Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Bukowski displayed no remorse. Moving from room to room, he checked to see that all items of value were taken, and when the walls were bare and the rooms echoing, he left the palace, not even pausing to think how fortunate it was that his mother had not lived to watch this raping and pillage.

  But as he was ready to depart for the train which would take him from Poland forever, Von Eschl drove into the beautiful driveway, screeched his Mercedes-Benz to a halt, and rushed into the entranceway. ‘As commander of this district I have given orders that the train shall not be moved.’

  ‘And a commander much higher than you has given orders that it shall,’ Krumpf said, his hand sweating as he reached for his letter. With his catlike wisdom he did not hand his enemy the real letter, but only a typed copy, and as Falk von Eschl took it, Krumpf said with nervous glee: ‘Look who signed it!’

  Von Eschl read the bottom lines, gasped, then recovered quickly. ‘Hermann Goering never saw this letter. Any fool could have typed it,’ but Krumpf replied with a bravura which astonished even himself: ‘But only Goering could have sent the original.’

  For such insolence Von Eschl could have called for members of his special forces to arrest this man, but Krumpf, fighting for his life, had one more surprise. Pointing with trembling finger to a special line in the letter, he said: ‘You better read that carefully,’ and Von Eschl read: ‘The Holbein you sent is here. Bring the other gifts you spoke of to me personally.’ Leaving the copy with Von Eschl, Krumpf walked with apparent indifference toward the car that would carry him to the train, but he was shaking inwardly, for he knew it was possible that Von Eschl in rage might shoot him in the back. But the imperious commander of the polygon was not entirely free to act; in the cascading days ahead he might very well require Hermann Goering’s support and he could not risk losing it over an individual as wormlike as Konrad Krumpf. With grinding anger he allowed Krumpf to enter his car and drive down the entrance lane of his Polish palace for the last time.

  Krumpf and Bukowski and their seven boxcars of treasures were on their way to Paris.

  The SS guards at Majdanek were skilled in spotting and frustrating escape attempts. For them it was a stimulating game, bursting in upon the plotters, beating them nearly to death, but saving them so that next morning their crumpled bodies could be dragged to the gibbet. There an officer would announce over the loud horn: ‘Ferencz Hunyadi, this Hungarian enemy of the Third Reich, tried to escape last night. See what happens to him.’ After his arms and legs were tied he would be suspended from the gallows by a loosely tied length of rope, so that he could struggle and choke for minutes before dying.

  However, over the years, three hundred Poles did escape, and two months after the forced depopulation of Zamosc the dedicated man to whom Szymon Bukowski had whispered made good his flight by killing an SS guard, donning his uniform, wiping away the blood, and exiting by the main gate. Eight supposed accomplices were shot, but he made his way south, where he joined up with Jan Buk’s commando. He announced himself simply: ‘Chalubinski, schoolteacher, Lodz,’ for he had served so long at Majdanek that he no longer used his first name, Tytus. The Nazis had transformed him into a man without nerves, a machine existing solely for revenge.

  Within minutes of meeting Buk he started the litany that would not cease: ‘We must move east and wipe out one of the new German settlements outside Zamosc,’ and when Buk hesitated, he added: ‘We must let the entire German occupation know they will never have an easy night in any house they’ve stolen from us.’

  ‘You mean,’ Buk asked in amazement, ‘that we’d just take a village at random, surround it, and kill everybody?’

  ‘Exactly what I mean. We must strike terror into their craven hearts.’ Again Buk hesitated, but Chalubinski would not relinquish his plan: ‘If we destroy one of their prize villages—“Our bright new Poland” and all that manure—we can make the entire occupation tremble. Then they’ll know they can never subdue us.’

  ‘Are you willing to burn an entire village? And kill everybody in it?’

  ‘If I had twenty men and the guns, I’d do it tonight.’

