Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Calories had a similar effect on the Stork Commando, for after the men had made frequent raids on the remote barn at Castle Gorka and got decent food in their bellies, they developed a daring they had not had before, and one day just as the titanic battles were developing at Stalingrad, producing the first tremors to attack the Nazi leaders of the General Gouvernement, Jan Buk devised a sortie which delighted his men by its ingenuity and terrified the Nazis in Krakow by its boldness and its nearness to their headquarters.

  Nineteen members of the Stork Commando slipped past the defenses of Krakow but did not go into the city itself; they went a short distance west to the prehistoric site of Tyniec on the Vistula, where under the shadow of ancient ruins they assembled a large raft made of logs and whatever floatables they could find. On it they piled an immense amount of dynamite stolen from various Nazi installations over the past year and a half. They covered this with the kind of hay used to feed cattle in winter, then donned heavy clothes and submerged themselves in the river, leaving two farmer types atop the raft to guard the hay.

  The seventeen swimmers propelled the raft rapidly toward the city of Krakow, and when they reached the big bridge that connected the south side of the river with the north, they hid under its protecting arches and at night conveyed their dynamite to a plant that generated electricity for much of the city. With great patience and almost unbearable risk they managed to cut wires, avoid alerting guards or activating signals, and plant their charges right against the walls. From a distance so short it would have terrified a professional dynamiter, they detonated a tremendous blast which destroyed much of the plant. Then, with forged passes, they slipped into the crowd that gathered to watch the fires and with brazen dexterity made their way out through Gestapo cordons, returning to their forest.

  The fury which Governor General Hans Frank felt when a plant on his doorstep was dynamited did not endanger the Stork Commando, for his intelligence officers assured him that the partisans must have come from the Katowice area, since none could have penetrated from the east, and he initiated harsh reprisals against the westerners. He did, however, transmit to all his subordinates a surprisingly accurate estimate of his own:

  ‘Because security in Krakow is so intense, I think we must assume that the terrorists came from outside, possibly from a good distance. I rule out nothing, not even as far away as Warsaw. Therefore, regardless of where your command is, I want you to assume that it was your people who committed this crime. Remember that nine Nazi workmen died in this blast, so we are dealing with murder. Act accordingly.’

  When Konrad Krumpf received these instructions he interpreted them as encouraging him to do something that he had intended for a long time. There was no possibility that partisans from his district could have committed the crime, but there was good reason to suppose that some of the Poles of his village were passing foodstuffs to partisans hiding in the forest. He therefore ordered a renewed search for hidden caches of wheat or private querns which were converting that wheat into flour and bread.

  To the captain of the searchers he confided: ‘Someone, it doesn’t matter who, has suggested that this woman Buk might be bringing food to the partisans. She might still have a grinding mill.’ The captain interpreted this, no doubt correctly, as an invitation to bear down on Biruta in hopes of extracting information, so after another thorough search of her cottage, which again disclosed nothing, he ordered her taken to the interrogation quarters at the far end of the village, and there he himself questioned her.

  He did not torture her; that would become known in the village, to the detriment of order. He simply knocked her down with his fist whenever her answers did not please, and each time she rose from the floor, bleeding from the mouth and unsteady, he questioned her some more, then knocked her down again when her stubbornness persisted.

  He continued this for several hours, always missing the true facts but always coming very close: ‘While your husband is working in Germany, you have a lover in the forest, don’t you? He sneaks into your cottage at night, while we aren’t looking, doesn’t he? Is he strong and good in bed? Do you love him as much as your husband?’

  She said nothing, and he hit her again, but now he changed his attack: ‘Who says your husband is in Germany? Has anybody seen him in Germany? I know about the postcard and the official report, but who really knows? Do you know what I think? I think your husband is here in Poland.’

  Again she made no response, so more blows rained upon her, until at last she simply lay still where she had fallen, unable to bear any more. But even then she refused to acknowledge even by wince or whimper that he had come close to the truth.

