Page 30 - Excerpts from the diary

At the table we learned that the people who had invited us were Jews who had escaped from a concentration camp, the so-called
extermination camp at Treblinka.

18.11.1944
Evening. I am waiting for dinner. Every day my hostess reveals more of her meanness and stinginess toward me. Today, for example,
when I began washing with her soap, she came over and warned me that the soap cost five hundred zlotys and therefore I should
remember that I had washed with her soap. Another example concerns blankets. At first, when I moved into the cold room to sleep, she
allowed me three blankets. The next day she took one away, and yesterday another. So last night I froze thoroughly.

I am exercising the utmost patience, but before I leave I still intend to let them know—to teach these people—just how nasty and
inhospitable they are, and how unlike their behavior is the attitude of our citizens from one end of my socialist Motherland to the other.

The girl lodging in the same house as I am behaves more freely and simply. She especially annoys the owners because she sometimes
uses their little household things—a towel, soap—and today, by mistake, even began brushing her teeth with the owner’s toothbrush.

“She ought to be given a bristle if she doesn’t understand,” the owner’s sons joked after the outraged lady of the house told them about
the toothbrush, adding that everything had to be hidden and locked away from her.
I wrote a letter to Red Star that was more a copy of my letter to Krokodil than an independent piece. I wrote one letter to Mother. There is
no one else to write to, because no one writes to me.

The girl staying in the same house with me is a worthless creature. I greatly regret helping her justify herself before the divisional Party
commission; she was not worth it. She is rude to me and does not want to talk, while every day, several times over, various men come to
see her—sober, drunk, and under the guise of being “patients”—and with all of them she flirts and behaves “sweetly.”

And yet something in my heart trembles whenever she appears. Nina—that is her name—cannot be called beautiful or intelligent; nor can
she be considered serious or substantial, although she is already in her twenty-third year. Nevertheless she is a girl, and my nature
weakens before the tenderness and warmth of a young woman. Electrified, it boils and suffers from the nearness of such a soft being who
is at the same time estranged from me. Yet I will have enough willpower to show a certain firmness and a measure of pride toward this
corrupted person and not think about the caresses and tenderness of her body. That is not merchandise to my taste. A special breed of
animal, hardly resembling a human being at all.

Yesterday I saw the film Continent, about the work of our rear and the transfer of industry from the Leningrad region and the city to the
Urals. The picture seemed insufficiently developed to me. The plot was unfinished; it failed to tell about [...]. The characters, however,
were lively and truthful, but their behavior became unclear and somewhat senseless when the storyline of the film unexpectedly broke
off.

22.11.1944
The owners are quarreling loudly and passionately. The old mother is especially furious; every argument and fight begins with her. I
began writing verse, but such shouting rose in the room that I almost had to stop my ears. It is already broad daylight, but I am waiting
for breakfast and inwardly regretting that I came here. I do not like shouting and squalor. To crown it all, the old woman’s stinginess is
painfully testing my patience. And they are ignorant people; they do not understand that when a person is writing he should not be
disturbed, and they keep interrupting me with empty questions that politeness obliges me to answer.

Yesterday, when I went to bed, the owners asked where I had put my pistol. I told them I did not have one, and immediately regretted not
saying I had hidden it in my pocket, because there were two men in the house and who knows what they might have conceived. At first I
felt uneasy, but then fell asleep. In the morning I saw that everything had turned out perfectly well—I was once again alone in the village.

Mińsk Mazowiecki. I traveled to the town in great comfort—sitting on barrels of gasoline—and arrived very quickly. This time my
vehicle was the fastest of all those passing along the road, and I almost rode it right into the area. On the way I nearly lost my cap; the
wind blew it off. When I got down, I realized I was thoroughly frozen. Although the vehicle had not yet reached the town itself, I decided
not to sit on it any longer but to walk and warm myself.

Only near the checkpoint at the entrance to the town, when I was asked for my documents, did I realize that I had dropped the notebook
in which I had written the division’s route. I was very upset—not so much by the loss of the notebook as by the fact that I no longer had
the route, which had barely fixed itself in my memory: “Through Mińsk Mazowiecki to Yagodin.” No one knew Yagodin—not at the
commandant’s office, not at the checkpoint, not among the residents of Mińsk Mazowiecki, and it was not even marked on the military
maps. I began to doubt myself. The only thing that gave me hope was the steady stream of vehicles with familiar letters and numbers:
“D,” “T,” and finally our “8.” But I could not determine exactly where these vehicles were going and seemed to have lost every way out
of the desperate situation into which I had fallen so unexpectedly.

I gave up and went to look around Mińsk Mazowiecki. It was the first fairly large town I had encountered in Poland during my travels
here. One broad asphalted street runs through the entire town and, together with the side streets adjoining it, forms its center. The shops
are so numerous and varied in their goods that it is surprising where so much wealth comes from in a town that is not even of the first
rank. Dnepropetrovsk is ten times larger than this Polish district center, yet even there there were hardly shops like these.
The houses are low. There do not seem to be any buildings higher than three stories in the entire town, yet they all look smart, with
striking facades and decoration both inside and out.