Poland: A Novel Part 36

'I've been thinking about this village,' Krumpf said cautiously, 'and I believe I ought to transfer my headquarters here.'

Bukowski, who had a shrewd ability to antic.i.p.ate trouble, said: 'Isn't it rather far from your other villages? Also, the Vistula cutting you off on one side?'

'But the more interesting ... I mean, the more critical things seem to happen here.'

During the months of occupation Bukowski had tried to estimate just how far Krumpf's authority extended, and he had seen proof that the Gestapo man could order the execution of anyone who provoked him, but he also noticed that like most middle-cla.s.s Germans, Krumpf was respectful of authority and had handled the Bukowskis and Count Lubonski with deference. Ludwik decided he could ignore the man's rather heavy-handed suggestions. 'You'd probably find it rather dull here, so far off to one side.'

Krumpf smiled, moisture showing at the edges of his eyes, and with carefully chosen words he said: 'Dr. Hans Frank ... the governor general, you know. He sent us a memorandum last week. He wants his representatives properly housed. With right of requisition anywhere in the General Gouvernement.' He looked directly at the wealthy Pole and waited for a response.

Bukowski could not imagine sharing his palace with such a man, a murderer, a tyrant, so he said nothing. Then, when Krumpf's silence grew frightening, like that of a watching adder, he licked his lips and asked: 'Have you identified any place in our territory you would deem acceptable?'

Krumpf rose, took his host by the arm, and walked him purposefully toward the room in which the Holbein portrait hung. 'I have been thinking that I would like my office here. In this room. With this great German painting.' And before Bukowski could respond, the Gestapo man led him back to the hall, where they stood before the portrait of Wiktor Bukowski: ' "The Hero of Zamosc." I like that. Your father was willing to fight the Communist atheists. I liked this place from the first time I saw his portrait. But at that time chance made us allies of the Russian monster and I was not allowed to speak.'

'I would have to consult my mother,' Ludwik said feebly. 'She owns the palace, you might say.'

'Not at all. In the Third Reich-and the General Gouvernement is practically a part of Germany now-widows own nothing and t.i.tle should properly pa.s.s to their sons. This is your palace, and I shall expect an answer from you.'

'I will consult with my mother,' Bukowski said with a surprising show of stubbornness. And he went to his mother's apartment, where the beautiful little Correggio graced her sleeping area. In his absence, Krumpf returned to the Holbein room, studying the floor plan to determine how his desk and files would be placed.

Ludwik and his mother found him there, sitting in a chair once used by Wiktor Bukowski, and he did not rise when they entered. Before they could speak, he said sharply: 'To avoid any statement that might be regretted later, let me say this. I have been empowered by the General Gouvernement to requisition any quarters I require.'

'I am aware of that,' Madame Bukowska said quietly, 'and my son and I hope that you will choose to stay with us, if the rooms suit your purposes.'

'They do,' he said, rising to give the n.a.z.i salute. 'Heil Hitler!'

By the peculiar rules operating in the General Gouvernement, any Pole to whom these words were spoken had to be meticulous in his response. He was forbidden to use the sacred phrase himself, but he was required to stand quickly, in a posture of supreme respect, hands at side, eyes straight ahead. The two Bukowskis stood at attention.

Laboriously Konrad Krumpf continued to file his notes on cards of five colors-red, purple, green, blue, brown-and the two clerks he had brought with him, or even ordinary soldiers, were allowed to study these cards and could make entries upon them. But he also maintained a sixth file on golden-yellow cards, and these no one ever saw but himself. He was reluctant to t.i.tle the top card in this pile by one of its honest names: traitors, betrayers, committers of treason, apostates; or to use either of the two new words: quislings or collaborators. Instead, with Germanic ponderousness, he t.i.tled them MEN OF PRUDENCE WHO CAN BE EXPECTED TO ACT IN THE INTERESTS OF THEIR NATION: It was not a good definition of treason, but it was a justification.

On the golden-yellow cards he recorded the shame of Poland: those few who betrayed their friends for money; those few who sought to pose as Germans, not Poles; those few who believed that the war was lost and that Poland would continue to exist as it did in these terrible times; those few who sought advantage of one trivial kind or another; those few who by nature always sided with the victors; those who preferred Germany to Russia; and those dreadful few, who could have been found in any nation, who actually supported the doctrines of Adolf Hitler and worked to spread them.

From his villages, Krumpf had a.s.sembled the names of thirty-seven 'Men of Prudence,' not yet fully confirmed, and on the night that he established his permanent headquarters in the Bukowski palace he riffled the golden-yellow cards, nodding appreciatively at remembrance of those few who had actually volunteered to aid the Reich. When he pa.s.sed the thirty-seventh card he came upon a dozen blank ones, each waiting for the name of its traitor, and at the last card he hesitated a long time: What about this fellow Bukowski? He speaks German well. He's never married, so he could possibly be a s.e.xual pervert. Definitely he's subject to pressure. And from the ideas I've heard him express, I'm sure he's more favorable to our side than to Russia's.

Very strongly did he want to add Ludwik Bukowski's name to his list, for to snag a member of the gentry, and one who would be extremely wealthy when his mother died, would offset the anger he felt over the fact that he had not yet captured the other Bukowski, who was now spoken of openly as a leader of one of the forest gangs. It would be a neat exchange, but he hesitated before lifting the pen which would convert Ludwik into an acknowledged traitor, for this privileged list contained only persons who had committed open acts of loyalty to the Third Reich.

He would wait to decide about the master of the palace, a weakling whom he did not trust, but as he was about to wrap the golden cards in their protective covering, he paused to weigh another name as a possible entry, and over this one he pondered a long time.

Count Walerian Lubonski, of Castle Gorka up the river, was a difficult man to a.s.sess. His card in the green file, 'Men of Importance,' showed that he was fifty-four years old, sole inheritor of the Lubonski estates, son of a distinguished servant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was almost as meritorious as having worked for Germany, and a man of p.r.o.nounced leaders.h.i.+p. A penciled note, in the handwriting of Hans Yunger, who had conducted the initial executions in Bukowo, said: 'Do not shoot. Cultivate for future use.' A similar note, appended to Ludwik Bukowski's card, had first aroused Krumpf's suspicion that this Bukowski might one day prove to be a 'Man of Prudence.'

Count Lubonski was much more complex. Gracious in the style of nineteenth-century diplomats, he lived spartanly at the old castle, his room overlooking the Vistula. He had one son, who had been at Oxford University at the outbreak of the war and who still resided in England as a postgraduate student; the rea.s.suring thing about this boy was that he was not engaged in any way in the Free Poland movement which infected England.

On the brief and chilly occasions when Gauleiter Krumpf visited the castle, he found the count punctilious, obedient and aloof. Soldiers watched the castle continuously, one detachment being billeted in the Gorka farmhouses from which the peasants had been expelled, but they reported no subversive activities. And on the two occasions when Dr. Hans Frank, the governor general, visited Bukowo he stayed with Lubonski, who entertained him not lavishly but with proper deference. It was thought by the Gestapo in the area that Dr. Frank was saving Lubonski for some important gesture, when his obedience to the n.a.z.i rule would carry weight with the locals.

Krumpf, uneasy at having a man of such obvious importance in his district but not under his personal command, kept careful watch on Castle Gorka, endeavoring to pick up any clues as to Lubonski's fate or, indeed, his own. Once when he asked a senior Gestapo official from Krakow: 'What will happen to men like this Count Lubonski in my district?' the man had replied: 'What happens? Like all the others. We use him till our position is secure from Berlin to the Kurile Islands, then we allow him to die. Slowly, inescapably he will die.'

Count Lubonski had only one black mark prominently noted. In the flush of n.a.z.i victories, when German armies stood poised at the gates of Moscow, at Leningrad, at Kharkov and at Stalingrad, prior to the sweeping pincers that would destroy the Russian nation, Heinrich Himmler and Dr. Rosenberg promulgated an ingenious plan whereby those young Polish girls who looked German-and because of constant infusions of Swedish blood and German in past centuries, there were many-would be deported to cities in western Germany, where they would serve in factories and become impregnated by German soldiers on leave. Their children, when born, would be taken from them and placed in good German homes to be reared as true Germans, thus replacing any manpower losses incurred on foreign battlefields.

Several thousand such girls had been rounded up and sent to Germany, where in due course quite a few of them did become pregnant, and since the mothers were never allowed to see their children, not even in the hospital, the plan was working well. But when Walerian Lubonski heard that Gestapo special forces were rounding up young blond girls along the Vistula, he hurried to Krakow without having been summoned, stormed into Wawel Castle and informed Dr. Frank, who had enthusiastically approved the new procedure, that if any girls were taken from his district, he, Lubonski, would personally intervene and ensure that everyone in Poland knew why he was being shot, if he was shot.

