Few lives turn out as planned. Mine was no exception. And what memories I now offer of my boyhood in Czempin, Poland, may be no more accurate, finally, than were my early dreams of a successful manhood in a free homeland. Recollections of a boyhood paradise, savored during five years of torture and confinement like the last bite of a familiar meal before a long fast, are not now so easily troubled with facts. From this distance, a harmonious light seems to fill the town square near where my four brothers and little sister and I lived with my parents in the quarters behind Father’s shoe shop on Koscielna Street, across from the Catholic Church's tall steeple. Arm and arm with my friends, I walk in my dreams south along Poznanskie Street past a small Jewish cemetery, then a larger German cemetery, and finally the Polish cemetery. While separation of the people of Czempin, or of Poland, did not begin at death, it would end in the deaths of millions of us.
Despite my happy memories of a simple childhood in peaceful times, if we were to walk south from the square, we would encounter further evidence of the divisions which the hard years of the Depression and the hard hearts of determined men would make deadly. Past the Protestant parish house was a smaller triangular square with houses on two sides. On the third side was a small German Protestant church and next to that was a palace surrounded by a large park. The palace and the village behind it, Borowko, belonged to the Von Delas family, enormously wealthy German farmers who had lived there throughout the 159 years that Poznan Province was German territory. When the Treaty of Versailles recreated the Polish state in 1918, Von Delas and perhaps 120 other ethnic Germans chose to remain in Czempin. Although Von Delas was a pompous man, he was well thought of after the severe winter of 1929 - 30, when he distributed meat from his farm to the needy. But even disregarding the disparity in wealth and the derisive comments which Germans farmers, taken with theories of an Arian “master race,” broadcast about their less successful Polish neighbors, the boys of my memory only had to travel northeast from the main square along Dluga Street to the German primary school or northwest along Szeroka Street past the Jewish synagogue to the Polish primary school to remember that we were not a people united. Had we not taken this route to school many times, taunting the Jewish boy who lived next to us on the square? A boy whose name I cannot now recall?
My parents, Joseph and Jadwiga Kielich, were born in the 1890s, in Polish territory still under German occupation, so both spoke fluent German. Like many Polish men, Father had served in the German army during the World War I with such distinction he was awarded the Iron Cross. As the eldest boy, born on March 12, 1920, I went to the shop after school to help sell the shoes we made by hand on Sundays. I often heard Mother or Father speaking German to customers and thought nothing of it. I never dreamed the divisions between Germans and Polish Christians would bring about my family’s ruin. For one thing, we were taught that Jews were the problem, that they were userers and members of a secret organization. I don’t remember any organized violence against Jews before the war, although gangs of boys would harass them, and this sometimes ended violently. Thus we harassed a Mr. Leberman, a Jewish merchant who lived near us on the square. I am sure the harm against Jews in pre-war Poland was greater than people will admit. While slogans against Jews intensified after Hitler come to power in Germany in 1933, by the end of 1938 the last Jewish family had moved from Czempin to central Poland, apparently seeking safety from their Polish neighbors. But I never imagined that one of the greatest threats to my family, not to mention my community, would be Czempin’s Hitler Youth leader, a German boy a few years older than I by the name of Kurt Kadler. His family had a clothing shop just a few buildings south of ours on the square. I used to watch from our shop as this misfit would march around the square in his uniform, acting superior to all he met.
My friends and I tolerated Kadler, thinking him a nutcase, not realizing that, to his nationalistic way of thinking, our Grey Order uniforms, which we cherished from the age of eight, were worn in opposition to his beloved Hitler Jugend. We belonged to the Stefan Batory Team of this national boys' club, named after an elected Polish king. Although some Poles, impressed with the buoyant German economy, claimed they would welcome the Nazis, most Poles had as much distrust of the Germans as the Germans had of us. Local Germans ridiculed Polish efforts to restore the economy. In the winter of 1938, times were still so hard in Czempin men stood in the square all day long, hoping for work. The local road authority hired the unemployed to wield sledge hammers, breaking into gravel the stones farmers had dragged from the fields the previous spring to the sides of country lanes. Although they were paid by the cubic foot, the men would gather around small coke fires, warming their hands, their fingers exposed from their gloves to help them grip the stones. Their wives and mothers walked long distances to bring hot soup to them at midday. Germans ridiculed these work habits, calling the Polish Authority “polnische Wirtschaft,” referring to the overall Polish economy with a term also used to scold children for not cleaning up after themselves.
