While Still We Live (50 page)

“Well, that was the situation. And then, on that evening after that day of waiting, Jan and his small band set out from the woods towards Reymont’s camp. They didn’t go very far. They were only about a mile away when they heard shooting. They knew that was the Germans. They started back to the village. Not that they could stop the Germans. Only Jan and his comrade had guns. But they thought that the people might have fled to the wood, that they could help them. When they got to a place where they could see the village—it was lighted by floodlights from the German trucks and cars—there were some bodies scattered on the road to the wood. So some of the people had tried to escape. But the Germans had come too quickly, too efficiently.

“Jan and his men saw the villagers being herded out of their cottages, being dragged back from the trees in their fields where they had tried to hide. The lights were still burning on the cottage tables. Some people carried a small bundle in a handkerchief. Others hadn’t even time to collect that. They just carried a picture or an ornament or a Bible, just something they had caught up when they were told to leave. You could see everything clearly, because as well as the floodlights, there were
now torches being lit, and one house was already in flames. Jan said you could see the villagers kneeling in prayer outside their cottage doors; that was the way they were saying goodbye to everything they owned. Then they were made to pick up their bundles, and they were divided into groups like so many animals. The younger women and girls were forced into one truck, the older women into another. The children were pulled from their mothers and pushed into a third. They were open trucks, and you could see the people jammed so close in them that they could neither sit nor turn around. The boys and men were grouped together and shot in the back. The parish priest was shot too, standing beside the truck with children as he tried to quiet them. Then the houses were set on fire. One old man had hidden in the stables beside the manor house. The Germans set fire to the stables, too, and they shot at the window when the old man tried to climb out. He got stuck, there, wounded.”

“Felix!” Sheila said involuntarily. He had stood shaking his head under her window, that last evening at Korytów. “Sad,” he had said so calmly, “all the young people going away again.” Somehow she had always thought that Felix, no matter how the young people went and came back or didn’t come back, would always be there.

“Then the trucks drove away,” Antoni was saying. “Jan’s friend broke loose from Jan’s grip. He ran towards the road and the truck with his girl. He shot two soldiers before he was killed. The Germans stopped the trucks, a machine gun was turned on the older women for a minute. Ten Poles must die for every German killed, you know. Then the trucks rolled on again. The women’s truck must have had many killed, certainly many wounded, but it left with the others. The Germans must
have thought that Jan’s friend was by himself, perhaps one of the refugees whom they had overlooked. For they left the village. The last truck with soldiers comfortably seated was gone. The manor house was on fire too. The whole village was one mass of flame and smoke.”

Sheila hid her face with her hands. She had asked to be told. She had been told.

The doctor’s professional voice continued, “The old women will be dumped out on the frozen plains northeast of Warsaw and left to wander. The middle-aged are sent as serfs to Germany or are given the dirtiest duties about the barracks. The younger women and girls will be sent to the soldiers’ brothels. The children are being sent to Nazi camps. They will be taught to be slaves.”

She had asked to be told. She had been told.

Antoni was saying, “If I told you more than you asked to know, it is only because we all should remember.” His voice was no longer the doctor’s voice. “If we don’t know, if we won’t listen or see, then we shall not remember. We shall forgive too soon, too easily, as we did before. And in the next war, we, the people who forget, will be destroyed even as Korytów.”

In a gentler voice, he said to the still silent girl, “Go in and rest a while. You are cold. You must not get cold.”

She didn’t move.

“I’m sorry,” Antoni said miserably. “I shouldn’t have told you, after all.”

“No. You should have. I had to know. We all have to know.” She was thinking of Dittmar, now. “I should have killed him,” she said.

Antoni stared at her. She looked up suddenly and caught his
expression.

“A man who does evil because he is evil, I should have killed him.”

“Come in now. We’ll rest for a space. Come in.”

She shook her head. The beech tree was now one purple shadow. “I’m warm,” she said. “I’m all right Let me stay here.” She reached out her hand and touched his shoulder. “I thought they loved children,” she said sadly.

