My Life in the Red Army

Fred Virski

• Publisher: The War Vault
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780359440948
• eBook ISBN: 9780359499878
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

My Life in the Red Army chronicles 19-year old Fred Virski's experiences as a soldier in the Russian military in the early years of World War 2. With a wry tone rarely seen in a combat memoir, Virski describes the hardships, the near-starvation rations, the inadequate clothing for the frozen wastelands, and his tense interactions with officers of the NKVD (secret police). He is wounded twice; earns a Medal of Valor; witnesses atrocities committed by both the Germans and the Soviets; is branded a deserter; and somehow finds time to fall in love more than once on his journey.

A testament to the will of the human spirit, My Life in the Red Army is a must read for fans of World War 2 adventure.

Part One

THE DAY WAS SO FOGGY that standing at the trolley-car station I couldn’t read the red letters of the posters on the opposite corner of the street. In the trolley, I heard rumors that a regular draft had been announced for three age groups: nineteen, twenty and twenty-one. (Mine was the last.) I was too sleepy to think about it, and too worried about getting to the factory by six o’clock. At that time being a few minutes late could mean a thirty percent reduction of salary for three to twelve months.

This was 1940, and today was the beginning of September. I had exceptional luck with my trolley connections that day. On Waly Hetmanskie Boulevard I immediately caught my car and, luxuriously sitting on the bumper, reached my factory on Zamarstynov Street in [Lwów, Poland]. The night watchman, old Nicholas, was sitting at the control switchboard (a Soviet innovation) in the janitor’s booth.

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Waly Hetmanskie Boulevard

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ALTHOUGH THE CLOCK indicated only twenty minutes to six, most of our metal tags were already hanging on their hooks. This switchboard had a glass window which could be locked, and at six old Nicholas had the duty of locking and lead-sealing it. The old man used to get so excited when the clock pointed to six and some tags were still on the table, that sometimes he would risk the grave offense of not sealing the board until 6:10; or, even worse, he would put the tag in its place on the hook, figuring that a given worker would be only a few minutes late and that perhaps he would be able to slip in unseen, using the side entrance. It was old Nicholas’s luck never to be unsuccessful in this procedure. Right after me came Puzer, who had once been the loader on the truck I drove.

“Well, Virski,” roared his bass voice, “you’ll be a soldier and sing [the Russian military song] ‘Katiusha’ to us on the streets.”

“Don’t you worry,” said I indignantly. “Before you see me in a Bolshevik uniform, a lot of water will flow down the Peltev. After all, they cannot take me; I am a refugee and I have no passport!”

Puzer scratched his head. “Maybe you’re right, but I have a feeling that you’ll be a krasnoarmieyety [Red Army Soldier].”

From the janitor’s booth we went toward the courtyard. On the stairs we met the director, a twenty-two-year-old Russian boy, with his hands in his pockets and his cap on the back of his head. His pants did not reach his ankles; his dirty, creased coat hung on him like a bag.

One had to admit that he was an honest man. Nearly all the other directors and commissars bought or requisitioned heaps of clothes for themselves. He belonged to those few who looked with disdain at “bourgeois” suits and with a kind of pride, worthy of a better cause, wore the rags brought from inside Russia.

“Good day, tovarisch director,” Puzer and I greeted him, touching our caps.

“H’m,” he muttered. “Virski,” he turned to me, “at ten o’clock we shall go to register the new car.”

I nodded and spat, thinking that I would have to drive the damned jalopy to the city.

Puzer and I separated: he to the storehouse to get instructions for the day, and I to the garage. Thus began a fresh day of “the new Soviet reality,” in which we had already lived a year.

A week later the blanks from the drafting commissions arrived.

I found out that in the spring of 1940 that they had taken the age groups 1909-10-11 of the Polish Army reserve for a kind of training. People with even one member of their family “on the other side,” i.e. under German occupation, were not accepted for this training, as they were considered “unreliable” or simply suspect.

I, therefore, as a native of Cracow, with my family dispersed all over the world, should not have been subject to the draft. Unlike almost all Lwów residents, who had been forced to apply for papers, I did not have a Soviet passport. The exceptions, those who had been denied passports, were hauled off to prison and deported inside Russia, some to Siberia, some to Kazakhstan or some other hell on earth.

