Biruta had been beaten close to death, but she still walked proudly, almost defiantly. Madame Bukowska was old and tired and nearly worn out, but she still displayed that inner radiance which comes only from a life actively spent in defense of purposeful ideals.
When they stood face to face, Marjorie leaned forward like a village busybody to inspect with her right forefinger Biruta"s scarred cheeks, but with her left hand, so that none could see, she delivered the fatal list of names.
"Kill them all," she whispered, and when Biruta gasped at such a message, Marjorie took her by the shoulders and turned her sideways so that light could fall upon her damaged face, as if she wished to see it more accurately. "They are the traitors. Kill them all."
Abruptly she dismissed the peasant girl as if she, Bukowska, were still gentry from the great house and Biruta the serf, and then resumed her pa.s.sage about the square, but as she reached one of the corners she half-stumbled sideways, as if struck by a cart no one could see. Then she staggered twice, reached out for a handhold that was not there, and died in the sunlight.
When the apparently distraught son was told that his mother was dead, he could not prevent himself from thinking: G.o.d"s mercy.
Because Poland continued to play such a vital role in the eastern theater of war, the attention of its patriots had to focus on what was happening along the battle lines in Russia, and every inch of territory regained by Soviet troops was greeted joyously by those partisans who saw in Communism the path that Poland must take when peace came, and with growing apprehension by those more conservative men who had begun to hear rumors of how the Russians were behaving in towns they recaptured.
At first Jan Buk sided with the pro-Communists, cheering the Russian victories, but when rumors of a ma.s.sacre of Polish officers at a place called Katyn Forest began seeping in, he had to wonder: Hundreds, maybe thousands, murdered by the Soviets. Shot in the back of the head. He found it difficult to believe such accusations, and when the radical partisans explained that Germans had really done the killing, he accepted their version.
But then he heard the pro-Russians describing the way they wanted the new Poland to be, and he was not pleased with the prospect of surrendering his farm to the management of others, and he was downright displeased with their proposal to outlaw the Catholic church.
The debate took a sharp turn when the radicals started abusing the Allies for accomplishing so little in the west when the Soviets were fighting so valiantly in the east: "Cowardly Allies! Hiding behind their Channel. Afraid to tackle Hitler. Leaving the Russians to fight the war alone." Such speakers held the efforts of the English and especially the Americans in contempt, but on several occasions Jan heard others argue differently: "Watch! When the great push comes, those Americans are going to hammer Hitler." He could not make up his mind who was right.
However, at midnight on 17 August 1943 the British had performed an act in their western theater which bore no apparent relationship to the war in Poland but which did subsequently alter the whole complex of warfare along the Vistula, plunging Jan Buk into the very heart of the wider conflict of which he had previously been ignorant.
An immense formation of heavy British bombers from various air bases in England and Scotland had flown across the North Sea, crossed Denmark in darkness, and dropped down low over the inconspicuous village of Peenemnde at the edge of the Baltic Sea. Here they had dropped a tremendous freight of high explosives upon laboratories, manufacturing centers and barracks in which Adolf Hitler"s most formidable secret weapon was being readied for the destruction of London. Damage caused by the mighty bombs was immense, fires started by the smaller incendiaries completed the damage, and although the German air force retaliated, the lumbering British bombers made their escape, bomb racks empty.
The raid did not obliterate Peenemnde, for its installations had been strongly built and cleverly camouflaged, but it did cause great anxiety, for if the bombers had come once with such striking success, they could come again. So a two-part decision was made: move the manufacturing elements for the secret weapon to underground sites deep inside Germany and move the testing of the weapon to some relatively unoccupied corner of Poland, from which the weapon could be fired onto empty land, Russian or Polish.
The site chosen by the German high command for the a.s.sembly and testing of the weapon occupied a polygon, one base of which was formed by a line between Castle Gorka and the Bukowski palace. Since test firings of the secret weapon might carry it far toward Przemysl and empty lands beyond, the experts who had been working at Peenemnde said: "An ideal location."
And now everything changed. Bukowo became a major battleground in the war. Where there had been one German soldier, twenty appeared to guard this vital secret. Where there had been two Gestapo men checking on the citizenry, there were now six. Railroad spurs were built overnight. Buildings appeared mysteriously, their roofs covered with forest branches to prevent detection from the air. Truckloads of workmen came from remote Polish villages and trainloads of technicians from Germany.
When six of Konrad Krumpf"s villages were overrun by the new demands for secure s.p.a.ce, so that every Pole had to be evacuated to find such quarters as he might, there was protest, and Krumpf personally warned that this must cease: "We must all make sacrifices for the Fatherland."
But the forced evacuation was so brutally carried out that serious objection had to be voiced; peasants were being treated worse than animals, and they said so. One village in particular, with the grandiose name of Nowa Polska, the New Poland, was especially abused, and its three leading farmers went to see Krumpf, who had always been attentive when the continued production of foodstuffs was involved.
This time the protesters met a man much different from their familiar, b.u.mbling Konrad Krumpf. The high command, recognizing the supreme importance of the weapon which now dominated the Gorka-Bukowo polygon, had sent to supervise the operation a man with a brilliant record of administration and a ruthless determination to succeed once more. He was Falk von Eschl, forty-seven years old, scion of a family whose forebear had fought with the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald in 1410, Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in the 1920s, and diplomat in various capitals of Europe.
Tall, slim, a fine tennis player who had once been Baron von Cramm"s doubles partner at Wimbledon, he was a man of unusual talents, especially that of self-preservation. Not a n.a.z.i and often contemptuous of their grosser acts, he saw them as the only agency that had the power to lead Germany to a position of world dominance. His years at Oxford had satisfied him that Great Britain could provide no leadership at all, and the Americans he had met there, most of them Rhodes scholars like himself, were beneath contempt: "Country boors who know nothing, lack all character, and have no insights whatever."
The n.a.z.is did not like him or trust him, but they did need him, for he had an uncanny perception of what steps ought to be taken to achieve sought-for results, as he now proved when the three farmers appeared before him to protest the destruction of their village.
"We will go there and see," he said in broken Polish, acquired by dint of forced study in the brief time since his appointment, and he allowed the farmers to lead him to their village. When he reached there, he indicated to his accompanying soldiers that they were to line the protesters against a wall and shoot them, and this happened within four minutes.
His troops then rousted all the villagers from their cottages, and every man was shot dead as he appeared. Six women who came screaming at Von Eschl were also pinioned, stood against the wall and gunned down. By this time the other women and the children were pacified through sheer terror, and in this condition they were expelled from the village while their homes were razed.
Falk von Eschl had the designated area cleared and ready for tests two weeks earlier than expected, and he spent this grace period training his personnel in their new duties: "Any Pole who trespa.s.ses into a restricted area without a signed pa.s.s is to be shot at the moment he is apprehended, and without further consultation. Anyone smuggling food is to be shot. For any sabotage, you are to execute six hostages. And if any Pole so much as touches a German soldier or workman in anger, appropriate steps will be taken. And you can a.s.sure the natives that such steps will become increasingly severe. The Third Reich is nearing victory, and what you accomplish here will make that victory possible.
"You are here to protect the most precious secret our nation has today. It must be defended with your life. If any one of you betrays even one word of what you see, you will be shot. And if any Pole or any member of the so-called underground is allowed to catch even a fleeting glimpse of what we"re doing, he is to be shot instantly."
While these draconian measures were being fine-tuned, Von Eschl had an opportunity to inspect the civilian areas bordering on the secret range and to give some attention as to where he might live during the extended period of his command. Naturally, he visited the Bukowski palace, but saw at once that it was too pretentious, and already occupied by Konrad Krumpf, for whom he had only contempt, and by the weak and silly owner, Ludwik Bukowski, whom the advance reports had described as worthless and to be ignored.
