Churchill's Triumph by Michael Dobbs Page A

patchwork of surrounding fields and scattered forests, yet they shared a keen sense of community that was focused around the main packed-earth square, which was both meeting point and marketplace. It held the only two buildings of any significance in the town: the church, and the two-story wooden building on the opposite side, that served as either mayor’s office or school, depending on which entrance you used. A row of young alders stood along one side, giving shade to the mayor’s office, and a garland of leaves and flowers hung above the church door, but by February it had been reduced to a handful of withered brown stalks. The square stood at the end of what was mockingly called Boulevard 3rd May, although in truth this was little more than a rutted ribbon of rocks and mud. The boulevard was one of the few pretensions of the plain, simple people of Piorun.
    It was also fortunate in some measure that Piorun lay only twenty miles from the German border and not much more than a hundred from Berlin. On the first day of the war, the panzers had passed it quickly by. There wasn’t any opportunity for the sort of resistance that was to bring disaster tumbling down upon so many other Polish towns. And there were no Jews, never had been. But the war didn’t completely neglect Piorun: many young men went off to the army and, when the battle had been lost, threw in their lot with the underground. Most of the other men of working age who remained, and also many of the women, were taken away by the Germans for forced labor as part of what was called the pacification campaign, which only encouraged an even greater number to take to a life among the forests of elm, oak and beech. Some Volksdeutsche moved in, as they did all over the Greater German Reich, grabbing the best of the land, forcing the owners out of their homes to live in mud-floored hovels, but in Piorun the Volksdeutsche were relatively few in number and huddled together on the outskirts in a community that became known as the Settlement. The inhabitants that remained in Piorun during the Occupation, the old, the young, the wounded and infirm, were left to lead a life of obscurity and, for wartime Poland, relative lack of hardship. No one actually starved—at least, not until the last, most terrible winter of the war.
    The local German garrison was the 1147th Fusilier Battalion of the 563rd Volksgrenadier Division—there were so many designations and divisions nowadays, so many gaps that had to be filled, like mushrooms spawning in a dark cellar. Yet the men of the 1147th enjoyed the obscurity of Piorun. There was no glory in it, but many had already encountered the glories of the Russian front and had developed an affection for dullness. They didn’t press the inhabitants any harder than necessary, they tried to turn a blind eye to the widespread pilfering and black-market activities, and they worked hard to avoid offering reasons for a visit from anyone higher up the Nazi food chain. Yet as the frontiers of the Greater Reich drew in, everything became a little more brutal. The garrison commander was sent off to find fame at the front—not for any misdemeanor, but simply because he was a whole man—and many of his men were ordered after him. They were replaced by the old and the very young, drafted from the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth, and those who had experienced the worst of the war, who knew it was being lost, and who neither knew nor cared for the people of this place.
    It was a coincidence for this story that the burmistrz, or mayor, of Piorun was Stanislaw Nowak, the father of Marian. It would have made no difference to events if he had been a Kula, an Andrzeyevski, a Smolarski or a Gawlik, or a member of any of the other families who had lived in Piorun for generations, for Piorun was very much a family affair. Yet the coincidence added to the sorrow. So when it became clear that Piorun and all the other parts of Poland would not remain much longer in