With so many German speakers in western Poland, we especially heard as threats Hitler’s demands for “Lebensraum,” or the “living space” he said the German people needed and deserved. Indeed, Nazi Germany annexed German-speaking Austria in March 1938. None of the large western powers took action, clinging instead to the false hope Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, offered in his agreement with Hitler that there would be no war as long as the German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, was peacefully "returned" to Germany. We wondered if France and Britain would honor their agreement to go to war with Germany if Poland were invaded. Germany took over the Sudetenland in September, 1938, and, as agreed, Western Europe did nothing, hoping Hitler would be satisfied with the "space." But no sooner was Czechoslovakia occupied than Hitler demanded a corridor through Poland to East Prussia. Young men my age knew that Europe would not remain peaceful long. Hitler boasted Germany could walk into Poznan Province without firing a shot. He claimed the Wehrmacht would be welcomed into “der Wartegau,” or this “Eastern Province of the German Reich” by the “Auslandsdeutsche,” thereby bringing our German speaking neighbors “home,” although in this case the “home” would be fetched to them.
One German in particular, had other reasons to dislike me. In those days of scant money, many people bought goods on time. In Polish this was called "Kupic Na Krede.” People made promises, but some would not pay for weeks. At the time, it didn’t seem important that Hitler Jugend Kurt Kadler was one of many who had not paid his debt to my father. Several times as I bicycled around Czempin and the surrounding villages, I had stopped at Kadler’s home only to be told they did not have the money to pay. Kadler was deeply embarrassed by my knowledge of his family’s poverty. On lousy terms with all his neighbors for one reason or another before the invasion, afterwards he would use his new found Arian status to seek revenge.
In March of 1939, Nazis marched into Bohemia and Morovia. That April, at the age of nineteen, I passed qualifying exams for the Polish Air Force. Twenty years after his own distinguished military service, Father was proud the oldest of his five sons would now serve Poland. On the morning in June 1939 I left my four younger brothers, Czeslaw, Stan, Jan and Tadeusz, and my little sister, Christine, and my parents to take my first, and last, trip to Warsaw for the Air Force medical exam. As my family waved goodbye, I walked past the line of women from the council flats kneeling on sacks in one long row in the town square. Hired by the Polish Road Authority to weed the grass growing between the cobblestones, they moved bit by bit through the square, little knives in hand, gossiping and laughing in the cool air.
I walked northwest on Szeroka Street, past the Jewish synagogue, empty now but testifying to a once thriving community, past the post office, the Polish primary school, the police station, and finally arrived at the railway station where I caught the main rail line for Rawicz and Poznan, full of hope that I would both avoid being a foot soldier and serve my country well. Serving in the Polish military was compulsory from the age of 21 to 23, but I personally wanted to avoid both the infantry and the cavalry; I knew nothing about horses, and what I had seen of the infantry was less than attractive. Every so often, when the Polish army held maneuvers near Czempin, I would see them halted by the side of the road after long marches, unwrapping the cloth that served as socks from around their blistered feet. I volunteered for the Polish Air Force, hoping for more prestige.
I soon made friends on the train with other young men from small towns. We were lodged for the examination at the University compound, and most of us stayed in Warsaw for a few days afterwards. Infected with the anti-Semitism of the times, we vowed to only visit “Polish” shops. No longer able to boycott Jewish shops at home, we took our prejudice with us on holiday. As we toured Poland’s greatest city, whenever we encountered Jewish merchants behind shop counters, we left them with our slogan, "Buy Polish Made in Polish Shops” which, often as not, was met with the reply, "Your streets, our buildings." There were nasty expressions from both sides. The world was dividing into “us” and “them,” and we young men thought we could protect a way of life we feared was vanishing by drawing lines within Polish society.
