Poland: A Novel Part 40

When Konrad Krumpf received these instructions he interpreted them as encouraging him to do something that he had intended for a long time. There was no possibility that partisans from his district could have committed the crime, but there was good reason to suppose that some of the Poles of his village were pa.s.sing foodstuffs to partisans hiding in the forest. He therefore ordered a renewed search for hidden caches of wheat or private querns which were converting that wheat into flour and bread.

To the captain of the searchers he confided: 'Someone, it doesn't matter who, has suggested that this woman Buk might be bringing food to the partisans. She might still have a grinding mill.' The captain interpreted this, no doubt correctly, as an invitation to bear down on Biruta in hopes of extracting information, so after another thorough search of her cottage, which again disclosed nothing, he ordered her taken to the interrogation quarters at the far end of the village, and there he himself questioned her.

He did not torture her; that would become known in the village, to the detriment of order. He simply knocked her down with his fist whenever her answers did not please, and each time she rose from the floor, bleeding from the mouth and unsteady, he questioned her some more, then knocked her down again when her stubbornness persisted.

He continued this for several hours, always missing the true facts but always coming very close: 'While your husband is working in Germany, you have a lover in the forest, don't you? He sneaks into your cottage at night, while we aren't looking, doesn't he? Is he strong and good in bed? Do you love him as much as your husband?'

She said nothing, and he hit her again, but now he changed his attack: 'Who says your husband is in Germany? Has anybody seen him in Germany? I know about the postcard and the official report, but who really knows? Do you know what I think? I think your husband is here in Poland.'

Again she made no response, so more blows rained upon her, until at last she simply lay still where she had fallen, unable to bear any more. But even then she refused to acknowledge even by wince or whimper that he had come close to the truth.

He let her lie on the cold floor for nearly an hour, after which, of her own accord, she rose as if to ask 'What now?' and after a while he sent her home, warning her to tell no one what had happened at the interrogation, but her face was so bruised and her gait so unsteady that she needed to say nothing.

She had defeated his interrogation, yet unknowingly he had gained a significant triumph, for he had made her afraid to risk teaching her children. He thus deprived her of the last possible act she could perform to demonstrate her enmity to the German occupation.

She went back to her cottage, and sat there, no light lit, and stared at the floor.

On the late afternoon of 2 November 1943 the new commandant of Majdanek, SS Obersturmbannfhrer Martin Weiss, a soft pudgy man who did not like to look anyone in the eye, received in code a set of instructions which launched his tenure dramatically: SUBJECT UNDESIRABLES. YOUR CAMP BADLY OVERCROWDED. HARVEST HOME ACTION.

On 3 November when the prisoners mustered in darkness, Szymon Bukowski became aware of unusual movements, and before dawn Otto Grundtz came storming down the line picking out men at apparent random, whereupon the troopers who followed grabbed each man indicated, throwing him forward. Bukowski was so nominated, for what no one knew, but when he saw the others who had been chosen he realized that they were all younger men with modest strength still in their emaciated bodies, and he had to a.s.sume that they were going to be shot because they were taking too long in their dying.

When the selections had been made, twenty-nine of them, the men were marched away, as always happened when there were to be ma.s.s executions rather than individual hangings. When they reached the three lines of electrified barbed wire that marked the exit from Field Four, the gates were opened and they were led right through, then ordered to go left toward the execution ground, a hill where machine guns could dispose of many prisoners at one time.

It was now dawn, and walking bent against the bitter wind that blew in off the endless flatlands, Bukowski thought how pitiful it was to die for no reason at all. Professor Tomczyk had been hanged because he was trying to strengthen the moral resistance of the men in Barracks Eleven. The mountaineer from the Tatras had died because he was a real revolutionary. But this group of young men had done nothing specific, they had uttered no battle cries for freedom, nor had they opposed the Third Reich in any detectable way. They were simply being shot, and he remembered his resolve not to die in this supine way, but he could devise no way to escape. He was powerless, unable to make even a protest, and he knew it: I am so weak. I am ashamed.

