POLISH VERSION

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Chapter 8. Advantages and handicaps of success.

The taste of success - science as a valuable commodity, underground schools - how lots of books were saved - ordinary science and applied science - with the vows of eternal friendship, the war culprits, Nazi and Soviets, rush to kill each another - Speedy Adolph defeats the Never Misled Joe in the first round - in a bandit fight over the loot, war changes to hell - fate of the Soviet soldiers and the POWs, the universe's top record for cruelty - the Nazi's task: to make the human race into "more valuable"; even the first German victims, Poles and Jews, cannot believe what is happening - twisted mirror of the manipulated press, all civilized norms from now on a naive superstition, the three biggest crimes - in the Polish country the military action starts again - the Jews shifted in the first phase of the "Great Experiment" - what happened to the Polish Jews, why could they not defend themselves - the USA, the last great partner enters the war.

Professor Mazzurewicz was a polonized Russian who in the past, before WWI, taught in a Russian Gimnazjum (secondary school). He proved himself to be a decent and cultural person, never taking part in persecuting Polish pupils. In fact, in matters of their ethnic problems, he remained neutral with a touch of goodwill, meaning he always shut his ears and eyes if he saw or heard anything he should not have. In short, he was an enthusiastic naturalist and positivist. The biology of amebas interested him much more - even in the cynical sense, for he considered them superior to people - not to say more predictable. "Noooo... amebas" he would say and in awe about pseudo-pods, vesicles and living plasma without visible limits, at one moment fluid and solid at the next, the lesson would be soon over, if the pupils allowed him to talk freely. His other favorite themes were bacillariophyceae and their scientific research, employing mathematical methods, adapted from the study of the generations of protozoa, especially paramecium. However, this was a longtime ago, when he was still young and handsome. After WWI, he remained in the same, though now Polish, Gimnazjum because nobody could say a word against him. He always treated his students fair. One could say he was an example from the generation of positivists; he had a broad understanding of the essence of this word not only relating to philosophy, but about also an attitude towards people.

Now he continued no more research, remaining active only in his professional capacity as a teacher even though having surpassed the age when he could have received a pension. He did not give up teaching even when the war should have stopped him. Besides biology, he taught mathematics, physics and chemistry - all the naturalist sciences. Every day he cycled to town to teach in the underground high school, which had no permanent location, functioning at different secret addresses. It was not too far for him and the cycling was healthy for his old legs.

In the afternoon, he gave private lessons at his house. In fact, he lived-in an ideal location, where the Wspólna (Common) Street that led from the town became a dirt road and was nearing its end. It was about one kilometer away from the make-believe restaurant, which never sold anything, but functioned only to legitimize the sale of alcohol bottles. This restaurant was the place where in the previous year Angus had sat alone, or with his father playing cards.

Mazzurewicz's lonely house of red bricks, with a large garden, covered by trees and thick bushes, was an ideal place for any illegal activity. There were no neighbors nearby, and the sandy street was not fit for motorcars, not even for bikes when the weather was dry. Since the professor preferred cycling to walking, he had to push his bike for several hundred meters. For years, not one German was seen, but one rather risky event happened in 1943, when on the parallel Bałtowska Street, the Germans found some Jews hidden by a Polish family. A horror followed, all the habitants were executed on the spot and the house was set on fire as a deterrent. Not stopping at that, the Germans searched the area for some time. This happened a good distance away and the Germans did not inspect Mazzurewicz's house, but it was still necessary to suppress the lessons for a time. Since this was an isolated incident, the place was normally considered safe enough.

Angus attended the first lessons with much emotion, literally energized with electricity. By disposition unable to keep his mouth shut, talkative, he tried hard to say nothing except in direct answer the teacher's questions, and to perform any assignments in the quickest time possible.

He even dressed, considering his normal careless attitude, formally in his new, dark blue suit and plain white shirt, only without a tie, which he could not endure at any point in his entire life. Quite funny, his only ornament consisted of a prestigious fountain-pen, a Mont Blanc, which he got from Mother when recommencing his regular studies. On principle, he never used this pen, preferring to use one of several pencils. By the end of the first week comprised of three lessons, Angus' reputation firmly established. He always had the solution ready on the instant, as soon as the professor ended the question or stopped reading the test from a book. Mazzurewicz did not believe it at first, and checked him several times, finally accepting that he had met a pupil able to calculate in record time in his head. Nevertheless, he always demanded the solutions written down on paper. Considering that his suit a lucky one, Angus stopped wearing it, deciding to reserve it for special occasions.

The class consisted of three students. One of the new colleagues, Stach Konar, was a son of a deceased army officer and former Polish legionary. After his father's death, his mother married a second time, to one of her husband's former soldiers who was a younger officer and friend. They all were dedicated followers of Piłsudski and thus "Sanacia," not for bread only, but from a deep conviction. The woman had a head for business, as they say, and the second husband agreed to the role of executive and first assistant. Maybe used to discipline at the hands of the first husband, now acting like her proxy. At the end of his tour of duty in the Army, he ended the service and was fully at the disposition of the woman. They made good before the war, were comfortable materially. But now in wartime the small candy factory got a German Treuhaender, and the cinema too went under German management. The last for the better, because it would be a shame to display German propaganda materials. Only a small nutritive store remained, located peripherally on Pieracki Street, at right angles to the end of Wspólna Street. This was now the sole source of keeping for the whole family. Anyway, the mother remained functioning as the head of family and the store prospered well indeed, half legally and half on the black market. (She felt there like fish in water, the stepfather supplying the muscle). The stepfather kept friendly relations with the stepson. In fact, they were great pals, something that was astonishing to Angus.

Stach was a so-called mediocre student, in fact above average, not hindered by his ability, but because of the war, he had lost two years of learning and now wanted compensate for this. In fact, but it was a deep secret and Angus never knew, he wanted body and soul to be accepted into the underground Warrant Officer School. In fact, the whole family involved in the underground, Stach and his stepfather directly and the mother rather loosely. During WW I she had been a POW messenger, and it was there that she met her first man. It was all a strong family tradition. The boy become conditioned to be an officer of the Polish Army. This was dream of his life and now he was a soldier of the conspiracy. However, the point was, they would accept him only after completing the minimum, four grades of High School. However, if he never betrayed his motives, Angus noticed that his colleague hurried obsessively and wanted to finish his class as fast as possible. He was all for an intensive rate of learning and wanted to absorb the biggest possible amount of material during each lesson.

This was correct for Angus too. Anyway, it was nothing strange. In private lessons, which cost money, science became a valuable commodity and a good part of students, a great majority, determined to take advantage to the maximum, to get their money's worth. (The lessons were few, in principle split by a couple of days in-between, and mainly consisted of self-study science material and homework. Each pupil was willing to shed his skin to gain more and more material, to show that he was able to stand even more work.) Therefore, because Angus knew nothing about the real motives of Stach, he regarded him as being in a similar position as himself, the only son of a family, living from a shop temporarily during the war. He thought this behavior was rational and was willing to help him if he could, in mutual interest.

The second new colleague, Stephan Wójciak, was a semi-orphan too, having lost his mother. His father was a plain worker in Ostrowiec Metallurgy Plant. A widower, newer married again, fully devoted to the education of his children, doing the duty both of a father and of a mother. To Angus it seemed that he held almost holy features, apostolic. There were two children, the older daughter and the younger son. The daughter first tried to substitute for the deceased mother, but before the war turned unexpectedly to politics and became independent and did not live with the family anymore. Quick-wited, intelligent and strikingly beautiful, determined, firm, even aggressive, she had some important role in the less important ONR (National Radical Camp). According to her nature she came into sharp conflict with the authorities, and in her own words, they persecuted her politically. Now and then, she visited the family house, but declined to live there for security reasons. She just appeared and passed by, a mystery not only for Angus but also for her brother.

Only afterwards Angus heard some news, that this fierce Queen of Amazons and savant organized the MWP (Youth of Great Poland), outpost of ONR. Next took part in organizing the Saint-Cross Brigade of NSZ, finally leaving with them for the West. Her brother Stephan shared her ambitions and convictions, but never came to such a top position in NSZ. Her father, by contrast, was a simpatico of socialism, but unable to influence his progeny.

Of a similar age as Stach, Stephan also had finished before the war two high school grades, but not in the same class, only parallel. He was always at the head of the class, a dead serious youth solidly build with deep eye sockets staring glassy. A true perfectionist, his only defect was the lack of a sense of humor and he almost never smiled. Much ambitious, he was always a top student, but during the war he had to work in the factory with his father. Soon, his father sold half of the modest family house, keeping for himself and the son one chamber with a kitchen and insisted the son should stop work and continue with high school. To compensate for the lost years, he insisted on private tutoring; this was expensive, but maybe a great investment for the family. The father went doggedly onward, preferring to pay rather than have his son attend the normal secret high school, which was free of any cost.

Now Stephan started a sharp contest with Angus. Being always first in the class, he considered this not only natural, but simply a duty to his family. Unfortunately, he did not a chance at all; it was like a contest between a man and a machine. For several weeks, he gave everything that was in him. Angus was genuinely sorry, remembering his impressions from the Polish campaign, the desperate race of infantry against the motorized Wehrmacht. Angus faced a heavy task, he extended unnecessarily the time for finding solutions, thought with a deep concentration and crinkled brow, and in short, did all possible to make Stephan feel better, but in vain.

After a month, Stephan left this group and joined another one. So there remained only two, Angus and Stach, who with ambitions located elsewhere, had willingly accepted the younger Angus as the leader and fully cooperated with him and engaging to keep sharp progress. It became a habit, they studied and completed the homework together. Angus always explained the new material and tasks. He helped nominally, but in fact gained an even better result. There was no inconvenience, as Stach was neither dumb nor obtuse, worked a little slow, but with strong motivation.

For Angus, the time of learning was the best period during the war. After the first lessons, when he was touchy and on edge, be began to feel at ease, on the top of the world. He began to recover faith in himself, tolerate himself and could even look in a mirror without dismay. Easily, without trying, he went from success to success. He was sure of his superiority not only over his colleague, but also over the teacher. He took care never show this, especially after the event with Stephan. By the way, Stephan continued learning the humanities in one group with Stach, Polish and Latin languages on the level of the third grade. Happily they came to good terms again over the chessboard. Both Stach and Stephan played chess much better than Angus, who was glad to learn from them and maybe this mellowed Stephan. So the departure of Stephan from the math and physics group had no serious effects, all ended well. As for Angus, he valued both of them high, but especially Stach, a genuine older friend, mature and more experienced in almost everything, except for math.

Humanistic study with Polish and Latin languages Angus continued in another group, because unfortunately he was less advanced in these, on the level of the second grade only. Despite his effort to fill the gap, the tempo of progress in this group was poorer and he started from a much worse position. The teacher was the daughter of Professor Mazzurewicz, Miss Piesewicz; she was a doctor of medicine, probably persuaded to go onto medicine by father, her talent being definitely not in science but in the arts. She made the Polish and Latin lessons splendid, a wonder of spiritual life, a full new experience. Angus liked to use simple and concrete language, being unfamiliar with the beauty of words, less so with poetry. Now he unexpectedly met this entire new universe through a top teacher, able to point out the most important, curious, charming or stunning passages, important fragments, responsive sentences. Besides it is necessary to concede, the textbooks for the Polish high schools were written magnificently, one could enter a trance by reading them. But especially, if someone tender and prompt with comment called attention, as for example "Notice, how colorful are the first verses," the answer would be "My God, my eyes were blind indeed. There is plenty of color, how could I not have noticed!" Or explaining besides a Latin text, why was the first wearing of the toga so much celebrated? (The most important, culminating day in the life of a "juvenus.")

These lessons continued in a three-person group, Angus being also the top student, but only because the others were not too bright. One of the colleagues, a tall ape although the age of only fifteen, arrived from the farm of his father on the so-called "linijka," a narrow long cart on four wheels pulled by a single horse. The traveler (or two, sometimes as many as three) sat on this construction with his legs almost touching the ground on both sides and helped to keep the vehicle's balance. In fact, it was possible to ride with this over every terrain where a pedestrian was able to go, or where today a motorcycle may cross, the experience being a bit similar. Henry Michorowski was the only student that Angus ever met in conspiracy school, who had no wish to learn and tried at every opportunity to avoid any lesson. This even though his father not only paid heavy money, but also organized transports of food. Every week or maximum at intervals of ten days, Henry instead of riding on the linijka, came with a coach bringing supplies. It was the second time, Michorowski had tried to manage the same second class, because another teacher had earlier declined good money to dispose of such a pupil. The father put a sharp ultimatum to the son, or a persuasion, a proposal not to be rejected and searched for another teacher, at the same time raising the honorarium. He also controlled the son with a steel hand. Therefore, in part because of the paternal supervision, in part because the student was already familiar with the material and in part because of the talented teacher he made this time not too bad a headway. Nevertheless, it was he who paid the biggest fee, the other two, including Angus, reduced ones.

Beside Henry and Angus, the third student was Thaddeus Kopski, a son of a city magistrate officer. Before the war it was a good employment, but now the family was in rather scratchy conditions. That is why Tadek, normally an average student, felt it his duty to compensate for the expense with a great diligence and really, he was always the best-prepared and hardest working, most conscientiously. Anyway, after finishing the second class he transferred to a regular secret high school, his parents could not afford the expense of private lessons anymore.

Angus too tried hard, but his motivation came from the character of his teacher. She not only transcended him intellectually, towering mentally over him and over all people he could imagine, in every manner - knowledge, horizons, ability to express herself, the whole cultural and intellectual level. However, with all this she was, if not exactly a classic beauty, a unique, adorable - well, hard to say a girl, but also not what Angus considered a mature woman. Already a full doctor, of medicine to be exact and not only after studies but also practice, including the bloody war, married and with a four-year-old son (enfant terrible) - if not beautiful, she shone with an internal light. Also, she behaved like nobody Angus had ever met before, impulsively like quicksilver, like a breeze of a wind. Not only this, she was able of expressing all, of finding words precise, right and at the same time wonderful, marvelous; touching the essence of a matter - and doing so superbly. To be brief, Angus fell hopelessly in love with his teacher.

The word love is not correct, satisfactory; he never dared to think of love. However, not only her talk, he worshipped the ground she trod, where she was, everything she touched. He detected unique details of charm in every movement or fragment of her personality, in the outline of her finger, in the crinkling of her nose, the hair never in proper, regular order. About love, he never dreamed, as in the song "black Johnny, sleeping in his little corner, dreams of a golden Lady." If anything, he became devoted to her like a dog. He regretted only that he could never say a word, never betray his feeling, never but kneel before this brilliant, delightful miracle, transcending every worldly beauty, without noticing this herself. He could never express his true emotions, never show his sentiment; at least, then, he believed so.

Two important events took place at the same time. This began when Angus was casually shopping for a book. At the city market, Angus incidentally noticed the bookstore of Wilak, a firm known from Poznan, so he took a closer look. In result, he chose and bought a book entitled "The Quest of Physical Phenomena". This was a book from the series "Library of Science", published by the well-known (but not to Angus) publishing house of Trzaska, Evert and Michalski. When he opened it and began to read, it was as if a thunderbolt had struck him. Almost paralyzed, he lost all sense of place and time. He remembered dimly going through some streets, sitting down somewhere, he was under an irresistible compulsion to keep turning the pages and get more knowledge, without a moment of delay.

When at last he reached his house, after an intolerable delay, he felt he must discuss this message with his first tutor and turned back. The gate to the Moranowski house remained firm closed, but he remembered a place where one plank of the fence hung only on one upper nail. He slipped through and standing on the entrance steps, called and tapped on the closed doors, causing a notable alarm. This appeared inconvenient - only years afterwards he heard that at exactly this moment a Soviet spy visited Moranowski and they both were busy developing a microfilm in the darkroom. Moranowski was not only a dedicated communist as Angus already supposed, but an active member of the "Friends of the Hammer and Sickle" group and occasionally helped Soviet intelligence. By the way, curious why they sent scouts at all, if they ignored their reports? Stalin anyway heard only what he wanted to hear, he knew better than the people he sent to find out the truth and rejected any information about German preparations to attack.

However, after a longtimehen Angus had already decided to give up, from behind the closed doors sounded the voice of Moranowski. After Angus identified himself, he told him to go away, and come back tomorrow because Moranowski was now busy copying photos. But Angus behaved as if the request did not get through to him.

"I ask for a moment only, I have something important to say."

"What is it about?"

"E equals M C squared."

"Impressive. But now I'm busy making some copies in the dark room and I cannot interrupt this and turn on the light. The universe probably shall wait till tomorrow in its old form, come back about eleven."

On his return to the house, he found his parents already alarmed about his long absence. However, they also had some unexpected news. They told their son, the family might soon move from Żeromski Street to Piaski Street. One of the hosts had a house to let, a half of it to be exact.

Before, the place rented a Jewish family, consisting of Moszek with his parents, wife and children. Several months ago, they had to leave for the Ghetto and the half of house remained empty, behind closed windows-shades and the neglected small garden. The host wanted to rent the house for a moderate price, because the house was beginning to decay with nobody living there. His parents found it convenient because it was not only an apartment, but also there was an ideal place for a shop within the building. Now it would be not necessary to walk too far to Wspólna Street and unnecessary sit there (as mentioned the store was a fiction, not a client came if not by mistake. However, formally it must exist and stay open just in case of control, it was a smoke screen to buy alcohol and sell them on the black market). For Angus the main difference was, it was a short walk to the teacher. So, the parents decided, they would move at the end of May or in the first week of June.

The disastrous, fatal year 1940 had gone by with its dead aura and Angus' plans to end his life. This year had already brought so many changes that it was difficult to keep track of them, and they were mostly changes for the better. Angus recovered from his former depression, being now not alone, denounced and sworn to hell, the world had a new sense and science, and he a place in this, already making good progress and gaining recognition. Besides, by fluke at last he had found a good colleague and some friends.

Nevertheless, the conversation with his guru the next day at eleven was disappointing. They discussed the information assembled from the book; Moranowski knew all the facts, but considered them premature; for example, it would be a longtime before we could expect a credible replacement substance to produce energy. In addition, he was now absorbed with another matter and it was not likely that soon they would be able to continue these interesting conversations. Therefore, he wished Angus many successes in his personal discovery of the universe. Bowing him out, he gave him another book, which was an inspiration in his youth and from which in tutoring Angus, he had taken many problems and fragments of mathematics. It was From the Abacus to Differentials. It was a beauty of a book and supplied much satisfaction, and Angus read it afterwards many times. For now, however, in the "Library of Science," he found the summons of the universe irresistible.

 Capsule: The best publishing houses, TEM in a unique class. What way, many books were saved. Ordinary science and applied science, what's the difference?

In his first trophy, The Quest of physical Phenomena, he experienced the glitter of new findings and even more bewildering possibilities. The possibility of new theories, new universes and an infinite number of questions and riddles which, if answered, in effect would lead to more questions and probing. However, there must be ways to find out what he needed to find out; obviously this was only a problem of more precise measurements, new methods to perform them and better instruments, just chicken-feed. He already had some ideas, although it was necessary to think them over.

Over the next period Angus mobilized all the money that he owned, all he could earn or get from his parents or whatever he could lay his hands on to get more books of the same series. The Wilak bookstore became his target at every walk and he was a steady customer. To gain the TEM trophy, he lay in ambush to be the first at every arrival of new stock. Next reviewed the collection to choose the ones about natural sciences and selected what he was able to buy now, what he could ask to reserve and pay for later, and what he must regretfully deny himself.

He deliberated long; it was not an easy decision, rather a serious expense. The Publishing House TEM was a top-level one and the popular scientific books were expensive before the war, almost precious. Before the war, indeed he could not afford such money, but during the occupation, the value of the cheap books increased more, in comparison to the expensive books. The prices leveled out, because all these books became illegal on the black market. The occupants at the end of 1939 had already shut down all the public libraries, the next step was to shut down the publishing houses with their warehouses, as everywhere setting up the German Treuhaenders. They robbed every property they could, but the books had to them a value of paper for recycling. Theoretically, the publisher could ask for permission to introduce them into circulation, if he was able to assert that they contained nothing adverse to Germany, Germans or the German culture and science. Especially, nothing contrary to NSDAP ideology and national-socialistic spirit. Expressly this concerned scientific books, because it was necessary to reject all fact and theories "infected with the rotten, decadent morale of the West, first the poison of Jewish thinking."

So they left over only mutilated remains of "clean German science," merely a citation about Albert Einstein or relativity theory, for example, was a criminal offense.

"Ordinary science and applied science, what is the difference? About as much as between a simple chair and an electric chair" - so went a contemporary joke. Some years after the war at a conference at the Soviet Academy of Science, there arose the same problem. Lysenko, instead of owning up to facts noted in his experiments that were contrary to his theory, did not diverge from his position. Instead he documented that his opponents were not aware of what "The Great Leader" said on this theme; in short, that his opponents disagreed with Stalin. This ended the discussion and opened a great purge and refining the Biology Section; in the future, a good deal of the whole Soviet Academy of Science, was entrusted to Lysenko care. This example was later repeated in other disciplines. At least in medicine Olga Lepieszyńska, who was the coryphée, did not throw her opponents to the wolves alive (the wolves meaning the NKWD). Instead, she only contended with some vague theory of proteins and the possibility of changing their structure to gel and back to a sol (like the amebas do). She used this theory to promise the Father of the Soviet People and Great Leader, if not exactly an everlasting, at least a long life. She proposed a simple cure, essentially soaking him in alternately in 1% and 0.5% solutions of sodium carbonate. A completely harmless operation, if a little unprofessional and aimless, but at least correcting his hygiene. It is necessary to note, that during the previous years Stalin washed very little. If anything, he occasionally preferred to take the "banya" (steam room), after that warming himself in an oven especially built for this purpose, like the used for baking bread.

Now it is clear, why all these books were consigned for destruction: they presented ordinary science rather than applied science, inconsistent with German, pure Nordic spirit. However, the German Treuhaenders not interested in this financially, acted rather the opposite. The financial effect of recycling the books to paper would be minimal. It is necessary to consider the Germans did not exactly send their finest men to Poland for trivial positions. They were basically a scum arriving from the Reich with the aim of getting rich quick, or at best the local Volksdeutschen. Lack of financial motive meant the case stopped interesting them. With bribery, the former owners or warehouse managers could save the books, exchanging them for just any paper, only the weight had to remain the same. So that's how it was in most of the publishing houses, from popular, to cheap and even gutter to the expensive and most luxury. The books hit the black market and it was necessary to find the customer fast. Money had decreased in value owing to the occupation, all prices changed, the living commodities in the year 1941 rose about twenty to forty times, the less needed not so high. The cheap books went up perhaps ten times over the former price, but the valuable only about five times or so. It would be better to explain this, comparing the expense not to money, but for example to butter. Before the war, on average a book from the exclusive TEM Science Library would be equivalent to twenty to thirty kilos of butter (with the changing value of money, butter became the popular standard of the black market prices). But now maybe only two kilos, as it was harder to find customers for the expensive books. Angus managed to buy first James Jean's From the Star to the Atom and Kendall's Modern Alchemy. Afterwards he decided to restrict himself only to the physics of cosmology and chemistry, he could not manage enough money for them all, it was sometimes necessary to lay books aside and ask the seller to wait. For example, with no questions asked and in haste, he bought anything by Sir Arthur S. Eddington. The others he quickly read in the shop, most of all regretting that he was not be able to buy books by Paul De Kruif and William Beebe, adventurous, interesting and splendid, but alas, the money ... The Great French Revolution was not the best in his eyes, rather an "applied history." But the History of a 400 Million Nation (China) by Mary Augusta, despite the same fault, interesting - and most of all he regretted not being able to buy A. Carrel's Humana, a Creature Unknown.

By the way, The Modern Alchemy was the cause of the only, but big embarrassment by his lessons. Reading it, he got so deeply absorbed that he forgot everything and was not able to explain the difference between sulfides and sulfates and between chlorides and chlorates, not to mention the perchlorates, etc. In short, not knowing the correct nomenclature of salts. Sure, it was only a matter of memorization and nothing to understand, but floating in the clouds, he neglected the duty. Professor Mazzurewicz and even Angus' colleague experienced a shock, such a matter had never happened before. The first time the group had to repeat the material and for this Angus was to blame. He explained the lapse as is typical for bad students, with some health problem, maybe head or tummy ache.

