Night Soldiers

reporter was entertained on the night of January 15 by a group of Zhukov’s aides. There was great good fellowship and many toasts were drunk. As a cold sun rose on the morning of the sixteenth, the correspondent walked down to the Vistula and stared out at the haze of gray smoke hanging over the burnt-out city. When he returned to the old manor house that served as Zhukov’s headquarters, the little slip of brown paper had been removed from the bottom of his sleeping bag. He was glad to see it go. The tiny Cyrillic printing had been beyond his ability to read, but he’d taken special care of the thing while it was in his possession. These little “favors” he did for his Belgian friend made him nervous, but in return he was sometimes permitted to send solid background material off to Canada in the Belgian diplomatic pouch, thus evading the heavy-handed Russian censorship. The newspaper was delighted with these transmissions, spread the material about to protect their source, and had advanced him three pay grades since August. He was glad of that, for he was very much a man who wanted to do well at his work. Josef Voluta had returned to Occupied Poland in the summer of 1944, along with two other members of NOV, the Polish Nationalist group made up of loosely affiliated army officers and Roman Catholic priests. They had been ordered to Warsaw to be on hand when their country returned to life but, instead, had witnessed its death.

By the end of July, the Poles could virtually taste freedom. July or August, that was the prevailing view. Pessimists spoke in favor of October. The German troops were giving ground, retreating from occupied territory throughout Eastern Europe, leaving behind terrified colonies of German “settlers” put in place by Hitler to bring civilization to the “barbarian” lands he had conquered.

By July 31, even the pessimists were heard whistling on the streets. The First Byelorussian Front under Rokossovsky was ten miles from Warsaw, but Hitler could not seem to bear the thought of losing his beloved Poland-his first conquest by force of arms, his first amour. NOV intelligence nets photographed the arrival of the SS Viking and Totenkopf divisions, the Hermann Goring Division, and the 19 th Panzer Brigade. They were the best-the worst-that Hitler could bring to bear.

But this did not deter the Polish Home Army, under General Komorovski (known then by his nom de guerre, General Bor), from rising against the Germans. The Poles had known the Russians for centuries and were indifferent to the distinctions between czars and Bolsheviks. Thus, when Rokossovsky took the city, the Poles had planned to greet their Russian allies as saviors and liberators, but not conquerors. And not occupation forces.

It went quite well in the first weeks. Panzer tanks, induced to enter the narrow alleyways of the old city, discovered themselves unable to maneuver and were then set alight by gasoline and soap bombs with potassium permanganate wicks. When the crews ran from the burning armor, Polish snipers knocked them down. Moscow radio celebrated the uprising, calling out in a September 5 broadcast for all patriotic Poles to “join battle with the Germans, this time for decisive action!” Throughout the city of Warsaw, partisan units attacked German positions, often at night: lively, sudden, short-range ambushes by running shadows who melted away into the darkness as German reinforcements arrived.

By the middle of September, however, the Poles were running out of supplies: food, ammunition, weapons, and especially anesthetics for the wounded. The Russians, still ten miles away across the Vistula, gave permission for British and American supply drops, using Russian airfields for refueling. Thus for four days, beginning on September 14, supplies reached the Polish fighters. But, on September 18, Russian permission was withdrawn. In the next three days, SS units inflicted terrible casualties on virtually disarmed partizan groups. Then, on September 21, a massive resupply effort was initiated-more than two thousand missions flown in a seven-day period. But, on September 30, with Polish units fully engaged, the Russians withdrew permission for a second time, and at that point the supply effort ended permanently.

By then, 250,000 Poles had died in the fighting. The Polish Home Army ceased to exist as a unified fighting force and, on October 19, Hitler determined to destroy that which he could not possess: under his specific orders, German engineers methodically blew the city to pieces. The Lublin Committee-the Soviet-sponsored government- in-exile-condemned the uprising, calling it “futile.” On the first day of 1945, the Lublin Committee declared itself the legitimate government of Poland. On January 17, the Russians finally crossed the Vistula and the First White Russian Front under Zhukov marched triumphant into the city.

