Zosia held the little girl in her arms, somewhat stunned by it all. Kasia stood nearby, and they both waited for Magdalena to wail at being left completely alone with strangers, but instead the child wrapped her arms around Zosia’s neck and hugged her.
“She doesn’t seem afraid,” Zosia ventured.
“Maybe she doesn’t see enough of anyone to feel at home anywhere,” Kasia suggested. Zosia handed Kasia the child and she hugged Kasia as well.
“Peter,” Zosia called, “I think you can come in now.”
“Already?” he asked quietly from the doorway. He had remained out of sight so that the nanny would not see him and report his presence to anyone, but also the three of them had guessed that Magdalena might be wild with fright and was more likely to calm down with women rather than a strange man. Pitching his voice as softly as he could, he asked tentatively,“Madzia?”
The little girl looked at him, curious and unafraid. When Kasia moved to hand her to him, Magdalena put out her arms and went naturally into his. Peter held her and hugged her and stroked her hair, saying her name over and over again. Her willingness to grab on to anyone, her determination to find a protector, tore at his heart. He had abandoned her without even knowing what he was doing, and now she was as alone in the world as he had ever been. “Oh, my little girl,” he almost sobbed, “my lonely little girl. How can I undo my mistakes?”
Kasia excused herself, and Zosia and Peter spent the afternoon getting to know the little girl. They tried all the standard games and rhymes and songs to see if she recognized anything, but she greeted each offering as if it were completely new. She was quick though, and during the afternoon Zosia taught her how to clap her hands, and with their enthusiastic encouragement, her ability to walk improved markedly. Peter watched with a growing sense of guilt and frustration as he realized that no one had taught the child anything, that she probably spent her time alone in a playpen or strapped into a carriage, making her way alone in the world with only the necessities shoved at her at the appropriate times.
Without thinking, he lit a cigarette. Zosia looked up from the finger game she had been playing with Madzia and snapped, “Put that thing out. It’s hard on the baby—both of them.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, and went to the ashtray to stub the cigarette out.
“It’s bad enough in here already without you adding to it,” Zosia continued peevishly.“No matter how many times I tell you, you always forget!”
“I said I was sorry,” he emphasized as he ground the end into the tray.
As if on cue the baby began coughing, one of those baby coughs that rack the entire body. Zosia picked her up and cuddled her while she coughed, then suggested, “We should feed her something. Let’s go to the kitchen.”
Genia and Joanna came in for their meal as well, and as they sat down at the table, Joanna pointed at the baby and asked, “Who is that?”
“Her name’s Magdalena. She’s . . .” Peter was going to say something innocuous,such as a neighbor’s child or just visiting, but the words stuck in his throat. Could he deny his daughter?
He looked up at Zosia, and they carried out a silent discussion, then Zosia said, “Go ahead.”
“Come with me, sweetie,” he said as he picked up Joanna. “I need to talk alone with you for a few minutes.”
Genia watched, glancing at her aunt for an explanation, but none was forthcoming. She shrugged; used to secrets as she was, she knew it was not her place to ask, and besides, she’d get Joanna to tell her later!
Peter retreated into the sitting room with Joanna and sat down with her on his lap. “Do you remember what I told you about my life before I came to Szaflary?”
Joanna nodded.
“You know, I lived and worked in a house near here. The people who were my . . .” He sighed, started again. “The lady who gave me orders was named Elspeth. She visited here a few days ago. Do you remember?”
Joanna nodded again.
“For nearly three years, she told me what to do, and I did it, because I had to, because I was . . . because I had to.”
“I understand,” Joanna said helpfully.
“Well, one day, she told me to behave as if I were her husband.”
“Did you?”
He nodded. “Yes, and I did with her what husbands do with their wives. We had to be very careful, because such games are illegal, and if anyone had found out, I would have been arrested and killed.”
“Did you want to play this game?” Joanna was used to dangerous games and to people giving and taking orders. None of it was really surprising.
“No, but I did. And as a result Elspeth had a baby. That’s the baby in the kitchen. She’s my daughter.” He paused but Joanna did not interrupt. “We have to keep it very secret though; you can’t tell anyone else. Not even Genia. Do you understand?”
Joanna nodded solemnly. “I swear, Dad, I’ll keep it secret.”
“Good. You understand what I did? Do you have any questions?” He felt that if she was going to chide him for his behavior, he’d prefer to get it over with.
“Does this mean she’s my sister?” Joanna asked gleefully.
“I guess so, honey,” he responded, relieved. “She’s your secret sister.”
Joanna grinned. “I have a sister! A secret sister!” she giggled. Genia had all those brothers and Stefi, but she had a secret sister!
They returned to the kitchen, and Joanna grinned at Genia, bursting with her news. But she had solemnly sworn to keep the secret, and she would do so because, as her mother put it, she was a professional.
Pawel continued seeing Liesel, indicating to his uncle, “You owe me for this, big time!” as he headed out the door yet again. Within a week, they had arrangedthat Liesel would come straight to their house to drop off the baby so that Pawel did not have to locate her in the park each day. Magdalena quickly established herself as a member of the household, and eventually even Ryszard became aware that the Vogels’ child was visiting with inexplicable regularity. He was finally driven to ask Kasia what was going on, and she explained the situation to him as they lay next to each other in bed.
