There was a faint odor of incense in the air, and she waited a moment for her eyes to adjust. Then she knelt, made the sign of the cross and slipped into the last pew on the right, the one closest to the confessional in the rear of the sanctuary. There were several people ahead of her, and she withdrew a rosary from her pocket. She closed her eyes, absently fingering the beads, thinking about the extraordinary message that had brought her back here.
It had arrived on her last day at the AK safe house in Zyrardow. The NKVD had been closing in, investigating the shooting of the two agents, and it was time to move on. Zeeka had made contact with another AK cell in Lodz and had sent Hammer and Rabbit on ahead. But as Natalia and Zeeka were gathering their things, the AK wireless operator came down from the attic with a message.
“From Lodz?” Zeeka asked.
The wireless operator shook his head. “It’s from SOE in London. It was sent several days ago, but it was routed through three different cells before I got it.” He handed Natalia the message. “It’s for you.”
“From the SOE in London? Are you sure it’s for me?”
“It’s addressed to ‘The Conductor’ and that’s you,” he said with a shrug.
Natalia hesitated then unfolded the paper and read the decoded message:
MUST LOCATE PROVIDER
REPEAT: LOCATE PROVIDER
Avoiding trains and keeping to the back roads and small villages, it had taken Natalia a week to get to Krakow. She had traveled first with Zeeka as far as Lodz, where she parted with her friends and comrades-in-arms. Rabbit had wanted to go with her, but whatever awaited her in Krakow, Natalia knew that she had to do this alone.
She had no idea why SOE wanted to locate the Provider. She had never even known there was a connection between the two. During her years acting as a courier, she’d never met the Provider. It was just a name, someone in the channel who passed documents to the priest, or to someone in between. She really didn’t know; she didn’t need to know. All she had ever needed to know was to kneel at the confessional in this church between one and two o’clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday.
But why would SOE contact her? She hadn’t been an active part of the channel since she left for Warsaw at the start of the Rising, almost a year ago. Why now? Why me? She had no idea. But it was an assignment, and it was not her place to question it. She had been instructed to locate the Provider. And this was the only place to start.
A woman sitting on Natalia’s left nudged her elbow, indicating that it was her turn. Natalia took a deep breath, then stood up, and stepped around a marble pillar and over to the confessional. It was an enclosure of rich mahogany wood, a bit larger than a telephone booth, with a peaked roof and adorned with intricately carved scrollwork. A slatted wooden screen allowed the penitent to communicate with the priest waiting inside. Natalia knelt on the velvet-padded kneeler and whispered into the screen, “In the name of our Lord, I come seeking.”
There was a moment of silence. Then a voice from the other side whispered back, “Whom do you seek, my child?”
Natalia paused before responding, her tension momentarily relieved at the familiar voice and the customary words. “I seek the one who has provided us with so much.”
“It has been a long time,” the voice said.
“A difficult time,” Natalia answered.
When the voice spoke again there was a slight tremor. “The Provider is no longer among us.”
Natalia’s stomach tightened as she stared at the wooden screen. She swallowed hard, carefully choosing her next words. “Did he leave anything for me?”
Another moment of silence. Then the voice said, “This afternoon, five o’clock, Dietla and Stradomska. Get on the tram for Stare Miasto.”
The tram was crowded, and Natalia had to stand. The priest sat on the right side of the car, a newspaper folded under his arm. When they reached the first stop in the Stare Miasto District, the priest got up and pushed his way through the crowd. Natalia followed him out of the car.
As they walked toward the Rynek Glowny, Natalia waited for the priest to say something, but he was silent. He was a thin, severe-looking man in his sixties with sharp, chiseled features and an imperious manner that Natalia had at first found intimidating. In later years she had little patience for the man’s haughty nature and had rarely spoken with him outside of the confessional.
“What happened to the Provider?” she finally asked.
The priest remained silent, walking briskly, staring straight ahead.
“Is he alive?”
