Poland

by James A. Michener

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘The Russians. The Communists. They’ll have no truck with such medals.’

  ‘Do you want me to throw it away?’ Buk asked angrily.

  ‘No. It suits you, that medal. And a defunct count trying to regain his estates.’

  Buk refused to lose his temper, but as a man of integrity he had to defend Lubonski: ‘At Majdanek, from what you say, you behaved well. Believe me, at Castle Gorka, Lubonski did too, and this commando is active today only because of the help he gave us.’

  ‘He better stay in London when peace comes. He won’t be wanted here.’ Although Buk did not seek a confrontation, he felt impelled to say: ‘Your new Poland will be a sorry show if it can find no place for men like him,’ and Chalubinski growled: ‘You don’t seem to realize. A totally new kind of man is going to organize Poland,’ and Buk asked, almost contentiously: ‘Who?’

  Then it came out: ‘With Russian aid, socialists and men who understand Communism will build a new society here, one that will be gloriously better.’

  Very quietly, as if aware of the danger into which he was projecting himself, Buk said: ‘I am suspicious of any aid which comes from Russia.’

  This infuriated Chalubinski, who asked with reason on his side: ‘Do you reject the great victories the Russians are giving us? The salvation which they will soon hand us?’

  ‘I shall accept the soldiers marching in, but I want them to march out again.’

  They were back in their camp now, but the idea that Soviet aid could be in any way injurious to Poland was so outrageous to Chalubinski that he kept up his harangue in a loud voice, whereupon an old man among the partisans—he was forty-nine, but years of deprivation made him seem sixty-nine—began to speak hesitantly, but as he proceeded, those about him listened, for he summarized their thinking:

  ‘Always in the village at night when we talked about Poland … I mean in those days that you did not know, when Poland did not exist. Always we asked: “Which would be better, to live under Russian rule or German?” And our old men who had known both told us the truth.

  ‘They said: “The Germans are the cruelest people on earth. They murder. They slaughter. And they do it all in the name of civilization.” They warned us that life under the Germans was to be avoided at any cost.

  ‘But always they said that in the long run, as years passed and the first fury subsided, life with the Germans could reach compromises. Continuance was possible. It was never pleasant, but it was possible, for there was music and celebrations and you could travel to Berlin, and if you did things their way, you survived and could even have a good time now and then.

  ‘But with the Russians, there was no hope. Only the dead hand of oppression, the unrelieved weight of Russian insensibility. Work, work, work. One stupid rule after another. Never an alleviation in a special case. Do it their way or die.

  ‘I myself have lived under the Russians, and it’s like being in a tomb—a large tomb, yes, with perhaps a little room to move around, but a tomb nevertheless. Russians can make an entire nation a tomb. They’re geniuses in building tombs.

  ‘So if I have to choose between Germany and Russia, all I can say is: “I don’t want either, but I think I don’t want Russia a little stronger.” ’

  With an impulsive swing of his right arm Chalubinski reached out and slapped the man across the face: ‘You could be shot for speaking against the only nation that can help us!’ A general confusion might have ensued had not Jan Buk stepped forward to end the discussion. ‘I think the new Poland will find a place for all of us,’ he said, but Chalubinski, with his deep convictions about the future, warned: ‘Not for your man Bukowski, who fled with all those treasures. And your silly Lubonski is no better. Good riddance to both of them.’

  Buk had no desire to prolong an argument which he deemed fruitless, but he could not keep from visualizing the two men whom Chalubinski had lumped together—Ludwik Bukowski slithering off to Paris in a Nazi train laden with stolen treasures, Walerian Lubonski flying in a small plane to London to continue his honorable warfare: My God, can’t he see the difference?

  The war ended along the Vistula almost a year earlier than on the western front, for by 20 July 1944 it was obvious to everyone that Soviet troops would enter Lublin in a day or two, and the Polish citizens of that city who had suffered so cruelly when the Nazis were victorious would now have an opportunity to observe how these same Nazis were going to conduct themselves in defeat.

  Suddenly German soldiers began to seek Polish friends, reminding startled housewives of how they, the Nazis, had always befriended the Poles and of how, on a certain day, this Nazi or that had brought children presents. Great fear showed in the German faces, and one captain went from house to house establishing friendships and stating his name clearly: ‘Gunter Kratzky. I am Gunter Kratzky of a little village near Dresden.’ But at the last moment, when he found that Soviet soldiers were only six miles to the east, he panicked and fled.

  Others remained unchanged. Walther Nocke went down into the cells at Under the Clock, counted the prisoners awaiting torture or in the middle of it, and found nineteen men and two women. ‘Shoot them all,’ he ordered, and he participated in the killing.

  In the prison cells at Zamek Lublin four hundred and sixty-three prisoners awaited trial, but the civilian judge with the thick glasses could stomach no more senseless killing. He said: ‘Let them all go,’ but the young Gestapo judge who had screamed during the trials held in the chapel handed down an edict that all were guilty, so every prisoner was legally executed by gunfire as he or she stood motionless behind the cell gates.

  At Majdanek any late-arriving Jews had already been liquidated during the preceding three weeks, so camp officials decided there was no necessity for a general assassination, but individual field commanders like Otto Grundtz were encouraged to clean out everyone they did not like, either by hangings at the gibbets or by point-blank gunfire. Grundtz sought one man he disliked intensely, this Szymon Bukowski who had escaped Barracks Nineteen by maneuvering an assignment to the shoe-repair shop, but he could not be found.

  Willi Zimmel, the physical-fitness fanatic, had hidden him.

  As Count Lubonski had predicted in his broadcasts from London, trials of the lesser Nazi officials were held in Lublin itself, and at lightning speed. But he was not allowed to participate; indeed the Russians forebade him to appear, since they had established their own courts and wanted no participation by democratically inclined Poles fighting from abroad. A few local Poles, selected because of their unswerving devotion to Communism—Tytus Chalubinski was one—were allowed to help the court in minor capacities, but Poles in general were excluded. It was a Russian victory and the Kremlin insisted that there be Russian justice.

  Arthur Liebehenschel, the last commandant at Majdanek, was hanged close to the office from which he had issued his bloody orders. Reconstructed records would show that his efficiently run camp had been responsible for the deaths of more than 360,000 prisoners. These could be divided in various dichotomies. Religion: 140,000 Jews, 220,000 Christians. Or nationality: 274,000 Poles, 86,000 foreigners. In this last group citizens of fifty-two different nations were represented, from Albania and Austria to Spain, Turkey and Uzbekistan.

  Walther Nocke, from Under the Clock, fainted at the sight of his gallows, while the civilian judge who had taken his glasses off to wait for pistol shots wept and pleaded for mercy on the ground that he was only obeying orders. The young Gestapo judge remained fiercely defiant, and from the gallows he predicted that without German leadership, Poland would collapse in weeks. In vile language he was describing what he thought of the country and its people when the rope caught his neck.

  Otto Grundtz was hanged from the gibbet which he had so often commanded at Field Four. A solemn square of prisoners from the barracks gathered to watch, many too emaciated to stand, and those ghostly figures from Barracks Nineteen who wanted to see their monster meet his death were brought th
ere on stretchers. Grundtz died bravely. With composure he stood on the white stool which he himself had so often kicked away and glared from beneath his dark eyebrows at his prisoners, until a man he had abused most cruelly cried: ‘Let me do it!’ and this man, too weak to mount the gallows, reached out with an appallingly thin right hand and jerked the stool away.

  When the hangings ended, Szymon Bukowski discovered to his amazement that he wanted to remain in Lublin, for Professor Tomczyk had awakened him to larger responsibilities than those available in a village like Bukowo. Within two weeks of the liberation of Lublin a university was operating, for as one of the new professors, a man from Majdanek, said: ‘We have so much catching up to do.’ A course in architecture was offered, even though for the moment there could be no drawing tables or drafting materials, and Bukowski, remembering Tomczyk’s death shout—‘Rebuild! Rebuild!’—enrolled.

