My Boyhood War

by Bohdan Hryniewicz

  There were more and more casualties. Staff Sgt. Mama, who enlisted us, was severely wounded by shrapnel. It became more and more difficult to evacuate the wounded who were rapidly filling the first aid station, which had been moved into the basement. We had no doctor and medical supplies were running out. There were no more painkillers, so the wounded suffered in silence. The nurses were doing everything they could but were completely worn out. Nevertheless they kept going.

  Word came that ‘Jaga’ had been killed evacuating one of the wounded. Both Andrzej and I had got to know her. She was the youngest nurse, only three years older than Andrzej. She had been in the Underground Girl Guides for a long time and we had the common bond of being scouts. Insurgent nurse and journalist Danuta Kaczyńska wrote:

  On this day (17 August) a nurse from the 1st Company, my friend, 17-year-old Jaga, also perished. She was late arriving at the Parasol assembly point. The Uprising found her near the square by the ‘Iron Gate’. She had joined the first unit she came across. It was Lieutenant ‘Nałęcz’’s unit from KB …

  Some time in the middle of August Jaga had come to see me in Krasiński Palace but did not find me as I was on the front line. She left news that she was in Lt. Nałęcz’s unit on Długa Street. In a free moment I ran to her. I wanted her to return to us, to Parasol, as we were short of nurses and Jaga was a girl you could rely on. She replied:

  – I want to return to you, but I know I am needed more here …

  During this short visit I noticed how well liked she was by the soldiers. I understood her: several days of fighting had bonded her to this unit …

  … I managed to find the person present at her death. Dr Barbara Zylewicz [Baśka] was commandant of the battle nurses in Nałęcz during the Uprising. She knew Jaga and talked of her attitude and bravery with admiration:

  ‘On 17 August Jaga and I were carrying a wounded to the hospital. We stopped to rest in the entrance of the Arsenal building on Długa Street. Jaga was standing close to the entrance talking with an insurgent. At that moment a shell struck, shredding them both.’ From Jaga’s pocket Barbara Zylewicz took a photograph of her and on the back noted the date and place of her death. I have this photograph …

  Dziewczęta z “Parasola” [The Girls from Parasol], p. 245

  The day of 18 August was relatively calm. There were no armoured or infantry attacks on our positions, just constant shelling from artillery and rocket launchers, while Stukas pounded our rear positions, causing widespread destruction and fires. We had the feeling that this might be the ‘calm before the storm’, and that the Germans were preparing a major attack on our positions – the only positions left from the original defence against the Germans’ main assault on the old town from the west. We were a projecting salient with exposed flanks.

  That night we looked in vain for Allied airdrops, there hadn’t been any for the last three nights. The next morning an artillery barrage of unprecedented intensity began at precisely 9 a.m., not only on our positions but all over the old town. The Germans employed everything in their armoury: artillery, mortars, Nebelwerfer rockets and assault guns. In the middle of August a Karl-Gerät, the largest existing siege mortar, previously used in the siege of Sevastopol, had been brought to the outskirts of Warsaw. It fired a 24in shell weighing over 2 tons, causing more destruction than anything previously fired or dropped on Warsaw.

  A big building on Rymarska Street close to the Leszno Street barricade was burning and blowing smoke towards our positions. The smoke reduced visibility on Leszno Street, the Germans’ main avenue of attack. The back of the telephone exchange received a direct hit from a Stuka bomb. Luckily, the front part facing Leszno Street had not been hit. We were sure that the attack would start soon. At that point there were no more than fifty men capable of fighting, including wounded. The only positive thing was that they were all very well armed, but ammunition was running out.

  The anticipated attack deployed from Leszno Street. Through the thinning smoke we saw one assault gun followed by two others further away. Three Goliaths, tracked mines, slowly advanced in front. They looked like miniature turretless tanks, about 2ft high by 3ft wide and 5ft long, and carried about 220lb of explosives. The Goliaths were propelled by a small gas engine and controlled from an assault gun following behind it, connected to the Goliath by a cable that unfurled as it moved forward.

