A Secret Life (7 page)
Authors: Benjamin Weiser
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage
During the occupation, Kuklinski’s parents decided to move him to a different school. In the public school, the Germans had eliminated many subjects, including the Polish language program. In the small monastery school located behind a church in Old Town, the teachers had more freedom, and Kuklinski’s parents hoped that he would receive a better education. The school was overcrowded but admitted Kuklinski after his father agreed to build him a desk, a small table that was placed in the corner of a classroom.
One cold day in March, Kuklinski and several of his friends skipped school, took two kayaks, and went paddling on the Vistula. They were moving through whitewater, with ice chunks floating around them, when a large piece of ice knocked Kuklinski’s kayak into a stone bridge support. The current held the boat against the bridge, terrifying Kuklinski and another boy in his boat. Kuklinski’s friend stopped paddling and began to pray. Kuklinski took his paddle and poked his friend on the head, threatening to kill him if he did not start paddling immediately. They finally reached the shore.
In school, Kuklinski felt isolated and spent much of his time reading during the priests’ dull lectures. One day, as he lost himself in a Polish translation of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
he felt a priest grab his ear and admonish him. Kuklinski was expelled. As he later recalled, God seemed to be saying,
Be careful, Ryszard. Be careful with America
.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
he felt a priest grab his ear and admonish him. Kuklinski was expelled. As he later recalled, God seemed to be saying,
Be careful, Ryszard. Be careful with America
.
As the occupation continued, Kuklinski could not avoid witnessing what was happening behind the ghetto wall. From a fourth-story window in his building, he peered down at a high brick wall topped by barbed wire and broken glass that divided Leszno and Przejazd Streets and marked the border of the ghetto, and he watched with uncomprehending horror as his neighbors were slaughtered in the street. One day, he witnessed the mass execution of dozens of Poles on Leszno Street outside the ghetto wall. Then Nazi storm troopers ordered two Poles whose lives had been spared to load the bodies on a flatbed truck and to sprinkle sand on the bloodstained sidewalk. Kuklinski had a small prayer book, which he took to the street afterward and pressed it on the spot where the massacre had been carried out.
Kuklinski’s father often took him to the homes of friends and asked him to bring his toy accordion. When they arrived at such gatherings, Kuklinski found other children with instruments―harmonicas, drums, even a violin. The children played noisily, with the music drowning out their parents’ hushed voices. It was Kuklinski’s introduction to the underground, the Polish resistance.
When the Nazis began to liquidate the ghetto in 1943, Kuklinski watched as soldiers burned apartment buildings, forcing the screaming residents into the streets. From his window, Kuklinski saw one hysterical woman trapped inside her third-floor apartment at 5 Leszno Street. As the smoke and flames filled her room, she went to the window several times for air. Finally, she climbed out onto the ledge and stood silently and unmoving as flames began to billow out the window. Then she stepped off. Kuklinski prayed as she tumbled to her death below. In spring 1943, the SS blew up the Great Synagogue next to Kuklinski’s building. Later, he walked through the ruins.
As the months passed, he watched as Jews and other Poles were forced from their homes, lined up and shot, or sent to concentration camps. Kuklinski’s parents took him more frequently to the country, afraid that the devastation in the ghetto would spread to the rest of Warsaw. One day, Kuklinski and some friends were at an amusement park near Krasinski Square, which bordered the ghetto near the Old Town. As he whirled around on a carousel, Kuklinski could hear gun-fire; people in an apartment building were shooting at German soldiers on the street below. Kuklinski and his friends inched closer, and from a slightly elevated spot, they could see people running and fighting behind the ghetto wall. In the chaos Kuklinski saw several German soldiers grab a man and a woman in the entranceway to a large building. The two people appeared to be frantically trying to comply with the soldiers’ shouted orders. As Kuklinski watched in terror, the man and woman stood face to face, clutching in an awkward embrace, and began to rub up against each other, simulating intercourse, as the soldiers laughed and jeered. Then one soldier raised his pistol and executed them both.
