Ashes in the Field

From the diary of Michał Kowalski

Warsaw, December 6th, 1941

This is by the light of a candle, and why not, since I cannot pretend, if I would, that this book of mine will live longer than I? Maybe it will burn, with the rest, in some dump of ash behind a fence; maybe it will sit, together with bundles of tied books, anonymous, like a set of bones after the rest of the flesh has gone. And yet I write, not to be remembered, but to have remembrance.

Warsaw is a throat half-cut. She does not scream. She chokes. Life trickles away, clotting the alleys and gutters, a drop at a time. Eggshells of tanks on cobblestones. Grey men flow past shuttered shops, bayonets glinting, and the sub never seems to surface. Everything is silence and suspicion. Even the pigeons have fled.

They say we’re a beaten people. That is not true. We are held, but not broken. We smile with the eyes, we kill with the hands. Every woman knows how to stuff the little note in a loaf of bread. Every boy knows how to blend into the shadows when the sirens’ wail begins to sound.

This morning I ran under the scaffold where they put the names of the dead. The paper gets longer every week. I look for my father’s name, which is not here. I do not know where he died, only that he did.

The message was held in my glove, in a hasty fold that was small enough that I could feel the crease digging into my palm. From the butcher’s bench to the convent school next to Praga. I pretended that I was just another skinny boy with a crust of bread in one hand and a ration book in the other. I stood as my body had been taught: back curved slightly, eyes downcast, though not modestly. There is an art to not looking here, and we all learn it young.

Sister Magdalena took the packet in silence. She never does. Her face is sallow and drawn, with red-rimmed eyes. I imagine she does not sleep. I imagine none of us do. Through the rusted iron gate, I handed the bread to her, and tipped my head in that original Catholic bow of my head, the praying kind. I suppose I was.

I glanced up, and in rising, I saw, before leaving the building, the glance of a German sentinel who was posted at the corner. He was young. Ha! Pathetic, at a young age, to present a death’s head with his collar. His fingers twitched toward his rifle, but then he turned away. Maybe I reminded him of someone. Or perhaps he had already reached his fill for the day.

Even at that moment, I had the thought, maybe this day will go by without any blood. We—thick heads, we—after all that.

Behind the tailor’s shop, where the stone walls are warm with ovens, where the windows fog too thick to see out of, I met my brother Jakub. A week had aged him, he thought. Grey at the temples. He is only twenty-six.

“Somebody leaked something,” he said. I didn’t answer. I just watched his eyes. “They know. They’re coming.”

I felt it coming up from behind, in the cold against my boots. “How do you know?”

He pointed toward the street. Unmarked trucks had already begun to line up on the block like beetles. A black coat was leaning on the doorpost of the chemist shop. But I spotted that right off: he’s Gestapo. The kind who do not knock. The ones who disappear people.

Jakub looked at me then. Not as a brother. A soldier glimpsing another who has yet to kiss the bullet.

“You have to go.”

“What about you?”

He removed his gloves and gave them to me as if he knew he would not need them any longer. “There’s no time. I’ll draw them away. You know where to run.”

“But the list-”

“They already have it,” he added. “They would not come if they did not.”

He pulled me close. He smelled of smoke and wool. “I put my mouth by your ear. If I fall, don’t stop. Don’t look back.”

He let me go and fell into the street. I ran. I don’t know how many streets I had walked down before I heard the pops of gunshots. And they echoed on the stone like thunder. In the distance, people shouted. A door slammed shut. A bell rang.

I went into a slop in the hole, water, or blood, goodness knows. I hit a curb with the edge of my knee, and it went numb. I peeped back into the alley behind the bakery then gagged in disgust at the stench of mold and old fat. I sighed, a wall at my back. And then I heard him. Jakub. His feeble and tense voice calling me just once, Michał, as though he felt I was near.

I peered through a hole in the brick and spotted him outside in the snow, on his knees. His hands were raised. There were no weapons on him. He pulled his pistol and shot him. He didn’t cry out. He doubled over like a man too weary to stand. In his coat, snow soaked like spilled ink. The soldier stepped over him, and walked on. I screamed then. I think I did. I know that I wanted to. But there was no one to hear it.

I remember running again, but not to where. The city twisted around me. I can still picture the hospital gate. On a swing, a lone boy swayed on chains that had rusted. I remember tripping on some stray wire and the stone rising to meet my skull.

After that: dark.

I awoke to the smell of urine and steel. We were packed in so tight that I could feel the desperate man to my left breathing in and out with his entire rib cage pulsating up and down. Someone moaned. Someone else whispered prayers. But no one moved. Space would be movement, and we did not have any to lose.

The walls were made of wood, jagged and splintering. Higher up, there was a broken slat and snow dusted in like ash. I looked at it. I lifted my face to it, not even expecting to feel anything, just wanting to see something that was not flesh.

There were tears from the men in the other corners. There was one dead man already. I felt it in the silence that surrounded him. No one would say it. There were no words. But we all knew.

The train shuddered. Metal screamed against metal. In the heady stench of terror, should I find that word. My wrists were sore from the want of the cord that had bound them. I still had my gloves. Jakub’s gloves. I didn’t know why they left them on me. Perhaps they thought it was a mercy. Perhaps it was a mistake. I remained clench-fisted, grabbing the wool in my palms.

I have no idea how long the ride was. Hours. Days. I slept in fitful chunks, waking whenever the train bumped. Once, I heard gunshots outside. One time, I felt a change in the air: cooler, more pungent. Open space, maybe. A forest.

There was no food. In one corner was a tin bucket we could use as a toilet. I never made it to it. No one did. There are prayers for the deceased. But we are not there yet. We were just no longer alive. Only waiting. Waiting to arrive at the place that no one comes back from.

When I descended that train I had a half hunch my gloves would follow, only it was my name instead. No longer Michał, just 7621. But they will not take this, this memory. So long as I have a voice to speak and a hand to write.

December 6th, 1941.

Warsaw is gone. But I am not gone yet.