Broken Face saluted smartly. I was a little late and took the full blast of abuse. Poor discipline and being improperly dressed. He knew damned well that something was wrong. Either we were joy-riding in an official car on the lookout for women, or we were picking up harmless Poles and blackmailing them into paying up to be set free.
‘What did you give these men?’ he snapped at Doubled-Up.
‘Nothing, sir. I don’t know why they wanted me.’
‘And you, what’s the matter with you?’
Our Jew shrugged his shoulders and held out his hands. The gesture was not typical of him. He was playing the traditional pawnbroker in order that we might have a sure excuse for having detained him.
The officer started to examine the car. While we stood stiffly to attention Broken Face whispered to me in English, ‘Turn round! The left, quick!’
I saw what he meant. The brain moves fast when facing certain death, almost as fast as when it snatches back a cut hand to avoid a deeper wound. We had passed the entrance to a little cobbled lane with garages which had once been coach houses on each side of it.
The officer ordered me into the car and jumped in alongside me. An inflexible, intolerable bit of faultless German military he was. He shouldn’t have been in the SD at all but commanding a battalion of Prussian Guards. He cannot have approved of Hitler’s vulgarity, but likely enough admitted in private that only vulgarity could keep the scum of the Reich at the necessary boiling point.
‘Permission to turn round, sir?’ I asked.
‘Of course, you fool! To Cracow!’ he replied, signing his death warrant.
There was no alternative. I swerved into the cobbled lane at such a speed that we nearly overturned. Before the colonel could start whatever he was going to say, Broken Face shot him in the back of the neck.
I was about to throw out the body when Doubled-Up begged me not to. There would be horrifying reprisals against every Polish family in the district, he said. So I dragged the colonel on to the floor in the back, heaved two greatcoats over him and made for the main road. There had been nobody to see us except an old woman. She had looked out of one of the garages at the sound of the shot and seen me dispose of the body. She must have guessed that we were in stolen uniforms, for she blew us a kiss. For long it disturbed me that so sweet a gesture, as if saying goodbye to a grandchild, should accompany the slaughter of a human being, however vile his service.
We had no more trouble on the road, but the nearer we got to our destination the more formidable the difficulties appeared. We had to hide the car. Broken Face and I had to change, as instructed, to civilian clothes. He still had with him his ragged coat and stained trousers, but I seemed doomed to remain a private of the Gestapo or, worse, as Hauptmann Haase. After that we had to make our way to the village on foot and call on the priest. The country was open and though it seemed sparsely inhabited – deserted farms suggested the forced removal of their owners – our movements could be watched, and so it was essential to find a safe place where we could wait till nightfall and then approach the priest. I wished that he had been appointed to some safer parish in the south where I could see the line of the Tatra and the dark mist of forest.
We followed a track very roughly paved with large stones down a tributary stream of the Vistula hoping to find a tall reed bed on fairly solid ground. There was nothing of the sort, and when the track led us past a small patch of woodland on higher ground we chose it for a temporary hiding place, although our presence could not be concealed from a few peasants in distant fields. We were sure they would say nothing and even hoped that somebody might come out with food. It was impossible to get the car right under the trees but an official search of the district was unlikely quite so soon. We outlaws lay down on the soft dead leaves for much-needed rest, myself on the edge of the open to be warmed by the sun.
I must have slept, for I remember suddenly jumping to my feet on hearing shots and equally suddenly dropping flat again as bullets cut into the turf alongside me. I rolled over into cover and watched the development of a skilful attack by a small party of poorly equipped German infantry. However, there was nothing wrong with their short bursts of fire, to which we could not reply because our weapons were in the car. It was all up. I found that I was empty and didn’t care very much. I had time to be sorry for my companions who would have preferred to die fighting.
It was our Jew who saved us by simply walking out into the open. The enemy did not attempt to shoot him down and may have been surprised that we continued to hold our fire. He strolled on, upright and fearless, towards a man whose head was sometimes visible behind a patch of nettles; it had no steel helmet and if I could have laid my hands on a weapon with longer range than my pistol he would have been dead.
The man in the nettles, who fortunately understood German, stood up and shouted to his comrades. Five of them there were. It seems incredible that till then Broken Face and I, so tired and so obsessed by mental and physical antagonism to the enemy, had entirely forgotten that we were wearing the enemy’s uniform.
Our friends explained that, when they heard that a car with German soldiers and either prisoners or informers had driven to the wood and were isolated from all help and witnesses, the local underground had nipped into their enemy tunics – they were short of boots and breeches – and come out for the kill. They had not been able to understand the lack of resistance and were about to rush us when the only man with any intelligence – we deserved that cut – had the courage to walk out and explain.
When they heard that I was British they were almost reverent, and eager to tell me how everyone understood that when our guarantee to Poland failed to deter the Nazi Reich there was no way we could send troops to help. They supposed I belonged to some suicidal, secret mission and thought it unfair that an officer who could not speak Polish should have been chosen. I did not disillusion them. A secret mission was about right though authorized by no one but myself.
