Interim: Resistance
The crawl space was a closed casket. A grave with rotting boards on damp earth walls. No lining whatsoever, but would it be silk, if it were?
No windows in the casket, no hiding places, not a barrel that might once have been used to age wine, when this city was free to be. This was no place for a man to make a living.
It was one for a messenger. One for children to starve, as the girl whose knobs for bones he could feel through his clothes did—does, every day.
The silence of her mother in the kitchen was more fearsome than the stomping of SS men who ripped through her possessions and turned over anything large enough for a six-year-old child to hide inside. This silence scared him, for the messenger couldn't tell whether it was because she wasn't breathing or because she was dead.
She couldn't be dead, he reasoned; he hadn't heard gunshots. Though there were many ways to kill someone, it was unethical. Though they shot men and women and children every day for arbitrary reasons:
* too slow,
* too feeble-minded,
* too weak,
* too imperfectly human,
the mother was not the objective this moment.
As her daughter trembled in his arms, the messenger allowed himself a moment's look around, absorb the details for the story he would tell one day, but then there was a thump overhead, dust rained, and the girl squeaked before she could silence herself. Both she and the messenger held her hand over her sore-ridden mouth. Waiting. Without breathing.
He stared at the hatch, the old crate he heard the mother slide over it when they beat loud—so loud—in the street.
Then it was yanked open, and the girl was dragged, screaming, from his arms.
The messenger was thrust next into the dim light of the mother's kitchen, and he struggled to find a sense of equilibrium amid shrieks and pleas of a mother and growls of truly heedless SS men to shut up as they were all hauled into the loud street—to be shot, he realized, dimly.
He was going to be shot soon.
The sky was bruised bluish and purple. A bare glimpse of it he was granted between the slatternly brick edges before a hand shoved him in the back. Soon the sky would be black, and starless. Absent of souls that should have been there—to watch, perhaps, or to pity. To hope they died quickly.
It is true that the messenger will die, but it is not because he participated in hiding the child, though that is the excuse they will use. In their eyes just another white armband, another blue Star of David.
The messenger wasn't Jewish, but in that moment he felt himself become one, like the Catholic clergy who are persecuted in his homeland, too. Neglected, forgotten.
There are enough people in this ghetto that the idea should easily have taken hold, but the messenger did not join the line of resisters—those brave fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers who protect their children and siblings.
The messenger would have joined them, but he was steered away from the street. Away from the little girl shoved into a wagon with her scared strong generation. Away from the other wagon of still warm bodies. Away from all those waiting to be brought home. Underground.
Slowly, his hands rose into the thick air, pale palms steady flashlights. His past whispered that he was allowed to fight. The present dictated him to fall in order—accept his fate—die.
Why?
First shots ring out loud.
Telltale thumps follow quietly.
He gnashed teeth, biting the urge to fight out of air that could taste like ashes one day. All it smelled like now was rotted fuel.
With the right flame it could burn. He could fight. He wanted to fight. Wanted to fight, needed to fight—
The SS man steering him like one of the pretty and shining VWs on the outside. Darkness is the color, like the sky but its soul is tarnished, artificially bright. He barked an order to turn left, showing him with his gun what he meant. Another round of shots followed it, echoing and rippling the opaque fabric stretched across the horizon, then… Silence.
He had no choice.
When they reached the Judenrat offices on Grzybowska Street—those whose lights when lived in by rulers blazed in the night hour, believably unafraid—the messenger couldn't help but see how well it fit the Nazis and their ideas. Simple walls lacked expression—or, rather, suppressed it. Boxy structure reflected systematic ways, like a train on a one-way track.
Within them, he knew what he could expect: a perception of liveliness—with the whip, with knives and bats—only to look in their eyes and find that they were as dead as those they beat. He did not question that he would suffer before the Schutzstaffel killed him. That idea had been written in his blood before, become the certainty in his life of uncertainties.
Still, he thought of the scars on his wrists, wondered whether he would have to open them again.