But then from the far end of the camp, from the fields near the main gate, came two other lines, one of men s.h.i.+vering in the thinnest of rags, many of them barefoot and without caps-thin, wasted men. The second consisted of women and children, hundreds of them or even thousands, frail creatures, some too weak to walk by themselves; other women helped them. Spryest were the children, especially the young girls of seven and eight, who walked with a certain eagerness as if glad to be out of their constricted field at last.

Almost every adult person in the two lines looked near death from starvation, and it was clear that these prisoners had received even less food than those in Fields Three through Six, and Bukowski wondered why this had been. Then he saw with horror that everyone in these endless lines wore the Yellow Star. He was not going to be shot. They were.

The code name for Jew was undesirable, meaning that the leaders of the Third Reich had decided that there was no way by which these people of a different religion and, the n.a.z.is claimed, a different race could be fitted into the great, clean Germany that was to evolve. Up to now, Majdanek had disposed of more than a hundred thousand Jews, but with the possibility that the Russian army might one day soon break through the German lines and overrun the great death camps like Belzec and Treblinka before the task of killing all the Jews in Europe was completed, the high command had decided, in a rush of panic, to get rid of all remaining undesirables now, when it could be done in an orderly way.

A thousand Jews marched up the hill that cold morning, then five thousand, then fifteen thousand, more than the population of some places on the map labeled cities, and the hardened men from Field Four, who had seen death in almost every guise, felt great pity for the old men and women who could barely struggle to their place of execution, and overwhelming grief when they saw the children, especially the young ones not old enough even to dress themselves. Szymon Bukowski was especially shaken by the awful parade, and as he approached the execution ground he did not know if he could control his emotions.

When he reached the top of the hill he saw that two squads of machine-gunners were in place on the western edge of a deep trench, and he realized that the Jews would be marched along the eastern lip, where they would be gunned down. His job would be to throw the piles of corpses into the trench so that the next batch of undesirables could be harvested.

The first contingent was a mixed group: about forty older men, a few youths, twenty women, and nine children from the age of two or three to fifteen. They stood in the dawn, facing their executioners, and the last sight they saw was the lovely skyline of Lublin, the medieval towers of the churches, the fine high profile of the castle in whose chapel men and women like themselves would be tried that day, and shot, and tossed down the stairwells.

Rrra-rrra-rrra-rrra! The machine guns stuttered. Bodies slumped forward. Otto Grundtz and two other Gestapo officials walked down the line of fallen, administering with their revolvers the coup de grce to any body that moved. And then the cold, dispa.s.sionate voice of a superior commander: 'Throw them in the ditch.'

All day the lines moved up the hill, all day, at ten- or fifteen-minute intervals, groups of Jews took their places along the edge of the pit, and from the tangled bodies below they knew what awaited them. Some prayed. A few sang. Women reached to clutch children who were not their own, and boys and girls in their early teens simply looked bewildered.

Rrra-rrra-rrra-rrra! Hour after hour the dreadful killing continued, until more than eighteen thousand were slain, and as the lines began to dwindle, a man whispered to Szymon: 'When the Jews are finished, they shoot us, you know. They always do. Want no witnesses.' So as dusk approached, Szymon Bukowski, this honorable man, the son of a woman of superlative decency and the grandson of a woman who had stood for all that was good in Poland, found himself hoping that the fields would disgorge a few more Jews so that he could live a few more minutes.

But on this day they did not shoot the burial crew. Someone forgot to give the order.

Even when the deep pits with their awful plantings were covered over in the careful way a farmer piles earth over his seedlings so that crops will grow, and when the hill showed only slight mounds running parallel one to the other, the day's work was not finished; typists in various buildings compiled endless lists of those executed, their numbers, names, birth dates, regional derivations, dates of death and presumed causes-and not a single Jew died unrecorded: The methodical masters of Majdanek saw nothing preposterous in recording that on 3 November 1943, an exact total of 18,431 people died at almost the same instant of tuberculosis, cardiac arrest or the flu, and that all of them happened to be Jews. SS Obersturmbannfhrer Martin Weiss had executed his first important a.s.signment with distinction.

At seventy-one, Marjorie Trilling Bukowski had to admit that the tensions of war were affecting her health adversely, and she listened attentively when her son Ludwik recommended that she heed the invitations she had been receiving from friends in Chicago and return to the States, where better care would be available.

