At first none of us believed him. I decided to try getting information from some of the other neighbours. Henryk switched the radio on, but there was silence: the station had gone off the air.
I could not find many of our neighbours. A number of flats were locked up, and in others women were packing for their husbands or brothers, weeping and prepared for the worst. There could be no doubt that the doctor had spoken the truth.
I quickly made up my mind to stay. There was no point in wandering around outside the city; if I was going to die I would sooner die at home. And, after all, I thought, someone needed to look after my mother and sisters if Father and Henryk went. However, when we all discussed it, I found that they too had decided to stay.
Mother’s sense of duty made her try to persuade us to leave the city, all the same. She looked from one to another of us, her eyes wide with fear, putting forward new arguments in favour of getting out of Warsaw. When we insisted on staying, however, instinctive relief and satisfaction showed in her fine, expressive eyes: whatever happened, it was better to be together.
I waited until eight o’clock and then went out, only to find the city unrecognizable. How could its appearance have changed so much, so completely, in just a few hours?
All the shops were closed. There were no trams on the streets, only cars, crammed full and driving fast, all going the same way – towards the bridges over the Vistula. A detachment of soldiers was marching down Marszałkowska Street. They bore themselves defiantly, and they were singing, but you could see that discipline was unusually lax: their caps were all worn at different angles, they carried their carbines just as they liked and they were not marching in time. Something in their faces suggested that they were off to fight on their own initiative, so to speak, and had long since ceased to be part of such a precise, perfectly functioning machine as the army.
Two young women on the pavement threw them pink asters, calling something out hysterically over and over again. No one paid any attention. People were hurrying along, and it was obvious that they all meant to cross the Vistula and had just a few last important things they were anxious to get done before the Germans began to attack.
These people all looked different from the evening before too. Warsaw was such an elegant city! What had become of all the ladies and gentlemen dressed as if they came straight out of a fashion magazine? The people scurrying in all directions today looked as if they were in fancy dress as hunters and tourists. They wore high boots, ski boots, ski trousers, breeches, headscarves, and they carried bundles, rucksacks and walking sticks. They had taken no trouble to make themselves look civilized as they had dressed carelessly and in obvious haste.
The streets, so clean only yesterday, were now full of rubbish and dirt. Other soldiers were sitting or lying down in side streets, on the pavement, on the kerb, in the roadway: they had come straight from the front, and their faces, bearing and gestures showed extreme exhaustion and discouragement. In fact they tried to emphasize their discouragement, so bystanders would know that the reason they were here and not at the front was because there was no point in being at the front. It was not worthwhile. Small groups of people passed on what news of the battle areas they had gleaned from the soldiers. It was all bad.
I instinctively looked round for the loudspeakers. Perhaps they had been moved? No, they were still in place, but they had fallen silent.
I hurried off to the broadcasting centre. Why were there no announcements? Why was no one trying to give heart to people and stop this mass exodus? But the place had closed down. Its management had left the city, and only the cashiers were left, hastily paying the radio station’s employees and performing artists three months’ salary in lieu of notice.
‘What are we supposed to do now?’ I caught hold of a senior administrator’s hand.
He looked at me blankly, and then I saw scorn in his eyes which gave way to anger as he shook his hand free of mine.
‘Who cares?’ he shouted, shrugging his shoulders and striding out into the street. He slammed the door furiously behind him.
This was unbearable.
No one could persuade all these people not to flee. The loudspeakers on the lamp-posts had fallen silent, and no one cleaned the dirt from the streets. Dirt, or panic? Or the shame of fleeing down those streets instead of fighting?
The dignity the city had suddenly lost could not be restored. That was defeat.
Very downhearted, I went home.
On the evening of the next day the first shell from the German artillery hit the timber yard opposite our house. The windows of the corner shop, so carefully sealed with strips of white paper, were the first to fall out.
3 ∼ The First Germans
Over the next few days, mercifully, the situation improved a good deal. The city was declared a fortress and given a commandant, who issued an appeal to the population to stay where they were and show themselves ready to defend Warsaw. A counter-attack by Polish troops was being organized on the other side of the bend in the river, and meanwhile we had to hold back the main force of the enemy in Warsaw until our own men came to relieve us. The situation all round Warsaw was improving too; the German artillery had stopped shelling the city.
On the other hand, enemy air raids were being stepped up. No air-raid warnings were given now; they had crippled the city and its defence preparations for too long. Almost hourly, the silver shapes of bombers appeared high above us in the extraordinarily blue sky of that autumn, and we saw the puffs of white from anti-aircraft shells fired at them by our own artillery. Then we had to hurry down into the shelters. It was no joke now: the entire city was being bombed. The floors and walls of the air-raid shelters shook, and if a bomb fell on the building beneath which you were hiding, it meant certain death: the bullet in this deadly game of Russian roulette. Ambulances were always driving through the city, and when they ran out they were supplemented by cabs and even ordinary horse-drawn vehicles, carrying the dead and injured taken from the ruins.
