Spring Will Be Ours

by Sue Gee

  ‘As the representative of the Polish Republic in London, I affirm that on the part of leading British statesmen I have found during this difficult period the most complete comprehension of Polish interests, and the unchangeable traditional fidelity to the given word … Into the scales of war, Great Britain has now cast all the forces of the empire. She is determined to fight on Poland’s side until victory is achieved.’

  ‘I hope Tata is listening to this,’ Anna said. ‘They’ll have a wireless, won’t they, in his barracks?’

  ‘I expect they’ve drafted him into the hospital in Brześć,’ said Teresa. ‘He might not have time to listen.’

  ‘But it’s a wonderful speech, isn’t it?’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Jerzy. ‘You’ve just missed something – he’s reading a message from Chamberlain.’

  ‘We in Great Britain are watching with profound admiration the heroic struggle of the Polish forces against the enemy invading their land. Great Britain and France have entered the war with the determination to aid with all their power the resistance of Poland to aggression. They are strengthened by the knowledge that they are fighting for things that are greater than the interests of any one country – for honour, for justice, and for the freedom of the world. Those who have taken up arms in such a cause are assured, whatever sacrifices they may be called upon to make, of victory in the end.’

  And then Count Raczyński was wishing them all goodnight, and through the buzzing wireless came the first few tender bars of Chopin’s Polonaise. Outside the curtained windows, the bombs went on falling.

  ‘Today, Warsaw defending the honour of Poland has reached the climax of her greatness and glory.’ That was Starzyński’s last, hoarse wireless message to the city. Warsaw, almost the last place in Poland to surrender, finally did so on the 28 September. They heard it on the wireless, but they did not need to hear. By then, whole streets of the city were ablaze or in ruins. Nowy Świat, one of the most important arteries, was destroyed; every hospital had been bombed; epidemics were raging. There was no gas, no electricity, no mains water for drinking or fire fighting, almost no food. Not a single British plane, nor any kind of military assistance, had been sent; two hundred thousand had died. The government had fled across the Carpathian Mountains in the south-east to Romania. And on the 17th, Russia·had invaded eastern Poland. Holed up in their apartment on Z órawia Street, Teresa and the children heard this on the wireless some days later and were stunned. When the news of the surrender came, and they made their way, famished and apprehensive, to Wiktoria’s apartment, she met them in tears.

  ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it …’ She sat trembling on the edge of a chair in the sitting room, hungry and debilitated, all her assurance gone. ‘To think it is only twenty years since the last war, the last occupation. Twenty years of independence – and now it’s all gone again. What will they do to us now, I wonder?’

  ‘What do you think will happen to Tata?’ Anna asked, because she couldn’t bear not to.

  Wiktoria bit her lip and shook her head, repeating everything like an old woman. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Some of them are coming back, I believe – the Russians can’t take every man alive a prisoner, surely?’ She blew her nose. ‘You must get back to Praga, all of you, and find out what’s happened. If Tomasz does get home, and finds it empty …’

  ‘Is it true that Hitler’s going to hold a victory parade?’ Jerzy asked.

  ‘God knows …’ She began to cry again.

  Teresa stood up. ‘Well, we shall not be here to see it,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come with us, Wiktoria?’

  ‘How can I?’ She gestured weakly at the room. There were whole panes missing from the windows, a film of plaster dust over every piece of furniture. ‘I’m not leaving just so that the Germans can take over my home – anyway, my friends are still here. We’ll – we’ll manage, I suppose. Go on, go back quickly now.’

  ‘We’ll keep in touch.’

  Wiktoria nodded. ‘Yes. Yes. Keep in touch.’

  They walked all the way back to Praga through a shell-shocked city, bodies sprawled on the pavements by great mounds of rubble, thousands of makeshift graves in the streets and squares. They passed a large gimnazium school where a cavalry unit had been stationed and saw dead horses in the playground, heads askew on glossy necks, tongues lolling, eyes rolled up in terror.

  The Kierbedzia Bridge was still thronged with refugees. ‘Why do they keep coming?’ Jerzy asked, panting.

