by Sue Gee
‘About … about what we thought.’ She lowered her voice as Wiktoria came down the corridor. ‘You know.’
He shook his head, exhausted. ‘What are you talking about?’
Had seven weeks in Pawiak made him forget so much?
‘About her being a Jew,’ she whispered.
‘Oh. That. Sorry … I’m not feeling too good …’
‘She says she isn’t.’
‘What are you two whispering about?’ asked Wiktoria, coming in. ‘Jerzy, you look terrible, we must get you to bed.’
His head slumped to his chest. Anna and Wiktoria struggled to lift him; they carried him, deeply asleep, into Wiktoria’s bedroom, and covered him with blankets.
Within two days Jerzy was smuggled out of Warsaw, carrying forged papers, and went into hiding on a farm, some twenty miles to the south, which belonged to a contact of the Captain. Dressed like a peasant labourer, he helped the farmer dig up the last swedes and potatoes; he learned to milk thin cattle and feed hungry pigs on mornings when mist hung over the frozen fields like a shroud. Pan Kruk had taken the oath two years ago: Jerzy was not the first person to be hidden away here, and in the loft above the kitchen, where he slept, was a rifle, under the floorboards.
‘My father’s,’ Pan Kruk told Jerzy briefly. ‘I hope the next time I fire it will be to blow a Kraut’s head off.’
He talked about the uprising as if it were a certainty; he told Jerzy that arms had been smuggled out of Warsaw for months, to prepare the countryside. And he had something else hidden away, too.
When Jerzy had been on the farm for a few weeks, he took him into the family sitting room, and lifted boxes behind the couch to reveal an ancient wireless. Jerzy gaped. He told Pan Kruk how he’d smashed their lovely Telefunken into a thousand pieces before handing it in to the collecting office, and the farmer laughed.
‘Good lad. But I’m glad I kept ours.’
That night, for the first time since the siege of Warsaw, four long years ago, Jerzy sat listening to a broadcast from London to Poland.
‘On every bomb the gallant Poles in the RAF drop on to the cities of Germany, there is written: oko za oko – an eye for an eye. Brave men and women of Poland – you are not forgotten!’ When the Polonaise was played at the end, crackling through the worn transmitter, Jerzy had tears pouring down his face.
He stayed on the farm all winter, and when in the spring of 1944 he returned to Warsaw it was not to Senatorska but to stay with Andrzej, in his uncle’s apartment. By then, Teresa and Anna had parted.
On a bright cold morning in March, they left the dark apartment on Senatorska, once more carrying their cases. It’s like the day we came here, thought Anna: a beautiful day, and a horrible lump in my throat. The canvas on the market stalls in·Z elazna Brama flapped in the wind; ahead, through the Iron Gate, the trees in the Saxon Gardens tossed bare branches. They walked through the gardens to Krakowskie Przedmieście, their faces cold, and at the tram stop by the church they put down their cases. In a place like this, the Champs Elysées of Warsaw, you could see how the Volksdeutsche and the better-off Poles were surviving the occupation: well-dressed women hurried along the broad pavements, fur collars turned up round soft faces against the cold. From here, Teresa was going to stay with a cousin, who lived near the embankment. From here, Anna was going to go and live with Wiktoria. They looked at each other, and looked away. Then Teresa put her hand on Anna’s shoulder. She had tears in her eyes, but it might have been the bitter wind.
‘Goodbye, Anna. Keep in touch.’
‘I will. Goodbye. Thank you – for everything you did for us.’
They kissed, suddenly hugging each other. Then Teresa wiped her eyes and bent down to pick up her suitcase. She walked quickly down the avenue, under the trees; within minutes she had reached a side street, and turned on the corner to raise her hand and wave.
Anna waved back, and then she was gone. She paced up and down, waiting for the tram, filled with guilt and relief.
‘But it’s much more sensible,’ said Wiktoria, half an hour later, sitting on the spare room bed and watching her unpack. ‘You will be able to be friends, now, without feeling so responsible for each other.’
