Suddenly a shout: “Let’s dig out the buried.”
I report. We wait by the gate. We’re released.
“They’re gone already. Others.”
But right away there’s another shout: “39 Chłodna is on fire! Who’ll put it out?”
We race outside. It’s right across the way. The whole building is burning. Four stories, probably. There’s no water. No, there is water, but buckets have to be used in addition to the pump. Through the hole in the wall. There is also sand for firefighting. Women run over and help. Heat. Flames. These means of extinguishing fire are practically useless. The walls are already in flames. On the fourth floor smoke is coming from behind some of the doors. But they’re locked. We hurl ourselves against them. No use. We break them down with axes. We dash in. A wall is on fire. A bare wall. We run over with those pails. For water. We go back. We pour it on. Whatever good that does. We run downstairs.
The women are yelling, “Use sand! Use the sand!”
We dash upstairs again. Now the planes come. They scatter bombs. And bomblets. Incendiary.
“Extinguish the bombs!”
We rush over. Pour sand on the bomblets. There are about twenty of them. Maybe thirty. In a pile. At the entrance. More on the fourth floor. They’re smoldering and hissing. And the wall is already on fire from them. Sand does a wonderful job. We hope. We pour it on. Will it help? After all, they’re bursting one after another. It does help. But now the right and the left walls. Are aflame. Already. We race downstairs. Pass each other. It’s good there are several of us. And those women. They give us the buckets filled with sand (I can’t remember if we lost water all of a sudden). They pass them to us through a hole in the wall, so that we won’t have to run across unnecessarily. They carry them over to the stairs. Then we grab them. Run inside. I remember that I chased those bomblets. That I stamped on them. Because there was no alternative. They were extinguished on the run. While they were smoldering. The whole pile. Better yet: the flames on the walls were becoming fewer and fewer. Unbelievable. After someone sprinkled sand the fire curled up and disappeared. A miracle! We’ve put it out! In this hell! The action is over. We go back.
The assault is increasing. The bombardment is becoming heavier by the minute. Those who are rescued, more or less conscious, uninjured, rush into our cellars. Terrible panic. In the courtyard, too. We ourselves are panicky. We move to Aunt Józia’s. Through the hole. To 49 Ogrodowa Street. There are some women in the yard near the stoves, in the smoke, and some guys are out there fighting with axes. They chase each other. Hurl the axes. The axes sail through the air. I am not exaggerating. We go to my aunt’s apartment on the fifth floor. But we can’t remain there longer than two minutes. With Aunt Józia’s boarder (an old lady) and her brother (also gray haired) we rush downstairs to someone’s apartment on a lower floor with some of their belongings and ours. Into someone’s kitchen. We sit down. Aunt Józia’s boarder gives something to her gray haired brother: “Here, have some bread with sugar.” He takes it, eats.
“Would you like some more bread and sugar?”
He nods his head.
I couldn’t eat anything for two days.
Suddenly, such explosions, crashes, that we run downstairs.
The arrival of the bombed. Everything is gray. From the ruins. Covered with smoke. Aunt Józia, Stefa, Mama observe that the cellar is weak, the building made of boards, plaster-covered laths, and bricks. But the neighboring cellar — number 51—Klein vaulting, a new building, not yet covered with stucco. We quickly move there through holes, the underground passageways. There are crowds there. They are sitting on the concrete floor. It’s damp. In the corners are carbide lamps. Mama, Aunt Józia, and Stefa take out some bedding, spread it out on a free bit of floor. In that crowd. Chaos. Explosions, shells, bombs… unbearable. But the worst is that the Ukrainians are coming. And butchering. Everyone. People talk about it nonstop. People. Twenty years later — right now, in 1964 and 1965—exact figures have been offered by witnesses on both sides. Our newspapers have printed estimates of how many people were massacred in Wola just on Saturday and Sunday, August 5 and 6. Several tens of thousands. Some who were not shot to death were burned along with those who were supposed dead. They were thrown onto common pyres. From St. Stanisław Hospital on the corner of Wolska and Młynarska Streets (now the Hospital for Infectious Diseases No. 1) patients were shot to death or thrown out of the windows alive into the courtyard below. They set fire to everything as they passed. Living or not. People were buried on the spot. Just like that. In 1946 I was sent to the exhumations as a reporter. I went there with a news photographer. We entered that courtyard. Three or four rows of freshly exhumed, shapeless clumps covered with earth. I had various associations. With cutlets in rolls covered with some sauce. I definitely remember one “cutlet” with a single bone sticking out. The rest a filthy mess.
Suddenly a woman orderly rushed into our shelter. “Who will help carry a wounded man?”
And suddenly, after the uproar and despite the explosions, there was silence.
“Will no one help?”
There were several hundred women there. And probably as many men. Everyone froze.
“No one at all?”
“I’ll go.” I stood up.
No one moved. I jumped up after the orderly. Up the stairs. And out into the street. Ogrodowa.
“Over here! Over here!” I snatched up the front end of a stretcher. And onward — fast. We joined a procession of stretchers. In front of us. Behind us. Toward Żelazna Street and farther on — in the direction of the courthouse, because that’s where the hospital for the uprising was located. The whole winding procession moved on toward the courthouse, toward the center of the city. It was Sunday afternoon, four or five o’clock, there was heat, rising smoke mixed with dust, either there was a fire nearby or something was just smoldering, explosions, cobblestones underfoot (we walked rapidly, now looking down at our feet, now forward again, now backward, now at the houses and the sky), scurrying, tall apartment houses, now and then barricades across the road, cornices. Also, I want to add, pigeons. But it seems either there weren’t any pigeons by then or they were kept so that they wouldn’t fly about; or perhaps they really were there and did fly up and wheel around and it was only the cornices and the window frames which had produced that smoke and dust. But the reason I don’t trust my memory about the pigeons (undoubtedly, I didn’t know then either what was what), because at other times and in other places I seemed to see the same thing, and right after the war, when I was living on Poznańska Street and it was Easter night with an early-morning Mass of the Resurrection, those pigeons — this time real ones — took flight and whirred among the cornices after every loud sound. So we were going at a trot. The shells were also pounding against the gates — traditional gates with a driveway leading into a courtyard, with wrought-iron Saint Nicholases on the sides or in niches. Against the barricades. The walls.