Małgorzata Szejnert

The Black Garden

About the book

Gerard Kasperczyk, who has reached the age of seventeen and spends his time after work at Master Bochynek’s running around Giszowiec and the area with his friends looking for girls, describes a lot of to-do at the American villas. The gate that has always guarded the inhabitants is wide open and everyone is going away. Some of them are leaving their furniture and kitchenware behind, but it’s not clear whether they’re doing so in haste or in the belief they will be back soon.
Mr and Mrs Georg Sage Brooks cross the Polish border on 29 August. They do it near Bytom and head for Holland.
Augustyn Niesporek tidies up the negatives, so many of which have now accumulated that they’re cluttering up the workshop, but some of his ever increasing family have to live in there. The glass plates used in the photographic studio take up a great deal of space. Twenty-three-year-old Paul, Augustyn’s oldest son, who is gradually taking over the photography workshop, comes to the conclusion that they should get rid of these plates, especially as they are becoming obsolete, just like the photos of veterans in Uprising uniforms celebrating their anniversaries. Augustyn accepts this decision with understanding. How the firm gets rid of the glass plates, we do not know. All we know is that they are soon gone.
The family of senior cavalry sergeant Andrzej Pawlak, who moved into two rooms with a kitchen in a three-storey house in Szopienice have only managed to live there for a couple of months. At the close of August Pawlak bid his family farewell. His troops are training in the woods near Giszowiec, putting on uniforms, arming themselves and obtaining means of transport, because they did not get a single car from the mobilisation store. So they are out in the Giszowiec woods, acting like the Silesian insurgents twenty years ago, requisitioning cars on the highway near the managing director’s villa, and borrowing horses and bicycles from the local people, promising to return them once they’re victorious.
The neighbours from the Szopienice tenement have encouraged Helena Pawlak to take the children and run away from the Germans, who are already entering Katowice and are sure to be tough on her family. So Helena, a small woman with a round face, gathers up the three children, of whom the youngest is four, and they walk on foot to Sosnowiec. Luckily the oldest daughter, Halinka, is fifteen and can carry the bundles. They stop for the night outside Sosnowiec, and in the morning they head onwards to Strzemierzyce, where they squeeze into tin-plated cattle trucks, which are already full of refugees. In the Olkusz forest they come under bombardment and lose half their luggage, but they get to Wolbrom, where a wrecked locomotive finally refuses to move. They stay the night with some kind people and reach Sławice near Miechów by horse and cart; the neighbours’ hospitable relatives live there.
Meanwhile Sergeant Pawlak and his troops get orders to close the gap that between the Tarnowskie Góry (held by the 11th Infantry Regiment) and Siewierz (held by the 3rd Regiment of Uhlans). They have some trouble in getting there because they only have maps in the direction of Berlin. They haven’t been issued any anti-tank guns. They drag a train of thirty horse-drawn wagons after them like a ball and chain.
On 1 September Edward Schulte’s son, nineteen-year-old Ruprecht, who wants to be a farmer and is doing summer work experience at a friendly estate in Lower Silesia, hears a swarm of aeroplane engines overhead. It is a squadron of Stukas and Junkers flying towards the eastern border of Germany. Wolfgang, Ruprecht’s twenty-year-old brother, has had to give up a holiday trip to Switzerland and Italy and is probably just crossing into Poland with his unit.
In August the Giesche mine had 4,038 employees.
On 1 September there are 630 fewer.
Of these, 390 men have been called up for the Polish army. 240 have escaped, to wait it out and see what happens. According to the Giszowiec scout’s newsletter, the local scouts, some of whom have just come back from a camp at Ligotka Kameralna in the Zaolzie region, want to fight the Polish soldiers. They are planning to defend the power plant at the Giesche mine. But under pressure from the Germans the Polish detachments withdraw beyond the river Przemsza and blow up the bridge. Seven scouts on bicycles, including the brothers Ludwik and Konrad Lubowiecki and Teodor Botor, try to find a mobilisation point, but they can see it is hopeless. They try to catch up with the Polish forces. Near Kozienice the Germans catch them, but let them go home. The boys must have explained in German that they were out on a bike ride.
Gertruda Badurzanka has also been trying to fight, in communications. She and her friends from the Nikiszowiec girl scouts have trained as telephone operators. Team leader Stefcia Szmolówna assigned shifts manning the Katowice phones, and sat up all night in an office with her eyes glued to the receiver, but no one called. The Germans marched into Giszowiec on 4 September. Gerard Kasperczyk notices that a lot of people, especially the old ones who were educated at German schools and who remember the First World War, regard these troops with an interest close to sympathy. And some of the soldiers smile at the local people too. The self-confidence, energy and smartness of the conquerors make a better impression than the chaos in which the Polish troops abandoned the district, though they were supposed to defend it.
“The war had only just begun, and they were already here, those Germans. We saw the other army. That lot were poor, on ponies, on carts. But this lot came in vehicles.”
A friend of Dorka and Gertruda Badurzanka called Maryla Wacławkówna despairs when she finds that the bed of asters in her Giszowiec garden on Ogrodowa Street, formerly and from tomorrow Gartenstrasse, has been ruined. Someone has broken in from the street, pulled up the flowers by the handful and thrown them under the soldiers’ feet. Father Dudek, who returned not long ago from a holiday in Krynica, greets the Germans from the pulpit. He says the parish has been waiting for them for seventeen years. Zbyszek Stacha, son of Wincenty, hears this with his own ears and runs to tell his father, who only yesterday was a Polish state official.
 
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones