A failed martyr—and a real hero?

Press, 25 February 1987, Page 19

A failed martyr—and a real hero?

Neal Ascherson, the London “Observer” columnist, writes on a touching cult of symbolic reconciliation that is being kicked apart.

In the village cemetery of Machowa, in southern Poland, the grave of a Nazi soldier is covered with flowers. The grass around it has been trodden by pilgrims, by Catholic bishops, by journalists from several countries, and — most recently — by the boots of ill-tempered policemen.

A touching cult of symbolic reconciliation has been kicked apart, leaving a scatter of recriminations. Private Otto Schimek, an Austrian conscript in the Wehrmacht, was only 19 in November, 1944, when he faced a firing squad. He left behind him a letter to his brothers and sisters: “ ... My heart is calm. Have we anything to lose except this miserable life? And they can’t kill the soul.” After the war, his family, from a poor district of Vienna, managed to have his body exhumed and transferred to consecrated

ground in the Machowa churchyard.

Gradually the rumour spread that Otto Schimek had been executed because he had refused to obey an order to shoot Polish civilian hostages, mostly women and children. It was a story very moving to many, in Poland and Austria. And it was highly convenient to some.

For the Polish Catholic Church, Schimek’s sacrifice was a symbol of the reconciliation between Poles and their wartime oppressors, which the Church had begun to preach from the mid-19605, in the teeth of outraged abuse from the Communist regime. He was given a lavish gravestone, complete with photograph and inscription commemorating his deed. The cult became popular. One young friend of mine remembers the priest in his parish church at Gdansk, far away on the Baltic,

leading prayers for the canonisation of Schimek as a saint. Catholic Austria, too, was delighted. Here, at last, was public proof that at least one Austrian who was not a Communist or socialist had resisted Hitler’s dictatorship at the price of his life. Cardinal Konig travelled from Vienna to pray at the grave. Austrian Catholic journalists wrote respectful articles, noting that Schimek’s grave was drawing not only pilgrimages but votary offerings imploring Schimek’s intervention in Heaven to cure sickness or loss. The Polish authorities, deciding to make the best of it, published some of these articles in the official press. Then, last year, some Leftwing and anti-clerical Austrian .journalists began to check the Wehrmacht archives and courtmartial records. Nowhere did they find any evidence that Schimek had refused to take part in executions. Instead, he had run away from his unit, apparently out of general dislike of military service, and after trying to hide among civilian Poles for a few weeks, had been caught, tried, and shot for desertion. There was consternation in the Church, glee in Polish Govern-

ment circles — and not only there. In West Germany, the Social-Democrat “Frankfurter Rundschau” published a disagreeable article remarking that "Austria had boasted of its own hero, a victim of National Socialism whose rarity made him precious, while Polish Catholics ... venerated Schimek as an example of resistance to political authority, a symbol of Solidarity’s resistance to the regime.” The article was reprinted in a Polish Government newspaper, while an official went on Warsaw television to jeer at Schimek as a “mere deserter” too cowardly to join the Polish partisans. A "mere deserter”? This was too much. The respected writer, Edmund Osmanczyk, retorted with an article beginning: “I was a deserter from the Hitlerite armies. And I have never hidden the fact.”

Living in Germany at the outbreak of war, Osmanczyk had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht but had escaped to join the Polish resistance, partly with the help of anti-Nazi Austrian soldiers. He could have added that deserting from the armies of foreign occupiers has been a mark of Polish patriotism through the ages.

And things have come to a pretty disgraceful pass when a European Government — even one as erratic as Poland’s — suggests that a soldier who deserted from Hitler’s armies deserved his fate. As the famous Cracow columnist Kisiel asked last week: “A 19-year-old soldier from a poor Viennese family who escapes from the army and manages to hide among Poles for a few weeks — is that a small thing, in those times of archsavagery and arch-barbarity?” I will watch with interest to see whether the Catholic Church, faced with the truth about poor little Otto Schimek, will decide that this is a failed martyr and quietly snuff out his cult. I hope not. Young Poles will not give him up, anyway. As a deserter rather than as a man who refused to commit an atrocity, he is still the patron of the “Freedom and Peace” movement, a small Green-ish opposition group which recently tried to demonstrate at his grave but was dispersed by police. The meagre data about Schimek which remain, mostly letters to his family, show that he hated being a soldier and in particular disliked the duty ’ to kill. He had been called up at the

age of only 17. To his mother he wrote that “I will aim away so as not to hit anyone. After all, they want to go home just like I do.” For these views he was bullied and mistreated until, finally and pathetically, he ran away in enemy territory.

For his army companions, Schimek probably seemed a despicable weakling. With battalions of Schimeks, nobody wins a war. But it is also true that this boy remained a whole personality which the entire weight of Hitlerite tyranny and and ideology could not split. And perhaps the disappearance of the “martyr against atrocity” element makes Otto Schimek more universal rather than less. Kiesel calls his desertion “a European gesture.” He did not run away because he was Austrian, or because he admired Poland, or even — as far as one can see — because he was antiNazi, although he probably was.

To shoot, you have to close one eye. Schimek could not do this; both eyes stayed open. He said, naively: “I’m not interested in war.” I suspect that now, and only now, he will become a real hero of our time.