Poland: A Novel Part 35

The Terror

How cruel are the repet.i.tions of history. Toward the close of the eighteenth century autocratic Russia, Prussia and Austria could not tolerate liberal Poland on their borders and united to obliterate her. In the middle of the twentieth century n.a.z.i Germany and Communist Russia looked askance at the surprising progress of a free Poland and maneuvered to complete a new dismemberment.

In the years 19211939, after Poland had repulsed the Russian invasion of 1920, she accomplished a miracle. Her three provinces had been ruled for more than a century by three radically different foreign occupiers, yet the Polish people were able to unite these provinces in one reasonable system. Three disparate judicial, educational and administrative patterns had been reconciled. Land reform was initiated, social security established, health care organized, industry encouraged. A bold new seaport was built on the Baltic at Gdynia; aristocratic t.i.tles were abolished lest the old n.o.bles regain an upper hand; liberated artists were encouraged to paint Polish canvases and produce Polish plays; and even the railroad system which used to have three kinds of trains-Russian, German, Austrian-was disciplined into one that conformed to European standards.

There was reason to hope that if this rate of progress could continue for another two decades, Poland might become one of the princ.i.p.al illuminations of Europe, but on 1 September 1939, Adolf Hitler's n.a.z.is crashed over the border with such overwhelming superiority in manpower, tanks and dive bombers that the nation was quickly devastated and occupied. Poland's defense might have been more effective had not France and England, all that summer, pleaded with her not to mobilize, fearing that Hitler might be antagonized.

A brief ten days after their thunderous start, the n.a.z.is, having met brave but futile resistance, stormed across the Vistula and occupied all territory around Bukowo, into which a contingent of their forward troops rushed, led by a civilian who announced himself to the villagers as Hans Yunger. When everyone was a.s.sembled in the village square he produced a carefully prepared doc.u.ment, from which he read the names of seven people to be arrested. Because the selection of these seven was so indicative of what was being repeated throughout Poland, their names will be recited here, with explanations of why they were on the list: Ryszard Aksentowicz 57 Schoolmaster Pawel Barski 54 Catholic priest Miroslawa Bukowska 49 Notorious liberal Szymon Bukowski 15 Son of the above Barbara Ostrowska 19 University student Roman Ostrowski 59 Leading farmer Jakub Pisecki 33 Reported to have Jewish blood n.a.z.i soldiers were able, with help from some villagers, to locate six of the seven; Szymon Bukowski had disappeared into the forest, but no one reported this.

The six were told that they could take with them one small parcel which had to contain everything they would need for an indefinite stay in jail. They were then lined up in the village square to await the truck that would carry them off to imprisonment: Pani Bukowska was tall, thin, quietly aggressive, as if she had known all along that something like this would happen one day. Barbara Ostrowska was a soft, gentle girl studying to be a teacher, not pretty but gloriously youthful and bright of eye. There had never been any Jews in this village, and had Jakub Pisecki possessed the slightest degree of Jewish blood, it would have been known to his neighbors. Father Barski, now a secure, stable priest, looked the role; his parishioners believed the rumor that he was soon to be a bishop. The schoolmaster looked like one; the wealthy farmer was robust, stocky, square-faced.

They held their small packages before them as the truck wheeled up, but as it stopped, three young n.a.z.is in gray-green uniform leaped out, knelt on the ground not six feet from the Poles, leveled their machine guns, and sprayed them with a terrible fusillade of bullets.

When the bodies lay slumped on the cobblestones, Hans Yunger said only three words, using Polish, which had been taught him in a special school for those officials who would govern Poland. Turning to a group of horrified men who had watched the execution, he snarled 'Bury them,' and to the general population, whom he surveyed coldly as he climbed into his staff car, he said 'Obey.'

The very next day Hans Yunger was back in Bukowo, this time to arrest six citizens at random, and as they stood waiting for the truck, he announced in his broken Polish: 'Last night someone threw rocks at our trucks, an act of sabotage. This will not be permitted, now or ever.'

The six were nondescript, just ordinary villagers, three men, three women. As the truck rounded the corner they saw that the windshield had been shattered, and they were rather pleased. And they were not surprised when the three young men in gray-green uniform leaped out and knelt before them, aiming the deadly machine guns. One farmer shouted 'Poland will live' and a woman cried 'You will suffer for-'

The bullets ripped through the bodies, making dents in the wall, after which Hans Yunger repeated his two-part order: 'Bury them' and 'Obey.'

