The Polish Officer (11 page)

“Defense-in-depth doesn’t happen overnight,” Broza said, thinking out loud. “And the Stalin Line is being dismantled now that the Russians have moved up to the middle of Poland. That advance may cost them more than they suspect.”

“They will sacrifice lives,” de Milja said. “And land. Burn the villages, blow up the bridges.”

Broza thumbed through a sheaf of papers in a dossier. “Granted, they are not distributing light oil for the winter, and they are not buying sheepskins. But we know they are building large hospitals on the border. For who? Not for us, certainly. And we’ve seen important commanders and staff logistics people flown in to border camps for conferences.”

Both officers thought about that for a time. “It is coming,” de Milja said. “But not this spring. Perhaps in ’41.”

“And this spring?”

“France.”

“Nobody believes such a thing can happen,” Broza said. “You mean a major attack—tanks, assault planes, infantry, Paris in flames?”

“Yes,” de Milja said.

Broza shook his head. It wasn’t possible.

The first winter of German occupation turned slowly to the rain and mud of a long, slow spring. Perhaps the Poles lost heart a little. The first rage was spent—a few SS officers assassinated, several hundred hostages shot. But when the smoke cleared the Germans weren’t frightened and the Poles weren’t intimidated. And so they settled down to fight.

The recommendation of the ZWZ intelligence service—to hammer at the links between Russia and Germany—was endorsed by the Sixth Bureau administration in Paris, and the logical area of attack turned out to be the Hitler/Stalin Pact trade agreements. German technology needed Russian raw materials; a million tons of animal fodder, a million tons of crude oil, tons of cotton, coal, phosphates, chromium, and iron ore. The Russians had the matériel—it was simply a matter of shipping it to Germany. By rail. Across Poland.

From the first days of occupation it was clear that all labor would be performed by Polish workers, under German supervision. So the Germans, when they decided to enlarge Prezmysl railroad station, just on the German side of the border, hired ZWZ carpenters, ZWZ masons, and ZWZ helpers to hand them the proper tool. Broza, de Milja, and company knew everything before it happened. The railroad line Prezmysl/Cracow/Breslau, entirely under the view of Polish underground intelligence, was soon ready to carry the goods that would keep Germany rich and powerful, while the Poles were itching to blow it all to hell, a small first step on the road to making Germany poor and weak.

The battle started with Polish Boy Scouts, adept at crawling under freight cars, opposed by German sentries, who shot anything and justified nothing. But it did not remain on that level. The initial Polish thrust—we can blow up whatever we want—was answered by a German counterthrust—we can fix whatever you blow up. The Poles soon realized the magnitude of the job they had taken on: the Germans
were
good fixers, and the strategic sector of the German/Polish economy was no small thing—it was going to require one hell of an effort to blow it all up. Not only that, the means to blow it up had to be stolen from these very Germans; at least until the French and British Allies found a way to fly in the explosives they needed. Not at all daunted, the Poles created a special blowing-up–and–stealing organization to do the job. They called it Komenda Dyversji—Sabotage and Diversion—Kedyv for short.

Like any organization, Kedyv measured its success in numbers. In 1940, a disabled locomotive was out of service for fourteen hours. Later, the period would rise to fourteen days. The increase in productivity was achieved by Polish chemists and engineers, opposed by German chemists and engineers. At which point the conflict had reached the level on which it would be decided: national intelligentsia versus national intelligentsia.

The Polish scientists took the offensive and never let up: they built incendiary devices that were swiftly and easily attachable to tank cars loaded with Russian crude oil, they then timed the fuse by the rhythm of the rails: x number of thumps would set off the explosion, sometimes in Poland, sometimes in Germany. Unable to determine the venue of the sabotage, the Germans found it impossible to investigate. Petroleum storage tanks were set afire by the introduction of cylinders of compressed hydrogen with open valves. Locomotives were disabled by the addition of an abrasive to the lubricating system. Russian iron ore was seeded with bombs that exploded while the ore was traveling down chutes into German smelters. When railroad tracks were mined, the first mine blew up a train, the second a rescue train, the third a repair train.

