I can’t distinguish exactly what happened on the second and what happened on the third of August (on Wednesday and Thursday). Both days were cloudy and drizzly. There were already fires, bombs. Both days there was racing downstairs.
“To the shelter!”—or, rather, to ordinary cellars. To the yard for discussions, duty tours, to work at digging, building barricades. We were still living upstairs, on the fourth floor. But we were already sitting in the foyer, at the most in the kitchen, within the innermost walls, because shells were pouring in. We slept on couches placed in the foyer. Once, Irena P. and I ran down without our shoes on, I think, because there was already an air raid and bombs. Staszek was in the WC at that moment. Then the bombs fell. Somehow, nothing hit us. A few minutes later Staszek came down and said, “You know, while I was sitting on the toilet the entire floor and the whole toilet with me on it caved in… And how…”
Anyway, we didn’t go out into Chłodna Street right away. Which was good. The gate, like all the others, was barricaded. We decided to hang out a flag. They blew it up through the iron grating.
“Attention!” and “Poland has not perished yet.”
The Germans began firing. At the flag. At the gate. Someone got something in his finger. Probably the lieutenant who hung out the flag. Or maybe the commandant of the Antiaircraft Defense for this house? I don’t remember. At some point there was a sudden dreadful blast. So that everything jumped. We flew downstairs.
“The Germans blew themselves up along with their Wache on the corner of Waliców!” people were shouting.
“Five apartment houses are gone!”
We ran out into Chłodna Street. The street was covered with clouds. Rust colored and dark brown. From bricks, from smoke. When it settled we saw a terrifying transformation. A reddish-gray dust was covering everything. Trees. Leaves. A centimeter thick, I think. And that devastation. One Wache less. But at what a cost. Anyway, things were already beginning to change. To anxiety. And always for the worse. Visually too. From Żelazna Brama Square, from Bank Square, from Elektoralna Street along our side of Chłodna against the wall, people were running and running— women, children, all hunched over, gray, covered with some kind of powder. I remember that the sun was setting. Fires were burning. The people ran on and on. A flood of people. From the bombed-out houses. They were fleeing to Wola.
The next day, around sunset, Staszek and I were ordered to carry concrete paving stones. To the other side of the street. Staszek grabbed a slab and carried it across. I was amazed. Suddenly, we hear shells. One hits a wooden fire barricade behind the church on Chłodna. It bursts into flames. Right afterward something hits Hale Mirowskie. It catches fire. Burns with a vivid flame. Tomato colored. The sun is setting. The weather is fair for the first time. On our side of Chłodna people are running beneath the wall to Elektoralna and beyond. Just like yesterday. The same people. They are fleeing from Wola.
“The Ukrainians are on the march from Wola and butchering people. And burning them on pyres!”
The fifth day, Saturday, August 5. A lot of prolonged roaring. I run out to the gate.
“The Wache is taken!” I race upstairs. With that joyous news. To Irena and Staszek. Chłodna was free. A minute later all decked in flags. In a moment crowds poured into the street. To make barricades. Everyone. Women. Old men. I remember. Salesladies in white aprons. And an older woman who was quickly passing me bricks with one hand because she was holding her pocketbook in the other. I passed the bricks to a salesgirl in her white apron. And so on.
People were shouting, “Faster! Faster!” The bricks were collected from the blown-up buildings on the corner of Waliców. Suddenly, we hear airplanes. We run to the steps of a Secession-style apartment house at number 20 or 22.[2] Bombs. We run down to the cellar. It was the house of Pan Henneberg, I think, an engineer, one of the Henneberg brothers and the father of my three schoolmates and scouting friends. I used to visit there before the war. I remember that whenever I visited them in those days the house was full of people, the door to the balcony was open and there was a terrific noise from the street, as if people were actually riding through the apartment. This morning or the day before, Pan Henneberg had climbed the tram mast and cut the wires and then thrown them down so that the tanks would get all tangled up in them, and he’d cursed at the Germans, out loud. Not long ago, just this year in fact, I read in the weekly The Capital that one of the younger Henneberg brothers, one of my schoolmates, that is, had died in the uprising. The other one also perished. I remember their mother from my school days, when she was in mourning; she had very blond hair. We could hear the tanks. They were on the way already. All or nothing. We had to escape.
In the cellar in this building there was one elderly gentleman. He had come there.
“Where did you come from?” I asked him.
“From Krakowskie Przedmieście.”
He described how the Germans were arresting people and herding them in front of the tanks against the partisans, so that the partisans would shoot them.
“And the whole street has been burned down…”
“Which street?” I asked.
“Krakowskie Przedmieście, of course,” he said very sadly.
I remember that I was surprised then, first of all at hearing someone call Krakowskie Przedmieście a street rather than an avenue and second that the old man was so terribly upset about it. I am not surprised now.
After the bombardment we went outside. They were calling for help at the next barricade right before Żelazna Street. Men were needed. I ran over. They handed out picks and crowbars. For the cobblestones and sidewalks. Anyway, part of the trench was already dug up. I saw for the first time what a tangle of pipes and conduits there is underground. They warned us to dig carefully. On the fourth corner of Żelazna a cigarette kiosk was overturned as a barrier, the cigarettes spilling out. Some guy started picking them up.
“Hey, mister, at such a time!” And other people also began yelling at him. He was embarrassed, stopped, went on digging with us. Suddenly people are wheeling out the corpses of those Germans from the Wache. In wheelbarrows. Stripped to the waist. Barefoot. The green soles of their boots sticking out. Bare soles. And I remember the belly of one or was it two Germans protruding from the wheelbarrows. There were several of them in each wheelbarrow. They are to be buried. On the square in front of the Church of St. Boromeusz. Don’t make a cross. But start over and mark out a circle of dirt (which later, more or less at dusk, I saw they did). They take me to help out.
I am ashamed to refuse. But I wish for an air raid right at that moment, so that others will have to do it instead of me. And there is one. Quickly, ever so quickly. They fly over. And bombs! So that the men with the wheelbarrows drop the wheelbarrows, the German corpses sail into the trenches, into the excavations, strike the pipes, the cables, and remain somewhere deep down there. With the result that some people dug them out immediately, but by then it was other people. After the bombs. I fled for all I was worth two apartment houses away.
Then the return to Irena. We decided to separate. Because we really had to go back to our mothers. Irena remained here, in her own house. I was supposed to go back to my house, to 4 °Chłodna. Staszek to his. To 17 Sienna Street. But people were running from that direction and screaming, “Pańska’s bombed! Prosta’s bombed!”
We say goodbye between Waliców and Żelazna. I run toward Żelazna. A lot of people, objects, destruction, changes, commotion. A crowd. Flight. The pigeon fanciers. I remember. I see: a line of what looks like Boy Scouts in green uniforms making their way from Chłodna Street to Żelazna near the arcades in those various blind alleys. They’re holding bottles of gasoline. They turn into Żelazna. The weather’s fine. Saturday. Sunny. I rush into our house. Mama’s there. And besides Mama: