The Polish Officer (35 page)

The wind rose, snowflakes spun through the air, swirling like dust and whitening the dirt road. It saved their lives, Razakavia said later. “Russians read snow like priests read Bibles.” Or, perhaps, that day, nobody wanted to die.

The Russians mounted their horses, slow and deliberate under the eyes of the unseen riflemen, and rode back the way they came.

De Milja had been ice inside for a long time—there wasn’t any other way for him to do what he had to do—but Rovno scared him. The Germans had it all their own way in Rovno. The SS were everywhere, death’s-head insignia and lightning flashes, a certain walk, a certain smile. The Einsatzgruppen came through, on the way to murder Jews in another ghetto somewhere, there were Ukrainian SS, Latvian SS, and German criminals, alley killers the Nazi recruiters had quarried from the prisons since 1927. As well as those ordinary Germans, always liked by their neighbors, who, given the opportunity, turned out to be not so very mild-mannered after all. They were the worst, and one taste of blood was all it took.

De Milja met their eyes in Rovno. He dared not be furtive. So he returned the stares, trudged along in the snow, cold and absentminded and absorbed in his business. And armed. It went against the current wisdom—one street search and you were finished. But he would not be taken alive. The cyanide capsule sewn in the point of his shirt collar was the last resort, but the VIS snugged against the small of his back gave him at least the illusion of survival.

The ZWZ secret mail system operated all over Poland, mostly out of dress shops, with couriers carrying letters from city to city. De Milja had used it to report the Russian contact and that had produced a request—delivered in a park in Brest Litovsk—for a meeting in Rovno. With Major Olenik, his former superior in Warsaw and, now that he was no longer under the direct orders of the Sixth Bureau in London, his superior once again.

Rovno had always been a border city—a Polish possession, claimed by Russia, populated by Ukrainians. Narrow streets, brick buildings darkened by factory smoke, November ice, November fog, Gestapo cars with chains on the tires.

“They will yet take Moscow,” Olenik said. “Or maybe not. The Russians have introduced a weapon they call the Katyusha rocket, also known as the Stalin Organ—multiple rockets fired simultaneously from a launcher that can be towed by a truck. The Germans don’t like it. They are afraid of it—they ran away from it up in Smolensk. And the Russians have a new tank, the T-34. German shells bounce off. If they can produce enough of them, they’ll shut the panzer divisions down. There’s that, and the fact that our weather people predict December temperatures outside Moscow of sixty-five degrees below zero. We’ll see what
that
does to their
Wehrwille.
”

The word meant
war will,
a cherished German idea: who wants most to win, wins.

De Milja and Olenik sat in the parlor of a safe house in Rovno, a small apartment, old-fashioned, as though a couple had grown old there and never changed anything. It was all curtains and doilies and clocks with loud ticks—a certain musty smell, a certain silence. De Milja wondered what it would be like in the forest at sixty-five degrees below zero. Olenik apparently read his mind. “We expect you’ll finish up before then,” he said.

Olenik hadn’t changed. Narrow shoulders, tousled gray hair and mustache, pockmarked skin—triumphantly seedy in a worn gray cardigan, you’d walk past him and never see him on any street in the world. He rummaged in a briefcase, found a pipe, fussed with it until he got it lit, then searched again until he found a single sheet of yellowish newsprint. “Have a look,” he said.

The newspaper was called
Miecz i Mlot—Sword and Hammer.
It was published in Polish by the League of Friends of the Soviet Union and the PPR, the Polska Partia Robotnicza, the Polish Workers’ Party.

“It comes from Bialystok,” Olenik said. “From Stryj and Brody and Wilno. From Brest and Rovno. All over the eastern districts. Curious, with a hundred and sixty-five newspapers issued by underground presses in Poland, including every prewar party, socialist, and peasant and all the rest of it, we now see this. Reference to a
communist
underground in Poland. If it exists, we don’t know about it. If it exists, it does nothing
but
exist, but that may be just precisely to the point. Its existence will make it easier for them to say, later on, that the communist state of Poland was preceded by a communist underground.”

