There were no letters dated December, but there is one, just one, dated January. This solitary letter, written as if into the void (‘I do not know if this will reach you’), is addressed to a son with a disillusioned final injunction.
Jacob Paur from Rosenheim (near Munich) is writing in the evening of 8 January 1945 to his son, Senior Lance Corporal Lothar Paur:
I got up today at 5.00, and by 6.00 was already on my way to Munich. I was there at 14.00 but there was nothing I could do. I pulled a bicycle from the rubble of our stockroom… From the East Station I headed over Ludwigsbrücke to the Stock Exchange… This route to the city centre passes through ruins… A bulletin from the command reports that the Royal Court Theatre and the Maximilianeum etc. have been destroyed, but these buildings were already so badly damaged that there was virtually nothing left to destroy. The chamber of the Regional Economic Administration is on fire, the Exchange has been razed to the ground by direct hits, the upper part of the city is burning, the Regina is ablaze, the Continental having already been burnt down. The Hotel Leinfelder has collapsed, but one wall of the Bitzig banking house has miraculously survived. The Nuncio’s House no longer exists, the Central Credit Bank is in flames, the Turkish Barracks are in flames… The Chinese Tower has vanished and the nearby buildings are burning, and the railway line has been blown up as far as Pasing Station… Everything is very disheartening and sad, especially when you look at the people who have been subjected to this cruel ordeal. I saw many houses in flames. Many streets are impassable for vehicles and you can make your way along them only through narrow paths. In all parts of the city and its environs a terrible number of blockbuster mines have been dropped and everywhere the destruction is immense. I do not want to look any more. I have seen quite enough in the places I am obliged to visit.
I am insisting that your mother should go to Mellek. I will then lead a vagrant lifestyle, or rather, the life of a gypsy. At all events, as soon as the roads allow it, I will cycle off. I have already written so much to you about all this, although there is nothing we can change. Enough. We are allowed only to remain silent, but you can still think what you please. For that reason I cannot answer your question about the end. But again I say to you – remain patient and calm and try to get out of all this horror alive. Dear Lothar, there is much more that should be written and said, but we will leave it at that and take ourselves patiently in hand. I will run my business for as long as circumstances allow, and you do what you are instructed to do, and that will be right because then you will have nothing to reproach yourself with. If I, too, am personally complicit in disaster and grief, I regret it with all my heart, even if my guilt is only that, like the rest of us, I did not rise up against everything, and allowed it to go the way it went, and has rebounded.
I wish you luck so far away. Perhaps your years will pass less disturbingly than they began in your first decades.
The Polish population of Poznań resurrected its city, its laws and dignity with extraordinary vitality and resilience, somehow managing to disregard the citadel, although there were feverish rumours the Germans were sneaking out through underground passages, murdering whoever they come across for their civilian clothes and then, disguised, melting away in the streets with plans for murder and sabotage. There was a more straightforward version that had the same underground passages, only the Germans materialized in the streets already disguised and Poles were capturing them and taking them to military headquarters. Perhaps that was so, but none were brought to our headquarters.
For a time I was staying overnight in the apartment of the Buzinski family, and made friends with the mother, Wiktoria. The head of the family, Stefan Buziński, went out early in the morning to his job at the railway depot wearing trousers too tight for him and a patched donkey jacket. His wife, pani Wiktoria, was a dressmaker by profession and had just acquired some new customers – our traffic-control girls, who were living on the ground floor of the same house. Standing that spring in full view of the whole of Europe, they naturally found it essential to have their tunics neatly altered to fit their figures. To the delight of hospitable and sociable Wiktoria, the girls pestered her from morning till night.
The housework in the family was done mainly by Alka, Wiktoria’s daughter. Slow-moving but pretty, she casually shifted the crude, ancient chairs around and would suddenly freeze, deep in thought, with a duster in her hands. If you happened to look at such a moment into her wonderful blue eyes, the contrast was very striking between her phlegmatic outward appearance and the hidden temperament her eyes betrayed. Passionate forces seemed to be slumbering in her soul, awaiting their hour. Where would Alka direct them?
Wiktoria’s son, a chubby adolescent with curly hair, was his mother’s darling. Every day he would retire behind a partition to play the violin. He was considered musically gifted and, before the war, a teacher at the conservatory gave him lessons, in return for which Mrs Buzińska did the teacher’s laundry and cleaned her apartment. During the years of occupation, the boy could play the violin only in secret, away from the eyes and ears of the German police. One time Mrs Buzińska confided to me she was hoping that her son would be admitted now to a music school.
Standing back a little from her tailor’s dummy, short-sightedly peering with her tired, light blue eyes, which had probably once been the same colour as Alka’s, she carefully examined the darts marked on the waist and shoulders of the tunic.
All those years, ‘the German period’, her children had had no schooling. I asked in surprise if there had been no schools in Poznań. I even noted down our conversation afterwards in my diary.
There were German-language schools for Polish children, but I certainly did not want my children learning German.
But they would have been taught other subjects than just German.
Oh, no, miss! In those schools Polish children were taught only German, and how to count. The Germans said Poles should only be labourers and Knechte – servants; they had no use for educated Poles.
The ‘German period’ was truly a time of dark and wasted years. I suppose I already knew all this, because I had translated German orders and Hitler’s views on the uses of Poles and Russians, but I was astounded every time I came across them in action.
The street in the suburbs was so peaceful, so unscathed. There was no sign of bitter fighting, of people running away, of devastation. The last train to Berlin, on which the fleeing Germans departed, left when there was already heavy fighting in the city. All four apartments in the villa where our operational group was working on the ground floor, were empty. Their previous, Polish, owners had not reappeared. Were they alive? After waiting for a time, I was allocated a room on the first floor, and said farewell to Wiktoria. For the first time during the war and, to tell the truth, in my entire life, I had, if only for a time, a room of my own. It was small, came with a sofa, an SS uniform on the back of a chair, an open writing pad on the table, and a cigarette butt in the ashtray. Also a framed exhortation on the wall from Hitler:
‘Sichere Nerven und eiserne Zähigkeit sind die besten Garanten für die Erfolge auf dieser Welt.’