The Germans didn’t like it.

These
untermenschen
were not to be permitted to interfere with the harmonization of German Europe. A message was sent to the Poles: the faculty of Cracow University was called to a meeting, then arrested en masse. It was thought to be the first time an entire university had been arrested. But a few nights later, on the Silesian border, a blue flash, a fiery spray of tank-car metal, five vats of flame towed through the darkness by a terrified engineer.
Fuck you.

28 March, 3:40 A.M. De Milja woke suddenly. He listened, concentrated. First the strange, whispery silence of a city under curfew. Then a board creaked in the hallway.

So, 9 mm from the nightstand, safety thumbed off. He sat up slowly, sighted on the crack where the door met the jamb. The knob turned delicately, a cautious hand on the other side. De Milja took a breath and held it.

Madame Kuester. In a silk robe, hair in a long braid. “Don’t kill me, please,” she said. He understood only by watching her mouth move, her voice barely made a sound. He lowered the gun. “Germans,” she said. Gestured with her eyes. She walked down the hall to her room, he followed, in undershirt and shorts. He stood close to her in the small room, could smell the laundry soap she washed with. The shade moved slightly in the air, the window behind it open an inch. From the roof across the narrow street, a hushed “
Ocht-svansig, Ocht-svansig,
” then a brief hiss of radio static.
Eight-twenty, then,
he thought. Meaning I’m in place, or proceed to apartment, or they’re all asleep, or whatever it meant. Now de Milja’s decision had been made for him: orders were specific, the response detailed; and he was not to permit himself to be taken alive. “Get dressed, please,” he said.

He walked down the hallway, tapped lightly at the door of the master bedroom. He heard the man and his wife breathing deeply inside, opened the door, had finally to lean over and touch the man on his bare shoulder.
They made love tonight,
he thought. The man was immediately awake, saw de Milja and the 9 mm and understood everything.

He went back to Madame Kuester’s room. When he opened the door she was naked, standing in front of an open bureau drawer. He knew this profile—the curve of her abdomen, flat bottom, heavy thighs. Her head turned toward him. She didn’t exactly pause, skipped a single beat perhaps, then took underwear from the drawer and stepped into it. He wanted to hold her against him, something he had never done before. There were family noises in the hall; the children, the parents, an angry word. “Best to say good-bye,” she said.

“Good-bye,” he said. He couldn’t see her eyes in the darkened room.

He hurried back to his room, put on a sweater, wool pants, heavy shoes, and a raincoat. The gun fit in the raincoat pocket. From inside a book he selected an
ausweis—
German work pass—and other identification meant for emergencies, as well as a packet of zloty notes and some gold coins. The family and Madame Kuester were waiting for him at the front door.

The bolt and lock mechanisms were heavily oiled, just a soft click and de Milja was looking out at the landing. A current of chilly air from the staircase meant that the street door was standing open. This was not normal. De Milja turned, silently let the others know what had happened. The reaction was calm; the father held a large military revolver, his thirteen-year-old son had its twin. The man smiled and nodded gravely.
I understand.

Three flights below, somebody tried to walk silently through the lobby. Others followed, one of them stifled a cough. They could have climbed the stairs quietly if they’d taken off their boots, but the SS didn’t do things like that, so de Milja and the family could hear them coming. When they came around the curve of the staircase onto the second floor, de Milja took the 9 mm out of his pocket and climbed the iron rungs of a ladder that led to a hatch that opened onto the roof. He tested the hatch with his gun hand, moving it only enough to make sure it wasn’t secured from the other side. He was reasonably sure there were German police on the roof.

They reached the floor below. They weren’t very careful about noise now, de Milja could hear the heels of their boots and the sound of leather belts and holster grommets and breathing deepened by excitement and anticipation. Then they pounded their fists on a door and yelled for somebody to open up, the guttural German rolled and echoed up the open staircase and rang on the tile landings. The door was flung open, knob hammering the wall, then there were shouts and running footsteps and a wail of terror as the downstairs neighbor was arrested.

They had, de Milja calculated, at most an hour.

