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Chapter 12:
The Death March of Thorn (Part 2)
Efforts to quarter the prisoners from Thorn on the Jarantonice Estate soon showed
that the barns that had looked so promising from afar were already occupied by
soldiers. All that was left for the prisoners were the horse stables, which were not
only covered in meters of horse manure but also mostly still half filled with
horses. Only the women were assigned to an empty garage, and they also received
enough fresh straw to lie on, but the men were crammed so tightly into the stables
that even here not all of them could lie down.
Nonetheless everyone drops where he stands and is soon fast asleep. But this
sleep doesn't last
long - hunger awakens them again all too soon. Of the junaki prowling the
surrounding villages and levying food for themselves, not a one thinks of the
prisoners - are they to go without even a morsel for this second day as well? Not
until noon do some Germans manage to call a few curious spectators, Polish
peasant farmers, over to them. "Sell us a bit of bread!" they plead, and offer them
their last few zloty.
"We're not allowed to!" the farmers reply.
"A little milk!"
"We don't have any..." say the farmers.
"Some apples?"
"Apples?" They think about it for a long time, then walk away. When they
return some time later they are carrying a basket of apples, still completely
green, and moreover just windfalls, gathered up under the estate's trees and
scornfully rejected by the gentlemen soldiers. "Ten for a zloty!" the farmers say.
"Oh, such pious Christians, such believers in brotherly love..." Dr. Raapke
thinks.
They buy a few baskets and distribute them exactly. The apples vanish in just a
few
moments - what a relief they bring to the starving, and they quench the raging
thirst a little too. An old coachman watching this meal suddenly shakes his head
and walks away, and eventually returns with a loaf of bread. "Give me twenty
zloty..." he says compassionately. "Oh, what a good soul!" Dr. Raapke thinks
again. "He truly feels sorry for us, but business is still more important, nothing
can make him forget that..." The bread is so fresh that it is still
hot - poison to their empty stomachs.
Hardly has a policeman observed the deal before he too comes closer, all smiles.
"Give me eighty zloty and I'll get you four!" he says amiably. Some of the
prisoners advise against this; haven't they already had bad experiences with such
helpful volunteers? But the others insist, and once more a collection scrapes
together eighty zloty. But the promised four loaves of bread never arrive...
In the forenoon the Commandant calls Reverend Dietrich and studies him with
narrowed eyes from top to bottom. "I need an intermediary," he finally says,
"with whom I can discuss certain requirements. You will assume this role, but
first you will give me your word of honor that you will not try to escape!"
"I give it!" says Reverend Dietrich. "Do I take it that this means that I am now
allowed to talk to all the people in my column?"
"But only in Polish!" the Commandant warns.
"Can I also walk between the ranks during the march?" Reverend Dietrich continues,
eager to get the greatest possible gain out of the Commandant's oddly
magnanimous mood.
The Commandant nods, then adds: "But if you speak even one superfluous word,
you'll be the first to hang from the nearest tree!"
"Then I'd like to make a suggestion right away," Dietrich continues, unmoved.
"Our women could cook for the guards in the estate kitchen. And if they got some
remnants of the dinner, both sides would benefit from the arrangement."
"A good suggestion," says the Commandant. "So be it!"
And that's already a significant gain. Now at least the women will get something
to eat, and no doubt they will be able to divert a little of it to the men. But this
hope is in vain; while the women do each get a scoopful when the soup is finally
finished, it is entirely impossible to smuggle a pot to the men. But even if the
women don't get to eat enough, they can at least drink their fill of the water that
was used to wash the potatoes...
Already around noon it becomes unbearably hot in the stables, and besides, the
old horse manure underneath the prisoners is so hot that they feel as though they
are lying
on red-hot rocks. The ammonia vapors rise acidly to their faces, and their eyes,
inflamed as they are anyhow from the dust, begin to tear severely. Sweat sheets
their bodies yet again and mixes with the dust covering them like fine sand,
stinging them all over as with needles. After the soldiers feed the horses, they also
water them
copiously - how all the prisoners' eyes, wide with longing, follow the course of the
full buckets! And how the sound of the water pierces their ears when the horses
play in it with their lips! "Do give us a bucketful!" cries an old man in
despair.
"Polish water, for you?" the soldier jeers. "If the Polish state wasn't good enough
for you, you don't need Polish water either!"
When the horses have been watered, he sets the empty buckets carelessly aside.
Almost before he has left the stable, some of the prisoners lunge at these buckets.
In some of them there are a few leftover dribbles, mixed with soggy chaff, but the
stale remains are distributed so that everyone can at least wet his swollen lips. "In
the evening the horses must be watered again," says a farmboy who knows about
horses, "maybe we'll get another sip then..."
When evening falls the soldiers return and pour oats into the horses' feedboxes.
Many of the Germans sneak up unseen and take out a handful and laboriously
chew it to
paste - but they can hardly salivate any more and it takes almost a quarter of an
hour before they can finally swallow.
