“Of course, come in, come in…”
They lead us in, sit us down, offer stools, chairs.
“I’ll give something to eat in a minute. Do you want to wash up? You look a mess!”
Stacha, Halina’s mother, wakes up. And Halina. In beds. We rush to them. In the dark I bend over Halina. I am the one from the sewers; she, the one under the quilt, is clean. I kiss her.
“We were supposed to see each other August 1,” I say. “Well, it’s exactly one month later.”
Halina is sleepy; she looks around.
“My God, you look awful, your hair is glued down. Zocha, he’s got to change his clothing. Swen, you look awful!”
Each of us was given a change of clothing. I think we undressed on the staircase. Then we took turns washing up in the anteroom. There was bustling, fussing, rising, chatting, boiling water, food. Everything in a rush.
At that moment we were happy. We talked without interruption. Together. All three of us. They did, too.
It took us two hours to wash. However, I think we ate something first. Then to the basins. Hot water. Our hair took the longest time. It didn’t want to come unglued. They helped us.
“Clothing into the fire.”
“Yes, right into the fire,” Zocha and Father decided for me. And flung it into the stove. My shoes, too. Everything I had on. Then mainly eating. Then bedding was laid out. After all, it was a big change for such a small apartment. Still more talk… And suddenly — sleep.
We wake up in the morning. Hungry. Halina is already preparing three bowls of buttered macaroni for us. She serves it. We eat.
“I’ll make something else for you right away. Zenek is at the Home Army. Downtown. Zocha’s at the barracks. She’s in charge of the kitchen.” (Zenek is my father.)
Again we eat something. Full bowls. Buttered. Something’s rustling. The janitor? Sweeping up? We look out the window. Yes.
Halina cooked and served us something again. Every hour, every hour and a half. Only now was Stare Miasto beginning to get out of us.
For the time being neither Starówka, nor the sewers, nor Śródmieście seemed real. Nothing did. Everything was unreal. All we wanted was to eat. Various surprises. Halina. Ourselves. And that feeling of peace and happiness. If only for an hour. But perhaps it would last till the end of the day. And through the night. Until morning.
I don’t remember if anything happened. I think it was then, on the first day, that Halina said at one point, “We’d better go down to the cellar.”
But it wasn’t anything terrifying. And it didn’t last long. It was summer all the time, hot. September 2. Saturday. Like five years ago. In 1939. The artillery in the afternoon. Halina explained.
“They begin around this time. We know what streets because they’re at an angle. Now it’s Złota and Zgoda. Over there, beyond Marszałkowska, they’re worse off.”
I think it was that first day already that Halina and I decided to continue our French studies. Halina pulled out Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale. In French. We read through the entire first page with enthusiasm. Which wasn’t easy. Because it was dense. And we had to check many words in the dictionary. And even so we couldn’t find the right meaning every time.
Father said that here in Śródmieście you absolutely had to know the passwords and responses, which were changed every day. For protection against the “pigeon fanciers.” They checked papers in the evening after dark. There was a curfew. They had so-called detention of pedestrians (to avoid calling them “roundups”). For public works. For digging, hammering, barricades. The headquarters of the Home Army was here, on the corner of Świętokrzyska and Marszałkowska, in the General Savings Association building. For the time being, at least in the central and southern districts of Śródmieście, it was so-so, or rather, the defense was continuing and so was public order. Father said that in light of this he could try to get us work somewhere. Because here you had to work at something. Work was obligatory.
On that foolish day of joy everything both amazed us and didn’t. It wasn’t that we were afraid of work. We had grown accustomed to it. What hadn’t we grown accustomed to? But it seems we had, under our sweetened mood, a great uncertainty about it all. Even a negative certainty. But for the time being, if that’s how things were, that’s how they’d have to be.
And so we were already talking among ourselves about joining the uprising.
“I’ve thought about it,” said Halina.
“But really,” I said, “if you want to we can join, it really doesn’t make any difference.”
Halina said that by now it didn’t make any difference to her, either.
And that’s the way we left it. Provisionally. As it turned out, they weren’t accepting volunteers anyway or else they were accepting them but unenthusiastically because there were no weapons. Besides which, it was necessary to be trained.
I think it was still on that same day that after several meals Zocha ordered us to come to her barracks for a meal. Nearby. The corner of Chmielna and Zgoda. The building is still standing today. A cake, a piece of cake, six stories high, with a little triangle in the center at the base (a so-called courtyard).
Zocha’s quarters, or rather the quarters of the division for which she cooked, was in the Bałtarowiczes’ apartment. Zocha was called Pani Zula there. She wore sneakers and had a turban on her head.
She sat us down at the table. She gave us each a plate of macaroni. In addition, she set out a jar of lard. With cracklings. And some juice. Also in jars, I think.
Somehow, Swen simultaneously greased his own food and mine. With a spoonful of lard. Then again.
“Have some more.” Another spoonful for each of us.
“Have some more.” Again another spoonful.
And he grabbed for the juice. Raspberry. No. Cherry, I think. He poured it onto the lard, the macaroni. I yelled something. But he poured on even more. We began wolfing it down immediately. And quickly. With great appetite. I confess. With appreciation for everything in that whole mess.
Our first gorging ended with this, I think. It was already dark. I remember that afterward Father took us to Uncle Stefan’s. The typesetter. On Górski Street. To the newspaper plant. It was a sweet warm evening. As in 1939. Just the same, September 2. Saturday. A sweetened peace, warm. Dark. The same Szpitalna and Chmielna Streets. Mama and I. We had walked from Napoleon Square to Jędrzejewski’s to buy some cake. Because he had good, large cakes. There was a front, too. Which could be heard. False happiness. Delusion through physical well-being.
In the printing shop there were many lights, people, the smell of the newssheets, the type, papers, piles, people bending over, tapping sounds. In addition, the radio was on. Tuned in to Lublin. Wanda Wasilewska was speaking.[19] To Warsaw about Warsaw. It was taken somewhat strangely. Because she spoke strangely.
Uncle Stefan was setting type, I think. And it seems he was snacking off a piece of paper. He told me (because I asked him) how Aunt Natka, Krysia, and Bogusia were (because, after all, they weren’t on Towarowa near the railway, though that’s where they lived).
“No, they’re at Marycha’s on Miedziana Street. It’s terrible there.”
I understood that everything was finished over there, that on August 26 or 27 there had been air raids, it seems, just as in Stare Miasto. They had survived. They didn’t know that they still had Dresden ahead of them, because they were deported there after the uprising.
It wasn’t only on the other side of Marszałkowska that the situation was terrible. It was also becoming terrible beyond Nowy Świat. Beyond the Saxon Gardens there were only ruins and empty lots. The front passed through the Saxon Gardens. So only that chosen belt remained intact, one-third of Śródmieście, at most. A semblance of order. With the headquarters of the Home Army. The five-minute “Śródmieście Republic.” But even here, to be sure, there was more than one peculiar incident.