For this and the next two Translation Tuesdays, we are thrilled to bring you the winners of our annual Close Approximations translation contest, judged by Margaret Jull Costa, Ottilie Mulzet, and Michael Hofmann. First up, Sean Gasper’s Bye translation from the Polish of Filip Springer’s nonfiction. Margaret chose Bye’s entry as the winner “because I found the subject matter totally gripping—it’s set in 1944, when the Soviet counteroffensive has reached the Vistula River—and the prose itself is satisfyingly dense, and it has what I look for in any good translation, a very convincing voice.”
—The editors at Asymptote
***
O Lord, Make No Tarrying
Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O LORD.
Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt.
Let them be turned back for a reward of their shame that say, Aha, aha.
Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: and let such as love thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified.
But I am poor and needy: make haste unto me, O God: thou art my help and my deliverer; O LORD, make no tarrying.
Psalm 70, King James Version
[. . .]
Winter
The situation beyond the mountains is getting worse. By 1944, the Soviet counteroffensive has reached the Vistula River. It stops there, though not for long. On January 12, 1945, at 5 a.m., “Stalin’s organs” begin to play on the banks of the Vistula. A thousand Katyusha rockets give the Red Army the signal to attack. It won’t stop until it reaches Berlin. Over the next few days, panic breaks out in the furthest-flung eastern provinces of the Reich. Since mid-January, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Upper Silesia—mainly women and children—have already been heading west. On January 20, all across Breslau the civilian population is ordered to abandon the city immediately. The scene on the streets is like Dante’s Inferno. There’s not space on the trains for everyone, so thousands set off on foot in sub-zero temperatures.
Helena Szczepańska is also among the refugees. She’s eight years old and the youngest of five siblings. Until now, she and her mother have lived in Niklasfähre, on the border of Upper and Lower Silesia. Thanks to their German ancestry—and despite their de facto Polish ethnicity—they are evacuated along with the other Germans. They stop for a day when they reach Schurgast, and then walk westward for almost two weeks. On February 1, 1945, they reach a small town on top of a hill—Kupferberg. Helena will remember this place well, for during their almost three-week trek through Silesia, Kupferberg is the only place she and her family get to sleep in a heated building. Everywhere else they sleep in barns, sheds, cellars, and God knows where else.
Starting in early 1945, a post operates in the Black Eagle tavern giving out hot meals and tea for refugees from the East. Before long, Kupferberg’s population has grown to nearly a thousand. The authorities estimate there are almost twenty thousand refugees in the region around Hirschberg. Watching them, young Karl Heinz Friebe wonders if he, his mother, and little sister will share the same fate. The feeling of hunger hasn’t left him for some months, and the supplies they’d prepared that summer are slowly running out. Bread, milk, and sugar are getting harder to find. It’s true the authorities have issued ration cards, but they’re no use, because finding anything to buy with them borders on a miracle.
The townspeople and the refugees generally believe even a trek over the ringing frost is better than falling into the Communists’ clutches. People can remember the films and photos shot by German soldiers in the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf in the fall of 1944, just after retaking it from the Soviets in a ferocious battle. This is how one of the soldiers who marched into Nemmersdorf described what he saw in the pages of the German press: “At the first farm, there was a hay wagon off the left side of the road. Four naked women were nailed to it by their hands, in a pose of crucifixion. Two naked women were nailed to the door of the barn, also in a pose of crucifixion. All in all, we found seventy women and children, and one old man, seventy-four years old. They were all dead. You could see they’d been tortured horrifically, except a few who had been shot in the back of the head. Even babies had been killed, their skulls smashed in. The bodies of all the women, including girls from eight to twelve years old, showed signs of rape. Even an old, blind woman wasn’t spared.”
No wonder news of the Russians’ approach makes people desperate to escape. The ones who can no longer flee resolve to commit suicide. There are hundreds of these cases in the towns and villages of the Reich. Entire villages and hamlets hang themselves. Entire families hang themselves; mothers kill their children and then take their own lives. They don’t know that although the Red Army has committed unimaginable crimes in Nemmersdorf and other places, the descriptions in German propaganda are strongly exaggerated. The authorities are trying to induce panic in the nation, terror of the savage hordes from Asia. You don’t negotiate with a horde; with a horde you fight to your last breath, because falling into the clutches of barbarians from the East is a fate worse than death.
