Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  He wouldn’t tell them, not yet. ‘Yes, sir. I … I understand.’

  God, Andrzej hadn’t told him he would be put through the hoops like this. But what had he expected – tea and open arms? If he was unnerved by a few straight questions, how would he cope when he actually had to do something?

  ‘You realize that if you are to join this unit, any unit in AK, you are required to take a most solemn oath? Its words were authorized by the Government almost immediately after the occupation, when they were still in France. To break this oath is as serious as to collaborate.’

  They shot collaborators.

  ‘Do you still wish to take it?’

  ‘I … Yes, sir.’

  ‘Very well. Stand up, please. I shall read it first, you will repeat it, and I shall make a formal reply.’

  Jerzy got to his feet, holding his cap before him. The Captain was gesturing to the others: chairs were pushed back, and everyone got up. On the other side of the circle, Andrzej was nodding and frowning at him.

  ‘Your cap,’ he mouthed.

  Quickly, Jerzy put it down behind him.

  The Captain had picked up a card from the table, and a small wooden crucifix. He began to read the words of the oath, and the room was absolutely quiet. He read slowly, but without emotion, as if he were dictating: he’s done this so many times, Jerzy thought. I’m just a cog in the wheel.

  ‘… that I will keep the secret, whatever the cost may be.’ The Captain stopped, and looked up at him. ‘You are ready?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He was handed the card, the crucifix. The card shook in his hand.

  ‘Before God the Almighty,’ Jerzy read huskily, ‘before the Holy Virgin, Queen of the Crown of Poland, I put my hand on this Holy Cross, the symbol of martyrdom and salvation, and I swear that I will defend the honour of Poland with all my might, that I will fight with arms in hand to liberate her from slavery, notwithstanding the sacrifice of my own life, that I will be absolutely obedient to my superiors, that I will keep the secret, whatever the cost may be.’

  He looked up. The Captain was watching him gravely; he didn’t feel like a cog in the wheel.

  ‘I receive thee among the soldiers of freedom,’ the Captain said quietly. ‘Victory will be thy reward. Treason will be punished by death.’ Then he smiled, and came over, taking the crucifix and card, and putting them back on the table. He gripped Jerzy’s hand. ‘Good. Good.’

  There was the lightest knock on the door, three quick taps. Andrzej went to open it, and a small dark woman came in, carrying a tray. She crossed the room quickly, and set it down on the table, nodding and smiling to the Captain. The room was filled with the smell of ersatz coffee; there was a plate of cake.

  ‘Thank you, Pani.’

  She smiled at the Captain, and went out again, through the door held open by Andrzej. Then he came over, and shook Jerzy’s hand, quickly.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Fine.’ Jerzy was passed a glass of coffee; he sipped it too fast, scalding his lip, and winced, spilling some on the floor.

  ‘Excuse me …’ He put down the glass and bent down, fumbling in his sleeve for a handkerchief to wipe up the spill. When he looked up, they were all laughing at him.

  ‘Relax,’ said the Captain. ‘Please – sit down, now, we shall all sit down after your ordeal.’

  Jerzy sat, scarlet.

  ‘And now,’ the Captain said lightly, ‘we must find a name for you.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He knew that the legendary leader of the whole AK was known simply as ‘Grot’ – a dart, or spike. His deputy was ‘Bór’, a forest. No one in AK used their real names, ever. What could he be?

  ‘This unit is lew, lion,’ said the Captain, and I myself am strzała, arrow.’ He gestured to the others. ‘Introduce yourselves to our new man.’

  ‘Lampat,’ said Andrzej with a shrug, almost as if he were embarrassed to have Jerzy learn something he had hidden from him for so long. ‘Leopard.’

  ‘And I am wilk, wolf,’ said one of the other boys, grinning. He was short and tough-looking, with cropped hair.

  ‘I’m tygrys. Tiger.’ The other one shrugged, like Andrzej. He looked very young.

  ‘Well?’ the Captain asked Jerzy. ‘Do you want to choose your own name, or shall we do it for you?’