To this last category I, as a nonresident of Lwów, belonged. But thanks to the director of the factory, I had managed to avoid deportation. This man had given me a certificate stating that I was indispensable at the factory and that, even though a refugee, I could not be spared. This he did for me out of sheer goodwill and gratitude for my having taught him how to drive and acquainted him with some auto mechanics. On the basis of that certificate I had received a piece of paper which generously permitted me to live and work in Lwów for one year. With this in my pocket I laughed to myself as I filled out the fifteen forms connected with the draft. Letting my fantasy loose, I wrote such nonsense in answer to the question: “What is your relation to the former authorities of feudal Poland?” and to: “Do you understand that only communism can give you a truly free and happy life?” that after rereading my composition I was delighted with myself.

Under the column: “Members of your Family,” I dispersed all mine so thoroughly that it looked like a mockery; yet it was the truth. My mother was in Cracow, my brother in the Polish Army in France (actually, in a German prison camp where he had been taken after the fall of France); two aunts were in Shanghai, an uncle in the U.S.A., another uncle in England, and so on.

At noon I handed these papers to the director.

He looked them over and scornfully puffed up his lower lip, “And why do you enumerate all your relatives who live in the capitalist world? Do you want to boast?”

I answered innocently that I did not, that I wanted to be frank so that nobody would ever be able to reproach me for trying to conceal anything.

The director looked at me with distrust; he had known me for a couple of months and realized that my blagonadiozhnost [reliability] was by no means perfect.

Though the conscription date was not yet officially known, it had already caused general excitement. The draft was to affect 150 to 200 thousand men from the entire terrain occupied by the Bolsheviks.

There could not be any question of running away or not presenting oneself at the conscription center because one’s family would instantly be arrested. We heard of some madmen who, if drafted, were planning to flee to the German side, where, during the fall of 1940, news was not so black. The general public, however, eyed the prospective conscription with resignation, expecting it every day.

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Kursants (cadets), Red Army Artillery School

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ON THE TWENTY-NINTH of September, with exceptional efficiency, considering Soviet methods—all those subject to the draft received a notice stating when and where they should report to their draft-board commission. The first shift was called for the following day. I was in it.

In the morning I went to the factory, took my jalopy, and arrived at eight o’clock in front of the appointed building. It was the luxuriously furnished former Railworkers’ Home. At the desk the first “authority” ordered me to the barber in the cellar to have my hair shaved off.

Naturally I objected at once, saying that I was surely not going to be inducted to defend the Soviet Union and that therefore the loss of my hair would be a useless sorrow. My opponent was stubborn. Finally, a Russian officer, hearing our yelling, came in and asked me in extra polite Polish what was going on. I explained that I was here by mistake and that just because of that mistake I had no intention of having my hair shaved off. The lieutenant listened, nodded with understanding, examined my strange passport, and decided that I would not have to be shaved, because that would be done anyway before our transportation, in a couple of days. I assured him daringly that I would not be on that transport.

Then began a comedy called “commission.” In Adam’s clothes I wandered from doctor to doctor. They were all Polish and you could see with what grief they were going about their business. The first one I approached was an acquaintance.

“You here?” he asked. “Say in a loud voice that you have a pain in your kidneys,” he whispered.

Then in an official tone he asked me the stereotyped question, “Are you in good health?” I inhaled a great deal in my lungs and roared: “I have a terrible pain in my kidneys, tovarisch doctor!”

All eyes in the room turned in my direction; almost everyone was smiling stupidly. The doctor was very seriously pressing my stomach. Not knowing where I was supposed to hurt, I screamed all the time, like a dying bull. At last the good man wrote something on my piece of paper and sent me away.

I remembered having read a humorous story of Imperial Austria, in which the conscriptees had pretended to be ill to avoid service. When I approached the laryngologist I was so deaf I couldn’t hear his questions; at the orthopedist’s I pretended I had flat feet; at the oculist’s, that I could not read the biggest letter on the chart. The oculist patted my back, nodded and, in a singing Wilno [in the northeast; now Vilnius, Lithuania] accent, said confidentially: “Of course, brother, this won’t help any, but try hard.”