  He let her lie on the cold floor for nearly an hour, after which, of her own accord, she rose as if to ask ‘What now?’ and after a while he sent her home, warning her to tell no one what had happened at the interrogation, but her face was so bruised and her gait so unsteady that she needed to say nothing.

  She had defeated his interrogation, yet unknowingly he had gained a significant triumph, for he had made her afraid to risk teaching her children. He thus deprived her of the last possible act she could perform to demonstrate her enmity to the German occupation.

  She went back to her cottage, and sat there, no light lit, and stared at the floor.

  On the late afternoon of 2 November 1943 the new commandant of Majdanek, SS Obersturmbannführer Martin Weiss, a soft pudgy man who did not like to look anyone in the eye, received in code a set of instructions which launched his tenure dramatically: SUBJECT UNDESIRABLES. YOUR CAMP BADLY OVERCROWDED. HARVEST HOME ACTION.

  On 3 November when the prisoners mustered in darkness, Szymon Bukowski became aware of unusual movements, and before dawn Otto Grundtz came storming down the line picking out men at apparent random, whereupon the troopers who followed grabbed each man indicated, throwing him forward. Bukowski was so nominated, for what no one knew, but when he saw the others who had been chosen he realized that they were all younger men with modest strength still in their emaciated bodies, and he had to assume that they were going to be shot because they were taking too long in their dying.

  When the selections had been made, twenty-nine of them, the men were marched away, as always happened when there were to be mass executions rather than individual hangings. When they reached the three lines of electrified barbed wire that marked the exit from Field Four, the gates were opened and they were led right through, then ordered to go left toward the execution ground, a hill where machine guns could dispose of many prisoners at one time.

  It was now dawn, and walking bent against the bitter wind that blew in off the endless flatlands, Bukowski thought how pitiful it was to die for no reason at all. Professor Tomczyk had been hanged because he was trying to strengthen the moral resistance of the men in Barracks Eleven. The mountaineer from the Tatras had died because he was a real revolutionary. But this group of young men had done nothing specific, they had uttered no battle cries for freedom, nor had they opposed the Third Reich in any detectable way. They were simply being shot, and he remembered his resolve not to die in this supine way, but he could devise no way to escape. He was powerless, unable to make even a protest, and he knew it: I am so weak. I am ashamed.

  But then from the far end of the camp, from the fields near the main gate, came two other lines, one of men shivering in the thinnest of rags, many of them barefoot and without caps—thin, wasted men. The second consisted of women and children, hundreds of them or even thousands, frail creatures, some too weak to walk by themselves; other women helped them. Spryest were the children, especially the young girls of seven and eight, who walked with a certain eagerness as if glad to be out of their constricted field at last.

  Almost every adult person in the two lines looked near death from starvation, and it was clear that these prisoners had received even less food than those in Fields Three through Six, and Bukowski wondered why this had been. Then he saw with horror that everyone in these endless lines wore the Yellow Star
. He was not going to be shot. They were.

  The code name for Jew was undesirable, meaning that the leaders of the Third Reich had decided that there was no way by which these people of a different religion and, the Nazis claimed, a different race could be fitted into the great, clean Germany that was to evolve. Up to now, Majdanek had disposed of more than a hundred thousand Jews, but with the possibility that the Russian army might one day soon break through the German lines and overrun the great death camps like Belzec and Treblinka before the task of killing all the Jews in Europe was completed, the high command had decided, in a rush of panic, to get rid of all remaining undesirables now, when it could be done in an orderly way.

  A thousand Jews marched up the hill that cold morning, then five thousand, then fifteen thousand, more than the population of some places on the map labeled cities, and the hardened men from Field Four, who had seen death in almost every guise, felt great pity for the old men and women who could barely struggle to their place of execution, and overwhelming grief when they saw the children, especially the young ones not old enough even to dress themselves. Szymon Bukowski was especially shaken by the awful parade, and as he approached the execution ground he did not know if he could control his emotions.