  ‘Perhaps they don’t know yet. Perhaps it’s worse everywhere else.’ Teresa’s eyes were searching. ‘Do you think your father –?’ Every now and then a knot of uniformed men, dirty and dishevelled, appeared in the crowd, returning home.

  ‘Do you think he’s in Praga?’ asked Anna. ‘Do you think he might be?’

  ‘I shouldn’t really think so. Not yet.’

  All the way back she thought: make him be there. Make him be there.

  When they reached their street they saw that it was covered, like almost everywhere else, in broken glass and rubble. Their house and all those nearby were still standing, and largely untouched, but they looked dead, eyeless and abandoned in a pale afternoon sun.

  They got inside, climbed the stairs, and Teresa turned the key of their own door: they stepped into a cold dark hall. ‘Tata?’ Anna couldn’t help it, even though she didn’t really believe there’d be an answer. They walked down the corridor and shivered; the sitting room floor was covered in a silvery mass of splintered glass. In the bathroom, when Teresa turned on the taps, there was a deep shuddering cough in the pipes and a trickle of brown water leaked into the basin, then stopped.

  Anna went into the surgery. Books were sprawled open on the floor; a drift of papers, covered in thick dust, spilt out from boxes. Panes here were mostly broken, too; so was the glass in the cabinet of instruments on the wall, and in the picture of Mama on the desk; a few dry leaves from the chestnut tree in the courtyard had blown through the holes in the window. She lifted the black telephone receiver, and heard nothing. So they couldn’t even phone Wiktoria now, and Tata wouldn’t be able to call them, either. On the blotting pad stood the black box camera they’d taken on holiday. She put down the receiver and picked up the camera, leaving a clean white square in the dust.

  Months later, she took the film to a Polish photographer to be developed, and she and Jerzy sat in their father’s empty surgery and stared at the prints. From under the silver birch trees he smiled at them in black and white. There were pictures of Anna and Jerzy in the boat, in swimsuits, laughing and fooling about in the water. It seemed to her then absurd that they could not have known – had she thought, once, that she was dreaming her own life? The whole of her past, of Tata’s and Jerzy’s past, looked now like a distant dream, as insubstantial as light and air, a family drifting downriver like Alice in Wonderland, innocent, uncaring; something that might or might not have happened a very long time ago, before the terror began, and everything changed for ever.

  3. Warsaw, 1939–1941

  Inhabitants of the General Government! Victorious German arms have, once and for all, put an end to the Polish State. Behind you lies an episode in history which you should forget forthwith; it belongs to the past and will never return.

  Inhabitants of the General Government!

  The Führer has decided to form a General Government as part of the territory of the Polish State, and to place me at its head. The General Government can become the refuge of the Polish people if they will submit loyally and completely to the orders of the German authorities and accomplish the task set them in the German war effort. Every attempt to oppose the New German order will be ruthlessly suppressed.

  Hans Frank, Governor General

  Kraków, 12 October 1939

  Hans Frank was Hitler’s lawyer. A large, fleshy man, in the years before 1939 he had visited Poland on a number of occasions, well dressed, smiling. Now, appointed by Hitler as Governor General, he was installed in
Krakow, in Wawel Castle, ancient palace of Polish kings. The swastika fluttered above the city; from here, Frank ruled the ‘General Government’, a large central and southern area of the country. On the west, it was bordered by Polish territory seized into the German Reich. On the east, along the river Bug, it was bordered by Polish territory seized by the Soviet Union. Under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, secretly signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov in August, Poland was held in pincers.

  Kraków, beautiful university city, was now the capital; Warsaw had been stripped of her historic, heroic role, and there, on 26 October, Dr Ludwig Fischer, lean and grey-haired, became District Governor.