De Milja handed the newspaper back and Olenik returned it to his briefcase. “Of course,” Olenik said, “we’re not spending life and money to find out what the Russians think about us. They enslaved us for a hundred and twenty years. Attacked in 1920. Attacked again in 1939. And they’ll be coming back this way, pushing a wave of Wehrmacht gray in front of them. We have to decide what to do then.

“If they go all the way to the Oder, to the Rhine, we’re done for—they’ll occupy the country. It’s that simple. So what we may have to do is, at the right moment, throw the Germans out by ourselves and declare a free Polish state, recognition by the British and the Americans to follow. That means a rising, and a terrible price to pay in blood.

“The alternative: reveal Soviet intentions—stick a knife in Stalin before he can get to the conference table. Britain won’t give him Poland, but the Americans are blind to life beyond their oceans.” He stopped for a moment and seemed to drift, then spoke again in a softer voice. “If you’re a small country and you have a bully for a neighbor, God help you, because nobody else will. You’re alone. You’ll cry out in the night, but nobody will come.”

He stopped abruptly, had said more of what was in his heart than he’d meant to. He cleared his throat. “What matters now,” he went on, “are the particular and demonstrable intentions of the Soviet state. If their partisan units take food without paying for it—and they do. If those partisan units have political officers—and they do. If they are forcing Poles to fight in those units and burning down villages that resist, and we know they are doing that, too, then they are acting, according to their own rules, like people fighting in an enemy country among enemies.”

“It was certainly that way in Krymno,” de Milja said. “And we were asked—that’s not really the word for the way it was put—to follow them to their camp.”

“Two of our people, in the northern Polesian district, did just that. They believed they were going somewhere to sit down and work out an agreement. One is dead. The other, we’re told, is in the Lubianka. So we are both fighting the Germans, but we are not allies.”

He stopped a moment, considered what he would say next. “So,” he said. “We, I mean London and Warsaw, we are interested in the story of Sergeant Krewinski, the brother of the man captured in the attack on the repair train.”

“The man in Rovno prison?”

“Yes. What we want you to do now, Captain, is to force Rovno prison. Liberate Krewinski—and two ZWZ officers who are also being held there. All are going to be executed.”

De Milja met the major’s eyes, but his look was opaque and distant. There’d been three attempts on German prisons that de Milja knew about, all had failed. Then he understood: this was a committee at work, and if they assigned what was in effect a suicide mission, there was nothing Olenik could do about it.

“It’s right away, then?” de Milja said.

Olenik spread his hands:
of course.

That completed Major Olenik’s work and he left the city by train the following evening. As a notional waterworks engineer, his papers allowed him to travel anywhere within German-occupied lands. He handed over to de Milja a group of code and contact procedures: ZWZ officers and operatives in the district were at his disposal. Explosives, weapons, whatever he needed was available.

De Milja returned to the forest, explaining to Razakavia what had to be done. The first step was to move the encampment, from huts in a clearing to an abandoned farm at the edge of a wood about ten miles from Rovno. The farm would serve as a reception base for the freed prisoners and some members of the attack commando. A doctor and nurse would set up an aid station at the farmhouse twenty-four hours before the attack.

Back in Rovno he made contact with a local ZWZ operative known as Vlach, a man in his late twenties, with tipped-up nose, carefully combed blond hair and a wise-guy curl to his lip. The ZWZ ran, in general, to more sober and stable personalities—Vlach had replaced one of those very gentlemen in late July. Had survived, had impressed Major Olenik; those were his credentials. At Vlach’s suggestion they met in a tearoom in Rovno’s central square, a very proper place, where German officials’ wives and girlfriends could drink tea with extended pinkies and nibble at mounds of pale-green petits fours. “Ha ha,” Vlach laughed. “Who would look for us here?”

Then he grew serious. “We can get you anything you like,” he said. “Cars, trucks, you say what.”

“How can you do that?”

“We all do the same thing here, everybody who you-know-what. See, the Luftwaffe and the panzer tanks, they can really do the job. Whatever the Russians had here is flat, gone. I never saw such a mess; staff cars on top of each other, railroad tracks peeled straight up into the air, airfields turned into junkyards. So now it’s conquered, so now it all has to be rebuilt.

