front line forces of the Wehrmacht and the garrison troops of the SS divisions. Nor could those people know that after the combat generals had moved further East into Russia that their authority over the civilian population would fall to the hands of Erich Koch, drafted to Kiev to head the Reichskommissariat.
On the afternoon of November 21st the townspeople flocked to the hill site of Tiutiunnyk's battle. They came in their best clothes as if it were a Sunday from the days before the church was closed. The headmaster made the first speech, flags flew, the town band played a medley of the tunes of the old Ukraine, a hymn was sung. In the evening the SS troops came to the homes of those who had organized such a happy day. In the morning the SS firing squads shot dead twenty-four of Bazar's most prominent citizens. The following week the train took all the young men and women of Bazar to the war factories of the Ruhr.
Stepan and Ilya Holovich were amongst those transported in the sealed wagons through Lvov and Krakow and Prague to Essen. They were the Ostarbeiters, intelligent and educated, and set to work as labourers, made to wear a badge.
Three and a half years later, the Panthers that had stormed through Bazar and the Ukraine came home in defeat.
Emaciated, servile, exhausted, Stepan and Ilya Holovich found themselves herded with a hundred thousand others into the Displacement Camps. The majority, the huge majority, were to be shipped back in the same closed trains to the Motherland of Russia. The minority, the tiny minority, succeeded in persuading the American authorities that they should not be returned.
In 1947 Stepan and Ilya Holovich arrived with no money and no luggage at London's Tilbury docks on a freighter from Bremen. Stepan Holovich had sunk to his knees to kiss the rain-soaked paving of the quayside. From a single room in Kingston-upon-Thames which he rented and where he lived with Ilya, he repaired watches and clocks. When the local doctor, confounded by the sparrow size of his patients, informed the couple that they were to become parents, Ilya Holovich had dropped her lined and weary face to her chest and wept, and Stepan Holovich had jumped up from his chair and then scratched between his thin grey hair and laughed. A fortnight later the buff OHMS envelope had been delivered which announced the granting of the natur-alization papers. They were British citizens by the time that Ilya Holovich entered Kingston General Hospital for a difficult confinement. That it was difficult was of no surprise to the duty obstetrician. A woman of that physique had no business producing 8 lb 7 oz babies.
They called the boy Mikhail.
In the year that the child first went to a nursery school his father anglicized the family name. It was his hope that whereas an essentially Ukrainian background would rule behind the front door of their home, his son could become assimilated into the society that had adopted his flotsam parents.
Michael Holly was an unremarkable boy growing up in the suburbs of south-west London.
That is perhaps the start of the road to the perimeter path of ZhKh 385/3/1.
A man stood, rakish and upright, and stared at the fences.
The night pressed down on the flood of the arc lights, the line of lamp clusters rested on the outer fence of wood planks.
The snow gathered in a thin cloak on his tunic's shoulders and he made no attempt to scatter the fall. Those who walked the perimeter path went behind him, and no one spoke to the man who gazed at the wall that held him. He communed in a solitude, and much of his face was hidden by the quilted balaclava, and his mind was blocked to those who passed him. When the bell sounded and the ghost figures pitched from the huts to form the lines at the Kitchen, he remained, his attention held all the time by the upper strands of wire and the topmost line of the wooden fence.
From the corner of the compound the raised machine-gun and its minder watched and bided
On the afternoon of November 21st the townspeople flocked to the hill site of Tiutiunnyk's battle. They came in their best clothes as if it were a Sunday from the days before the church was closed. The headmaster made the first speech, flags flew, the town band played a medley of the tunes of the old Ukraine, a hymn was sung. In the evening the SS troops came to the homes of those who had organized such a happy day. In the morning the SS firing squads shot dead twenty-four of Bazar's most prominent citizens. The following week the train took all the young men and women of Bazar to the war factories of the Ruhr.
Stepan and Ilya Holovich were amongst those transported in the sealed wagons through Lvov and Krakow and Prague to Essen. They were the Ostarbeiters, intelligent and educated, and set to work as labourers, made to wear a badge.
Three and a half years later, the Panthers that had stormed through Bazar and the Ukraine came home in defeat.
Emaciated, servile, exhausted, Stepan and Ilya Holovich found themselves herded with a hundred thousand others into the Displacement Camps. The majority, the huge majority, were to be shipped back in the same closed trains to the Motherland of Russia. The minority, the tiny minority, succeeded in persuading the American authorities that they should not be returned.
In 1947 Stepan and Ilya Holovich arrived with no money and no luggage at London's Tilbury docks on a freighter from Bremen. Stepan Holovich had sunk to his knees to kiss the rain-soaked paving of the quayside. From a single room in Kingston-upon-Thames which he rented and where he lived with Ilya, he repaired watches and clocks. When the local doctor, confounded by the sparrow size of his patients, informed the couple that they were to become parents, Ilya Holovich had dropped her lined and weary face to her chest and wept, and Stepan Holovich had jumped up from his chair and then scratched between his thin grey hair and laughed. A fortnight later the buff OHMS envelope had been delivered which announced the granting of the natur-alization papers. They were British citizens by the time that Ilya Holovich entered Kingston General Hospital for a difficult confinement. That it was difficult was of no surprise to the duty obstetrician. A woman of that physique had no business producing 8 lb 7 oz babies.
They called the boy Mikhail.
In the year that the child first went to a nursery school his father anglicized the family name. It was his hope that whereas an essentially Ukrainian background would rule behind the front door of their home, his son could become assimilated into the society that had adopted his flotsam parents.
Michael Holly was an unremarkable boy growing up in the suburbs of south-west London.
That is perhaps the start of the road to the perimeter path of ZhKh 385/3/1.
A man stood, rakish and upright, and stared at the fences.
The night pressed down on the flood of the arc lights, the line of lamp clusters rested on the outer fence of wood planks.
The snow gathered in a thin cloak on his tunic's shoulders and he made no attempt to scatter the fall. Those who walked the perimeter path went behind him, and no one spoke to the man who gazed at the wall that held him. He communed in a solitude, and much of his face was hidden by the quilted balaclava, and his mind was blocked to those who passed him. When the bell sounded and the ghost figures pitched from the huts to form the lines at the Kitchen, he remained, his attention held all the time by the upper strands of wire and the topmost line of the wooden fence.
From the corner of the compound the raised machine-gun and its minder watched and bided
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