Wartime Lies

by Louis Begley

  It was a glorious hot summer, one sun-filled day succeeding another. As my grandfather had foreseen, the Wehrmacht was crumbling in the East. In three weeks, fifteen German divisions were annihilated; in the two or three weeks that followed, the Russians advanced almost four hundred kilometers. We had already seen an army routed and in full retreat: the Red Army fleeing from T. in June 1941. But at that time, from the outset, the front was never far from us, and then the Russians seemed to disappear overnight. Now we saw a defeat as though in slow motion: trucks in the streets of Warsaw as well as trains with German wounded, trucks and trains with bedraggled units being withdrawn from the front—all heading west. One heard of German soldiers asking to be hidden or to trade their pistols and rifles for civilian clothes.

  Meanwhile, the police were everywhere. Feldgendarmerie patrols were stationed at important intersections. There were more and more controls of identification papers and random arrests. A loudspeaker would suddenly bellow over a marketplace with orders to freeze, and police, sometimes only Germans and sometimes Germans and Poles, would appear from abutting streets and search the crowd. On certain days, Pan Władek advised us not to go out; it seemed that he no longer went to work; he would leave the apartment and reappear at unusual hours. On other days he would ask Tania and sometimes me to carry packages for him. We were to hand them over to such and such person who would approach us at a specified place. He said it was as safe as anything else we did.

  Then, toward the end of July, the Russians astonishingly slowed down. We could not understand how they could have been stopped. The BBC told us, in its usual brisk and cheerful manner, that they were regrouping and shortening their supply lines. Fresh troops from the Dnieper were advancing to the front. But fresh German troops were also being brought on the line. There was talk in Warsaw of long German convoys, this time heading east. The RAF and, as some thought, the Russians bombarded Warsaw during several nights. Tania told me to welcome the thud of the bombs and the whine of a diving plane that almost always preceded them. We were learning to guess, according to the depth and richness of the thud, whether a building had been hit. Sometimes the thud was very loud and very near and the walls and ceiling of the cellar, where our whole building took shelter, would suddenly sway. A raid seldom lasted long. We would go back upstairs and get into bed, our hearts filled with hope. These planes were a friendly presence; they could not stay but they would return.

  Pan Władek and Pan Stasiek now openly referred to Armia Krajowa, or A.K., which stood for Home Army, the main branch of the Polish resistance directed by the government in London. They brought leaflets that had appeared in the streets calling on the population to rise and rally to the Polish colors. A.K. was ready to strike at the enemy and liberate Warsaw. According to Pan Władek, they were only waiting for the Russians to complete their preparations and resume the offensive. But the Russians did not seem to be moving at all. The positions reported by the BBC were unchanged; for the time being, the front in Poland was stationary.

  The only trace left of my jaundice was an excessively refined sense of smell; I could tell what meal was being cooked in each apartment in the building. Unfortunately, just then meals were especially malodorous. Sometimes I would reel from nausea. Tania took me to the Saxon Gardens to breathe fresh air. We went on ever longer walks.

  August I was a Tuesday. We met my grandfather in his mleczarnia. Almost no food to be had anymore. We had some bread and tea. Grandfather said he felt an uncomfortable sort of quiet in the city. At the same time, there had been more leaflets about liberating Warsaw. He didn’t like it. He thought Tania should carefully stock some provisions, never mind how much things cost. She should buy candles if she couldn’t get acetylene, flour, rice, bacon, whatever she could find. We decided to meet again the next day. He told us to take the trolley home and buy the provisions. He took a trolley himself and went back to Mokotów.

  In fact, we did not take the trolley. A sort of laziness overcame us. We went first to the Saxon Gardens and sat in the sun. We were wondering whether my father was alive. Neither of us could imagine when the end of the war would come or where we would be at that time or where he might look for us if he reappeared from Russia. I thought it would be best to wait for him in T. We would get our house back, perhaps find our furniture, and begin to live as before. He certainly would have the same idea; he would go to T. We headed in the direction of the Cathedral and the Rynek Starego Miasta, the Old Town market. The streets were full of people strolling about; one felt a mood of gaiety out of keeping with the Wehrmacht and Feldgendarmerie squads in battle dress on Teatralny and Zamkowy. They had armored cars; the machine guns on street corners were surrounded by sandbags. We ate a roll in the Rynek, watching the crowd. It felt strangely difficult to return to Pani Dumont’s: Tania said for the moment we were free, the house was like a prison cell. But we had to go back. Though we were tired, Tania thought we should take advantage of the late afternoon sun and walk. It was time to start.

  We were still in the narrow, gray streets of the Old Town when we began to hear, seemingly from all sides, the sound of rapid gunfire, then the sound of machine guns, and then much louder sounds, which we would later recognize as the explosion of hand grenades. People ran in the street; other people shouted for everyone to get off the street, into entranceways of buildings or wherever else one could find cover. We ducked into an entrance gate, like many such gates in Warsaw really a porte-cochere leading from the street into the inner yard, which someone immediately began to try to shut; it was stuck and left us a view of the street. Clattering down Piwna in the direction of the Rynek was a Wehrmacht armored car, the barrel of its machine gun moving carefully from side to side, firing in regular, short bursts. We could see the tracers, then the holes that the bullets made in the buildings, and the shattering of glass. From up high, a window or a roof, someone began to shoot at the armored car, and bullets were ricocheting from its sides. The car stopped, raised its machine gun, and returned fire. This lasted awhile, until a cylindrical object, like a small glass bottle, rolled toward the rear of the armored car and under it. For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then there came a loud explosion, smoke, and the car began to burn. German soldiers got out; other men could be seen kneeling on the sidewalk and taking aim. The soldiers fell. Everybody in the porte-cochère was talking at once: we began to understand what was happening. Before our very eyes, probably throughout Warsaw, the A.K. was attacking the Germans. The uprising that Pan Władek thought was to await a new Russian offensive had begun; that could only mean that the Russians were coming. Tomorrow or perhaps within a few days at the latest, we would be free; we would never have to hide or be afraid again.

  Instead, weeks passed and the fighting in the city continued. Until the Germans cut the electricity, we listened to the news. According to the BBC, the Russians were still consolidating their positions and shortening supply lines. The Wehrmacht radio told us that German reinforcements had been brought to the periphery of Warsaw. The BBC knew that but hoped that the Red Army would liberate the city before long; pending that event, airdrops of weapons and ammunition would sustain its heroic defenders. The Wehrmacht radio promised the population of Warsaw prompt extermination. We were beginning to joke that perhaps the Americans would get to us sooner than the Russians.

  Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe, flying very low, was bombing and burning Warsaw in a wheel of fire; we, in the Old Town, were the hub of that wheel. Progressively, the wheel became smaller. Until the bombs began to fall regularly quite near us, we went up on the roof to watch the planes, the bombs they dropped, and the fires. In appearance these new German fireworks were not unlike those in the flaming ghetto we had earlier observed from Pani Z.’s. Only this time, we and our fellow watchers were a part of the spectacle, and no one on the roof was cheering. The university library was hit and burned; for days afterward, in addition to the steady rain of undifferentiated ash to which we were now accustomed, entire calcined pages of books fell from th
e sky. Sometimes they were stuck together and did not break up when they hit the ground; one could make out large portions of the text.

