Kaputt (24 page)

"
Ja, sehr amusant
,"
I replied.

"There is now perfect understanding between me and the Polish clergy. Nevertheless, I have not altered and shall not alter in the slightest the fundamental lines of my religious policy in Poland. To be respected in a country such as this, one must be consistent; I am, and I shall remain, consistent with myself. Polish aristocracy? I ignore it and have no contact with it. I never enter the houses of Polish noblemen and none of them enter mine. I have allowed them to gamble and to dance freely in their palaces. They gamble, run into debt and dance without perceiving the ruin that faces them. They open their eyes now and again, perceive that they have caused their own ruin, shed tears over the misfortunes of their country and charge me in French of being a cruel tyrant and an enemy of Poland; then they begin laughing, gambling and dancing again.

"The middle classes? The greatest part of the rich middle class escaped abroad in 1939, in the wake of the Republican government. Their property is administered by German officials. Those of the middle class who have stayed, have been mortally hit by the impossibility of practicing their liberal professions and are trying to survive by desperate means, entrenching themselves in an irreducible opposition that is composed of ludicrous chatter and ineffective plots that I weave and undo behind their backs at my leisure. All Poles are born conspirators, especially the intellectuals. Conspiring is their principal passion. Only one thing comforts them in Poland's ruin—the chance to be able at last to give vent to their dominant passion. But I have a long arm and know how to make use of it. Himmler, whose arm is short, dreams only of shootings and concentration camps. Doesn't he really grasp that the Poles fear neither death nor imprisonment? The secondary schools and the universities were hotbeds of political intrigue. I have closed them. What is the use of high schools and universities in a country that has no
Kultur."

"And now we come to labor. The peasants grow rich on the black market, and I allow them to grow rich. Why? Because the black market is bleeding the middle classes and starving industrial labor, making a coalition of peasants and workers impossible. The workmen toil in silence under the leadership of their own technicians. When the Republic crumbled to pieces the technicians did not flee; they have not left their machinery and labor; they have remained at their places. The technicians and the workmen are our enemies too, but they are enemies who deserve respect. They do not conspire; they work. Maybe their behavior is part of a general plan to fight us. Leaflets containing communist propaganda printed in Russia and smuggled into Poland are passed around in the mines, the factories and the shipyards. Those leaflets urge the Polish workmen and technicians to abstain from acts of sabotage and from lowering the average output, to work in perfect discipline, so as not to give the Gestapo any cause for reprisals against labor. Obviously, if labor succeeds in not having its back broken by Himmler and is not scattered about in graveyards and concentration camps, after the war it will be the only class capable of seizing power. Always assuming of course that Germany loses the war. And if Germany wins the war, she will be forced to lean on the only class that will be on its feet, that is to say on labor. The Polish middle class accuse me of being the source of those leaflets. That is a piece of slander. Those leaflets are not of my making, but I allow them to be circulated. Our main concern is to make the Polish industrial output meet the requirements of war. Why should we refrain from utilizing communist propaganda to achieve our objectives when that propaganda, in order to save the working classes from destruction, urges workers not to damage our war production? German and Russian interests in all of Europe are irreconcilable,- there is a single point on which they meet and agree: that is maintaining the full efficiency of the laboring classes until the day when Germany will crush Russia, or Russia will crush Germany.

"And now we come to the Jews. Inside the ghettos they enjoy the most complete freedom. I persecute no one. I allow noblemen to go to ruin gambling and to amuse themselves with dancing. I allow the middle class to conspire, the peasants to grow rich, workers and technicians to work. Very often I even close an eye."

"A person closes an eye," I put in, "when he is aiming a rifle."