With the methodical and judicious approach for which he was famous, he decided quickly that the logical place for his headquarters was Castle Gorka; it was clean and strong and not exhibitionistic like the palace; it was well situated in relation to where the work would be done; and its owner, even though a Pole, was a person deserving of respect, for he had traveled widely, he spoke both German and English, and he had a well-matured understanding of the world. He was probably also a secret supporter of the Polish underground; that made the relationship more exciting and in the long run it might be profitable, for if he could unmask a man like Lubonski, he would strengthen his claim to significant promotions when Russia and the Allies were finally defeated.
He summoned Lubonski to a meeting, and was astonished at how much like himself the Pole was: several years older, hair nicely grayed while his own was still black, most of his teeth apparently, the reserved bearing of a man who rode horses well, and that mastery of languages which marked the European gentleman. But there was a deeper similarity that intrigued Falk von Eschl: Walerian Lubonski gave the appearance of a man of fierce commitment who could absorb much punishment and still keep fighting.
"I"ve decided to make my headquarters in your castle," the German said. Lubonski nodded with just the right degree of deference. "You may continue residence, but only in the upper rooms." Again Lubonski nodded. "My men will convert two of your barns into barracks."
"Of course," Lubonski said.
"This fellow Bukowski, at the palace. Is he as stupid as he seems?"
"His father, you know, was a great hero at Zamosc. In the 1920 battle against the Communists."
"I didn"t know that."
"It has been an excellent family. For a thousand years."
"That I did know. One of his ancestors fought at the Battle of Tannenburg in 1410."
"What we call the Battle of Grunwald," Lubonski said quietly.
"Where one of your ancestors fought, too."
"And one of yours, as well. With the greatest distinction. Von Eschl is an honored name along this river, especially with my family." When the German diplomat realized that this clever Pole had briefed himself on the Von Eschl record, it was his turn to nod graciously.
So the sparring began, and when Von Eschl had time to look into records with his customary diligence, he discovered a most disturbing fact: on several different occasions a Lubonski barn had been raided and food supplies stored there had been stolen. What attracted Von Eschl"s attention was the fact that it was always the same barn, which led him to believe that there was some kind of connivance going on between the count and the partisans.
He therefore baited that particular barn with an extra supply of unground wheat and established near it a concealed bunker manned every night by men with powerful guns; but he was not able to conceal it perfectly, and one morning as Count Lubonski was leaving the castle he spotted the disturbed earth, which had been unsuccessfully smoothed down, and guessed what it meant. He alerted one of his servants, who alerted a woodsman bringing fuel to the castle for the German contingent billeted there, and this woodsman warned the Stork Commando that it could no longer obtain food from that cache.
Von Eschl, suspecting some intricate maneuver like this, drove over to the Bukowski palace to do something which irritated him immensely: he had to consult with Konrad Krumpf to learn what kind of record that stupid Gestapo underling had been able to compile on Lubonski, and for the first time he was able to inspect the remarkable card file a.s.sembled by Krumpf. It was extraordinary that this seemingly dull man had completed such a splendid work, and he ran through the purple cards with extreme care, noting every name that Krumpf had identified as potentially dangerous. Count Lubonski"s name was not there.
"We"ve heard rumors," Krumpf said. "Persons who could be part of the infamous Stork Commando have been seen in the vicinity of your castle ..." Von Eschl noted the subtle introduction of the phrase your castle, as if Krumpf were now throwing the problem into his lap. Perhaps the man was more clever than he had at first supposed.
"What are those other cards, the yellow ones?" As Krumpf"s acknowledged superior, he reached for the small carefully guarded file, and although the Gestapo man objected to surrendering it, Von Eschl insisted, and after he had studied the cards, he a.s.sembled them into a neat pile and started shoving them back to their owner, but as Krumpf reached out to recover them, Von Eschl kept his own hand firmly on them.
"Is it wise to have such names in a list? I mean, in a list anywhere but your own head?"
