7
From Wilno to Warsaw, September 1942–19 March 1943
Upon our return, Andrzej, Tadek and I resumed lectures with our tutor. I started my last year of primary schooling and Andrzej the first year of the gimnazium curriculum (first of six years of secondary education). Shortly thereafter, Tadek’s grandmother died and he left for Warsaw to live with his aunt. That autumn there was another fuel shortage and our supply of coal dust from the cellar floor was almost completely exhausted. At that time electricity was rationed at minimal levels. There were draconian penalties for exceeding that allowance: immediate suspension of service, fines and even prison. Wiktor, being an electrical engineer, found a solution. He altered the electricity meter so that at the flip of a switch it would reverse direction and the recorded consumption would decrease. From time to time we would flip the switch and run the meter backwards.
Wiktor then made several space heaters using resistant coils mounted on insulated frames. Each frame was about 18in high and 2ft wide with coils running up and down a couple of inches apart. The frames were mounted in flowerpots filled with cement to give them stability. After a couple of them were turned on they blew the fuses. Wiktor then changed the fuses not only in our apartment but also on the principal lines running into the building. The heaters were very effective but you had to be very careful around them as the resistant coils were red hot.
In late autumn, mother told us she would try to go to Warsaw. At that time you needed a special pass from the German authorities to cross the border between what was considered the Ostland, territories captured by Germans after their invasion of Russia, and the Generalgouvernement, the part of Poland captured in 1939. After obtaining the necessary pass in November, she left for Warsaw. Before leaving, Zygmunt asked her to deliver a letter to Janek Bytnar, an old friend from secondary school. (Jan Bytnar, code name ‘Rudy’, became a legendary figure in the Polish Underground). She returned about two weeks later with a letter for Zygmunt and news of all the family: uncle Jozef Emir-Hassan’s wife was killed in the September 1939 bombing and he was wounded. Their apartment was damaged. My mother’s brother Stefan’s apartment was destroyed by bombing. His wife and daughter Danuta moved to a house my grandmother had bought in Babice outside of Warsaw. They were still receiving food parcels from Portugal, indicating that uncle Stefan was alive. After the fall of France he made his way across the channel and rejoined the Polish Air Force in England.
The snows began and we started to ski again. One day before Christmas, as we left our courtyard we noticed a newly built structure at the corner of the park, next to the cathedral. It was a wooden beam about 18ft long supported by wooden posts at both ends, 12ft above ground. The next morning when I woke up to a grey, overcast day I saw from my window that bodies were hanging from the beam. I dressed and quietly left the apartment through the kitchen. There were twelve bodies, two of them women. They had their winter clothes on, but all were bare headed. On the ropes, their heads were bent at an unnatural angle. Some had boards hanging from their necks with ‘PARTIZANEN’ (partisan) painted in crude black letters. As they passed by, men would take off their hats and women would cross themselves.
Christmas came and went, and was, again, very subdued. As the new year, 1943, began, everybody once again started saying that Germany would be defeated this summer. There was more and more news about the battle at Stalingrad. As always, the BBC and German propaganda presented opposing views. Needless to say, we believed the BBC. Towards the end of January German radio stopped broadcasting news about Stalingrad. On the last day of January 1943, German radio started to play very sombre music. Finally, there was the announcement of defeat. After hearing the scope of the German Army’s defeat on clandestine radio from London, mother said, ‘We have to move to Warsaw, we will never see Wilno Polish again.’ Her words turned out to be prophetic. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Stalin’s demand to keep the eastern part of Poland, taken previously in September 1939 in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939. The Polish population was later resettled in communist Poland. Starting at the end of 1944, about 100,000 Poles left Wilno, taking with them the memory of Polish culture, language and the spirit of the Commonwealth of Two Nations. After 400 years it had died forever. Wilno became Vilnius; my mother never returned, and I returned for the first time in 1994, fifty-one years later.