“So, just about the time the Wehrmacht shot the last sniper and hanged the last commissar, the big German construction companies came in. Ho, ho—Ve gonna make money now, Fritz! The military authority told them what they needed—airfields, barracks, airplane hangars, oil-storage tanks—exactly what they just finished blowing up. Plus, as long as they were at it, roads, which they never had here.

“So, the construction companies get all these contracts, but when they finished rubbing their hands and winking at each other, it begins to dawn on them that they’re going to have to find somebody to do the work. Ah, not so easy. Can’t bring in people from Germany, either they’re building airplanes and submarines back in Essen, or they’re shooting more Russians, six hundred miles east of here. See, when you shoot a Russian, somebody puts another one down, but they haven’t figured that out yet.

“Anyhow, they’re going to have to use local labor. We started by getting one guy hired. Every German’s dream of what a Pole should be—cooperative, friendly, religious, trustworthy. A fifty-five-year-old man, a machinist all his life, Henryk. So all the Germans loved Henryk. They could count on him, he never drank, he never stole, he never answered back, and you said be at the job site at five-thirty in the morning, and there he was.”

Vlach blew out his cheeks to make a fat German face. “ ‘Henryk, mein friend, maybe you haff a cousin?’ Well, guess what, he does. He has also an uncle, an aunt, a long-lost friend, a nephew—that’s me—and about eighteen more, one way and another. We go anywhere we like, we have company trucks, two Opel automobiles. If we want to carry something that’s—unusual, you understand, we can request a Wehrmacht driver. When they’re behind the wheel, nobody even pretends to look.”

Respectable little man, tortoiseshell spectacles gave him a slight resemblance to the American comedian Harold Lloyd. Except that Harold Lloyd would have bought new glasses if he’d cracked a lens.

“The Russians put him in a camp in ’39,” Vlach said.

“How did you get out?” de Milja asked.

“I escaped,” the man said.

He sat with de Milja and Vlach in the apartment, a map of Rovno unfolded on the kitchen table. “From the central telephone exchange, which is here, there are three lines that leave Rovno.” He pointed, his hands cracked and peeling from working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. “The main line goes west, to Lutsk. Then we had a branch north, to Klesow, and one south, to Ostrog. From there a line went to Kiev—but it was often cut, or blocked. The Russians interfered any way they could.”

“And the wireless telegraph—is that something you knew about?” The man had been the regional accounting supervisor for the telephone system before the war.

“There were five stations,” he said.

“So if we disabled those, and cut the telephone lines—”

“They would use the military wireless. I don’t think you can silence them, sir.”

The prison guard had never liked his work. They paid him slave wages to sit on the lid of a garbage can, the way he saw it. But it was better than nothing, so he did what he had to do. A mean existence; everything had to be watched, saved, rationed: lightbulbs, soap, coal, meat. He’d never, not once, had a lot of something he liked. His kids were gone, had their own sorry lives. His wife was still with him, mostly the Church to thank for that, but whatever had once been inside her had died years ago. For himself, he sat in a bar after work and soaked up vodka until he was numb enough to go home. He would have liked, once he got older, to go back to the countryside where he’d been raised. Since the war you could buy a small farm, it didn’t take much, just more than he’d ever had.

So when the offer came, he didn’t say no. They’d probably watched him, the way he looked, the misery in his step. The old man who made the offer wasn’t such a bad sort. Polish, with the sharp cheekbones like they had sometimes. And educated, maybe very educated. “You’ve had enough bad weather,” the old man said. “Time to take a walk in the sunshine.” Then he mentioned an amount of money, and the guard just nodded.

“You don’t have to do anything,” the old man said. “Just draw what’s inside, the corridors and the offices and the cells, and show me how it’s numbered.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“They don’t tell me. It’s the Russians gave me this job.”

“Bandits. We have some of them locked up.”

“Just draw and number.”

“I’ll take care of it at home,” the guard said.

The old man put a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of him. “Why not right now? There’s nobody here.”

So the guard did it. And when his mind raced as he lay in bed that night—should he tell, could he sell the old man to the Germans, should he have demanded more money?—he realized that his childish drawing was as good as a signed confession. That scared him. So he hid the money under the mattress and kept quiet.