Dr. Frank backed down. In those areas contiguous to Germany, young fair-haired Polish girls were still s.n.a.t.c.hed off the street and s.h.i.+pped like cattle to western Germany, some to factories, some to brothels, and their children were expropriated, but this did not happen in Lubonski's district.

Why don't they shoot him? Krumpf asked himself that question many times that first night in his new quarters, and the answer he came up with was a half-truth: Dr. Frank must be toying with him. The total truth was that Dr. Frank was exactly like his subordinate; as a man from the German middle cla.s.s, he had a fawning respect for anyone with a t.i.tle, a big house or a fortune, but he was also convinced that he was clever enough to bend that important person to his purpose. Could Krumpf have entered Count Lubonski's name with cert.i.tude in his golden file of German patriots, he would have been overjoyed, but like the cautious man he was, he refrained from doing so, for he had a nagging suspicion that the Lubonski case was far from settled. In the meantime, he would keep watch.

Krumpf's decision to move his headquarters to the Bukowski palace created many new problems for the family of Jan Buk. Now additional troops moved through the village, and surveillance of Polish movement intensified. Under directions from the General Gouvernement in Krakow, renewed drives were made to increase food production, and when a neighbor of the Buks was caught baking more bread than permitted by her quota, the a.s.sumption being that she was sneaking the extra loaves to the partisans in the Forest of Szczek, the woman was apprehended by Krumpf's soldiers, dragged to the village square, and hanged. Again, her body was allowed to remain dangling from the gibbet for seven awful days before Krumpf gave the order to take it down.

Jan Buk was one of the three men a.s.signed to bury the woman, and that night he was awakened by two sounds which terrified him: from his own kitchen he could hear Biruta moving about and he knew she must be grinding illegal wheat, an offense for which she, too, could be hanged; and from the outside he was certain he heard the stealthy approach of steps, which meant that Krumpf's soldiers were spying again.

Trembling, he slipped into the kitchen to warn his wife to hide the quern, immediately, but before he could alert her the door opened quietly and a man slipped noiselessly into the kitchen: 'Buk? Are you awake? Don't make a light.'

It was Szymon Bukowski, creeping in as he sometimes did from his hiding place in the forest. He was in need of food for his men, desperately in need, and had come pleading to his cousin Jan Buk.

He was barely eighteen, not powerfully built, but a young man of enormous resolution. He moved like a panther, always alert, always checking his escape routes. He was tired and cold and hungry, and as he sat in the darkness, munching bread and cheese, he gradually became aware that Biruta was grinding wheat. 'Thank G.o.d, someone is. They're drawing the net very tight.'

'You know they hanged Zosia last week?'

'We know. We keep records.'

'What's it like ... in the forest?'

'We harry them. We let them know we're still in existence.'

He told the Buks that in the autumn days of 1939 the men in the forest had been a brave lot, hoping that the Germans would break their teeth in the west and be forced to withdraw from Poland. 'We dreamed. But by 1940 any hope of such victory ... vanished ... gone. Now we had another dream. That Russia would save us from the east. I remember Piszewski warning: "Russians will prove as bad as Germans." But we continued to pray for their victory. Now it looks as if the n.a.z.is are going to occupy all the Soviet Union. And where does that leave us?' Despair momentarily crossed his face. 'German occupation forever.'

'But you will still fight?'

'Won't you?'

Without speaking, Jan Buk indicated where his wife was grinding her wheat, and Szymon ceased his eating, rose, went to where she worked, and kissed her: 'You will be the salvation of Poland.'

Then Szymon asked Jan the question to which the answer could mean life or death for the Buks: 'Will you help us?'

'To what end?'

'To keep hope alive. To make the Germans know we shall never surrender.'

'Even if Russia falls?'

'Even if England and America fall. Dr. Hans Frank will never rule this land in comfort.'

'But every time you strike, he executes a dozen hostages. My name is on the list now. Four more killings and I'll be shot.'

Now the great moral question of the underground had been confronted, and Szymon Bukowski, a mere boy, gave the answer which he and his men had worked out in pain and anguish: 'All our names are on the list, Jan. Every name in Poland is on the list. It's just a matter of time till those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds kill us all. So we must go down fighting. We must resist them. We must never let them have an easy night's sleep.'

'So you intend to keep on murdering stray soldiers?'

'We do so much more! Jan, you would be proud of what we do. We can commit sabotage that looks exactly like a normal accident, and they can't do anything to prevent it. Watch, we're going to strangle this country, slowly, bit by bit.'

