The Children's War (123 page)

Blowing a stream of smoke toward the ceiling, Ryszard answered, “Not in my lifetime.”

“You don’t think there’s any hope?” Peter asked.

“Not for us,” Ryszard replied. “Your people—the English—they have a chance. You have the Commonwealth, and besides, nobody’s trying to annihilate you. You might one day get autonomy, some cultural rights, then perhaps independence and then you can rebuild. But for us, shit, there’s nothing but ruin and extinction in our future. I’m surprised we’ve lasted this long, if you call the mess we have left in our land ‘lasting.’ A half-starved, illiterate population of ten or fifteen million standing on top of twenty million corpses, waiting their turn. No industry, no economy. Our language spoken in whispers, our heritage looted or destroyed. Our entire land has been turned into a strip mine—pull out all the resources and leave nothing but a wasteland.”

“We’ll survive. We did it before,” Kasia argued.

“They only tried to annihilate our culture then,” Ryszard replied. “Genocide wasn’t part of the
Kulturkampf
or Russification, as far as I know.”

“Well, we have managed to stop that, haven’t we?” Kasia responded.

“Just barely. Given half a chance, they’ll start again, and this time they won’t quit until the job is done,” Ryszard answered morosely.

“Do you really think that’s the case?” Peter was trying to determine if Ryszard’s gloomy predictions were based on rational observation of his colleagues or if it was simply an expression of his obvious depression.

“Perhaps it’s not that hopeless,” Zosia interjected.

“Maybe it’s like 1850,” Kasia suggested, referring to roughly halfway through the 125 years her country had endured occupation and nonexistence. At the questioning glances, she explained, “You know, too long in the past to remember independence and decades away from liberation.”

Ryszard snorted. “Great. Just like us, they lived to see neither end!”

“Nevertheless,” Kasia persisted, “it was necessary to keep the dream alive. What would have happened if our people had lost faith then? Hmm?”

“Dream on, if it keeps you sane,” Ryszard responded sarcastically. “But just look how efficiently the Soviets have destroyed the other half of the country. They shot or exiled or deported into the Reich anyone who claimed to be Polish, awarded some cultural rights to the Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Byelorussians, and that’s it”—he snapped his fingers—“we’re gone! Like we never even existed! Even we accept it as a fait accompli! Look at how our demands have changed!”

“What exactly are your demands?” Peter asked.

“They are irrelevant, is what they are,” Ryszard snapped.

“Nevertheless, what are they?” Peter insisted.

“In the most extreme form,” Kasia replied, “we demand the status quo when the first international crime against us was committed: our prepartition boundaries of the old republic. Nobody takes that seriously though, centuries of violence and occupation having left their mark. The criminals have gained legitimacy through the passage of time. A fact, which I am sure, many other criminal governments have noted.”

Pawel continued, “More hopefully, we demand our independence and the territory that was ours prior to the 1939 invasion. That’s the publicly stated goal.”

“But now,” Zosia picked up the thread, “we’re working toward accepting just the territory under German occupation back. It’s just a tiny bit of what we once had, but thanks to murder and deportations, it’s the only area that still has a reasonable number of ethnic Poles.”

Kasia added, “And it’s a concession to the NAU’s attempts to normalize relations with the Soviet Union. They can stand us having aspirations contrary to the wishes of the Reich, along with all the other captive nations, but to have a quarrel with two empires . . .”

Ryszard interrupted angrily. “We don’t ask for reparations or even apologies, we don’t ask for our lands or for the resurrection of the millions of our war dead. No damages for pain and suffering, no recompense for our anguish, for the children who saw their parents murdered, for the people who lost their eyes and their limbs, for the people worked to death, for the women raped to death. We don’t ask for our loot back or for the reconstruction of our hospitals and schools, the rebuilding of our capital, the restoration of our ancient heritage— nothing, none of that! We touch our forelocks and beg the international community to acknowledge our right to breathe! And for that we are scolded for being troublesome and uppity!”

The four of them studied Ryszard, surprised by his vehemence.

“There are some in the West who denounce us as terrorists,” Ryszard fumed. “They say we deserve our fate, that we should have lain down and died quietly, that by fighting back we only cause trouble. They would call me a wrecker, Kasia is a saboteur, Zosia here is a murderer!”

Zosia glanced at Peter but he looked guiltily away. Why had he ever said something so stupid?

“They grumble that we make things difficult for them to normalize relations!” Ryszard continued. “They whine that they are tired of war, that there’s nothing to fight about, that what’s done is done! To them we are dead already, and they can’t bury our heaving corpses fast enough!”

“There are those who recognize your bravery and your courage, who defend basic human rights,” Peter offered.

“Well, they don’t do it loudly enough,” Ryszard retorted. “The mass of the NAU population is uninformed and therefore unwilling to support us. And without them, we have no hope. They’ll stand idly by and watch us be murdered, strangled to death for our criminal proximity to psychopaths. They tell us our screams disturb the peace and couldn’t we please shut up! Then they’ll feign surprise and whine that they were not warned when the psychopaths turn on them!”