During their chores in the stable the soldiers cannot resist mocking the prisoners
with the latest news. "Have you heard?" says one of them, "there's nothing left of
Berlin but a big pile of rubble!"
"Mussolini has killed himself!" a second adds.
"Your Hitler has resigned!" a third continues.
"He's fled to Doorn, to the Kaiser!" a fourth concludes triumphantly.
The Germans have to remain serious in the face of this
nonsense - a smile would already suffice to enrage the soldiers and would no
doubt cost a few prisoners their lives. As though to disprove the childish lies, the
soldiers' last words are drowned out as an entire squadron of German fighter
planes roars in from the west and actually drops a few bombs onto troop units
marching nearby. The prisoners have this air raid to thank for a second night
spent in Jarantonice. Are the junaki not yet able to march on, or are they
afraid that the raid would be repeated while they are on the road? In any case
there is
no march-out that night, and they spend that night still in the stables. Just as Reverend
Dietrich brings this news to Dr. Raapke, who shares one of the stables with eighty
of his comrades, a soldier suddenly steps out from behind the horses and stands in
front of the minister, legs apart. "Let me see your Bible!" he says calculatingly.
Reverend Dietrich takes out his Testament and calmly shows the soldier the slim
volume.
"That's not the right one!" the soldier insists.
"I don't know any other!" says Reverend Dietrich.
"You don't know - oh - you liar! 'Mein Kampf' is your
Bible - not the New Testament!" laughs the soldier.
At last they water the horses again, and again there is a sip of water for everyone.
They are lucky this time; one of the horses did not finish, and a bucket is left
almost full. The night gradually
falls - but the night is worse than day. Is it just the darkness, or is it because they
no longer have any measure of time? Isn't any one of these seven hours longer
than an entire night normally
is - due to the thirst, the hunger, the heat, that turn each hour into a virtual
eternity? To make matters worse, the flies have come indoors now, out of the
cool night into the warmth, and like a torture dreamed up by the Poles they sit on
the prisoners seemingly by the millions, let nobody close his eyes, crawl like fat
tired worms into their noses, into their mouths open with thirst...
The least weary among them whisper quietly to each other and seek to pass the
time a little faster in conversation. "Here we sit now," says old man Rausch, the
owner of a large engraving establishment, whose son was one of the first to be put
into Raapke's cell but whom he has not seen again since
the night-time march, "here we sit, the factory owner beside the apprentice, the
laborer beside the bank director. Here's the real national community which we've
always heard about from
the Reich - we already have it, we won't need to learn it after we're liberated."
"And what brought it about here?" says Dr. Raapke softly. "The fact that they're not
persecuting us individually or as a class, but seek to exterminate us as an entire
people. Seen in that light, they couldn't have picked a better way to weld us
together irrevocably for all time!"
"Hopefully we'll never forget it again!" old Rausch says thoughtfully.
"Tell me," Raapke resumes, "I remember certain stories we recounted during
our alehouse-evening get-togethers, in the good old days. You were once right in
the midst of the Russian civil war: did the Russians treat the Whites the way the
Poles treat us here?"
Old man Rausch ponders a while, then says decisively: "First of all, there was a
civil war going on in those days, in other words, the kind of war that's always the most
terrible. And the warring sides shot thousands, and let tens of thousands die. But
the emphasis is on 'let', because epidemics contributed the most, and not to
forget the general starvation. And those people that were shot, were shot, but the
kind of tortures that are a matter of course here were exceptions to the rule there,
and occurred only in cases where they had caught someone who had maltreated others
before the revolution. Whom did we maltreat, and whom did we
deprive of what's rightfully theirs? That's the big difference, and it makes for an
entirely different prerequisite... I saw many a column of deportees in those days
as well, but by God, I never saw that they weren't even remotely taken care of,
and by God, I never saw that they were prevented from taking a drink of water when they
marched past wells in the heat of the day! And I never saw women being so
inhumanly tormented, and I never saw even the dead being desecrated by the
thousands - those Russians were far too good for that, their souls were pure! And
when horrible things did take place there, the perpetrators were usually liberated
convicts, or in many cases Latvians, and often
Chinese - but here it is the people per se, the people as an entire nation,
the educated elite, almost every soldier, and also many peasants! And the most
important difference: here all these things are done to unarmed people, whereas
there it was mostly officers who had been caught with weapons in hand..." He has
grown noticeably agitated, has old Rausch, and pauses now to catch his breath.
"That's good, my dear fellow!" says Dr. Raapke loudly. "We shall remember that,
for the comparison says more about it than a long account of the events
themselves! And at the same time it's as unassailable a verdict as any can be, and
it brands the Poles as the lowest people on earth this century!"
"I often heard a soldier say," old Rausch resumes, "when a badly injured White
fell into their hands and the Red Jewish Commissar wanted to let him die without
even a bandage: 'Wrap him up a bit anyway, for God's
reward - even this man had a mother who labored to give birth to him!' Have you
ever, even once, heard a Pole say something like that?"
