age, every class, babbling in at least seven languages, only one thing in common: they were too late. Unlucky or unwise didn’t matter, the trains had stopped. A stationmaster’s voice crackled through the public-address system and tried to convince them of that, but nobody was willing to believe it. In Poland, things happened in mysterious ways—authority itself was often struck speechless at life’s sudden turns.
For instance:
The stationmaster’s voice, “Please, ladies and gentlemen, I entreat you, there will be no more service . . . ,” was slowly drowned out by the rumble of an approaching train. People surged to the edges of the platforms, police struggled to hold them back.
Then the crowd fell silent, and stopped pushing.
A war train. It had started raining, and water glistened on the iron plates in the twilight of the high-roofed station. The voice of the engine was deep and rhythmic, like a drum, and machine-gun barrels thrust through firing ports traversed the platform. This was a Russian-style armored train, a Bolshevik weapon, a peasant killer—it meant burnt villages and weeping women and everybody in Gdansk station knew it. The train, too heavy for its engine, moved at a crawl, so the crowd could see the faces, cold and attentive, of the antiaircraft gunners in their sand-bagged nests on the roofs of the cars.
Then someone cheered. And then someone else. And then everybody. Poland had been brutally stabbed in the back, and so she bled, bled fiercely, but here was proof that she lived, and could strike back at those who tormented her.
But that was only part of the miracle. Because, only a few minutes later, another train appeared. And if the armored train was an image of war, here was a phantom from the time of peace, a little six-car train headed south for—or so the signs on the sides of the coaches said— Pilava. The Pilava train! Only thirty miles south, but at least not in besieged Warsaw. Everybody had an aunt in Pilava, you went there on a Sunday afternoon and came home with half a ham wrapped in a cloth. Vladimir Herschensohn, pressed by the crowd against a marble column, felt his heart rise with joy. Somehow, from somewhere, a manifestation of normal existence: a train arrives in a station, passengers ascend, life goes on.
But Mr. Herschensohn would not be ascending. He needed to, the Germans would make quick work of him and he knew it. But God had made him small, and as the crowd surged hungrily toward the empty train he actually found himself moving—helped along by a curse here, an elbow there—away from the track. After a moment or two of this, all he wanted to do was stay near enough to watch the train leave, to send some part of his spirit away to safety.
Watching from the cab of the locomotive, de Milja felt his stomach turn. The crowd was now a mob: if they got on this train, they would live. Babies howled, suitcases sprang open, men and women clawed and fought, policemen swung their batons. De Milja could hear the thuds, but he willed his face not to show what he felt and it didn’t. A huge, brawny peasant shoved an old woman out of his way and started to climb onto the coupling between the engine and the coal car. The fireman waited until his weight hung on his hands, then kicked him full force under the chin. His head flew up and he went tumbling backward into the crowd. “Pig,” the fireman said quietly, as though to himself.
But, in the end, the ones who pushed to the front were the ones who got on.
When the train was good and full, people packed into the cars, when it looked like a refugee train should look, de Milja raised his hand. Then something stopped him. Out in the crowd, his eye found a little peanut of a man in a long black overcoat, with a black homburg hat knocked awry. He was holding some sort of a case and an old- fashioned valise in one hand, and pressing a handkerchief to his bloody nose with the other. The policeman standing next to de Milja was red in the face and breathing hard. “Get me that man,” de Milja said, pointing.
The policeman whistled through his teeth, a couple of colleagues joined him, and the little man was quickly retrieved, virtually carried through the crowd by the elbows and hoisted up to de Milja in the locomotive cab.
“Better go,” the policeman said.
De Milja signaled to the conductor, who swung himself up onto the train. The engineer worked his levers and blew a long blast on the whistle as the heavily laden train moved slowly out of Gdansk station.
