Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories by Tadeusz Borowski

Author:Tadeusz Borowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE DEATH OF AN INSURGENT

Near the trench, across a narrow strip of meadow, lay a beet field. If you peered out over the brown wall of freshly excavated sticky clay, you could see green succulent leaves almost within reach and underneath them white mangels with pink veins, split open in the wet earth. The field lay on an uphill slope and ended against a wall of black forest that was blurry in the thin fog. A guard was posted at the edge of the forest. The funny sticklike barrel of a long, probably Danish, rifle jutted out from him like a lance. About forty meters to the left, under some rachitic plum trees, another guard was posted. He had wrapped himself tightly in a gray airman’s coat and pulled his forage cap down low over his ears and forehead; he surveyed the valley from under his cap as if peering into the bottom of a tank.

Farther up the slope, where the forest had descended in the form of groves of young willow trees, between an unexpectedly lively stream and a highway that sliced diagonally across the valley, enormous tractors dragging plows were leveling the earth that was being dug up by excavators and transported out of the pit in a huge number of carts pushed by human beings. It was dangerously noisy and crowded there. Men were pushing hand trucks, carrying ties and rails, ripping up turf in sheets to serve as camouflage for buildings, followed by the tractor leveling the ground.

We were digging a trench in the bottom of this tank. The trench had been completed presciently in good times when the sun was shining and when there were plenty of ripe plums shaken loose by the wind underneath the trees; during the rains it had begun to fill in again and was even threatening to collapse entirely, since we had been ordered to dig it straight across to the pipes on the wall and not, as they say, slantwise, for it hadn’t been foreseen that the Norwegians assigned to lay the pipes for the water supply system would die in solidarity to the very last man by the time they’d laid the first ten kilometers. So we had been hastily reassigned from carrying rails and extracting the tangled steel rods that were lying every which way in a pile at the station, and had been driven into the bottom of the tank to repair the trench that ran indecently close to the beet field.

“You’d think a trench like this, it probably means nothing,” I said to Romek, a former saboteur from Radom who had been laboring in German camps for the past two years to make up for what he had ruined for them in Poland. We had worked together from the moment they founded this lousy camp on the edge of a small meadow beneath one of the Wirtemberg hills, and we’d achieved a certain proficiency in digging trenches. He would smash the soft earth into fine grains with a pickax, and I would hurl it onto the top of the wall with the end of my spade.

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