Douglas Jacobson - The Katyn Order

And now, as if he’d risen from the dead, Adam was here.

The tram slowed to a stop in the Podgorze District, where the Jewish ghetto had been. Natalia stood up, made her way to the door and stepped from the tram. She could feel him following her. The streets were busy with people on their way home from work or the market, clutching bags half-full with the few meager groceries they could find. She walked with a steady pace, blending in with the crowd but making sure he could keep her in sight.

She continued around a few corners, along the route she’d planned, until she came to Lwowska Street, lined on one side by the high brick walls of the former ghetto. Replacing the German propaganda placards that had been ripped down, the invented word, grunVald, with a large capital “V,” had been painted along the wall. It was a popular form of anti-German graffiti in remembrance of the Medieval Battle of Grunwald when the Kingdom of Poland defeated the Teutonic Knights. Natalia followed the ghetto wall for a hundred meters, then crossed the street at the intersection with Dabrowskiego, passing through a doorway and down a flight of creaking wooden steps. Scarcely able to breathe, she stood in the center of the dimly lit cellar and waited.

A few minutes passed before Natalia heard him descending the staircase. She fidgeted, suddenly feeling very conspicuous. When he stepped into the room, tears flooded her eyes. She had fantasized about this moment ever since Warsaw, wishing in her heart that it were possible, but knowing in her mind that it wasn’t. But it had happened. He was alive. The impossible dream had come true. And now, as he stood in front of her, no words would come.

“I watched you,” Adam said, “in Warsaw… that night on Dluga Street, from a window in Raczynski Palace.”

Natalia felt a chill and wrapped her arms around her chest. “I thought I’d never see you…” Her voice trailed off and she turned away, a sudden rush of anger, shame and frustration, washing over her all at once. She had believed he was dead. You gave up hope. You don’t deserve this. The shame was almost more than she could bear.

“Natalia?” His voice was quiet, soft.

She closed her eyes and rocked slowly back and forth. Tears trickled down her cheek.

After a moment he asked, “Have you found Ludwik Banach?”

Natalia spun around and glared at him, scarcely able to believe what she’d just heard. “Have I what? You come back… you just show up after all this time… and then you ask me…” She dropped to her knees and buried her face in her hands.

Adam knelt down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I thought it was a safe place to begin.”

She looked up at him. “I thought you were dead.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. I can explain.” He stood and offered his hand to help her up.

Natalia ignored his hand and stood up on her own, shaking her head. “Not now, not here.” She took a breath to calm herself. “I haven’t found your uncle. He was alive, and here in Krakow as recently as January of this year. But I don’t know where he went.”

“Was he captured by the Russians?”

“He left before they got here.” She watched Adam run a hand over the scar on his face, his brow furled, as he absorbed the news. “He kept a journal,” she added.

“A journal? You have it?”

“Yes, it’s all there: how he came to Krakow and started my smuggling channel, Hans Frank, all of it.” She cocked her head. “You told SOE about me. You’re the one who asked them to contact me so I could find your uncle.”

Adam nodded. “Colonel Whitehall, the head of SOE, brought me back to London. Then he sent me to Berlin with a War Crimes Investigation Team. Whitehall told me that Banach was ‘the Provider’ and I eventually realized that you were part of the channel. It’s a long story. Perhaps, sometime…”

“Perhaps.”

“I need to see that journal,” he said.

“I’ve hidden it. We’ll have to be careful.”

“Yes, of course. But he must have written something—left some clue about where he would go.”

“No, there wasn’t anything like that. But there was something else.” Natalia glanced up at the ceiling as a truck rumbled past on the street outside. She waited until the sound disappeared, then took a few steps deeper into the cellar, away from the stairs.

Adam followed her.

“The last entry your uncle made in the journal was this past January,” Natalia whispered. “He mentioned a document he had discovered in the Copernicus Memorial Library, where he was working.” She moved closer. “It was a copy of an order, signed by Joseph Stalin in 1940, authorizing the murders in the Katyn Forest.”

Adam stiffened. “Good God! You have it?”

“No, I don’t. Banach mentioned the order in his journal… but I don’t know where it is.”

Adam rubbed the left side of his face again, and paced around the cellar. He stopped and turned back to her. “In your message you said, we are not pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard. Where did you learn that phrase?”

“Those were the last words your uncle wrote in the journal: to whoever reads this journal: find Adam Nowak and tell him that we shall never be pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard of the NKVD.” There were voices in the street, and Natalia held up her hand, listening. It sounded like children, young boys. There was a tinny clanking sound as if a can were being hit with a stick, then footsteps running away, laughter, a few shouts. Then it was quiet again. “We should leave now.”

Adam stopped her with a gentle touch on her shoulder. “That phrase —pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard —it’s from an unpublished paper my uncle wrote in 1935. Hans Frank copied it and used it in a paper of his own a year later. I discovered it when I was in London.”

Natalia shrugged. “I don’t understand.”

“My uncle and Hans Frank knew each other.”

Natalia nodded. “I know; he wrote about that in the journal. But I still don’t understand. Why would that be the message he wanted to send to you?”

Adam looked up at the ceiling, as though he was trying to recall something. “I don’t understand either,” he said, “but there’s something else you need to know. When I discovered that my uncle had been released from Sachsenhausen, it caught the attention of the NKVD.”

Natalia suddenly felt cold again, icy fingers on the back of her neck.

Adam continued. “An officer by the name of Tarnov has issued an arrest warrant for him.”

“Is he here? This Tarnov, is he here in Krakow?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Natalia started for the stairs. “We have to leave. I’ll go first—”

Adam reached out and took her hand. “That copy of Stalin’s order. We have to find it. We don’t have much time.”

“What do you mean, ‘much time’?”

“In a few weeks there’s going to be a conference in Germany,” Adam said. His face flushed and he talked quickly. “It’ll be in a place near Berlin called Potsdam. They’re going to decide what happens to Poland.”

“Hah! We both know what’s going to happen to Poland. The Russians will gobble us up, and the world won’t give a damn.”

“Not if we can find that copy of the order. If we can pass it along to the right people, it could make—”

“Stop it!” Natalia snapped, suddenly overwhelmed again. “Goddamn it, Adam, I thought you were dead! Can you understand that? Do you have any idea how I felt that last night in Warsaw when you decided to kill yourself rather than escape?” She caught herself before he could respond and backed away, waving her hands. “No, don’t say anything. I’m sorry, just give me a moment.”