Freedom Climbers (Legends and Lore) Read online

  In truth, Jurek didn’t think much of women’s expeditions, even though he admired Wanda. He supposed that she viewed climbing as a competitive sport, which was why she insisted on climbing with, and being compared to, other women. He just wanted to go climbing. Most of his male counterparts felt the same. Nevertheless, Wanda was well connected and had managed to get a climbing permit for K2. If he and Voytek could tag along, they weren’t too proud to do it.

  Since Voytek knew her better, it was he who had negotiated their places on her permit. They wouldn’t get in her way, he promised, or climb on her route. He knew it was important to Wanda that her all-women’s expeditions at least be perceived as being unsupported by men. As far as the Pakistani authorities knew, he and Jurek were along as official photographers and reporters, as well as to protect the ladies in a Muslim country. He understood Wanda’s wishes, and he respected them.

  This was characteristic of Voytek. Unlike some of his more plainspoken fellow climbers, he was thoughtful and careful about what he said. His powers of observation were impressive, not just of facts, but of nuance and attitude and feeling. Known as a “thinking man’s” climber, he came from an educated and cultured background and was able to demonstrate his remarkable curiosity in a number of languages.

  Now in his early thirties, Voytek came from the small village of Skrzynka in western Poland, in what formerly was German territory. There, he spent his early years surrounded by nature. A move to the war-ravaged city of Wrocław at age 10 sank Voytek into a childhood depression. Studying electrical engineering in university did little to improve his spirits. Then he encountered rock climbing. His natural aptitude for climbing on rock garnered him the nickname zwierz, or “animal.” He immediately grasped that climbing was a kind of addiction for him. Little did he understand how serious a trap that addiction could become.

  A year younger than his intense friend, Jurek Kukuczka was built solid and stocky, while the slender Voytek was coiled tight like a spring. Jurek was a man of few words. If anything caught one’s attention, it was his eyes. They were warm and friendly, with just a hint of a smile. Born in 1948, Jurek, like so many of Poland’s leading climbers, studied electrical engineering at university. This prepared him well for work in the coal-mining industry that dominated the Katowice area of southwestern Poland. But his life was climbing. From the first time he touched rock at the age of 17, he felt a surge of power that ultimately propelled him to the world’s highest summits. And in the mountains, he was unstoppable.

  Jurek, Voytek, and Wanda: three climbing legends, all in Pakistan with the same goal—to climb what was widely accepted as the most difficult of the 14 peaks that exceed that magic height, 8000 metres. Their fierce resolve and tireless motivation had made these three among the most highly respected climbers in the world. Yet nothing about their position in the mountaineering world was accidental. Their brilliant careers as alpinists had begun humbly; but like so many, they were shaped by the violent devastation into which they were born—a country plagued by wars, then carved up and dominated by two stern masters: Germany and the Soviet Union. And although Wanda, Jurek, and Voytek were among the lucky ones to survive, the terrors of war helped shape their resilience and toughness. For all of these elite climbers, the story was the same: history had hardened both their bodies and their minds. They weren’t just climbers. They were Polish climbers.

  Four years before Wanda was born, Poland’s fate was sealed. In 1939, just days before the onset of World War II, the Nazis and Soviets signed a non-aggression agreement known as the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact. The agreement stated that the two countries would not attack each other and would handle any “problems” in an amicable manner. Initiated by Germany, the agreement was meant to minimize the threat of having to fight a war on two fronts—a situation they wanted to avoid at any cost, particularly after their experiences in the previous world war.

  The “non-aggression” theme is ironic because, at the same time, the two states agreed to a secret protocol that would partition Poland and the Baltic States between Germany and the Soviet Union, providing the Soviets with a buffer zone in case of an attack from the west. This secret deal precipitated years of bloodshed and horror.

  Less than two weeks after the secret protocol was signed, Germany unveiled its duplicitous strategy through an ingenious plan. On August 31, 1939, German soldiers attacked a German-language radio station in Gliwice, in the Upper Silesia region of Poland. The attack was a complete sham, for at least one of the instigators was not a German soldier at all, but a convicted German criminal who had been promised reprieve for his actions. Mission accomplished, he was mowed down by real German SS soldiers. The SS troops removed his blood-soaked uniform, replaced it with a Polish uniform, and left the body to be discovered by the police. The next morning the world learned the shocking news: the Poles had apparently launched an unprovoked attack on the Third Reich.

  Germany’s military pummelling of Poland accelerated after that, exactly as planned: air raids, dive-bombers, street bombs, and rifle fire. In less than a week, Poland was unable to defend its frontiers. By the end of the second week, Warsaw was surrounded. The Poles were completely outnumbered: 2600 German tanks against the Poles’ 150; 2000 German warplanes against 400 Polish. But the Poles didn’t panic. They knew they only had to hold the Germans off for a couple of weeks until the Western Allies, who had recently declared war on Germany, would launch a major offensive.

  That never happened.

  Then, on September 17, 1939, to the complete surprise of the Poles and the rest of the world, but precisely as outlined in the secret protocol, the Soviets crossed Poland’s eastern frontier. The Polish government fled Warsaw, leaving the local population to defend it, which they managed to do for another 10 days. But by then it was clear what was going on: the Germans and the Soviets were in collusion, pinching off the city. There was no place to hide. The Polish armies lost more than 60,000 men, with 140,000 wounded. The Allies never appeared. It would have been unthinkable to upset the Soviet alliance for the sake of the Poles.

  Germany and the Soviets then had to divide the spoils. While the Soviets carved up the northeast, the Reich picked up the western parts of the country, where they promptly declared martial law. They designated their newly occupied territories as “work areas,” offering just two types of punishment for perceived offences: concentration camps or death.

  Both sides appeared to hate the Poles almost as much as they hated the Jews. Nazi military commander Heinrich Himmler busied himself criss-crossing the country in his efforts to classify, segregate, and subjugate the population. Village by village, he forced each citizen to register with the Nazi authorities. They doled out identity cards and work passes and finally, calorie coupons, depending on each individual’s classification. A “first-class” person born of German heritage received 4000 calories per day. A Polish worker got 900. A Jew, usually nothing at all.

  The troops expelled Polish citizens from their homes in order to make room for German officials. Wanda’s father, Zbigniew Błaszkiewicz, was living in Radom in central Poland at the time. He was working as an engineer at a weapons factory when he was forced to flee rather than risk imprisonment. The soldiers gave him just a few hours to gather his meagre belongings and leave. Eager to get as far away as possible, he moved to Płungiany in northeastern Poland (later Lithuania). There, he met and married a well-educated local girl, Maria Pietkun, whose passion was translating hieroglyphics.

  Almost from the start there was tension between them. Zbigniew, who was obsessed with frugality and worries about the future, confided in his diaries that he didn’t completely respect his free-spirited wife. Wanda, their second of four children, was born on February 4, 1943, into a divided household and a divided country.

  It wasn’t just the Germans who were terrorizing Poland. In the northeast, where Wanda’s family lived, the Soviets were deporting Poles to concentration camps where they were used as slave labour. Throughout 1940 and 1941
, scores of freight trains headed east, full of falsely convicted Polish “criminals.” They were packed standing up in sealed, windowless cattle cars and transported thousands of kilometres at a time. They starved. They went mad. They froze. They even resorted to cannibalism. Those who died en route were thrown from openings in the car roofs. In all, 1.5 million Poles were deported, and nearly half never made it back. The brutality was another sad reminder of Poland’s melancholy history of partition.

  Between the Nazis and the Soviets, Poland was being systematically reduced to a slave nation. Completely isolated from outside help, it had no means of defending itself. Then the war changed direction when Germany attacked Russia on June 22, 1941. Incomprehensibly, the Soviets turned to the Poles for assistance. As outrageous as the idea was, answering the Soviets’ call saved Poland from total annihilation—but just barely, for it was on Poland’s soil that some of the principal battles were fought.