'Aren't you frightened?'

'No more. Two years in the forest, you're not frightened any more.'

'But you keep looking at the door.'

'Cautious, yes. You will have to be very cautious when you join us.'

'I ...'

'You've already joined us, actually.' Szymon pointed to where Biruta patiently ground her wheat. 'You stand with one foot on the gallows, now. Plant both feet and work with us.'

The silence in the dark kitchen was broken only by the sound of Biruta at her quern, but now a soldier pa.s.sed along the village street, his hobnailed boots striking the pebbles, and the grinding stopped. When he pa.s.sed on, she resumed her work.

Jan Buk was being asked to join the partisans, not in any big or bold way, but as a minor messenger between units or a distributor of clandestine newspapers; he would not even see a gun until the day of open rebellion, but he was needed. His wife was needed too, as a supplier of food to the men in the forest.

It was an invitation that might lead to the gravest consequences. Death might come at any moment, even for such a casual meeting as this, and to what reasonable end? Victorious n.a.z.i battalions now threatened Stalingrad. Leningrad, despite its heroic resistance, seemed about to surrender and only the fiercest patriots believed that Germany could be defeated in the field, and yet the Polish underground preached that if pressure was constantly applied, and if Russia was able to stabilize its front, and if the Allies ever accomplished anything, there might be a chance, a remote chance, to regain freedom. As one pamphlet pointed out: 'Once we were in captivity for one hundred and twenty-three years, yet we prevailed. We shall prevail this time, too.'

So, with only the bleakest of prospects, Jan and Biruta Buk cast their lot with the partisans. Rarely had the oppressed of any nation groped so hopelessly for the light that might lead them out of a pit so deep.

Szymon said he would arrange at once for Jan to smuggle messages into Krakow and for Biruta to deliver bread. Within three days Jan was on his way to Krakow, where the underground maintained headquarters in an ordinary house less than three hundred yards from Wawel Castle, where Dr. Hans Frank orchestrated his grand design for the extermination of the Polish people.

There was great excitement in the General Gouvernement these days, when n.a.z.i troops prepared to subdue all Russia, and vast plans were spelled out in Dr. Frank's offices for the incorporation of huge additional territories into the General Gouvernement. Frank had proved himself to be an able administrator, quick to prevent the ma.s.s uprisings that had occurred in other parts of occupied Poland. He had been a.s.sured by both Himmler and Hitler himself that his reign would be extended and prolonged, no doubt for the remainder of his working life.

When total victory came he would consider moving his headquarters to Lwow, which he preferred as a center of operation because it contained only a limited number of Poles, all of whom could be made to disappear. By that time, too, all Jews in the Lublin pale would have been exterminated, and if enough pure Germans could be moved in to replace them, what had once been eastern Poland would be a decent place in which to live. Farther east would be unpalatable: too many Russians there.

So at the very time that Jan Buk became a runner for the Polish underground, Hans Frank began to tighten up his administration of the General Gouvernement, and when Buk entered Krakow, which he did not know well, he had to be extremely careful where he went. He was not afraid of being arrested for traveling with limited papers; as a farmer bringing food he was ent.i.tled to show his pa.s.s and move fairly freely, but he did have to avoid any spot at which the Gestapo might conduct one of its sudden sweeps, trapping anyone on the streets within a cordon and arresting them all.

When this happened, and it did every other week or oftener, those inside the cordon were condemned. Either they were lined up against some city wall and machine-gunned in reprisal for a purported crime about which they knew nothing, or they were transported to Germany proper to serve out their lives as slaves, oftentimes in the underground factories where they would never again see daylight.

And sometimes the fierce raids occurred, on any street in any city, simply to terrify the citizenry and to remind them of Dr. Frank's basic rule: 'Poland is no longer governed by laws. You are to keep silent and perform your duties as we determine them.' On these wild, irrational raids the Gestapo would simply round up a score of citizens and execute them in some public place, so that the cowering Poles would remember that any German could kill any Pole for any reason whatever. One poor woman had a watchdog who protected her after her husband had been slain in such a raid, and this dog growled at the bigger dog owned by a German who had come to work in Krakow. The woman was arrested for anti-German activity and her dog was shot. When she protested weepingly, she, too, was shot.

So Jan Buk moved through Krakow with outward calm, as if he had no fear, being a simple farmer in from the country, but with immense inner attention, and in six trips as messenger he avoided capture.

