by Bart Gauvin
Rob nodded. “I won’t, sir.”
CHAPTER 5
0130 CET, Friday 13 November 1992
0030 Zulu
East of Ossówka village, Biała Podlaska Voivodeship, Poland
SZYMON’S RUBBER BOOTS splattered through cold mud onto hard earth as he ran along the cow path. The muddy trail crossed the fields between the small farming village of Ossówka and the dark mass of forest to the east. The boy’s babcia had shaken him awake, told him to run to the forest as fast as he could with a warning for the men.
“The guardsman is out looking for them,” babcia had said. The guardsman was a communist sympathizer sent up from Biała Podlaska, the city just to the south. “He knows what they’re planning, tell them to hurry!”
The cold rain was easing now, the low, broken clouds overhead moving rapidly east allowing moonlight to peek through. When the boy reached the tree-line he stopped, unwilling to charge headlong into the black wall of the forest. In the daytime he loved to play in these woods, but at night, especially this night, he was daunted by the long, spindly white birch branches, reaching out like ghostly arms. There were graves in these woods, said older boys from the village, ghosts as well. He caught his breath and tried to gather the courage to pass over from pasture to trees when he heard it.
The metallic, rhythmic chunk and swish of several shovels biting into the earth and tossing dirt, mingled with low murmurs ahead through the trees. The boy peered in and thought he saw the red glow of a cigarette. Taking a deep breath, he plunged forward, feeling the ground under his feet change from the muddy grasses of the fields to the softer moss-covered forest floor. Feeling his way towards the sounds, Szymon tripped over something, a root, and stumbled into a thick bush, shaking the bare limbs and cracking several twigs. The murmuring stopped, then a hiss as the digging sounds ceased as well. He extracted himself from the bush, scratching his hand in the process, and called out, “Tata?” Father?
The harsh white beam of a flashlight, switched on from ten meters in front of him, destroying what night vision his eyes had begun to afford him. Szymon shielded his face with the back of his hand, trying to see who was beyond the light. “Tata?” He called again, fear creeping into his voice.
“It’s your son,” came a low growl from behind the light. Another hissed command and the shovel sounds resumed.
“Get over here, boy!”
Even though the command was given in a low, harsh tone, the child was relieved to hear his father’s voice. The light switched off. Szymon scrambled forward until he was standing in a small clearing. The dark shapes of grown men were around him now. He couldn’t recognize any of them in the shadows. Moonlight glinted off the barrel of an old hunting rifle carried by one of them. He recognized the distinctive front sight post of a Kalashnikov slung over the shoulder of another.
A strong hand grabbed his upper arm and spun him around.
“What are you doing here?” The query was delivered in a low, harsh growl that came from the back of the throat.
“Ba…Ba…Babcia sent m…me, tata,” the boy managed.
Father released his arm and squatted down so the two of them were at eye level. “What did she say, Szymon?” Softer now, the familiar sweet smell of currant sok on his breath.
Comforted by the closeness of his father, he spoke rapidly, “The guardsmen, they are looking for you…for all of you. Babcia said they know what you plan to do,” he allowed the message to tumble out, not really sure he understood what it meant.
The boy heard a muffled curse from someone in the darkness, then more clearly, “Alright, that’s all we have time for. Let’s get this over with.” His father stood up quickly and looked in the direction of the voices.
Soft moonlight came and went with the passing clouds as Szymon’s eyes focused on the small clearing where they were gathered. At one end, farthest from him, four dark shadows were digging holes side-by-side. They were barely knee-deep in the shallow trenches. One of the diggers was sniffling and murmuring short, unintelligible words. Eight or more other shadows were there, but in the darkness they seemed more numerous. These, including his father, were carrying rifles, the boy realized. Some had their weapons pointed at the shovel-wielders.
“That’s enough!” came an order from the gloom. “Drop those and come here.” Little Szymon recognized the voice of a neighbor, a young man named Piotr.