Anna nodded, but didn’t answer. She wanted to confide in Wiktoria, but she was too ashamed. This is what the war has done to me, she thought, and probably to most of us. I couldn’t see Teresa for who she really was, I could only look at her through Nazi eyes, and fear for my own skin. If I were religious, if I really believed, instead of wishing I could, I would go to confession now, and ask to be forgiven.
‘Anna? What are you thinking about?’
She blushed. ‘Nothing.’ A book lay on the bedside table; she picked it up and turned it over. ‘What’s this?’
‘Tke Forsyte Saga, dear. We’re all lapping it up – I thought you might enjoy it. A nice little bit of escapism for you – I think you could do with it.’
Anna smiled. ‘Thank you.’
She shook out the dress with patch pockets she had made in the dressmakers’school, and hung it in the cupboard. And now, she thought – now I have only myself to think of.
In the afternoon, she telephoned Natalia and arranged to meet her.
There were five of them, meeting before curfew in the cellar of a house near Central Park. Natalia and Jadwiga, both recruited through Guides. Henryk, the commander, who worked under cover in a German chemical plant. Wojtek, nineteen, who had been recruited there by him. And Anna, who joined them one evening after leaving work at the hospital, and stood in the middle of the cellar with a cross in one hand and the card with the oath in the other, as they watched her.
‘Before God the Almighty, before the Holy Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland,’ she read slowly, ‘I put my hand on this Holy Cross, the symbol of martyrdom and salvation, and I swear that I will defend the honour of Poland with all my might, that I will fight with arms in hand to deliver her from slavery …’
5. Uprising: Warsaw, 1944
The mood of the city was changing. With almost every kommunikat, in almost every AK meeting, the news from Europe brought hope: on front after front, the German forces were being beaten back at
The third of May was Constitution Day1 Last year, in the·Zoliborz district, the underground had celebrated by tapping the wires of the German loudspeakers, and the passers-by had slowed down, suddenly aware that instead of the usual stream of pronouncements and propaganda, someone was fervently delivering a patriotic speech. And they were playing the national anthem! For perhaps ten minutes, people stood listening, cheering, crying. Then the Gestapo swept in, in furious carloads, and the people scattered.
This year, on Constitution Day, people in Stare Miasto crossing Zamkowy Square, before the Royal Palace, found other people nudging them to look up, right up, to the palace roof. Unfurled from the top of the clock tower, the Polish flag was flying, and down below the knots of people became a crowd, gazing up at the white and red, billowing in the early summer sky.
In weeks, the bulletins which Wiktoria and Anna shared were full of the triumph of Monte Cassino. For six months, the Germans had held the Italian monastery, set at the very top of a mountain overlooking the only road between north and south Italy. The monastery was surrounded by the heaviest fortifications; every movement on the road was observed, and so far all attempts by Allied forces either to breach the fortifications or to use the road through the mountain had failed: they were under constant bombardment from German artillery. But on 18 May, led by General Anders under British command, the Polish Second Corps had advanced up the mountain, and in one of the most ferocious battles of the war stormed the beleaguered monastery. By the end, almost four thousand men lay dead or wounded on the mountainside, but the way was open for the Allied advance on Rome, and in three weeks the capital had fallen.
Warsaw was ecstatic.
‘And now I really do believe,’ said Wiktoria, putting away her spectacles, and tearing the paper to shreds, ‘that we don’t have
long to wait.’
‘For the uprising?’ Anna asked, taking the shreds and putting them in a paper bag to burn in the stove.
‘For the end of the war,’ said Wiktoria. ‘For liberation.’
Four weeks later: D-Day, and with the Normandy landings, the Allied invasion of occupied Europe began. Cherbourg was taken by the Americans. Caen fell to the British and Canadians. Now, tanks were able to break through the German defences, and the Allies began to advance on Paris.
Another month. In ‘Wolf’s Lair’, Hitler’s headquarters near the town of Rastenburg, East Prussia, a bomb planted by anti-Nazi officers exploded under the table where he sat in conference. Hitler escaped the death intended for him, and well over one hundred and fifty conspirators were executed, but the attempt on his life had been made, and it fuelled the certainty in occupied Europe that a German defeat was now inevitable.
