Father came rushing out of the entrance.
Miecio was alive. He was. Meaning, he’s here. With his sister. They have a room with a kitchen. They invite us in. We collect our packs and our bundles from the picket fence. Some of the bags were completely white. Halina’s was, definitely. I remember. In the moonlight.
Introduction, hospitality, we spread our things out, make ourselves at home immediately; there’s a place to spend the night. The ground floor — semi-salvation. We can sleep. On whatever. Just to stretch out. Shelling on the ground floor isn’t given much consideration. If it’s not a vicious attack. And there was nothing vicious. Aimed in this direction. The moon was shining. So it was peaceful. A sigh of relief. Food. A table. We sit down. We chat. We wash. Everyone. By turns. In basins. In real water. With soap. And to sleep.
Yes. That was no earlier than the night of September 6–7. From Wednesday to Thursday. We didn’t know what day of the week it was then. I am figuring it out now. We only knew the dates. Because from the beginning there was that confusion, that chaos. Not later. Because as I found out afterward, Powiśle fell on September 6. And after all, those people from below, from Tamka, Okólnik, Oboźnia, came running up, screaming: “Powiśle’s fallen!” (definitively, that time).
That’s proof of the date.
Perhaps I’ve exaggerated in saying one-third of Śródmieście. That it was ours. Because Powiśle and the ghetto, or no-man’s-land, were cut off. And you have to remember that Śródmieście didn’t include as much as it does now.
On the other hand, I didn’t add (and this is important for people who don’t know the history of the uprising) that part of Mokotów, both upper and lower, was always ours. Southern Powiśle was ours (the so-called southern part near Czerniaków) and Żoliborz, including Marymont. Only, these were separated cauldrons.
In the morning, an air raid. On our “new” Śródmieście. A bomb somewhere nearby. An explosion. And something was drifting down on us already. Soot. Father was completely covered. Because he was sitting under the vent. He jumped up. And he stood there black and helpless with his arms slightly extended. We began to laugh. How could we help it? It was impossible not to. And then we cleaned him off right away, washed him, scrubbed him; especially Zocha. We also had to scour ourselves. Again.
It was hot. After the full moon, a full sun. As there was every day (without exception!). But, how did things work out on the far side of Aleje? Amidst this luxury? It turned out that even this last refuge would be shaky. For the time being it was still peaceful. Relatively speaking, of course. With shellings. Air raids, now and then. But in those days, that was peace.
I already knew this peace would end at any moment. That for the time being they were bombing that part of Śródmieście. But at any moment they could pick themselves up and come over to my new district.
In other words, the same thing for the fourth time. And again it would be necessary to start coming to terms with death. Or with the tearing off of an arm or leg. That one of us might die, just one, didn’t occur to us. We always thought that we would die together.
I think Swen and Zbyszek went to Żurawia immediately to inquire about Danka. And Father and I, the two of us, I think, went to 21 Wilcza to Zocha’s, Father’s, and Halina’s closest friends. To Jadwiga and Stanisław Woj. To move in with them. Because we had crossed Aleje with that intention. In addition, I think, it seemed better to us to be on Wilcza Street than here on Nowogrodzka. Was it an anti-Aleje motivation? An urge to move southward? An urge. Indeed! All creatures when terrified run around, hide, run around some more.
Before Wilcza, I think, we dropped in on my schoolmate Zdzisław Śliwerski. About his being a schoolmate? I could say a lot about that. 6 Żurawia. The second floor. Zdzisław’s father opened the door. And Pani Śliwerska appeared right away. They made a gesture of invitation. But one could sense the uneasiness. In addition, it was on the second floor. So staying there lost its attractiveness. Because they too must already have been thinking about a shelter. We chatted in the foyer. Standing up. Then for a long time at the door and on the stairs. Everyone was panicky. I asked after Zdzisio.
“Zdzisio’s on Emilia Plater Street,” Pan Śliwerski told me, “with his unit.”
“On Emilia Plater?” I was surprised, because I didn’t think we had men there, that far.
“Yes. Emilia Plater. Would you like to look for him there?”
“Yes. But can I get through?”
“Well, yes.” And he gave me the name of the unit. It was supposed to be at the corner of Wspólna or Hoża. One of the corners.
We went first, however, Dad and I, to Wilcza Street. Down the length of Krucza. But to go via Krucza itself was dangerous. Or perhaps we still used Krucza then. It’s easy to forget. Because there were barricades everywhere. High. Flung together. Out of paving stones. Certainly, even if it was possible to use the street, you couldn’t take it all the way. There’d be a gate, a courtyard, a hole in a wall, a doorway. Another hole. Into a cellar. A courtyard.
The crowds were unbelievable. That part of Śródmieście was absolutely jammed by then. People were still arriving. And they were expected to keep on arriving. Every hole and corner was swarming with people.
No doubt a courtyard-hole route had already been prepared by then along the left side of Krucza (as you walk away from Aleje). Then that route descended even farther underground. And since like other routes, or, rather, “Champs-Élysées,” which I knew from the uprising, it was amusing — because there were pipes and holes and little cellars, twists and turns in it — a jingle came into being about this walk down pseudo-Krucza. And we read it in the newssheet. Out loud. Laughing heartily. Just as in Stare Miasto. With the wound-up wardrobe. Called a “cow” here. Because actually, if you listened to it for a while (and you didn’t have to hear it for too long— it was a noisy creature) then it did sound something like a cow bellowing. (Those mine throwers, the “wardrobes” or “cows,” viewed after the war in the Army Museum in Warsaw, amazed me. Especially the shells. Six or nine together. They looked like milk cans. In other words, something to do with cows.) Here, on the other side of Aleje, I saw apartment houses that had been uprooted by the “cows,” narrow ones, but often five stories high. And when I said that the “cows” weren’t anything serious, people responded: “Oh, they’re capable, you’ll see.” And they were.
Some people also shrugged off artillery in the same way. Especially those huge mortars, which I associated with something solid, like a metal, brass perhaps, but this name “mortar” was from the mortars used for grinding pepper and cinnamon.
People would also say to me about them, “You’ll see…”
I replied, “But they can’t break through into the cellars.”
And they responded to that: “Ha ha! They can’t break through? You’ll see how they’ll break through!”
And that was also the truth.
I have already spoken about how acute our hearing had become. To distinguish what was the front. What was a different district. What was beyond Aleje. What was two streets over. And what caliber. By ear. Halina and I had our own terms. For flying missiles. Some shells meowed strangely. We would say, “Aha, the cats!”
The “Berthas” were the worst. They were, as far as I can remember, three-quarter-ton bombs. Three-quarters of a ton isn’t too bad. Only it was three-quarters of a ton of bomb, and straight from the sky, at a slant. I think that was the decisive factor. Well, the ones from the sky fell slantwise, at an angle. And those from the side also came in at an angle. The difference wasn’t so great. But yet there was a difference. I insist on my interpretation. I’m talking only about the toll in the cellars.