The Brothers Kurzchuk

Untitled Part 1

Majek and Arek Kurzchuk were born in Gerozyna, a small farming town on the Polish/Lithuanian border in 1928 and 1929.

There parents were Dobroslaw Kurchuk, a vegetable framer with a glass eye and Magda Kurchuk, a home maker some thirteen years younger than her husband.

The Kurzchuk family farmstead was four square miles of fields and a small lake that served little purpose other than the washing of clothes and the drowning of pups. They owned three cows, a goat, two horses and several dogs no one bothered to name. Dobroslaw owned the barely functioning carcus of a tractor that unbeknown to him would one day sit in a museum of pre war agriculture in Warsaw.

Magda instilled the importance of reading to her sons from a young age and would bring home the work of classical writers such as HG Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe for her sons to embrace.

They would turn pages to the sound of the planes and distant bombing that grew closer like an Autumnal wind.

The first Soviet soldiers appeared at their door a few days before Christmas, 1939.

They had rape seed staining to their boots which meant they must have come west from Krislow across Blazec Dębicki's land. They had apple and lamb on their breath which meant they had either been guests at Blazec's table, or merely been in his pantry.

The commanding officer had a silver horse shoe moustache and spoke with a Ukrainian accent. He asked for water and somewhere warm they could carry out an amputation of a comrade they'd dragged from the last town with a bullet imbedded in his foot. He also enquired if the Kurzchuks had any daughters.

As the family listened to the men slice off their comrade's foot with a grain sickle that had been used by their family for three generations, the Kurzcuk Brothers began to pack their books into a case.

The soldiers had arranged for them and other families in the area surrounding Gerozyna to be taken by cattle truck to Warsaw where they would be loaded onto trains bound for somewhere in the east. Their land would be burnt and bulldozed as a precaution should it ever fall under German control. Years later the Kurzchuk Brothers would discover that Blazec Dębicki and his family were shot for refusing to comply with these orders.

The soldiers ordered them to take only essentials they could carry by hand; Magda wanted to take a painting of her great grandfather that hung above the fire place, but the soldiers would not let her. The next morning, as the Kurzchuk's were hurried on to the back of trucks that only weeks earlier had been used to transport pigs, the soldiers used the painting as fire wood, along with just about anything else they could find on the farm.

The trains the families were loaded onto resembled huge coffins that had once been used to transport barrels of beer; huge piles of hay clung to the sticky floor like hair and every carriage smelt like the breath of an ageing drinker. Once a day the train would stop and they would be allowed to buy food and provisions in the local town.

Dobroslaw traded his glass eye for bread and sausages; Majek and Arek agreed to wash the feet of an elderly Jewish woman in exchange for an apple each and Madga cut the hair of three men in one family in return for a pail of milk.

While eating their apples, the brothers watched a grandmother from Bialystok trade her wig for three eggs. Else where fathers were offering to return to the town to marry off their sons and daughters in exchange for fresh coffee and cigarettes.

Away from the bartering crowds, several drunken Russian soldiers fleeced a young couple for their wares; when the husband resisted, they knocked out his two front teeth with a gun butt.

On board the trains, the children would carry out tasks in exchange for minor luxuries. One particular task involved holding up a bed sheet in front of a small hole in the floor of the carriages that became the communal toilet to offer those using it a certain modesty.

Other roles included gathering news paper that could be used as toilet paper, picking fruit or gathering pails of water from lakes or rivers whenever the train stopped.

They were far more perilous tasks than parents let on; being caught by Russian soldiers usually incurred a beating or being left behind in the icy, snow choked countryside as the train slunk away.

The days and nights brought them through territory they did not recognise; the occasional burnt out town or resistance soldier dangling from a tree acted as a reminder than a war existed out there somewhere, flirting with them and then vanishing back into the icy, flat hinterlands.

The winter gathered strength within the four walls of the train carriages. Initially the soldiers supervising the transit allowed the refugees to light small cast iron stoves as a source of heat but as the coldness grew and their rations dwindled, they become short tempered and banned the usage of these stoves. A middle aged gypsy woman travelling with her two children and elderly mother was struck with the butt of a rifle for resisting.

That night Arek removed his boot at the irritation of a trapped stone; turning it upside town and hammering it in the air, a tooth came flying out.

'A time machine.' said Majek, spitting out the train door.

'They're not real. HG Wells made it up.' replied his brother.

They sat on the edge of the open door, they're legs dangling above the blur of tracks below.

'If we can get hold of one, we can go back to before the invasion and never have to leave home.'

'But the Russians would still invade, we wouldn't be able to stop the war.'

Majek balanced on the thought for a second, then decided not to argue his point any further.

'Nineteen forty was the year I was going to have my first cigarette.' said Arek.

'Are you still going to?'

'Haven't decided yet.'