The Katyn Order

by Douglas W. Jacobson

  Adam reflected on his conversation with Whitehall the other day when they were alone in the drawing room of the mansion before dinner with Kovalenko. One of Whitehall’s comments had struck a chord: Get proof about Katyn, something even the Americans can’t ignore. He thought about the comment, remembering the Poles he knew in Chicago—most of them, like himself, first or second generation immigrants, and all of them patriotic Americans. While they kept alive their Polish heritage, they were as fiercely proud to be an American as he was.

  But Whitehall’s comment had made him think. If there were solid proof of Russia’s treachery at Katyn, would the Americans stand up to Stalin and help Poland? Would his adopted country stand beside the country of his birth at the hour of her greatest need?

  Adam knew what the answer would be if he asked any of the hundreds of AK commandos he’d fought with over the years, the proud, stubborn Poles who were fighting to the death to win their freedom. The British and the French may have let them down, but Adam knew that every one of them believed America would be there when it counted. He hoped it was true.

  He suddenly felt very tired. He let his head fall back on the seat and closed his eyes, wondering what he would say when he met Natalia.

  Thirty-Nine

  13 JUNE

  THE LATE AFTERNOON SUN was quite warm when Adam exited Krakow’s Central Station with his suit coat draped over his arm. For the first time since he’d been deported by the Germans in 1939, he walked the familiar streets leading to the Stare Miasto District, grateful the city that had once been his home had survived the war with little damage.

  Sweat trickled down the back of his collar as he crossed the Planty park and stopped outside of St. Florian’s Gate to get his bearings. He looked around, observing his surroundings and noticing faces. Then he passed through the gate and the remnants of the ancient fortifications, and entered the old city.

  Adam walked a short distance down Florianska Street, weaving through crowds of people. He turned into a narrow cobblestone lane, barely wide enough for a horse and carriage, then circled around and came back to where he’d started to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Repeating the process another time, he continued down Florianska to the Rynek Glowny.

  Adam paused for a moment at the northern end of the vast market square, taking in the view of the Mariacki Church, the Cloth Hall, the vendors’ horses and carriages. He’d spent many Sunday afternoons on this square as a boy, sitting at a café with his aunt and uncle, eating ice cream and feeding the pigeons. And he’d spent many hours here after he returned from America, sitting at those same cafés, sipping coffee or beer while studying law books.

  The square was much the same, largely undamaged by the war, but it felt different. It was quieter, more subdued. A few of the vendors were at their stations, but there was little in their carriages for sale. And many of the cafés were closed, their awnings rolled up, chairs stacked upon the tables. Adam took a last look around, then walked across the square, proceeding south along Grodzka to Wawel Castle, heading for the rendezvous point in the Kazimierz District.

  An hour later, he entered the courtyard of the Church of Archangel Michael and Saint Stanislaus. There was no one around. Adam checked his watch—five o’clock—he was right on time. He lit a cigarette and wandered over to the pond, pretending to study the statue of Saint Stanislaus in the center. The saint had a stern expression on his stone face, as if he were disappointed by human frailty. A few minutes passed. Then a few more and still no one appeared except an elderly man who looked like a caretaker, carrying a basket filled with grass clippings.

  The elderly man walked toward him and seemed to be heading for the gate when he suddenly dropped the basket at Adam’s feet. The grass spilled out, covering Adam’s shoes.

  “Ach, what a fool. I’m sorry, sir.” The man bent over and scooped the clippings off the ground as Adam shook his shoes clear.

  Adam instinctively bent down to help, and the man whispered, “Dietla and Starowislna, at six o’clock. Get on the tram for Podgorze.” Then the man picked up the last of the clippings and headed out of the gate.

  Despite all of her efforts to keep her emotions under control, Natalia gasped when Adam boarded the tram. She quickly covered it up with a cough when the woman across the aisle glanced at her, but it had been enough, and he turned in her direction. Their eyes met for an instant before the crowd pushed him toward the front of the car.

