Poland

by James A. Michener

  Without speaking, Jan Buk indicated where his wife was grinding her wheat, and Szymon ceased his eating, rose, went to where she worked, and kissed her: ‘You will be the salvation of Poland.’

  Then Szymon asked Jan the question to which the answer could mean life or death for the Buks: ‘Will you help us?’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘To keep hope alive. To make the Germans know we shall never surrender.’

  ‘Even if Russia falls?’

  ‘Even if England and America fall. Dr. Hans Frank will never rule this land in comfort.’

  ‘But every time you strike, he executes a dozen hostages. My name is on the list now. Four more killings and I’ll be shot.’

  Now the great moral question of the underground had been confronted, and Szymon Bukowski, a mere boy, gave the answer which he and his men had worked out in pain and anguish: ‘All our names are on the list, Jan. Every name in Poland is on the list. It’s just a matter of time till those bastards kill us all. So we must go down fighting. We must resist them. We must never let them have an easy night’s sleep.’

  ‘So you intend to keep on murdering stray soldiers?’

  ‘We do so much more! Jan, you would be proud of what we do. We can commit sabotage that looks exactly like a normal accident, and they can’t do anything to prevent it. Watch, we’re going to strangle this country, slowly, bit by bit.’

  ‘Aren’t you frightened?’

  ‘No more. Two years in the forest, you’re not frightened any more.’

  ‘But you keep looking at the door.’

  ‘Cautious, yes. You will have to be very cautious when you join us.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘You’ve already joined us, actually.’ Szymon pointed to where Biruta patiently ground her wheat. ‘You stand with one foot on the gallows, now. Plant both feet and work with us.’

  The silence in the dark kitchen was broken only by the sound of Biruta at her quern, but now a soldier passed along the village street, his hobnailed boots striking the pebbles, and the grinding stopped. When he passed on, she resumed her work.

  Jan Buk was being asked to join the partisans, not in any big or bold way, but as a minor messenger between units or a distributor of clandestine newspapers; he would not even see a gun until the day of open rebellion, but he was needed. His wife was needed too, as a supplier of food to the men in the forest.

  It was an invitation that might lead to the gravest consequences. Death might come at any moment, even for such a casual meeting as this, and to what reasonable end? Victorious Nazi battalions now threatened Stalingrad. Leningrad, despite its heroic resistance, seemed about to surrender and only the fiercest patriots believed that Germany could be defeated in the field, and yet the Polish underground preached that if pressure was constantly applied, and if Russia was able to stabilize its front, and if the Allies ever accomplished anything, there might be a chance, a remote chance, to regain freedom. As one pamphlet pointed out: ‘Once we were in captivity for one hundred and twenty-three years, yet we prevailed. We shall prevail this time, too.’

  So, with only the bleakest of prospects, Jan and Biruta Buk cast their lot with the partisans. Rarely had the oppressed of any nation groped so hopelessly for the light that might lead them out of a pit so deep.

  Szymon said he would arrange at once for Jan to smuggle messages into Krakow and for Biruta to deliver bread. Within three days Jan was on his way to Krakow, where the underground maintained headquarters in an ordinary house less than three hundred yards from Wawel Castle, where Dr. Hans Frank orchestrated his grand design for the extermination of the Polish people.

  There was great excitement in the General Gouvernement these days, when Nazi troops prepared to subdue all Russia, and vast plans were spelled out in Dr. Frank’s offices for the incorporation of huge additional territories into the General Gouvernement. Frank had proved himself to be an able administrator, quick to prevent the mass uprisings that had occurred in other parts of occupied Poland. He had been assured by both Himmler and Hitler himself that his reign would be extended and prolonged, no doubt for the remainder of his working life.

  When total victory came he would consider moving his headquarters to Lwow, which he preferred as a center of operation because it contained only a limited number of Poles, all of whom could be made to disappear. By that time, too, all Jews in the Lublin pale would have been exterminated, and if enough pure Germans could be moved in to replace them, what had once been eastern Poland would be a decent place in which to live. Farther east would be unpalatable: too many Russians there.

