Alan Furst - Night Soldiers

Next, he made a round of the mission offices, making sure the ashtrays were clean and emptying the pencil sharpener shavings into a piece of newspaper. The tiny office at the end of the hall was used by a junior diplomat-a devout Catholic, the grandson of Polish immigrants to Belgium-and after Pavel emptied his pencil shavings on the paper he left him a little something in return: a slip of brown paper, folded once, inserted in the barrel of the pencil sharpener before the canister was wiggled back into place and left upside down, a signal that the mailman had visited.

On January 10, a Canadian war correspondent was driven west from Moscow to the suburbs of Warsaw, to be on hand when Marshal Zhukov’s First White Russian Front, accompanied by units of the Lublin Polish Army, marched in to take official control of the city. Zhukov’s divisions had been waiting across the Vistula since August of 1944, while the Polish Home Army under General Bor fought it out in the streets and sewers of Warsaw with Hitler’s Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division. Some quarter of a million Polish partizans had died in the fighting-only occasionally supplied by the Russians. Thus there would be no resistance from the Poles when the Lublin Army, representing the Polish Communist party, took over the administration of the country. The Canadian 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.