  She could feel the flush in her face and turned to look out the window, not trusting herself if their eyes should happen to meet again. Is it really him? Several minutes passed. Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer and shifted in her seat, stealing a glance at the front of the car, certain she had made a mistake.

  Adam was halfway up the aisle, wedged between two taller men. He wore a dark blue suit and carried a briefcase. He looked older. There were creases at the corners of his eyes that she didn’t remember, and his shoulders sagged a bit, as though he was tired. She swallowed hard when she noticed the thin scar on the left side of his face and his ragged left ear. Half of it had been torn away. Tears clouded her vision, and she turned back to the window.

  The tram rumbled over the Vistula River, and Natalia gazed at the slow-moving gray water, fighting the urge to look at him, to get up and push through the crowd. Vivid memories of the last time she had seen him suddenly returned with a rush—Dluga Street in Warsaw, fires raging out of control and artillery shells shrieking overhead as he headed off to the hospital in Raczynski Palace in his suicidal effort to protect the trapped and wounded AK commandos. Natalia had been certain that night she’d never see him again. Then she had heard the reports a week later, confirming that the SS had murdered everyone in the hospital.

  And now, as if he’d risen from the dead, Adam was here.

  The tram slowed to a stop in the Podgorze District, where the Jewish ghetto had been. Natalia stood up, made her way to the door and stepped from the tram. She could feel him following her. The streets were busy with people on their way home from work or the market, clutching bags half-full with the few meager groceries they could find. She walked with a steady pace, blending in with the crowd but making sure he could keep her in sight.

  She continued around a few corners, along the route she’d planned, until she came to Lwowska Street, lined on one side by the high brick walls of the former ghetto. Replacing the German propaganda placards that had been ripped down, the invented word, grunVald, with a large capital “V,” had been painted along the wall. It was a popular form of anti-German graffiti in remembrance of the Medieval Battle of Grunwald when the Kingdom of Poland defeated the Teutonic Knights. Natalia followed the ghetto wall for a hundred meters, then crossed the street at the intersection with Dabrowskiego, passing through a doorway and down a flight of creaking wooden steps. Scarcely able to breathe, she stood in the center of the dimly lit cellar and waited.

  A few minutes passed before Natalia heard him descending the staircase. She fidgeted, suddenly feeling very conspicuous. When he stepped into the room, tears flooded her eyes. She had fantasized about this moment ever since Warsaw, wishing in her heart that it were possible, but knowing in her mind that it wasn’t. But it had happened. He was alive. The impossible dream had come true. And now, as he stood in front of her, no words would come.

  “I watched you,” Adam said, “in Warsaw . . . that night on Dluga Street, from a window in Raczynski Palace.”

  Natalia felt a chill and wrapped her arms around her chest. “I thought I’d never see you . . .” Her voice trailed off and she turned away, a sudden rush of anger, shame and frustration, washing over her all at once. She had believed he was dead. You gave up hope. You don’t deserve this. The shame was almost more than she could bear.

  “Natalia?” His voice was quiet, soft.

  She closed her eyes and rocked slowly back and forth. Tears trickled down her cheek.

  After a moment he asked, “Have you found Ludwik Banach?”

  Natali
a spun around and glared at him, scarcely able to believe what she’d just heard. “Have I what? You come back . . . you just show up after all this time . . . and then you ask me . . .” She dropped to her knees and buried her face in her hands.

  Adam knelt down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I thought it was a safe place to begin.”

  She looked up at him. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. I can explain.” He stood and offered his hand to help her up.

  Natalia ignored his hand and stood up on her own, shaking her head. “Not now, not here.” She took a breath to calm herself. “I haven’t found your uncle. He was alive, and here in Krakow as recently as January of this year. But I don’t know where he went.”

  “Was he captured by the Russians?”

  “He left before they got here.” She watched Adam run a hand over the scar on his face, his brow furled, as he absorbed the news. “He kept a journal,” she added.