On the third day he performed the act which engraved his name and his countenance on the village mind forever: he appeared in his staff car, still in civilian dress, and posted on the door of the little church a list of one hundred and sixty-nine names, typed neatly but in no special order, men and women mixed together, each with proper age. No one under the age of sixteen was listed, and the proportion seemed to be older people, seventy percent; younger, thirty percent; men, sixty percent; women, forty percent.

This time Yunger had with him a proficient interpreter, who lined out the rules under which this region would now operate: 'This is a list of hostages to be shot if any Pole in this region commits any act of aggression or sabotage. Destruction of German property, no matter how small, whether actual or attempted: six to be shot. Any physical act against a German soldier, no matter how small, whether actual or attempted: eight to be shot. The death of any German soldier or civilian, no matter the cause: twelve or more to be shot. Last night there was further destruction of military property, so the first six hostages will now be shot.'

Again six ordinary villagers were stood against the wall; again the three young soldiers took their half-kneeling stance; and again the order was given to bury the bodies.

Bukowo never saw Hans Yunger after that third day. He had been sent there to strike terror into the hearts of the villagers, and he had succeeded. He would now move on to his next a.s.signment, where he would perform just as efficiently.

His place was taken by a n.a.z.i of much different character, SS Major Konrad Krumpf, a low-level functionary of the Gestapo whose job it would be to govern a set of seventeen villages for the duration of the war. He was a tense man of thirty-three when he drove his own small car into town, not at all the imperious commander that Hans Yunger had been. When the villagers first saw him they wondered how he had ever been accepted into the Gestapo or risen to the position he now held, but after he had been at work for a while they recognized his shrewd capacity to guess at what might be going on and his determination to stamp it out if it threatened the security of the Third Reich.

He was not tall, not heavy. He had thin sandy hair, weak eyes that required gla.s.ses and a weak voice that required him to scream when he wished to emphasize points. Villagers said 'He soars like a lark,' but he made himself understood. He had acquired a sober education at schools through his sixteenth year and through wide reading thereafter. As a boy he had supposed that he would enter his father's textile shop, but an offer of membership in the Gestapo at a time when they were eager to enroll anyone opened dreamlike horizons, and for some time now he had imagined that through diligent service to Hitler, Goering and especially Himmler, he might, in his fifties, attain a position of some importance. To prepare himself for compet.i.tion with others who had attended university, he continued to read serious books and had acquired a vocabulary much larger than a man who had left school at sixteen might be expected to possess.

However, he was a realist, and knew that he was not as intellectually brilliant as some of his compet.i.tors in the Gestapo, or as gifted in political maneuvering, or even as masculine-looking as the stiff Prussians in the SS or the handsome Bavarians. But he knew he possessed two traits which many of them lacked: he had an innate sense of where his enemies, Polish or German, might be hiding and a cunning skill in frustrating them; and he had an almost rodentlike capacity for acc.u.mulating facts about everyone with whom he came in contact, a.s.sembling huge stacks of cards, in five different colors, on which were summarized the bits of information he had collected about them. These files were supervised by two gloomy, nervous clerks whose names were not even known to the villagers but whose laborious work dominated their lives.

No act was too trivial to escape the attention of Konrad Krumpf and his clerks, and when observed, it was written down. For example, he knew that Szymon Bukowski, the fifteen-year-old son of the liberal agitator Miroslawa Bukowska, had been among the seven to be liquidated on that first day and that he had somehow escaped. His card on the young man was voluminous, listing his friends, the books he read, his habits during winter and summer, where he might be encountered, and particularly the names of his relatives, no matter how far removed in blood line or geographical distance.

It was Krumpf's job to find this condemned man and execute him, and as he studied the cards pertaining to his target, he saw that Szymon was the presumed grandson of the local gentleman now dead, Wiktor Bukowski, who was known as The Hero of Zamosc because of his conduct at the siege of that city by the Russian Communists. So Krumpf went to the palace to pursue his ongoing investigation.

There he was greeted by a woman whom he had been instructed to treat with deference, for she was said to be a multimillionaire from Chicago and from a family potentially friendly to the German cause. Marjorie Bukowska, his cards told him-green in her case, indicating a person of high importance-was sixty-seven years old, a widow, an amateur patron of Polish culture, and the mother of the current owner of the palace, Ludwik Bukowski, thirty-nine years old and something of an enigma. The original list of leaders to be executed had said of Bukowski: 'Not to be shot. Could prove to be of use.'