  So at the very time that Jan Buk became a runner for the Polish underground, Hans Frank began to tighten up his administration of the General Gouvernement, and when Buk entered Krakow, which he did not know well, he had to be extremely careful where he went. He was not afraid of being arrested for traveling with limited papers; as a farmer bringing food he was entitled to show his pass and move fairly freely, but he did have to avoid any spot at which the Gestapo might conduct one of its sudden sweeps, trapping anyone on the streets within a cordon and arresting them all.

  When this happened, and it did every other week or oftener, those inside the cordon were condemned. Either they were lined up against some city wall and machine-gunned in reprisal for a purported crime about which they knew nothing, or they were transported to Germany proper to serve out their lives as slaves, oftentimes in the underground factories where they would never again see daylight.

  And sometimes the fierce raids occurred, on any street in any city, simply to terrify the citizenry and to remind them of Dr. Frank’s basic rule: ‘Poland is no longer governed by laws. You are to keep silent and perform your duties as we determine them.’ On these wild, irrational raids the Gestapo would simply round up a score of citizens and execute them in some public place, so that the cowering Poles would remember that any German could kill any Pole for any reason whatever. One poor woman had a watchdog who protected her after her husband had been slain in such a raid, and this dog growled at the bigger dog owned by a German who had come to work in Krakow. The woman was arrested for anti-German activity and her dog was shot. When she protested weepingly, she, too, was shot.

  So Jan Buk moved through Krakow with outward calm, as if he had no fear, being a simple farmer in from the country, but with immense inner attention, and in six trips as messenger he avoided capture.

  At intervals young Szymon Bukowski slipped out of the forest to consult with the Buks, always deep at night, and on one such visit he told Jan: ‘You must take a code name. Because our real names must never be spoken.’ At that moment the storks which inhabited the chimney pot of the Buk cottage, as they had done the chimneys of Bukowo for ten centuries, made one of their regular commotions, and Jan said: ‘I’ll be Bocian,’ and henceforth he was known as Stork.

  It was this name which was reported to Konrad Krumpf by one of his collaborators: ‘We have reason to believe that Szymon Bukowski is getting food supplies from someone near Castle Gorka with the code name Bocian.’ The location was wrong, the identification accurate, but the fact that Krumpf now concentrated his search efforts in the territory of Count Lubonski allowed the Buks a little extra freedom to conduct their underground activities. Biruta continued to bake her illegal bread and sneak it to the men in the forest, while her husband entered upon that dangerous and often tragic escalation which tempted a man first to run messages, then to derail a train, and finally to do outright battle with the Nazi troops.

  At every step he took, Jan Buk was cruelly aware that his actions moved names higher and higher on that posted list of hostages and that he was, in effect, the executioner of those whom Krumpf apprehended and shot after the latest outrage against the Third Reich. In time he could well become the executioner of himself.

  It was interesting that Krumpf never displayed the slightest reluctance to murder the next assignment of hostages, for he believed without question that Germany was intended by destiny, or
God if one wished, to rule Europe and that Adolf Hitler had been brought to Germany from Austria to lead the nation into this supremacy. Therefore, the most trivial action against any German was an action against the ordained rule of the world, and no punishment could be too severe. Also, in the particular case of Poland, it was clear that this bastard nation must this time be totally removed from the map, with no possibility of reincarnation, so whatever steps he took to hasten that disappearance were laudable.

  He was not a vicious man; in Magdeburg his family had long enjoyed a good reputation and his parents had raised him with an appreciation for German history and a conviction that Germans were inherently superior. He was a faithful Lutheran, but he had no animosity against Catholics, some of whom from the Munich area made excellent Gestapo officers. He did, however, despise Jews and sometimes wondered whether they were really part of the human race; he suspected not.

