She pondered this, then decided, despite misgivings: “Yes, at least it’s a place we know, one Ryś associates with good times.” Really, she had no idea, but persisted in packing, relying on Jan’s hunch, then climbed into a cart loaded for what might be a long absence, and set out quickly before the roads grew too crowded.
The resort village of Rejentówka lay only about twenty-five miles away, but Antonina and a cart driver spent seven hours en route, sharing the dirt road with thousands of people, mainly on foot, since cars, trucks, and most horses had been confiscated by the military. Women, children, and old men hurried along in a worried trance, escaping the city with whatever they could carry, some pushing baby buggies, wagons, and hand trolleys, some hauling suitcases and small children, but most wearing several layers of clothing, with knapsacks, bags, and shoes slung across their bodies or swinging from their necks.
Flanking the road, tall poplars, pine, and spruce juggled large brown balls of mistletoe in their limbs; and black-and-white storks nested atop the telephone poles, still fattening up for their arduous flight to Africa. Soon farm fields quilted both sides of the road, grain glistening and tassels pointing skyward. Antonina wrote of sweat pouring in rivulets and breath bunching, the air clotted with dust.
A storm’s distant rumble became a cloud of gnats on the horizon, then grew to German aircraft looming near in seconds, chewing up the skies, flying low overhead, panicking people and horses alike. Pelted by bullets, everyone hurried through clouds of flying dirt, the unlucky fell, and the relatively lucky fled beneath splattering machine-gun fire. Dead storks, redwings, and rooks littered the road along with tree branches and dropped satchels. Catching a bullet was sheer chance and for seven hours Antonina beat the odds, but not without scenes of the dead and dying etched into memory.[6]
At least her son, in Rejentówka, was spared these images, so hard to erase, especially for a small child whose brain, busily sampling the world, was learning what to expect and stitching those truths in place at a trillion connections. Stay prepared for this world the rest of your life, a child’s brain tells itself, a world of mayhem and uncertainty. “That which doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,” Nietzsche wrote in The Twilight of the Idols,[7] as if the will could be annealed like a Samurai sword that is heated and pounded, bent and reforged, until it becomes indestructible. But the metal of a little boy, what does the pounding do to him? Mixed with Antonina’s worry about her son was moral outrage that the Germans “in this modern war, so different from wars we knew, allowed the killing of women, children, and civilians.”
As the dust settled, blue sky returned and she noticed two Polish fighters attacking a heavy German bomber above a field. From afar, the geometry of the scene looked homely, like fierce wrens driving off a hawk, and people cheered whenever the fighters stung the bomber with tufts of smoke. Surely an air force that agile could repel the Luftwaffe? Threads of tinsel flashed in the waning sunlight, and suddenly the bomber gushed a fountain of blood-red flames and fell to earth in a sharp curve. Then a white jellyfish floated above the peaks of the pine trees: a German pilot swaying under his parachute, slowly descending through a cornflower-blue sky.
Like many Poles, Antonina didn’t realize the magnitude of danger, relying instead on a Polish air force that boasted superbly trained and famously courageous pilots (especially those of the Pursuit Brigade defending Warsaw), whose outnumbered, obsolete PZL P.11 fighters posed no match for Germany’s fast, swervy Junkers JU-87 Stukas. Polish Karas bombers swooped low over German tanks at such a slow speed, while flying level, that they fell easy prey to antiaircraft fire. She didn’t know that Germany was testing out a new form of combined-arms warfare which would come to be called Blitzkrieg (lightning war), a charge-in-with-everything-you’ve-got—tanks, planes, cavalry, artillery, infantry—to surprise and terrify the enemy.
When she finally arrived in Rejentówka, she found a ghost town with summer guests gone, shops shuttered for the season, and even the post office closed. Exhausted, rattled, and dirty, she rode to the cottage hemmed in by tall trees and luminous quiet, in a setting that smelled familiar and safe, full of the mingled aromas of loam, meadow herbs and wild grasses, decaying wood and pine oil. One can picture her hugging Ryś hard and greeting his nanny; eating a dinner of buckwheat, potatoes, and soup; unpacking; bathing; longing for the habitual routines of just another summer, but unable to calm her nerves or quell her sense of foreboding.