The priest slowed his pace and glanced at her. His face, partially hidden under his black, wide-brimmed hat, was pale, his eyes blank and distant. “He’s gone.”
“Gone where? When?”
“I don’t know. The day before the Russians arrived, he was just . . . gone.”
They entered the Rynek Glowny, an enormous cobblestone square surrounded by church spires, Medieval merchant halls and former residences of Krakow’s elite. They found a table at an outdoor café where they tried to order tea but had to settle for bitter, ersatz coffee. While they exchanged small talk about the weather, Natalia glanced at the folded newspaper which the priest had laid on the table. Inside would be an address handwritten in the margin.
The priest finished his coffee, his dull eyes darting around the busy market square. He whispered, “God be with you, my child.” Then he stood and walked away.
An hour later, Natalia found the address in the eastern section of the Kazimierz District. For centuries it had been a crowded, bustling district of apartment buildings, banks and synagogues, tailor shops and jewelers, butchers, clothing stores, and outdoor markets. The Jews who built it were gone now, murdered in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and little remained in the area except decaying buildings, emaciated stray dogs foraging for scraps in the gutters, and crippled beggars, dressed in rags, holding empty cups in their bony hands.
Repeating the same procedure she had used during the war, Natalia let herself into the run-down apartment building and retrieved a key from the mailbox in the vestibule. She climbed the creaking stairs to the third floor, wondering if anyone still lived there, unlocked the door to a room at the end of the hall and locked it behind her. She opened the window a crack to let in a bit of fresh air, and stood in the center of the room listening to the silence. Then she got down on her knees and reached under the bed.
The package was wrapped in the usual brown paper, but it was smaller than the others she had retrieved in the same manner from other rooms in other shabby buildings. This package felt more like a book than the files of documents she had received during the years she had spent as part of the channel.
Natalia sat on the bed and held the package, turning it over in her hands, thinking about the hundreds of documents that had been passed along this same channel during the years of Nazi occupation, documents that she could never resist reading despite putting herself in even greater jeopardy by possessing the information. There had been meticulously prepared reports, including daily logs and charts filled with numbers, revealing inconceivable atrocities taking place behind the walls of Auschwitz, Treblinka and the other death camps of Poland.
Extreme risks had been taken by everyone along the channel, from the Provider to another unknown contact, then to the priest and finally to Natalia, who carried them on the train to Warsaw. The identities of those involved in the channel were a carefully guarded secret. Natalia knew only those with whom she had direct contact: the priest, Berta and Falcon. The documents had been passed along, and perhaps some had made it to London, New York or Washington. Natalia had no way of knowing. It hadn’t done any good. That much she knew. The carnage had escalated. Hundreds of thousands were murdered, perhaps millions.
And now, when the war had ended, the Nazis were defeated . . . the Provider is gone?
Natalia stared at the package, her nerves taut as piano strings. Then, very slowly, she removed the wrapping paper. Inside
was the customary envelope containing currency, a thin stack of fifty-zloty banknotes to help her with expenses. There was also a book.
It was a leather-bound notebook, similar to a diary. The cover was worn, the edges of the pages frayed, as if having been thumbed through hundreds of times. She opened the cover and stared for a long time, confused by the handwritten words on the first page.
The Journal of Ludwik Banach
Thirty-Three
7 JUNE
NATALIA WOKE SUDDENLY. A noise in the hallway . . . footsteps . . . creaking stairs.
Then it was quiet.
She waited a moment, then stepped quietly across the room, parted the curtain and peeked out the window, squinting in the early morning sunlight. A scrawny, three-legged dog hobbled across the cobblestone alley, sniffing in the gutter. She dropped the curtain and glanced at her watch. Seven o’clock. What time had she fallen asleep? She had no idea.
The journal!
She spun around, her eyes darting to the bed, then to the floor. It was there, the tattered leather-bound notebook that she had spent the night reading. She picked it up and sat down on the bed, leafing through the pages, as though to make certain the words hadn’t changed.