  The assault guns stopped just outside the range of our PIAT and started to fire directly at the telephone exchange. Our men, including the machine gun crew, moved to a part of the building not visible from Leszno Street. We were still holding the corner building of Przejazd and Leszno streets adjoining our main barricade. The other buildings on Leszno Street, numbers 4 and 6, were no-man’s-land. A small team moved along the top floors of those buildings and with a lucky drop of a grenade managed to cut the cable to one of the Goliaths, immobilising it. The other two continued forward. As Nałęcz and I watched from the telephone exchange, one exploded in front of the barricade. The building on the corner of Leszno and Przejazd streets collapsed. A few minutes later the last one exploded next to the barricade, damaging it even further.

  After the two explosions, another attack deployed from Leszno Street. The Germans again used Polish civilians as a shield. This time almost all of them were women and children. Like the last time, Nałęcz again ordered us to hold our fire. The women reached the barricade and started to take it apart. Not hearing or seeing any fire, the Germans assumed we had abandoned our positions. They started to be careless and expose themselves. Some had even crossed over the barricade when Nałęcz yelled to the Poles to escape. Our sharpshooters started to pick off individual Germans while our machine guns let off several short bursts. The Germans retreated in panic. Again there were bodies lying around mostly in feldgrau, but sadly women and children too.

  Soon after, another attack deployed. Under the suppressing fire of Brummbärs, German infantry attacking from Leszno Street and the ghetto managed to capture the odd side of Przejazd Street. We had now fallen onto the block of the even (east) side of Przejazd Street, between the telephone exchange on the corner of Tłomacka and Długa streets. Our back was a very vulnerable field of rubble.

  From behind the motionless assault guns there emerged a tracked armoured vehicle without a turret or a gun. As it moved towards our barricade, Holski picked up a PIAT and yelled, ‘Bohdan, grab the ammo and show me to the top.’ We were on the second floor of the telephone exchange. I took the lead running, carrying a canister with projectiles, and Holski followed with the PIAT. We ran up the interior staircase to the fourth floor. The front wall was practically non-existent from having received so many hits. To our right, hidden from Leszno Street, was the position of our machine gun. The Mirowski brothers were manning it from behind sandbags, where they had a good view of the barricade.

  Holski put the PIAT butt down and cocked it with his foot. I took one of the two remaining projectiles, armed it and passed it to him to load the weapon. We crawled forward amid the rubble until we could see the barricade below us. The armoured vehicle, moving slowly, was only a few feet away from it. Holski fired, scoring a direct hit on the front glacis of the vehicle. The vehicle stopped but did not explode or burn. Nobody tried to get out. There was a strange moment of silence and the shooting stopped for a moment. As we picked ourselves up and ran downstairs, the floor above received more direct hits. After a while the assault guns retired and the Germans abandoned further attacks. During the night they towed away the damaged armoured vehicle.

  Later on I followed Nałęcz as he made the rounds of our new, reduced defensive position. We counted less than thirty men capable of fighting. We were all hungry, tired and sleep-deprived. That night a runner from Maj. Sosna brought an order saying that we would be relieved the next morning. During the night we got help to evacuate our wounded.

  The armoured vehicle we had immobilised was a Borgward BIV. The same type of vehicle as the one captured from the Germans that had exploded ten day
s earlier in the old town, killing over 300 people. These vehicles were used as ammunition or explosive carriers and could suspend a large explosive charge in front, to be placed before a target and fired remotely. If this vehicle had not been stopped, it could have climbed over the barricade and exploded its 1,000lb charge against the telephone building. The driver was probably killed by the explosion of the PIAT projectile, keeping him from placing and activating the mine it was carrying.

  In the early hours of 20 August, a company from Czarniecki Battalion under Cpt. ‘Jacek’ started to relieve our positions. We were ordered to turn over our two machine guns but our crews refused to surrender the guns. They preferred to stay with them rather than leave them. Nałęcz reluctantly agreed and let the crews stay with their guns.

  Once our men had briefed their replacements, they started to move to our quarters in the Spiess building at 5 Hipoteczna Street. By the time Nałęcz turned over command to Cpt. Jacek it was late morning. We left for the sector headquarters to report to Major Sosna. On the way there I mentioned that I hadn’t seen Andrzej for quite some time. Nałęcz replied that we would see him in the duty room at headquarters when we got there (Andrzej was our battalion’s runner at HQ). When we arrived at HQ on Barokowa Street we went directly to the second floor, where Maj. Sosna was based. I waited outside. After a short time Nałęcz came out and we walked down to the duty room, where he asked, ‘Where is Tarzan from Battalion Nałęcz?’ There was silence and then somebody said in a loud nonchalant voice: ‘They made soup out of him.’ Someone else whispered loudly, ‘Shut your trap, you moron, that’s his brother.’ The nonchalant voice, a young runner, put his head down and quietly left the room without looking at us as I silently stared at him. I stood there not feeling anything. It was like an out-of-body-experience. I was there, I heard what was said, but I did not feel anything, I did not say anything. I just stood there.