Steps before the entrance, the building spoke from its shadows. "Halt, Hauptscharführer."
Immediately, the soldier stopped and flung his arm into the air. The precision of the act may have been congratulated if not for the words it meant, and that he gave life: "Heil Hitler!"
Knowing what would happen if he didn't, the messenger copied him. The world burned as he did, carrying with it all the horrible smells and sounds. Air that tasted like ashes. Screams that shuddered windows. Not one day. Here and now.
But this man will say something one day. Something that is written on murals to commemorate him, something that is remembered as a sole explanation for why people didn't come to save the Jews.
It goes: "He, who does not condemn, acquiesces."
And the next line—even more potent but not as well recalled: "The blood of the innocent calls to heaven for retribution."
The longer he watched, a uniform made from night's harshest dreams separated from the emotionless wall and stepped into the street, pale gaze flicking over them both before parroting them back in a voice that quaked the ground with its power.
The messenger noted it was unenthusiastic. "I will take over from here, Hauptscharführer."
And, for all he pretended not to understand his language, he felt himself become a ghost. Felt his skin tingle as his resister's soul threatened to depart and blood froze in the streets. When he dared to lift his eyes, let them wander over to the officer, he found himself staring at the curled, gloved fists at his sides. He imagined the weight they could throw, the bones they could crush in a simple stroke.
This, surely, was Death himself.
The messenger could run. He has every right to, and the street is wide enough, empty enough. He should run, actually. Even if it means being shot, he would still die resisting reality. God, why isn't he running?
Terror is traitorous.
Every person in this war knows that.
There is no shame in wanting to save your own life.
With his feet rooting and his knees locked, the messenger swallowed, hard. His hand twitched, and the scar rubbed along the fabric of his tired, inked-in shirtsleeve. I don't want to die, it says, and weeps. It was madness, to be so afraid. Running would have been stupid, but it just might have been brave.
The sky was a single shade of black as the barrel of a pistol returned to the messenger's side. He heard the grind of leather as the Hauptscharführer's fingers tightened around the trigger. Suppressed a shudder. "Oberführer—"
"Jetzt bin ich Brigadeführer," he growled, under the sound of more shots that flared orange in the sky—orange, or red? They could have been the deepest sunsets, but the messenger did not see them. He did not dare look up. The time to thank God had not yet come.
What he did see—the expression—shocked the messenger; it appeared like pure fury on him, but the mask was not quite good enough. One of many nightmares crossed his gaze, a haunt wrinkled his nose and cheekbones.
The truth, he realized, is anguish to Death.
His correction appeared to be all that was needed, for when the Hauptscharführer conceded to the superior rank, he—like the messenger—had no choice. They reiterated their allegiances, and his lips thinned into an obligatory line as the Brigadeführer swept the messenger into the Judenrat.
He wondered: was he willing to die with his secrets? For them? The messenger was. Better to die with a closed mouth than to live with it gaping. Those above him could forgive him dying, but he would not betray them by destroying the silence.
Yet.
The Brigadeführer did not stop in any of the square, clean rooms. They did not pass anyone in the short, narrow halls. Once, when the messenger dared to glance over, he found focus and depth in his stare—none of the shallowness the officers and Aryan policemen here bore. It widened when they reached another lacquered door at the end of the main corridor, and the messenger half-expected him to kick it open, but he opened it gently—a hairsbreadth wider than his own head, as if setting up his own guillotine. He glanced both ways, and then reached back for the messenger.
"Come with me," the hand said. Why?
The next he knew, he was being hauled through the greyest alleys and side streets, between leaning and tired buildings—the searching threads of the ghetto where life and decay wore strongest, smelled openly of hope and despair.
His uniform and the messenger's dark suit let them blend with the shadows, but the camouflage, he soon discovered, wasn't necessary. They met no one—not a single patrol, not another prisoner—on their path. The messenger began to think that he possessed some Life when only the sounds they made filled their surroundings. Boots thumped on cracked pavement, war medals clanged, guiding with an expertise that avoided the high walls and barbed wire, misled the omnipotent barracks. It was a route he would have taken on any other visit to escape.