"That may be. But please do not interrupt me," went on Frank after a momentary hesitation. "The real fatherland of the Polish people, its real
Rzepospolita Polska,
is the Catholic religion. That is the only fatherland left to this unhappy people. I respect and protect it. At first, there were many grounds for dissension between me and the clergy. Now matters have changed. After the latest war developments in Russia, the Polish clergy has changed its position with regard to German policy in Poland. It does not help us, but neither does it fight us. The German army has fallen before the walls of Moscow; Hitler did not succeed, or, rather, has not yet succeeded in crushing Russia. The Polish clergy fears the Russians more than it fears the Germans, the Communists more than the Nazis. They may well be right. As you see I speak very frankly to you; and I am also sincere when I tell you that I bow before the Polish Christ. You might object that I bow before Him because He is defenseless. But I would bow before the Polish Christ even if He were armed with a tommy gun, because I am prompted by German interests and by my own conscience as a German Catholic. There is only one charge that the Polish clergy can make against me—I have forbidden pilgrimages to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. But I was within my rights. It would have been extremely dangerous to the safety of the German occupation of Poland to tolerate a crowd of hundreds of thousands of fanatics gathering from time to time around that shrine. Every year almost two million faithful visited the Czestochowa shrine. I have forbidden the pilgrimages, and I have forbidden the public exhibition of the Black Madonna. For any other charge I am answerable only to my Führer and to my own conscience."

Suddenly he stopped and looked around. He had spoken with a sad, resentful eloquence without pausing for a breath. We were silent as we gazed at him. Frau Brigitte was gently weeping and smiling; Frau Wächter and Frau Fischer were moved and did not take their eyes from the sweating face of the Governor-General. I felt oppressed by the silence and discreetly coughed. Frank, who was patting his forehead with a handkerchief, turned and after staring at me for a long time, smiled and asked: "You have been to Czestochowa,
nicht wahr?"

I had been to Czestochowa a few days earlier to visit the famous shrine as the guest of the Paulite monks. Father Mendera had led me to the underground crypt where the effigy of the Black Madonna is preserved, the most venerated effigy in all of Poland. The image is encased in a silver frame of Byzantine design and is called the Black Madonna because the face was darkened by smoke and flames during a siege. The Stadthauptmann of Czestochowa, who, as a near-relative of Himmler, was especially feared, despised and obeyed by the monks, had made an exception in allowing me to see the effigy of the Black Madonna. This was the first time, since the beginning of the German occupation of Poland that the sacred icon had appeared before the eyes of the faithful, and the monks were filled with joy and amazement at the unhoped-for event.

We crossed the church and went down into the crypt followed by a group of peasants who while they were kneeling in the church, had seen us walk by. The two Nazi inspectors of the Stadthauptmann of Czestochowa, Günter Laxy and Fritz Griehschammer, and the two SS men who accompanied me stopped at the door. Günter Laxy made a sign to Father Mendera who looked at me uneasily and said in Italian, "The peasants." I replied loudly in German, "The peasants stay here." The prior of the shrine, a small, lean man with a creased and wrinkled face, came in at that moment; he wept and smiled, and now again he blew his nose into a large green handkerchief.

Gold, silver, precious marbles gleamed softly in the dimness of the chapel. The peasants, kneeling in front of the altar, fixed their eyes on the silver door that conceals and guards the ancient image of the Czestochowa Madonna. From time to time we could hear the clattering of the rifles of the SS men who stood guarding the door.

Suddenly the walls of the underground chapel were shaken by a deep rumble of drums and by the sound of silver trumpets blaring Palestrina's triumphal notes. The sliding door was raised little by little and the Black Madonna studded with pearls and precious stones that flashed in the red candlelight appeared holding the Child in her arms. Prostrated, their faces pressed to the ground, the peasants wept. I could hear their repressed sobs, their foreheads beating against the marble floor. They called the Virgin softly by name, "Mary, Mary," as if she were a member of their family—their mother, their sister, their daughter, their wife. No, not as if they had been calling their mother—they would not have said "Mary," they would have said "Mamma." The Madonna was the Mother of Jesus; she was not their mother, she was the Mother of Jesus and only of Jesus. But she was their sister, wife, daughter,- and they called her softly, "Mary, Mary," as if they feared being overheard by the two SS guards standing motionless by the door. The menacing deep rumble of the drums, the frightful blare of the long silver trumpets made the walls of the shrine shake,- it seemed as if the marble vault were about to collapse. The peasants called "Mary, Mary," as if they called to a dead person, as if they meant to rouse a sister, a wife, or a daughter from her death sleep; they cried out "Mary, Mary, Mary!" At that moment the prior and Father Mendera turned slowly around. The peasants fell suddenly silent and also turned around slowly and looked at Günter Laxy and Fritz Griehschammer, and at the two SS men armed with rifles, their brows hidden by their steel helmets, who stood motionless at the door. They looked at them and wept, silently wept. Deeper rumbled the drums in the stones, shriller blared the trumpets beneath the marble vault, as the sliding door slowly descended and the Black Madonna disappeared in a gleam of jewels and gold. The peasants turned toward me, their faces streaming with tears, and smiled.

