“Please, let us swear to each other that we will not quarrel.”
“We swear,” the entire crowd repeated obediently.
And it actually helped. At least for a while. Then Swen repeated it. And again the shelter obediently swore. Again it helped for a while. So they weren’t just words.
I am returning now to the course of events. To the friendly tram couple. The date, August 12, is connected with them.
On August 12 a few people left our shelter as was common during the daytime to run some errands, I don’t know for what exactly — for food, water, to do rescue work, perhaps for a duty tour on the barricades — and the tram driver was among them. For the time being, we had become accustomed to the shells. To the bombardment. From Praga. From the gunboat on the Vistula. And from the armored train on the tracks at the Gdańsk Station. These shellings weren’t as frequent yet as they were to become a little later. In any case, August 12 itself was a turning point. In the afternoon, while they were gone, Stare Miasto suddenly shook from several repeated explosions and strong wind blasts. It was something entirely new, like a typhoon. It seemed clear to us that the upper floors throughout lower Starówka had been torn off. At any rate, people said that all the roofs had been ripped off. An unknown weapon. And people did have a feel for the varieties of weapons. They rushed out to check. And returned with the news about the roofs. That it was something really bad. Some sort of “V.” Panic erupted. What could it be? But not for long. Because shortly afterward the same thing was repeated. Until then the nights had been peaceful. There were no planes during the night. There were sudden artillery attacks. And other things. Such as tanks. But from then on this new weapon — mine throwers — began stalking us, especially at night and more and more frequently several times a night.
There were also flamethrowers. We didn’t know what they looked like. Either of them. At first you could only hear three to six creaking screeches and right afterwards just as many explosions and wind blasts. People used to say when they heard those screeches, “They’re cranking up the wardrobe again…”
And right away a humorous verse about the cranking up of the wardrobe appeared, and we even read it in the newspaper.
Throwers — that was a proper name. Because those wind blasts threw us and the walls about.
But let us return to the tram driver’s girlfriend. She waited for him till evening. He didn’t return. She didn’t sleep that night. She cried. He didn’t return in the morning. We consoled her. I think we stopped consoling her several hours later. Because there was no longer any reason to. At this moment I’m no longer so certain that that was on the twelfth. But maybe it was. There’s only one thing that makes me uncertain. The next day was the thirteenth. The famous day of the explosion of the Goliath on Długa Street.[11] So perhaps I’m right after all. Even before the Goliath, on the morning or the afternoon of the thirteenth, the tram driver’s girlfriend asked us, “Could you help me search for him in the hospitals?”
“Of course!”
And the three of us — she, Swen, and I — raced to the city.
Or perhaps it was the fourteenth after all? Because the thirteenth was a Sunday. But no. Only two Sundays and one holiday, definitely August 15, a Sunday and a holiday. Sundays didn’t differ from each other in any way. How could they? After all, which of the eyewitnesses has ever associated the explosion of the Goliath with a Sunday? That’s probably proof.
That a short period of time appeared long is not surprising. Every day people would say, “It’s already the twelfth day of the uprising.” “It’s already the thirteenth day of the uprising.”
It seemed as if we already had entire years of this behind us, and what was there ahead of us? There never had been, nor would there ever be, anything else, only the uprising. Which it was impossible to endure much longer. Each day it was impossible to endure it much longer. Then each night. Then every two hours. Then every fifteen minutes. Yes. People kept track of time incessantly. They listened to the air or felt the ground to see if it was trembling or not. Where are they? The eastern front? Somewhere beyond the Vistula, or where? In Wiśniewa? In Piekiełko? People listened to the radio or to those who listened to the radio, which is to say, to what was happening in the west. There too (since June) a front was on the move. French cities were being liberated. Belgian cities. And us? There were parachute drops. Arms. They flew over more than once. First those from the west. The Allies. Mostly they were Poles in those planes. Mostly or exclusively. Someone told a story about how once a whole fleet of those airplanes flying from somewhere in England or Africa with supplies for us struck a cold air front over the Alps (I think). All the engines froze. And all of them crashed on the spot. Once at night an airplane from the Union of South Africa crashed right in front of our eyes. Into Praga. Another crashed on Miodowa Street. Where it joins Krasiński Square. Right onto the barricade that already had a tram car on top of it. The fliers were pulled out. I happened to meet them — that August 13—by accident. They were Poles. Too.
Where Długa Street intersects Kiliński near the Garrison Church on the side facing the Vistula, of course, new hospitals had been set up in various cellars. Organized right at that time. Mainly because of the Goliath. According to a version I heard recently from an acquaintance of mine, a teacher who was there, on August 13, on that incomprehensible Sunday, late in the day, probably after sundown, a Goliath released by the Germans turned into Freta Street from Świętojerska. Just a little tank. Rather, a robot tank. At first no one knew that it had been set loose. Rather, it appeared to have been abandoned. Or allowed to come close. And it was captured by the Poles. At once crowds of people rushed up to cheer. They followed the trophy, walking alongside of it. They turned from Freta into Długa. And somewhere near the exit onto Kiliński Street, when the euphoria had reached its peak and the balconies were jammed with people, a catastrophe occurred. The timing mechanism went off. The balconies were left with lots of figures draped over the iron railings. The majority of the corpses, pieces of legs, hands, guts, clothing were found in the garden plots at the center. Those new hospitals came into being that night. My teacher friend had two brothers who were taking part in the action. One — the elder — perished in a skirmish. The other, just a boy, was helping with something over there. He was always rushing about. That’s what he was doing then, too. They, my friend and her mother, that is (they had escaped from Wola), were sitting in the cellar when the younger brother was on Długa. His sister (my friend) rushed outside. She searched for him. After the explosion. Because someone told her that the kid had been there. And in the garden, grassless at that time, on the bare earth, she found a piece of his leg with his shoe still on it. Someone said, however, that her kid brother was alive and no doubt was in the new hospital. She wanted to go inside. But they wouldn’t let her in. Because they were just setting it up. By the next day the hospital had already been bombed. Irena P., when I saw her again during the uprising in Starówka, I think, said (she too had been there then) that they’d had to collect the guts with shovels.
When we rushed out with the tram driver’s girlfriend onto Rybaki Street, we first checked the hospital on the corner of Rybaki and Boleść. In the Gunpowder Depot. There was a hospital there on the ground floor. The tram driver wasn’t there. They told us that if the wounded man wasn’t from the military it was more likely that he was somewhere on Długa.