  He was a bright man, but his watery blue eyes and straw-colored hair made him look something of a bumbling peasant, a fact he acknowledged, and this was one of the reasons why he had so firmly determined to live in the palace: to show his subordinates that he, too, was a gentleman. In his favor it should be said that he himself never tortured a prisoner, not even a Jew; if the man or woman was guilty of a crime against the Third Reich, that person was either hanged properly, or machine-gunned, or shot with a revolver behind the ear.

  Counting the arbitrary sweeps in which the Gestapo rounded up citizens for mass killings, and the orderly shooting of hostages, and the executions for cause, like those of the women grinding illegal wheat, Konrad Krumpf had now been responsible for one hundred and eighty-three deaths in his villages, and he could not think of one that was not fully justified. If asked, he would have said: ‘I can imagine this rate continuing far into the future.’ For with the defeat of the Russians and the pacification of the eastern frontier, the General Gouvernement could begin the orderly extermination of the Polish people, just as the Jews were being handled now.

  It was therefore with the greatest excitement that he learned that the man he wanted most, Szymon Bukowski, was indeed hiding in the Forest of Szczek and that he sometimes made nocturnal visits to his village of Bukowo. Sentries were posted, and one starry night in January he was caught as he left the forest.

  He was taken directly to the Bukowski palace, where in the darkness Krumpf arraigned him, looked at his horribly beaten face, and told him: ‘You will be executed tomorrow at noon. But not before you are interrogated.’

  The interrogation, a brutal affair, was not conducted in the palace—that would have been unthinkable—but in a former schoolhouse, where the Gestapo beat the young man until he was almost dead but failed to elicit any significant information. It was obvious that he could not be executed at noon, even though the villagers had been alerted that a public hanging would be held at the gibbet, for more questioning was necessary.

  This was a fortunate delay, because Governor Frank himself telephoned from Krakow directing that the terrorist be delivered to the Gestapo in Lublin, since they were more skilled in the interrogation of prisoners with secret knowledge, so with some regret Krumpf dispatched a truck to Lublin, where the Gestapo driver said: ‘I’m looking for Under the Clock,’ and the policeman looked at the rear of the truck and asked: ‘Terrorist?’ and when the driver nodded, the policeman said, as he often did when trucks came in from rural areas: ‘Go straight down this street till you hit the square, look for the clock in the tower, and the door you want will be on the side street to the left.’

  On a Tuesday afternoon in February 1942, Szymon Bukowski, known terrorist, was delivered to Under the Clock in Lublin.

  Jan Buk was in Krakow, working with regional headquarters of the underground, when he learned of his cousin’s arrest and removal to Lublin. ‘They’ll kill him. Especially if they send him to Lublin.’

  ‘Yes, and that raises a problem for us. Even a man like Bukowski, even he might speak under extreme torture. It would be perilous for you to return to your village.’

  ‘I think so, too.’

  ‘What we have in mind, and we’ve discussed this for some time … You’re a powerful man, Buk. You have the temperament we seek.’

  ‘I could work in Warsaw.’ He paused. ‘I mean, Biruta could take care of herself.’

  ‘We’re sure of that. But Warsaw has all the men it needs. What we want you to do is to go back to Bukowo.’

  ‘You just said …’

  ‘The village, yes. It’s too dangerous for you. But the Forest of Szczek? We have a promising group there, and we want you to lead it.’

  Jan Buk was twenty-two years old, a man who could read and write, a man of that stubborn character which often comes from wrestling with the soil. He had no fanatical hatred of the Nazis, only an unshakable resolve that they must somehow be expelled from his fields and from all of Poland. He realized this winter morning that this resolve would never leave him during his life and that whether Szymon died in Lublin, or Biruta in Bukowo, or he in the forest, the fight would continue, remorselessly, imaginatively, brutally, forever.

  ‘We want your group to have a name,’ the district commander said, ‘because we have major plans for your activity.’

  ‘My group?’

  ‘Yes. You’re the leader as of now.’

  Jan Buk stood silent, thinking of his village, and of the public square in which his grandmother had been hanged, and his aunt fusilladed on that first day, and he saw it as a village of peace, one in which many people had found satisfactory lives, and then he saw storks flying home from their winters in Africa and he thought that they, too, looked to his village as their home; they, too, sought repose.

