They were the elite, the ad hoc Underground government of the entire southern region of their now invisible country and the military staff of a headquarters for scattered partisan encampments that defended their small piece of free land in the middle of the Thousand Year Reich. They regularly moved from one society to another using faked documents, faked histories, entire faked lives, to supporttheir activities among the German occupiers. They continued a resistance movement dedicated more to cultural survival than active warfare, and as the decades had gone by they had turned more and more from guns and bombs and sabotage to education and economics and politics. Still, they were at war, and as they struggled to maintain contact with their thousand-year-old history and to keep the local population from sinking completely into the mire of ignorance and semistarved slavery, they did not lose sight of their need to remain a military outpost, defending their borders and preparing for the inevitably violent uprising that would overthrow their brutal oppressors and resurrect their ancient, beloved homeland.
Though it was not completely shut, Zosia knocked at the door of Julia’s flat. Olek greeted her with a broad smile. Eighteen years ago, when she was only eighteen, Julia had been assigned to infiltrate a government office in Berlin. She worked in the Security Ministry as a secretary, moving up from the typing pool to a trusted position handling an entire department’s files. She carefully maneuvered herself into advantageous personal relationships, including having a torrid affair with a young and handsome Party official, and after two years of patiently feeding information back to her people, she had an opportunity to complete her mission and plant a deterrent bomb in a suitable location. She returned not only having successfully completed her assignment but with a bulging belly. Though she refused to name the father, she decided to keep the baby, and the gangly, brown-haired, sixteen-year-old youth who greeted Zosia was the happy result.
“Colonel Król!” Olek snapped to attention and saluted Zosia with comic seriousness.
“Cut the crap,” Zosia snapped, fed up by all the teasing her new commission had earned her.
“Just showing proper respect for our youngest female colonel, and, of course, the soon-to-be wife of a powerful Council member!” Olek remarked with military precision.“Not even thirty yet.” Olek whistled his admiration.
“I’ve been on active duty for sixteen years,” Zosia retorted, “and it’s well past time I get proper recognition. I should be on that Council!”
Olek winked to try to ease Zosia’s irritation. “I just figured that if they tolerate you and Uncle Adam, then they’ll tolerate anybody and there’s hope for me!”
Sometimes her reputation as spoiled-brat-cum-golden-girl, the brave, talented, impetuous, and adored youngest daughter of powerful parents, annoyed Zosia. At other times, she used her position to exquisite effect. Right now, she simply ignored Olek’s gibes. “Where’s your mother?”
Olek shrugged. “Out.”
“Drinking?”
“Probably.”
“I hope she makes it to the wedding. She’s my maid of honor, after all,” Zosia fretted, but not very convincingly.
“What do you need her for?”
“I don’t, I just need her closet,” Zosia answered as she tromped past Olek into the apartment. “Fashion emergency.”
With a bit of stuffing the shoes fit well enough, and Zosia did not suffer unduly as she marched forward to take Adam’s hand. Adam looked quite dashing in the uniform he had chosen to wear. The uniform matched his most commonly assumed identity, that of an SS major, but he had carefully removed the obnoxious Nazi paraphernalia that was usually attached and had covered the German insignia with the shields and decorations of his own rank in the Home Army. Or rather, his mother probably had. Adam was not particularly handy with needle and thread or, in fact, any other domestic object. Nor was Zosia, and the pair’s combined gross domestic incompetence was the source of many jokes and wagers among their friends and comrades.
The ceremony was held outside in the crisp October air, and with the inspiration of the wind rustling the leaves and the bright sunshine glinting through the pines, Zosia and Adam quieted their natural exuberance and solemnly pledged themselves to each other. After the ceremony, the touching display of solemnity did not last very long, and the wedding party soon became raucous. Adam and Zosia joined in the dancing and drinking and merrymaking until early the following morning and then absconded quietly, mounting a horse and disappearing into the predawn mist that covered the pine woods in an ethereal cloak of gray.
5
GRAY. GRAYNESSEVERYWHERE. Gray walls, gray floor, gray ceiling. Even the wooden door had a gray patina. His clothes were gray from dirt, his skin, sallow and gray from imprisonment. As the gray fluorescent bulb flickered day in and day out, he thought he would go mad if he did not see the sun soon. He didn’t though. He just waited, aching, hungry, scared, and bored in a demihell of gray.
While he waited, a routine of sorts developed. They continued to feed him, delivering food in the morning and the evening; he was able to visit the toilet twice a day, just after breakfast and just after his dinner, but otherwise he never left his cell. His new cellmates, two friends from the same factory, had no reason to trust him, and their conversation was somewhat limited as he did not trust them either. By virtue of his seniority, he claimed one of the two cots for himself. They could have ganged up on him and seized it, but they did not, opting instead to share the other cot between them. The two were taken out and interrogated regularly, and his heart went out to each as he heard their cries of pain, but when they returned, he did not bother being solicitous. Let them offer each other comfort.In any case, they were Germans—union organizers, he gathered from their occasional conversations—and for that reason alone he was not much inclined to like them. Let them enjoy the bestiality their master race had inflicted on its subject peoples. Let them understand what it felt like to be labeled as somehow inferior.
