Now add to that the destruction of protective structures. If the building collapses, if it shrinks, then our chances become worse. And then. It could shrink even more. And more. Go somewhere else? Where? Buildings are shrinking everywhere. And the crowding. Because people are dying. Right. But buildings are dying, too.
Or fires. Because they happen. Fire itself is nothing. In comparison with bombs. One can flee a fire. People sit in the cellar until the fire is on the ground floor. Until the neighbors call out: “Come out! The ground floor’s burning already!”
And they come out.
But then one’s cover is lost. Cover? The better it is the greater possibility that it will remain. Or so it would seem. But on the other hand, should a so-called fatal accident occur, then everything good becomes bad.
Over and over. You can do this. Calculate. Ponder. Observe. Run away.
Swen didn’t come. One day. Nothing surprising. Neither did Roman Ż. He said he’d come. But he also didn’t. Maybe something happened? An action? And then, those air raids… But the next day, too, they don’t show up. We wait. Well, they’ll come… But it made us think.
We sit there unshaven. We don’t wash. Occasionally. Mainly from a bottle. A bit. Here and there. Washing thoroughly is out of the question. There’s only a little water. Allegedly there is some. In the valley dug out of Krucza. But that’s a large area. And they’re firing. But without water? Everyone has to wait until dusk. But at dusk the grenades, mortars, Berthas, cows go wild. In the courtyard weapons have a different significance. Not only bombs but everything else is important. And very much so. Despite that, people go to fetch water. That day, Father goes, too. He takes the bucket. His armband on his sleeve. It’s afternoon. The rest of us — Zocha, Stacha, Halina, Pan Stanisław, Pani Trafna — stay behind. Everyone in the Wi. family is staying put. Father is gone a long time. Bombs are falling. Nearby. Far off, too. Somewhere, all the time. But that’s nothing. We know that there’s a huge line there. It seems they’re coming back. Some people. With buckets. Of water. And they tell us how many people are there. An hour. Two. Suddenly there are explosions. Right beside us. Did we get hit ourselves? Did someone rush out to check? Or rush back? Yes. I think people ran back. Without water. Terrified. Because something had exploded. Once. Or more often. Apparently it was a bomb. Nearby. And shells. One hit the well itself. It seems a part of it is gone. Well, yes. The well destroyed, the source of water cut. Tough luck. But the people… What happened to Father? Zocha-Zula and I jump up. We run. Through the hole. To that enormous pit in the large courtyard. It’s about ready to grow dark. Or it is growing dark. It’s like a battlefield. The wounded. The dead. They’ve moved them away. Already. Father’s not there. He’s disappeared. We go back. He’s not there. We sit down. It’s evening. He’s not here. Where is he? Why isn’t he here? Where can we look? For his traces? In case. We don’t sleep. Zocha and I. No one does. In our family. We wait. Maybe he’ll still come. And if he doesn’t? We’ll have to go from hospital to hospital in the morning. Begin with that. But he will come… Yes. And it’s nighttime… And late at that. But he’s not back. Finally, toward morning, I think, or in the morning, when we were already certain that something dreadful had happened, he returned. With the bucket, I think. Healthy. Sound. Wearing his armband. It was nothing. A bomb fell. It hit. Destroyed the well. And people? Some, too. Something or other. But mostly they managed to scatter. Father also fled. He ran to Chopin Street. For water, I think. Right behind that little square with the barricade across it. A colleague of his lived nearby. Whom we knew. All of us. An eternal soldier. Jolly. Pan Kowalski. He tempted Father. To drop in. With the bucket. He goes in there. Upstairs. Because his billet is upstairs. Because one side of Chopin Street is Polish and the other German. So they’re not bombing there. So as not to hit their own. The billet is in an engineer’s house. With a daughter. A grown girl. The windows are open. It’s fair weather. The devil take it! They’ll play cards. Probably bridge. Because the four of them sat down this way: Father against the wall, with his back to it, between the windows. Kowalski across from Father. In one window — the daughter. In the other, the engineer. They play. A shell. Soviet. They hadn’t taken that into account. The front. Shrapnel flies in. Through one window. And the other. Nothing happens to Father or Kowalski. The engineer is wounded. But that’s only half the trouble. The daughter. Her side is torn open. So they run down for a stretcher. Bring it. Load her. Bandage her. I think they carried her somewhere.
“The daughter was in a bad way,” Father remembers to this day. “That side, eh… completely torn open… a damaged liver… something… else… I don’t know… I tell you, it was bad.”
The next day Swen came running over.
“A bomb hit. Our annex. Broke through to the cellars. Half the house is gone.”
“Five floors and it broke through?”
“That’s just it. I was standing right in the part that collapsed. With other people. At the last moment I managed not only to rush over to the part that’s still there but I also shoved a whole family over. They’re grateful…”
That was Swen’s reflexes. And his experience from Starówka. That you can manage to do a lot between the time a bomb hits and the building collapses.
“The bodies are still lying in the courtyard, come and see.”
We ran over. Half the building was gone. Sheets were strewn about the courtyard. That is — something in sheets. I think they’d buried some already. The yard. The house. Everything here looked hideous. Wrecked. You couldn’t tell by what. Windows without frames. Heat in the air. Like after a volcano. Something gray. All the time. Hanging there.
On the third day Roman showed up. With his head completely bandaged.
“A Bertha got me on Mokotowska, in my billet, on the seventh floor. The others ran down to the shelter. Two of us stayed there. Suddenly we hear a Bertha. And we’re already lying under the bricks. A door had collapsed onto me. And the bricks were on the door. A piece of wall. I couldn’t be seen. I had a chink to breathe through. I could hear people. Walking around. I yelled. They heard me. They ran in. They started digging. And they got me out.”
A bomb destroyed the well. Next door. And we started looking for water elsewhere. I think that’s why we were running via Hoża, from Krucza toward Skorupka Street (called Sadowa today), until we were practically at Marszałkowska. Suddenly there were ruins. Fresh ones. They bombed. Down to the cellars. The movie theater Urania, the prewar Seagull. (There was a revue here in ’42–’43, Polish, with the best singers. Warsaw was buzzing with revues in ’42– ’43.) As we were walking out, people were leading a lot of Germans out of that Seagull-Revue-Urania. Covered with bits of plaster, walls, in those thin green uniforms. Unbuttoned. Somewhat tattered. Prisoners of war. For an exchange. They’d been sitting under the stone building that was the post-Seagull Urania. A bomb. Hit. Or bombs. And broke through. Those who weren’t killed were dug out. Now people were escorting those who hadn’t been wounded. Simply to another place. We passed by them. In fact, crowds of people passed them. Rushing by. Some from the bombed-out houses, others to help; some to search, others looking for water, still others on official business. With surprise, really. And the Germans looked at us and at the buildings, and at everything — with fear. And they had reason to. So what that they’d done this to us before? They had wanted this. Perhaps not all of them. And now their own bombs. A paradox. But not a joke.
I’m confused by two moons. One, from August 26 on Miodowa, on that frieze. The other, around September 6 on Nowogrodzka. So a span of thirteen days. That might be possible if you counted it as the interval from one phase to another. However, on Nowogrodzka it seemed to be a full moon. In fact, it most definitely was the moon. But there shouldn’t have been a moon on Miodowa. It could only have seemed that way at times. Or memory had already transformed it into a moon. But no doubt it was a reflection of the fires. What would the moon be doing there?