Poland’s hope that the Soviet Union would protect us from Hitler was dashed when, to the amazement of the entire world, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop signed a Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939. By this time, I had little doubt war was coming, but I would never get a chance to serve my country. The end for Poland would come too fast.
The Nazis breached the Polish border many times, the last such attack occurring in Glivice. On this occasion Nazi SS officers dressed in Polish army uniforms staged an attack on their own radio station. Immediately, the Germany propaganda machine announced that Poland had "invaded" Germany. Supposedly in retaliation for this “attack,” at 4:15 a.m. on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, beginning their "Blitzkrieg," or "lightening war" against us.
At home that morning, Father, Mother and my six-year-old sister Christine slept in a room between the kitchen and the room my brothers and I shared. Waking first, Father’s first task in the morning was hauling in enough water from the well to get the five youngsters still in school up and dressed. When I came into the kitchen, Father stood with the water pail in hand, a stunned look on his face. For the next few hours, the radio was the focus of all our attention. We listened sitting at the table in our kitchen until the sun rose, trying to take in the shocking news. And when we could not, we walked out onto the square where speakers had been placed in the street and people gathered, listening and discussing the war, unsure what to do. Following the declaration of war, the Polish government assured us that our cavalry was fighting to shouts of “Defend Poland to the last man!”
"Those German tanks are made of cardboard," I remember someone saying. Everyone laughed with relief. But listening to reports of how those tanks cut down our courageous cavalrymen, armed only with lances and riding on horseback, we knew the tanks were steel.
On the third day a rumor reached the square that German farmers had staged a revolt in the small village of Pecno, some 4 km away. Since my friends and I could always count on young men gathering at the Czempin railway station, we road our bikes there to find out what we could. There had been no revolt. German farmers in Pecno had left their homes to hide in the forest. Standing around the station, this false alarm only made us more anxious for real news. What were we supposed to do? We waited for a call to arms, but none came. We had sighted neither the German nor the Polish army. That day, September 3, 1939, England and France declared war on Germany, but only the German army seemed to be on the march.
In the early morning of 7 September 1939, a column of tired civilians guarded by uniformed Polish men stopped in the square to rest. The prisoners, German civilians from nearby Polish border towns, were interned by the Polish authority for security reasons. Their orders were to take the Germans on foot to central Poland. Several questioned this action. My father was nearly beaten by a Polish guard for bringing the men food from our kitchen. “What’s going to happen to them?” he asked as the guard pushed him back.
Then someone shouted, "Lets get
our Germans." Although a few local Germans were arrested and added to the tired group before the column moved on, Kurt Kadler remained at large, waiting for the Wermacht to restore him to his rightful place over his Polish neighbors.
Our house’s three rooms filled with uncles, aunts and cousins from Koscian who feared the advancing Germans might bomb the larger towns. Each uncle voiced a different plan for conducting the war, but they all praised the Polish cavalry’s gallant charges in the north and south. On the ninth day of the war, early in the morning, thousands of Polish people fleeing Koscian brought reports of the first German tanks reaching their city, which had not resisted them, after all.
The approach of the German army convinced me not to wait any longer to join up. I said good-bye to my family. A group of us young men road our bikes toward Warsaw some 350 kilometers away. We avoided Poznan, taking a secondary route through Srem to reach Wrzesnia which would get us on the main highway from Poznan to Warsaw. The first part of our journey was good, as the countryside was still free of German bombardment. At Wrzesnia, when we got on the main highway, the real war began for us. People crowded the road on foot, bikes, wagons and carts full of belongings and children. Some carts were pulled by draft animals, others were pushed by people, but they all formed an endless column headed to Warsaw. German planes flew parallel to the road dropping bombs and indiscriminately spraying people with bullets. Hearing a German Stuka coming our way, we dropped our bicycles by the road side and ran into potato and corn fields.
Closer to Warsaw the road became increasingly dangerous. Dead and wounded people lay on the ground and we constantly dodged litter from smashed wagons. The wounded or dead were mainly old people and children who could not get out of the road fast enough to escape the approaching Nazi planes. Towns and villages next to the main highways were destroyed. The worst place was the small town of Sochaczew, some 50 km from Warsaw. It must have been hell there. In only a few minutes the houses and church buildings lay in ruins. The dusty streets had deep bomb craters filled with debris. People ran in all directions, shouting, crying and looking for relatives under collapsed homes. I could not understand this merciless bombing of civilians. The Polish army was no where in sight. We hadn’t seen them in our journey through the district, so what was the purpose of this destruction? Never in all my life had I seen so many seriously wounded people.
In the midst of the devastated town stood a Jew, a black skullcap on his curly hair, his long black caftan clinging to his body in tatters. Dust covered the beard on his pain stricken face raised toward heaven. He howled, his trembling hands clutching a bag dangling from his neck as if to ensure it, too, would not be lost as was the ruined house behind him. Then I remembered the Jews in my hometown. They had always dressed in clean clothes just like all of us. Before the war central Poland was regarded as a safer place, a better place, for them. Now, it was the center of destruction.
We made good progress for several days, eating very little and sleeping in barns. One of my friends was quite traumatized by the constant German air raids on the main road, so we took a dusty and bumpy narrow dirt road through a potato field which led us to the edge of a forest where we stopped to rest and take stock of what had happened to us. We had yet to meet the Polish army, only distressed Polish soldiers, possibly deserters, going in the opposite direction. Nor had we caught sight of the Polish Air Force in the week we had been on the road. Our only news came from an army reservist lost from his unit who told us the war on the ground was being fought north and south of Warsaw. He had no news of the army units stationed in Poznan. I supposed they had left the district knowing that Hitler would take it anyway. So the Wielkopolska army went to defend the central, northern and southern territories. Judging by the destruction the Nazis inflicted on the countryside, the war was going badly for Poland. Lying on the ground, I was still confident we would be able to reach Warsaw, but I had no idea what would become of us. How, and where, were we to join the army? All I remembered from my one visit to Warsaw was the main street in the center of the city. I was afraid of going into a city surrounded by the German army.
I fell half-asleep, listening to the distant, heavy guns and the now familiar sound of bombers which sounded to be coming in our direction. We were terribly tired and not one of us was prepared to move. We must have slept for some time because the sun was well down on the horizon when we finally awoke. The weather for this time of the year was just beautiful. Not a cloud in the sky. In fact, I thought God was on Hitler's side to have provided such wonderful weather for the invasion of Poland. Hitler was lucky to have picked a good month. The harvest was over and the crops were stored in the granaries. This "Golden Autumn," as the Polish used to call the season, merely facilitated the German Air Force’s relentless destruction.
But that same weather proved kind to us as well, considering the thin clothing we wore. While the days remained warm, the nights were getting chilly. Rising after our secure little snooze in the forest, we had just enough time to look around before German planes were again overhead. Whistling bombs dropped all over the forest. I did not waste time but jumped into a nearby hole probably dug by Polish soldiers who had left in a hurry, perhaps only hours ago. Trembling, I held the prayer book Mother gave me before I left home and I prayed like never before. Each time a bomb fell on the forest floor the walls of my hole crumbled. After the bombardment, I crawled out, thanking God.
Frightened now to our bones, we moved once more through the forest. A narrow path with a slight slope led us towards the main highway. As we came to the road’s edge, we found what seemed to be the entire German army marching on Warsaw. We were all so frightened we froze as a German officer riding a motorbike came toward us. Looking surprised, he asked us where we were going.
“Warsaw,” I said.
“Go back home,” he told us simply.
So ended our dream of fighting for Poland. For us the war had ended. Poland was again under German occupation, and Kurt Kadler at home.
