Fifty meters away, in the middle of the street, a bulldozer was at work, scooping hundreds of human corpses onto a pile. A gang of SS troopers tossed scraps of wood and paper onto the pile, while another trooper wielding a flamethrower set it ablaze. Beyond the pile, a bus had overturned, and a third gang of SS troopers methodically machine-gunned the passengers crawling out through the windows.
Natalia crept back into the shadows between two buildings and leaned against a brick wall for support, swallowing hard as trucks rumbled past delivering more bodies to the blazing pile. She felt lightheaded and her stomach was churning, so she stayed a few minutes longer until the noxious stench of burning flesh finally forced her to move. Her legs tingled as she crept unsteadily between the buildings, found an alleyway and made a wide circle around the blazing corpses.
An hour later Natalia slipped through the side door of the Church of the Sacred Mother in the center of the Wola District, and was once again assaulted by the scent of death. This time it wasn’t an actual smell—though the air was heavy with a pungent sulfurous haze—but more of an aura, an ominous feeling that something dreadful had just happened. She hesitated just inside the door and glanced down the shadowy hallway that led to the sanctuary as the last hazy glimmer of twilight filtered through the transom windows above the door. She took a step into the hallway and—
“Don’t!”
She stopped.
“Don’t go in there,” whispered a voice from behind her.
The hairs on the back of her neck bristled, and she stood still for a moment, waiting until she could take a breath, then turned slowly toward the voice. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, Natalia saw a figure standing in a narrow doorway at the end of the hall opposite the sanctuary. “Falcon?”
“Yes. Come quickly.”
She took a step closer, and the tall, muscular man motioned with his hand. “Follow me. They may come back.”
Natalia followed him through the doorway and down an ancient stone staircase. A lighted kerosene lantern hung from the wall, and Falcon grabbed it and continued on through another doorway. They hurried along a damp corridor with rough stone walls and a beamed ceiling for fifty meters, then entered a small windowless room.
Falcon closed the door behind them and set the lantern on a wooden table. In stark contrast to the madness outside, it was eerily quiet, the air musty, as though they had entered a tomb. “I thought you might not make it,” Falcon said. He turned and placed a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve seen what they’re doing out there?”
Natalia stared at Falcon in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, then shrugged off his hand. “It’s barbaric, even for the Nazis. There are bodies everywhere: women, children, piled up in the streets like cordwood. They’re setting fire to them!” She ran a hand through her short-cropped brown hair and rubbed her irritated eyes. “Who on earth chose this location for the rendezvous?”
“Stag, of course. But we held this area until twenty-four hours ago.”
Natalia cursed under her breath. “We got as far as the West Station,” she said. “Then the SS ordered everyone off the train. Everything was on fire, and the area was crawling with storm troopers. I just barely got out of there.”
Falcon hand-rolled a cigarette and lit it. He was a whole head taller than Natalia, with thick black hair and steely dark eyes. The bars of an AK captain were prominent on the collar of his makeshift uniform.
“The church?” she asked.
He shook his head. “They’re all dead. The SS herded the whole group into the sanctuary—priests, nuns, a dozen or so children. Gunned them all down. Happened just before you got here. Damned good thing you didn’t walk into the middle of it.”
Natalia took the cigarette from him and inhaled deeply.
“What did you see on the way into Warsaw?” he asked. “We’ve heard they’re bringing in reinforcements.”
“That’s why it took so long to get here. We were diverted onto sidings three times for German transport trains—tanks, armored cars, artillery, dozens of troop carriers.” She glanced around the small, austere room, suddenly feeling claustrophobic, and took another drag on the cigarette. “The word is that Hitler’s furious and he’s gone berserk. Imagine a motley bunch of Poles wanting to take back their capital city.”
Falcon managed a grim smile that faded quickly. “They’ll step up the artillery barrage again right after dark, so we’d better get the hell out of here.” He pointed at the black bag hanging from her belt. “Anything from Krakow? From the Provider?”
Natalia removed the folded conductor’s cap from her bag, thumbed through the railway schedules, ticket vouchers and a variety of other official odds and ends, then carefully lifted up the false bottom. She removed an envelope and handed it to Falcon.
Suddenly, a thundering blast shook the building, and a beam cracked in the ceiling above their heads. Natalia instinctively dropped to her knees as the beam sagged, and a giant chunk of plaster broke loose and shattered on the floor.
Falcon shoved the envelope into the breast pocket of his jacket and grabbed the lantern. Natalia scrambled to her feet, and they bolted from the room as a second blast brought down the rest of the ceiling.
They raced through the corridor and up the stairs, retracing their steps back to the main hallway, which was miraculously still intact. They burst out the side door, into a narrow cobblestone street and onto Avenue Wolska amidst shrieking artillery shells, shattering glass and a thousand bricks cascading onto the street in heaps of rubble.
Natalia’s heart pounded as she followed Falcon past the remains of once-stately buildings that lined the east-west thoroughfare, through a blurred pandemonium of terrified people, faces streaked with dust and ashes, bleeding, crying and cursing. A man staggered from an alley and almost knocked her down, a bloody stump dangling from his shoulder.
Then a monstrous explosion hammered Natalia’s eardrums. The ground fell away, and she landed hard on shattered cobblestones. Ignoring the piercing bolt of pain in her hip, she got to her feet and lurched to the right as a second eruption of bricks and glass obliterated the street. Falcon shouted something, then disappeared into a storefront. She followed him through a maze of toppled shelves and broken crates, out a back door and into another street. Choking on dust and smoke, they continued on, dodging flying debris, climbing over rubble, heading east.
Eventually the shelling was behind them as they made their way, breathless and covered with dirt and soot, from the Wola District into the City Center. Slowing to a walk they rounded a corner where barricades loomed ahead, fashioned from paving blocks, railroad ties and sheets of corrugated metal. Tattered red-and-white flags fluttered from makeshift poles alongside banners emblazoned with Poland’s white eagle. Sweat ran down her face, and her legs felt like rubber as Natalia walked in silence beside Falcon, toward a group of men and women wearing the armbands of the AK.
It was close to midnight when the shelling finally ceased, but fires raged on in the Wola District and most of Warsaw’s other western suburbs, sending clouds of thick, black smoke and a stench of death billowing into the night sky. But an uneasy quiet hung over the area of the city occupied by the insurgents of the AK. In a small three-room apartment near Pilsudski Square that served as an AK district headquarters, Natalia sat on a faded brown sofa, smoking a cigarette.
She didn’t really enjoy smoking but it was something to do, something to keep her hands busy and her mind off the bloody faces and burning corpses she’d seen on the street that day. She blinked away the images and exhaled slowly, glancing around the dingy parlor. A red-and-black banner displaying the letter “P” fashioned from an anchor along with the words Polska Walczy—Poland Fights—hung on the wall between the windows.