He wasn't shamed to admit that, when he realized this, the messenger considered ripping his arm free and running in the other direction, but a crawling sensation in the pit of his stomach knew that the Brigadeführer would find him, no matter where he hid, or how. Death is rather omniscient that way, but—
You already know that he is not Death, don't you?
They reached a section of wall facing busy Chłodna Street on the other side, and the messenger's heart sagged further with dread. Here was supposed to be a Warszawa secret, a small slice of hope in a sagging world of endless despair. Here was where the caged Tiere came to talk with the free, to plot and yearn for escape. Here marked the spot where the messenger became a silent observer or walked free.
He knew. Oh, God, he knew he was an informant.
And still he let him go, approaching the night-blackened brick. Against it he knocked once, twice, with an equally night-black fist, and received an answer of gunshots behind—far behind them, but there was only so much space to hide in a square mile. They would be found eventually, and how could he be certain that the Brigadeführer wasn't stalling until then? His life, as he said, is a cycle of uncertainties, and his missions had caught him from behind before. Once.
One day, who knows, they might again.
This wasn't a risk he could take. The only reason he followed the Brigadeführer was because he was ordered to and dragged. He turned to the tall brick bodies bracing shoulders to hold one another up, searching for a sliver of space to hide inside between the pronounced bones of their skin. He looked intentionally towards the darkness, not realizing that it would be certain death if he went.
More shots. Springing poppies screaming remember me.
The messenger's foot turned to gather them—their faces, if nothing more.
"Stay where you are—please," the Brigadeführer grunted in stilted Polish, and the messenger froze. The officer's back was to him, and his loafers were light on the brittle grass, but he wasn't certain which shocked him more: the fact that he heard him move, or that he was willingly speaking a language considered inferior by his own people. "It will only be a minute."
Questions crawled up his throat, but he wondered if answers would only sit in the back of his. It was enough of one, he supposed, that the Brigadeführer moved with urgent purpose, peeling off one of his gloves like a layer of dirt and tossing it over the wall.
Despite himself, he asked.
Question number one: "What are you doing?"
Answer number one: "Waiting."
The Brigadeführer braced his hands on his hips. One pale and stark while the other blends in.
The messenger stopped breathing.
A moment passes of this utter stillness, this frozen second that would last eternally—until he died—in the messenger's memory.
Then came answer number two: "Come on…" The Brigadeführer peeled off his cap and raked a hand through tidy, un-waxed hair that now didn't look quite as yellow as the messenger initially thought. Soon it fell in dried, drooping petals across his eyes. Cloaked in a sheen of ashes from the burning air.
Question number two, this one unspoken: What was he doing here? There was no sense for a general-grade officer of the SS to be in a lowly ghetto. Unless, perhaps, for inspection.
On a night like this? They knew to stay away. Blindness, when they wanted to avoid responsibility. What they witnessed, or what they didn't, couldn't betray them.
So they think.
"Waiting for what?" Question number three.
Its answer was coming, but when the Brigadeführer looked over, he looked past him, and his eyes widened. Three long strides, and he was near enough that the answer might have been shared in the manner of the secret it was, but only pain burst in the keeper's jaw. He slammed into the ground, making a sound in spite of himself, and when he looked up there it was, what he expected all along:
* a gun pointed at his face,
* power, an entire house of it, and
* piercing pale eyes
flicking over the darkness in his, begging him to keep quiet.
"You will salute to the Führer or you will not have a tongue to speak with. Now, repeat, if you will: Lang lebe der ruhmvolle Führer," the Brigadeführer snarled. His oath fed torches at the messenger's back, lit the air into blood red fear. The ground burned. His hands scorched, and he wanted to pull them away, to place them somewhere cold and silent. The Brigadeführer's mouth.