'How can I leave one battle zone and cross through enemy lines to another?' she asked, and her son's reply terrified her: 'I have friends. There's a constant exchange of prisoners.'

He has friends, she thought. And who would they be, that they can authorize such traffic? It was clear that he must be referring to his n.a.z.i a.s.sociates, and that raised the most difficult questions, for the only one of his German friends that she knew was Konrad Krumpf, and to a.s.sociate one's self with him would be dishonorable.

She was forced to dine with Krumpf about four nights a week, but there were compensations: he provided the palace with large supplies of good food, and the meals gave her an opportunity to observe her son, whose uncertain future had always bothered her. He was like his father, not like her, a vague and ineffectual man whose refusal to marry or even to court seriously had perplexed her. Hesitancy about s.e.x had certainly never been a weakness of his father, whose occupation in Vienna had been chasing pretty girls, and why Ludwik should have become confused in this vital area she could not specify, but she guessed it might have something to do with his falling between two worlds, her international interests and his father's rural concern with horses. All she knew was that for some sad reason Ludwik Bukowski, heir to two splendid palaces and a large income from funds invested in Illinois, was a most unsatisfactory man of forty-three. It was by no means clear how he would behave in the crisis which she could see approaching from the east, where Russian armies, to her alternate joy and apprehension, were beginning to gain impressive victories.

She was delighted that the German terrorists were tasting defeat, but as the daughter of an eminent American capitalist, she suspected that Communist victors would prove almost as vicious as the n.a.z.is, and she wondered if Ludwik would be strong enough, or clever enough, to protect this marvelous palace from either the retreating Germans or the incoming Soviets. She had good reason to think not. So now, as she sat in the resplendent hall where Paderewski and Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt had shared spectacular nights with her, with Ludwik at her right, Konrad Krumpf on her other side, she felt the world slowly falling apart and the stones of her palace falling with it.

She had only one hope. During the long middle years of her marriage with Wiktor Bukowski she had often felt as gloomy about his prospects as she now felt about Ludwik's, yet he had survived for that one glorious day at Zamosc and was now, as the portrait at the far end of the room proved, a permanent actor in Polish history, The Hero of Zamosc. But there had been a difference. Dear, weak, frivolous Wiktor had never faced real moral temptation; true, he had behaved rather poorly with the serving girl Jadwiga and not too sensibly with the pianist Krystyna Szprot, but the monumental moral questions of treason and the meaning of civic life had never confronted him. When the war bugles blew he mounted his horse, and kinetic energy took care of the rest. Poor Ludwik was going to have to confront problems infinitely more complex, and his mother was not rea.s.sured by what she saw as the lights grew dimmer.

'I've done what I promised,' Krumpf announced one night at dinner.

'You mean with Berlin?' Ludwik asked.

'Yes. My message went direct to Goering and he's just let me know that he'd be delighted.'

'Now I am pleased,' Ludwik said, but when his mother asked about what, he became evasive.

Krumpf, however, proud of his accomplishment, was eager to talk. 'When I first visited with you, Madame Bukowska, I told you how impressed I was, how favorably impressed, that is, with the Hans Holbein you have in my room. That you should have chosen a German painting for a place of honor pleased me very much. I thought of it a great deal, the honor you had paid our country, and I sent a report to Hermann Goering. He's making a major collection, you know.'

Marjorie felt faint. This wormy little man, making deals behind her back regarding her paintings. She s.h.i.+vered to think of what he was going to reveal.

'For a year I heard nothing, and believe me, it's frustrating to be here at the end of the line, you might say, and hear nothing. I had rather hoped that Goering would become excited by the Holbein, or maybe the Correggio, but one of his aides told me when I asked during my visit to Berlin, "Goering already has a big Correggio," and he accented the word big like I just did.' He laughed at himself, then confessed: 'To tell you the truth, Madame Bukowska, I didn't know what I hoped to win for myself with this information about the Holbein. A promotion, maybe. A summons to be on Goering's staff, maybe. I really didn't know.'

'Do you know now?' Marjorie asked acidly.

'Well, Goering's man a.s.sured me that if the field marshal takes a liking to the Holbein-and I sent three excellent photographs-the matter of the train might be arranged.'