Over the next few days, they often stood on the porch watching waves of German planes, en route to Warsaw, blacken the sky in lines neat as hedgerows. The regularity addled her: each day planes swarmed above at 5 A.M. and again after sunset, without her knowing whom exactly they had bombed.
The local landscape looked strange, too, since Rejentówka wasn’t a spot they visited in autumn, without vacationers and pets. Tall lindens had begun turning bronze and oaks the burnt maroon of stale blood, while some green survived on the maples, where yellow-bellied evening grosbeaks fed on winged seeds. Along the sandy roads, staghorn sumac shrubs raised antler-velvet twigs and cone-shaped clusters of hairy red fruits. Blue chicory, brown cat-o’-nine-tails, white dame’s rocket, pink thistle, orange hawkweed, and goldenrod tuned the meadows to fall, in a tableau that changed whenever a breeze bent the stems like a hand gliding over a plush carpet.
On September 5, Jan arrived by train, his face somber, to find Antonina “very depressed and confused.”
“I’ve heard rumors that a wing of the German army, invading from East Prussia, will soon reach Rejentówka,” he told her. “But the front hasn’t arrived in Warsaw yet, and people are slowly getting used to the air raids. Our army is bound to protect the capital at all costs, so we may as well return home.”
Even if he didn’t sound altogether convinced, Antonina agreed, in part because Jan was a good strategist whose hunches usually panned out, but she also thought how much easier life would be if they could stay together, sharing comforts, worries, and fears. Traveling the main road again was out of the question.
At night, they boarded a slow train with blackened windows and arrived in civil morning twilight, the hour of brightening before the sun spills over the horizon, in a lull between the night and dawn raids. According to Antonina, horses awaited them at the station and they rode home bewitched by the everyday—windless calm, damp air, aster hedges, colorful leaves, squeaky axles, clopping hooves on cobblestone—and, for a short spell, they slipped into the premechanized past, sinking deep into a pristine stillness where the war seemed to her muffled and unreal, only a remote glow like the moon.
At the main gate in Praga, the toll smacked her wide awake again as she dismounted. Bombs had ripped up the asphalt, shells had bitten large chunks out of the wooden buildings, cannon wheels had furrowed the lawns, old willows and lindens dangled unplugged limbs. Antonina held Ryś tight, as if the desolation before her were communicable. Unfortunately, the zoo edged a river with busy bridges, prime German targets, and with a Polish battalion stationed there, it had made a superb target, repeatedly, over several days. Picking their way through debris, they walked to the villa and its bomb-cratered yard. Antonina’s eyes fell to the flower beds crushed from the hooves of horses, and she fixed on the small delicate calyxes of flowers stomped into the ground “like colorful teardrops.”
Just after dawn, the day and battle started heating up. Standing on the front porch, they were surprised by the canyon echoing of hoarse explosions and snapping iron girders. Suddenly the ground trembled and walked under their feet, and they hurried indoors, only to find the roof beams, floors, and walls all shaking. The moaning of lions and yowling of tigers spiraled from the big cat house, where she knew cat mothers, “crazy with fear, were grabbing their young by the scruff of the neck and pacing their cages, anxiously looking for a safe place to hide them.” The elephants trumpeted wildly, the hyenas sobbed in a frightened sort of giggle interrupted by hiccups, the African hunting dogs howled, and the rhesus monkeys, agitated beyond sanity, battled one another, their hysterical shrieks clawing the air. Despite the uproar, workers continued to carry water and food to the animals and check their cage bars and locks.
6
Antonina’s recollection is matched by that of Wiktor Okulicz-Kozaryn, a retired engineer, who watched the same scene as a boy, and remembers “German aircraft flying low over the crowd, shooting and killing many people… [and] two Polish planes attacking a German bomber above a field, the plane flaming, then one parachute floating down near some trees.”