AGAIN a stifling Roman afternoon, again I’m sitting in Maria’s little student room on the Via dei Fiori. We continue the conversation left unfinished yesterday.
“Are you a believer?” I ask suddenly.
“Yes . . . well, in my own way.”
“But you are Catholic,” I press her, “you practice?”
Again a slight hesitation.
“Like most people . . . yes, sometimes.”
“I’m not sure I see what you mean, though I’m sure it’s quite understandable. Please help me understand better.”
Maria lowers her head and speaks as if with an effort, haltingly, weighing each word:
“Because you see, we are taught in the catechism that God is One and that God is just, so I believe fully, but I reject one of those claims. If God is One, God is not just, no one who has observed people can believe in one just God, no one can believe that all men are created in the image and likeness of God and only God . . . But if God is just, how can we believe he is One! No, sir, there is God and there is Satan, and men are made not only in the image of God.”
We are silent. After some thought I say:
“I think that’s what the Zoroastrians believed, and the Mazdeics we met in Iran.”
“I don’t know what those people believe,” Maria replies, lost in thought.
After a moment of silence I ask if she observed religious impulses in Russia. Maria livens up.
“I’ll tell you a few scenes that stuck in my mind. I didn’t see many. They were mostly timid impulses, scarcely defined, nothing beyond the sphere of astonishment, suppressed emotion, ancient habit, or surprise, the surprise of people for whom that world did not exist at all, or almost at all. Their encounter with Poles, who displayed their religiosity almost provocatively, often prompted very contradictory reactions.”
At that moment I remembered my own first impression of that kind among the Soviets. When we crossed the Soviet border on a transport to Starobielsk in the first days of October 1939, I retain in memory the face of an old whiskered railway man walking past our train car in the early morning as we were singing the hymn “When Dawn Rises.” The railway man made a face: “And they call that an educated people.”
I tell Maria the story.
“But no, really, I saw many quite different reactions. Back in the prison in Kremenets in 1939 we had a guard named Sasha. He was about twenty-eight, certainly no more than that. I don’t know to what we owed his very humane approach to us. It seems that he was in love with the daughter of a policeman in Poland. But as an NKVD member he couldn’t get permission to marry her. It was a time when we were under a less rigorous watch. The hall where we were being kept had an air vent in the toilets. Of course what we were most interested in doing was jumping up to the vent and seeing who was coming in. It was our only way of receiving any kind of information from the outside. In our cell we also sang religious songs in chorus. Many of us prayed. There was a young Jewish woman with us who once jumped up to the vent at the exact moment the guard was coming in. He asked her why she did it against the rules. The girl began to try to deny it, saying it hadn’t been she who jumped. Sasha came up very close to her and asked her in a low voice, ‘Why do you lie, if you believe in God?’
“In that prison I was once praying on my knees in the evening. That’s just the way it was, many of us prayed openly in Russia, even those who didn’t do much praying back in Poland. Our hall guards, Ukrainians, had just been changed for native Russians and half-Tatars, who were good-hearted on the whole. One of them came in once when I was kneeling and stood behind me. I felt someone was there but I didn’t turn around. But finally he couldn’t help himself, he took me by the arm and asked in total astonishment: ‘Shto ty delayesh?’ (What are you doing?)
“In another prison in Kharkov there was a male cell above us. They always sang ‘Under Your Protection’ at eight in the morning. On our hall many Polish women also sang religious songs. We later encouraged the Russian women and they too began singing their songs softly. In Kremenets it was forbidden, but here they didn’t interrupt us; even the hall guards opened the peephole to listen.
“Back in the jail in Kremenets a nice old Russian lady was sitting with us. Everyone called her Babushka. After Russia had occupied Polish territory she had crossed the Polish-Soviet border, which was still guarded, to buy some shoes for her son. She might have gone unnoticed, but she was reckless and in her naivete spoke about what was going on in Russia. For us then this was news. She told how her family had been deported, how besides her son she had only her little granddaughter left, told about mass deportations in the period of the famine in Ukraine, where in some areas cannibalism was common; quite calmly she told the story of a neighbor who had two daughters, one sixteen and the other ten, and how one day the younger one had vanished, because she’d been eaten by her mother and sister. The old lady had faith in the Lord, she prayed and bowed. She said in the Soviet Union old people prayed without telling their children because they were afraid the children would inform on them. But it’s not the same everywhere. I saw a village where children prayed too and not only parents but their children also crossed themselves before every meal.
“I told you I also worked weeding the gardens. We were always guarded by a convoy, armed with rifles. We’d return to the sleeping barracks at nine in the evening, completely exhausted. Despite that, the Polish women began singing. When we approached the barracks, a boyets ordered us to stop. He threatened us with his rifle. But there was no way he could make the singing stop. Then he started cursing us in all the worst, vulgar terms, which I’m sure you know well. In the end he used the worst oath, by the Mother of God. And he suddenly brought himself up short and said reproachfully, ‘Why are you driving me to sin like this?’ And then we all stopped singing.
“In Akmolinsk I lived with a woman who had children. She was young and she prayed. But she confessed to me that she hid it from her children, because she was afraid they’d inform on her. At one of the stations on the way to the Polish Army HQ, there was a woman of about forty who went up to one of the Polish girls who’d been given a few medallions and crosses by a priest and begged her in a trembling voice for just one cross. She received it with the greatest joy. A moment later her child came up to her asking why she was so happy. The Russian woman didn’t show him the cross. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said.
“Once in Turkestan I had a funny conversation at the kolkhoz hospital. I was sitting with a few Mordvin women by the kopcilka (a rag wick immersed in oil). One of those kopcilkas gives a little light and a little heat. One of the Mordvin women began talking. I remember her sweet face with broad cheekbones and very black eyes lit up by the faint glow of a little flame: ‘We just can’t understand you Polish women,’ she said. ‘You believe and you talk about it, and with us people believe too but they would never say, because they’d be punished. I was in the hospital in a big city and I saw even doctors believed there. I caught one of them crossing himself before an operation.’ Another girl having listened to this, added under her breath, ‘I’m sure even Stalin believes, he’s just scared to tell.’
“We all observed reactions like this to religious things, but in the last camp where I was held, I remember something I’ll never forget.
“It was a trial of nuns. It was said that they were nuns who refused to work, who rebelled. It was said that no punishment had any effect on them. They were probably some kind of Orthodox zealots: they had been taken not from convents that had been shut down long ago, but from their homes. As far as refusing to work goes, you know Russia. You know that the laws are often changed, and applied differently in different locations. In our camp it was still relatively liberal. You had to refuse to work thirty times to be put on trial. But after only three days they would cut your ration of bread, and after that they virtually stopped feeding you. I was interested in these monashki. I saw one of them, an old woman. I don’t know what she lived on. Just what she received as alms, nothing more, because they had stopped giving her food a long time ago. She wore clothes in rags, but always with a long skirt. The women had previously done ordinary work in the world, they said some of them were even married, but they balked at working for the government, because they saw it as working for the devil.
“Ten of these sisters were locked in a cell next to our barracks. But even before that, when no one knew what to do with them, they were put in with the urkas in a separate barracks. Those bandits, criminals of the worst kind, trying to get to them, stole from them and stripped them naked. But those women even managed to live with the urkas. They were sent to do forced labor weeding vegetable plots. They were led into the field by a convoy. When they reached the plots they sat on perches and crossed themselves, but not one of them lifted a finger. They were kept all day in the burning sun and at dusk they were led back. Then they were locked in the holding cell. They obviously had to eat something, because they were going to die of hunger. I don’t know what they ate. I’m sure that they received no food at all after that day. From time to time the prisoners threw them something to eat through the window.
“At that time the news spread that a court would be arriving to try the women and that anyone could attend the proceedings. This was a few days after our amnesty in 1941. Not only the nuns were on trial. They were also trying one woman who after the war with Germany broke out had climbed up a pole and looked in a western direction to see if the ‘Whites’ weren’t coming. Generally for the people there, that didn’t mean Germans, but they were the ‘Whites’ who were expected. I was present at the trial. The prosecutor arrived with two judges, a secretary, and a lawyer.
