“Listen to the fucker yell.”
“Keep shouting like that and your balls are gonna drop off.”
“A dog can bark all it wants, it’ll never talk like a human.”
“Because you have to be born human to talk like a human, you can’t learn it, Wincenty.”
In any case, what I got out of it was that we needed to supply even more stuff, because the German soldiers were fighting for us just the same. At the end he screamed something so loud he almost rose off the table and floated into the sky. At that exact moment a whole bunch of soldiers poured out from behind the administration building. Where had so many of them come from all at once? Socha from Malenice pointed to where two trucks were parked in back of the building. They started to push us back against the fence with the butts of their rifles. The translator told us to form lines, because the officer was going to come talk with some of us one-on-one.
So we formed lines and the officer started walking around. But he evidently didn’t have much to say anymore, because he just pointed at one or another of the men, and the soldiers pulled them out and had them stand in the middle of the square. He reached me and he might not have paid any attention to me, but he suddenly looked at my four-cornered Polish army cap and his face bulged. Because I wore a cap like that. I’d brought it back from when I’d been in the regular army, it didn’t have the eagle on it and without the eagle it just looked like an ordinary cap, so what did I have to be afraid of. He asked me through the translator if I’d been in the war? I had. So I’d fought against him? I had. He smashed me right in the face. He was a stocky guy with a bull neck and a face like a cobblestone. My nose started bleeding. He hit me with his other hand, then punched me in the stomach for good measure.
Truth was I’d barely done any fighting at all back then, less than three weeks, and most of it we were just marching endlessly back and forth, then off in another direction till we didn’t know which way was which. Then when we finally started to actually fight, right away the order came through to stop fighting and retreat. I shot my gun all of five times and I probably never killed anyone, unless God hit someone with one of my bullets. But I don’t know about it if he did. On top of that I came down with the dysentery, and whenever we halted for a moment I’d have to run off into the bushes. I lost weight, grew a beard, got infested with lice, and that was my war. But I wasn’t going to tell that bastard the truth when he asked if I’d fought. I had fought.
It wasn’t enough that he knocked me around, he also pulled the cap off my head and stomped on it. And he didn’t just point his finger at me, he used his whole hand. The soldiers grabbed me under the arms and dragged me out into the middle of the square with the other men that had already been picked out. Then a truck drove up and they ordered us to climb in.
To begin with it didn’t occur to anyone that they were going to kill us. How could they go straight from a meeting to killing us? We weren’t thieves or any kind of criminals, why would we have to die? Also, we were misled by the spades that were in the truck. If there were spades, that meant they needed laborers. Maybe they’d have us do some digging or fill something in. In wartime there’s always digging and filling in to be done. It would have helped to know which direction they were taking us, but we couldn’t tell because first, the truck was covered with a tarpaulin, and second, the sky was overcast that day and it seemed like the sun was on one side one minute, the next minute on the other, first in front of us then behind, like it wasn’t really there at all. Stelmaszczyk from Obrębów even got into an argument about the sun with Wrona from Lisice. One of them said he knew the sun like the back of his hand, the other one said he did too. The first one said he got up with the sun every morning, the other one said he got up with the sun every morning as well. The first one said he had the sun in his blood, he didn’t even need to look up in the sky to know where it was, the second one said he could have gone completely blind and he still would have known where the sun is in the sky. It’s over there. In the end someone said that maybe the sun in Obrębów was different than the one in Lisice, because perhaps each village had a different sun, and so the sun over the truck was a different one again. It was only then they stopped arguing.
You could feel the potholes and the bends in the road. But potholes and bends won’t tell you you’re being taken to your death. Sure, there were four soldiers sitting at the back of the truck with their guns pointed at us, but that didn’t surprise anyone, if they were taking us somewhere they had to guard us on the way. And even if we’d asked them where they were taking us they likely didn’t know, because it was probably their higher-ups made the decisions. Besides, what language could we ask them in when they didn’t know Polish. But Smoła couldn’t take it, in the end he asked them:
“Excuse me, can you tell me where you’re taking us? You probably need workmen, right? Am I right? We’ll do it, why wouldn’t we. Some of us were soldiers too, though in the old wars, so we even know how to dig trenches if need be. It’s just a pity we didn’t let the folks at home know we’d be gone a while. Because we haven’t done anything wrong, have we?”
The soldiers didn’t say a word. They just sat there all stiff with their eyes shining like cats’ eyes under their helmets.
“What could we have done wrong? You don’t need to go asking them, we know perfectly well ourselves,” said Antos from Górki, bridling up. He was known for talking straight to anyone, even if it was the priest or the squire. Before the war he was always going around to political rallies everywhere.
“Or maybe there’s no point in asking these gentlemen,” said Sitek, like he was trying to excuse the soldiers so they didn’t feel bad about not knowing. “They’re probably country folks like us, they only know as much as we do. But I’m sure they won’t hurt us, no way.”
“You’ll see, we’ll be back home this evening,” said Jagła, backing Sitek up. “There’s twenty-five of us, we’ll have the job done in two shakes. They’d have said if it was anything else.”
“What do you mean, anything else?” said another guy, suddenly worried, and he leaned forward on the bench towards Jagła.
“They might say, they might not.”
“Say what? What might they say?”
“Come on, what’s the point of worrying ahead of time, when we get there they’ll tell us.”
“I don’t like the look of this, I really don’t. We’re going somewhere and we don’t know where. What can it mean?”
“Maybe they’re going to kill us?” Strąk burst out, and everyone was suddenly terrified.
Strąk was the oldest guy in the truck, way older than Antos or Wrona. He could barely shuffle about, they’d had to help him into the truck because he couldn’t have climbed up by himself. His son-in-law had sent him to the meeting just like my father had sent me. Why would they have chosen Strąk as a laborer when so many other younger, stronger men had been left behind on the square? If someone had thought about Strąk earlier, maybe we’d have figured out right away where they were taking us.
“Darn it!” said Kujda angrily, like it was Strąk’s fault that they might be going to kill us. “You should have sat on your backside and not gone to any meeting.”
“How was I supposed to know?” said Strąk, trying to defend himself. “The policeman said to go to the meeting.”
But everyone started in on Strąk.
“Your son-in-law should have come. He’s the head of the household, not you. You signed the farm over to him. You should stick to praying instead of going to meetings.”
“Or if they start telling us to dig, and they will, because why else would there be spades here, we’ll have to do your digging for you. No one’s got four arms.”