In fact Angus had entered the best period during the occupation, progressing from good to better, recovering the wish for life, his old personality and self-assurance. The only dream not coming true was participation in the underground, in combat with the enemy. Now this most important purpose of his life came back repeatedly to his mind. If he was not such a worthless, ugly creature as he had thought last year, if he was a human being and not a worm or reptile, he should at least try to do something toward his duty. He began the search for an opportunity, with his good colleague, who answered noncommittally. Stach said he did not take an interest, the matter was still premature, we should see if the right time came and so on, in short the words similar to those heard before in the concentration camp. The only difference was, he ended this with: "We'd better deal now with science."

In fact, Angus expected something like this. The secret organizations would be not called secret, if one pal bubbled everything to another. At least, he had sent a signal.

But now he remembered the feeling that he already once found such a society or amicable environment. Not long ago, as he listened to the song "Many long days and sleepless nights…," as he first heard the word "Oświęcim," there, in the forest at the end of Traugutt Street, below his former home by Żeromski Street. At the place where he watched the volleyball games, and one of the players, Godniowski hurried with these verses and tragic news. They all heard him with tears in their eyes, there was the distinctive feeling of unity, of elation, ecstasy, belonging together, readiness for anything even to the death. If he had only dared to open his mouth immediately, no doubt he could have settled the wanted contact.

If he only had dared to throw out the words about his wildest dreams, thirsts, it could have changed all! Yet at the time he considered himself not worth it, an ugly and bad creature not deserving a comradeship with true men and possibly a honorable death. He got so conditioned by the narrow-minded priest, who persuaded him he was only fit for hell, if even hell did not spit him out. All this happened because of some organic reactions natural at his age. He believed in every word and became depressed to the degree of wanting to end his miserable life. That was why, when the proper moment occurred, he kept silent, lost the best chance. Now he wanted to try once more.

Now they lived by "Piaski" (Sands) Street, some distance off, not so convenient as before, when he could see the volleyball field in the glade right from the house. Nevertheless, he started again to visit it regularly, every afternoon. And regularly put on his lucky suit, taking care of his appearance. So his parents assumed he must be meeting a girl. Of course, girls, several of them, were present, but he had already located his heart elsewhere. He tried with all his might to fix good relations and at first this bore results. His presence became tolerated and sometimes, before better players arrived, he could join the game. Unfortunately, he played poorly as do all beginners, no chance with extraordinarily good players, which were there aplenty. Honestly, he had never met such a high class in all his youth, and even afterwards in his best years would be no match to them. However, the main was the atmosphere was good, the distance lessened gradually.

Angus did not realize he was transparent as if made from glass; his efforts were clear enough. The bunch of people whose junction he was seeking already knew a lot about him and in part approved, but conditionally. The II company of ZWZ (Association of Armed Struggle) in Ostrowiec and in future the detached diversionary squad AK (Country Army) emerged principally from the base of these young men of the senior classes of the Gimnazjum (high school). Next came some older boys from the lower classes, also some graduates and a few tutors. In such a close band, information circulated quickly. Angus had already the reputation of a "wunderkind" and possibly future genius, also a proper boy and good patriot, but unripe yet, childish and naive, more, unfit, inadequate and ineffective. And he hoped to behave discreetly and anonymous, but was like seen under a magnifying glass. They considered he would be useless in conspiracy at the moment. However, if he survived the war, he might develop and become a valuable person when there would be a lack of educated or quick-learning people. In short, they decided about him and without consulting him, to stretch a protective umbrella. It was a decision of the lower grade command only and there was a good and a bad side of it.

From Angus' vi, it was a disaster and a painful matter, that despite his searches and efforts he was not able to make contact and join a secret organization. Not knowing the reasons and without possibility to discuss the motives (which were for his own good, but he thought exactly the opposite), it renewed his old complex. Of course he was the one to blame, it must be his fault. In fact, he gained from books one simple judgment: each failure depends on many causes, some independent of the person concerned, and some coming direct from him. As we cannot change the first, the only possibility, if at times hard, is to change and correct oneself. One's first act after every failure should be to look carefully into a mirror.

Not a bad principle, however sometimes one-sided and depressing, because frustration reduces the abilities. Many external causes are independent of us, but they change and it may be better to wait and choose the right moment, than ram the closed door headfirst and in case of failure, try to make the skull harder. On the other hand, the path of self-improvement should also not be lightly rejected. "In medio stat virtus," the middle way is the best.

The silver lining of this cloud was that in trying hard to find his place in the resistance, he with time reached many different political environments, from the extreme right ONR to the PPS-WRN on the left. He gained a broad perspective and even founded next one more organization (not airy-fairy, but a real one). Finally, he had the privilege of contacting and doing some simple services for the regional delegate of the Polish Government in Exile, civil top authority country level. It was a restless, nervous and feverish activity that called attention and could wake suspicion in the conspiracy. However, each time he received a blameless opinion, a clean bill from the local squad of AK.

But coming back to the present, among the young people playing volleyball in the group, boys as well as young women, several lived by Traugutt Street but the majority arrived from afar, cycling, some daily, some occasionally. All were active in conspiracy; more so, they were the initiators and the hard core. Also the commander of AK II Company, the eldest of the bunch, appeared here often and played volleyball fine. Although he was not among the best, who were a little younger.

However, it surely does not mean that all members of II Company played volleyball here. For example, Stach Konar and a few more colleagues were also soldiers of II Company, yet Angus never met them here. The players were in fact a bunch of friends and had played here even before the war, as students after lessons. They shared the same convictions and in result came to the same organization, that was natural, but they met here not as conspirators, only as friends. Mostly they came from well-to-do families, high intellectual and cultural and having received a good education, planned on going to university. One could say, they were the first and best product of the new reformed higher schools, the first alumnus generation. These exceptional good schools produced them just in the last year's before the war. If one should judge the reform by the fruits, it was excellent.

A wonderful breed, top of the top and not only because of their intellect ability, learning and knowledge. They had not only their heads, but also their hearts on the proper side, tender, ready to sacrifice, of excellent morale, courage and spirit, at the same time taking all the pleasure from being alive now. Perhaps they modeled their lives not only on what they learned at school, but also partly on the Hollywood films, the positive heroes? These days we may forget the influence of the movies, at the bygone time notable.

If not for the war, all these young people would continue their studies, proceeding to build a new life better than the old one. In times past the boys would dream of motorcycles, if not exactly a Harley-Davidson, at least a Polish Falk, and the girls a light cabriolet, maybe a French plaything on three wheels, cheap, money pooled by several friends. Ranging far afield in the vacations, seeing the sights of the country, and afterwards possibly much of Europe, making some acquaintances. As in the song, "We speed over the roads stepping on a full gas." With exactly such a passion these girls and boys would realize their ideals, try to help those who were poor, alone, old - or, probably, the secret wish would be to become an inspiration to the young's too.

The main feature of the whole group was hot idealism in the time of disaster and never-ending calamities, a need, thirst for action, readiness for self-sacrifice, considering their own interest as the last in line. Maybe the school and the Scouts organization produced young people too good and fine to survive, because they all perished. If someone managed to the end of the war, they disappeared afterwards in communist prisons, as the German occupation changed for that of the USSR. Of course, they underestimated the danger, but even if they had not, they would never back up. So they lived and died magnificently, ready to burn out for their ideals. Meanwhile they enjoyed every day and every hour left, cheerful in common friendship. They had chosen the fairest, best part of life. Therefore, at least one old man remembers them not with regrets, but envy.

This poem was no less relevant then, about eighty years after it was penned, or now, after more than one hundred and forty years.

At first Angus' efforts did not yield any visible effects. Particularly, he was not able to approach and talk openly with one of the two Godniowski brothers, the one called Filip on the sports field. (This was his nickname from school days; as a young boy he had the tendency to take the voice uncalled-for - in fact, he could not remain silent long. Hard work to discipline him, and as the Poles say, he repeatedly pulled out as Filip (Polish colloquial for a hare) - from the hemp ( cannabis, ganf) = being rather dizzy, a daydreamer. The same man who came and sang the song about Oświęcim some months before, still impulsive, rash and passionate, not careful at all. Even with the other men, Angus could not establish the contact which might lead to sincere conversation. However at some moments it looked as if the girls might have better, tender hearts. One of them, the sister of the man in authority here (the former scout instructor was now the officer commanding the Detached Diversion Unit) took him aside and conducted a conversation. About on all matters, but having somewhat the nature of a qualifying interview. Probably, if Angus was still too young and unfit to be a soldier, he still could be good enough for some auxiliary role. Also the girls were not exactly soldiers; although involved in the conspiracy, they fulfilled the roles of messengers, nurses and the like.

One of questions was how well Angus could ride a bike. In this crowd, skill on the bicycle was taken for granted and all, except for of these who lived nearby on Traugutt Street, arrived here cycling; always there were many bikes standing between the trees. Yet Angus never cycled and alas, was not able to. Before the war, Mum considered he was still too small for a bike, if he wanted not to ride a children's one. As he got taller, he began saving the money, but in 1939 instead of buying a cycle, he gave his funds to the FON. He never tried to cycle before the war, and after war came, there was not any opportunity.

"But, could you learn it, if necessary?"

"Sure. Right away!"

Two junior girls at once offered to coach him. He should try on a women's model, which allowed an easy seat. All should go smoothly, there seemed nothing that could go wrong. But the test ended in miserable failure. Angus was not able to go a few meters; he fell off repeatedly, every time. Worse still, he fell off even if helped by a girl. If both of them held the bike from both sides, he did not fall, to be sure, but it was like hauling a sack of potatoes. They ran with devotion several circles until exhausted, and Angus' performance went, if possible, from worse to worse.

The display became compromising and Angus would have been happy to vanish beneath the ground, the shameful results discouraged and depressed him still more. The only course left was to interrupt this piteous presentation and recede as fast as possible. This way the second part of opinion about Angus, that he was inadequate, unqualified physically, unfit for duty in resistance, settled.

After this, Angus tried several times to ride the bike, without success. The explanation is simple. He suffered from serious disturbances of balance. As described in the second chapter, this dated from September 1939, when he offered his shoulder as support for the gun of his friend, the soldier, shooting at the German plane. This caused damage in the middle ear, dysfunction of the cochlea. Now emerges the question, why had he not said so right away, had the tests carried out. He admitted his misfortune to nobody, not even Mother, because he considered the training with the gun a dead secret and the fault was as well his own as the soldier's, they both were too eager, acted too hastily. Also, he was not exactly aware of the problem and never consulted a doctor. He noticed the bad balance, but he could move freely with his eyes open and the capacity corrected slowly. In 1941, he already could stand and even walk with his eyes closed, but it was only in winter of 1942 that he glided down a hill on skis, before he could slide only on a level field. Not until 1945 did he unexpectedly mount a bike and ride it without problems, or no more than any beginner. Now at the beginning of 1941 and even years after he did not understand what was making him perform so poorly.

For his private use he formulated a theory, that fate always gives willing recipient one chance, and if the person is not ready to catch it at the right moment, but afterwards insistently seeks it, a second chance too. However, it will be always more difficult; there is usually some bad link which breaks at the critical moment and second attempts often end in failure. As if fate wanted to punish or ridicule the person, who missed his first chance. Certainly, the theory is not convincing, sometimes it happens that only after multiple failures does a person manage at least to achieve the purpose. However, maybe there is something in it, one should not expect exceptional gifts of fate many times. The essence is, catch the first opportunity, always show up.

Angus never resigned from his purpose in life, he could not, if he did, the world would lose any meaning. He felt deeply compromised and doubted whether he could achieve anything more in this area. Surely even these girls, who sacrificed so much effort to help him, had already had enough of him. Angus was so deeply ashamed, he temporarily left off going to the forest below Traugutt Street, feeling he had not a chance there; for several days, he did not show himself. And shortly after, there was no question of volleyball matches, they had to stop for a time.

For a second time this year, the highway, nearby forests and the whole region filled with German troops. Compared with this time, the former displacement of the German Army seemed nothing at all. For about half of June, such masses of troops, men and heavy equipment rode without a break along the highway that it was hard to pass on the other side. The use of highways for cars and private vehicles of any sort became prohibited. At the start, the people thought maybe this was a return of the troops from the Balkan campaign, which had earlier traveled this way from France, but after a few days it was obvious that it was more than that. Motorized infantry and masses of other cars filled the whole width of the highway. Looking at this incredible show, Angus' mother commented, "We were blind, we never realized what power the Germans have at their disposal. We had to lose the campaign; we did not have a chance from the start. What a silly motto it was - "We don't care a fig, we will defend ourselves and beat the Germans in the end."

Mother' impression, if overwhelming, was an exaggeration.. In this moment after two years of victories, the power of the German military was much stronger than at the start. Small losses and great gains resulted in much better equipment, several times stronger than during the attack on Poland. Angus evaluated, there was about four times as much heavy arms, tanks and artillery. The soldiers, now believing in their Fuehrer as in God, with full enthusiasm instead of doubt and uncertainty at the beginning, differed from those at the Polish campaign in 1939, which had not proved so easy. In fact, in 1939 Poland would have had a decent chance, if the Allies had held to their word, fulfilled the agreement, if they had acted honorably. If not for the direct treason of the French General Stab and the Commander-in-Chief General M. Gamelin, there would be never have been six years of WW II horror.

The headlines in the newspapers made a most comic impression. They announced not only a great friendship, but a hot, ardent love between Germany and the Soviets. The great letters declared that nothing would ever disrupt the friendly cooperation and alliance with the USRR against the rotten democracy of the West.

The contrast between what one could see with one's own eyes and the written declarations was so strong that it amused. Angus and his parents burst their sides laughing, thinking about the Russians ever getting hold of these newspapers. How could be possible for the Red Army to read this news, but at the same time be blind to the German armies, moving eastwards in a body. Even an eyeless man would mark this. Almost all Poles had no doubt it was the start of a new war, however all this had happened once already, months before and instead of the USRR, the expedition started on the Balkans. Therefore, some exceptions happened. Angus for example heard one such rare opinion: they are performing an amicable concentration of troops with the prospect of great maneuvers of German and Russian troops near the Bug River. Next they will move, the Wehrmacht against Turkey and next Baghdad and Cairo, the target being the Suez Canal, the Red Army to Persia and finally India. The interlocutor swore that in Warsaw, from where he was arriving, most people were sure of it. And during these common maneuvers, when the troops concentrate in a small area, British Aviation would hit them and next a Polish revolt would start with the help of an English landing force.

Surely it was something like the notorious dream of a drunken gardener, a rigmarole thought up by a person who never was close to any real combat. Therefore, Angus never tried to explain that neither could the British Aviation act forcefully at such a distance, nor would such a bombardment be able to overcome a land-based army. Even with the aid of a Polish revolt.

Of course, a bombardment could cause certain losses, but especially among the unprotected civil population. He knew this through his own experience, it was not worth an argument with someone who did not understand this. Such nonsense could emerge either from the suggestions of newspapers, or issued by German propaganda.

At daybreak on the 22nd of June Father suddenly retreated from the door to the yard and said:

"It has begun already!"

"How do you know?"

"Come outside the house."

They all went out and then heard it, the far, deep, continuous rumble, unique in the world.

"It must be hot there."

He issued this opinion as an unchallenged expert, who had served in artillery during the Warsaw battle, called the Vistula miracle. Angus had heard guns too, but never so many; here the rumble lasted without a break, only pulsing, alternating in intensity. The distance was about one hundred fifty kilometers away and in the days that followed the rumble got weaker, the front moved away.

The newspapers appeared this day late. The people said the edition had already been printed as usual, praising the USSR to the skies and assuring the everlasting friendship and cooperation with Germany, that left not a chance to the degenerate plutocracy, falsely calling themselves democracy. They were Jewish capitalists and bankers, manipulating the establishment from concealment. But the young states, with Germany, the USSR and their associates, would build a new, better world. In short, all repeated as before. Then at the last minute came the order to delete this edition and print a new one, about the defense of European civilization and their spiritual values from the bloody, wild Asian hordes. The author is not sure if this story is genuine, but if not, surely it was well invented.

Alliance and cooperation between Hitler and Stalin was from the start an incredible phenomenon. The extreme right with the extreme left was like water with fire. Besides, it was as if Lucrecia Borgia had married Henry VIII, the problem was who kills whom first. Both parties risked much indeed and fatally predetermined the future of their countries. This absurd alliance resulted because neither of these two sweet creatures was able, had enough power to unleash the WW II on his own. Hitler after swallowing Czechoslovakia, appeared blocked efficiently by British diplomacy; if he was sure of the victory, his subjects were not and would not follow him if he raided recklessly. Stalin had only recently destroyed the most powerful army of the contemporary world, his own. The army prepared and about ready to take over all of Central and Western Europe to the Atlantic. He probably was not aware of the full extent of damage inflicted on the Red Army, nevertheless, would not take any risk. It was better to wait until all states bled in the conflict and that is why he backed Hitler and encouraged him. The two had joined forces for arson and robbery, but cooperating robbers usually is temporary, they plan after the first success to kill each other and take the whole lot.

At the beginning, Hitler paid his partner generously, although not from his own pocket. The actual military cooperation happened against Poland. Next they continued against Rumania; first, the USSR broke their determination and defense, taking two provinces, and then Hitler took the fruit, the rest of the cracked state, throwing a bit to Hungary for further encouragement. Afterwards the USSR performed for Germany roughly the same service as the USA for Britain, remained a great base of supplies. There was a difference: the USSR, beyond food, provided strategic raw materials instead of industrial products, because it was Germany which had a much better industrial base, unlike the USA, which had much better production potential than the UK. But there also functioned a kind of lend-lease, because as in commerce with Poland and other European states before the war, Germany continued the policy of greater imports than exports, keeping a negative bank balance. In short, USSR financed a large part of Germany's war expenses. In fact, the supply of strategic materials and food arrived despite the explosive situation to the very last minute. The trains never stopped to the midnight of June 21, the first German soldiers passed them on the way, starting the attack.

However, Hitler did not accept Stalin's offers for further military cooperation, for example on the Scandinavian Peninsula. For the former valuable services be gave a wide strip of Europe, more than half of Poland, and allowed annexing of the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and the mentioned provinces of Rumania. But that was the end, he did not want to have the ally too close, keeping a reasonable precaution. Especially the last "friendly visit" of Mołotow, who demanded more than Hitler wanted to pay. Especially the estuary of Danube with preferred travel and commerce rights along the river, in fact a deep penetration of the Balkans as well as the whole rest of Finland: it was too much. This convicted him the time had come to kill the ally. It was not a question of too expensive a payment, but taking positions for further expansion and probable attack, the partner in crime was preparing to strike first. Hitler had not the smallest doubt that if he started to invade England, or the Wehrmacht became seriously involved elsewhere, he would have on his back and neck the Red Army. Therefore, in this moment he had only one choice, turn to the east, any other direction would be suicidal. Time had come to slay the accomplice, and quick, to be the first. He was late already, for according to earlier plans, on the 22nd of June the Wehrmacht should pass the Smolensk and Dnepr. It was unfortunate that Yugoslavia caused a delay.

In his speech, reprinted by all newspapers, Hitler used only one argument for starting the new war: if one sees somebody is taking aim at him with a rifle, he should not wait, but shoot first. He lied often and without crinkling an eye, but this did not mean that he never said a word of truth if the truth was convenient. Especially, he often blended lies with a truth. This way he became more convincing, mixing up the listeners. Really, when Hitler started shooting, Stalin was already well advanced in preparations for attack.

The Poles expected already in 1939 a collision between the Germans and the invading Red Army, but this was only wishful thinking. Both armies showed a close comradeship and reliance based on common fight; they arranged a common military parade of Victory in Brześć. This parade accompanied a transfer into German hands of the refugees from the Gestapo, members of the former German Communist Party, which opposed Hitler. This greatest of German parties, millions of people, fought to the last and then perished in concentration camps, but some lucky ones or top functionaries ran away to the USSR. Now these survivors became handed back to Hitler, not a chance for life. In deep secret Stalin allowed to stay only a few people, the less known, never performing an important party role, informers to GPU, the most efficient and vile, who betrayed without remorse their own comrades. One may say, those who preferred to be butchers rather than sheep, remained alive as seed of a future party, fully submissive to Stalin.

At the same time both allies closed an agreement of close cooperation between GPU and Gestapo against Poles, the common link Bureau at first opened in Krakow, and after a time, for better secrecy transferred to Zakopane. An analogous Bureau opened in the USSR.

Nevertheless, Father told Angus that soldiers of the Red Army were sure Poland was only a start on the long way west. Father mentioned a song:

"Germańce, Germańce, job' waszu mat',

zawtra w Berlinie budu skuszat'..."

"Germans, Germans, f.. you mother

Tomorrow I shall dine in Berlin..."

Meanwhile, however, Stalin held them on a short leash and punished them for such songs and any open talk.

In the years 1939 and 1940 time worked for Stalin. First, he rebuilt a great part of his army and advanced to test her during the Finnish campaign, which exposed the remaining weakness. There was never a lack of people, but equipment and production soared, if at cost of hunger, slave work, murderous exhaustion and many human lives. Worst of all was the staff, there was no substitute for the tens or hundreds of thousands of killed officers, more so the top commanders. Those who survived in concentrations camps, "the less guilty," got free gradually and after medical treatment and rest in Crimean health resorts returned to service. Fulfilling the appointed task, if at first only on paper, the Red Army began occupying the starting positions for assault. The movement accompanied messages in German newspapers, several times repeating Tass, there are no movements of troops in the USSR zone, beyond the normal rotation and exchange.

A fundamental difference between Germany and USSR was that Germany had at its disposal a thick network of good roads, including highways, and a thick network of railroads. The USSR had only a scratchy infrastructure, the roads were bad and long distances transport contributed the railroads with too a rare network, the rest must compensate the troops' legs. Therefore, the Wehrmacht could transport troops in several days, at most one or two weeks, when the USSR needed many months. After deciding about a war, when the chances for another expansion ended, Stalin needed more time for preparations than Hitler; and he tried to buy it at any price. So, he forbid the troops near the limits to shoot and even return fire on the Germans, escape any conflict and in no conditions let themselves be provoked. To the squads at the border was denied live ammunition, they remained almost defenseless. Maybe this happened by direct order of Stalin, or maybe from initiative of local generals, who feared Stalin worse than the enemy, panicked at the eventuality of suspicion that they had neglected Stalin's orders or not acted ardently enough.

In 1939 started intensive work at liquidation of a powerful fortification line called the Stalin line. This giant strip of fortifications, from one sea to another and several dozen kilometers deep, was inaccessible to the modern motorized army and could be overcome only traditionally, by infantry and artillery. But after the first expansion and expecting the next, it presented a serious communication barrier, so they opened wide passages for approaching masses of Red Army troops, materials, equipment and supplies.

A far-fetched guess, when the Red Army could start. This would depend lastly on the order of Stalin, who was unpredictable and changed decisions often, being suspicious. Usually, he wanted first to be convinced by trusted coworkers that everything was ready and every single button clasped, then he would think of some denials and possible second motifs and finally decide always the unexpected. On June 22, most of troops were already in starting positions and to the final positions remained maybe several weeks. However, it seems that in assessing the situation it is necessary to consider more facts.

