by Sue Gee
‘Let me out! Let … me … out …’
‘Shut up! Stop it, you bastard, stop it, shut up, do you want us all to go mad with you?’
A man was shaking him, then holding him, holding him. ‘Look, here’s a light. Look. Look. Calm down.’
The man in front had his arms round him, the next one had a stub of candle, and he could see again. Paweł was leaning up against the wall, his chest heaving.
The man who was holding Jan said: ‘They passed this back, pass it on, there’s another one coming. The girl’s sent a message: the sewage level has risen, it’s waist high, but she thinks we can get through.’
Jan clung to the candle. Behind him, voices were rising.
‘I said pass on the fucking candle!’ It was snatched away from him, and went out.
Paweł had his arms round his neck, and they were wading through shit. From somewhere in a channel off to the right he could hear someone laughing dementedly, but it might have been him. He went on, step by step, slipping, staggering, somehow keeping upright, his eyes only on a flickering pinpoint of light far far down the tunnel.
It began to get warmer, warmer still. Sweat was already pouring down him, but as the level of the sewage dropped, and they were able after a long break to move on again, he realized that the tunnel itself was getting hot, and that they must be passing underneath a burning house. They went on, gasping in the heat, and then the man in front was passing back a message: ‘A hundred yards to go.’
Impossible to believe they could go further. The level had dropped right down, now, but the tunnel roof was also low again, and they had to go almost on their bellies.
‘Paweł?’
There was no answer.
‘Paweł … get off me, you bastard, let me get down.’
He struggled to lower himself without dropping Paweł, crawled the last, pitiless yards through the passageway with the weight on his back. There were voices ahead, and air. There was air. He went on, sobbing, his head banging the feet of the man in front until he felt him stop and scramble upright, then turn and pull Paweł off his back so that he could stand, too, and stare up at the ladder of the exit shaft, where faces were peering down, and arms ready to help them up, and out into the precious light of dawn.
Anna sat on a broad, leather-topped desk at the open window of an apartment in Three Crosses Square, looking along the length of Ujazdowskie Avenue. She was on observation duty, had been posted here with Natalia and Wojtek early this morning, making their way through the network of trenches and barricades. On their way, they’d seen something which until now she’d only heard people talking about: a little knot of AK soldiers bent down round a lifted manhole cover, hauling out thin, grey-faced, gasping men and women who’d crawled all the way through the sewers from Stare Miasto. They looked terrible, half-dead, and the stench made her heave. But at least they were alive, safe behind Polish lines again.
Here, it was quiet this morning, with little movement along the broad, leafy avenue: she looked through the heavy binoculars which had once belonged to Natalia’s father, watching every corner of every street opening into it. At the far end, a tank stood motionless: she was to report any change in its position, any new patrols. The surface of the road and the pavements were pitted with craters; many of the stone balconies and window arches on the five-storey houses shattered. On the whole, however, Ujazdowskie and much, of the city centre generally had so far escaped major damage: they knew that at the moment the Germans were concentrating their attack on what had been the stronghold of Stare Miasto.
Anna put down her binoculars to rest. The room they were in must have been someone’s study: it made her think of Tata, with the bookshelves, the spacious desk, the sunlight. The door was heavy, thickly padded against noise from the rest of the apartment. Who had sat here before the war, reading and making notes, watching the peaceful rustling of the treetops down the centre of the avenue? Natalia and Wojtek were resting in armchairs pushed back against the far wall: for a moment, it felt as if they were all simply spending an ordinary morning together, on summer vacation from the liceum: if the war had not happened, that was what they would be doing now, preparing for university, visiting each other in the summer, going to parties, on holidays. The darkness inside her yawned open once again. If Tata were alive … if Jerzy and Andrzej were alive …
Wojtek looked up from the chair where he was reading yesterday’s edition of Walka. ‘Anything happening?’
She shook her head, turned back to the window and raised her binoculars again. The tank she’d noted an hour ago, right at the far end, was slowly moving up the avenue. It came past the Botanical Gardens, past the park, on past each intersection, moving a little faster now. She shifted the binoculars, and was dazzled for a moment by the midday sun. The tank came on; as if in a dream of summer heat and haziness, she saw the cannon being raised, higher, then higher still, until it was pointing directly at their building, at the window where her binoculars must be glinting, and she suddenly flung them down and yelled to the others: ‘Run! Run for your lives!’
She leapt off the desk, Natalia and Wojtek sprang from their chairs, and they flung open the heavy door and ran into the corridor, slamming it behind them. Within a moment, the study shook with a deafening blast; they were flung flat on the floor and lay there, immobile, listening until the roar at last diminished to the crumbling of bricks, and tinkling glass, and silence. Then came the sound of the tank again, moving closer, stopping, then turning off into another street. They raised their heads, stared at each other, then scrambled up, shaking, and slowly pushed open the door which had saved them.
Inside the study they saw a great hole ripped into the wall where the window had been, the desk, the floor and furniture completely covered with glass and bricks and plaster.
‘My God …’ said Anna, and they stood there staring, watching the dust from the explosion rise into the air and float towards the trees. They left·the building and made their way slowly back to the base in Hoza. Henryk was about to leave to meet them: he looked at their white faces, listened as they told him what had happened. Then he passed them a sheet of paper: an additional communiqué to the usual bulletin. They read it in disbelief at first, and then Natalia began to cry.
Since the second week of August, hardly a single airdrop had been made over Warsaw – the distance from Brindisi, the base in southern Italy, meant that there was barely a hope of making it there and back without refuelling. Now they read that Stalin had refused to allow British and American planes the right to land and refuel on the nearby Soviet-held airfields: his price had been the arrest of the leaders of the Uprising.
The Old Town had fallen. The lovely squares and houses lay in smoking ruins, and now the Germans seized a great mass of women prisoners, and began to herd them towards the barricade which separated the Old Town from the next district to the south, Powislé, on the riverside, still in Polish hands. Those defending the barricade saw the women approach, and the German infantry behind, and held their fire: how could they shoot at their own people? The Germans pushed on, and as they reached the barricade they shoved the helpless women on to it, and scrambled over them, kicking and punching, into the street behind it. At the sight of Germans in their midst, pounding down the streets and firing indiscriminately, panic spread through Powislé. Thousands of civilians pressed up to the great barricades transecting Jerozolimskie Avenue and Nowy Świat, the main arteries of the city, partly in German and partly in Polish hands. They stumbled through the deep trenches, and many of those who had managed to reach them were buried by falling earth and sand: as fast as they were repaired, the barricades fell in, under the pressure of the people passing beneath them.
Powislé was lost, and with it the electricity plant, tenaciously held and defended for over four weeks. Now, at night, the city was plunged into total darkness. The civilians crouching in the cellars of the houses still standing, and in the ruins of those which had been destroyed, were without light, without a
ny but the most pitiful of rations: many of the warehouses had been bombed, and it was becoming more and more difficult to move what little supplies remained from the tunnels connecting one district to another. Babies and children were dying: dysentery swept through the cellars like a medieval plague. On the surface, bodies rotted in the street. The exhausted AK platoons and commanders who moved through the shelters were besieged, now, with pleas for surrender.
On the night of 10 September there came at last the sound the whole of Warsaw had been waiting for: the thunder of Soviet artillery from across the Vistula.
