46

FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANISLAW KABBELSKI, CHIEF OF POLICE, STAROVICHE. Feb. 2, 1945, Berlin

The lieutenant we visited today at Dahlwitz in bad way with pulmonary inflammation and thigh wound. He lies in his own room in infirmary at commando school. He would be better off surrounded by other humans in a general ward, but his superiors believe he would spread alarm.

Last time I was at Dahlwitz was just prior to Christmas, when out there with Ostrowsky to review Black Cats and other Belorussian operatives soon to be parachuted home. Atmosphere then very sanguine, confidence high, men looked magnificent. Hard to believe the proud personnel of that day have been reduced to this one gibbering officer.

He looked up from bed at us and said, “You can’t go back, no one can go back! No use threatening agents we left behind, no use saying go on working for us or we’ll spill the beans to the Soviets. The Soviets know everything. I tell you, every damned thing!”

This statement of faith, delivered from clogged lungs and a constricted throat, contracted during what must have been a pitiless and unhinging escape through the frozen Belovehz forest, across Poland, across occupied Germany, flashing forged papers, hiding his thigh wound, surviving by wit. Now his wit is at an end.

Ostrowsky sat beside him like an uncle, calming him. In no time the boy was again calling him “Mr. President.” “Tell us precisely what you believe the problems are back there,” asked Ostrowsky soothingly. “In the homeland.”

The boy began by weeping, but his account was clear. Clear too that what has happened to the Black Cats is the largest Belorussian reversal since last December at Biscenson when Germans unwisely insisted on throwing the Belarus Brigade up against General Patton’s armor in a blessedly brief encounter. (For which, of course, Abramtchik unjustly blames Ostrowsky.)

His face therefore a mess of tears and sweat, the lieutenant began to tell us how the Soviets manage security. The lieutenant and his squad parachuted into the Kaminetz area on midwinter’s night. They had been given the names of Belorussian loyalists still supposedly to be found in the villages north of the Pripet and the Bug. They found the villages totally deserted and empty of food. It had been intended that they live off the villages. Now, within two days of landing in the woods, they were in a desperate and famished condition. They moved north looking for Vitushka’s platoon. On the way they met a very frightened, very elderly charcoal burner, living with his wife in a hovel in the woods, who told them that the Russians had simply cleared the area. Along the Belorussian-Polish border, they had emptied every village and relocated the villagers in encampments to the east. Hence they now knew that anyone found in the woods was a fascist spy. The old man and his wife, who had escaped this extraordinary relocation, were terrified that that would be their fate.

Starving and ill from exposure, the lieutenant and his men located Vitushka in the woods near the Pruzhany road. Vitushka confirmed the old man’s story. Along a border of 150 miles, and to a depth of fifty miles, everything had been cleared. Ostrowsky agents in the villages had been executed. Travel by urban people in Grodno, Kaminetz, Brest, Kobrin, and so on was not permitted. The city dwellers were locked up, the villagers were gone.

Could not help feeling an awe and admiration for such a degree of thoroughness. This is relocation on a scale which would be beyond my resources and Redich’s gifts.

The boy related that a supplies drop on New Year’s Eve and a few successfully stalked stags saved them from starvation. It was apparent however that they had a choice only between dying in perfect security in the forests or trying to contact Ostrowsky agents in the cities.

Moving south now, they encountered a Russian patrol-in-strength at night while trying to cross the Brest Litovsk—Minsk highway. Only six of them escaped death or capture and, after two more cruel days passed, stood on the northern outskirts of the city of Kobrin. Vitushka and two others decided to penetrate the city and make contact with the Ostrowsky cell there while the wounded lieutenant and the others waited in the woods. Vitushka, he said, had behaved very well through all their sufferings. When he could, he did his party trick, which was to sing black American jazz songs in a gravelly voice. The lieutenant described how in his peasant coat, Vitushka emerged from the woods on an edge of a country road. Away in the dimness of late afternoon was that most miserable of low-lying Belorussian towns, with its shabby wooden suburbs and its unkempt timber mills. And Vitushka stood there for a moment singing for the benefit of the two going with him and the others who would wait, “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.”

