Poland: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  For two weeks she continued to teach her students, at night, in the early morning, now in some barn, now boldly in the church, and then she slipped through the forest to Castle Gorka and asked to see the count, and when Gestapo sentries guarding the castle demanded to know the nature of her errand, she said boldly: ‘He wants to hire a maid,’ and they forced her right into the castle and shouted for the count. When he appeared from an upper floor the Nazis asked: ‘Are you expecting someone looking for work?’ and upon seeing the young woman, he said instantly: ‘I’m seeking a maid,’ and they left her with him.

  ‘What causes you to risk your life?’ he asked when they were upstairs and alone.

  ‘Madame Bukowska sent me.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  Now came the terrible moment when she must trust a man to whom she had never before spoken, a man whose credentials she did not know, a man who could cause her to be shot within the next few minutes if she judged him incorrectly. But the fate of all Poland seemed to hinge upon her that day, and whereas she had known instinctively that the Bukowski palace was corrupted and must not be touched, the same instinct assured her that Castle Gorka was an inherent part of Poland and could be trusted.

  Taking a deep breath, she said: ‘The men in the forest are starving.’

  Without altering his expression in the slightest, Count Lubonski replied: ‘I conduct no traffic with partisans. Now get out of here,’ and he called for the Gestapo to remove the girl, but before they reached the second floor he told Biruta in calm, even tones: ‘In the barn away from the river and near the beech trees we keep wheat and sometimes a freshly slaughtered pig.’

  When the Gestapo arrived he told them: ‘This one won’t do. She doesn’t know how to bake. If you come upon a young woman who can bake in the German style, let me know.’ And Biruta was dismissed.

  She returned to her village with thundering heart, but the problem now was how to deliver the message to her husband, and she pondered this perplexing question for some days, because there seemed no rational way by which she could get into the Forest of Szczek or find her husband if she did, for Krumpf maintained patrols which even skilled woodsmen like Jan Buk had difficulty penetrating. She thought of sending some child sneaking through the trees, but in the end she concluded that she and only she must undergo the danger of such an excursion.

  For several days she made herself conspicuous in the village square, lest anyone had missed her when she went on the secret trip to Castle Gorka, and then one evening as the sun was going down she studied the disposition of Krumpf’s troops, and as soon as darkness fell she headed into the forest.

  Her plan was to continue in a straight line, using the stars as her compass, until she was intercepted by someone. If it turned out to be a Nazi patrol, she was dead. No, she told herself repeatedly to nerve herself for what might happen, I would not be dead. They would torture me first, maybe pull out my fingernails or cut off my toes. No, I would not be dead. But I will not betray our men. I will not betray my husband. She walked through the night, catching glimpses of the guiding stars now and then through breaks in the trees, and she encountered no one. During the first segment of daylight hours she slept at the foot of a huge beech tree, but by midafternoon she was back on the trail, heading always eastward, and toward dusk the great Forest of Szczek lived up to its name, for she heard a clinking sound, and when she crept toward its source she spied from behind her tree a small group of young men who were obviously not Gestapo patrol and who might be partisans.

  For more than an hour, as darkness deepened, she studied the men, and when she heard them speaking Polish she judged that she could make her frightening gamble. Remaining behind her tree lest they fire at her in fright, she cried: ‘Polish men! I am over here.’ And still from the safety of the tree she waved a hand.

  They ran to her, seized her, and led her to their quarters, where they tried to determine who she was, while at the same time she was endeavoring to find the same answer about them. Gradually her suspicions abated and she satisfied herself that they were indeed partisans, but whether they were members of her husband’s group she had no way of ascertaining. She could tell them his name, but they might know him only by his code. In fact, she did not even know the name of the group to which he belonged, for he had not wanted to burden her with that fatal knowledge in case the Gestapo interrogated her. But she did know that somewhere in this considerable forest her husband was hiding, and starving.

  ‘My husband is with you,’ she said, and now they had to be suspicious, for she could well be some silly village girl whom Konrad Krumpf had suborned to act as his spy. Everyone in Poland had to be an object of supreme suspicion, and she was not excused.

  They questioned her for a long time, and now she had to be circumspect, lest one of them be trapped by the Nazis and tortured for information. So the battle of misinformation continued, the men lying to the woman, the woman to the men, and that night nothing was settled, but next morning when she intimated that she might be able to deliver food, they had to pay attention.

  They decided, after much angry debate among themselves, that they must take this woman to another camp, and although two of the most outspoken members warned against it, still not convinced she wasn’t a spy, the others prevailed, and they walked a far distance through the woods, and after signals had been given and answered, they took a carefully prescribed route to where a larger group lay in hiding, and in the bright noonday sun filtering through the treetops, Biruta saw her husband and ran toward him joyously and embraced him and started to weep with overwhelming joy, mumbling through her tears: ‘You will have food.’

  At Majdanek it was always understood by the Gestapo officers running the camp that they must provide the factories whose branches had been erected outside the gates with a steady supply of slave laborers for whom the employers paid nothing but whom they were obligated to provide one meal a day. The firms who participated in this scheme were some of the most respectable in Germany; before the war they had operated subsidiaries of distinction in cities like London, Sydney and New York, their advertisements appearing proudly in such magazines as Life and The Illustrated London News.

