When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Read online

  He remembers taking his camera to school, taking photographs in the classroom, and producing an album of photographs with a double page for each subject and captions in cardboard lettering, which he shows the teachers on the last day of term.

  His two best friends at school are Jasio (Jan) Matecki and Genio (Eugene) Moszkowski. Jasio’s father is a doctor, specializing in psychoanalysis, who has corresponded with Sigmund Freud. Genio’s father is a lawyer. The three of them found a make-believe aircraft manufacturing company, called MGM after their surnames, and they take long walks in the evenings and discuss world affairs.

  During their summer vacations, they go into the forest to try smoking, and as soon as they light up, a forest ranger appears and scolds them for causing a fire hazard.

  His first vacation, he thinks, is to Copoty, better known by its German name Zopot, which is part of the Gdažsk (Danzig) free city. Wacek Binental is there too. He remembers subsequent summer vacations in rented gingerbread villas, fifteen miles from Warsaw by a narrow-gauge railway, in a spa called Konstancin, or, next door to it, Skolimov. A small river flows through the spas, with a few sandy beaches. The one near Konstancin is next to a wooden railway bridge, from which you can dive into the river. He loves to kayak there. His favorite is No. 4, a single-seater painted red and white. And later they go to Orlowo, between the new Polish port of Gdynia and Gdažnsk. And on his return, his parents take their vacation, alone. Two weeks on the French Riviera, every year.

  When he is twelve they go on a cruise to the Norwegian fjords on a brand-new Polish passenger ship, the fourteen thousand–ton Pi?sudski, which has just been built in Italy. He sits at the bar drinking fresh orange juice. They go as far north as Tromsø, where he refuses to go to bed until the sun sets, well after midnight.

  The summers of 1937 and 1938 he remembers spending in the Swiss Alps, at La Clarière, “École pour Jeunes Garçons” (which the young John Kerry was later to attend), learning French and climbing in the mountains. And during the summer of 1937 his parents also take him with them to Paris to the World’s Fair. He remembers riding in a Citroën taxi specially modified to run on a battery. One of his father’s business contacts invites them to dinner at a cordon bleu restaurant and brings along his son, my father’s age, who wears a dinner jacket. Kazio is humiliated because he has on a brown suit with plus fours.

  He remembers winter vacations in Otwock or Srodborow, and in Zakopane, at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, part of the Carpathian range, where he learns to ski.

  THE GOLDFARB FAMILY is nonobservant. Kazio cannot speak Yiddish, has never been inside a synagogue, considers himself a Jewish Pole not a Polish Jew. And yet he is aware of the steady drumbeat of anti-Semitism. Aware how carefully his father avoids ostentation, for fear of exciting envy, eschewing a car even when they can clearly afford one. He recalls a law being passed that requires the owners to put their full names on their shopfronts, so Jewish merchants can be identified and boycotted. He remembers an elderly German woman in Berlin who, discovering he is Jewish, begins harassing him, saying Jews should not be allowed in Germany. His host, a family friend, turns on the woman. “Don’t you know the Führer wants to promote tourism?” she says.

  Although most “educated” people in Poland can speak French and German, and the elderly also speak Russian, compulsory during the Russian occupation, English is an almost completely unknown tongue in the 1930s. But Maurycy, a great admirer of Churchill, says it will be the language of the future. So Kazio begins attending evening classes at the language college, when he is thirteen. He is the youngest student. Mrs. McAvoy, a middle-aged English lady, is the teacher, and everyone assumes her husband to be a member of the British Secret Service.

  Lessons begin with the singing of current English popular numbers, and he remembers belting out the “Lambeth Walk,” where the chorus “Oi!” has to be shouted loudly. They use Eckersley’s Essential English textbook, and read “The Selfish Giant,” by Oscar Wilde, and practice conversation, and within ten months he thinks that he can make himself understood in English.

  After a lot of discussion with his parents, he writes to the Daily Mail in London asking them to recommend places where he might study English for the summer. The Goldfarbs choose Greenhayes, in St. Leonard’s-on-Sea, East Sussex, where Mr. V. S. Ward, MA (Cantab), and his wife run a residential English-for-foreigners course. Kazio sets off for England in late June 1939.

  Later, he will wonder whether the whole thing was a ploy to get him out of the country, in expectation of what was to happen three months later, but he has no inkling of it at the time. He sails on an old twelve-berth steamer called the SS Baltrover, sharing a cabin with three men on their way to America. None of them can speak any English, and they ask him to arrange for warm water to shave. But when he asks the steward for “varim vater,” his Polish accent is so thick that the steward cannot understand him.

  The Baltrover docks just below Tower Bridge. He has been sent written instructions to take a taxi to Charing X, and a train from there to St. Leonard’s.

  “Sharing Ex, Sharing Ex,” he says to the driver, who has no idea what he is talking about until Kazio shows him the note.

  “Oh, Charing Cross,” the driver says. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  And Kazio realizes that perhaps his English is not so good after all.

  There are few other guests at Greenhayes, the residential-hotel-cum-language school. They include a Dutch girl, related to the owners, and a middle-aged Frenchman, M. Askenazi, who spends all his summer vacations there. Vincent Ward, a retired schoolteacher, spends a couple hours a day with Kazio, improving his English, and slowly my father’s Polish accent fades.

  By the middle of August 1939, it begins to look as if a war is coming to Europe. Hitler has already occupied Czechoslovakia and clearly has designs on Poland. Kazio wants to move up his return to Warsaw, but Vincent Ward says that is not necessary. Later, he suspects that his father has contacted Ward and told him not to let Kazio leave. The Germans invade Poland on September 1 (the Soviets invade from the east, part of the secret pact with Hitler to partition the country), and on the following Sunday, September 3, Chamberlain, the British prime minister, hitherto bent on appeasement, finally declares war on Germany. That morning the first air-raid warning sounds in St. Leonard’s.

  AFTER THAT, HE remembers, everything changes. All the other guests at the Wards’ leave except for M. Askenazi, who stays on a while, making blackout screens on wooden frames for all the windows. Vincent Ward becomes an air-raid warden, going around the area shouting at people who expose any lights. Peggy, their grown-up daughter, comes home from Canada to be with her parents when they are bombed. All cars are fitted with covers for their headlights, and driving after dark becomes dangerous. Everyone is issued a gas mask, to be carried in a cardboard box that hangs from a piece of string from one’s shoulder, and an identity card. My father still remembers his number: EIBL 134-3.

  Kazio is stranded. He knows no one but the Wards. He has left Poland expecting to be gone for only seven weeks. Now the summer is over, and the new school year has begun. Vincent Ward enrolls him at King’s College, a private school down the road. It is named not after the monarch, but after Lieutenant Colonel Wally King, the headmaster and owner, whose military rank is in fact in the cadet corps. There are only four teachers for two hundred boys, mostly sons of local shop owners and tradesmen. Wally doesn’t really know what to do with this stranded Pole from a different educational system, but Kazio stays there until the following summer. He receives very occasional letters from his parents, smuggled out via Sweden, not saying much, but reassuring him that they are well, they are alive.

  In Britain men are drafted and children are evacuated from major towns into the countryside, complete with their schools and teachers.

  In April 1940, Hitler launches his Blitzkrieg, starting with Denmark and Norway. Weeks later the German army attacks the Low Countries and then pushes south into France. And by the end
of May, the remains of the British Expeditionary Force are chased to the channel ports, mainly Dunkirk, and are being evacuated back to England. In England, the panic starts in earnest; an invasion is expected daily. Something has to be done and done quickly. Local Defense Volunteers, later called the Home Guard, and consisting mostly of elderly men armed only with sticks and pikes, begin to patrol, looking for Germans. And the next thing that comes to somebody’s hare brain, my father says, is to get rid of all the foreigners living in possible German landing areas. There is no time to see if they are likely enemy sympathizers, and Kazio, like everybody else without a British passport, is ordered out of St. Leonard’s. He has one small suitcase of clothes and a few books, his camera, a bicycle, and ten pounds. He is still a boy. He is in a foreign country. And now he is on his own.

  Twelve

  1940

  IN JUNE 1940,” WRITES my father, “I became an adult. It was a somewhat traumatic change from a schoolboy, especially because it was quite unexpected.”

