Thousand Days: Fragments of a Soldier's Life of 1939 and 1940 (part 2 of 6)

The Polish Army do not acquit themselves well

read part 1 here.

The evening brought the first experience of war. When I remember it today, I have to smile at its theatricality and comedy; back then the event looked different. We lay in tents on the snow or on the floors of huts and sheds; the evening had made the cold even fiercer, and an evil, sharp wind blew across the fields. We were freezing and miserable. From time to time I went out of the shed into the open air, only to find the sheltered shed like a warm room when I returned. I deceived myself like this every half hour. I stamped in the snow outside the names of people I was thinking of or looked up at the crystal-clear winter sky. In these hours I felt for the first time the feeling that never left me during the entire war at the front, the feeling of knowing myself somewhere far away at home, in the homeland, safe, protected, enclosed, resting, sleeping and enduring, only being here as one watches and pities at theatre plays and yet only spectates. When I think about it today, I have actually never suffered, never felt cold even though I was cold, never been afraid even though I was afraid, and never even been scratched by a gun or a bullet. I only saw the cold and the terror and the death with awe and tremor. I never really knew that it was so terribly close.

That first war experience that awaited us on our arrival day at the battalion remained the only one for a long time. The news spread around midnight through the Polish villagers, that a Polish cavalry regiment was hiding in a large forest about three to four kilometers away, and would attack us during the night. A little later a motorcyclist, a dispatcher, came driving through the village, asking for directions to a division and taking the occasion to report to our commander that a general in his car had been attacked a few hours ago on the western edge of the forest about ten kilometers from here.

Our command post began to buzz like a swarm of bees. We were informed of the seriousness of the situation and were given orders to form a closed camp and fortify it on all sides in a hedgehog position. So, panting, we dragged together crates, sawn-off tree trunks, wagons and other farm equipment, and used them to build a protective wall around the camp, in front of which we ourselves stood with extremely worried expressions when it was finished. In addition, we learned on this occasion that the battalion did not have a machine gun. So the guards we posted placed their submachine guns over the edge of the old harrows and plows, pulled the blankets over their heads and stared at the dark edge of the forest ahead of us. The camp was restless and somewhat feverish throughout the night, and I do not think anyone slept. At dawn we suddenly saw a rider with a white flag galloping towards us from the forest. He stopped a few hundred meters from the camp and asked to speak to an officer in broken German. A young lieutenant, hastily provided with all the commander’s instructions and blessings, climbed over the parapet and approached the Polish rider. We saw that they spoke only briefly to each other. Then the officer returned and the rider trotted off towards the forest. It was an exciting moment. We all surrounded the commander, completely un-Prussian and unsoldier-like, in a dense crowd, as the officer reported to him. He had very good news. There had indeed been a Polish cavalry squadron in front of us in the forest during the night. Just as we had heard about them, so they had heard about us. They had dug in for the night, formed a closed camp and had not slept a wink. Towards morning they decided to surrender to us. An hour later they actually came rode up, a long string of horses and riders, their eyes filled with astonishment when they saw our force in the daylight.

For a long time, that was the only exciting event. The next few days brought us orders to roam forests, search villages for weapons and lead prisoner transports. At times it was said that we would be garrisoned, and one day it came true. We were withdrawn to the Poznan province area and gathered in the barracks where we had made our first stop. The battalion formed up in a large square and then names were read out for two hours. Nobody was missing, nobody was wounded, nobody was killed. The group of five hundred men was divided into two parts and took up separate quarters, one or two companies in an old, picturesque wing of a historic building, the other in a seminary just outside the city gates. I envied the two companies that moved into the old, beautiful Romanesque wing and thought of our quarters with unease and reluctance. It was said to be a very modern building, unfortunately still unfinished. We saw it lying in an open field from afar as we marched over the Warta Bridge to Cathedral Island. It was a tall, narrow brick-red box that jutted into the air like a last tooth.

We soon learned to love this house, and after marching through the city, as we moved into our countless little monk’s cells, I must confess that I experienced for the first time the feeling of a very modest happiness that somehow felt like security, like home, like good friends, like peace. There were four beds in our small room, two on top of each other. We set up a table corner by the window, which looked almost cozy thanks to an improvised lamp and lots of cigars and pipes. Later, in an hour when my good spirits deserted me, I had the idea of painting all sorts of scenes from our soldiers’ lives on the boards of our beds, and this cell became a place of pilgrimage.

