At 8:20, Captain de Milja cranked the engine to life, the pilot made the thumbs-up sign, the plane bumped over the rocky field, picked up speed, then staggered up into the sky—airborne and flying a mission for free Poland.
The trick for the pilot was to get the plane down—quickly.
There certainly was hell to pay in the Warsaw air-defense sector— the Germans could hear something buzzing around up there in the clouds but they couldn’t see it, the searchlight beams swept back and forth but all they found was gray mist. The antiaircraft batteries let loose, the drone of the plane vanished to the west, the pilot headed around east on his compass until he picked up two gasoline-in-a-barrel fires lit off by de Milja and Chomak, then wasted no time getting down on the lumpy field, since Luftwaffe nightfighters were just that moment slicing through the sky over Warsaw looking for something to shoot at.
Down below, hundreds of people broke the curfew to run outside and snatch up a leaflet. These were, with the aid of friends and dictionaries, soon enough deciphered—the English-style printing, as opposed to the usual Polish letters, made it just a little more difficult to read—and by breakfast time everybody in Warsaw and much of occupied Poland felt good the way one did when a friend came around to say hello.
To the Brave People of Poland
Greetings from your British allies. We are
flying over your troubled land tonight to
let you know that you are not forgotten.
We’ll be back soon, there will be lots more
of us, and next time we won’t be dropping
leaflets. Until then, keep your chin up, and give the Germans hell any way you can. Long live Poland! Tenth Bomber Wing
RAF
“. . . but he changed his mind and they had to hit him a few times before he’d calm down.” Thus the night watchman at the Pruszkow airfield. But nothing more. De Milja had carried a small 9 mm automatic—there wasn’t any point in not having something, not for him. But Colonel Broza had said in their last meeting before the operation, “Don’t kill him, Captain. Let’s not start that yet.”
Yet.
But then, it wasn’t really up to them, of course it never had been, and the miracle was that fifty days or so of occupation had passed so— peacefully. Then it happened, out in Praga one Friday night, and that was that.
A workers’tavernin aworkers’part oftown. What wasa Wehrmacht noncom even doing in such a place? Probably a worker himself, back in Dusseldorf or Essen or wherever it was. Not the classic Nazi—some fine-boned little blond shit quivering with rage and overbreeding, cursing Jews in a squeaky voice with saliva on his chin. The breed existed, but it didn’t fight wars. Who fought wars was the guy in the Polish tavern: some big, blunt, slow-thinking German workingman, strong as an ox, common as dirt, and not such a bad type.
Here it was coming Christmas and he was stuck in Poland. He wasn’t making out with the Polish girls, everything was a little grimier than he liked, there was garlic in his food, and people either wouldn’t meet his eyes or glared with hatred. Hatred! Christ, he hadn’t done anything. They put him in the army and they said go here, go there, and he went here and there. Who wouldn’t? That was the way of the world; you did what the Wehrmacht told you to do, just like you did what Rheinmetall or Krupp told you to do.
And Friday night, like always, you went to a tavern, just to get out from underneath it a little. Ordered a beer, then another, and minded your own business.
But taverns were taverns, especially in working-class neighborhoods, and it was always the same: a word, a look, some little thing that just couldn’t be ignored. And people who couldn’t afford to lose their tempers brought them in here on Friday night in order to do exactly that. And then, some people didn’t like Germans. Never had, never would. Maybe they thought that Hansi or Willi or whatever his name was was spoiling a good night’s drinking. Just by being there. Maybe they told him to leave. Maybe Hansi or Willi had never been told to leave a tavern. Maybe he figured he was a conqueror. Maybe he refused.
Well, he wasn’t a conqueror that night. Somebody took out a knife and put it just the right place and that was that. The Gestapo came running, hanged the tavern keeper over his own door and next day executed a hundred and twenty neighborhood men. So there. The Germans were famous for reprisal long before they forced the Polish frontier. In 1914, stomping into Belgium, they encountered franctireurs—snipers—and responded with heavy reprisals, shooting hundreds of Belgians when they couldn’t get at the franc-tireurs. They didn’t invent it—revenge killing was right up at the front of the Bible—but they believed in it.
And it was just about that time when Hans Frank, named governor-general of the swath of Poland around Warsaw not directly incorporated into Germany, wrote in his diary that “the Poles will be the slaves of the German Reich.” Meanwhile they had the Jews sewing Stars of David on their breast pockets and hanging signs on the shops that said nicht arisch, not Aryan.
The ZWZ was besieged. Everybody wanted a piece of a German. De Milja didn’t exactly recruit, but he did look over candidates before passing the name on to a committee, and the first two weeks of December he barely had time to do anything else.
Two days before Christmas, de Milja went to see the maid who was taking care of his father, a newspaper-wrapped parcel in hand: sausage, aspirin, and sewing needles, the latest items that had become impossible-to-get treasures. “He wants to see you,” the woman said. “He told me to tell you that.”
De Milja thought a moment; he was staying in the basement of a large apartment house in central Warsaw, just off Jerozolimskie Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. “There’s a bar called Zofia, just by Solski Park, with a public room above it. Ten minutes after seven, tell him.” The maid nodded that she understood, but de Milja could see she disapproved of the idea that the professor would set foot in such a low place.
It was a low place, an after-curfew nightclub with a room upstairs that held three pool tables and an assortment of Warsaw lowlife— mostly black-market operators and pimps and their entourages. Tough guys; plenty of hair oil, overcoats with broad shoulders and ankle-length hems, a little bit of a cigarette stuck up in the corner of the mouth. They played pool, bet on the games, practiced three-bank wizard shots, sold a tire, bought a few pounds of sugar. De Milja liked it because someone was paying off the Germans to stay away, and that made it useful to people like him who’d had to learn one of the cardinal truths of secret life: anything clandestine is temporary. So the room above the Zofia was a welcome item on a list that could never be long enough.
Watching his father walk through the smoky poolroom, de Milja felt a pang in his heart. With hair combed faultlessly to one side, and round tortoiseshell spectacles, he looked like photographs of T.S. Eliot, the English banker/poet. His face was thinner and brighter than de Milja remembered, and he wore a raincoat, not his winter overcoat. Where was that? de Milja wondered. Sold? Clutching his professorial briefcase tightly, he excused his way through the crowd, ignoring the stares of the poolroom toughs. Some of them would have liked to humiliate him—he was an inviting target, a large ungainly bird who cried out for insult—but he was moving faster than they realized and before the right words could be said, he was gone. He paused while a boy with a huge pompadour and a royal-blue suit squinted down his cue to line up a shot, and winked suddenly at his son: there in a minute, must wait while Euclid here gets it all worked out. Thus had his father survived years of the Ostrow uncles: the more his sensibilities were offended, the more he twinkled.