  With his experience in amateur cinematography, he finds a job as a rewind boy at a cinema in Bulford, on Salisbury Plain, called the Garrison Theater. The pay is thirty shillings per week, which is not enough to live on (three pounds was considered a living wage). However, with air raids expected at any moment, the cinema also employs its staff as fire watchers, and so he volunteers, for which he is paid an extra eighteen shillings per week, plus one Coke per shift.

  He finds a room with a retired sergeant major and sells his prize camera to help pay the rent. The cinema manager is Mr. Piper, and his daughter, Cecilia, plies the aisles with a tray hanging from her neck, full of sweets and Cokes for sale. The chief projectionist is Norman Taylor, who says “fucking” every four words. The projectors have arc lamps, whose carbons Kazio has to adjust as they burn out every minute or so. He also does all the rewinding. There is a second cinema in Bulford called the Beacon, which shows the same films an hour after the Garrison, so he has to shuttle the films back and forth between them.

  The situation is quite comical, he says. He has not been allowed to live at St. Leonard’s because he is considered a security risk — as a foreigner, he might cooperate with German invaders. But there seems to be no objection to his living on the edge of the Salisbury Plain, which is full of military establishments. One of them is Boscombe Down, a huge Royal Air Force (RAF) airfield, where you can easily see experimental aircraft being tested.

  Kazio saves up his pay and eventually acquires a brown double-breasted suit and a blue belted overcoat, which he wears with the collar up at the back just like the film stars. Later, with another lad, the grocer’s son, he buys an old Ariel 600cc motorbike for six pounds, putting a beer-bottle label in the license-plate holder. He joins the Church of England and is prepared for confirmation by an army padre, who seems to spend most of his time drinking in the officers’ mess, and confirmed by the bishop of Salisbury. “There is no shame in being a Jew,” the bishop says. “Jesus Christ was a Jew.”

  Jewish or not, at heart he is still very much a Polish patriot, so when General Sikorski forms a Polish government-in-exile in London in June 1940, Kazio writes volunteering to join their army and does so as soon as he can, even though he is not quite seventeen.

  From time to time I try to interrupt my father’s chronicles of Kazio. “But what did it feel like, Dad,” I ask, “to be stranded like that; to be cut off from your family in a strange place?” But he can tell me little of his emotional state.

  THE POLISH FORCES in Britain that started forming in 1940 are a very mixed bunch, my father remembers. There are fewer than twenty thousand men, most of them members of the defeated army who have somehow managed to get out of Poland. Many, if not most of them, are officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs). Others are Poles who were living outside Poland when the Germans invaded. In Kazio’s unit, there are miners from the coal pits of northern France, a Jewish tailor from the East End of London who can hardly speak Polish, a student from San Francisco, and a steward from a transatlantic liner. It is quite difficult to transform this bunch into a fighting unit. The RAF takes on any trained pilots and when their numbers become sufficient forms them into Polish squadrons.

  Soon Kazio is stationed at the Firth of Tay, in Scotland, where the Poles are guarding the coast against possible invasion. Initially he is part of a rifle battalion dedicated to Mary Queen of Scots. On the front of their forage caps they wear the Polish eagle, but on the side is pinned a little Royal Stuart tartan flash and the Scottish lion. He is placed in the machine gun platoon, which uses World War I vintage Vickers .303 machine guns. Their firing range is on the edge of a moor, firing over the sea. There is a lookout, who waves a red cease-fire flag if a ship approaches. As the lookout is out of direct sight of the troops, another man is posted in between to alert the gunners that the red flag is aloft. Kazio has that duty once when a British submarine sails past on the surface. Unfortunately, he is color-blind and doesn’t see the red flag waving against the background of green grass. The captain of the sub gets a bit upset when his vessel is fired on by several machine guns at once. He dives the sub and later lodges an official complaint. Kazio is reprimanded.

  Soon his unit converts from machine guns to three-inch mortars and is issued with armored carriers, but Kazio is sent to St. Andrews on a matriculation course to qualify for officer training. It is held in a small hotel, facing the sea, and not far from the Royal and Ancient Golf Club.