At last I reached the main room where, behind a long table covered with red felt, the People’s Commission was seated. It was the strangest conglomeration, for, according to the Bolshevik recipe, it was to be a true representation of the working people. The chairman was a Russian colonel. Next to him sat, poor thing, one of the professors of the University of Lwów, an old man with gray hair, representing the world of learning. There were also representatives of many other professions, among them Poles, Ukrainians, Polish Jews.

On the left of the chairman sat a very young boy, a poet of the “Young Ukraine” movement, as I found out, who also had the job of translator. Almost no one knew Russian; some were slightly acquainted with Ukrainian. At that time I had twenty words of Russian and as many of Ukrainian. The room was cold even though the day was warm. As I stood in line before the main table, my teeth chattered, and in order to pass the time I counted the pimples on the back of my predecessor. The boy had one leg shorter than the other; otherwise he was all right. I did not envy him the pimples on his back, but I would have given a lot for his leg.

During the examination everyone looked enviously at his infirmity. He smiled stupidly, patting his “guarantee” of nonmilitary status, showing us how highly he valued his legs. I listened carefully when they started to question him. Behind the Commission table there was a loud deliberation; he was asked to march across the room. The colonel then asked him through the interpreter whether walking was difficult for him and if he felt well otherwise.

The idiot answered that he found walking quite easy and that he was healthy as few people are. His father was a policeman; he himself had a job in the post office.

“Kharasho!” agreed the colonel. “In the army you will also work in the post office!”

The wretched boy was still grinning, not knowing whether he should be happy or sad. Then he limped off in the direction of the exit.

Then my turn came. All the information they needed lay in front of them on the table.

“Why is your mother in Cracow?”

“Because,” said I, “she has lived there for fifty years and she did not flee in September.”

“And why didn’t you bring her here?” asked the colonel, as though it were possible to bring people back and forth across the frontier.

“And what for?” I asked him stupidly.

Luckily for me, he did not catch the irony of that question; most likely he thought that, according to the rules of Bolshevik education, I did not nourish any feeling toward my mother.

“Why don’t you have a passport?” the chairman continued.

“Because they didn’t give me one,” I answered in all sincerity.

“Why not?”

“About that, I am afraid you will have to inquire at my local passport department.”

“You, a student of the university, don’t know the Russian language!” he went on suspiciously.

“Tovarisch poet,” I burst out finally, “please tell tovarisch chairman that at our universities other languages than Russian were taught.”

“The colonel,” translated the poet, “wants to know whether you know another language in addition to Polish.”

In one breath I enumerated eight European languages, though I knew only three. I saw the old professor cover his face with his hands to stop himself laughing.

“Sheer indecency!” growled the colonel. “He knows eight languages, but not Russian!”

Then came questions about my relatives abroad. I began telling the most incredible stories about each one, even about my uncle in New York, whom I had never seen. I tried to present each of them as a hundred percent capitalist, and to emphasize my attachment to these relatives so as to make myself appear more suspicious. I was proud of myself, thinking that even without one shorter leg I could talk myself out of the army. After all, by now they must have been convinced of my nieblagonadiozhnost [non-reliability], which would make it impossible for them to take me.

Behind the table whispered discussions continued. The old professor took no part in them; from time to time he secretly smiled at me. At last the interpreter informed me that the Commission had to deliberate my case a little longer and that I should step aside and wait. I walked away and leaned against a pseudo-marble wall.

Now that the nervous tension had passed, I again began to shiver with cold. But I was so sure they would reject me that I did not let that worry me. At worst, they would inform the factory that I was not “reliable,” and in the factory I could manage. After a while they asked me to appear again before the colonel.

After fumbling among my papers for a few long minutes, he asked me straight: “You’re what? A driver?”

“Da,” said I in Russian.

“Good,” said he. “You will be a driver with us in the artillery.”

This I understood without the interpreter’s help, but at first I could not quite embrac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Author’s Note
• Part One
• Part Two
• Further Reading: Captured!