Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  A Polish farmer on the opposite side of the river, who had watched the rocket splash down near him, convinced the Germans that it had flown over his head and landed far inland, and off they went.

  From the Warsaw underground a team of Polish scientists with cameras and intricate tools sneaked down to Bukowo, entered the river at night, swam to where Jan Buk guided them, found the rocket, dragged it to the western shore and dissected it. Burying the vital parts on the farmer’s land, even though he knew this was a sentence of death if he was detected, they informed London that they had the guts and sinews of a rocket bomb. The hope was that the Allies might be able to counteract the devilish bombs when they began to hit London … if the information could be spirited out of Poland, flown across Europe, and delivered to General Eisenhower’s headquarters. For the moment such delivery was impossible, but the determined Poles spent long hours trying to devise some daring trick that would help defeat the Germans.

  Now the war raged toward its climax, and as tremendous news surged out of Russia—‘Leningrad breaks its siege, Vitebsk is freed, great victories in Ukraine’—the individual battles of the Polish occupation accelerated. Count Lubonski, aware that his guest Falk von Eschl was setting traps for him, continued quietly and bravely his support of the underground, determined to set some traps of his own; like cobra-and-mongoose the two distinguished gentlemen engaged in thrust and parry. Konrad Krumpf, holding on to a secret letter which he hoped to use effectively, had to protect himself from Von Eschl but at the same time keep Bukowski and his trainload of treasures safe until such time as both could be moved out of Poland. Jan Buk and Biruta had to be suspicious of everyone yet continue their personal warfares against the invader. And inside the charnel house of Majdanek, Szymon Bukowski had to study with the instincts of a ferret every whim that possessed Otto Grundtz lest that capricious dispenser of death and life drag him some morning to the gibbet in Field Four.

  At the conclusion of his last assignment with the two compassionate managers at B.E.L., he noticed that they said goodbye with what came close to affection: ‘Take care of yourself, Szymon. You’re a good worker.’ Then he learned that Dr. Mannheim had decided that Bukowski had been up and down the calorie ladder so often that he had become disoriented, as such prisoners invariably did, and was thus of no further use to the Third Reich. When Szymon was returned to Majdanek this time, it was with instructions that he be placed on a diet of seven hundred calories, given the most strenuous work possible, ‘and be encouraged to disappear.’

  He was assigned to the concrete rollers, and day after day, with bare hands, he had to grasp those ice-cold iron handles and exert almost superhuman effort with his team to move the massive rollers back and forth so that the roads, in the words of Otto Grundtz, ‘could be nice and a credit to the camp.’

  It was soon obvious that a prolonged assignment to the rollers would kill Bukowski, even though he had started with his body in good condition after his spell of decent food at the factory, and he began to connive at ways to conserve strength, to keep his mind a blank, and to waste his energy on nothing at all, to feel no resentment at the morning hangings, or at Otto Grundtz’s brutalities, or even at the monstrosity of Majdanek itself, with its continued Zyklon-B administrations to the Jews and the constant burnings at the crematorium.

  The terrible risk in the weeks ahead, he realized, would be that some morning Grundtz might find him in a coma and move him into Barracks Nineteen, where without regaining consciousness he’d soon starve to death. This, with the help of God, he would avoid. He had watched with horror as those eighteen thousand Jews had died passively at the pits, and he swore to himself that he would not allow himself to be killed that way. But even as he voiced this resolve, he remembered how powerless he had felt that cold November day when he believed that it was he who was about to be executed; poor Jews, they never had a chance.

  For one spell of three weeks he thought of absolutely nothing day or night but a glass of cold beer he had once enjoyed in Sandomierz. He could see every drop of sweat on the glass, each millimeter of level as the foam subsided. He could hear the echo of the filled glass when it was placed before him, the changing tone as he set it down after each sip. He could taste the difference between the pure froth, the froth with a little beer mixed in, the beer with no froth. He spent twenty-one days drinking that glass of beer, and was so preoccupied with it that he did not notice the deterioration of his body, but others whispered: ‘It won’t be long now. The rollers take everyone to Barracks Nineteen.’

