The Miernik Dossier (3 page)

It is considered that a Polish personality, operating unofficially, might find it possible to give assistance and advice to progressive elements in African countries who, for reasons of discretion, cannot deal openly and directly with the diplomatic missions of the USSR and other Socialist states. A Pole who has a reputation as an anti-Communist and a history of conflict with the Polish government would be ideal for this role. It is considered essential that such a person should possess Western citizenship, or at least a bona fide travel document issued by a Western state.

Countries of prime interest are Kenya, Tanganyika, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Sudan.

It was agreed that this project should be discussed by responsible officials in the two ministries, with the participation of the ministries of state security of the two countries.

23 May

9.  C
ABLE RECEIVED BY THE
U.S.
CHIEF OF STATION,
G
ENEVA, FROM HIS HEADQUARTERS.

1.
CHRISTOPHER SHOULD PURSUE MIERNIK MATTER TO DETERMINE HIS INTENTIONS. POSSIBILITY MIERNIK MAY BE ATTEMPTING TO PROVOKE CHRISTOPHER INTO REVEALING SELF. INSTRUCT CHRISTOPHER TO MAKE NO REPEAT NO SUGGESTION HE CAN FACILITATE DEFECTION THROUGH CONTACTS WITH US GOVERNMENT. CORRECT POSTURE FOR CHRISTOPHER IS THAT OF CONCERNED FRIEND POWERLESS TO ASSIST.

2.
HEADQUARTERS DISINCLINED ENCOURAGE DEFECTION UNLESS CAN ESTABLISH MIERNIK IS OPPOSITION AGENT WITH SPECIFIC MISSION. IN THIS CASE COULD JUSTIFY FACILITATING HIS MISSION AS MEANS NEUTRALIZING MIERNIK THROUGH SURVEILLANCE AND MANIPULATION HIS SOURCES.

3.
NO INTEREST IF MIERNIK DILEMMA GENUINE.

10.  E
XCERPT FROM THE DIARY OF
M
IERNIK (TRANSLATION FROM
P
OLISH).

19 May.
In the park today I spoke to P. [Christopher] about my situation. He offered no assistance. I think that his sympathy is aroused, however. His American manners make him seem more open than anyone plausibly can be. At lunch I made a scene with K. [Khatar] over some joking remark he made concerning slavery. My emotions are raw, and I overdid it. Must write to apologize. Now, of all times, he (and all the others) are important to me.

11.  L
ETTER FROM
M
IERNIK TO
K
ALASH EL
K
HATAR.

19 May

My dear Kalash,

I wish to apologize for my unforgivable behaviour at lunch today. In justification I can only say that I was much disturbed by a personal matter, and I am afraid that I permitted this to colour my reaction to your joking remarks.

As you know, I have the greatest respect for.the culture of your people. Also, I have very great affection for you in spite of the fact that you are a member of the ruling class!

I hope very sincerely that you will consider that I never said to you the things that I said.

Several of our friends will be coming to my flat on Sunday night at eight o’clock for the small party I mentioned to you last week. I very much hope that you will reaffirm our friendship by coming along to the party, bringing with you whomever you wish to bring.

Your affectionate and very contrite friend,
[signed] T. Miernik

12.  R
EPORT BY
C
HRISTOPHER.

The disintegration of Tadeusz Miernik went public Sunday night at a party in his apartment. Miernik invited a small group of people up for drinks. Usually these affairs of Miernik’s are anything but wild; the party on Sunday was an exception. Miernik himself made it so.

I arrived a little late and found Collins, Brochard, Khan, and three girls already on hand. Of the females, the most noteworthy was Ilona Bentley, Collins’ companion. She is half English, half Hungarian. She has black hair to her shoulder blades and a face that will be ruined before she is thirty. It is not yet ruined. A light burns under her skirt.

It was apparent early in the evening that Miernik had noticed all this. Ilona sat on the floor at Collins’ feet. Miernik sat opposite, saying nothing, his eyes fixed on the girl. He wore a suit, a vest, a tie, polished shoes. Everyone else, just back from the mountains on a Sunday evening, wore sweaters and corduroys.

For his guests Miernik had provided Polish vodka, and nothing else. The vodka, several bottles of it, was chilled in ice buckets. Miernik kept one bucket beside his chair, and he filled the glasses out of the dripping bottle as soon as they were emptied. He insisted that the stuff be drunk Slav style: no sipping, right down the hatch with a cry of good luck.

This sort of drinking did not bring good cheer to our company. Among them, in addition to the melancholy Miernik, we had a concentration camp survivor (Ilona); a man who saw his three young brothers murdered by a Hindu who decapitated the little corpses and hung the heads around his neck on a string (Khan); a victim of mass rape by Russian troops (Brochard’s girl, an Austrian named Inge); and a veteran of the Maquis (Brochard).

Brochard was attempting to lighten the mood by singing bawdy songs. This failed because no one else knew all the French words, and because Collins wanted to hear about Brochard’s experiences as a boy guerrilla.

Brochard’s Maquis group operated, during the war, in the country around Geneva. He comes from a small town in the Jura. He joined the Maquis as a runner when he was only twelve. Apparently the Resistance felt that the Germans were not intelligent enough to suspect children. Brochard found out different when he was thirteen. He was arrested by a German patrol, which seized him as he bicycled from one village to another at two o’clock in the morning. The Germans took him to their headquarters, where he was questioned by a Wehrmacht officer. Brochard managed to get rid of a kitchen knife that he was carrying (against orders) in the waistband of his trousers. He pushed the knife downwards and shook it out the leg of his pants. He cut himself on the thigh in the process.

The German officer stood him in front of his desk and questioned him in a harsh voice. “I think that he must have been a schoolmaster in civilian life,” Brochard said, “because he had the technique perfect. I, of course, was filled with heroism: the Boche would not get any secrets out of me. The only secret I knew, really, was the one I was carrying in my mind. I had been told to tell a certain man in Gex that Marcel wished to sell his cows. The Resistance used these ridiculous formulas for their messages. They were always sending news about cows to people who had no conceivable interest in cows. The Germans could not guess the meaning of the code phrase, of course. But they could shoot anyone who spoke such phrases. The messenger was dead, but the secret was safe. The joke was, the message usually meant no more to the recipient than to the Germans. Our clever agents were always forgetting the code, so they would have to call up the sender on the telephone and ask what he meant by ‘Marcel wants to sell his cows.’ At thirteen, I hadn’t figured this out.

“The German officer wanted an explanation of my riding around on a bicycle at two o’clock in the morning. I knew that I must tell him something. I searched for a cover story. I couldn’t think of anything. My leg was bleeding, I could feel the blood filling my shoe. I thought I might faint. I stood there daydreaming about a daring rescue: I pictured my gallant comrades of the Maquis bursting through the windows with machine pistols blazing. I saw myself picking up the weapon of a fallen rescuer and riddling the German.

“The German said, ‘I am going to call your parents in here to find out why they permit a child to roam about on a bicycle in the middle of the night.’ He was outraged that I wasn’t asleep as I should be. He thought I was a bad boy. It was humiliating that he should think only that, when I was a hero of the Resistance. I thought of a story that I believed would keep my parents out of it.

“‘Herr Hauptmann,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I was doing if you agree not to tell my mother and father. I was making love to a girl in the woods.’

“‘Making love to a girl!’ bellowed the German, and stood up so suddenly that his chair went squealing over the floor. He was outraged. He strode around the desk. I think that he was going to strike me. Then he saw, on the floor at my feet, a puddle of blood from the cut that the knife had made.

‘“What the hell is
that?’he
cried. ‘Take off your pants.’

“I tried to avoid this. I refused. He sent for two soldiers. They leaned their rifles against the wall and pulled off my trousers.

“It was a very German scene:
‘Take off that boy’s trousers!’
—
‘Jawohl!’No
questions, no hesitation, no smiles, a serious order to be obeyed.

“Blood was running down my leg. The soldiers were careful not to get it on their uniforms. The officer brought the lamp from his desk and tipped it so that the light fell on my wound. It was a small cut. ‘How did you come by that?’ he demanded. He shone the light on my genitals. ‘You have no hair!’ he cried. He grinned in triumph; I was outwitted. Obviously hairless boys cannot make love in the woods. Then he stopped and stared at my hairless parts again. His expression became grim. He told the soldiers to go out of the room.