'What train?' She noticed that her son was most uneasy.

'Ludwik proposed it,' Krumpf said with real enthusiasm, 'and I approved immediately. I saw every reason to support the idea, and I did, in writing, to the field marshal.'

'What train? What would it do?'

With calculating eye and swiftly moving gestures with both hands, as if he were a country auctioneer, Konrad Krumpf indicated the treasures in this grand room-the gold chairs, the centerpieces in their cabinets, the paintings, the silvery chandeliers-and by extension, the wonders in the rooms above. 'Ludwik said that it would be a mortal shame if anything happened to these treasures ...'

'You mean the Russians?'

'Oh, no! The Russians will never reach here. You can be a.s.sured of that.'

'What did you mean?'

'Well, frankly, under the Fuehrer's plans for Poland, for its extinction, that is ... I don't mean gentry of quality like you or Count Lubonski. I mean only the unspeakable peasant and the impossible shopkeepers in the villages. In the new Poland there'll be no place for a palace like this, a center of education and refinement.'

'Where would the train carry the treasures?'

'To Berlin.'

She wanted to say, with bitter force, that Berlin was being bombed nightly by the Allied planes and that her treasures would be much safer in Bukowo than there, but she refrained, conscious of the absolute power this unpleasant little man had over her. She asked simply: 'Is that wise?' and received an answer which stunned her.

'I believe arrangements could be made for the train to pa.s.s right on through to Paris.'

She could not believe what she was hearing, but then her son said: 'Goering has indicated that if we give him the Holbein and three of the statues, he will permit us to carry the rest of the treasures to Paris.'

'What an extraordinary arrangement,' Marjorie said. 'Whatever would we do with them in Paris?'

'What do we do with them here?' her son asked.

'They grace a building which is inextricably a part of this land, this edge of the Vistula River, and no other. Each piece, Ludwik, was brought to stand in proper relation to each other. Those two paintings ...' and she indicated the two magnificent panoramas that summarized so much of Polish history.

'Oh,' Krumpf said. 'We've already discussed them. Goering or n.o.body else would want them. They're purely local, with no significance at all. We wouldn't take that other big one, either, the one that's nothing but water lilies. But even leaving them behind, which we would have to do, Ludwik and I calculate we'd need seven goods wagons from here to Paris.'

'I do believe that you and Ludwik might have consulted with me,' she said. 'They are my belongings, each item purchased with my money.'

Krumpf did not have the gall to state the truth bluntly; had he been alone with her, he might well have done so, pointing out that she was a worn-out old woman who would soon be dead and commanding her not to meddle in decisions reached by her superiors with great difficulty. Instead he said: 'Under the new rules this palace became your son's at the moment his father died. These are his treasures now, regardless of who paid for them. And he is being very wise, I think, in completing these arrangements now.'

She could not keep herself from asking: 'Before the Russians come?'

Krumpf's voice rose to a high scream: 'You stop that! If you say that where others can hear you, you can be shot. For treason.'

'I am sorry,' she said honestly. 'These are difficult times.'

'They are,' Krumpf said, resuming his customary manner. 'And I think your son has been rather brilliant in handling this affair. A train of seven cars, all the way to Paris. I can tell you that when Ludwik first proposed giving the Holbein to Goering, I prophesied it wouldn't work. We'll be crating the Holbein tomorrow for a special truck heading for the mine outside Berlin where the field marshal is collecting the paintings for his new museum.'

So it was Ludwik who had arranged this infamous deal, and as she looked to where he sat before the Matejko painting of Jan Sobieski on his way to Vienna, she wondered what other things he had done behind her back-what hideous price had he paid the Germans to have won their permission to obtain an entire train? And she began to count up the strange happenings at Bukowo-the capture of young Szymon Bukowski, the beating of Biruta Buk, the executions of the women grinding illegal wheat-and she saw that in every instance the clever identifications by the n.a.z.is would be understandable if they had within the Polish community someone who was feeding them information. Could it really have been her son?

When the carpenters crated the Holbein, sending mournful echoes through the palace, she did not run to catch one last glimpse before the lid was nailed down; she carried that painting in her heart. But as she sat at dinner that night at one corner of the vast table which could have seated threescore, she felt terribly alone, even though Krumpf and her son were in their usual places, and when the German asked her why she was so sad, she said: 'Painters do strange things. They put the image on the canvas and at the same time on the hearts of all who ever own it.'