  He then transferred his imagination to a supper served at the wedding of a well-to-do farmer, where huge platters of sauerkraut, sausage, boiled pork and pickles had been provided, one to each of six tables, and he had helped himself piggishly, moving from one to the other so as not to reveal his gluttony. He recalled this particular feast for two reasons: as a peasant, he knew that the acid bite of the pickled kraut was good for him, all peasants knew that and it was one reason why they survived so long; and he could see in the rich fat of the meats the strength that came from them.

  Now when he absolutely lusted for something, anything, to eat, his mind oscillated between the two benefactions of that long-ago feast: the vitamins that keep a body alive and the rich fats that keep it strong, and after a while his mind focused only on the latter, and he imagined himself luxuriating with platters of butter, or grease, or pork drippings, or oil that rich people bought from Spain, or the golden globules at the edge of a roast, or plain lard.

  ‘Oh God!’ he cried one day as he toiled at the freezing handles of the roller. ‘I want something with fat on it.’ He knew that he could not go on much longer with this excessive labor unless he had some fat intake.

  But then a miracle happened. Each barracks had at its entrance a good, strong cot provided with warm blankets, its own bucket of water and clean eating dishes. This was always occupied by some newly recruited Gestapo man whose job it was to keep order and forestall incipient subversion. For some time it had been the quarters of a weak-chinned city lad, but when he showed signs of cracking under the strain of watching so many of the prisoners die from starvation, Otto Grundtz requisitioned a new man, and he received a most unlikely replacement.

  Willi Zimmel was a round-faced, towheaded, good-looking farm boy of nineteen, with flashing blue eyes and a congenial grin. He liked people, and was so gently simple-minded that he refused to see Majdanek as the charnel house it was.

  In his Rhineland village he had been an early volunteer for the Hitler Jugend, whose mysticism and battle drills delighted him; he interpreted it as a kind of superior Boy Scouts, which he had intended joining before it was outlawed. He loved marching; he thrived on camping; military drill excited him; and he invariably considered heroic any older man placed over him. On two occasions his troop had been ordered to smash Jewish stores and beat their owners, but he did this with no malice, and now, suddenly promoted to full membership in the Gestapo, he felt no animus toward the prisoners he was to guard. As he told his mother in his first letter home: ‘They’ve all done something wrong and must be in jail for a while,’ and he refused to believe that every man in his barracks was slated to die.

  When he first saw the physical condition of Barracks Eleven he was appalled at its messiness, those hundreds of double-decker planks, each with one filthy blanket, those lines of men who had not washed in months, the scores with infestations of lice about which they did nothing, and he took it upon himself to improve matters. But only through exhortation, never with any ration of soap or lice powder or better food: ‘Men, you must develop selfpride. You simply cannot live decently with lice crawling everywhere.’ He always harangued them as if they wanted the lice, as if they had plenty of soap but refused to use it. He assured them every morning at muster that if they would but wash themselves more carefully, look out for the cleanliness of their sleeping spaces and spruce themselves up generally, they would feel better.

  Then, remembering the joy he had found
in the Hitler Jugend programs of physical exercise, he initiated at morning muster a series of gymnastics made popular by the Sokols in the 1920s. In his well-fed condition he found these energetic movements invigorating, but his emaciated charges could not possibly follow them. In fact, it seemed to the disappointed Zimmel that only the man recently returned from Berlin Electric paid any serious attention to the fitness program, unaware, of course, that Bukowski did so because he was trying to follow Professor Tomczyk’s advice: ‘Agree with anything they want you to do.’

  Bukowski realized that Willi Zimmel lived in a world of dreamlike simplicity where torture and starvation and hangings did not exist. He was the perpetual leader of a hearty boys’ camp, and he saw the men who lined up before him each morning as skeletons only because they did not look out for their health. One morning when a man from Willi’s barracks was hanged for no discernible cause, Bukowski heard Zimmel say: ‘He must’ve done something terribly wrong.’

  The preposterous morning exercises continued until one snowy morning when Otto Grundtz happened to see Willi Zimmel going through a series of wild distortions, devised by a Czechoslovakian instructor to train Olympic athletes, while all his ghostlike men but one watched lethargically, not even trying to wave their frail arms. They were a pitiful lot, gaunt, almost skeletal, many with sunken mouths, for Grundtz had confiscated all false teeth, since the materials, especially the metals, were needed in Germany.