At the end of February, mother told us that we would be moving to Warsaw and instructed us not to tell anyone. She had clearly been planning this for some time as our furniture, carpets and even clothing were gradually being sold off. She also sold her beauty salon. The proceeds from all the sales were converted into gold coins, mostly Imperial Russian 10 rouble pieces called chervonets, as well as British Sovereign and American dollar gold coins. The challenge was hiding the gold coins so they would not be discovered during an inspection at the border. Wiktor found three big thermoses. He opened them up and very carefully cut out the bottom from the glass casing of the vacuum flask. The space between the outer and inner casings was about half an inch wide. Gold coins were packed into that space with cotton wool to prevent them rattling and the cut-out bottom glued back. The rest of the coins were layered between the stiffening boards on the bottom of mother’s bag.
Finally, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of March, we were told to pack our bags as we were leaving the next day. We could take only hand luggage that we could carry. Andrzej, mother and I would go first; Wiktor and Zygmunt would follow later. We each took just a backpack with a ‘golden’ thermos and a small suitcase. Mother had her ‘golden’ bag and thermos and one larger suitcase. The only personal article I took with me was my stamp collection.
Early next morning, while it was still dark, a truck belonging to the Große Heeresbaudinstellen Company pulled into our courtyard. Wiktor arranged for us to travel in the truck, which was going to Warsaw on official business. We climbed into the back and sat on our suitcases, the back gate was slammed shut and the canvas top closed. The truck started to move, rattling through the streets of Wilno. When we left the city the truck picked up speed and the wind whistled through the loose canvas. It was very cold, well below freezing. We bundled ourselves in blankets and sat close together for warmth. After a while the truck stopped and the driver invited one of us to sit in the cab to warm up. Every hour or so, we traded places. The truck was an old Russian Army ZiS modified to run on gas generated from wood. The iron furnace, about 18in in diameter and 5ft tall, was mounted outside the cab on the other side of the driver. Every few hours we had to stop and load more wood chips into it.
Around noon we drove through Grodno and crossed the River Niemen, where the truck and our papers were checked. In the afternoon we arrived at the administrative border established by the Germans between the Generalgouvernement and Ostland. The border check was rather perfunctory as the truck belonged to an official German company and made the same trip almost every week. After the guards examined my mother’s documents and took a cursory look at our open suitcases, we were allowed to proceed. No one showed any interest in our thermoses. Shortly after the border we stopped for the night as it was getting dark and very cold. After some warm soup, we slept in our clothes on the floor, wrapped in our blankets.
Our truck left early the next morning, arriving in Warsaw just before noon on 19 March 1943.
8
Warsaw, 19 March
1943–December 1943
We were dropped off in the Grochów suburb on the Praga side of Warsaw, at my great-aunt Walerja’s villa, who greeted us warmly. Walerja was the younger sister of my maternal grandmother and mother’s favourite aunt. As a child, mother used to spend her Easter holidays with her. Before the Russian Revolution, Walerja and her husband Zdzisław Modzelewski lived on their Lubomirka estate near Kiev. They and their baby daughter survived the Revolution and escaped to Poland. Zdzisław became the administrator of all the estates belonging to Count Grocholski and liv
ed on an estate near Zbaraż in south-eastern Poland. My mother, her brothers and all their Emir-Hassan cousins spent their summer holidays there.
Walerja was a slender, elegant and prematurely grey woman. When she and her husband moved to Zbaraż in the early 1920s they endured an attack on the manor by bandits. Zdzisław was shot and lost an eye, but survived. The bandits threatened to kill their two young children, but luckily the shots were heard by a unit of the Polish Army, which came to their rescue. After the Polish-Bolshevik War, the border areas were a no-man’s-land. Bands of Ukrainian partisans, White Russians, Soviet deserters and just plain bandits robbed and burned estates. Aunt Walerja perished in the Warsaw Uprising; her body was never found.
Aunt Walerja’s home was about a fifteen-minute walk to the tram stop on the main street, from where it took about half an hour to reach the centre of Warsaw. There was a great shortage of tram wagons because all the new ones had been taken to Germany. On top of that, the front third of the first wagon was Nur für Deutsche, reserved for Germans only. The wagons were always overcrowded with people literally hanging on the outside.
