So Stefa had to move. As it turned out, the janitress hadn’t made that remark from malice, but who could tell. We had to assume the cat was out of the bag, as they say. Anyway, one warm day, in May I think, after Stefa had moved out, I woke up at six a.m. and could hear a real commotion. Downstairs. Right away, I had a funny feeling. I rushed over to the window in my nightshirt. In front of every stairwell there was a German with a rifle. And they were going through all the stairwells and checking everyone. No one knew why. In our apartment, at least, it didn’t go any further than a check of identity cards, my Ausweis, and then they left. A German and a Polish-speaking informer wearing a white coat. Maybe nothing would have happened. To Stefa. If she’d still been there. Perhaps she would have passed as Zosia Romanowska. But who knows who that guy in the white coat was.
Well, on August 5, 1944, Stefa was sitting there in that chair, the post-Jewish one, with which she had been reunited, a turban on her head, because turbans and wooden shoes were fashionable out of necessity throughout Europe, it seems, but for some reason you could recognize German women in particular by those turbans and Stefa, after all, was pretending to be German.
So, Stefa was sitting in that chair and saying, “Where haven’t I been. I’m riding in a tram. A commotion. I look at my basket. And then someone throws me an armband. A Jewish one. They stop the tram, take us to Gęsiówka. We’re there, the partisans rescue us, we run through Krasiński Gardens, across Bielańska Street, and then through the Saxon Gardens; but the Germans are there, so we double back; Żelazna Brama, people on their knees, they’re going to shoot them, I’m telling you, Miron, it’s a miracle we escaped.”
“But you made it back here?”
“Ach, what it was like…”
Aunt Józia was there, too, right away. Her house—49 Ogrodowa Street — adjoined ours at 4 °Chłodna. Its third courtyard (the rear wall) had a hole in it and that was the passageway into our long courtyard. I was happy that there were more of us. Though, to be honest, Aunt Józia returned to her house. But Stefa stayed on; it wasn’t gloomy. And also, she’d survived. But suddenly, after various setbacks and news bulletins, such disastrous deterioration and such hell set in, that one lost interest in everything. The attack against Chłodna, against Ogrodowa, was in progress. People were shot to death, burned on pyres on Górczewska Street, on Bem, on Młynarska, on Wolska. Those who were stubbornly (I am amazed at how stubbornly) defending the lines of the Polish front kept finding the stairways, exits, everything cut off; they lay on roofs, on the fifth and sixth floors; the roofs caught fire, burned through, and the men caved in along with the roofs. An inferno, as in the ghetto during Easter of 1943.
Excavating, digging out, extinguishing fires, helping — it was difficult, although it was done, but it was made impossible by new bombs falling all the time, incendiaries. Or rather, it was hopeless. A vicious circle. At someone’s cry, “Planes!” we rush to a cellar, a shallow basement housing a workshop for glass tubes and balls. A crush. Panic. Prayer. Explosions. The rumbling, bursting of bombs. Groans and fear. Again they fly low. An explosion, they’re probably bombing the front, we crouch down. Nearby an old neighbor beats her breast, “Sacred heart of Jesus, have mercy on us…”
The howling of planes, bombs.
“Sacred heart…”
And suddenly something rocks our house. Window frames, doors, glass panes are blown out. Explosions. The end? Still more crashes. Even more explosions. We go outside for a while. The yard is changed, it’s black, covered with dust, gone gray, the windows are empty, the panes smashed to smithereens. In front of the gate is a crater half the length of the street. We look out from our second-floor window. At that scene. Crowds in the courtyard. Hell — nothing less — and without end. It’s bad. The crowds panic. With packages, bundles. They run. Some toward the gate. Others, away from the gate. Some through the hole toward Ogrodowa Street. Others toward us from Ogrodowa Street. Suddenly, an uproar. A horrifying scream. A kind of humming from the crowd. They’re carrying something. Someone… They put it down. Corpses? A scream… Whose?
“That’s Pani Górska. Her son was killed in the school on Leszno Street.”
They bring in the corpses. A whole school bombed. Number 100-something Leszno, 111 or 113. Where once I went to see a Christmas pageant. Long before the war, of course. During one of the acts the curtains in the left corner of the stage were torn. The wings were suddenly exposed. It was a catastrophe, because a crowd of angels, kings, and others were awaiting their turn there. With a squeal they rushed into a corner, huddled together, formed a triangle. The angels huddled together, pressed close to one another, covered their faces with their hands, and squealed. How painful it was for me now in this courtyard.
(Pani Górska, her son, and her daughter-in-law were patriots, Baptists. They came to Mother to sew for them. Both women. My mother asked them, “Would you give up your faith?” “I? Never. I was raised in this faith and I’ll die in it.”)
I decided to return to Irena’s for a while, to 24 Chłodna. I found them all in the cellar already. Depressed. But it was quieter here and there were fewer people.
Two women were sitting opposite them. One was worrying about her children because she had left them at Wedel’s in Praga.[4] The other, somewhat younger, was with her. They sat there, slumping. In that passageway. Which, in normal times, was intended to be used occasionally for fetching potatoes or coal.
“Like owls,” Staszek said slowly and, characteristically, in an awfully audible whisper.
I remember the calm. And the relief. After my house. We passed the night here. Because I know that on the next day it was sunny, warm, the sixth of August. The owls (the older one was Heńka; the younger, what was her name? — I know she could tell fortunes from cards) said, “Today is the Transfiguration of Our Lord. Perhaps the good Lord will change something for the better.”
And suddenly the news erupted: “The uprising has failed.”
“My God,” the cellar, stairs, women, crowds jumped up, “so much effort and all for nothing, Lord? It can’t be possible.”
“And yet…”
“My God.” People wrung their hands, raced around the courtyards. After the first complaints there was discipline, solidarity. Because there was despair.
And suddenly people are running around shouting, with newssheets, with a retraction. That it isn’t true.
The partisans themselves, I remember, spoke about defeat and initiated the despair; but now, what joy!
But Sunday had just begun. There was fear such as had not yet been experienced. It was then that we three decided to go our separate ways. Staszek would go to Sienna Street. Irena would remain here. I would go home again. Sun, heat, smoke, fires, explosions; I raced home. It was probably that day that I found Aunt Józia. In the afternoon the Germans, with the Vlasovites pushing ahead of them, began launching the final attack on Kercelak, on Towarowa, on Okopowa. Kercelak fell. Our lines drew back. They were already close to the barricades on the corners of Wronia. And they were shooting. But on the Towarowa — Kercelak — Okopowa line more streets were still to fall, no longer in Wola but in the direction of Śródmieście. (Actually, those of us on Chłodna Street, right up to the Kercelak — Towarowa — Okopowa line, were really in Śródmieście, not just in the traditional administrative center but in the uprising’s center, at least as it had been designated by the leadership when Warsaw was divided into districts before the outbreak of the uprising.) Meanwhile, the strip between Towarowa and Kercelak — Wronia was being defended. But the attack was proceeding not only along the streets, with infantry, tanks, artillery, machine guns, grenades, flame throwers, antitank guns, but also — which was much worse — from the sky. Protected by all of these, the planes flew over in endless formations, turned and came back, and bombed apartment house after apartment house, outbuilding after outbuilding. Chłodna. Ogrodowa. Krochmalna. Leszno. Grzybowska. Łucka. And so on. They collapsed and burned.