We reached King Albert Street, where our security detachment had previously taken position. There was a short exchange with the post: ‘nothing to report, all is quiet sir’. We crossed King Albert Street and proceeded towards the next corner of Fredry Street. The back of the palace was on that street. The point men crossed; one was scanning forward and the other along the back of the palace. We crossed one by one and kept close to the palace walls. We proceeded quietly, examining the windows as we moved forward. They were high, the parapet about 5ft above the pavement; they had heavy grates on the outside with steel-plated shutters behind. Nałęcz conferred with Abczyc. It was a no-go: we did not have enough explosives to blow the necessary openings. At that moment we heard German voices behind the windows and a flare shot upwards from the courtyard of the palace. We remained motionless against the wall. From the direction of the Saxon Gardens we heard an engine start, followed by the clatter of tank treads. Nałęcz signalled the retreat and we went back the way we had come.
It was well past midnight when we reached our quarters. I tried going to sleep but I was very cold. I heard a rustling of paper and saw some men sleeping with their legs in large paper sacks. There was a stack of them in the corner. I grabbed one and crawled in almost to my chest. I had no problem falling asleep immediately.
11
Old Town – Town Hall, 6–11 August 1944
We bow in shame today at the crimes of the Nazi troops
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Warsaw, 1 August 2004
On Sunday 6 August, a warm and sunny day, I was awoken in the early morning by the sounds of bombing: Stukas were concentrating on the old town.
The remainder of the battalion that had been on Leszno Street re-joined us with a new officer, Lt. ‘Skóra’. We were ordered to move into the town hall building and take over its defence. We were under the overall command of Lt. ‘Barry’, who had taken the town hall at the outbreak of the Uprising. The town hall was the old Jabłonski Palace, a very large four-storey building on Theatre Square facing the opera house. It occupied practically the whole block with the Convent of the Canoness Sisters (Kanoniczki) and the Church of St Andrew on the south-west corner of the square by Bielańska Street. On the opposite corner was the two-storey Blank’s Palace. The whole complex had several interconnecting courtyards accessed from the square through a massive wooden gate. We were assigned the defence of the main building.
Most of the day was spent preparing defences. I accompanied Nałęcz as he walked through the building giving dispositions for the defence points and machine gun positions. He ordered openings to be broken through the walls to allow easy movement of the defenders. We came across large stores of food and Nałęcz ordered them to be secured together with the municipal pawnshop. We moved on to explore Blank’s Palace, a small and beautiful baroque building. Before the war it was used by the President of the City of Warsaw for official receptions. During the occupation it was the residence and office of Ludwig Leist, the German mayor of the city. At the back of the palace there was a garden with a pond full of large golden carp. Nałęcz took out his colt pistol, ‘let’s see if we can get some’, and shot into a large group of fish. Nothing happened. One of the soldiers accompanying us said, ‘Lieutenant, sir, let me show you how to do this properly,’ and tossed a concussion grenade into the pond. There was an explosion, a geyser of water shot up, and the surface of the pond was covered with golden fish floating belly up. That afternoon we all had a very tasty fish soup.
While exploring the palace I found the butler’s pantry between a large dining room and a kitchen. There were partially opened drawers with silver utensils and cutlery. Most of them were gone but I managed to find a fork, knife and spoon. They were solid silver with the Warsaw coat of arms, a mermaid holding a shield and a sword. From that moment on I ate in style!
On the way back we heard the sound of a racing car engine. When we entered the main courtyard we were greeted by the sight of a large black limousine, running boards loaded with men, speeding around with squealing tyres. Seeing Nałęcz, the car came to a screeching halt. It was a pre-war Cadillac, the official car of the pre-war City President and later of the German mayor. Nałęcz ordered the car back into the garage to preserve the petrol.
During the day more volunteers joined the battalion. Most were men who hadn’t managed to connect with their units. Cpl. ‘Grisza’, a Russian soldier freed from the municipal jail, joined us. He was wounded a few days later and died of his wounds.