Like many wealthy women free to tend their every need, Madame Bukowska had grown more beautiful as she aged, and now her slender figure and glowing white hair gave her an aura of great dignity as she came forward to greet the commander of her district: 'Herr Krumpf ...'

'Major,' he corrected.

'I've never been able to read military designations,' she said. 'Do join me,' and she led him into that grand hall dominated by the two huge paintings. He was awed by its majesty and in that first moment he hatched his plot. He, Konrad Krumpf, son of a merchant in Magdeburg, would live in this palace, and from it he would dispense justice to the Poles he supervised. To achieve this he must deal gingerly with the American woman and her Polish son.

'Madame Bukowska,' he said easily as he settled into one of her comfortable chairs, 'I must interrogate you on what could be a painful subject.'

'Many things are painful these days,' she replied.

'This missing man, Szymon Bukowski 'Szymon?' she asked brightly, almost laughingly. 'He's not a man. He's a boy. Hardly old enough to drive an automobile.'

'He's a fugitive, Madame Bukowska,' and he said this with such finality that she made no further defensive comment. 'I must ask you two questions.'

'Please do,' she said graciously, but before he could ask them the tea she had ordered arrived, and when Krumpf had balanced his cup on his knee, she said: 'Now fire away.'

'I have no weapon,' he said, and she explained that she had been using an American idiom meaning 'Ask me what you will,' but that in the German they were using, it came out rather more ominous than she had intended. He laughed.

'Now to my questions. Do you know where Szymon Bukowski is hiding?'

'I do not,' she said in the good German she had acquired in Vienna. She sipped at her tea, then said emphatically: 'I would never have known where he was, Herr Krumpf. For I had little to do with him.'

'Major Krumpf, if you please. But was not his father your husband's manager?' He had set his cup down and now held some cards, which he was studying as if to make sure of his facts.

'He was. And a very dependable one.'

'And was not the unfortunate Miroslawa Bukowska who fell into trouble, was she not your husband's cousin?'

'Very remotely.'

He glanced at his cards and nodded. 'Where is your husband?'

She pointed to an equestrian portrait hanging on an end wall, away from the two great panoramas; it showed Wiktor in native costume astride his horse, with a caption which Krumpf rose to read: ' "The Hero of Zamosc." ' He looked at his cards again and said: 'Yes, he fought the Communists at Zamosc, I remember.' And from the manner in which he enunciated his words, precisely but at a level somewhat higher than before, she deduced that he was not happy with Germany's present close alliance with Russia.

'He's dead?' he asked, although he well knew the answer.

'Many years.'

'What I meant to ask, where is your son?'

'You must know that the governor general summoned him to Krakow. He's in Krakow.'

'Yes, yes.' He rearranged his cards and asked: 'Now to my next question, the difficult one.' He accepted more tea, then said: 'This Szymon we seek, his father Seweryn Buk, later Bukowski, he was your husband's son, was he not? That is, he was your stepson?'

'Everyone in these parts knows that.'

'So that Szymon is really your grandson, in a manner of speaking.'

'I have never thought of him as such.'

'Does his presence on your estate ... well, does it in any way embarra.s.s you?'

'Nothing embarra.s.ses me. I'm sixty-seven years old and life continues to amaze me, but it never embarra.s.ses.'

'In Chicago,' he began, p.r.o.nouncing it Tchee-ka-goe with equal emphasis on each syllable, 'you were very wealthy, yes? Then why are you still in this dreadful country?'

'Because I love it,' she said quietly.

'And you would do anything to a.s.sist it?'

Turning so that she could look squarely at him, she said: 'Yes, I suppose I would. You see, it's my country now.'

'Would you be offended if I asked to ... not search ... but ...'

'Look around?' She used a homely German idiom and he smiled, a thin, grudging smile which brought half-tears to his watery blue eyes.

'Yes, I'd like to look around. We're very concerned about this Szymon, you know.'

It was during this inspection that Konrad Krumpf first saw the art treasures of the Bukowski palace, and although he ridiculed the two big Polish panoramas, terming them peasant painting, and denigrated the Claude Monet as degenerate Jewish art, he was astonished by the quality and beauty of the Rembrandt and the little Correggio: 'But these are museum paintings! Madame Bukowska, your husband had flawless taste.'

