Meanwhile, back at the warehouse a group of prisoners of war in German uniform were lining up, eager also to head to the repatriation point, also breathing the air of freedom. ‘We are Austrians!’ they declared. ‘Unfortunately, gentlemen,’ I had to inform them, ‘you are also soldiers of the enemy army.’ The Austrians filed disconsolately back into the warehouse.
Marianna tracked me down. Alfred had been taken to the repatriation point and was forbidden to leave it. Her voice had lost its crispness, its intonations, and now her speech was colourless and halting. She asked me to pass him a note. She could not do it herself because the sentries were not letting anyone in.
It was very noisy at the repatriation point. The soldiers reacted enthusiastically to my appearance, and as I crossed the broad courtyard I was bombarded with witticisms that evoked an explosion of mirth, perhaps inoffensive, perhaps not. The Italians were looking a bit more cheerful than the previous day. They wanted to tell me something but I could not understand what. It seemed, though, to be friendly.
To one side, beside a post stuck in the melting snow and bearing the flag of Belgium to summon his compatriots, stood Alfred. Alas, the Belgians who had been herded out of Bromberg were by now being marched by German guards far from this place. He was the only one in that column to have escaped. He stood there hatless, his dark coat unbuttoned, inscrutable.
I don’t remember now what language they communicated in, but I brought Alfred’s note back to Marianna. When she had been scurrying around by the prison waiting for him she had seemed much more confident that they would be reunited than she was now. She was baffled by the new circumstances that had so pitilessly parted them. Her face grew long, her cheeks were sunken, her lips tightly pursed together. She seemed stunned, but from beneath those downcast eyelids her bulging grey-green eyes were feverish with hope. I found some pretext to visit the repatriation point one more time.
In the courtyard soldiers of different nations were clowning around, energetically playing soldier games. I found Alfred still in the same place at the back of the courtyard, as if he could not move away from the pole with the Belgian flag. He was a lonely man. He took the note silently, quickly read it, undid and moved aside the flap of his open coat, and hid the note in the inside pocket of his jacket. Hurriedly, as if afraid of running out of time, he painstakingly outlined the letters of his answer, very large, as if he were writing to a child. His hand was trembling with tension. When he had filled the sheet of paper, he tore it out of his notebook, folded the little page in four and handed it to me. He watched silently, making sure I put it safely in the breast pocket of my tunic. He did not speak, but his face said it all, expressing the pain, the rage, the powerlessness. Or did it? That is how I remember it now but he was stony-faced. That made me even more afraid to look straight at him, to meet that unwavering gaze through his glasses.
Outside the gates tanks were passing, infantry were being deployed to Bydgoszcz in trucks. At any moment a battle might break out on the approaches to the city. The outskirts were being fortified, artillery brought in. The war was approaching again. A strict regime was enforced. That is how it was and, probably, the only way it could be in the avalanche of war, that victories crushed personal destinies. It seems it is easier to defend a city than to protect your feelings and the one person you love.
An early winter’s morning and the light is still dim. The church roofs are black and we are driving through this city for the last time. Trucks manoeuvre through narrow streets lined by buildings.
Leaving Bydgoszcz. Grey houses built long ago; narrow, hospitable streets. Two little three-year-old Polish citizens, in long trousers but without hats on their heads, are shrieking by a gate. A blind old man with a bicolour scrap of cloth on his tall astrakhan hat is feeling his way along the pavement.
We overtake the prison officials in their blue uniform, walking to work: the prison is back in business. Ahead we see some male civilians sweeping the last of the snow off the pavements. We catch up and I see a swastika chalked on the lapels of their coats. And that explains the Nazi emblem I drew next to my copy of the magistracy’s decree not to feed Germans. I was not expecting what I saw. In fact I was dumbstruck. The magistracy had also decided that the remaining Germans in Bydgoszcz must go out to clear the streets. Not having to hand anything more suitable, a swastika had been chalked on their clothes. I cannot describe the wave of revulsion that swept over me. Everything seemed catastrophically turned upside down. Eine verkehrte Welt. A world capsized. Something irreparable had surged up from the dregs of the war on the very road to victory. How deadly this enemy was proving: you could kill him, but that did not free you from him.
Neither before nor after that day did I see anyone marked with a swastika. In Bydgoszcz it probably lasted only a single day, but on that morning there they were, those dark, grim figures, those identification marks chalked on human beings, those people cast out from the protection of the law, or even of common human decency.
We drove out of the city, leaving behind us the solid phalanx of our troops, and again saw at the roadside those tall, slender crosses bearing Christ crucified. Trees flanked the road, the lower part of their trunks whitewashed.
For some reason in the land around Rzhev while the fighting was going on every cell of life was eternal, in every physical detail, down to the most fragmentary, minute, tremulous particle. Everything was part of you. There, the road leading you to face danger and uncertainty kept you alert. Here, on the path of invasion, something was different. You could feel something was being pulled tight into an inextricable knot. At Rzhev there had been pain, but for that only the enemy was to blame. Here, an indefinable anxiety was wearing me down. I could not yet tell what was burdening me with a troubling sense of responsibility far too great for me to bear, and far above my authority to deal with in terms of rank. It was pursuing me, but why me? How could I put things right? Who was I to assume the responsibility?
We drove away from Bromberg–Bydgoszcz, having stayed there only a few days. So why do I find my thoughts returning so relentlessly, again and again to that city? Why are my memories of it still so sharp? Why do they still smart so? Why is it those particular faces and those particular episodes that so upset me?
I know nothing of what happened after that. Were Alfred and Marianna ever reunited, or were they inexorably separated by the state borders imposed by the victory and so pitiless towards an alliance of love? If they waited and met again many years later, had that sublime emotion they had shared survived, or had it withered and lost its amazing potency?
Did the Jewish women find refuge in that city liberated from a shared deadly enemy? Or were they doomed to stand around in the cold on street corners, like the Hungarian Jewesses on the day we drove into Bydgoszcz? ‘You are free!’ But what sort of freedom can there be in wartime? The idea was absurd. Captivity had provided a roof over their heads, and freedom none.
Where did those German peasants find respite, who had been torn from their native land? Where could they rest when Germany was beyond their reach, on the far side of an impassable front line?
And what of the nephew of Count Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Moscow who had warned of the German attack and was executed for complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler? Perhaps he really could have been shown a little more sympathy, or at least interest? Nobody had any time for him, so there he stayed, in the darkness of that warehouse.