Rybaki Street already looked different from what it had been like at the beginning. Every few steps there were barricades of earth, steel rails, paving stones, and concrete with narrow little crannies near the wall. The walls of the old driveway and the two shell-like gates of chipped plaster were pockmarked. The houses were already losing their normal contours. Their height. The lines of their façades.
From the corner of Boleść we turned back a short way in the direction from which we had come (Kościelna). Right at the bend, as has already been described, was the wall at which the gardens of the Dominicans, dropping down from the hill and intersected by Stara Street, came to an end. In this wall, described several pages back, was the gate that has also been described already, the same gate with the monstrance that marked the beginning of the Staromiejski route from lower to upper Stare Miasto. After dashing through the gate you immediately made a sharp left turn. Then you raced toward the garbage bin near the opposite wall. You jumped onto the table placed beside it. From the table onto the garbage bin. From the garbage bin (a bin of the old kind with a lid) through a hole in the wall. And you were on a slightly higher level, or, rather, at the bottom of the courtyard from which you could scurry along a board through a window, from the window into someone’s apartment, from that apartment through a hole in the wall into some other dark place that was at ground-floor level at one end but was a cellar in the middle of the building. There you landed blindly amid a crowd of people who were sitting or lying down, some of whom were even wounded. Some of them cried out, “Jesus!… don’t trample us… Jesus!”
From there, you raced along various turnings in the dark up to some higher place, out into the courtyard. From that yard through a gate. Out to Mostowa Street. Here you ran across the street at an angle, stealthily, behind the barricade. Across cobblestones. From there you could always see a bit of blue sky and the Vistula through a chink in the wall. The street runs downhill. And that barricade was considered both a lookout and a front. Often, partisans were lying on it and firing at Wybrzeże and Praga. Perhaps even at those legendary trees with the Germans and their binoculars. On the other side of Mostowa (there were buildings there then) you hurried through the gate of the lower courtyard of the Gdańsk Cellar. Or perhaps that wasn’t the Gdańsk Cellar but only its vicinity. Somewhat lower down. It seems to me that the oldest hospital in Warsaw, St. Lazarus (I remember its burnt-out walls were still standing, adhering to the ancient ramparts, when it was uncovered after the war; they dismantled the monument), stood, I think, directly opposite the entrance from Mostowa near that first lower courtyard. If there really were two courtyards there. And behind the hoardings, or the wall, at least behind the wide-open wooden gate, it seems there was a second courtyard. Also with cobblestones. And that was the one that housed the Gdańsk Cellar. The Gdańsk Cellar has always been a famous building. My grandmother lived in it. My father spent entire months there as a child around 1905. The Gdańsk Cellar stood four stories above that courtyard with its cobblestones and gray cats always sitting on them, or, rather, it was four stories counting from below or two above the upper level, which faced Freta Street, or the front. The stairs were wooden. Also with cats on them. I remember that from before the war. Only at that time no one knew either about the landmark value of St. Lazarus (which had been reconstructed, after all, built onto, renovated, like the majority of such buildings in Warsaw, so that it was difficult to see it as a monument), nor did anyone know that the Gdańsk Cellar, in addition to its elaborate construction, was a parasite on the remains of the barbican. So you rushed into a stairwell. Up to the third floor. And after racing through the passageway you realized that it was the ground floor on Freta Street. Then came the gate and then, right away, the street. The hill of Stare Miasto. On this route, in the Gdańsk Cellar and its exit onto Freta, at the intersection of Długa, Nowomiejska, and Mostowa Streets, people were always passing by quickly, in crowds. They would walk past once or twice. Searching. Taking care of things. And they would rush on. Długa was always the most central and important street.
One of the buildings, either the Gdańsk Cellar or the one housing the baths near Mostowa, had a façade decorated with graying cream-colored tiles, which were fashionable in the nineteenth century. Come to think of it, there were somewhat similar tiles on the cathedral on Kościelna Street. The colors of the apartment houses, however, were already beginning to turn scorched gray. A corner of Mostowa and Freta was in ruins. Perhaps even two corners. I know for certain, from recent testimony, that the first bomb demolished the building to the right of Mostowa — as one stands facing the Vistula; and yet to this day I see it as the left corner. The one with the shops. A pile of red bricks. After all, those weren’t the only ruins here. But still, all that was just the beginning. True, perhaps it was then that the people in the cellar near Stary Rynek were suffocated to death by flour when the bomb fell. But the churches, convents, and the cathedral were still standing. Never has Warsaw — although it is four times larger now than it was then — seemed so large and complicated, so endless. Distances were extended. Layouts and divisions were multiplied, peeled away, excavated, overlapped into a fine network. Today I am moved by the thought that I was at the confluence of Krucza — Piękna — Mokotowska while those others were shooting from Polytechnic Square — and that it seemed and felt distant. Certainly one could see neither the guns nor them. Involuntarily, one transposed the entire topography of the front. The Praga shore seemed to be located on some other map. The Hitlerites with their binoculars in the zoo’s tall trees and the eastern front in Żerań were a myth — something that revealed itself, it is true, but only as a second or third reality. Which means, however — because this is probably the main cause — psychic compartments and distances. After all, the same thing happened in the Jewish uprising.
We rushed into the hospitals. All on the left side. There were a lot of them. I think there was still some clattering on the ground floors. But since it was dangerous (Miodowa was already quite shot up) the hospitals were in the basements. And since the basements were merely shelters, and since shelters beneath old houses were ordinary cellars for coal and potatoes with narrow cubicles and stalls, it is not surprising that even after all our experiences we were floored once again. Astounded. Signs were posted along the narrow corridors over the entryways to the potato stalls: Ward 5, Ward 6. And in the corridor itself, the one leading from the courtyard entrance, lay the wounded. That, too, was a ward number something. Some lay on the cellar floor. On what? On whatever blankets were available. On scraps of paper, too. And also under packaging paper. Others were sitting. They half sat up. There were yet others, swathed in bandages, with faces burned the color of a wardrobe, covered with strips of gauze bandages. Their arms, too. And they were so held together by these bandages that they looked as if they were propped up on it (on something). They were walking back and forth. Like totem poles. They kept passing by. Returning. Because it was crowded. They were practically marching in place. And holding their bandaged arms up — both of them — symmetrically (that’s where “totem poles” comes from). Their mouths were open. They were breathing. They were walking about out of dreadful impatience. Because they couldn’t stay still. Because of being burned alive and still living— alive but not living. They were the airmen. From the plane. The ones who had crashed onto the barricade with the tram at the outlet of Miodowa Street. We asked them a few questions. Nothing much. They nodded at some things. But it wasn’t really a conversation. They were walking. That’s all. With those raised arms. With their breathing. With a slit for nose and mouth in the bandages on their faces. The tram driver wasn’t here, either. So our chances were dwindling. The tram driver’s girlfriend was crying. I think all three of us went home. After a while. Why not?