The next morning, Ryszard snickered when he saw Peter and commented, “I should have guessed.” Ryszard surprised Kasia by not saying anything more, though one evening when Pawel groaned in the presence of the four adults about how tedious Liesel was, his father snapped, “Get used to it. Lie and smile and smile and lie. You’ll never be able to be yourself out there. Not until we’re free.”
Feeling somewhat sorry for Pawel, who looked stunned by the rebuke, Peter changed the subject by asking, “And when do you think that will be?”
Blowing a stream of smoke toward the ceiling, Ryszard answered, “Not in my lifetime.”
“You don’t think there’s any hope?” Peter asked.
“Not for us,” Ryszard replied. “Your people—the English—they have a chance. You have the Commonwealth, and besides, nobody’s trying to annihilate you. You might one day get autonomy, some cultural rights, then perhaps independence and then you can rebuild. But for us, shit, there’s nothing but ruin and extinction in our future. I’m surprised we’ve lasted this long, if you call the mess we have left in our land ‘lasting.’ A half-starved, illiterate population of ten or fifteen million standing on top of twenty million corpses, waiting their turn. No industry, no economy. Our language spoken in whispers, our heritage looted or destroyed. Our entire land has been turned into a strip mine—pull out all the resources and leave nothing but a wasteland.”
“We’ll survive. We did it before,” Kasia argued.
“They only tried to annihilate our culture then,” Ryszard replied. “Genocide wasn’t part of the Kulturkampf or Russification, as far as I know.”
“Well, we have managed to stop that, haven’t we?” Kasia responded.
“Just barely. Given half a chance, they’ll start again, and this time they won’t quit until the job is done,” Ryszard answered morosely.
&nbs
p; “Do you really think that’s the case?” Peter was trying to determine if Ryszard’s gloomy predictions were based on rational observation of his colleagues or if it was simply an expression of his obvious depression.
“Perhaps it’s not that hopeless,” Zosia interjected.
“Maybe it’s like 1850,” Kasia suggested, referring to roughly halfway through the 125 years her country had endured occupation and nonexistence. At the questioning glances, she explained, “You know, too long in the past to remember independence and decades away from liberation.”
Ryszard snorted. “Great. Just like us, they lived to see neither end!”
“Nevertheless,” Kasia persisted, “it was necessary to keep the dream alive. What would have happened if our people had lost faith then? Hmm?”
“Dream on, if it keeps you sane,” Ryszard responded sarcastically. “But just look how efficiently the Soviets have destroyed the other half of the country. They shot or exiled or deported into the Reich anyone who claimed to be Polish, awarded some cultural rights to the Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Byelorussians, and that’s it”—he snapped his fingers—“we’re gone! Like we never even existed! Even we accept it as a fait accompli! Look at how our demands have changed!”
“What exactly are your demands?” Peter asked.
“They are irrelevant, is what they are,” Ryszard snapped.
“Nevertheless, what are they?” Peter insisted.
“In the most extreme form,” Kasia replied, “we demand the status quo when the first international crime against us was committed: our prepartition boundaries of the old republic. Nobody takes that seriously though, centuries of violence and occupation having left their mark. The criminals have gained legitimacy through the passage of time. A fact, which I am sure, many other criminal governments have noted.”
Pawel continued, “More hopefully, we demand our independence and the territory that was ours prior to the 1939 invasion. That’s the publicly stated goal.”
“But now,” Zosia picked up the thread, “we’re working toward accepting just the territory under German occupation back. It’s just a tiny bit of what we once had, but thanks to murder and deportations, it’s the only area that still has a reasonable number of ethnic Poles.”
Kasia added, “And it’s a concession to the NAU’s attempts to normalize relations with the Soviet Union. They can stand us having aspirations contrary to the wishes of the Reich, along with all the other captive nations, but to have a quarrel with two empires . . .”
Ryszard interrupted angrily. “We don’t ask for reparations or even apologies, we don’t ask for our lands or for the resurrection of the millions of our war dead. No damages for pain and suffering, no recompense for our anguish, for the children who saw their parents murdered, for the people who lost their eyes and their limbs, for the people worked to death, for the women raped to death. We don’t ask for our loot back or for the reconstruction of our hospitals and schools, the rebuilding of our capital, the restoration of our ancient heritage— nothing, none of that! We touch our forelocks and beg the international community to acknowledge our right to breathe! And for that we are scolded for being troublesome and uppity!”
The four of them studied Ryszard, surprised by his vehemence.
“There are some in the West who denounce us as terrorists,” Ryszard fumed. “They say we deserve our fate, that we should have lain down and died quietly, that by fighting back we only cause trouble. They would call me a wrecker, Kasia is a saboteur, Zosia here is a murderer!”
Zosia glanced at Peter but he looked guiltily away. Why had he ever said something so stupid?