When Kuklinski was thirteen, he and a group of older friends went to a local fire station and asked to join the Home Army, the country’s largest underground organization, which was under the command of the Polish government in exile in London. Kuklinski’s friends were accepted, but he was told he was too young and was sent home. One group, Sword and Plow, finally allowed him to put up posters.
On May 13, 1943, Kuklinski was heading home when he saw that the Germans had surrounded his block. Afraid to enter the apartment building, he slept that night in a nearby potato patch located on the front lawn of a historic arsenal building on Dluga Street. The next day, he entered his apartment and found it a shambles; his mother was sitting alone and weeping. She said the Gestapo had stormed the apartment, dragging along a bloodied informant. In a blatant setup, one of the storm troopers had stuffed a handful of ammunition under his father’s pillow and demanded, “What’s this?” His father, Stanislaw, who did not own a weapon, had no idea. The soldier upended a heavy oak table in the dining room, broke off one leg, and used it to beat Stanislaw. As Anna was forced into another apartment, she could hear her husband’s screams, accompanied by the music of Kuklinski’s accordion, which another storm trooper was playing to mask the sounds of torture.
After the Gestapo officers had left, Anna said, she returned and found the apartment walls splattered with blood and her husband gone. His mother said she would seek refuge with close friends near Niedabyl and asked her son to go with her. But Kuklinski decided to go into hiding. He found shelter in the homes of friends and then in the forests outside Warsaw near Radzymin, where teenagers and young men he knew were roaming in small bands, forming an organized resistance. Kuklinski joined a group of about a half dozen boys, the oldest a Jewish teenager of about eighteen. They had heard that the Nazis were advertising for Polish citizens to work in the occupied zones. Kuklinski and his friends devised a plan, which in retrospect seemed naive: They would volunteer to work in France, where they hoped to steal a fishing boat and make their way to Britain. They had learned that Polish airmen were with the British, and they wanted to join them. As a gesture of solidarity, they tattooed their left arms with a picture of a boat and the word “Atlantyk.”
The boys showed up at a recruiting office and said they wanted to go to France. They were put on a train, but were unloaded instead in German Silesia, in southwestern Poland. Nearby were several prison camps, in which the Germans were detaining POWs of all nationalities, including Soviets, Italians, Americans, and British. Kuklinski spent the next eighteen months at forced labor in German wartime factories, which were producing propellers and other airplane parts.
In the winter of 1945, Kuklinski was ordered to join hundreds of prisoners, mostly women, who were being evacuated from a concentration camp. As they walked through the freezing rain and snow in tattered prison garb, Kuklinski and two older boys, one of them the Jewish teenager he knew from Warsaw, escaped through an open field. They spent the next few months hiding in small villages, scrounging for clothing and food, and sleeping in barracks that housed laborers who were being forced to work on the large German farms. They traveled only after dark. One night, as they walked along a rural road, they encountered an SS soldier guarding a machine gun in a defensive position.
“Hands up!” he ordered, asking who they were.
“We are Polish workers,” Kuklinski and his friends replied, explaining that they were trying to find the next village, Neudorf, where they wanted to obtain food. The soldier cursed but pointed the way to the village.
Kuklinski and his two friends walked several more kilometers through a snowy field, shivering in their tattered clothes. They came upon a brick house, which was dark inside. They approached it cautiously, aware that retreating German soldiers often took refuge in such houses as they foraged for food. They broke a window in the basement and climbed in. Finding jars of food, they had a quick meal. Then the three friends crept up the stairs to the kitchen. Suddenly, they heard a voice speaking in German and saw a man in uniform in the hallway. He picked up a hunting rifle and called out. The boys tried to defend themselves, and in the struggle, one of the older teenagers grabbed the man and pushed him down the basement stairs, where the other beat him with the man’s own rifle, killing him. Both older boys and Kuklinski ran from the house to the next village, where they were given shelter by a Pole who hid them in his basement for months. One day in the spring, they noticed tanks rolling into the village, led by soldiers in fur caps and the traditional khaki uniforms of the Soviet Army. Kuklinski had never seen Russians before. As he and his friends watched, the Germans tried to put up a fight, but they were vastly outnumbered, and the shooting ended within hours. As Kuklinski and his friends ran to welcome the Soviet forces, they witnessed the savagery of the Soviet troops, who casually finished off hundreds of German soldiers who were lying wounded in a large field.