In the concentration camps of the USSR, in the far north, remained still millions of prisoners; some from the purge in the army, others with bad luck in the years of terror. If they did not earn capital punishment, the so-called "cap" in more representative cases, or an informal bullet in the back of the head without any ceremony in a cellar, in the extreme conditions of Arctic Siberia happened a selection. There survived only the strongest, among them many former military men. Now they could buy off their "lesser offenses" with their blood, fighting for the Army. The camps emptied, the prisoners became soldiers again and death was to be their privilege. Though so far without weapons and uniforms, at first on foot and after reaching a railroad by trains, they started to the German border. The first wave was only on its way, the next to follow. If they were to be only a supply of men for replacement of those lost in battle, then the probable attack might be planned for about September. But what it they should be the first shock-troops and gun-meat, only next followed by the regular army, which would kill any refugees? If the Army should be next followed by GPU, which would fight not the enemy, only its own soldiers if they tried back out? So, then the targeted date was probably for winter. The author presents an opinion that most probably Stalin aimed at a winter campaign with the second variant, which would be most consistent with Stalin's way of thinking. However, at the time the prisoners arrived, the regular army had mostly ceased to exist. The first camp prisoners met the Wehrmacht in October, but this was because German troops came a long way to meet them. The next waves came in winter, and they had on them still the Arctic camp fatigues padded with cotton wool, which probably made the unexpected, crucial difference in the winter campaign.

The Germans, despite their experience in the severe winter of 1939/40 were still unable to continue to fight in deep frost and this was no secret to the Soviets, who preferred a winter offensive. More so, Stalin believed he had time enough, exactly because the Germans still had not started preparations for severe cold.

Anyway, the Poles met this event with enthusiasm - the bandits who attacked their country regularly were now springing at each other's throat. They murdered Poles together, now they began to murder one the other. Whatever the result, every report was a good one. If the Germans pounded the Red Army, just splendid; if the Russians make a hash of the Germans, better still.

The fading gun rumble was proof enough the front was moving away. Of course, it would to be expected, the border defense troops dared not return fire contrary to Stalin's orders. They did not have any live ammunition, so the Germans massacred them in no time. The main line units remained passive, waiting for orders from the top, which never came. Stalin, after the experiences of the great purge, was considered a danger much greater than any invading enemy. And at first Stalin did not want to believe the messages and next he ran into depression or panic, shut himself away and did not react to anything. In the first days, this looked like an assault of bandits on a madhouse. To be more exact, on a madhouse already set afire by lightning. Afterwards, as Stalin came to his senses and begun to issue commands, he only worsened the crisis.

At first, the news about the course of war came scantily, for the Poles, there was no way to guess how it would turn out. After the early surprise, the papers wrote only about the huge losses of the Red Army in result of bombardment and activity of the German Luftwaffe. Angus could not understand how could they call the assault unexpected and startling, for weeks all the people ware aware of Wehrmacht concentration, a blind man could not miss it, had the Soviet no scouts at all? And the Soviets losses seemed exaggerated, hard to verify. There was lack of concrete knowledge of the front's movement and position. Because of this, Mother began to buy, besides the newspapers in Polish, also German papers, where the news appeared about one day earlier. Angus and Father followed this example, although neither of them knew the language. So Mother read the text and translated for them on the spot. But soon, curiosity prevailed over the old distaste and Angus began to guess and in short time could himself read the war messages, his vocabulary about only battle matters and war communiqués. So did Father, but the young boy made quicker progress. Odd, but they both learned not one word beyond the military; they still wanted not to know.

 Capsule: WW II in a twisted mirror, the Nazi press. How the German people got manipulated.

In newspaper stands, the papers, both in Polish as in German, were incredibly cheap. The first ones were usually 50 groshes, astonishing low, considering that with the galloping devaluation, groshes were rare used at all, so often this difficulty was solved by taking two papers for one zloty. German papers mostly sold for one zloty, except for the weekly magazine Das Reich, rather expensive. The family bought principally the daily "Krakauer Zeitung" and started it with reading "Aus dem Fuehrerhauptquatier…", but Mother, and following her example Angus, also bought any other newspaper that appeared in the kiosk. Father commented, they were both like the cat, Pusia, who always brought in and showed to the family any mouse she was able to catch; just so they boasted with their hunt after newspapers.

The strong second place took the "Voelkisher Beobachter", a Nazi Party daily, big and representative, the format about double compared with "Krakauer Zeitung". But Mother especially looked for the "Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung", which she remembered from the years long before the war (or rather halfway between the wars) and valued as objective (it was, but a longtime ago). Berliner papers occurred rarely and later came some exotic ones, for example once instead of the Krakauer, they got Kaunauer Zeitung, another time Ukrainian Zeitung, the author does not remember exactly the title.

The common feature of this rather casual multitude was identical content. The papers might originate several hundred, or a thousand kilometers apart, but contained the same articles, the same sentences and the same words in them, all materials and photos. Only the last two pages, with announcements and local news remained different.

The sole exception was the weekly "Das Reich". The magazine emerged some thirteen months before, already after the disaster of France, right before the surrender, supposedly by the initiative of Goebbels. It should be a visiting card, keeping up the appearances of German civilization and intellect for the world. The only one of its kind, excluded from the manipulated general pattern and the only one at its level, it made an impact, especially against so poor a background. Despite a big edition, it was hard to buy, perhaps locally in Ostrowiec. Anyway, this publication contained less current news, rather prophecies of a rosy future, designs for what has to be done after the German victory, for example, the monumental building plans of Hitler, as presented by his coworkers. It was the first time Angus read the name of Albert Speer. The planned reconstruction of Berlin seemed a plain megalomania, Angus heard a comment, Hitler probably wants to arrange a meeting of all his tanks, considering the width of the streets. But Speer had no objections to realizing any madness.

The flat uniformity of all newspapers astonished Angus. Before the war, he read plenty, mainly books, but also many newspapers, all he could lay his hands on. He remembered how much the newspapers were different. Each presented its own version of the news and only reading several of them would it be possible to settle his personal opinion (or not, it might be necessary to seek more information). For example, during the Spanish civil war, the Small Journal praised to the skies the rebels, "Lions of Alcazar", the courage of their small children, who prayed to their fathers never to give up the fortress, defend it too last. And this despite the arrests of hostages, to whom security men handed the telephone to tell the crew they were to surrender or their children would be shot. However, "Robotnik" (The Worker) omitted any notice of the red terror. Quite the contrary, it announced the fascist terror, strengthened by the Italian Divisions and the German Aviation Corps "Condor". It praised the unprecedented courage and devotion of the republicans, lamenting over the suffering civil population.

Reporting the purge in the Red Army, some papers described horrible details. The Central Committee member responsible for overseeing the Red Army protested, never managed to outline his speech. He got a bullet in the ear and blood overflowed the papers. The Commander of the Army and all Commanders of districts did not resist, they admitted their incredible sins and all were shot that very night and the killing continued, spreading more and more. Other newspapers commented on this with silly jokes, some even malicious. Even the Abyssinian war, where was a full consensus of public opinion against the aggression, they described differently, if only in some details, options and future steps. The matter of German debts, already mentioned before, the much serious facts many papers presented as amusing.

Now the German papers not only printed the same communiqués, which may be expected, but verbatim all the text. The only difference between the local Krakauer Zeitung and central VB with an edition of about two million was a better, more luxurious show. A better paper and print and a format so big, one could wrap in it a really big bottle. Or wipe whatever one wanted to wipe, proper and comfortable. So, the hunt for papers had no sense, indeed.

Even the Stalin regime never had such uniform press. It too treated the subjects as idiots and any independent reflection was dangerous, everyone had to believe in the official news. Nevertheless "Prawda" ("Truth," what a title, a lie already in front, as people said) was a little different from "Izwestia," and both from "The Red Banner."

To believe the unbelievable, it is necessary to see. Why not? As long as there are public libraries with collections of German newspapers, to be precise the ones from the end of June and the July of 1941, everyone may read them. One look at them may give a much better understanding of what this war was like and what was the matter with Nazism, than a long study of history. These were the means by which Hitler held the Germans in hand, dictating to them how they should they think and what he allowed. Without this it is not possible to understand the degree of submission and maybe imbecility of the soldiers and the German population.

Hitler declared this were his own words: "I am proud of the fact, that...with a handful of people, I was able in one moment to rearrange the steering so the course of the press changed instantaneously a full 180 degrees in the opposite direction. As this happened on the day 22nd of June." (This was a postmortem comment in honor of Otto Dietrich.)

Perhaps the tale of the full edition of already-printed newspapers having to be recycled was an exaggeration, but the change to an opposite course was a fact . One day, the USRR was the best ally of Germany against the rotten Western democracies, eternal friendship forever and ever. The next day it had always been a deadly enemy, not only to Germany, but also to Europe and all human civilization. The astonishing fact was, how the Germans could swallow all this. As for the Poles, they anyway did not believe in any of Hitler's messages, even the occasional ones which were correct, so it was for them only a plain example of lying and a theme for malicious jokes.

After a few days, beyond numbering of decline and ruin, with photos of trophies and prizes, appeared the names and positions of the front, telling the Wehrmacht was conquering and Red Army was backing out. The first concrete data concerned the Białystok bulge, where Soviets located a great assault power. The Germans did not write that Stalin denied soldiers live ammo and so in fact the foremost units were unarmed; besides, the command had prepared no plans for defense, only for offensive. In the next day's, they called the battle a double, Mińsk-Białystok battle, a clear case the Germans were in hot pursuit of the Red Army and going fast.

Now in reports from the front, homogenously in all the newspapers, appeared some novel motive. The German soldiers were meeting trails of horrible crimes of the bolshevists, piles of corpses of the civil population, mass tombs, and cellars full of murdered people with traces of torture. In special dispatches, they told of many murdered clergy with crosses cut out on their breast, or burned with hot iron. From the end of June, this theme they repeated systematically with ample illustration. And how the local people were taking revenge on the culprits of these atrocities, they being the bolshevists and Jews. German propaganda deliberately equated the two, Jews and bolshevists. The German press persuaded the whole authority was placed in the hands of Jews and they were responsible for everything which happened in Russia. Poles read this without great impression, not anticipating that this brainwashing was an introduction to a new horror, the slaughter of all Jews. They thought the photos and descriptions probably genuine, but they could as well have come from German occupation. For example, in Ostrowiec, below Sienkiewicz Street, now called the Starachowice Highway, were two former apartment houses, one of plain bricks and the other plastered, now containing the Gestapo site. The separate cellars they excavated some distance off, because the smell of rotten meat and decay was heavy. There was not a way to transport and bury secretly those proofs of many crimes every day.

To make it short, those with whom Angus discussed this theme, including his father, thought the Germans and Soviets applied identical methods and probably had identical professionals, familiar and schooled in this work. They knew from their own practice what and where to seek and they helped reporters to find the needed material. Some doubt caused only the crosses burned in flesh, because there are more effective tortures, not so messy and fatiguing for the operators; most people considered this as later decoration of genuine corpses, to madden the crowd.

About the Jews, they were never the leaders of the Soviets and not favored by Stalin, who trusted nobody and sure did not co-rule with them. In fact, as Father had already told Angus, they really presented a notable part of NKWD (former GPU, next KGB) staff. This came about because the Soviets executed principally all the Russian intelligentsia and had to substitute someone familiar with the art of writing. A known fact, Hitler too remarked several times, he would willingly liquidate all these intellectuals, but unfortunately, they were necessary (but never proposed the use of Jews to replace them).

Dated 3 July 1941 appeared a unique communiqué of OKW, that near Mińsk surrounded some twenty thousand "Krasnoarmists", who on their own initiative shot their Jewish commissars. A rather unlikely performance and one probably difficult for the Germans to arrange. They never repeated it. Either a Nazi provocation, which succeeded well, or perhaps they arranged this event like the Gliwitz scenario. Maybe the same crew which supervised the fortress Ossowiec and after succeeding in their task, rearranged into a Sonderkommando and advanced down the Biebrza valley, dressed in Polish farmers' jackets, now changed them again for Red Army uniforms. They could murder the Jews in these uniforms and it could go into the account of war prisoners. There is no way to examine and explain this matter, because not one of the captives remained alive, and finding a German witness is unreal.

Reading the contemporary German press with descriptions of the horrible Soviet crimes and seeing the grim images of victims pointing to Jews as culprits, it was clear what the purpose of this tragedy was. It followed a call for vengeance, for mob law. Hitler wanted to create the impression the simple people living in the USRR and persecuted by the Jews ruling this state, were now free thanks to the Germans. So now the vengeance, mob law and lynching were automatic and self-governing, and Germans justice must be fair, must tolerate historic justice. It was, the true introduction to the Holocaust.

After his own words, Hitler was the sole person who had the authority, full control to start this procedure. It is obvious, the press material addressed to the Germans only; there was not a chance the rest of world could treat it seriously. However, for the past year Hitler had not cared about credibility, now he simply ordered what the Germans had to believe.

In the testimony of Halder at the Nuremberg trial, he summarized Hitler's characteristics. He had many lacks, some astonishing, but simultaneously unusual talents, rare developed imagination, ability to look a long way ahead, fantasy and vision with almost magic influence on people. Halder did not notice, or was not willing to mention the most important component: a mental disease, developing rapidly with the loss of self-control.

A youth on the gutter-dump of a capital, constant bad luck and failure, survival in deep humiliation - this all left an inferiority complex. This needed for compensation at any price, by proving his personal worth. Hitler in fact had great imagination, overdeveloped, at start it was the only thing protecting him from suicide. A substitute for real life, which he did not value. Always prepared for suicide, he did not fear death - unlike Stalin, who was a coward, murdering because of a persecution mania. The ability to contact and influence people were his professional qualifications, gained after WW I, when he began his career as propagandist for Freikorps and was responsible for their social image and links with people. He learned to tell one bit at a time and only so much as the audience wanted to hear. Thus he became a grand speaker and always successful.

(This is not a place to repeat history, but I believe already The Barber of Seville noticed, the art of diplomacy is most subtle and indispensable just for plain survival. To earn a supper and find a sleeping place, great business by comparison is easy, just chicken-feed. And if you arrive at the top, the interstate affairs are also simple.) Hitler used a primitive pattern. At first confrontation, but always leaving the opponent an exit, proposal of compromise. Next take the benefits but do not respect obligations, proposing a corrected compromise or confrontation from an already strengthened position. One demand only, then the last, then final and then the ultimate, after every concession he despised more the stupid competitor.

Now, after years of multiple victories, Hitler had advanced a long way from his starting position, when only with difficulty, with skilled manipulation he pushed the reluctant Germans into the war. He had gained unlimited confidence, with full control of information could dictate to his subjects what was right and law. However, he still was not content; he wanted more fame and everlasting memory, compensation for the old complex. Victories came too easy; great conquerors left piles of corpses and not only of enemies, his own, heroic warriors. Therefore, he never accepted a proposal of peace from Stalin, who in 1941 was ready to cut his losses. Stalin would let about half of European USSR go into Hitler's hand and come down to the position of his second, "ally" or servant. He wanted only to remain in the possession of the rest of the USSR. But Hitler needed a great triumph and glory, a great decisive battle, changing the fate of the world and the whole human race. These hopes failed by the end of 1941 at Moscow and next year at Stalingrad. For the next try he deliberately chose the strongest point in the Soviet line, Kursk, in fact repeating the error of Verdun, which he criticized before. But if he could break the backbone of Stalin, this would be the supreme victory. Hitler was ready to accept in calculation any cost, more so, the great amount of blood would make the victory most spectacular, to say the least. Later he could cut out the valueless races, the Jews and Slavs first, next all the bloody mongrels, till the Nordics only, true supermen would rule Europe and with time the whole world. The number of killed enemy would assure him the highest position in history for all ages, what a laugh would be a comparison to Genghis Khan or Tamerlane with their poor pyramids of skulls. And if the Germans had to pay for this a few million of dead, it was not too much. This confrontation should be serious. (In fact, any sane commander would have backed out the minute the concentration positions of German assault troops by Kursk came under rapid artillery fire exactly one hour before the beginning, it was obvious the Soviets knew his plan. But Hitler had invested already too much, he never allowed his generals to act reasonably, to take the Wehrmacht a few kilometers away from the rapid-fire and come over to the defense with some chance of success.)

The author thinks his father was right, Hitler was a gambler, if winning he would play for higher stakes. He could never stop till he had nothing to continue the play. Surely, he must reckon with the possibility of failure, but if so, he would be not in any worse position than in his youth in Vienna, where he took suicide in his stride. And probably his huge construction plans after victory, mentioned in Das Reich, were only window dressing for followers or self-delusion. Meanwhile, he achieved a lot and even if he lost, could hope for a place in history. What a great tragedy and hero. And if with him should perish the whole country and nation, it would be the biggest catastrophe in history. The "Supremo" and with him perish all the people, or at least all the dignified, worth the name of true Germans. Not as good as victory, but also honorable and great. Goetterdaemmerung, twilight of the Gods.

It seems a normal, the new models of society appear at first in minds, often more or less frantic, then became sociological ideas, some advance to the realization, checked in practice. Next, they are modified, adjusted, reformed, often complicated by the changes of other minds. In the progress many of the conceptions become reduced ad absurdum, others lose the competition. One may say there is some analogy to the natural evolution. The world consists of many separate fragments on which exist different models of society, some more efficient or better for the people. However, as the world changes, integrating into one, it raises the danger of self-destruction. What we really saw a short time ago was the mechanism by which two crazy monsters, beginning from zero, changed a large part of our planet to hell.

Sure, they were predetermined for failure by their own minds. But if Hitler could have held self-control a little longer, be persuaded to react reasonably one or two more years, it the unnatural alliance survived longer, it could have ended much worse. The next monster may manage better, what are the chances humanity finds the strength to emerge from the zone of shadow? If it was possible to subordinate the people to such a degree, enforce them to believe in the absurd and worship criminals, even executioners, the conclusion is, they lack character and power of intellect. We must realize, we are living in an unstable world. Moreover, as it unites, the danger increases, because the competition and with it the quasi-evolution stop to exist.

After end of May Angus' parents moved into a new place, a house located again by Piaski (Sands) Street, so now Angus had a shorter journey to the house of Mazzurewicz, where the lessons continued. He went through the yard and out the back gate over the grain fields to the back of the professor's garden, overgrown with trees and bushes, in the center of which stood the house. Usually he returned in company of Stach and they sat together for homework. The proportion was about five to six hours of homework to one lesson, more than in normal school, for obvious reasons. Sometimes this routine changed, they went to the end of Wspólna (Common) Street, at the corner with Pieracki Street, where lived Stach's family and adjoining the apartment appeared their store with nutritive articles. However, usually they preferred to learn at the Piaski Street house, they had at their disposition a quieter place and nobody disturbed them here.

Angus' parents rented a whole half of the house, built from great stones. It was nice and cool in the summer, but rather chilly in winter. Their rented part consisted of a suite, one living room with two windows over a small flower-lawn from the street side. The kitchen with one window overlooking the yard, with a tiny ante-room, besides a great shop with cement floor. This last accommodation was huge, more than all the others together, over sixty square meters and hollow. The parents had to fetch the same crew that some time ago Angus had found to make the beds. It was still possible to make an arrangement with the craftsmen from the ghetto, only now the client had to give a little money more to the Jews, who needed an extra bribe for the ghetto office. Now Angus was obliged to go with them personally back to the ghetto. In the new East Territories behind the front already the German Sonderkommandos were starting the murders, yet nothing about this was known here. In GG, all functioned as before, or rather got only slowly, bit by bit, worse. Both the Jews and the Poles, all must be short-sighted, but for a longtime all thought, the news in the papers was only intended to provoke the natives in the East to form lynch mobs. This would be a terror bad enough, but not the "Endleasung." Stupid imbecility? Rather, they assumed such a proceeding would be impossible between civilized people in Europe.

Anyway, the team performed its commission even better than before, it was a long contour with a buffet behind it, several tables each with four chairs, all proper and not too expensive. It was not guilt of the makers, the investment turned out badly. However, the rations of alcohol on concession began to shrink rapidly and next turned to zero. The pub was only a false decoration, so it would be meaningless to continue. Mother decided to close it and from autumn 1941 the glass door remained shut with green wooden shutters fastened with hooks, only the show-window remained to let sunlight into the low and dim interior. Now only Stach and Angus sat here, studying near the window. The summer was hot and rather stormy, but here all was always quiet and cool, charming.

The very moment they came to live again in Sands Street they heard that Jan Misior was dead. Arrested by the Gestapo, he was so heavily beaten that after release, all the corpus black, with disabled kidneys, cracked liver and pancreas, he died within a few days. Many similar cases happened. For example such was the fate of close neighbors, one former pilot named Palka, and a former theater actor, disowned and dislodged from Poznań Concentration Camp in the same train with Angus, name of Stomma. Of many arrested people, none survived. It was the so-called AB action and after the terror only hardened. People reluctantly told about the fatalities and it was not polite to ask about details, disturb fresh wounds.

However, this was quite another kettle of fish. Only after some time the parents, and from them Angus got knowledge that this arrest had nothing in common with the popular terror. It was an individual case, the traitors being in his own family, living under his roof. The youngest sister of Misior's wife and her husband, Słodek, demanded from him to resign and overwrite to their advantage the concession for alcohol, which for some time assured good profits. Profits by his own will shared half-and-half with them, after they lost their own maintenance in the war, for a longtime living from his offer. When Misior now declined, considering he did enough for them, they turned him in to Gestapo men. Sometime around the middle of 1940, sure of German victory, Słodek become an informer and later a direct co-worker of the Gestapo, his wife also, keeping in addition some intimate relations tolerated by the husband. People ready to do anything for career and money.

The treacherous pair set up a bistro, allowed and patronized by the soldiers and members of the SS, SD and Gestapo if only of the low-level (the chief, Peters, never visited the place), anyway this proved enough to arrest Misior. Officially, they accused him of seeking out, sheltering and entrusting to the Polish resistance guns and arms which remained on the battlefields, or rather forests after the last campaign. The accusation seemed probable, considering the strong patriotism of the man concerned, a former soldier who had already lost one his leg in the earlier war. Also, he often coached to his farm, traveling in the severe winter of 1939/40 alone through the places and forests of Kunów and Iłża. However, he denied strongly all charges and the executioners told him they had no firm evidence, so for this time it would be punishment enough, he should resi the concession in favor of his brother-in-law. Alas, he was a man of strong character, an honest John, maybe a little obtuse. He underestimated his tormentors and such duplicity and lawlessness could not contain in his head. He never agreed and it ended fatally. After he dropped unconscious his wife agreed to all demands of the villains, but her dear Johnny, dismissed in a helpless condition, died on her hands.

Indeed a paradox, this infamous plan brought the pair of Słodek little gain, because almost immediately the concessions lost their value. The amount of alcohol, officially allowed to purchase by every shop with a concession, quickly dropped and in the next month's reduced to zero. As only allowance to Słodek remained only the tavern (buffet), decorated with a red cardboard, on which the great black letters announced: "Fuer Angehoerige der Wehrmacht, Waffen SS, SS and SD …. zugelassen" (allowed). The place visited only the Germans, from plain soldiers to the Gestapo men. The Poles walked a distance round it and avoided any contact since the circumstances became known, so the utility of the pair of Słodeks for the Gestapo shrunk too.

The Polish underground court sentenced Słodek to death, but the execution delayed, because as known informer he presented less danger. It was necessary to concentrate first on liquidating more harmful traitors. Therefore, the pair of Slodek survived the war and became informers of the UB. With their black past they became worthy confidants for the communist Safety Office.

After coming back to live on Piaski Street, Mother visited the widow, Mrs. Misior to express her condolences with words of sympathy and offer help. However, this was like mustard after dinner, the widow managed her affairs herself. She rented out the farm, the horse and wagon, and all the agricultural instruments of the deceased husband for the compulsory so-called "contingent" regulated and payable to the occupants, leaving some of grain for personal use. With this, it was possible to feed a pair of pigs and a cow, there was no danger of hunger or poverty, a portion of the milk she sold for handy money.

