Katie gasped, a hand going to her mouth.

‘All the dead, it was like this . . . Not much food, not much water . . . So, we are taken to the north, to a place in Russia near Archangelsk, to a camp for logging.’

‘Logging?’

‘Of course. They need wood for everything: for railway, for building – all these barracks, huts for their slave labour, for one thing – everything they make, they have the whole of the taiga forests. I was sent with the men. We cut the trees. The women and children gather branches, and my mother had some cooking work. I see them at night. Again, little food. Soup is just cabbage water. People are getting very sick – some have chicken blindness, I think they call it beri-beri. Some of the men, when the sun started to go down, we had to guide them back to the huts because they went blind; they are stumbling, falling.

‘We all survived that together, by God’s grace. Then came the amnesty. Amnesty . . .’ He repeated the word with bitter contempt. ‘As if we were criminals. The Germans had attacked Russia – you remember, in 1941? So suddenly their great friendship is off, and Russia is comrades with Poland again. So, they decide we can go. Can you imagine?’

He stopped and drew in a big breath, letting it out slowly.

‘Oh, it is a long story. It took us some time to get out – I was almost going alone, I was young and impatient – me and some other boys and girls. But my mother said: No, you wait, we stay together. We have to get rail permit to go south. In the end we left the camp. For days we walk, my sister Ewa was very sick, pain in head, fever. After days we come to railway. There were many of us on the train. No one knows anything, except we are told there will be a new Polish army. We make a long journey south. Trains, barges, trucks, walking. Even donkey and camel.’ Kate felt his chest move in laughter for a moment.

‘It was chaos, Russia – the Russians didn’t know what they were doing. Finally they hand us all over to the British, when we got south, in Uzbekistan. Here we are told that for sure there will be a Polish Army Corps gathered out of those freed from the camps. Our General, Anders, they let him out of Lubyanka prison in Moscow and he came to command us. I was old enough – eighteen by this time. I decided to join. But for some time everyone would be travelling together: the army and also women and children, everyone. We went to Tashkent where there was a camp. This is very bad time – there was no food, almost, eating worms from the ground. And you know what else we could eat sometimes? Turtles – big ones, we boiled them – and storks. They make their nests high up, but there were no high buildings, so they nested in the trees. We would go and lift them by the neck. But this is not often, of course. We were hungry and many people sick, thin like insects, dying. I was worried about my mother. After all the camp, the journeys, all she had suffered, her health was very bad; she was weak. We did not know where was my father – she had to do everything alone. And Agnieska got very sick – typhus, as we told you.’