"This file is secure. Only I touch it."
"I"m touching it, now."
"You"re my superior. In this particular operation."
"If I were you, I would burn those cards. They"re terribly dangerous. What I mean, these people are very vulnerable. Surely you see that."
"Is that an order?"
"I would never give you an order, Major Krumpf. We"re partners in protecting a secret of inestimable importance."
"But you recommend burning?"
"I do," and Von Eschl casually lit a match and reached for a wire basket. While he held the match, Konrad Krumpf with considerable anguish held out the first card and watched it burn. Dropping that card into the basket, he surrendered one card after another to the flame until all forty-three were consumed.
"I feel infinitely safer," Falk von Eschl said. "If anyone had seen those cards, even someone like me ..." He paused. If this man had been careless enough to maintain such a file, he might be stupid enough to inform others of its existence. "Have you ever told anyone about this file?"
"No. Not even my a.s.sistants knew."
"Not anyone? Not some village girl, perhaps? No one?"
"No one," but as Krump spoke he remembered that Ludwik Bukowski had once come upon him as he was consulting the cards, and the hesitation that came into his eyes a.s.sured the older man that someone else had known, and that the contents were no longer secure.
He said no more to Krumpf, but he did a.s.sign one of his best men to make a detailed study of all unusual deaths within the villages under Krumpf"s command, and then the pattern stood forth in brutal clarity: "In this village a woman was run over by a runaway wagon, but the bruises on the back of her head were not matched by any wagon marks on her face or chest. In this village a man was shot accidentally while hunting. This man drowned." From Krumpf"s list of forty-three traitors to the Polish cause, so far as Von Eschl could remember names, eight had died mysteriously, and as he talked with his agent he could not know that the Stork Commando was even then executing a ninth, at the very edge of the polygon.
From London a Polish officer and an English scientist who had taken a crash course in Polish dropped by parachute into northern Czechoslovakia. They made their way, with the help of the underground of that country, into Poland and the Forest of Szczek, where the Pole told Jan Buk and his commando: "It is vital, more important than anything we have ever asked before, that we know for sure what"s going on inside that forbidden area."
Buk said: "We"re engaged in a vital process of our own. Wiping out collaborators."
"No longer," the Polish officer snapped. "You"re to direct every effort to providing this man with solid information on what the swine are doing in there."
"But we know nothing," Buk said honestly. "We"ve counted the trucks and watched the trains, but we haven"t even a guess ..."
The scientist had to concede the common sense behind Buk"s complaint; if the commando didn"t know even the outlines of the thing whose details it was seeking, what possible intelligence could it collect? So he told the partisans: "If what the Germans are doing is so secret with them, it"s doubly secret for us. We think Hitler"s perfected a completely new kind of weapon with the capacity to wipe out London." He had been empowered by the Allied high command to divulge the problem to the men on the site if that became inescapable, so after two days of cautious a.s.sessment of the men and the leadership of the Storks, he concluded that if anyone could be trusted, these veterans of the forest could: "When we hit Peenemnde with the most powerful armada we"d launched to date, we didn"t really know what our target was. The Americans have cause to think the n.a.z.is were making heavy water there, peroxide we call it, for some new kind of bomb. Devastating it would be, I"m told.
"We British are convinced that what they were building was a radically new type of flying bomb. Germany to London in one swoop. Tremendous explosive head in the nose.
"Your job and mine is to determine what in h.e.l.l it is they are doing. If the Americans are right and it"s peroxide, we"ll see tremendous explosions when they test it. Something quite spectacular, I"m told. If we"re right and it"s a flying bomb, we"ll see them flying through the air. So we"ll listen and watch. But I must inform you of this most stringently. We do not know, we cannot predict, what little fragment of information will prove most valuable. Something so small we"ll overlook it, that might be the key that unlocks the riddle. And if we do not unlock it, London may be destroyed and the whole western effort abandoned."
