Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

It was his opinion, in these darkest days of the war when Germany’s triumph seemed universal, that two things would happen:

  ‘Like Napoleon, Hitler will go too far into Russia, and before I die I will see his armies heading back this way. Mark my words, you young fellows, you will be liberated sooner than you know by men coming from the east. The barbed wire will be torn down. The gibbets … [He stopped, as if he knew how close he was to those gibbets.]

  ‘At the same time the Americans will strengthen the west. You’ll see American bombers over this camp. Yes, you will see airplanes right up there. This you must never doubt. So what if the Germans have reached the Volga River? Mark their retreat. You will hear about it.’

  On one point he was insistent:

  ‘You must remember the name and look of every Nazi who worked in this camp. If any of you escape, and I pray to God you will, first thing you do is not eat a big meal or visit your wife. First thing, you get someone to write down all the names. Karl Otto Koch, who came here from Buchenwald. Max Koegel, who was our commandant, and Hermann Florstedt, if I have his name right. And Otto Grundtz, who commanded Field Four, and don’t forget the medical doctor, Heinrich Rindfleisch. Promise me to record Otto Grundtz, the worst of them all. And find out the name of The Dancer.

  ‘Because when liberation comes you must see that these men are brought back here to Majdanek and hanged. They must be hanged from the very gibbets they profaned. Because they did not profane me, or harmless Jakub Grabski, whom they hanged last week. They profaned the human race, and the memory of Jesus Christ, and the souls of the little children they have massacred in Field Five. For this terrible crime of profanation of all that is good in life, they must be hanged. You must commit yourselves not to revenge but to the service as God’s exemplars here on earth. These men have profaned God, and they must be punished.’

  Until word of what Professor Tomczyk, this walking ghost, was doing reached the ears of Otto Grundtz, he merely continued to observe the old man, noticing that each day he seemed feebler. But his head was still held high and the sunken eyes still flamed. He had seen phenomena like this before in Field Four; the average Pole was a pathetic thing, a subhuman type who wilted in adversity and did not resist being dragged off to Barracks Nineteen. With no food at all, the man would just stay asleep, comatose one day, dead the next—and no harm done. But a few men, sensing death upon them, seemed to pour all their energy into their hearts, and their eyes and their voices. These men died on their feet; he concluded that in some devious way they must have got German blood into their life systems. Perhaps in centuries past, some German warrior had come this way, leaving his precious seed, which had continued uncorrupted; he could imagine no other explanation for the behavior of men like this Tomczyk.

  Once he satisfied himself that the old professor was spreading lies and cultivating anti-German attitudes, he knew that he must be stamped out, so on one cold morning after the inspection was finished he directed his guards to bring Tomczyk to the headquarters of Field Four, the small stone house outside the fences, and there he interrogated him. ‘What is your purpose in disseminating lies about the Third Reich?’ he began, and to his amazement the old man collapsed and cringed like a frightened child. He wept, he pleaded, he threw himself upon the mercy of the commander, and whatever Grundtz proposed, no matter how contrary to what he had been preaching to the men in the barracks, Tomczyk agreed.

  ‘Poland is a fifth-class nation not worth preservation.’

  Tomczyk nodded.

  ‘It is Germany’s destiny to bring order to the east.’

  Tomczyk nodded.

  ‘A superior race must under God’s will subdue and rule an inferior.’

  Tomczyk agreed.

  And slowly, as Grundtz continued, laying bare his soul and identifying the drives which motivated him and justified him in slaughtering hundreds and thousands, he began to realize that this man was making a fool of him, leading him on, encouraging him to divulge the horrible sickness in his soul.

  In the end Grundtz was screaming at Tomczyk, who stood placidly agreeing with everything: ‘You are laughing at me. You’ve been tricking me. You don’t believe a word of what I’ve been saying.’ With a mighty blow, he knocked him clear across the room, then pulled him to his feet and began hitting him about the face and head, but Tomczyk did not stop smiling, and agreeing, and nodding whenever he had a chance to control his head.