Early in April 1943, we moved to a boarding house on Sienna Street in the centre of the city. Mother was busy making contacts and looking for an apartment, which was not an easy task as there was a tremendous shortage of housing. In addition, she needed an apartment in the centre of the city large enough to set up her cosmetic salon. We lived there for one month, a very dramatic month. Mother found out that both Janek Bytnar and his father had been arrested by the Gestapo. Janek’s father was sent to Auschwitz; Janek was tortured by the Gestapo, and then rescued in a spectacular armed action carried out by his friends. He died four days later from injuries sustained in torture during his interrogation.
In mid-April the Germans published information regarding the massacre of Polish officers in Katyń Forest by the NKVD. The papers showed pictures of exhumed Polish officers in uniform, hands tied behind their backs with wire, and holes in the back of their skulls. A new list of names with military ranks was published daily in the papers and displayed on wall posters. Groups of people would stand silently before them, checking the names.
On Monday 19 April, news spread about fighting in the ghetto. Over the next few days we heard explosions, sporadic shots and the rattle of machine guns from the direction of the ghetto. At night the glow of burning fires was visible from the same direction. While walking nearby I saw a group of prisoners, guarded by Germans, dumping rubble into manholes to block any escape through the sewers.
Early on the Friday morning before Easter there was a document inspection for everyone in our boarding house. A uniformed Gestapo officer and a civilian speaking heavily accented Polish burst into our room, demanding to see our IDs. Mother’s papers were in order but she couldn’t find our birth certificates right away. They would not believe mother’s insistence that we were her children, shouting that she was too young to be our mother. The Gestapo officer started to yell that she was hiding Jewish boys; looking at my brother he shouted, ‘He is a Yid, look at his dark wavy hair.’ When mother protested again, he hit her across the face, yelling that he would ‘take care of all of us’. As he tried to pull his gun from the holster, the other man told us to drop our trousers. A visual examination revealed that we were not circumcised. After confirming the findings, the Gestapo officer casually holstered his gun and left the room.
On the Monday after Easter we took a tram to go and visit Wacek Wieczorek, a friend of ours from Wilno. He lived on Zakroczymska Street on the other side of the old town, close to the ghetto. When we disembarked near Krasiński Square we could hear explosions and see clouds of dust arising from the ghetto. As we walked close to it we saw a surreal scene: on our side of the wall the trams were running, there was light traffic on the street and a few people walked quickly and purposefully, looking straight ahead. On the other side of the wall there were explosions, burning fires, clouds of smoke and dust. A single Stuka plane circled above, diving down and dropping bombs. A group of German SS men were manhandling a field gun through a breach in the ghetto wall. Polish police were stationed outside to keep people away.
By the middle of May it was over. The last of the heroic fighters perished. On 16 May the Great Synagogue was blown up and the Germans started to methodically destroy all the buildings within the ghetto. Fires burned for a long time and buildings were blown up. The entire area was levelled, becoming nothing more than a great field of rubble.
After a month in the boarding house, mother found a perfect apartment located on the main street, 37 Nowy Swiat (now part of Royal Way, the main thoroughfare to the Royal Castle). Before the war, it was considered one of the most fashionable streets in Warsaw. Most of the buildings were four storeys high, built between 18th and 19th centuries in a neoclassical style. The ground floors were used for commercial purposes while the upper floors were residential. Our apartment was on the second floor. We had four rooms plus a maid’s room and a kitchen with a separate service entrance. Shortly after we moved in, Wiktor and Zygmunt arrived from Wilno. Wiktor quietly left his job with the tacit permission of the German lieutenant in charge (his Austrian friend from Vienna Polytechnic), hoping he would not report his disappearance to the Gestapo. Zygmunt moved into the maid’s room and for the first few weeks Wiktor slept at mother’s aunt’s apartment nearby. The Gestapo conducted most of their arrests at night so, had Wiktor somehow been informed upon, he would most likely have been taken at night within the first few weeks of their arrival. At that time, mother started to work in a beauty salon to make contacts before opening her own business.
During June and part of July we spent a lot of time in Babice, where my aunt, the wife of my mother’s brother Stefan, lived together with Danuta. There was also another girl, a little younger, who was introduced as her cousin. Many years later, Danuta told me that this ‘cousin’ was not actually a relative but a Jewish girl her mother had been hiding. Danuta learned the truth after the war, when the girl was repatriated to Israel. The rest of the summer was spent in Swider, close to the town of Otwock, about 20 miles from Warsaw. We stayed in a boarding house within walking distance of a swimmable part of the river. We had a great time as both Tadek and Wacek were there and the rest of the summer passed very quickly.
At that time we knew that there was a very strong and well-developed Polish Underground in Warsaw that incorporated the Boy Scouts. We had seen signs of their activity on the streets: the symbol ‘PW’, an acronym for Polska Walczy (Fighting Poland), was painted in the form of an anchor on buildings and monuments all over Warsaw. We were trying to find a contact so we could join. In Swider I approached Wacek, a native of Warsaw, who was two years older than me and had been back from Wilno for over a year. Without making any commitment, he said he would try to arrange a ‘meeting’ when he was back in Warsaw.
Upon our return from Swider, mother told us that we would resume our studies. Since the start of the occupation, the Germans had closed all the secondary schools and universities in Poland. Primary schools and a few trade schools had been allowed to stay open. As a consequence, an underground education system was created which the Germans tried to suppress with draconian penalties.
In the first week of August mother took us to see Miss Górska, daughter of Dr Wojciech Górski, who in 1877 had founded a secondary school that became one of the best private and progressive schools in Warsaw. Mother’s brothers and most of her cousins completed their secondary education there. Mother contacted Miss Górska to arrange for an interview. She looked like an old maid, a very stern, tall woman. After the interview, we were accepted to the Gimnazium, me to the first year and Andrzej to the second. Lessons were given in private homes in small groups called komplety; my group had eight boys. A teacher would arrive and lecture us for a few hours on various subjects. Each boy would arrive and depart individually, or in pairs at staggered times. We would meet at different homes and at varying times. Miss Górska taught Latin and French. There were two
male teachers, one taught maths and science, and the other lectured on Polish language, literature and history. Religious education was given by a priest in one of the churches. As a first-year student I had to learn how to be an altar boy, which required memorisation of the Latin liturgy. I served mass at a hospital chapel once a week, very early in the morning.
Shortly after we started our education, Wacek came to see me and told me that he could arrange the ‘meeting’ if we were still interested. ‘Of course we are!’ I shouted on hearing the good news. The meeting was arranged and the next day he introduced us to ‘Jerzy’ and ‘Wojtek’. Jerzy, the younger of the two, looked about 15 or 16; Wojtek was probably 18. They asked us a lot of questions about our background and family. After the interrogation Jerzy looked at Wojtek, who nodded and I knew that we were in. Jerzy gave us the time and place of our next meeting and then told us to choose code names. I decided on Sokół, meaning ‘Falcon’, and Andrzej chose ‘Tarzan’. Much later I learned that Jerzy’s real name was Wiśniewski; he became our squad leader. I never learned Wojtek’s real name and never knew where either of them lived. Wojtek was second in command of our troop, ‘Number 11’. At our first meeting we met the other six boys and were introduced by our code names. We were told only to use our code names and adhere to the principle that ‘what you do not know, you cannot betray’. Nonetheless, we soon learned the others’ real names and where some of them lived.
From then on, we would meet once or twice a week at different apartments. Our training followed the pre-war Polish Boy Scouts model, but had a greater emphasis on paramilitary skills – communications, map reading and first aid. We sharpened our observation skills with an exercise in which about twenty different items were placed on a table and covered by a blanket. The blanket was removed for one minute, after which we had to write a description of each object, with as much detail as possible. Another field-related exercise was to observe military vehicular traffic and give detailed reports, like ‘13:02, Opel Admiral car with driver, escort armed with MP40 and two officers, WH licence plates’. We were also required to know Warsaw inside and out, particularly the transportation system: tramlines, suburban trains and train stations. We had to be aware of all possible escape routes through buildings with additional exits that opened onto a different street from the entrance. We were given the address of all these buildings and had to make sure we knew them all. If we discovered a new pass-through building, we were to report it.
My Boyhood War Page 6