This museum of crippled objects Alsop describes has its literary counterpart in Białoszewski’s reconstruction of the Warsaw Uprising, with its careful attention to the artifacts of life under siege. Similarly, Białoszewski’s rejection of literary tradition in his poetry and his refusal to limit himself to conventional and so-called “tasteful” subject matter also finds its expression in his unorthodox treatment of this singular event in contemporary Polish history. Paradoxically, this poet of banality has chosen to address himself to a historical event of great moment, although he has done so in order to assert the primacy of the ordinary demands of life even in a situation of extraordinary horror.
The Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944, as the war in Europe was drawing to a close. During the summer of 1944, while the Western Allies pushed eastward into France, the Soviet Red Army crossed the pre-1939 Soviet-Polish border into the territory that the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, had awarded to the USSR. In July 1944, in the eastern Polish city of Lublin, the Soviets set up a provisional communist government for Poland. It was designed to contest the authority of the London-based anticommunist government-in-exile, which disputed Stalin’s claims to Poland’s eastern territories. By the end of July 1944, Red Army detachments had reached the right bank of the Vistula and were encamped in the working-class suburb of Praga, directly across the river from Warsaw.
At this juncture, the underground Home Army, encouraged and directed by the London government-in-exile and assisted by other partisan groups, including units of the communist People’s Army acting against orders, initiated the uprising in the capital. The anti-Soviet leadership hoped that by liberating Warsaw they could seize the initiative in the coming struggle for power with Moscow’s puppet provisional government. Moreover, for many of the participants the uprising was to be a demonstration of Polish pride and vigor. Poles would not stand by passively to be “liberated” from the German yoke by the detested Russians. And, of importance for injured Polish pride, the April 1943 uprising by Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto would not remain the only organized armed rebellion against the Nazi subjugation of Poland.
The uprising did not succeed, however. The German forces in the city were neither as reduced in size nor as weakened as had been thought and, most important, the Soviet forces refrained from coming to the aid of the embattled capital until the uprising was on the verge of defeat. The people of Warsaw were left to fight and die by themselves. By the end of the uprising in early October, approximately 200,000 Poles — armed fighters and civilians — had been killed in combat and as victims of indiscriminate ground-level and aerial bombardment. After the city’s surrender on October 3, 1944, and the negotiated evacuation of its surviving population, the Germans, following Hitler’s explicit orders, completed the physical destruction of the city. When it was all over, Warsaw had been virtually obliterated. The clearing of the rubble and slow reconstruction of the city took many years and even in the late 1960s, when Białoszewski began composing his memoir, there were many areas in Warsaw which still bore the scars of devastation from both the 1944 uprising and the 1943 uprising in the ghetto.
Białoszewski was one of the noncombatant survivors. In his memoir he speaks of the uprising as “the greatest experience of my life.” Perhaps because of the centrality of this experience, he waited almost a quarter of a century before attempting to shape his memories into some kind of literary form. As he tells us in the memoir, it was precisely the question of form over which he hesitated:
For twenty years I could not write about this. Although I wanted to very much. I talked. About the uprising. To so many people. All sorts of people. So many times. And all along I was thinking that I must describe the uprising, somehow or other describe it. And I didn’t even know that those twenty years of talking — I have been talking about it for twenty years — because it is the greatest experience of my life, a closed experience — precisely this talking is the only device suited to describing the uprising.
The form Białoszewski finally selected as least likely to distort the truth of his experience is a rambling monologue that wanders from incident to incident, with frequent digressions from a basically chronological structure. He rejects the diary form, which preserves the order of events as they occurred and presents the diarist’s assessment without benefit of hindsight; he also rejects the retrospective narrative of memoirs in which events have been recollected, reinterpreted, and then marshaled prior to writing to form a coherent progression. Instead, he adopts the pose of a raconteur and preserves, by a variety of structural and linguistic devices, the illusion of a spoken, off-the-cuff narration.
One of the most important narrative devices is the yielding to free association in utter disregard of the chronological havoc wreaked by this approach. The reader will confront this stylistic device from the very first pages of the memoir. Białoszewski moves freely among a multiplicity of time levels in his narrative. These include the present time of writing; the past of the uprising, which is re-created as though it were the present; the elapsed time between these levels seen variously as past or present, depending on the perspective from which it is viewed; and what we may call the “historical past” of the years before the uprising.
Although a breathless outpouring of recollections is the basic narrative style of the memoir, it is by no means the only voice in which Białoszewski speaks. He frequently agonizes over the accuracy of his memories, but on occasion he speaks with the authority of a reporter as, for example, when he describes the postwar exhumations of the hastily buried dead at which he was present as a journalist. Occasionally he yields to an emotional outburst, but even the deepest of emotions is expressed in a muted tone. This emotional understatement is effective because the horror he describes is so overwhelming that any attempts at a sophisticated rhetoric would be both ludicrous and offensive in contrast. In fact, one temptation for a writer fearful of not doing justice to experiences so horrific that we refer to them as “unspeakable” is to resort to the eloquence of silence.
Białoszewski eventually chose to speak, and to commit his speech to paper, strengthening the illusion of an unpolished spoken narrative by using colloquial language and ignoring the rules of grammar in favor of the intonations of the spoken idiom. Indeed, after the 1970 publication of this memoir, he continued in successive editions of the book and in recorded readings to introduce even more “ungrammatical” elements. This makes it very difficult to render the full flavor of the memoir in English translation. Since Polish syntax is more flexible than ours, I have been forced at times to opt for a more “normal” English syntax than is called for by Białoszewski’s usage rather than run the risk of making the text appear utterly bizarre, which it certainly is not in the original.
Although Białoszewski preserves throughout his memoir the appearance of a spoken narrative whose development is determined primarily by the vagaries of free association and memories, the whole is actually carefully calculated to present a thorough picture of what the author calls the “topography” of the action. The text is densely aural and visual. We see Warsaw in the process of disintegration — not just the quick change from wholeness to ruins as the result of a direct hit but the multiple stages of metamorphosis of particular lovingly described churches and other buildings of the Old City (referred to in the text by its Polish names — the formal “Stare Miasto” and the affectionate “Starówka”) as their contours and façades are slowly eaten away. We hear the unusual sounds of the city. Białoszewski uses onomatopoeic devices to mimic the varied noises of the artillery, the guns, the mine throwers. We also hear, in one of the most majestic scenes in the memoir, a hymn that is being sung by thousands in a labyrinthine bomb shelter. Hymns, psalms, litanies, snatches of popular songs and sayings are all introduced by Białoszewski and blended into his memoir along with information he has gathered from newspapers, from his friends, his father, and other sources. Precisely because Białoszewski defines the function of memoirist as that of witness, he is not content to rely on his own observations alone, though he is too distrustful to accept unquestioningly other versions of the event.