1944 (Part VIII)

First of all, I asked the local parish priest if I could become an altar boy. Because of an uncommon and to this day unexploited acting talent, I was able to convince him that there had manifested itself in me a revelation of a kind of prematurely developed calling.

Touched, the priest directed me to the vicar, who was responsible for everything having to do with altar boys. I had to wait a long time in front of a small home, the so called vicarage, because the vicar was just partaking in his meal. When he finally came out, he gave me a liturgy with some marked Latin text, and there were five pages of this, and he said that I had to commit this to memory and return in two weeks.

I remember it was a Wednesday. Because every week counted, and rather each Sunday, never in my life had I learned anything so intensively and diligently, so much that even most of the residents of the shared farm house began to worry whether everything was alright with me, but no one especially had any mind to this, because the whole time the negotiations with the Germans were advancing.

Some petty officers constantly came to us for long conferences and even longer settling of details, and one in particular always tried to get a game of bridge going. None of them paid the least bit of attention to the piles of weapons in each corner not to the very Semitic looking Miss Stefa nor her two Jewish girls.

I was only a child but yet again I came to appreciate the fact that honest work really did give the best results. On Saturday morning I was already ready, but when I reported to the vicar, he, hurrying to breakfast, told me to return in the afternoon.

The exam lasted more than an hour and turned out exceptionally well. It had to do with this, that the vicar recited in Latin some words that were in the liturgy, and I, despite not understanding any of it, like a parrot continued from that point until he interrupted me.

We did this some several dozen times.

The next day, and this was Sunday, I was already to serve for the vicar at mass.

I took the place of the released altar boy, for a long time accurately suspected of drinking from the ceremonial wine. Mass, which the vicar performed, began at seven in the morning, and half an hour to nine was the next one, for the German soldiers from the Bavarian unit of mechanics.

German Mass lasted a precise forty five minutes, and then, at ten, began a very boring extended singing Mass, which the priest led and which could last even two and a half hours. Before seven I was in the vestry where the vicar gave me last minute instructions.

Two altar boys served for Mass. The other was older than me by three or four years, a country boy with a disproportionately large head, very pious and even, from this devotion, diffident. We dressed in over the top starched garments. The garments of my new colleague barely made it through his big head. According to the vicar’s directions I was to do the same as him, only that he was in charge of wine and I of the missal.

Everything went not too poorly. There were not too many faithful, maybe thirty, and maybe even less, a few of the locals, devotees who hung around the church and a few peasants, who had later some of their own affairs and unfortunately could not participate in the prestigious, directed by the parish priest, extended singing Mass.

When our Mass finished, the vicar immediately went for breakfast, and told us to stay put in the vestry this entire time, that is, to the moment when before ten the parish priest would appear. On the matter of the vicar and his pathological bouts of hunger gossip abound.

Despite that he ate much more often than the average person’s frequency, not to mention already the quantities, he was very thin and despite his young age did not look too healthy. Earthy white skin, drips of sweat on his forehead, shaky hands and permanent states of impairment signaled that he was not well, and the repeating constant attacks of purely animalistic hunger allowed everyone to suspect that the cause of all this was a wild feeding tape worm in his digestive tract, with which the vicar, in fact against his own will, had to divide each mouthful he consumed.

For the young parish priest this was very stressful. Long ago he came to the conclusion that when he is receiving the most sacred sacrament, then at least half of the host was taken also by the parasite, being ensconced in the vicar’s organism somewhat as an antichrist.

The horrible realization of the sacrilege being committed daily hung heavily on the vicar like the proverbial millstone on the neck. He came from a peasant family, because of this he did not want even to talk about any visit to the doctor, even more because in the area there were not really any doctors. Before the war almost every doctor practicing here represented the books of Moses.

The smarter of them in June of 1941 escaped with the Soviets, and the rest to this time were already long ago thoroughly smoked out by the Germans and Ukrainians. There was a moderately famous in the area folk healer—five hours of dangerous trek by horse—but it came to be that not long ago the folk healer was also murdered, I don’t remember anymore if as a Pole by Ukrainians or as a Ukrainian by Poles.

So we sat in the vestry as instructed, and after some ten minutes came the German priest. He was an older fellow, who was of the age still to have made it through the first world war in his youth, and apparently, as he once attested to uncle Poldyk, for some time he even served at Verdun. He was named Mayer-Walzer and he was of the rank Hauptmann.

As participants at the shrine, the Germans were self-sufficient. They brought with them everything: liturgical apparel, missals, their own tabernacle, chalices, as well as other accessories necessary to perform Mass.

Of course all of this was in a modest but rather tasteful field version. For Mass two young soldiers served for the chaplain. The German Mass began punctually. The faithful there were maybe sixty, and the devotional songs they sang did not differ much from the songs sung by the contemporary yokels and their hags.

After about ten minutes, when nothing suggested that the German Mass would be in some sudden and unexpected way interrupted, I went quickly to the hanger, where the chaplain Mayer-Walzer hung his coat, his parade officer cap as well as his belt and gun.