  When he reached the top of the hill he saw that two squads of machine-gunners were in place on the western edge of a deep trench, and he realized that the Jews would be marched along the eastern lip, where they would be gunned down. His job would be to throw the piles of corpses into the trench so that the next batch of undesirables could be harvested.

  The first contingent was a mixed group: about forty older men, a few youths, twenty women, and nine children from the age of two or three to fifteen. They stood in the dawn, facing their executioners, and the last sight they saw was the lovely skyline of Lublin, the medieval towers of the churches, the fine high profile of the castle in whose chapel men and women like themselves would be tried that day, and shot, and tossed down the stairwells.

  Rrra-rrra-rrra-rrra! The machine guns stuttered. Bodies slumped forward. Otto Grundtz and two other Gestapo officials walked down the line of fallen, administering with their revolvers the coup de grâce to any body that moved. And then the cold, dispassionate voice of a superior commander: ‘Throw them in the ditch.’

  All day the lines moved up the hill, all day, at ten- or fifteen-minute intervals, groups of Jews took their places along the edge of the pit, and from the tangled bodies below they knew what awaited them. Some prayed. A few sang. Women reached to clutch children who were not their own, and boys and girls in their early teens simply looked bewildered.

  Rrra-rrra-rrra-rrra! Hour after hour the dreadful killing continued, until more than eighteen thousand were slain, and as the lines began to dwindle, a man whispered to Szymon: ‘When the Jews are finished, they shoot us, you know. They always do. Want no witnesses.’ So as dusk approached, Szymon Bukowski, this honorable man, the son of a woman of superlative decency and the grandson of a woman who had stood for all that was good in Poland, found himself hoping that the fields would disgorge a few more Jews so that he could live a few more minutes.

  But on this day they did not shoot the burial crew. Someone forgot to give the order.

  Even when the deep pits with their awful plantings were covered over in the careful way a farmer piles earth over his seedlings so that crops will grow, and when the hill showed only slight mounds running parallel one to the other, the day’s work was not finished; typists in various buildings compiled endless lists of those executed, their numbers, names, birth dates, regional derivations, dates of death and presumed causes—and not a single Jew died unrecorded:

  The methodical masters of Majdanek saw nothing preposterous in recording that on 3 November 1943, an exact total of 18,431 people died at almost the same instant of tuberculosis, cardiac arrest or the flu, and that all of them happened to be Jews. SS Obersturmbannführer Martin Weiss had executed his first important assignment with distinction.

  At seventy-one, Marjorie Trilling Bukowski had to admit that the tensions of war were affecting her health adversely, and she listened attentively when her son Ludwik recommended that she heed the invitations she had been receiving from friends in Chicago and return to the States, where better care would be available.

  ‘How can I leave one battle zone and cross through enemy lines to another?’ she asked, and her son’s reply terrified her: ‘I have friends. There’s a constant exchange of prisoners.’

  He has friends, she thought. And who would they be, that they can authorize such traffic? It was clear that he must be referring to his Nazi associates, and that raised the most difficult questions, for the only one of his German friends that she knew was Konrad Krumpf, and to associate one’s self with him would be dishonorable.

  She was forced to dine with Krumpf about four nights a week, but there were compensations: he provided the palace with large supplies of good food, and the meals gave her an opportunity to observe her son, whose uncertain future had always bothered her. He was like his father, not like her, a vague and ineffectual man whose refusal to marry or even to court seriously had perplexed her. Hesitancy about sex had certainly never been a weakness of his father, whose occupation in Vienna had been chasing pretty girls, and why Ludwik should have become confused in this vital area she could not specify, but she guessed it might have something to do with his falling between two worlds, her international interests and his father’s rural concern with horses. All she knew was that for some sad reason Ludwik Bukowski, heir to two splendid palaces and a large income from funds invested in Illinois, was a most unsatisfactory man of forty-three. It was by no means clear how he would behave in the crisis which she could see approaching from the east, where Russian armies, to her alternate joy and apprehension, were beginning to gain impressive victories.

