Wartime Lies (15 page)

The Germans cut off the water as well. Going to the toilet was a harrowing problem; the building we were in had no outhouses. With a pickax, the janitor and some other men managed to lift enough paving stones in the yard to allow them to dig a hole. They covered it with boards, leaving a narrow space so that one could empty a chamber pot or even use it directly. Before, we and the other homeless had to ask someone’s kind permission to respond to a call of nature or to wash our body or clothes. Now we were at least on a footing of equality. Somebody said, It serves the tenants of this building right; let them start growing petunias in their toilets.

It became harder and harder to get food. Householders sitting in their apartments ate whatever they had gotten ready from well-developed wartime habit or because like my grandfather they sensed that the storm was about to break: potatoes, rice, dried beans and flour. We had to talk
them into selling some of these provisions. Tania let Pani Helenka conduct the negotiations on our behalf, but soon no one was foolish enough to exchange necessities for paper that was probably worthless. It became a matter of begging. An A.K. officer tried to instill a spirit of sharing in the building, but no such spirit developed. As the days wore on, the elation of August I was turning into resentment and sometimes outright fury against the underground, just as Pani Helenka had foreseen.

Tania’s worry about my grandfather was extreme. He was alone, and as a Jew he continued to be in special danger. We also realized how right he had been: we should not have dawdled in the Old Town. We kept daydreaming aloud about somehow finding our way to him, but there was no reasonable prospect of it. His room in Mokotów was practically at the other end of Warsaw, so far that Pani Helenka said she would stop us by force if we tried to go there. In fact, although we did not know it yet, just crossing the street in the Old Town could be a deadly business. Soon, our daydreams had to take another direction. An A.K. man told Tania that the Germans were already in control of Mokotów. We now had to hope that grandfather had not been killed in the fighting. In that case, if we also survived, we would be reunited after the war.

Pani Dumont’s apartment was less remote than Mokotów. Tania decided we should try to return there: the jewelry was in its hiding place under a floorboard; we would have clothes and, unless the others had helped themselves to it, Tania’s small stock of provisions. We
would be surrounded by familiar faces: Tania said that she had never before imagined missing Pani Dumont—Pani Helenka’s attentiveness was becoming oppressive. Thus, early one morning, after a brief embrace to bid Pani Helenka farewell, we started out. Tania thought we could manage a few blocks at a time before we were forced to seek temporary shelter. I would go first, running along the sidewalk, keeping low and trying not to make noise. Every couple of houses, I was to stop in an entrance gate and wait for Tania. It was better that I go first because the Germans might not bother about a child; if we went together, we would make a larger and more attractive target. Tania promised she would not be far behind.

The street was empty except for us; I felt very nimble and swift. The gates to buildings were closed, but, even so, in every porte-cochère there was just enough space to squeeze into between the sidewalk and the closed gate itself for me to have a protected corner to crouch in. When Tania reached the gate where I had paused, she would kneel beside me, tell me which new gate to head for and when to start. But at the corner we had to cross Piwna; just turning the corner made no sense.

I could see an entranceway with a closed gate and a good hiding place diagonally across the street. Tania said to run as fast as I could, never mind keeping low this time. I had barely reached the entrance and settled myself against the wall, though, when I heard gunfire, and bullets began scraping the ornamental stone post on my side of the gate and the sidewalk in front of me. A German soldier on the roof of a building on the side of Piwna I had
just left, a few doors away from the corner, was shooting at me. So long as I had stayed on his side of the street he not seen me and I had not seen him. Now each of us had a good view of the other. He was kneeling next to a chimney; from time to time he looked at me through his field glasses. After a while, he stopped firing if I remained very still. As soon as I moved, a single bullet and sometimes two would zing past me. I realized that while he was there Tania could not cross Piwna and come to my gate. He would kill her in the middle of the street.

I didn’t have a watch, but I thought hours must have gone by while I stayed at the gate. Occasionally Tania waved to me; she was making signs with her hands that I couldn’t understand. Then she disappeared inside her gate. Once in a while, on my side of the street, a door would creak open, and the German would immediately send a bullet or two in its direction. Sometimes it was the same system as with me: silence and then shots. I thought that these were buildings where people were also hiding in entranceways or trying to come out. Once he must have hit somebody, because there was a cry followed for a long time by moaning.