  Exhausted and somewhat ashamed of having lost his temper with such an old fool, Grundtz smoothed down his rumpled uniform, resumed his seat at his desk, and looked up at the old man who, miraculously, was still able to stand. ‘I know what you really think. You think the Russians will drive us back one day. You think the American bombers will destroy Germany. That’s what you think, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ Tomczyk lied, ‘that’s what you think.’

  Now real screaming began, real hammering punishment, until Tomczyk’s face was distorted and knocked sideways. When at last he fell unconscious, Grundtz shouted for his assistants: ‘I want every Pole and every Jew in Field Four in formation at the gallows, now!’ When the men said that some were working outside the fences, he shouted: ‘Get them!’

  So a guard ran to the shoe-repair shop and brought the two Field Four men who worked there back to the gibbet, and the squared lines were formed, and the little white stool on which the condemned man would take his last stand was put in place. The prisoners were confused as to what was happening, for there had never before been a hanging except at morning muster, but here came Otto Grundtz with three guards who were half-carrying the victim, and voices whispered in hushed affection: ‘It’s the old man.’

  For the first half of the walk from gate to gallows, his feet dragged, but when Tomczyk reached the waiting square and moved past his own men, he braced himself, tried to control his almost crippled legs, and walked with awkward dignity through their ranks and to the gallows.

  ‘This man has been spreading lies against the Third Reich,’ Grundtz bellowed. ‘He has proved himself an enemy of the new order. He has forfeited his right to life.’

  It was the cynicism of the sentence which infuriated Bukowski, the infamous insincerity at a time of death. In Germany’s eyes, every man in that field had forfeited his right to life by being either a Pole or a Jew, and to specify any further fault was insane. He wanted to scream against the lunacy, but, helpless, he stood silent.

  When Tomczyk mounted the gallows, the prisoners could see his face, how it had been abused, jaw knocked to one side and broken, teeth kicked out, and they were sickened, but as the noose was put about his neck the old man shouted: ‘Rebuild! Rebuild!’ And he was trying to shout it again when the stool was kicked away.

  The iron discipline with which Konrad Krumpf governed the movement of food through his seventeen villages made it more and more difficult for Biruta to sequester any of her wheat kernels or grind them into flour for the baking of illegal bread. Also, Krumpf’s fanatic determination to reduce further the local use of fallen branches, so that more could be shipped to Germany, meant that she could seldom use her oven. Krumpf maintained a watch on chimneys, and if unauthorized smoke was seen emerging from them, his men were ordered to break into the offending kitchen and confiscate whatever was being baked and to arrest the woman if any loaves were being made beyond quota.

  So the midnight quern ceased operating, and the men in the forest had to forage even more for their existence. One night, against his better judgment, Jan Buk sneaked into Bukowo to plead with his wife for more bread, and she had to inform him that Krumpf had made this impossible.

  ‘What shall we do?’ Buk asked in desperation, and they considered for some moments the possibility of throwing themselves on the mercy of Ludwik Bukowski at the palace.

  ‘He’s a Polish patriot,’ Jan reasoned. ‘He’ll see he has to help us stay alive,’ but Biruta pointed out something her husband had apparently forgotten: ‘Konrad Krumpf lives in the palace,’ and he surprised her by actual
ly laughing: ‘That’s where we always do our best work. Under their noses.’ And in the darkness he told her in broad general terms, so that she would not be able to divulge secrets if questioned, of how the men always attacked a train near some German headquarters or stole from a commissary close to the Nazi barracks: ‘They feel secure in numbers and leave themselves vulnerable.’ She remarked that he was using bigger words now, and he said that he was working with bigger men, men of education and savage purpose, but then the question of more food returned, and she had to tell him truthfully: ‘We in the village suspect that Ludwik Bukowski is collaborating.’

  ‘If so, he should be killed,’ Jan said without hesitation.

  ‘But we’re not sure.’

  ‘You think it would be fatal to approach him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t, Jan. Because no one can trust him.’

  ‘But the old woman? The American?’