Morale among the population was high, and enthusiasm grew hour by hour. We were no longer relying on luck and individual initiative, as on 7 September. Now we were an army with commanders and ammunition; we had a purpose – self-defence – and its success or failure depended on ourselves. We had only to exert all our strength.
The general in command called on the people to dig trenches round the city to prevent the advance of German tanks. We all volunteered to dig: only Mother stayed at home in the morning to look after our flat and cook us a meal.
We were digging along the side of a hill on the outskirts of the suburbs. An attractive residential quarter of villas stood behind us and a municipal park full of trees in front of us. It would actually have been quite pleasant work if it hadn’t been for the bombs aimed at us. They were not particularly accurate, and fell some distance away, but it was uncomfortable to hear them whistling past as we worked down in our trench, knowing that one of them might yet hit us.
On the first day an old Jew in kaftan and yarmulka was shovelling soil beside me. He dug with Biblical fervour, flinging himself on his spade as if it were a mortal enemy, foaming at the mouth, his pale face streaming with sweat, his whole body shaking, his muscles contracting. He ground his teeth as he worked, a black whirlwind of kaftan and beard. His dogged labour, far beyond his normal capacities, produced vanishingly small results. The point of his spade could hardly penetrate the baked mud, and the dry yellow clods he prised out slipped back into the trench before the poor man, making a superhuman effort, could swing his spade back and dump the mud outside the trench. Every few moments he leaned back against the wall of earth, racked with coughing. Pale as a dying man, he sipped the peppermint brew made to refresh the workers by old women who were too weak to dig but wanted to make themselves useful somehow.
‘You’re overdoing it,’ I told him during one of his rests. ‘You really shouldn’t be digging when you’re not strong enough.’ Feeling sorry for him, I tried to persuade him to give up.
He was obviously unfit for the work. ‘Look, no one’s asking you to do this, after all.’
He glanced at me, still breathing heavily, and then looked up at the sky, a calm sapphire blue where the little white clouds left by shrapnel still hovered, and an expression of rapture came into his eyes, as if he saw Yahweh in all his majesty there in the heavens.
‘I have a shop!’ he whispered.
He sighed even more deeply, and a sob burst from him. Desperation showed on his face as he fell on his spade again, quite beside himself with the effort.
I stopped digging after two days. I had heard that the radio station was broadcasting again under a new director, Edmund Rudnicki, who used to be head of the music department. He had not fled like the others, but had reassembled his scattered colleagues and opened up the station. I came to the conclusion that I would be more useful there than digging, which was true: I played a great deal, both as soloist and accompanist.
Meanwhile, conditions in the city began to deteriorate in reverse proportion, you might say, to the increasing courage and determination of its people.
The German artillery began shelling Warsaw again, first the suburbs, then the city centre too. More and more buildings lost their window panes, there were round holes in the walls where they suffered a hit, and corners of masonry were knocked off. By night the sky was red with the glow of firelight and the air full of the smell of burning. Provisions were running low. This was the one point on which the heroic city mayor Starzyński had been wrong: he should not have advised the people against laying in stocks of food. The city now had to feed not only itself but also the soldiers trapped inside it, and the Poznań army from the west that had made its way through to Warsaw to reinforce the defence.
Around 20 September our whole family moved from the Śliska Street flat to friends who lived in a flat on the first floor of a house in Pańska Street. None of us liked the air-raid shelters. You could hardly breathe the stuffy air down in the cellar, and the low ceiling seemed about to fall in any moment, burying everything underneath it with the ruins of a multi-storey building on top. But it was hard to hold out in our third-floor flat. We kept hearing shells whistle past the windows, which had lost all their glass, and one of the shells could easily hit our building on its way through the air. We decided that the first floor would be better: the shells would hit the higher storeys and explode there, and we would not have to go down to the cellar. There were already a number of people staying in our friends’ flat. It was crowded, and we had to sleep on the floor.
Meanwhile the siege of Warsaw, the first chapter in the city’s tragic story, was coming to an end.
It was more and more difficult for me to reach the broadcasting centre. The corpses of people and horses killed by shrapnel lay about the streets, whole areas of the city were in flames, and now that the municipal waterworks had been damaged by artillery and bombs no attempt could be made to extinguish the fires. Playing in the studio was dangerous too. The German artillery was shelling all the most important places in the city, and as soon as a broadcaster began announcing a programme German batteries opened fire on the broadcasting centre.
During this penultimate stage of the siege the population’s hysterical fear of sabotage reached its height. Anyone could be accused of spying and shot at any moment, before he had time to explain himself.
An elderly spinster, a music teacher, lived on the fourth floor of the building into which we had moved to stay with our friends. It was her bad luck to bear the surname of Hoffer and to be courageous. Her courage could just as well have been described as eccentricity. No air raids or shelling could induce her to go down to the shelter instead of doing her daily two hours of piano practice before lunch. She kept some birds in a cage on her balcony and fed them three times a day with the same dogged regularity. This way of life looked distinctly odd in the besieged city of Warsaw. It seemed highly suspicious to the maids in the building. They met at the caretaker’s for political conversations. After much to-ing and fro-ing they came to the firm conclusion that a teacher with so unmistakably German a name must be German herself, and her piano-playing was a secret code through which she sent signals to the Luftwaffe pilots telling them where to drop their bombs. In no time at all the excited women had made their way into the eccentric old lady’s flat, tied her up, taken her downstairs and shut her in one of the cellars, along with the birds as evidence of her sabotage. Without meaning to, they saved her life: a few hours later a shell hit her flat and destroyed it completely.