Two more Germans appeared on the roof carrying a machine gun; they set it up and started firing along my side of the street, spraying the entranceways carefully, as though with a water hose. The noise was deafening. I had become less frightened when I saw that the first German could not get me; now I was terrified again. More gunfire came from another direction. The Germans continued firing, but no longer at the street. Something was going on
from one roof to another; the shooting became continuous. I decided I would try to open the gate and sneak inside while the Germans were busy with other targets, but they were watching me too: when I began to move bullets hit my gate and the post behind which I was hiding.

Abruptly, help came. The gate behind me swung open, someone was firing from behind it in the direction of the Germans, someone else pulled me inside, the gate shut. Inside were Tania and two A.K. soldiers. The men had led her through a sewer below the street to an adjacent building and then through a passage between the courtyards to my gate. They said we must hurry, and we followed them to a crowded cellar. The arrival of the A.K. men caused a stir. One of them asked everybody to be quiet; he introduced us as having been trapped in the street by German fire and asked that we be made welcome.

The new cellar was quite light, for it had half-moon windows near the ceiling, opening on the street and courtyard, that had not been boarded up. People were sitting on beds and chairs; there was a great deal of conversation. Some of the women spoke to Tania. I heard her say she was sorry we would be a burden for them. But these seemed to be strangely generous people: right away, someone offered us biscuits and jam; another person was looking for a mattress and quilt we could use; there was a family willing to have us sleep in their apartment when it was safe to be upstairs.

We remained in this second cellar until the last days of August. By then, Warsaw lay in ruins, with only a few buildings in the center of the city intact above the second
floor. All talk of an A.K. victory had ceased. One could hope that Rokossovsky’s army, immobile on the other side of the Vistula, would finally storm Warsaw and drive the Germans out. But were we more likely to survive a German or a Russian attack? The odds seemed even save in one respect: we heard rumors that in neighborhoods where the Germans had succeeded in stamping out A.K. resistance they either killed the civilians on the spot or took them away to camps.

In the meantime, we went about our daily chores. At night, we took turns going through jagged passages the A.K. had chopped in walls to a courtyard at the end of the block where there was a well and a pump. The training I had received from Pan Kramer in T. became useful again; I could show Warsaw grown-ups at what rhythm to pump, and how a bucket that was only three-fourths full was easier to carry and would not spill. Once again, there was very little to eat. Someone from another building—the general opinion was that none of us could have been guilty of such ignominy—broke into the kitchens of several apartments and looted them. The loss of provisions was considerable. Guards were posted. The building decided that the remaining food would be pooled and rationed by a committee of cooks. Several of the older people were sick. Tania volunteered to be a nurse, dispensing aspirin, which was very scarce, applying compresses and cups. A.K. soldiers became a regular presence in the cellar; they needed to sleep for a few hours, some were wounded. The fighting in the streets was drawing closer. We were constantly being bombed and strafed by
the Luftwaffe. The A.K. had no antiaircraft guns; they tried to shoot at the planes from the roofs with rifles. Machine guns were scarce and ammunition for them was running out. Once, before it became too dangerous to go to the roof, we watched them hit a plane that had been flying low, from time to time dropping a bomb. It began to smoke and then burn and finally disappeared among distant buildings. Perhaps it returned to the airfield. Now there was no going to the roof or resting in an apartment during pauses in the bombardment. We waited for the end in the cellar.

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afternoon, an A.K. officer came to speak to the people in the cellar. He said that the A.K. would have to withdraw at once from the neighborhood through the sewers; the Germans could be expected within a few hours. We should stay calm and, when the Germans did come, follow their orders promptly and without argument. They would make us leave the building; it was a good idea to gather whatever clothes we needed and have a little suitcase ready. The Germans had Ukrainian guards with them. The Ukrainians were like wild animals. It would be best if young women put shawls over their heads and faces and tried to be inconspicuous. He saluted and wished us all luck. Soon afterward, a bomb fell on the building next to us; another made a hole in the street. People from the building that had been hit came to our cellar. There was less gunfire, and after a while both the gunfire and the bombs began to seem more distant. It was already dark, and the Germans had not come. Few people slept that
night. Families sat together talking. Some people prayed aloud.