We told them at once that between us we had killed nine of the SD and Gestapo, plus a colonel whose body they would find in the car, and that they must expect all the troops in the garrison to be called out to search for us. With luck it would be assumed that we were still in Cracow and for a day or so the hunt for us might be concentrated there; but we could not count on anything. If the underground were willing to take the risk of helping us, action had to be immediate.
They emptied the car of the weapons, the uniforms and the colonel. For them it was a precious haul. The whole lot was manhandled into the wood and covered up well enough for a casual eye. Final disposal would be carried out after nightfall. Their intention after exterminating the supposed enemy had been to hide their own bits and pieces of German uniforms and arms and then drift away in ones and twos to the fields, returning after dark to bring in the dead and recover their property. They wanted to stick to this plan, taking Broken Face and Doubled-Up with them. Both could be securely hidden until identity documents had been forged for them, when they would be as safe as any other villager – which wasn’t saying much.
The Jew and I were a problem out of the ordinary since we could not pass as Poles. It would be best, they thought, if we remained in the wood until they returned with some agreed plan for us, for the car and for the late colonel. Two roving sentries would be on duty to cover the track and the main road and to warn us if there was any danger. We were on no account to try to shoot our way clear, or reprisals on the villages would annihilate this promising section of the underground resistance.
It was after midday when they left, with at least eight hours to go till darkness was deep enough for a party to come out to fetch us. For a while we could blessedly relax in the sun, which already had some power, cheating hunger with two cold baked potatoes and a small flask of vodka, which were all they had. In peace we could listen to a part song of the birds and watch a busy covey of partridges until a peregrine dive-bombed and scatter
ed them. That broke our mood of temporary innocence. We became too conscious of our isolation, of lack of cover on the slopes and the long fields, of the barracks of Cracow emptying into the troop-carriers. That we could remain undiscovered for eight long hours now seemed improbable. We decided that as soon as capture was inevitable we must ensure that we were killed. He had nothing to lose, certain to be whipped off for extermination. Nor had I. But before I died they would require a lot of detailed information from Don Ernesto Menendez Peraza whose passport I still held and intended to hold in case it turned out to be a better safeguard than the pass of Hauptmann Haase in places where neither of them had ever been heard of.
I have continued to call my companion our Jew as if he were some kind of exotic pet because until then names were unimportant in the rush of the escape, and only half heard. I described the three to myself by the nicknames I gave them, with the result that I have forgotten what Doubled-Up and Broken Face were called, but never can I forget Moshe Shapir, my companion in the wood and thereafter.
The first we heard of the return of the partisans was the soft plodding of a pair of horses, approaching over grass. The axles of the haycart they drew were well greased and silent and there was no one with it but the driver. The others joined us quite imperceptibly, materializing from different patches of darkness. Their caution and woodcraft were admirable. And I had always believed the Poles to be impetuous!
Not a light was shown while arms and uniforms were packed under the hay in sacks. The car was extricated and pushed back on to the track by which we had come, while undergrowth was carefully replaced and all tyre marks brushed over. If the wood was still safe, a man would visit it in the morning and perfect the job. I felt that even so my trackers in Africa could have reconstructed all the events of the night, but that was a brilliance denied to Hitler’s blasted Aryans and unlikely to be included in any course of Gestapo training.
The party then split up, two going home with the haycart and four dragging the car along the track by a rope. Two more followed behind with brooms, wiping out the tyre marks wherever they showed on the rough surface of stones. Since Shapir could hardly make any more effort, he was tucked up in the back of the car with his feet – for a change – on the colonel, while I walked alongside the car putting a hand to the wheel when necessary.
Since our scrupulous progress was very slow, two hours had passed before I saw the gleam of the Vistula ahead, I doubted whether they could run the car into the water far enough for it to remain hidden, especially if the enemy suspected what we had done and dragged the river. But again the partisans had thought that one out. A small flat-bottomed barge, shaped like a punt so that the ends, fore and aft, would overhang the slope of the bank – it was probably a country ferry – was waiting for us. On board this barge, which he himself had evidently collected and poled down to the end of the track, was the leader of the band: a tall, powerful man with dark hair and a straight, full moustache, dressed all in black. His eyes were continuously on me, summing up the stranger, but he said little. When he did speak to me it was in French. I was pretty sure that he belonged to the landed gentry, though appearing a peasant like the others.
We shoved the car on board, poled some distance up river, then started it up and let it run off the end into deep water, shipping a lot in the process. The colonel, now naked and suitably weighted, was dropped a good distance away.
When we had run the little barge ashore again, hauling it well up the bank so as to tip most of the water out and leave the bottom boards clear, the leader said to me, ‘This has to be your home for the present. I am sorry but it’s the best I can do at short notice.’
Sheepskins were laid out for us to lie on and more to cover us. Food and drink followed. Wading alongside, they pushed the barge up river and through tall reeds, which opened up into a narrow channel. He advised us to draw the barge further into the reeds when the sun rose so that even a plane would be unlikely to spot us.