“Thank you,” said the little man. He was somewhere in his forties, de Milja thought, with the face of a Jewish imp. “I am Vladimir Herschensohn.” He extended his hand, and de Milja shook it. Herschensohn saw that de Milja was staring at his battered violin case. “I am,” he added, “the principal violinist of the Polish National Symphony Orchestra.”
De Milja inclined his head in acknowledgment.
“So,” Herschensohn said. “We are going to Pilava.” He had to raise his voice above the chuff of the locomotive, but he managed a tone of great politeness.
“South of there,” was all de Milja said.
At the 9:15 meeting with Colonel Vyborg, de Milja had brought up the issue: what to tell the passengers. “What you like, when you like, you decide,” Vyborg had said.
Vyborg’s room had been crowded—people sitting on desks, on the floor, everywhere. De Milja knew most of them, and what they had in common was a certain ruthless competence. Suddenly the days of office politics, family connections, the well-fed wink, were over. Now the issue was survival, and these officers, like de Milja, found themselves given command and assigned to emergency operations.
The agenda of the meeting was long and difficult and devoted to a single topic: the dispersion to safety of the national wealth. War cost money and Poland meant to keep fighting. And there wasn’t that much. A country like Great Britain had a national wealth of two hundred million dollars, but Poland had only been alive as an independent nation since 1918—this time around—and owned barely a tenth of that.
Stocks and bonds and letters of deposit on foreign banks were going to leave the port of Gdynia on a Danish passenger liner. British pounds, French francs, and American dollars were to be flown out at night by one of the last remaining air-force transports, while millions of Polish zlotys and German reichsmarks were being buried in secret vaults in Warsaw—they would be needed there. Senior code and cipher experts, the cream of Polish intelligence, had already left the country. And it was de Milja’s job to take out the gold reserve, carrying it by train to Romania, where another group would move it on to Paris, the time-honored host to Polish governments-in-exile.
From Gdansk station they traveled slowly through the central districts of the city, where crews were filling bomb craters and repairing rail by the light of fires in oil drums. They crossed the railroad bridge back into Praga, then turned south on the eastern bank of the Vistula. Soon the city was behind them, and the track left the river and curved gently southeast, toward the city of Lublin.
The conductor who’d gotten on the train at the Dimek Street bridge was a man of old-fashioned manners and grave demeanor, with a droopy mustache, a conductor’s hat one size too large, and a limp from wounds received when his train was dive-bombed in the first hours of the war. When he’d reported to de Milja at the bridge, he had stood at attention and produced from his belt a 9 mm Parabellum pistol—a 1914 cannon—and informed de Milja that he’d fought the Bolsheviks in 1921, and was prepared to send a significant number of Germans straight to hell if he got the opportunity.
As the train chugged through the Polish countryside, the conductor went from car to car and made a little speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. Soon we will be stopping at Pilava; those who wish to get off the train are invited to do so. However, this train will not be returning to Warsaw, it is going all the way to Lvov, with brief stops at Lublin and Tomaszow. The military situation in the south is unclear, but the railroad will take you as far as you wish to travel. Passage is without charge. Thank you.”
From the last car, de Milja watched the crowd carefully. But the reaction was subdued: a number of family conferences conducted in urgent whispers, an avalanche of questions that God himself, let alone a train conductor, couldn’t have answered, and more than a little head shaking and grim smiling at the bizarre twists and turns that life now seemed to take. The Polish people, de Milja realized, had already absorbed the first shock of war and dislocation; now it was a question of survival; ingenuity, improvisation, and the will to live through catastrophe and see the other side of it. So when the train stopped at Pilava, only a few people got off.
For a time, the countryside itself proved them right. South of Pilava there was no war, only a rainy September morning, a strip of pale sky on the horizon, harvested fields, birch groves, and tiny streams. The air smelled of damp earth and the coming October. The leaves a little dry now, and rustling in the wind.
De Milja’s mother was the Countess Ostrowa, and her brothers, known always as “the Ostrow uncles,” had