I played in front of the microphone for the last time on 23 September. I have no idea myself how I reached the broadcasting centre that day. I ran from the entrance of one building to the entrance of another, I hid, and then ran out into the street again when I thought I no longer heard the whistle of shells close by. I met Mayor Starzyński at the door of the broadcasting centre. He was dishevelled and unshaven, and his face wore an expression of deathly weariness. He hadn’t slept for days. He was the heart and soul of the defence, the real hero of the city. The entire responsibility for the fate of Warsaw rested on his shoulders. He was everywhere: he went along the trenches, he was in charge of the building of barricades, the organization of hospitals, the fair distribution of what little food there was, the air-raid defences, the fire services, and still he found time to address the population daily. Everyone waited eagerly for his speeches and drew courage from them: there was no reason for anyone to lose heart as long as the mayor had no doubts. Anyway, the situation did not seem too bad. The French had broken through the Siegfried Line, Hamburg had been badly bombed by the British air force and the British army might land in Germany any moment now. Or so we thought.
On that final day at the radio station, I was giving a Chopin recital. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw. Shells were exploding close to the broadcasting centre all the time I played, and buildings were burning very close to us. I could scarcely hear the sound of my own piano through the noise. After the recital I had to wait two hours before the shelling died down enough for me to get home. My parents, brother and sisters had thought I must be dead, and welcomed me like a man risen from the grave. Our maid was the only person who thought all the anxiety had been unnecessary. ‘After all, he had his papers in his pocket,’ she pointed out. ‘If he’d been dead, they’d have known where to take him.’
The same day, at three-fifteen in the afternoon, Warsaw Radio went off the air. A recording of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto in C minor was being broadcast, and just as the second, beautiful, peaceful movement was coming to an end a German bomb destroyed the power station. The loudspeakers fell silent all over the city. Towards evening, in spite of the artillery fire now raging again, I tried to work on the composition of my concertino for piano and orchestra. I kept at work on it all through September, although I found it more and more difficult to do so.
When darkness fell that evening, I put my head out of the window. The street, red with the glow of fires, was empty, and there was no sound but the echo of bursting shells. To the left, Marszałkowska Street was burning, and so were Królewska Street and Grzybowski Square behind us and Sienna Street straight ahead. Heavy blood-red masses of smoke loomed above the buildings. The roadways and pavements were sprinkled with white German leaflets; no one picked them up, because they were said to be poisoned. Two bodies lay under a street-lamp at the crossroads, one with arms spread wide, the other curled up as if to sleep. Outside the door of our building lay the corpse of a woman with her head and one arm blown off. A bucket lay tipped over beside her; she had been fetching water from the well. Her blood flowed into the gutter in a long, dark stream, and then ran on into a drain covered by a grating.
A horse-drawn cab was progressing with some difficulty down the road, coming from Wielka Street and making for Żelazna Street. It was difficult to see how it had got here, and why horse and driver seemed as calm as if nothing were going on around them. The man stopped his horse on the corner of Sosnowa Street, as if wonde
ring whether to turn off there or drive straight on. After brief reflection he chose to go straight ahead; he clicked his tongue, and the horse trotted on. They were about ten paces away from the corner when there was a whistling sound, a roar, and the street lit up with white light for a moment, as if in a flashlight photograph – I was dazzled. When my eyes were used to the twilight again, there was no cab left. Splintered wood, the remains of wheels and shafts, bits of upholstery and the shattered bodies of driver and horse lay by the walls of the buildings. If he had turned down Sosnowa Street instead …
The dreadful days of 25 and 26 September came. The noise of explosions merged with the constant thunder of guns, penetrated by the boom of nose-diving aircraft like electric drills boring holes in iron. The air was heavy with smoke and the dust of crumbling bricks and plaster. It got everywhere, stifling people who had shut themselves up in cellars or their flats, keeping as far as possible from the street.
How I survived those two days I do not know. A splinter of shrapnel killed someone sitting next to me in our friends’ bedroom. I spent two nights and a day with ten people standing in a tiny lavatory. A few weeks later, when we wondered how it had been possible, and tried to squeeze ourselves in there again, we found that only eight people could possibly fit in unless they were in terror for their lives.
Warsaw surrendered on Wednesday, 27 September.
It was two more days before I dared to go out into the city. I came home in a deep depression: the city no longer existed – or so I thought at the time, in my inexperience.
Nowy Świat was a narrow alley winding its way through heaps of rubble. At every corner I had to make detours round barricades constructed from overturned trams and torn-up paving slabs. Decaying bodies were piled up in the streets. The people, starving from the siege, fell on the bodies of horses lying around. The ruins of many buildings were still smouldering.
The Pianist Page 3