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By Root 12488 0

was like my Uncle Stanislaw, who was my father’s brother and was a colonel in the Polish horse troops. He was my favorite uncle, so full of life and this big laugh and this kind of wonderful, innocent feeling about the greatness of Poland—la gloire, tu comprends, la patrie, et cetera, as if Poland had never been under the Prussians and the Austrians and the Russians all these many years but had this continuité like France or England or some places like those. He would visit us in Cracow in his uniform with his saber and this mustache of a hussar and would talk very loud and laugh a lot and say that the Germans would be teach a lesson if they tried to fight Poland. I think my father would continue to be nice to my uncle—you know, try to humor him—but Kazik had this very direct, logical mentality and would argue with Uncle Stanislaw in a friendly way and ask him how these horse troops would have effect when the Germans came with their Panzer troops and tanks. And my uncle would say that all that was important was the terrain and that the Polish cavalry knew how to maneuver in the familiar terrain and the Germans would get total lost in the strange terrain, and that is how the Polish troops would turn the Germans back. And you know what happened when there was this confrontation—une catastrophe totale, in less than three days. Oh, it was all so foolish and gallant and futile. All those men and horses! And so sad, Stingo, sad...

“When the German soldiers came into Cracow—this was in September of 1939—we were all shocked and scared and of course we hate this thing that was happening to us but we stayed calm and hoped for the best things. Truly that part was not so bad, Stingo, I mean in the beginning, because we had faith that the Germans would treat us decent. They had not bombed the city like Warsaw, and so we feel a little special and protected, spared. The German soldiers they had very good behavior and I remember that my father said that this proved what he had believed for so long. And that was that the German soldier was in this tradition of ancient Prussia which had the code of honor and decency and so they would never harm civilians or be cruel to them. Also, it make us to feel calm to hear of these thousands of soldiers speaking German, which to our family was almost like the native tongue. So we had this panic at the very beginning but then it seemed not so bad. My father suffered terribly over the news about what happened in Warsaw but he said we must continue with our lives in the old way. He said that he had no illusions about what Hitler think of the intellectuals but he said that in other places like Vienna and Prague many teachers in the universities was permitted to continue their work, and he thought that he and Casimir would too. But after weeks and weeks passed and anything didn’t happen, we saw that this time in Cracow was going to be okay, tolerable I mean.

“One morning that November I went to Mass in St. Mary’s church, that is the church that has the trumpets, you know. In Cracow I went to Mass quite often and went many times after the Germans came, to pray that the war be over. Maybe it sound selfish and horrible to you, Stingo, but I think mainly I wished the war to be over so I could go to Vienna with Kazik and study. Oh, naturally there were a million other reasons to pray, but people are selfish, you know, and I felt very lucky that my family had been spared and was safe, so I just wished for the war to be over so that life could be as it was in the old days. But when I prayed at Mass this morning I had a... a prémonition—yes, the same, a premonition, and was filled with this slowly mounting frightful sensation. I didn’t know what the fright was about, but in a sudden the prayer stop in my mouth and I could feel the wind blowing in the church around me, very wet and cold. And then I remembered what caused the fright, something that just came over me like a bright flash. Because I remembered that this same morning the new Nazi Governor General of Cracow district, this man named Frank, had make the