Poland

by James A. Michener

  No act was too trivial to escape the attention of Konrad Krumpf and his clerks, and when observed, it was written down. For example, he knew that Szymon Bukowski, the fifteen-year-old son of the liberal agitator Miroslawa Bukowska, had been among the seven to be liquidated on that first day and that he had somehow escaped. His card on the young man was voluminous, listing his friends, the books he read, his habits during winter and summer, where he might be encountered, and particularly the names of his relatives, no matter how far removed in blood line or geographical distance.

  It was Krumpf’s job to find this condemned man and execute him, and as he studied the cards pertaining to his target, he saw that Szymon was the presumed grandson of the local gentleman now dead, Wiktor Bukowski, who was known as The Hero of Zamosc because of his conduct at the siege of that city by the Russian Communists. So Krumpf went to the palace to pursue his ongoing investigation.

  There he was greeted by a woman whom he had been instructed to treat with deference, for she was said to be a multimillionaire from Chicago and from a family potentially friendly to the German cause. Marjorie Bukowska, his cards told him—green in her case, indicating a person of high importance—was sixty-seven years old, a widow, an amateur patron of Polish culture, and the mother of the current owner of the palace, Ludwik Bukowski, thirty-nine years old and something of an enigma. The original list of leaders to be executed had said of Bukowski: ‘Not to be shot. Could prove to be of use.’

  Like many wealthy women free to tend their every need, Madame Bukowska had grown more beautiful as she aged, and now her slender figure and glowing white hair gave her an aura of great dignity as she came forward to greet the commander of her district: ‘Herr Krumpf …’

  ‘Major,’ he corrected.

  ‘I’ve never been able to read military designations,’ she said. ‘Do join me,’ and she led him into that grand hall dominated by the two huge paintings. He was awed by its majesty and in that first moment he hatched his plot. He, Konrad Krumpf, son of a merchant in Magdeburg, would live in this palace, and from it he would dispense justice to the Poles he supervised. To achieve this he must deal gingerly with the American woman and her Polish son.

  ‘Madame Bukowska,’ he said easily as he settled into one of her comfortable chairs, ‘I must interrogate you on what could be a painful subject.’

  ‘Many things are painful these days,’ she replied.

  ‘This missing man, Szymon Bukowski

  ‘Szymon?’ she asked brightly, almost laughingly. ‘He’s not a man. He’s a boy. Hardly old enough to drive an automobile.’

  ‘He’s a fugitive, Madame Bukowska,’ and he said this with such finality that she made no further defensive comment. ‘I must ask you two questions.’

  ‘Please do,’ she said graciously, but before he could ask them the tea she had ordered arrived, and when Krumpf had balanced his cup on his knee, she said: ‘Now fire away.’

  ‘I have no weapon,’ he said, and she explained that she had been using an American idiom meaning ‘Ask me what you will,’ but that in the German they were using, it came out rather more ominous than she had intended. He laughed.

  ‘Now to my questions. Do you know where Szymon Bukowski is hiding?’

  ‘I do not,’ she said in the good German she had acquired in Vienna. She sipped at her tea, then said emphatically: ‘I would never have known where he was, Herr Krumpf. For I had little to do with him.’

  ‘Major Krumpf, if you please. But was not his father your husband’s manager?’ He had set his cup down and now held some cards, which he was studying as if to make sure of his facts.

  ‘He was. And a very dependable one.’

  ‘And was not the unfortunate Miroslawa Bukowska who fell into trouble, was she not your husband’s cousin?’

  ‘Very remotely.’

  He glanced at his cards and nodded. ‘Where is your husband?’

  She pointed to an equestrian portrait hanging on an end wall, away from the two great panoramas; it showed Wiktor in native costume astride his horse, with a caption which Krumpf rose to read: ‘ “The Hero of Zamosc.” ’ He looked at his cards again and said: ‘Yes, he fought the Communists at Zamosc, I remember.’ And from the manner in which he enunciated his words, precisely but at a level somewhat higher than before, she deduced that he was not happy with Germany’s present close alliance with Russia.

  ‘He’s dead?’ he asked, although he well knew the answer.

  ‘Many years.’

  ‘What I meant to ask, where is your son?’

  ‘You must know that the governor general summoned him to Krakow. He’s in Krakow.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He rearranged his cards and asked: ‘Now to my next question, the difficult one.’ He accepted more tea, then said: ‘This Szymon we seek, his father Seweryn Buk, later Bukowski, he was your husband’s son, was he not? That is, he was your stepson?’

  ‘Everyone in these parts knows that.’

  ‘So that Szymon is really your grandson, in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘I have never thought of him as such.’

  ‘Does his presence on your estate … well, does it in any way embarrass you?’

  ‘Nothing embarrasses me. I’m sixty-seven years old and life continues to amaze me, but it never embarrasses.’

  ‘In Chicago,’ he began, pronouncing it Tchee-ka-goe with equal emphasis on each syllable, ‘you were very wealthy, yes? Then why are you still in this dreadful country?’

  ‘Because I love it,’ she said quietly.

  ‘And you would do anything to assist it?’

  Turning so that she could look squarely at him, she said: ‘Yes, I suppose I would. You see, it’s my country now.’

  ‘Would you be offended if I asked to … not search … but …’

  ‘Look around?’ She used a homely German idiom and he smiled, a thin, grudging smile which brought half-tears to his watery blue eyes.

  ‘Yes, I’d like to look around. We’re very concerned about this Szymon, you know.’

  It was during this inspection that Konrad Krumpf first saw the art treasures of the Bukowski palace, and although he ridiculed the two big Polish panoramas, terming them peasant painting, and denigrated the Claude Monet as degenerate Jewish art, he was astonished by the quality and beauty of the Rembrandt and the little Correggio: ‘But these are museum paintings! Madame Bukowska, your husband had flawless taste.’

  ‘I bought them,’ she said. ‘I studied art in Italy.’

  ‘Ah, Italy! What a perfect union, Germany and Italy. These two produce most of the art in the world.’

  He was on the point of advising her to get rid of the Monet, or at least hide it, because a new world of art was about to take command of Europe, one in which there would be no place for such immoral painting, when he saw for the first time the elegant Hans Holbein portrait of an English lady. The great German painter had chosen blue and gray as his dominant colors, with touches of red and gold, and the frame, which seemed a part of the painting, was one of those broad slabs of ebony beautifully carved in little squares which stood out from the rest of the wood, radiating light. It was really a complete work of art, very Renaissance, very German.

  ‘That is a notable painting,’ Krumpf said with such enthusiasm that Marjorie was compelled to ask: ‘Where did you learn so much about art?’ and he with obvious pleasure replied: ‘We are not all pigs, as your Jewish New York Times would have it.’ She wanted to know more, but he said, abruptly, that he had to leave, so they returned to the hall, and from the manner in which he surveyed it, with an almost proprietary interest, she was certain that she and her son would be seeing a great deal of SS Major Krumpf in the months ahead.

  When the Nazis overran Poland that September they found themselves empowered to put into cruel operation a plan which Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg had worked out in harsh detail.

  Those sections of Poland which lay next to either Germany proper or East Prussia were to be completely denuded o
f Poles and resettled by Germans. What was to happen to the Poles living there? At first there would be mass expulsions; later there would be systematic extermination. As many as twenty million Poles would either be worked to death in labor camps or slain instantly. That part of Poland would never again exist.

  There was temporarily an atrocious plan for creating an artificial Jewish state centering on Lublin, a city not far from Bukowo, where Jews would be herded until such time as they could be exterminated, down to the last woman and child. Himmler’s figures showed a Jewish population in Poland of 3,547,896; every one was to be slain.

  That left a large southern area well removed from the German borders and based on the triangle of cities—Warsaw, Krakow, Lwow—in which Bukowo was centrally located. This was given the curious name General Gouvernement, and why French was used to designate a so thoroughly German solution, no one explained, except that this name had been used in World War I for the area then occupied by the Germans, and now once more General Gouvernement served. It was governed by an able Nazi lawyer, Dr. Hans Frank, who maintained headquarters in the famous Wawel Castle in Krakow.

  Dr. Frank was not a caricature, nor was he a sadist. He was a realist with a firm understanding of Polish history. His instructions to his subordinates were stated in clear, simple, legal terms:

  ‘The General Gouvernement will comprise all that is left of historic Poland, and it is essential that Poles residing here understand the nature of their new state. It is not a nation governed by law. It is a nation governed by the demands and desires of the Third Reich. The Pole has no rights whatever. His only obligation is to obey what we tell him. He must be constantly reminded that his duty is to obey.

  ‘With my full approval you are to apply ruthlessly every reasonable measure to keep the local situation under control, and this office will not enquire foolishly into the actions you deem necessary to keep all areas of the General Gouvernement pacified.

  ‘A major goal of our plan is to finish off as speedily as possible all troublemaking politicians, priests and leaders who fall into our hands. I openly admit that some thousands of so-called important Poles will have to pay with their lives, but you must not allow sympathy for individual cases to deter you in your duty, which is to ensure that the goals of National Socialism triumph and that the Polish nation is never again able to offer resistance.’

  When deputies like Konrad Krumpf inquired in a general meeting what the ultimate plans were for this miserable, unhappy country, Dr. Frank was specific:

  ‘Every vestige of Polish culture is to be eliminated. Those Poles who seem to have Nordic appearance will be taken to Germany to work in our factories. Children of Nordic appearance will be taken from their parents and raised as German workers. The rest? They will work. They will eat little. And in the end they will die out. There will never again be a Poland.’

  Dr. Frank encouraged the initial execution of all visible leaders, and he also ordered the rounding up of college professors, especially those of the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Krakow, assigning them to the most brutal of the concentration camps, where most of them perished. He also helped to establish the rules of retaliation that Hans Yunger had delivered to the citizens of Bukowo, and he commended those local leaders who enforced that rule.