  German rulers had a plan for Poland and its people, despite their preoccupation with Russia. They estimated that about 20 million of the “least suitable” Poles should be resettled in Western Siberia; about four million were suitable for “re-Germanization” because of their Germanic roots; and the rest should simply be eliminated. The German troops confiscated private land, factories, and homes—without compensation. Poland provided Germany with the ideal location for a wide array of camps: camps for “criminals,” camps for deportees, camps for political and racial enemies, camps for slave labour and, finally, camps for systematic genocide. Lublin, Chełmno, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, and Auschwitz: names that became forever associated with inhumanity. But this program of death was not limited to the camps. From 1940 to 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto and most of its Jewish occupants were carefully and methodically eliminated.

  During the six years of war, from 1939 to 1945, more than six million Poles lost their lives—over 15 per cent of the population. Only 10 per cent of the dead were a result of direct war actions. The rest were Polish civilians, killed in executions and perished from disease and starvation in the streets and the camps. The numbers defy understanding, as do the conditions in which people struggled to survive during those years.

  Those who did survive continued fighting for their country’s independence, still with no help from abroad. The Warsaw Uprising, which Polish citizens launched in 1944 in order to gain back their capital, was doomed from the start. It took only 63 days for the Reich to demolish the city’s historical treasures, its hospitals, homes, and bridges. Mass shootings were commonplace. More than 150,000 Warsaw residents were killed, and the remaining half million were transported to labour camps. After the city emptied out, troops of German engineers came in and burned and destroyed everything that was left, with particular attention paid to historical monuments, churches, and archives. The German army had taken Hitler’s orders to heart when he said that Warsaw should be “razed without trace.”

  When the Russians pulled in a few months later, in early 1945, they didn’t take long to push the Germans back and install a new president in the city—a Communist. By the time “peace” was declared on May 9, 1945, all of Poland was under Soviet rule. Liberation from the Germans was complete—but it was liberation in name only, and even then it hardly lived up to the name.

  The new Soviet bosses made high-level deals and shuffled borders at will. Płungiany, where Wanda was born, was now in Lithuania and rechristened Plungė. The Polish citizens who survived were numbed by the six years of terror and slaughter. They no longer remembered what it felt like to walk in the streets without fear of being shot. Their social structure was completely altered; there was no more intelligentsia, and there were certainly no more Jews. For the survivors, each day that passed by blurred the memory of the Poland they had once known.

  Near the end of the war, Wanda’s family home fell into the hands of the conquering Soviets. By 1946 most of their personal property had been confiscated and it was clear they would have to flee. But to where? Eventually they joined Zbigniew’s parents in Łańcut, in the south, not far from the Ukraine border. Once again, Zbigniew packed up his family’s few pieces of furniture and clothing and set out. They weren’t alone. The pockmarked roads were crammed with tanks, motorcycles, trucks laden with gas cans, and human convoys—everyone leaving some anguish behind, looking for fresh hope, a new life.

  But in Łańcut, Zbigniew struggled to find meaningful work and, after the birth of two more children, the family of six outgrew the ancestral home and began to search for a place of their own. They found it in Wrocław, hundreds of kilometres to the west, where the ravages of war were still very evident. Street corners were piled with debris, and the walls of many buildings were scarred from shellfire. Dislodged roof tiles clattered down in the wind, and shards of glass in the gaping windows were bandaged over with cardboard. Some houses were completely destroyed, with just a few half-walls standing. The worst appeared as hideous, blackened, burnt-out shapes, etched against the sky. Everywhere was rubble.

  The Błaszkiewiczes moved into a partially destroyed, three-level house. The water pipes had burst; the windows were broken; the walls were damp with cold; the roof leaked. But according to the authorities, it was too large for just a family of six, so they threatened to move even more people in. The highly intelligent yet eccentric Zbigniew wanted none of that. He not only refused to repair the damage but inflicted even more on the old house in order to discourage any takers.

  The chaos of Wanda’s home was mirrored in the continuous power struggle within the household. Zbigniew was an impatient man, uninterested in practical things, preferring instead to invent new tools, experiment with unusual varieties of vegetables in his backyard garden, or tend to the goats that occupied the first level of the house. He was stingy with what little money he had, and he doled it out in dribs and drabs to Maria. When he lost all confidence in Maria’s ability to budget, he delegated responsibility for the household expenses to Wanda. This, at the age of four.

  It was difficult to find enough food in the shops, and the queues were endless. Luxuries like chocolate or coffee arrived only at Easter and Christmas, sent by sympathetic relatives living abroad. The stress grew too much for Maria, who couldn’t cope. Instead, she relied heavily on Wanda, the eldest daughter, who spent much of her time sweeping floors, peeling vegetables, standing in food lines, and caring for her siblings. Clever Wanda soon learned that the best way to finish her chores was to delegate them to her younger brother and sister, a practice she would use frequently on her climbs later in life. “She was a very good boss,” said her brother, Michael Błaszkiewicz, of their youth. “She was a hard boss,” sister Nina Fies corrected him.

  Even at this early age there was little time for Wanda to be a girl. One day, in a ruined section of the house, Wanda discovered a rag doll almost as big as her. The only thing missing was a head. She was overcome with childish joy when her parents managed to find a plastic head for the doll. It was much too tiny for such a big doll and looked ridiculous, even macabre. But Wanda the girl still had a doll, with a head, and for a time she was happy.

  Wanda didn’t mind looking after her much younger brother Michael, but her sister was a different matter. Nina was just close enough in age that she often wanted to be with her older sister, something that Wanda abhorred. “For me, it meant that my freedom was curbed,” she said. Years later, she struggled to find pleasant memories of that time. “I don’t remember the moments when love and tolerance were between us... Only the regrets stay in my mind.”1 But not so for Nina, who smiled sadly as she recalled her impressive older sister.

  Across the street from their home was a large wooded area, a favourite place for children to play and one of the few parts of the city that had not been assaulted. But even more fun was roaming throughout the nearby bombed-out houses, crunching broken glass underfoot, and building playhouses with bricks and stones. Hide-and-seek was popular, and so was finding unexploded grenades buried in the rubble.

  One afterno
on in the spring of 1948, Wanda, together with a few friends and her older brother, came upon one of these grenades. They decided to put it in a firepit and light it. Since Wanda was the only girl in the group, the boys chose to exclude her from this thrilling and forbidden game and sent her home, angry and crying. She wailed her story to her mother, who raced back through the streets to stop the others. She was too late. Mercifully, the killing scene was obscured by a thick, dusty haze. Only a few hours later, there was nothing left to indicate the hideous tragedy that had occurred: all of them killed, including Wanda’s brother. The emotional scars, and the capricious nature of death, never left Wanda, however. “I wouldn’t be here if seven-year-old boys could bear to play with five-year-old girls.”2

  Wanda’s childhood was not unusual; life in Poland at this time was anything but comfortable. The first postwar government administration was called the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), and, although the personnel were Polish, they were appointed by and worked for Stalin. The Soviets first set up a sinister surveillance system to deal with spies and saboteurs. Next, they “liberated” vast numbers of landowners from their property by breaking up all private holdings larger than 50 hectares into 15- to 20-hectare plots, which they then redistributed to peasants. But not even the peasants were safe. They were subsequently ordered to share their food with worker squads, all in the name of “agrarian reform.”

  In the three years that followed the war, there were massive resettlement programs. Millions of people took to the roads. Some were survivors of the work camps. Others were Polish refugees who had fled the country. Still others were residents ordered to relocate and populate the recovered territories in the north and west.

  A particularly tough year was 1947. The harvest failed, triggering a series of new laws and protocols created to manage the resulting panic. Centralized control grew even tighter. Economic statistics were considered state secrets, and free debate ceased. By 1948 the Soviets had successfully moulded the government into a clone of the Soviet system, not only in Poland but in all of the Soviet-controlled Eastern European countries. They closed the frontiers, tightened security to wartime levels and reintroduced conscription. They spent all the public coffers on military priorities and even set up a Soviet-style secret police to deal with any perceived transgressions.