This was more than absurd. It was a kind of diabolical farce sending murderers to observe religious rituals, go to confession and take communion. I realized he expected me to do the same.
I went to the church accompanied by fifteen policemen. They all waited their turn to confess, and I was the last. I sat apprehensively in the pew, afraid of giving myself away because I had no idea how to behave during confession. It certainly never occurred to me that within a few years I would myself be hearing confession from my parishioners.
When all the policemen had gone, I went to the priest. I had several times dined with him in the Walewicz household, and asked whether he would be going to visit his brother today.
“No,” he replied, “I shall see them in the middle of the week.”
We said good-bye and I left. None of the policemen noticed my ploy.
I did not know then that Father Walewicz was sympathetic to Jews and even, as I later learned, helped them. To this day I do not know whether he guessed I was Jewish. Perhaps he did. I am still greatly saddened that I was unable to save him, although I did try.
One and a half months later, returning home late in the evening after work, I saw a column of trucks parked by the roadside. This time the Belorussian police had received no notification of any imminent anti-Jewish operation, which could mean only one thing: the trucks were intended for Poles. They had not advised the Belorussian police because, as everybody knew, Semyonovich was married to a Pole. I had not been told because I was believed to be a Polish patriot.
I ran to Walewicz and warned him about the trucks and my suspicions. I thought they should hide immediately, take to the forest or flee to some remote farmstead. I asked him to warn his brother and all his Polish friends, but Walewicz did not believe me. He hated Communism and Fascism equally, but believed that as a loyal citizen he could not be subjected to repressions. The entire family was taken away, Father Walewicz, an engineer, a doctor, and twenty other people. The Polish intelligentsia. They were shot that same night. They did not come for Beata.
Sweet Marysia, poor Halina. The list of those we pray for is infinitely long. There was only one Pole I managed to warn that evening that was saved. He left Emsk within the hour.
When Semyonovich brought me to Emsk, the local Jews had already been moved to the old castle. I learned of a tragedy which had been played out two weeks before my arrival. The Jews were ordered to gather in the town square and obediently came at the appointed time, bringing their children and old people, bundles of clothing and supplies for the journey. There, in the town square, between two churches, one Orthodox and one Catholic, a terrible massacre took place. A police unit together with the Sonderkommando shot more than fifteen hundred civilians. The Jews who survived, about eight hundred people, were transferred to the half-ruined castle, which was turned into a ghetto.
It was after this incident that a new chief, Major Adolf Reinhold, a professional policeman with thirty years of service, arrived in Emsk. He found the state of the administration highly unsatisfactory and introduced his own “civilized” measures to establish order. He turned the castle into a real ghetto, establishing tighter security and making this the responsibility primarily of the inhabitants of the ghetto themselves. The Belorussian police were also involved, under German supervision. Major Reinhold began by requisitioning a Catholic nunnery as a police station and moving the nuns to the building next door, which had belonged to a Jewish family killed in the pogrom.
Accompanying Semyonovich as his interpreter, I naturally came to the notice of Reinhold, and a few weeks later he said he wanted to draft me into his department. Semyonovich could hardly refuse and, needless to say, nobody asked me whether I wanted to work for the Gestapo. Semyonovich thought I would see it as a good career move. I looked back at my teaching in the village school nostalgically. Now I was to work for the Germans! There was no escape. I had no option and agreed, well aware that my situation was now even more precarious.
My duties with the Gestapo were little different from what they had been before. As their secretary, I answered the telephone, allocated the policemen’s shifts, and kept the accounts. My duties included translating documents and working with the local population, and this I did conscientiously. I tried to translate matters relating to criminal cases with total accuracy. There were many of these—fights, thefts, murders,—but I was acutely aware that, working for the Gestapo, I had a share of responsibility for what was going on there. I was not directly involved in killing people but had a sense of complicity. I desperately needed to maintain an inner counterbalance to the things I was indirectly participating in. I felt an obligation to do things which would enable me later to look my parents and brother in the eye without shame. If I was not always successful in exploiting situations to help people, I believe I can say I never missed an opportunity to try.
Working in the police station was very unpleasant. I cannot tell whether the people chosen to work there were particularly brutal and stupid, or whether working there brought out the worst in them, but there were some real sadists, and others who were mentally retarded, in a clinical sense. Most of them came to a bad end and I try not to remember that. There is a lot in my memory I would prefer to forget but cannot.
Surprisingly enough, the person most deserving of respect there was Major Reinhold. Although a member of the Nazi Party, he was a perfectly decent individual and conscientious executive. Before the war, he had been a member of the Cologne police force. Having worked under him for a few months, I noticed that he tried to avoid involvement in the operations to exterminate the Jewish population. When he did have to be present, he tried to observe the outward norms of legality and to prevent gratuitous brutality.
Another striking and regrettable feature of the atmosphere of that time and place was the flood of statements landing on my table from local inhabitants. There were denunciations of neighbors, complaints, and accusations, almost always illiterate, often untruthful, and invariably shameful. I was constantly in a state of profound depression but had to conceal the fact at all costs from those I worked with. I suppose it was the first time I had come into such close contact with vile human behavior, ingratitude, and meanness. The only explanation I could find was that the local Belorussian people were dreadfully poor, uneducated, and downtrodden.
Happily, I did often manage to protect people whose neighbors had denounced them. I soon started conducting many of the investigations myself and was able to defend innocent people, deflect suspicion from those seen to have links with the partisans, and simply to facilitate justice. The only thing which gave me strength to get through the day was this constant search for ways of helping people.
The Walewiczes were dead, their property plundered. Several Belorussian families had seized their house and were now arguing about how to share it. Poor Beata, the only survivor, lay for days at a time with her face to the wall and did not want to see anybody. She was in the last month of pregnancy and Semyonovich was getting drunk and going on a rampage. I didn’t see much of him because I spent whole days inside the police station. There was a vast amount of paperwork, bulletins, laws, public announcements. They had to be translated into Polish and Belorussian so the population could be informed of them.