  He was enraged by what he saw, and bellowed: ‘What in hell is going on here?’ and Zimmel replied: ‘I want them to look out for their health,’ and Grundtz screamed in German, which some of the prisoners would understand: ‘Stop it, you pig’s asshole!’

  Zimmel was mortified by such a command; he could hear those who knew German starting to laugh, but he also noticed that one man from his barracks had a look of compassion on his face, realizing that he, Zimmel, had merely been trying to help. And that brief look, for that hundredth of a second, would save Bukowski’s life.

  One morning as Zimmel was walking idly back from the main gate, he happened to see Bukowski straining at the concrete rollers and went over to him. ‘Isn’t this heavy work?’ he asked naïvely, and when Bukowski nodded, he asked: ‘Are you the one who used to be a shoemaker?’ and Bukowski nodded again, but at this time nothing further happened.

  A few days later, when Szymon was dragging the road in front of Fields Five and Six, he witnessed the arrival of some nine thousand women and children, the largest contingent of its kind ever to reach Majdanek, and in that mass of people he happened to notice a young girl, perhaps nine or ten, dressed in good shoes, a Russian-style woolen cap and a new overcoat. He never saw the child’s face, but from the proud manner in which she bore herself, it was clear that she hoped to behave well.

  Transfixed, he watched the child striding along, trying to keep up with the older women, her hands in the pockets of her coat, her head bravely erect as the horrors of the camp unfolded, and then she vanished in the teeming crowd entering Field Five, where he knew her fine clothes would be stripped from her, leaving her to sleep in a thin, miserable shift on bare ground, with only a frail blanket to ward off the pneumonia and the fatal bronchitis.

  For the next week Szymon could think of nothing but that little girl, and by persistent questioning he learned that she and her group had come from the splendid walled town of Zamosc: ‘All Poles are removed from that area. Exterminated. Their place is being filled by German immigrants. Zamosc is to be a German town forever. A frontier fortress. No Pole to be allowed to set foot inside.’

  This statement was accurate. A vast area around that noble city was to be depopulated, then filled with loyal Germans, and the Polish citizens who had once lived there were being moved into Majdanek to be starved to death. They had done no wrong, but their land was coveted.

  Now, as he dragged the massive rollers, tall as a man, he tormented himself with visions, imagining this little girl again, whose face he had never seen, and she filled his mind. Always he saw her in her new overcoat, still striding along, still trying to keep up with older people, her little body pressed forward to accept whatever was to happen. Then one day, as he was almost hanging on the frozen handles to stay alive, he imagined that she turned to look at him, and for the first time he saw that she was beautiful, and that she was a grown woman, and that it was she he was destined to marry, and for two semi-delirious days he imagined only his courtship of her, and their marriage, and of how in the evening she sat with needle and thread, mending her coat.

  Always attentive, Otto Grundtz saw that Bukowski’s mind was wandering, and he ordered Willi Zimmel to move him into Barracks Nineteen as soon as he showed the first sign of unconsciousness, but Szymon suddenly rallied, aware that he must prepare for the christening of his wife’s first son, and that morning as he dragged the rollers he was present when the death truck stopped at the gate to Field Five and he watched as women in prisoner’s garb threw in the bodies of newly dead companions to be taken to the crematorium, and as the wagon filled, Bukowski in his delirium thought he saw the little girl again, as she had been on that first awful day, still in her overcoat, still marching bravely, and when he saw her body tossed into the open wagon, he uttered a terrible cry.

  This cleared his addled brain, and in quivering fury he left the rollers and followed the death truck up the hill to the crematorium. When it halted at the entrance to the ovens he watched as men came out to strip the corpses of any usable clothing, then toss the naked bodies into the waiting ovens, five carefully constructed steel-bound ovens from Berlin, each with its gaping mouth. His mind glazed, and when he saw that the next body to be lifted would be that of his little girl, flames seemed to engulf his eyes, and he heard himself screaming ‘No! No!’