She left the generous table where Krumpf and some of his men ate extremely well, and wandered not to the upstairs, where her Rembrandt and Correggio and Jan Steen still waited, but down to the lower floor, where that narrow, poorly lighted gallery housed the portraits of Polish n.o.bles long dead, and as she walked along with a flashlight, she illuminated each face and spoke to it as if the owner shared her misery: 'Radziwill, you d.a.m.ned Lithuanian conniver. You were always smarter than the Poles you competed with. I would have enjoyed crossing swords with you. You were clever and genetically prolific, and that's a good combination for those who would rule.

'Old Mniszech, it was you who determined who should sit on the throne of Russia. What a devious, powerful rascal you were. And Jan Zamoyski, I would have loved to be your daughter. We would have understood each other, you a minor n.o.ble who became head of the University of Padua and owner of whole cities and wise governor of men. What savage husband would you have found for me?

'And you, Czartoryski, how I admire you! Tyrant, manipulator of princes, but always the defender of women's education and the father of Lubomirska. I wish I had been educated at your feet, old man.'

And there in the darkness, when she allowed her torch to dim, she burst into tears and asked aloud: 'How could I love Poland so much and Ludwik, my own son, love her so little?'

Signals flas.h.i.+ng through her tired body sent unmistakable messages that her remaining days might be few, and she felt that she must dedicate what energy she had to try to bring reason and responsibility to her son, and to this end she arranged to be with him whenever possible.

'Ludwik, I can see now that someone like Goering was bound to get some of our paintings, and you've probably done a clever thing in buying him off cheaply.'

'That was my thinking. You know, Mother, the future here is extremely obscure.'

'I don't think so. I think the Russians will sweep over here like a hurricane. They'll probably burn the villages, but they'll leave this. They enjoy museums.'

'You think the Germans are doomed?'

'Of course I think so. I know America. I know her factories. Ludwik, when they get cranked up, as they say, they'll keep turning out tanks and planes for twenty years, if it takes that long. I know my nephew Lawrence in Detroit. If it takes till the year two thousand, he and others like him will still be working.'

'You believe that, Mother?'

'The amount of time? I don't know. The end result? There can be no question. We will see American airplanes over this palace.' She paused, startled by her own vehemence and by the alteration it made in her relations with her son and his adviser Krumpf. 'I am sorry to have disclosed my hand so openly, but I feel very weak these days and thought it better be said.'

Ludwik, trembling with apprehension lest the Germans learn that his mother was a defeatist who could be shot-and Konrad Krumpf was a man to do the shooting-could think of nothing to say. It would be undignified to plead with his mother to keep her mouth shut, for he knew she would not. And there was no way he could prevent her from voicing her opinions at table if she felt she was about to die. The simplest solution would be if she really did die, and sooner rather than later, and he reached this conclusion not through callousness, but because he could see that the decisions which had to be made now were of a magnitude and definition which she was simply too old to understand. Marjorie Trilling, heiress of Chicago, had quixotically fallen in love with a nation she had never seen realistically, and now those days of romance and imagination were ended. She was as out-of-date as her palace, and he prayed that she would vanish without causing irreparable damage.

She sought certain a.s.surances: 'Ludwik, my family was a proud one. My grandfather was a country druggist, an apothecary, and he gave honest count in his prairie town. He couldn't do otherwise. The Bukowskis in this little village never had much, you know. Always had to jump and do what the various Counts Lubonski directed, but they were known as men of solid honor. I don't want you to do anything, not the slightest thing, Ludwik, that would scar our honor.'

'Whatever do you mean?'

'I mean Krumpf. His job is to drag you down and destroy you. His job is to destroy Lubonski, to destroy everything Polish. He tolerates you because you live in a palace, and when he has no more use for you, he will cut your throat.'

In the long silence that followed, Ludwik, inheritor of the palace, was forced at last to study the real moral issues that confronted him. Finally he said, very slowly: 'I know that Krumpf is using me to gain a promotion of some kind, but princ.i.p.ally to gain escape from here. I think he's terrified of the Russians. I think he will do anything to get away, and that's why I was able to get him to make the deal on the train.'

