The Clarinet Polka (41 page)

There were only six Germans from that special unit, and it takes six men a long time to kill three hundred people. Rachela's parents died there in that forest. When all the Jews were dead, the Poles and Ukrainians had to shovel in dirt and cover them up, and then the Poles and Ukrainians were loaded onto trucks and transported back to the labor camp.

Well, the Jews that were left in the ghetto, the Germans kept them locked up in there with hardly any food. Then in the summer of 1942 the Germans got their Final Solution up and running, so they took all the Jews out of the ghetto and loaded them into trucks and transported them to the railroad station and loaded them into freight cars and took them to Treblinka where they gassed every one of them. Then the Germans put up signs that said Krajne Podlaski was Jew-free.

*   *   *

Marysia and her mom worked like crazy to turn Rachela into Krystyna. They taught her all the prayers she'd know as a good Catholic girl, and how to cross herself, and they went over the Mass with her step by step. They threw Markowskis at her night and day until she'd memorized how she was related to all of them. And Marysia would ask her things like, “Do you remember the first time we went to the Hotel Europejski in Warsaw?” and Rachela would say, “No, I don't quite remember that. Remind me.”

But a day or two later, Rachela would say, “Oh, of course I remember. How could I ever forget it? We were with your father, and he indulged our every whim. He even allowed us to wear lipstick. Do you remember the little silver bowls of ice cream?”

The real Krystyna was somewhere in Kazakhstan doing God knows what, but her baptism was on record at the church, and her papers were registered at the municipal hall, and all Rachela needed was whatever papers Krystyna would've had if she'd got away from the Russians. The Polish resistance was getting into full swing by then, and the papers arrived under the straw in a basket of eggs. Whoever did them was real good.

Mass was celebrated in the church for the first time since the Russians left. Afterward the priest said to Rachela, “I'm so glad to see you, Krystyna,” and she said, “Thank you, Father,” and so the word went around on the grapevine. When the girls finally dared to go out, friends of Krystyna's would come up to chat and ask Rachela if she'd heard anything from her family in Kazakhstan, and peasants would say, “Good day, Panno Krystyno.”

Now you'd think that in that whole town there'd be somebody who'd give her away, right? That's what Janice and her brothers thought. “It's because of who we were,” Janice's mom said. “That's how much respect there was for us. The Markowskis. We were the only ones who could have got away with something like that.”

One night when the girls were going to bed, Rachela asked Marysia, “What do you suppose the Germans did with my horses?”

Marysia was taken by surprise, and she thought, I must never again think of her as Rachela. If I do, I'll give her away. From that moment on she always thought of her as Krystyna.

Eventually the Germans came to visit. There were two SS officers—the one in charge and a short fat man who seemed to be some kind of assistant—and a dozen soldiers. The way the Germans were, they never asked, they just stomped on in and started shouting. The soldiers searched the house. Marysia's mother inquired politely if the officers would care for a drink, and the officer in charge all of a sudden got just as polite as she was and introduced himself and the other man. Krystyna and Marysia served them some little cakes and the Markowskis' best orange-flavored vodka.

The short officer was a German from central Poland, so he spoke Polish. He asked to see Krystyna's papers, and then he started asking her questions in Polish. At first she answered him real polite, but after a few minutes something snapped and she just lost it.

Krystyna's eyes were flashing, and she was speaking a mile a minute in her high-flown Polish, and she traced her lineage on both sides going all the way back to the Old Republic, and she told him exactly how she was related to Prince Markowski, and about everybody else the Markowskis were related to—the Tarnowskis and the Radziwills and all those other blue bloods. She told him about how the Russians, those barbarian pigs, had looted her home, and about how she'd slipped away from them, those idiots, and she asked him to tell her, if he would be so kind, what they had done with her horses.

The fat guy's jaw kind of drops open. He looks at the other SS officer and he kind of shrugs like he's saying, yes, she really is Krystyna Markowska. There's nobody else in the world she could possibly be.