In the evening the detachment that had been sent to King Albert Street returned. They reported that that morning their sharpshooter had successfully picked off Germans digging trenches in the Saxon Gardens from the top floor of the building. The Germans had responded with heavy machine gun and tank fire, and in the fighting that followed they managed to destroy one tank but lost four of their own soldiers and several others were wounded.
That night I slept in the same clothes I had been wearing since I left home, but on a real bed in the guards’ barracks of the municipal prison behind the town hall. The next day Col. ‘Wachnowski’ took over as commanding officer of the old town, which was renamed ‘Group North’. He assigned Lt. Nałęcz overall command of the town hall area. Lt. Barry was made head of military police. Our battalion was to defend the town hall and the adjoining Convent of the Canoness Sisters. We were reinforced by Lt. ‘Leszek’’s twenty-man platoon from Barry’s unit. On our right flank, Company P-20 under Lt. ‘Tadeusz’ was defending the barricade on Bielanska Street and the surrounding buildings at the junction with Theatre Square. P-20 Company was placed under the tactical command of Lt. Nałęcz. The 2nd Company of the Łukasiński Battalion, defending Blank’s Palace on our left flank, was also placed under his command. Our total strength increased to over 150 men. We were made part of the Kuba Sector, commanded by Lt. Col. ‘Kuba’, and were the southernmost defences of the old town.
Stukas were again concentrating on bombing and strafing the old town, although it was relatively quiet in our immediate area. We heard the noise of tank movements and fighting to the east, from the direction of Castle Square. There were also sounds of motor vehicles and fighting coming from the direction of the Saxon Gardens. Nałęcz sent well-armed patrols along both sides of the opera house towards the Saxon Gardens. He surmised that a German thrust from Wola had succeeded and that the old town was now fully surrounded. We were the last unit to cross over from the centre of Warsaw. He expected the next German attack to be made against our position.
The work to prepare the defence of the buildings continued. The ground-floor windows were blocked while the basement and other floors were interconnected by holes broken through the walls. The superintendent of the building asked for help transferring important paintings and documents to the city archives in the Arsenal building.
When we made openings in one of the walls of the basement we made an interesting discovery. At one point the pickaxe easily broke through one layer of brick, which was unusual since the other walls were 3 to 4ft thick. The second blow produced the sound of broken glass. The rest of the wall was carefully removed, brick by brick, revealing a cache of about fifty bottles lying on their sides. Covered in dust, they were shaped like brandy bottles, made of dark glass and only half-full. Nałęcz was called in and he sent me to find the superintendent. When I brought him in, he was as surprised as everybody else: nobody knew about this hidden cellar. We examined a bottle; it was sealed with wax and stamped with the date 1792, the reign of the last King of Poland. The seal was removed, there were only remnants of a cork left. The liquid was syrupy and sweet. It was opined that it was Tokay, a Hungarian sweet wine or Polish mead. The bottles were removed and secured, but somehow their number greatly diminished.
Throughout the morning Nałęcz and Pobóg discussed the possibility of making some sort of catapult that could compensate for the lack of mortars by increasing the range of the Molotov cocktails and grenades. A soldier who overheard the discussion said that he had an idea
. When he had been a young teenager he and his friends had made a catapult capable of shooting a brick up to 220yd. Abczyc was called in and after further discussion it was decided to build a catapult capable of shooting bombs and that he would make it. A sketch was made of the proposed contraption. The body was made of a shallow, u-shaped wooden channel about 5ft long. The propelling force was provided by a steel leaf from a car spring mounted on the front end like a giant crossbow. A rubber truck tyre inner tube connected the slide to the ends of the steel bow. There was some sort of mechanism to cock the slide. In a few hours, it was ready. In the meantime, the sapper section was making bombs from empty oilcans found in the garage. They were pre-war American Pennzoil quart cans with a conical top and a small cap. The bottom half was filled with nuts, screws, nails and whatever else could be found in the garage. The top half was filled with crushed TNT from an unexploded bomb. A priming fuse with a length of Bickford cord cut to burn for six seconds was inserted. The screw top, with a small hole made for the priming cord, enclosed the bomb. About twenty such bombs were made.
