Poland Lives

[CENTER]Poland Lives
[/CENTER]


When the Germans invaded us, I was living in Gr?jec, some 40 kilometers south of the capital. A chill wind was sweeping low, heavy, threatening clouds across the rolling countryside; small lakes sparkled among the dark forests and, here and there. Soldiers in our town were laughing, girls on one arm, drink in the other. Our people were having a wonderful time, but soon, it wouldn't be so wonderful for us all. Everything was calm but for the weather, as if a warning of things to come, yet no one took heed. It was a time of calm and hope for the future. The British had promised to protect us in case of German aggression, and so we had no fears. I can still remember their smiling faces even though many of them didn't survive into the next year.

They came without warning, bombing our cities ahead of their tanks and troops. The news reported of a German attack, unprovoked and sudden. They poured into our nation army after army, like ants overrunning another hill. Our troops put up a brave but hopeless fight against the German onslaught as they rampaged across the Motherland. Our lancers, the last charge of our cavalry, rode against the Germans, only to be slaughtered en masse according to rumors. It was clear there was no hope for us: the Germans had already won. And we all knew it, but many of us kept fighting.

Convoys of civilians fleeing the disaster zones were killed by the dreadful Luftwaffe, and when the dust would clear bodies were everywhere, mothers clutching their children, fathers protecting their families, and all the while, more fled, no longer caring. People would wear their heaviest coats, even the wealthy Poles fleeing the major cities. I didn't know why they did this, not until winter rolled around.

I fled, with others, to shelters in Warsaw claimed to be safe for us. As we made our way north, in a field we found a crashed enemy plane with words painted in heavenly white: Ob Figuren, Benzin, Bomben oder Brot, wir bringen Polen den Tod. We reached Warsaw, a chaotic city of civilians dashing here and there, avoiding the debris and the bombs. There was no shelter. It was another rumor. Many of us dispersed to find places to hide, and some of us hid in the sewers, while I went to find the subways, a possible safe place to hide from German bombs. People would run in, out of breath, exasperated, yelling about how the Germans had begun encircling Warsaw and entering suburbs of the city. We could hear the distant sounds, dull against the concrete walls of our tomb, of artillery and gunfire. It came closer and closer.

Midway into the month, the Soviets invaded from the east. Some of us took their families and left to find a way out; I don't think I ever saw them again. Soon, the Polish radio stations went dead, and I can only imagine what happened to them. About a week after the Soviet invasion, we found out Warsaw was conquered. A German soldier, screaming at us and pointing his weapon, found us, and we were forced out to be searched and demanded to show identification. I had my papers. I am a Polish Jew.

***

I walked down the streets of the Ghetto with my six fellow Jewish Police comrades, armed only with clubs as the Germans didn't trust us with firearms. We wore warm but worn coats that covered our bodies, and a Jewish armband to identify us. I didn't feel like a collaborator. The Germans offered, to those of us who helped them restore peace and order by policing ourselves instead of leaving it to foreigners who hated us, increased rations, bread, sometimes meat, and other necessities of a normal life. I decided I'd take the job, and help my fellow Jews in any way I could. But life never works out the way you want it to. There wasn't enough extra food to be passed around, and my good intentions of taking the job just disappeared as I finally felt some relief from the dull hunger I lived with since the war.

The cobbled streets had little puddles of water from the recent rains that settled in the cracks and holes of the broken stones. We were probably being watched from the windows at this time of night, by our own fellow Jews who would spit in front of us sometimes. I hated being despised. Going to get supplies of food would instill a sense of fear and disgust from the Jews around me, and I'd always hurry up and leave with my bread wrapped in newspaper, never failing to notice the cold stares of everyone around me. But, no one dared to speak against me, or hurt me, for fear of certain results.

One of us whispered someone was lurking around the corner up ahead, and we huddled against the walls of the buildings as we moved forward. A young man jumped out, looking guilty of something, when we spotted him and he spotted us. He yelled at us, "Polska walcz?ca!", pulling out a pistol and shooting two of us before we could force him down and kick the gun away.

"Bastard!" one of us said, before landing a blow to the young man's face, and began kicking him violently. The rest us, enraged at the deaths of the other two of us, began beating him as well. I was reluctant, but the man had murdered my comrades. My boot met his side.

We took the three bodies to the Germans in charge of the Jewish Police and reported it as murder. They didn't seem to care, and we had the bodies transferred to outside the city for burial. We knew they'd just be thrown off the trucks on the side of the road, like garbage. We were nothing to the Germans who showed more interest in their dogs than in people like us.