The officer in charge stands up and clicks his heels. He kisses Pani Markowska's hand. “It is my fondest hope, dear lady,” he says in German, “that we might meet again in happier times,” and then he goes, “Heil, Hitler!” and they're gone.

*   *   *

Well, happier times weren't exactly in the works. A few weeks after that, another one of those special units came to town. The folks in Krajne Podlaski must have really pissed off the Germans. Maybe it was that too many Jews had escaped or too many of the boys had run off and joined the partisans, but anyhow the Germans were going to teach them a good lesson—with what they called a “special pacification act.” That means cleaning out the Polish intellectuals, and they did a real thorough job of it. They got anybody they thought might show any sign of resistance or turn out to be any kind of leader.

The Gestapo had their lists already made up, so the SS starts rounding these people up, and if they had families, then the whole lot of them right down to the babies. Schoolteachers. Librarians. Lawyers. The priest and the nuns. Anybody who had a university degree. Anybody who'd ever been in anybody's army, even old guys in their eighties. Anybody who'd ever been active in any of the leftist political parties. Anybody who'd ever managed anything of any size—like a distillery.

They were herded into a compound, and then the Germans selected the young able-bodied ones—like between the ages of fourteen and forty, Marysia said, but they didn't ask your age, just picked you out by eye. Krystyna and Marysia and Marysia's mother got picked, and Czesław's sister Helena got picked, but grief had aged Czesław's mom, and she didn't make the cut. The young and able-bodied were divided into men and women and transported off to work in slave labor camps. Everybody else was executed.

They did it just the way they'd done it to the Jews—the pit in the forest, the bullet in the back of the head. Czesław's mother and Marysia's father died there in the forest. The Germans murdered nearly a hundred people there.

The women who got picked were shipped to Germany where they worked in a munitions factory. They shaved them all over—Marysia said it was one of the most humiliating experiences of her life—and then they made them take a shower, and that was the only bath of any kind they got as long as they were there. They slept on little wooden platforms that looked like shelves on a wall, and their only clothes were what they had on when they were picked up in Poland. They had to wear the letter P so that everybody would know they were Polish and treat them like they were a notch or two below human—which is what the Germans said the Poles were.

They marched you into the factory at dawn and worked you till late at night, and if you didn't work fast enough, they cut your rations, and if you got onto that slippery slope and stayed on it too long, that was the end of you. All they gave you to eat was soup and a little bread, and the soup usually had maggots in it. Krystyna turned out to have a lot of courage and fortitude, and she was always saying things to try to help the other women keep going. “Be sure to eat the maggots,” she said. “They're dead and they won't hurt you, and they've got good food value.”

There were so many fleas it looked like a jumping carpet everywhere you went, and all the women were infested with lice. There weren't enough latrines, and they were never cleaned, and the floors in the latrines were smeared with shit. Typhus is carried by lice, and maybe a quarter of the women died of it. The women never received any medical care. Typhus raged in that work camp until it burned itself out, and then a new shipment of women would come in—they were starting to get Ukrainian and Russian girls—and the typhus would have a go at them. Marysia's mother died of typhus.

*   *   *

While the women were working in the munitions factory, Czesław was off in the forest with the Home Army—the
Armia Krajowa
. Czesław told them the name of his unit and his rank and his
nom de guerre
and the exact years he'd been in the AK. He said they generally operated in the forests in the region of Krajne Podlaski, but they moved around a lot. They had to if they wanted to survive.

“What did you do?” John asks him.

“The main thing we did,” Czesław says with this thin little smile, “was try not to get killed.”

They disrupted communications. Sabotaged roads and rail lines. Once they burned a bridge. They executed collaborators. They fought with other partisan groups. They tried to maintain order, but that was impossible. “By the end, there were God knows how many other groups in the forest. Some were legitimate, but many were simply bandits—riffraff with no moral or political convictions of any kind.”