‘It won’t hurt this poor devil to lie still for a while,’ he added, ‘but you will have to have patience. I cannot tell how long before it will be safe to visit you. When it is, I shall come along in a rowing boat.’
‘Should I know your name?’
‘You may call me Casimir.’
‘And our two companions are safe?’
‘Warm and well hidden in a roof. I can’t get them a doctor for there isn’t one nearer than Cracow and his movements are watched. But we can get in touch with him for advice and we have a bone-setter who can carry out whatever treatment he recommends.’
He said that they had wanted to thank me on their knees and they had been so effusive in their praise that he reserved judgement until he himself had met me.
‘Now is there anything I can do for you while you are here?’
‘Nothing. All I want is to have the captain’s uniform brushed and thoroughly cleaned. I daren’t use the colonel’s.’
‘Our central command can often communicate with London. If you have a wife and family, would you like her to be told that you are alive and well?’
‘I have no wife. I would have had if Hitler had not tortured and killed her.’
‘In my case it was my daughter.’
‘Then Lord help the Nazi who falls into your hands.’
‘I was just about to say the same to you,’ he answered.
We were left alone among the frogs and that mysterious waving of rushes by no apparent body which always fills the watcher with a vague unease, though knowing that it is caused not by the passage of Pan searching for a hollow reed but a fish or eel among the roots. The east began to lighten and the silence of still water was broken by the clamour of duck setting out on the morning flight, great arrowheads of winged life and purpose.
Arms round my knees, I sat up in the bows, sure of my own purpose but wondering what my destination should be whenever I was free to choose. Till then I had been wholly engaged in avoiding the ever-present destination of death. It was obviously essential to get out of Poland, where every officer of the SD and Gestapo would be on the lookout for their bogus colleague. All routes to the east led through concentrations of the military and ultimately to the Russian front. To the west was Germany again. So it had to be south over the Tatra, provided that the partisans could recommend safe paths. What conditions I would find on the other side of the Carpathians in Slovakia were beyond guessing. The poor Slovaks, once a contented people of the empire and then an unenthusiastic partner in Czechoslovakia, were probably pro-German.
Moshe Shapir, who had been sleeping his way back to some remnant of health, woke up. He said that it was the most memorable luxury of his life to feel warm again. Recalling my own sensations after I had emerged from my Dorset burrow and wrapped myself in von Lauen’s fleece-lined coat, I was inclined to agree with him.
I asked him if he had any plans for his future, assuming we had one.
‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘I shall go to Palestine.’
It seemed worlds away and no more than a compass bearing. The route must lead through Turkey, a truly neutral country where I might be accepted by my countrymen, though I had little hope of it after my experience in Sweden. But to hell with neutral countries! More tempting was the thought of Greece, conquered and occupied, where I spoke a recognizable version of the language and might intensify my personal war up to its end.
The duck settled and the day passed. A plane flew low down the Vistula, possibly searching for any sign of us but unlikely, we decided, to have spotted the barge. We had bent reeds partly over it and concealed ourselves and everything of unnaturally light colour beneath them. More alarming was the distant sound of a heavy vehicle passing along the track beside the wood.
Around midnight we heard the splash of oars and the rustle of a boat being pulled through the rushes. The dark, grim Casimir came alongside with more food and drink and some temporary comfort. He told us that
a search party had indeed come down the track as far as the water’s edge and found nothing. They had visited his village but left after asking a few questions, sure of its innocence because the Gestapo had its own informer there. I said that I wondered he had not met with a fatal accident.
‘That would be suicide.’
‘It’s you?’
‘Yes. I am a favourite in Cracow. I am a simple squire, as I think you call it in English, poor and ambitious and not such a patriot as the great men and the peasants. I am a good Aryan and I detest the miserable Slavs and communists and Jews. God, how easy it is to babble their nonsense!’
Fortunately Moshe did not understand French. He was in no mood to appreciate irony.
‘I know. I have done the same I said. ‘We Nazis are the salt of the earth and the hope of Europe.’
He slapped me on the back and laughed. It was the laughter of a soul in hell, quite joyful considering the flames.
I asked him what were the chances of a successful escape into Slovakia. He replied that the passes were heavily guarded and whatever we pretended to be we should not get through.
‘Unless you can bluff your way over in that uniform,’ he added. ‘We have had it thoroughly cleaned for you. Beautiful boots, friend. Beautiful boots to kick with.’
I told him that the risk was too great. It was a delightful thought that all security officers of the Reich for miles around would have their identities checked and re-checked when passing through any control, but it meant that I could not pretend to be Haase with a photograph that was no likeness. I would wear his boots and keep his pistol and documents but abandon his uniform, which was too bulky anyway to be carried on my back.
‘What else have you?’
‘A Nicaraguan passport in the name of Ernesto Menendez Peraza. Anyone who is caught with that will be taken straight to Hitler’s headquarters for treatment. Ernesto only died four days ago, so they won’t have taken him off the blacklist yet. No, I must use the skills of a hunter. Arms, not bluff. And I am sure of myself in mountain and forest.’
Rogue Justice Page 6