The financial situation of Angus' family got worse, as the income from the concession stopped. They had no other source of maintenance, only some savings which were running out too quickly. So Mother decided to sell the supplies she had bought earlier from the German soldiers moving the first time via Ostrowiec on their way from France to the Balkans. They consisted of coffee, tea and a few cognacs; she had hoped they might last for some time. However, one bad business contact made short work of this asset. After the first, small transactions the parents took in their confidence one receiver who duped them. This buyer, Zenon Pacholski, offered the best price and acted fair at first, with only a little delay, because, he said, he commutes with the goods to Lwów, where there is a great demand for such rarities. (Genuine coffee and similar bourgeois luxuries were unattainable on the territory of Soviet occupation.) He gathered all necessary entrance papers and said he was now coming back for his money, invested for the early bribery. Next, he took on credit all the remaining stockpile of coffee and other commodities, but this time paid nothing after his return, but told a long story about the misery, hunger and many bad fates of inhabitants of Lwów. The facts and reports being in general true and consistent with other similar tales, he disclosed in a believable manner. However, the gist of it was, he gave his own money with the money of Angus' parents to aid the poor customers. He simply could not act any other way, but all of this would soon be recovered. Hee tell, had to left the sums temporarily at the disposal of a Polish charitable organization and they had promised to give back the money as quickly as they could. Angus' parents, having bad experiences of their own, believed him, touched by the sad story. Father himself, in the dramatic circumstances after his escape over the green border, had experienced such charitable help from the former Polish Red Cross (already illegal). So he considered it a moral debt and duty to help others. To make a long story short, they offered all their savings, some as a donation to the poor victims and some as a loan to the nonexistent organization, temporarily, as they would themselves be in need soon.

Zenon Pacholski made a good impression, tall, handsome and eloquent, as persuasive and convincing a con man as they make them. He proved not only a swindler, much worse, a Gestapo informer, traitor and a so-called hyena. He got sentenced to death by the Polish underground court and shot on the street in the winter of 1941/2. Angus' parents relaxed only after hearing this, because he tried next to blackmail them, demanding even more money. They had serious fears, after he milked them dry, he might really report them to the Gestapo, just as he did other people. Mother never did see back any of her money, on the contrary, she still had to add some more, if only little sums, because they became poor now. The blackmailer when his interest decreased, with time transferred his activity to Jews. There was a rumor, that was his true business in Lwów (Ostrowiec being too small to spread one's wings) and this was the offense he was executed for. But the parents thought it prudent to remain silent, cut their losses and never to comment on this any more, never talk, not even to their son.

The astonishing fact was that despite everything they determined to pay for private lessons for Angus. The condition got so bad, they must sell their personal clothes to buy food and in winter, they burned in the stove only the cheap peat. It was a bad fuel, no-good for the permanent oven. It made necessary to buy a small round iron stove, and even there it was a problem to fire it, the peat smoked badly and produced little warmth. Nevertheless, they remained firm, they might go hungry and cold, but the money was first for Angus' education, an absolute priority. Angus had strong remorse; the heavy tutorial fee was many times worse than the money paid for the private school in Poznań. As only answer he heard again and again, that he was the most important family investment and he must learn, even if he and the whole family went hungry. Only he should look for results; "prudente age and respice finem."

There was an extra motivation. Initially, as science came easily, he began to neglect his work a bit, now he mobilized all his potential again. With Stach, who had a strong motivation of his own, they finished the whole annual third-class program in little more than three months and after a few weeks' break started the fourth, in September 1941. However, in the humanistic disciplines, Angus was still learning the second class. The whole group was weaker, and Angus started much worse prepared, he had to overcome many failings. However, the lectures were hugely attractive, by the merit of the teacher, Mrs. Piesewicz. As mentioned before, Angus thought her a brilliant, genial professor and a wonderful person and thanks to her, Angus grasped the domains which before he missed altogether.

Unexpected, Miss Piesewicz lowered substantially, by half, the tutoring fee, on her own initiative. She said, one member of the group pays more, because he is slow, so the other should pay less. Angus deep in his soul hoped that she did not notice the worsening circumstances, as some of the lessons took place in his home. It was a convenient place and if Professor Mazzurewicz and his daughter, Professor Piesewicz, had to teach at the same time, they could not use the one available chamber. Besides, it was on the way if either of them went to the city or returned from it, a nice walk between the fields. Professor Mazzurewicz came rarely, as all old men he followed routine so he preferred the adapted classroom in his home, it was his daughter who normally left the place to his disposition if the classes collided.

The lessons of the humanities began later and lasted longer. Mevrtheless, Angus did gain a very sound foundation. It was painful when Mrs. Piesewicz declared to his parents that she had taught Angus as much as she could herself, and now for the good of the pupil he should transfer into the care of Professor Jaruga. He was a permanent professional teacher of high school and an excellent scholar of Latin and Polish languages, while she was only an assistant teacher in wartime. To Angus' sorrow, his parents followed this advice in to spite of the financial difficulties. The tutorial fee was much higher, especially as they decided, because of the gap between the science and humanities programs, Angus should start immediately with individual lessons, not waiting for a full complete to form. It was a direct path to ruin. But Angus survived the separation with his idol so hard, he had not the strength to protest for of sound reason of economy. Anyway, knowing already what the beliefs of his parents were, it would be ineffective. After that, he only rarely in flying saw Mrs. Piesewicz in the house of Professor Mazzurewicz.

Nevertheless, but this means talking already about the future, the year 1941 was for Angus the best in all wartime, if not exactly happy, almost so. He found his way in life, developed, performing the task of learning better than others and this awareness was satisfying. The bad economical status made to him no difference, on the contrary, the former prosperity he recalled with a sense of blame. The time was so, all proper people became poor and this almost became regarded as decent.

And in the books of the Library of Science he found his own, private world, an unlimited field for fantasy unknown to the outsiders or glimpsed only in fragments. In addition he got permission to borrow books from the private library of Mr. Grankowski. Now he discovered there too something really precious, a collection of old newspapers from the end of the former century up to WW I and again from about 1923 to 1935, much more interesting than novels. Also something suited to him, in fact attractive for all teenagers and young people. It was a top edited and ambitious paper named "Kuźnica" (the forge, hotbed). A curious paper, subsided by the government and pro-sanatia, but discreet and intelligent, nothing like propaganda. In fact, young men from high schools got a free hand and opportunity to write whatever they chose, if only they could do it well. The result was splendid, a generation of young writers got their spurs. Many of them went away from sanatia later, maybe even to hostile opposition. Nevertheless, all of eminence, from right to the left, started here. Sure, it was a great, brilliant idea and it made an impact on Angus too, if not so great as the Library of Science, which determined his future life.

The house where they had lately come to live was without electricity, but in late summer 1941, as the days began to shorten, Father arranged for electric light installation. In result Angus could read to his heart's content, as much as before the war or even more. Sometimes never stopping, days and nights, if the parents did not protest. He had not enough time even to play chess with his good colleagues, Stach and Stephan, who were now in another complete, but with whom he met. The intensive reading made him feel better and better.

The parents arranged also some physical exercise or rather work. They made a deal with the priest Mlynkowski, for some small rent and a part of the harvest he allowed them the use of a piece of earth near the forest. It was the terrain on which the future church was to be built, right by the garden of Kawiorski. Meanwhile father and son kicked up the raw earth with spades, cultivating there many potatoes and afterward prepared nearby a place for setting tomatoes. Sometimes Angus hated the "healthy" physical exercise, but it proved better than he expected, in the next year they survived only thanks to this food the worst period of poverty.

People at first did not believe in the messages from the east front, about the colossal German victories; they thought them exaggerated. They considered simply, the bandits who attacked Poland and the rest of Europe, now quarreled and fought between themselves, both suffering heavy casualties. Up to now, the Germans were on top, but this might turn with time. There were rumors about great railroad transports of wounded German soldiers, matching the reports in the newspapers of huge Soviet casualties. Gradually, the public opinion changed. As long as the German propaganda praised the Soviets, calling them splendid sunny friends, who were building a fine new world in common with Hitler and Germany on the ruin of the foul democracy, the case was clear. They were as bad as the Nazi - mortal enemies. Now, influenced by the German propaganda in reverse, the sentiments softened: poor blokes, they allied with the devil incarnate, Hitler. They acted foul indeed, but now they were punished enough for their wrongdoings and regretting them bitterly. The Polish people forgave them from the heart. Anyway, they were now allies of the English, so of us too. Let bygones be bygones. Now we take the same side.

Anyway, the statistics about the incredible number of prisoners of war met with skeptical distrust. In the former campaigns, the number of captives was noted in thousands, except in France, where the badly commanded army wanted not to battle and protested by surrendering. Subjecting in a mass to captivity, the number grew in hundreds of thousands. Now the indicator scaled in millions. It seemed, if the communiqués were true, the end of the Red Army should have happen long ago, but the battles continued with unchanging intensity. The newspapers mentioned one, two, three, four millions of prisoners and the number continued to grow.

The people did not take this seriously, in fact telling jokes. For example, Stalin calls Hitler on telephone: "Are you ready to surrender? If not, prepare for more prisoners of war, we shall overload you with ten times as many, twenty, thirty, forty million. Lay down the weapons now, if not, I may send you even fifty million. "U nas ludi mnogo - (we have a lot of people)."

Suddenly these stupid jokes stopped, as everyone could see with his own eyes the macabre march of death. Later, in the last days of war, such gruesome proceedings, especially with concentration camp prisoners, happened more often. Earlier in 1939 sometimes Polish soldiers in captivity were treated similarly, but only sporadically, for a few days. However, on a full-scale, the ghastly nightmare began with the Russian prisoners.

The German escort rushed what seemed never-ending columns of prisoners of war, practically without food or even water. Whoever fell, or moved from his place only a few steps, got a bullet, or if already dying, was finished with the barrel or butt of the gun. There was not a question to throw a bit of bread, the escort shot not only any prisoner who fell only a step behind, but also anyone who approached. Before, as the groups of Jews were escorted for the construction of highways, it was possible to throw bread or something to eat, the security men threatened, but, according to Angus' knowledge, did not shoot. Here, approach was equivalent with suicide. In rags, sometimes enwrapped in dirty, bloody swaddles not deserving the name of bandage - these people went like automatons, sometimes falling down. The remaining corpses sometimes were carried away by a following wagon. More often, left for the local authorities to dispose of. No way to tell, how many died on average for every kilometer, it might be only one, or a few in other columns, nobody thought of statistics.

Some such columns went by the Ostrowiec highway this autumn, and a few in the following summer. This was not a constant heavily used main route. People said the great camps located near Przeworsk and Częstochowa, so there were many alternative routes. In Ostrowiec, for a temporary concentration camp the German used buildings of the high school and the elementary school opposite. Here the columns stopped for one, sometimes several days. In fact, the German escort took the buildings, the Soviet captives were held in the nearby yard, sports fields and so on. Two lines of barbed wire formed a hedge round the field and here, direct on the earth lay hundreds and thousands of deathly exhausted men, wherever they fell. The water was not enough for all of them, not to mention bread. Some tried to commit suicide, but it was not a simple matter in such a mass of people, especially as the Germans would treat those present nearby as co-responsible. Those concerned might be not ready to die at the same time, in company.

The prisoners prayed for bread and especially salt. People living nearby found ways and means to effect this. Even if the guards in camp were not so trigger-happy, it was still risky business and the amounts were small. And a good-thing, because shortly it became known, the salt was not for food, but served for suicide. The exhausted, weak and dehydrated men needed only about a handful of salt to lose consciousness, but the death did not come easy. The captive might lie in convulsions the whole day, sometimes two, before he expired. Poor devils, at least as the Germans registered them as sick and dead from natural causes there followed no repercussions. Maybe they were not sure, or maybe did not want an investigation, possibly paperwork. Anyway, they had enough of dead, and despised the sick.

Angus went at once to the Żeromski Street house where he lived before. He remembered correctly, from the window he had a straight line of sight on the yard and sport-grounds, the same place where he watched the infantrymen training. Now, by the barbed wire, lay some cadavers. But after a time, some of them were pulled by violent convulsions, as by grand malady. His first intent had been to go next to the brick house on the other side of the highway, near his first guru's home, where he could view also the other side. But now he had had enough, did not want to see any more. What a hell on earth. And he could do nothing, no way to help. Better to avert his ayes, the view was horrible; surely he shall not sleep this night. He never expected anything good, but how could human beings do something like this to other human beings? Were they human beings at all?

 Capsule: The fate of the Soviet captives.

The data from the OKW communiqués were not exaggerated, the Wehrmacht took in the year 1941 four and a half million captive Soviet soldiers and in the first half of 1942 one and a half to two million more. After this time, taking even one prisoner of war became an exceptional rarity. Hitler already officially declared in 1941, the Red Army stopped to exist and only the leftover debris would gradually undergo liquidation, likes a sweeping or cleaning. This was a false message and a great mistake, but not a full lie. The Red Army existing before the attack had been blasted away. From the five million at the western border, few, almost nobody survived, especially in captivity. If some might be lucky, Stalin had already ordered treatment of all prisoners of war as traitors. If Hitler neglected to kill them all in time, the rest should perish by order of Stalin.

Father, who had been in the Soviet Paradise himself and had run away through the green border to GG, explained to Angus behavior of Soviet soldiers. He told him that these people already walked in hell, but believed the propaganda that beyond the limits of the USSR the hell were still worse. When they entered Poland and other countries, they saw by their own eyes, that people can live different and better. It was a shock. Therefore, they surrendered easily, preferring to become POWs. He supposed, they probably were choosing a path out of Paradise.

However, Angus did not think so and this explanation was not right, or maybe only about a small part of the Red Army members. The majority, if willing to see other countries, would prefer to hit them as winners, conquerors. By no means would they plan to surrender in advance, subject to captivity only to run away from a bad government. The overwhelming part consisted of simple, ordinary soldiers (not monsters, as many people thought), compulsorily mobilized into the Army and surely convinced of Victory of a World Revolution and indoctrinated in-serv. If they were not exactly happy, they endured their fate and accepted the future. So, as they fell into captivity, not through their own fault, it was a bad fate that met them.

The idea that a whole army or society may consist of traitors only is not only absurd, it is a direct madness, paranoia. However, Stalin must have shared the suspicion, if he sentenced every one of the prisoners of war to death.

In every community, there is some percent of bad and good people, and the base consist of average, plain majority (statistically it about follows section of the Gauss line). If we take as, for example the percentage of potential traitors is normally 10%, it follows, that a society with 5% is solid and moral, and with 2% exceptional good, however one with 20% demoralized. However, by 90 or 80% there must be some error in algorithm or settings and foundation, this is impossible because it means there are no average people, so the norm is false. Such evaluation is tendentious, so it would be better to take a closer look at the small "right" percentage and especially, who puts up such estimation. As known, the French did not want to fight and surrendered in mass. Yet no one decided that all French people were traitors. If they were in Stalin's power, he definitely would order them all killed (but not in 1940 because then he was backing Hitler. The most defeatist slogans including the "We do not want to die for Gdansk," sourced from the French Communists Party, doing Stalin orders).

In such cases, not the soldiers are to blame, but the command. And this exactly concerns the millions of Soviet prisoners of war. They were not traitors, they were the betrayed, sold down the river.

The first line of the Red Army never had a chance. Exposed to attack without capacity of defense, in fact disarmed without live ammo, unable to return fire, they could only keep up appearances behind decorations of boundary fortifications, erected deliberately as a laughing matter for the Germans. Stalin tried at any price to buy a little more time, needed to prepare his offensive. To display peaceful intent, he behaved like a dog appeasing his master, laying on his back and placing the vulnerable parts at the mercy of his partner. For example, he forbade shooting at the German reconnaissance planes flying low to their heart's content over the Red Army positions. In the last week's swarms of them entered the Soviet territory at their will. Also, he forbade to return fire, if even the Germans should shoot first. At the last moment on the 22nd of June, as it already became known the German Army was moving and shooting, the Soviet command urgently wanted to put the Army to an alarm status. But Stalin did not allow this. Hours after, he granted permission to defend Soviet territory, but avoiding any possibility of provocation. This could be understood as further prohibition on taking any action against the enemy.

But Hitler didn't delay and bit deep into the exposed, tender flesh. The second and third lines of the Red Army were in not much better condition. They might already know the war had started, but left without orders they dared not take any action. It is necessary to bear in mind that recently the Red Army had been decimated by Stalin, who murdered about eighty percent of the superior staff and more than half the officers. Especially all who might have any opinion of their own, paid with their heads. Stalin proved much more dangerous than any enemy did and had only just begun to rebuild the army, in a blind obedience. Besides, there were not any plans for defense, only for an attack. When at last the orders for battle came, they could only perform the plans of offensive without any reconnaissance, not knowing what was in front of them. Exactly this happened with the strongest group of Red Army located on the so-called Bialystok projection, which first attacked into a vacuum, when the Germans enclosed them from both sides. The following tank battle decided the Luftwaffe, with the Red Air Force already inactivated.

A wild chaos followed, and then panic and retreat. The Soviet commanders did not know the position, were unable to fetch information, not only where was the enemy, but even where might be their own units. Not to mention, what are the plans and purposes of their superiors and most vital of all, what to do to satisfy Stalin. That being so, in battle against an army well trained and with experience of two years of war, up to now always victorious, at the peak of her capability, the Red Army could only lose, and quickly. When at last Stalin came out of the shock which caused a nervous breakdown and apathy (he remained incommunicado for two weeks), he immediately picked himself as supreme Commander. Before, the role was formally up to Timoshenko, but he could not issue orders without Stalin's acceptance, and for an opportunity to see the master he must wait, sometimes long. However, this did not make the situation any better, because Stalin issued many absurd commands, sometimes in a surrealistic manner.

As an example may serve the story about the Special Military District of Kijow. The commander was the General Colonel Michail Pietrowitsh Kipronos, one of the few who survived the great purge. He happily occupied at the time a secondary position, as a commander of the infantry officer school in Kazan. In the empty niche, he was rapidly promoted, worshipping in public the Great Teacher, acting as yes-man and at every opportunity trying to appease. Luck continued during the first period of war, because the German impact directed not into his zone, rather north.

Besides, he had at his disposal thirty-two divisions of infantry, sixteen armored and eight mechanized, so it was not too bad against an enemy which hit with twenty-four infantry divisions and nine armored. Even if the German divisions had more men, and some of Soviets divisions reorganized. However, the big trump was the stronghold of Kijów. A part of the Stalin Line, adapted for a round defense, it was territorially the largest fortress in the Soviet Union and probably in Europe. The fortifications had not been modernized lately and in the last two years disarmed. Anyway, the army had its own arms and could introduce them into the forts and set up more complimentary field fortifications, as was done in Sevastopol, a much older fortress.

So, Kipronos was in a comparatively comfortable position, not seriously oppressed and had ample time for a decision. He could command the retreat of his army with a finger in his nose. Or close in the fortress with full equipment and survive there each siege, surely till the winter. He did nothing of the sort, waiting a longtime for orders, which did not come. Avoided any suggestions, because he feared to antagonize Stalin, who first commanded to defend the fortified position and next, to make a retreat right now. These directives he changed several times, but Kipronos accepted every one without questions, as the voice of God. At last, when the troops were already enclosed in the stronghold, he got an order to leave the fortifications with all the heavy equipment and lead the men in open field to enforce retreat without any aerial support. Most of aircraft was destroyed in the airports already on the first day of war, June 22. It was a long way back to reach the front and it was necessary first to pierce the German Army, a longtimectorious and towards which the Soviets had already developed a genuine inferiority complex. No way to expect a good end.

When the armies got smashed in four parts, but still not definitively beaten and destroyed, Kipronos received a new order. He had to leave his soldiers, run away with his staff only, and after this, appear before His Highness. There is no mistake, such infamous procedures set a precedent and Stalin ordered his generals always to abandon the soldiers, if any army placed in a scratchy corner. First, it was his own privilege to kill them, second, he could not chance that if caught by the enemy, they might commit treason, which he considered most natural. In case some general might not listen to orders and should want to share the fate of his soldiers to the bitter end, members of a company protecting the staff, secret NKWD men, had an errand to kill him. Such was the case with Wlassow, who got wounded in a murderous attempt as a skirmish resulted soldiers between loyal to him and the security force. He fell into German captivity, which probably could never have happened had he remained conscious.

Such description of these events Angus heard two years later, from a tale of one Soviet soldier who managed to escape from the captives' column, finally to a Saszka squad of Soviet guerrillas, remaining in contact with Polish guerrillas. Of course he never could say if this story was correct, this was only a rumor, heard second hand (or rather mouth). The person telling got repatriated to the USSR and after that no one heard from him, nor managed to get one letter by mail. Probably, he was unable to talk.

However the gist of all this is, the poor people normally were led direct to slaughter and left there without a chance, any capacity of defense. Dropped by their command as the leftovers of an army, as quarry to the victorious enemy, they tried to run and were caught. If they surrendered, they made personally a bad mistake, but neither a dishonor nor an offense. Stalin calculated to cheat his partner by an incredibly stupid behavior and prepare an unexpected attack. He could not carry out this because the individual concerned was every cent equal in cunning and deviousness, but more intelligent. When this plan turned into a catastrophe, as always he thought of how to throw his personal blame on the shoulder of others with himself in the role of the judge, sentencing the imaginary culprits with severe punishment. He issued a sentence of death to all soldiers who had the bad luck to fall victim to his maniacal conceptions and, alas, action.

This was probably the cruelest crime committed in WW II. The biggest crimes, each with similar number, about six million corpses, are: killing almost twenty percent of Poland' population, killing nearly six million Jews, and killing the whole generation of men doing compulsory service in the Red Army.

The author, despite being a Pole and therefore maybe not always objective, still regards the last massacre as being the worst. It lasted a longtime in public view of all the world, which averted its eyes and never wanted to notice it. Practically the same happened with the Holocaust and as bad, about decimating of the Polish population. But only with Soviet captives, the free world actively helped Stalin to catch the last survivors after the war and return them to the USSR. It had already become known it was only death that awaited them. Perhaps some people may think it was a hard, but necessary measure from the initiative of Stalin, who had to stop the panic in the army, desertion, defeatism and so on. However, it is a lie, the inhuman program of Hitler was enough to convert the war from a comfortable blitz to a zoological battle for an all-out destruction.

Maybe some of the Russian soldiers surrendered too easily, although put in such a hopeless position, they could not do anything more. Or, so they believed at the time, knowing only instructions, never allowing for the unexpected. Yet, when the news about the fate of the captives hit the market and confirmed, these fellows realized that a fast death on a battlefield is better. This was enough to change them to the most fearless combatants. Stalin needed add nothing.

Stalin had other motives. Every chieftain of bandits, professional chief of gangsters or capo of Mafioso's well knows the inconvenience and nuisance of any witness. It is enough to rub out all witnesses, remove them, dispose of them (any other euphemism will do, the meaning is clear) and no jury can sentence him, no crime can be punished. One can say, the case finishes to exist. More so, the criminal may present his own version of the truth, publicize himself as a hero instead of a monster. That exactly was the matter with Stalin, not some problems about right and bad. The Great Teacher and Leader proved himself an obtuse and stupid imbecile, committed such idiotic errors and miscalculated so badly, that any politician of rank after such disgrace could not govern. In civilized countries he should resign, in less civilized be overthrown and perhaps murdered. However, Stalin thought differently, he never performed any error; he was a prophet, superman. If he did not allow himself to be recognized as God, it was only because this would be difficult to settle with materialism and Marxism. He never cared about such trivial matters as facts, creating his own history, any man in the USSR must believe in this, or perish. As simple as that.

It seems incredible how in the twentieth century (even now and may the good Goodness forbid, but possibly also in future) people accept any obvious nonsense, extreme lie, if coming from top and supported by an impressive force. It seems that after millenniums no evolution, no mental progress has occurred; the people live in a madhouse and do not care about any truth, not to say dignity. Reading of the one and only, special "historic" work of Stalin "The Short Course of WKP(b) History", makes an unforgettable, shattering impact. Mixture of the mind of a troglodyte with the debility of a moron. Everyone may seek the book in a library only to take a look with his own eyes, an experience unique indeed. It seems confusing, how this mixture of primitive lies with obvious fabrications could not bring ridicule on the author. To the contrary, it was printed in hundreds of millions and worshipped over decades, like a contemporary gospel. This happened not only in communistic countries. Toward the end, every student to get a scientific degree had to make a special examination at the University about this foul imagination. All who would not believe, disappeared. Stalin had practiced all this many times before and was sure of the effect.

