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.

Death in Poland
The Fate of the Ethnic Germans