  We were told that ‘Tarzan’ had been wounded at the Arsenal a few days before and taken to the field hospital at 7 Długa. We walked down Długa Street. The devastation from Stukas and artillery fire over the previous eight days was very noticeable. Several buildings, including the Garrison Church, had collapsed under direct bomb hits.

  The Field Hospital in the old Raczynski Palace was the largest in the old town. It housed over 500 wounded in very primitive conditions. We couldn’t find any information as no one at that time kept records. We walked through the large rooms filled with beds and mattresses on the floor. There were wounded everywhere, including German soldiers, many amputees and people horribly burned by phosphorous from ‘mooing cow’ rockets. We could not find Andrzej. A nurse finally told us there had been a priest who kept records of those who died, but he had been killed that morning. She handed us the priest’s notebook, still sticky with his blood. It was a simple school notebook, folded in half. The very last entry read: ‘Runner Tarzan, Andrzej Hryniewicz, died this morning after amputation of both legs and an arm’. The nurse then told us that several bodies from the hospital had been buried that morning, but she did not know where.

  Nałęcz squeezed my shoulder and said ‘let’s go look’. We searched all the fresh graves in the pavements and courtyards of the adjoining buildings but could not find Andrzej. After a while I said, ‘Panie Kapitanie, (Captain, sir) you had better go back to the battalion.’

  We returned to the battalion, or rather its survivors (in the previous eight days we had suffered forty-nine deaths and over 100 wounded, equivalent to 75 per cent of our strength). We learned that the Germans had renewed their attacks after our battalion left the telephone exchange. Early that afternoon Cpt. Jacek’s relief unit abandoned our old positions under heavy attack, withdrawing without notifying our machine gun crews. The abandoned crews fought their way out, without losing the guns. Unfortunately, Kmita, our best and most experienced gunner, was killed.

  The loss of our old position gave the Germans a good jump-off point for further attacks. Later that day they captured Radziwiłł Palace, creating a very dangerous salient into the Polish line of defence.

  Capt. Ognisty, from Czarniecki Battalion, which held the sector adjoining ours, later wrote:

  in my opinion, had … Cpt. Nałęcz been relieved and reinforced by reserves earlier, then without question the Tlomackie-Przejazd line, anchored by the telephone exchange, this key position, would have been held until the end of the fighting in the old town … those units having superior military manpower would have provided resistance unbreakable by the enemy.

  Lucjan Fajer, Zołnierze Starowki [The Soldiers of

  the Old Town], p. 285

  * * * * *

  After the war my mother received a letter from the Polish Red Cross dated 27 October 1945:

  … With sorrow we inform … Andrzej Hryniewicz, son of Władyslaw – died in the period of September–October 1944 in Warsaw – was buried provisionally near 15 Długa Street. From there the exhumed [body] was, on 23 April 1945, [moved to] Grave Nr. I in Krasiński Gardens, Burial # 3483.

  A few months later we visited his grave. By then there were several mass graves of exhumed bodies reburied in Krasiński Gardens. On his grave lay a plaque listing seven names, including Andrzej’s, plus fifty-three ‘NN’. In April 1947, after our escape from Poland, father was notified that the grave was going to be exhumed and asked to collect my brother’s body. He buried Andrzej in an individual grave in Warsaw’s Powąski Military Cemetery. In the meantime, the rest of the bodies from temporary graves were moved to the Wola Cemetery, where over 50,000 bodies and ashes, mostly civilians, were buried. Somehow, Andrzej’s death certificate was issued with the wrong date of death, 21 August. He died on 20 August.