  Biruta pondered this question a long time, then conceded: ‘All we know of her is good. She helps us with the babies.’ Then she added quickly: ‘But as I told you, Krumpf lives there.’

  It was almost a challenge, to grab food from under Krumpf’s nose.

  ‘Approach the old woman. Plead with her.’

  Jan was so famished that he accepted with no embarrassment or apology his wife’s last bit of bread, her final scrap of cheese, rationalizing that in the village she could eat somehow, whereas in the forest he could not. But as he wolfed down the last morsel he chanced to look at her and saw that her mouth gaped with hunger.

  ‘My God! What are we doing to Poland?’ he cried, and with both arms he reached out for her, kissing her furiously and almost sobbing upon her shoulder: ‘Forgive me for eating your food.’

  She could not speak. In the darkness she could only return his kisses, and as she did so, a stalwart woman who refused to acknowledge fear, he realized the peril in which he had placed her through his pressure on her to provide him with bread, and in the passion of that moment of intense love he left her, uncovered the quern and clutched it to his breast. ‘It is too dangerous to leave here. If you were lost, Biruta, I would …’

  ‘Don’t speak it,’ she said, placing her fingers on his lips. ‘You’d fight on, that’s what you’d do, and we both know it.’ But the quern that would have ensured her death was taken into the woods, where the partisans could not use it, for they had no grain to grind.

  The wisdom of Jan’s action in removing the grinding stones was demonstrated two weeks later when Konrad Krumpf organized a master sweep through the village, his men probing into corners overlooked before. Four cottages away from Biruta’s the investigators found a buried quern, and without even granting the woman a trial, they hanged her from a village tree. Their eyes ablaze with victory, they descended upon the Buk cottage, and soon they found the secret hiding place in the corner where wall met floor, and when they ripped it open they expected to find grinding stones; instead they came up with a chain made of woven hair from a cow’s tail on which was suspended a curious pentagon-shaped medal dating back to some pre-Christian time.

  ‘What’s this?’ a soldier asked, and Biruta said truthfully: ‘We’ve always had it.’

  ‘Why was it hidden?’

  ‘It’s our good-luck charm.’

  This was too complex for the men, so they summoned Krumpf, and as soon as he saw it he surmised that it must be some early Germanic medallion, a souvenir of the time when Teutonic greatness began, and he snatched it from the soldier. As he stomped off with his prize, Biruta thought: How strange. A man from this village, centuries ago, took that medal from a pagan. Now the pagans have reclaimed it.

  Like Professor Tomczyk in his final desperate days, Biruta felt a consuming urge to share with the children of Bukowo whatever knowledge she had acquired, and she realized that she could teach them only if she could set up some kind of illegal school. In the parts of Poland outside the General Governement, even the speaking of Polish was punishable by beatings and long imprisonment; if persisted in, it could mean death, for those areas were now officially part of Germany and neither Poles nor their language existed, but in the General Gouvernement, which was to remain semi-Polish until the race died out, oral use of the language was grudgingly permitted, though any printing of it or education in it was forbidden, and this meant that schools for children no longer functioned.

  As Konrad Krumpf had explained when the villagers first protested: ‘In the future, Poles will not be going to college or even high school. You will grow food and make things for use in Germany.’

  Biruta herself had had an imperfect education, no more than seven years of partial schooling, but she so appreciated the tremendous difference even that little had meant in her life, an understanding so superior to that of her mother, who had started work at five, that she was now determined the children in her village would learn to read and write. So she organized an informal, secret school, which met at odd hours in odd places, and when she saw the bright little faces looking up at her, grave faces aware of the forbidden thing they were doing, her heart grew big with pride and she taught with an efficiency she did not know she possessed. She loved the children and wanted to see them grow in knowledge, and the villagers encouraged her because they knew that even if Krumpf did discover the clandestine school, he would punish her and not the children.

  It was through this school that Biruta had met Madame Bukowska from the palace. Biruta was with her children one morning, all of them just standing in the village square looking at things their teacher had been telling them about, when Madame Bukowska had walked past, stopped, and inquired as to the children’s health.

