I have already told how the Hitlerites attacked 18 Bracka Street behind their tanks and slaughtered who knows how many people there. Then the same thing happened on Jasna Street. Also raids, and Big Berthas, and other things. Once, Father was walking along Zgoda Street and someone was playing a piano. Suddenly — planes. Immediately, bombs. Half of the house disappeared. The person upstairs was cut off. The staircases had collapsed. Luckily a truck came. Firemen. They got him down with a ladder.
It wasn’t for nothing that people in Śródmieście sang to the tune of an old rumba:
The tanks along Marszałkowska
The tanks along Nowy Świat…
The huge General Savings Association building itself (headquarters) was already scarred. But it was standing, more or less. Mighty. Concrete. So many stories high. People were staying there. Father went to see his acquaintance, Major Brejdygand. To get him out of there. Major Brejdygand replied, “No, it’s just fine here…”
The next day, in the morning, Father went to see him again. He found the building in ruins. Major Brejdygand had perished. They had bombed through to the cellars, two floors down, I think. The concrete hadn’t helped.
I know from Janek Markiewicz’s mother that she and Janek had a wounded friend there. He had to be carried out. They got hold of a stretcher; they rushed about looking for him but he couldn’t be found. They called to him. No answer. Plenty of wounded people. In water. And the water was rising. Because something had burst. The wounded were crawling about but they didn’t have any strength. They went on looking for their own. Finally, a weak little voice: “Here I am…”
They look: a mummy wrapped up in bandages. They put him on the stretcher. They carried him out. Others were shouting: “And when will we get out? When will you get us out?”
“ ‘We’ll come back for you,’ I shouted,” Markiewicz’s mother told me. “I had to lie to them. It was horrible. We carried that poor thing. We carried him. It was getting too heavy for me. Around Sienkiewicz Street I stumbled with the stretcher and began to shriek. Janek yelled at me, ‘What are you trembling for, you hysterical woman!’ But I didn’t say anything; I only lay there and screamed, ‘He-ee-elp…!’ ”
“And so?” I asked, laughing. “Did it help?”
“You won’t believe it, but it did. Suddenly someone ran up. Wearing a uniform. He and Janek carried the stretcher. Finally he saluted and walked away. And he was that Yugoslav who took part in our uprising.”
All that took place right at the beginning of September. Back in August Father had been asked to find a postman. His address: some number on Śliska Street. Father went there; the old man was sitting in his kitchen with his sister. Father told us:
“I say they should leave but they say no, no… I come back several days later. They’re no longer there. They’re sitting in the cellar. But do you know how? Under the courtyard. They dug corridors under the entire house and under the yard in a square. And people were sitting there on benches along both sides, crowded together, one next to the other, without any space. Again I try to persuade him but again he says, ‘No… my sister and I will stay right here!’ Just as I was going back to them for the last time I was thrown against the wall in the building housing the Capitol movie theater; I was thrown against the wall, fell through into the basement, and then the main wall began to collapse because they had obviously struck behind the wall and broken through into the basement… Then we just stood like that, everyone without moving, and everyone was holding on to his head to protect it. And when I reached Śliska Street I learned that everyone in those corridors under the walls was killed.”
After telling us about the famous battles in the Telephone Exchange (that layer cake with the Germans and Poles on alternating floors) and in the Church of the Holy Cross where, it seems, the Germans were on the roof of the church proper and the Poles in the choir with the organ and they even tore out the pipes in order to hurl them, Father and Halina told us about one youth who sat for days in the tram on Marszałkowska somewhere near Złota and whenever a tank approached he threw bottles at it; it seems he destroyed several tanks like that but finally he was killed, too.
What amazed me even more was that Woytowicz had organized a Chopin concert in a café on the ground floor on Nowy Świat.[20] For the partisans. It was evening. The artillery fire began. Woytowicz was playing the “Revolutionary Étude” when the shells began to whistle and hit Nowy Świat. Right nearby. Woytowicz didn’t stop. No one moved. Only the cups and saucers tumbled down and were broken. Irena P. told me about it when everything was over.
Halina said that there were concerts in the conservatory. And in the Apollo movie theater nearby a film was being shown. A documentary. Of the battles in the Church of the Holy Cross. She saw it herself. She told me about it then.
But let’s return to the situation at 32 Chmielna, on the fourth floor. I don’t remember anymore how we slept. After all, there were seven of us and yet it seems we were comfortable. From the beginning Zocha showed a great partiality for Zbyszek, which Swen made fun of.
On September 3 it was already hot in the morning. Sunday. It felt exceptionally holy. Food. Sitting around. Family. On a couch. And peace. As then. In 1939. Also September 3. Also Sunday. Suddenly the bombing had ceased. Heat. People were rushing from embassy to embassy, carrying manifestoes, because England and France had declared war. On Nowy Świat, near the statue of Copernicus, I had stumbled across a group of people singing “La Marseillaise” in French. A woman standing on the roof of a limousine was leading them, her black hair combed to look wet and sleek, and shaking her large earrings. I asked someone who she was. He said she was the wife of Prime Minister Sławoj-Składkowski.
So today, September 3, 1944, I organized a reading. Of a narrative poem. On a totally unrelated theme. Written on Rybaki Street. And also of a play I’d begun writing about the uprising. With a scene in the shelter on Rybaki. The play was written on the paper I’d taken from the cabinet at 5 Podwale, where that wooden well was. During my “author’s afternoon” the four of us — Halina, Swen, Zbyszek, and I — sat on the couch. I was certain that the day would be peaceful until nightfall. And it was, more or less.
I don’t know what started first, the bombing or the major diarrhea. I know that Swen started first. Running up and down. To the exit into the courtyard. From the fourth floor. He kept making a dash for it. Diarrhea and vomiting. A lot. Both the one and the other. I suspect that it hit him toward the end of that last (holy) Sunday. I started, I think, on Monday. In the morning. That fair weather. Familiar. Heat. The burning of garbage in a rubbish bin. Shared by 32 Chmielna and the Palladium theater because we had a common wall with a hole in it. And they had water. We didn’t. On the other hand, we had corpses lying in our courtyard. Since Saturday. And the rags from those corpses, assorted bloodied cloaks, hung on the outhouse door handle. So it wasn’t pleasant for us when the runs started. And somehow the bombardment also started suddenly. On Monday.
Father says that we lay in our beds then, after our trip through the sewers, for almost three whole days. But it was neither three days nor a complete rest that we had right after Starówka. After all, I have described our first two days. All that walking around. I can recall that we set up camp beds on Monday, September 4—the third day. But because we had to keep running downstairs Swen and I couldn’t lie in bed as one normally would have. After all, not only did we have the vomiting and diarrhea but there was the bombing, too.