26

FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE. Dec. 1, 1943

Arranged. Drusova has assured her contacts that after the Kommissar arrives at his apartment for lunch tomorrow, c. 12:30, Bienecke and I will be withdrawing the normal guards. Kommissar will be left only with a few Wehrmacht sentries who have not seen combat or really encountered the Satanic determination with which Oberführer Ganz’s apartment is likely to be assaulted. Even partisans must know Willi values lunch highly, so that Bienecke’s choice of the apartment for the appropriate location very deft. No one in SS or in Dr. Kappeler’s office seems to care the partisans will milk Ganz’s liquidation for all it is worth in propaganda terms. Bienecke intends to cancel any partisan sense of triumph by surrounding those involved in the attack as soon as they have fulfilled the intentions of the Reich Security Central Office toward Oberführer Ganz. I imagine friend Bienecke will keep no promises to Drusova or her brother either, unless he wants to use Drusova for future security work. Surmise he may send Drusova and brother east out of pure vanity, however useful Drusova might be in future, just to show partisans they’ve been used by Bienecke. Bienecke like most men of limited intelligence out to prove even to Bolsheviks that he’s smart, that we’re all smart on this side of fence, that we possess dangerous cunning.

Both Radek and Danielle still confused and depressed about Ganz’s outburst. As gentle a soul as Danielle is, believe she has been distanced from him now.

BBC news came through clear in Polish and even if halfway unreliable is alarming. At least even BBC say German Fourth Army holding in front of Orsha. More optimistic officers you meet speak of defeats in southern Russia as if they are positive blessing, creating a shorter, more rational, more defensible line. The loss of Smolensk and then Bryansk has weighed on Danielle—you can see the fright and a sort of yellow insomnia come up in her eyes whenever I turn the radio on. Smolensk is something intimate to Danielle. Before the first war her family had interests in a brickworks there and she visited the place as a child. It is the first city of the East, she always said, the place where the last traces of those Catholic allegiances which connect us to the West end, and that other world emphatically begins. It is also—as am always saying to reassure her—a good 350 kilometers from Staroviche, and on this front that seems a great distance, even though in the south last summer the Russians would make advances of seventy kilometers in a day.

Am taking heavy dosage of laudanum tonight. Don’t want to face tomorrow with the usual ashen fatigue.

3 A.M. woken from heavy sleep by telephone call from Ostrowsky in Minsk. Wanted me to know that final plans for a Belorussian Republican Congress have been thrashed out with von Gottberg’s office and with Political Section in a meeting which went on in Minsk until an hour ago. Wanted me to know. “If there’s anyone likely to resent the hours he spent in sleep while this glorious news hung around his bed unspoken, I knew it was you, my dear Stanek.”

Poor Danielle waiting in corridor, a wraith in her nightdress, sure the call was bad news. We celebrated with brandy and then slept happily in each other’s arms till dawn.