When routine bombardment of Breslau begins in early February, in Kupferberg the decision to evacuate is made. Karl Heinz Friebe dresses warmly and makes sure his little sister is equally bundled up. A blizzard is raging outside. They take what food remains from the house, as well as their most essential possessions; they don’t know where they’re going. They clean the house, lock it behind them and pocket the key. They know the first section of the route perfectly. They have to leave the house, pass the brewery and then the two stone crosses, which at this time of year barely peek out over the snow banks. They take the road down toward Jannowitz. If it weren’t for the war, there they’d get on a train and go wherever their hearts desired—but at the station, they’re shocked to discover the trains aren’t stopping there, just slowing down a little only to speed up again a moment later and rush southward. The fountain has also vanished from the front of the station; a deep crater now lies in its place, and the walls of the surrounding houses are pockmarked with rounds from machine guns. Karl Heinz Friebe looks at all this and doesn’t understand what the little fountain in Jannowitz had to do with the war going on beyond the mountains.
The refugees don’t get onto a train but instead into military trucks waiting at the station. They spend the next few hours packed together, trying to withstand the deadly cold forcing its way through the canvas roof. Finally, just before dusk, they reach Gablonz and are quartered in the gymnasium of the local public school. For more than a week, every morning they will pack up their possessions and wait for their transport westward to depart. They know their destination; everyone here says there’s nowhere safe anymore, but the least dangerous place is Dresden. That’s exactly where most trains and refugee columns from Silesia are being directed.
So they wait patiently. Every now and then another family will disappear from the gymnasium where they’ve ended up living, and new ones will arrive in their place. A large share of the nearly six hundred thousand refugees passes through Gablonz. The ones who’ve stood eye-to-eye with Red Army soldiers have terrible stories to tell. One of the refugees will later write in his memoirs:
The terrifying news magnified our fear. We heard blood-curdling stories about young men and old people being murdered, women being raped regardless of age, nursing mothers having their breasts cut off, pregnant women having their wombs cut open and the still-unborn fetuses ripped out, deep wells being filled up with the bodies of living people, eyes getting poked out with bayonets, tongues being cut out, crowds of Germans being burned alive in barns or houses, militiamen being driven into captivity by powerful tanks and armored cars charging them from behind, and many other stories that would make your hair stand on end.
Yes—compared with all the horrors talked about in the school gymnasium in Gablonz, the thought of escaping to Dresden is a true comfort.
Finally it’s their turn. They head out the afternoon of February 13. They have almost a hundred miles to cross, but the train they get on stops constantly, because there are already Soviet planes about and there’s a danger they’ll bomb the tracks. But the refugees are moving. They leave Kupferberg, and their fear, behind them somewhere. Supposedly it’s safer in the West. They’re going farther from home, but farther from danger too. Dresden isn’t far now, almost within reach. But when night falls, the whole convoy stops completely; they turn out the lights and everything is enveloped in darkness. In the air they can hear a terrifying hum growing louder and louder, as though a giant swarm of bees were waking from their winter sleep. Karl Heinz Friebe presses his nose against the frost-covered window of the train. The other passengers do the same. They look up in the sky, but can’t make anything out. After a moment, they see the first flashes far to the west: one, a second, a third. Soon they won’t be able to count them anymore; the flashes transform into a golden glow taking up almost the entire horizon. There’s a rumble from afar, but it’s muffled enough inside the train that they can still hear the children crying. They would be able to hear whispered conversations too, but no one speaks. They all stand and watch. It’s the night of February 13, 1945, and right now several hundred Allied planes are carrying out the carpet bombing of Dresden. Over the next two days, they will turn the city into a heap of rubble and take the lives of twenty-five thousand people. Those who managed to get onto the earlier trains leaving Gablonz will also be among the dead. The train from which Karl Heinz Friebe is watching the glow in the west has stopped ten miles from the city, because it was one of the last to leave.
So they can’t go to Dresden. That city is gone, so where to now? Breslau is under siege, just like Posen, Thorn, Danzig, and Königsberg. They head south, slowly. They come to Gablonz again; there’s chaos at the station and weeping. They don’t get off there. The train will go somewhere, a train has to move, the train will take them away from there. They’re on the road the next few days; Karl Heinz Friebe loses count, he’s hungry and cold. It’s quiet on the train. They’re in Bohemia; they’re getting as far as the border of what used to be Austria. Suddenly an alarm sounds: there are Soviet planes in the air and people are fleeing the train. It’s winter, there’s snow and a town in the distance. They run; the planes are getting closer. Karl holds his sister with one hand and his mother with the other. His greatest fear is losing one of them. The planes fly low overhead and fire their machine guns. First they shoot at the train, and then they turn around and fly over the town. People scatter in all directions. They run up to the first houses they see—there are walls and cellars, they can hide there! But no. The whole town closes its doors to them. No one lets them in. They can pound their fists, they can shout and weep, but they can’t go in. They can only lie curled up against a wall and hope the planes shoot at the people lying in the street. Once they’ve flown off, the grown-ups lead the children away, and then pile up the corpses in one place. The train will be able to move on.
They travel this way for three weeks—Bohemia, the Sudetenland, Silesia. Finally, at the beginning of March, they reach Hirschberg, where they also meet those who survived the bombing of Dresden. They don’t want to hear their stories; they’re going up the mountain—returning home. Lomnitz, Schildau, Boberstein, Rohrlach, Jannowitz. On the way, Karl Heinz asks the farmers if maybe they have a little milk to sell. Finally, the two stone crosses, the brewery building, the key from the pocket. Home.
Spring
Columns of skeletons appear in the area. It’s the evacuation of a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen. They come from Hirschberg, Bad Warnbrunn, and Landeshut (where after a day’s march they end up back where they started and the SS-men fly into a rage). In Bolkenhain, they undergo selection first. A prisoner from that camp later testifies he saw living people thrown into ditches with lime, and the Lagerführer personally killed some prisoners with poison injections.
Kupferberg is out of the way; maybe if the women’s camp in Märzdorf were evacuated, the four hundred women would pass through the town on their grim march. But that camp operates right to the end, until the Russians liberate it.
Bolkenhain is thirteen miles from Kupferberg, Hirschberg is a little closer. It’s eleven miles to Landeshut and barely six to Märzdorf. That’s not beyond the mountains anymore. That’s here.
There are other camps here too, small factories, individual farms where French, Belgian, and Polish prisoners work. They’ve been brought in throughout the war. They were meant to work for the Reich and be glad they were alive. Now it’s said they can’t wait for the Russians to come, so they can point out who treated them the worst.
The Nazis disappear too. One night in a panic, they load up a van, gather up all their documents and head out of Kupferberg toward Bohemia. The mayor of the town is among them; they’re all Nazi Party members. After a few days, they return beaten-up, with no van, shabby and resigned. The ring of encirclement has long since closed. There’s no escape; the only thing to do is wait.
Explosions can already be heard in every direction; planes appear more and more frequently in the sky. Once they find out the Russians have captured the German airport, no one looks at the symbols on the planes’ wings anymore; they all just go straight into the cellar and wait. Yet not one bomb falls on Kupferberg. A plane is shot down and falls on the rail bridge just beyond Jannowitz, meaning the route to Hirschberg is cut off too. The townspeople are constantly being thrown into panic by word the Russians are coming: one more town will join the ghost of Nemmersdorf. As February turns to March, the Germans successfully retake Striegau from the Russians. The streets there are covered with the corpses of civilians who didn’t manage to evacuate.