At 8.30 in the evening of 14 September, Moscow radio sent out another broadcast. It was picked up in the AK headquarters: they had been bombed out of the Old Town, bombed out of the cellar of the Polish Savings Bank in the city centre, and were now in hiding in a house to the south of Jerozolimskie Avenue. Here the monitoring staff heard:
‘To fighting Warsaw: the hour of liberation for heroic Warsaw is near. Your sufferings and martyrdom will soon be over. The Germans will pay dearly for the ruins and blood of Warsaw. The first Polish Division Kościuszko has entered Praga. It is fighting side by side with the heroic Red Army. Relief is coming. Keep fighting! Whatever may have been the motives of those who started the rising prematurely, without agreement with the High Command of the Red Army, we are with you with all our hearts. The whole Polish nation is with you in your self-sacrificing struggle against the German invaders. A decisive fight is now taking place on the banks of the Vistula. Help is coming. Victory is near. Keep fighting!’
Soviet planes reappeared in the sky, and for the first time since the Uprising began, there were dogfights between them and the Luftwaffe. At night, the Russians made their first drops, but they were without parachutes, and containers of arms and sacks of grain smashed and split on the roofs and pavements. Much of the ammunition which fell did not, naturally, fit the British and American arms, or those arms captured from the Germans in the early battles, but the talk of surrender died down: the Russians had shown themselves ready to help at last, and the battle in Praga was raging. By 15 September, the district had been seized from the Germans. Now, each day, everyone waited to hear that the Russian troops had crossed the river: after five weeks without rain, the water level was so low that in some places whole stretches of sand could be seen: you could almost have walked across.
Then came the news that Stalin had, finally, granted one landing right to American planes.
‘Anna! Anna!’
All night she had been helping in the field hospital, where men were being brought in from other districts half dead from hunger and exhaustion, with severed or gangrenous limbs, or with pieces of shrapnel lodged in their heads and faces. There was little she could do, her tiny first-aid stock long since given to the Red Cross nurse she had met the day the hospital was hit, and she had carried the boy with his lifeless foot up the steps from the cellar. He had had it amputated that afternoon, and hobbled now on crutches, his white face grimacing. Last night, Anna had seen him trying to sleep, tossing and heaving under a thin blanket on the floor. She had gone across to hold his hand for a moment, but had quickly been recalled to help with another stretcher.
She came back to the apartment just after dawn, and fell at once into a deep sleep. Now, hearing her name called so urgently, she woke to see Jadwiga looking at her in excitement, saw the shutters flung back so that midday sunshine made her screw up her eyes, and from the street outside heard running feet, and wild cheering. The air was full of a roar of planes.
‘They’re coming!’ said Jadwiga.
‘The Russians?’ Anna scrambled to her feet.
‘The Americans! We’re all on the roof – come on!’
She ran after her, up the broad stairs to the ladder leading to the roof. Through the square of the skylight, she could see among the crowd Wojtek and Natalia hugging each other, jumping up and down. Her ears were filled with the noise of the planes, as if the whole sky were taken over by them; she stumbled up the steps and out on to the packed rooftop.
In the cloudless, windswept sky, perhaps a hundred planes with the American white star insignia were approaching from the west. They flew at a great height, too high for the anti-aircraft fire which now burst into the air to reach them. As far into the city as Anna could see, the streets and avenues were packed with people up from the cellars and basements and hiding places in the ruins: the whole of Warsaw seemed to be gazing upwards, at the dark bellies of the planes and then, almost mad with happiness, at the white specks of parachutes, bearing containers which must hold food, and arms, and medicines, opening and descending like a gentle fall of snow.
And then, as if a great satanic hand had swept the sky, the parachutes drifted in the wind beyond the Polish lines. Ten days ago, a week ago even, the places where they were landing were in Polish hands: Powislé, the Old Town, Napoleon Square. Now, all these places and many more were surrounded by German tanks and armoured cars: the watchers on the rooftops and in the streets stood staring, numb, as container after container tumbled towards enemy territory and disappeared.
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘No, no …’
All around her they were weeping; on the streets she could see people moving as if condemned, stricken, silent, back down into the darkness and grimness of their cellar world. How could they have dared to hope that they would be reprieved?