  We had been in the house on Piwna for perhaps a week when a woman lawyer who had also found herself there because she was visiting her corset maker’s workshop on the third floor of the building began to smile and wink at Tania and then to talk to her. It was the evening; as usual we were in the cellar. Tania asked her to sit down with us on the mattress she had bought from the janitor’s wife, Pani Danuta; Tania still seethed from the unpleasantness of the transaction. To my surprise, she began to tell this stranger how, for days after she had paid the extortionate price, the janitress came to the cellar, looked the mattress over, and speaking to no one in particular explained that Tania had driven a hard bargain, acquired the precious object for half its value and was lucky to have made the deal before other homeless, more willing to open their wallets, got hold of every spare mattress and cot in the building. Pani Danuta was tired of all the homeless—begging, whining and needing everything just because they had nothing. They should have stayed in their own apartments, with their own furniture, food and clothes instead of trying to live off the kindness of poor people who would soon be hungry and naked themselves.

  The lawyer laughed and asked that Tania call her by her first name; she used a diminutive, Pani Helenka. Let Pani put herself in the janitress’s place, she said. Now these people have three armies to hate: the Wehrmacht, because it is German; Armia Krajowa, because it started this accursed uprising; and the invading army of the homeless, yourself, your son and me and all the others who have been thrust into their midst by bad luck—happening to be on Piwna at the wrong hour of the wrong afternoon. And we all want their mattresses and their food! Pani Danuta and many of the others here see that there is something wrong with this uprising—while the Russians were winning and the Germans were running away our A.K. warriors passed out pamphlets and perhaps shot a German here and a collaborator there. Then just as the Wehrmacht managed to stop the Russians, the boys began their war! Is that the coordination with the Russians and the English they were promising? If they planned to have all of Warsaw destroyed, like Stalingrad, they could not be doing a better job. In any case, the woman means no real harm; Pani isn’t from Warsaw and can’t know this class of people. Among them a sharp tongue is often the sign of a soft heart.

  Pani Helenka had short, curly gray hair, a round face with round brown eyes, and a round little body. Her gray silk sleeveless blouse was stretched tight over a large bust thrust forward and fortified by a corset I could glimpse under her arms when she gesticulated. She liked to talk; as she warmed up to her subject, she stroked Tania’s hair. It was the first time I had seen a stranger be so familiar with Tania. It did not surprise me that Tania submitted; we were in no position to offend Pani Helenka. But it was also the first time since we left Lwów that I heard Tania express her real feelings about anyone except to my grandfather and me.

  The cellar was dank; the walls, floor and wooden support beams were all wet to the touch. Pani Helenka bought a salmon pink quilt on credit from her corset maker. All three of us could huddle under it at night, sleeping fitfully, Tania whispering that I must not be afraid when we heard bombs and gunfire approach. During the day, Pani Helenka presided over a bridge game with Tania and a childless couple who moved their mattress so that it faced ours. I watched their hands. When they weren’t bidding, we listened to Pani Helenka. Her own apartment, where she also received clients, was in Mokotów, not far from my grandfather’s. She had a telephone, but there was nobody to answer it so it was quite useless: we couldn’t get a message through to him even if the line weren’t down. She had let her secretary go a long time ago. There are no more clients, she laughed, just the black market. She blamed the A.K. not only for having started the uprising when it was unprepared and outnumbered, but especially for having attacked in the afternoon of a working day, so that Warsaw’s working people were away from their homes—unless, of course, like her corset maker they worked where they lived. Don’t think just of people like yourself and your boy, you were out enjoying the good weather—thank God you are together—or an old maid like me with nobody to care about who decided to have a fitting for some oversized bras, she said addressing Tania. Think of all the mothers who were at work and left their children unattended, children who were sent to play with friends in some park, old people left behind locked doors of their room while whatever niece takes care of them went to work or to shop, all of them lost in a city that has become a bombing-practice target for the Luftwaffe. These are the tragedies that break my heart; people won’t let the A.K. forget them.

  The Germans cut off the water as well. Going to the toilet was a harrowing problem; the building we were in had no outhouses. With a pickax, the janitor and some other men managed to lift enough paving stones in the yard to allow them to dig a hole. They covered it with boards, leaving a narrow space so that one could empty a chamber pot or even use it directly. Before, we and the other homeless had to ask someone’s kind permission to respond to a call of nature or to wash our body or clothes. Now we were at least on a footing of equality. Somebody said, It serves the tenants of this building right; let them start growing petunias in their toilets.

