The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  “It’ll cause a mighty stink, too,” someone else said.

  “What do you think Chelzak?” the block commander said.

  “Why do you ask me?”

  “You seem like a wise fellow.”

  “I don’t know anything about burning trash.”

  “Chelzak doesn’t know.”

  “Shall we put it to a vote?”

  “Burning may not be that effective,” Karl pointed out. People lowered their voices and listened. “Half the trash may be tin or things that won’t burn.”

  “We can bury that.”

  “If we’re going to bury half, why not bury all?”

  “Chelzak—what about that?”

  “Well—how many shovels have we got?” Karl asked.

  They counted two dozen shovels and plenty of hands.

  “I move we bury the trash,” Gorcewicz said. “Not half, but all.”

  “I second. All in favor, say ‘aye.’”

  The “ayes” carried and they started digging. They dug a hole in the back of the row of houses facing Mokotow. The Germans stood in the trenches and sat on tanks and smoked. They saw the people digging and yelled a few things, but the words were German and didn’t mean much. Everybody was so busy digging that at first they didn’t notice the latest fliers. Karl and Shosha stopped digging as a young woman read the “news.”

  “Prime Minister Mikolajczyk held a conference with Stalin and pledged mutual co-operation with the Red Army. The same Red Army which murdered the soldiers of the National Army in Wilno.

  “The Russian Government has clearly shown its treacherous plans by setting up a Bolshevik government in Chelm. The hostile reaction by the Polish people taught Stalin a lesson. Now he has returned to the way of deceitful treachery.

  “Prime Minister Mikolajczyk let himself be used for the ignoble plans, probably being afraid of losing his position.

  “Prime Minister Mikolajczyk stained the honor of the Polish soldier who fought for five years and never gave up. Poland’s enemies, heavily armed, can occupy our soil but cannot conquer the Polish people. To pave the way, they are now using treachery.

  “The German occupier is fighting with his last breath. In the West, the Americans and the English have broken through the Front and are streaking forward quick as lightning.

  “Russia is also at the end of her possibilities. Great and independent Poland will soon appear at the side of our allies, America and England, but never under the German yoke, nor the Soviet whip.

  “I hereby announce the following Order of the Day. The Bolsheviks are near Warsaw and proclaim that they are friends of the Polish nation. This is a treacherous lie.

  “The commanders of the Polish National Army must stop all acts which are trying to help the Soviets. The Germans are fleeing. On with the battle with the Soviets.

  “Long live free-fighting Poland!

  “BOR, Chief Commander of the Armed Forces in Poland.”

  “Poorly fucking written,” Stazek Pszenny said. “I don’t believe it’s him. Bor is much more eloquent.”

  Three shifts had the trash buried by next morning.

  THE FAMILIAR ACRID SMELL OF FIRE awakened Shosha in the dark. It was close. She sat up and put on her shoes and walked downstairs to the first floor. She looked out the window and saw smoke. She opened the front door. She felt heat and heard fire barking and cracking. Then she saw flames flipping and twirling above stone and brick up the street.

  “Oh dear God,” Stazek said. He stood with her. “It’s the Jesuit chapel.”

  “We should look,” Shosha said. “We should help them.”

  “Absolutely not. The fire’s done burning. See the smoke. It’s turning white. There’s no one left to help.”

  Shosha looked at him.

  “I’m sure they all got out,” Stazek said.

  Soldiers came in from the trenches later that afternoon for rest and recreation. They stood on the streets and talked to people they had been shooting at the day before. The talk was friendly. The soldiers showed photographs of their families. The children pretended they were soldiers. Women gave the soldiers food. In exchange, the soldiers told them which windows to avoid and which streets to stay off. This queer detente lasted a day and kept a few people alive.

  Two subjects dominated the conversations of the women on the block: the Jesuit chapel and the potatoes that were growing in the Mokotow field. No one had the courage to ask the soldiers about digging up the potatoes, so Shosha did.

