‘I doubt that.’
‘He’s got Krumpf living there … even before you left. You know that.’ When her husband said nothing, she asked: ‘How was the report spread that you were in Germany?’ and he said: ‘I didn’t hear that rumor,’ and she said: ‘Yes, and at first I thought it was true. How did you get from Krakow into the forest?’ and he refused to explain, for the rule of the underground was: ‘No one is to know anything until the moment of action.’
At two in the morning he prepared to leave, but had one final plea to make: ‘Biruta, sometimes we starve. We must have food. Could you speak to the women?’
‘No,’ she said with stern finality. ‘I can trust no one. Krumpf has spies everywhere. You wouldn’t believe that he could get Poles to spy for him.’
‘I can believe,’ he said.
So she made no promises about anyone else but she did say that she would steal what she herself could, and she would reserve it for him.
‘No! I can’t come back. Not for a while.’
‘I’ll give it to the Storks.’
‘You do that. We’ll get our share.’
And suddenly a flood of great love came over these two, there in the utter bleakness of their situation. In the abyss of Polish hopes, when the enemy was proving stronger than ever, they trembled in each other’s arms.
‘They’ve taken our other priest, you know,’ she whispered. ‘Sent him to Auschwitz.’
‘Oh God, that poor man.’
And in the darkness they prayed, and then, after a final desperate embrace, he returned to the forest, carrying food which he took reluctantly, for he had never seen her so thin.
In the city of Lublin at the corner of University and Basztowa streets there stood a rather impressive public building graced by a tower containing a good clock which struck the hours. In the cramped, dark, damp rooms in its cellar, the Lublin Gestapo had constructed a series of windowless cells and interrogation rooms, and none in the entire area of occupied Poland was as horrible, for criminals delivered here were not expected to leave this place alive.
When Szymon Bukowski was shoved through the small, low door leading to the cellar, he was greeted by a Gestapo functionary who clubbed him over the head with a brutal blow that might have killed a man less vital than he, then ordered two others to drag him to a holding cell. When he revived in the darkness, his head throbbing and his ability to speak impaired, he found that he was in the presence of another prisoner, whose voice indicated that the owner was a much older man.
‘Professor Tomczyk,’ the voice said. ‘Roman Tomczyk of this city.’
Szymon could scarcely make his tongue work, but managed to ask in muffled accent: ‘University here?’
‘No,’ the voice said, and that was all.
Bukowski thought that perhaps the man was a spy, and would try to extract confidences, but there were no questions. And when light finally entered the cell, Szymon was amazed that this man could speak at all, for his face was horribly battered: ‘What happened?’
‘The broomstick.’
‘Did they beat you with a broomstick?’ The bruises looked too big and too flat for that.
‘They put you on the broomstick. Then things happen.’ When Szymon tried to interrogate him, he diverted the questions: ‘Two things to remember, young man. Save your physical energy. Protect your psychological strength.’
‘How?’
‘Never fight back. Let them do what they will. Never get angry. There will be a day of retribution. And a third rule, a very good one. Scream like hell when they beat you. It makes them feel superior.’
‘What is the broomstick?’ Apparently it was too horrible to be discussed, for the man merely said: ‘You can survive, believe me, you can survive if you will husband your physical and psychological strength. Indulge in no excesses, not even hatred.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I interrogated escapees … before they caught me. But don’t you tell anybody anything … not even me. And it’s known that I was head of the Lublin committee for two years. Tell no one who you are or why. Stay quiet and conserve your energies.’
Before noon Bukowski learned what the broomstick was. He was taken from his cell, thrashed by two guards, who kicked and mauled him as they dragged him along, and delivered to a larger cell with lights. It contained four men, Gestapo he supposed, and two chairs with high, wide backs, facing outward one from the other. There was also a broomstick, a rather long length of some heavy wood like oak or ash, and with obvious delight one of the men brought this to where Szymon was standing, or rather, had been standing, for a savage blow to the back of his neck knocked him to the floor.
Adeptly, one of the men grabbed his feet and doubled his knees backward, whereupon his ankles were strapped together while the broomstick was passed under his knees. His body was then thrust brutally forward so that his elbows could be passed under the stick, and his wrists were lashed tightly and secured and forced back close to his chest. He thus formed a compact bundle, tightly compressed and twisted around the broomstick, whose ends the four men placed on the upper rims of the chair backs. Two men sat spread-legged on the chairs, holding the backs erect, and now Szymon was rolled back and forth as the four men rained blows upon him.
No one spoke, but from time to time one of the men sitting on the chairs would leap up, whereupon the weight of Szymon’s bundled body would cause that chair to topple over; this meant that he would crash to the floor from a height high enough to terrify and bruise him horribly, but not high enough to kill him outright. Then he would be kicked numerous times, abused for being clumsy, and hoisted back onto the chairs. Again and again one of the men would jump up, sending him crashing to the floor. Once they placed him at the extreme end of the chair backs and started rolling him slowly toward the end, informing him of the distance still to be covered: ‘Thirty centimeters. Twenty. Ten. Whoooo!’ and with a mighty shove they pitched him off. Since he fell a greater distance than when the chairs slowly collapsed, he was badly hurt and thought he might have a broken hip, but when they kicked him about the body he felt a new pain greater than that to the hip, and before he fainted he judged that he was still whole.
Of three hundred and sixty-seven prisoners interrogated during Szymon Bukowski’s stay Under the Clock, one hundred and ninety died. Every one was listed in the careful records kept by the Gestapo as having died from Lungentuberkulose.
On three successive days Bukowski and Professor Tomczyk were each given the most savage treatment on the broomstick, and Szymon wondered how the old man survived, but whenever the latter was dragged back to his cell he simply lay on the floor, breathed as deeply as his damaged lungs would permit, and assured Szymon that nothing had happened: ‘It is not my responsibility to bring retribution to these men. We have created a God to whom we allocate that task and we must believe that He notes every action in this cellar and will in due course make honest restitution.’
Szymon was too battered to comment, but the professor realized one weakness in his argument, and through lips shattered by kicks to the mouth he said almost incoherently: ‘And it does not matter, son, whether we are alive to see the restitution or not. It will come as surely as day follows night, and we are now in the night. It will surely come. That we must never doubt.’
His remarkable faith helped keep Bukowski alive during these days of torture and interrogation, and during one afternoon of hideous abuse, he happened to be taken to the cell while Professor Tomczyk was still on the broom, and the old man was crying and weeping and screaming like a baby, which seemed to give his tormentors great pleasure, but later when he rejoined the old man in their cell, Tomczyk said: ‘Nothing happened. You must relax, son, and save your spiritual energies. I shall not survive, but you must, to bear witness. So save your energies, because God sees everything that happens in that room, and it is to Him that we look for deliverance.’
Tomczyk proved a poor prophet; he did survive, and at the end of the interrogations
he and Bukowski were taken out into an alley behind Under the Clock, thrown into a van, and hauled away as near-corpses to one of the fine buildings in Lublin, Zamek Lublin. It stood on a hill, a castle dating far back into history. It now served as both the major prison in the area and the court in which the destinies of prisoners were determined.
The court was convened on an upper floor of the castle, and as will be seen, this was significant, but more so was the fact that the trials were held in a very old chapel decorated with Biblical frescoes dating back to 1418, for this gave the proceedings an aura of religious sanction. Holy figures, representing justice, looked down on the judgments and watched their consequences.
The trials epitomized Nazi justice in general and the attitude of Germans toward Poles in particular. Two men, dressed in judges’ robes, sat at a long marble table occupying the space where during five centuries the altar had stood. They wore red hats, which gave them a judicial appearance although neither had ever before been a judge. The older man, on the left as the prisoners saw him, wore heavy glasses; for a brief period he had been a lawyer’s clerk in Hamburg; the young man on the right was a Gestapo functionary, and it was he who determined the course of the trial and its outcome.
Some forty prisoners had been assembled in the chapel at seven in the morning, and there they sat, as if at prayers, for two hours, and some whose kidneys had been damaged or even ruptured by the beatings Under the Clock began to experience extreme discomfort, but their guards would not allow them to move. With dismay Bukowski became aware that Professor Tomczyk had wet his pants, and then he saw that two others had done the same. This amused the guards, who cuffed the three men over the head most brutally for having misbehaved.
When the trials began they were shocking affairs. A prisoner would be dragged, literally dragged, by the armpits, his feet barely touching the ancient stones of the chapel floor, to a spot where he was thrown before the judges; some lost their footing and looked up from the floor itself in grave embarrassment, whereupon the young Gestapo judge shouted in a high piercing voice that the accused must stand before this court of the Third Reich.
Each trial lasted only six or seven minutes. A Gestapo officer announced what the charges were, a prosecutor heckled the prisoner, demanding answers to questions which assumed guilt, and the two judges harassed the man if he tried to reply. No witness was allowed to speak for the defendant, and if he endeavored to speak for himself, the Gestapo judge shouted him down.
The verdict came swiftly. In the week of Bukowski’s trial an average of fifty-two men a day stood before the judges, or more than three hundred and fifty accused, and not one was found innocent; the judges felt that the Gestapo, Hitler’s most valuable arm, would not have brought these culprits before the court unless they were guilty; the only legal problem was what their punishment should be.
Bukowski noticed that occasionally the Gestapo judge would consult a paper and whisper something to the other judge, and then the prisoner would be told: ‘You are to be taken to further imprisonment, where you will reveal what you have refused to tell us so far.’ These men were led off to the left.
The others, and by far the greater number, were ordered to execution, and it came swiftly. Upon pronouncement of the verdict, always by the Gestapo judge, two guards hustled the prisoner out the door to the right, which closed behind him with a bang. Within seconds there came another bang, this time very loud, from the muzzle of a revolver held close to a human head, then a moment of silence, then a crashing sound as the dead body was pitched headfirst down a stairwell to an open area below. Then the two guards returned to the courtroom to await the next verdict.
Szymon noticed one peculiarity which betrayed what the verdict was going to be. Whenever the young Gestapo judge, after whispered consultation, decided to impose the death penalty, but before he announced it, the civilian judge would take off his heavy glasses and stare at the accused. It was as if, having tried a ghost with only ghostly evidence against it, the judge wished to catch a glimpse of the real human behind the charges. Dangling his glasses, the inquisitive judge would watch the condemned man as he was taken from the courtroom, listen for the pistol shot, then replace his glasses almost as if to say: ‘Well, that finishes that. Let’s get on with the next one.’
Professor Tomczyk was summoned first, and he presented a pitiful sight, a frail old man who had wet his pants, his face badly bruised, his eyeglasses twisted from a blow he had received in this courtroom, his knees trembling, not from fear but from lack of food during the preceding five days of torture. But he stood erect and almost defiant as the so-called legal procedures swirled about him. He was charged with having led the opposition in Lublin to the new rule of the Third Reich and with having aided Jews to escape eastward into Russian areas.
It was clear from the rantings of the prosecutor that Tomczyk was to be executed, but at the moment of judgment the Gestapo judge consulted his list and announced in that piercing voice that this prisoner was of supreme danger to the new order and would be remanded to further imprisonment and interrogation. Tomczyk was led off to the left, and Bukowski supposed that he, Bukowski, would never see him again.
