A Man Without Breath

The count removed a brown Homburg hat from his head and wiped his high forehead. He was a very tall, distinguished, grey-haired man of about sixty and wore a three-piece tweed suit that already looked too warm for comfort. It seemed like only yesterday that Smolensk had been too cold for comfort.

The archdeacon, more than a head shorter, wore a plain black suit and a biretta. He took off his glasses and shook his skull-like head. ‘I’m not sure this can be fixed,’ he said. ‘Sloventzik is being unusually obdurate. On two separate matters.’

‘That doesn’t sound like him at all,’ I said. ‘He always seems so unfeasibly reasonable.’

The count sighed. ‘Not this time,’ he said.

‘Sloventzik has repeatedly informed us that our report should list twelve thousand bodies in Katyn Wood,’ said the archdeacon. ‘That is the figure provided by the German ministry of propaganda in its radio broadcasts. Our own information however – from the Polish government in London – suggests a figure of less than half as many. But Sloventzik is quite adamant about this and has suggested that were he to disagree with your own government’s figures, it might cost him his head. I’m afraid this has caused several members of our party to ask questions about our own safety.’

‘You see,’ added the count, ‘one or two members of the Polish Red Cross have friends or relations who have suffered at the hands of the Gestapo, or who were even beheaded in German prisons in Warsaw and Krakow.’

‘I can see your point,’ I said. ‘Look, I’m sure I can sort this out, gentlemen. I’ll speak to Berlin and have this matter clarified today. In the meantime I can assure you that regarding the security of all the members of the Polish Red Cross there is absolutely no cause for concern. And you have my apologies for whatever alarm you’ve encountered here today. I might add that Lieutenant Sloventzik has been working extremely hard ahead of the arrival of the international commission to make sure that everything runs smoothly. You’ll appreciate that his only concern has been to make sure that this bestial crime is properly investigated. Frankly, gentlemen, I think he’s been working too hard. I know I have.’

‘Yes that is possible,’ admitted the count. ‘He is most diligent in many respects. There is however another matter, and that is the issue of the Volksdeutsche. Poles born in Poland for whom German and not Polish is their first language. Poles who before the Great War were East Prussians. Ethnic Germans.’

‘Yes, I know what they are,’ I said, patiently. ‘But what have ethnic Germans to do with any of this?’

‘Many of the bodies that have been found so far were Polish officers of German origin,’ explained the count.

‘Look, I’m sorry gentlemen,’ I said, ‘but these officers are dead, and I don’t see that it matters very much now where they came from if they were butchered by the Russians.’

‘It matters,’ explained the archdeacon stiffly, ‘because Sloventzik has ordered a separation between those Polish officers who are discovered to be Volksdeutsche in origin and those who are not. The lieutenant proposes that the Silesian ethnic Germans receive separate burial. It’s almost as if the rest of the Poles are to be treated as second-class citizens because they are ethnic Slavs.’

‘The Slavs who have been exhumed are not to be given coffins,’ said the count.

‘Well, he’s only a lieutenant. As his superior officer it’s a very simple matter for me to countermand that order. I tell him to do something and he salutes and says “Yes sir”.’

‘You might reasonably think so,’ said the count. ‘Especially in a German army that prides itself on obeying orders. However it’s our belief that Sloventzik’s been put up to this by Field Marshal von Kluge, who as I’m sure you know is a Silesian German himself. From Posen. And has no love for ethnic Poles like us.’

This was more complicated; it wasn’t just Von Kluge who, like the late Paul von Hindenburg, was a Silesian German, it was Colonel von Gersdorff and, to my knowledge, several other senior officers at Army Group Centre, many of them proud Prussian aristocrats who had narrowly escaped becoming Poles because of the treaty of Versailles.

‘I see what you mean.’ I offered them each a cigarette which, Polish cigarettes being what they were, the two Poles accepted gratefully. ‘And you’re absolutely right. This does sound as if the field marshal is behind it. I don’t think his sense of honour and pride has ever recovered from the Seven Years War. However I can promise you gentlemen that this matter is being followed at the highest levels in Berlin. It was Doctor Goebbels himself who insisted that you be given control of the investigation here in Katyn. He’s told me nothing is to be done that interferes in any way with your pre-eminent role in this matter. My own orders make it quite clear that the German military authorities in Smolensk are to give the Polish Red Cross every assistance.’