  He was so remorseless in his pressure that Buk felt he must call his leaders together, and when they sat in a circle to judge the debate, they saw two entirely different men. Chalubinski was tall and cadaverously thin, Buk of medium height and also thin, but he was not emaciated; men of the commando had not eaten well, but the men of Majdanek had been systematically starved. Chalubinski’s fanatical face looked as if all humanity had been drained from it by the calculated terrors of the concentration camp, but Buk’s still retained the square, open, peasant appearance of a man who had known poor treatment but never a carefully planned assault on his body and mind. The greater difference was not visible, for it lay in their hearts. Chalubinski’s had been sorely damaged: he had watched six men he knew well hanged at the gibbet outside his Barracks Six. To escape he had killed the SS man with a pair of scissors. On one day alone he had helped dig graves for more than eighteen thousand Jews. For two long years he had doubted that he would ever escape. And worst of all, he had been alone, shared his thoughts with no one. Jan Buk, on the other hand, had always been with friends; in the forest he was with men he could trust; on his early forays into Krakow he had met with daring men like himself; he had seen his wife at intervals; and he had worked with enterprising people like the English scientist and Count Lubonski.

  Society had helped to ennoble Buk, it had done everything to dehumanize Chalubinski, and this difference manifested itself in what the two men said to the commando.

  Buk started quietly: ‘An entirely new operation has been proposed. Tell them about it, Chalubinski.’ When the schoolteacher was finished uttering his cold, harsh words, Buk said: ‘I’m sure you all see the two problems. If we do what he suggests, Hans Frank’s retaliation will be terrifying.’

  Chalubinski cried: ‘Wrong statement! Hans Frank has already retaliated, in advance. He’s already done his worst.’ And in brief, cruel sentences he told them of Under the Clock, and the chapel in Zamek Lublin, and the deaths of the Gypsies, and the one-day execution of eighteen thousand Jews.

  ‘But he will do more of the same,’ a farmer warned.

  ‘He will do it anyway,’ Chalubinski said, and now the commandos faced the first of the two moral dilemmas which would confront them in this operation: should they commit an act which would bring down vicious retaliation on the heads of innocent neighbors, even though the act had merit of itself, and when the viciousness was going to arrive regardless of what they did?

  The men discussed this for a long time, and some suffered real anguish at the difficulty facing them, but before a resolution could be reached, Buk presented the graver problem: ‘If our commando wipes out an unsuspecting German village and kills innocent people, aren’t we as bad as Hans Frank when he wipes out one of our villages?’ This question carried terrifying overtones and the men in the forest handled it cautiously.

  ‘We don’t kill innocents,’ one man said forcefully, and he was so obviously concerned with the moral aspect of such a raid that he seemed to persuade many of his companions, who repeated the sentence approvingly. Buk, listening to ideas which he himself supported, thought of how only a short time ago these same men, upon hearing of a most wanton shooting of hostages, had wanted to commit almost any act of retaliation. Now, with an ugly opportunity before them, they drew back, and it became clear that the vote was going to go strongly against any attack on the Zamosc villages.

  But before a decision could be voiced, Chalubinski moved Buk aside and explained in cold, shattering words what this proposed raid was all about:

  ‘You men sound as if you were discussing a picnic. Would it be better to take potatoes or beets? Men, we’re talking about the soul of Poland. Listen to what’s been happening.

  ‘As you all know, the Nazis decided to make Zamosc, on the border with Russia, a German stronghold, peopled only by Germans. To achieve this they had to expel from
the city and the surrounding area more than one hundred thousand Poles. How did they do it? And what happened to these Poles?

  ‘The eight thousand leading citizens were marched to a place in the city called The Rotunda and shot. Well, as you know, that’s happened everywhere. But in the dead of winter the others were marched to concentration camps. I saw them enter Majdanek. I saw them starve to death. I saw them carted away to the crematoriums, so their ashes could be freighted back to Germany as fertilizer.

