We also learned ordinary Boy Scout skills such as knot tying. We received lectures from Wojtek on the structure of our organisation. Ours was an underground continuation of the ZHP (Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego), the pre-war Polish Boy Scouts. The underground Boy Scout organisation was formed in the autumn of 1939, at the very beginning of the German occupation. It assumed a new name, Szare Szeregi, meaning ‘Grey Ranks’. It was divided into three groups based on age: the youngest, for boys of 12 to 14, where we started, was called Zawisza, the name of a legendary medieval Polish knight. Our mission was to prepare ourselves for auxiliary military service in the case of an uprising. In the meantime, we had to continue our education so that we could contribute to the rebuilding of Poland after the war. The second group, for boys of 15 to 17, was ‘BS’, an acronym for Bojowe Szkoły, meaning ‘combat school’. This group underwent military training and took part in small acts of sabotage, a form of psychological warfare against the Germans. The oldest boys, 18 and over, were the assault groups or ‘GS’, Grupy Szturmowe. The GS were incorporated into the Armia Krajowa (the AK, or Home Army of the Polish Underground) and used on special operations. These were the elite troops of the Underground.
After the summer of 1943 our lives fell back into a routine. Mother opened her beauty salon and steadily expanded her clientele while Wiktor did small electrical jobs. I have no idea what Zygmunt was doing; he periodically disappeared for prolonged periods of time. There is no question in my mind that he was involved with the Underground. Since we had no maid, Wiktor, Andrzej and I helped with the housework and Wiktor did some of the cooking. Finding food was a problem as it was severely rationed. However, there was a thriving black market where almost anything could be obtained, even if at exorbitant prices. We managed to eat better than the average person, but food was scarce and limited in choice. It was carefully portioned and never wasted; everybody always finished everything on his plate. Meat was the scarcest food item, except for horsemeat, which was not rationed. We ate horsemeat quite often. I loved it, I thought it was good.
Our days were fully occupied. Between the underground secondary school, Boy Scout meetings and exercises, schoolwork and housework, we had little free time. I spent what spare time I had making toy tanks, which I sold to toyshops to bolster the limited pocket money I received from my mother. The tanks were about 2 to 3in long, made of wood, cardboard and clothing snaps that served as the tanks’ wheels. They sold quite well as there was a shortage of any toys and my little business did indeed provide me with additional pocket money. Later I increased my production line by making toy submarines, photo albums, gypsum lambs for Easter, and whatever else there was a market for.
We got to know Warsaw inside and out by walking the streets and riding the trams. It was a large and crowded city with a pre-war population of 1.3 million, which included more than 400,000 Jews. Initially, these numbers were increased by the influx of Poles forced out of the western part of Poland annexed to the German Reich. After the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943, the remaining Polish population in Warsaw was reduced to less than 1 million. The habitable areas of Warsaw had decreased due to damage wrought during the September 1939 siege, the destruction of the ghetto and the establishment of a German-only district in the best part of the city. Transportation was a big problem: all city buses and private cars, including taxis, were appropriated by the Germans. Poles were not allowed to own motorcars or motorcycles. What remained for the general population were horse-drawn droshky and a new invention: the pedal-powered rickshaw. The only motor vehicles moving through the streets of Warsaw were driven by Germans.
On several occasion, while wandering through the streets of Warsaw, we came across łapanki, German roundups. All of a sudden a street would be blocked at both ends by Germans and all working-age men and women were segregated and their IDs checked. Most of them were loaded into budy (covered trucks) and driven away. If they were lucky, they ended up as forced labourers in Germany; if not, in a concentration camp or as a hostage to be executed later. Once, when I found myself in one such łapanka, I remembered that there was a pass-through in one of the buildings. I quickly directed several people towards it and a large number of them escaped the roundup. Our Boy Scout training was paying off.
In October 1943, the Germans began public executions of hostages on the streets of Warsaw. They would publish a list of the names of hostages and a warning that any hostile act on the part of the population would lead to hostage executions. Following each execution, another list of names and birthdays was published on red paper, stating that they had been executed for such and such a crime, usually killings of Germans or some act of sabotage. Hostages were executed at the rate of ten Poles for one German. The lists were plastered on the streets of Warsaw, some with over 100 names.
On 12 November 1943, in the middle of the day, as I approached our apartment I realised that our block was closed off at both ends. This time it was not a roundup. On the contrary, the Germans allowed all the traffic to leave and the block was absolutely empty. I was at the entrance gate to our building and there were a few other people scattered around the entrances to nearby buildings. Germans were patrolling on both sides of the street. After about fifteen minutes, I heard the unmistakable sound of the German police siren. From the direction of the Old Town, a convoy of two large open German police cars arrived escorting a covered truck, stopping in front of No. 49, about six buildings away from us. The Germans dismounted and pulled thirty men out from the truck, shoving them against the wall. The men were in civilian clothes, gagged and with their hands tied behind their back. When they were all lined up against the wall, a few SS men stepped forward and raked them with machine pistol fire. An officer walking among the bodies delivering a coup de grâce with his pistol. Somehow those measured single shots were more unnerving than the rattle of the machine pistols.
After a few minutes, as the Germans stood around and lit cigarettes, a few men in striped concentration camp uniforms were brought out from the same truck. I thought they would be the next ones to be shot, but instead they picked up the corpses and loaded them back into the truck. Once all the bleeding bodies were loaded, the Germans mounted up and departed. Before traffic flow was restored a fire engine arrived and hosed the blood from the pavement. I stood watching the red water flow into the gutter. The blood in the water slowly dissipated, the firemen left, the water stopped flowing and the traffic resumed. Within half an hour the cleanly washed pavement in front of a bullet pockmarked wall stained with blood, was covered in flowers and lit candles. The next day I read posted on a nearby wall the names and birthdays of the thirty men whose executions I had witnessed.
Three weeks later, on 2 December, Andrzej and I witnessed another execution on the other side of our street, conducted in a similar manner. It was a bit further from us, about twelve buildings away at No. 64. According to the next day’s announcement, thirty-four men had been shot. These public executions continued into February 1944 and during those four months there were thirty-five executions on the streets of Warsaw. Flowers and lit candles always appeared at the execution sites.
Today there are simple, identical stone memorial plaques at each of these sites around Warsaw, all bearing the same inscription:
A Place Consecrated By The Blood Of Poles Fallen For Freedom And Country
Here On 2 XII 1943 Hitlerites Executed 34 Poles
To this day, on the anniversary of the executions, there are always flowers and lit candles on the pavements under the plaques.
9
Warsaw, December 1943–
31July 1944
Christmas 1943 and New Year 1944 ushered in a new spirit. The Russian offensive was slowly grinding down the German Army and making its way towards Poland. In early January 1944, the Russian Army crossed the 1939 Polish-Soviet border. Everybody was sure that the war would end this year.
The Boy Scouts’ motto was ‘Today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow’. ‘Today’ was what we were doi
ng during the occupation: preparing ourselves for ‘tomorrow’, i.e the armed fight against the Germans. In the ‘tomorrow’ phase, our mission would be to assist the Polish underground Armed Forces with communication, reconnaissance and other military functions. The ‘day after tomorrow’ would be the rebuilding of Poland, for which we had to prepare by studying hard now. In a meeting that January we were assigned an assembly place to meet when the fighting started. We were to meet at the apartment of one of our members, near the Square of our Saviour.
In between our clandestine classes, Boy Scout meetings and exercises we travelled all over Warsaw, mostly by foot and tram. These activities, plus our homework and housework, made our days quite full. In addition to our old friends from Wilno, we had a group of friends from school and scouts. We became friendly with Ryszard Budzianowski, who lived across the street from us and was the same age as Andrzej. We started to socialise with girls, mostly sisters of our friends, and I must say I liked that very much.
What we lacked were sports. All the sporting facilities, including tennis courts, swimming pools, gymnasiums and stadiums were closed to Poles. When winter came, we missed skiing. One of the few sporting activities we were able to engage in freely was swimming in the Vistula. On the Praga side of the river there were floating swimming pools made from big barges that had changing rooms and lockers. Part of the deck was cut out, forming a pool with the bottom and sides made of slats through which the river flowed. We kayaked and raced rented bicycles in the velodrome, about the only sporting facilities open to Poles. We played football on suburban fields and large courtyards.
We knew that the Polish Armed Forces in exile were fighting with the Allies. The exploits of Polish fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain were well known thanks to the Polish writer Arkady Fiedler. His book Squadron 303 was published in England, first in Polish as Dywizjon 303 and then in English. A copy was parachuted into Poland and secretly reprinted by the Underground. In the winter of 1943–44 our unit was given a copy and each of us had just two days to read it. I spent almost the entire night reading that book by torch while under my covers and managed to finish just as the battery died.
The second book published clandestinely in Warsaw was Aleksander Kaminski’s Kamienie na Szaniec (Stones for the Rampart). The book was based on the actions of a group of older Boy Scouts who, in 1939, all graduated from Stefan Batory secondary school in Warsaw. They were active in the Underground from the very beginning of the occupation. According to the author, the story was about ‘magnificent ideas of brotherhood and service; about men who knew how to live and die beautifully’. It was the story of Janek Bytnar. All the men were classmates and friends of Zygmunt. Again we had the book for only two days.
The title referred to a line from Juliusz Slowacki’s poem ‘My Testament’ published in 1840, shortly after the failed uprising of 1831, when Poland lost its independence:
But I beseech you – do not let the living lose hope
Lead the nation with a torch
And one by one, as need be, go to death
As stones hurled on the ramparts by God.
And that is how this generation lived and died during the occupation and Uprising.
Possession of either one of these books, or any underground press, was a sure-fire ticket to a concentration camp.
Towards the end of March 1944, while we were out, mother received a telephone call from Zygmunt:
Niusiu, I met Janek Bytnar at the railway station. Please take my suitcase from under the bed and bring it to the station. Do you understand?
Yes
Thank you, goodbye.