  “I make the best potato soup you’ve ever had,” she told the soldiers. “But I need potatoes.”

  The soldiers talked among themselves.

  “Come with us,” one of them said. “We’ll have to take you over.”

  When the soldiers were outside the gate and it was clear they planned no trickery, Shosha, Karl, Stazek, Gene, and four other women and one other man followed them into the field. From there, they could see smoke still rising from the Jesuit chapel. Bricks and stained glass littered the lawn around it.

  Stazek approached one of the soldiers. “How did that happen?” He pointed toward the chapel. “Do you know?”

  “Weapons search,” the soldier said.

  “There?” Stazek asked.

  “We found rifles, bullets, some incendiaries.”

  “So you attacked the fathers?”

  “Not me,” the soldier said.

  “Anyone hurt?” someone else asked.

  “If anyone was in there,” the soldier said.

  “There were people in there?” asked one of the women. “How many?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jesus,” Stazek said.

  “Was it during services?”

  “I wasn’t there,” the soldier said. “I don’t know.”

  “Is the old Father dead? Did they kill the old Father?”

  “Father Philip,” Stazek said.

  “I don’t know who they killed,” the soldier said. “I wasn’t there.”

  They came in from the fields with dozens of potatoes expecting an excited welcome. Instead, the streets were bare.

  “One of the Jesuits is in Mirim’s cellar,” someone whispered after nightfall.

  A few women made enough potato soup to feed the block. The Jesuit priest came into the yard after midnight for air and a smoke. He had a bandage around his hand and neck. When he lit the priest’s cigarette, Karl held his hand around the match so no one would see the flame. Shosha joined some other people who gathered around the priest. Stazek stayed home with his son.

  “Your brother’s Jakub,” the Jesuit, Father Peter, said to Karl.

  “You know him?”

  “I know about him.”

  “Have you seen him?” Karl said. “Do you know where they took him?”

  “No,” the Jesuit said. He drew on his cigarette.

  “What happened?” Shosha said, indicating the chapel.

  The Jesuit folded his arms and held the cigarette between his fingers. He shook.

  “They came in,” he said. “They wanted to search. They said we had weapons.”

  “What kind of weapons?” said a man standing there.

  “Did they kill Father Philip?” someone else asked.

  “Rifles, grenades—I don’t know. They pushed us into the basement and next thing we know there’s a loud blast in the chapel. Just deafening.” The priest’s lips quivered. “People were praying,” he said. “People in the chapel. They didn’t see the soldiers. The soldiers came through the sacristy.”

  “Surely they heard them.”

  “The people there that time of day are old, slow and deaf,” Fr. Peter said.

  “Did Father Philip make it out? Is he alive?”

  Father Peter lowered his head.

  “How did you get out?” Karl asked.

  The priest drew on his cigarette as he sat on a stone bench against a wall in the yard. He looked at the people. “The SS came down to the basement and shot everybody,” he said. His face was hot
. “I don’t know how they missed me.” He lowered his head. Shosha sat next to him.

  “Did anyone else make it out?” someone asked.

  Shosha put her arms around Fr. Peter. She could feel him tremble. “I’m the only one,” he said. He rubbed his forehead and his eyes.

  Shosha took the priest’s head onto her shoulder. The crowd started to break up.

  “You’ll be all right here?” Karl asked.

  Shosha nodded. She stayed with the priest until his composure returned. Three days later, she stood with the others when Father Peter celebrated Catholic mass in Stazek Pszenny’s living room.

  Forty

  After resistance attacks on Rakowiecka Street and the Avenue of Independence, Niepodleglosc, exhausted German soldiers offered a short, self-serving truce on orders of Warsaw Command. To assure people still felt punished and no men would fight on the Polish side, the Germans restricted the truce to women. To assure only Poles felt and appeared “in retreat,” the occupiers insisted Poles wear white handkerchiefs. The truce was such a relief that any man who didn’t go along risked severe consequences from the woman or women in his life.

