by Sue Gee
Anna put down the receiver. ‘Wiktoria!’ She ran down the corridor to Wiktoria’s room, and stood in the door. ‘Guess!’
Wiktoria sat up on the pillows, pulling a cardigan round her shoulders.
‘It’s starting?’
‘Yes! Natalia’s going to ring back with the time.’ She ran across and hugged her. ‘I’m going to explode.’
‘Perhaps you’d get me some tea first.’
‘Of course.’ Anna raced back to the kitchen, and while the kettle came to the boil she stood and looked down on to the street. A grey morning suddenly, after the heat of the last days of July. The pavement was beginning to fill with people, although it was still early, and they were hurrying, purposeful, the atmosphere surely already changed: these people did not look as though they were simply going drearily to work in an occupied city.
The kettle sputtered, and she switched it off and poured boiling water into the glasses through the strainer with just a pinch of tea. She carried them through to Wiktoria’s room, and found her already out of bed and dressing. ‘I’ll leave it here,’ said Anna, putting the glass on the chest of drawers, and went back to her own small room. She left her glass to cool, and bent to open the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. She pulled out the small parcel, and spread the contents carefully on the bed.
Bandages – mostly made from strips of old sheet. A bottle of iodine. Safety pins, two dozen. The nail scissors she’d had since she was twelve. And the small piece of paper she’d been given in the meeting three days ago, heavily printed in small, smudged black letters: AK Courier Pass.
From the wardrobe she took out the canvas shoulder bag hanging inside, and she put all these things into it, fastening and unfastening the stiff buckles and straps until they would open quickly and she didn’t need to fumble with them. Then she took her needlecase from the drawer of the little table by her bed, and the two strips of material, one white, one red, which she had hoarded from the dressmakers’ school, as they all had. She folded the white one round her arm to check the length, then sat on the bed, sewing them together until she had an armband, in the colours of the Polish flag, and was ready, now, for the next phone call.
It came within the hour. ‘Five o’clock. Be there by four.’ The number of an apartment house, a coded street, not far from the coded Three Crosses Square. She stood at the window of the sitting room, watching the movement of the people on the street below, as a fine rain began to fall.
That afternoon, 1 August, over ten thousand members of the AK took up their positions in Stare Miasto, the Old Town. In the most overcrowded area of Warsaw, they were preparing to seize and defend key points: Krasiński Square, the Royal Palace, St John’s Cathedral; the Polish Bank, the Market Square. In every cobbled street, every winding alleyway in Stare Miasto’s few square miles, doors in the tall narrow houses opened quickly, and the people behind them let in men and women from outside without greeting, closing them quickly again.
Inside, the officers and men, the women nurses and cooks and couriers, piled up sandbags at the windows of the first and second floors – rooms where, usually, whole families ate and slept. They ran up the winding stairs to the attics, peering down from gabled windows on to the open squares, and German patrols. They ran down worn stone steps to the sprawling cellars, swiftly assembling and setting out equipment secretly stored there, to turn them into kitchens and field hospitals. They scribbled the names of the streets overhead on the walls, so that you could follow a whole underground route through the district, if necessary, by knocking through from one house cellar to another, and another. Perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary – everyone hoped it would be over in days. In every house, the atmosphere was a feverish, heady mixture of nerves and elation.
In a ground-floor room on a street not far from the river bank, the last man in Boar unit had just arrived, panting, furious with himself for missing the deadline by ten minutes.
‘Sir. Reporting for duty.’ He stood in front of his lieutenant, sweating. ‘Sorry I’m late, sir – I was waiting for my mother, to say goodbye, she must have got held up somewhere … Sorry, sir.’
The lieutenant looked him up and down, and nodded curtly. ‘Uniforms in the next room – go and get dressed, and come back here with the other men for orders.’
‘Sir.’ Jan Prawicki was seventeen years old, as scrawny as the other boys in Boar, but tough, quick on the uptake, witty. He’d always wanted to join the army – if it hadn’t been for the war, he’d have gone to military academy after the liceum, and enlisted with the regulars, like his father.
Jan’s father was originally from Wilno, a kindly man who in the First World War, in his early twenties, been decorated for bravery. In the golden period of Polish independence which followed, he had commanded a division of the army stationed just outside Warsaw. Like thousands upon thousands of others, Major Prawicki had been captured in September 1939, and taken, the following spring, to the Polish officers’prison camp in the German mountain town of Murnau. Throughout the occupation, Jan and his mother had received brief, lonely, censored letters. Meanwhile, they eked out a living.
Zofia, who had read economics at the university of Kraków, was now a dressmaker. Jan did anything – he had mended burst pipes, sold paraffin, been a porter, mended windows. He had joined the AK very early, recruited by a teacher from the gimnazium komplet with his best friend, Paweł Staszewicz.
Paweł was in the room with the uniforms, fighting like the others to grab from the heap of old clothes on the floor. He seized an outsize tin hat and emerged from the scrum, looking up to see Jan come in to the room, panting.
‘Hey!’ Paweł pulled the tin hat down over his eyes and raised an imaginary rifle. ‘You’ve got here – Poland is not yet lost!’
Jan grinned. ‘Idiot.’
The room smelt like a jumble sale. He looked at the heap on the floor, and the other boys frantically trying on khaki trousers and combat jackets which looked like his father’s First World War uniforms. They probably were – his mother, and plenty of other women whose men were held prisoners of war, had turned out every wardrobe and chest of drawers for the AK. His mother had taken the oath last year: she was supposed to join up today, too, on the other side of Stare Miasto – why the hell hadn’t she come back from work first, as they’d arranged?
‘Come on, there’s not much left.’ Paweł dragged him over, and Jan knelt down, rummaging. He yanked out a pair of cotton trousers and a thick khaki shirt, and stripped fast, pulling them on.
‘How do I look?’ The trousers were too big; Paweł threw him a belt, and he buckled it to the last hole. Not so bad. ‘What about the armbands?’
‘Here.’ Paweł picked up a little heap of red and white from the window sill. Jan’s mother had made all of them, she had made dozens, from an old flag hidden in a chest in their apartment – he’d spent two days last week, distributing them to different units. If he’d been stopped with that lot on him … well, he hadn’t been. He pulled one on, over the right sleeve, and immediately felt a rush of excitement.
‘Yerrrrrrow!’ He leapt into the air, making a mock salute. ‘Polska Walczącd! Hitler has only got one ball – forwarrrrd!’
The roomful of half-naked, undernourished boys collapsed.
‘Men!’ Lieutenant Wroński stood at the door, perhaps not more than five years older than any of them. There was instant silence. ‘You will all be lined up and dressed and reporting next door within one minute. Kozica – kindly calm down.’
‘Sir.’ Jan was scarlet. Kozica – chamois – swift and graceful.
Humiliating to be reprimanded. But for God’s sake – they’d waited four years for this.
‘You’re a soldier now,’ said Paweł, rapidly buttoning his own shirt, grabbing an armband. ‘Don’t cock it up.’
Behind him, the others pulled up zips and put on caps and armbands, caught each other’s eyes and spluttered.
‘Hitler’s only got one ball,’ Piotr sang under his breath.
‘Shut up!’ Jan snapped. Quickly, he emptied his old pockets and stuffed lighter and cigarettes into the chest pocket of the khaki shirt.
They all filed back into the next room, where the lieutenant was waiting. A wooden box stood on the table beside him. No one could take his eyes off it.
‘In this box,’ the lieutenant said flatly, ‘is the allocation of arms for this unit.’ He lifted the lid, and took out a small brown pistol. ‘This, and two others. We have twenty rounds of ammunition. Two rifles – fifteen cartridges. Thirty-five filipinki – grenades.’
There was an uneasy, incredulous silence. Then Jan said cautiously:
‘Between all of us, sir?’
‘Between all of us. You must understand that until recently many units outside the city were being supplied with arms from here – it has only been decided in the last two weeks that Warsaw herself should take full part in an armed uprising. After all …’ He hesitated. ‘After all, we suffered a very great deal in the siege. Our leaders have wanted to spare more mutilation to the city itself, and more suffering for the civilians. However – all that has changed. The Russians are approaching, they have encouraged us to seize the moment, and we are expecting reinforcements of arms from them and from Great Britain at any time.’ He tapped the little pistol against the palm of his hand. ‘In the meantime – this is what we have. The very strictest discipline is to be maintained in the use of ammunition. Weapons will be shared on a rota system.’