Silence once more from across the river. The Soviet fighters disappeared from the sky as suddenly as they had come, and with their flight the Luftwaffe renewed their attack, dive-bombing the last, desperate outposts of the city. Hand grenades were thrown into the long queues waiting at the few remaining wells which still held water. AK troops guarded other wells, where water for the wounded was sometimes rationed by the glass. The last kilos of barley from stores in the city centre had been ground to make a soup full of husks; dogs, cats and horses had been eaten. From the headquarters of the AK, General Bór radioed London: ‘We are starving.’
In the riverside district of Czerniaków they had been without food for four days. For much longer, the Russians had been sending messages promising help with evacuation of wounded and civilians: one hundred boats were to cross the water from Praga, but only a handful came, and in desperation the defenders began to throw makeshift rafts together, and make a frantic attempt to cross by themselves as the Luftwaffe bombers screamed down. On 23 September, Czerniaków gave up, and surrendered.
In Mokotów, to the south-west of the city centre, the AK units who had not made their way out to the centre through the sewers were pressed into a few streets. The day after Czerniaków, Mokotów
On 29 September the northern suburb of·Zoliborz, beyond the ruins of the Old Town, was attacked, and General Bór ordered its immediate surrender: there was no hope of relieving the defenders now. The only district remaining to the Polish defenders was the city centre: impossible that it, too, would not fall within a matter of days.
At eight o’clock in the evening of 2 October, sixty-two days after the first shots of the Uprising had been fired, the surrender of Warsaw to the Germans was signed.
On 3 October dawn broke over a silent city. No sound of shelling, no scream of bombers, no cries, no falling buildings. As news of the capitulation spread, the doors of the cellars and basements opened, and from each house came wave after wave of thin, grey-faced people, carrying their children and their last possessions, stumbling over the rubble-strewn streets, over the planks across the craters, making their way towards the barricaded exits from where they were to walk to Oz·arów and Pruszków, the German transit and prison camps ten miles away.
In a half-bombarded house not far from the street where Anna was stationed, Jan looked down at the place where two weeks ago Paweł had died. He listened blankly to the commander of the unit they had joined when they came out of the sewers, listing the terms of surrender. All those who had fought in the AK were to be protected by the Geneva Convention, treated not as terrorists, or ‘bandits’as Stalin once scor
nfully described them, but as prisoners of war. In the absence of full uniform, they were to be recognized by their white and red armbands, or by the insignia of the Polish eagle.
The commander was a thick-set, powerful man in his forties. His voice broke as he began to read out General Bór’s last order to his troops:
‘Soldiers of fighting Warsaw!
‘Our two months’ struggle in Warsaw, which has been a chain of heroic actions on the part of the Polish soldiers, is fraught with dread, yet it is a solemn proof, above all, of our mighty striving for liberty. The valour of Warsaw is the admiration of the whole world. Our struggle in the capital under the blows of death and destruction, carried on with such tenacity by us, takes first place among the glorious deeds achieved by the Polish soldiers during this war …’
Jan saw at his feet the dying body of Paweł, saw him on the first day of the Uprising, laughing and waving an imaginary gun, shouting out: ‘Poland is not yet lost!’ and he closed his eyes.
The commander cleared his throat and read on:
‘Today the technical superiority of the enemy has succeeded in forcing us into the central part of the city, the only district still in our possession. The ruins and rubble are crowded with civilians cooperating valiantly with the soldiers, but already exhausted beyond measure by the ghastly conditions of existence on the field of battle. There is not sufficient food even for bare existence, and there is no prospect of a final conquest of the enemy here in the capital. We are now confronted with the prospect of the complete destruction of the population of Warsaw and the burial of thousands of fighting soldiers and civilians in its ruins.
‘I have therefore decided to break off the struggle.’
‘I can’t bear it,’ said Anna. ‘All this for nothing – I can’t bear it.’ She began to cry, helplessly, clinging to Natalia, as they all sat on the floor, hardly hearing the words which Henryk went on reading:
