by Leon Silver
There wasn’t much around to make Tolek smile. Halls with rows of cots; public showers and toilets; endless lines for cafeteria food on trays. The only camps he’d ever been on (also his only time away from the family fold) were the Zionist youth camps, Hashomer Hatzair – the Young Guards – where teenagers slept on cots six to a tent and ate freshly cooked food. Tolek remembered being encouraged to leave home and make aliyah – ascension to the Holy Land of Palestine. The day lectures on the marvels of immigrating to Palestine, where Jews worked the land, free from the Polish yoke. In camp they exercised every day, and were woken for night hikes by torchlight. The campers joked and laughed and did their best to be paired off with the right person for night-watch duty. At the end of the week they could go home for a decent bath and feed and boast to friends about their rough pioneering adventure. Some of Tolek’s friends did leave home and immigrate. Klara’s older sister, Neche, had immigrated to a kibbutz in Palestine and had written back with enthusiasm about the wonderful freedom of being out from underneath the Polish anti-Semitic yoke. But most Polish Jews, including the Klings family, believed Hitler would not dare take on all of Europe, that the anti-Semitic danger would pass, as it had in previous generations, and they could return to normal life in Poland.
There were only two other Jews in Tolek’s group: Singer and Hertzcovitch. Singer was a merchant, tall and strong of body. Even with the little ammunition available he had already distinguished himself as a sharpshooter, a skill he’d honed growing up on a farm. Hertzcovitch, a skinny and stooped upmarket men’s tailor, was from Bóbrki, too. He had made the Klings family’s wedding suits. He and his wife Batya and son Itskhok were close friends with Tolek, Klara and Juliusz.
Tolek and his two friends were loudly accused of antagonising Hitler, making him set his military sights on Poland to invade and control the Jews. The patriotic Jewish soldiers were shoved and abused, continuously pushed back in line with their empty trays at the canteen and tripped over when carrying their trays back to the bench to a background of cheers and laughter. Tolek took a little comfort in the fact that not all of the Polish soldiers were hostile. Some looked away with embarrassment, while some even helped pick up the spilled food.
* * *
The Germans invaded on Friday, 1 September 1939, Tolek’s twenty-ninth birthday. Early in the morning, having breakfast in the barracks, Tolek heard the droning aircraft approaching and ran out with his new companions, rushing to wave support to the Polish Air Force. Better late than never, Tolek thought. Except it wasn’t the Polish Air Force, it was the German Luftwaffe. Planes with black crosses on the wings and swastikas on the tails fell into screaming dives as bombs exploded all around. Tolek rushed back inside, where the floor was littered with food and metal plates. He locked terrified eyes with Singer and Hertzcovitch as they cowered under the heavy tables, the three of them quaking at every bang. The barracks shook as though about to tumble down.
Tolek stole out from under the dining table and ran outside. The ground shook and exploded, and panicked soldiers ran around the barracks, diving under trucks and even pushcarts, sometimes shoving each other out of the way. Tolek took refuge around the corner of a concrete building. German planes dived so low that he could see the pilots staring at him.
The first few moments of shock passed. Some soldiers, lucky enough to have loaded rifles, got on one knee, took aim and shot – uselessly – at the planes. Among the blown-up vehicles, wounded soldiers screamed in pain. Though their cries were terrifying, even worse were the silent bodies, scattered like torn rag dolls. Tolek watched as blood trickled from the crushed skull of a body nearby.
Across the road were the stables for the Polish army’s proud horses. The Polish cavalry was famous for its past glories and formed about ten per cent of the army. Go fight tanks and planes with horses. Some horses lay dead, others screamed and kicked when the soldiers came near to restrain them. Heart beating in his throat, Tolek couldn’t decide on the safest place to wait out the attack. With a dozen of his colleagues, he ran from one hiding place to another, then he suddenly realised that he had more immediate problems than being hit by falling bombs: he was in civilian clothes and could easily be shot by a Polish solider as a spy. He needed to act quickly.
Head spinning, stomach churning, he worked his way to the supply stores. Soldiers ran out carrying guns and ammunition – the rumours were correct, these war supplies had been locked up. He pushed his way into the store against the traffic, bumping shoulders with stone-faced armed soldiers, until he reached the abandoned uniform shelves. There he found stacks of neatly folded uniforms: shirts, jackets, trousers, socks and boots. So they didn’t have a uniform his size? They had stacks of them. With shaking hands, he quickly stripped to his underwear and grabbed whatever he could find. The brown shirt, jacket and boots were too small and the pants were too big, but they would do. At least now he looked like a kosher Polish soldier. With a longing glance at his shirt, tailored pants and polished shoes, Tolek turned and entered the war.
* * *
Within days, Tolek’s infantry regiment had retreated from Kraków. News was they were headed back to Lwów. Along the old road near Swoszowice, he stared with stunned silence at the bombed-out houses and throngs of civilian refugees. Bodies had been dragged off the road and tossed in piles, and crushed cardboard suitcases overflowing with clothing, bed sheets, kitchen utensils and children’s toys lay discarded everywhere he looked. Among a constant stream of soldiers moving east, Tolek was one of the lucky ones, having found a seat in a column of five crowded trucks retreating from the front lines.
At some of the stops, Tolek, Singer and Hertzcovitch listened to loudly shouted army radio updates and glimpsed front-page headlines in newspapers. They didn’t believe the reports of Polish Army victories; they hadn’t seen a single Polish plane overhead nor a tank chugging along the road. Broadcasters were careful to not yet call the conflict a ‘war’. But some reports stated that the Germans were using young Polish men as human shields, or else were shipping them straight to the Reich for slave labour. Singer told Tolek that he’d heard an official radio bulletin say the Germans were shooting Jewish men of all ages, but that women and children were spared. Tolek didn’t know whether to believe it, but he gripped hope tightly to his heart. Would Bóbrki be spared from the bombing? It was a small town of no significance. He promised himself that, one way or another, he would find out if his family were all right.
On Sunday, 3 September, the trucks stopped for a break and the soldiers took lunch in a civilian camping ground. An officer approached the group, yelling and waving frantically: France and Britain had declared war on Germany. For the first time in three days, genuine smiles spread across the soldiers’ weary faces and they clashed their tin mugs in cheers. Their powerful allies had called Germany’s bluff. The general opinion of the Polish press had been that Hitler was confident the Allies would never declare war if he invaded Poland. Chamberlain had allowed Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia without censure or proclaimed warnings. Now that England and France had stood up to the bullying dictator, a ceasefire was surely just around the corner.
* * *
Tolek’s regiment stopped in Lwów to await fresh orders. Tolek knew the town well – he’d received his legal training at the Lwów University and had worked in the city as a senior law clerk for so many happy years, before he was put in charge of an office in Bóbrki. At the first opportunity, when the troops were resting, Tolek slipped out and, with full pack, helmet and rifle, jogged all the way to advocate Schrenzel’s office, where he’d worked as a law clerk – the best place to telephone Klara to see how his family were doing. Were they safe? Had they escaped the bombing? How was his little Juliusz coping? He longed to embrace his son.
But, this wasn’t his Lwów. The Lwów he trained and worked in was a bustling city full of elegant shops, restaurants and coffee houses. This town’s main streets were blocked by a crush of overloaded cars, trucks, pushcarts, horse buggi
es and pedestrians. Columns of troops marching and on trucks and horses moved east, away from the war front. All around was honking, shouting, crying, arguing, pushing and shoving. Houses and shops were boarded up, restaurants empty. Tolek knew from the army’s scuttlebutt that Lwów was on the attacking Germans’ radar. He jogged past the chic Svobody Boulevard and Promenade Alley in the park, where he had met Klara when she visited her married sister who lived in Lwów. They strolled there often while they were courting, getting to know each other. Next came the grand Rynok Square café. In their courting days, the café had stood opposite a fountain featuring a semi-clad Greek warrior, one arm raised in victory. Now the fountain was dry and listless, and a waiter in a long white apron stood like a statue in front of the deserted café, watching this mass exodus. The other coffee houses were closed. None of these refugees had the time or inclination for a coffee break – it could cost them their lives. The bored waiter yawned, not giving Tolek even a second look.
Tolek barged into his old legal office in full uniform and with frantic eyes, startling the staff.
‘I should have listened to you!’ Pan Schrenzel cried, jumping up from his desk and running towards Tolek with extended arms, his eyes flooded with tears. Weeks earlier, Tolek had tried to persuade his boss to close the practice and go for a holiday to London with the two families, as he felt that war was imminent. His boss had laughed, telling him not to be such a pessimist. Schrenzel passed on Tolek’s right, arms still stretched out. He reached the wall of his office, flattened his hands on the white plaster and started banging his head against it, repeating, ‘I should have listened to you, Tolek.’
Tolek was caught by surprise; his empty arms had been ready to receive Schrenzel. By the time he took off his helmet, unhooked his equipment and restrained his hysterical boss, there was a small dent in the white wall and blood on Schrenzel’s face.
Without asking for permission, Tolek grabbed the black telephone and rang his family. His finger trembled while he dialled, each number taking ages. He continued trying to pull Schrenzel away from the wall while talking to Klara.
‘Happy birthday, my darling, my kochanie – happy twenty-ninth! So sorry I wasn’t with you to celebrate.’ Klara, breathless, sounded so happy that Tolek was sure she was smiling ear to ear. The connection severed at the railway station was back instantly and Tolek felt her quivering touch on his neck. ‘We made a cake for you. Juliusz blew out the candles – all twenty-nine of them.’ She laughed.
Tolek could hear Juliusz in the background and imagined him clutching at his mother’s knee to wish his tatte a happy birthday. He had a flashback of his parents and brothers setting up the tables for dinner at the restaurant, and Juliusz, knowing his tatte would soon be home from the office, waiting at the door like a puppy, dressed neatly, hair parted. Klara always stayed back to let Juliusz have time with his tatte before she greeted Tolek.
‘How are you all, everything okay?’
‘Yes, no bombs here. We’re all doing well. Collar laundry is quiet. Not too many businessmen worrying about starched and pressed business-shirt collars right now. But I go there every day.’
Tolek laughed in return; Klara deserved to hear it. They had set up the collar laundrette before Juliusz was born and Klara was totally committed to running it.
‘I’m in Lwów. I can be home in a few hours.’
‘No! Don’t!’ Klara cried, all humour gone.
‘Tatte, come home!’ Juliusz yelled.
‘No, don’t listen.’ Klara was firm. ‘Stay with the army. You must.’
‘No one will miss me,’ Tolek promised her. ‘The army is a mess. Buildings have been bombed, records burned or lost. Many casualties. Soldiers missing everywhere.’
‘No one will know?’ Klara reeled off the names of everyone they knew, neighbours and restaurant regulars. ‘After the war there will be questions.’
Tolek’s father came on the line. ‘There will be a ceasefire as soon as France and England start fighting instead of talking,’ the Great War veteran assured his oldest son. ‘The Germans will retreat. You can’t desert. You have to stay with the army.’
Desert? To Tolek, it was simply going home.
Klara came back on to beg her husband to remain with the army. ‘Listen to your tatte, Tolek, please, please, stay.’ Pause. ‘I want you home, so much, but please stay till the ceasefire.’
Tolek stared at his helmet, rifle and pack leaning against the wall. He was a soldier in the Polish Army, no longer the free law clerk with a loving wife and son at home. Of course he couldn’t leave, especially as he was a Jew: he had to be seen as twice as loyal.
‘I kiss you on the telephone now, Klara and Juliusz, and I make you this promise: I will stay, but I will come back to you as soon as there is a ceasefire.’ Tolek stared at the receiver in his hand – he heard a loud kiss down the line, and sent one back, then, crash bang, the connection was cut.
Tolek made Pan Schrenzel drink a full glass of vodka. That gave him respite enough to smack on his helmet, pick up his gear and slink out of the office.