  The villagers had always known the Madame as an interested, generous woman. They knew that she was not Catholic, but it was always she and not her son who had helped the priest in whatever programs he had arranged for the children. It was she who purchased little books in Warsaw and candies for the feast days. She refrained from attending the large religious festivals of the church, holding that they were reserved for the believing Poles, but she did often appear at Sunday Mass, occupying the place which had been reserved for Bukowskis since the church began seven hundred years ago.

  In the weeks following that first meeting, Biruta had occasionally seen the great lady and always treated her with deference, not because she felt any subordination to the Madame, but rather because it was possible that one day she might need the American’s help. Now was such a time, and for three anxious days Biruta awaited her next encounter with the lady of the palace, and one morning she saw her coming into the square.

  Madame Bukowska dressed with elegant touches, a hat just a little larger than one might expect, a bit more lace or filmy material, and never in the funereal black that Polish widows seemed to prefer. In fact, the villagers often wondered why she remained in Bukowo when her wealth would have entitled her to live anywhere pleasant in the world. One day she had explained to the priest: ‘This has been my home since 1896. That’s almost half a century. Also, my paintings are here, and this is the land I love.’ Then she had looked back toward the palace: ‘I built that building, from plans I sketched on a schoolgirl’s tablet. I cannot leave it now it’s endangered.’

  As the great lady of the district passed through the square, Biruta accosted her: ‘Madame, may I speak with you?’

  ‘Of course. What do you hear from your husband in Germany?’

  ‘He was allowed to send only one card.’

  ‘Of course.’ She spoke Polish with a delightful, almost childish accent. ‘These are trying times. Your name again?’

  ‘Biruta Buk.’

  Marjorie Trilling Bukowska was silent for a moment, recalling those distant days when as a young bride her life was entangled with that of the Buks. ‘Let me see, your husband’s father … no, his grandfather. Didn’t he fight with my husband at Zamosc?’

  ‘He was killed there.’

  ‘So he was. So your grandmother … his grandmother, that is, must have been Jadwiga?’

/>   ‘Yes. She was hanged over there.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ She could visualize Jadwiga, young and arrogant and so very capable. She remembered Jadwiga most forcefully, for she had learned some of her Polish from that sturdy young woman.

  ‘Madame,’ Biruta said in a burst of confidence, ‘our children are starving. They must have food.’

  ‘Indeed they must. No matter what happens, children must not be allowed to go hungry.’

  ‘I was wondering if you …’

  ‘If I could give you some extra food?’ To Biruta’s surprise she broke into laughter. ‘Dear child! Don’t you know that Konrad Krumpf lives with me? That his men watch like hawks everything I do? Because I’m an American and they suspect me, even though they live in my house. I could not give you even a crust, Biruta, not even from my purse now, for over there they are watching me. And if you are seen talking with me too long, those clever men will sooner or later guess about you and your school.’

  ‘School?’ Biruta repeated in astonishment.

  ‘Yes, your school,’ and the slim, erect woman in the faultless dress walked away.

  For six days they did not see each other, but on the seventh, Madame Bukowska passed Biruta in the square, and in the briefest possible exchange, told her: ‘I know you want the food for the men in the forest. I cannot help, but Count Lubonski might.’ And she was gone in a flutter of gray and creamy lace.

  Before Biruta could bring herself to do anything about the startling suggestion made by Madame Bukowska, the two women met again. Biruta was with her children—not in any formal structure, but more like an earnest mother showing her offspring the trees and the storks nesting on the chimneys—when Madame Bukowska passed idly by, stopped to admire one of the little girls, and said: ‘If you want to feed your husband in the forest, do see Lubonski. That one’s a great patriot.’

  ‘My husband is in Germany,’ Biruta said. ‘And I have no school.’

  ‘I shall pray for you … and your husband … and the little ones,’ Madame Bukowska said, and tears filled her eyes, but regardless of whether they were real or not, Biruta could take no chances: ‘My husband is in Germany, and I have no school.’