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One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz
by Jack Fairweather
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Suddenly, Witold found himself the steward of the local community. Peasants from the local village of Krupa worked his fields and sought his advice on how to develop their own land. He set up a dairy cooperative to earn them better prices, and, after spending a large chunk of his inheritance on his prized Arabian mare, founded the local reserve unit. He met his wife, Maria, in 1927 while painting scenery for a play in Krupa's new schoolhouse and courted her with bunches of lilac flowers delivered through her bedroom window. They married in 1931, and within a year their son, Andrzej, was born, followed twelve months later by Zofia, their daughter. Fatherhood brought out Witold's caring side. He tended to the children when Maria was bedridden after Zofia's birth and taught them to ride and to swim in the pond beside the house. In the evenings, they staged little plays for Maria when she came home from work.
But his quiet home life was not cut off from the political currents sweeping the country in the 1930s, and Witold worried. Poland had been one of the most pluralistic and tolerant societies in Europe for much of its thousand-year history. However, the country that had reemerged in 1918 after 123 years of partition had struggled to forge an identity. Nationalists and church leaders called for an increasingly narrow definition of Polishness based on ethnicity and Catholicism. Groups advocating greater rights for Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities were broken up and suppressed, while Jews—who comprised around a tenth of Poland's prewar population—were labeled economic competitors, discriminated against in education and business, and pressured to emigrate. Some nationalists took matters into their own hands, enforced boycotts of Jewish shops, and attacked synagogues. Thugs in Witold's hometown, Lida, had smashed up a Jewish confectionary and a lawyer's office. The main square was filled with shuttered shops belonging to Jews who had fled the country.
Witold disliked politics and the way politicians exploited differences. His family stood for the old order, when Poland had been independent and a beacon of culture. That said, he was a man of his time and social class. He likely held a paternal view toward the local Polish and Belarusian peasants and shared in some of the prevailing anti-Semitic views. But ultimately his sense of patriotism extended to any group or ethnicity that took up Poland's cause. They would all need to unite now to repel the Nazi threat.
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Once mounted on his horse, it took Witold a breathless prayer to get to Krupa a mile away, where he likely called Maria from one of the few houses to have a telephone. Next he rode to the training ground beside the manor to assemble his men and gather supplies. Witold received ammunition and emergency rations from the regimental headquarters in Lida but had to arrange the remaining provisions from the community: bread, groats, sausages, lard, potatoes, onions, canned coffee, flour, dried herbs, vinegar, and salt. The horses needed the best part of 30 kilograms of oats a week. Not everyone in the village was happy to contribute, hardly having enough for themselves, and it was a long day in the sweltering heat to load the wagons in the manor courtyard.
Witold had offered up the manor as a billet for officers and may have been camping with his men. At any rate, he wasn't at home when Maria and the children finally arrived the following evening, hot and bedraggled, to find soldiers dozing in their beds. She was annoyed, to put it mildly. It had been a long journey. The train was so packed that infants had been passed into the carriages through the windows, and they had stopped constantly to make way for military traffic. Witold was promptly summoned from the field and had to ask the men to leave.
Maria was still upset when she woke up to the news that some peasants had broken into one of the baggage trains and stolen some supplies. But she put on one of Witold's favorite dresses for the send-off in Krupa, and she made sure Andrzej and Zofia were in their Sunday best. The children of the village gathered outside the school, and Krupa's single street was packed with well-wishers waving flags or handkerchiefs. A cheer went up as Witold led his column of horsemen down the street. He was dressed in a khaki uniform, with his pistol and saber strapped to his waist.
Excerpted from The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather. Copyright © 2019 by Jack Fairweather. Excerpted by permission of Custom House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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