Warsaw

by Richard Foreman

  Sleep acquitted the hormonal girl not of her obsessions. She dreamt of him. They were all running through the forest together, Thomas and the family. It was night time, cold - Jessica she could hear panting and see her breathing mist-up in front of her face. Ferocious, foaming Alsatians - held on a leash by their blood-thirsty masters - pursued them. Shots rang out and one by one her Papa, Halina and then Kolya fell, disappearing. Her tiny hand in his strong, warm palm Jessica and Thomas sped on. Through the dark briary woodland she saw the light sands and safety of a desert, where the Germans would not follow - they'd evaporate. Her legs grew stone heavy though. Just as the couple were about to escape the gothic forest Jessica felt a hot jolt, her back arched and she fell to the floor. Thomas disappeared - his wrenching loss as agonising as her physical pain. As if she were a spirit departing from her body Jessica looked down on herself, her pretty cotton dress soaking up the gushing blood from her wound. She did not want to die. Yet a part of her was consoled, in that it was now finally all over. It was the last image to be branded in her mind's eye as the sweat soaked girl woke with a jolt in this world, her back still arched.

  It was not just Oscar's friendly warning which prompted a prickling sense of anxiety in Thomas in regards to seeing the Jewish girl again. He was sanctioned to murder without cause, steal from and even rape the woman, but he could not be seen to converse with her or her people. By the very fact that it was absurd and vicious it must be true Thomas wryly reasoned, such was the age. Sometimes his mood and contempt for the regime was so strong as to provoke a determination in the soldier's heart to defy his orders. But what was he to do? Show up at the nurse's hospital? Or knock on the family's door and ask her mother if her daughter was free to take a walk? Thomas also used Maria as an excuse not to get further involved with the girl. Perhaps it was a valid one.

  Yet Thomas still did his best to visit Adam when possible. The Corporal was both curious and pleased to see the changeable student in a lively and equable mood during his last meeting. There was playfulness in his conversation and glimmer in his eyes that Thomas hadn't seen for a long time, if at all. He frequently quoted snippets of poetry and was neither bellicose nor fatalistic in regards to his future. It was as if the occupation wasn't happening outside. All of Thomas’ questions as to why Adam seemed so positive were answered by a knock at the door.

  Adam opened the door to his second visitor that afternoon. Thomas heard a woman's voice.

  "I thought you might want these," Anna said kindly, handing her friend and lover a couple of apples.

  Anna to catch sight of Thomas - and vice versa.

  "This is my friend, Thomas. Thomas, this is Anna."

  Whatever shameful acts Duritz or his prostitute lover had committed previously they here blushed and stole glances through downcast eyes like never before. Either out of shame, fear or shyness Anna could not look the German in the eye - who was paternally smiling to himself as if he were the friar who had just married Romeo and Juliet. Thomas broke the silence. He rose and respectfully bowed to the young lady.

  "Nice to meet you."

  Anna at first reciprocated the handsome Corporal's disarming expression. She then checked herself for such forwardness and glanced at Duritz in hope of receiving some direction as to what to say.

  "It's okay, Thomas is a friend of mine. Would you like to come in?"

  The soft-featured woman was still hesitant at the door and bashfully shook her head. Duritz thought how adorable she was, coy, childish, sweet - and grinned to himself for he also knew Anna as the ardent lover, spirited Jewess and intelligent woman.

  "I have to go out. I'll see you tonight," she swiftly expressed, submissively, all the time trying not to make any direct eye contact with the German. Duritz smiled and then excused himself, hurrying down the corridor to catch up with his companion. In the short interim whilst waiting for Adam to return Thomas took the time to study a couple of pictures done in coloured pencil and paints that had sprang up on the walls since his last visit. The first was an accomplished (for an amateur) copy of Caspar Friedrich's "The Wanderer Above A Sea Of Mists". The sky was moodier, greyer than the original - and the figure atop of the mountain looked a little clumsy - but in that the original could be recognised in the copy Thomas gave the picture due credit. If the second picture on the wall opposite, erupting with light like an arctic flower upon the colourless background, was a copy as well, then Thomas was unfamiliar with the original. It was a simple landscape of a stone-clad cottage planted in a sea of verdant greens and browns. A valley. Pastoral. An industrious, happy couple tended to their garden and a couple of pens of livestock. The cottage, sketched with natural technique and detail, was old but homely. Its door was open and, though but a speck within the picture, one could still discern a warm fire inside and its delicate plume of smoke weaved its way up out the chimney. In parts the sky was as blue and white as the imitation Friedrich should have been, but over half the landscape was bathed in the amber glow of the Claudian sun which dominated the scene. Was the sun rising or setting though?

  "I was bored," Adam dryly remarked as he returned and caught his friend studying his pictures, which he quietly rejoiced in creating and was intensely proud of.

  "I rather think you were inspired by something, or someone. She's pretty - and good for you if that satisfied smile on your face is anything to go by."

  "I dare say she's good for you then also in turn, if the amused smirk on your face is anything to go by. It's just finally nice to talk to someone who can conjugate their Polish verbs properly. What do you think of the pictures? The SS haven't taken away what little talent I've got as well as everything else have they?"

  "No. They're very good. I didn't know that you were familiar with the works of Friedrich."

  "Even I was an idealist once, which is probably why I became such a scabrous cynic and realist. I once painted in oils a copy of his "Winter Landscape with Church" for a college exhibition."

  "Isn't that the work in which a cripple prays to a crucifix and is healed?"

  "Yes, with the Cathedral in the background. Neither the painting nor Friedrich are well known in Poland however. Some of my more Christian class mates attacked me for being sarcastic towards Christianity and the miracles. Whilst my father was equally disgusted, but for different reasons - with my having painted such a "goy" picture. He barely spoke to me for a week after my mother dragged him along to the exhibition."

  "What was your intention and interpretation of the scene, if you don't mind me asking?"

  "I don't know, it changed and changes. Sometimes I can't help but be impressed and warmed by the idea of the power of faith and compassion of God, but at other times I can't help but be scornful of the sentimentality, propaganda and inadvertent sarcasm of the piece. I can remember however being offended by one comment I overheard by one of the parents who viewed the work. They didn't say it was a Christian painting - that I could understand and appreciate - but rather they deemed it a gaudy Catholic work of art. I didn't agree with them of course, but after that I couldn't look at the picture without a feeling of dissatisfaction."

  Thomas had wrestled with the idea before, but that afternoon the German revealed something of his own history to Duritz. Perhaps it was because of Duritz being in such a relaxed and confessional mood. Adam listened avidly to the German's biography.

  "I won't bore you with the reason or reasons, why I left university but I did. Suffice to say though that almost immediately after the fact, I drowned my life in drink. Half of my day was spent reading, or writing some piece of hack journalism which would pay for the next bottle of vodka - and the other half was spent drinking the bottle and sleeping it off. I became a hermit, or rather the Underground Man. I'd had my fill of women by then. I saw less and less of my friends, who grew hypocritical and mediocre in my blinkered eyes... My intellect made me conceited. In the same way that some of my countrymen started spouting about how they were the Master Race, I happily satirised them whilst I sincerel
y, almost religiously, believed myself to be superior to others. Perhaps the only thing that I was consumed and intoxicated by more than the drink was Nietzsche. Like him I wanted to shout from the rooftops of the world, ‘One day you will cry: I am alone! One day you will cry: Everything is false!"

  And I possessed a proud and defiant enough nature to believe that I was happy with my lot. Yet all the while an oppressive feeling of dejection, or nausea, pervaded my existence and rendered it empty at the same time. And I couldn't, or didn't, change. More than from some sublime epiphany though, I went back home to my village. My money ran out and my debts were mounting to the extent that they made even a drunk sober up a little. In a similar way to when my parents were half-heartedly proud of me for going to University, they were duly half-heartedly disappointed in their estranged son when they discovered that he had been expelled. They had high hopes perhaps, or dollar signs in their eyes, when I went off to make my fortune in the big city...

  I was desperate and needed money to pay off my debts. So I turned to my old Sunday-school teacher, who had recently become the Head Teacher at the village school. His name was Josef Wirth. In a way he was my original mentor. Ever since I could remember I looked up to the Iron Cross winner; just as importantly though he had introduced me to Shakespeare and Socrates... Josef was an unsung good man in a world that had forgotten, or devalued, the qualities he embodied. He did not forgive me or grant me a second chance because he was weak. He did so because he was strong. Believing himself to have been given a second chance in his own life he generously gave others the benefit of the doubt... I also went to Josef because he was one of the few friends who I had left in my life who I deemed I could fall back on. He cashed in his pension fund and paid off all the monies I owed to various creditors. In return though I not only had to promise Josef that I would pay him back, but that I would do so by securing the requisite qualifications and teaching in his school for the next two years.

  I lived in his house with his wife as a boarder. They both helped me try to clean up my act. I still perhaps drank more than I should have but I consciously drank beer rather than vodka. My belly swelled more than my liver. On Josef's suggestion I started to read Kierkegaard instead of Nietzsche. I still feel sometimes as if I am the child of those two fathers... As there were no prostitutes in the village, or good women of ill repute, I courted a nice German girl. Necessity became the mother of invention... It was also around this time when I discovered that I enjoyed - and had a talent for - teaching... Work fended off boredom. Work set me free so to speak it might even be argued. I just didn't have the spare time to be depressed or feel stupidly superior anymore... Believe it or not but one of the greatest days of my life was when I coached the school's football team to victory in the regional finals...

  After the two years were up and I had paid off my debts I realised that I was as content as I had ever been. I remained at the school, bought a modest cottage and married Maria... I would have lived happily ever after - if not for the rest of the world intruding. At first the Nazis and SA descended upon the village, vomiting their poison out. I felt ashamed when I did not speak up when they took over the tavern. The next night however a local man did. The bastards laughed as they beat him to a pulp. His wife, rather than his friends, rescued him from more serious injury. Then the Communists came, promising to emancipate me from my quiet sense of contentment. As far as I was concerned I couldn't abide either of them, they were like two sides of the same worthless coin... In many ways I was happy in my ignorance of the rising tensions and injustices that were occurring at the time. We were lucky also in that the Depression did not affect our village as harshly as it did other areas. I tried just to read the sports articles in the newspapers. But eventually I couldn't help but be dragged down by what was happening, into the concentric circles of some modern Hell. But what could I do? I felt but fear, impotence and shame. Resignation, interspersed with instances of unvoiced indignation was the order of the day. No, once I did do something. I drafted a ten page letter to one of our efficiently ineffective liberal newspapers, protesting about the illegality of the Nuremburg Laws. I also intended to donate money to Jewish families who'd had their homes and livelihoods taken away from them in engineered acts of barbarity. But I didn't actually go through with it. My wife told me "not to cause any trouble" - we had a baby to think about... The world turned upside down. The bullshit of the local tavern, with its bigotry, half-truths and idle gossip somehow mutated. Anti-Semitism, Fascism, Nazism, became political gospel. Right became wrong and vice-versa. I remember hearing a story about how, just before Hitler came to power; a group of SA foot-soldiers beat a man, a Communist, to death. There was a trial and the men were sentenced to death. When Hitler came to power however he pardoned the culprits, claiming that they were not cold-blooded killers but brave soldiers fighting for the National Socialist cause. Politics turned into thuggery, or worse - it became a form of religion. We were a new chosen people. We had a new Bible in the form of Mien Kampf, augmented by Party propaganda and the diatribes of Goebbels. And we bowed down to follow a new saviour, our God-given Fuhrer. More than our deliver though Hitler was an avenging angel, vanquishing the enemies and false idols of Judaism, Communism and homosexuality... A Jewish colleague at the school was one day ordered to go back home and never return to work by an odious bureaucrat, producing a government stamped piece of paper as a reason. We did nothing. A year later the man disappeared altogether. We said nothing... And what did I or anyone else do when an ambulance arrived and took the retarded son of a neighbour of mine away? They told her that the boy had been selected for an experimental cure. She wrote letter upon letter requesting to visit her son in the clinic, which they said that he was staying in. Eventually, after threatening to visit her son without permission, she received a letter informing her that her child had contracted an infectious disease and had died. Such was the contagious nature of the disease that, for the good of the other patients in the hospital, they had to cremate the bodies of all the victims, to prevent the risk of further infection...

  Protest was made illegal under the Decree against Malicious Acts. Criticism of either the state or the Fuhrer, which were increasingly becoming one and the same, became an actual crime...We were simultaneously manipulated by the media. Goebbels himself argued that the aim of the media was to make the people "think uniformly, react uniformly, and place themselves body and soul at the disposal of the government." We were happy in our new Reich, because we were too intimidated to be anything else... And denounce thy neighbour became the new commandment...

  And so we moved into Saarland and Memel, claiming rightful ownership. For hadn't the territories been stolen from us in the legalised theft that was Versailles? Austria welcomed us with open arms, not owning the strength to push us away. And then the Sudeten lands were returned to Germany. The debate about whether they were given or taken could not be heard over the sounds of our triumphalism. And then we invaded Poland. But could we not argue that this was pre-emptive self-defence? Were we not doing the world a favour by occupying Poland before the Russians did?...

  Maria advised me to sign up before I was conscripted. My father-in-law had a friend who arranged for me to be posted in Poland, rather than Russia. The grass sometimes seems greener even on that side."

  Thomas attempted to smile, but ultimately couldn't. His confession had been imbued with fury, sorrow and despair. The soldier clasped his heavy head in his hands, partly covering his face - in a pose which suggested he wanted to remember everything or bury it all.

  12.

  Should Christian Kleist not have drawn the curtains in his apartment he might have deemed the velvety black night, bedecked in the jewellery of the stars and brooch of a platinum moon, a romantic sight. Instead an ornate - overly so - candelabra provided the light for his dinner table and young guest.

  The Lieutenant lit another cigarette and smiled. His uniform was freshly pressed for the evening. He wore a florid scent that he hadn
't used for a while. His hands were manicured and spotless. There was a twinkling, charming look in his usually intimidating aspect. From across the mahogany dining table his Aryan eyes paused for a revealing moment or two on the slightly feminine attractive countenance of Dietmar Klos. This was their second meal together; the first was carried out in the name of an informal interview a few days ago. Christian, to test the youth's suitability, had been deliberate and authoritative in his speech during their principle interview,

  "I believe you to possess both the intelligence and superior morality Dietmar for me to deal with you plainly - treat you like a man. You know of our project here. We are not making an omelette. I will put it to you as Heydrich once put it to me. We will wipe out the disease through the environment and work we will create for them. Those who prove to be so resilient to survive such conditions will be murdered, because, not in spite, of their resilience. You were fortunate in a way Dietmar not to know the dishonour the Republic suffered after the war. The French, British and Americans raped us. It was the Jew who whispered in their ears. Not only did they cost us the war with their cowardice and machinations but so too they were the ones who stole from and crippled Germany at Versailles. But of course you know all this."

  "Yes sir. My father told me. For all of his stories about the war - he was an artillery officer on the Eastern Front - not once did I hear him speak well of the Jew. So too I am aware of the Jewish conspiracy against us," the starry-eyed Private dutifully replied, being unable however to expand upon the shadowy, insidious conspiracy any further. At times Dietmar spoke as if he were reciting his catechism to a testing, all-knowing Priest.

  The persuasive Lieutenant had gone on that night to paint the Jew as both Bolshevik and capitalist, without a hint of being contradictory. He also tossed into his argument, as if throwing ingredients into a mixing bowl to make a cake, "Christ killers", "parasites" and “isolationists". However, Christian was conscious of giving the floor to his guest as well. Dietmar spoke of his love of the Fuhrer and his belief in the causes of the war. His conversation was not original Christian concluded, but he was sincere and articulate - correct. Dietmar was also understandably nervous, but Christian found that endearing.