  ‘But as you know again, that happens all the time—Auschwitz; Belzec, not far from here; Birkenau, maybe worst of all. It was what happened to the children that counts. It was the children that brought me here. They were placed in boxcars, thousands of them, and shipped to various camps, but it was winter, and there were no blankets, no food, no water, and the trains were delayed, and when the boxcars were finally opened, the children were found frozen to death.’

  There was a long, aching silence, and some men who had not seen their own children for months began to weep. Then came Chalubinski’s hard, terrible voice: ‘We shall wipe out one of the villages they stole from the people of Zamosc. We shall destroy every cottage, throw down every stone. Because we must send the Germans a message that they cannot do such things to us ever again.’ His voice rose to a scream: ‘They cannot stuff our children in trains and freeze them to death!’

  There was something wrong with that last sentence and the men knew it. The accusation was too sensational, so broad that his cry for revenge lost its force, and he sensed that the meeting was flowing away from him. But with a touch of schoolteaching genius he stumbled upon exactly the right note on which to end his plea: ‘And what do you suppose they’re going to name Zamosc when they’ve made it German? Himmlerstadt.’

  The obscenity of this, the erasing of a notable Polish name and the glorification of one of the worst Germans ever to have been born was too much for the commandos, and men began to shout ‘No! No!’ and to call for an immediate march on the stolen city of Zamosc.

  But now Jan Buk asserted his leadership: ‘We do not massacre innocent civilians.’

  Chalubinski was waiting for this, and cried: ‘They’re not innocent, and they’re not civilians. It was people like them who brought Hitler to power. They applauded what he’s done. And they glory in their new homes. They’re front-line soldiers and they must be destroyed. And if Buk won’t lead you, I will.’

  The men cheered and insisted that Buk join them in the assault, but he temporized, and this was the beginning of the serious tension between him and Chalubinski, who was infuriated by the delay Buk initiated when he proposed: ‘Let’s forward this to headquarters,’ and when this was done he received a surprising response: ‘We’ve been considering such an operation for several months. Now is the time. Take your group and eliminate one of the new settlements.’

  One hundred and eight men were assembled from units in the forest, and they moved cautiously eastward, acquiring other underground units from Stalowa Wola and a few former residents of Zamosc who were continuing personal vendettas against Nazis who had expropriated their homes. Never showing themselves in groups of more than three, they drifted slowly into position, then found that their leadership had sent down twenty resolute men from Lublin.

  Scouts surveyed the area, evaluating six different communities where German settlers tilled their new fields and tended cattle that had only recently belonged to Poles. Sometimes, seeing the neat cottages at night with lights dimly glowing, Buk lost all stomach for this mission, and Chalubinski, already convinced of Buk’s unreliability, noticed the hesitancy and kept close watch upon him.

  At ten minutes of two on a dark night the commandos formed a half-moon scimitar close to the northern edge of the chosen village, and posted sharpshooters at strategic spots to the south. With terrible resolve the scimitar began to close and men bearing the torches prepared to light them. The sharpshooters and machine-gunners to the south breathed deeply, their fingers on the trigger.

  When Buk sensed that Chalubinski was about to leap ahead and start the attack, he jabbed his gun backward, catching the teacher in the gut: ‘I’ll give the command,’ and Chalubinski, masking his anger, said grimly: ‘Be sure you give it.’

  When the force was so near the village that dogs might begin to bark, Buk called to his Stork Commando ‘Now!’ and flicked his flashlight to signal the Lublin men on the wings, and with flaming torches these commandos fell upon the village, setting roofs ablaze and sweeping all areas with gunfire.

  The enraged Poles, remembering what had happened to the children who had once occupied these cottages, never had to face the awful problem of whether they themselves were guilty of a similar crime, because their fire was so intense, their flames so wild and rampant, that no Pole ever confronted an individual German. There were a few screams, a few shadowy figures running in the night, until the waiting gunmen shot them down … then only silence.

