We wanted a city.
I insisted that it should be as near as possible to the border of the Generalgouvernement in order to escape to Częstochowa at the first opportunity. Halina was dreaming of Vienna. She liked to sing:
I’ve lost my heart
Which someone stole in Vienna…
I said that that was frivolous at such a time, and it was also so far away. But she replied: “But I want to go there and that’s all; you’re drawn to Częstochowa because of your love affairs.”
And so one more separation was in the making. Father didn’t want to part with me, or Stacha and Zocha with Halina. But Zocha didn’t want to lose Father, and Father also depended on Zocha’s and Halina’s company — very much so, in fact. So that later, in Opole, he ate practically nothing from grief at the separation.
On Monday before noon new groups kept leaving. Until the call came: “Who wants to go to Opole?”
Father and I volunteered. Halina remained stubborn. Vienna— and that’s that. And so we said goodbye hastily. And off we went with our white knapsacks, with the rest of the macaroni and sugar, into the train. That was October 9. On November 11, after one month of work as bricklayers’ assistants on the expansion of a gasworks in Oppeln, Father and I escaped to Częstochowa. During the first snowstorm. Thanks to someone from Częstochowa who had come for us on a circuitous route through Berlin.
The first person from the uprising whom I saw suddenly one evening near a kiosk in Częstochowa was Swen’s mother, and the second was Swen, who was holding her by her arm.
I saw what remained of Warsaw in February 1945.
NOTES
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
1 Prior to writing his memoir, Białoszewski had published four volumes of poetry and small prose narratives: Obroty rzeczy (1956), Rachunek zachciankowy (1959), Mylne wzruszenia (1961), and Było i było (1965). These were followed by Donosy rzeczywistości (1973), Teatr osobny (1973), Wiersze (1975), Poezje wybrane (1976), Szumy, zlepy, ciągi (1976), Zawał (1977), Odczepić się (1978), Rozkurz (1980), Wiersze wybrane i dobrane (1980), Przepowiadanie sobie (1981), Trzydzieści lat wierszy (1982), Stara proza: Nowe wiersze (1984), Oho (1985), and, posthumously, Obmapywanie Europy. AAAmeryka: Ostatnie wiersze (1988), Konstancin (1991), Chamowo (2009), and Tajny dziennik (2012).
2 Czesław Miłosz, ed. and trans., Postwar Polish Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
3 Joseph Alsop, “Boguslaw Sent Me,” The Boston Globe, June 6, 1959.
A MEMOIR OF THE WARSAW UPRISING
1 “Vlasovites” refers to military units composed of Ukrainian, Russian, and Central Asian volunteers and conscripts fighting under German command. In September 1944 the former Red Army general Andrei Vlasov (1901–1946) was granted permission to organize and recruit these troops into a Russian Liberation Army (ROA) under his command. Białoszewski uses the term “Vlasovites” to refer also to the ruthless units of the Russian People’s Liberation Army (RONA) under the command of Bronisław Kamiński, who were primarily responsible for the rapes at Zieleniak and other atrocities committed against civilians.
2 The Polish term “Secession style” refers to the influence of the Viennese Secession movement on Art Nouveau art and architecture in Poland during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Most of these elaborately ornamented buildings in Warsaw were destroyed during the war.
3 The Wedding, a 1901 play by Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907), a representative of the Young Poland movement, satirizes the mystical expectations of national restoration with which turn-of-the-century Polish intellectuals masked their basic inertia; Stańczyk, the court jester to King Sigismund I (1467–1548), appears in the play as a figure out of Poland’s legendary past.
4 There were many elegant Wedel’s cafés in Warsaw, operated by the E. Wedel confectionary firm, which continued to produce its line of fine chocolates throughout the war, selling to civilians and supplying the German occupying forces.
5 The original name of Bank Square was restored after the collapse of the communist government in 1989.
6 The People’s Army (Armia Ludowa, or AL), officially organized in January 1944, comprising units that had been operating under Communist control in occupied Poland since 1942. The AL joined the uprising on August 2, 1944.
7 The Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK), composed of partisan units that began operating in occupied Poland (under both the German and Soviet occupations) from the start of the war, was formally placed under the authority of the Polish government-in-exile in February 1942. It was the chief resistance force in Poland throughout the war and the largest underground army in Europe.
8 On this “Black Monday,” the Luftwaffe launched its first major air attack of World War II on an open city, flying more than a thousand sorties and dropping more than five hundred tons of bombs on Warsaw to force the capitulation of the capital’s defensive forces. Warsaw was occupied two days later.
9 Ratusz — etymologically from German Rathaus—is the old town hall.
10 Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal (1957) is perhaps the best-known cinematic dramatization of the partisans’ descent into the Warsaw sewers. One of the film’s most famous scenes shows the fleeing partisans taking a wrong turn and winding up at a sewer exit blocked with barbed wire strung with grenades.
11 Goliaths, like Tigers, were robot tanks under radio control by German soldiers.
12 The turning point of the 1920 Russo — Polish War took place on August 15, when embattled Polish forces succeeded in repelling Red Army troops at the outskirts of Warsaw. Since the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is celebrated on August 15, believers attributed the seemingly miraculous victory to the intercession of Mary, Queen of Poland.
13 The November 1830 uprising was a doomed revolt by Polish officers against the tsarist Russian occupying forces.
14 Mazovian princes were the medieval rulers of Mazovia, Poland’s north-easternmost region; Staś is Stanisław II August (1732–1798), the last king and grand duke of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1764–1795), during whose reign Polish territory was subjected three times to partition among Russia, Austria, and Prussia, after which it ceased to exist as an independent state until it was reconstituted in 1918. Jan III Sobieski (1629–1696) was elected king of Poland in 1674; he led a combined force of Polish, German, and Austrian troops to defeat Turkish armies at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The Saxon kings — August II (1670–1733) and his son Augustus III (1696–1762) — elected like the other kings of Poland, were rulers over both Poland and Saxony. The Vasas are Sigismund III Vasa (1566–1632), the king of Poland (1587–1632) and of Sweden (1592–1599), and his son Władysław IV Vasa (1595–1648), who were descendants of Gustav Eriksson, the progenitor of the Swedish royal House of Vasa. Fukier is the name of a prominent merchant family dating back to the sixteenth century. Marysieńka, Queen Marie-Casimire (1641–1716), was the beloved French-born wife of Jan III Sobieski and the mother of fourteen of his children.
15 Bolesław Prus (pseudonym of Aleksander Głowacki, 1847–1912), was one of Poland’s leading nineteenth-century writers. His novel The Doll (Lalka, 1890) and his Weekly Chronicles contain realistic portrayals of Warsaw life. Prus was among those Polish Positivists who rejected the romantic tradition of the grand gesture of (inevitably failed) rebellion and argued for the organic, pragmatic development of Polish society and economy as the most effective way to counter the heavy hand of Russian rule.