When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (14 page)
1940
I
N
J
UNE
1940,”
WRITES
my father, “I became an adult. It was a somewhat traumatic change from a schoolboy, especially because it was quite unexpected.”
With his experience in amateur cinematography, he finds a job as a rewind boy at a cinema in Bulford, on Salisbury Plain, called the Garrison Theater. The pay is thirty shillings per week, which is not enough to live on (three pounds was considered a living wage). However, with air raids expected at any moment, the cinema also employs its staff as fire watchers, and so he volunteers, for which he is paid an extra eighteen shillings per week, plus one Coke per shift.
He finds a room with a retired sergeant major and sells his prize camera to help pay the rent. The cinema manager is Mr. Piper, and his daughter, Cecilia, plies the aisles with a tray hanging from her neck, full of sweets and Cokes for sale. The chief projectionist is Norman Taylor, who says “fucking” every four words. The projectors have arc lamps, whose carbons Kazio has to adjust as they burn out every minute or so. He also does all the rewinding. There is a second cinema in Bulford called the Beacon, which shows the same films an hour after the Garrison, so he has to shuttle the films back and forth between them.
The situation is quite comical, he says. He has not been allowed to live at St. Leonard’s because he is considered a security risk — as a foreigner, he might cooperate with German invaders. But there seems to be no objection to his living on the edge of the Salisbury Plain, which is full of military establishments. One of them is Boscombe Down, a huge Royal Air Force (RAF) airfield, where you can easily see experimental aircraft being tested.
Kazio saves up his pay and eventually acquires a brown double-breasted suit and a blue belted overcoat, which he wears with the collar up at the back just like the film stars. Later, with another lad, the grocer’s son, he buys an old Ariel 600cc motorbike for six pounds, putting a beer-bottle label in the license-plate holder. He joins the Church of England and is prepared for confirmation by an army padre, who seems to spend most of his time drinking in the officers’ mess, and confirmed by the bishop of Salisbury. “There is no shame in being a Jew,” the bishop says. “Jesus Christ was a Jew.”
Jewish or not, at heart he is still very much a Polish patriot, so when General Sikorski forms a Polish government-in-exile in London in June 1940, Kazio writes volunteering to join their army and does so as soon as he can, even though he is not quite seventeen.
From time to time I try to interrupt my father’s chronicles of Kazio. “But what did it feel like, Dad,” I ask, “to be stranded like that; to be cut off from your family in a strange place?” But he can tell me little of his emotional state.
T
HE
P
OLISH FORCES
in Britain that started forming in 1940 are a very mixed bunch, my father remembers. There are fewer than twenty thousand men, most of them members of the defeated army who have somehow managed to get out of Poland. Many, if not most of them, are officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs). Others are Poles who were living outside Poland when the Germans invaded. In Kazio’s unit, there are miners from the coal pits of northern France, a Jewish tailor from the East End of London who can hardly speak Polish, a student from San Francisco, and a steward from a transatlantic liner. It is quite difficult to transform this bunch into a fighting unit. The RAF takes on any trained pilots and when their numbers become sufficient forms them into Polish squadrons.
Soon Kazio is stationed at the Firth of Tay, in Scotland, where the Poles are guarding the coast against possible invasion. Initially he is part of a rifle battalion dedicated to Mary Queen of Scots. On the front of their forage caps they wear the Polish eagle, but on the side is pinned a little Royal Stuart tartan flash and the Scottish lion. He is placed in the machine gun platoon, which uses World War I vintage Vickers .303 machine guns. Their firing range is on the edge of a moor, firing over the sea. There is a lookout, who waves a red cease-fire flag if a ship approaches. As the lookout is out of direct sight of the troops, another man is posted in between to alert the gunners that the red flag is aloft. Kazio has that duty once when a British submarine sails past on the surface. Unfortunately, he is color-blind and doesn’t see the red flag waving against the background of green grass. The captain of the sub gets a bit upset when his vessel is fired on by several machine guns at once. He dives the sub and later lodges an official complaint. Kazio is reprimanded.
Soon his unit converts from machine guns to three-inch mortars and is issued with armored carriers, but Kazio is sent to St. Andrews on a matriculation course to qualify for officer training. It is held in a small hotel, facing the sea, and not far from the Royal and Ancient Golf Club.