It was the same smile that I had seen blossoming suddenly on the lips of the miners in the depths of the Wieliczka salt mines near Cracow. Within the dark caves hewn out of blocks of rock salt a throng of pale faces, worn by hunger and anxiety, had suddenly appeared to me like a throng of ghosts in the smoky light of the torches. Before me rose a little baroque church which had been hewn out of salt with pickaxes and chisels by the Wieliczka miners about the end of the seventeenth century. The statues of Jesus Christ, the Virgin and the saints had been sculptured out of salt too. And the miners, kneeling before the altar built with blocks of rock salt and crowding at the door of the church with their leather caps in their hands, looked like statues of salt too. They gazed at me and smiled through silent tears.

"In the Czestochowa shrine," went on Frank without giving me time to answer, "you heard the rumble of the drums and the blare of the silver trumpets and you believed that you heard the voice of Poland. No, Poland is dumb. The limitless, frosty silence of Poland is louder than our voices, our shouts, the shots of our rifles. It is useless to fight against the Polish people. It is like fighting a corpse. And yet one feels that it is alive, that blood throbs in its brain, that hatred is pulsating in its breast, that it is stronger than you are. It is like fighting a living corpse. Yes, a living corpse. Ha, ha, ha!
Mein lieber Schmeling,
have you ever fought a living corpse?"

"No, never," replied Schmeling in a tone of deep amazement as he stared at Frank.

"And what about you,
lieber
Malaparte?"

"I have never fought against a corpse," I answered, "but I have been present at a fight between living and dead men."

"Is that possible?" exclaimed Frank. "Where?"

Everyone gazed at me attentively.

"At Poduloea," I replied.

"At Poduloea? Where is Poduloea?"

Poduloea is in Romania on the Bessarabian frontier—a village only a score of miles beyond Jassy in Moldavia. I cannot listen to an engine whistling in full daylight without thinking of Poduloea—a dusty village in a dusty valley beneath a blue sky loaded with white clouds of dust. It is a narrow valley, shut in by light, low, treeless hills with only a few scattered acacia groves, some vineyards and lean wheat fields.

A hot wind was blowing, a wind that was as rough as a cat's tongue. The wheat had already been harvested, the stubble fields gleamed yellow in a slimy, heavy sun. Clouds of dust rose from the valley. It was the end of June 1941, a few days after the great Jassy pogrom. I was motoring to Poduloea with Sartori, the Italian Consul in Jassy whom everybody called "Marquis," and with Lino Pellegrini, "a stupid Fascist" who had come from Italy with his young wife to spend his honeymoon in Jassy and who was sending home to Mussolini's papers articles steeped with enthusiasm for Marshal Antonescu, the "Red Dog," and for all the bloody bastards who were driving the Romanian people to ruin. He was the best-looking young fellow who had ever walked under the Moldavian sun. Everywhere between the Transylvanian Alps and the mouth of the Danube women were crazy about him; they leaned out of the windows, they came to the shop doors to see him go by, and they said, sighing, "Ah,
frumoso! frumoso!—
Beautiful, beautiful!" But he was a "stupid Fascist." Moreover it goes without saying that I was somewhat jealous of him, and would have preferred it if he were not so good-looking and less of a Fascist. In my heart I looked down on him until the day I saw him face the Jassy Chief of Police and shout in his face, "Rotten murderer!" He had come to spend his honeymoon in Jassy, under the bombs dropped by the Soviet planes, and he spent his nights with his wife hidden in an adapost, the underground shelter that had been dug amid the tombs of the old abandoned graveyard. Now, the three of us were driving to Poduloea to look for the owner of the villa inhabited by the Italian Consulate. He was a Jewish lawyer, an honest man, whom the police had injured severely in the garden of the Consulate by hitting with their rifle butts. Then they had carried him away more dead than alive, probably to finish him elsewhere, so they would not leave on the grounds the evidence that they had murdered a Jew within the precincts of the Italian Consulate.