Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  Crouched beneath the rim of the window sill, he and Andrzej watched the sky begin to redden as fires burned in other parts of the city. Then, just after eight, they heard the Captain behind them draw in his breath. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘The Prudential – quick! Look and tell me what you can see there.’

  They craned their necks, and saw to the north-east, on the very top of the Prudential Building skyscraper, the white and red of the Polish flag, fluttering wildly against the clouds.

  ‘We’ve done it!’ Andrzej yelled, and leapt into the air. ‘We’ll have every bloody swastika in Warsaw shot down by tomorrow.’

  Jerzy grinned at him. Wilk and Tygrys – Grzegorz and Ryszard, they all knew each other’s names, now – had been on the far side of the room, oiling the rifles. They scrambled to their feet and came over, and they all stood gazing out over the rooftops, where other flags were billowing, as the last of the light faded, and far away, in the Old Town, a bonfire burned like a beacon in the Market Square.

  From his new headquarters in a factory in Wola, bordering the ghetto ruins, General Bór issued his first message to the fighting city:

  ‘Soldiers of the capital!

  ‘I have today issued the order which you desire, for open warfare against Poland’s age-old enemy, the German invader. After nearly five years of ceaseless and determined struggle, carried on in secret, you stand today openly with arms in hand, to restore freedom to our country and to mete out fitting punishment to the German criminals for the terror and crimes committed by them on Polish soil.’

  On the radio station Kosćiuszko, a repeated broadcast: ‘The streets of Praga are being shaken by the roar of Soviet guns. Attacks on the Germans are the duty of every Pole. Your sufferings will be over in a few days. Listen carefully and obediently to our authorities, the Polish National Council, and the Committee for National Liberation.’

  At 8.15, General Stahel, Commander of the German Armed Forces in Warsaw, gave an order from his headquarters in the Bruhl Palace:

  ‘As of this moment, Warsaw is in a state of siege. Civilians who go out into the street will be shot. Buildings and establishments from which the Germans are shot at will be levelled to the ground.’

  He woke with the sound of shooting, felt stiff from sleeping on the floor, thought for a moment he was back in the kitchen in Praga, in the winter after the siege, when they’d all slept by the stove to keep warm and woken each morning with cricks in their necks. But it was Andrzej lying next to him, not Anna, and when he turned to look at the window he didn’t see the white light of falling snow but summer rain. The Captain was standing by the heavy curtains, with Grzegorz on the other side.

  ‘Sir?’ He struggled to his feet, Andrzej and Ryszard, too, throwing off their blankets. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Something in Napoleon Square – I think it might be the post office.’

  They all pressed to the window.

  ‘Keep down!’ the Captain snapped, and they flung themselves down and then peered cautiously over the sill. He saw German tanks, overturned trams, uprooted lamp posts, barricades: overnight, the avenue had become a wasteland for battle. From below, in the building, came the sound of heavy banging. Then the door opened and Pan Wójcik came in, saying: ‘They’re moving down into the cellars – air raids are expected.’ When they followed him to the apartment door they saw people spilling out of doors on every landing, carrying bedding, clothes, boxes of food, cans of water. Here and there were AK armbands, but most were civilians, women with children, grandparents. He saw one old man talking to an AK commander, begging to be allowed to join, and the officer shaking his head, explaining that there were barely enough arms to go round as it was.

  By the afternoon the rain had stopped, and a hot August sun cast long shadows over the streets. Snipers hid in doorways, behind windows, in attics. The cellars were filling with families, trying to find a space to settle, calling when they found one, offering to share blankets, food, water. Few seemed afraid: a fever-pitch of excited talk rippled under the streets and pavements.

  At 5.15, a voice almost breaking with emotion was picked up on the radio in the AK headquarters. ‘This is Polish Radio in London. Yesterday, at five o’clock in the afternoon, the Home Army began open fighting in Warsaw.’

  That night, Lion unit was repositioned on the ground floor, and it was Jerzy’s turn to keep watch, with Andrzej, as more tanks moved into the avenue and the buildings began to shake under mortar fire. In the north, many AK units were making for the Kampinos Forest,·hoping for airdrops there, the supplies to be smuggled back into Zoliborz and the Old Town later.

  By 3 August, the bridges across the Vistula were still in German hands, but the AK had taken and held the centre of the city, including the post office, the gasworks, the water supply and the Central Railway Station. After a battle lasting nineteen hours they had captured the electricity plant. They held the Old Town, they held the riverside districts of Powiśle and Czerniaków, and Mokotów, where they had stormed the Gestapo Headquarters. They were fighting desperately for Wola district.

  In Moscow, Prime Minister Mikołajczyk was appealing for airborne supplies to be sent immediately.

  ‘What sort of an army is this Home Army of yours, without artillery, tanks or air force?’ Stalin demanded. ‘It has not even enough light arms to fight properly. In terms of modern warfare, it is just nothing. I hear that the Polish Government has ordered these units to drive the Germans out of Warsaw. I do not understand how they can possibly do it.’

  On 4 August, the Soviet fighter planes disappeared from the sky over Warsaw. German planes dropped leaflets in broken Polish, supposedly from General Bór: the talks in Moscow had failed, the people were to lay down their arms and go home. They fell on to streets empty of trams, cars, bicycles – of any kind of transport. People ran across the avenues and broad thoroughfares crouched down behind the barricades, stumbling over water and gas pipes in the trenches. From Wola and Ochota in the west, a great flood of refugees was beginning to pour towards the city centre and the Old Town. They were fleeing from German units made up mostly of ex-criminals, the very dregs of the Wehrmacht, who were rounding up civilians by the thousands, machine-gunning them in sealed-off side streets, burning them alive in their wooden houses, raping women and children; in the Curie-Skłodowska Radium Institute, they raped the cancer patients in their beds, and the nuns who nursed them.

  At two o’clock that afternoon came the first Luftwaffe raid since the siege of 1939. Twenty-four Junkers flew over in close formation, dropping a hail of incendiary bombs. They came again at four. Fires raged through the city; fear began to spread in the cellars.

  When it was over, Jerzy’s unit crept out of the doorway of the apartment block, into the choking, dust-filled air on the avenue, and helped to clear a path through the heaps of fallen masonry.

  ‘Listen,’ the Captain said suddenly in the evening, as they tried to settle on the floor for the night, throats parched, skin thick and itching with dust. ‘Across the river,’ he said, frowning. ‘Can you hear anything?’

  They listened. Something was missing from the sounds they had quickly grown used to, a background to the sputtering of gunfire, the tearing of falling beams from plaster, groans beneath great heaps of rubble.

  From the other side of the Vistula the Soviet artillery no longer thundered. As darkness fell, they strained their ears for it, but only silence came across the water.

  Black Friday, 5 August. Daylight raids on Wola sometimes as low as a hundred feet. In some parts of the district the inhabitants were herded street by street into cemeteries, into courtyards, gardens and factory back yards and shot by machine guns. The heaps of corpses were burned, covered by rubble and debris. In headlong flight, the panic-stricken civilians poured out of Wola and into the Old Town, and the next evening General Bór and his staff, under continuous fire in their headquarters, the Kammler Factory, were forced to evacuate, leaving
behind vital pieces of damaged signalling equipment, and go to the Old Town too. They moved into a building backing on to Krasiński Square, already named in radio messages to London as a place for airdrops.

  So far, the Old Town was untouched by fire or bombing. But fear of the air raids over the city centre had forced people down into the medieval cellars and passageways, and the whole district was now crowded with twice the population of the days before the Uprising. It was difficult to move anywhere: the courtyards and narrow streets were filled with people, looking for somewhere to stay, and where the pavements had been ripped up for barricades a fine sand lay beneath; the streets were ankle-deep in it. Thirty-five people were now crammed into the three-room apartment where Jan Prawicki and his unit were stationed. Already, food supplies were running low.