The same procedure repeated on a grand scale in WW II. Stalin never committed any

smallest error, all the time with an eagle eye did penetrate the political and military plans of all the ungodly and, victorious, saved from danger first the USSR, next the entire world. A plot of bad capitalists threatened the whole earth, but due to a brilliant diplomacy, he first made them fight between themselves. He never allied with Hitler, never attacked any country, only spread his wings to protect the people endangered and prepared for the Red Army a skillful chosen new defense boundary. Not an easy task, because Hitler took possession of all of Europe, achieving a huge superiority of men and weapons. However, because of the excellent strategy of Stalin, Hitler exhausted the power of his armies, never breaking the elastically commanded retreat of the Russian front, his superiority of numbers diminished and finally crashed. The sole merit of beating the Nazi and all the weight of WW II embraced exclusively the USSR, which after Soviet data, met about ninety-eight percent of the expenses and engaged at least ninety percent of German troops.

The material assistance of the Allies was insignificant, did not surpass two percent of the war production of the USSR and even then was relatively valueless, of low quality. As for a warfare of the Allies, it is not proper to mention this, most of it only a simulation. Stalin all the time led a correct political line and prepared the country for emergency. However many officers by a lack of vigilance caused an opportunity for the people aiming at the decay of state and ready to help any external enemy by treason. These individuals had long been the internal enemy, hated communism, but could do nothing against the great loyal majority. At the start of war they believed now at last came the moment to show their true face. These vile treacherous surrenders had already incurred, or would incur, a severe but fair punishment.

It was immaterial and unimportant, that these people were his followers, who fulfilled only truly and blindly his orders, which was their only fault. However, they were the potential witnesses, they knew the truth. They could tell how they were deceived, left in a slaughterhouse and the leader, whom they trusted, failed. This could be dangerous and that is why all the millions of witnesses had to be rubbed out. Nothing personal, a hard need, but not one of the soldiers who fell into German captivity should survive. Nobody could deny the false legend about the Great Teacher.

A good deal of the work had already been done by Hitler, who ordered right at the start the murder of ten to twenty percent of the six and a half million prisoners. Of the rest, more than half lost their lives to the end of the war. On the 6th of June 1941, about two weeks before the onset, Hitler issued an order about the political commissars. This was to immediately search out among the captives the commissars and kill them outright after interrogation. Hitler announced two reasons: first, the USSR had never signed the Geneva Convention about prisoners of war, so it did not apply to the Soviets. Second, the commissars were too dangerous. This was not a conventional war, but a life-and-death fight between two ideologies, no room for sentiment or respect. (He probably remembered how the German Army demoralized at the end of WW I and was afraid to take the risk.)

So the political commissars and all party members were to be shot, also all people under suspicion, better a little exaggeration, than let any guilty escape. First segregation performed the Wehrmacht, the next, through a special agreement with the RHSA (Reichshauptsicherheitamt) the specialized death units, SS-Einsatzkommandos headed by Himmler, but really organized under the command of Heydrich. After this, still another part of the prisoners they selected out to concentration camps, factories of death.

Probably in the first sequence nearly nine hundred thousand may have been killed, because the communiqués of OKW mention the number of 4,5 million POW taken in 1941, and afterwards the accounts concern only 3,6 million. Obvious, nobody dared to cite the number of the murdered according with the highest order in the account. Still, it is possible the nine hundred thousand figure includes some alive turncoats, although in 1941 the Germans accepted only few of them, no more than one hundred thousand.

But on a mass scale, the greatest mortality was caused by the inhuman conditions of life, first hunger, next cold (the captives were not allowed in 1941 to live in buildings), and bad sanitary conditions.

In the letter from A. Rosenberg to W. Keitel, dated the 28th of February 1942, he wrote: "From the number of 3.6 million prisoners of war, only a few hundred thousand remain able to work today. A large part perished from great hunger, others from bad weather or by typhoid. In most camps there were not any quarters, the prisoners remained in rain and snow under the naked sky. They did not get even instruments to excavate caves. They could not wash and even the cleaning from parasites neglected. Often could be heard statements such as: the more prisoners of war die out, all the better for us."

Probably Alfred Rosenberg wrote this not from humanitarian reasons, but he considered it an unheard-of waste, when the arms industry suffered an extreme lack of hands to work. (Nevertheless, in private, the author hopes, maybe Rosenberg was still a little human. Born in Russia he knew these people, had another conception of war, but could not persuade Hitler. Maybe he used these arguments because only such could be effective.)

Examples:

The commander of the Brzezinka branch in construction of the camp Oświęcim (Ausschwitz-Bibkenau) Hoess wrote in a report about the ten thousand captives assigned to work in November 1941: "According to the directive of Reichsfuerer (Himmler) there should be fetched only the particularly strong prisoners capable of heavy work. However, on the way they received no food at all. During breaks in a march, they were allowed to search out anything edible right on the closest field. Eager to work, but could perform nothing by the reason of extreme illness. They died as flies exhausted, or from any disease, against which the receded organism could not defend itself. I know for certain they were given special additions of food, but too late and without result, the destroyed organism was not in condition to digest this. I saw many dying, while devouring potatoes or beetroots. Some hundreds only lasted to 1942."

(Comment: Remember the ancient Greeks story about Geofagos? It is a little known fact, that every hectare of cultivated earth includes several tons, sometimes up to ten, of a biomass type of primitive animal life. To be sure, most of the organisms are too small, but there always remain some hundreds of kilos of the greatest. These people, if they did not known about the ancient story, may have heard about a similar behavior during the great hunger in the Ukraine. Though hard and messy, it proved better than cannibalism and many people survived the experience; still, in times of severe cold this method proved inadequate.)

The camp Hammerstein, Stalag 315 (IIF, after 1945 in Poland, Czarne near Człuchów). "On the sandy field of the camp were neither shrubs nor vegetation which could give a shelter or food. Prisoners stayed all December on the open field permanently; only later, they made first elements of buildings. Meantime these prisoners tried to excavate temporary shelters in the ground for the nights with spoons, but in the unstable earth, they easily got full of sand, in the morning the people were dead, if found. Other prisoners of war tighten into groups to conserve warmth. Such crowd moved in time of bad weather from the line of barbed wire to the side opposite, because those being on the windy side after a time proceeded to take their place back.

"In the so-called battalion of sick, the patients who survived typhoid or other diseases were forced to daily gymnastics, to find out and eliminate the weakest..."

(Comment: December 1941 was exactly the time when transports of frozen meat arrived in Germany from around Moscow; frozen meat, having previously been German soldiers. It was an exceptional severe winter and they were exceptional poorly equipped.)

Obviously in his letter Rosenberg omitted the case of those captives renegades and turncoats, who decided to put on enemy uniforms. At the start, it happened rarely, but Germans tried immediately to build up the ethnic differences, separating the Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, even Georgians and so on. After a time, they allowed forming more subsidiary police squads, or transferred some of the captives on the status of enslaved compulsory workers, subjected to police oversight, but the rules and conditions being much better, without any comparison.

There were rumors about creating an army of a million, called ROA (Ruskoj Oswoboditielnoj Armii), but this proved a great exaggeration. The mentioned General Wlassow, taken into captivity, agreed to collaborate with the Germans and organized such an army, but only small. The three divisions and a few incomplete squads never surpassed a hundred thousand, because the Germans and Hitler never trusted them. The ROA commander tried to save as many men as he could. In fact, he fell into captivity wounded and unconscious because he did not want to quit his soldiers, decided to share their fate to the end and the NKWD men tried to erase him. Now, he took on to build a good army, regular and disciplined, with a human face. Therefore, Hitler stopped this and interrupted a further growth of ROA, but instead created many other auxiliary formations, with poor subordination, in fact undisciplined and wild.

It would be difficult to judge these people placed in such terrible conditions and not by their own fault. It was as if suddenly the earth vanished under their legs, they fell in a hell much worse than the one they knew in their own country. Some wanted to save themselves, maybe hoping they might be not forced to do exactly the worst. Some might have thought it was only temporary, to survive now and find a niche till the war ended. The author wondered many times whether Hitler created such conditions deliberately, calculating the captives would plead for active service in the German Army as sole hope of survival. If so, the results were scratchy, not any better than the average which could be expected from the probability calculation. In fact, several times more perished than became turncoats and even from these, Hitler gained not a great service. The exact data are unknown, but it may be that twice as many died as survived, about half of them being enslaved workers and the second half traitors and turncoats, but not much use, not motivated. So the balance may be, up to twenty percent were killed right at the start, then about forty to fifty percent were tormented to death. Despite all this maybe up to fifteen percent survived as workers and an equal number or less as turncoats.

After Rosenberg' letter the conditions changed a little for the better. The Soviet captives were still not protected by law, but were not murdered so quickly, for economic reasons. Das Reich could not stand nor allow such waste of labor potential. If all assigned to death, first they had to give up every drop of sweat and strength still left in them. They served for the roughest tasks. For example, formed in Arbeitsbattalions, they build the colossal underground objects, destination secret and in part unknown even now, as if by magic safe from any bombardment. The mortality was high, but anyway not one worker left the structures alive; the rest remained buried right there. "Geheime Reichssache" (State secret).

In all, maybe one and a half to two million captives of war survived to Germany's surrender. They got fetched (the euphemism was: repatriated) back to the USSR and soon, all landed in camps of the far north. Nobody left these camps alive, but first as before, the poor people had to leave there every bit of their strength. Only the strongest were able to survive, such men as the saying goes, who had not only seven (like cats), but more, at least nine lives.

At least a certain number of the Soviet captives wanted not to return to the USSR. Maybe they had a bad premonition or were more intelligent than the others and guessed what awaited them, or they really acted wrong, or had enough of the "Red Paradise" and simply wanted to see a piece of world. A great majority were repatriated compulsorily; the Allied authorities at the demand of the Soviet Mission allowed the application of force, even violence.

Only a few managed to hide in the millions of the so-called DPs (displaced persons), people removed by force from their homes and country and transported to slave labor in Germany. These people were not subjected to a compulsory repatriation, the Soviets could persuade, organize informative meetings, try propaganda, but not brute force; nevertheless they did sometimes, but quietly, secretly and inconspicuously. So, for the tracing and killing of these who luckily took cover and not, as fans of sensation in movies and books may now assume, to fight with James Bond, Stalin created a special Department of KGB, called Smert. A powerful organization, covering the whole world and having at its disposal unlimited means in money and men, hunted the runaways in all countries, all corners of the earth. It respected neither any law, nor the local police nor security. A lot of the former Repatriation Mission men, after doing their first task, took a second specialization and became successful professional killers, next advancing to KGB spy nets.

It is almost unbelievable that such enormous means and work they exerted only to exterminate the group of accidental witnesses, who had the misfortune to be at a wrong time and place. Meaning, at the front and having to know the true face of their leader. Anyway, probability means that of the great numbers some may survive. They kept silent, knowing they would have not a chance if they called attention to themselves or made possible the identification. They remained effectively muzzled.

Summer 1941 was hot, almost tropical and humid, with showers and thunderstorms; autumn also warm and long, if not a comparison to the exceptional warm and clear of i939.

Winter came suddenly with the second week of December and sharp frosts started about the middle of the month. All the war winters were severe, but none equal to the first, in 1939; never came the thermometers so low (but only those with alcohol, quicksilver turned solid long ago) and snow so deep. If not the worst, the winter was bad enough. As Angus walked daily to the lessons, it was difficult not to step away from the narrow path between fields, which were unrecognizable in the deep snow. Sometimes, if the day was misty, he felt lost, although he walked the same way every day since the summer. Yes, but the fields promoted at the time a good crop and the visibility was clear, but now occasionally only a few meters. Anyway, it was never too bad, it never happened that he had to retreat. He always managed to go on (in 1939 it would have been impossible)

In fact it was not his personal merit, rather that of his boots. e early spring of this year the help committee distributed among the former concentration camp prisoners deported without any personal belongings and thrown out from the cattle wagons some four hundred kilometers from their former houses, American gifts. Angus gained what he needed most, shoes. Too great even for his formidable feet (he must stuff them), but indestructible, from genuine, soft but strong and thick leather, with soft, quiet soles of some plastic, simply a dream. They lasted the whole war including the 1944 months as a guerrilla, during which a bullet separated one sole, wounding his foot, but the shoe suffered worse, anyway given repair they served a couple of years after the war. In such boots, one could go anywhere, never mind the sharp frost, wind, even snowstorm. The way took in the winter more time, over half an hour compared to the fifteen, in a hurry even ten minutes in summer. Sometimes it seemed the journey would never end. Especially in the poor visibility after the early December twilight or when the sharp wind threw snow, one could hold direction only by feeling the wind.

As the sharp frosts began, the Germans declared a new "Blitz" action, collecting warm clothes for the troops. The Poles were not in the mood to offer anything, so they were often forced on the streets to spring out from their overcoats, especially if visibly warm (for example furs) and to "offer" them at gunpoint. But after such a plain robbery they warmed up to hear the pleasant messages, how poorly the German Army was equipped for the winter. More so, the rumors circulated about huge transports of German soldiers just thawing or solidly frosted, coming from the east front. However, nobody knew the German losses were much smaller in comparison to the freezing prisoners of war mentioned before.

In fact, the German Army was badly prepared for the winter conditions, direct a compromising matter. They had made already a great progress compared to the winter of 1939, when the German soldiers were as helpless and unprotected as blind and naked puppies. Since this time, they had collected the experience of two heavy, sharp winters, but still, their vehicles and tanks would not start in sharp frost and weapons would not shoot. They not the lubricants adapted to low temperatures. Incomprehensible, how anyone could be so obtuse, not forecast a simple order of nature.

The worst problem was dress, the normal uniforms made of wool. The only rather funny improvements of the overcoats were several buttons between the legs, allowing the formation of a substitute of second trousers. Yet the soldiers must lie for hours, sometime days in a deep snow under hail of bullets. Indispensable for this was clothing with several layers, assuring a good isolation. The public donation of warm clothing was in fact a public compromise and embarrassment, a public announcement of negligence and failure. The Soviets, dressed in simple and cheap uniforms consisting of two layers of water-proof tissues stuffed with cotton and pierced like a quilt, were infinitely superior. In fact, it was the typical clothing of prisoners from the deep north camps. The mobilized prisoners brought them exactly in the rushed alarm mode with transports of fresh gun fodder, when the regular Red Army disintegrated. A part was fresh dyed white for winter, others stockpiled for the regular "siero-gawiennaja odswieta," the Poles called this a shitty color. They substituted the former uniforms, assuring the Red Army a great advantage in the winter.

Obviously, the Germans with Hitler in command, including their military experts both of the "Fuererhauptquatier" and the General Staff (before Hitler liquidated it) considered the war a seasonal condition. The planned it only in summer and autumn. Best of all, after the harvest and rarely also in spring. In the wintertime, the soldiers should sit in a warm accommodation and prepare for new campaigns. Stupid, but Hitler knew only the west front in WW I, nothing about heavy winter conditions, lack of imagination limited him. He imposed on his yes-generals (the only sort he tolerated, like Lo-Keitel) the conviction they were to end this war before the winter. No sweat at all, then the Wehrmacht might rest and if necessary. In springtime it could continue to liquidate, whatever remnants of the Red Army Stalin might manage to collect again over the winter.

It is astonishing that none of the competent officers dared to set him straight on how poorly the Wehrmacht prepared for a deep frost. Especially, considering that the allied Finland Army was perfectly adapted. Finnish soldiers could, according to the instruction book, survive in open field or forest, in deep snow and ice to the temperature of -50 degrees C. Their arms still could shoot and all the technical equipment performed up to this temperature. In the period of the roughest heavy winter of 1939, Finnish soldiers prevailed through just this ability to act in the most extreme weather. They became a part of environment, united with nature. Therefore, the few Finns could resist the huge mass of the Red Army, but as the weather got better, the sheer weight of the Soviets gradually overpowered their defense. They had to surrender, but now, they allied with the Germans, to recover their lost land, Karelia. In fact, it was an effect of the rough and stupid politics of Stalin. If he had not attacked this small state in 1939, with the false grounds of assuming better safety and more foreground for the capital of Leningrad, the Finns would never have allied with the Germans in 1941. This little country would remain neutral, like Sweden. It would never come to the terrible blockade of Leningrad with the horrific toll of hunger among the civil population. The results of Stalin's action in 1939 turned opposite to his declarations.

Even now, if Hitler and his closest advisers and yes-men were not irresponsible madmen, they should ask this ally knowing the problems and technically prepared for the worst frosts, for aid and professional expertise on winter campaigns. Maybe also for transferring a few hundred Finnish military advisers and instructors. But with luck for humanity, Hitler was exactly such a proud and top-lofty madman with a swollen head, who always know better and had several times already squandered his best chances. It was not accidentally, but the essential, basic feature of his character. The source of his early successes, but afterwards of all disasters. Besides, once a gambler, always a gambler, sure of himself and always bringing up the stakes if he won. Also if he lost and wanted to recover the losses (which was relatively only the smallest of his many defects). itler, after routing the Red Army on the Central front and tightening the noose around Leningrad on the North did not try to take Moscow from the march. On the South front over the Germans hung a powerful group of armies. They had a fortified base in the Special Military District in Kijów. Some analogy to the battle by Kutno in the campaign 1939. Hitler remembered still the painful lesson, which had almost ended with his defeat.

Only after removing this danger, which occupied almost all the September, did the Germans regroup their troops. It was necessary to draw much ammo, supplies and whatever attachments were necessary, the rears stayed far back and with a growing distance (now almost up to two thousand kilometers from Germany), this was not a simple task. The problems of transport were difficult, more so, as patrols of Polish "Fan" from the former Polish territory started sabotage actions, the initiative quickly copied and repeated by the Soviets, on bigger scale.

With all the preparations, only in November did Hitler throw all available power on Moscow. At the same time, he declared (the statement reprinted by all the newspapers) the Red Army was already destroyed and he demanded from his soldiers the last push. After this they could rest and enjoy. It was accepted with confidence, because everything he declared until now had proved true (alas, unfortunately).

At the opposite side of the front the Soviets piled all the recently formed new units strengthened by the elite troops from the Far East, from the stripped bare Japanese border. However, the biggest asset was, that Stalin at last resigned from issuing orders direct, to command the Red Army remotely by phone, nominating a special envoy, General Żukow (Zhukow, see Chapter 3). Though even then, at least a few times he made a bad mess in command, as for example when he mistook on the map two localities with similar name. He got violently disturbed, because he reasoned the Germans must have broken the Soviet front and appear unexpectedly very near and began to panic, demanding immediate assistance from units engaged elsewhere. When pulling them out of the battle, with some luck, Żukow managed to tame him. Not an easy task, because Stalin was very suspicious and had already assumed it might be treason.

Despite all, the Germans pushed back the Russian defense and for a time managed to outflank the capital. However, they could never enclose it, their time ended rapidly. At last, heavy frosts came in the middle of the battle and suddenly the German Army experienced a bad crisis. Hitler turned it into a full disaster by forbidding the only rational step, a fast retreat. Not realizing the effect of low temperatures on the German technical equipment (never mind the people), with the obstinacy of a maniac he ordered further attacks. Finally, when this proved futile, he persisted to stick to every meter of the achieved boundary, at any price. The price turned high, costing the Wehrmacht hundred of thousands of frozen and killed.

Nobody dared to risk the words of truth to the dilettante Commander in Chief and amateur dictator and the Wehrmacht ended the year with about a million dead. The numbers vary, but the less is about eight hundred thousand. Indeed only a fragment of Soviet losses, but anyway, it had badly shaken the Germans, especially as the losses in the first months were relatively small. If this time the supplied men filled up the army, however, Germany had also much smaller reserves of men than the USSR. Also, the Soviets came out from the last round with a blow. Besides, the war stopped being a good interest, investment and fun. The enthusiasm for the Fuehrer expired, especially among simple soldiers, who found no opening and personal benefit. Only those who in the war found their chance and material gain, still believed him the risk was worth it.

In fact, December brought a lot more news. The 7th of December, just at the time the German tanks attacked Moscow, their weapons shooting or not because of low temperature, Angus awoke in night and pronounced to his parents just now, America and Japan had started war. He told the same to his colleagues and some other people. Nobody believed him, but afterwards many remembered. In a couple of days, all newspapers were full of news about Pearl Harbor.

A curious experience. In the morning and indeed all-day, Angus was under an overwhelming spell, plastic and colorful impression of the dream. From infancy never had he had such a detailed, perfect vision, a longtime after awakening not sure what was reality and what dream. However, it surely was not a sleep of prophecy. It had nothing common with the "res gestae" (genuine events), but was a pure fantasy.

In the dream, he was inside a powerful, ironclad tower, which contained three huge guns. If never having seen a similar construction before, he had read descriptions and instinctively knew this was the artillery tower of a ship, a big one, at least a heavy cruiser or better. The caliber of the guns suggested this (though he could not be sure if this caliber was 406 or only 380). Nevertheless, he was sure this was an American ship and they were at maximum speed approaching a Japanese fleet opposite, both fleets searching for each other.

Angus was looking out from one of the observation slits, although it crossed his mind that it was absurd. Long before he may see anything, all the loudspeakers from the central observation post would tell everybody. Then he would surely still see nothing, even if these loudspeakers pronounced the coordinates of the target. He could not expect that his eyes could compete with the powerful observation set-up on the central tower, with all the powerful kolidars, radars, and optical auto focus, whatever. Besides, even if he could not see it, he was sure the aircraft too had started, already searching for the enemy. He awoke exactly at the moment when he heard a coarse sound from the loudspeaker, the first foreshadow of the message about to follow. Then, he was awake and the rest of the night and morning he was regretting not having heard what came next. He tried to sleep again, but alas, such dreams do not happen often, he could not see it again; he had as clear an mpression as if he really had taken part in all the events.

After two or three days, as all newspapers brought details about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the terrible fate of the US Pacific Fleet, he realized there were no analogies. On the American fleet, all slept fair, when the unexpected aerial attack, a genuine end of the world, destroyed the ships. There was not the smallest likeness to his vision, except the war really had started.

The only explanation which Angus could associate with the facts was that some time before he had read, with the help of his mother, the German weekly magazine Das Reich. There was an extensive article, one of those predicting devoted to the so-called Atlantic Chart, mostly in an unfavorable tone. There was attached a satirical drawing, primitive, like the Poles had grown familiar to see, also after the war, under the communist regime. On the board stood Churchill, with dog's features and a cigar between his teeth, holding a bottle of whisky (however, he had human hands and legs). Beside him Roosevelt in a careless apparel, obviously sick and suffering, holding the newly signed declaration and trying to salute. The cruiser is firing in honor of the moment, but the missiles, making circles in the air, fall down in the sea or on board the ship and Churchill bubbles, "Ich glaube, es war ein faules Pu… Pul… Pulver!" (I believe it was a faulty powder!).

Clearly, the Germans did not like neither the Chart, nor the declaration of goals and made a good face to a bad game. Angus' sleep was probably a memento of this drawing and some remark in the paper, that Japan was not pleased either.

 Capsule: Hitler saves Roosevelt much fatigue and embarrassment, declaring war on the US.

The United States is nearly unable to start a war, at least this is a hard and difficult task for them, because it requires a consistent decision of the President, Senate, and Congress. Such an arrangement has its good and bad sides. The legal intent was, the US should never begin aggressive wars, without definite conviction of public opinion, a good point. On the other side, keeping democratic procedures, it is necessary to win first a distinct majority, which takes much time and sweat. Thus, the US were in a position of a boxer, beginning always with long-signaled blows. No surprise action is possible.

In WW II the standard procedure of the aggressors was an unexpected attack, even without any declaration of war, which they called bourgeois superstition. The trickier the better. At best, the war would be preceded by declarations of friendship, unlimited and forever, to the last minute before onset. The public declaration of friendship or diplomatic sweet talk could point out, a dangerous preparation of aggression is in progress. Nevertheless, as everyone could see from the events of 1941, the surprise was still effective.

No democratic country, including the US, would act this way. The long and difficult discussion was unavoidable. America could proceed only if a clear majority was sure there existed an immediate and clear danger. The only other possibility was, if the war could follow automatically from a system of alliances, but Senate and Congress should first approve the alliances, what would mean a credit of confidence to the allies. But from the end of WW I to WW II, both the Senate and Congress wanted not to give such a credit of confidence, avoiding such alliances.

Still up to December 1941 Roosevelt and his Cabinet, despite their distinct regard for the efforts and endeavors of England and democracy, could not persuade the people to approach the war. The opinion of majority did not see such a need; with all the sympathy they accepted only moral and material support to the opponents of Hitler. Neutrality meant good business and besides, both the Nazi Germany and the Fascist Italy still had some influential partisans and extended lobby.

Now the enemy solved this difficult problem. Already the next day, the 8th of December Senate and the US Congress voted to declare war on Japan. It became a source of indiscriminate jokes in the German press, but even to the Poles it seemed an amusing gesture without meaning. The war was already going and had begun with a heavy defeat of the USA, followed by a series of catastrophes. The Japanese beat the Americans in any place and time they wanted, they beat also the English, Dutchmen, no one was safe. This was plain self-defense and not lucky so far, so a declaration of war from the side of the victim looked a bit ridiculous, as a declaration of intent without something more to back it. Like one who gets a bad whipping and unable to come to his feet is threatening what he will do to the assailant - if he only gets his feet.

The series of dramatic gestures was continued by Hitler, who in three days unexpectedly declared war on the USA, delivering at the time a pompous speech. Without doubt, it was the act of a madman. Even after declaration of war on Japan, pushing a similar vote on Germany would cost much time and energy. That energy Roosevelt much needed for action, making easy concrete preparations of indispensable military steps. By this empty gesture (Germany was unable to launch serious operations against the USA), Hitler very-much speeded up Roosevelt's action, taking away the obstacles from under his legs.

Perhaps, it may be a result of the fact the last time a US President allowed arming the boats and opening fire in case of assault by submarines, as well as ordering the fleet to aid the American boats. Possibly, Hitler counted the submarines might decide the war, throw England on her knees, if he commanded to destruct all boats in the Atlantic. Even so, the gesture was pointless, because the Germans had started an unlimited underwater war already and destroyed every boat they met, including American, going also secretly in the territorial waters of the USA. Despite this, the United Stated had so far declared no war on Germany, the President allowed only for self-defense. Now the strategic and tactical conditions did not change much, only they openly attacked also the coastal transport of the US.

Tthe preparation took about one month ("Operation Paukenschlag"). At first, the submarines sank more boats, but not many. This depended mostly on the effective capacity of the subs, which already stretched to the limit. If they waited longer, especially until they produced more subs, it could be a lot worse. Now, the threat for coastal trade and transport speeded up to produce a better, more efficient method of braving the submarines with the aid of aviation. This method, launched earlier on the coasts of England and now developed in the US, in time cut out the submarines. Nevertheless, the danger lasted about one and a half years more and meantime the crisis got serious, with huge losses indeed.

As Pearl Harbor brought about a fundamental change of politics, after time appeared a story that Roosevelt, the government and top command secretly invoked this disaster, because despite their biggest efforts, they could not manipulate the US into the war. This surely seems the notorious dream of a drunken gardener, or rather of some desperate reporter, chasing any stupid sensation because he was not able to spot any reasonable news.

"Das Oberkommando der Wehrmach gibt bekannt: an der Ostfront griff der Feind mit starken Kraeften vergeblich an", Angus read loudly. A wonder, this already destroyed Red Army attacks, somehow managed to amass serious powder. Those attacks were always futile, nevertheless, the front came back and the Germans retreated one or two hundred kilometers. Not a chance for a conquest of Moscow now, the Germans could only look at the photographs. Not long ago they were so close, they could take photographs themselves and see the capital.

In the winter of 1941 Angus could share in the war only by reading the news. He could only dream about the underground press, so he daily, or at least every other day walked to the city to buy newspapers, mainly German, which delivered the reports earlier. He bought most often Krakauer Zeitung, besides, sometimes even the disgusting, repellent Voelkischer Beobachter, or, if he had luck, some Berliner papers. And the so-called reptile press, edited by the occupants in the Polish language, which principally repeated the news from yesterday's German press. Now he did not have any serious inconvenience with reading, difficulty to understand war messages, Mother corrected only the accent. If in doubt, he first must guess and then Mother explained the unknown words and details. This way, Angus gained a useful military vocabulary, although he still declined to learn the German language. Besides, he could compare the next day's newspapers, edited in Polish with the German press from the day before. When he knew the Polish translation, he could without problem read and understand correctly the German version, even if his grammar was not perfect.

The east front, after a series of "victorious" shortcuts of the planned new line with better positions, "the more suitable" found a long way back, temporary stabilized. The Germans somehow fulfilled the worst technical lacks, supplied more proper supplies, but still were able in this winter only to defend themselves. At most, they managed successful attacks, thanks to which the German troops surrounded by Red Army managed to move, but towards the west, achieving the better prepared for defense frontline mentioned above.

However, the main attention, alas, concentrated now on the bad news from the Pacific. After wiping out the heavily armored American fleet, the Japanese for a time almost reigned on the sea and in the air and took advantage of it. On the maps, it was obvious they had earned a great part of the world and had done it at such a rate that it left the former German "Blitz" offensive in shadow.

In the Philippines, the beaten American troops closed themselves in the fortress Corregidor and in rocky caves of the peninsula Bataan. Already before the war the Japanese had taken possession of French Indochina (now Vietnam) and subordinated Syjam. Now they landed on Malaya and traveled by the jungle fast, which British experts in their former expertise regarded as impossible. Because of a developing crisis, the English Fleet sent over two of their most powerful and modern ships, the ironclad Prince of Wales and heavy line cruiser Repulse. Both of them recently modernized, especially by developing a powerful antiaircraft defense and an extra thick armoring of decks, according to opinion a craft unsinkable by any bombardment and capable of independent task. Their mission was secretly and quickly to approach the landing beaches, scattering and sinking the Japanese invasion ships and boats, and immediately bounce back. However, Japanese aviation discovered the threat and attacked the approaching ships, constantly returning after refueling and rearming with bombs and torpedoes planes, and carried out in about twelve hours forty-seven air raids and finally sunk both ships. The event awoke genuine shock, but decided the further meaning of aviation in the sea war. Armored ships lost their main importance to aircraft carriers.

About halfway through February fell the most powerful fortress of the Far East and probably the world, Singapore. Again, the impossible happened, it was a stronghold continuously armed and extended by the English, considered impossible to conquer, able to stop any assault. But the Japanese behaved improperly, tactlessly, attacking from the unfortified, unsuitable side of the Malaya jungle. After taking Singapore, there was no longer any barrier for further Japanese expansion south; in early 1942 they conquered all the Dutch colonies and anything almost to Australia, which too felt seriously threatened. On the west, the English forces concentrated on desperate defense of Burma and approaches to India. In fact, they were impressive triumphs, many times topping the Germany gains in USSR territory, populated with hundreds of millions of people. Hitler was impressed as much as he impressed Mussolini in 1940 and was perhaps afraid Japan might win the war without his help. In fact, in the west, Japan took Rangoon and touched India, before stopping. In Australia, the people seriously considered the last defense only behind the belt of sands, with evacuation of the whole North Australia, Port Darwin. Then, the US marines began a limited offensive, taking the air base in construction Guadalcanal (and happily many construction machines and first-class Japan gear, which they could use to continue building the airfield).

This was a masterstroke. The marines entangled in insistent battles with Japanese landing troops, but with air support managed until the united command was able to push in help. Still, the German newspapers presented even the first and the second battle on Coral See as a great victory of the Japan Fleet, even if this was the end of Japan's offensive, always victorious until now. So, people believed still in bad news.

With all this, Angus almost missed the most important change nearby, on Polish earth, the turning point of the public opinion, not of sentiments, but practical conclusions. From end of 1941, Poles came again to take part in the armed battle. This may be a simplification, because the military battle never wholly stopped, but most of Polish society did not see any sense in continuing the struggle, treated this as a suicide, ugly and sure. Many secret organizations prepared their members for a military fight, but only in favorable conditions. Poland never surrounded, but even the detached unit of the Polish Army commanded by Major Hubal, which fighting survived to May 1940 before smashed by the Germans, received several times from the chief of conspiracy orders to stop armed battle. Despite all, some people continued to fight, but they were true desperadoes, seeking death or who anyway did not have a chance, fugitives wanted by the Germans. For example, it concerned some groups of Gryf Pomorski (Pomeranian Griffon) in a terrain incorporated into Germany, where all Polish Kaszubae got compulsorily assigned to German nationality. Anyone protesting or known before to hold Polish sentiments would be shot on sight without discussion.

Now this changed, the favorable condition arrived, rather unexpectedly. First, as rightly forecast the father, trying to talk Angus out of suicide, the conquering vast new territory of the Germans diluted their power. Second, most of their soldiers were constantly on the front and not engaged for a short campaign, but permanently; they could not pull out. However, the main, final ground was, that they left the Poles no choice. It is a fact, the Germans supplied Poles with motivation to battle for life-or-death, to the end. On the same principle as they turned the Russians, fighting before rather weakly and without conviction, surrendering easily, into determined warriors who preferred death to surrender.

In 1939, immediately after the campaign, the triumphing Nazi started the mass murder of hostages. The purpose was to scare the people and indeed, many lost their nerve before the terror. However, in the year 1940 the terror continued to increase and the rate of murder rose, despite the fact the terrorized Polish society gave no case for further flow of blood. After the action AB, starting after the first success over France, and then more actions, with more and more victims, the public opinion inferred the Germans intend to kill all Poles and had made already a bad start.

The military setting in GG:

In the reservation area temporarily left for Poles, the Germans had at their disposal about three hundred thousand armed men in different formations and units, equivalent to about fifteen to eighteen divisions. However, they were neither regular divisions nor elite units, not even of standard army value. A majority was simply human garbage, inept for service at the front. Though armed to the teeth and eager to terrorize the unarmed and helpless, they had no wish to fight with a desperate opponent. A few squads of real value they mixed in for a scratch improvement of the whole, mainly for protection of the VIP's or priority, important purposes.

Just such a priority task became the action in Zamość region and there they directed the worst squads. Still, the number was too small and inadequate for the task. The plan consisted of emptying the whole country to create an experimental sample of "New Heimat," an experimental land to practice the future construction of an eastern empire for breeding the Nordics. Armed resistance spread and for the first time the Germans found themselves in a bed with too short a sheet. The German force did not do, they were necessary in several places at once and it was impossible to take more men from the front. That being so, the Germans stopped this action. In fact they essentially changed the policy and principles against Poles. They stopped the planned extermination, but instead came over to application of collective responsibility, terror and repressions in picked areas, wherever happened any armed resistance against the occupants. This way, the overall number of victims shrank, even if in some regions the population was in the short-term worse off. If in 1941 the military organizations took atious stand and battles with the occupants were rare, yet the number of victims fell about in half in comparison to 1940, in which not one open battle happened. Finally, in 1943 all the Polish population observed that armed resistance decreased the number of the killed, with Germans losing the initiative. The occupation force acted in the manner of a fireguard (with one small difference, they did not extinguish the houses, but set them on fire). The network expanded in one place ruptured in others. Overall, if the occupants could be kept busy, life became safer. Obvious, unless one happened to be in an inappropriate place at a wrong time.

Only a year later, at the end of 1942 and in the first months of 1943 did this initiative come to its conclusion. This time, the Germans collected more men and prepared better. Again, they tried to create an experimental state of SS with liquidation of all Poles on this territory, applying methods like the ones developed now for Jews. The population should be imprisoned in concentration camps, but not temporary ones, like those Angus knew from the inside when displaced from Greatpoland (with robbery), but rather like the death camps with high mortality. Like in Greatpoland, the places left by the Poles should settle a compact German population. A big part of them consisted of so-called "Ost Volksdeutchen," who should form a base to breed the new, better Germans of Nordic race. The experiences collected there would, after the victorious war, be used on a great scale in the Ukraine and the East. The black ground belt should become the place to breed, first hundred million and then more Germans of the pure Nordic race, according to the prophesy of Mein Kampf.

However, the biggest emotions evoked the fate of the children. The small children of parents killed (or not), if they responded to the Nordic type according to the mad Nazi norms, the Germans fetched to breed. They considered them a valuable genetic material for further improvement of race. A horror, but consistent with the observation the Nordic type occurred in the Polish population more often than in the German (see the research of Czekanowski, mentioned in Chapter VII).

Such actions signaled the Nazi had assigned the entire Polish population for extermination and wanted to use only a certain part for genetic material. If such an assumption may seem premature or too far-fetched, the firm evidence is exactly the procedure planned and applied in Zamość country, an experiment they wanted to employ on a great scale with the whole Polish population.

 Capsule: The Nazi racist theory and perspectives - making the human race more valuable. If it shall anyway be necessary to "exchange" hundreds of millions of individuals, why not start a little earlier with the murder of a few millions. Not much difference.

Better explain at once, that Hitler intended not only to exterminate the Jews (to whom he denied even a leftover of genetic material) and the Poles (for them he was ready to make eventually this gracious exception). Hitler left a record in form of a book, clearly and distinctly outlining his purposes. It is simply amazing, that so few people at the time and even up to now, to this moment, took the trouble to read Mein Kampf. Even the contemporaries who did, missed the logical outcomes, because they did not believe this could be serious (the book was an appeal for felony and crime). However, Hitler was deadly serious, believed in every word and equally radical in views as determined for drastic actions and results. He determined that from the human herd occupying Europe, it was necessary to remove the valueless exemplars, the racial mixtures and mongrels and exchange for them the most valuable breed, represented by the Nordic race. For short-term could be allowed the mixed types with at least some blood of the Nordic race. The method for improvement of the blood would be similar to those applied with success for breeding animals.

In practice it would mean that more than half, probably about three quarters of the herd was to be "exchanged"; to say it plain, about three to four hundred million of the people inhabiting Europe were selected for slaughter. Sure, the exact words never fell. However, the idiom and manner of organization clearly points to the terrible purpose. This should go with complete utilization of cadavers economic value. First, this concerned their working capacity. Second, in the concentration camps, besides theft of the leftovers, search for assets and selection of possessions (the so-called "Canada" or "Klondike" branch of camp) progressed research on most expedient economical use of all debris, skins, bones, fat. (Although it is only fair to mention, the ersatz soap with the letters RJF, popularly translated as "Rein Judisches Fett" - genuine Jews' fat - was not made from such a raw material).

In general, all European nations, including even the Germans, had much human material not answering the Nazi racial standard. The Dutchmen and the Scandinavians might have the fairest chance, but already the English people allegedly presented a mixture which only in part could remain as valuable breeding material. As examples of most racially inappropriate, mongrel nations, Hitler mentioned the French and Russians, the latter by a noticeable infusion of Mongolian blood. The Poles may have much valuable breeding material, a high percentage, but they were useless. Though after cutting out adult people, the small children could be Germanized and assimilated. Hitler's primary plans were different, he changed them after 1939 because he felt betrayed. He counted on the Poles in his war plans, offering splendid conditions. Built his calculations and designs in the firm belief that such a glorious offer from the Creator of New Civilization could not be rejected, and what did they do? First, they played a prolonged diplomatic game, which drove him into a time crunch, and then said no. He blamed them for all failures resulting from him being late, missing his timetable (or the bus, as Churchill said). From this time he decided, the Poles are and will remain natural enemies of the Germans, to say it plain, they suck in the hate of Germans with the milk of their mothers. It would be impossible to rely on them, because even if they should bend temporarily, in every crisis they will act to the disadvantage of the Germans. Besides, his offended vanity or rather paranoia demanded, he should punish them exemplary. Just as an angered God punishes.

It was not clear how the relations, conditions and dependence between particular nations were to change. There was a talk about the family of Germanic nations, including first the Germans, but also the Dutchmen, Walloons, Anglo-Saxons, the Scandinavians and eventually the Baltic nations. Hitler and Himmler never exactly specified what nationalities should be only "cleansed," meaning killing off partially, only the inadequate, and which all. Anyway, the Jews were sure in the second group and so the Poles, next probably some of the east Slavs. According to Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote a forecast: the fertile belt of black ground in the east shall be a base, a new bench where a hundred million new Germans shall breed. It remained unclear, what should be the difference in fate of Russians and of Ukrainians, because this fertile belt lay mainly within the Ukraine. On the other hand, Germany had long played the Ukrainian card. In fact, the newspapers announced that starting the war, the German troops had come to free the Ukrainians from communist oppression, as they did before from the Polish injustice. They also enlisted the Ukrainians into the SS (the SS "Galicien" Division). Maybe, as tell some semi-official Nazi sources, the plan was to "swap" the Ukrainians in the place of the Russians? And "liquidate the Russian question finally', or drive them out from Europe?

Although the main breeding base of the improved Nordic race should remain in German families with many children and with state support, some contribution to the development would be made by special centers, called "Lebensborn". These created for dealing in production and breeding of children. Men of good Nordic type, not to say pure, should find here the right conditions to help multiply the right genes and produce the best Nordic children with desirable racial features. Next, the state would take on the cost of breeding and educating. However, they accepted also children taken by force from some of the unworthy nationalities, if of Nordic type. Probably Hitler assumed that a large group of Nordic features showed the child came from German blood; among the half-breeds the Germanic genes naturally took over, somehow "out-mendel'ing" the pure stock from genetic heritage. The primary nationality could be forgotten, the Nordic features decided.

This was a general conception, but still in an experimental state, the detailed instructions and realization on a grand scale should follow in the right circumstances, - after the final victory. The scenario may look too ridiculous to be true, but if anyone does not believe this, there was not only an idea, but already concrete plans, in part realized. There was the "Generalplan Osten" (east), in fact, not one, but several such "Generalplans." All elaborated and directed by Professor Konrad Meyer Hetling (SS-Oberfuehrer), with assist of academic and scientific Institutes and professors. For example, there joined in the Berlin University, Technical Hochschulen in Hannover and Hamburg, Arbeitswissenschaftliche Institut d. Deutschen Arbeitsfront and others.

A few days before the German aggression Hitler picked Himmler, at the time Minister of Interior and Reichsfuerer of SS, in addition a "Reichkommissar fuer festigung des Deutschen Volkstums" (RKF). Following this, Himmler chose K. Mayer to the SS planning office for the Polish territory incorporated into the Reich. The first task, to model the deportation and wiping out of Polish citizens, followed by resettlement by the Germans. And this was precisely why Angus with his mother, after robbery of all their personal effects, were put into the Concentration Camp and next deported. Two such resettlement Chief Quarters created, in Poznań and Łódź, each with a group of local offices. Only in Silesia and Pomerania there would apply another procedure, enforcing of Third Reich citizenship on all Polish citizens living there (like the Soviet Union pattern). Resettlement (with robbery of all possessions) was used only with those who protested or were considered unfit for Germanization. The Gauleiters of Pommerania and Silesia preferred to accept first the directions of BWsied (Beaftragter d. Wehrmacht fuer Siedlungsfrage), while the Wehrmacht interested in new recruits. This inconsistency ended with the creation of RuSHA (Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt SS, matching to the RSHA).

Professor K. Mayer was responsible only for planning, not for execution of these actions, that is why he got off so lightly in the Nuremberg Tail. Anyway, after fulfilling with success his first task, he was honored with a permanent position as Head of "Planung in Stabsamt u. Zentralamt des RKF" (later RuSHA). At the same time remained still the Director d. Institutes fuer Agrarwesen d. University Berlin.

Now he came over to greater tasks, planning the future of all Polish lands, Baltic Republics, the Ukraine, Russia, in short all of Central and East Europe. He did it exactly to the initiative of Himmler, following the suggestion from Hitler, that is why there were so many changes, some call them different plans. First, it had to be Poland, the Baltic Republics and the West Ukraine provinces of Żytomir, Kamenec and Vinnica. But then, Hitler mentioned also Crimea with the bend of Dniepr ("Dnieprbogen"), calling it "Gotingen" and the territory around Leningrad and Psków "In-germanland," and finally wanted to include even Baku and the South Ural.

Mayer's bitter opponent and critic became Dr. Erhard Wetzel, but he never opposed the principle, only the details, as the number of Germans to be settled, ten million in the first phase he thought unrealistic. Probably only eight would be feasible; calculating cost and the exact number of the "aliens" to be disposed of, between thirty-one and forty-five million. The cost, about 45 billion DM, he calculated too low. However the project should be realized with the work of concentration camp prisoners. In fact, there were many candidates for the job of Dr Mayer and all sure, they would do better. Also, there were many institutions in sharp contest, as RfR, WVHA, REM, the already mentioned BWSied, etc., not mentioning the Ministry for the occupied Eastern Territories (with Dr. Wetzel acting as expert).

It was never exactly determined what to do with the unwanted "aliens," if only to send them off to Siberia, or destroy them all. The numbers included five to six million Jews, who were always told they were only on their way to resettlement. Such talk arouses suspicion. Also in "Les Archives Secretes du Comte Ciano 1936-42," on page 478 there is report of a talk with Goering, who said about twenty to thirty million people were to die on these territories.

But this all is speculation, the only hint is the notice that about thirty-five percent of Ukrainians may be fit for "umfolken" (planned change of nationality or only race type). Also about a quarter of Byelorussians, only five percent of Poles (probably the active traitors of the day). Still as many as half of Czechs and Frenchmen and about the same of Balts (of the Lithuanians only thirty-five percent). Anyway, a certain percentage of the Germans too should be liquidated and in fact were, for the better race development.

The place for breeding the pure Nordic race should be connected by two modern main freeways. The one from Konigsberg and/or Warsaw to Wilno, Leningrad, the other by Warsaw, Lublin, Równe, or Kraków, Lwów, Rowne to Biała Cerkiew, Krzywy Róg, Nikołajew, Crimea. The colonists should settle in compact regions of about two thousand square kilometers, as "Wehrbauern" (armed settlers) of SS, doing the military service and protecting the borders. There should be temporary fiefs (seven years), inheritable fiefs of twenty years with continuation to the legal followers (up to twenty hectares). Next, great heirlooms (two hundred and more hectares for the commanders and officers) but the land remained a state monopoly. In short, if Stalin modeled a common slavery state like in ancient Egypt, with himself as the Supreme, and party ideologues as top priests. Hitler as more modern would create a regime after the feudal pattern.

Curious, what Hitler thought about all the race rigmarole. Did he believe in it? Looking in the mirror, did he plan to commit a suicide, or only never produce any children? Or, perhaps he believed in the race theory even less, than Stalin in Marxism? Of course, this plan gave him a comfortable position. Being a supreme judge of all segregation questions in the conquered world would give him the authority of a semi-god. (Or rather a real God by the strength of a new religion). Decisions about life-and-death of all nations and people would remain in his hands.

The relative small area for "final solution," only a fragment of the "Polish question," in a limited area in Zamość turned into a military confrontation, unexpectedly desperate, with a full engagement of local people. It just happened, without any help, preparations, against orders of the central resistance movement and central conspiracy organizations. The local farmers decided never to leave their homes or fields and forests alive, they had nothing more to lose except life itself and they would stay here till death. A zoological fighting erupted, the men were killed, but they killed also, the soldiers and the incoming German settlers. Eventually they set their homes in fire, before or after being taken by Germans. A horrible fight, whole families perished, but the toll on both sides. Only then did the central underground organizations lend a small support, a few weapons and some professional army officers, but these did not fit this unconventional battle. The command remained solely in the hands of the local "BCh" (Peasant Battalions) or even the former "Chłostra" (Peasant Guard).

Surprised by the unexpected resistance, the Germans stopped for a time to pull in more forces and started it again at the end of 1942 and in winter 1943. The chief of the SS, O. Globocnik was a ruthless criminal, energetic, hungry both for money and success and ambitious. He could never overcome the bitter end of his career as Gauleiter of Wien where he made too many embezzlements. All the Gauleiters mixed the public money with their own, so it must have been quite a thievery, to get fired. He made his comeback as chief of the SS and had already distinguished himself by murdering Jews earlier, in a similar test action. Now he wanted again be first in, he had already found an imposing expression, the Experimental Laboratory of the SS.