Three other Berliners moved into this cell with me, a high school graduate, a young, colossally fat and bloated businessman, whom I never remember seeing other than in jumpers and slippers, and a master painter who later caused quite a stir with the performances he gave through his arm and sexual power. Berliners also lived to the right and left of us; almost everyone else, like the battalion itself, was from Hamburg. I soon got to know them well; they were young, old, tall, short, fat, thin, bow-legged, cross-eyed, stuttering, ventriloquizing, walking on their hands, curious people, almost all of them from Hamburg’s harbor district and former stevedores. A stevedore [Schauermann] is a man who has a very specific job. He unloads ships, he does not loads them in. I suspected that these men, who all spoke dialect, were not completely fluent in German. In any case, they had one thing in common: they were all incredibly strong and someway bizarre.

After a day or two, after we had swept and mopped, hammered and dragged straw sacks, a gentle barracks wind arose for the first time. We lined up, were read in, again and again, and one day the first duty orders came with the first guard patrol. The battalion had to provide the guards for Poznan. We did it. I stood guard a lot during those weeks. For a while I stood guard over Gauleiter Greiser. I stood in front of his villa many a day and many a night. I saw the big cars drive up, the house was festively lit and there was a lot of laughter and noise, and then I stood too a little later in those days in front of the wrought iron gate, when the house lay dark and Greiser often paced up and down at the windows of his study all night long, pondering the strange fate that did not stop even before a Gauleiter and took away his only son in the stupidest of all car accidents.

I stood guard most of all at the stockyard in those days. Out of a sense of style I was very attracted to the post at the Civil Administration, a wonderful old, formerly monastic Baroque complex, because these posts were indoor posts, one patrolling the lower corridors, one the upper ones and one in the gardens and greenhouses. The walkways were huge old cloisters whose beauty amazed me. Nevertheless, I preferred to head to the abattoir because the guard there, although cold and not entirely without danger (there were attempts to steal and the thieves occasionally shot), was incredibly nutritious. It was a time when I devoured countless veal livers. At these stations we were often checked by officers in the middle of the night and therefore had to take our duty seriously. Things were a little more pleasant for those on guard duty who sat in a separate room and did not have to stand guard in person. This group quickly emerged as a privileged, elevated class, and before we knew it, they were all corporals. I myself, how could it be otherwise, was not one of them. During the nightly watches, which lasted from one noon to the next, I walked up and down between the slaughter halls and coal heaps, hung my carbine from one shoulder to the other when I got tired and trod the names of people I was thinking of in the snow.

When the changing of the guard came and we marched back to our quarters, the priests’ seminary, at one o’clock in the afternoon, we were already soldiers to such an extent that our hearts leapt in our bodies, a song came to our lips and soon rang out. At that time, the unforgettable military musician Herms Niel had just written his song “For we are driving towards England” and we sang it very often. I sang it too, because it it was better to march that way. It would be difficult for me to be the only one singing “God Save the King.” The images of England came before my eyes again, London, Wales, Cheshire and Scotland. It had only been six months since I had last seen them. I think with such thoughts, I will sometimes forget to continue singing.

The 24 hours, that followed a watch, fell into two parts. In the morning there were drills and field exercises, and we had the afternoon off. The four of us in my room usually got ready to go out together and then went to Poznan through the winter days, which were cold but bright and beautiful in those days. Personally, I have never extended my explorations as far as pleasures were concerned beyond the street where the café was, which had wonderful cream cakes, and where the butter store was located to which I went every week, and sent packages home, I do not know how often, to my mother. In the evenings we sat together under the lamp and smoked. Then the room had the atmosphere of a student room, and the conversations were often similar. On one such evening, fat Schmidt once said, as he unpacked the enormous packages of sweets he had received from Berlin: “This way, the war can last another thirty years for my sake.” Perhaps he was not familiar with the Thirty Years’ War. We all looked at him a little shocked.

