Slavomir Rawicz - The Long Walk

‘You look all right yourself,’ Zaro answered.

And Mister Smith was not as old as I had thought him, now that he was shorn of his greying hair. And Kolemenos, in spite of the ravages that marked us all, was as handsome as a big, fine-bodied man could be. We sat there laughing and joking in our nakedness while the fire roared.

Scrubbed clean, our cuts, sores and scratchings anointed, we were made ready for our re-entry into a civilized community. We received white, crisp new underwear, bush shirts, stockings and canvas shoes, and, to top the lot, dashing Australian-type light felt hats. Smith dressed in a leisurely, careful way, but the other three of us hurried through the operation in an enthusiastic race to be first ready. We looked one another over and liked what we saw. We joked about the stark whiteness of our knees.

They drove us away westward. I had a curiously detached feeling about it, like an exhausted swimmer allowing himself to be carried along in a tide race. We came to a small military town, but I had no chance to look at it. We were immediately lodged in sick quarters.

The Army doctor had been waiting for us. He examined us gravely, eyes narrowed behind thin tortoiseshell spectacles. He nodded his head, thinning on top, in acknowledgment of Smith’s answers to terse questions. He was aged about forty, quick-moving, sympathetic behind the professional facade of impersonal efficiency. We needed a lot of care, he told Smith. We needed to take things easy. Recovery might take a long time.

For a few days they kept us there. The doctor dosed us with medicines and pills. We lounged and lay about. We ate most magnificently and were plied with fresh fruit. Kolemenos amused the small staff with his huge appetite. We were allowed to smoke as often as we pleased.

Here it was that we temporarily parted from Smith. He said be was being taken away to see the American authorities. ‘You three will be taken to Calcutta. Whatever happens I shall see you there.’

We shook him by the hand. There didn’t seem to be anything we could say.

‘Just keep your spirits up,’ he said. ‘The doctor tells me we are all going to be very sick before we recover from our trip. But he says that with the proper attention we shall get in a big hospital we should pull through.’

I thought we were not as ill as that and said so. I did not appreciate then that I was feeling a quite spurious sense of well-being, that I was a little drunk with the excitement of these wonderful last few days, that the reckoning was yet to come.

He went away from us like a figure slipping out of a dream. Zaro said, ‘We shall be seeing him in Calcutta,’ as though India were a small place and Calcutta was just around the corner. It was the way we felt. Everything was taken care of. We were spent forces, content to be carried along. All the hammering urgency and the iron-hard resolution of the last bitter year had drained from us. We were more sick than we knew.

I have small recollection of the journey to Calcutta, except that it was long and tiresome and I was shrouded in black depression. We smoked incessantly.

It was a symptom of our condition, I suppose, that when we were driven in a bus through the teeming, noisy Calcutta streets we were as bright as crickets, pointing out the sights one to the other, almost hysterically good-humoured. I could have persuaded myself then that recovery had already begun. I was being fooled again by the fever of a new excitement.

The bus drove between the tall main gates of a hospital and a medical orderly took Zaro, Kolemenos and I away for a preliminary medical examination. At first we were bogged down in language difficulties. After some time it was understood that between us we spoke Russian, Polish, French and German — but no English. Eventually we were interviewed by an orderly who spoke French. They wanted a medical history from childhood, so Zaro told the orderly about our measles and our whooping cough and our operations. It all went down on a set of stiff cards. We were examined by doctors, weighed, measured, given a bath, decked out in pyjamas and tucked in bed in a long ward, Zaro and Kolemenos in adjoining positions on one side and I facing them from directly opposite.

Quite clearly I remember my awakening the next morning, a spotless vision of a nursing sister standing beside my bed laying her strong brown arm against my white one and joking with me until I smiled up at her. Then came the breakfast, of fresh eggs with wafer-thin white bread and butter.

I went back to sleep that morning and dropped into a bottomless pit that stole all mind and recollection from me for nearly a month. I learned all about it later, and it was Mister Smith who gathered the story and told it to me.

They gave me sedatives, they kept a day and night watch on me. Meanwhile Zaro and then Kolemenos went under. At night I screamed and raved in madness. I ran from the Russians all over again, I crossed my deserts and my mountains. And each day I ate half my bread and slyly tucked the remainder under the mattress or in the pillow case. Each day they gently took away my precious little hoard. They talked to me and brought in great white loaves from the kitchens and told me I should never have to worry again. There would always be bread. The assurances meant nothing. I kept collecting bread for the next stage of my escape.

The climax came after about ten days, I was told. After that I was quieter, very weak, exhausted and on the danger list. Kolemenos and Zaro, too, were in a bad way.

But, said the hospital staff, neither of the others matched the performance I put on during the second night of my stay in the ward. I fetched out my saved-up bread, rolled my mattress, bedclothes and pillows and, to their astonishment because they had not believed I had that much strength left, set off staggering under the load for the door. By the time I had rolled my bedding, the night sister had the doctor there. He had said, ‘Leave him; let us see what he does.’

At the door the doctor, the sister and two male orderlies blocked my way. The doctor talked quietly as he would have done to a sleep-walker. I went on. The orderlies held me and I dropped my burden and fought with savage fury. It took all four of them to get me back to bed. I have no memory of the incident.

Four weeks after my admission to the hospital I woke one morning feeling refreshed, as though I had slept the night through dreamlessly and restfully. I could not believe when I was told that my night had been a month long.

Mister Smith came to see us. He looked lean and spruce in a lightweight civilian suit. For a week, he said, he had been close to death. He had been to see me a couple of days earlier but I had shown no signs of recognizing him. He had talked to the doctors about us, told them in detail what we had been through.

‘You are going to be all right now, Slav,’ he said. He gestured over to where Zaro and Kolemenos were sitting up in bed and beaming across at us. ‘And so are they.’

One of the soldier patients in the ward wanted to know our names. The American told him but the soldier had difficulty in getting his tongue around the unfamiliar syllables. A compromise was reached. We became Zaro, Slav and ‘Big Boy’.

Our story got round. From other parts of the hospital staff members came along to take a peep at us. The British soldiers in our ward showered us with kindnesses. One of them went round with his hat collecting cigarettes, money, chocolate, little personal gifts, and shared the offering between us.

The American came to see us again later. He gave me a silver cigarette case and some money.

‘What are you intending to do when you are better, Slav?’

I told him there was only one course open to me. As a Polish officer I must rejoin the Polish Army.