CHAPTER 31
1944
NOTHING HAD CHANGED IN THE VILLA’S ROSTER OR ROUTINES, but a new malaise hung in the air, Antonina thought, as everyone went about their chores with a friendly smile, while trying to hide scorched nerves. People seemed “distracted,” and “conversations stumbled, sentences fell apart mid-word.” On July 20, a bomb planted by Count von Stauffenberg exploded at Hitler’s Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair) headquarters in the Prussian forest, though Hitler escaped with only minor injuries. After that, panic grew in the local German population, and columns of retreating soldiers began streaming through Warsaw, blowing up buildings as they fled westward. Gestapo members burned their files, purged warehouses, and shipped personal belongings back to Germany. The German governor, mayor, and other administrators bolted away in any handy truck or cart, leaving only a garrison of 2,000 soldiers behind. As the Germans rushed out, creating a void, many Poles hurried in from nearby villages, afraid the coming soldiers might ransack their houses or farms.
Convinced the Uprising would start any minute, Jan felt sure it would cost only a few days at most for the 350,000 men of the Home Army to overwhelm the remaining Germans. In theory, once the bridges were captured by the Poles, battalions from both sides of the Vistula River could join ranks and create one single powerful army to liberate the city.
On July 27, when Russian troops reached the Vistula sixty-five miles south of Warsaw (Antonina said she could hear the gunfire), German Governor Hans Frank summoned 100,000 Polish men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to work nine hours a day building fortifications around the city, or be shot. The Home Army urged everyone to ignore Frank’s order and start preparing for battle, a call to arms echoed the next day by the Russians, pushing closer, who broadcast in Polish: “The hour for action has arrived!” By August 3, as the Red Army bivouacked ten miles from the right-bank district that included the zoo, life grew even tenser in the villa and people kept asking: “When will the Uprising start?”
The dramatis personae at the zoo changed abruptly. Most Guests had already left to join the army or escaped to safer melinas: Fox Man planned to move to a farm near Grójec; Maurycy joined Magdalena in Saska Kępa; and although the lawyer and his wife fled to the other side of Warsaw, their two daughters, Nunia and Ewa, decided to stay at the villa, because if something were to happen to Antonina, they insisted, then newborn Teresa, Ryś, Jan’s seventy-year-old mother, and the housekeeper would have to manage all alone, which wasn’t feasible. Although soldiers started evacuating civilians from the lands closest to the river, Jan hoped his family could remain in the zoo, since Polish soldiers were bound to win the Uprising soon, and the strain of traveling might kill the baby or Jan’s infirm mother. In his testimony to the Jewish Institute, he recalled that at 7 A.M. on August 1, a girl came to summon him for battle. This would have been someone like the Home Army messenger Halina Dobrowolska (during the war, Halina Korabiowska), whom I met one sunny summer afternoon in Warsaw. Now a lively woman in her eighties, she was a teenager during the war, and she remembers the day she was dispatched by bicycle and tram on a long, dangerous journey into the suburbs to summon fighters and warn families that the Uprising was due to start. She needed to take a trolley and finally found one, though the conductor was packing up, since most Warsawians had already abandoned their jobs and raced home to prepare for battle. Anticipating just such a problem, the Underground had supplied Halina with American dollars, which the conductor accepted, and he nervously drove her to her destination.
Jan raced upstairs to where Antonina slept with Teresa, and told her the news.
“Yesterday, you had different information!” she said anxiously.
“I don’t understand what’s happening either, but I have to go and find out.”
Their friend Stefan Korboński, who was also surprised by the timing of the Uprising and not given warning, captures some of the fervor and haste on the downtown streets that day:
The tram-cars were crowded with young boys…. On-the sidewalks, women in twos and threes were walking along briskly, with obvious haste, carrying heavy bags and bundles. “They are transporting arms to the assembly points,” I muttered to myself. A stream of bicycles flowed along the roadway. Boys in top boots and wind-jackets were pedalling as hard as their legs could go…. Here and there was a German in uniform, or a German patrol, proceeding on its way without seeing anything, and without knowing what was happening around it…. I passed numerous men scurrying, grave and purposeful, in all directions, and exchanging glances with me full of tacit understanding.[88]
Four hours later, Jan returned home to say goodbye to Antonina and his mother, explaining that the Uprising would be starting any moment. He handed Antonina a metal mess tin and said:
“There’s a loaded revolver in here, just in case German soldiers show up….”
Antonina froze. “I was paralyzed in place,” she wrote, and said to Jan: “German soldiers? What are you thinking? Did you forget what we believed only a few days ago, that the Underground army was supposed to win?… You don’t believe anymore!”
Jan replied grimly: “Look, a week ago we had a good chance of winning this battle. It’s too late now. The timing isn’t right for the Uprising. We should wait. Twenty-four hours ago, our leaders thought the same. But last night they suddenly changed their minds. This kind of indecisiveness can lead to very bad consequences.”
Jan didn’t know that the Russians, supposed allies, had their own voracious agenda, and that Stalin, who had been promised a chunk of Poland after the war, wanted both the Germans and the Poles to be defeated. Meanwhile, he refused to allow Allied planes headed for Poland to land on Russian airfields.
“I hugged Jan tight, my face pressed hard against his cheek,” Antonina recalled. “He kissed my hair, looked at the baby, and then ran downstairs. My heart was pounding like crazy!” She hid the tin with the revolver under her bed and went to check on Jan’s mother, whom she found sitting in an armchair, saying her rosary beads, “her face wet with tears.”
Jan’s mother would have abided by the custom of making a quick cross on her forehead and inviting Mary to bless Jan’s journey. Our Lady of the Home Army (the Virgin Mary) was patron saint for the soldiers during the Uprising, when one found hastily built altars to her in the city and shrines along the roadways (Poland still has many today). Soldiers and their families also prayed to Jesus Christ, and often carried in their wallet a small portrait of Christ with the inscription Jezu, ufam tobie (In Jesus we trust).
We don’t know what Antonina did to ease the pincers of uncertainty, but Jan once informed a journalist that she had been raised a strict Catholic, and since she’d had both children baptized, and always wore a medallion around her neck, she most likely prayed. During the war, when all hope had evaporated and only miracles remained, even unreligious people often turned to prayer. Some of the Guests used fortune-telling to help shore up morale, but as a self-proclaimed man of reason, and the son of a frankly atheist father, Jan frowned on superstition and religion, which means Antonina and Jan’s devoutly Catholic mother may have kept some house secrets of their own.
88
Stefan Korbónski,