Jakob Kowalski was twenty-three, a mechanic in the small town of Wieliczka, twenty kilometers southeast of Kraków. His days were measured in the rhythmic hum of tractor engines, the scent of diesel mixed with fresh-cut hay, and the seasonal cycle of the harvest. The family farm—twenty hectares of rye, potatoes, and beets—had survived the Great War relatively intact; his father had returned from Austrian service in 1918 with only a limp and a quiet hatred for empires. Jakob had grown up tinkering with the first Fordson tractors imported in the 1920s