  She was delighted that the German terrorists were tasting defeat, but as the daughter of an eminent American capitalist, she suspected that Communist victors would prove almost as vicious as the Nazis, and she wondered if Ludwik would be strong enough, or clever enough, to protect this marvelous palace from either the retreating Germans or the incoming Soviets. She had good reason to think not. So now, as she sat in the resplendent hall where Paderewski and Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt had shared spectacular nights with her, with Ludwik at her right, Konrad Krumpf on her other side, she felt the world slowly falling apart and the stones of her palace falling with it.

  She had only one hope. During the long middle years of her marriage with Wiktor Bukowski she had often felt as gloomy about his prospects as she now felt about Ludwik’s, yet he had survived for that one glorious day at Zamosc and was now, as the portrait at the far end of the room proved, a permanent actor in Polish history, The Hero of Zamosc. But there had been a difference. Dear, weak, frivolous Wiktor had never faced real moral temptation; true, he had behaved rather poorly with the serving girl Jadwiga and not too sensibly with the pianist Krystyna Szprot, but the monumental moral questions of treason and the meaning of civic life had never confronted him. When the war bugles blew he mounted his horse, and kinetic energy took care of the rest. Poor Ludwik was going to have to confront problems infinitely more complex, and his mother was not reassured by what she saw as the lights grew dimmer.

  ‘I’ve done what I promised,’ Krumpf announced one night at dinner.

  ‘You mean with Berlin?’ Ludwik asked.

  ‘Yes. My message went direct to Goering and he’s just let me know that he’d be delighted.’

  ‘Now I am pleased,’ Ludwik said, but when his mother asked about what, he became evasive.

  Krumpf, however, proud of his accomplishment, was eager to talk. ‘When I first visited with you, Madame Bukowska, I told you how impressed I was, how favorably impressed, that is, with the Hans Holbein you have in my room. That you should have chosen a German painting for a place of honor pleased me very much. I thought of it a great deal, the honor you had paid our country, and I sent a report to Her
mann Goering. He’s making a major collection, you know.’

  Marjorie felt faint. This wormy little man, making deals behind her back regarding her paintings. She shivered to think of what he was going to reveal.

  ‘For a year I heard nothing, and believe me, it’s frustrating to be here at the end of the line, you might say, and hear nothing. I had rather hoped that Goering would become excited by the Holbein, or maybe the Correggio, but one of his aides told me when I asked during my visit to Berlin, “Goering already has a big Correggio,” and he accented the word big like I just did.’ He laughed at himself, then confessed: ‘To tell you the truth, Madame Bukowska, I didn’t know what I hoped to win for myself with this information about the Holbein. A promotion, maybe. A summons to be on Goering’s staff, maybe. I really didn’t know.’

  ‘Do you know now?’ Marjorie asked acidly.

  ‘Well, Goering’s man assured me that if the field marshal takes a liking to the Holbein—and I sent three excellent photographs—the matter of the train might be arranged.’

  ‘What train?’ She noticed that her son was most uneasy.

  ‘Ludwik proposed it,’ Krumpf said with real enthusiasm, ‘and I approved immediately. I saw every reason to support the idea, and I did, in writing, to the field marshal.’

  ‘What train? What would it do?’

  With calculating eye and swiftly moving gestures with both hands, as if he were a country auctioneer, Konrad Krumpf indicated the treasures in this grand room—the gold chairs, the centerpieces in their cabinets, the paintings, the silvery chandeliers—and by extension, the wonders in the rooms above. ‘Ludwik said that it would be a mortal shame if anything happened to these treasures …’

  ‘You mean the Russians?’

  ‘Oh, no! The Russians will never reach here. You can be assured of that.’