Poland: A Novel Part 37

'They're very brave. What do you do?'

'Like always. Carry messages mostly.'

'How do you live in the forest? How do you eat?'

'Poorly. We shoot a few deer.'

'Where do you get guns? Ammunition?'

'We raid German depots. We steal.'

'But you don't have actual battles? I mean, real fighting?'

'No.' He asked her what her life was like, and now she had to lie, too.

'We do well in the village. Hostages shot now and then, but not like it used to be.'

'Food?'

'Plenty. Plenty.'

'Do many women send bread to the partisans?'

'I know of none, Jan. I suspect several. We keep it very secret.'

'Do you send any?'

'Krumpf watches our wheat like a hungry crow at harvest. I haven't touched ...' She looked toward the sacred quern and showed her shame, and then she came close to tears. 'Krumpf watches us constantly.' She twisted her hands, then said: 'You know he caught Szymon?'

'I heard.' He sighed deeply and embraced his wife. 'If you and I have troubles, think of Bukowski in Lublin.'

After a while she said: 'Some of us think that our Bukowski, the one at the palace, we think he's working with the Germans.'

'I doubt that.'

'He's got Krumpf living there ... even before you left. You know that.' When her husband said nothing, she asked: 'How was the report spread that you were in Germany?' and he said: 'I didn't hear that rumor,' and she said: 'Yes, and at first I thought it was true. How did you get from Krakow into the forest?' and he refused to explain, for the rule of the underground was: 'No one is to know anything until the moment of action.'

At two in the morning he prepared to leave, but had one final plea to make: 'Biruta, sometimes we starve. We must have food. Could you speak to the women?'

'No,' she said with stern finality. 'I can trust no one. Krumpf has spies everywhere. You wouldn't believe that he could get Poles to spy for him.'

'I can believe,' he said.

So she made no promises about anyone else but she did say that she would steal what she herself could, and she would reserve it for him.

'No! I can't come back. Not for a while.'

'I'll give it to the Storks.'

'You do that. We'll get our share.'

And suddenly a flood of great love came over these two, there in the utter bleakness of their situation. In the abyss of Polish hopes, when the enemy was proving stronger than ever, they trembled in each other's arms.

'They've taken our other priest, you know,' she whispered. 'Sent him to Auschwitz.'

'Oh G.o.d, that poor man.'

And in the darkness they prayed, and then, after a final desperate embrace, he returned to the forest, carrying food which he took reluctantly, for he had never seen her so thin.

In the city of Lublin at the corner of University and Basztowa streets there stood a rather impressive public building graced by a tower containing a good clock which struck the hours. In the cramped, dark, damp rooms in its cellar, the Lublin Gestapo had constructed a series of windowless cells and interrogation rooms, and none in the entire area of occupied Poland was as horrible, for criminals delivered here were not expected to leave this place alive.

When Szymon Bukowski was shoved through the small, low door leading to the cellar, he was greeted by a Gestapo functionary who clubbed him over the head with a brutal blow that might have killed a man less vital than he, then ordered two others to drag him to a holding cell. When he revived in the darkness, his head throbbing and his ability to speak impaired, he found that he was in the presence of another prisoner, whose voice indicated that the owner was a much older man.

'Professor Tomczyk,' the voice said. 'Roman Tomczyk of this city.'

Szymon could scarcely make his tongue work, but managed to ask in m.u.f.fled accent: 'University here?'

'No,' the voice said, and that was all.

Bukowski thought that perhaps the man was a spy, and would try to extract confidences, but there were no questions. And when light finally entered the cell, Szymon was amazed that this man could speak at all, for his face was horribly battered: 'What happened?'

'The broomstick.'

'Did they beat you with a broomstick?' The bruises looked too big and too flat for that.

'They put you on the broomstick. Then things happen.' When Szymon tried to interrogate him, he diverted the questions: 'Two things to remember, young man. Save your physical energy. Protect your psychological strength.'

'How?'

'Never fight back. Let them do what they will. Never get angry. There will be a day of retribution. And a third rule, a very good one. Scream like h.e.l.l when they beat you. It makes them feel superior.'

'What is the broomstick?' Apparently it was too horrible to be discussed, for the man merely said: 'You can survive, believe me, you can survive if you will husband your physical and psychological strength. Indulge in no excesses, not even hatred.'

'How do you know?'

'I interrogated escapees ... before they caught me. But don't you tell anybody anything ... not even me. And it's known that I was head of the Lublin committee for two years. Tell no one who you are or why. Stay quiet and conserve your energies.'

Before noon Bukowski learned what the broomstick was. He was taken from his cell, thrashed by two guards, who kicked and mauled him as they dragged him along, and delivered to a larger cell with lights. It contained four men, Gestapo he supposed, and two chairs with high, wide backs, facing outward one from the other. There was also a broomstick, a rather long length of some heavy wood like oak or ash, and with obvious delight one of the men brought this to where Szymon was standing, or rather, had been standing, for a savage blow to the back of his neck knocked him to the floor.

Adeptly, one of the men grabbed his feet and doubled his knees backward, whereupon his ankles were strapped together while the broomstick was pa.s.sed under his knees. His body was then thrust brutally forward so that his elbows could be pa.s.sed under the stick, and his wrists were lashed tightly and secured and forced back close to his chest. He thus formed a compact bundle, tightly compressed and twisted around the broomstick, whose ends the four men placed on the upper rims of the chair backs. Two men sat spread-legged on the chairs, holding the backs erect, and now Szymon was rolled back and forth as the four men rained blows upon him.

No one spoke, but from time to time one of the men sitting on the chairs would leap up, whereupon the weight of Szymon's bundled body would cause that chair to topple over; this meant that he would crash to the floor from a height high enough to terrify and bruise him horribly, but not high enough to kill him outright. Then he would be kicked numerous times, abused for being clumsy, and hoisted back onto the chairs. Again and again one of the men would jump up, sending him crashing to the floor. Once they placed him at the extreme end of the chair backs and started rolling him slowly toward the end, informing him of the distance still to be covered: 'Thirty centimeters. Twenty. Ten. Whoooo!' and with a mighty shove they pitched him off. Since he fell a greater distance than when the chairs slowly collapsed, he was badly hurt and thought he might have a broken hip, but when they kicked him about the body he felt a new pain greater than that to the hip, and before he fainted he judged that he was still whole.

Of three hundred and sixty-seven prisoners interrogated during Szymon Bukowski's stay Under the Clock, one hundred and ninety died. Every one was listed in the careful records kept by the Gestapo as having died from Lungentuberkulose.

On three successive days Bukowski and Professor Tomczyk were each given the most savage treatment on the broomstick, and Szymon wondered how the old man survived, but whenever the latter was dragged back to his cell he simply lay on the floor, breathed as deeply as his damaged lungs would permit, and a.s.sured Szymon that nothing had happened: 'It is not my responsibility to bring retribution to these men. We have created a G.o.d to whom we allocate that task and we must believe that He notes every action in this cellar and will in due course make honest rest.i.tution.'

Szymon was too battered to comment, but the professor realized one weakness in his argument, and through lips shattered by kicks to the mouth he said almost incoherently: 'And it does not matter, son, whether we are alive to see the rest.i.tution or not. It will come as surely as day follows night, and we are now in the night. It will surely come. That we must never doubt.'

His remarkable faith helped keep Bukowski alive during these days of torture and interrogation, and during one afternoon of hideous abuse, he happened to be taken to the cell while Professor Tomczyk was still on the broom, and the old man was crying and weeping and screaming like a baby, which seemed to give his tormentors great pleasure, but later when he rejoined the old man in their cell, Tomczyk said: 'Nothing happened. You must relax, son, and save your spiritual energies. I shall not survive, but you must, to bear witness. So save your energies, because G.o.d sees everything that happens in that room, and it is to Him that we look for deliverance.'

Tomczyk proved a poor prophet; he did survive, and at the end of the interrogations he and Bukowski were taken out into an alley behind Under the Clock, thrown into a van, and hauled away as near-corpses to one of the fine buildings in Lublin, Zamek Lublin. It stood on a hill, a castle dating far back into history. It now served as both the major prison in the area and the court in which the destinies of prisoners were determined.

The court was convened on an upper floor of the castle, and as will be seen, this was significant, but more so was the fact that the trials were held in a very old chapel decorated with Biblical frescoes dating back to 1418, for this gave the proceedings an aura of religious sanction. Holy figures, representing justice, looked down on the judgments and watched their consequences.

The trials epitomized n.a.z.i justice in general and the att.i.tude of Germans toward Poles in particular. Two men, dressed in judges' robes, sat at a long marble table occupying the s.p.a.ce where during five centuries the altar had stood. They wore red hats, which gave them a judicial appearance although neither had ever before been a judge. The older man, on the left as the prisoners saw him, wore heavy gla.s.ses; for a brief period he had been a lawyer's clerk in Hamburg; the young man on the right was a Gestapo functionary, and it was he who determined the course of the trial and its outcome.

Some forty prisoners had been a.s.sembled in the chapel at seven in the morning, and there they sat, as if at prayers, for two hours, and some whose kidneys had been damaged or even ruptured by the beatings Under the Clock began to experience extreme discomfort, but their guards would not allow them to move. With dismay Bukowski became aware that Professor Tomczyk had wet his pants, and then he saw that two others had done the same. This amused the guards, who cuffed the three men over the head most brutally for having misbehaved.

When the trials began they were shocking affairs. A prisoner would be dragged, literally dragged, by the armpits, his feet barely touching the ancient stones of the chapel floor, to a spot where he was thrown before the judges; some lost their footing and looked up from the floor itself in grave embarra.s.sment, whereupon the young Gestapo judge shouted in a high piercing voice that the accused must stand before this court of the Third Reich.

Each trial lasted only six or seven minutes. A Gestapo officer announced what the charges were, a prosecutor heckled the prisoner, demanding answers to questions which a.s.sumed guilt, and the two judges hara.s.sed the man if he tried to reply. No witness was allowed to speak for the defendant, and if he endeavored to speak for himself, the Gestapo judge shouted him down.

The verdict came swiftly. In the week of Bukowski's trial an average of fifty-two men a day stood before the judges, or more than three hundred and fifty accused, and not one was found innocent; the judges felt that the Gestapo, Hitler's most valuable arm, would not have brought these culprits before the court unless they were guilty; the only legal problem was what their punishment should be.

Bukowski noticed that occasionally the Gestapo judge would consult a paper and whisper something to the other judge, and then the prisoner would be told: 'You are to be taken to further imprisonment, where you will reveal what you have refused to tell us so far.' These men were led off to the left.

The others, and by far the greater number, were ordered to execution, and it came swiftly. Upon p.r.o.nouncement of the verdict, always by the Gestapo judge, two guards hustled the prisoner out the door to the right, which closed behind him with a bang. Within seconds there came another bang, this time very loud, from the muzzle of a revolver held close to a human head, then a moment of silence, then a crashing sound as the dead body was pitched headfirst down a stairwell to an open area below. Then the two guards returned to the courtroom to await the next verdict.

Szymon noticed one peculiarity which betrayed what the verdict was going to be. Whenever the young Gestapo judge, after whispered consultation, decided to impose the death penalty, but before he announced it, the civilian judge would take off his heavy gla.s.ses and stare at the accused. It was as if, having tried a ghost with only ghostly evidence against it, the judge wished to catch a glimpse of the real human behind the charges. Dangling his gla.s.ses, the inquisitive judge would watch the condemned man as he was taken from the courtroom, listen for the pistol shot, then replace his gla.s.ses almost as if to say: 'Well, that finishes that. Let's get on with the next one.'

Professor Tomczyk was summoned first, and he presented a pitiful sight, a frail old man who had wet his pants, his face badly bruised, his eyegla.s.ses twisted from a blow he had received in this courtroom, his knees trembling, not from fear but from lack of food during the preceding five days of torture. But he stood erect and almost defiant as the so-called legal procedures swirled about him. He was charged with having led the opposition in Lublin to the new rule of the Third Reich and with having aided Jews to escape eastward into Russian areas.

It was clear from the rantings of the prosecutor that Tomczyk was to be executed, but at the moment of judgment the Gestapo judge consulted his list and announced in that piercing voice that this prisoner was of supreme danger to the new order and would be remanded to further imprisonment and interrogation. Tomczyk was led off to the left, and Bukowski supposed that he, Bukowski, would never see him again.

Now two guards cuffed him on the back of his head, causing stars to dance in the courtroom, and he was dragged forward. The strong shove he received at the end caused him to fall on the stones, where he looked up at his judges. Since these would probably be the last human beings he would ever see, he wanted to savor each moment, each revealing impression. He did not listen to the accusations, for they were preposterous and in no way related to what he had actually done while operating from within the Forest of Szczek: destruction of a troop train, the murder of two members of the Gestapo, the spiriting of Jews away from the Krakow ghetto, the theft of wheat and other consumables. Instead he focused on the faces, and saw not beasts devoid of human characteristics, but two men caught up in the pa.s.sions of their time: a man who should have been a legal a.s.sistant in some small German town and never a full-fledged lawyer or judge, and a man who should have spent his life as a minor and ill-regarded political hack in some rural district, the kind who was sent for beer and sausages in the late afternoons. By the fate of revolution and war they were now dispensing supposed justice in a city they had never before heard of and to a people they despised.

Profoundly sad that men and their systems could be so cruel, Szymon tried to straighten his bruised shoulders and accept the death so wrongfully imposed upon him, but he noticed that the civilian judge had not removed his gla.s.ses! He was not going to be shot! Then came the high, whining voice: 'The prisoner has not told us where his hiding places were. Further imprisonment and interrogation.'

He had not the slightest idea as to what awaited him behind the left door, but when he was shoved through he found himself in a small stone-walled room which looked as if it had once been used as a robing closet for the priests who officiated in this chapel, and there he waited with some dozen others as the trials in the courtroom proceeded, and with every echo of the pistol shot that sent some other Pole pitching headlong down the stairwell, he shuddered. In Zamek Lublin four hundred thousand Polish men and women would be tried by judges like the two Bukowski had seen and less than nine thousand would be found innocent.

When the trials ended and the gunfire ceased, a new group of guards appeared in the little stone room, heavy boots and heavier voices, and they a.s.sumed control of the prisoners sentenced to further incarceration: 'Line up. Keep silent. Move smartly.'

They were taken down two long flights of stone stairs and out into the Lublin sunlight, where some two hundred other prisoners from various parts of Poland were waiting. In ragged military formation they walked eastward out of town, some older men falling by the way, for the pace was sharp and steady.

'Get up!' the guards said only twice to the fallen men, and if they could not, they were shot, their bodies left behind as the long file moved on.

At the edge of Lublin a spur of the railroad which connected Krakow with Brest-Litovsk had been converted into a huge unloading platform, and here several thousand prisoners from the south of Poland and even from Hungary and Czechoslovakia were being driven from the boxcars that had carried them great distances, and these, too, joined the procession, which now started a long tramp eastward.

Bukowski walked beside Professor Tomczyk, aiding him when it looked as if the old man might collapse, and in whispered consultation they tried to decipher what was happening. 'Many of them must be Jews,' Tomczyk guessed. 'From other countries, maybe. They don't look Polish.'

'Where are we going?'

'Majdanek, I think.'

And for the first time Szymon heard the name that would be engraved in letters of fire upon his heart. 'Majdanek,' he repeated. 'What is it?'

'A big camp our people in Lublin helped build east of the city.' Tomczyk paused, then added: 'It was really built by Russian prisoners captured on the eastern front. They worked five months, and on the day they finished the barracks they were shot. Every man. Five thousand, four hundred and sixty-three in one day.' They walked in silence and then the old man said: 'My group kept the records.' More silence, then a nudge so deftly given that the Gestapo guards could not detect it. 'Someone in that crowd from my unit is counting each of us as we go past. You are being recorded, Szymon. Tonight, somehow, our numbers will be radioed to the Polish government in London.'

It was a long, tiring march from Lublin to Majdanek, and some of the new prisoners from the boxcars could not negotiate it; they were shot. Others who talked in ranks were clubbed with rifle b.u.t.ts, and many limped from the bruises of previous tortures, but this tragic column came at last to Majdanek, that once-beautiful field of corn and wheat that was now enclosed by three concentric fences of barbed wire, two of them electrified with enough power to kill any pa.s.sing animal which touched them.

At the main gate to the camp things happened with startling speed: 'All women and children here. All Jews here. Men under thirty here.' The sorting out was swift and amazingly accurate.

A guard spotted Bukowski standing with the non-Jewish men under thirty and snapped: 'Can you drive a car?'

'Yes.'

Szymon received a blow to the head, and the instruction: 'Here you say "Yes, sir," ' after which he was told: 'Over there. That truck.'

He moved quickly to a long flatbed truck with wooden strakes that formed low sides; if Bukowski or his neighboring farmers had had such a truck, they would have used it to haul manure. It had no driver.

'Take it over there and wait,' the guard said, and Szymon moved his truck to third position behind two others that were also waiting.

The guards now had all the Jews separated and were herding them quickly to a low stone building, well built and of good design, marked BATH HOUSE. Here the Jews were ordered to undress, to take a medicinal shower that would kill any lice acquired in the boxcars during the long trip north, and Szymon caught glimpses of their naked pale-skinned bodies, like those of city people who rarely saw the sun. As he waited in his truck he watched an unceasing flow of new arrivals head for the bathhouse.

Nineteen minutes after the first batch of Jews had entered the bathhouse, the three flatbed trucks with the shallow sides were edged forward, toward the far end of the bathhouse, where four Gestapo guards ordered the drivers to dismount and help with the task at hand.