Now two guards cuffed him on the back of his head, causing stars to dance in the courtroom, and he was dragged forward. The strong shove he received at the end caused him to fall on the stones, where he looked up at his judges. Since these would probably be the last human beings he would ever see, he wanted to savor each moment, each revealing impression. He did not listen to the accusations, for they were preposterous and in no way related to what he had actually done while operating from within the Forest of Szczek: destruction of a troop train, the murder of two members of the Gestapo, the spiriting of Jews away from the Krakow ghetto, the theft of wheat and other consumables. Instead he focused on the faces, and saw not beasts devoid of human characteristics, but two men caught up in the passions of their time: a man who should have been a legal assistant in some small German town and never a full-fledged lawyer or judge, and a man who should have spent his life as a minor and ill-regarded political hack in some rural district, the kind who was sent for beer and sausages in the late afternoons. By the fate of revolution and war they were now dispensing supposed justice in a city they had never before heard of and to a people they despised.
Profoundly sad that men and their systems could be so cruel, Szymon tried to straighten his bruised shoulders and accept the death so wrongfully imposed upon him, but he noticed that the civilian judge had not removed his glasses! He was not going to be shot! Then came the high, whining voice: ‘The prisoner has not told us where his hiding places were. Further imprisonment and interrogation.’
He had not the slightest idea as to what awaited him behind the left door, but when he was shoved through he found himself in a small stone-walled room which looked as if it had once been used as a robing closet for the priests who officiated in this chapel, and there he waited with some dozen others as the trials in the courtroom proceeded, and with every echo of the pistol shot that sent some other Pole pitching headlong down the stairwell, he shuddered. In Zamek Lublin four hundred thousand Polish men and women would be tried by judges like the two Bukowski had seen and less than nine thousand would be found innocent.
When the trials ended and the gunfire ceased, a new group of guards appeared in the little stone room, heavy boots and heavier voices, and they assumed control of the prisoners sentenced to further incarceration: ‘Line up. Keep silent. Move smartly.’
They were taken down two long flights of stone stairs and out into the Lublin sunlight, where some two hundred other prisoners from various parts of Poland were waiting. In ragged military formation they walked eastward out of town, some older men falling by the way, for the pace was sharp and steady.
‘Get up!’ the guards said only twice to the fallen men, and if they could not, they were shot, their bodies left behind as the long file moved on.
At the edge of Lublin a spur of the railroad whi
ch connected Krakow with Brest-Litovsk had been converted into a huge unloading platform, and here several thousand prisoners from the south of Poland and even from Hungary and Czechoslovakia were being driven from the boxcars that had carried them great distances, and these, too, joined the procession, which now started a long tramp eastward.
Bukowski walked beside Professor Tomczyk, aiding him when it looked as if the old man might collapse, and in whispered consultation they tried to decipher what was happening. ‘Many of them must be Jews,’ Tomczyk guessed. ‘From other countries, maybe. They don’t look Polish.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Majdanek, I think.’
And for the first time Szymon heard the name that would be engraved in letters of fire upon his heart. ‘Majdanek,’ he repeated. ‘What is it?’
‘A big camp our people in Lublin helped build east of the city.’ Tomczyk paused, then added: ‘It was really built by Russian prisoners captured on the eastern front. They worked five months, and on the day they finished the barracks they were shot. Every man. Five thousand, four hundred and sixty-three in one day.’ They walked in silence and then the old man said: ‘My group kept the records.’ More silence, then a nudge so deftly given that the Gestapo guards could not detect it. ‘Someone in that crowd from my unit is counting each of us as we go past. You are being recorded, Szymon. Tonight, somehow, our numbers will be radioed to the Polish government in London.’
It was a long, tiring march from Lublin to Majdanek, and some of the new prisoners from the boxcars could not negotiate it; they were shot. Others who talked in ranks were clubbed with rifle butts, and many limped from the bruises of previous tortures, but this tragic column came at last to Majdanek, that once-beautiful field of corn and wheat that was now enclosed by three concentric fences of barbed wire, two of them electrified with enough power to kill any passing animal which touched them.
Poland: A Novel Page 62