At the time, also, the local Polish squads were finding strength; the women with children found some hideouts. However, the most important action covered the whole GG territory, sabotage of the transport. In result of the actions "wieniec I and wieniec II" (coronet I and II), the whole transport to the east front was stopped or seriously limited for 24 to 48 hours. This solidarity action could lead to serious consequences. It might become suicidal for the entire Polish population, could develop into an all-out war of the already conquered with the occupants. In fact, this was the greatest threat the Poles were able to confront. The Germans still had the power to exterminate them all, but at a risk of the collapse of the east front, especially after Stalingrad. That being so, they decided to put it off till after the final victory.

Still later, the Polish community tried to help the caught and deported children, orphans of the killed parents. They extracted and placed in Polish families a large part of them by bribery or force. It was one of the last acts of national solidarity, so common in 1939, but increasingly rare later, as the bad time came and fewer and fewer of the upright people survived.

(As already mentioned, Angus at the time did not have any personal experience with these events, not even information. He only heard some distant, uncertain rumors and did not even know if he could believe them. Not until about a year and a half later did he hear some more reports, second-hand only, from his colleagues who were, if not exactly there, still in the region, one of them only about thirty kilometers away. The most details he read still later, in the first months of 1944, when he got an unlimited access to the secret archives of the Polish underground press in the care of Professor Niedzielski. He could read these reports to his heart's content and they led to many discussions - more about this in Chapter 11.)

Sometime in the first half of December, in the evening after the police hour, there was a tapping at the door. Angus opened, but at first could not recognize the person. Only after a moment did it come to him that he was seeing an old inhabitant of this house, Moshek, the first person his family contacted in business, after their deportation. Now, with the ghetto already enclosed and severely guarded, not a chance he could get a pass or permit, surely not in the night, not after the police hour. Only a few months ago it could have been possible, this very summer they had got a Jewish carpenter who, with some assistants, made the furniture. Not much difficulty in getting a pass at the time before. But now, only organized groups of workers, doing work for the occupants, were allowed to leave under guard. Angus did not know exactly when all this had changed - recently, but he was too busy watching the war news and trying to find a way to take a part in it, to notice the changes around.

So it was certain that Moshek could come here only illegally, perhaps seeking aid from familiar people. He was frozen cold and with pleasure accepted hot tea, but wanted nothing to eat, exactly as at the former meeting and the first, two years ago.

"No," he said. "I do not have any problem, nothing specific, and I am sorry, but I was passing nearby and I felt haunted, wanting to see once more the house where I born and lived with my family."

The parents tried to encourage him to eat something and take some food home, knowing that in the enclosed ghetto food was already lacking, if up to now the people there were not exactly dying of hunger. Being an orthodox, he declined it further, finally accepting only one recently opened package of sugar. Answering the question, how he sees the future, he said it is better not to talk about this and he tries not even to think. Angus had an impression that he had already lived through something similar, that everything was repeating itself, deja vu.

"No sense to trouble so much in advance," Mother said, "however, everything is turning better for us, and worse for the Germans. You look still able and fit, you have changed little. Surely we may see the end of the war, with luck all still whole."

"Yes, probably, but without me. I do not expect to survive."

"But why, you surely may last one year more, and we expect the German power to decline in about half that time. You have as fair chance as any."

But then they heard first the name "Babi Yar."

 Capsule: Shift of the Jews in the first phase of the "big racial experiment" of the Nazi.

At the end of the first half of 1941, when German troops penetrated deeply the Soviet defense assuring Hitler of success, he made his final decision about the Jews, until now delayed, but already pending. Even earlier, before the first day of war, the Wehrmacht was obliged by a special instruction about the prisoners of war kill all Political Commissaries and active communists after interrogation. There was an addendum, directing particularly to take notice of Jews, automatically suspected of such political role, or at least being spies, confidants of the NKWD.

It is unclear how long before the issue discussed the close top bunch of the Nazis, Hitler never said one word publicly. Only once before the war, in his speech addressed to Roosevelt on the 30th of January 1939, in which he called the US president a clown, he had thrown in a prophecy. He said that if the Jews unleashed a new war, then this would cause them a disruption ("Vernichtung"). However there was no doubt, Goering on an explicit errand for Hitler had ordered Heydrich to begin the mass murder of Jews, the genocide. Or, as the Nazi euphemism would have it, "the ultimate solution of the Jewish problem". This began first on the eastern territories taken from the Soviets, right near the front, from where the news came neither fast nor easy.

Babi Yar was exactly one such place of murder, not the first, but near the direct line of communications from Kiew, so this news arrived quickly in Ostrowiec. Others news on events happening earlier, was yet unknown. But even now, most of the Poles hadn't heard about Babi Yar, but the Jews had.

Historically, the Jews had arrived a longtime since in Poland, it being the only country in Europe which provided a safe shelter for the harassed refugees. Their settlement area exactly covered the borders of the former Res Publica, but as Moscow took great areas in war and finally Poland lost her independence, a great part of Jews remained in the same places they had initially settled. They could not receive permission to move further into Russia, where anyway they were subjected to many legal restrictions and persecutions, with the finally organized pogroms. Therefore they started move back to the west, in part only to the Polish ethnic lands, but the wealthy and active emigrated to Austria and German lands, next further, to France and England and some still further, across the ocean. The poor stayed.

After WW I, this trend continued. A great number of Jews, legally or illegally, tried to reach Poland, where shortly they met a second wave, the refuges from Nazi Germany. According to statistical data, the numbers of Jews in Poland grew from 1.8 million in 1918/19 to 3.5 million in 1938 despite a notable emigration. However, some of the refugees never registered, they came after bad, sometimes terrible experiences, badly shocked and they wanted no official contact, only to remain alone, or rather, with members of family and close friends, if they had them. So, probably the total number was higher than in official statistics, rather nearer 4 million. Anyway, in the east of Poland remained a serious reserve of Jews. In the Soviet Union remained over 2.5 million of Jews, nearly 3 million. They lost their former source of income, because the government tolerated neither private commerce nor financial enterprises, big or small.

On the other part, the revolution, at least theoretically, stopped the racial intolerance and ethnic problems in the USSR. The Jews were no longer citizens of a second category; restriction of settlement and movement lost its meaning. After a short time all citizens needed permits to move and needed a pass on every ordinary journey, even to buy a ticket for a train. Also, many cities and whole districts became banned, but not to any single nationality, to all. Simultaneously appeared a new chance or rather ecological niche: because the Soviets murdered about ninety percent of the Russian intelligentsia (this with small Stalin's participation, mainly deed of Dzierżyński). There was an urgent need for new bureaucrats. Therefore some Jews fled, but some accepted this opening, the financial intelligentsia changed to the bureaucratic. They all had the basic education and often the quick presence of mind necessary in the earlier occupation. In result some Jews made a career, occupying relatively high places. Even in a hell, there are different levels and positions, and possible promotion, from a damned soul to a devil's servant, maybe to a devil, an odious devil and even to a devil-in-chief. In fact, Stalin preferred to use the national minorities or people with minimal ties with Russian society, because they were more dependent on him. But they never became a ruling class, also the purges, with shooting and lesser forms of persecution, didn't bypass the Jews, or any others.

Despite this, Hitler seriously believed the Jews secretly ruled the USSR, keeping up the appearances of communist ideology. This would be only propaganda, masking the true culprits, who, similar to those in the West, masked behind the façade of banks and capitalism, took possession of a big part of world for their own purpose and benefit.

Paranoia? Well, yes. But without madmen and their actions, it would be impossible to explain history, which often shows an astonishing lack of logic. The biggest errors and tragedies happen when people assume that all parties concerned shall surely proceed in a reasonable manner.

Hitler in his poor mind nursed a view of a great Jewish plot, from one side including communism controlled by Jews and from the other the Jewish plutocracy. In this way he explained the last centuries of history. However, he saw himself as the white knight who would rescue humanity, especially the most valuable Nordic race from the Semitic supremacy. He would not only throw the Semites from the saddle, but also exterminate them because they presented an imminent mortal danger. The world has no place for two overlords, the Semites must go (but how in these criteria did he classify the Arabs, admitting them to service in the SS?). Curious, he repeated this many times and still nobody believed it might become serious procedure after his rise to power.

It began with a mass murder of the Jewish POWs, which he explained as a necessary elimination of political officers and commissars, dangerous for the Wehrmacht's morale, as had happened in WW I.

The Jews and others on whom a party document was found, should be shot on suspicion. Next followed the murder of civilian Jews. At first, it was a manual work in a manner similar to the Soviet NKWD. Several SS "Sondercomandos" (special commands) murdered the victims at the back of the front and in the fighting area. At the same time, in parallel, began the press campaign mentioned earlier. If the German community did not accept this, there would still be time to back out, explaining that it was not the Germans' intent, that only the people hard-pressed by the Soviets were taking their revenge with lynchings. But the Germans believed all they were told and so the genocide spread first in Lithuania and the Baltic countries and next deeper around the traditional Jewish settlement area. But not yet to the Polish lands in GG, it was the first time Angus' family had heard about it.

So they tried to assure Moshek that such cases could happen only during warfare at the front, or right behind it, before the new administration became organized. In the time of the Polish campaign, also, had occasionally happened atrocities beyond human norms, murder of POWs, even of the civilian population, the only difference being this didn't concern the Jews, only the Poles. Yes, the current events were on another scale, but this war was bigger too, beyond comparison.

"Of course," agreed Moshek. "I do not say that such events may happen here, in a geographic center of Europe. But this does show the intent. Not many Jews shall survive, even without outright murder. Do you know what the ghettos are becoming? A concentration camp turning into a death camp. Instead of building a camp, it is less expensive to draw barbed wire around a small part of the city and cram in there many people. High mortality follows hunger, constant work without rest, overcrowding and bad health and sanitary conditions. But this is not the worst".

"Most of all I fear, who may survive. Probably only the worst. Decent, respectable people have not a chance. The Germans rarely fatigue themselves, they appointed a Jewish police. Sometimes even there occur good people, but not for long. Usually it is a job for the worst crooks, muggers and at best pickpockets or thieves, who, if only they get from the Germans an uniform cap and an oak bludgeon for beating, serve the Germans with all their strength. They learn the German language and if they can talk to some German, best to a Gestapo man, or walk along in his company, they are so pleased and happy as if he shit right in their pocket. Ready to kill anytime and in fact are sometimes killing plain people with these bludgeons or at least breaking bones, proud they are able to do this. They plunder, loot - no, they just take away anything and carry it to the German they serve. If the German is satisfied the policeman almost waggles his tail, so much he tries to appease. They are so important, they don't even notice the ordinary Jews. They look at them as at manure under their feet, only if they trod on them, they are careful not to mess up their boots."

Capsule: The self-defense and crime prevention.

Every community has some percentage of bad and very bad men and the Jews were no exception. In fact, the average was there no worse than among Poles, maybe even less traitors, renegades and collaborators. But the problem was, the Jewish society did not develop methods and means to keep them in check and if necessary, to remove the danger. For example the Poles, with probably a higher or similar percentage of scoundrels, ready for any violence, robbery, blackmail, treason including cooperation with the occupants, applied some efficient forms of deterrence. Banditos, often protected by the Gestapo or just tolerated, fought guerrilla-style and this is a reason, why the farmers were so helpful for partisan units. But in the ghettos, the bad people found fair conditions, as if the Jews cultivated them. It was an evolution in reverse, with preference for the wrong. Moshek’s fears could have come true. But the Germans murdered all, sparing not even the worst, those who cooperated in the crime of the Holocaust.

These words may seem like a call for mutual murdering, violence and inhuman methods, but I intend no such purpose. Any man has a right for self-defense and the same applies to a community. If somebody causes the death of many people, there is not much choice, alas, but to kill him just as one would a mad dog. This is not a matter of punishment; punishment has nothing to do in such a case, but a measure to protect the lives of others. It is the right of nature to kill to stay alive, more so to save many. A community which doesn’t recognize that right, invites a collective suicide. Such societies are on the way to extinction, it may come earlier or later.

Unfortunately, the Jews allowed their criminals, even if not many, to act freely under German protection, and the communal instinct for survival faded. In the Ostrowiec Ghetto, there were not many bad men, but alas, the majority allowed them to act without resistance. They believed simply it to be the will of God, who turned away his face.

The underground was weak, for example in the Warsaw Ghetto the ŻZW had not much more than a hundred soldiers and fewer weapons, principally pistols with only a few long arms. However, a surprise, the men adapted to the conditions of the city guerrilla, they lived barracked and ready at moment’s notice, efficient and professional. Just before the Germans destroyed the Ghetto, the number grew to several hundreds of better armed men, still unsatisfactory. They could already cope with traitors and Gestapo agents, but in comparison to the German Army, simply a despair. The volunteers consisted of the right Zionists or of the Jews with a background in the Polish Army, about half-and-half. This may seem a curious mixture, but they had something in common: they wanted to fight and in common with Poles, sharing their experience.

Rather late emerged a second Jewish paramilitary organization, ŻOB (Jewish Battle Organization), consisting mainlf left-oriented members. They had similar numbers of soldiers, but even less weapons.

Small branches of both those organizations existed in the ghettos of Białystok, Kraków and Częstochowa, but the remaining knowledge and memory is faulty, full of empty blanks. Their faith and fight had mostly a moral meaning and became a symbol.

In short, the Jews found themselves in a sad plight, analogous to the condition of the Poles about two years earlier. Terrorized and murdered, they hoped for survival if only they didn’t oppose their executioners. Few believed in the possibility of an armed struggle. With time, they recognized the mistake, the executioners needed no pretext or excuse, they just murdered as many as they could manage. But the murder of Poles started earlier and in 1941 they already began to fight back, realizing this makes the task of murdering harder and reduces the number of victims. Alas, the Jews, badly oppressed but not exactly murdered up to 1941, came to the same conclusion in 1943 and this was already too late. The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto was not the only one, if surely the best organized, the most effective and spectacular. Military actions took place in the ghettos of Białystok, Częstochowa and some others. But the most tragic, hopeless were the essays already in the death camps.

Obviously, the German press and especially the reptile press, edited by the occupants in Polish, tried its worst, provocation, instigation, calumny, mud throwing, whatever to create mutual distrust between Jews and Poles. However, the result was poor, because the people always mistrusted the official press, considering it as a lie and automatically accepting as truth something opposite. However, people of poor intellectual ability, especially those who had no contact with the underground press and resistance movement and taking not part in fighting the occupants, sometimes accepted this propaganda. That is why this poison recycles even now. Hitler and his minister are known for saying: “Repeat any lie again and again, a part shall remain.” (A variation on the familiar ”Make the lie big enough and tell it often enough…”). This, unexpectedly, proved true a longtime after the war.

Moshek was Orthodox, but he was aware that resignation is not only faulty, but fatal. However he didn't see any way to oppose, he was not able to do anything, or at least so he said. Because, it seems unlikely that he would take the risk to leave the ghetto after police hour for some minor business only. In fact, in the house on the opposite side of the street acted secretly the Council for aid to the Jews, known afterwards as Żegota, but this they heard only after the war.

Angus always suspected a second bottom on this may be probable, because at the end of the conversation Moshek asked Mother whether she expects travel again to Warsaw and if so, whether she might carry there some private letter. Mother said well, yes, but only if the address is not in the ghetto. Best, if somebody could take it from her brother's house, or if it would be an address nearby, on the Saxon Cluster, where her family lived. Never did she say anything more about the matter. But Angus had his suspicion, especially as even after the war Mother never directly answered his questions, as if not hearing them at all. He knew already his mother to be talkative, but never on sensitive matters.

It was already after midnight when Moshek left their home, Angus first looking around to see if the street, yards and fields around were empty, next stood with the dog, stroking and caressing him. The dog knew Moshek, but it was better if he remained quiet, or all the dogs on the street could bark, on a quiet night the sounds carry a long-distance. Angus never met Moshek again.

Capsule Supplement: What really happened to the Polish Jews?

The author accepts as a cardinal principle to write about facts which he saw with his own eyes, took part in, so to say touched, or has been told by an impeccable eyewitness known to him personally, especially his parents. This goes fair and true, all the information about the Jews is genuine too, but still the general picture turned false. Clear example, how an incomplete part of truth may appear more misleading than a direct lie. He regrets to say that his truth was not the whole truth. Not only are there blanks and empty spaces, but he should have known better, because the fragments did not add up logically. As the Scripture says, he had eyes, but did not see, ears, but did not hear, worse still, lost sound reason.

These capsules are sometimes useful to explain the background, especially for a reader not familiar with the theme, but they may be valueless. Sure a lesson of humility.

First, the author took part in the evacuation, the flight of the civilian population from the German aggression, if not for long. Only eight days and not a full hundred kilometers, but plenty to experience the feature, get the knowledge and recognize the pattern. The evacuation train reduced the deadly fatigue and he missed the worst. He only could hear about the routes blocked by corpses of people and animals, crowds of refugees, continuous air raids, about a lack of food and sleeping places. But he talked with many and could imagine the difference. Also he learned details from the memory of his father, who starting earlier, traveled near to the east border and survived under Soviet occupation for almost six months. Then he crept over the green border (illegally) to GG and, almost by a miracle, found his displaced family.

Evacuation and flight from the German aggression concerned millions of people, who panicked in result of terrorist actions of the Luftwaffe and, if less frequent, also the Wehrmacht. A similar picture appeared later in France. In central Poland the panic became even more massive than in Greatpoland, because the alarming news had more time to spread. The people had more time to make the decision to run away. In Warsaw, even the speaker for the Army, Colonel Umiastowski, made a radio appeal for evacuation of persons of age fit for military service. Commissary President of Capital Warsaw, Stephan Starzyński intervened, canceling this appeal, but a big wave of refugees had already left the city. Others decided not to change once taken plans. A large part was a mass of volunteers, who wanted to take arms and fight the enemy. Few had this chance and only about two hundred thousand reached the Romanian or Hungarian border, crossing it to the Army in France. The huge majority went into a trap, when from the back side started the Soviet aggression.

For example, Father told Angus, the number of inhabitants in Białystok soared. The city, counting before the war not fully one hundred thousand people, swelled about two hundred and fifty thousand addedople, so Father must seek shelter with his family in the nearby village Barszczewo, his birthplace. In Białystok piled up, at the beginning of the Soviet occupation, about one hundred and ten to twenty thousand Jews, compared with about forty thousand living there before. This was nothing special, even the small town of Choroszcz became similarly crowded, the nearby Baranowicze, Brześć, even Pińsk more than doubled their population. Next Father got wind of similar conditions in the southern part of the Soviet occupation. Everywhere the number of people similarly increased, in Lwów, also Stanisławów and Tarnopol, but so it was in Kołomyja, Kowel, Łuck. Włodzimierz, Drohobycz. Next, they all began to shrink a bit, as after the campaign the Polish refugees returned to their homes. The Soviet in the first months allowed this, demanding only that they show their hands; if they were dirty and black, it was fine, they accepted these as the hands of a workingman. Clean, and more so white hands were a matter for NKWD.

However, most of Jews preferred to wait, they expected from the Germans only the worst. Just like the rest of the population, they believed France was sure to beat the hell out of Hitler come spring.

Just as under German occupation in GG, in the Soviet zone persecution of Jews started not outright at once. Apprehension, tip-offs, arresting and exiling the dispossessed to Siberia began first with Poles. This occurred in winter 1940 and from this time it was difficult to leave the USSR and return home. Theoretically it was still possible to apply for a pass and Father took a chance, but in fact only because the crowded and stinking waiting rooms in offices remained the only safe places. It was possible to remain there whole days in queues or if lucky, on benches, the Soviets did not control the places and people there. Finally, as he heard information the NKWD was taking interest in the former railway officers, got away without formalities, with the help of professional smugglers who took also people, over the so-called green border to GG. The second wave of arrests followed as he was on his way, he overheard it also bypassed the Jews. This started a rumor the Jews were in a privileged position, arousing a mistrust, which at the moment of his escape seemed probable. However, Father affirmed distinctly that according to his knowledge the Polish Jews always behaved correctly. The NKWD functionaries were Russian Jews, quite a difference. He owed thanks to the Polish Jews, those known to him living in Choroszcz, for the news which alerted him.

Father did not know any further events, happy to cross the border and more so, to find his displaced family. It took him the end of February and most of March. But the mass deportation of Polish Jews by the Soviets followed only in July, the last days of disaster of France. The campaign on the West, already decided, but still not finished and the shock and general desperation caused the events in the Soviet zone to pass almost unnoticed. The known world fell in dust, people committed suicide thinking this the final victory of Hitler, little difference if some die a little early and some later, all hope ended. Therefore, the first information about the fate of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union got Angus only in the first months of 1944. He started to read the underground press in the secret archive, some backwards. But even then, he did not join the facts in logical order, unable to make a consistent image. After the war, he filled in some of the gaps, but still the theme was dangerous and obscured in the communist press on purpose, similar to the case of Katyn. He hit on proper information only after the decay of the communist regime. A more detailed and compact image emerged finally after reading the American sources. Even then, the already petrified mind and solidified brain paths caused some years in doubt, before he realized the truth and could see the whole picture.

These facts now almost forgotten and even before known to few are as follows:

All the people living under the Soviet occupation had to accept compulsory Soviet citizenship. Often also the nationality and name in the new identification papers was changed in an administrative way. Protesting would be not only futile, but dangerous. However, this did not affect the runaways, returning to Polish lands outside the USSR, mostly the GG. The so called "inostrancy" (foreigners), were allowed to leave on the strength of their old Polish papers with address, and then after crossing the border the new ID card would be up to the German administration.

But in case of the Jews, the Soviets declined return pass even to those who could display the hands of workingmen. At first this accompanied a conversation, motivating this decision on the well-being of the ones concerned, pointing to the danger from the German side. There was already information about the brutal treatment of Jews, marked clothing, announcements about creation of ghettos and so on, although so far the Jews were not being exterminated, only the Poles. The opinion of the Jews divided. A bigger part decided to wait for the expected catastrophe of the Nazi in the spring of 1940, even if some determined managed to slip through the border. So for example did Anielewicz, one of organizers of the ŻOB and future first commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The NKWD continued the persuasion insisting Polish Jews should resign from Polish citizenship and ask for USSR citizenship, which would make them happy people.

However, the opinion of Polish Jews remained adamant, almost all rejected the offer.

The archives of the underground press from 1940 included many blanks. Professor Niedzielski found for him three reports about the deportation of Polish Jews from the Soviet zone, the first defined the presumed number of victims as five hundred thirty thousand, the second as five hundred seventy thousand. The third, consistent with official note of the Polish Government in Exile, presented the official number, six hundred thousand. The world at the time collapsed, Germany seemed to win the war, obviously with its true ally. Hitler and Stalin would together rule the world, whatever was left of it. All hope vanished. It was impossible to walk through the nearby forest without meeting the cadaver of someone who had taken his life, hanging on a tree. Angus himself tried to induce his parents to collective suicide, his grounds were complicated. Anyway, if Stalin personally chose the deadline for the rout, it was a moment most advantageous for the USSR. It all proceeded without an echo, not only the Polish people, all the fighting countries took no notice. Only the Polish Government in Exile protested, but its note was disregarded.

Being in 1994 in the USA, the author read the deposition before the commission of the House of Representatives from September 22/23, 1954 by Hershel Weinrauch, the top manager of Białystok magistrate, nominated by the Soviets. Before the war he was an editor-in-chief of the last Jewish magazine appearing in Yiddish in Soviets. He conceded, that in June there remained in Białystok only sixty thousand Polish Jews. All who declined resigning from Polish citizenship were arrested and deported to Siberia.

Bronisław Teichholz described similar events in Lwów, where some fifty thousand Polish Jews were imprisoned. The same action was simultaneously carried out by the NKWD in all greater and smaller cities where the refugees lived.

Rabbi Aaron Pechenick, in a book edited in 1943 in New York, wrote, "In two terrible days and nights a million of Jewish refugees were pushed into cattle wagons and in the worst condition deported to Siberia." Probably the number announced by the Polish Government in Exile is more precise. Maybe Pechenick adds together the figures of the later actions, of which there were several, smaller. The last mass deportation of Jews started some ten days before Hitler' attack, the 10th to 12th of June and gradually changed to an all-out evacuation of the population. But not of all the population, only the part who could work, be useful.

According to the report of the Ministerialdirigent Raucher from German Kriegsferwaltung u. Wirtschaftsstab, all those capable of heavy work, about twelve and a half million people were evacuated at the time from the terrains taken by the Wehrmacht. An unheard achievement of transport. These people did not hit the Gulags, the railroad brought them only where they were wanted. The Soviets dumped there the factories with equipment, which immediately had to be set up and start production. The fate of the people was no better than in the Gulags, they worked fourteen hours a day, living in terrible conditions, because they built factories but not shelters for people. So the workers had to manage as they could. They got as much bread as the Gulag prisoners, half a kilo a day, sometimes only a quarter. It is unknown how many survived, surely a clear minority.

Now it is time to say straight and clear that neither the Poles, nor the Jews deported to Siberia ever blamed for this the Russian people, at least the author never met anyone who did. They could see that in comparison to the misery Stalin caused the Russian people, this was only half as bad. Whatever they suffered, the Russians suffered longer and worse. What appeared to the Polish Jews and Poles a terrible calamity, for the Russian was a norm, for their whole life or the essential part of it. Also, see the capsule "Fate of the Russian Captives," which was also Stalin's doing.

In the year 1942 the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee led aid to six hundred thousand Polish Jews in Siberia. The report edited in 1943 cites this number, but notes that between twenty-five and thirty-three percent had already died, so the total number of the prisoners must have been about nine hundred thousand, or at least seven hundred and fifty. "Who did not see the thousands of tombs along the railroad lines, could never imagine this." The journey lasted from four to as many as eight weeks. The prisoner received on arrival only half a kilo of bread daily, all other products he could get by exchange only. The conditions got a little better when the prisoners learned to live from the forest. In this respect Jews were in a worse position than the Poles, because living in cities, they had a weaker contact with nature, less experience. On the other hand, they were fortunate to bypass the great frosts. However, the Poles were arrested in winter. Also, the Jewish refugees were seldom accompanied by families, while the Poles were principally deported with a whole family, so proportionally there died more children, the elderly and weak.

Already in 1942, on the basis of the agreement between Sikorski and Stalin began the discharge of Polish citizens from the Gulags, slowly and long, including Polish Jews too. According to the primary task, they veered towards Polish troops, those who could not be included remained temporarily in reserve, accompanying the Anders Corps as civilians. The formation left the USSR borders. It is known from memoirs that the exhausted men died in numbers, when they crossed the Persian border and the threat and tension passed away, and began eating normally. It certainly was a journey to hell and back again, if lucky.

One of the soldiers was Menachem Begin, former commander of the paramilitary Zionist organization Betar in Poland, future head of Irgun Zwoa Leumi in Palestine. (In sharp competition with both the Group of Stern and Haganah). Finally a prime minister of Israel. After getting a honorable dismissal from the II Corps, he and others remained in Palestine to fight for their future state. Modeled after the AK pattern, Haganah and next the Israeli Army organized with a strong participation of soldiers of the II Corps. From several thousands of Polish Jews moving out with it, maybe a thousand took discharge, others remained waiting till they had served their term to end of the war, still others chose the long roundabout way after the war. A short summary: of the seven hundred and fifty to nine hundred thousand Polish Jews displaced and imprisoned in the Siberian Gulags, about one hundred fifty-seven thousand survived and left Siberia. So this means eighty percent or more perished, less than twenty percent survived. About the same proportion as with Poles (except Katyń).

Here we arrive at the point, explaining why the Germans so easy killed the Jews, meeting almost no resistance, when they, because of the situation on the fronts and lack of available power, temporarily put off exterminating Poles. The author has alluded several times to this phenomenon, explaining this falsely and unfairly, if always believing it the truth. Anyway, contemporary Poles judged it so: the Jews fear combat and resign in advance.

At a stretch and using all capacity, modern states in the time of WW I managed to mobilize ten, exceptional as much as twelve percent of the population. After WW I, a smaller percentage than this toll caused in France a serious crisis, as the number of population dropped for twenty years. Hitler after coming to power devoted six years to a come-back of the population, cultivating the children for new soldiers.

Meanwhile in the year 1939 left for the war or evacuated more than twenty percent of the Jewish population, maybe up to twenty-five percent, principally all the fit men of conscript age. They all declared the intention to volunteer to the army, like all refugees, Polish or Jewish, did. There is no point considering whether the purpose was genuine: since they went, and were prevented from joining the Army only by a superior force, the assumption must be, yes. Anyway, such sentiment was at this time popular, the author remembers this well; he too did his utmost to achieve the dream unrealistic at his age, would give and do anything to fight.

However, the remaining Jewish community was unable to resist, to fight. With the men gone, who should defend them? Even if the Germans would leave them in peace, the natural birthrate would fall off drastically, for a longtime it would be a dying community, with a chance to regenerate only after war.

Of course a few solid men able to take arms, remained. For example the only householders with children or sick parents. Also some teenagers matured in the long years of war and were eager to fight (exactly as did the Polish children; youth are always more ready to take any risk). But they were few, maybe one, two percent and there remained those defective either physically or still worse, mentally, a moral trash, who appeased the Germans and helped them to destroy their own people, hoping to make a career. To say it short, traitors, such as Gancwajch, or among Poles the Heniek mentioned in Chapter 4 (some said, even Heydrich was born in a Germanized, but originally Jewish family).

The whole image of occupation changes dramatically. Killing of Jews was not only Hitler's doing, but as all WW II and all the atrocity attached, the common work of Hitler and Stalin. Stalin started first and on him lays the responsibility for over a half million, rather close to a million victims. Next Hitler darted like a hyena on a community stripped of men, unable for defense and exterminated the remaining women, children and elderly. Finally murdered even the trash, helping him in crime. Cruel tragedy and now it is clear why for so long it was prohibited to say the truth. In a communist regime even to mention this, allude to the facts would mean damaging, slander with malicious intent to the USSR. Exactly as the Katyń case, only the number of victims much greater.

Horrible story, however every state should be proud of such citizens, willing to take a risk and devoting their lives for the privilege of citizenship status. The living should stress the point, it is a mutual great honor.

Obvious, not all went from pure patriotism but calculated also more practical reasons. If so, it means Polish citizenship had a great value indeed, more honor not only to such a citizen, but also to such a country.

Of course, the Polish Jews could not expect such an extreme reaction from Stalin, nobody could, because it was beyond human reason. On the other side he had a fatal reputation and they may not exactly expect caresses.

Whatever way you look at it, these people deserve glory, fame and memory. And we should supply this. Obvious, let's repeat the phrase, not only from pure loyalty, to be fair, but also calculating more practical reasons. This shows Poland in a good light, doesn't it? Not a bad place, if the citizens were ready to die for such country.

Now the time has come for the author's conscience. He wrote about Jews several times with some superiority, not knowing the exact facts, but ignorance and stupidity do not justify the mistake. In three sentences: Contrary to his beliefs, the Polish Jews took the maximum yield, mobilizing all fit men. Not by their own fault, only by a superior force, instead of a combat field, they got into the jaws of another monster. They rejected the offered exchange of Polish citizenship for USSR citizenship.

From that moment their expedition changed into a tragic odyssey. A great majority died, less than twenty percent, roaming around the world, found a new shelter and built there a new state. In this time, the community without its men got wiped out, and the few who managed to survive (surely, with the active aid of the Polish people), hurried after their men.

The author was born and educated in a house of an Endecia ideology. In Poznań, there never was any violent anti-Semitism, only a feeling of superiority and it is possible, some of the old petrified brain-paths remained. But mainly, it was a lack of information, both societies stood in the time of war strictly isolated by a common enemy. The closest the author came to the truth, was as he on the evening after the day the Ostrowiec Ghetto perished, crept in there (more about this in Chapter 9). It was a crazy madness to do so and he became terrified after he recognized the small packages were dead children; but he found no babies, neither dead nor alive, and he looked for them. Afterwards he thought about this much indeed, but failed to link the obvious.

After the war, the matter of Jews in the Soviet zone was a strict taboo, there was no way to get more information. Being in Torrence, CA in 1994 he found a book of Walther Sanning, Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry. He did not like it, the writer was fantasizing, he never saw the facts and did not know what he was writing about, probably tailoring the truth to the buyer's request. But he did mention also some real issues. From there it was a straight path to the Library of Congress and other sources.

The author certainly should have attached this supplement earlier, but he was still checking many details and afterwards thought, the whole book might need revising. With luck, no, it was only this one wrong interpretation, about which he, at the time of happening a teenager, always was a little in doubt (only could not lay his finger on the spot). But all the mentioned facts are and always were genuine, as seen by him.

With senility, the work capacity drops and time runs faster.

In March 1942 Angus finished the fourth class of the Gimnazjum in the science course and this ended his study with Stach, but they met often to talk and occasionally played chess. However, in the humanities program, he still was on the grade of the third-class. But now he could increase the rate, and taking individual lessons with Professor Iaruga, he finished as a runner making a final sprint. On the way, he often met Stach and Stephan, but they were working on their fourth class courses in Polish language and Latin.

But there appeared a problem. Professor Mazzurewicz told Angus that even after completing the humanities program and despite his excellent results, he still could not get him the Gimnazjum diploma of completion.

Now, this makes necessary a short explanation about the pattern of Polish schools. First, there was primary school compulsory for all children aged between seven and fifteen, consisting of six classes. The seventh class was available, on a voluntary basis, for those who were ending their education at that point. Next it was Gimnazjum with four classes and then the Liceum of two classes with a final official examination called "Matura." There was no other official exam, but sometimes the schools, if the number of candidates was too great, fixed internal exams. Also after four classes of Gimnazjum, before the Liceum, there was not any exam, but traditionally the certificate of finishing the fourth class of Gimnazjum was called the "little matura." Some professional schools, for example those educating the priests, or Army officers and so on, accepted candidates with their "little matura". But only the Matura would do for a study at the University (occasionally some specialties with too many candidates, fixed also extra internal exams). In fact, the education continued step-by-step. There was a possibility to miss some steps, even all, but only by an external examination before a commission settled for every following year by the Ministry.

The case was simple; Angus had missed one step, the sixth class of the primary school. In 1939 he had only finished the fifth class. (In fact he had once already done an exam, for the second primary class, having missed the first, but this was simple, he was only expected to read and write fluently, just "chicken feed"). But the war happened before he managed the sixth class and it was Father who taught him using textbooks, and much extra, especially about arithmetic. In an intensive course, he coached Angus on all he was able to do himself in speedy calculation and speed counting. In fact, made of Angus a machine, which assured all his following career and successes. Anyway, lacking the primary school certificate, Angus learned in the Gimnazjum only informally.

Such an obstacle may seem absurd, a mere formality. But the secret educational pattern, subjected to the Government in Exile via the district delegate of the county Ostrowiecko-Opatowskiego needed strictly following the instructions to the letter, even the formal ones. The concern was the certificates to be issued after the war in free Poland, should uphold their merit. There should be not any doubt about their credibility.

Anyway, a couple of years after the war the rules smoothed out, the secondary schools reopened and accepted candidates on the grounds of entrance exams and further proof in progress of studies. It became possible to enter any suggested class and if the candidate did not fit the level, the pedagogical council removed him to the proper place. In fact a sound, practical reasoning. That being so, Angus could not care about these regulations and certificates, just carry on learning.

But in the wartime and specifically in Ostrowiec nobody expected this. Elementary school existed still in GG and functioned under the German occupation, if with a lowered, reduced program. Only the higher schools remained closed and outlawed and that is why the secret education was organized. The secret elementary schools were organized only in the lands incorporated into Germany, where even the Polish language was prohibited. But the thought of traveling illegally to, for example, Greatpoland just to pass a secret commission examination there, would be absurd.

Yes, the problem was paradoxical, but to Angus far from funny. Enough to say, that long after the war and after completion of his University degree, in sleep Angus dreamed that his study was void, null, worthless. All because the high school graduation exam was invalid, because he had not finished Gimnazjum formally, because he lacked the certificate of the sixth class in primary school. He should start again, with primary school. Angus awoke in a cold sweat and almost arrived late for the solemn handing out of the diploma.

Now, this case continued almost two months. Professor Mazzurewicz put the case before the board of the secret high school, which next passed on the query to the Country Delegate Department of Education. Still the opinion remained that despite the obvious case, nothing could be done against the book of regulations. However, they showed simultaneously a simple manner of overcoming the barrier. Angus had already the fifth class certificate, so it would be enough to return for a month or so to one of the primary schools to get a certificate of sixth class and all would be correct.

Opinions of his parents divided: Mother thought it a pure cretinism, bureaucratic invention how to poison the mind and life of the common people. But Father, being a former government official, had full understanding of law and order. He regarded that in the special situation of a secret state all the procedures must be maintained according to the book. Otherwise there could be abuses, and the whole authority of the secret state rests on a moral credit. Angus did not have any definite judgment. He agreed that it would be most easy to apply the proposed formal solution and have the matter off his head, to forget all about it. But on the other side he felt it as a painful humiliation, a degradation. He, a student finishing the last class of Gimnazjum should return to the primary school, among the little kids, it was too much.

June came and with it, a last take on to realize the ideas of the "genial strategy of the brilliant leader Stalin" to command directly by telephone the attacking Soviet troops afterthe spring slush ran dry. After the first rupture of the German front, the battle by Charkow ended in a double encirclement and disaster. The whole southern front broke up and the USSR came again close to the breaking point. But also Hitler committed solid errors, next he acted as a gambler, who could never break a game whether winning or losing. In winter this ended with the Stalingrad catastrophe, a worse failure than Moscow in the year before. But now, in the hand of Germany sat the last huge mass of Russian POWs, nearly three quarters of a million.

From this time, Stalin remained the Commander in Chief, but did not try to command personally. He issued orders like "Let's beat them but proper," leaving the realization to the generals familiar with war, on condition that they did not try to put themselves forward and demanded copyright for their ideas. By a natural elimination in battle appeared a group of able, professional commanders. This way, the worst defects of the Red Army healed, though this procedure cost of life, or slavery worse than death, of millions. With the time passage, the Red Army became again valuable troops. In meantime perished all the soldiers from the first conscription, but more older men were pressed into service. If not so fit as the youth, at least they already knew what to expect from the Germans and preferred to die once, than continue a long agony in captivity. In short, the conditions on the front changed radically in the year 1942.

Angus could not note in detail the events on the front and the new German victories, including Africa. He decided in early June to continue with the unwanted and unpleasant need and under persuasion and pressure, joined the sixth class of primary school. The modern building of the composite school opposite the Gimnazjum used the Germans and occasionally in the yard appeared Soviet prisoners (now treated a little less bestially), so he had a long way to walk. He walked by the open grassland to the Wspólna Street, next to Pieracki Street, turning his face away not to be seen by any friend. Almost at the end, by the corner with Garden Street an old, brick house was placed.

There he sat, a deadweight on a wooden bench, too small for him, for the next five or six hours. The teachers and the director knew already his case and generally asked no questions, only sometimes when they could not extract the proper answer from the class. The class overfilled, more than ten pupils (about half were girls) of his age and a few older, but being very tall and rather massive, he seemed older. Considering himself only accidentally here, he fook to himself and evaded any close acquaintance. However they returned at times home in a group, chatting. Up till then he had attended only boys' school, and coeducation with the girls made a strange impression, but they were small, younger girls and not interesting, though they felt attracted to him too much for his liking.

There was one exception, an outstandingly pretty girl of fifteen years, who pleased him very much, but alas had already her knight-errant of similar age and did not look at any but him. But after ending the term the girl was sold by her father, a simple and primitive beast, to a works-master in the Ostrowiec metal-plant. To be exact, he sent her for service in his house. The case aroused much comment, because when the girl fled weeping back, the father using physical force led her again to his chief and ordered her to full obedience to the employer. He said, he had rented her for a full year of service, the whole family would be better-off, because he got a better job. He not only ordered his daughter to full obedience, but beside transferred to his chief for the period of a year his parental authority with authorization to punish her. Never before had Angus heard of anything like this story, but the old people said such events had happened before. Angus considered, what would he do, being in the place of her knight-errant or cavalier and really did not know. This was the only sensation that happened in this boring month, which at last passed away.

With luck, Angus managed on his way to primary school and back to meet no one who knew him. He felt nonetheless deeply degraded. Anyway it was not a full month, but only a little more than three weeks. On the 24th of June the, well, if not exactly inferno, at least purgatory ended and Angus received a certificate for having passed the sixth class of primary school.

The scrupulous professor Mazzurewicz had another surprise ready on his bosom, wanted an extra formality. In the last year's before the war it was the custom for the fourth class students in their physics lessons to become familiar with motorization, including the driver's license. It was the common task for teachers of physics and the military exercise trainer and impossible in secret schools, but at least the theoretical part, entering the program of physics, should be learned. Mazzurevicz never drove a car, luckily for the pedestrians and other vehicles, but tried several times and these tries evoked panic and shock among the instructors driving with him. However, being a member of the examination commission he knew all about the physical principles of inner combustion, motor construction, all the physics and mechanics of car. He put many difficult questions before the candidates, even if the other members of commission thought they were immaterial and not important for a practical course and ability to drive. Agreed, a driver has to know the difference between the two-cylinder and four-cylinder motor, but the ideal cycle of Carnot is another kettle of fish, important rather for engineers and builders of motors. The instructors and other members remained unclear about the refinements, however listening to the questions and answers seriously and with indifferent faces.

Even before the obtaining of the primary school certificate, Mazzurewicz lent to Angus two books, one a handbook for learner drivers and the other, much bigger, for professional drivers. After managing the material, Angus should undertake an examination and afterwards the professor would credit him with finishing the physics program and the whole science program of the fourth class.

Angus found the contents of the books interesting. He had much imagination and it made him no difference that he could only read the descriptions of mechanisms and constructions and look at the drawings, without being able to touch the genuine parts. It was better so, he always preferred theory, but had two left hands for practice. Years later, having a car, he was not able to find and distinguish the proper place or part, but could always describe it exactly. This lasted up to the time when one of the mechanics, asked about the price, answered: "It would be so-and-so, but with the excellent advice of the client, the repair is worth more, let's say twice as much."

But talking seriously, the only mechanism Angus learned well in his life was the Polish infantry carbine. He remembered it, could feel each part of the lock in his fingers, by one touch with closed eyes. Awakened from a sleep, he could identify every single detail with one touch, take it apart it and put it together again in the dark. But first, he had in 1939 an excellent instructor and next, the huge emotional motive of a child who never stopped dreaming of taking part in a battle. Now as before, he would give his life ten times over for the occasion to shoot from this rifle but in reality, not in a dream; naturally, aiming at the German occupants. Unfortunately, it did not seem probable.

In a few days more, Angus turned fourteen. In Poland, it is a custom to celebrate the name day (of the holy patron) rather than the birthday, but this was special occasion and Mother made his favorite breakfast, scrambled eggs followed by strawberries. Angus did not say so, but he thought achieving fourteen years a serious matter. Centuries ago exactly at this age a boy could become an arms-bearer, a squire, training at the side of a knight to become a warrior. If brave enough, skillful and with luck, he could himself become a knight, at any day, despite the age. To say it short, Angus expected that from now on he might be active, take his part in the fighting.

He tried to look at himself as at an alien, a foreign person. He felt already more than a boy, at the age of fourteen years he topped the professor by a head, by half a head his already mature colleague. He was 182 cm tall, more in his boots and later grew only in millimeters. He had a wide face and big head, in a shape similar to Herbert Hoover, not the contemporary one, from whose organization he got the mentioned boots and some other relief, after leaving the concentration camp and displaced. The young one, from the years 1921-23, he had seen in a photograph. However, any similarity spoiled a ruffled shag; if cut short, he never could keep this in order. Certainly, he could not expect to equal an adult man in strength and endurance, but hoped the days of combat with swords and shields had passed. Now, the ability to shoot was more important than physical power and he was sure he had forgotten nothing. He lacked sound reason and experience, nevertheless he had almost finished the Gimnazjum and this at his age was a rather good result. No delay despite the war, he had compensated and was ahead of his age, compared to the prewar norms. True, he had finished only partially, had to add some trifles to Mazzurewicz and in humanities was only a couple weeks short of finishing the third class with Professor Iaruga.

For the lessons in Polish language and Latin (the only ones still not finished), he walked three times a week to Professor Iaruga. These lessons differed from the conducted by Dr. Piesewicz, not so beautiful and seizing the spirit, but demanding and hard. The professor had the reputation of excellent educator and perfect humanist, but demanding, stiff and dry, occasionally sarcastic. He wanted perfection fast and rigorously, precisely pointing out any shortages. The first lesson was a review, proof of knowledge from the former class, he commanded Angus to write in short what he remembered about Piotr Skarga. Angus served all the basic data of the excellent orator, writer and preacher, including even the dates of birth and death, which was not compulsory, but he had a memory for figures and remembered them accidentally. Iaruga peered at the notes, a page and a few lines long and asked, "Is this everything?" Angus felt hurt and said, "Professor, you said to be short and they are all the important facts, I have not added any water."

Then for the next lesson Iaruga asked him to compose two essays. One was on the theme: "Wandering of a raindrop on a windowpane" and was to come to eight pages exactly, not a line more or less. The other was to have the title: "From a tree fell a faded leaf" and could be shorter, let's say seven pages. The next lesson was three days later (luckily there was a Sunday among them) and two of those days Angus spent spattering water on the window and taking notes on how the drops behaved. Several times he began the essay, every time disrupting and throwing the papers, it was hopeless. On the last night, he got into bed in a despair, but then got up and wrote the text, which with some corrections produced the needed amount. With the faded leaf the task was easier. He was ready in the last minute, and when with this genuine work of Hercules he met Iaruga, the professor took it indifferently and put aside for later review, beginning the next lesson as if nothing had happened.

Probably, it was the intentional preliminary set-up of a pupil and was good for Angus, who, to use the popular expression, had saddled Mazzurewicz and became vain. After such a chilly shower right at the start, reduced to his place, he tried with all his might to create a favorable impression in the eyes of the pedantic, perfectionist teacher. In general, he managed well, but although the lessons were individual and he make every possible effort to hurry, still the term prolonged, it seemed now, for the next two weeks. Nevertheless, he remained satisfied and what's more, so did the parents, who although a bad financial status, paid for the lessons without the crinkle of an eyebrow.

However by far more important for Angus would be his share in combat. He never doubted that a full college student would meet with a better reception and his chances would increase. He was full of optimism, energy, the old depression forgotten. In the past year, he broke down because of religion, but now he stopped to over concern himself with his spirit and sins incumbent, which as he now evaluated were normal at his age. Not grounds for suicide. He still walked to the church, but mainly for Father's sake, still not entering the period of violent rebellion, but in fact becoming rather indifferent. Now, in his memory stuck the poem of Cyprian Godebski, "The voice of freedom clamored down the holy bronze and before its banner fled the crosses."

Exactly at the moment Angus envisaged the beautiful future, his fate turned another way, the prospects changed. The trivial matter of the primary school certificate, for him only unpleasant and distressing, but already past and forgotten, had more serious outcomes. Alea iacta sunt, but these bones had fallen badly. Not for him the speedy freeway of education, he had to wait until the end of war to continue, meanwhile taking a hard and dangerous path of life.

Each school, besides teaching, makes reports for the Department of Education, now and ever. But just then, the German authorities used the experience of some innovative office to improve the work of the Arbeitsamt, by sending the reports with lists of pupils finishing school, aged over fourteen years. The purpose was not exactly to send them congratulations.

However, looking back, maybe it was not so bad. Angus did survive, if several times his chances looked near zero. Who knows, what might have happened another way. But the most important was, he could realize the dream, fight for his country, if only a short time, just enough to not be ashamed of himself. Certainly, he accomplished nothing of merit, let alone anything affecting the war, only did the minimum of simple duty. Anyway, along the way he found good company, formed friendships and met splendid men, some topping him infinitely in mental ability, some in courage, genuine heroes. He could never reach such height, but they were like beacons indicating the direction. To say it short, there and then, his future was decided. He found examples and models to copy, and if this proved too difficult, at least to try.

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