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I
[ONE]
Between Rzeszów and Blizna
German-Occupied Poland
2145 25 May 1943
“There! It’s coming!” Kapitan Mordechaj Szerynski announced at the faint chugging sound of the small steam-powered locomotive. The twenty-six-year-old resistance fighter in the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army, had a wiry five-foot-eight medium build, light skin, and thick bushy black hair and eyebrows.
He turned to the twenty-one-year-old guerrilla beside him. Porucznik (Lieutenant) Stanislaw Polko l
ooked like Szerynski, though was a head taller. They were hiding under a loose layer of downed limbs and leaves next to the narrow gauge railroad track that wound through the dense forest of the Carpathian mountain foothills in southern Poland.
“Pass the word for everyone to move on my command,” Szerynski ordered, “not a second sooner!”
“Yes, sir,” Polko said, and touched the tips of his right index and middle fingers to his forehead, the two-finger Polish Army salute signifying Honor and Fatherland.
Polko crawled over to the other five guerrillas—the majority of them, like Polko and Szerynski, Jewish and in their twenties—spread out to their right. All were dressed in clothing that they had acquired from farmers who for months had been supplying the Armia Krajowa with details of Nazi activity in the area. And all were armed with weapons smuggled to them by the Allies—the U.S. Office of Strategic Services working in London with the Government of the Republic of Poland in Exile.
As Polko crawled back beside Szerynski, and the train chugged closer and louder, Szerynski thought he could hear in the cool night air the sound of men singing.
Jesus! he thought. That’s not “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” is it?
Hearing Polko mutter “bastard pigs!” seemed to confirm that there indeed was singing—and probably that of the Nazi anthem.
After another moment of listening, Szerynski then thought: And the bastards sound drunk!
“I swear I kill first Nazi pig,” Polko muttered as he smacked the magazine of his Sten 9mm submachine gun, the cold fury in his voice unmistakable.
Is he going to follow orders? Szerynski thought.
Or just start shooting?
Szerynski knew that if not for the dark night he now would see in Polko’s deep-set coal-black eyes the same anger he’d often seen at the mention of German soldiers.
“Keep your damn head, Porucznik.”
Polko grunted.
Only a month earlier Szerynski and his men had been in the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa—the Jewish Fighting Organization—bravely, but futilely, battling the Nazis in the ghettos of Warsaw, about a hundred kilometers to the north.
Szerynski had seen the brutality inflicted by the Schutzstaffel—the German SS—including last December the torture of his little brother and two other Boy Scouts caught running ammunition to the ZOB. The teenagers had had their testicles torn out, their eyes gouged, and their teeth pulled before being killed and thrown into the snow-covered street as a message to others.
That Szerynski and his men weren’t among the thousands of other Poles who were mass murdered after being forced into Warsaw’s slums was nothing shy of a miracle. And they had avoided being packed in freight train boxcars for what the Nazi soldiers announced was simply a “relocation” to the SS-run konzentrationslager.
Instead, they had fled the city, finding refuge in the forest.
The resistance fighters, after having joined up with the Armia Krajowa, then discovered the truth about the relocations. At the heavily armed concentration camps, the passengers were made prisoners—the SS called them sonderkommandos—put in striped outfits, and within weeks worked to their death.
When the farmers alerted the Armia Krajowa that a new camp was being built by slave laborers outside the village of Blizna, Szerynski and his men moved south through the forest to investigate.
The conditions they found at the construction site staggered the mind. Under the cold eyes of SS guards, hundreds of malnourished prisoners struggled at hard labor—hewing timber, pouring concrete, cutting stone, even digging their own graves. Nearby, the slave laborers also worked at carving out of the woods a small airstrip for light aircraft to reach the remote area. They saw the SS summarily beat—and execute on the spot—those judged not to be working hard enough.
And twice weekly the boxcars came on the narrow gauge railway to deliver sonderkommandos, many of the prisoners from Warsaw, as replacements for the dead.
Kapitan Szerynski had told his men: “If we cannot stop the Nazi pigs, we damn sure can rescue some of our people.”
* * *
“As we planned,” Kapitan Szerynski now ordered, “after the train comes to a stop, follow my lead. Maintain discipline. No shooting unless absolutely necessary.”
Porucznik Polko was quiet for a long moment.
He thought back to the previous two days, when they had practiced the ambush of the train inside a deserted barn. Using bales of hay as a mock-up for one of the thirty-foot-long freight cars, Szerynski had drilled the discipline into their heads. Each boxcar—it sickened Polko to call them what they were, foul-smelling cattle cars—would be packed with at least fifty prisoners, and possibly as many as a hundred or more, with a shared bucket or two being the only method for the disposal of human waste. Szerynski had cautioned his men that a single stray shot at some Nazi bastard could also easily kill or injure others—and, as they had seen during ambushes with the ZOB in Warsaw, an anxious, undisciplined shooter could almost instantly empty his weapon’s entire magazine.
Polko grunted.
“Understood,” he said, then looked over his shoulder and motioned for the men to await his signal.
To force the train to a stop, the resistance fighters, using explosive Primacord that resembled a thick bootlace, felled two mature black alder trees across the tracks just past a curve. They trimmed the limbs, then manhandled the trunks so that they were between the narrow gauge rails; the heavy V-shaped “pilot” metalwork on the front of the locomotive would not be able to push the trees off the tracks. Instead, the locomotive would become wedged on top of the heavy timbers, and they could storm the train’s freight cars that carried the prisoners.
As they had practiced in the barn, each resistance fighter then would run to a particular door on a boxcar, unlatch its lock, swing it open, then repeat until all doors were open. It was expected that the guards would be either dazed or injured or both from the sudden stopping of the train, and that the guards could then be disarmed and secured—or, if necessary, killed.
The prisoners, once helped out of the boxcars, would be led deep into the forest to where another dozen guerrillas waited to split them up and, later, absorb them into their resistance cells. They knew that each train arriving at the camp near Blizna had averaged three boxcars, and that that meant there could be anywhere from 150 to 450 prisoners to rescue. (The long trains leaving Warsaw for the initial “relocating” had fifty boxcars carrying upward of five thousand people to the death camps.)
The sounds of the steam locomotive and the singing continued getting louder.
The bastards celebrate bringing our people here to die! Szerynski thought bitterly.
But if there is any good news it is that their being drunk should make this ambush easier.
The locomotive’s carbon arc headlight, heavily masked so as not to project its full brilliance, could now be seen bouncing a dim beam through the trees by the curve in the train track.
The beam grew bigger as the train approached the curve at a fast clip. The sound of singing grew louder. Then the nose of the train—and the masked headlight—were visible. The locomotive steamed on into the turn, its beam of light sweeping the forest of trees on the far side of the track as it did so. Then, just as the beam of light squared with the train track, it illuminated a huge obstacle on the tracks—and the conductor slammed on the train’s full brakes.
Something about this train is different, Szerynski suddenly thought, straining to make out its shape in the darkness.
But what?
At once a stream of sparks began to spray out from where the locomotive’s heavy steel wheels slid on the iron rails and the air filled with an ear-piercing high-decibel metallic screech. There then came a deep dull thud that was caused by the underside of the locomotive impacting the tree trunks. The pitch of the screech lessened somewhat, and the trees n
ow could be heard thumping together under the pressure of the still moving train.
It looks to be a shorter train. Maybe only one car?
And it is a smaller car, almost half the size of a boxcar . . . a passenger car? . . . why?
What happened next did not go according to plan.