The men converged on the four diggers as hands reached out to yank them out of the holes. The smallest pleaded as he was dragged, stumbling, in front of Piotr, and then they were lined up side by side and their hands were bound.
Another figure stepped forward, slightly stooped. He straightened as best he could and addressed the four in a clear, faltering voice of an old man: “This liberation court of the Polish people will come to order,” the voice said. “You are each charged with crimes against the Polish people. Tonight, your guilt will be determined. How do you plead?”
The youngest’s shoulders heaved in a great sob as he almost collapsed, but another of the accused spat loudly and looked up to stare defiantly at the speaker. Piotr lunged towards the defiant one, but a restraining arm from Szymon’s father held him back. Mumbles of “not guilty” came from the other two.
The stooped old man began again in a formal tone, as if pleas had in fact been entered in a court of law. Starting at the end of the line he pointed and said, “You are charged with the crime of killing peaceful citizens of Poland as they marched for our freedom through the city of Lukow this October past. What is your defense?”
The boy heard one of the accused men clear his throat and swallow. His voice sounded dry and cracked when he spoke. “I was a soldier in our army, we…my unit…we were only following the orders of the officers. We—” his plea was cut short.
“‘Just following orders is no defense!” hissed Piotr, enraged.
“The marchers weren’t peaceful!” the defendant blurted out. “They attacked us with clubs! We were defending ourselves. We were afraid.”
“Silence!” the stooped judge commanded coldly. “So, you admit you fired on the citizens in Lukow?”
“We didn’t have a choice!” the man pleaded, panic in his voice. “They were going to kill us!”
“We’ve heard enough,” the stooped man said, nodding to two others. They seized the defendant as the self-styled judge continued, “We, the liberation people’s court of Poland will do the duty that the communists’ lackeys in the Public Prosecutor’s Office refused to do. We find you guilty of crimes against the Polish people. May God have mercy on your soul.”
The man was dragged backwards, thrown into his hole and held there at gunpoint.
Next the stooped man turned to the sobbing boy, his size betraying his youth. Szymon could see the fuzz of a mustache on his upper lip in the moonlight.
“You,” he said. “You are charged with being a member of the traitorous communist regime’s ZOMO informers; of collaborating with the enemies of our people, and delivering patriots to be tortured and killed by the communist pigs. What is your defense?”
Slowly raising his bound hands as if in prayer, pleading with tears streaming down his face, he said between sobs, “I’ve told you, I was never in the ZOMO. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why are you doing this to me?”
Some of the accusers began to falter. Then Piotr walked up to the self-appointed judge and hissed in his ear, “You know he is guilty! My wife saw him go into the City Guard station in Biała just two days before my brother disappeared. You know what Andrzej said those pigs did to him. Now they will not even let us have the body!”
The sobbing boy looked up. After a second he asked through tears and in a broken voice, “Am I not your brother, too, Piotr?”
Piotr turned to him and said, “You were, once,” before turning his back and stalking off into the darkness.
The stooped
man paused, before pronouncing “You are found guilty.”
Men pulled him back to the freshly dug holes, his heels dragged in the wet moss, his please lost in the night. The result was no different for the third accused. He’d been discovered with a brand-new AK-74 assault rifle, packaged and labeled with Cyrillic letters, in his workshop. His defense that someone else must have left it there fell on deaf ears to those who saw a new Russian weapon as clear proof of collaboration with the Medvedev regime’s agents.
“What you are doing here is exactly why there are people accepting help from the Soviets!” the man shouted as he was dragged backwards.
The fourth man, the one who had spat, would not go meekly either. When he was told to defend himself, Szymon was surprised to recognize the calm, defiant voice of his school teacher.
“Father!” the Szymon whispered loudly, grasping his father’s sleeve.
“Hush, boy,” came the stern rebuke.