  Again his mind cleared, and he realized with new horror that he was far from his assigned duty and that if caught, he would be shot at once, so he started running back to Field Five, but this route took him right past the guardhouse from which Otto Grundtz conducted his business, and he was terrified, for the closer death came, the more he wanted to live.

  And now, from the guardhouse, came the man who would send him to his death, and Szymon was prepared to do battle, when he heard a mild voice asking: ‘Where were you? I was looking for you.’

  It was Willi Zimmel, and he told him that the officer who ran the shoe-repair shop wanted him back again: ‘He said you were a good shoemaker.’ Almost too weak to follow, for on this day he surely would have passed into final coma had he returned to the rollers, Szymon accompanied Zimmel to the shop, where he resumed his old job and regained his sanity.

  But he never forgot Field Five and the little girl in the overcoat, and when his calmer moments returned he swore that her death would be avenged. Planning how became even more obsessive than his former preoccupation with beer and food. Stupid acts like trying to murder Otto Grundtz he dismissed, but his gyrating mind did evolve six or seven reasonable alternatives, not one of which could he at that moment put into operation. Gradually, however, amid the storms that possessed him he came upon exactly the right revenge.

  Having noticed a daring Pole he thought might be planning escape, he watched the man intently for a week, then whispered one night: ‘If you make it, tell the underground to wipe out one of the German settlements at Zamosc.’ The would-be escapee, knowing well that his chances were eighty-to-one against and that slow strangulation awaited him if he failed, was the kind of man who could appreciate what Bukowski was saying. The terrible rape of Zamosc must be avenged, but he gave no sign to Szymon that he had heard the whisper.

  As the dreaded Russian armies drew ever closer, Konrad Krumpf realized that he had a difficult and tricky game to play if he wished to survive, with certain advantages. He must get a train into the area, which, in view of the way Allied bombers had been destroying German railroads, would require maneuvering, and he must get it packed with the palace treasures before Falk von Eschl at the castle could interfere. Then, and this could be
most difficult of all, he must somehow manage to leave his post and ride with the train to safety in Paris. The obstacle to such an escape would be Von Eschl, who could be depended upon to anticipate it and forestall it.

  Krumpf had made the reasonable deduction that Von Eschl intended to have him shot, and he did not propose to have this happen. So the two German officials sparred on every point. Von Eschl, actually no more than a civilian, had wanted Krumpf to move his headquarters into the castle, where he would be under easier surveillance. But Krumpf, aware of his motive and as an authentic member of the Gestapo with powers of his own, refused, for he was plotting the downfall of the arrogant plenipotentiary.

  Von Eschl, now convinced that Krumpf had bungled with his famous golden cards, betraying an entire cadre of spies to the enemy, confronted him with the dismal figures: ‘In less than six months, of your group of forty-three valuable aides to the Reich, sixteen have now been shot or otherwise murdered, and I am wasting good forces to protect the remaining twenty-seven. Doesn’t that tell you something?’ Krumpf replied with a surprising show of wit: ‘It tells me that nothing I was supposed to protect’—and he accented the I heavily—‘fell in my own backyard, where I allowed partisans to take it apart under my nose and send it God knows where.’

  But in a straight duel, Von Eschl, with his extraordinary influence, had the upper hand, which meant that Krumpf had to be especially clever if he was to escape with the treasures and with his life. He had two pawns to be played at the proper moment: Ludwik Bukowski; and a letter of major importance, addressed to him personally, about which Von Eschl could not know, and he was grimly determined to play them with daring and skill.

  On the day the train arrived, he requisitioned all the villagers for the task of loading it, and farmers with wagons needed for tillage brought them to the palace, where the treasures of half a century were taken from their accustomed places and prepared for shipment. The paintings, the carved tables, the priceless rugs from Persia, the silverware from Venice, chandeliers from Prague, the bibelots in gold and amethyst from Vienna, all went into the wagons and from there into the seven boxcars of the waiting train. By dusk one of Poland’s finest buildings had been denuded: originally the contents had cost more than three million 1896 dollars; they had been added to and were now worth five times that much, and all was being stolen from the Polish people, for whom it had always been intended. And what was most painful to the villagers who were forced to participate in the theft, it was being supervised by the son of the woman who had gathered the treasures.