The lieutenant looked at them all, subdued scarecrows in caps, tin hats, old patched shirts and trousers, the hastily stitched white and red armbands their only true uniform.
‘We are not making a film,’ he said quietly. ‘We are going into Battle. We are going to liberate Warsaw.’
Jan felt for his cigarettes.
At three o’clock Jerzy’s unit, Lion, assembled. He, Andrzej, the Captain and the other boys walked one by one to a block on the corner of Krucza and Jerozolimskie Avenue, turning casually in at the entrance, ignoring the German patrol which suddenly appeared across the street, and then pounded up the stairs of the requisitioned apartment, each one let in by Pan Wójcik and his wife, the old couple who had lived there for fifteen years.
When they had all arrived, the Captain gave out the arms which they had smuggled in on Sunday. Two rifles to be shared between the six of them, forty cartridges. A large box by the window was filled with filipinki, homemade hand grenades. They had bakelite casings and key rings as detonators.
They stood round, looking at the pile.
‘Is … is this all, sir?’ Andrzej asked.
‘At the moment, yes,’ said the Captain. ‘You are all under the strictest orders not to waste a single bullet: shoot only when you are quite certain you have the enemy within your sights. We expect to be replenished soon.’
‘But we’ll take the city in a few days, won’t we?’ said Jerzy.
‘We hope to.’
Wilk was at the window. A pale sun had broken through the morning’s cloud, and the room was filled with light. ‘Things are happening,’ he said. They all went over and stood looking down on the crowded trams, on the broad avenue filled with people on both sides, hurrying in all directions. From across the river, which they could not see, came the thunder of the Soviet artillery.
‘They’ll be here in a day, surely,’ said the Captain. He looked at his watch. ‘An hour and a half to go. Let me summarize our strategy. At sixteen-fifty hours we take up our positions …’
They listened, and grinned at each other, checking their white and red armbands, the letters AK carefully drawn on in ink, slipping cartridges into rifles, arranging a shift system to use them.
‘May I try to phone my sister, sir?’ asked Jerzy.
‘If Pani Wójcik agrees.’
In the kitchen, she nodded, smiling. ‘Of course. And I’ve made some bread – I’ll bring it in to you all in a moment.’
‘Thank you.’ He dialled Wiktoria’s number, but there was no answer.
Anna and Natalia did up the buttons on the flannel shirts, printed in tiny grey check. ‘They’re quite the thing,’ said Natalia, and they stood and looked in the mirror, with Jadwiga, just arrived, behind them, her mass of hair brushed out wildly.
‘Where did they come from?’ asked Anna.
‘Some shop on Nowy Świat, I think,’ said Jadwiga. ‘Everyone’s got them round here.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Half-past four. Where are the boys?’
‘In the kitchen,’ said Natalia, ‘stuffing themselves. The woman upstairs has made a great mountain of sandwiches.’
‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ Jadwiga complained. ‘I’m starving.’
In the kitchen, they all stood eating, although Anna was too tense and excited to have more than half a sandwich. Henryk, their leader, was keeping watch with Wojtek at the window, his hand on his pistol.
‘Where’s Wiktoria?’ Jadwiga asked Anna through a mouthful.
‘At home. The apartment’s been requisitioned for another unit – we heard at lunchtime. I imagine she’s looking after them all.’
‘And Jerzy?’
‘As far as I know he’s stationed near Jerozolimskie, but I’m not certain where. He knows where we are, though: I told him three days ago we’d probably be here.’ She put down her plate. ‘It’s no use, I can’t eat a thing. I wish I knew if Teresa was all right – I haven’t heard from her for weeks.’
‘There’s two bastards on the corner,’ said Wojtek suddenly. ‘I’m going to have them. Oh, God, why doesn’t it start?’
There was a hammering on the door of the apartment.
‘I’ll go.’ Henryk walked quickly out and down the corridor; they heard him open the door on its chain, the murmured inquiry, then the rattle as he unbolted it, saying, ‘Yes, of course.’ He reappeared in the kitchen with a small stocky man in shirtsleeves.
‘Pan Grabowski, the civilian commander of this block,’ Henryk announced, and the man nodded at them all.
‘Good afternoon. I should have come to talk to you before, but there has been so much to do …’ He wiped his face. ‘I am on the ground floor, apartment number three. In charge of all matters relating to this block, you understand? If we need to go into the cellars … or … have any problems with the lighting, or with water … I shall direct operations. My mother is with me now, and already baking bread as if for twenty units.’ He smiled nervously. ‘This is a great day for Warsaw. God bless you all. I must go upstairs now.’
Henryk saw him out, and they turned to each other, eyebrows raised.
‘Can’t see him directing an outing to the park,’ said Jadwiga. ‘Oh, God, I can’t bear it any longer – it must be five.’
‘Ten to,’ said Henryk, returning, ‘Hold on to your hats, everyone. Out of here, now, into the living room. Take up positions.’
They stood at the windows, stomachs churning, looking down on to the rush-hour traffic, at those workers who were not, yet, aware of what was about to happen, and at the leaves of the great trees of Central Park, across Ujazdowskie Avenue, motionless in the cloudy evening air.
Five o’clock. And suddenly, at last, the flash of windows flung open all over the city, a sputtering of gunfire, another, another, an explosion. In street after street, the pounding feet of German troops, the sudden roar of alerted tanks, moving at top speed, scattering civilians. Doors slammed shut. Doors flung open. Screams. The bodies of ambushed German patrols sprawled on the ground.
In street after street taken by the Poles, people were running wildly out of the houses, waving white and red flags, upturning trams and setting them ablaze, staggering under the weight of sandbags, dustbins, slabs of paving, tables, chairs, chests of drawers – anything which might be used for a barricade, even sewing machines, even saucepans. Behind the barricades, pickaxes, spades, forks and shovels were passed along, the road and pavement torn up and dug out, the trenches made under fire from snipers. Many buildings were on fire: lines of fire fighters passed buckets, anci
ent hoses.
By six-thirty, Anna and the rest of her unit were out in the street, piling up the barricade at the southern end, filthy, laughing, hugging each other. Improvised flags – torn white sheets, scarlet cushion covers – were at the windows, armbands wound round the catches. From a doorway an old man emerged, waving a real flag, threadbare and yellowing. ‘I’ve had this hidden in the cellar for five years!’ he called out, and jammed the pole into the mountain of earth and rubble by the trench. A cheer rose, and then, as it died, a familiar tune sounded from an open upper window. Hissing and scratching on a gramophone record from the twenties came the ‘Warszawianka’ the battle hymn of the 1830 Uprising against the Czar, which had become the anthem of Warsaw; in moments the whole street stood still, listening to the reedy, wavering music, and then singing together, arms locked:
‘This is the day of blood and glory,
Let there resurrection be …’
Anna saw a young, heavily pregnant woman standing nearby, swaying as if she might be about to faint. She moved quickly across to her, since no one seemed to have noticed, and caught her arm. ‘Are you all right?’
The woman slowly turned to look at her, and Anna saw that she was almost in a trance. ‘My baby will be born in a free Poland,’ she said dreamily, ‘I never thought it would happen.’
From Jerozolimskie Avenue, four or five blocks to the north, there came the sound of a raging gun battle. Still holding the young woman’s arm, Anna turned towards it, found herself saying aloud: ‘Please, please, look after him.’
‘Your husband?’ asked the girl.
‘My brother.’
The whole of the avenue was filling with German tanks and heavily armed patrols at every intersection. From further up, perhaps on the corner of Nowy Świat, they could hear angry crossfire, but down here, for the moment, it was fairly quiet. The trams which had been caught in the sudden explosion of the Uprising, almost three hours ago, stood abandoned on the lines, some pockmarked with bullet holes; Jerzy could see the bodies of two German military policemen sprawled in the middle of the pavement on the far side, and another, much closer, killed by the Captain as he ran for cover. There were other bodies, some with the AK armbands, some without, lying under the trees: to be killed on the very first day of fighting, even in the first hour – Christ! Later, the Captain had said, under the cover of darkness they’d get those bodies back, and bury them.