Tania told me to lie down on our mattress. She lay down too, put her arms around me and talked to me in a whisper. She said it was lucky that we had not forgotten for a moment we were Catholic Poles and that nobody seemed to suspect us. Our only hope was to be like all the others. The Germans weren’t going to kill every Pole in Warsaw; there were too many of them, but they would kill every Jew they could catch. We would make ourselves very small and inconspicuous, and we would be very careful not to get separated in the crowd. If something very bad happened and she was taken away, I wasn’t to try to follow: it wouldn’t help her and I might even make things worse for both of us. If possible I should wait for her. Otherwise, I should take the hand of whatever grown-up near me had the nicest face, say I was an orphan, and hope for the best. I shouldn’t say I was a Jew, or let myself be seen undressed if I could avoid it. She had me repeat these instructions and told me to go to sleep.

We were awake when they arrived late the next morning. It was the same bellowing as for Jews in T., the same pounding of rifle butts on the gate and then on the cellar door and the apartment doors and people trying to hurry and stumbling on the stairs. A Wehrmacht officer and a couple of German soldiers stood on the sidewalk in a little group apart while the work was done by Ukrainians: they rushed around, pushing and hitting people as they came out into the street. Some of them had whips and some had dogs. A woman just ahead of us did not move fast enough
to satisfy a Ukrainian. He hit her with his whip. Her husband pushed his way in front of her. Two Ukrainians beat him. Many people from other buildings were already assembled in a column, four abreast, ready to march. A Ukrainian called for silence and asked that all the women in our group immediately give up their jewelry. He pointed to a bucket. Then he told us to pass by it one by one. When our turn came, Tania took off her bracelet and ring and threw them in. He asked to see her hands and waved us ahead. I looked at Tania. She had put a kerchief over her head and tied it under her chin; her face was smeared black with coal dust; she was walking bent over like an old woman. When we reached the column she said she wanted to be in the middle of a row; I could be on the outside. The column seemed ready to march when another squabble erupted: a woman had not thrown anything into the bucket; the Ukrainian in charge of it grabbed her hand, saw a ring, beat her on the face and with an easy, fluid gesture, just like a butcher, cut off her finger. He held it up for all to see. There was a ring on it. The finger and ring both went into the bucket.

The march began. Tania had maneuvered us both into the middle of the row, with a man on either side. We no longer saw familiar faces. People from our building had drifted away; much rearranging had to be done before the German officer gave the order for departure. The column went down Krakowskie Przedmieście, turned right on Aleje Jerożolimskie, but it was difficult to recognize in the smoldering ruins the streets we had tried to memorize. Tania said she thought they were taking us to the Central
Station. We were a sea of marchers. Tania and I had no possessions; our hands were free. I was walking with a light and bouncy step. Was it fear or the strange parade we were a part of after the weeks spent in cellars? Around us, people were staggering under huge valises; some were transporting a piece of furniture or a rug. Many had children in their arms. Directly in front of us was a man with a large gray-and-red parrot in a cage; every few minutes the bird screamed. The man had the cage door open, and he would put his hand in to quiet the bird.

As in T., when I watched the final departure of the ghetto Jews, but on a vaster scale suited to the breadth of the avenues we were walking on and the enormous length of the column, the crowd was contained on both sides by Ukrainians, SS and Wehrmacht. Many of the Germans were officers. The Ukrainians and their dogs walked with us, while the Germans, immobile on the ruined sidewalks, were like green-and-black statues. From time to time, a Ukrainian would plunge into the column and beat a marcher who was not keeping up with the others or had stopped to shift his load. They beat marchers whose children were crying; we were to make no noise. And they dragged out of the column women who had attracted their attention. They beat them, beat men who tried to shield them, and then led the women to the side, beyond the line held by the Germans. They possessed them singly, in groups, on the ground, leaning them against broken walls of houses. Some women were made to kneel, soldiers holding them from the back by the hair, their gaping mouths entered by penis after penis. Women they
had used were pushed back into the column, reeling and weeping, to resume the march. Others were led toward the rubble and bayoneted or shot.