“But the Germans,” Mark asks him, “didn't you fight the Germans?”

The Germans had a policy of one hundred to one, Czesław tells them. They'd kill one hundred Poles for every German killed, so the AK had to be careful not to cause reprisals. A lot of times the Germans did it even better than one hundred to one. A little village called Biebrz near Krajne Podlaski—someone fired from that village. Just a couple shots, hit nobody. The Germans burnt the village to the ground and shot anyone who tried to escape from it.

When they got caught off guard, the AK fought skirmishes with the Germans, Czesław said, but they didn't stick around to see how things turned out. Near the end of the war when the Red Army was rolling over everything, his unit finally did get a chance to get their licks in. The Germans had been running out of men, and a lot of the soldiers were mere boys. The AK ambushed a bunch of them, and they surrendered without putting up any fight at all. “They fell on their knees begging for their lives,” Czesław says. “They were crying like babies.” He kind of shrugs. “It was too bad.”

Janice said that she felt all the blood rush out of her head—or maybe it wasn't doing that, but it felt like it was. She could hear her own heartbeat in her ears.

Czesław sees how his kids are looking at him. “You don't understand how it was,” he says, hard and angry. “I knew you wouldn't understand. It's foolish to try to tell you. But we couldn't take prisoners. You'd have to feed them and watch them all the time, and they'd slow you down. It would have been suicide to take prisoners.”

That sets him off remembering another German. This one he stalked for hours through the forest. “He was part of a unit that had been sent out to look for us. He became separated from his comrades. He was lost and badly frightened—and I knew the moss on every tree. Well, he got tired. He sat down under a tree to try to collect himself. He laid his rifle down, poor fellow.” He kind of stares off into space for a minute. “I was glad to get that rifle. He had a damned good pair of boots too.”

“Did you feel bad about it?” Mark asks his father.

Czesław looks kind of startled. “What? About that German? Why should I feel bad? He was a soldier.”

“Well, how about the young Germans—the ones who were crying like babies?”

“Well, of course I felt bad about them. But you did what you had to. I have no regrets about any German.”

He sits there for a while staring off into space, and then he says, “You ask me if I felt bad. It's a question you could ask—you weren't there. I'll tell you what I did feel bad about. Living. So many good people died, and I was spared, and I kept asking why. You could fool yourself. I think sometimes that you
had
to fool yourself. You could say it's because you were young and tough and smart—that's what kept you alive. Or maybe God spared you. And it helped to tell yourself things like that. But all it came down to in the end was luck.”

*   *   *

For a while Czesław was sunk in the old deep gloom and nobody was saying anything. The kids figured the story was pretty much over, but it wasn't. Finally their mother starts to talk.

One day a group of men came to the munitions factory, and the women had to walk by them one at a time. Marysia was in the group that was picked to walk by them again, but this time they had to take all their clothes off. Whatever they were looking for, she had it, because she was one of about fifty girls who were taken away in trucks. They were each given a bowl of good soup and a piece of bread that wasn't moldy. They were each issued a sliver of soap, and they had a shower. Then they were examined by this German doctor. He looked into their eyes. He studied their ears. He had this metal gadget, and he measured their skulls with it.

Marysia was one of about twenty girls who passed all the tests. The girls were all in their late teens or early twenties. They were all blond and blue-eyed. They didn't look like much because they'd been starving and they were covered with insect bites and open sores and like that, but you could tell that they'd all been pretty once. They didn't know what was going to happen to them, and as you can imagine, they were scared shitless.

The doctor came and gave them a little talk in German. They should be very happy, he said, because his exhaustive tests—the most scientific and accurate tests possible—had demonstrated that they all had pure Aryan blood—pure Aryan blood that had, up until now, been lost to the Reich. But that blood would be restored to the Reich. He was also testing fine young men of our victorious Wehrmacht, and only those with pure Aryan blood would be selected, and together with those fine young men, all of the girls would be privileged to make pure Aryan babies.