At intervals young Szymon Bukowski slipped out of the forest to consult with the Buks, always deep at night, and on one such visit he told Jan: 'You must take a code name. Because our real names must never be spoken.' At that moment the storks which inhabited the chimney pot of the Buk cottage, as they had done the chimneys of Bukowo for ten centuries, made one of their regular commotions, and Jan said: 'I'll be Bocian,' and henceforth he was known as Stork.

It was this name which was reported to Konrad Krumpf by one of his collaborators: 'We have reason to believe that Szymon Bukowski is getting food supplies from someone near Castle Gorka with the code name Bocian.' The location was wrong, the identification accurate, but the fact that Krumpf now concentrated his search efforts in the territory of Count Lubonski allowed the Buks a little extra freedom to conduct their underground activities. Biruta continued to bake her illegal bread and sneak it to the men in the forest, while her husband entered upon that dangerous and often tragic escalation which tempted a man first to run messages, then to derail a train, and finally to do outright battle with the n.a.z.i troops.

At every step he took, Jan Buk was cruelly aware that his actions moved names higher and higher on that posted list of hostages and that he was, in effect, the executioner of those whom Krumpf apprehended and shot after the latest outrage against the Third Reich. In time he could well become the executioner of himself.

It was interesting that Krumpf never displayed the slightest reluctance to murder the next a.s.signment of hostages, for he believed without question that Germany was intended by destiny, or G.o.d if one wished, to rule Europe and that Adolf Hitler had been brought to Germany from Austria to lead the nation into this supremacy. Therefore, the most trivial action against any German was an action against the ordained rule of the world, and no punishment could be too severe. Also, in the particular case of Poland, it was clear that this b.a.s.t.a.r.d nation must this time be totally removed from the map, with no possibility of reincarnation, so whatever steps he took to hasten that disappearance were laudable.

He was not a vicious man; in Magdeburg his family had long enjoyed a good reputation and his parents had raised him with an appreciation for German history and a conviction that Germans were inherently superior. He was a faithful Lutheran, but he had no animosity against Catholics, some of whom from the Munich area made excellent Gestapo officers. He did, however, despise Jews and sometimes wondered whether they were really part of the human race; he suspected not.

He was a bright man, but his watery blue eyes and straw-colored hair made him look something of a b.u.mbling peasant, a fact he acknowledged, and this was one of the reasons why he had so firmly determined to live in the palace: to show his subordinates that he, too, was a gentleman. In his favor it should be said that he himself never tortured a prisoner, not even a Jew; if the man or woman was guilty of a crime against the Third Reich, that person was either hanged properly, or machine-gunned, or shot with a revolver behind the ear.

Counting the arbitrary sweeps in which the Gestapo rounded up citizens for ma.s.s killings, and the orderly shooting of hostages, and the executions for cause, like those of the women grinding illegal wheat, Konrad Krumpf had now been responsible for one hundred and eighty-three deaths in his villages, and he could not think of one that was not fully justified. If asked, he would have said: 'I can imagine this rate continuing far into the future.' For with the defeat of the Russians and the pacification of the eastern frontier, the General Gouvernement could begin the orderly extermination of the Polish people, just as the Jews were being handled now.

It was therefore with the greatest excitement that he learned that the man he wanted most, Szymon Bukowski, was indeed hiding in the Forest of Szczek and that he sometimes made nocturnal visits to his village of Bukowo. Sentries were posted, and one starry night in January he was caught as he left the forest.

He was taken directly to the Bukowski palace, where in the darkness Krumpf arraigned him, looked at his horribly beaten face, and told him: 'You will be executed tomorrow at noon. But not before you are interrogated.'

The interrogation, a brutal affair, was not conducted in the palace-that would have been unthinkable-but in a former schoolhouse, where the Gestapo beat the young man until he was almost dead but failed to elicit any significant information. It was obvious that he could not be executed at noon, even though the villagers had been alerted that a public hanging would be held at the gibbet, for more questioning was necessary.

This was a fortunate delay, because Governor Frank himself telephoned from Krakow directing that the terrorist be delivered to the Gestapo in Lublin, since they were more skilled in the interrogation of prisoners with secret knowledge, so with some regret Krumpf dispatched a truck to Lublin, where the Gestapo driver said: 'I'm looking for Under the Clock,' and the policeman looked at the rear of the truck and asked: 'Terrorist?' and when the driver nodded, the policeman said, as he often did when trucks came in from rural areas: 'Go straight down this street till you hit the square, look for the clock in the tower, and the door you want will be on the side street to the left.'

On a Tuesday afternoon in February 1942, Szymon Bukowski, known terrorist, was delivered to Under the Clock in Lublin.

Jan Buk was in Krakow, working with regional headquarters of the underground, when he learned of his cousin's arrest and removal to Lublin. 'They'll kill him. Especially if they send him to Lublin.'

'Yes, and that raises a problem for us. Even a man like Bukowski, even he might speak under extreme torture. It would be perilous for you to return to your village.'

'I think so, too.'

'What we have in mind, and we've discussed this for some time ... You're a powerful man, Buk. You have the temperament we seek.'

'I could work in Warsaw.' He paused. 'I mean, Biruta could take care of herself.'

'We're sure of that. But Warsaw has all the men it needs. What we want you to do is to go back to Bukowo.'

'You just said ...'

'The village, yes. It's too dangerous for you. But the Forest of Szczek? We have a promising group there, and we want you to lead it.'

Jan Buk was twenty-two years old, a man who could read and write, a man of that stubborn character which often comes from wrestling with the soil. He had no fanatical hatred of the n.a.z.is, only an unshakable resolve that they must somehow be expelled from his fields and from all of Poland. He realized this winter morning that this resolve would never leave him during his life and that whether Szymon died in Lublin, or Biruta in Bukowo, or he in the forest, the fight would continue, remorselessly, imaginatively, brutally, forever.

'We want your group to have a name,' the district commander said, 'because we have major plans for your activity.'

'My group?'

'Yes. You're the leader as of now.'

Jan Buk stood silent, thinking of his village, and of the public square in which his grandmother had been hanged, and his aunt fusilladed on that first day, and he saw it as a village of peace, one in which many people had found satisfactory lives, and then he saw storks flying home from their winters in Africa and he thought that they, too, looked to his village as their home; they, too, sought repose.

'Use my code name-Bocian,' he said, and thus the famous Stork Commando which operated out of the Forest of Szczek was born.

To protect his anonymity, the Krakow people forged several papers, which were inserted into Governor Frank's records by partisans who worked in Wawel Castle, and official word was sent back to Konrad Krumpf in the Bukowski palace that Jan Buk of his district had been swept up by a Gestapo raid and s.h.i.+pped off to Germany to labor in a munitions factory.

'We won't hear from that one again,' Krumpf said, for life expectancy in such slave centers was not great.

Now the burden of running the Buk farm fell exclusively on Biruta, a woman of only twenty and with an imperfect knowledge of agriculture. Nevertheless, the Gestapo gave her a quota, which they said she must fill or the farm would be taken from her and she would be sent to work in Germany. But villagers would guide her in the spring plowing, instruct her in how she must apply for seed grain from the n.a.z.is, and help her with her first planting. With them she prayed for rain and from them she would learn how to conceal part of her harvest to be sold for her personal profit. There was no need for her to reveal that she did not intend selling the grain; she would smuggle it to the partisans, and she suspected that other families were doing the same.

She worked hours which in normal times might have killed her, but she was kept strong by her faith: she was sure that if anyone could survive in the forest, or wherever he was, her husband would; and she was constantly encouraged by news of the bold moves made by the group that was now called throughout the district the Stork Commando. Its members appeared suddenly at some railroad crossing, dynamiting the tracks, or in some village where a German soldier was behaving with unusual brutality. It struck at those targets which would bring greatest discomfort to the Germans, greatest rea.s.surance to the Poles, and Biruta Buk, dead tired from her animal-like labor in the fields, quietly shared her joy with the other villagers when the Storks humiliated the n.a.z.is.

Fortunately, the operations of the commando were not a.s.sociated in the German files with the village of Bukowo. The leader had not yet been identified, nor his hiding place discovered; it was a.s.sumed that the criminal gang must be somewhere in the Forest of Szczek, but that covered a large area, and Krumpf's experts believed the group must be getting its major support from the Castle Gorka district, and once more intensive searches were conducted there. Krumpf was infuriated when they revealed nothing.

And then late one night, almost at dawn, a soft footstep warned Biruta that someone was approaching her cottage. She experienced no undue fear, for she had not used her quern for some time and it was safely hidden, but she did sit up in bed, and she was there, arms clasped about her knees, when the door opened and her husband entered, his face discernible in the growing light.

He stayed in his home all that day, prepared to dash into the forest at the sign of any soldiers, but Biruta went to her fields as usual, and that night she talked with Jan about his activities: 'Are you with the Stork Commando?'

'No,' he lied, as he did to everyone.