Alan Furst - The Polish Officer

Rovno had always been a border city-a Polish possession, claimed by Russia, populated by Ukrainians. Narrow streets, brick buildings darkened by factory smoke, November ice, November fog, Gestapo cars with chains on the tires.

“They will yet take Moscow,” Olenik said. “Or maybe not. The Russians have introduced a weapon they call the Katyusha rocket, also known as the Stalin Organ-multiple rockets fired simultaneously from a launcher that can be towed by a truck. The Germans don’t like it. They are afraid of it-they ran away from it up in Smolensk. And the Russians have a new tank, the T-34. German shells bounce off. If they can produce enough of them, they’ll shut the panzer divisions down. There’s that, and the fact that our weather people predict December temperatures outside Moscow of sixty-five degrees below zero. We’ll see what that does to their Wehrwille. ”

The word meant war will, a cherished German idea: who wants most to win, wins.

De Milja and Olenik sat in the parlor of a safe house in Rovno, a small apartment, old-fashioned, as though a couple had grown old there and never changed anything. It was all curtains and doilies and clocks with loud ticks-a certain musty smell, a certain silence. De Milja wondered what it would be like in the forest at sixty-five degrees below zero. Olenik apparently read his mind. “We expect you’ll finish up before then,” he said.

Olenik hadn’t changed. Narrow shoulders, tousled gray hair and mustache, pockmarked skin-triumphantly seedy in a worn gray cardigan, you’d walk past him and never see him on any street in the world. He rummaged in a briefcase, found a pipe, fussed with it until he got it lit, then searched again until he found a single sheet of yellowish newsprint. “Have a look,” he said.

The newspaper was called Miecz i Mlot-Sword and Hammer. It was published in Polish by the League of Friends of the Soviet Union and the PPR, the Polska Partia Robotnicza, the Polish Workers’ Party.

“It comes from Bialystok,” Olenik said. “From Stryj and Brody and Wilno. From Brest and Rovno. All over the eastern districts. Curious, with a hundred and sixty-five newspapers issued by underground presses in Poland, including every prewar party, socialist, and peasant and all the rest of it, we now see this. Reference to a communist underground in Poland. If it exists, we don’t know about it. If it exists, it does nothing but exist, but that may be just precisely to the point. Its existence will make it easier for them to say, later on, that the communist state of Poland was preceded by a communist underground.”

De Milja handed the newspaper back and Olenik returned it to his briefcase. “Of course,” Olenik said, “we’re not spending life and money to find out what the Russians think about us. They enslaved us for a hundred and twenty years. Attacked in 1920. Attacked again in 1939. And they’ll be coming back this way, pushing a wave of Wehrmacht gray in front of them. We have to decide what to do then.

“If they go all the way to the Oder, to the Rhine, we’re done for-they’ll occupy the country. It’s that simple. So what we may have to do is, at the right moment, throw the Germans out by ourselves and declare a free Polish state, recognition by the British and the Americans to follow. That means a rising, and a terrible price to pay in blood.

“The alternative: reveal Soviet intentions-stick a knife in Stalin before he can get to the conference table. Britain won’t give him Poland, but the Americans are blind to life beyond their oceans.” He stopped for a moment and seemed to drift, then spoke again in a softer voice. “If you’re a small country and you have a bully for a neighbor, God help you, because nobody else will. You’re alone. You’ll cry out in the night, but nobody will come.”

He stopped abruptly, had said more of what was in his heart than he’d meant to. He cleared his throat. “What matters now,” he went on, “are the particular and demonstrable intentions of the Soviet state. If their partisan units take food without paying for it-and they do. If those partisan units have political officers-and they do. If they are forcing Poles to fight in those units and burning down villages that resist, and we know they are doing that, too, then they are acting, according to their own rules, like people fighting in an enemy country among enemies.”

“It was certainly that way in Krymno,” de Milja said. “And we were asked-that’s not really the word for the way it was put-to follow them to their camp.”

“Two of our people, in the northern Polesian district, did just that. They believed they were going somewhere to sit down and work out an agreement. One is dead. The other, we’re told, is in the Lubianka. So we are both fighting the Germans, but we are not allies.”

He stopped a moment, considered what he would say next. “So,” he said. “We, I mean London and Warsaw, we are interested in the story of Sergeant Krewinski, the brother of the man captured in the attack on the repair train.”

“The man in Rovno prison?”

“Yes. What we want you to do now, Captain, is to force Rovno prison. Liberate Krewinski-and two ZWZ officers who are also being held there. All are going to be executed.”

De Milja met the major’s eyes, but his look was opaque and distant. There’d been three attempts on German prisons that de Milja knew about, all had failed. Then he understood: this was a committee at work, and if they assigned what was in effect a suicide mission, there was nothing Olenik could do about it.

“It’s right away, then?” de Milja said.

Olenik spread his hands: of course.

That completed Major Olenik’s work and he left the city by train the following evening. As a notional waterworks engineer, his papers allowed him to travel anywhere within German-occupied lands. He handed over to de Milja a group of code and contact procedures: ZWZ officers and operatives in the district were at his disposal. Explosives, weapons, whatever he needed was available.

De Milja returned to the forest, explaining to Razakavia what had to be done. The first step was to move the encampment, from huts in a clearing to an abandoned farm at the edge of a wood about ten miles from Rovno. The farm would serve as a reception base for the freed prisoners and some members of the attack commando. A doctor and nurse would set up an aid station at the farmhouse twenty-four hours before the attack.

Back in Rovno he made contact with a local ZWZ operative known as Vlach, a man in his late twenties, with tipped-up nose, carefully combed blond hair and a wise-guy curl to his lip. The ZWZ ran, in general, to more sober and stable personalities-Vlach had replaced one of those very gentlemen in late July. Had survived, had impressed Major Olenik; those were his credentials. At Vlach’s suggestion they met in a tearoom in Rovno’s central square, a very proper place, where German officials’ wives and girlfriends could drink tea with extended pinkies and nibble at mounds of pale-green petits fours. “Ha ha,” Vlach laughed. “Who would look for us here?”

Then he grew serious. “We can get you anything you like,” he said. “Cars, trucks, you say what.”

“How can you do that?”

“We all do the same thing here, everybody who you-know-what. See, the Luftwaffe and the panzer tanks, they can really do the job. Whatever the Russians had here is flat, gone. I never saw such a mess; staff cars on top of each other, railroad tracks peeled straight up into the air, airfields turned into junkyards. So now it’s conquered, so now it all has to be rebuilt.

“So, just about the time the Wehrmacht shot the last sniper and hanged the last commissar, the big German construction companies came in. Ho, ho-Ve gonna make money now, Fritz! The military authority told them what they needed-airfields, barracks, airplane hangars, oil-storage tanks-exactly what they just finished blowing up. Plus, as long as they were at it, roads, which they never had here.