  ‘Um …’ He wished he’d thought of one for himself. What other animals were there, for God’s sake? ‘Um … Antylopa?‘ he said quickly.

  ‘Antelope. Yes, I like that,’ said the Captain. ‘Graceful and fast-running. Welcome, Antylopa. Now – I am going to tell you a little more about our activities.’ He finished his coffee, and stretched out his legs.

  ‘You realize, of course, that the whole aim of AK is eventually to coordinate every unit in a total uprising.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘There is no doubt whatever that the Germans are going to lose this war. They will never be able to withstand pressure on two fronts, and our most important action is concentrated on the rearguard as they are beaten back in Russia. I need hardly say that although we are cooperating with the Red Army we are making it very clear that it is the Polish Armed Forces, directed by General Sikorski from London, to whom we are ultimately responsible.’

  ‘Sir.’

  The Captain smiled. ‘I’m making a speech, forgive me. But I have to stress that we have one clear goal before us: to fight with the Allies to win the war and to restore the exiled Government to a liberated Poland. In the meantime, we are doing everything we can to make things as difficult as possible for the enemy. Much of our work is outside Warsaw, of course, in sabotage – derailing trains, blowing up bridges, burning military stores … Those of us employed in the munitions factories ensure that as many German arms as possible are sent out in a faulty and dangerous condition. And …’ His fingers were drumming on the table again. ‘We supply papers and passes to those who need them. We have skilled assassins, whose targets are the Gestapo – any of the enemy whose activities are particularly brutal.’

  He thought of the street raid he had seen in the summer, of the slumping bodies and the two women, their heads lifted by the hair, the sharp crack on the cobbles.

  ‘Within Warsaw,’ the Captain was saying, ‘indeed in every city where a ghetto has been built, we are amongst our other activities trying to do something for the Jews. You realize what is happening?’

  ‘That they’re being taken away? Oh, yes. It’s … it’s horrible.’

  ‘We’ve been getting reports from railway workers outside the city which seemed at first, I must say, simply … fantastic. Still –’ He shook his head. ‘There’ve been so many that we’re forced to believe them. We are in urgent communication with London: the Government is doing all it can to alert the British Government; we have sent a courier to New York, to Roosevelt, to the Jewish organizations there. And here the Jews themselves have formed a Militant Organization within the ghetto, and we’re smuggling in what arms we can. As you probably realize, our own supplies are very limited, but we have a good number of people in the munitions factories and warehouses who help us.’ He looked at Jerzy closely. ‘Have you any contacts of this kind?’

  ‘No, sir. I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Well … in any case it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever become directly involved in any of this.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s time we closed the meeting. But first’ – another smile – ‘first I must brief you on your first assignment.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’ He listened, his stomach full of butterflies.

  Afterwards, he left with Andrzej. They stood for a moment in the doorway of the building, peering out.

  ‘All clear,’ Andrzej whispered. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Fine. Thanks for getting me in.’

  ‘You got yourself in. See you soon.’

  ‘See you soon.’

  They shook hands, and then Andrzej went out quickly, turning left. Jerzy waited for a couple of minutes, to give him time, and then he duck
ed out, looking up and down again. No one. The rain had stopped, and the moon raced through ragged clouds. He walked quickly home, past the shuttered windows, over the wet, gleaming cobbles.

  Before the occupation, the Evangelical Hospital had been one of the best in Warsaw, well equipped, well run – Tata had spoken highly of it, Now, after three years of struggling to maintain its standards, it looked dingy and neglected, the walls peeling, the bedclothes patched and worn, dressings and drugs carefully counted, sparingly used. When the ghetto walls went up, they had enclosed the hospital, and the German authorities wanted it shut down. By sealing up the entrance within the ghetto, and using the old back doors outside it, opening on to a street near Teatralny Square, the Polish administration had managed to keep it open.

  Like the patients, and all those working there, Anna had to make her way to the back-door entrance past ruins from the 1939 seige: many fallen buildings in the city had been deliberately left untouched by the German authorities, as a constant reminder to the Poles of their defeat. Her ward, where she had been taken on as a nursing assistant through an old friend of Tata’s, was on the first floor, long and narrow, holding some thirty beds. Every window on the ground floor had been bricked, in, and the wards and corridors down there were dimly but permanently lit: there was not a single point where a Jew might creep in, and hide. From the tall windows on Anna’s ward, however, it was possible to look down into the ghetto. All staff were under the strictest orders from the German medical authorities never to do so, but Anna had looked, once, when the senior nurse was too busy to notice.

  It was January 1943 when she began to work in the hospital. The day she looked down was a freezing afternoon, the light beginning to fade, the lights in the wards due to go on soon. Anna peered, cautiously.

  The streets of the ghetto below were no longer crowded, as they used to be when she travelled through by tram. Those who remained, and who were out on this bitter afternoon, were like ghosts, their skin a terrible, unforgettable grey. They paced slowly, in rags, as if the cold could no longer touch them, they were already so cold, dying on their feet, crumpling against the walls and slipping down to the gutter. There were a great many bodies in the gutter.

  ‘Nurse … nurse …’ A woman was calling weakly, from a bed across the ward. Anna turned from the tall window and hurried over. The woman looked very white. White, ill – but not that awful, awful grey. How could living flesh ever be that colour?

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I feel very sick …’

  ‘Poor thing. I’ll get you a bowl.’ She walked quickly to the sluice, and tried to push away the image of what she had just seen.

  Working in the hospital each day, she did feel for the first time since the war began that she had a purpose, and, too, that she was following a little in Tata’s footsteps, even if she was only emptying pots, making beds or taking temperatures. The women patients were badly undernourished, as well as ill: they leaned weakly against her as she fed them on broth from the kitchens, or dumplings, potatoes and cabbage.

  The spring was bright and cold. Still wearing the warm inner lining of Tata’s burka, Anna went to the hospital each morning, sometimes by tram, at other times walking, watching the trees in the Saxon Gardens come into bud and leaf. Many of the grass strips down the centre of the wider streets on the outskirts of the city had long since been dug up and turned into allotments: as the weather grew warmer, you often saw old men, housewives and children digging and planting. At least, however hungry they all were, there would always be vegetables. Anna had almost forgotten

  She hurried through·Zelazna Brama, where the market stalls sold cakes and pastries and many used items – old clothes, battered saucepans, chipped plates and serving dishes – anything which could still be used and might fetch a few złotys or be simply exchanged for food. There were no bookstalls, though once Warsaw had been full of them – under the rigid censorship regulations they had all but disappeared. But there were stalls like these ones all through the poorer districts; here, she often saw children in patched or ragged clothes scavenging behind the pastry stalls or in the vegetable baskets. Anna had grown used to these sights, they were everyday, like the call of one of the ‘sparrows of Warsaw’ – the newsboy on the corner of Teatralny Square, near the hospital, where he sold the Kurier. Normally, like most people, she ignored him, but on a morning in April she saw that a crowd of people stood round him, and she stopped.

  People were pushing and jostling each other, almost snatching the papers from the boy’s hands; Anna heard the word ‘murdered’ and frowned: who had been murdered? She heard it again – ‘murdered!’ – as she managed to break through to the front, and then she saw something on the front page which made her snatch at a copy, too.

  Polish Officers in mass grave …

  She pushed her way back out of the throng and stood reading, motionless, no longer hearing the trams, or the people, or the newsboy’s call.

  Katyń Forest … deep in Russia … found by party of German troops …

  But the Germans lied. Every word the Kurier ever printed was propaganda, distorted news of the Allies’setbacks, lies, lies. It would so suit them to announce that the Russians were criminals …

  Some weeks later, new posters were nailed on the noticeboards throughout the city, and Anna, Jerzy and Teresa stood among the press of white-faced families, peering up at them.

  Katyń Forest: the names of those so far identified

  A long thin column. Another. Another. Another. Badly printed, on coarse paper.

  Kurowski, Tomasz.

  It was there.