She spent an hour going over it again, rereading carefully the last installments of Ludwik Banach’s implausible journey that had ended with his disappearance just before the Russians arrived in January. When she finished, Natalia stared at the book, trying to decide what to do, then slipped it in the inside pocket of her vest. She put on her hat, opened the door slowly and peeked down the dim hallway.
Nothing.
She hurried down the steps, then made her way through the eerily quiet, litter-strewn streets, past vacant buildings marred with graffiti and broken windows, until she arrived at Szeroka Street, once the central market area of the Jewish community, now largely deserted. She slipped into a grimy café and took a seat in a booth at the rear.
The foul-smelling proprietor brought over a cup of lukewarm coffee and asked if she wanted anything else. Over at the bar a shriveled ghost of a man sat on a stool, slurping something out of a bowl. She shook her head, and the proprietor shuffled away. Natalia took a sip of the bitter concoction, grimaced and slumped back in the cracked leather seat, overwhelmed by the story of Ludwik Banach.
Ludwik Banach . . . Adam Nowak’s uncle . . . was the Provider.
It was almost impossible to believe, but it had to be true. Banach said it himself in the journal, in an entry he wrote in 1940:
I waited for this day for nine months, thinking every hour in the hellhole of Sachsenhausen about my Beata, and my nephew, Adam.
Adam had mentioned his uncle’s name—Ludwik Banach—that last night they spent together in the ammunition cellar. Natalia had forgotten about it in all the chaos of the Rising, and it hadn’t registered again until she read that entry in Banach’s journal.
It was just as Adam had said. Banach was arrested in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen. But then, after being released into the custody of Hans Frank, Banach was back in Krakow and working at the new Copernicus Memorial Library, Frank’s pet project and the reason Frank arranged for Banach’s release from Sachsenhausen. But Banach had used that opportunity to re-start the channel, the channel she’d been part of. Natalia recalled the words Banach wrote in the journal in 1942:
I realized what had to be done with documents I’d smuggled out of the library. The channel has been resumed. Many are taking risks to preserve what little is left of our humanity. May God grant that our efforts are not in vain.
Natalia rubbed her forehead, still scarcely able to comprehend it. Ludwik Banach was the Provider. He smuggled documents out of the library—documents describing the unspeakable atrocities taking place within Poland’s death camps—and resumed his Resistance work. Banach wrote that entry in the journal in 1942, about the same time she’d been contacted by the priest and given a new assignment. She’d been working as a conductor on the railway since being sent to Krakow by the AK. The priest was her contact, and by 1942 she had a well-established routine, working the daily round-trip from Krakow to Warsaw. With only a slight change in her routine to include “confession” at the Church of Archangel Michael and Saint Stanislaus on Wednesdays, and a modification to her black conductor’s bag, she had become part of the channel.
Natalia glanced around the sleazy café that stank of cooking grease and body odor. The bartender was reading a newspaper, and the ghostly man was asleep with his head on the bar. She was hungry but couldn’t bear the thought of what might have been in the bowl. She took another sip of the bitter coffee, then propped her elbows on the table and tried to sort things out.
Was it just pure chance that she and Adam had met in Warsaw, in the midst of the Rising, neither one knowing of their mutual connection through Ludwik Banach? As improbable and remarkable a coincidence as it seemed, there was no other explanation.
Natalia thought about their conversation that last night in Warsaw when she and Adam had huddled in the ammunition cellar. Adam had told her about his uncle, Ludwik Banach, who was arrested in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen, then his aunt’s arrest the next day. “I’m sure they’re both dead by now,” he’d said. So, on that night, just ten months ago, he hadn’t known that his uncle had been released from Sachsenhausen four years earlier.
But someone knew. The British, someone at SOE, must have learned just recently about Banach’s release from Sachsenhausen. And they knew he’d been sent back to Krakow in the custody of Hans Frank. Why else would they send her a message instructing her to locate the Provider?
