John Reynolds - Leaving Home: The Remarkable Life of Peter Jacyk

I go the way Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.

Adolf Hitler

It had been a long, hot day in western Ukrainea day that was about to dissolve into an evening of horror.

Two weeks earlier, nineteen-year-old Petro (Peter) Jacyk had waited for a train to carry him into the city of Stryi, where he worked as an assistant railroad engineer. Fit and energetic, Peter had earned his elevated position through a six-month training course on railroading. On this morning, he was informed, the trains were not coming from the west, because the German army had bombed the railroad tracks leading to Poland. Finding other means of transportation, he managed to reach the railway yard, where he learned to his astonishment that the Soviet Union was at war with Germany.

Peter and his fellow employees were instructed to remain at the railway yard, eating and sleeping in a large communal hall until further orders were issued. Loudspeakers installed in the hall repeatedly proclaimed that brave Soviet troops were advancing deep into German-occupied territory on their way to a glorious victory of Communism over Fascism.

No one believed it. How could they, when the sound of distant German artillery competed with the loudspeakers, and German Messerschmitt aircraft were attacking the city, unhindered by either anti-aircraft fire or Soviet planes?

For a few days, Peter managed to avoid leaving the railway centre aboard trains travelling east and west. Those sent west toward the front were loaded with troops and supplies. Trains dispatched east toward the Soviet Union conveyed bureaucrats as well as labour leaders and higher intelligentsia in comfortable passenger cars in which they would safely escape the expected carnage. Meanwhile, following Stalins orders to destroy all that cannot be evacuated, factories and food supplies were either blown up or shipped east, along with almost half of the cattle on Ukrainian farms.

Amid this chaos and destruction, Peter was finally assigned to manoeuvre trains within the rail yard in preparation for their loading and departure. Day after day, the news from the incessantly chattering loudspeakers grew more outrageous and unbelievable. By the end of the month, the Soviet propaganda machine declared that the unvanquished Soviet army was actually approaching Berlin, even while German artillery fire crept closer by the hour.

On this day in late June, the sound of Panzer tank divisions could be heard on the citys outskirts, announcing the advance of the German Sixth Army and the success of Operation Barbarossa, Germanys long-planned invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite the preposterous claims of victory for the Soviet Union forces, more than 4.5 million Axis troops and 600,000 motorized vehicles were moving steadily east along a front extending from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, almost three thousand kilometres.

The noise of war so near to the city was frightening, though perhaps not as alarming in western Ukraine as elsewhere in Europe. While the Germans were feared, the Soviets, who had occupied eastern Ukraine for almost twenty years and western Ukraine for barely two years, were hated, and almost anything or anyone who would drive off the commissars and soldiers was considered beneficial. Its not that anyone welcomed the Germansthey were invaders, after allbut compared with the Soviets, some might hope they would be the lesser of two evils.

When German artillery began shelling the city at the end of the day, however, choosing sides took a back seat to finding means of survival. The artillery barrage began killing residents indiscriminately, and as the barrage crept closer to the rail yard, Peter and two companions decided it would be safer to spend the night in a passenger railway car rather than the massive communal building. Smaller targets, they assumed, were less likely targets.

This was not the case. Sometime after midnight, German artillery started blasting switches and roundtables in the rail yard. Would the artillery batteries target the trains themselves next, assuming passenger cars were as worthy of destroying as freight cars? Peter didnt know, but convincing the other young men that they would be safer elsewhere, he led them away from the rail yards and toward the centre of the city.

By 3 a.m., what should have been a soft summers night had become a simulation of hell. The flash of distant guns ring toward the city, the whistle of artillery shells passing overhead, the thunderous explosions when they hit their targets, the rumble of encroaching Panzer tank divisions, and the screams of frightened residents created a nightmare experience that the young men could not imagine becoming more horrifying. But it did.

With dawn beginning to break, the three men reached a jail that had been converted to a prison operated by the NKVD (Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del, or Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the dreaded Soviet secret police. They watched as a Soviet guard scurried down from his watchtower and ran off, leaving the prison gate unlocked behind him. Assuming the guard was the last to leave the prison, Peter and the others entered the building.

The prison entrance opened into a large courtyard, empty except for a handful of prisoners left behind who wandered around dazed, asking Have the Russians gone? and How close are the Germans?

Peter couldnt tell them. Besides, the view through two doors, opening into what appeared to be a communal shower room, had caught his attention. Heaped against the far wall of the larger room were stacks of mens clothing, obviously removed in haste and tossed aside. But it was the oversized drain in the centre of the tiled floor that drew Peters eye. The drain and much of the floor surrounding it were heavily splattered with blood. A massacre had taken place here just hours ago, Peter realized. But where were the victims? And what of the Soviet guards? Would they return if the Germans failed to enter the city immediately? The risk was too great to linger in such a dangerous place, and turning to his friends, Peter suggested they leave the jail.

The sun was up by now, and walking out of the prison, Peter noticed for the first time a concrete slab bordering the jail, measuring about four metres wide and fifty metres long. Atop the slab were two openings, each about fifty centimetres square. As he passed the slab, he saw that the cover of one of these openings appeared partially open, and curious, he lifted it to look inside. To his surprise and horror, he saw a mans face, covered in blood and excrement, staring back at him. Even more shocking, the man appeared to recognize him. Peter, the man said in a voice almost too weak to utter the words, what are you doing here?

In amazement, Peter almost dropped the cover back into place. He recognized the man as his cousin, Adam Kamianka, from their village of Verkhnie Syniovydne. No one in the family had heard from Adam since his arrest by the Soviets weeks earlier. Calling for help from passersby, Peter began lifting his cousin out of the concrete pit, which he realized, with revulsion, was the prisons septic tank.