Like Neville Chamberlain and the Sudetenland, like the Fourth Partition of Poland, like the phony war that existed before France was invaded. History lessons that had remained unlearned. Were they doomed to be repeated? Peter did not need to say any of these things, he knew the others were all too aware of what had gone before. Nevertheless, the Reich had been halted, there was no invasion of America, there was a balance of terror to be maintained. Were the lessons of the past insufficient to dictate the actions of the future? Was there some other way out of the mess other than direct confrontation?

He really wanted to know what Ryszard had dispassionately observed from his politically powerful position. Trying to work around the grim responses that sprang from Ryszard’s mood, Peter pressed, “Don’t you think things have settled down inside the Reich? Do you really think they’re going to try and reimplement their original plan, after all these years? Don’t you think the moderate element has a chance of holding power?”

“Other than a few people here and there, like Katerina, the entire Jewish and half-Jewish population of Europe was murdered. Where was this moderate element then?” Ryszard asked.

“But certainly there’s been some evolution within the Reich government. After Hitler died and there was that shake-up . . .” Peter suggested.

Ryszard shrugged, suddenly tired. “I don’t know where they’re going. They don’t know either. That’s the problem with absolute power—it’s so dependent on the whims of one or two personalities.”

“But then, what is your genuine goal?” Peter pleaded to know.

Ryszard responded, “There are many divergent opinions about what we can hope for and what is achievable, but our unstated and genuine goal is simply survival. We hope to maintain a sufficient population base and enough of our culture to one day reconstruct our nation. Maybe if we get a few concessions from a future government, we can parlay that into a bit of autonomy and some cultural rights.”

“So you are willing to deal with them and set yourselves up as a client state?”

“Personally, yes,” Ryszard answered.

“Client state!” Zosia snorted. “That would be an extreme demand from our Ryszard!”

“She’s right,” Ryszard agreed. “I’m working toward something more basic.”

“What?”

“A guarantee of, shall we say, second-class human rights. The right not to be arbitrarily murdered, the right not to be taken hostage for other people’s actions, the right to a fair trial, the right to marry and to keep our children. Maybe, in an optimistic scenario, the right to speak our language and to schooling for a year or two.”

“How about land ownership?” Peter asked.

“No hope. I doubt we could even get them to outlaw arbitrary expulsions. If I were being really optimistic, I might demand wages for services rendered. That would help your people.”

“The English?”

“No, the
Zwangsarbeiter.”

“So you hope there’d be an end to slavery?”

“Just wages at first. If we could outlaw land expulsions, abductions, and forced
unpaid
labor, then those would be the first steps toward ending slavery. Make it uneconomic. Of course, one could argue that it would be better to extend the unpaid labor system.”

“Why?”

“It causes a great deal of social tension. Every job done by a
Zwangsarbeiter
is a wage-paying job taken away from a German. The working classes hate you. You force them into military service as the only alternative because they simply can’t compete with slavery. As the union movement grows stronger—”

“There’s a union movement?” Peter asked, remembering those Germans who had long ago shared a prison cell with him after he had been recaptured. Were they part of a larger phenomenon?

“A weak one,” Ryszard answered. “If they were to grow stronger, they might be pushed toward revolution if they see no alternative. But I think that’s unlikely. I think a minimum wage would be more likely to cause the changes we want to see.”

“You’re not asking for much,” Peter commented somewhat sarcastically. The idea of forced paid labor was not particularly attractive to him. What could he have done with the money? Still, it might have been a disincentive to waste his labor, and that might have made the conditions of his existence a bit more palatable. Perhaps, too, he could have bought his freedom at some point.

“No, it’s not asking much, but it’s more than we have, and it could mean the difference between survival and extinction. With the prevailing morality of categorizing the vast majority of people as not quite human, the only hope we have for keeping them from being killed is to make them economically valuable. They don’t even need to receive the wage—it could be paid to the state, like a tax. Then the state would have an interest in preserving their lives and the industrialists
would have a vested interest in not wasting their labor. As it is, workers are too cheap and are treated like so much garbage—and you can see what it’s doing to our economy.”

“Our
economy?” Peter asked pointedly.

“The economy, if you wish. But I won’t apologize for referring to the economy that dominates all our lives as ‘our’ economy. We must acknowledge that it is no longer a war between us and them—we’re conquered and we’re trapped within this society and whatever affects it, affects us. We must work with the system that we have—it’s idiocy to pretend that there is any alternative.”

Zosia made a face but did not comment.

“My sister thinks I’m a fool. Or brainwashed by being out here too long. But I don’t believe a few rabid partisans lurking in the mountains makes for a convincing foreign enemy. Whatever happens is going to happen from within. We are past the point of winning a war, we must look toward either evolution or revolution. And since I see no indication that revolution is imminent, I look toward evolution. I think it’s our only hope:
collaboration.”
He emphasized the word, looking pointedly at Zosia. “There are others who think that any acknowledgment of their power is a betrayal of our cause, that we must maintain our longstanding ‘stiff attitude toward the occupant,’ but I’m a realist and won’t argue for their point of view.”