The Polish Officer Read Online Free Page A

the train.
    Guards with machine guns had positioned themselves along the track, while a dozen carpenters pried up the floorboards of the railroad coaches and workers from the state treasury building installed the Polish National Bullion Reserve—$11,400,000 in five-pound gold ingots packed ten to a crate—in the ten-inch space below. Then, working quickly, the carpenters hammered the boards back into place.
    At which point Nowak came running, his face red with anger. “You had better see this,” he said. The carpenters were just finishing up. Nowak pointed at the shiny nailheads they’d hammered into the old gray wood.
    “Couldn’t you use the old nails?” de Milja said.
    The head carpenter shrugged.
    “Is there any lampblack?”
    “Lampblack! No, of course not. We’re carpenters, we don’t have such things.”
    17 September, 6:48 A.M. Gdansk station. The platforms and waiting rooms were jammed with people, every age, every class, babbling in at least seven languages, only one thing in common: they were too late. Unlucky or unwise didn’t matter, the trains had stopped. A stationmaster’s voice crackled through the public-address system and tried to convince them of that, but nobody was willing to believe it. In Poland, things happened in mysterious ways—authority itself was often struck speechless at life’s sudden turns.
    For instance:
    The stationmaster’s voice, “Please, ladies and gentlemen, I entreat you, there will be no more service . . .,” was slowly drowned out by the rumble of an approaching train. People surged to the edges of the platforms, police struggled to hold them back.
    Then the crowd fell silent, and stopped pushing.
    Then someone cheered. And then someone else. And then everybody. Poland had been brutally stabbed in the back, and so she bled, bled fiercely, but here was proof that she lived, and could strike back at those who tormented her.
    But that was only part of the miracle. Because, only a few minutes later, another train appeared. And if the armored train was an image of war, here was a phantom from the time of peace, a little six-car train headed south for—or so the signs on the sides of the coaches said—Pilava. The Pilava train! Only thirty miles south, but at least not in besieged Warsaw. Everybody had an aunt in Pilava, you went there on a Sunday afternoon and came home with half a ham wrapped in a cloth. Vladimir Herschensohn, pressed by the crowd against a marble column, felt his heart rise with joy. Somehow, from somewhere, a manifestation of normal existence: a train arrives in a station, passengers ascend, life goes on.
    But Mr. Herschensohn would not be ascending. He needed to, the Germans would make quick work of him and he knew it. But God had made him small, and as the crowd surged hungrily toward the empty train he actually found himself moving—helped along by a curse here, an elbow there—away from the track. After a moment or two of this, all he wanted to do was stay near enough to watch the train leave, to send some part of his spirit away to safety.
    Watching from the cab of the locomotive, de Milja felt his stomach turn. The crowd was now a mob: if they got on this train, they would live. Babies howled, suitcases sprang open, men and women clawed and fought, policemen swung their batons. De Milja could hear the thuds, but he willed his face not to show what he felt and it didn’t. A huge, brawny peasant shoved an old woman out of his way and started to climb onto the coupling between the engine and the coal car. The fireman waited until his weight hung on his hands, then kicked him full force under the chin. His head flew up and he went tumbling backward into the crowd. “Pig,” the fireman said quietly, as though to himself.
    But, in the end, the ones who pushed to the front were the ones who got on.
    When the train was good and full, people packed into the cars, when it looked like a refugee train should look, de Milja raised his hand. Then