“‘Léon,’ he said. ‘You are clipped.’

“He had seen that I was circumcised. Everything was pushed out of my mind by a sudden shame. I knew that I could not be a hero in the German’s eyes now. He knew I was a Jew. He knew that my parents were Jews. I might say that he knew more than the French people in our village knew, because my father had stopped mentioning his religion years before. France is not a Jewloving country.

“I knew we were all as good as dead. We’d be on the next train for Auschwitz. The German poured some alcohol on his handkerchief and gave it to me. ‘Wash that cut, he said. I did so. He left me standing in front of his desk for several minutes. I remained as I was, naked from the waist downwards. He stared at his hands.

“Finally the German looked at me. ‘Put on your pants, he said. He wrote me out a pass. ‘I advise you,’ the German said, ‘to keep your pants on in the presence of the German Army. Get out of here.”’

Inge, the Austrian girl, lifted misty eyes to Brochard. “Not all Germans were beasts,” she said.

Miernik gave a great snort, like a horse smelling a corpse. “That is a lot of shit,” he said in German. “Ilona, isn’t that a lot of shit?”

I had never heard Miernik use such a word, I would have been less surprised if he had pulled a gun.

“Which?” asked Ilona. “Léon’s story or Inge’s proposition?”

“Inge’s shit about the Germans.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve had no chance to observe the Germans?”

“I don’t suppose that I met the flower of Germany at Belsen.”

Ilona, herself a flower at Collins’ feet with her white skirt spread around her, reached over and touched Miernik’s heavy leg. He was quivering. The black cloth of his suit trembled.

“I’ve practically forgotten the camp; I was very young, Ilona said. It was hard to think that Ilona—she could hardly have been less beautiful, less fragile at the age of eight—had stood behind the wire in a sack dress, her hair shaved off, guard dogs sniffing her sour prisoner’s odor. She smiled apologetically, as if she really regretted that she could tell no horror stories.

Inge stared at Miernik, her face ready to break like a child’s. “I remind you that I am Austrian,” she said.

“I remind you, my dear Inge, that Austria was part of the German Reich when your lover was having his pants pulled off by German soldiers, while Ilona was in a concentration camp, while my country was being raped by the SS.”

“Really, Tad,” Brochard said. “Inge was hardly born when all that was going on.”

“I was thirteen when the war ended,” Inge said.

“Old enough,” Miernik cried. He pulled another bottle of vodka from the rattling ice and began filling glasses. Water poured off the end of the bottle, wetting everyone’s clothes. Inge pulled her glass aside, and the vodka splashed on the floor beside her.

“I was old enough to be thrown on the ground and raped by a company of Russian soldiers,” she said. “They are heroes, I suppose. Was Ilona raped by a German soldier? Did the Germans rape your mother, your sisters?”

“The Germans raped no one. That is an act of life.”

“Try it at thirteen,” Inge said. “Your act of life! I say shit right back at you.”

“Yes, an act of life. An act of spontaneous human beings. Brutal, yes. But
human,
Inge.”

“Wild beasts,” Inge said. There was no danger of her crying now. She was a victim, too.

“Better a beast than a machine,” Miernik said. “I will tell you the difference between the Russian Army and the German Army, since you are too young to remember.”

“Inge seems to remember, all right,” Ilona said. “Tad, we’re all a little drunk.”

Miernik remained standing, the bottle in one hand, the vodka glass in the other. He poured himself three quick drinks, throwing his head back to swallow. His hair fell over his forehead.

“The German Army was a machine,” he said. “A machine, Inge, a gray machine clanking through mankind. It smelled of steel and petrol. The Germans sat on the machines, like machines themselves. Gray, smelling of the machine shop.”

“I know what the Russians smelled like,” Inge said.

Miernik, holding Inge’s eyes, went around again with his bottle. He poured the vodka into glasses that were already full; it slopped over. He drank out of the bottle.

“The Russian Army,” he said. He fell into his chair with his legs spread and closed his eyes. “The Russian Army was like the earth. To see it coming was like seeing the earth move, a great mob of men in brown. It was an avalanche. It buried your Germans. The German Army, to me, is the burnt trucks and tanks in the Polish countryside.”