'I bought them,' she said. 'I studied art in Italy.'

'Ah, Italy! What a perfect union, Germany and Italy. These two produce most of the art in the world.'

He was on the point of advising her to get rid of the Monet, or at least hide it, because a new world of art was about to take command of Europe, one in which there would be no place for such immoral painting, when he saw for the first time the elegant Hans Holbein portrait of an English lady. The great German painter had chosen blue and gray as his dominant colors, with touches of red and gold, and the frame, which seemed a part of the painting, was one of those broad slabs of ebony beautifully carved in little squares which stood out from the rest of the wood, radiating light. It was really a complete work of art, very Renaissance, very German.

'That is a notable painting,' Krumpf said with such enthusiasm that Marjorie was compelled to ask: 'Where did you learn so much about art?' and he with obvious pleasure replied: 'We are not all pigs, as your Jewish New York Times would have it.' She wanted to know more, but he said, abruptly, that he had to leave, so they returned to the hall, and from the manner in which he surveyed it, with an almost proprietary interest, she was certain that she and her son would be seeing a great deal of SS Major Krumpf in the months ahead.

When the n.a.z.is overran Poland that September they found themselves empowered to put into cruel operation a plan which Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg had worked out in harsh detail.

Those sections of Poland which lay next to either Germany proper or East Prussia were to be completely denuded of Poles and resettled by Germans. What was to happen to the Poles living there? At first there would be ma.s.s expulsions; later there would be systematic extermination. As many as twenty million Poles would either be worked to death in labor camps or slain instantly. That part of Poland would never again exist.

There was temporarily an atrocious plan for creating an artificial Jewish state centering on Lublin, a city not far from Bukowo, where Jews would be herded until such time as they could be exterminated, down to the last woman and child. Himmler's figures showed a Jewish population in Poland of 3,547,896; every one was to be slain.

That left a large southern area well removed from the German borders and based on the triangle of cities-Warsaw, Krakow, Lwow-in which Bukowo was centrally located. This was given the curious name General Gouvernement, and why French was used to designate a so thoroughly German solution, no one explained, except that this name had been used in World War I for the area then occupied by the Germans, and now once more General Gouvernement served. It was governed by an able n.a.z.i lawyer, Dr. Hans Frank, who maintained headquarters in the famous Wawel Castle in Krakow.

Dr. Frank was not a caricature, nor was he a s.a.d.i.s.t. He was a realist with a firm understanding of Polish history. His instructions to his subordinates were stated in clear, simple, legal terms: 'The General Gouvernement will comprise all that is left of historic Poland, and it is essential that Poles residing here understand the nature of their new state. It is not a nation governed by law. It is a nation governed by the demands and desires of the Third Reich. The Pole has no rights whatever. His only obligation is to obey what we tell him. He must be constantly reminded that his duty is to obey.

'With my full approval you are to apply ruthlessly every reasonable measure to keep the local situation under control, and this office will not enquire foolishly into the actions you deem necessary to keep all areas of the General Gouvernement pacified.

'A major goal of our plan is to finish off as speedily as possible all troublemaking politicians, priests and leaders who fall into our hands. I openly admit that some thousands of so-called important Poles will have to pay with their lives, but you must not allow sympathy for individual cases to deter you in your duty, which is to ensure that the goals of National Socialism triumph and that the Polish nation is never again able to offer resistance.'

When deputies like Konrad Krumpf inquired in a general meeting what the ultimate plans were for this miserable, unhappy country, Dr. Frank was specific: 'Every vestige of Polish culture is to be eliminated. Those Poles who seem to have Nordic appearance will be taken to Germany to work in our factories. Children of Nordic appearance will be taken from their parents and raised as German workers. The rest? They will work. They will eat little. And in the end they will die out. There will never again be a Poland.'

Dr. Frank encouraged the initial execution of all visible leaders, and he also ordered the rounding up of college professors, especially those of the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Krakow, a.s.signing them to the most brutal of the concentration camps, where most of them perished. He also helped to establish the rules of retaliation that Hans Yunger had delivered to the citizens of Bukowo, and he commended those local leaders who enforced that rule.

But he did not, like many of his subordinates, practice cruelty for its own sake, and he did not for a very good reason. As he explained to his cadre: 'Long term, we work for the extermination of the Polish people. Short term, we must use them to help feed our soldiers. Therefore, farmers are to be kept at their fields, but the most rigorous rules are to be published in every community demanding that farm families keep for themselves only enough to sustain life. Everything else must be delivered to our representatives for shipment to Germany, and any farmer or housewife who connives to avoid this rule shall be shot. Each district commander is personally responsible for collecting the maximum food possible from his district. The farm population is to be preserved for the present, but when victory is ours we will settle with it.'

When this order reached Konrad Krumpf in Bukowo he inst.i.tuted his search for the querns. Bringing in sixteen extra Gestapo enlisted men, he lined them up in the village square, then summoned everyone in the area to stand at attention as he read the decree which would apply to his portion of the General Gouvernement: 'Every item of every crop raised in this district belongs to the Third Reich and must be delivered to my a.s.sistants at locations which will be stipulated. Every grain of wheat must be brought to us, after which we will return you enough to live on till the next harvest. This means that no kitchen will be allowed to maintain its own quern for grinding wheat and making flour that might be baked into loaves for private use. It is now ten o'clock. You have till the clock strikes twelve to bring me all the querns you have in your possession, because at one minute after twelve these soldiers will begin searching your cottages, and if they find a hidden quern which has not been turned in, the owner will be shot.'

For most of the villagers and farmers the situation was clear: turn in the little hand mills in which wheat had been ground for generations and from which the good bread of Poland had been made, or run the risk of being shot. From cupboards, from places in the corner behind the stove, women with tears streaming down their faces brought forth the treasured querns: two round flat stones set in a box small enough for a boy to carry, each top stone with a hole in its upper surface into which a wooden handle could be placed, which, when turned in a tight circle, caused the upper stone to revolve and grind the wheat until it became flour sifting safely into the bottom of the box.

Some of the stones had been used for almost a century, outlasting three or four of their owners' wooden houses, but all were treasured and each was surrendered with pain.

The order presented a problem for Jadwiga Buk, now seventy-two and still a determined woman; she delayed bringing forth the little mill on which she had ground her family's grain because she wanted to see what was going to happen to the querns that were surrendered. She was standing off to one side when at half past ten the first housewives came forward with their precious instruments, and she was horrified by what Konrad Krumpf did with them.

'Put them there,' he commanded, and when they were placed on the ground, he directed the soldiers to smash the stones and toss the boxes into a pile that was obviously going to be burned.

This wanton destruction of the little machines which had served so well, this violation of the household G.o.ds who keep society together, so shocked Jadwiga that she cried: 'Send them to Germany. Don't destroy them.'

Krumpf did not halt his operations to check who had called out, but from the corner of his eye he saw that it must have been the Buk woman, and he could visualize her card: GRANDMOTHER OF THE SZYMON BUKOWSKI WE SEEK.

Jadwiga left the village square in great perturbation. The quern which she had inherited from her grandmother was one of the best, two marvelously flat stones set in a box made of some special hardwood; from the time she was a young child, grinding wheat in a quern like that was almost a pleasure, and when she grew up and married and had her two children, in addition to her first son, Seweryn, she taught them to love the process, for it seemed to her an essential act of wifeliness-to accept the husband's grain and convert it to nourishing food.

She simply could not condemn her quern to the destruction she had witnessed, and she endeavored to hide it, vainly. Her efforts were quite juvenile, and when the noon search began the SS men quickly found it. They dragged her into the square, where she was ordered to stand at attention as the stones were crushed at her feet and the hardwood box smashed and thrown onto the pile. She had not the courage to look down at the shattered stones but she did watch as the pile was set ablaze, and she was still staring in disbelief when the rope was thrown about her neck and she was hanged.

Because both his grandmother, Jadwiga Buk, and his aunt, Miroslawa Bukowska, had been executed by the n.a.z.is, Jan Buk, inheritor of the farm, had to be looked upon with suspicion by Konrad Krumpf's men, and the three cards which summarized his case contained numerous entries. The blue proved that he was known to have dangerous a.s.sociates, in this case his grandmother and aunt. The brown showed that either he or his family had attempted to h.o.a.rd food. The purple, an ominous card, predicted that he would ultimately prove to be dangerous; and with dismal regularity men with purple cards were promoted to red: WANTED FOR ARREST: There was good reason to suppose that sooner or later Jan Buk would be so moved.

He was twenty years old, broad and solid like his ancestors, and a good farmer; if any would produce a surplus which might be hidden, it would be he. He also owned a forest from which branches could be taken by the Germans for firewood. But his greatest a.s.set was his wife, Biruta, a peasant girl of the old type who milked and plowed with vigor.