  The raid coincided with broadcasts from London telling of monumental Soviet victories in the east, and in the days that followed, Poles could tell when passing a German whether or not he had heard the two pieces of ominous news. When they saw one worried and looking cautiously here and there, they said of him: ‘That one has heard about Leningrad and Zamosc.’

  From the eastern front the Nazis were receiving bulletins that were even more ominous, for an Allied victory seemed to roar across the land like a firestorm blown in from the Asian steppes, gathering momentum with every mile, but from the western front, there was still reassuring news, because cities like London, from which the force of any Allied attack must come, found themselves in great danger. The V-2s were displaying awesome power, and it was therefore obligatory that the Stork Commando which had in its possession plans and parts of an actual V-2 deliver them to the Allied strategists in England, but in this effort they were consistently and brilliantly frustrated by Falk von Eschl, who had clamped down on all likely routes of exit.

  And then one night when the Poles were sure that he would be engaged in an affair which the Storks were staging at the far end of the polygon, two Poles in rubberized swimsuits dug up the vital parts of the V-2 from the farmer’s field, swam across the Vistula in darkness, and handed a woman cook from Castle Gorka a sheaf of drawings and a wrapped bundle of tremendous value. Without speaking one word, she accepted the packages from the dark and froglike men and took them into the castle, where she reported immediately to the count.

  Lubonski could guess what the materials must be and knew he must get them to London, but how this was to be accomplished he did not know. Without opening the packages, he secreted them behind a panel which his family had often used in past centuries, and waited. That he would deliver the crucial materials properly he had not the slightest doubt.

  Two nights later, when Von Eschl was again called to attend matters in his domain, the two frogmen who had been guarding the buried V-2 swam the Vistula once more, this time with a third member. It was Jan Buk, head of the Stork Commando, who was met in silence by the woman cook and led immediately to Count Lubonski’s study.

  ‘You are Buk of the next village?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Leader of the Stork Commando?’

  ‘I do not know them. I hear rumors.’

  ‘Why do you come? At such risk to us both?’

  ‘Tomorrow at half after one I shall appear at your gate, in uniform, in a stolen German staff car, and send you to London.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Be ready. Half after one. The timing is critical.’

  With that he was gone. He had told Lubonski just enough to command his attention, not one word more which might be betrayed if the count were caught.

  That night Buk did not swim back across the river; he stayed in the forest with the men who had stolen the staff car and who had the proper forged documents. Satisfied that everything reasonable had been done on the Polish end, Buk went to sleep as easily as if he had done a day’s work at the plow and eaten a go
od meal. His days and nights in recent years had been filled with such constant danger that he had learned there was not much he could do about it. Tomorrow he would try to drive a stolen car past a dozen sentries, and he hoped that luck would continue with him.

  Walerian Lubonski slept easily, too. The men of his family had been trained to service, sometimes under arms, sometimes at a papal court, sometimes at the imperial palaces in Vienna, and it was in no way unusual that he should now be summoned to duty of the most stringent character. The possibility of death in this charade whose rules he did not even know was no greater than his ancestors had known at the battles of Grunwald and Vienna.

  But at ten-thirty next morning he received a shock. Falk von Eschl sent word that he would take lunch at the castle, at which time he wished to discuss important matters, and customarily the German commander liked to eat late, which would make a one-thirty departure with Buk impossible. At first he thought that he must ask his cook to take Buk a message, if he could be found, but to have her moving about in daylight was too dangerous. Besides, if Jan Buk was clever enough to have arranged an escape as complicated as this one sounded, he would be clever enough to see Von Eschl’s Mercedes-Benz waiting in the driveway.

  Lubonski was therefore not unduly nervous as he awaited his German guest, and at eleven-thirty he checked to be sure the piece of venison the cook proposed to serve was in good order. It was, and he said: ‘Please see it’s served promptly,’ and she nodded, aware that this simple request might mask a most complex situation. Had he asked her to stab Von Eschl with a carving knife as she brought in the roast, she would not have been surprised and would have complied.