“They grumble that we make things difficult for them to normalize relations!” Ryszard continued. “They whine that they are tired of war, that there’s nothing to fight about, that what’s done is done! To them we are dead already, and they can’t bury our heaving corpses fast enough!”
“There are those who recognize your bravery and your courage, who defend basic human rights,” Peter offered.
“Well, they don’t do it loudly enough,” Ryszard retorted. “The mass of the NAU population is uninformed and therefore unwilling to support us. And without them, we have no hope. They’ll stand idly by and watch us be murdered, strangled to death for our criminal proximity to psychopaths. They tell us our screams disturb the peace and couldn’t we please shut up! Then they’ll feign surprise and whine that they were not warned when the psychopaths turn on them!”
Like Neville Chamberlain and the Sudetenland, like the Fourth Partition of Poland, like the phony war that existed before France was invaded. History lessons that had remained unlearned. Were they doomed to be repeated? Peter did not need to say any of these things, he knew the others were all too aware of what had gone before. Nevertheless, the Reich had been halted, there was no invasion of America, there was a balance of terror to be maintained. Were the lessons of the past insufficient to dictate the actions of the future? Was there some other way out of the mess other than direct confrontation?
He really wanted to know what Ryszard had dispassionately observed from his politically powerful position. Trying to work around the grim responses that sprang from Ryszard’s mood, Peter pressed, “Don’t you think things have settled down inside the Reich? Do you really think they’re going to try and reimplement their original plan, after all these years? Don’t you think the moderate element has a chance of holding power?”
“Other than a few people here and there, like Katerina, the entire Jewish and half-Jewish population of Europe was murdered. Where was this moderate element then?” Ryszard asked.
“But certainly there’s been some evolution within the Reich government. After Hitler died and there was that shake-up . . .” Peter suggested.
Ryszard shrugged, suddenly tired. “I don’t know where they’re going. They don’t know either. That’s the problem with absolute power—it’s so dependent on the whims of one or two personalities.”
“But then, what is your genuine goal?” Peter pleaded to know.
Ryszard responded, “There are many divergent opinions about what we can hope for and what is achievable, but our unstated and genuine goal is simply survival. We hope to maintain a sufficient population base and enough of our culture to one day reconstruct our nation. Maybe if we get a few concessions from a future government, we can parlay that into a bit of autonomy and some cultural rights.”
“So you are willing to deal with them and set yourselves up as a client state?”
“Personally, yes,” Ryszard answered.
“Client state!” Zosia snorted. “That would be an extreme demand from our Ryszard!”
“She’s right,” Ryszard agreed. “I’m working toward something more basic.”
“What?”
“A guarantee of, shall we say, second-class human rights. The right not to be arbitrarily murdered, the right not to be taken hostage for other people’s actions, the right to a fair trial, the right to marry and to keep our children. Maybe, in an optimistic scenario, the right to speak our language and to schooling for a year or two.”
“How about land ownership?” Peter asked.
“No hope. I doubt we could even get them to outlaw arbitrary expulsions. If I were being really optimistic, I might demand wages for services rendered. That would help your people.”
“The English?”
“No, the Zwangsarbeiter.”
“So you hope there’d be an end to slavery?”
“Just wages at first. If we could outlaw land expulsions, abductions, and forced unpaid labor, then those would be the first steps toward ending slavery. Make it uneconomic. Of course, one could argue that it would be better to extend the unpaid labor system.”
“Why?”
“It causes a great deal of social tension. Every job done by a Zwangsarbeiter is a wage-paying job taken away from a German. The working classes hate you. You force them into military service as the only alternative because they simply can’t compe
te with slavery. As the union movement grows stronger—”
“There’s a union movement?” Peter asked, remembering those Germans who had long ago shared a prison cell with him after he had been recaptured. Were they part of a larger phenomenon?
“A weak one,” Ryszard answered. “If they were to grow stronger, they might be pushed toward revolution if they see no alternative. But I think that’s unlikely. I think a minimum wage would be more likely to cause the changes we want to see.”
“You’re not asking for much,” Peter commented somewhat sarcastically. The idea of forced paid labor was not particularly attractive to him. What could he have done with the money? Still, it might have been a disincentive to waste his labor, and that might have made the conditions of his existence a bit more palatable. Perhaps, too, he could have bought his freedom at some point.
“No, it’s not asking much, but it’s more than we have, and it could mean the difference between survival and extinction. With the prevailing morality of categorizing the vast majority of people as not quite human, the only hope we have for keeping them from being killed is to make them economically valuable. They don’t even need to receive the wage—it could be paid to the state, like a tax. Then the state would have an interest in preserving their lives and the industrialistswould have a vested interest in not wasting their labor. As it is, workers are too cheap and are treated like so much garbage—and you can see what it’s doing to our economy.”
“Our economy?” Peter asked pointedly.
“The economy, if you wish. But I won’t apologize for referring to the economy that dominates all our lives as ‘our’ economy. We must acknowledge that it is no longer a war between us and them—we’re conquered and we’re trapped within this society and whatever affects it, affects us. We must work with the system that we have—it’s idiocy to pretend that there is any alternative.”
The Children's War Page 104