  Prisoners who were detached from Majdanek to work in these plants entered a bizarre world, for they worked all day in what was an almost normal situation, even given a real lunch, then returned at night to barracks where Otto Grundtz still dominated their lives. They were also threatened by a curious fact of human behavior: the German civilians who operated the plants were never in actual charge of the slave laborers; that job was handled by a Gestapo detachment. But since any Poles assigned to the factory were already stigmatized as being criminals, their civilian bosses were prone to treat them as such, and more Majdanek men lost their lives because these civilians brought arbitrary charges against them than were shot because some Gestapo guard took a dislike to them. It was a risky game, working in the civilian plants, and Majdanek men learned that they must jump to any task and show enthusiasm and pay great deference to their civilian supervisors, or they would die.

  The compensations, however, more than offset the risks. Men worked on tasks which made sense, and not the cruel make-work of the camp. They worked with other intelligent human beings and saw the results of that work. And they received real food, not ersatz stuff that was only marginally digestible.

  The deadly temptation, of course, was sabotage. Since the plants produced armaments, anything that retarded the process helped Germany’s enemies, and if a product could actually be destroyed or rendered useless by inserting some defective part, it was the same as if an Allied shell had struck the plant. So sabotage occurred constantly, and men were killed at their machines for attempting it. A civilian inspector would suddenly scream: ‘This is sabotage!’ and a Gestapo guard would run up, listen for a few seconds, put a pistol to the back of the offender’s ear, and fire—right in the factory.

  And yet almost every Polish worker devised some new and hellishly cleve
r way of obstructing the system. Shells would leave munitions plants after the most careful inspection, then blow up just as they were being fired, killing an entire crew. Or the gearbox of a truck would suddenly grind to a halt, its various parts fused together in one lump. Sabotage was an infinite game of chess, played with death as the adversary, and some Poles played it with exquisite skill. But there were also some German overseers who possessed a fiendish ability to anticipate it.

  When Szymon Bukowski was detached from his shoe-repair job and delivered like a sack of sand to the Berlin Electric Laboratories, whose plants in Pittsburgh and Chicago had made superb components before the war, he entered a contradictory world, for he had two supervisors who earnestly wanted him to master their machines and who gave him every encouragement to do so. They were highly trained men, experts in their specialty, who recognized him as their equal in basic abilities and potentially their equal in ultimate mastery. For them to have a prisoner like Bukowski was a privilege.

  They accepted no nonsense: ‘One suspicion of sabotage, Bukowski, and you’ll be shot. You’ve seen what happens.’ But they never ranted, like many of the other supervisors: ‘You’re making this machine for the greater glory of the Third Reich.’ They did their work because a good machine was an admirable accomplishment of itself, and they intended to make the best. There was not much sabotage in their division because they rid themselves quickly of men who had no respect for good work and treated with friendliness those who did.

  However, Bukowski quickly learned that something was badly wrong in this section of the B.E.L., and one day he even overheard the two men referring to one serious aspect of the problem. One said: ‘If we could only keep a man like Bukowski permanently,’ and the other replied: ‘It’s that damned Mannheim.’ Bukowski began to look about him and discovered that his managers were right; as soon as a Majdanek prisoner became proficient in the intricate processes of assembling electrical devices, he was taken off the job and returned to the camp, where he was given the most menial tasks or the most brutal and destructive heavy labor, as if Otto Grundtz was determined to punish him for his vacation at B.E.L.

  Then it happened to him. Just when he had mastered all the procedures in his section at B.E.L., he was yanked off the job and assigned to the heavy concrete rollers that graded the camp roadways. Also, it seemed to him, he invariably found himself in the kitchen lines that received the worst food, and he realized that any strength which he had acquired at B.E.L. was dissipating.

  He was therefore pleased when he was again assigned to the cadre at B.E.L., and when he reported there he was further pleased that the managers of his old section recognized him and requisitioned him for their assembly line. Soon the good lunches at the factory restored both his energy and his enthusiasm, and he was once more almost happy at his work. The evening and morning torments that Otto Grundtz applied to all men taken away from his daytime jurisdiction could be borne, but there was another problem which disturbed him mightily. With Professor Tomczyk dead, he had no older man with whom he could discuss his dilemma, but he did seek out a prisoner whose intransigence he admired, a forester from the Tatra Mountains.

  ‘I think the things I’m making go into German tanks. Inspection is constant and they shoot any saboteur. What is my duty?’

  ‘Burn the damned factory down.’

  ‘Even though they’re watching every move?’

  ‘Burn it down.’

  Szymon received little helpful guidance that first time, and not much during later discussions. The mountain man was simplistic and advocated that everyone react as he did. Late one night he whispered:

  ‘The governor general, Hans Frank himself, came to Zakopane and us mountain men were told to dress in colorful costumes, so bagpipes paraded and we danced and the girls flared their skirts like it was four hundred years ago, and Frank cried: “This is the real Poland!” and he went back to Krakow and gave orders that a free state was to be erected in the mountains, with every consideration. Brotherhood of Mountain Folk, it was to be called, and we were to wear our costumes all the time and every boy was to be taught the bagpipes, and when peace came, tourists from all over Germany would come to admire us. We were to do a lot of woodcarving too.