Ludicrous as the idea was, he couldn't stop staring. He watched it disappear.
The messenger didn't understand why. Had he expended all his courage in another language?
Was he willing to die with his secrets?
Running was pointless. The messenger had spent the war running—always running—but he knew now that, regardless of his defects, to run from the Brigadeführer would be diving into the hawk's numerous and steely claws, where here he had the dimmer pain of his single beak. His silence in the SS men's fervor was telling, and if he meant to betray him eventually then so be it, but for now his was the only safety available.
The words fled his mouth with the certainty of a lie, the kind that satisfied the men who didn't look too closely when they tore apart homes and minds. They broke the messenger's heart.
This would be his last visit to the ghetto. He couldn't save a child like this, as the last threads of flesh attaching a limb to the body.
He wanted to save them all. The sort of extremist love for humanity with all its flaws that gifted him that thought…
God, if He's watching, He sees it on fire in the Brigadeführer's heart, too. There the torch blazes.
The messenger, human himself, can only catch the gleam from the entryway.
As soon as the SS men were gone, the Brigadeführer's stowed his pistol, crouched, and made to speak, but the messenger—he couldn't help himself. Can humans ever?
"Why?"
The Brigadeführer's wide-eyedness crinkled like onionskin paper, dissolving the second a resonated from the alley. A scream. They listened to a scene that had been repeated throughout hundreds of homes—more like thousands, or millions—until the messenger heard him say, quietly, "Anything defined by walls, whether they are made invisible or solid, is bound to change."
The face staring painfully at the silhouettes on a puppeteer's stage, when the messenger studied it, wasn't bound by age, if ever it had been. In it laid the possibility of a map—of rivers and lush plains fringed by mountains, of pale suns and cloudless skies. The breath of it rose in slow, controlled passages.
But there were no bridges on this map. Only walls.
It denied itself peace. Tracks of silver steel raced through. Ink splotches devoured burns.
Black ate the pain, white exposed it. Or maybe it was the other way around.
The whole image was difficult to tell.
His last question: "Why save me and not the children? They are the ones being deported."
The Brigadeführer didn't smile, exactly, and it wasn't a pleasant one at that, but it was, above all, an emotion. True and genuine.
"You will understand. One day."
Smack. They turned. His glove had returned.
The Brigadeführer helped him onto the wooden footbridge at the intersection of Chłodna and Żelazna, whispered of the broken barriers at its center. Then he melted like Death into the recesses between locked rib cages.
This was the first of two times he saw Germany.
As the days will pass, he will begin to understand what that means. When strained faces on the other side of the wall secret him to their safe haven, when living eyes in skeletal faces blink at him from a huddle in the basement. When he sees real food in a starving child's hands, sacrificed by thin-petaled flowers to make certain they live when others cannot.
Naïve, perhaps, but resistance is always hopeful.
Footnotes:
1. Jan Karski (b. Kozielewski): A resistance fighter, a diplomat, a courier with photographic memory, it is from his perspective that this is written. He began the war in the army but soon found his way to the Polish underground and work as a courier—hence, his nickname here as "the messenger". Throughout October 1942, he was smuggled into both the Warsaw ghetto and the Lublin camp, and it is these visits that drove him to become a voice for the Jews and to convince the Allied governments of their massacre in Poland. As we know, however, his accounts were met with little responsive action in both Britain and the United States. Disheartened but undeterred, he worked from the US throughout the remainder of the war and for long after to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.
Scars on his wrists: In 1940, he was captured by the Gestapo while on a mission and tortured for information. Fearing that it would work, he cut his wrists and was sent to a hospital, from which he escaped.
A special thanks goes to viennese. caffee to for introducing me to the story of this incredible man.