Helena Plüschke, one of the inhabitants of Striegau, later recalls the Russians’ entry into the town:
A Russian patrol bursts into the house. They chase out the women and girls. They catch them all, street by street, and take them to the school. There, it’s hell on Earth! The nightmares still linger in my mind: drunken soldiers, a gun in one hand, a torch in the other—on the hunt. German women are their main prey. Women from Striegau and nearby are held in schoolrooms for entire days, imprisoned and tortured. In over-crowded rooms, their tormentors select their victims. If anyone resists, they drag her down the corridor by her hair to the “slaughterhouse.” Every two or three hours, a special team appears to pick out women for the officers’ quarters [. . .]. Those who return from there are mental, and sometimes physical, wrecks. I am a victim once again. Luckily, I manage to protect my 11-year-old daughter. I wrap her in old rags and hide her behind a pile of junk. The torture begins by asking whether I am a Nazi. My denial is answered with a powerful blow to the face and then a whipping. They hold a pistol to my head and force me to drink; as though ironically, it’s German rye vodka. It doesn’t take long before I’m engulfed by drunken intoxication. Whatever they’ve done to me I don’t feel until the next day. Now I’ve completely lost my will to live, and I’m finished. I throw up a few times, and then lie apathetically among the other women who’ve met the same fate.
Since the Nazis have fled, Richard Fürle becomes the mayor. (He doesn’t know he’ll be the last in the history of Kupferberg.) When the news of Hitler’s death reaches the townspeople on April 30, a meeting is held in the Black Eagle tavern. The mayor appeals for everyone to stay calm and reasonable until the war ends, and he abolishes the requirement for them to greet one another with the Nazi salute. When he returns to his office, an officer of the Waffen SS division currently stationed in Kupferberg is already waiting for him there. The officer accuses Fürle of treason and puts a pistol on his desk.
“Mr. Mayor, I think you ought to carry out the sentence yourself. Otherwise, I will be forced to do so.”
“If you do as you intend, be sure you will not leave here alive,” answers the mayor.
The officer looks out the window. By now a considerable crowd of townspeople has gathered in front of the mayor’s office. After a moment’s silence, the officer takes the pistol off the desk and leaves. Soon the SS-men abandon Kupferberg.
On May 9 at about 5 p.m., the first Russian motorcycle patrol rides into Hirschberg. They’re shot by the one SS post in the town, making up the sum total of shots fired in defense of Kupferberg. That same day, Karl Heinz Friebe, walking on the road to Rudelstadt, spots the first Russian soldier. The boy stands stock-still; the soldier would probably have done the same, if he weren’t completely drunk and barely able to stay on his feet. So here they are! Karl runs toward the town and prays the soldier won’t shoot him. A moment later, all the inhabitants of Kupferberg are sitting in their cellars, shaking with fear. They’ll spend almost twenty-four hours down there, because the Russians won’t enter the town until the next day. They drive up the road from Rudelstadt and Märzdorf in tanks. They evict the inhabitants of a house at the bend in the road right next to the brewery, and set up their headquarters there. That’s where the Germans are to come hand in any guns they have, and any radio receivers too. The ghost of Nemmersdorf claims its first victim: in the cellar of the Black Eagle tavern, the first young woman hangs herself.
Translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye
*****
To read the rest of the article, hop over to Asymptote’s brand-new Spring issue uncovering new writing from 27 countries including an exclusive interview with Man International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator, Ann Goldstein.
Filip Springer is a Polish photographer and journalist. Born in 1982, he studied archaeology and cultural anthropology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. In 2011 he published his first book, Miedzianka: Historia znikania (Miedzianka: The Story of a Disappearance, Sean Bye’s English translation of which is forthcoming from Restless Books). The same year saw publication of Źle urodzone: Reportaże o architekturze PRL-u (Ill-Born: Reports on Polish Architecture Under Communism). He published two more books in 2013: Zaczyn: O Zofii i Oskarze Hansenach (Blueprints: The Life and Work of Zofia and Oskar Hansen) and Wanna z kolumnadą: Reportaże o polskiej przestreni (Bathtub with a Colonnade: Reports on the Space That Is Poland). And in 2015 his fifth book, 13 Pięter (13 Storeys), came out. He lives in Warsaw and works with the Reportage Institute there.
Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish, French and Russian literature. He studied modern languages at University College London and international studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. In 2013 he won a space on the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentorship program, spending six months working with Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Since 2014 he has been Literature and Humanities Curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York. His translations of Polish fiction, reportage, and drama have appeared in Words Without Borders, Catapult, Continents, and others. His translation of Watercolours by Lidia Ostałowska is forthcoming from Zubaan Books in New Delhi, and his translation of Miedzianka by Filip Springer is forthcoming from Restless Books. Sean grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and is currently based in New York.
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