Poland will never be a beautiful country, but some of its landscapes have a melancholy charm. It took me about half a day to get from Cracow to Lublin. Along the road, large, gloomy potato fields, interspersed with irrigation canals, alternated with Scotch pine and birch woods, the ground bare, without undergrowth, dark and silent, seemingly sealed off from the beautiful June light. Piontek drove capably, at a steady speed. This taciturn family man was an excellent travel companion: he spoke only when addressed, and carried out his tasks calmly and methodically. Every morning, I found my boots polished and my uniform brushed and ironed; when I went out, the Opel was waiting, cleaned of any dust or mud from the day before. At meals, Piontek ate with gusto and drank little, and between meals, he never asked for anything. I had immediately given him our travel budget folder, and he kept the expenses meticulously up to date, noting down, with a pencil stub wetted between his lips, every pfennig spent. He spoke a rasping German, with a strong accent but correctly, and also got by in Polish. He had been born near Tarnowitz; in 1919, after the Partition, he and his family had found themselves Polish citizens, but had chosen to stay there, so as not to lose their plot of land; then his father had been killed in a riot, during the days of unrest before the war: Piontek assured me that it was an accident, and didn’t blame his old Polish neighbors, most of them expelled or arrested during the reincorporation of that part of Upper Silesia. Having become a citizen of the Reich again, he had been mobilized and had ended up in the police, and from there, he didn’t really know how, he had been assigned to the service of the