Kuklinski joined a column of refugees returning east in carriages and carts, drawn by bedraggled horses. At one point, he left the caravan and rode a train that was carrying Poles back into Warsaw. He found the city leveled, and his apartment building reduced to rubble. There was no sign of his parents. Kuklinski hiked for two days to Niedabyl, where his uncle’s farm was located. He found his aunt in the front yard. She looked up and began to scream, “Ryszard! Ryszard! Ryszard!” and then his mother’s name, “Anna! Anna! Anna!”
Anna came running and embraced her son for the first time in two years. But in their tearful reunion, she told him that his father had not returned. She showed him three postcards from his father, who had been held in the Pawiak Prison in Warsaw and later sent to the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen concentration camps near Berlin.
After the German surrender on May 7, 1945, Kuklinski took a Soviet military transport train to Berlin and hitched a ride to the camps, which were almost empty. Kuklinski found a prisoner who led him into Block 4A, where his father had been held and where sick prisoners still lay. Kuklinski walked from one bed to the next, talking to each survivor, but none of them knew his father. They reported that dozens of infirm prisoners had been hanged before the war ended, and thousands of others had been taken on a death march to the north.
Kuklinski walked for several days along a country road that led north. He saw bodies of former prisoners scattered along the path. He slept in barns or in the homes of friendly farmers. But there was no trace of his father, and he finally turned back.
Kuklinski felt no special claim as a victim; his father was one of 6 million Poles―including virtually all of the country’s 3 million Jews―exterminated by the Nazis. But he concluded that his country had to become strong again, in order to defend itself against outside aggression. Poles could never let an invading power cross their borders again.
In the first years after the war’s end, Kuklinski moved to Wroclaw in the southwestern part of Poland and took a job as a night watch-man in a soap factory, attending school in the daytime. He loved to draw and dreamed of becoming an architect. On September 25, 1947, at the age of seventeen, he decided to enlist in the army. But he soon discovered Poland had a new oppressor, the Soviet Union. During his three years in officers school in Wroclaw, Kuklinski’s commanding officer and the school’s commandant, both of whom had served in the prewar Polish Army, were replaced by Soviets who could not even speak Polish. The deputy commandant for political matters―a Polish Jew―was replaced with a Soviet who quickly imposed the new order. In 1949, Moscow installed a new Polish defense minister: Polish-born Konstanty Rokossowski, Marshal of the Soviet Union and a career Soviet officer. Members of the Home Army were tried on trumped-up espionage charges.
When Kuklinski joined the army, he did not believe that it would necessarily end up being Communist. The new army was made up not only of Polish officers from the eastern front, who had served under command of the Soviet Army and helped it liberate Poland, but also of other officers who had served with the western forces and returned home. The result was a struggle between officers who were indoctrinated by the Soviets and gradually accepted communism, and those who wanted Poland to be independent and believed that the army should serve the national interest, not the party interest.
Kuklinski hoped that in spite of the Soviet dominance and the purging of dissent, young officer candidates like him might someday replace their Soviet commanders. He threw himself into his studies and quickly became the top-ranked student in his class. He excelled in shooting drills and in track, regularly winning races of 3, 5, and 10 kilometers. He also completed 15-kilometer marches while carrying a heavy backpack and other equipment.
But Kuklinski quickly saw that the army was being remade along Soviet lines: their teachers, their drills―how to stand, how to turn, how to use a rifle―even their uniforms and caps. The round Soviet cap, with its red band, replaced the four-cornered cap of the Polish Army. Strict loyalty to the Soviet system was enforced. In class, Polish heroes were no longer discussed, only Soviet figures. In the field, training exercises were run only in a westerly direction―as in an offensive action against Europe―and soldiers were forbidden to attack toward the east. “It was a parody, absurd,” Kuklinski felt. “We didn’t feel as if we were in Poland anymore.” The soldiers had once sung patriotic songs and said prayers before bedtime. Now they felt only fear as the Communists carried out purges of the army ranks.
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