Janusz stared at his troops deeply as they solemnly walked through the serene boscage. He wanted to see their souls again, see the strength they had before everything, before it all. But now was not before, and they were bruised, battered, and scarred. 

        He saw his brother, Franciszek, walk by. He remembered the good times when they were little. Now he was tall with a 5 o’clock shadow that had a bayonet mark blazing straight through. His thick eyebrows hid his eyes, which were crusty from his lack of hygiene. They parted ways. 

        Janusz was now on a trail he remembered walking along with the warm company of his father, who was now lost to the gulag. When the Soviets first came, they offered the resistance citizenship if they laid down their arms. Janusz’s father, knowing that he was too old to keep fighting, accepted the deal. But it was a trap, and he was put in front of a court designed to put him into the gaping mouth of the gulag, hungry for more innocence to thrive on. And with one bite, he was gone.

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        Franciszek stumbled over an unburied root; it kicked him onto the ground. He attempted to stand up, but an unusual movement caught his eye. There were hundreds of Soviets marching in unison with their backs to Franciszek.  He scrambled for his Karabinek wz.29. He needed to alert the resistance. Their prediction was erroneous, and the nuisances were there almost an hour early. He ran back the way he came, alerting Mateusz, a 75-year-old general. 

        “Tell the guys!” Franciszek sputtered, barely able to talk, partially due to fear, partially due to the quarter-kilometer sprint he ran. “The Soviets are here, we gotta go!”

        “Yes, but how will we -?” Mateusz asked.

        “I can do it. Just go!” Franciszek cut in hushedly, knowing the Soviets couldn’t be far. He turned and spun, looking for a way to sneak behind the Soviets. He saw a tree, but it was barely too thin for him to hide behind. There were bushes, but they had lost their leaves already. Overrun by faulty possibilities, Franciszek did the only thing he knew - fighting. He bombastically flew down the path they had so surgically cut just months before. He then saw the Soviets, towering and burly. He wasn’t scared since he had ripped through hundreds of soviet skulls. So, he worked his rifle like a pianist on the ivories, mowing soldiers down, but he knew his rounds were low, and the others were retreating. He foresaw no other options. So, as the last round came to the top of the rifle, and he shot one last communist rat; he didn’t tempt fate. He walked up to the soldiers and turned his back.

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Janusz heard Franciszek’s bravery in each shot, knowing each bullet met its mark with a skull. But then he heard none. They had got him. The only man that was equal to twenty of them was dead, he was sure of it. He felt tears trickle down as he walked away from the battlefield

The next day Janusz went for his brother’s body. It would be gruesome to carry his own sibling’s body, especially with his short stature, but he deserved a proper burial next to his father’s memorial. But as he got to the path Franciszek died on, he saw nothing, not even a trace, of his brother. He saw no blood on where he was fighting, judging by the bullet casing. Then he knew. He had been taken to the gulag, just like his father, but this time he could do something about it. He took one bullet casing before hurrying to the underground. 

        The underground was shabby, nothing too fancy for a group of the resistance. Tree roots were dangling from the ceiling, waiting to nail one’s head. Some of the men played cards, some tried to work radios to talk to their families. No use. Janusz walked up to a little mound of dirt to propose his concept.

        “Why not lead a charge on the gulag? We’ve already lost Łukasz and so many others there. They could still be there, rotting away, losing faith!” Janusz protested. 

        Andrzej, a scout, disagreed.  “I’ve seen their guard towers. You ain’t getting past those alive. Plus, most of our men are already dead,” he argued. Everyone seemed to agree with Andrzej; No one wanted to go there.

        “We’ll whittle down their numbers if we catch them off guard. They think they’re untouchable, but we can show them who’s really in charge of Poland!” Janusz deflected. The discord continued almost all night.

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        Franciszek was beaten all the time. Even on his first day, he felt his limbs would fall off. He thought he could escape the gulag after being captured, but he quickly realized that his idea was a fever dream. After staring blankly into the hallway for almost half an hour, he tried to talk to the cell next to him.

        “Hello?” Franciszek very quietly said for even a sliver of a chance at beguiling.

        “No use, buddy,” the man replied. He sounded as though he had been alive from the beginning of time as he sounded wise yet desperate. “I know you want to make a plan to bust out of here, but the truth is, you won’t. Even if you do, the soviets will find you, then kill you. Better to just get your death out of the way now.”

        “But may-” Franciszek started.

        “There’s no chance, friend. They won’t even let me get my life out of the way now. Just be happy you can die,” the prisoner slid in. Franciszek didn’t want it to be true, but he admittedly knew it was going to be. He stared at the concrete over his head where he knew he would meet his demise.

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        Janusz dug through the thickly coated dirt while his homemade necklace created from the bullet casing he had acquired perpetually tapped on his chest. They would soon reach concrete. The tunnel itself was about one person tall and one wide. Once they had breached the gulag; they would easily kill the guards silently, release everyone, and then extract the prisoners in the Soviet’s tanks. As Janusz was thinking about how smoothly it would go, his shovel hit something hard, making a gravelly sound that everyone plugged their ears to evade.

        “I guess we found the courtyard,” someone said. Janusz pulled out his pickaxe and rhythmically started to mine out a hole. 

        It took half an hour and a few extra hands, but Janusz was able to poke his eyes through their makeshift entrance. It took him as much accuracy as threading a needle. He saw a few guards talking. Not too much surveillance. They dug out the hole so the rest of the extraction team could get through. Then they made a beeline for the cell block. Each of them had made a lockpick before coming. Janusz looked around for his brother, but most of the prisoners laid as peacefully quiet as a lamb. He saw a guard from the corner of his eye, trotting down his contrived route, and hid in a nearby dumpster quicker than the blink of an eye. 

        Unfortunately, an untrained recruit, Włodimir, wasn’t so spry. The Russian shot him on the spot, alerting other guards and waking up estranged detainees. The resistance went into a panic. There was no point in stealth anymore because the Soviets were probably already asking for reinforcements, so Janusz jumped from his cover and killed a passing guard with his bayonet. He hoped that if he dinned, he could find his brother with ease. A convict would never pass up the opportunity to watch a fight. Janusz injured another guard with a well-placed shot on his shoulder. A fresh slew of soldiers started contracting into the hallway; Janusz knew he couldn’t handle them.

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Franciszek woke to the sound of gunshots. There was no time to wipe off his groggy expression. He had been in the work camps almost all night, squandering all energy. He turned to see the guards, distressed, desperately hiding behind one of the many tantamount walls. Figures were on the other side of his cell. Franciszek assumed they were the resistance fighters. 

        Had the aged prisoner been wrong? Franciszek asked himself? Franciszek hoped and prayed for his brother to appear, swooping in to save him from the nightmare. His wish came true. He saw Janusz, running frantically from yet another group of soldiers with a bullet casing fashioned into a necklace lightly dangling from his neck. That was his last sight though, as a bullet pierced the dense iron jail bars and slit a clean, surgical hole in his forehead. He tumbled to the ground, forced to stare at the same ceiling he brought himself to sleep on just the last night. In his final breath, he knew that the old prisoner had been right.

-Tim K.