UFO Info Week-End

When that happens one of my friends Waldek sticks his nose

When that happens, one of my friends, Waldek, sticks his nose into the crack and begins feverishly to inhale the odour and to rub his stomach with delight, as if he were sitting at a sumptuously laid table. Human life is worth little now, no more than a lump of coal or a piece of kindling. We have nothing to eat.Mother stands motionless for hours at the window, staring out. You can see people gazing out at the street like this in many windows, as if they were counting on something, waiting for something.

Under difficult circumstances, one feels the cold more keenly; the chill is more penetrating. Winter can be just another season, a waiting for spring; but now winter is a disaster, a catastrophe That first winter of the war is truly bitter. In our apartment the stoves are cold and the walls are covered with thick white frost. There is nothing to burn; there is no fuel to buy, and it’s too dangerous to steal any It’s death if you’re caught filching coal or wood.

The horse – a large, defenceless animal – doesn’t know how to hide; during a bombardment it stands motionless, awaiting death. There are dead horses in the roads, in ditches, in the fields a bit further out. They lie there with their legs up in the air, as if shaking their hooves at the world I don’t see dead people anywhere; they are quickly buried. Only the horses – black, bay, piebald, chestnut – lie where they stood, as if this were not a human war but a war of horses; as if it were they who had waged among themselves a battle to the death and were its only victims.A cold and hard winter arrives.

We pass battlefields strewn with abandoned implements of war, bombed-out railway stations, overturned cars It smells of gunpowder, of burnt things, of rotting meat We encounter dead horses everywhere. On the empty, deserted road only the wagon remains, and on it my grandfather. He sees the planes coming towards him, sees them abruptly descending, sees them taking aim at the abandoned wagon, sees the fire of the on-board guns, and hears the roar of the machines over his head. When the planes vanish, we return to the wagon and mother wipes my grandfather’s perspiring face Sometimes there are air raids several times a day. After each one, sweat trickles down my grandfather’s exhausted face.We find ourselves in an increasingly bleak landscape There is smoke along the distant horizon We pass empty settlements, lonely, burned-out houses.

I walk with my sister next to the horse-drawn wagon; it is a simple wooden cart lined with hay, and high up on the hay, on a linen sheet, lies my grandfather. He is paralysed and cannot move.When an air raid starts, the panicked crowd, until then patiently trudging along, dives for the shelter of the ditches, hides in the bushes, drops down in the potato fields. All the highways, roads, even country paths are full of wagons, carriages, and bicycles; full of bundles, suitcases, bags, buckets; full of terrified and helplessly wandering people. Some are making their way to the east, others to the west, still others to the north and the south. They run in all directions, circle about, collapse from exhaustion, fall asleep anywhere they can, and then, having caught their breath for a moment, they summon what’s left of their strength and start once again their confused and endless journey.I am supposed to hold my little sister tightly by the hand We can’t get lost, my mother warns. But I sense, even without her saying it, that the world has suddenly become dangerous, foreign, and evil, and that one must be on one’s guard.