One Sunday afternoon, taking a break from homework, he strolls across the road to the sea wall and leans on it and looks over the water and wonders about Poland and his family there. Then he notices another young man next to him, in the uniform of a Polish paratrooper, also looking out to sea. It is Wacek Binental, his childhood friend, whom he has not seen since before the war. Each has assumed the other dead. They embrace, my father says, “and I rather think we were both crying. Fortunately no one saw us.” Wacek is on a weekend pass from parachute training near Manchester. Later, he breaks his back jumping from a plane and spends much of the war in the hospital recuperating. After the war he emigrates to Australia.
By the time Kazio joins the First Polish Armored Division in 1943, after his matriculation, the whole Allied force is preparing for the invasion of Europe. The soldiers are gradually shifting southward, and his battalion is now in Yorkshire. In his four-man carrier is a young soldier nicknamed Cania, Polish for “bird,” because he is small and agile and fast. The two of them become firm friends.
They make their way farther south to an embarkation area near Southampton. His unit sails for Normandy in a U.S. Navy motor torpedo boat and disembarks onto Juno Beach from a “Mulberry harbor” at the end of July, seven weeks after the first D-day landings. One of the ships scuttled to provide the breakwater there, remembers my father, is the only Polish cruiser, the
Dragon,
a gift from the Royal Navy — recently holed by a German torpedo.
Polish morale is high. As they set out inland into Normandy, they hear the first reports of the Warsaw uprising. Kazio’s unit is attached to the First Canadian Army, which is to form the left wing of the forces advancing into France, parallel to the coast. They camp near Bayeux, and together with the Canadians, move on through the ruined city of Caen, which has only just been liberated.
O
UTSIDE
C
AEN, THEY
pause just short of a big concentration of artillery, says my father, row upon row of guns of all calibers, firing at the German positions until their barrels glow red. The Americans are meant to join in this bombardment from the air, with their B-17 Flying Fortresses. But something goes wrong. The system relies on a master bomber, and when the master bomber drops early, the rest follow suit. Kazio and Cania watch in tears, appalled, as the Flying Fortresses drop their bombs on the Canadian and Polish gun crews, who are unable to communicate directly with the air force to stop the “friendly fire.”
British army spotter planes, little unarmed Austers, fly in and out of the American formation, with no direct radio contact, their pilots desperately waving their arms and firing signal rockets, trying to stop the bombing. It seems a very long time before the bombs cease. The casualties are especially high because the gunners are about to move forward and are not dug in.
This is the first of three times that Kazio is to be bombed in the war, he says, twice by Allies and only once by Germans.
The Poles advance toward the town of Falaise, trying to complete the Allied encirclement of a huge German force — fourteen divisions, about one hundred thousand men. They manage to dislodge German infantry dug into positions on top of two thickly wooded hills that straddle “the Falaise gap,” the last escape route for the Germans. The Poles nickname the feature
Maczuga
, “the Mace,” because of its shape on their contour maps.
Almost immediately Kazio and his comrades come under ferocious and sustained counterattack by German forces desperate to break through Allied lines, and also by two elite SS armored divisions returning from outside to help. Largely surrounded and running out of ammunition, their Sherman tanks outgunned by the German’s latest Panther and Tiger tanks, the Poles are mistakenly bombed again by their own allies.
The fighting, much of it at very close quarters, blurs in Kazio’s memory. Once, he recalls, he finds himself alone, caught in open ground, armed only with his rifle, as a Panther bears down on him. He crawls under the wreck of a Sherman tank abandoned in a ditch, and watches, terrified, as the Panther’s barrel rotates slowly toward him. It lowers until it is trained on him, pauses for a long moment, then the German tank abruptly accelerates away.
He remembers too being slumped, exhausted, on the edge of a road, in a rare gap in the fighting, with his corporal, a man in his early twenties, the son of a well-known Polish actress. There is a deafening roar, and when Kazio’s ears clear, he realizes that the corporal, still sitting beside him, is dead. Kazio starts removing the dead man’s personal items to return them to his family. He unbuckles his watch and reaches into his breast pocket where he discovers a small diary with a bullet lodged in it. But there is no visible wound. He still can’t understand how the corporal died.
The Poles hold their ground for four long days until, finally, they are relieved by the Canadians. By then, according to their battle report, nearly six hundred Poles are dead or missing, another one hundred fifty wounded. They have killed more than two thousand Germans and captured another five thousand. General Stan-islaw Maczek, the officer commanding the First Division, later wrote, “Of all the battlefields in Normandy, none has presented such a picture of hell, destruction, and death.”
A memorial is later built there. It reads:
Between the 18th, 19th, 20th and 22nd of August 1944, this vast panorama of the Oren countryside stretching away to the horizon, with its gaily colored pattern of crops and fields dotted with apple trees hemmed by hedgerows, was the scene of a battle of unprecedented importance, which was to determine the outcome of the Second World War. At this historic spot, the First Polish Armored Division closed the last escape road out of the “Falaise Gap” (Chambois — Montormel) to the German VIIth Army, thus playing a decisive role in its destruction and hastening the liberation of France.
Over the next few days the German retreat turns into a rout, as soldiers flee down what becomes known as
Todesgang
, “Death Road.” Allied fighter planes relentlessly attack the withdrawing troops. Kazio recalls that road, strewn with the wreckage of charred vehicles and choked with carnage; corpses lined thick along the roadside — human and horse — both distended by gas, their innards busting out.
The Poles advance north at a punishing pace, covering three hundred miles in nine days to liberate Abbeville. They cross into Belgium, and on September 6 they help to liberate the ancient city of Ghent. There, at last, they are allowed a few days’ rest.
W
HAT IS HAPPENING
back in Poland, Kazio knows only vaguely. His elation at news of the Warsaw Uprising has turned to disbelief as he begins to hear reports that the Russians approaching the city from the east have stopped their advance on the banks of the Vistula, their guns silent, allowing the Nazis to crush the uprising and raze the city.
Since the outbreak of the war, Kazio has received three letters from his father. They are carefully written to include virtually no personal details, in case they are intercepted. In the final two letters, his father asks him for any news of his mother and sister. Kazio’s letters to his father ask the same question. Their letters have crossed. In his last letter, Maurycy has enclosed a copy of a snapshot of himself as a keepsake. Kazio peers at it with a magnifying glass and thinks he can make out the letters
ECUA
across it. He assumes his father has acquired an Ecuadorian passport to enable him to get out of Poland, and Kazio carries the passport photo around with him in his tunic pocket as a talisman. When he discovers that there is an Ecuadorian consul in Ghent, he goes to see him, hoping he can find out his family’s whereabouts. But the man is only an honorary consul and can do nothing, and anyway, Kazio’s unit moves out of Ghent the next day.
They make their way to the Dutch town of Breda, which they liberate without a single civilian casualty. But some stubborn German troops take up defensive positions on an island in the middle of the river Maas and refuse to budge. So the Poles dig trenches facing the island and trade mortar and rocket fire daily with the German holdouts.
Kazio turns twenty-one years old in that dugout by the river Maas, celebrating with a large, round Gouda cheese shared with Cania and other friends from his unit. Later, when he falls ill from a cheese overdose, he is ordered to the hospital. He finds it full of Dutchmen all slowly going blind from bingeing on German rocket fuel.
Just as his unit is about to advance north into Germany itself, Kazio is selected to attend Officer Training School. So he says good-bye to Cania and the others and sails from Ostend for Britain. On the ship, he gets drunk with a Polish sailor whom he last saw four years before, when they both volunteered at the Polish Army headquarters in London.
K
AZIO IS STILL IN
the officers’ training course at the Crieff Hydro Hotel in Perthshire, when the Germans surrender and VE Day is declared in May. But Poles like Kazio remain in limbo.
Back home, the Soviets have already selected and eliminated the flower of the Polish intelligentsia, in a calculated act of cultural genocide. Almost twenty-two thousand people were killed — many of them executed in an abattoir in the Russian city of Smolensk and buried in the forests of Katyžn. (The dead include an admiral, 2 generals, 103 colonels and half-colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, 7 chaplains, 200 pilots, 3 landowners, a prince, 43 civil servants, 20 professors, 300 doctors, more than 100 writers and journalists, and hundreds of engineers, teachers, and lawyers.)