  It became harder and harder to get food. Householders sitting in their apartments ate whatever they had gotten ready from well-developed wartime habit or because like my grandfather they sensed that the storm was about to break: potatoes, rice, dried beans and flour. We had to talk them into selling some of these provisions. Tania let Pani Helenka conduct the negotiations on our behalf, but soon no one was foolish enough to exchange necessities for paper that was probably worthless. It became a matter of begging. An A.K. officer tried to instill a spirit of sharing in the building, but no such spirit developed. As the days wore on, the elation of August I was turning into resentment and sometimes outright fury against the underground, just as Pani Helenka had foreseen.

  Tania’s worry about my grandfather was extreme. He was alone, and as a Jew he continued to be in special danger. We also realized how right he had been: we should not have dawdled in the Old Town. We kept daydreaming aloud about somehow finding our way to him, but there was no reasonable prospect of it. His room in Mokotów was practically at the other end of Warsaw, so far that Pani Helenka said she would stop us by force if we tried to go there. In fact, although we did not know it yet, just crossing the street in the Old Town could be a deadly business. Soon, our daydreams had to take another direction. An A.K. man told Tania that the Germans were already in control of Mokotów. We now had to hope that grandfather had not been killed in the fighting. In that case, if we also survived, we would be reunited after the war.

  Pani Dumont’s apartment was less remote than Mokotów. Tania decided we should try to return there: the jewelry was in its hiding place under a floorboard; we would have clothes and, unless the others had helped themselves to it, Tania’s small stock of provisions. We would be surrounded by familiar faces: Tania said that she had never before imagined missing Pani Dumont—Pani Helenka’s attentiveness was becoming oppressive. Thus, early one morning, after a brief embrace to bid Pani Helenka farewell, we started out. Tania thought we could manage a few blocks at a time before we were forced to seek temporary shelter. I would go first, running along the sidewalk, keeping low and trying not to make noise. Every couple of houses, I was to stop in an entrance gate and wait for Tania. It was better that I go first because the Germans might not bother about a child; if we went together, we would make a larger and more attractive target. Tania promised she would not be far behind.

  The street was empty except for us; I felt very nimble and swift. The gates to buildings were closed, but, even so, in every porte-cochère there was just enough space to squeeze into between the sidewalk and the closed gate itself for me to have a protected corner to crouch in. When Tania reached the gate where I had paused, she would kneel beside me, tell me which new gate to head for and
when to start. But at the corner we had to cross Piwna; just turning the corner made no sense.

  I could see an entranceway with a closed gate and a good hiding place diagonally across the street. Tania said to run as fast as I could, never mind keeping low this time. I had barely reached the entrance and settled myself against the wall, though, when I heard gunfire, and bullets began scraping the ornamental stone post on my side of the gate and the sidewalk in front of me. A German soldier on the roof of a building on the side of Piwna I had just left, a few doors away from the corner, was shooting at me. So long as I had stayed on his side of the street he not seen me and I had not seen him. Now each of us had a good view of the other. He was kneeling next to a chimney; from time to time he looked at me through his field glasses. After a while, he stopped firing if I remained very still. As soon as I moved, a single bullet and sometimes two would zing past me. I realized that while he was there Tania could not cross Piwna and come to my gate. He would kill her in the middle of the street.

  I didn’t have a watch, but I thought hours must have gone by while I stayed at the gate. Occasionally Tania waved to me; she was making signs with her hands that I couldn’t understand. Then she disappeared inside her gate. Once in a while, on my side of the street, a door would creak open, and the German would immediately send a bullet or two in its direction. Sometimes it was the same system as with me: silence and then shots. I thought that these were buildings where people were also hiding in entranceways or trying to come out. Once he must have hit somebody, because there was a cry followed for a long time by moaning.