Adam followed her at a safe distance, across the Planty and the Rynek Glowny, into the Mariacki Church. Inside, the sanctuary was quiet. Friday morning was an off time and only a handful of people knelt here and there, praying the rosary to themselves. Adam slid into the pew next to Natalia and laid the daisies on the seat beside him.
He waited while Natalia sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking straight ahead. Finally she turned to him and said softly, “I thought I’d never see you again. I know where you went that last night in Warsaw, and I know why, but…” She turned away, shaking her head.
Adam rested his arms on the back of the pew in front of them. How could he explain his actions on that chaotic night? He didn’t understand what he’d done any more now than he did then. In the few brief hours they had spent together in Warsaw, Natalia had stirred emotions inside him that he had thought were long dead, emotions that had driven him to try to defend the AK hospital.
He glanced at Natalia. She was as tough and battle-hardened as he was, not hesitating to kill the enemy before they killed her. But there was a difference, something he saw in her eyes every time he looked at her, a tenderness that he doubted he could ever return.
She touched his arm and motioned for him to sit back. Then, as if she had read his mind, she leaned close and whispered, “Don’t.”
He slid back in the pew. “Natalia, I—”
“Don’t,” she repeated. “You’re here now. That’s all that matters.”
“Natalia, I… Natalia, I don’t think…” Christ, he had to get this out! He tried again, keeping his eyes on the floor as he spoke. “When I went to Raczynski Palace, I knew I’d die there. I couldn’t go with you. I couldn’t escape. I wanted to. But I couldn’t.” He paused and took a deep breath, grateful that she didn’t try to stop him before he could get it out. “I wasn’t trying to be a hero. But I had to do something that would have some meaning. I just needed… I needed…”
“Redemption?” she asked quietly.
Adam blinked, taken aback by how easily she could see into his soul. Was that it? After all the murders, the hatred, the years of cold-blooded killing… Was he seeking redemption? Was that even possible after everything he’d done? He gripped the edge of the wooden pew, willing himself to go on. “I wasn’t the only commando in the palace that night,” he said. “There were six of us. The SS opened fire on the building with machine guns and mortars. They kicked in the doors and tossed grenades through the windows. Then they charged in. They shot the patients, doctors, nurses. They went from room to room. We took out a lot of them, but they picked us off one-by-one. I was the only one left at the end. I was driven back to a corner on the ground floor. And then my head…” He brushed his fingers over the scar on the left side of his face and slumped back in the pew as the events of that last night rushed back: the anguish on the faces of the doctors, the terror in the nurses’ eyes, the crushing frustration and the feeling of absolute futility.
“Then something happened,” he went on, still avoiding her eyes. “I remembered that last moment in the ammunition cellar, when the lights went out and you took my hand. And I wanted to live. Suddenly, at that moment, more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life, I wanted to live.”
Natalia placed her hand on his knee and rubbed it gently. “We’ve been given a second chance, Adam. We can make this mean something.”
He finally looked at her and nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
They decided it would be safer if they kept moving, and a few minutes later they were walking along Avenue Grodzka heading south, away from the Rynek Glowny. They circled around Wawel Castle and followed a path down to the bank of the Vistula River. There was no one else around, and they sat on the grass beneath a giant willow tree. Ducks swam lazily on the river, and a rowboat glided past. Natalia held the bouquet of daisies in both hands, looking down at them.
After a few minutes she laid the daisies on the ground and reached into the vest pocket of her jacket and withdrew a thin, leather-bound book. “We can’t take much time now, but there are some sections of this you must read before we do anything else.”
Adam watched in silence as she opened the journal written by his uncle, Ludwik Banach. She thumbed through the pages, then handed him the journal, pointing to an entry near the end.
Adam held the journal in his hands for a moment, then began reading. His uncle told of working in the Copernicus Memorial Library six days a week, of sleeping most of the rest of the time, of feeling tired, with a hacking cough. He wrote about a friend, Jerzy Jastremski, who urged him to see a doctor, but he declined, remembering the “hospital” at Sachsenhausen from which no one ever returned.
Then Adam read the account of a meeting his uncle had with Hans Frank, once his colleague, now his jailor, a meeting in which Frank told him about the discovery of a mass grave in the Katyn Forest where thousands of Polish officers had been murdered in 1940.
14 April 1943
He said that he had known about the murders for some time. He asked if I recalled his visitor last November. Thanks to this visitor and the gift he brought, Frank said, he has proof that it was the Russians who committed this despicable act. He said that proof—solid evidence—was always useful.
Adam set the journal down, staring out at the river. Frank’s visitor was Tarnov. It had to be. It all fit with what Captain Andreyev had reported that night on the terrace. Tarnov’s lady-friend said they went to Krakow in the fall of 1942 and Tarnov gave Frank a document. The document Frank referred to as a “gift.”
Natalia touched his arm. “You should read the last two entries.”
15 January 1945
Today I discovered the “solid evidence” Hans Frank boasted about back in April of 1943. It is a carbon copy of a single document authorizing the massacre in the Katyn Forest! I found it neatly folded in a non-descript envelope intermixed with dozens of other envelopes and file folders in the final box of documents left on the table in room L-3.
Adam’s eyes leaped to the next entry, dated 16 January:
I have translated the document. It took more than two hours… this is the essence of its contents:
On 5 March 1940, at the request of NKVD Commissar Lavrenty Beria, an order was signed by Joseph Stalin and every other member of the Soviet Politburo, authorizing the execution of twenty-seven thousand Polish “nationalists and counterrevolutionaries.” The various groups of Poles and their places of execution were itemized—including the four thousand officers of the Polish army whose graves were discovered by the Germans in the Katyn Forest.
A little later, came the last words his uncle had written:
Now, I have but one last thing for which to live. This will be my final entry of the journal. I have been up all night, and I know what I must do. The copy of Stalin’s order authorizing the massacre in the Katyn Forest must not fall into Russian hands.
To whoever reads this journaclass="underline" find Adam Nowak and tell him that we shall never be pathetic pawns on the perilous chessboard of the NKVD.