Starówka, at last. You can see it. At the end of Długa Street — past several barricades — a blue-green ball on the bell tower of the Church of the Dominicans is glinting. How strange. The remains of a burnt tin spire? Perhaps. So we rush on — no longer barefoot — we’d put on our shoes at the corner of Leszno and Przejazd, I think — we run along Długa, down Mostowa Street to Rybaki. It’s daytime already. And silence. Stare Miasto is quiet as can be. On a bend in Rybaki Street, beyond the Gunpowder Depot, children are playing on the grass among the cobblestones near the wall of the housing estate. The rear of the Gunpowder Depot faced the Vistula, as did the rear of every building on Rybaki Street. That wall I just mentioned was very old. It had two shell-shaped, rococo gates. An old inn. As soon as we’d passed it I said to Heńka and Jadzia, “Right here.”
14/16 Rybaki Street. A pair of three-story brick housing blocks, without stucco, on a concrete foundation, with a third block added on, which struck me as less imposing. Those two housing blocks stood crosswise between Rybaki Street and the Vistula. Between them was a large courtyard. From Rybaki all the way to Wybrzeże. We entered the courtyard through a latticework gate. And walked along the left side against the wall — because the entire center was devoted to garden plots and overgrown — to the stairwell, the one leading to Swen’s mother’s apartment (perhaps she’s there? and perhaps Swen’s there, too? — I had an anxious hope). Their stairwell was right near Wybrzeże itself, because their windows, too, looked out onto the Vistula. I look and right inside the entrance to that stairwell two guards are standing, still from the night shift, wearing armbands; one with the red armband of the Armia Ludowa, because here in Starówka there was a large contingent of the AL. And the other, someone I knew both from Swen’s home and from his office, Pan Ad….
“Is he in? Swen?” I asked. “Are they at home?”
“They’re here. All of them. Swen and his fiancée. And his aunt and her son. And my wife and child.”
“Where are they?”
Pan Ad., smiling all the time, said, “In the shelter, they’re still sleeping.”
Down stairs that smelled of cement and raw bricks we descended into deep cellars with thick walls. Silence. And the odor of a stifling laundry room. It struck our ears and our noses. As for what struck our eyes — it’s a shame even to talk about it.
A dusky abyss with flickering candles on a small altar adorned with a porcelain Mother of God, as for the rest — the strangest plots, crowded, everyone sleeping, snoring, disheartening.
These plots turned out to be groups of bunks. Each group was made up of several bunks. Each bunk was made of two or four plank beds merged at their heads. Each was long, for several people lay on it. In the dim light pieces of junk seemed to be floating between the groups of bunks. And only a single main aisle from the door to the altar and around the room could be distinguished. In addition, there were cement pillars. So, the macabre aura of a chapel in the catacombs.
I sought out Swen’s family’s plot. I saw them in a row. Asleep. I leaned over Swen. And said something. I don’t remember what. Swen stretched, looked up at me, was surprised, was moved to tears, began welcoming me. Immediately the rest of them, especially Swen’s mother, stirred and started bustling about.
Aunt Uff. and Zbyszek were still asleep. I told them whom I was with. They said that was fine. They told us to find a place. They welcomed us. Gave us some food. Celinka, Aunt Uff., and Zbyszek, and Pani Ad. on the neighboring pallet with her tiny daughter woke up right after that. Other people too. They stirred. Half rose. Getting up — all the way — was just not done. What for? Just to be crowded together?
So, they stirred, stretched, dug about in their bundles without standing up. And it began: “Buzz-buzz-buzz”—what chattering! Also, I think, Matins near the altar, or rather from the altar or to the altar. The morning or first prayer. There were many other prayers in addition to that one. And chants. As it turned out, there weren’t all that many that first week. Later they became more frequent. And closer together. Until it reached the point that in all the cellars throughout Warsaw people were praying aloud in choruses and in chants, everywhere, and without interruption.
So what next? That time, that entrance was the start of a new, hideously long story of communal life against the background of the possibility of death. What do I remember? Both a lot and a little, and not always in order or day by day. I may confuse the order of some things, the dates (even of events that were rather important, although I have several dates fixed in my mind), the positions of the fronts — both ours and the greater one.
So, I found out that the uprising had caught Aunt Uff. and Zbyszek in a store on Freta Street. A couple of days before we came, life had been transferred from the upper floors to the shelters. Along with everything that could be moved. A neighbor, Bacia, who was deaf but able to speak and sing, only off-key, a woman incorrectly referred to as Baciakowa, brought down her sewing machine and her little son with his legs in a hip-high cast and sewed on that machine in the cellar across from us and sang a lot — Swen laughed — because she could not hear the explosions. The entrance into Baciakowa’s cellar (something that was supposed to be a door but by 1939 was still only a hole) was just one tiny element of the labyrinth under 14/16 Rybaki Street. Because there was an endless number of corridors, cellar rooms with and without pillars, passageways, exits to the staircases, corners, separate vaults, storerooms, bins, subbasements, passages leading to the boiler room with its many pipes and sewer mains. In addition, the two main blocks (A and B) had a connecting passageway, or what was referred to here as the tunnel. Under the garden plots with their pumpkins. And tomatoes. And probably potatoes, which were so much in fashion throughout Warsaw during the occupation that not only the larger and smaller squares (from which in the winter of 1939 those who had been hastily buried in September were exhumed), not only the embankments but even Aleje Jerozolimskie were planted and blossomed with potatoes in July.