  Women—and a few men—came from several blocks to dig potatoes and socialize with people on the Pszenny’s block, which was close to the Mokotow field. They came pushing carts with children. Men just in from the fighting were wounded and dirty. People kissed and hugged and exchanged small gifts.

  Darkness ended the truce. Two German officers ran into the yard and shooed everyone into basements. The soldiers looked after these women, who fed them, talked to them, listened to their complaining, and tended their wounds.

  FROM PSZENNY’S BASEMENT WINDOW, SHOSHA watched the occupiers pull a cannon up the street, moving close along the walls. She no longer felt safe in the attic. Basement purges had given way to artillery shelling.

  “Get away from there,” Karl said.

  “They aren’t shooting yet,” Shosha said.

  “So?” He walked to her. “You want to risk it?”

  The cow bellowed again and Shosha cringed. They covered their ears. She looked at Karl. After the noise stopped, she took his palms away from his ears.

  “Stay with me,” she said.

  The shooting started an hour later and continued all night. Shosha lay on a mattress in the dark and kept her eyes open and watched the basement window, where flames and shadows danced by. Karl lay next to her. Stazek and Gene Pszenny were upstairs.

  “We men should be out there,” Karl said.

  “And leave me with a bunch of women?” Shosha said. “We need you here.”

  “I can’t move here,” Karl said. “I can’t find Jakub. I can’t ask anyone about him.”

  After a while: “You want to know about him?” Shosha said. She looked up at the ceiling. “I can tell you about him.”

  She turned to Karl. He looked at her like he was going to speak. “He helped me bury my best friend,” she said. “He said Kaddish with me. He helped keep us safe because the soldiers were afraid of him and because he had an uplifting way.” She paused. “Do you know what Kaddish is?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Karl said. “Some kind of prayer.”

  “It’s the prayer,” Shosha said. “It’s the final prayer, the goodbye of goodbyes. What you say to the L-rd about the person you love before they see Him.”

  “That’s a strange thought,” Karl said.

  “What’s strange about it?”

  “Talking to God, here.”

  “Your brother did.”

  “Jakub talk to God? Only when he’s drunk.”

  Shosha turned away. “He seemed devout to me.”

  “In his own way. But he doesn’t pray much.”

  “He prayed with me. I heard all stigmatics pray.”

  “Not Jakub,” Karl said. “Well, sometimes, but not every day.”

  They let some silence pass between them.

  “Your best friend is the one Jakub came to help,” Karl said.

  “He carried her body a mile,” Shosha said. She lay on her back in the darkness and saw light from the corner of her eye. She left her eyes open until they pooled with moisture and the light from the corner went away.

  PEOPLE EMERGED FROM THEIR CUBBIES in the morning. Near first aid posts, soldiers lay in cots—German and Polish fighters, side by side. Polish nurses tended them and smiled and spoke to each one the same. Toward midnight, a young doctor and several nurses wearing white handkerchiefs came to the yard with a horse-drawn wagon. Karl helped unload stretchers with wounded fighters. The medical team was from one of the suburbs and everybody who was outside surrounded them for news.

  “There’s so much fighting there,” a nurse said. “The hospital’s too full, we have no painkillers, no anesthetics. We can’t get to the wounded with all the fighting.”

  “What do you do?” someone asked.

  “They lie for days,” the nurse said. “Too many times we have to amputate.”

  “You can’t believe all the fighting,” another nurse said.

  Two German soldiers—the same boys who had dined on Shosha’s potato soup—ordered everyone out of Pszenny’s block the following morning.

  “They’re burning the houses,” one of them said. “It has to be done.”

  “Burning houses?” Shosha said. “Why? No one is fighting here.”

  “Orders,” the boy said.

  “This is crazy,” someone said. “It’s insane—you can’t just burn our houses.”

  “We’re giving you fair warning,” the other boy said. “Get out or get burned.”

  “Let me see your orders,” Shosha said.

  “Orders?” the boy said. “We don’t have those.”