  With seven other students as emaciated as himself, he stayed at the home of Professor Tomczyk’s widow, and she did her best to feed the young scholars, but there was still very little food in Lublin, and often they ate poorly, but one glorious day Mrs. Tomczyk found a chicken, and one of the students was able to fetch some bits of pork from the country, and she announced: ‘Tonight we have our victory celebration,’ and she prepared a real Polish feast, pork and sauerkraut with coriander seeds mixed in, a plate of chicken parts, a fine soup made from the various fats.

  But when the students were seated, with Bukowski occupying the chair Professor Tomczyk would have used had he been here, and the soup was served, suddenly Bukowski started to shake, and then lowered his head, and the others were aware that he was sobbing, uncontrollably. No one spoke, for in these days of sudden peace people did strange things, nor could anyone guess what awful memory had assaulted their friend. But after a while the shaking ceased and with some effort he regained control. Pointing to the rich soup on whose surface floated globules of yellow fat, some as big as a golden Austrian crown, he said: ‘I would have strangled my brother for a bowl of soup like that.’

  * * *

  German troops were able to retain control of the villages along the Vistula for a few days after the fall of Lublin, and at Castle Gorka, Falk von Eschl, aware that Count Lubonski had predicted in his London broadcast the destruction of his home, refrained from burning it, and even when men under his command appeared with large loads of dynamite salvaged from the polygon, he refused to give them the order. In haughty silence he climbed into his Mercedes with his driver, leaned out to salute the castle, and departed. He crossed the Vistula at Sandomierz and hurried west to the temporary security of a major German army, which was itself retreating. When he was gone his men, guessing at what his wishes must have been, piled dynamite around the tower and under all the stone rooms. They detonated a tremendous blast which threw segments of the battlement into the Vistula, leaving behind only the jagged stump of a castle gaping at the sky, as its predecessors had done in 1241, in 1510, in 1655 and in 1708.

  The Bukowski palace, now vacant and denuded, was grabbed at eagerly by two Nazi companies fleeing the Russians. A Captain Plischke was in command, and at first he tried to maintain some kind of order, but since his troops could see only disaster ahead, everyone except Plischke got obnoxiously drunk and stayed that way for several days. One sergeant, loathing everything Polish and scornful of Plischke’s attempts to preserve discipline, sat on a box in the big empty hall and stared at the two large canvases which had been left in place, and he became so enraged by the Matejko portrait of Jan Sobieski riding to Vienna that he whipped up a machine gun and started blasting the painting, killing all the Polish warriors. Hearing the shots, other soldiers rushed in, and when they saw what their sergeant was doing, they broke loose what weapons they had and joined the firing. They concentrated on Sobieski’s big mustachioed face and blew it apart. They then turned to the Jozef Brandt painting of Czestochowa, riddling all the heads there, too. Then the sergeant shouted: ‘It’s those bastards in the cellar I want,’ and he led his executioners’ squad down to the long hallway, where the Nazis blazed their guns at the noble gallery of Polish heroes. Barbara Radziwill’s brother had his face blown off. Maryna Mniszech’s bold kinsman took fifteen bullets through his ample body. The glorious layman Zamoyski was exploded and Czartoryski had his face shredded.

  ‘That finishes the Poles,’ the sergeant bellowed, but in his moment of victory he looked down the darkened corridor to see that Captain Plischke, hearing the fusillades, had come to investigate, and he was obviously disgusted by the behavior of his troops. Grasping his revolver in his right hand, with his left he pointed to the sergeant, as if condemning him: ‘You! Halt this destruction!’ This was a dangerous moment, when anything might have happened, but a fat corporal who had not participated in the shooting said loudly: ‘Let’s go up and see if there’s any more beer.’

  This dissolved the tension, and the men started to move off, but the sergeant, bristling from the reprimand, swung his machine gun around as if to blast his captain, but he never had the opportunity, for Plischke coolly put two bullets through him, and he fell in a crumpled heap beneath the portraits he had savaged.

  The suddenness of the pistol shots and their reverberating echoes down the corridor reminded the men that this was still war, and almost automatically they began firing at a captain they had never liked. Because they were drunk, their first bullets missed, and Plischke said calmly: ‘Men, come to your senses!’

  But now more bullets, scores of them, came whining past the portraits, knocking Plischke to the dark floor, where three final shots from close in ripped his head.

  The fat corporal, awed by the amount of blood streaming from the two dead bodies, cried: ‘Leave them! Let’s get out of here!’ but a tough enlisted man who had done much of the firing gave stronger counsel: ‘We’ll burn this place before the others see what happened.’

  Not realizing that the retreating Wehrmacht would be too preoccupied with its own safety to worry about the deaths of one more captain and sergeant, he rushed upstairs, took what dynamite he could find, and began putting it in those spots where it would cause maximum destruction, and he would have blown up the entire palace had not outposts rushed back to warn: ‘Russians coming through the forest.’

  Hurriedly he ignited those explosives already in place, rushed outside, and watched with grunting pleasure as large portions of the palace crumbled: ‘There’s one thing the Russians won’t get.’ Then, seeing the magnificent stables still untouched, he used the last of his dynamite and gasoline to set them ablaze, so that when he led his remnant in retreat across the Vistula, the Nazis could look back at the blazing ruins along the shore, as if this were the last act of some turbulent and brooding opera.

  He had lacked time to destroy the great hall. Headless, but still in command of his troops, Jan Sobieski continued his march toward Vienna.

  * * *

  One of the most touching moments of victory came at the village of Bukowo when the men of the Stork Commando were finally free to leave the Forest of Szczek, for when the villagers saw that this man whom they had believed dead was still alive, and that other man for whom they had prayed was not, there was wild and pitiful weeping; and when the men who had endured so much saw the ruined palace and the charred spots where their cottages had stood, they, too, wept. But the most powerful moment came when Jan Buk, heroic leader of his commando, walked the length of the village square, no longer wary of spies, no longer afraid of being captured by Nazi patrols. He simply walked past a row of cottages bearing in his arms the once-fatal quern which could now be restored to its proper place.

  At last he saw Biruta, saw the deep scar across her face, and without calling out he went up to her, holding before him the symbol of their hearth. She took it, and then fierce tears coursed down her cheeks, for she better than most could appreciate the significance of its return; across his shoulder she could see the ravaged cottages from which women no less brave than she had been dragged to the hangi
ng tree. Quietly she led her husband back to the home he had defended so stubbornly, and when she inserted the wooden handle into her top stone, she began to grind wheat from the fields she had tended, afraid no more of the noise she was making, and when the rich brown flour was milled, she kneaded it and baked that fine dark bread which makes men and nations strong.

  In the years to come, many Polish communities would erect memorials to the heroism of the resistance, and most of them, seeking to avoid militaristic memories, preferred to feature some gallant woman striding forward with her children, undaunted. Biruta Buk could have posed for them all.

  The happiness of the Buks was brief, because a few mornings after surrender a staff car roared into the village and a Russian official descended, with a list of persons to be arrested. Because the selection of these eight was so indicative of what was being repeated throughout liberated Poland, their names will be recited here, with explanations of why they were on the list:

  Lionel Aksentowicz 32 Schoolteacher and supporter of General Bor

  Bartosz Wysocki 22 Known member of the reactionary Home Army

  Lucyna Grabska 20 University student. Member, Youth of all Poland

  Janusz Glowacki 44 Priest

  Konstanty Buczek 29 Member, Polish Peasant Party right-wing

  Mikolaj Konarski 30 Member, Service for Poland’s Victory

  Zdzislaw Daraz 33 Outspoken opponent of the Lublin Committee

  Obviously these names had been designated not by Russians, but by radical Poles who wanted to be sure the new state would be headed in their direction. It was the eighth name which evoked cries of great protest from the villagers:

  Jan Buk 27 Accepted medal from

  London reactionaries

  The only man who could have known about that medal was Chalubinski, the fanatical schoolteacher from Lodz; in their forest arguments he had classified Buk as a reactionary and had so reported him to the Russians.