Douglas Jacobson - The Katyn Order

She spent an hour going over it again, rereading carefully the last installments of Ludwik Banach’s implausible journey that had ended with his disappearance just before the Russians arrived in January. When she finished, Natalia stared at the book, trying to decide what to do, then slipped it in the inside pocket of her vest. She put on her hat, opened the door slowly and peeked down the dim hallway.

Nothing.

She hurried down the steps, then made her way through the eerily quiet, litter-strewn streets, past vacant buildings marred with graffiti and broken windows, until she arrived at Szeroka Street, once the central market area of the Jewish community, now largely deserted. She slipped into a grimy café and took a seat in a booth at the rear.

The foul-smelling proprietor brought over a cup of lukewarm coffee and asked if she wanted anything else. Over at the bar a shriveled ghost of a man sat on a stool, slurping something out of a bowl. She shook her head, and the proprietor shuffled away. Natalia took a sip of the bitter concoction, grimaced and slumped back in the cracked leather seat, overwhelmed by the story of Ludwik Banach.

Ludwik Banach… Adam Nowak’s uncle… was the Provider.

It was almost impossible to believe, but it had to be true. Banach said it himself in the journal, in an entry he wrote in 1940:

I waited for this day for nine months, thinking every hour in the hellhole of Sachsenhausen about my Beata, and my nephew, Adam.

Adam had mentioned his uncle’s name—Ludwik Banach—that last night they spent together in the ammunition cellar. Natalia had forgotten about it in all the chaos of the Rising, and it hadn’t registered again until she read that entry in Banach’s journal.

It was just as Adam had said. Banach was arrested in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen. But then, after being released into the custody of Hans Frank, Banach was back in Krakow and working at the new Copernicus Memorial Library, Frank’s pet project and the reason Frank arranged for Banach’s release from Sachsenhausen. But Banach had used that opportunity to re-start the channel, the channel she’d been part of. Natalia recalled the words Banach wrote in the journal in 1942:

I realized what had to be done with documents I’d smuggled out of the library. The channel has been resumed. Many are taking risks to preserve what little is left of our humanity. May God grant that our efforts are not in vain.

Natalia rubbed her forehead, still scarcely able to comprehend it. Ludwik Banach was the Provider. He smuggled documents out of the library—documents describing the unspeakable atrocities taking place within Poland’s death camps—and resumed his Resistance work. Banach wrote that entry in the journal in 1942, about the same time she’d been contacted by the priest and given a new assignment. She’d been working as a conductor on the railway since being sent to Krakow by the AK. The priest was her contact, and by 1942 she had a well-established routine, working the daily round-trip from Krakow to Warsaw. With only a slight change in her routine to include “confession” at the Church of Archangel Michael and Saint Stanislaus on Wednesdays, and a modification to her black conductor’s bag, she had become part of the channel.

Natalia glanced around the sleazy café that stank of cooking grease and body odor. The bartender was reading a newspaper, and the ghostly man was asleep with his head on the bar. She was hungry but couldn’t bear the thought of what might have been in the bowl. She took another sip of the bitter coffee, then propped her elbows on the table and tried to sort things out.

Was it just pure chance that she and Adam had met in Warsaw, in the midst of the Rising, neither one knowing of their mutual connection through Ludwik Banach? As improbable and remarkable a coincidence as it seemed, there was no other explanation.

Natalia thought about their conversation that last night in Warsaw when she and Adam had huddled in the ammunition cellar. Adam had told her about his uncle, Ludwik Banach, who was arrested in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen, then his aunt’s arrest the next day. “I’m sure they’re both dead by now,” he’d said. So, on that night, just ten months ago, he hadn’t known that his uncle had been released from Sachsenhausen four years earlier.

But someone knew. The British, someone at SOE, must have learned just recently about Banach’s release from Sachsenhausen. And they knew he’d been sent back to Krakow in the custody of Hans Frank. Why else would they send her a message instructing her to locate the Provider?

Natalia left the café and walked quickly through the mostly deserted streets of the eastern Kazimierz District, avoiding eye contact with the occasional cripples and beggars and hunched figures lurking in the shadows—the desperate, starving people who could slit her throat for a single zloty.

She made her way back toward the busy Stare Miasto District, where she could disappear into the flow of pedestrian traffic on a work-day morning. Her stomach ached from hunger, and she eventually spotted a small bakery with a half-dozen poppy seed rolls in the otherwise empty display case. She purchased one, found a bench on the Rynek Glowny and sat down, thinking carefully about what to do next.

Why was the message sent to her? If SOE needed to contact the Provider why wouldn’t they have sent the message to the priest? Natalia took a bite of the poppy seed roll, then another, and it was all gone. She was still hungry. She considered walking back to the bakery to buy another when the answer suddenly struck her.

SOE didn’t send the message to the priest because they don’t know about him. They sent it to her because she was their only contact. She was the only one they knew of with knowledge about the Provider.

Natalia’s stomach growled, but she ignored it, trying to sort out the mystery. There were only three people besides the priest who knew that the documents she smuggled out of Krakow originated with someone called the Provider: Falcon, Colonel Stag and Adam. She felt a lump in her throat when she thought about Adam and what they might have had together, in some other place, at some other time.

But Adam had died that night at Raczynski Palace.

That left Colonel Stag or Falcon. The hair on the back of her neck bristled, remembering her last encounter with the drunken, abusive Falcon. But he wasn’t high enough in the AK chain of command to have contact with SOE.

Was it Stag? She remembered what the colonel had said the day she arrived in Warsaw with the smuggled documents: “You’ve done excellent work. And so has the Provider, whoever he or she is.” Stag’s uncertainty about the Provider’s gender indicated he also hadn’t known Banach’s identity.

Natalia stood up and walked around the square to clear her mind. In the end it was insignificant how the British had learned Banach’s secret identity. What really mattered was what they didn’t know. They know Banach is the Provider, but they don’t know about the journal.

And they didn’t know about Banach’s stunning discovery in January of 1945, one of the last entries in the journal. As Natalia recalled the revelation she had read in that entry, icy fingers raced up her spine. What if I’m the only other person who knows this? Banach is gone. Is it all up to me?

Natalia reached into her vest pocket and touched the journal.

She felt very alone.

AT HIS OFFICE IN BERLIN, General Andrei Kovalenko hung up the telephone and banged his fist on the massive oak desk. “Výdi von!” he shouted at the orderly who had just entered the office carrying a tray of coffee and biscuits. As the orderly scurried away, the general glared at Captain Andreyev, who sat across from him. “What the hell is that son of a bitch, Tarnov, trying to pull?” he demanded.