The teacher was saying, “…all we try to do is build a just society, to create economic equality. No wonder the SB spends so much effort to hunt you down! And this is how you plan to hand our country back to the Germans, eh? This is how the fascist collaborators did it back in ’thirty-nine too. You are fitting heirs to their—”
The butt of a Kalashnikov smashed into his face. He staggered to one knee, but slowly stood back up, spitting blood and teeth.
The sudden growl of of engines approaching from the south broke the tension. Men reached for their weapons and looked toward the approaching danger. Piotr came scrambling back from the darkness, and with vengeance and anger on his voice snarled, “There’s no time. Finish this!”
The judge nodded, and the fourth defendant was dragged back to his hole without a spoken verdict. The four condemned men waited in their shallow trenches, the teacher standing in defiance, blood dripping from his face, the boy whimpering, and the other two with heads bowed, looking at the ground that was about to receive them. The accusers gathered in a shallow crescent around them, weapons half raised.
Father grabbed Szymon’s arm and in a tone that brooked no argument commanded, “Leave here son. Go home. Run!”
The boy ran, frightened and stumbling again. The trees reached out to grab him, to drag him back to those holes. He heard the first shot. Putting hands over his ears, Szymon ran faster, but he couldn’t keep out the sounds of gunfire, the murder, that were tearing his country apart.
City Guardsman Dabrowski, chief police officer for the Biała Podlaska Voivodeship, including the village of Ossówka, thought he heard gunfire. The engine noise of his little four vehicle convoy might be playing tricks on his ears, but as he entered the village, he heard it again. His head snapped right to look out the passenger-side window in the direction of the sound. The headlights of one of the GAZ jeeps behind him caught a small boy sprinting across the field between the village and the forest. The police officer watched as the boy climbed over a fence, disappearing somewhere into the one road village. We are too late, he thought.
The convoy stopped in the middle of the village. Dabrowski exited his car and watched his men disembark from the two GAZ jeeps and the light truck behind him. Of his many policemen, he’d only been able to muster four trustworthy officers for this call. He’d been forced to contact the local army commander for more men. That had taken time, and worse, he didn’t know how far he could trust the soldiers jumping from the truck.
As Poland descended further into chaos, Dabrowski knew the army would fracture, with some units supporting the Solidarity government, others the communist-dominated Defense Ministry, and still others pursuing personal objectives. He and the commander of the army detachments in this area sympathized with the communist elements, though neither were diehards. Let’s hope everyone can keep their personal politics to themselves and just do their duty tonight, he thought.
Dabrowski stepped away from his car and looked up the village street. Their arrival in the town had not been quiet. The villagers, most in night clothes, were standing in half-opened doors and windows, peering out at the spectacle. Almost all women, the police officer realized. Where are the men? He gritted his teeth; he already knew the answer.
The disappearance of a soldier who came from this village yesterday afternoon had had Dabrowski nervous; then he’d gotten a phone call from an informer, who had since disappeared. That was when he knew he had to mobilize and stop the dissidents here in Ossówka. The guardsman shook his head and heaved a resigned sigh. This area was collapsing into the same cycle of violence and revenge that had engulfed so many other communities across the country over the past months. Dabrowski gave the order for his men to round up the villagers for questioning.
He hated that it had to be this way. The post-communist government had so many advantages, but they squandered them by antagonizing the Soviets, he thought. Faced with unexpected pressure from the east, the new Solidarity régime in Warsaw had failed to re-establish trust in the country’s law enforcement after the travesties of martial law in the eighties. As institutions fractured, officers followed the guidance of whoever happened to control the local department, or simply acted as individuals in whatever capacity they saw fit. As I am doing, he thought.
Dabrowski watched as two soldiers approached a young woman wearing a long nightgown standing in a doorway. As the men drew near, rather than withdrawing as many of the other citizens had, she stepped forward and began shouting accusation at them. The soldiers were soon shouting back.