‘Can you please… Please, can I get my family and come with you on the army truck?’ Schrenzel begged as his tears overflowed. ‘I should have listened to you, Tolek. We would now be in England.’
Tolek jogged back to camp, the image of Schrenzel’s bulging eyes and bleeding forehead smeared with white plaster still in his mind, but he shoved his boss’s desperate words away. He needed to concentrate on now. On this war. He had to stay with the army until he could go home to his wife and child.
2 The war’s weight
Tolek spent the next week in a semiconscious whirl. The infantry regiment – normally around 3000 soldiers – had been broken up into smaller groups to minimise the targets for the Messerschmitt dive bombers. The soldiers in the trucks retreated in uncontrolled panic in all directions, some crossing their own tracks before nodding in silent hopelessness when circling back upon the same farmhouse or village. They were bombed several times, hustled out of the trucks to fall face down behind any cover as fragile as a bush. They scrambled for food in deserted farms and pulled water from wells.
At one well Tolek stopped the men before they could drink. He checked that saboteurs had not dumped corpses of animals and humans to poison the water. One of Tolek’s tormentors grabbed the full water bucket from Tolek’s hands and fed it to a horse. The soldiers stood and watched. The horse drank then trotted off. The tormentor yelled that it was safe to drink. Tolek warned that they needed to wait longer but no one listened. Another soldier declared that Tolek should know all about well poisoning: ‘It was the Jews’ fault. Everyone knows they like to poison wells.’
The other soldiers listened in silence. Some of Tolek’s comrades looked away in shame, and he made a note of those faces for the future.
The soldiers struggled on, heading southwest towards the Hungarian border. It was surprising how quickly Tolek had become used to the new rules of a chaotic war. Once, caught in another bottleneck on the road, Tolek watched a small girl, about three years old, crying hysterically next to her mother’s corpse as it lay on the verge, the mother’s hand still clutching the handle of a shot-up cardboard suitcase. Another woman left a refugee cluster, went over to the little girl and picked her up. Despite the girl’s screaming, the woman cuddled the infant and took her along. The little girl leaned over the woman’s shoulder, crying and reaching for her dead mother until they were out of sight. Tolek shook his head with sorrow. Did the little girl at least know her own name, an anchor to her past life?
What if Klara and Juliusz were now on the road? Tolek scanned the refugee children with their drooped heads and listless arms while he prayed over and over that his family were still safe at home, supporting each other as they had been when he had phoned.
On 16 September, two weeks and two days since the German invasion, the officers called the men to order in the army barracks mess hall in the small town of Stryj, sixty-five kilometres south of Lwów. The
y allowed the men to remain sitting; a bad sign.
A colonel they hadn’t seen before got up on the table and took a minute to examine the drawn, attentive faces below him. He stretched his bottom lip as though testing its flexibility then said, in a choking voice, ‘My colleagues, my comrades in arms, I’ve been commissioned to inform you that the war is lost for Poland.’
A palpable silence rose from the soldiers.
‘Men, you have two choices. Take off your uniform and run through the lines back home, or go into exile with the army into Hungary.’
Tolek exchanged glances with Singer and Hertzcovitch. Would Hungary be safer? Hungary had a strong relationship with Nazi Germany. Singer shrugged and Hertzcovitch nodded. For the time being, maybe.
‘The radio reports of victories?’ a soldier murmured.
The colonel dismissed the question with a wave. ‘Our hope of the Allies’ intervention has not happened yet. They are still talking instead of attacking. As soon as they enter the war and there is a ceasefire, we will return. Very soon,’ the colonel added, ‘tomorrow, the next day, next week – Poland can’t take much more of the bombing and tank attacks – we will officially be surrendering to the German dogs. September 1939 will go down as one of the most calamitous months in Polish history.’
Tolek’s mouth went dry as he thought of Klara and Juliusz, Mamme and Tatte, Ijio and Lonek, abandoned to the invading Germans. He watched the blood drain from the faces of his Jewish friends. They all had families back home.
No one moved. Since the first day of their recruitment, the men had been conditioned to take orders, and now they were being told to think for themselves.