  “A journal? You have it?”

  “Yes, it’s all there: how he came to Krakow and started my smuggling channel, Hans Frank, all of it.” She cocked her head. “You told SOE about me. You’re the one who asked them to contact me so I could find your uncle.”

  Adam nodded. “Colonel Whitehall, the head of SOE, brought me back to London. Then he sent me to Berlin with a War Crimes Investigation Team. Whitehall told me that Banach was ‘the Provider’ and I eventually realized that you were part of the channel. It’s a long story. Perhaps, sometime . . .”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I need to see that journal,” he said.

  “I’ve hidden it. We’ll have to be careful.”

  “Yes, of course. But he must have written something—left some clue about where he would go.”

  “No, there wasn’t anything like that. But there was something else.” Natalia glanced up at the ceiling as a truck rumbled past on the street outside. She waited until the sound disappeared, then took a few steps deeper into the cellar, away from the stairs.

  Adam followed her.

  “The last entry your uncle made in the journal was this past January,” Natalia whispered. “He mentioned a document he had discovered in the Copernicus Memorial Library, where he was working.” She moved closer. “It was a copy of an order, signed by Joseph Stalin in 1940, authorizing the murders in the Katyn Forest.”

  Adam stiffened. “Good God! You have it?”

  “No, I don’t. Banach mentioned the order in his journal . . . but I don’t know where it is.”

  Adam rubbed the left side of his face again, and paced around the cellar. He stopped and turned back to her. “In your message you said, we are not pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard. Where did you learn that phrase?”

  “Those were the last words your uncle wrote in the journal: to whoever reads this journal: find Adam Nowak and tell him that we shall never be pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard of the NKVD.” There were voices in the street, and Natalia held up her hand, listening. It sounded like children, young boys. There was a tinny clanking sound as if a can were being hit with a stick, then footsteps running away, laughter, a few shouts. Then it was quiet again. “We should leave now.”

  Adam stopped her with a gentle touch on her shoulder. “That phrase—pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard—it’s from an unpublished paper my uncle wrote in 1935. Hans Frank copied it and used it in a paper of his own a year later. I discovered it when I was in London.”

  Natalia shrugged. “I don’t understand.”

  “My uncle and Hans Frank knew each other.”

  Natalia nodded. “I know; he wrote about that in the journal. But I still don’t understand. Why would that be the message he wanted to send to you?”

  Adam looked up at the ceiling, as though he was trying to recall something. “I don’t understand either,” he said, “but there’s something else you need to know. When I discovered that my uncle had been released from Sachsenhausen, it caught the attention of the NKVD.”

  Natalia suddenly felt cold again, icy fingers on the back of her neck.

  Adam continued. “An officer by the name of Tarnov has issued an arrest warrant for him.”

  “Is he here? This Tarnov, is he here in Krakow?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Natalia started for the stairs. “We have to leave. I’ll go first—”

  Adam reached out and took her hand. “That copy of Stalin’s order. We have to find it. We don’t have much time.”

  “What do you mean, ‘much time’?”

  “In a few weeks there’s going to be a conference in Germany,” Adam said. His face flushed and he talked quickly. “It’ll be in a place near Berlin called Potsdam. They’re going to decide what happens to Poland.”

  “Hah! We both know what’s going to happen to Poland. The Russians will gobble us up, and the world won’t give a damn.”

  “Not if we can find that copy of the order. If we can pass it along to the right people, it could make—”

  “Stop it!” Natalia snapped, suddenly overwhelmed again. “Goddamn it, Adam, I thought you were dead! Can you understand that? Do you have any idea how I felt that last night in Warsaw when you decided to kill yourself rather than escape?” She caught herself before he could respond and backed away, waving her hands. “No, don’t say anything. I’m sorry, just give me a moment.”