Monique. That was the word his eyes settled on. The writer had used blood to draw a heart and inscribe the name across it. His eyes wandered further, searching out the next graffito in a familiar routine. Dona eis requiem. He heard the words sung, whispered almost, in his mind. It was the funeral of a friend, and a stranger stood next to him in the church singing quietly, mourning her loss. He had not looked at her face, his eyes had been too intent on Allison and her husband, only a few pews away. He remembered how, unaware that she was being observed, she discreetly made the sign of the cross. It was then that he had realized how very little he knew about her. His eyes returned to the wall and the word Freiheit scratched near his cot. Freedom. Then there was the long polemic near the door. Each day he managed to decipher a bit more of the rambling sentences. Each line was more incoherent than the last, as the writer had slowly succumbed to daily torture.
Done with reading the graffiti, he lay on his cot, exhausted and bored, and watched as his two companions wrote furtive notes with pens and paper they had somehow managed to acquire.
“What are you staring at?” one of them asked accusingly.
He shook his head at his faux pas. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“Do you want a bit of paper?” the second one asked, rather more helpfully. “We’ll see that the note gets out.”
He shook his head again, then rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “There’s no one out there,” he said as if talking about God.“No one at all.”
The second one stood and walked over to his cot.“No one?”
A series of faces passed through his mind: his little sister, his mother, his father, his friends, Allison. He felt an urge to confide in his cellmate but blinked the deadly impulse away with the faces. “No one,” he repeated in a voice that indicated further questions would be unwelcome. There was an awkward silence, and then the union organizer pursed his lips as if preparing to ask another question. He decided to preempt it, and taking in the two with his eyes, he asked, “So what have you two lads been up to that has
gotten the local cops so riled?”
That’s all it took. The union organizer was an idealist and talked freely of his traitorous beliefs, smiling with pleasure at the rare opportunity to have an interested audience. Only the sound of the door being opened interrupted his long monologue. All three prisoners looked with trepidation at the two men who entered. One was their usual guard, the other an officer. As the guard herded the two union organizers to the far side of the room to bar their exit, the officer beckoned imperiously to him. He smiled at his two comrades as they cowered inthe corner. “I guess you won’t need to share the cot anymore,” he quipped as he obediently rose to his feet. He submitted to having his hands bound behind his back, and then he was shoved toward the door.
Rather pointlessly, one of the union organizers called out, “Good luck,” as he disappeared down the hall.
The court was a modest affair: a simple wooden table with two chairs, one occupied by a harried-looking military official sitting in judgment and the other by a prosecutor who presided over stacks of documents. Off to the side a private sat at a small table and took notes. It was late afternoon and everyone in the courtroom was obviously tired.
He approached the bench as ordered; there was no defense attorney, no crossexamination; he stood helpless and alone as his guard retreated to the far wall to light a cigarette. Sighing heavily, the prosecutor set down his cigarette and began impatiently searching through a stack of files. Finally finding the right one, the prosecutor pulled it out, slumped back into his chair, and finished the cigarette, fussily waving away the cloud of smoke it had produced.
It took about five minutes for the charges to be read. Crossing the border turned into a litany of crimes: escape from imprisonment, unauthorized departure from his place of work, falsifying documents, resisting arrest, corruption and bribery, deception, fraud, besmirching the reputation of the Reich, violation of national borders, smuggling . . . He stopped listening. They were throwing the book at him. It was, quite literally, overkill since his escape attempt—his second criminal conviction!—was in and of itself sufficient to get him the death penalty. As the prosecutor concluded by summarizing the evidence and reading out his confession, the judge stirred and prepared to pass sentence.
“I want counsel,” he demanded into the momentary silence.
The bald statement stunned them all, then finally the judge found the wherewithal to answer, “You have abrogated that right.”
“That’s impossible. I demand a defense.”
“Be silent. You will not speak out of turn,” the judge responded coldly, trying to hide his irritation.
“I want a defense.”
“You have no right to an attorney. Now be silent!”
“Then I want my turn to speak. I demand an opportunity to defend myself.”
“You will not make demands of this court!” the judge snapped angrily.
“I demand—”
“Shut up!”
He refused to stay quiet. He shouted out his opinions over the objections of the court and the senseless pounding of the judge’s gavel. As it degenerated into a shouting match, his guard threw down his cigarette, carefully ground it out with his boot, and approached his prisoner. Assuming the guard would try to drag him away, he rushed to vent his years of outrage and anger, but the guard was in no mood for such physical exertion. The guard swung the butt ofhis pistol at the back of his prisoner’s head and watched impassively as the defendant crumpled to the floor, thus restoring silence and dignity to the courtroom.
“Guilty,” muttered the judge, ticking a box on a sheet of paper. “Sentence: death,” he added, checking another little box on the form. He carefully placed the sheet on a stack of papers, and as the prisoner was dragged out of the room, the judge sighed, rubbed his forehead, then called out,“Next!”