2. The Warsaw ghetto was the largest of its kind in Poland. This was in part because the capital housed the largest Jewish population in Europe and the world—second only to New York City—with a total of 350,000 people. 12 October 1940 began the development of the ghetto following implementation of Nazi laws similar to the Nürnberg Laws the previous November. At its onset, an estimated 400,000 Jews were forced to live within a 1.3 square mile area. Ghettos were established as temporary districts by the Nazis, and so it grew smaller as time passed, but over the next four years, hundreds of thousands would die from starvation, disease, deportation to labor or extermination camps, and resistance to the latter.
3. "White armband, another blue Star": these were what Jewish inhabitants were required to wear in the ghetto.
4. Catholic clergy: It is true, in Poland's case, that Catholics were also persecuted. William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich cites a diary entry of General Franz Hadler which references a looming "house cleaning" of the Polish clergy (as well as the Jews, intelligentsia, and nobility) (874).
It would also be relevant to note that Jan Karski was born a Roman Catholic and remained so throughout his life, but because he felt he failed in his mission to save the Jews, he is quoted saying in a 1981 speech, "And thus I myself became a Jew. And just as my wife's entire family was wiped out in the ghettos of Poland, in its concentration camps and crematoria – so have all the Jews who were slaughtered become my family."
5. Ludwig's division here of Brigadeführer in the Schutzstaffel is in the largely administrative, or paramilitary, division of the Allgemeine-SS, likely a personal upgrade from Oberführer - (which was seen as the last field-grade rank before general) - granted by Hitler himself in order that he may have the proper clearance to be in meetings, etc. as more than a Wehrmacht (Army) leader. Of the other two divisions, the Waffen-SS were comprised largely of operative troops, and the Totenkopfverbände-SS, or "death's head units", were largely relegated to the concentration camps.
6. The Judenrat ("Jewish Council") offices comprised the Nazi-established organization responsible for administrating the Ghetto and carrying out orders from them. Roles ranged from chairmen to policemen, but there was no question that they were still considered inferior in Nazi eyes, who did not hesitate to shoot them if they believed they were not following orders.
7. Chłodna Street: The description of this section of wall as a meeting place between people on both sides is—as far as I know—true. Karski's entry may not have gone exactly like this—in fact, it probably didn't—but I hope the detail adds a glimmer of reality to this section.
8. The wooden footbridge at the intersection of Żelazna and Chłodna Streets was erected on 26 January 1942 for Jews to cross between the small and large ghettos (divided in December 1941) without touching the so-called "Aryan" side of Warsaw. It seems to have been closed in August 1942, and today it exists as a symbol of the Holocaust.
Information Sources:
1. "Allgemeine-SS" – Wikipedia
2. "The Envoy" – Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
3. "Ghettos" – Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
4. "Jan Karski" – Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
5. "Jan Karski" – Wikipedia
6. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William. L Shirer
7. "Uniforms and insignia of the Schutzstaffel" – Wikipedia
8. "Warsaw" – Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
9. "Warsaw Ghetto boundary markers" – Wikipedia
Inspirations:
1. The deportation of children from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Storyteller, by Jodi Picoult
2. Stylistic components: The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
3. "Lang lebe der ruhmvolle Führer": a variant of "Lang lebe unser ruhmvoller Führer" in "Don't Let Me Die", by Slovenskych. Used with permission.
Some of this, I do not doubt, is inaccurately depicted. After writing this, I discovered that Jan Karski was once smuggled into a camp disguised as a Latvian soldier and wondered if that was how he went into the Warsaw ghetto, too. I don't know, but when I first read about Jan Karski I knew I wanted to write an interaction between him and Ludwig. Their missions seemed so similar that, if Ludwig existed, it seemed inevitable to me that their paths would cross at some point.
I hope this makes sense, and that it doesn't read like the abstract ramblings of a wannabe writer. The Holocaust is difficult to write about, and to write well and respectfully. I don't know if I've done that in your eyes, but I do know that—at the least, between the lines of Alfred's, Arthur's, Matthieu's stories—it acknowledges that which could have laid buried and unknown if not for the efforts of courageous people like Jan Karski.