  ‘By God, he meant it! He established the Brotherhood of Mountain Folk and made that horse’s ass Krzeptowski king of our new nation or president or something, and documents were printed up, and stamps were to be issued.

  ‘Do you know what we did? We held a meeting in a barn and said: “There’s only one thing to do about Krzeptowski. Hang the dumb bastard.” So while the Gestapo was out of town we put a rope about the king’s neck and hauled him sky-high and left him there. The Gestapo went crazy and shot half a dozen men and sent the rest of us here. A man who arrived the other day told me that Frank has decided not to go ahead with the separate kingdom. Said the mountain people weren’t ready for it.’

  One morning as Bukowski stood in line for roll call before being taken to B.E.L., he noticed that the deadly square was being formed about the gibbet. Then he saw Otto Grundtz leading the forester to the gallows, and when the big, undefeated man stood on the stool he heard him bellowing: ‘Burn the fucking place down!’ and the cries rang in Szymon’s ears for many days.

  Then one day after he had completed the normal tour of five months at the Berlin Electric Laboratories, followed by a hideous six weeks digging burial trenches for Jews shot in the fields, he was again returned to B.E.L. The two supervisors welcomed him with a half-bottle of really good German wine and made him a kind of supervisor, not of his fellow Polish workmen, for that job had to be filled by Germans, but of the flow of materials into and out of the plant, and it was while performing these duties that he found on the floor an important-looking document which he knew at once he was not supposed to read, but without attracting attention he bent down, scooped up the paper, and stuffed it in his trousers.

  At mortal risk to himself, he smuggled the paper back to Barracks Eleven, but when he tried to read it he found that he could not, for it was in German, and for three days he could find no one to translate it, but finally a man at the far end of the barracks came, took it in silence, returning later to read it in whispers. ‘It’s called “Control of Calories,” written by Dr. Siegfried Mannheim:

  ‘We have established that a grown man doing hard manual labor requires thirty-five hundred calories per day, nicely distributed between fats, carbohydrates and proteins. In such a diet vitamins take care of themselves and no additives are necessary.

  ‘At Majdanek the diet for enemies of the Third Reich who are to be liquidated after their period of usefulness is nine hundred calories, which is satisfactory if the prisoner is to do brute work without regard for nervous control. However, when such men are moved into the plant of B.E.L., they are not capable of doing the delicate work we require. They ruin more than they make and not always because they are saboteurs. I believe that at least half the men who are regularly shot for sabotage committed theirs because they were too weak to prevent it.

  ‘Prisoners reporting to B.E.L. must have a daily intake of at least eighteen hundred calories. With that they can perform our tasks, which do not require brute strength but do require eye and hand coordination.

  ‘But now we face a problem. At nine hundred calories daily and hard work, the prisoners remain docile, concerned only with their next meal and childish plots to steal even one extra crumb. They are easily controlled. But at eighteen hundred calories they begin to regain strength and mental acuity, and first thing you know, they are complaining about ventilation, light, quality of the food, freedom and things like that. With our good food we create problems for ourselves.

  ‘This seems like a vicious circle, but it can be broken. We must note carefully the date at which any man leaves Majdanek and enters B.E.L. and keep him on advanced rations for only five months, which seems to be the exact time when he begins to cause trouble. At the end of these five months he must be sent back to Majdanek an
d hard work, with a daily ration of nine hundred calories. This will break his spirit, and after seven months of this we can use him again at B.E.L. without fear of his causing trouble.

  ‘From other plants which have used convict labor since 1937, there is evidence that after a man has been up and down this calorie ladder three or four times his usefulness at B.E.L. is exhausted. Psychologically and physically he seems ruined, insofar as good work is concerned. Therefore, at the conclusion of his last assignment at B.E.L. the prisoner should be returned to Majdanek, given the hardest labor possible, a daily ration of seven hundred calories, and be encouraged to disappear.’

  When the horror of the document was revealed, Szymon knew that it must somehow be delivered to the underground, for if it could be smuggled out to London, it would prove the inhumanity which was being exercised with full knowledge and support of distinguished German industries, but the man who did the translating refused to accept any responsibility for handling the document: ‘Too dangerous. They’ll shoot you if they find you with it.’

  So the task remained Szymon’s, and for three perilous days he carried the paper about his middle, where it became well stained with sweat. On the fourth day he ran enormous risks to slip it to a Polish woman who worked on the B.E.L. food line, and she in turn gambled her life to spirit it out of the factory, where other members of the underground displayed their own heroism in moving it out of the country and eventually to Washington.

  There an official of the State Department, Jefferson Rigaud Riverton, studied the sweat-stained document as it lay on his desk, turned it over distastefully several times, then pushed it away with his fingertips, telling his assistant: ‘Jewish propaganda. And not very cleverly done. File it.’ Eleven years after war’s end it would be found in a crowded drawer, but even then it would not be believed.