Aswim in Thought

At the same time, I had a great need for contact with some normal human beings. Because Karl's performance definitively took away any appetite I may have had, I decided to go to the pool. The Germans left in this place several splendid baths and swimming complexes. 

After a summer spent on the coast, the fall was spent in the covered pools with the crowd there. One of these pools was in the center of the city. I went there several times a week. Because the swimming section of my sports club had its training there, even though I was not a professional swimming athlete I was able to get my own locker, with two padded locks. 

Swimming was always the number one matter for me. If I found myself anywhere for more than a week, the most important concern was whether there was somewhere there to get a swim in. Unfortunately, swimming from the fourth year of my life, through the years I permanently impressed and magnified my slight but various bad swimming habits. They were in all practicality uncorrectable. I could swim any distance, any river, or any lake very effectively, but there was no possibility of being some record holder or even winning any more serious competition.

As usual the pool crowd was all there and when I recounted to them the day’s adventures they revealed to me a certain very vital, unknown to me, and wildly disturbing fact, namely—that for the last couple of years in the army there existed certain units, comprised of a certain element, like sons of former capitalists and freeholders, sons of rich peasants, sons of pre-war politicians, reactionaries and young people who demonstrated their pro-American and pro-Western sympathies. 

Collectively they were called class enemies, or the anti-socialist or anti-Soviet element, and they were directed into a special battalion, where, ostensibly within the parameters of the broad duties of army service, they were forced into hard labor, often fourteen to sixteen hours a day in the coal mines and the most unhealthy and dangerous sections of heavy and chemical industry. 

The aim—biological destruction of the undesirable element in the course of building the socialist nation. Candidates for this service were designated by the communist party’s youth organizations, mainly the ZMP and the UB, the security office of the ministry of public security. 

Finally it became clear to me what the presence of the miserable faced self-important civvies at the assentierung meant.I swam for more than an hour. Indoor swimming, outside the simple joy of contact with water, was, no matter how you looked at it, a decidedly dull activity. However, it did often lend itself as an occasion for the peaceful gathering of thoughts and needless to say, what I had just heard affected me to the core. 

Physical labor, as it were, never interested me, and I never felt the slightest urge or predisposition in this direction. I knew perfectly well that I could not count one hundred percent on my competitive athletic standing to keep me from the labor-penal brigades. 

Of course the chance existed that maybe I would qualify for the sports team representing the army, but I did not yet hold master’s classification, only first class, and so it was almost certain that instead I would contribute to the numbers of the already mentioned hard labor battalions… To this, my predicament was made more dire by two elements—my fatal political opinion, and some unspoken antagonism between our trainers and the trainers of the army’s sports team. 

All in all, a situation not too rosy. The prospects that were likely to await me shortly did not give me peace and compelled me to react. I was fully motivated, wanting to spare my health, and maybe even my life, to escape from this miserable, peasant and lumpenproletariat dominated country. 

For many reasons, my family had attempted to make an escape to the American zone of occupation in Germany not two years after the end of the war. It was a time when from day to day the horrendous and ever more consuming terror of the new pro-Communist and pro-Soviet establishment was becoming abundantly self-evident; there would be no World War Three, lamentably, no General Eisenhower or General Anders on a white horse leading an American invasion here. Everyone was beginning to orient themselves exactly as to what was and what would be. 

The main reason for my family’s attempt to escape the country was because my father, who spent nearly the entire war as a partisan fighter with the AK, the insurgency, became a wanted man by the UB after the end of the war and, intending to avoid arrest, had to hide. The whole thing was organized by my mother’s brother, Uncle Stanley. 

Before the war he was the co-owner of a prospering brokerage firm and a citizen of the city of Gdynia. The entire war he worked intelligence for the AK, he knew several languages fluently, he was handsome, energetic and enterprising but womanizing too. As a youth with experience of war, I was able to keep my lips sealed, and so I was informed daily by my mother about the progress of the preparations. Unfortunately, some ten days before the whole affair was to go down, my uncle was murdered under mysterious circumstances. The tragedy deeply affected my family and unfortunately the business of escape from the country fell through, but it left in my consciousness potential escape as a completely real possibility.

It was already early evening by the time I left the swimming complex. The Douglas MacArthur outfit, along with the US Navy sweater I left, together with the incumbent military booklet, in the buttoned right pocket of my shirt, upon which I did not even want to look, and which I did not even want to touch, in my double-locked pool locker. There I had found, and immediately changed into, thin brown velvet pants, a black sweater of the Montmartre existentialists, and an English officer’s Burberry trench coat with all the frills. I had left this there at the pool a few days ago in the afternoon when the weather suddenly cleared, which had been, after all, the earlier forecast on the radio from the American sector in Berlin. I even changed my socks, from the cotton white to thinner ones with red-orange-lemon horizontal stripes. 

Again I got to feeling like Humphrey Bogart. As I calculated, I had three to five weeks. I knew that if I wanted to save myself, I had to operate with lightning speed, because otherwise I could perish poorly. Above all, the most important was contacts. People to whom I could turn and who could eventually be able to do something for me I could count on the fingers of one hand.