  For once, there was no need to rely on the underground press for news: triumphantly pointing the finger at the Soviet Union, the German authorities ensured that the events which followed the discovery of Katyń were kept before the Poles for months. Lists of the dead were published almost every day. Red Cross offices in Warsaw were flooded with letters, asking for documents, pleading to have the bodies brought back to Poland for burial, asking, ever more urgently, about the men who had been held in all three camps: Ostaszków, Starobielsk and Kozielsk. Not for a long time was it learned that only men from Kozielsk had been found in Katyń.

  Over the next few weeks, Anna and the family learned that in London General Sikorski had demanded an international Red Cross investigation, and that Stalin had angrily refused, calling the demand an insult: the bullets found in the skulls of the murdered men were German! Within a day, he had severed diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in Exile. Without Stalin’s agreement, the Red Cross were forced to abandon their own plans; instead, an international commission with members drawn from twelve German-occupied countries travelled to Katyń in May.

  Gradually Anna, Teresa and Jerzy learned that Tata, like the thousands of other prisoners of Kozielsk, must have been murdered in 1940, in April – that was when all the letters and diaries found on the bodies abruptly broke off. They had been deported from Kozielsk in sealed trains, taken off at the tiny forest station of Gniezdovo, near Smoleńsk, and from there driven in covered lorries deep along the road through the trees. When they were taken out, each man’s hands were roughly tied behind his back, in many cases using a rope which was then looped up to wind round the throat, so that anyone struggling to get free would only strangle himself. Many of the bodies showed bayonet wounds, many of the jaws were broken, showing the violent resistance put up before the men were bound in this way and gagged. They were then shot, one by one, at point-blank range at the base of the skull, probably as they stood on the edge of the freshly dug mass graves. When the graves were filled in, young pine trees were planted in the light sandy soil, in an attempt at disguise.

  It was the freshness of these trees, however, which had alerted forest workers this year, noticing the mounds for the first time, and growing suspicious. And then the German troops arrived, pushing their way through in their retreat from Moscow, and the discovery was made.

  No one in Warsaw could talk
about anything except Katyń, and the evidence emerging from the grim exhumations. The bullets used were German, as the Russians repeated again and again. But they were of a manufacture which had been widely sold both to Poland and Russia until 1941. Everything else – the make of bayonet, the make of rope, that particular knot in the ropes, the location, and the fact that for two years Stalin had been unable to give Sikorski a convincing answer as to the whereabouts of the missing men – all this pointed to the murders being the work of the Soviet Union.

  Gradually, all these facts and findings were published and pinned up on the walls of Warsaw or blared through the loudspeakers. For Anna, for a long time, there was only one fact: that Tata had died in April 1940. That meant that all the time they had been writing to him, until the June or July, when the letters had been returned, he had been dead.

  Retour – parti …

  All the time they had talked about him, or thought about him, and wondered what he was doing, and missed him, and longed for him to come home, all the time they had prayed that with the amnesty of 1941 he would be released, he had been dead.

  Retour – parti …

  She couldn’t get that brief, bleak phrase out of her head. And as she walked the distance to and from the hospital each day, she could not rid herself of the image of a dark, unseeing figure, somewhere infinitely far away, waiting to be found.

  In the middle of April, Anna arrived on the ward to find patients being helped into the corridors outside, and stretchers bumping down the stairs. Many of the beds were stripped; a nurse, distracted, told her to pile up the linen and help take it down to the basement, where the patients were to be resettled.

  ‘Why? What’s happening?’

  The nurse bit her lip, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The ghetto …’ said Anna, her stomach turning. ‘Something in the ghetto.’

  ‘I think it must be. Come on – give me a hand.’

  Down in the stuffy, half-lit basement, the sister supervised the patients being helped back into beds and on to mattresses, then summoned staff and helpers into a small side room. ‘We have received an order,’ she said tersely. ‘Until further notice, no one is to go to any upper floor or look out of any window for any reason whatsoever. Anyone found up there will be shot.’ She paused, very pale. ‘I believe that something particularly terrible is about to happen – I need hardly say that our patients will need us to appear calm.’