'But what will you do with all these treasures in Paris?'

'Sell them.'

His mother could offer no sensible comment, so she ignored the statement. If her son believed that he could find happiness by selling off his mother's possessions in a strange city, so be it. But she could speak about the graver issues: 'Ludwik, you're Polish. You're not even half-American, because I became Polish years ago, heart and conscience Polish. So in saving yourself, you must not do anything to the detriment of your nation.'

Ludwik licked his lips, looked at his mother finally, and promised: 'You will not find my name on Krumpf's golden cards.'

'What do you mean?'

'I came upon him one day when he was working, as usual, on his cards. Poles who could be trusted. Poles who would be shot if arrested. One color for each. And I noticed a small pile of much different cards and I asked what they were, and he quickly covered them up. But he did say: "Those are the ones who will have positions of importance in the new Poland we shall create here, the German Poland." And he said meaningfully: "I hope your name will be on one of those cards soon-the people we treasure." I could guess what a Pole had to do to get on that list.'

The image of Konrad Krumpf hunched over his cards, ordaining who should live and who should die, was so compelling that Marjorie could think of little else during the remaining days of her life. Early one morning, after Krumpf had departed to supervise the execution of nine hostages in one of his villages down the river, she walked casually along the second-floor hall and looked into the Holbein room to see if Krumpf's secretary was there, and finding him absent, she entered as if to check the spare s.p.a.ce where the painting had been, but when she satisfied herself that no one was likely to interrupt, she took a deep breath, hurried to Krumpf's desk, and began rummaging for the stack of golden cards.

Finally she found it with the neatly lettered top card proclaiming that the persons hidden underneath were people of prudence willing to act in the long-range interests of their country. Trembling, and aware of the suicidal thing she was about to do, she took paper and began writing down the forty-three names.

As she was at work, she heard footsteps in the hall, and a.s.suming it to be Krumpf's secretary, who would occupy the room from then on, barring her escape, she supposed that she was doomed, but on the chance that something might happen to save her, she scooped up the cards, grabbed her paper, and darted into a closet, where she waited in darkness, trying to control the palpitations of her heart.

It was not the secretary. It was two minor Gestapo functionaries come to make entries in the card system, and they went to the very section from which she had taken the golden cards.

'h.e.l.lo, the commander left the drawer open! He'd bite us if we did that.'

'He's busy these days.'

'Do you have Biruta Buk's card? She's a bad one.'

'I can't understand why he just doesn't shoot her.'

'I think he's using her as bait. She's pa.s.sing food to the partisans, you know.'

'Everybody knows. He'll trick her yet. You watch.'

The men made their entries, returned the files, and closed the drawer. When their footsteps retreated down the hall, Marjorie went to the desk, spread her cards, and resumed transcribing them. When she was finished, and had replaced the file, she thought: I'm glad my son's name was not among them. At least he's not an actual traitor.

She folded the precious piece of paper and held it in her left hand as she walked down the hallway. She paused at the entrance to her theater, where she could hear Caruso singing and Paderewski at the piano, then descended to the great hall and looked as if for the last time at her two mammoth canvases, nodding to the defenders of Czestochowa and saluting Jan Sobieski. She walked casually from the palace, gazing with love at those sights which had always enchanted her. There was Wiktor's grandiose stable with its array of handsome carriages. There was the chimney on which the storks built their messy home each year. Beyond were the immortal beech trees, those castles of the forest. And straight ahead was the little village in which so much life evolved. She loved that village and its irregular square, and she loved the people who had occupied it, bold Jadwiga most of all. From this powerful woman she had learned her first real words of Polish, and in this square she had seen Jadwiga hanging by the neck.

She walked twice around the perimeter, pausing now and then to inspect shops that contained nothing, and then she spotted her target. Biruta Buk, limping from the punishment she had absorbed during her interrogation, unable to smile because of the wounds across her face, appeared at the far end and saw Madame Bukowska immediately. Sensing that the old woman would not be here without good reason, she walked slowly toward her, and as the distance between the two diminished, each could see in the other exactly what she had hoped to see.