  Soon, the walls of the city were plastered with notices and proclamations, in German and Polish. When the decree announcing the ‘refuge’of the General Government went up, so did a poster showing a Polish soldier in rags, bent over a wounded comrade. His bloody fist was raised against a background of the ruins of Warsaw beneath a lurid sky. A picture of Neville Chamberlain hung there, and the caption read: ENGLAND, THIS IS YOUR WORK! Anna saw a copy of the poster, pasted up in the main shopping street in Praga, and felt sick. She thought of the sunny afternoon in Wiktoria’s apartment, hiding in the bathroom and listening to the grown-ups talking about how if there was a war the British and French would come and save them. She remembered listening to the wireless with Jerzy and Teresa, to Count Raczyński reading the stirring message from Chamberlain, his assurances of victory. She didn’t know what to think about the poster – she knew it was called propaganda, and that she should ignore it, but nonetheless it confused and frightened her.

  In October, the first snow began to fall. A few days later, frost gripped the city, and the temperature plunged into an abyss of cold. Figures in black picked their way slowly through the streets, past snow-covered mounds of rubble from the siege. Peasants from beyond the suburbs drove through with their carts piled up and turned to stare at the German patrols on every street. Coal vanished, reappearing on the black market at terrifying prices. It was strictly forbidden to venture into the forests outside the city and forage for wood, but people went, or stayed in bed all day to keep warm, boarding up the holes in the windows with cardboard. The mains water was still cut off: almost all the pipes had been destroyed during the bombing, and long, shivering queues formed at the frozen pumps in streets and courtyards. Some electricity was restored, but there were frequent power cuts. On milder days, people walked to the farms beyond the suburbs – Teresa and the children went to the fields in Bródno – and searched the hard ground for potatoes, turnips and cabbages. Most of the farmhouses were empty, the farmers captured by the advancing German troops, their wives and children fled. Machinery stood unoiled and neglected, the animals had gone. There was little to be found in the way of food, but occasionally people stumbled on rusting guns and rifles, hastily buried by Polish Army units before they were taken prisoner. Even in Central Park, weapons had been buried. Few people dared to dig them up and take them home, but the places where they lay were carefully noted.

  New notices went up: all wireless sets were to be handed in to collecting points all over Warsaw. To own a wireless, even to be found listening to one, was punishable by death. It was also punishable by death to go out after curfew. In the long, freezing winter evenings, people were trapped in their bombarded homes; they sat in the dark, eking out candles, isolated and afraid.

  Early one morning Anna woke to hear something being smashed. For a few moments, dazed and sleepy, she thought it was a window breaking; then she realized that the sound was coming from right inside the apartment, from the sitting room. She scrambled out of bed, and ran down the corridor. The banging and smashing grew louder; she could hear Jerzy swearing.

  ‘What on earth –’

  Inside the sitting room, she found him with a hammer, sweating. On the floor at his feet lay pieces of Bakelite, brown mesh, wires and glass valves.

  ‘Jerzy!’

  ‘If they have it, they have it in pieces,’ he said, kicking the mess into a heap. ‘Do they think we’re going to let them confiscate our wireless, and have them and their fat wives sit listening to it?’ He marched out of the room, and came back with a cardboard box. ‘Come on, give me a hand.’

  They knelt down and scooped it all into the box. Anna picked up a broken piece from the front, with half of the company name snapped off. Tele – Telefunken, it had been. A German set. They’d all been so pleased when Tata brought it home two years ago. She dropped the piece on to the heap.

  ‘Right,’ said Jerzy. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Do be careful,’ said Anna, following him to the front door. ‘I mean – don’t say anything to upset them.’

  ‘Oh, but I want to upset them! I’m looking forward to this.’ He went out of the door and down the stairs, whistling.

  Within weeks, secret listening stations had been set up, monitoring the·broadcasts from London and Paris. The first underground paper, Polska Z yje, Poland Alive, began to circulate. Soon, through the underground komurakats – news bulletins mimeographed on wafer-thin paper, distributed and instantly destroyed – everyone knew that a Government in Exile had been formed in Paris, under the leadership of President Raczkiewicz and General Sikorski, Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces abroad.