Inside the actual shower room, yet another contingent of Gestapo men, this time in gas masks, were busy tossing naked bodies out through small doors, from which the men waiting outside grabbed them, head and feet, tossing them deftly into the waiting trucks. Bukowski worked with a strong German who counted, each time: 'Eins ... zwei ... drei'-and through the air the newly dead body would fly. Twenty-one minutes after arriving at Majdanek, the Jews from Hungary and Czechoslovakia were dead.

When his truck was loaded with fifty-four dead bodies, men, women and children indiscriminately, Bukowski was ordered back to the wheel, and by the pale wintry light he followed the two lead trucks up a kind of alleyway between the barracks, arriving at last at the gateway to another solidly built structure, where a man with an unforgettable face awaited. He was Eric Muhsfeldt, about thirty years old, with a pinched, triangular face, square at the top, pointed at the bottom and with almost no chin. He had big ears, a low hairline, wide eyes which saw everything and a generous mouth which smiled easily. He was in command of this building, and since these were the first deliveries of the day, he was eager to get started. Congenially, and almost jovially, he greeted the first two drivers, then saw Bukowski still in regular dress: 'You're new, eh? You'll catch on.'

When he directed the first two trucks to unload their cargo, men came out from the building to take charge, and one by one the dead bodies were carried inside. 'You want to see?' Muhsfeldt asked Bukowski, almost as if the latter were his brother. And when Szymon stood inside, facing the five effective brick-faced ovens with the gas jets blazing below, he was awed by the mechanical ingenuity displayed in the design of this crematorium.

Corpses were moved in orderly fashion from the receiving gate to the five gaping mouths awaiting them. When an oven was crammed, the entrance door was locked shut with heavy metal clamps, elegantly designed, and the fierce heat was allowed to do its job. When only ashes and bones remained, equally efficient doors on the other side, each bearing a neat bra.s.s sign indicating that they had been built by Cori of Berlin, were opened and the ashes were removed by four Polish prisoners using long-handled shovels.

Less than an hour after a Jew stepped inside Majdanek, he could be fertilizer heading for a collection dump outside the electrified barbed wire. 'But you'll find many Jews still inside the camp,' Muhsfeldt a.s.sured Szymon. 'We had to handle these so quick because we had no more room.'

That evening he was formally processed, which meant that all his clothes were taken from him and thrown in a heap for later distribution in Germany. In return he was given only three items, each made from a flimsy material conspicuous for its broad convict stripes in black and white: a cap, a large shirt and baggy pants. One young prisoner who had been a university student and done field work in Italy studied himself in stripes and whispered: 'Now I look like the Siena cathedral,' but Szymon, who knew nothing of architecture, did not understand.

In gathering dusk the new prisoners were marched down the camp road to their quarters, and it was a mournful experience to pa.s.s almost a mile of barbed wire, horribly tangled, forming three different fences, one behind the other, inside of which stretched what seemed like an endless row of low, ma.s.sive barracks. The first impression was one of bleak immensity, for the plan was that when Majdanek was completed, it would hold two hundred fifty thousand prisoners, year after year, for as long as any Poles survived. The Jews, by that time, would have long since been exterminated.

For the present it consisted of six fields, tremendous in size and surrounded separately by their own barbed fences. Each field contained twenty-two identical barracks carefully aligned, for this was an orderly camp.

Szymon had been a.s.signed to Field Four, and when he reached the heavily guarded gate which led through the wire he noted that the guardhouse was decorated with the famous SS sign, in which the letters had been drawn to look like two bolts of lightning, and by a huge swastika. The n.a.z.is want us to remember who's in charge, he said to himself. When the gates were locked behind him he was taken to Barracks Eleven, which would be his home until he died, for it was not intended that he or any of the others in that camp should emerge alive.

He walked into a room of enormous size, and stood still for a moment, shivering in the wind that seemed to come from every direction through the cracks in the walls. Double-decker wooden frames stretched in two lines, seemingly to infinity, bare planks on which five hundred and fifty slept jammed side by side, each man allocated exactly twenty-six inches.

While he waited for a sleeping s.p.a.ce to be a.s.signed him, a prisoner in charge of handing out blankets to the newcomers whispered: 'Most of us in here are Poles, like you and me. But one thing I want to warn you about.' He was toothless and could have been thirty years old or eighty. 'I seen you driving the death truck to the crematorium. You keep that up, in no time you'll be dead.'

'Why?'

'They find men can't stand it. They go crazy. Do crazy things.'

'What do you mean?'

The whispering man did not answer that question. 'So when they see that a team of drivers and oven men are about used up, they wait till you're together, then herd you into one of the rooms and release the Zyklon-B.'

'What's that?'