Even when I feel most sorry for myself, I cannot deny it: It was my drum, no, it was I myself, Oskar the drummer, who dispatched first my poor mama, then Jan Bronski, my uncle and father, to their graves.

But on days when an importunate feeling of guilt, which nothing can dispel, sits on the very pillows of my hospital bed, I tend, like everyone else, to make allowances for my ignorance—the ignorance which came into style in those years and which even today quite a few of our citizens wear like a jaunty and oh, so becoming little hat.

Oskar, the sly ignoramus, an innocent victim of Polish barbarism, was taken to the City Hospital with brain fever. Matzerath was notified. He had reported my disappearance the night before, although his ownership of me had never been proved.

As for the thirty men with upraised arms and hands folded behind their necks, they—and Jan—after having their pictures taken for the newsreels, were taken first to the evacuated Victoria School, then to Schiesstange Prison. Finally, early in October, they were entrusted to the porous sand behind the wall of the run-down, abandoned old cemetery in Saspe.

How did Oskar come to know all this? I heard it from Leo Schugger. For of course there was never any official announcement to tell us against what wall the thirty-one men were shot and what sand was shoveled over them.

Hedwig Bronski first received a notice to vacate the flat in Ringstrasse, which was taken over by the family of a high-ranking officer in the Luftwaffe. While she was packing with Stephen’s help and preparing to move to Ramkau—where she owned a house and a few acres of forest and farmland—she received the communication which made her officially a widow. She gazed at it out of eyes which mirrored but did not penetrate the sorrows of the world, and it was only very slowly, with the help of her son Stephan, that she managed to distil the sense of it. Here is the communication:

Court-Martial, Eberhardt St. L. Group 41/39

Zoppot, 6 Oct. 1939

So you see, not a word about Saspe. Out of solicitude for the men’s relatives, who would have been crushed by the expense of caring for so large and flower-consuming a mass grave, the authorities assumed full responsibility for maintenance and perhaps even for transplantation. They had the sandy soil leveled and the cartridge cases removed, except for one—one is always overlooked—because cartridge cases are out of place in any respectable cemetery, even an abandoned one.

But this one cartridge case, which is always left behind, the one that concerns us here, was found by Leo Schugger, from whom no burial, however discreet, could be kept secret. He, who knew me from my poor mama’s funeral and from that of my scar-covered friend Herbert Truczinski, who assuredly knew where they had buried Sigismund Markus—though I never asked him about it—was delighted, almost beside himself with joy, when late in November, just after I was discharged from the hospital, he found an opportunity to hand me the telltale cartridge case.

But before I guide you in the wake of Leo Schugger to Saspe Cemetery with that slightly oxidized cartridge case, which perhaps had harbored the lead kernel destined for Jan, I must ask you to compare two hospital beds, the one I occupied in the children’s section of the Danzig City Hospital, and the one I am lying in now. Both are metal, both are painted with white enamel, yet there is a difference. The bed in the children’s section was shorter but higher, if you apply a yardstick to the bars. Although my preference goes to the shorter but higher cage of 1939, I have found peace of mind in my present makeshift bed, intended for grownups, and learned not to be too demanding. Months ago I put in a petition for a higher bed, though I am perfectly satisfied with the metal and the white enamel. But let the management grant my petition or reject it; I await the result with equanimity.

Today I am almost defenseless against my visitors; then, on visiting days in the children’s section, a tall fence separated me from Visitor Matzerath, from Visitors Greff (Mr. and Mrs.) and Scheffler (Mr. and Mrs.). And toward the end of my stay at the hospital, the bars of my fence divided the mountain-of-four-skirts named after my grandmother Anna Koljaiczek, into worried, heavily breathing compartments. She came, sighed, raised her great multifarious hands, disclosing her cracked pink palms, then let hands and palms sink in despair. So violent was her despair that they slapped against her thighs, and I can hear that slapping to this day, though I can give only a rough imitation of it on my drum.

On the very first visit she brought along her brother Vincent Bronski, who clutched the bars of my bed and spoke or sang softly but incisively and at great length about the Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland. Oskar was glad when there was a nurse nearby. For those two were my accusers, they turned their unclouded Bronski eyes on me and, quite oblivious of the time I was having with this brain fever I had acquired while playing skat in the Polish Post Office, expected me to comfort them with a kind word, to reassure them about Jan’s last hours, spent between terror and card houses. They wanted a confession from me that would put Jan in the clear; as though I had it in my power to clear him, as though my testimony carried any weight.

Supposing I had sent an affidavit to the court-martial of the Eberhardt Group. What would I have said? I, Oskar Matzerath, avow and declare that on the evening of August 31 I waited outside Jan Bronski’s home for him to come home and lured him, on the ground that my drum needed repairing, back to the Polish Post Office, which Jan Bronski had left because he did not wish to defend it.

Oskar made no such confession; he did nothing to exculpate his presumptive father. Every time he decided to speak, to tell the old people what had happened, he was seized with such convulsions that at the demand of the head nurse his visiting hours were curtailed and the visits of his grandmother Anna and his presumptive grandfather Vincent were forbidden.

The two old people, who had walked in from Bissau and brought me apples, left the children’s ward with the wary, helpless gait of country folk in town. And with each receding step of my grandmother’s four skirts and her brother’s black Sunday suit, redolent of cow dung, my burden of guilt, my enormous burden of guilt increased.

So much happened at once. While Matzerath, the Greffs, the Schefflers crowded round my bed with fruit and cakes, while my grandmother and Uncle Vincent walked in from Bissau by way of Goldkrug and Brenntau because the railroad line from Karthaus to Langfuhr had not yet been cleared, while nurses, clad in anesthetic white, babbled hospital talk and substituted for angels in the children’s ward, Poland was not yet lost, almost lost, and finally, at the end of those famous eighteen days, Poland was lost, although it was soon to turn out that Poland was not yet lost; just as today, despite the efforts of the Silesian and East Prussian patriotic societies, Poland is not yet lost.

O insane cavalry! Picking blueberries on horseback. Bearing lances with red and white pennants. Squadrons of melancholy, squadrons of tradition. Picture-book charges. Racing across the fields before Lodz and Kutno. At Modlin substituting for the fortress. Oh, so brilliantly galloping! Always waiting for the sunset. Both foreground and background must be right before the cavalry can attack, for battles were made to be picturesque and death to be painted, poised in mid-gallop, then falling, nibbling blueberries, the dog roses crackle and break, providing the itch without which the cavalry will not jump. There are the Uhlans, they’ve got the itch again, amid haystacks—another picture for you—wheeling their horses, they gather round a man, his name in Spain is Don Quixote, but here he is Pan Kichot, a pure-blooded Pole, a noble, mournful figure, who has taught his Uhlans to kiss ladies’ hands on horseback, ah, with what aplomb they will kiss the hand of death, as though death were a lady; but first they gather, with the sunset behind them—for color and romance are their reserves—and ahead of them the German tanks, stallions from the studs of the Krupps von Bohlen und Halbach, no nobler steeds in all the world. But Pan Kichot, the eccentric knight in love with death, the talented, too talented knight, half-Spanish half-Polish, lowers his lance with the red-and-white pennant and calls on his men to kiss the lady’s hand. The storks clatter white and red on the rooftops, and the sunset spits out pits like cherries, as he cries to his cavalry: “Ye noble Poles on horseback, these are no steel tanks, they are mere windmills or sheep, I summon you to kiss the lady’s hand.”