In My Grandfather's Footsteps

Three years ago, Polish photographer Michal Iwanowski decided to retrace on foot a journey across western Russia that his grandfather made 70 years ago.

Through landscape, as if through a porthole, we are constantly attempting to connect to a time or people long gone. I found myself doing just that when I set off on a journey through Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland, retracing a journey my grandfather made in 1945.

We crossed the same land nearly 70 years apart, but for utterly different reasons. Just how different were our experiences of that landscape?

My grandfather was a fugitive on the run. He, his brother, and two other friends had escaped after a year of captivity in Kaluga, a town southwest of Moscow; theirs was a fate shared by many partisans from the Vilnius area after their arrest in 1944.

Grandfather had been fighting against the Nazi German occupation. In July 1944, when the Soviets arrived, the partisan group was disarmed in a relatively peaceful manner – they were given an ultimatum to surrender and join the Red Army in a common fight against the Germans.

Under that false pretense, they were all transported east, believing they would be trained as Soviet soldiers. Those who attempted to escape during the transport were shot. Once they got to Kaluga, they were given uniforms, but they never again held their weapons. Instead, they became laborers with no pay and no permission to leave. Though my grandfather was never formally charged, he became a de facto prisoner in the barracks of a military camp.

My great uncle was sent to a shtrafnoy battalion – one of dozens of punitive combat units formed of convicts – east of Moscow, where he worked in the forest, cutting down trees and loading the logs onto trains. He was later moved back to Kaluga to pave roads, where he reunited with his brother.

At that point, my grandfather had already planned his escape and accumulated essential provisions – sugar, salt, and plenty of Belomorkanal tobacco – the best painkiller and hunger deterrent available. To stockpile necessities for the long journey, he made ornamented tins out of metal scraps, trading them for food rations.

Because the brothers had been reliable workers, the guards allowed them to walk unattended from the work site back to their barracks at the end of their shift. It may have been a short distance, yet it was long enough for a few men to disappear and remain unnoticed until the evening head count.

One August evening in 1945 they seized the opportunity. They made it to the river, found a small boat, and set off on a journey that for the next three months was to severely test their strength and determination.

Then there was me: a tourist, standing on the banks of the Oka River one August evening in 2013, close to where the Kaluga camp once stood. The landscape was serene and beautiful, and I found myself wandering, with no clear idea what I was expecting to find. I had no interest in judging history, nor was I interested in glorifying my relatives.

But as I stared across the wide river, with hundreds of miles ahead of me, I thought about the fate of all the people who had found themselves thrown in the middle of the conflict. World War II had been equally tough on countless millions, regardless of nationality or ancestry. There is no room in the history books to fit them all.

The brothers walked at night, taking turns to sleep and watch the flames of their small fire. Matches were their most precious possession, and they only used one each day, in order to make a fire deep in the forest, as far away from people as possible.

I traveled during the day, in comfortable hiking boots, with a digital map in my smartphone showing me an aerial view of my surroundings. They used a makeshift compass that my grandfather had made, and which later turned out to be giving false readings, forcing them to turn to the stars for direction and time.

In Kozelsk the escapees were ambushed while crossing a railway bridge.

I stood on that same bridge, looking down on the Zhizdra River, into which they had tumbled after fighting military officers. I saw a man following a herd of cattle below. He heard the camera shutter and looked up. He did not smile. A lady with heavy grocery bags passed me by on the tracks. Then a group of teenagers followed. A train whistle made us all step off the tracks and wait for the engine to roll past. It was just another day. Nothing profound happened. Yet I stayed in town for a few days, returning to the bridge like a dog to the place where it lost its owner. It was a strange feeling, juxtaposing my idea of that place and the place itself – finding nothing at all, but feeling so much at the same time. In that spot we met.

They lost their two companions that night, along with most of their food supplies. My grandfather was shot and a fever incapacitated him for a week.

Just outside of town, during a heavy storm, a Cossack family invited me to join them under their gazebo. They fed me fresh baked apple pastries, and made me a cup of coffee. “This will keep you warm,” they said. Their teenage son brought me a dry shirt. Their daughter sat opposite and said she missed her friends. “We used to play on the Volga,” she said, “and it’s so wide that sometimes you can’t see the other shore.”

I remember feeling equally happy and sad. For some inexplicable reason I felt like I knew these people well, and understood them far beyond my rusty Russian. Or maybe I was just projecting my own nostalgia.

As I left that family behind, I thought back to a story my great uncle had told me, about a little hut in the forest, some 20 kilometers outside of Bryansk.

He and my grandfather were exhausted and decided to take the risk of contacting some locals. They knocked on the door of the hut. An old woman opened it. There was an image of the Virgin Mary hanging on the wall, and the brothers crossed themselves. The lady invited them in. She lived there with her daughter and a grandchild. Her son had died in the army. They had one pair of shoes between them. She gave the visitors several tiny potatoes and a pinch of salt, all she had, and she blessed them, as only a mother can bless her sons. As they left, they were all crying.

“We were saying goodbye to genuine people,” my uncle said.

Physical exhaustion and hunger took its toll on the brothers. The autumn weather was difficult. I would remind myself about their hardship whenever I started feeling sorry for myself.

There were times I lost my way and began to panic. There were days I walked in torrential rain for hours. I spent a lot of time picking ticks from my legs. I got used to getting stuck in mud or clay and falling over. I entertained myself in the evenings by counting bruises and picking dried blood from my skin.

A lady in Rechytsa told me off for eating a Snickers bar instead of a Belarusian equivalent. A police officer in Kalinkavichy ordered me to go into my room and stop loitering outside the hotel. I ended up in an immigration office detailing my itinerary to two ladies who found my explanation both strange and amusing. But I never ran into any serious trouble. I never felt unsafe, and I did not feel threatened.

When the brothers arrived in Vilnius they realized that their family had been relocated to Wroclaw, Poland, so they carried on west. By sheer luck and coincidence, they found their parents on the first day they arrived in Wroclaw, after running into a friend who had also escaped from Kaluga and knew where their parents lived. It was an emotional welcome, as the boys were presumed dead.

Soon after, they resumed their education and sports careers. My grandfather became the Polish swimming champion in 1946, studied electrical engineering, and became a well-respected professional. He died in 2008. My great uncle became a professor with a focus on spinal deformations and moved to Szczecin, where he died in 2014. He was active in cultivating an interest in history and visited Lithuania a number of times, where he kept in touch with friends and comrades from Ponary, renovated the graves of fellow partisans, and organized symposiums and events.

The thing I felt most along the way was excitement. For a photographer, the process of walking is ideal for capturing images. After a while, when the eyes get used to scanning the landscape and accustomed to the journey’s repetitive rhythm, magic happens: simple scenes become exciting, and the most ordinary aspects of nature catch your eye. You start seeing beauty where you would not otherwise look. That was very rewarding.

I got called “durak” (fool) a few times, but mostly in an endearing way. “If you were my son,” said a lady in Lida, Belarus, “I would never allow you to do this.”

People were usually surprised to see me walk into their remote villages, where no tourists ever go. In Sosenka, an old woman came out of her house to greet me, with a big smile and two rows of golden teeth.

“You need to put your jacket on, you’re going to get sick,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in ages. Where have you been?”

She had no idea who I was. But it did not matter: we were connected on a basic human level. She held my hands and we laughed at her chickens, which were sitting on a bench to avoid the wet ground.

I tended to keep myself to myself. It was a solitary journey. I was being cautious, and when probed about my visit, I would often say “my grandfather was from here,” that I was merely visiting his childhood places.

Yet there was usually a certain glare in the eyes of my interlocutors, especially the elderly, if I told them the real reason for my presence. The story of personal hardship during the war seemed all too familiar. We often just looked at each other in silence, gently smiling, nodding, like we understood there was not much to say. The hurt that people suffered, from whatever side of the conflict, lingered. And so we stood there, momentarily connected to some greater collective memory, overcome by a familiar nostalgia we carry in our genes. RL

Michal Iwanowski’s book Clear of People will be published by Brave Books (Berlin) in July 2016.