***

I turned in resistance fighters today. One of them approached me, talking about the invasion, and the necessity of resistance, and eventual uprising when the time was right. I couldn't help but feel sympathy for him; we were both Poles and we were both conquered people treated like slaves in our own land. He told me to meet him with other confederates of his later that day in a soup kitchen. We'd all sit down, have soup, talk. He said it was completely harmless and the Germans wouldn't know. I was so close, right then, in helping my people throw off the shackles of occupation that I was ready to listen to them.

I came to the soup kitchen, watching for a while the distraught people standing in close lines, sorrow painted on their faces, as they waited for watery soup. While some of the people standing in lines seemed like everyone else who saw people like me, "collaborators" with the German monsters, the kitchen workers didn't seem to mind. I was going to get some soup to avoid suspicion when I saw the man who had met me, calling me "friend" and telling me he had a bowl of soup for me. He was sitting with a small number of others, some of them women. I came over to his table, his friends moving for me so I could sit across from him. They didn't seem fearful, they even seemed polite. They probably thought they had an official on their side now, someone they could count on in as high a place as a Jew in a ghetto could hope to aspire to.

In hushed voices they spoke to me about their stories, about the bombings, the occupation, and the Ghetto. They told me one day we would rise up, but for now, we should stick to resistance. As I listened, my heart inside shrunk into a black tumor as they talked about poisoning water supplies in the German-controlled zones to kill their troops, torture and murder of captured collaborators and soldiers, sabotage of outside food supplies and destruction of medical supplies going to anyone outside the Ghetto. Afraid they would kill me, and knowing they were so desperate they had to trust a fellow Jew to help them, I said I would use everything I had to help them. They scheduled another meeting in four days, same time and place. I didn't show up. However, the Germans did. They massacred everyone in the soup kitchen and I was personally given extra rations for my heroic actions in preserving peace and order. How was I supposed to know it would end like that? For days I didn't eat very much, guilt raging inside of me like the invasion of my homeland, until I finally took a large bite of hard bread. I knew that resistance was doomed to fail, and if it took the deaths of more Poles to prevent the deaths of all Poles, I knew that it was the right thing to do.

***

Sometimes I would dress as a civilian and go into areas of the Ghetto I normally never went into because they were outside my zone of patrol. It was getting late, but I did have identification on me in case I was arrested, so as to avoid any undue fate. I heard people talking in a nearby room of what was a former house, now apparently a place for many Jews to sleep. I hid next to the wall of the house, listening in on the conversation coming out of the open window.

"Auschwitz is real!" said a woman who sounded perhaps in her twenties.

"There is no such thing," said a man with a deep voice.

"If it was real, if they were killing us, exterminating us all, why are we still alive? Why haven't they come to kill us, too?" said another woman.

"People have been released. I know it exists because the person who told me said a former inmate has tattooed numbers on his arm, his prisoner number," said the young woman. Though the others scoffed at this, she continued. "In Auschwitz, whenever someone tries to escape, the Germans condemn ten other prisoners to starvation. They rounded up ten men one day for the failed escape of one man, and when one man selected cried out, 'My poor wife! My poor children! What will they do?', a priest took his place. A priest, I don't even know his name, took the place of another, to die in his place. After three weeks of starvation, they injected him with phenol."

I bowed my head to the ground, slinking down the side of the wall, contemplating the story.

"I don't believe you, they haven't killed us yet."

I got up and began walking back to my area of the Ghetto, but I couldn't get that story out of my head that day.

***

We narrowly escaped as the Ghetto went into a mode of open resistance and uprising. We heard shots being fired, ran around to escape, jumping over the bodies of Germans and Jews alike, before being shot at ourselves. The Germans let us escape, because they still needed collaborators to justify everything they did and were going to do. My hand was shot, and as I ran through the streets following my comrades, blood getting on my coat and boots, it was as if the world went silent and all I could hear was my own hurried breath in the midst of smoke, gunfire, and some explosions.

We reached German lines as they guarded the entrances to the Ghetto. While they still hated us, many of them knew we hated the resistance just as much. We didn't want more deaths, even if it meant everlasting occupation.

***

They would drag women and children and men, suspected of being resistance fighters, by their hair, kicking and screaming. Taken outside the Ghetto, the Germans would beat them in plain sight, until they were close to death, and then they would shoot them in the head. Some were more lucky, the Germans simply took them to hastily-made gallows and hung them within the space of 30 minutes of capture, putting signs on them saying things like, "I am a murderer", or "I helped bring this on Warsaw." Maybe they were the lucky ones, the ones who died quicker. Some were kept for questioning, and none of us knew what eventually happened to us. Imagination died a long time ago.