  It is a long tradition that on the anniversary of the Uprising, at 5 p.m. on 1 August, we all meet at the graves of our comrades in the Powąski Military Cemetery. A few years ago, while standing next to my brother’s grave, one of my friends told me that Andrzej was not buried there but in Wola Cemetery. I was curious, so we went there. He showed me a grave with a monument listing the same seven names, including Andrzej’s, and fifty-three unknown persons. My brother is one of the few people I know who is ‘buried’ in two places.

  * * *

  At the time of Andrzej’s death all I knew was that he had been severely wounded. I speculated from the nature of his wounds that he had been hit by shrapnel a few days before the 20th. I also knew that Jaga was killed on the 17th, but didn’t know how or where. Over fifty years later, I made contact with Dr Zylewicz, Baśka, and she told me what happened:

  On 17 August, Jaga and I were taking a wounded soldier from our positions. Jaga was leading, carrying the ‘legs’ [lighter] end of the stretcher. We stopped in the gateway of the Arsenal to take a rest and put down the stretcher at the end of carriageway, close to the courtyard. Jaga saw Andrzej walking with an officer in the courtyard; he spotted her and ran towards her. There was an explosion. When I came too, lying on the ground, I saw Jaga’s body, her chest ripped open, the wounded on the stretcher dead with the fin of the mortar shell embedded in his forehead and Andrzej lying on the ground with two nurses from Parasol tending to his wounds and carrying him off on a stretcher.

  This is basically the same story told by Danuta Kaczynska in her book The Girls from Parasol. By the time I learned of this, my father had died. To his dying day he refused to believe me when I told him that the story in March through Hell, and subsequent articles and publications, was not true. He wanted to believe in the glorified description of Andrzej’s death. He believed that Sternik, who wrote the article claiming that he witnessed the incident, was not making it up. Father’s final argument was that he had seen my brother’s exhumed body and knew that his legs had been cut off by machine gun fire. After all, he had seen enough bodies during the Polish-Bolshevik War to know …

  13

  Old Town – Radziwiłł Palace,

  20–24 August 1944

  The following day, Nałęcz received orders to retake Radziwiłł Palace. Our ‘rest’
ended after a day, 21 August. We hardly had any rest as the area we were in was under constant Stuka attack. There were only about forty men fit for duty. Two assault groups were formed, one under Lt. Pobóg and the other under Lt. Orwid. Nałęcz and I were with the third, smallest group of sappers under C. Off. Abczyc. We made our way to the courtyard of Koloryt, a dye factory adjoining the back garden of the palace. The night was clear as we reached a hole in the wall which, to our surprise, was not protected on either side. We moved cautiously through the gardens to the palace. It was almost midnight as the assault groups entered, taking the German troops by complete surprise. They were busy plundering the palace and had not positioned guards anywhere. In a quick firefight, a few Germans were killed and the rest escaped, taking refuge in a guardhouse at the front of the palace. While our machine guns blocked their escape route, Molotov cocktails set the building on fire. The trapped men started to shoot blindly from the windows of the burning building. The ones who tried to escape were cut down and the rest perished in the fire. We had no casualties.

  We took defensive positions at the windows of the first and second floors. The men were so exhausted that many fell asleep immediately. Those designated as guards tried very hard not to follow them. We captured weapons, ammunition and grenades. Among the dead we discovered that they were Azeris from the special ‘Bergman’ unit we called Kalmuks. I followed Nałęcz as he made the rounds of our defensive positions. Later, as we entered the palace cellars, we were met by Prince Janusz Radziwiłł and his butler. There were some other people, including a few members of his family. Wooden crates, trunks and luggage were stacked everywhere. The prince was a tall, handsome man approximately 65 years old. He invited us to sit down. His butler had a chair ready for Nałęcz, while I sat on one of the trunks. After some small talk, Nałęcz asked the prince if he had any food or wine as we needed provisions. The prince replied that the Germans had taken everything but somehow this did not ring true as the cellar was in perfect order. If the Germans had in fact been there earlier, it would have been in shambles. ‘In that case, you won’t mind if we look and see if the Germans missed something?’ The prince did not look very happy. Nałęcz nodded, and I went upstairs to get a few men. Needless to say, they found quite a large wine cellar with some canned food, so we confiscated what we needed. (Prince Radziwiłł was a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm; it is very possible that the German officers protected him). Nałęcz and I went upstairs to the master bedroom, which overlooked the garden, and crashed on the largest bed I had ever seen.