  ‘Use my code name—Bocian,’ he said, and thus the famous Stork Commando which operated out of the Forest of Szczek was born.

  To protect his anonymity, the Krakow people forged several papers, which were inserted into Governor Frank’s records by partisans who worked in Wawel Castle, and official word was sent back to Konrad Krumpf in the Bukowski palace that Jan Buk of his district had been swept up by a Gestapo raid and shipped off to Germany to labor in a munitions factory.

  ‘We won’t hear from that one again,’ Krumpf said, for life expectancy in such slave centers was not great.

  Now the burden of running the Buk farm fell exclusively on Biruta, a woman of only twenty and with an imperfect knowledge of agriculture. Nevertheless, the Gestapo gave her a quota, which they said she must fill or the farm would be taken from her and she would be sent to work in Germany. But villagers would guide her in the spring plowing, instruct her in how she must apply for seed grain from the Nazis, and help her with her first planting. With them she prayed for rain and from them she would learn how to conceal part of her harvest to be sold for her personal profit. There was no need for her to reveal that she did not intend selling the grain; she would smuggle it to the partisans, and she suspected that other families were doing the same.

  She worked hours which in normal times might have killed her, but she was kept strong by her faith: she was sure that if anyone could survive in the forest, or wherever he was, her husband would; and she was constantly encouraged by news of the bold moves made by the group that was now called throughout the district the Stork Commando. Its members appeared suddenly at some railroad crossing, dynamiting the tracks, or in some village where a German soldier was behaving with unusual brutality. It struck at those targets which would bring greatest discomfort to the Germans, greatest reassurance to the Poles, and Biruta Buk, dead tired from her animal-like labor in the fields, quietly shared her joy with the other villagers when the Storks humiliated the Nazis.

  Fortunately, the operations of the commando were not associated in the German files with the village of Bukowo. The leader had not yet been identified, nor his hiding place discovered; it was assumed that the criminal gang must be somewhere in the Forest of Szczek, but that covered a large area, and Krumpf’s experts believed the group must be getting its major
support from the Castle Gorka district, and once more intensive searches were conducted there. Krumpf was infuriated when they revealed nothing.

  And then late one night, almost at dawn, a soft footstep warned Biruta that someone was approaching her cottage. She experienced no undue fear, for she had not used her quern for some time and it was safely hidden, but she did sit up in bed, and she was there, arms clasped about her knees, when the door opened and her husband entered, his face discernible in the growing light.

  He stayed in his home all that day, prepared to dash into the forest at the sign of any soldiers, but Biruta went to her fields as usual, and that night she talked with Jan about his activities: ‘Are you with the Stork Commando?’

  ‘No,’ he lied, as he did to everyone.

  ‘They’re very brave. What do you do?’

  ‘Like always. Carry messages mostly.’

  ‘How do you live in the forest? How do you eat?’

  ‘Poorly. We shoot a few deer.’

  ‘Where do you get guns? Ammunition?’

  ‘We raid German depots. We steal.’

  ‘But you don’t have actual battles? I mean, real fighting?’

  ‘No.’ He asked her what her life was like, and now she had to lie, too.

  ‘We do well in the village. Hostages shot now and then, but not like it used to be.’

  ‘Food?’

  ‘Plenty. Plenty.’

  ‘Do many women send bread to the partisans?’

  ‘I know of none, Jan. I suspect several. We keep it very secret.’

  ‘Do you send any?’

  ‘Krumpf watches our wheat like a hungry crow at harvest. I haven’t touched …’ She looked toward the sacred quern and showed her shame, and then she came close to tears. ‘Krumpf watches us constantly.’ She twisted her hands, then said: ‘You know he caught Szymon?’

  ‘I heard.’ He sighed deeply and embraced his wife. ‘If you and I have troubles, think of Bukowski in Lublin.’

  After a while she said: ‘Some of us think that our Bukowski, the one at the palace, we think he’s working with the Germans.’