For 63 days the Ghetto was in a state of armed rebellion, even as German planes bombed the city, and not just the Ghetto. Indiscriminate killings were commonplace. Tens of thousands of our people were massacred in Warsaw's Wola district. We would overhear things from the Germans, such as the Soviets having reached us, but mysteriously stopped in their tracks. We all knew if the Soviets didn't help the Warsaw uprising, it would be brutally crushed.

And such was the fate of Warsaw. By the end of the uprising, most of the entire city was in ruins. Many of the survivors, perhaps most, were taken elsewhere, to God-knows where. In the chaos, I slipped outside the city at night, taking off anything I wore that might link me to the Jewish Police, and I began heading east after I linked up with civilians guarded by members of the Polish Home Army moving towards Soviet lines. They figured it would be safer getting behind Soviet lines than staying in Nazi territory where we would face certain extermination now that the war was essentially lost for them. Their rage and anger was unchecked, and people in our convoy spoke of atrocities across Poland, the casual brutality of the Germans, and even the collaboratist Poles who aided the Germans. I didn't feel guilty, in fact, I only felt fear: fear of being caught.

We reached Soviet troops who were less than amicable. The Soviets felt we had waited too long in our national uprising. We were all questioned though, and sent to Warsaw where a temporary center for displaced civilians was being established by elements of the surviving Home Army and the Red Army. Coming back to Warsaw, I passed the house I had listened in on. I passed the bombed-out, ruined entrance to the subway I once hid in. I saw the street corner where I helped beat a fellow Jew to death. I tried to blend in with civilians, making up stories about my harrowing experiences when prompted.

But, it was a time of hope again. The Germans were on the verge of complete defeat and occupation themselves. Many of us relished that idea. The Soviets created a newspaper for the people of Warsaw, and its first edition prominently displayed its very first heading, "Polska Zyje!" (Poland lives!)

***

A survivor of the Ghetto who came back to Warsaw with the other civilians recognized me. They took me into the street, making me wear a sign displaying myself as a collaborator. They would beat me, and I often felt like the man I once beat. I was held for many months in a makeshift prison cell with other collaborators, and Russians would come in every day, question me, and beat me regardless of my answers. I told them I felt remorse, guilt, and sorrow for my actions. But I didn't. I only felt sorry for myself.

As the noose was pulled down over my head, I couldn't help but tell these people, my people, the people I had only wanted to help, in a fearful voice, "How was I supposed to know?"

---------- Post added 10-23-2009 at 05:36 AM ----------

I didn't want to clutter the original post with these notes.

I was planning on writing an actual poem, with ten-line stanzas, perhaps twenty stanzas in total, concerning a Polish collaborator, until I decided to write a short story about it instead, and place this within the Warsaw Ghetto, and told by a Jewish collaborator. While his story is fictional, most of this is entirely historical. The priest did exist, there were heroic but hopeless cavalry charges by the long-gone Polish Cavalry, and stories of soup kitchen massacres and random beatings can be verified by survivors of the German occupation of Warsaw.

In September of 1939, Germany attacked Poland without warning. They did suffer substantial losses in taking Poland, but the Poles suffered far worse. The Germans began indiscriminately murdering Poles by the hundreds of thousands. The Soviets, in agreement with a secret Nazi-Soviet protocol dividing Poland between both nations, helped to bring about the downfall of independent Poland by early October, 1939. Before the war began, Britain had made it known it would help Poland in the event of war, and once war began, Britain and France declared war on Germany, however they did virtually nothing to help stop the storm of war.

The Jews in the areas around the former capitol of Poland, for tens of kilometers, were forcibly concentrated into Warsaw. While they represented 38% of the population of the former capitol, they were crowded into a walled section of the city comprising only 4% of the city. The Nazis employed Jews to be collaboratist police, and it was often commented by the Nazis themselves that the Jewish policemen were more brutal than themselves. Ghetto residents' daily rations amounted to 10% of the daily rations of gentile Poles, and less than 5% of the daily rations allotted to a German.

By middle 1944, the Warsaw Ghetto was in a state of open uprising. The Soviets, only miles from the city, were under orders not to assist and stood by as the uprising fought to survive. This was partly due to Soviet policies when they occupied Poland, such as their massacres of Poles themselves, and persecution of Poles which lasted even after the victory over Hitler. While the Allies provided piecemeal supply drops on the Ghetto (most of the drops landed outside of Resistance-controlled zones), the Jews were actually able to hold out for 63 days straight with virtually no outside assistance. Brutally crushed, the vast majority of the survivors were sent to camps like Auschwitz to be murdered.

In 1939 the population of Poland was 35 million, with a total of around 4 million Polish Jews. In 1946, the population of Poland was less than 25 million, with a total of a few thousand Jews.