94
BÜHLER RETURNED TO Kraków, reporting to Frank that the offer of full assistance from the General Government had been accepted with keen gratitude. This coincided with the arrival in Kraków of the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte, sent by the newspaper Corriere della Sera to interview Frank. With a soft spot for Italy and Mussolini (a personal friend), Frank was delighted to receive Malaparte at the Wawel, offering a private dinner to which senior officials were invited, with their wives. Among the guests was Otto von Wächter, the governor of Kraków, and Josef Bühler, recently returned from the Wannsee Conference.
Frank (center) hosts a dinner party at the Wawel Castle (undated)
Malaparte was impressed by the detail, the tight-fitting gray uniforms, red armlets, and swastikas. A host with fine wines, Frank sat at the head of the table on a high, stiff-backed chair, close to Bühler. Malaparte noticed Frank’s black glossy hair and high ivory-white forehead, the prominent eyes with their thick, heavy eyelids, and Bühler’s flushed cheeks, perspiring temples, eyes that glistened with deference to Frank. Each time Frank asked a question, Bühler was the first with an answer, shouting and fawning. “Ja, ja!”
Did Malaparte know that Bühler had recently returned from the Wannsee Conference in Berlin? Did Bühler talk of Heydrich, of the measures agreed on, of the “total solution of the Jewish question in Europe”? The Italian didn’t report on such matters in the article he filed with Corriere della Sera, which was published on March 22, 1942. He said little about the Jews—a passing reference to the confiscation of property, which caused difficulties—but did shower adulation on Frank. “He is a man of great stature, strong, agile,” the Italian wrote, “with a subtle mouth, a slim and aquiline nose, large eyes, an ample forehead, illuminated by a premature baldness.”
Frank, who spoke fluent Italian, would have been pleased with such a description of him, a leader “sitting on the throne of the Jagellions and Sobieski.” A revival of the great Polish tradition of royalty and chivalry was under way.
“My one ambition,” Frank was quoted as saying, “is to elevate the Polish people to the honor of European civilization.” After dinner, they retired to Frank’s private apartment. Sprawled across deep Viennese settees and large armchairs upholstered in soft leather, the men talked, smoked, drank. Two valets dressed in blue livery moved around the room, offering coffee, liqueurs, and sweets. The opulence was great: green-and-gold-lacquered Venetian tables laden with bottles of old French brandy, boxes of Havana cigars, silver trays heaped with candied fruit, the celebrated Wedel chocolates.
Frank invited Malaparte to his private study, with its rare double loggias: one on the outside, overlooking the city, the other internal, facing the castle’s laddered Renaissance courtyard. At the center of the study was a vast mahogany table, bare and polished in the candlelight, long gone by the time I visited the room seven decades later.
“Here I think about Poland’s future,” Frank told Malaparte.
The two men walked onto the external loggia, to admire the city that lay below.
“This is the German burg,” Frank explained, pointing a raised arm to a shadow of the Wawel, sharply cut into the blinding reflection of the snow. Malaparte reported the sound of barking dogs, a troop that guarded Marshal Piłsudski in his tomb, deep below the castle.
That night was bitterly cold, so much so that tears came to Malaparte’s eyes. They returned to the study and were joined by Frau Brigitte Frank. She came to the Italian and put her hand on his arm gently. “Come with me,” she said. “I want to reveal his secret to you.” They passed through a door at one end of the study, entering a small room with bare, whitewashed walls. His own “Eagle’s Nest,” Brigitte announced, a place of reflection and decision, empty save for a Pleyel piano and a wooden music stool.
Frau Frank opened the piano and stroked the keyboard. Malaparte noticed the fat fingers that so disgusted her husband (by then, the marriage was in difficulty).
“Before taking a crucial decision, or when he is very weary or depressed, sometimes in the very midst of an important meeting,” she told the Italian, “he shuts himself up in this cell, sits before the piano and seeks rest or inspiration from Schumann, Brahms, Chopin or Beethoven.”
Malaparte was silent. “He is an extraordinary man, isn’t he?” Frau Frank whispered, a look of pride and affection crossing her harsh, greedy, adoring face. “He is an artist, a great artist, with a pure and delicate soul,” she added. “Only such an artist as he can rule over Poland.”
Frank didn’t perform that evening in Kraków. A few days later, Malaparte was able to listen to him perform in Warsaw, when the governor-general visited the city to meet Himmler to discuss setbacks on the Russian front and changes of personnel on his territory. Himmler and Frank agreed that Otto von Wächter, the governor of Kraków, would move to Lemberg, 180 miles to the south, to be governor of Distrikt Galizien. He would replace Karl Lasch, accused of corruption, rumored to be having an affair with Frau Frank, and said by some to be the father of the infant Niklas Frank.