“One of the barracks had been turned into a courtroom. The long, dark barracks was filled with people from the camp listening to the proceedings. On the far side there was a table covered with red cloth. Candles on the table, and patches of red light from the lit-up red cloth. In the middle, the prosecutor (who stammered, which spoiled the effect) and the two judges. Behind them the camp commandant with a long beard, and on the side, the secretary in a red beret. On the other side of the table—the man who was supposed to pass for a lawyer. The prosecutor started with a speech saying that Soviet authorities, in spite of their benevolence, were forced to bring charges against these women; they had at first been dealt with by the gentlest measures, then by sharper measures and punishments, but it had not been possible to persuade a single one of them to agree even to the lightest work. Then the prosecutor began reading out the names of the nuns and asked each of them separately to state her name. Each of them got up in turn and said in a dull wooden voice directed at the whole assembly, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, God willed that my name is so-and-so.’
“To each question each one of the nuns responded with the words Bog velel, ‘God willed it.’ There was no discussion. They were simple women of stubborn resolve and unbending faith. You know, I listened to twelve of them one after another who had no private understanding among themselves, they didn’t say a word to each other, they just repeated the same statements and the same name of God in the crowded Soviet barracks which was silent as the grave, it was quite extraordinary.
“The prosecutor asked the third one why she wouldn’t work. And again, ‘God willed that I should not work.’ To which the prosecutor replied with the question: ‘Did you work before?’ ‘God willed that I worked.’ ‘So why won’t you work now?’ ‘God willed me not to work for Satan.’
“Generally they always spoke in the first person, always ‘I,’ never ‘we.’ The prosecutor tried to find out which of them was the inspiration, the leader of the group, but he couldn’t drag it out of them, because even previously the women hadn’t spoken to each other, they just prayed. With one of the women the prosecutor tried to provoke a discussion about power. He asked one of the older nuns if she recognized power. She replied that she recognized God’s power. Then he asked whether she recognized power in general. She said yes. ‘But don’t you people say that all power comes from God?’ To which the old woman responded in a sonorous voice: ‘Your power comes from Satan.’
“In the end they were asked if they would work. They answered no. Now it was the lawyer’s turn to speak. The lawyer asked if these women had been reeducated by the Soviet system—perevospitane. The barracks commander was asked if he had conducted educational conversations with them. The old bearded commander was terrified and began to assure the court that he had visited them, tried to educated them, he said they just remained silent, and he couldn’t even figure out which of them was leading the action. ‘I tried to talk to them about the value of work and even what’s said in the Gospels, “Who does not labor will not eat.”’
“We Polish women,” Maria adds, “thought of the Gospels, the passage about the lilies in the field, that toil not, neither do they spin, but the prosecutor seized on the passage and confirmed it: ‘Vot vidite —there, you see. Their Gospels even tell them to do this.’
“The lawyer considered his part had been played. Anyway, what can be said of lawyers in Russia these days? One of my prison companions who was accused of a number of crimes in Soviet prison was told outright by her lawyer: ‘If you don’t confess your guilt I won’t defend you.’ I was told by a lawyer in Kremenets: ‘We have a different legal system from the West, where it is better to free a hundred men then to convict one innocent man. With us it’s different; better convict a hundred innocent men than let one guilty man go free.’
“The judges withdrew to consider their decision, we prisoners were removed under the pretext that it was late. Only a few people stayed, who could walk around without a guard, and it was they who told me the next day what the result had been.
“Three women were sentenced to death, the rest to prison terms of ten to fifteen years.
“I also heard that after the sentences had been read out, the nuns stood up, crossed themselves, and with resonant voices thanked God for their sentence.
“The next day they were all carted off in black vans.”
Here she broke off. It was getting dark. The remains of the coffee had gone cold in the white cups. The light of the evening sky fell into the room, cut across by patches of gold. Against the background of those patches the pliant, pointy leaves of a eucalyptus showed black like little Tatar sabers.
I looked at Maria’s tranquil face in the darkening room.
“Martyrs, they were,” she said softly.
Wiadomości, London
1946