The forest men were sobered by the gravity of the situation in which they were now involved, by its opaque definition and their own inability to penetrate the security rim established so effectively by Von Eschl.
"I heard about him at Oxford," the Englishman said. "Fantastically good. He"ll stop at nothing to frustrate us."
For five weeks the men of the Stork Commando and this dedicated Englishman stayed in the forest, watching, listening, but learning nothing. Behind Von Eschl"s perimeter they could see, from various treetops, much hurried activity but not a single object that would indicate what that activity involved. One daring man carried a small Leica camera aloft to photograph with long-distance lenses the terrain inside the stout wire fence which had now been erected for miles, and these undeveloped films were spirited back to London by messengers who risked death each day as they crossed Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Italy before they reached the Allied air base at Bari. When they were studied by English and American experts, they revealed nothing.
So far, Von Eschl"s security had allowed no intelligence to seep out of the polygon, and it had accomplished certain unexpected triumphs of its own. Convinced that Konrad Krumpf"s list of Polish traitors had somehow been compromised and that Polish patriots were engaged in a process of killing them off, one by one, he used as a kind of bait a farmer who had betrayed several underground operations. The man, who had to be a likely target for execution, was allowed to go unattended to his field, and when the expected attack was launched against him from a grove of beech trees, the three Poles conducting it were overcome before they could harm him. One commando was killed, the other two tortured to death without revealing anything.
The increased n.a.z.i forces also enabled Von Eschl to make broad sweeps into the forest, and two retreats of the Stork Commando were overrun, with loss of life. The English scientist, rescued narrowly from one by virtue of heroic covering action by his Polish friends, understood better the hardships these men had faced incessantly for so long. "The beaters do try to drive you into the guns, don"t they?" he joked, but it was obvious that he was disheartened.
Then, on a bitterly cold day in December, the German scientists inside the polygon reached a point at which they must test one of their devices, and a number of Stork Commandos at various lookouts through the forest heard a vast, prolonged explosion, after which a monstrous cylindrical object rose slowly in the frosty air and soared to a great height, then began a swift descent toward an unoccupied area downrange.
With quivering excitement the English scientist a.s.sembled his spies and compared their interpretations of exactly what had happened, and aided by his learned guesses as to what the explosion must have been, he put together an accurate profile of what the dreadful V-2 rocket was going to be like when it struck London, but before his report even reached London, something much more dramatic occurred.
One of the rockets, headed toward Przemysl, soared into the air, became confused, turned about, and roared westward almost directly at Castle Gorka, but at the last moment it went north, crashing into the Vistula River some distance north of Bukowo. With heroic effort, Jan Buk and the Englishman, accompanied by four powerful swimmers, burst out of the forest, dashed to the river"s edge, swam out to the foundering rocket, and sank it with a tangled ma.s.s of ropes and stones, then hid in the woods to laugh at six different detachments of Von Eschl"s men as they dashed up and down each side of the riverbank looking for their wayward rocket.
A Polish farmer on the opposite side of the river, who had watched the rocket splash down near him, convinced the Germans that it had flown over his head and landed far inland, and off they went.
From the Warsaw underground a team of Polish scientists with cameras and intricate tools sneaked down to Bukowo, entered the river at night, swam to where Jan Buk guided them, found the rocket, dragged it to the western sh.o.r.e and dissected it. Burying the vital parts on the farmer"s land, even though he knew this was a sentence of death if he was detected, they informed London that they had the guts and sinews of a rocket bomb. The hope was that the Allies might be able to counteract the devilish bombs when they began to hit London ... if the information could be spirited out of Poland, flown across Europe, and delivered to General Eisenhower"s headquarters. For the moment such delivery was impossible, but the determined Poles spent long hours trying to devise some daring trick that would help defeat the Germans.
