An hour later, Natalia found the address in the eastern section of the Kazimierz District. For centuries it had been a crowded, bustling district of apartment buildings, banks and synagogues, tailor shops and jewelers, butchers, clothing stores, and outdoor markets. The Jews who built it were gone now, murdered in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and little remained in the area except decaying buildings, emaciated stray dogs foraging for scraps in the gutters, and crippled beggars, dressed in rags, holding empty cups in their bony hands.
Repeating the same procedure she had used during the war, Natalia let herself into the run-down apartment building and retrieved a key from the mailbox in the vestibule. She climbed the creaking stairs to the third floor, wondering if anyone still lived there, unlocked the door to a room at the end of the hall and locked it behind her. She opened the window a crack to let in a bit of fresh air, and stood in the center of the room listening to the silence. Then she got down on her knees and reached under the bed.
The package was wrapped in the usual brown paper, but it was smaller than the others she had retrieved in the same manner from other rooms in other shabby buildings. This package felt more like a book than the files of documents she had received during the years she had spent as part of the channel.
Natalia sat on the bed and held the package, turning it over in her hands, thinking about the hundreds of documents that had been passed along this same channel during the years of Nazi occupation, documents that she could never resist reading despite putting herself in even greater jeopardy by possessing the information. There had been meticulously prepared reports, including daily logs and charts filled with numbers, revealing inconceivable atrocities taking place behind the walls of Auschwitz, Treblinka and the other death camps of Poland.
Extreme risks had been taken by everyone along the channel, from the Provider to another unknown contact, then to the priest and finally to Natalia, who carried them on the train to Warsaw. The identities of those involved in the channel were a carefully guarded secret. Natalia knew only those with whom she had direct contact: the priest, Berta and Falcon. The documents had been passed along, and perhaps some had made it to London, New York or Washington. Natalia had no way of knowing. It hadn’t done any good. That much she knew. The carnage had escalated. Hundreds of thousands were murdered, perhaps millions.
And now, when the war had ended, the Nazis were defeated… the Provider is gone?
Natalia stared at the package, her nerves taut as piano strings. Then, very slowly, she removed the wrapping paper. Inside was the customary envelope containing currency, a thin stack of fifty-zloty banknotes to help her with expenses. There was also a book.
It was a leather-bound notebook, similar to a diary. The cover was worn, the edges of the pages frayed, as if having been thumbed through hundreds of times. She opened the cover and stared for a long time, confused by the handwritten words on the first page.
The Journal of Ludwik Banach
Thirty-Three
NATALIA WOKE SUDDENLY. A noise in the hallway… footsteps… creaking stairs.
Then it was quiet.
She waited a moment, then stepped quietly across the room, parted the curtain and peeked out the window, squinting in the early morning sunlight. A scrawny, three-legged dog hobbled across the cobblestone alley, sniffing in the gutter. She dropped the curtain and glanced at her watch. Seven o’clock. What time had she fallen asleep? She had no idea.
The journal!
She spun around, her eyes darting to the bed, then to the floor. It was there, the tattered leather-bound notebook that she had spent the night reading. She picked it up and sat down on the bed, leafing through the pages, as though to make certain the words hadn’t changed.
She spent an hour going over it again, rereading carefully the last installments of Ludwik Banach’s implausible journey that had ended with his disappearance just before the Russians arrived in January. When she finished, Natalia stared at the book, trying to decide what to do, then slipped it in the inside pocket of her vest. She put on her hat, opened the door slowly and peeked down the dim hallway.
Nothing.
She hurried down the steps, then made her way through the eerily quiet, litter-strewn streets, past vacant buildings marred with graffiti and broken windows, until she arrived at Szeroka Street, once the central market area of the Jewish community, now largely deserted. She slipped into a grimy café and took a seat in a booth at the rear.
The foul-smelling proprietor brought over a cup of lukewarm coffee and asked if she wanted anything else. Over at the bar a shriveled ghost of a man sat on a stool, slurping something out of a bowl. She shook her head, and the proprietor shuffled away. Natalia took a sip of the bitter concoction, grimaced and slumped back in the cracked leather seat, overwhelmed by the story of Ludwik Banach.
Ludwik Banach… Adam Nowak’s uncle… was the Provider.
It was almost impossible to believe, but it had to be true. Banach said it himself in the journal, in an entry he wrote in 1940:
I waited for this day for nine months, thinking every hour in the hellhole of Sachsenhausen about my Beata, and my nephew, Adam.
Adam had mentioned his uncle’s name—Ludwik Banach—that last night they spent together in the ammunition cellar. Natalia had forgotten about it in all the chaos of the Rising, and it hadn’t registered again until she read that entry in Banach’s journal.
It was just as Adam had said. Banach was arrested in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen. But then, after being released into the custody of Hans Frank, Banach was back in Krakow and working at the new Copernicus Memorial Library, Frank’s pet project and the reason Frank arranged for Banach’s release from Sachsenhausen. But Banach had used that opportunity to re-start the channel, the channel she’d been part of. Natalia recalled the words Banach wrote in the journal in 1942:
I realized what had to be done with documents I’d smuggled out of the library. The channel has been resumed. Many are taking risks to preserve what little is left of our humanity. May God grant that our efforts are not in vain.
Natalia rubbed her forehead, still scarcely able to comprehend it. Ludwik Banach was the Provider. He smuggled documents out of the library—documents describing the unspeakable atrocities taking place within Poland’s death camps—and resumed his Resistance work. Banach wrote that entry in the journal in 1942, about the same time she’d been contacted by the priest and given a new assignment. She’d been working as a conductor on the railway since being sent to Krakow by the AK. The priest was her contact, and by 1942 she had a well-established routine, working the daily round-trip from Krakow to Warsaw. With only a slight change in her routine to include “confession” at the Church of Archangel Michael and Saint Stanislaus on Wednesdays, and a modification to her black conductor’s bag, she had become part of the channel.
Natalia glanced around the sleazy café that stank of cooking grease and body odor. The bartender was reading a newspaper, and the ghostly man was asleep with his head on the bar. She was hungry but couldn’t bear the thought of what might have been in the bowl. She took another sip of the bitter coffee, then propped her elbows on the table and tried to sort things out.
Was it just pure chance that she and Adam had met in Warsaw, in the midst of the Rising, neither one knowing of their mutual connection through Ludwik Banach? As improbable and remarkable a coincidence as it seemed, there was no other explanation.