6
“HERE’YOUR ADDRESS,” Richard snorted as he let the slip of paper float down to Kasia’s lap. “It seems they’re moving up in the world,” he added sarcastically.
Kasia grasped the slip of paper and read the address. “Poznan? Are they registered there?”
“Posen,” Richard snapped testily.“No, but your sister was granted a work permit and a temporary, foreign-employee residence permit. I assume your parents are living with her since they wouldn’t be able to resist going ‘home’ as they would call it.”
Kasia suppressed a bitter reply. Richard had only met her parents once, and their unremitting hostility toward him had left its impression. Fascist murderer, her father had called him. Baby thief, her mother had said, tears in her eyes. Pigheaded ignoramuses, Richard had called them, deliberately sacrificing their children’s future to a chimerical nonsense. Kasia held the paper tightly in her hand and asked imploringly, “Do you think I could try another visit?”
Richard motioned to the servant to light him a cigarette. “You know, in my position, these things are not easy,” he replied coldly.
“I know, darling.”
Richard smoked in silence for a moment. Kasia stared wide-eyed at him, wordlessly pleading. With each puff of the cigarette he felt a little more mellow, and finally relenting, he said, “I’ll check with the authorities.”
The building had been constructed sometime in the sixties or seventies: a massive tower of moldering concrete, misfitted windows, and dangling electrical wires. The concrete steps that led around and around, up innumerable flights, had huge chunks chipped away from overuse, poor maintenance, and vandalism. Here and there in the walls the slabs had chipped down to the rusting metal bars that threaded their way through as structural supports.
Kasia stopped on the eleventh floor, and once she had caught her breath, she turned into the hallway and began inspecting the doors. The numbers indicatedthat she had miscounted and had one more stairway to climb, so she returned to the steps and dragged herself up another flight. When she finally achieved the eleventh floor, she walked down the gloomy hallway peering at the faded numbers on each door until she found the appropriate one. There was a small nameplate next to the door and in tiny handwriting was written her sister’s name.
Kasia rang the bell and waited. She had not warned anyone she was coming, and she had deliberately chosen the dinner hours so that she would have the best chance of finding someone at home.
“Who’s there?” a voice asked in German.
“I have news of Kasia,” she answered.
The door opened a tiny width and a young woman peered out. “Who are you?”
Kasia looked into the face of her younger sister and was ready to reveal herself, but her sister recognized her and slammed the door shut before she could say a word. A muffled “Go away!” came at her like a knife through the door.
Kasia rang the bell again and pressed her ear to the door. Inside she could hear an argument, and she continued to ring the bell insistently. Again the door opened, this time held by Kasia’s father. He motioned her inside, but even as she stepped through, her sister pushed past her and left the apartment. A man whom Kasia did not know approached and stared at her with undisguised curiosity, then dutifully followed Kasia’s sister out the door and down the hall.
“Your brother-in-law,” her father explained. “They’re married, though of course they never got official permission.” He led her to the dinner table where her mother and brother were seated but did not offer her a seat. Kasia seated herself, and grabbing one of the glasses on the table, poured herself some water from a pitcher.
“It’s tap water,” her brother warned. “It will make a fine lady like you quite sick if you’re not used to it.”
Kasia already felt so sick from her pregnancy that she found herself pushing the glass away, even though she had not meant to.
“What do you want from us?” her mother asked wearily. “Does your husband need our winter coats for his dog? Or maybe he would like to steal your sister’s child to clean his toilet?”
“Mama . . . ,” Kasia began, but stopped as her mother raised a hand in warnin
g.
“Do not call me mother! They stole two children from me, Kasia! Two innocents taken as babes from my arms. Your brothers! Stolen so that they could become some other couple’s adopted children or so that they could slave in some carpet factory weaving their fine carpets. Torn from my arms because I did not have a legal marriage, a legal marriage which they would not grant to me! They were stolen, but you, you harlot, you go voluntarily into their homes, you sleep with that man you call a husband, you produce children for him! You carry some piece of paper they’ve given you to prove your worth, but in here”—Kasia’smother tapped her chest dramatically—“in here, you are hollow. You are no daughter of mine.”
“I’ve brought pictures of the children. Your grandchildren, Mama.”
“I am not your mother!”
“Darling,” Kasia’s father soothed his wife, “let her speak.”
“My husband does not steal children,” Kasia stated. “Your sons were taken decades ago, before I was born, before Richard was born. If only you would get to know him, you would see, he is a good man.”
“A good man! There is no such thing as a good German! The only good German is a dead German!” Kasia’s brother inserted angrily.
“Hatred gets us nowhere,” Kasia replied quietly. “I have my reasons for what I do, for what I have done . . .”
“What reasons could explain such a betrayal?” Kasia’s father asked pointedly.
“I can’t explain, Papa. You must have faith in me. We do not need to discuss our differences. I just wanted to tell you about the children, to show you their pictures, to see if we can offer you any help—”
The Children's War Page 4