"And that is perhaps the greatest disgrace staining the Polish Church," Raapke
throws in, "namely, that it did not intervene in even a single case. When a
Catholic priest was dragged from his seminary because he was a German, his
Superior did not put in a single word on his behalf. When the Cardinal of Posen
drove past one of these columns of deportees and some Catholic Germans hung
on to his car and begged him for help for the children among their number, he
turned his saintly head away without a word. And in one village, when the women
fled to their priest for protection from the soldiers, he told them, right in front of
those soldiers and with the crudest curses: 'Turn to your Hitler for help, what are
you coming to me for...'"
The acid vapors rise, the heat consumes, the flies torment. Every few moments
someone moans, and a few cry audibly. Mouths are painfully dry, eyes burn from
the vapors from the manure, stomachs cramp in short intervals as if a cruel fist
squeezed them.
"And the teachers!" a man who has many children suddenly chimes in. "My
children often told me what went on in the Polish schools. Three times a week,
for example, there was
a so-called instruction hour, which the teacher opened by showing a large picture
of the Führer. 'Who is that?' he would ask. 'It's Hitler!' the children cried,
'the destroyer of Poland!' 'What will happen to him if he falls into our hands?'
the teacher continued. 'We'll roast him!' some of the children would yell. 'Cut
him in pieces!' shrieked some others. 'Grind him through a mill!' still others
yelled. And for the entire hour they did nothing but dream up tortures for
him - so why are we surprised at the tortures they now visit upon us
Germans?"
"And in comparison, which of us couldn't swear to it," Dr. Raapke thinks, "that in
the Reich the state truly wanted to come to an honest understanding with Poland?
Didn't they, for example, ban all books that had anything negative to say about
Poland?"
"Another question they liked to ask the children in the schools," the man
continued, "was, why all the Germans wore boots? So they'd have better
posture, for without their tall boots they're all weak! the children would answer.
And another: What will we do with them after the war? We'll burn them all at
the stake! And a third: How many of them can be permitted to survive? As many
as will fit under a pear tree!"
Their conversation is interrupted as everyone is startled to attention. Shrill
screams are heard from the women's
garage - is someone being raped over there, or is it another touch of insanity? Oh,
it's just some who have lost their minds, it's just two women who want out at any
cost. "I have to go to my children, they're starving by now without me!" one of
them shrieks over and over, while the other one suddenly believes that a bomb
will strike the garage any second now. But there as well, a few dauntless ones
stand guard at the door and manage to hold the women back, though just barely.
Again, brave Fräulein Buller is one of them.
But the shrieks and screams are the straw that breaks the camel's back for the men
as well. A number of the psychologically weakest among them suddenly jump up
and also rush the door here. "I'm burning up in here!" one of them cries. "My
skin is already covered in blisters, I want into the water, I want to cool my
burns..." A desperate struggle begins at the door. If these men succeed in breaking
out, there is no doubt that the soldiers will fire wildly into the stable at all of
them. In the end the last stalwart few have no choice but to beat them back with
hard blows. And so they finally collapse, exhausted, back onto the manure. One
of them keeps repeating dully, at least thirty times: "Let me at least make a phone
call, let me tell my folks at home..."
Finally the first light of dawn glimmers through the windows, and the insanity of
the night falls away from them one more time like a spook. Even the
most out-of-control are suddenly sensible again and listlessly obey their leaders'
instructions. Only one of them suffers a relapse even in the brightness of the
morning. When Reverend Dietrich comes to the door to discuss some matter of
business, he calls out to him: "There is no God any more, I know it now for certain!
Let's pray to the devil instead, my fellow Christians, he alone can help us here!"
And he continues in a sermonizing tone of voice, "This world belongs to him
alone, all people serve him alone..."
For a second, Reverend Dietrich stares at him helplessly, then walks over to him
decisively, takes a big swing and slaps him resoundingly in the face. "Shame on
you," he cries, "you call yourself a man, and talk such nonsense? Pull yourself
together, like those weaker than you manage to do..."
This sharp blow, these sharp words, they act like a cold bath. The madman
stumbles back, rubs his hand over his forehead as though waking up, then drops
weakly onto the manure and breaks down into desperate sobs.
And again the sun rises, again the hunger begins, again thirst torments them all.
Again they purchase some apples and drain the dregs from the horses' water
buckets. Reverend Dietrich has won the concession that now the prisoners may be led
out to answer the call of nature, but hardly anyone still needs to. On the few
occasions when the gate is opened for such a reason, the prisoners see the
junaki sitting outside, stuffing their faces and feeding the dogs with their
surplus. Oh, if only they had these leftovers, how happy they would be... But
nobody begs, not even
now - as yet their pride has not deserted them, and their souls are still stronger
than all the tortures their physical bodies can suffer...
As dawn breaks, the order comes to march on to Wloclawek.
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Death in Poland
The Fate of the Ethnic Germans
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