On the day that Grandmother Jadwiga was hanged, Jan returned to the cottage with the cement floor, the one that Jadwiga had gained for the family, and sat soberly in the chair once occupied by the earlier Janko, the one who had worked in Vienna and been killed at the battle of Zamosc. He sat there until Biruta returned after having watched the hanging, then stared at her inquiringly, saying nothing, and by a meaningful glance at one corner where cottage wall joined cement floor, she indicated that something of value lay buried.

His eyes riveted on the perilous spot, Jan listened as his wife spoke in whispers: 'When Krumpf ordered that the querns be brought in, I gave them the old one my mother used. Our good one is hidden. But when we need to use it, we shall.'

Jan, aware of the terrible risk his wife was taking, grasped her hand and pressed it. Then he kissed her, and the hidden quern was not mentioned again, but as he worked his fields he sequestered larger and larger quant.i.ties of wheat, which he smuggled home beneath his pants, and sometimes at night, he would awaken to hear in the darkness the turning of the stones and he would know that the Buks would once more have extra flour to bake into secret loaves for those in the cities who were starving.

In the other sections of Poland, those contiguous to Germany, terrifying rules against the movement of Poles were in effect: a Pole could be shot if caught on a train, or executed in a public square if caught moving about without a pa.s.s. No Pole could own a bicycle without a license from the n.a.z.is indicating the specific streets on which he was allowed to ride to and from work. And even when on foot he had to step into the gutter if a German approached; if tardy, he could be shot.

In the General Gouvernement these harsh rules did not apply, for here the job of the Pole was to produce food, and it was realized that to do this, a limited amount of travel was obligatory. Nevertheless, the peasants were tied to their land, just as they had been a thousand years earlier, and it was a.s.sumed at headquarters in Krakow that this would continue sometime into the future, until the Polish race died out and its place was taken by Germans.

During 1939, 1940 and the first half of 1941 living conditions for farmers in the General Gouvernement were bearable; their food was taken from them, but they were always clever enough to steal just enough to sustain their strength. There was constant repression, and the list of hostages remained in the public square; nineteen had now been shot in retaliation for various offenses committed by hotheads, but the general opinion in the countryside was that it was useless to try to oppose the n.a.z.is: 'They have the guns and they're ready to use them.'

They also had the ropes, and these made an even deeper impression on the farmers, because when a disobedient person like Jadwiga Buk was hanged, the Germans left her or his body swaying in the wind, this way and that, legs not tied together, until some morning when Konrad Krumpf would come by and shout in his high-pitched voice: 'Get that filthy thing out of here.' Then the villagers were allowed to bury the corpse.

In his seventeen villages Krumpf had now executed more than sixty Poles, but never viciously, as some commanders did, and never without just cause, as he interpreted the rules. But even so, he was not able to stamp out the first beginnings of resistance in the countryside, and the more he studied the instances of sabotage or major thefts of food, the more he was convinced that some mastermind like the missing Szymon Bukowski was in command, and that the acts were by no means isolated or accidental. Placing all his cards before him on the table in his headquarters, he studied them, and had to conclude that it was Bukowski, even though so young, who was somehow communicating with the farmers of the district and causing trouble.

On three widely different occasions he had picked up rumors of an underground cell which operated from hiding places in the Forest of Szczek, and he wondered if Szymon Bukowski might have anything to do with this. Gnawed by doubt and irritated that he had not been able to run the missing man down, he returned to the Bukowski palace to talk with its real owner, and not that rather difficult American woman who might once have been its mistress.

He had always found Ludwik Bukowski a pleasant man to do business with: smallish, well-groomed, perfect in his German, an apparent conservative who had nothing to do with the rabble, and recognized in Krakow as a potential friend. Now as Krumpf sat with Bukowski, he spoke frankly: 'We have persistent rumors of an organized underground operating in these regions. Have you heard anything?'

'No. And I rather think I would have.'

'Who could be commanding such a body of men?'

'I haven't the vaguest idea. Perhaps some patriot who dreams of reviving-'

'Could it possibly be Szymon Bukowski?'

'My goodness, he's only ... what ... seventeen?'

'Aren't you his uncle, in a manner of speaking?'

'There've always been twisted rumors ...' He twirled his thumbs, looked at the portrait of his father, and said: 'There always are, in a village like this.'