Nałęcz sent me with a dispatch to Lt. Jur at the Spiess building. After I delivered the dispatch I found Andrzej. We had not seen each other for the last three days. I immediately noticed that he had a pistol in a holster on his belt. He showed me his Belgian FN 5mm, a so-called damka (lady’s) pistol he had gotten from Jur. I was very glad that he had a weapon but also jealous that I only had a grenade. I noticed that he was wearing German Army jackboots. Jur had got hold of a car and they had gone to Stawki, where a large warehouse with uniforms and food had been captured from the Germans on the first day. Jur was trying to get the necessary authorisation to go back and get uniforms for our battalion. In the meantime, he got Andrzej new jackboots.
When I returned, our catapult was ready for a trial. A mock bomb without TNT was loaded. I got Nałęcz, and on his signal Abczyc tripped the trigger. The bomb flew up at about a 30° angle and landed … twenty paces away! There was a moment of stunned silence and then everybody burst out laughing. This was the ignominious end of our ‘artillery’.
Another sunny day dawned on 8 August. It was the day that, after successfully opening a corridor from the Wola district to the Saxon Gardens surrounding the old town, the Germans began their attack on our sector. The Great Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Warsaw Uprising describes the military actions of that day as follows:
The enemy attacked the sector of Theatre Square, the town hall, Bielańska (Street) herding civilians before tanks. The defenders repulsed those attacks; as a result of all-day fighting in this region, the Germans only managed to breach one barricade. Germans dug in in front of the opera house.
Wielka Ilustrowana Encyclopedia Powstania Warszawskiego, vol. 3, p. 129
Historian Antoni Przygoński also describes the day’s events:
The fighting that day on Theatre Square was unusually dramatic, continuing from morning to late afternoon. The German attack started with a few tanks entering Theatre Square from Wierzbowa Street, proceeding directly towards the town hall, defended by Battalion KB of Lt. ‘Nałęcz’ (Stefan Kaniewski). The attempt to break the insurgents’ defences was unsuccessful. After bunched grenades were thrown from the top floors of the building, the tanks quickly withdrew to the other side of the square towards the ruins of the opera house, where they started systematically firing on the insurgents’ positions. The insurgents managed to immobilise one of the tanks and liquidate the crew trying to escape. After a short barrage, the enemy infantry attacked from the direction of the opera house, herding before them a large crowd of frightened civilians, mostly women, children and elderly. However, the insurgents allowed the attackers to approach to within a short distance, called to the civilians to escape to the side and repulsed the Germans, inflicting heavy losses. The fighting was momentarily stopped and stretcher-bearers from both sides entered to remove the wounded. Corpses of dead German soldiers and Polish civilians covered the square. In the meantime, the soldiers of (SS) Dirlewanger (Brigade) herded in a new group of civilians, placing them in the middle of the square in front of the tanks as a live shield. Awaiting near-certain death, people knelt on the pavement singing ‘Boże coś Polskę’ (a religious patriotic hymn). Shortly after, more tanks entered from Wierzbowa Street but the following infantry could not deploy to attack under the concentric fire from insurgent machine guns located in barricades on Bielańska and Daniłowiczowska streets, the town hall and positions in Senatorska Street. Twice more the Germans tried to attack without success and withdrew around 5 p.m., losing over thirty killed and many wounded, taking the surviving civilians with them.
Przygoński, Powstanie warszawskie w sierpniu 1944 r. [The Warsaw Uprising in August 1944] (Warsaw, 1980), vol. 1, p. 426
The previous day’s defence preparations proved their worth on this day. To plan for the defence, Lt. Nałęcz placed his two machine guns on both flanks to provide crossfire over Theatre Square; soldiers with rifles were placed on the highest floors to give them a better field of fire from a greater height; and assault groups with submachine guns and grenades were on the ground floor to deal with any breach of the walls. The right flank machine gun was manned by the Mirowski brothers, who were all cadet officers: the oldest, Zbigniew or ‘Gryf’, was the gunner while Jerzy, ‘Wilk’, and Henryk ‘Dąb’ were crewmen. Their friend and future brother-in-law ‘Runiek’ and their uncle, 2nd Lt. ‘Zew’, completed the section. On the left flank, the gunner was C. Off. ‘Delfin’, a Pole from Silesia who had been forcibly drafted into the German Army. An experienced soldier, he fought on the eastern front and then managed to desert in Warsaw. The sapper section commanded by Abczyc prepared anti-tank grenades by taping TNT blocks to German ‘potato masher’ grenades.