Voluta had stayed on in Warsaw long after it became clear that the city was doomed. There was always one more thing that had to be done-wounded to be cared for, German positions observed, gasoline bombs to be manufactured, last rites offered. The partizans lived like rats in a city of ghosts, a city that burned for three months and immolated its own dead. Voluta picked wheat grains from the mud to keep from starving, loaded machine-gun belts, performed an operation on a wounded man with a tailor’s needle and thread, using wood alcohol as an anesthetic because there simply wasn’t anything else.

On January 3, Voluta had been able to reestablish contact with his base in Vatican City, sending a coded radio message to the NOV communications center. A commercial frequency was used, with a letter code based on Chapter Twelve of the Book of Daniel. The German radio reparage had almost caught up with him, because he was exhausted and slow on the keys of the transmitter and the sending had taken him much too long. But the driver of the German radio truck had become disoriented in the dense pall of smoke that lay over the city and a few teenagers had come up out of a sewer and turned the truck over, lighting off the gasoline with a strip of shirttail run into the tank.

Voluta’s contact was answered on January 9. A fifty-second transmission in Book of Daniel code, ordering him to wait for “an urgent letter” that was moving toward him via the NOV courier system and telling him where and when he could receive it. The latter half of the transmission ordered him to forward this message to “KS” and informed Voluta of his whereabouts.

Thus, on the morning of January 17, he made his way to a shattered tenement on the edge of what had once been the Jewish ghetto, where a group of youngsters was busily breaking down-emptying sandbags, tearing apart a wall built of paving stones-a machine-gun emplacement that had somehow survived the destruction of the city. A girl of thirteen greeted him and handed over a small slip of brown paper. They stood together at the edge of an enormous hole that had been blown in the street by a German 88 round. Voluta could see down into a sewer, where black water flowed sluggishly past, sometimes carrying a body in its current. From the distance, the sound of a Russian marching band could be heard, brassy and discordant. Voluta read the slip of paper quickly, then put it in his pocket.

“Thank you,” he said to the girl. Then nodded toward the blare of the music and added, “You must be careful now, you know.”

She smiled at him, face gray with soot and ash, hands wound with rags against barrel burns from the machine gun, feet lost in a preposterously large pair of Wehrmacht tanker’s boots. “I shall be, Father,” she said to him, “you may be sure of that.”

“You had no trouble across the river?”

“No, Father, no trouble. They were all snoring like krokodil, and, anyhow, I have learned to be invisible.”

He nodded, said good-bye, then touched her face for a moment. His heart swelled with things to be said but he could say none of them.

At nightfall, he left the city, dressed as a laborer. The following morning, dressed as a priest, he crossed through rearguard elements of the retreating German divisions, giving his blessing to those soldiers who requested it. After that, he headed south and a little west, meaning to deliver the slip of brown paper to the “KS” named by the NOV officers in Rome. The message could have been moved unobtrusively into diplomatic channels-far more efficient than a priest walking by daylight through the battered and frozen countryside-but the NOV officers knew the ways of bureaucrats, knew the fate of paper that sat on desks.

So he walked, sometimes riding a little way with a farmer who still had a horse and cart, day after day, often through snow, moving always southwest, along one of the many escape routes-some so old and well used that they were marked by fugitive’s huts-that led out of Poland.

They had come to Khristo Stoianev in December of 1944 and asked him to undertake the FELDSPAR mission. They had not threatened him-they were the OSS, not the NKVD-but neither had they relieved him of any obligation he might place upon himself. They were all very well dressed, these people, and they spent money like water, taking him to lunch or dinner over a three-week period and sliding Swiss franc notes from leather wallets and dropping them atop the check on its little plate and not waiting for change. “We don’t want you to feel we’re putting pressure on you,” one of them said in the grand dining room of the Hotel Schwarzwald in Bern, putting extraordinary pressure on him at precisely that moment. “It would,” the man said ruefully, knocking cold ash from the bowl of his pipe by smacking it against his palm, “be very dangerous work.”