Now the war raged toward its climax, and as tremendous news surged out of Russia-"Leningrad breaks its siege, Vitebsk is freed, great victories in Ukraine"-the individual battles of the Polish occupation accelerated. Count Lubonski, aware that his guest Falk von Eschl was setting traps for him, continued quietly and bravely his support of the underground, determined to set some traps of his own; like cobra-and-mongoose the two distinguished gentlemen engaged in thrust and parry. Konrad Krumpf, holding on to a secret letter which he hoped to use effectively, had to protect himself from Von Eschl but at the same time keep Bukowski and his trainload of treasures safe until such time as both could be moved out of Poland. Jan Buk and Biruta had to be suspicious of everyone yet continue their personal warfares against the invader. And inside the charnel house of Majdanek, Szymon Bukowski had to study with the instincts of a ferret every whim that possessed Otto Grundtz lest that capricious dispenser of death and life drag him some morning to the gibbet in Field Four.
At the conclusion of his last a.s.signment with the two compa.s.sionate managers at B.E.L., he noticed that they said goodbye with what came close to affection: "Take care of yourself, Szymon. You"re a good worker." Then he learned that Dr. Mannheim had decided that Bukowski had been up and down the calorie ladder so often that he had become disoriented, as such prisoners invariably did, and was thus of no further use to the Third Reich. When Szymon was returned to Majdanek this time, it was with instructions that he be placed on a diet of seven hundred calories, given the most strenuous work possible, "and be encouraged to disappear."
He was a.s.signed to the concrete rollers, and day after day, with bare hands, he had to grasp those ice-cold iron handles and exert almost superhuman effort with his team to move the ma.s.sive rollers back and forth so that the roads, in the words of Otto Grundtz, "could be nice and a credit to the camp."
It was soon obvious that a prolonged a.s.signment to the rollers would kill Bukowski, even though he had started with his body in good condition after his spell of decent food at the factory, and he began to connive at ways to conserve strength, to keep his mind a blank, and to waste his energy on nothing at all, to feel no resentment at the morning hangings, or at Otto Grundtz"s brutalities, or even at the monstrosity of Majdanek itself, with its continued Zyklon-B administrations to the Jews and the constant burnings at the crematorium.
The terrible risk in the weeks ahead, he realized, would be that some morning Grundtz might find him in a coma and move him into Barracks Nineteen, where without regaining consciousness he"d soon starve to death. This, with the help of G.o.d, he would avoid. He had watched with horror as those eighteen thousand Jews had died pa.s.sively at the pits, and he swore to himself that he would not allow himself to be killed that way. But even as he voiced this resolve, he remembered how powerless he had felt that cold November day when he believed that it was he who was about to be executed; poor Jews, they never had a chance.
For one spell of three weeks he thought of absolutely nothing day or night but a gla.s.s of cold beer he had once enjoyed in Sandomierz. He could see every drop of sweat on the gla.s.s, each millimeter of level as the foam subsided. He could hear the echo of the filled gla.s.s when it was placed before him, the changing tone as he set it down after each sip. He could taste the difference between the pure froth, the froth with a little beer mixed in, the beer with no froth. He spent twenty-one days drinking that gla.s.s of beer, and was so preoccupied with it that he did not notice the deterioration of his body, but others whispered: "It won"t be long now. The rollers take everyone to Barracks Nineteen."
He then transferred his imagination to a supper served at the wedding of a well-to-do farmer, where huge platters of sauerkraut, sausage, boiled pork and pickles had been provided, one to each of six tables, and he had helped himself piggishly, moving from one to the other so as not to reveal his gluttony. He recalled this particular feast for two reasons: as a peasant, he knew that the acid bite of the pickled kraut was good for him, all peasants knew that and it was one reason why they survived so long; and he could see in the rich fat of the meats the strength that came from them.
Now when he absolutely l.u.s.ted for something, anything, to eat, his mind oscillated between the two benefactions of that long-ago feast: the vitamins that keep a body alive and the rich fats that keep it strong, and after a while his mind focused only on the latter, and he imagined himself luxuriating with platters of b.u.t.ter, or grease, or pork drippings, or oil that rich people bought from Spain, or the golden globules at the edge of a roast, or plain lard.
"Oh G.o.d!" he cried one day as he toiled at the freezing handles of the roller. "I want something with fat on it." He knew that he could not go on much longer with this excessive labor unless he had some fat intake.
But then a miracle happened. Each barracks had at its entrance a good, strong cot provided with warm blankets, its own bucket of water and clean eating dishes. This was always occupied by some newly recruited Gestapo man whose job it was to keep order and forestall incipient subversion. For some time it had been the quarters of a weak-chinned city lad, but when he showed signs of cracking under the strain of watching so many of the prisoners die from starvation, Otto Grundtz requisitioned a new man, and he received a most unlikely replacement.
Willi Zimmel was a round-faced, towheaded, good-looking farm boy of nineteen, with flashing blue eyes and a congenial grin. He liked people, and was so gently simple-minded that he refused to see Majdanek as the charnel house it was.
In his Rhineland village he had been an early volunteer for the Hitler Jugend, whose mysticism and battle drills delighted him; he interpreted it as a kind of superior Boy Scouts, which he had intended joining before it was outlawed. He loved marching; he thrived on camping; military drill excited him; and he invariably considered heroic any older man placed over him. On two occasions his troop had been ordered to smash Jewish stores and beat their owners, but he did this with no malice, and now, suddenly promoted to full membership in the Gestapo, he felt no animus toward the prisoners he was to guard. As he told his mother in his first letter home: "They"ve all done something wrong and must be in jail for a while," and he refused to believe that every man in his barracks was slated to die.
When he first saw the physical condition of Barracks Eleven he was appalled at its messiness, those hundreds of double-decker planks, each with one filthy blanket, those lines of men who had not washed in months, the scores with infestations of lice about which they did nothing, and he took it upon himself to improve matters. But only through exhortation, never with any ration of soap or lice powder or better food: "Men, you must develop selfpride. You simply cannot live decently with lice crawling everywhere." He always harangued them as if they wanted the lice, as if they had plenty of soap but refused to use it. He a.s.sured them every morning at muster that if they would but wash themselves more carefully, look out for the cleanliness of their sleeping s.p.a.ces and spruce themselves up generally, they would feel better.
Then, remembering the joy he had found in the Hitler Jugend programs of physical exercise, he initiated at morning muster a series of gymnastics made popular by the Sokols in the 1920s. In his well-fed condition he found these energetic movements invigorating, but his emaciated charges could not possibly follow them. In fact, it seemed to the disappointed Zimmel that only the man recently returned from Berlin Electric paid any serious attention to the fitness program, unaware, of course, that Bukowski did so because he was trying to follow Professor Tomczyk"s advice: "Agree with anything they want you to do."
Bukowski realized that Willi Zimmel lived in a world of dreamlike simplicity where torture and starvation and hangings did not exist. He was the perpetual leader of a hearty boys" camp, and he saw the men who lined up before him each morning as skeletons only because they did not look out for their health. One morning when a man from Willi"s barracks was hanged for no discernible cause, Bukowski heard Zimmel say: "He must"ve done something terribly wrong."
The preposterous morning exercises continued until one snowy morning when Otto Grundtz happened to see Willi Zimmel going through a series of wild distortions, devised by a Czechoslovakian instructor to train Olympic athletes, while all his ghostlike men but one watched lethargically, not even trying to wave their frail arms. They were a pitiful lot, gaunt, almost skeletal, many with sunken mouths, for Grundtz had confiscated all false teeth, since the materials, especially the metals, were needed in Germany.
He was enraged by what he saw, and bellowed: "What in h.e.l.l is going on here?" and Zimmel replied: "I want them to look out for their health," and Grundtz screamed in German, which some of the prisoners would understand: "Stop it, you pig"s a.s.shole!"
Zimmel was mortified by such a command; he could hear those who knew German starting to laugh, but he also noticed that one man from his barracks had a look of compa.s.sion on his face, realizing that he, Zimmel, had merely been trying to help. And that brief look, for that hundredth of a second, would save Bukowski"s life.