  But he did not, like many of his subordinates, practice cruelty for its own sake, and he did not for a very good reason. As he explained to his cadre:

  ‘Long term, we work for the extermination of the Polish people. Short term, we must use them to help feed our soldiers. Therefore, farmers are to be kept at their fields, but the most rigorous rules are to be published in every community demanding that farm families keep for themselves only enough to sustain life. Everything else must be delivered to our representatives for shipment to Germany, and any farmer or housewife who connives to avoid this rule shall be shot. Each district commander is personally responsible for collecting the maximum food possible from his district. The farm population is to be preserved for the present, but when victory is ours we will settle with it.’

  When this order reached Konrad Krumpf in Bukowo he instituted his search for the querns. Bringing in sixteen extra Gestapo enlisted men, he lined them up in the village square, then summoned everyone in the area to stand at attention as he read the decree which would apply to his portion of the General Gouvernement:

  ‘Every item of every crop raised in this district belongs to the Third Reich and must be delivered to my assistants at locations which will be stipulated. Every grain of wheat must be brought to us, after which we will return you enough to live on till the next harvest. This means that no kitchen will be allowed to maintain its own quern for grinding wheat and making flour that might be baked into loaves for private use. It is now ten o’clock. You have till the clock strikes twelve to bring me all the querns you have in your possession, because at one minute after twelve these soldiers will begin searching your cottages, and if they find a hidden quern which has not been turned in, the owner will be shot.’

  For most of the villagers and farmers the situation was clear: turn in the little hand mills in which wheat had been ground for generations and from which the good bread of Poland had been made, or run the risk of being shot. From cupboards, from places in the corner behind the stove, women with tears streaming down their faces brought forth the treasured querns: two round flat stones set in a box small enough for a boy to carry, each top stone with a hole in its upper surface into which a wooden handle could be placed, which, when turned in a tight circle, caused the upper stone to revolve and grind the wheat until it became flour sifting safely into the bottom of the box.

  Some of the stones had been used for almost a century, outlasting three or four of their owners’ wooden houses, but all were treasured and each was surrendered with pain.

  The order presented a problem for Jadwiga Buk, now seventy-two and still a determined woman; she delayed bringing forth the little mill on which she had ground her family’s grain because she wanted to see what was going to happen to the querns that were surrendered. She was standing off to one side when at half past ten the first housewives came forward with their precious instruments, and she was horrified by what Konrad Krumpf did with them.

  ‘Put them there,’ he commanded, and when they were placed on the ground, he directed the soldiers to smash the stones and toss the boxes into a pile that was obviously going to be burned.

  This wanton destruction of the little machines which had served so well, this violation of the household gods who keep society together, so shocked Jadwiga that she cried: ‘Send them to Germany. Don’t destroy them.’

  Krumpf did not halt his operations to check who had called out, but from the corner of his eye he saw that it must have been the Buk woman, and he could visualize her card: GRANDMOTHER OF THE SZYMON BUKOWSKI WE SEEK.

  Jadwiga left the village square in great perturbation. The quern which she had inherited from her grandmother was one of the best, two marvelously flat stones set in a box made of some special hardwood; from the time she was a young child, grinding wheat in a quern like that was almost a pleasure, and when she grew up and married and had her two children, in addition to her first son, Seweryn, she taught them to love the process, for it seemed to her an essential act of wifeliness—to accept the husband’s grain and convert it to nourishing food.

  She simply could not condemn her quern to the destruction she had witnessed, and she endeavored to hide it, vainly. Her efforts were quite juvenile, and when the noon search began the SS men quickly found it. They dragged her into the square, where she was ordered to stand at attention as the stones were crushed at her feet and the hardwood box smashed and thrown onto the pile. She had not the courage to look down at the shattered stones but she did watch as the pile was set ablaze, and she was still staring in disbelief when the rope was thrown about her neck and she was hanged.

  Because both his grandmother, Jadwiga Buk, and his aunt, Miroslawa Bukowska, had been executed
by the Nazis, Jan Buk, inheritor of the farm, had to be looked upon with suspicion by Konrad Krumpf’s men, and the three cards which summarized his case contained numerous entries. The blue proved that he was known to have dangerous associates, in this case his grandmother and aunt. The brown showed that either he or his family had attempted to hoard food. The purple, an ominous card, predicted that he would ultimately prove to be dangerous; and with dismal regularity men with purple cards were promoted to red: WANTED FOR ARREST: There was good reason to suppose that sooner or later Jan Buk would be so moved.

  He was twenty years old, broad and solid like his ancestors, and a good farmer; if any would produce a surplus which might be hidden, it would be he. He also owned a forest from which branches could be taken by the Germans for firewood. But his greatest asset was his wife, Biruta, a peasant girl of the old type who milked and plowed with vigor.

  On the day that Grandmother Jadwiga was hanged, Jan returned to the cottage with the cement floor, the one that Jadwiga had gained for the family, and sat soberly in the chair once occupied by the earlier Janko, the one who had worked in Vienna and been killed at the battle of Zamosc. He sat there until Biruta returned after having watched the hanging, then stared at her inquiringly, saying nothing, and by a meaningful glance at one corner where cottage wall joined cement floor, she indicated that something of value lay buried.