During the night one of the lieutenant’s two companions swallowed his cyanide pill. It was after dark the next night before one of Vitushka’s small party turned up again. He too was ready to end his life. Soviets had a ten-thousand-man intelligence division in the town—at least one man attached to each household. Nothing in the slightest way remarkable could happen in Kobrin or in any of the border cities. Vitushka and one of his men had approached the Kobrin address given them during their training at Dahlwitz and had been instantly captured. The third man, the one who had now reached the woods again in a state of moral collapse, had been posted in the doorway of a grocery shop and had seen the arrest. He had instantly tried to cover his connection to Vitushka by showing his papers to the grocer and buying one of the few items which were for sale—a can of pickled cucumbers. These he took to a timber yard, where he spent a miserable night in hiding. Somehow he talked his way through a patrol next afternoon. By then loudspeakers were announcing that the fascist Vitushka and one of his lieutenants would be publicly paraded through Kobrin and that the parade would be filmed by a newsreel camera crew.

The lieutenant lost one more of his companions through suicide and another was shot by a Russian sentry near Bialystok.

Ostrowsky continued to comfort the lieutenant during our time with him today, but we need no intelligence officer to explain to us the significance of the boy’s experiences. Belorussia must be recaptured frontally. It cannot be recaptured by infiltration. The President’s network of agents has been obliterated.

Ostrowsky continued to hide his true feelings from me. Atmosphere dismal in the car returning to Alexanderplatz. On arrival the President asked me not to go home yet but to join him for a drink in his office. Friendly drinking after office hours was not at all characteristic of him, and the oddity of the request made me accept.

He poured the vodka himself, quickly, in case I changed my mind and went home to Danielle. Both of us drank the first shot at the same hectic pace. As they say, if ever men needed it …

Ostrowsky said, “There are agents, Soviet agents, working among us. It is amply apparent that they’re from the other faction.”

Wondered if it was amply apparent, but Ostrowsky too tired and heartsick to argue with.

“It’s essential the Americans don’t find this out. We must be able to offer them networks. We can tell them later the networks have gone and have to be rebuilt. But in the first instance, at the first meeting with them, they must not know what happened to Vitushka or what the lieutenant found out.” The proposition that it as well that the lieutenant will not live to meet the Americans hung for a moment in the air.

Remarked that the Soviets themselves might let the United States know. But Ostrowsky is sure the Americans will believe us and not their Godless and temporary allies.

“Two men,” he said, “of whom I can be sure neither have Soviet affiliations. Yourself and Hrynkievich.”

Do not consider it a compliment being compared to Hrynkievich, who runs Belorussian self-help here in Berlin. The good Dr. Hrynkievich cunning, venal, not very clever.

“I call upon you again, Stanek, for something of a special contribution. At a given moment, I would like yourself and Hrynkievich to go as my representatives and to make contact with the Americans, preferably with Patton, in Bavaria.”

Proposal is of course attractive. But thought at once of Danielle. Asked a question which in my good will toward Ostrowsky I would never once have asked. “Hrynkievich to lead the mission?”

Ostrowsky nodded. “He has seniority as my Minister of Welfare.”

Mentioned to Ostrowsky Danielle’s unease about the coming flight from Berlin. Her anxiety would treble if she knew I would be gone somewhere to the west and that she had to make it unaccompanied.

He poured another glass of liquor like a supplicant. He would be very grateful, he told me.

As I drank second glass, became increasingly enraged at him. He would shackle me to a barely competent minister like Hrynkievich and send me out on the roads of Bavaria to offer the Americans a nonexistent agent network. Later he might be able to say to General Patton, “After all, I cannot be responsible for what a fool and a junior minister tell you.”

Idea was that I should discuss the thing with Danielle and give Ostrowsky an answer—no doubt a positive one—in the morning. As I drank, found the true answer come out of my mouth of its own accord. “I regret, Mr. President, that any idea of leaving Danielle behind me in Berlin would amount to a betrayal worse than adultery.”

“But I would see her safely to the West when the appropriate moment came,” he assured me.

Delighted to find myself unrelenting. “I am afraid those are guarantees that in the circumstances would bring her no comfort, Mr. President.”

Leaving his office, felt more of a free agent than I have in a dozen years. In back of car on way home, found myself saying aloud, “Let him send Redich.”