  One Sunday afternoon, taking a break from homework, he strolls across the road to the sea wall and leans on it and looks over the water and wonders about Poland and his family there. Then he notices another young man next to him, in the uniform of a Polish paratrooper, also looking out to sea. It is Wacek Binental, his childhood friend, whom he has not seen since before the war. Each has assumed the other dead. They embrace, my father says, “and I rather think we were both crying. Fortunately no one saw us.” Wacek is on a weekend pass from parachute training near Manchester. Later, he breaks his back jumping from a plane and spends much of the war in the hospital recuperating. After the war he emigrates to Australia.

  By the time Kazio joins the First Polish Armored Division in 1943, after his matriculation, the whole Allied force is preparing for the invasion of Europe. The soldiers are gradually shifting southward, and his battalion is now in Yorkshire. In his four-man carrier is a young soldier nicknamed Cania, Polish for “bird,” because he is small and agile and fast. The two of them become firm friends.

  They make their way farther south to an embarkation area near Southampton. His unit sails for Normandy in a U.S. Navy motor torpedo boat and disembarks onto Juno Beach from a “Mulberry harbor” at the end of July, seven weeks after the first D-day landings. One of the ships scuttled to provide the breakwater there, remembers my father, is the only Polish cruiser, the Dragon, a gift from the Royal Navy — recently holed by a German torpedo.

  Polish morale is high. As they set out inland into Normandy, they hear the first reports of the Warsaw uprising. Kazio’s unit is attached to the First Canadian Army, which is to form the left wing of the forces advancing into France, parallel to the coast. They camp near Bayeux, and together with the Canadians, move on through the ruined city of Caen, which has only just been liberated.

  OUTSIDE CAEN, THEY pause just short of a big concentration of artillery, says my father, row upon row of guns of all calibers, firing at the German positions until their barrels glow red. The Americans are meant to join in this bombardment from the air, with their B-17 Flying Fortresses. But something goes wrong. The system relies on a master bomber, and when the master bomber drops early, the rest follow suit. Kazio and Cania watch in tears, appalled, as the Flying Fortresses drop their bombs on the Canadian and Polish gun crews, who are unable to communicate directly with the air force to stop the “friendly fire.”

  British army spotter planes, little unarmed Austers, fly in and out of the American formation, with no direct radio contact, their pilots desperately wavin
g their arms and firing signal rockets, trying to stop the bombing. It seems a very long time before the bombs cease. The casualties are especially high because the gunners are about to move forward and are not dug in.

  This is the first of three times that Kazio is to be bombed in the war, he says, twice by Allies and only once by Germans.

  The Poles advance toward the town of Falaise, trying to complete the Allied encirclement of a huge German force — fourteen divisions, about one hundred thousand men. They manage to dislodge German infantry dug into positions on top of two thickly wooded hills that straddle “the Falaise gap,” the last escape route for the Germans. The Poles nickname the feature Maczuga, “the Mace,” because of its shape on their contour maps.

  Almost immediately Kazio and his comrades come under ferocious and sustained counterattack by German forces desperate to break through Allied lines, and also by two elite SS armored divisions returning from outside to help. Largely surrounded and running out of ammunition, their Sherman tanks outgunned by the German’s latest Panther and Tiger tanks, the Poles are mistakenly bombed again by their own allies.

  The fighting, much of it at very close quarters, blurs in Kazio’s memory. Once, he recalls, he finds himself alone, caught in open ground, armed only with his rifle, as a Panther bears down on him. He crawls under the wreck of a Sherman tank abandoned in a ditch, and watches, terrified, as the Panther’s barrel rotates slowly toward him. It lowers until it is trained on him, pauses for a long moment, then the German tank abruptly accelerates away.

  He remembers too being slumped, exhausted, on the edge of a road, in a rare gap in the fighting, with his corporal, a man in his early twenties, the son of a well-known Polish actress. There is a deafening roar, and when Kazio’s ears clear, he realizes that the corporal, still sitting beside him, is dead. Kazio starts removing the dead man’s personal items to return them to his family. He unbuckles his watch and reaches into his breast pocket where he discovers a small diary with a bullet lodged in it. But there is no visible wound. He still can’t understand how the corporal died.