The next day a new order came. A rumor had been circulating in the city for days that all Polish citizens were to be evacuated from Poznan and transported to Congress Poland. Every now and then waiters and tram conductors had anxiously asked us about it confidentially, but we could not give them an answer. That day the guard duty was suspended and we were ordered to the police station in the evening. Old sergeants were waiting for us and led us into a large room where a police officer gave us the following words: “On the orders of the Führer, the resettlement of Poles from the former German territories begins today. Poznan is one of these provinces. From now on, for a few weeks, your task will be to locate the Polish nationals on the basis of the lists and to supervise the immediate evacuation of the apartments and the removal of the people. You have absolute police power for this purpose and are to use this power if necessary. You will encounter misery and hardship, pleas and resistance, perhaps even violence. Do not let anything soften you or deter you from your duty. Remember something: this country was German, and if you go further back in history and perhaps say that ‘it was Polish before the partition of Poland,’ I will teach you that it was once again a German colonial territory before that time, and that it was the German settlers and above all the Teutonic Knights who opened up these territories to Central European civilization in the earliest times, when there could be no talk of a Polish state. And by the way, you will agree with me when I say that this great present is moving beyond the historical past. Take a look at the city of Poznan, walk through the streets with old historical buildings, walk through the modern quarters and show me even a single street that dates back to the Polish period. You will find nothing. After the armistice of 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles had already been signed, the Poles attacked the province of Posen in the deepest peace and seized this land. The same people will now visit you in their homes and cause you to leave the city just as quickly as you entered it.¹ After a few weeks or months, they will be replaced by Germans who have previously lived in the Baltic states and whom we want to bring back within the German borders.” He made an indeterminate gesture with his hand that could be interpreted however you wanted, and then we were there dismissed. We stood in the dark courtyard again, were given lists and a map of the city, put on our steel helmets, secured our pistols and went out into the night-time city.

There were five addresses on my piece of paper: I looked at the first one. It was an Ilica far out in the Warta lowlands. I walked across the residential area and then across the fields. Finally I stood in front of the house. It was a middle-class house from the imperial era, quite clean and neat. I discovered that I could process three Polish addresses in this house. I knocked on door number 1. A middle-aged man opened the door for me. When he saw me in the steel helmet, he was frightened and uttered a few Polish words that I did not understand. Then his wife and teenage son appeared, and everyone in the corridor stared at me in shock. I asked if one of them could speak German, both parents could. I pulled out my identification card and told them the police order in a matter-of-fact tone. It read: Polish citizens who came to the country after 1918 or who lived here before 1918 but did not opt for Germany are subject to the resettlement to central Poland. The apartment must be vacated within two hours. Hand luggage of up to two suitcases and one rucksack per person as well as all valuables and cash up to a certain amount may be taken along. In two hours the transport car will be waiting at the door. All other property is to remain untouched in the apartment and is hereby confiscated.

When I revealed it, there was dead silence for a while, then the woman burst into tears. The man turned to me in a firm voice and with a good demeanor and asked: “Is this unavoidable?” I answered: Are you the one listed here on my list as the owner of the apartment and the person responsible for the family, are you Stanislaus Kopralski? He nodded. “Then it is unavoidable and you must submit to it.” He looked at the clock, always very matter-of-factly, called a few words to his wife, gave his son an order in Polish and began his work immediately and without any hesitation . He tore open cupboards and drawers, rummaged through everything with hurry, took papers and valuables, asked me in between whether it would be advisable to take more linen or beds instead. I shrugged my shoulders, I did not know, because it was his fate was unknown to me. I told him to put two or three suits on top of each other. After half an hour the suitcases were packed, unpacked again, packed again, the mother was still crying, the son was cursing, the father continued to rummage through cupboards and boxes, the apartment looked like it had been burgled. At ten o’clock in the evening the big truck pulled up to the house. I had now moved up one floor and completed my duties with a second family, which consisted of an older man and an adult son. All the doors in the house were open and all the residents were peering out from behind the gaps in the doors as the Poles dragged their suitcases to the car. What’s happening to them over there, the old man’s angry son shouted in front of the first floor, pointing to the other residents. Are they Poles too, I asked. “Of course.” “I do not know. I have no orders.” To which he called out desperately: But I have to go, especially me and my old father. But it did not last more than a week before the other Poles suffered the same fate. Within a few minutes they got into the car, the accompanying soldier signed the protocol and then drove off. The whole street watched them through the dark windows as they disappeared into the December night.

I looked at my list. A second car did not run today; I only completed two of the five addresses. I decided to call it a day, took off my steel helmet, put on my cap and trotted through the dark streets of Poznan, through the quiet and peaceful villa district, across the castle square, from whose cafés and restaurants the laughter and music rang out, over the half-blasted and shot-up Warthe Bridge, over the gloomy Cathedral Island, to our seminary. I was almost the last to arrive. The others were already sitting by the lamplight, smoking their pipes and being silent. We soon went to sleep.

TO BE CONTINUED…

read part 3 here.

1. he is switching for rhetorical effect from addressing the soldiers to addressing the invaders, i.e. “the Germans will now take their German homes from you confiscating Poles and send you back”