I became very familiar with the location of our defence forces, all the strongpoints and officer command posts. I knew the quickest way to get from point to point. Over the previous two days I had not only accompanied Nałęcz everywhere, but also done a lot of exploration on my own. This morning I was with Nałęcz as he was making his rounds. We were on the top floor of the town hall when we heard the noise of tanks. We looked towards the direction of the clatter and saw three thanks emerging from Wierzbowa Street, proceeding slowly towards the barricade on Bielańska Street on our right flank. At the beginning of the Uprising, during action next to the post office, soldiers of Kiliński Battalion had captured one and destroyed another of these turretless tank destroyers. They were Jagdpanzer 38 Hetzers (baiters) armed with a 75mm gun and a four-man crew. When the tanks were spotted, Nałęcz sent me to all our positions to repeat his order: not to waste ammunition shooting at tanks. When I returned, the leading tank had approached Bielańska Street. An anti-tank grenade blew off its track. A few Molotov cocktails finished the job by setting it on fire. Three of the crew, one on fire, jumped from the tank and were immediately killed by a few single shots from the top floors. The fourth crewman never got out. The remaining two tanks moved back to the ruins of the opera house. From there, they started to shell us. Several machine guns from the opera building were pouring heavy fire into the windows of the town hall. We all took cover, apart from a few observers, who moved around.
Then the shooting stopped. A group of about 200 civilians – mostly woman with children and a few older men – emerged from the opera house. Amongst them were a few Germans followed by a larger concentration of Germans behind. Again, on Nałęcz’s order, I ran to all the riflemen telling them to hold their fire until the signal from Nałęcz. I continued downstairs to the main gate and told the detachment there to unlock the small door in the main gate and be ready to open it to allow the civilians to escape to us. When I returned to the top floor, the slowly moving group had covered about two-thirds of the distance. The cries of the civilians – and the Germans’ shouts and swearing – were clearly audible as the tanks and their machine guns stopped firing.
When they were within 50ft, Nałęcz leaned out of the window and yelled ‘Poles to us, run, run t
o the barricade, run to the gate!’ On that signal, our machine guns started to bark very short bursts at the Germans’ flanks; at the same time, the rifleman carefully picked off the Germans in the crowd of civilians. Some of the German soldiers removed their tunics to blend in better with the civilians. That did not help them. From that short distance our aim was very accurate and the Germans started to fall. They tried to return fire but it was not effective. The Polish civilians broke out and started to run towards us. They were shot at by the Germans, but some of them still made it. The square was covered with bodies, some in feldgrau but many other were civilians, including children. It was hard to look at this sight; most of our soldiers had tears running down their cheeks. Everybody was very subdued; there was no celebration.
Travelling in the tracks of the tanks, German ambulances slowly entered the square from Wierzbowa Street. They stopped and the German Army nurses started to pick up their wounded. Seeing this, our nurses ran out and started to remove wounded civilians. As the last German ambulance retreated, our nurses also left the square. There were still a lot of bodies. Polish civilians and Germans lay motionless. There was no movement on the square, and the two surviving Hetzers remained next to the opera house.
The relative quiet that descended after the removal of the wounded was interrupted by the sound of sustained machine gun fire coming from the ruins of the opera house. We realised that the Germans were executing civilians (that day, in the ruins of the opera house, they executed over 300 civilian men). After a prolonged silence, the Germans brought out another group of women and children to the middle of the square in front of the two tanks. Expecting to be executed, the woman knelt and started to sing ‘Boże coś Polskę’.
My Boyhood War Page 10