  “Well—then how do you know what you’re supposed to do?”

  “Our commanders tell us. Listen, you shouldn’t be questioning.”

  These boys had begged to defend Germany against her bitter, hateful, imperialist enemies. Now they were arguing with a bunch of skinny women.

  “If your commanders have the orders, let’s see them,” Shosha said.

  “That won’t happen,” the other boy said. “They won’t show you anything.”

  “Then we won’t leave,” Shosha said.

  “You sure you know what you’re saying?”

  “She knows what she’s saying.” Karl stood in the little group. “We need official signed orders, just like you.”

  “I’m not so sure about this,” said another man. “They can shoot us any time.

  “It only makes sense,” a woman said. “It’s only fair.”

  “It’s not fair,” the soldier said. “We don’t carry around written orders.”

  “Why should we listen to mere boys?” Shosha said. “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty,” one said.

  “You’re not twenty,” Shosha said. “You’re sixteen maybe. What if I tell your commander he has a child for a soldier?”

  “I’d shoot you before you could,” the boy said.

  “Then you’d have to shoot everybody here,” Shosha said. “They all know now.”

  The other boy took his friend’s arm. “Let’s go.”

  EVERYONE ON THE BLOCK PACKED. THEY BUNDLED sheets, emptied wardrobes and drawers, carried trunks and suitcases down from attics and boxes up from basements. They dug holes in the ground and buried their valuables. They took food and essential things. Some praised Shosha for her courage; others condemned her stupidity. Arguing with the boy soldiers would only make things worse, they said. They complained about other things, too.

  After dinner, Karl helped fold up the first aid station. Shosha was in the yard with the other women and Stazek. She felt someone behind her. Her heart jumped. It was the boy soldier, with papers in his hand.

  “Here,” he said. He handed the orders to Shosha.

  She took them and her hands shook when she tried to read. “I can’t read them,” she said. “I can’t read German,” she lied.

  The boy took the pape
rs and read them. The houses would be burned tomorrow, September 9, 1944. The orders were signed: Korpsgruppe Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.

  SS-Obergruppenführer Bach-Zelewski was now a battle-fatigued fat man who recovered from a nervous breakdown two years earlier. He commanded all German troops in the area. He was assigning the job of burning the houses to a man whose name Shosha had heard.

  Oskar Dirlewanger.

  Her heart leapt again. “Of the soap?” she asked.

  The boy looked at her. He hadn’t heard the rumors: that this Dirlewanger character made soap from people his brigade murdered. He injected his victims with poison the tales went, then cut them into small pieces, mixed the pieces with horse meat and boiled the fatty mess into soap.

  “They never let photographers travel with this man,” Shosha told the boy. “Even Stroop had photographers.”

  “Well, I didn’t choose him,” the boy said. “I hope you leave. I like you. All us guys do.”

  Shosha walked away from the soldier and picked up her pace. By the time she was at Pszenny’s, she was running.

  “Oh L-rd, Oh L-rd,” she thought. “Please forgive me for taking thy name in vain. Oh L-rd,

  Oh G-d.”

  She told Karl.

  “Oh fuck,” he said.

  WORD SPREAD DIRLEWANGER WOULD BEGIN BURNING HOUSES the next day.

  “Sonderkommando? Good God. They kill anything that moves.”

  People grabbed belongings and went into the street despite cannons and gunfire. They looked up the streets and crossed one at a time. On the other side, they started down alleys and went through open doors—laundries, basements, boiler rooms, kitchens, bombed-out shells—as shortcuts to adjacent streets. The Germans marked block after block for burning and people filled yards and streets with their belongings.

  Karl and Shosha moved down the street with Stazek and his son. “They’re going to burn the whole fucking city,” Stazek said. “A bunch of women and children—they’re insane. If I needed proof, I have it. They’re insane, this war’s insane. I may go insane if I live long enough.”

  German soldiers came out of empty buildings waving guns. Planes would be dropping bombs in a only a few minutes, they yelled.