Mother took his suitcase straight to the next-door neighbours, who were good friends, and it was immediately removed from the building. When we came back mother told us that Zygmunt had been ‘burned’ and gone into hiding. We were told to go through everything to make sure there was nothing incriminating that would connect us to the clandestine school or to ‘whatever else you are involved in’. Even though everybody knew, neither our membership in the Boy Scouts or Wiktor and Zygmunt’s in the Underground was ever talked about.
Next morning we were told to leave early and stay away all day. We left early, went to classes and meetings, and spent the rest of the time at our friend’s apartment, returning home in the evening. For the next several days nothing happened and then, late one afternoon just as we arrived, a very excited gatekeeper was waiting for us in the entryway. He told us that the Gestapo had arrived around noon; three men had gone up to our apartment while the other two remained in the porte cochère with a machine gun. The Gestapo was there for about an hour but left without arresting anybody. We ran to our apartment. Mother was sitting alone in her salon – following Zygmunt’s telephone call, she had cancelled all her clients and told her two employees not to come to work.
She told us what had happened. She had heard shouting and commotion in the porte cochère and seen through the window the gatekeeper pointing to our apartment and three Gestapo men marching through the courtyard towards the staircase. The loud steps stopped in front of our door then there was loud banging. As she opened the door the three men barged in, a young Gestapo officer in a black uniform and two in civilian garb. One of the plain-clothes agents spoke Polish and started to interrogate mother. Instead of replying to him she turned to the officer and asked him if he spoke French. He said yes and told the other two to start searching the apartment while he began to interrogate mother in French. He wanted to know where Zygmunt was. Mother replied that she also wanted to know as she was very worried because he had left about two weeks ago and hadn’t come back or called. The relatively short interrogation ended and the conversation switched to Paris. Mother was a very attractive woman and kept her cool. They were interrupted by the Polish speaker, who had found a page of Latin exercises that Andrzej had overlooked (Latin had been taught in secondary schools, which were now closed). To his visible annoyance, the Gestapo officer dismissed this and in less than an hour they left. It was a miracle that she was not arrested and interrogated further by the Gestapo.
Wiktor later told us what had happened with Zygmunt. He had been on his way to a meeting of the Underground. It turned out that the meeting, which was to be held in a second-floor apartment in Warsaw, was compromised. As Zygmunt knocked on the door with the pre-arranged signal, the door opened and he was pistol whipped and pulled inside. Two Gestapo agents were pointing their pistols at Zygmunt. He was told to remove his jacket and sit on the chair next to the door with his hands clasped behind his head. One of the agents stood by the door, pistol in hand, waiting for more arrivals. The other agent took Zygmunt’s wallet to the adjoining room. Soon there were sounds of shouting and people being hit. Zygmunt noticed that the entrance door was not locked, the door could be opened by simply pulling the handle. After a few minutes, the first Gestapo agent came back and dropped some rope on the floor in front of Zygmunt, presumably to be used for tying hands. When the Gestapo agent returned to the room, the other standing in front looked down at the rope. In that instant, Zygmunt kicked the pistol out of his hand, pulled open the door, hitting the agent, and ran out of the apartment. Somehow he managed to escape even though he had been running through the streets with his face and shirt covered in blood, without a jacket in cold weather and without any documents. He was now at a safe place outside of Warsaw.
Zygmunt’s luck ran out half a year later. On 1 August, the first day of the Uprising, he was killed. His body was never found.
On the Monday morning after Easter, a cold, windy overcast day, Andrzej and I were on a tram travelling down Królewska Street. As always, the tram was overcrowded. Andrzej managed to squeeze inside but I was standing on a step with three other men, hugging onto a handlebar. It was raining that day and the streets were wet with dirty water standing in the gutters. As we passed the large and empty Piłsudzki Square, renamed Adolf Hitler Platz, a gust of wind blew my cap off. I jumped off the tram, motioning to Andrzej to continue home. I picked
up my soaking wet cap from a puddle of dirty water and found myself in front of a large plate glass window of a Soldatenheim, a restaurant-nightclub for German soldiers. It looked empty inside. A quick look left and right confirmed that the street was also empty. I stepped up to the window and with my wet dirty cap painted a gallows with a swastika hanging from the noose.
Stepping back to admire my handiwork I noticed the door to my right open. As I turned to run away I was grabbed by a German soldier who had snuck up behind me. I was taken inside, shoved and kicked by three soldiers as they started to take off their army belts. At that moment a German lieutenant appeared from the back room. He was in his late middle age, short but large in girth. He didn’t look very military, more like the proprietor of a restaurant or hotel, which he most likely had been before the war. He asked the soldiers what had happened and they pointed to the window. I must say that from the darkened inside my art work was impressive: the gallows was about 5ft high, with a 3ft long arm and a 2 x 2ft swastika hanging from its noose.
The officer asked me in German what my name was. ‘Jan Kowalski, Herr Oberleutnant’, I replied, which is like saying John Smith in English. ‘Where is your father?’ was the next question. ‘On the Russian front, working for Große Heeresbaudinstellen’, I replied. After yelling and berating me for five minutes, he told the soldiers to let me go. I was taken outside and let go with couple of swift kicks to my backside. I was very lucky; I could have ended up in a concentration camp.
My Boyhood War Page 7