  They had knocked through a hole in the cellar wall, into the cellar of the house adjoining, and another through the far wall into the next house, and so on, until it was possible to move along much of the avenue without ever going to the surface. The tunnels and passages through the overcrowded cellars were narrow and airless, filled with an endless two-way traffic of AK courier girls delivering bulletins and messages, older women carefully carrying baskets of bread, or potatoes, or boxes of tinned food, to the soup kitchens and field hospitals set up behind the front lines.

  From the news-sheets delivered daily, Jerzy knew that in many parts of the city life was now being lived almost entirely underground. Apartment block commanders controlled the distribution of food, and supervised the digging of wells, for the Germans had regained control of the water supply, and had cut off most of the mains. It had not rained for a week, not since the second day of fighting.

  Every night a few people in his building crept out on to the roof and searched the sky for the lights of approaching planes, bearing not the heavy black crosses of the German bombers but the red, white and blue roundel of the RAF, or the white and red check of the Polish insignia. So far, no lights had been sighted, but no one doubted that they were on their way. The avenue was largely controlled by the Germans now, but Lion had finished off a tank crew this morning: from the empty second floor Grzegorz and Jerzy had hurled half a dozen filipinki into the ventilation slits, as the tank passed the broken windows, and the Captain and Andrzej, crouching behind sandbags, had picked off the men as they scrambled out in terror. Jerzy hadn’t used a rifle yet. Tomorrow night, he and Andrzej were to cross the avenue, to join a depleted unit on the other side. Now, leaning against the sandbags by the window, he listened to Ryszard playing the mouth organ, stopping and starting over the same old tune, ‘My Heart’s in a Knapsack’, until he got it right at last, and everyone cheered. He closed his eyes, suddenly very tired, wondering just before he fell asleep if Anna was all right.

  A post box had been put up behind their barricade, a plain wooden box with a slot in the top and a lily painted on the side. Twice a day, two young boys appeared to collect the messages inside – you were allowed twenty-five words, clearly written, with nothing about the actual course of the fighting. Neither of the boys looked more than ten or eleven, and Anna assumed they were Scouts. They wore AK armbands, and grinned from beneath enormous caps at the people who went out each day to rebuild and reinforce the barricade.

  The phones in their apartment block had stopped working two days ago. Now, the only hope of contacting Wiktoria or Jerzy was through the field post, and she wasn’t even certain exactly where Jerzy was. There was no chance that a note to Teresa would get right across the city.

  She sat at the living room table with Jadwiga, writing in pencil on two small pieces of paper. Wiktoria, and her address. All safe so far. Are you all right? What else was there to say? Victory! And just the letter A, to sign it. On Jerzy’s note she could only print Kurowski, J., Lion, Jerozolimskie: she did not know what number, but there was just a chance that another Scout would know where Lion unit was, and be able to find him. Get in touch with me, she wrote, with her address. Be careful. A. Then she folded over both pieces of paper, and looked at Jadwiga. ‘Shall we do it now?’

  Jadwiga nodded, folding over the note to her mother. ‘Yes. Come on.’

  They went out of the apartment and ran down the stairs to the ground floor. From the open cellar door they could hear the families below moving about, coughing, clattering pots and pans. It had been a quiet night; the children might be allowed to come up, soon, and play in the hall.

  Outside, it was already very hot, sun on the balconies and barricades; they stood at the entrance looking down the deserted street. ‘I think it’s all right,’ said Jadwiga, and they ran out, slid their notes into the post box and ran back again. The very moment they reached their entrance, they heard a deafening explosion, and clung to each other.

  There was the sickening sound of tearing masonry, a building crumbling, then silence. Anna raised her head from Jadwiga’s shoulder, and they stared at each other. From the place of the explosion came the noise of bricks falling to the ground from a great height, then more, in ones and twos, sounding almost gentle, and then they heard the screams, and muffled shouts, and they turned and ran out into the street, towards them.

  Clouds of dust floated through the air, obscuring the sun, and they coughed and choked, and realized they couldn’t move at all until it had begun to settle. They stood pressed against a wall, hands over their mouths, eyes closed again, and listened to the screams and cries for help. When the dust began at last to sink on to the pavement they went out again, and saw doors and gateways opening all along the street, and people hurrying out and down towards a house with a great gaping hole in the front, right down the middle, blasting open the second and third floors and blocking the entrance with a towering heap of rubble.

  ‘You know what that is, don’t you?’ said Jadwiga, panting.

  ‘The field hospital.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They reached the house and stood with a crowd of others, staring at whole apartments exposed above, pieces of beds and tables and sofas hurled like doll’s house furniture across the rooms. Then a Red Cross nurse appeared at the ground-floor window to the left of a blocked doorway, her face and hair grey with dust and shock, and called out: ‘Hurry!’

  From behind the crowd men were pushing through with shovels and pickaxes, shouting to everyone to get out of the way, and they began to tear down the rubble, and clear a path through to the door. Anna and Jadwiga ran towards the window, where daggers of broken glass were sticking all round the frame. Peering through, as the nurse moved back a little, Anna could see nothing but pale shapes in darkness, figures on the floor so thick with plaster dust that they looked like pieces of sculpture. Then something stirred, moaning, and she said to the nurse: ‘What do you want us to do?’

  ‘Just help us to move them. I think we can go across the street.’

  ‘We can’t get anyone out through here, surely,’ said Jadwiga, and the nurse shook her head.

  ‘No, no, but if you can climb through you can help me a little, until they clear the door. We’ve lost two of our staff …’ She spoke with such control that Anna wondered if she really knew what she was saying. Then she saw her hands, clenching and unclenching as if in spasm. ‘We’re coming,’ she said, and began to tug at the larger pieces of glass. At once, although she was trying to be careful, blood began to pour down her palm, and she looked at it distantly, feeling nothing.

  ‘Idiot,’ said Jadwiga, and bent to tear a strip off the bottom of her dress. ‘Tie this round – no, I’ll do it.’ She quickly tied a knot round Anna’s thumb, and said, ‘Let’s just smash it in.’ She picked up a brick, and began to tap all round the frame; the glass fell into the room, and then she pulled herself up on to the sill and said to Anna, ‘Come on. Do you need a hand?’

  Anna shook her head, scrambled up, and dropped down after her into the room. On the far side, a huge beam had fallen, and from beneath it she could see two or three twisted bodies protrude on split-open mattresses. Beyond was the doorway to the ha
ll, and beyond that the heavy oak door to the cellar, hanging half off its hinges, with a heap of bricks and plaster before it. Groans came up the stairway.

  ‘If one of you can go down …’ said the nurse. ‘I must have someone to help me here.’

  From outside the front door the pickaxes sounded louder and closer, and they could hear bricks being hurled aside.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Anna, and ran across the room. She began to tear the rubble away from the top of the cellar steps. ‘We’re coming!’ she yelled to the doorway, and scrabbled like a rabbit until she could make her way past the hanging door to the top of the steps and look down.

  It was quite dark. Very slowly, she crept down, feeling the wall until she could see a thin strip of light coming through a ventilation slit near the top of a far wall, and made out several figures on the floor. Here, too, a beam had fallen: it lay across the middle, and above it a hole yawned between lath and plaster.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said unsteadily to the figures. ‘We’re going to get you out.’ How many were there? Who had been groaning? Who was alive? Something was moving on the other side of the beam. She stepped over it awkwardly, and found a young man half-propped up against the wall. Even in this light she could see that his face was completely colourless.

  ‘My … leg …’ He could barely speak.

  She bent down, ran her hands over his legs, saw his left foot twisted inwards as if on a pivot. He must somehow have dragged himself out from under the beam: the edge of a half brick was just supporting it a few inches above the floor.