  She forced herself to calm down, trying to sort things out one more time. A moment passed, and gradually she realized what she had to do. “There’s someone I have to see. Go back the way we came and get on the tram. I’m going a different way.”

  Adam balked. “But how will I find you?”

  “I’ll find you.”

  Forty

  13 JUNE

  A LONG, BLACK CITROËN drove from Krakow’s Central Station, through the Stare Miasto District and up the winding road of Wawel Hill. It circled around the castle, through the Dragon’s Den Gate and stopped next to the cathedral.

  Dmitri Tarnov got out of the auto and stomped across the courtyard. He was oblivious to the three-story arcade of spiral columns, balconies and stone archways fronting the palace rooms that had served as knights’ quarters, armories and the royal treasury during Poland’s golden age. His mind was focused on only one thing as he flashed his identification to the NKVD officer standing guard, then pushed through a discreetly hidden doorway leading to the lower level. He made his way down a hallway, removed a key from his pocket and let himself into a small, windowless room.

  Tarnov flicked on the light switch, closed the door behind him and re-locked it. Then he sat at the solitary table and stared at a row of filing cabinets containing the records of his interrogations and search of Hans Frank’s headquarters last January.

  He realized that his sudden fixation on Ludwik Banach might be nothing more than a wild goose chase. But there was something about this law professor’s connection to Frank that compelled him to dig deeper. He was determined to hunt down Ludwik Banach and find out what he knew. And the search had to start here, in these files. It had to be here somewhere, the one thing Tarnov knew he must have overlooked . . .

  After more than an hour of digging, Tarnov discovered a file he had set aside as irrelevant last January. It was labeled Staatsbibliothek Krakau. He rubbed his eyes, shifted in the hard wooden chair and opened the file. As he leafed through it, he discovered page after page of copious notes written by Hans Frank about Germanizing the Copernicus Memorial Library. Tarnov shook his head. No wonder he had tossed it to the side six months ago. Who the hell cared about a library?

  As Tarnov kept reading, however, it became obvious that this was a special project for Frank, and he had visited the library often, discussing with the staff the transfer of thousands of books and documents into the new facility. It was indeed a mission, bordering on obsession—the establishment of a new Center of German Culture right here in Krakow, with Frank at the center of it all.

  Eventually, digging
deeper into the file, a smile came across Tarnov’s face as he discovered the name of a person who worked at the library, a person with whom Frank met frequently. Ludwik Banach.

  Tarnov read further. There were more notes, written by Frank, about discussions he had with Banach on all manner of subjects—books, periodicals, works of art, the events of the war, the construction of Jewish ghettos—hinting at an importance Frank placed on Banach’s opinions. Tarnov propped his elbows on the table. What does it all mean? What else did Frank share with him?

  Tarnov continued flipping through the file, searching for anything that might provide a clue to Banach’s whereabouts. There was nothing.

  Then, at the very end, he discovered a list of people who worked at the library. With typical German thoroughness the list was complete with job descriptions, departments in which each individual worked and the dates of their employment. Tarnov studied the list, making notes, cross-referencing the information, until another name caught his attention, someone who worked closely with Ludwik Banach.

  Tarnov sat back and took a deep, satisfied breath. He circled the name, folded the list and slipped it in his pocket. He was annoyed and frustrated that he had overlooked the file earlier, but he put it out of his mind. There was still time. Banach was out there somewhere. And now he had a place to start.

  Forty-One

  14 JUNE

  NATALIA KNELT IN A PEW at the Church of Archangel Michael and Saint Stanislaus, waiting her turn for confession. She held a rosary in her hand, but she wasn’t praying. She’d stopped praying long ago, feeling betrayed by God as everything she’d known and everyone she’d loved had been crushed under the heels of fascists and communists. She wasn’t praying, but in her heart there was a feeling that hadn’t been there for a long time. There was a glimmer of light in the darkness.

  Adam was alive.

  Could there still be a chance? she wondered. After all the brutality, the killing and destruction . . . Could there still be a chance?