The Polish Officer

they would have had to rip out the walls, and that day they didn’t bother. That’s not always the case— they’ve turned Jewish apartments into sawdust—but all they did was break up some furniture, and so here you are.”

Olenik smiled suddenly. “We must look at the bright side. At least the Kulturtrager”—it meant culture-bringer, a cherished German notion about themselves —“brought us ‘subhumans’ some new and adventurous ideas in architecture.”

3 April 1940. The “subhumans” turned out to be adept pupils, gathered attentively at the feet of the Kulturtrager. The Germans had, for example, a great passion for important paper. It was, all prettily stamped and signed and franked and checked, order and discipline made manifest. Such impressive German habits, the Poles thought, were worthy of imitation.

So they imitated them, scrupulously and to the letter. As de Milja was moved north through occupied Poland, he was provided with a splendid collection of official paper. Passierscheine, Durchlasscheine, Urlaubsscheine, and Dienstausweise—general passes, transit permits, furlough passes, and work permits. The Poles had them all— stolen, imitated, doubled-up (if you had one legitimate citizen, why not two?—it’s not unsanitary to share an identity), forged, secretly printed, altered, reused, and, every now and then, properly obtained. To the Germans, documentation was a fence; to the Poles, it was a ladder.

And they discovered a curious fact about the German security police: they had a slight aversion to combat soldiers. It wasn’t serious, or even particularly conscious, it was just that they felt powerful when elbowing Polish civilians out of their way in a passenger train. Among German soldiers, however, whose enemies tended to be armed, they experienced some contraction of self-esteem, so avoided, in a general way, those situations.

The lowly untermenschen caught on to that little quirk in their masters right away: the new ZWZ intelligence officer for France reached the port of Gdynia by using Sonderzuge— special night trains taking Wehrmacht soldiers home to leave in Germany. These “specials” were also used by railway workers, who rode them to and from trains making up in stations and railyards all over Poland. De Milja was one of them—according to his papers and permits a brakeman—headed to an assignment in Gdansk. Taken under the care of escape-route operators, he moved slowly north over a period of three nights.

Three April nights. Suddenly warm, then showery, crickets loud in the fields, apple trees in clouds of white blossom. It meant to de Milja that he would not see this country again—it was that strange habit of a thing to show you its loveliest face just before you lost it.

The trains clanked along slowly under the stars in the countryside. Across the river on the rebuilt bridge at Novy Dvor, back to the other side at Wyszogrod, then tracking the curves and bends of the Vistula as it headed for the sea. The railwaymen gathered in a few seats in the rear of the last car on the Sonderzuge trains, and the tired Wehrmacht soldiers left them alone. They were just working people, doing their jobs, not interested in politics. A heel of bread or a boiled potato wrapped in a piece of newspaper, a cigarette, a little quiet conversation with fellow workers—that was the disguise of the Polish train crews.

Captain de Milja rarely spoke, simply faded into the background. The escape-route operators were young— the boy who brought him to the town of Torun was sixteen. But the Germans had helped him to grow up quickly, and had sharpened his conspirative instincts to a fine edge. He’d never been an angel, but he should have been lying to some schoolteacher about homework, or bullshitting his girlfriend’s father about going to a dance. Instead, he was saying “Nice evening, Sergeant,” to the shkopy police Kontroll at the Wloclawek railroad station.

“New man?” the sergeant said.

“Unh-huh,” said the teenager.

Polite, but pointless to seek anything further. The sergeant had had a teaspoon of human warmth in this godforsaken country, he’d have to make do with that. Stamped de Milja’s papers, met his eyes for an instant, end of discussion.

In the daytime, he was hidden in apartments, and he’d grab a few hours sleep on a couch while young people talked quietly around him. The escape-route safe house in Torun was run by a girl no more than seventeen, snub- nosed, with cornsilk hair. De Milja felt tenderness and desire all mixed up together. Tough as a stick, this one. Made sure he had a place to sleep, a threadbare blanket, and a glass of beer. Christ, his heart ached for her, for them all because they wouldn’t live the year.

Germans too thought in numbers, and their counterespionage array was massive: Abwehr, KRIPO—criminal police, SIPO—security police, including the Gestapo—the SD intelligence units, Ukrainian gestapo, railway police, special detachments for roads, bridges, forests, river traffic, and factories. In Poland, it rained crossed leather belts and side arms. People got caught.

“There is soup for you,” Snub-nose said when he woke up.

“Thank you,” de Milja said.

“Are those glasses false?”

“Yes.” Because they had his photograph, he had grown a little mustache and wore clear glasses.

“You must not wear them in Torun. The Germans here know the trick—they stop people on the street and if their lenses are clear they arrest them.”

People came in and out all day; whispered, argued, left messages, envelopes, intelligence collection. Young as she was, Snub-nose had the local authority and nobody challenged her. That night, another railwayman arrived, this one eighteen, and de Milja’s journey continued.

Late in the evening, they left the train at Grudziaz. De Milja, wearing a railroadman’s blue shirt and trousers, metal lunchbox in hand, walked through the rain down a street in front of the station. A whore in a doorway blew him a kiss, a half-peeled German poster on a wall showed a Polish soldier in tattered uniform, Warsaw in flames in the background. The soldier shook his fist in anger at a picture of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister. “England, this is your work!” said the caption. Along with their propaganda, the Germans had put up endless proclamations, “strictly forbidden” and “pain of death” in every sentence.

They were stopped briefly by the police, but nothing serious. They played their part, eternally patient Poles. The Germans knew that Russia had owned the country for a hundred and twenty-three years, until 1918. They certainly meant to do better than that. The policeman said in slow German, “Let’s see your papers, boys.” Hell, who cared what the politicians did. Weren’t they all just working folks, looking for a little peace in this life?

After midnight, the leave train slowly wound through the flat fields toward the coast, toward Gdynia and Gdansk. It kept on raining, the soldiers slept and smoked and stared out the windows of the darkened railcar.

The escape-route way station in Gdynia was an office over a bar down by the docks, run by the woman who owned the bar. Tough exterior—black, curly hair like wire, blood-red lipstick—but a heart like steel. “Something’s wrong here,” she grumbled. “Shkopy’s gota flea up his ass.”

In a room lit blue by a sign outside the window that said bar, the couriers ran in and out. Most carried information on German naval activity in the port.

“Look out the window,” said the woman. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Right. Eight German ships due in this week—two destroyers and the rest merchantmen. Where are they?”

“Where do you think?”

“Something’s up. Troops or war supplies—ammunition and so forth. That’s what they’re moving. Maybe to Norway, or Denmark. It means invasion, my friend.”

“I have to get to Stockholm,” de Milja said.

“Oh, you’ll be all right,” she said. An ironic little smile meant that he wouldn’t be, not in the long run, and neither would she. “The Swedes are neutral. And it’s no technicality—they’re making money hand over fist selling iron ore to the Germans, so they’ll keep Hitler sweet. And he’s not going to annoy them—no panzer tanks without Swedish iron.”

They were getting very rich indeed—de Milja had seen a report. Meanwhile they were righteous as parsons; issued ringing indictments at every opportunity and sat in judgment on the world. Pious hypocrites, he thought, yet they managed to get away with it.

“When do I go out?” de Milja asked.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “On the Enkoping.”

Two men in working clothes arrived before dawn. They handed de Milja an old greasy shirt, overalls, and cap. De Milja shivered when he put them on. One of the men took coal dust from a paper bag, mixed it with water, and