“Prisoner Krewinski,” Vlach whispered.
“Which?”
“Krewinski.”
“Yes, wait. It’s that corridor. Second to the last, on the left. You see, I don’t give you a problem.”
“On the floor,” de Milja said.
The guard gave a nervous laugh, went to one knee, then both. “Like this? You see, sirs, no trouble from me.”
De Milja pushed him over on his side and began wiring his ankles together. “Sirs?” The guard’s voice was very high now. “You’re going to let men out of these cells, don’t leave me tied up here, I beg you.”
De Milja didn’t answer. He ripped the keys off the warder’s belt, held them in front of the man’s eyes, and began going through them. “Yes, there,” the man said. He was fading now—drifting toward death before anyone touched him, de Milja could see it.
The prisoners, in cells lining the twilit corridor, came to their barred doors and watched with curiosity: two men with weapons, moving quickly. No uniforms, no warder. For the moment, de Milja and Vlach ignored them. In the second cell from the end on the left, a man sat on a bed—a wood frame suspended from the wall by two chains. He was tall and wiry, with a mournful face and hair shaved to a colorless stubble—a hard head and soft eyes. He was clean-shaven, but a cavalry mustache would not have been out of place. Sergeant Krewinski, de Milja now saw. The man stared at de Milja and Vlach without much interest, they were only the most recent in a long line of men with guns who’d come for him.
“Are you Sergeant Krewinski?”
“Yes,” the man said—meaning if you like.
As the three left the cell block, the keys were passed to other prisoners. In Block Six, Jan and his group freed the two ZWZ officers, a group of Russian partisans, all the political prisoners, and the women in the adjoining wing. The pandemonium was just getting started when de Milja and Vlach and the sergeant reached the Opel. Ukrainian guards running for their lives, prisoners running out into the streets of Rovno. Some would escape, and police units would be busy for days. At the Zamkova Street intersection, they saw Jan’s truck, rocking from side to side as it sped away from the prison.
The Opel wound through the back alleys of Rovno—there were sirens now, as the attack on Czarny prison began to draw in security elements. They first dropped Kolya at a hideout, a room above a pharmacy. Then Vlach, on the outskirts of the city, at a lumberyard. A few miles down the road, the Opel stopped at the edge of a small village. Bron tapped the horn three times and an ancient farm truck rolled out of a snow-covered lane. The driver of the truck joined Bron in the Opel, they waved good-bye, and drove off in the direction of Rovno. De Milja and the sergeant sat in the cab of the truck, changed into sheepskin jackets, old boots, and new identity papers.
They waited until dawn, then in first light headed for the Razakavia band in the farmhouse at the edge of the forest. De Milja never went more than twenty miles an hour—the tires were old and battered, the road ice over frozen mud, and patches of ground fog turned the windshield white. As they drove along, Krewinski told his story. “The NKVD sergeant, the man whose dog had been sick, he came to the wire one day and told me, ‘You go to Moscow, to the training school, because if you stay here, well . . .’ I understood what he meant. I never saw him again, but he saved my life. The major who had run my regiment was still in the camp at that time, and he told me how to go about it. He was a reserve officer, a chemist from Lodz, an important man.
“Well, it was just like he said it would be. I asked for a book about communism, and I read it and I discussed it with a guard. A political type called me into his office, and he gave me another book. That went on for a month or two, then they moved me to a separate part of the camp, and they left a gate open.” Krewinski laughed. “I’d been told they would do that, and they did. I ignored it. Then, a week later, the provocateur. A little man that worked around the office. Came to me and said, ‘I know your game. Let’s you and me work together and get ourselves out of here.’”
“What did you do?”
“Went directly to the camp commandant and turned him in. And that really seemed to make a difference, that earned their trust. About two weeks later I went east.
“It was a kind of school. On Arbat Street, in an old mansion. And also at the university. A school for guerrilla fighting. Nothing like that in Poland—oh, maybe for officers, but not for an enlisted man like me. They had all kinds of people there, from everywhere in Europe—we could barely talk to one another. Estonians and Lithuanians and Hungarians, Frenchmen and Belgians. All kinds. They taught us how to blow up a train, how to ambush a column. But they also spent time on political matters—putting out a newspaper, and getting it into people’s hands; by leaving it on trains, or mailing it to addresses in the phone-book. They taught assassination. How to force peasants to fight for you, how to infiltrate organizations. Then, in August, after the German attack on Russia, they dropped me by parachute into the Tsuman forest. I was to search out a certain band, and work to bring them under the control of the Znamensky Street center—the GRU—in Moscow.”
“What happened?”
“I went home,” Krewinski said. “It wasn’t that simple or easy, and it took time and luck, but that’s what I did.”
They reached the farm at dusk, were given something to eat, the sergeant spent some time with his brother, then they were given blankets and taken to a hayloft on the second floor of an old stone stable. There they fell into a dead sleep, awakened at 5:00 a.m. when German antipartisan units and Ukrainian militia, acting on a tip from an informer, attacked the farm.
They got very close, killing the sentries silently as they came. Three hundred of them, Ukrainian militia led by a special SS unit—men imprisoned for poaching game in Germany recruited to hunt humans, partisans, in the forests of Poland.
It was a hand grenade that woke Captain de Milja.
It blew a hole in the corner of the stable and set the beams on fire. By the flickering light he saw militia running across a frozen pond. He kicked himself free of his blanket and ran to a window, Simonov in hand. Down below, on the ground floor of the stable, some of the partisans were shouting to one another, trying to organize a defense. But the guards out in the forest were lying in the leaves with their throats cut, and it was too late to organize much of anything.
The Germans had a heavy machine gun in the woods. They traversed window to window across the outbuildings, the main house, then the stable. Only Frantek’s final cry alerted de Milja to the gunfire and he dove below the sill just as it reached him. He crawled over to help, but Frantek simply stared at him upside down, eyes wide, a look of indignation frozen on his face.
Sergeant Krewinski knew how to do these things. He waited until the machine gun moved to the next building, then fired a long burst at its muzzle flare with a machine pistol. This occasioned a change of gunners—a few moments of reorganization, but nothing more. By then, the fire in the beams had taken hold and it was getting hard to see, and to breathe, on the upper floor. One of the defenders from down below rushed halfway up the stairway, yelled something, then tumbled, dead weight, back down. A moment later a rifle was poked up from the stairs and fired blind. A partisan reached down and pulled it up, a very surprised Ukrainian hanging on the other end. The sergeant shot him. Then Krewinski and de Milja exchanged a certain look—the time we always knew would come has come—and led the others on the second floor in running down the open stairway. Nobody really wanted to burn to death in a stable. Krewinski was shot, but the impulse turned out to have been a good one. There were only five or six militia gathered at the foot of the stairway. Triumphant— blood on the walls, dead militia, dead partisans—but undermanned, a successful attack that had spent its strength en route.