Natalia left the café and walked quickly through the mostly deserted streets of the eastern Kazimierz District, avoiding eye contact with the occasional cripples and beggars and hunched figures lurking in the shadows—the desperate, starving people who could slit her throat for a single zloty.
She made her way back toward the busy Stare Miasto District, where she could disappear into the flow of pedestrian traffic on a work-day morning. Her stomach ached from hunger, and she eventually spotted a small bakery with a half-dozen poppy seed rolls in the otherwise empty display case. She purchased one, found a bench on the Rynek Glowny and sat down, thinking carefully about what to do next.
Why was the message sent to her? If SOE needed to contact the Provider why wouldn’t they have sent the message to the priest? Natalia took a bite of the poppy seed roll, then another, and it was all gone. She was still hungry. She considered walking back to the bakery to buy another when the answer suddenly struck her.
SOE didn’t send the message to the priest because they don’t know about him. They sent it to her because she was their only contact. She was the only one they knew of with knowledge about the Provider.
Natalia’s stomach growled, but she ignored it, trying to sort out the mystery. There were only three people besides the priest who knew that the documents she smuggled out of Krakow originated with someone called the Provider: Falcon, Colonel Stag and Adam. She felt a lump in her throat when she thought about Adam and what they might have had together, in some other place, at some other time.
But Adam had died that night at Raczynski Palace.
That left Colonel Stag or Falcon. The hair on the back of her neck bristled, remembering her last encounter with the drunken, abusive Falcon. But he wasn’t high enough in the AK chain of command to have contact with SOE.
Was it Stag? She remembered what the colonel had said the day she arrived in Warsaw with the smuggled documents: “You’ve done excellent work. And so has the Provider, whoever he or she is.” Stag’s uncertainty about the Provider’s gender indicated he also hadn’t known Banach’s identity.
Natalia stood up and walked around the square to clear her mind. In the end it was insignificant how the British had learned Banach’s secret identity. What really mattered was what they didn’t know. They know Banach is the Provider, but they don’t know about the journal.
And they didn’t know about Banach’s
stunning discovery in January of 1945, one of the last entries in the journal. As Natalia recalled the revelation she had read in that entry, icy fingers raced up her spine. What if I’m the only other person who knows this? Banach is gone. Is it all up to me?
Natalia reached into her vest pocket and touched the journal.
She felt very alone.
Thirty-Four
8 JUNE
AT HIS OFFICE IN BERLIN, General Andrei Kovalenko hung up the telephone and banged his fist on the massive oak desk. “Výdi von!” he shouted at the orderly who had just entered the office carrying a tray of coffee and biscuits. As the orderly scurried away, the general glared at Captain Andreyev, who sat across from him. “What the hell is that son of a bitch, Tarnov, trying to pull?” he demanded.
“He’s NKVD,” Andreyev replied. “You never know with them.”
The general gestured toward the phone. “That was the American, Colonel Meinerz, the head of their War Crimes Investigation Team. He wants to know why the NKVD is demanding that Hans Frank’s records be sealed. It was the first I’d heard of it. Apparently, Tarnov called him and didn’t bother to inform me.” Kovalenko leaned over the desk. “And how did Tarnov find out about the American diplomat’s visit to Sachsenhausen?”
“I think Major Vygotsky, the commander of the camp detail, was the leak, sir. He’s disappeared.”
The general pulled a cigarette from a crumpled pack and snapped his gold-plated lighter three times. It didn’t light. “Goddamned piece of shit,” he grumbled and tossed it into the wastebasket.
Captain Andreyev pulled out his own lighter and lit the general’s cigarette.
Kovalenko stared at the younger officer, thinking, considering. Andreyev had been with him a long time. The young officer had put his own life at risk, and lost his eye, rescuing Kovalenko from a Luftwaffe attack in Stalingrad. He could be trusted. And now, perhaps, he could be useful. “What I’m about to tell you, Captain Andreyev, stays between the two of us.”
The Katyn Order Page 21