“Who? The Germans? Yes, they love children: German children. They glorify youth: German youth. They talk sentimentally of motherhood: German motherhood. In the last war, the worst famines were in Belgium and Poland. Our starvation was caused not only by the blockade but by the Germans who ate all our cattle and grain and left us nothing. But did you ever hear of German Relief for starving people? Unless for German peoples?”

Sheila’s halting voice said, “They suffered, too. Perhaps that is what twisted them.”

“Yes, of course.” Antoni’s voice was bitterly sarcastic. “Think how they suffered and starved. That’s why they have so many rickety cripples in their armies today! And such small armies! And all because they suffered more than anyone else in the last war. Think of their countryside with its cattle and grain all stolen by invading troops. Think of their towns ruined in the battles fought on German soil. Think of all the rebuilding they had to do, with half of their population shot, and the other half working with bloated bellies. Don’t you see how their bodies have suffered through the terrible hardships and cruelties which the Allies forced on them when they invaded the Rhineland in 1914 without warning? What wrecks, what invalids they are!
Why, the poor dear Germans have never done anything at all! Their land has been the cockpit of Europe where other more powerful nations came to fight and rape and steal. That’s why they have so few people in their country, today, compared to other countries of the same area! Don’t you see it all? Surely it must be clear to you. That’s why they have no industries, no factories, no well-equipped laboratories. That’s why they’ve no trade, why they can’t reach South American markets or the Danube. And all these German firms and salesmen you find throughout the world, even in India and other far places? Why they aren’t Germans at all! It’s only a capitalist lie, a stab in the back by Jews and Communists. They are merely—”

Marian’s voice said cheerfully, “I got thirty eggs today. Isn’t that wonderful? If the hens don’t stop laying when the cold weather comes, we’ll be able to have one egg each every two weeks. Isn’t that wonderful?” She was watching Antoni’s sad face. There is something pathetic in a face which is sad when it seems made only for laughter. Marian said quickly, “You just can’t trust a man, can you? Turn your back fifteen minutes, and he’s talking to the prettiest girl in the district. That’s what I get for not taking my mother’s advice. ‘Marian,’ she said, ‘never marry a good-looking man. He’ll roast your soul.’” She placed a hand gently on her husband’s shoulder, and Antoni looked up at her as he patted it.

He was smiling once more; a round faced little man, with kind eyes and spectacles that kept on sliding down his nose.

“I hear that our outposts have just seen the first of our men coming back from the raid. There’s been a relay of signals from the edge of the forest. Better get things ready, Antoni. I’ve set Franziska to boiling water and sterilizing the knives.”

Antoni rose. Now he was the capable doctor, moving quickly, neatly. He touched Sheila’s head as he passed her. “Keep your illusions about human nature,” he said. “Life is stark without them. It is wonderful to keep being broadminded.”

Sheila smiled sadly. “Now you make me feel still more smug,” she said. “People like me who have never suffered—I mean in the way the people of Korytów and all the other millions of Poles are suffering—can afford to be broad-minded. You and the people who have really suffered must think people like me are not only smug, but callous.”

“Only if you tell us that it is wrong to hate,” Antoni said. “That is callousness to the men who have been tortured to death, to the women who have been raped and the children who have been brutalised. That is callous and blind selfishness disguised as nobility. Let everyone think of himself as a villager in Korytów, and then if he does not hate the men who do these things, then he is truly broad-minded. If he can see his mother dragged off to destitution, his wife being forced to work German latrines, his daughter sent to German brothels, his son shot in the back or left dangling from a tree, his young children kidnapped and their minds distorted, his house burned, his lifework destroyed in a few short minutes, and can still honestly say, ‘I do not hate the men who do these things,’ then he has my respect. But I have none for those who only hear of those things, and still say so very nobly, ‘Of course,
you
should not hate.’”

“Antoni, the men will start arriving,” Marian warned. “I’ll come over and help as soon as I get our patient in bed again.”

Marian looked after him with a mixture of pride and sadness.

