As airplanes flew low strafing runs over the city, Antonina tried to guess what was happening on the other side of the Vistula, and finally went up to the terrace, from which she searched the bright sizzle of gunfire across the river, reading every snap as a clue. The shots sounded “separate, personal,” she noted, not like the streaming echoes of a big military battle.
The leadership of the zoo’s little fiefdom fell to her, she realized, including Ryś, four-week-old Teresa, the girls Nunia and Ewa, her mother-in-law, the housekeeper, Fox Man and his two helpers. The “heavy ballast of being responsible for the lives of others” slid around her body and stole through her mind as obsession:
The seriousness of the situation didn’t let me relax for a moment. No matter if I wanted to or not, I had to take a leadership of our household… be on alert all the time like I was taught in my Girl Scout years. And I knew that Jan had much more difficult duties. I had a powerful feeling of being responsible for taking care of everything at home; I carried those thoughts obsessively…. I just knew I had to do it.
Sleep surrendered to war, and for twenty-three nights she forced herself to stay awake, terrified that she might doze off and not hear a noise, however tiny, that signaled danger. In some ways, this guardian spirit wasn’t new to Antonina, who remembered how, during the shellings of 1939, she had shielded her young son with her body. It sprang from the ferocity of motherhood, she decided, the instinct to battle if need be to protect one’s family.
Even though the battlefield lay across the river, she smelled death, sulfur, rot on westerly breezes, and heard the relentless clash of guns, artillery shells, and bombs. Without news or contact with the rest of the city, Antonina imagined the villa transformed “from an ark to a tiny ship on a vast ocean, hopelessly adrift without compass or rudder,” and she expected a bomb at any moment.
Stationed on the terrace, she and Ryś craned to see the fires across the river and divine events. At night, they watched bright sparks of gunfire—single shots, not the rapid echoes of a field battle—and airplanes whining and whistling above the city until early morning.
“Dad is fighting in the worst part of the city,” Ryś kept repeating as he pointed toward the Old City. For hours he stood sentry’s watch, scouting the battle through binoculars, searching for his father’s shape, ducking down whenever he heard a bomb growling toward him.
Just outside the door to Antonina’s bedroom, a metal train ladder led up to the flat roof, and Ryś often climbed it, binoculars in hand. Germans stationed in Praski Park had taken over a small amusement park near the bridge that included a tower for parachute-jump rides, from which they spotted Ryś atop the roof, spying on them. One day, a soldier stopped by to threaten Antonina that if he ever caught Ryś up there again he’d shoot him.
Despite the skittish, sleepless nights and the daily alarms, Antonina confessed to feeling “chills of excitement” about the Uprising, “having imagined this day through the long ghastly years of occupation,” though she could only guess at events. Across the river, in the heart of the city, food and water were scarce, but there was plenty of lump sugar and vodka (filched from German supplies) to fuel the Home Army as they built antitank barricades from paving stones. Of the 38,000 soldiers (4,000 were women), only one in fifteen had adequate weapons; the rest used sticks, hunting rifles, knives, and swords, hoping to capture enemy weapons.
Because the Germans still held the telephone exchange, a corps of brave girl couriers carried messages around the city, just as they had been doing secretly during occupation. When Halina Korabiowska returned to Warsaw, she headed downtown to help relay messages, set up field kitchens and hospitals, and supply the fighters.
“There were barricades everywhere,” Halina told me with excitement in her voice. “Everyone was happy in the beginning. At 5 P.M. the Uprising started and we put on red-and-white armbands…. In the early weeks of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horsemeat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats, and birds.
“I saw my fifteen-year-old friend carrying one end of a stretcher with a wounded soldier on it. A plane flew over and she saw the fear in the soldier’s eyes and lay down on top of him—she was badly wounded in the neck. Another day, on my messenger run, I encountered two women carrying heavy bags from a building. I stopped to ask if they needed help, and they said they’d found a cache of German medicines and also a huge sack of candy, some of which they offered me. I filled my jacket pockets and sleeves with candies and went among the soldiers holding my arms just high enough not to spill them. Whenever I encountered soldiers, I told them to put their hands together and I extended my arms and let candies pour into their hands!”
With the Germans in retreat, everyone could move and talk freely for the first time in years, Jews could emerge from hiding since the racist laws had evaporated, and people flew the Polish flag from their houses, sang patriotic songs, and wore red-and-white armbands. Feliks Cywiński commanded a brigade of soldiers that included Samuel Kenigswein, who led a battalion of his own. Warsaw’s long-suppressed cultural life started to bloom again, cinemas reopened, literary periodicals suddenly reappeared, concerts sparkled in elegantly furnished sitting rooms. A free postal service issued stamps—Boy Scouts ran it and hand-delivered letters. An archival photograph shows a metal mailbox decorated with both an eagle and a lily, to signify that the youngest scouts risked their lives delivering its letters.
When news of the Uprising reached Hitler, he ordered Himmler to send in his harshest troops, kill every Pole, and pulverize the whole city block by block, bomb, torch, and bulldoze it beyond repair as a warning to the rest of occupied Europe. For the job, Himmler chose the most savage units in the SS, composed of criminals, policemen, and former prisoners of war. On the Uprising’s fifth day, which came to be known as “Black Saturday,” Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed in, slaughtering 30,000 men, women, and children. The following day, while packs of Stukas dive-bombed the city—in archival films, one hears them whining like megaton mosquitoes—ill-equipped and mainly untrained Poles fought fiercely, radioed London to air-drop food and supplies, and begged the Russians to launch an immediate attack.
Antonina wrote in her diary that two SS men opened the door, guns drawn, yelling: “Alles rrraus!!”
Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst.
“Hands high,” they yelled. Antonina noticed the men’s first fingers cupping triggers.
Holding her baby in her arms, she could only raise one hand, and her brain had trouble “registering their vulgar, brutal sentences” as they bellowed:
“You’ll pay for the deaths of our heroic German soldiers being slaughtered by your husbands and sons. Your children”—they pointed to Ryś and Teresa—“suck in hatred for the German people along with their mother’s milk. Up till now we let you behave that way, but enough is enough! From now on, one thousand Poles will be killed for every dead German.”
“Surely this is the end,” she thought. Hugging her baby tight, mind darting to think up a plan, she felt her heart caged in her ribs, and her legs became too heavy to move. It wasn’t the first time she literally froze in fear. On this occasion, although she couldn’t move, she knew she had to say something, anything, and stay calm, talk to them the way she used to soothe angry animals and gain their trust. Her mouth filled with German words she didn’t think she knew, and she began talking about ancient tribes and the grandeur of German culture. As she hugged the baby tighter, words streamed from her mouth, and, in another chamber of mind, she concentrated hard and repeated over and over the command: Calm down! Put the guns down! Calm down! Put the guns down! Calm down! Put the guns down!