As other villagers looked on, the woman berated the soldiers. With a speedy jerk she grabbed the barrel of the nearest soldier’s assault rifle. The man reached to secure his weapon as the woman yanked and in doing so a finger slipped into the trigger guard. Before Dabrowski could shout a warning, the street was lit by muzzle flashes and filled with the distinctive crack of rifle fire. The woman spun and fell onto the dirt road.
Villagers screamed or slammed their doors and retreated. Dabrowski thought he heard a masculine voice utter an anguished cry from the fields beyond. He turned to look just as the fiery, flower-shaped muzzle flash of rifle fire winked in the pasture. A hammer blow knocked him back against his car. His last sensation was hearing gunfire erupt all around him. Then his world went black.
0130 CET, Friday 27 November 1992
0030 Zulu
Ossówka, Biała Podlaska Voivodeship, Poland
Three weeks later, Jack Young stood in the muddy track that passed for a road running through the ghost village of Ossówka. Despite the heavy mist beading on the reporter’s coat, Jack’s head was uncovered as a mark of respect for the tragedy that had unfolded here: a bare head in the Catholic tradition of this country. Looking around at the empty houses that lined the street, the dark, pane-less windows, the shattered doors hanging off their hinges, Jack couldn’t help but feel a sense of foreboding about where this story would lead.
Crossing the street until he was standing under the eaves of an abandoned home, grasping for some shelter from the wet, a fleeting thought crossed his mind that the village must have been a nice place to live. Not wealthy, by any stretch of the imagination, but small and cozy in the way that rural, tight-knit communities could be. Fishing his notebook out from inside his jacket, he flipped it open and reviewed his notes for completeness. He didn’t want to come back to this place of death if he didn’t need to.
A little boy, Szymon had been Jack’s main source for piecing together the events of that terrible night three weeks ago. He had sat with the boy and his grandmother. Babcia, he’d called her, Jack remembered. Their farmhouse was quiet as they recounted the massacre through an interpreter. They were two of a small group of survivors.
The census official back in Biała Podlaska, told Jack that the population of Ossówka was, had been, just under four hundred. Jack couldn’t be sure, but the village didn’t seem to contain more than a few dozen shell-shocked people now. Would this town ever be that
nondescript, cozy place it once was? Jack wondered.
Babcia recounted what she remembered of the massacre, how the soldiers began shooting, how the chief police officer—Dabrowski had been his name—fell dead in the middle of the street, other soldiers and guardsmen falling around him. She described how soldiers broke into homes, shooting the terrified inhabitants in their rage and fear. Eventually, more soldiers arrived from Biała Podlaska, and then the real killing began. The situation devolved from a running gun battle into a full-fledged massacre as the soldiers sought revenge for their fallen comrades. The gray-haired old woman had described it all in grisly, bitter detail. Her anger, hatred, Jack thought, was plain to see.
Nonetheless, Jack sensed there was more to Babcia’s story. When the old woman finally finished, he looked at Szymon. The boy’s haunted eyes had barely blinked during the entire interview, and he’d remained silent as a ghost. But when Jack’s enquiring look gave him the opportunity to speak, the words spilled out of his young lips almost too quickly for the interpreter to translate, despite several attempts by his babcia to shush him.
“They shot my teacher,” Szymon had said at one point, his voice wavering. “Why did they do that? Why did father let them do that? And the brothers, why do they hate each other so much?”
Jack, a professional reporter, was usually good at distancing himself from emotional connection with his sources. This little boy, though, in this damp, dead place had been so wronged that Jack couldn’t help but empathize with him. Szymon’s account of what occurred in the woods confirmed what the police in Biała Podlaska had said about why Dabrowski and the soldiers had come to Ossówka in the first place. The villagers weren’t entirely innocent, a fact confirmed by the muddy shallow graves he’d found on a short walk into the woods. On the walk back across the field he unconsciously paused to wipe mud from his hiking boots, an act which evoked a fleeting realization in his literary mind. The western world has wiped the mire of Eastern Europe off of our collective consciousness for decades, even centuries.