“He was the kindest, happiest, best-natured fellow you ever met,” she said slowly. “He still is, to those who are human
beings. Come on, here’s my arm. That’s the way. Stiff? You’ll soon be running about this place. Can you nurse?”

“I could try to learn,” Sheila said.

“Good. We need help.”

“Are you and Franziska the only women here?”

“In the camp. Yes. And that’s because we have work to do—plenty of it. When the men get leave, they go to the villages round the forest. No weapons or uniforms, then: they are just relatives from another village. When they first came here, all they did was to sit about the camp in their free hours, sit and stare at the forest. It worried me. But now they go to the villages. They’ve got girl-friends there, some even have wives now. That’s better. That’s more natural. Can’t sit about moping. That drives a man mad.”

Marian had helped remove the wide black skirt and the bright petticoat. “Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “We sent down to one of the villages for it when you arrived. You know, I wish they’d let me go on a raiding party sometime. I’ve got a list of things I need: just a few needles and some threads and an extra pair of scissors—I’m always losing mine—and some buttons and a few books and some real handkerchiefs. I always like a neat handkerchief; I hate these little scraps of cloth I’ve got to use nowadays. But you can’t ask the men to risk their lives for these small things. They’ve got to get rifles and ammunition and uniforms and food, and they’ve got to find good hiding places to cache them in. We don’t use much of the stuff we are collecting now. It’s for later, when we’ve enough trained men and our Allies start attacking from the west. Then we can help. Then we’ll show the world that Poland was not beaten in four weeks.”

“Yes,” Sheila said. “Yes.” And she smiled. To think of the word victory, even a remote and faraway victory, cheered her. She stretched her body comfortably; bed, she decided, was a good place after all.

“It’s just patience we shall need,” Marian said. “We won’t always have to live secretly in a forest.”

Franziska’s running feet almost blotted out her words. “Three back,” she gasped delightedly. “No wounds.”

Three, only three? Sheila watched the two women clasp each other in their joy. Marian’s keen eyes had noticed the expression on her face.

“The men slip back as they slipped out, in twos and threes,” she explained. “You didn’t think we marched out in a column with flags flying, did you?”

The two women laughed good-naturedly. They were so happy that they could laugh at the smallest thing.

“Takes a raiding party two days to get out, and often a week to come back in,” Marian continued. “Now, I must dash over and hear the latest news. Franziska, fetch her some milk. And then she can get up for a warm supper this evening when the cooking starts. You’ve never told us your name, you know. It’s an English one, isn’t it? You talked English in your sleep.”

“Sheila. Sheila Matthews.”

Marian and Franziska repeated it solemnly, and then giggled at their efforts.

“Such queer names foreigners have! I can’t think for the life of me how they can ever pronounce them,” Marian said, and gave Sheila a warm smile, and was gone to hear the news from the world outside.

Sheila sipped the strong-tasting yellow milk from a square-shaped
cup of bark.

“Birchbark,” Franziska explained as she moved around the room, tidying its simple belongings. “It gives a strange taste at first, but you get used to it. We can even boil water in buckets made from it. The milk came from our goats. We have three of them, kept specially for our invalids. We’ve got hens. And last week, Zygmunt brought back two young pigs. We are fattening them up for Christmas. The only trouble is keeping the fox and the badger away.”

“I’ve so much to learn,” Sheila said. “This life is all so strange.”

“Oh, you get used to that too.” Franziska had almost finished her tidying: not that there was much to straighten. Life was decidedly utilitarian in this hut. There was another straw mattress on the ground with half of an army blanket neatly folded across its rough cover. The earth floor was hard-packed, swept clean. A natural wooden table, new-looking and stoutly made, was against one log wall. An equally new bench stood along the front of the table. There was no glass in the small window, only inside shutters. Franziska was now hanging Sheila’s strange clothes on one of the large wooden pegs driven into the wall at one side of the narrow door. On the wall beyond the door was a wooden crucifix.

“It won’t be long before it is dark,” Franziska said, “and then we can go across to the Lodge to warm ourselves round the fire and have something to eat. Or don’t you feel strong enough, yet?”