And then –
‘The Russians are coming!’ Jerzy burst into Wiktoria’s apartment. ‘Have you heard that? They’ve crossed the river Bug, they’re beating back the Germans – I overheard two officers in a cafe this morning, they were talking about leaving Warsaw – they’re starting to panic’ He grabbed Wiktoria’s hands. ‘They’re starting to panic!’
Wiktoria looked at him. ‘And do you really imagine, Jerzy, after everything that has happened, after what happened to your poor father, that we are to feel only gratitude to the Russians?’
He flushed, frowning. ‘I know … But the Red Army has AK units fighting alongside, doesn’t it? It’s they and the Russians who will liberate us, after all…’
‘And I wonder,’ said Wiktoria, sitting down, ‘if that is what will happen.’
‘What do you mean?’
She shrugged. ‘I mean I wonder if there will be such … cooperation. There are rumours that the Polish cities the AK help to take from the Germans may be retaken by the Russians.’ She looked at Jerzy, shaking her head. ‘Naturally, I hope that we shall all receive as much help as possible from Russia when the moment comes. But I should like to think that it is only assistance, to fight against the Nazis, nothing else. I should like to think that with help we shall liberate ourselves, and welcome the Russians as guests in a free Poland.’
‘You should be writing speeches, Aunt.’
‘Yes,’ said Wiktoria. ‘I think perhaps I should. And you be careful, Jerzy – what are you thinking of, eavesdropping in cafés? Your escape seems to have gone to your head.’
He grinned. ‘Yes. Perhaps it has.’
Soon, the whole of Warsaw was watching a great trail of traffic across the bridges of the Vistula as the defeated German army retreated from the eastern front. Wounded, dirty, exhausted and apathetic, they shuffled through the city streets, and with the news of the attempt on Hitler’s life, and the success of the Normandy landings, retreat became flight, and then, as Jerzy had said, it did become panic.
German civilians besieged the railway stations, or paid fortunes for the hire of a horse and cart. All the German offices, including the Post Office, closed down; heavily defended pillboxes, and barricades of barbed wire, surrounded all the major installations and buildings. German newspapers stopped publication. In the headquarters on Szucha Avenue, the Gestapo were burning documents; the mayor and Governor Fischer abruptly departed.
On 26 July, Prime Minister Mikołajczyk, who had succeeded General Sikorski, flew from London to Moscow for urgent talks with Stalin. Mikołajczyk wanted three things: crucially, to establish the voice of the London Government in any new administration in Poland; to reclaim the cities of Wilno and Lwów; to ensure that Soviet aid was guaranteed for a Warsaw insurrection.
On 27 July, Fischer returned. The following day, posters appeared and loudspeakers throughout the city broadcast a call: one hundred thousand men were to report immediately for fortification work – digging trenches, building additional barricades all round the main German strongholds, defences against a Russian attack. Except for a few old men with a sense of humour, who turned up at the recruitment posts in the Old Town next day with rusty spades, the call was ignored.
Within two days, quite different posters appeared, this time signed by the political and military chiefs of the PAL, the Polish People’s Army, an underground military organization numbering some two thousand, under Soviet leadership. General Bór and his staff had apparently deserted Warsaw: the people were called on to accept the leadership of the communists in an armed fight against the Germans. This call was also ignored: no one believed that Bór would leave them now.
Gunfire sounded from across the river. Soviet planes flew over the city. The Soviet Army, commanded by Marshal Rokossovsky, drew near to the outskirts of Praga. Marching alongside was the First Polish Army, formed in 1943, when Stalin had broken off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in London over the Katyń affair. It was led by General Berling, the Polish officer who, unlike General Anders, when captured by the Russians in 1939 had declared himself prepared to serve the communist cause.
Now, every member of every AK unit, some forty thousand men and four thousand women, was tense with the expectation of coming out into the open at last. Office workers, teachers, factory workers, artists, musicians, doctors, nurses, labourers, waitresses, students, clerks and typists – all were waiting for the call to arms.
On the evening of 29 July, the AK monitoring service picked up a transmission in Polish from the Soviet radio station run by the Union of Polish Patriots. The Union had been formed by Polish communists in Soviet Russia in 1943, to act as Stalin’s puppet. ‘No doubt Warsaw already hears the guns of the battle
which is soon to bring liberation. Those who have never bowed
their heads to the Hitlerite power will again, as in 1939, join
in battle against the Germans, this time for the decisive action.
The Polish Army, now entering Polish territory, trained in the
USSR, is now joined to the People’s Army to form the Corps
of the Polish Armed Forces, the armed core of our nation in
its struggle for independence. Its ranks will be joined tomorrow
by the sons of Warsaw. They will, together with the Allied
Army, pursue the enemy westward, drive the Hitlerite vermin
from the Polish land, and strike a mortal blow at the last of
Prussian imperialism.
‘For Warsaw, which did not yield, but fought on, the hour
of action has already arrived. The Germans will no doubt try
to defend themselves in Warsaw … They will expose the city
to ruin, and its inhabitants to death. They will try to take
away all the most precious possessions and turn into dust all
that they have to leave behind. It is therefore a hundred times
more necessary than ever to remember that in the flood of
Hitlerite destruction all is lost that is not saved by active effort;
that by direct, active struggle in the streets of Warsaw, in its
houses, factories and shops, we not only hasten the moment
of final liberation, but also save the nation’s property and the
lives of our brethren.’
Next day, similar transmissions were broadcast by this Polish-language radio station, nicely named Kościuszko, after the Polish national hero who had led an uprising against Czarist Russia. It sounded so close and clear that those intently listening assumed it was broadcasting from just across the Vistula, with the Soviet forces in Praga. In fact, it was deep inside Russia, in Tashkent.
Then the Soviet planes dropped leaflets, swirling and fluttering on to the streets. Walking arm in arm down Jerozolimskie Avenue, Anna and Natalia found themselves in a snowstorm of paper. Anna reached out and grabbed one; they stood reading it, as more tumbled out of the sky.
‘Poles! The time of liberation is at hand! Poles, to arms! … Every Polish homestead must become a stronghold in the struggle against the invader … There is not a m
oment to lose.’
They looked at each other, excited and afraid, and hurried to find Henryk.
On Sunday 30 July, tanks patrolled the streets which were suddenly calm and quiet, and which seemed to have no more than the ordinary amount of traffic, except, perhaps, that there were an unusual number of young people out, heavily dressed in unseasonal anoraks or windcheaters. Many carried knapsacks or bags. They ignored the tanks, the police and military patrols as they made their way through the city; some, enjoying the sun in the parks, were openly reading underground newspapers.
Fourteen hundred men and over four hundred women were deported that day from Pawiak, and sent to concentration camps.
On 31 July, in his staff headquarters, General Bór was told by his intelligence units that Russian tanks had been sighted in Praga. Already, the suburbs of Otwock, Falencia, Józefów, Radzymin – all within ten miles of the city – had been taken. Now, in urgent consultation with the Governor Delegate, Jan Jankowski, Bór judged that the time for open insurrection had arrived.
‘Very well, then,’ said Jankowski. ‘Begin.’
Bór turned to General Monter, Commander of the whole Warsaw District of the AK. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘at five p.m. precisely, you will start operations in Warsaw.’
The telephone rang in the empty hall.
‘Anna?’ Wiktoria was still in her bedroom.
‘I’ll take it.’ She turned down the gas under the kettle, went quickly out of the kitchen, and picked up the receiver.
‘Słucham. I’m listening.’
‘It’s me,’ said Natalia. ‘Are you ready for our outing?’
‘Today?’
‘Today.’ Anna could hear Natalia trying to control the excitement in her voice. ‘I’ll ring you again later, to confirm the time, but can you have everything ready for the picnic?’
Anna saw herself smile in the shadows of the mirror above the phone. ‘Of course. I’ll have everything we need. We’re … we’re going to the picnic spot we’ve talked about?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice dropped. ‘Don’t move until you hear more.’ The phone clicked.