Staszek himself had seen many tigers. “Tanks as big as apartment houses.”
So they were cruising around. Someone had seen a thousand people (ours) on horseback, riding up to 11 Mazowiecka Street. Various things were happening. And it wasn’t even five o’clock, or “W” hour, yet. Staszek and I were supposed to go to 24 Chłodna Street to see Irena P., my colleague at the secret university. (Our Polonistics department was located on the corner of Świętokrzyska Street and Jasna, on the third floor; we sat on school benches; it was referred to as Tynelski’s school of commercial studies.) Well, we were supposed to be at her place by five (I had a date at seven with Halina, who was living with Zocha and my father at 32 Chmielna Street), but since it was early we walked along Chłodna from Żelazna to Waliców and back. The sexton had spread a carpet on the church steps and set out potted green trees for a formal wedding. Suddenly we see that the sexton is removing everything, rolling up the carpet, carrying in the potted trees, rushing to get it done, and this surprised us. In fact, the day before — July 31, that is — Roman Ż. had dropped in to say goodbye to us. At that moment the Soviet front could be heard distinctly, explosions and simultaneously the planes dropping their bombs on the German districts. So we went into Irena’s. It was before five. We’re talking, suddenly there’s shooting. Then, it seems, heavier weapons. We can hear cannons. And all sorts of weapons. Finally a shout, “Hurrahhh…”
“The uprising,” we told each other immediately, like everyone else in Warsaw.
Strange. Because no one had ever used that word before in his life. Only in history, in books. It was boring. But now, all of a sudden… it’s here, and the sort with “hurrahhhs” and the thundering of the crowd. Those “hurrahhhs” and the thundering were the storming of the courthouses on Ogrodowa. It was raining. We observed whatever could be seen. Irena’s window looked out onto a second courtyard with a low red wall at the end, and beyond this wall was another courtyard, which extended all the way to Ogrodowa Street and housed a sawmill, a shed, a pile of boards, and handcarts. We’re standing there watching and then someone in a German tankist’s uniform, I think, wearing a forage cap and an armband, leaps across that low red wall from the other courtyard into ours. He jumps down onto the lid of our garbage bin. From the bin onto a stool. From the stool onto the asphalt.
“The first partisan!” we shouted.
“You know what, Mironek, I could give myself to him,” Irena told me ecstatically through the curtain.
Immediately afterward people ran into that courtyard from Ogrodowa Street and began grabbing the wagons and carts to use as barricades.
Then — I remember — after Staszek cooked dumplings and we ate them, we played a game, thumbed through Rabelais’s Gargantua (my first contact with him). Then we went to sleep. Of course, it wasn’t quiet. The whole time. Only the large-caliber guns, which became so familiar later on, quieted down a little. So Irena went to sleep in her room. And Staszek and I lay down on her mother’s bed in her mother’s room, since of course she had not come home from the center. It was raining. Drizzling. It was cold. We could hear machine guns, that rat-a-tat-tat. Nearer burst, then farther off. And rocket flares. Every so often. In the sky. We fell asleep to their noise, I think.
It was 1935 when, for the first time in my life, I heard about bombardments. When the Italian fascists attacked Abyssinia. Lame Mania was visiting us, listening to the radio through earphones, and suddenly she announced, “They’re bombing Addis Ababa.”
I had a vision of Aunt Natka’s house on Wronia (I don’t know why that one precisely), the sixth floor, and that we’re there on the landing between the fifth and sixth floors. And that we start caving in along with those floors. Then right away I thought that was probably impossible. But in that case, what was it really like?…
What happened on the second day of August 1944? Since June the Allied offensive in the west had been moving across France, Belgium, Holland. And from Italy. The Russian front was at the Vistula. Warsaw entered the second day of the uprising. Explosions woke us. It was raining.
Organizing began. Block leaders. Duty tours. Shoring up cellars. Tunneling underground passageways. For nights on end. Barricades. At first people thought they could be made out of anything, such as the boards from the sawmill and the carts on Ogrodowa Street. (All of Ogrodowa — we looked out on it — was decked out in Polish flags — a strange holiday!) Meetings and conferences in the courtyards. Assignments: who, what. Possibly already a newssheet. Of the uprising. And in general the partisans. Showed up. In German castoffs — in whatever they could find: a helmet, boots, with anything at all in their hands, so long as it could shoot. We looked out onto Chłodna Street. And it was true: a front had been established. Throughout Warsaw. Right away. Or rather, several fronts. Which the first night established. And the day began to force back. This was reported in the newssheets. There were explosions. All sorts. From cannons. Bombs. Machine guns. Was it the front? The real one, the German-Russian front? It was moving from somewhere near Modlin toward Warsaw (our great hope). Nothing dreadful yet from Wola. But Chłodna Street was in trouble. It seemed to be ours. Already decked in flags, I think. But on the corner of Waliców and Chłodna there was a Wache — a guard post. There was a second Wache (the building with the columns) on the corner of Żelazna and Chłodna. “Wache” meant a building held by the Germans, and that meant shooting from above (from all six stories). Machine guns. Grenades. Every so often a single shot from the roof, from behind a chimney, someone wounded, someone killed. It was those concealed men who were shooting.
“Pigeon fanciers,” people called them. They were chased, hunted down, but nothing came of it. They fired from our buildings. Later they were being caught. But there were a lot of them. All the time. To the very end. It seems they would walk behind the tanks as they rode by and jump through the gates. Shells hurtled in from the German districts, from Wola, from the freight station or the tracks, from an armored train, from the Saxon Gardens. Planes flew overhead and dropped bombs. Every now and then. Frequently. Sometimes every half hour. Even more frequently. And tanks. From Hale Mirowskie. From Wola, too. They wanted to conquer, or rather, to clear the line. Chłodna Street. The first barricades, temporary, wooden, weren’t worth anything. The tanks rode right over them. Shells set them on fire in an instant. Or incendiary bombs. I remember people throwing down tables, chairs, wardrobes onto the street from the third floor of the house on the other corner of Chłodna and Żelazna opposite the Wache, and people here grabbing them for the barricades. And right away those tanks rode over them.
So people started tearing up the concrete slabs from the sidewalks, the cobblestones from the streets. There were tools for this. The tram drivers had prepared iron crowbars and pickaxes for the uprising. They handed them out to the people. And with these the cobblestones were broken into pieces, the concrete slabs were dug up, the hard ground was broken. But those two Waches interfered a lot. I know that my mother suddenly showed up at number 24, in Irena’s courtyard. Worried about me. She’d run over from beyond Żelazna Street, from 4 °Chłodna. She brought something to eat. I preferred to stay here at Irena’s with Staszek. I walked Mother to the corner. The one near the Wache. We separated for the time being, going in opposite directions. Everything stealthily — at a run — under cover of the barricades. At the intersection the tram wires were torn and tangled somehow from the crossfire — anyway, someone had hung a portrait of Hitler on them and this infuriated the Germans. They were shooting at that intersection. The “pigeon fanciers” were puffing away.