The middle-aged couple who lived below would be taken to Szucha Avenue headquarters, a sergeant would put down basic information and fill out forms, and when the interrogators finally got busy they would realize that this was not Captain Alexander de Milja or
the man in the brown raincoat
or whatever description they had. Then they would come back.

There was, of course, at least the mathematical possibility that the police had not made an error, but those who indulged themselves in that kind of thinking were no longer alive in Poland in the spring of 1940.

A few minutes after five in the morning, when the curfew ended, the wife, both children, and Madame Kuester left the apartment with false identity cards and a wicker basket on wheels they used for shopping. Moments later, they came to the side street and turned right. Which meant, to de Milja looking out the window, that German police remained on guard in the lobby, checking papers as the tenants left the building. Five minutes later, de Milja was alone—the former customs official had walked out the door of his apartment, probably never to see it again. He too turned right at the side street, which confirmed the earlier signal, and touched his hair, which meant the Germans were checking closely. At 5:15, de Milja climbed the ladder, cautiously raised the hatch, then hoisted himself out onto the roof.

The dawn was a shock after the close apartment—cold air, dark blue sky, shattered red cloud in streaks that curved to the horizon. He took a moment to get his bearings, smelled cigarette smoke nearby, then knelt behind a plaster wall at the foot of a chimney. Somebody was up here with him, possibly a German policeman. He held the 9 mm in his right hand, pressed the fingertips of his left hand against the tar surface of the roof. He could feel somebody pacing: one, two, three, four, five. Pause. Then back again. Everything de Milja knew suggested a police guard on the roof—the raid, the document control at the front door. Germans were thorough, this was the sort of thing they did. He wanted to see for himself, but resisted the temptation to rise up and look around—the roof was cluttered; sheets hung on clotheslines, chimneys, ventilation pipe outlets, two tarpaper-roofed housings that covered the entries to staircases.

A few feet away, across a low parapet and above a narrow alley, was a fire escape on the sixth floor of the building next door. From there, he had several choices: climb in an apartment window, descend to the alley, or go up to the roof, which abutted two neighboring buildings, one of them a factory with heavy truck traffic in and out. All he had to do was jump the space above the alley.

Down in the street, a tramcar arrived, ringing its bell, grinding to a stop, then starting up again. He heard the clop of hoofbeats—perhaps the wagon that delivered coal—and the high/low siren of German police wagons as they sped through the city streets. The air smelled of coal smoke and onions frying in fat, and he could see the morning star, still sharp, but fading in the gathering daylight. He heard the rasp of a window forced up, he heard a woman laugh—shrill, abandoned, it was so funny she didn’t care how she sounded.

Turning his head, he saw a woman appear at an open window in an adjacent building. Her apartment was one story above the roof, so he found himself looking up at her. She wore an old print dress with the sleeves rolled up, an apron, and a kerchief with the knot tied in the middle of her forehead. Her face was determined—here it was just after dawn and she was cleaning her house. She poked a dustmop out the window and gave it a good bang against the sill, then another, just so it remembered who was boss.

When she saw de Milja, she stared as though he were an animal in a zoo. Of course, he thought. What she sees is a man with an automatic pistol in his hand, kneeling behind the base of a chimney.
Hiding
behind the base of a chimney. Hmm. Probably a criminal. But he’s not alone on the roof. From where she stood—she gave the mop a desultory rap just to keep up appearances—she could see another man. This man was pacing, and smoking a cigarette. Perhaps, if God wills, de Milja thought, he’s wearing a uniform, or if he’s in civilian clothes maybe he has on one of those stupid little hats with alpine brushes the Germans liked.

De Milja watched the woman, she stared back shamelessly, then looked away, probably at the pacing man. Then back at him. He sensed a motion behind her, and she was briefly distracted. She almost, he felt, turned away from the window and went back to cleaning the apartment—somebody in the room had told her to do that. Yes, de Milja thought, that was it. She turned her head and said something, something dismissive and sharp, then returned to watching the men on the roof below her. She had broad shoulders and big red hands—nobody told
her
what to do. De Milja now faced her directly and spread his arms, palms up in the universal interrogatory gesture:
what’s going on?