  From all over the country, disguised as railway workers and peasant farmers, men travelled south to the frozen Carpathian Mountains and attempted the dangerous and punishing journey across them at night. There were German dog patrols up to forty miles deep into the frontier territory, and escapees were arrested if they were caught, and later sent to Auschwitz. But thousands reached Romania, and from there made the long journey to France, to join the Polish forces.

  Those who remained formed themselves into what was to become the most powerful resistance movement in occupied Europe. There was an entire civilian administration, the Delegatura, the Government Delegate. Responsible to the Government in Exile, the Delegatura secretly ran a judiciary, schools and hospitals – all the functions of the state, ready to assume power as soon as the war was over.

  There was, too, an underground military resistance, organized in clandestine cells all over the country. The Union of Armed Struggle, as it was first known, was responsible to General Sikorski in Paris, and directed from Warsaw by Colonel ‘Grot’Rowecki. His deputy was eventually to be General ‘Bór’Komorowski.

  ‘Anna, Jerzy! Wake up – there’s a letter from your father.’

  They woke in the kitchen, where they all slept each night on mattresses next to the tall tiled stove. Teresa in her dressing gown, was holding a small grey sealed card.

  ‘Where’s it from?’ Jerzy leaned across and peered at the postmark as she sat down beside Anna. ‘Kozielsk … where’s that?’

  Teresa shook her head. ‘We’ll have to look it up.’ She carefully slit open the card, and they read:

  30.11.39

  My darlings,

  I am in good health. Write to me often about everything. Are the children going to school? I hug and kiss you with all my heart.

  Tomasz

  ‘He’s a prisoner?’ asked Anna. She looked again the Russian lettering on the front of the card.

  ‘Yes – but at least we can write to him now.’ Teresa looked suddenly calmer than she had for months. ‘Let’s have breakfast.’

  They sat at the table in their overcoats. Breakfast was black bread, available only on rations, which Jerzy had queued for an hour to get the day before, and weak ersatz coffee.

  ‘Disgusting,’ he said. ‘What the hell do they make it from?’

  Anna swallowed and grimaced. ‘Do you think it’s acorns?’

  ‘It’s barley,’ said Teresa. ‘Go and get the atlas, Jerzy.’

  He returned with it from the sitting room and they pored over Russia, searching for Kozielsk. ‘Oh, here it is,’ Teresa said at last. It was deep inside Russia, east of Smoleńsk.

  ‘What do you think he’s doing?’ Anna asked. ‘Do you
think he really is in good health?’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell us if he wasn’t, would he?’ Jerzy said.

  ‘But his writing’s quite strong, isn’t it?’ said Teresa.

  ‘He won’t get a letter from us until next year, now,’ Jerzy said, tearing off another hunk of bread. ‘I can’t imagine Christmas without him.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Christmas at all,’ said Anna.

  Last year, at Wigilia, they had all gone together to midnight mass. This year, the curfew made that impossible. Wiktoria came to stay with them, and they all went to mass on Christmas Day morning, in a church which had escaped any damage in the bombing.

  It was bitterly cold, but the church was packed; the unheated aisles were clouded with breath, and when they knelt to pray the scraping of boots and shoes echoed on the icy stone. A single tall candle burned on the altar, from where the crucifix and all the tapestries had been removed: Anna imagined the priest hiding them somewhere deep in the crypt, perhaps even daring to keep them in his own apartment – anywhere, as long as the Germans could not take them away. Throughout the service people’s eyes wandered upwards, to look at the shattered stained-glass windows, roughly patched with pieces of wood. After the mass, and prayers for the souls of those who had died in the siege, the priest said: ‘Let us have a few moments of silent prayer for those dear to us.’

  Kneeling between Jerzy and Teresa, Anna clenched her hands. Please, please let Tata come home to us soon. She struggled to imagine her father as a prisoner, could not even begin to imagine what his prison might look like. A fortress? A row of huts? Then she had a sudden image of lines and lines of men in heavy coats, stamping up and down in the cold, being shouted at, and she began to cry. Please look after him.

  ‘And now,’ the priest was saying quietly, ‘perhaps you would all like to join me in the National Anthem.’ Still kneeling, they began to whisper: