This is not an inspirational book. It offers no comforting conclusions about individual heroism or historical necessity. There are no lessons to be drawn from the tragedy of Warsaw, no higher meaning to redeem the city’s suffering. We are left with the simple fact that human beings are infinitely vulnerable and are offered no suggestion that this can ever be otherwise.
As the translator of A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, I have been granted the extraordinary opportunity to revise my original, forty-year-old translation for publication by New York Review Books. In the process, I have discovered and corrected some egregious errors that I would like to think were the inevitable and forgivable mistakes of a novice translator, and I hope that in making numerous minor changes throughout the text I have not introduced a new set of errors. Most importantly, this revised translation of A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising is based on the 2014 edition of Pamiętnik z powstania warszawskiego, edited for the multivolume collection of Białoszewski’s oeuvre by Dr. Adam Poprawa, who has produced for Polish readers a version of the memoir that restores passages that appear to have been omitted from the 1970 and later editions either because of rulings by the censors or by Białoszewski himself in anticipation of the censors’ objections. Some of the changes introduced by Białoszewski in print in later editions or orally in his readings were stylistic; some were corrections of the abbreviated names by which he referred to certain individuals; a few filled out some of his memories. But the most interesting thread connecting a number of newly introduced comments and asides is political and linked to the fraught topic of the position of Jews in Poland during and immediately after the Holocaust. One may imagine that this became of heightened significance for Białoszewski after the 1967–68 official exclusion of Jews from positions of cultural and political influence, resulting in an exodus of many thousands of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who had hoped to live out their lives in Poland. As Poprawa points out in his afterword to the 2014 edition, during the 1970s Białoszewski recorded on tape for Polish radio the entire text of the memoir. In his reading he made a significant change in the memoir’s concluding passage. A single inserted sentence quietly reminds the reader of Poland’s “Jewish question”: “A couple of months later I saw Stefa, who was preparing to go abroad.” Stefa, a Jewish woman and family friend who survived by passing herself off as Volksdeutscher, has returned to Warsaw but is preparing to leave Poland. Poprawa chose, on aesthetic grounds, to retain the closing passage as it appeared in the 1970 edition minus the “offending” sentence. But he admits that there is no way of knowing whether Białoszewski added the sentence in the 1970s or the censors removed it in 1970 as too clear a reminder of the 1968 purge of Jews. Because of its potential importance, I have chosen to include the variant ending in this introductory note, while respecting Poprawa’s decision in the translation, which follows the 2014 edition in every particular.
The first person from the uprising whom I saw suddenly one evening near a kiosk in Częstochowa was Swen’s mother, and the second was Swen, who was holding her by her arm. A couple of months later I saw Stefa, who was preparing to go abroad.
I saw what remained of Warsaw in February 1945.
— MADELINE G. LEVINE
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Stevensville, Montana
A GUIDE TO THE PRONUNCIATION OF POLISH NAMES
As a rule, Polish names are stressed on the penultimate syllable. Polish letters with approximate English equivalents:
c
ts
cz
ch
j
y
ł
w
rz
zh
sz
sh
w
v
a
ah
ą
nasalized o
e
eh
ę
nasalized e
i
ee
o
oh
ó, u
oo (as in soon)
y
i (as in if)
A MEMOIR OF THE WARSAW UPRISING
TUESDAY, August 1, 1944, was overcast, wet, not too warm. It must have been about noon when I stepped out onto Chłodna Street (my street at the time, number 40), and I remember that there were a lot of trams, cars, and people, and that right after I reached the corner of Żelazna Street I became aware of the date — August 1— and I thought to myself, more or less in these words: “August 1—it’s Sunflower Day.”
I remember looking down Chłodna Street in the direction of Kercelak. But why the association with sunflowers? Because that’s when they’re blooming and even shedding their petals, because they’re ripening… And also because at that time I was more naive and sentimental, I hadn’t become cunning yet, because the times themselves were also naive, primitive, rather carefree, romantic, conspiratorial, wartime… So — that yellow color must have been in something — the light of the inclement weather with sunlight struggling to break through (it did) on the trams painted red as they are in Warsaw.
I shall be frank recollecting my distant self in small facts, perhaps excessively precise, but there will be only the truth. I am forty-five years old now, twenty-three years have gone by, I am lying here on my couch safe and sound, free, in good health and spirits, it is October, night, 1967, Warsaw once again has 1,300,000 inhabitants. I was seventeen years old when I went to bed one day and for the first time in my life heard artillery fire. It was the front. And that was probably September 2, 1939. I was right to be terrified. Five years later the all too familiar Germans were still walking along the streets in their uniforms.
(I am using the designation “Germans” here and elsewhere because any other usage will sound artificial. Just as at that time the Vlasovites were often assumed to be Ukrainians.[1] We knew that the Germans weren’t the only Hitlerites. We even saw it. I remember the Latvians in 1942 after the liquidation of the little ghetto. With rifles. Entirely in black. They were standing along the length of Sienna Street. Close together. On the Aryan sidewalk. And for entire days and nights they scanned the windows on the Jewish side of Sienna. The remains of windowpanes in their frames, plugged up with quilts. Deathly goose down. Along the street — that one street — from Żelazna to Sosnowa ran not a wall but barbed wire. Along its entire length. The roadway, the cobblestones — on that side tall reeds and goosefoot were already growing — had dried out by then and turned as gray as charcoal. And yet they were crouching. That’s how they took aim. And I remember that one of them fired every so often. At those windows.)
Well, that August 1, at about two in the afternoon, Mama said that I should go get some bread from Teik’s cousin on Staszic Street; apparently, there wasn’t enough bread and they had arranged something. I went. And I remember that when I returned there were a great many people and there was already a commotion. And people were saying, “They killed two Germans on Ogrodowa Street.”
It seems to me that I didn’t go the way I should have because right away they were rounding up people, but somehow it also seems that I really did take Ogrodowa Street. My commotion in Wola may have been only local because right afterward I ran into Staszek P., the composer, and afterward Staszek laughed and said, “And my mother said that today was such a peaceful day!”