One morning as Zimmel was walking idly back from the main gate, he happened to see Bukowski straining at the concrete rollers and went over to him. "Isn"t this heavy work?" he asked navely, and when Bukowski nodded, he asked: "Are you the one who used to be a shoemaker?" and Bukowski nodded again, but at this time nothing further happened.
A few days later, when Szymon was dragging the road in front of Fields Five and Six, he witnessed the arrival of some nine thousand women and children, the largest contingent of its kind ever to reach Majdanek, and in that ma.s.s of people he happened to notice a young girl, perhaps nine or ten, dressed in good shoes, a Russian-style woolen cap and a new overcoat. He never saw the child"s face, but from the proud manner in which she bore herself, it was clear that she hoped to behave well.
Transfixed, he watched the child striding along, trying to keep up with the older women, her hands in the pockets of her coat, her head bravely erect as the horrors of the camp unfolded, and then she vanished in the teeming crowd entering Field Five, where he knew her fine clothes would be stripped from her, leaving her to sleep in a thin, miserable shift on bare ground, with only a frail blanket to ward off the pneumonia and the fatal bronchitis.
For the next week Szymon could think of nothing but that little girl, and by persistent questioning he learned that she and her group had come from the splendid walled town of Zamosc: "All Poles are removed from that area. Exterminated. Their place is being filled by German immigrants. Zamosc is to be a German town forever. A frontier fortress. No Pole to be allowed to set foot inside."
This statement was accurate. A vast area around that n.o.ble city was to be depopulated, then filled with loyal Germans, and the Polish citizens who had once lived there were being moved into Majdanek to be starved to death. They had done no wrong, but their land was coveted.
Now, as he dragged the ma.s.sive rollers, tall as a man, he tormented himself with visions, imagining this little girl again, whose face he had never seen, and she filled his mind. Always he saw her in her new overcoat, still striding along, still trying to keep up with older people, her little body pressed forward to accept whatever was to happen. Then one day, as he was almost hanging on the frozen handles to stay alive, he imagined that she turned to look at him, and for the first time he saw that she was beautiful, and that she was a grown woman, and that it was she he was destined to marry, and for two semi-delirious days he imagined only his courtship of her, and their marriage, and of how in the evening she sat with needle and thread, mending her coat.
Always attentive, Otto Grundtz saw that Bukowski"s mind was wandering, and he ordered Willi Zimmel to move him into Barracks Nineteen as soon as he showed the first sign of unconsciousness, but Szymon suddenly rallied, aware that he must prepare for the christening of his wife"s first son, and that morning as he dragged the rollers he was present when the death truck stopped at the gate to Field Five and he watched as women in prisoner"s garb threw in the bodies of newly dead companions to be taken to the crematorium, and as the wagon filled, Bukowski in his delirium thought he saw the little girl again, as she had been on that first awful day, still in her overcoat, still marching bravely, and when he saw her body tossed into the open wagon, he uttered a terrible cry.
This cleared his addled brain, and in quivering fury he left the rollers and followed the death truck up the hill to the crematorium. When it halted at the entrance to the ovens he watched as men came out to strip the corpses of any usable clothing, then toss the naked bodies into the waiting ovens, five carefully constructed steel-bound ovens from Berlin, each with its gaping mouth. His mind glazed, and when he saw that the next body to be lifted would be that of his little girl, flames seemed to engulf his eyes, and he heard himself screaming "No! No!"
Again his mind cleared, and he realized with new horror that he was far from his a.s.signed duty and that if caught, he would be shot at once, so he started running back to Field Five, but this route took him right past the guardhouse from which Otto Grundtz conducted his business, and he was terrified, for the closer death came, the more he wanted to live.
And now, from the guardhouse, came the man who would send him to his death, and Szymon was prepared to do battle, when he heard a mild voice asking: "Where were you? I was looking for you."