Spring Will Be Ours (33 page)

Then came the news that Stalin had, finally, granted one landing right to American planes.

‘Anna! Anna!'

All night she had been helping in the field hospital, where men were being brought in from other districts half dead from hunger and exhaustion, with severed or gangrenous limbs, or with pieces of shrapnel lodged in their heads and faces. There was little she could do, her tiny first-aid stock long since given to the Red Cross nurse she had met the day the hospital was hit, and she had carried the boy with his lifeless foot up the steps from the cellar. He had had it amputated that afternoon, and hobbled now on crutches, his white face grimacing. Last night, Anna had seen him trying to sleep, tossing and heaving under a thin blanket on the floor. She had gone across to hold his hand for a moment, but had quickly been recalled to help with another stretcher.

She came back to the apartment just after dawn, and fell at once into a deep sleep. Now, hearing her name called so urgently, she woke to see Jadwiga looking at her in excitement, saw the shutters flung back so that midday sunshine made her screw up her eyes, and from the street outside heard running feet, and wild cheering. The air was full of a roar of planes.

‘They're coming!' said Jadwiga.

‘The Russians?' Anna scrambled to her feet.

‘The Americans! We're all on the roof – come on!'

She ran after her, up the broad stairs to the ladder leading to the roof. Through the square of the skylight, she could see among the crowd Wojtek and Natalia hugging each other, jumping up and down. Her ears were filled with the noise of the planes, as if the whole sky were taken over by them; she stumbled up the steps and out on to the packed rooftop.

In the cloudless, windswept sky, perhaps a hundred planes with the American white star insignia were approaching from the west. They flew at a great height, too high for the anti-aircraft fire which now burst into the air to reach them. As far into the city as Anna could see, the streets and avenues were packed with people up from the cellars and basements and hiding places in the ruins: the whole of Warsaw seemed to be gazing upwards, at the dark bellies of the planes and then, almost mad with happiness, at the white specks of parachutes, bearing containers which must hold food, and arms, and medicines, opening and descending like a gentle fall of snow.

And then, as if a great satanic hand had swept the sky, the parachutes drifted in the wind beyond the Polish lines. Ten days ago, a week ago even, the places where they were landing were in Polish hands: Powislé, the Old Town, Napoleon Square. Now, all these places and many more were surrounded by German tanks and armoured cars: the watchers on the rooftops and in the streets stood staring, numb, as container after container tumbled towards enemy territory and disappeared.

‘No,' said Anna. ‘No, no …'

All around her they were weeping; on the streets she could see people moving as if condemned, stricken, silent, back down into the darkness and grimness of their cellar world. How could they have dared to hope that they would be reprieved?

Silence once more from across the river. The Soviet fighters disappeared from the sky as suddenly as they had come, and with their flight the
Luftwaffe
renewed their attack, dive-bombing the last, desperate outposts of the city. Hand grenades were thrown into the long queues waiting at the few remaining wells which still held water. AK troops guarded other wells, where water for the wounded was sometimes rationed by the glass. The last kilos of barley from stores in the city centre had been ground to make a soup full of husks; dogs, cats and horses had been eaten. From the headquarters of the AK, General Bór radioed London: ‘We are starving.'

In the riverside district of Czerniaków they had been without food for four days. For much longer, the Russians had been sending messages promising help with evacuation of wounded and civilians: one hundred boats were to cross the water from Praga, but only a handful came, and in desperation the defenders began to throw makeshift rafts together, and make a frantic attempt to cross by themselves as the
Luftwaffe
bombers screamed down. On 23 September, Czerniaków gave up, and surrendered.

In Mokotów, to the south-west of the city centre, the AK units who had not made their way out to the centre through the sewers were pressed into a few streets. The day after Czerniaków, Mokotów

On 29 September the northern suburb of
^·
Zoliborz, beyond the ruins of the Old Town, was attacked, and General Bór ordered its immediate surrender: there was no hope of relieving the defenders now. The only district remaining to the Polish defenders was the city centre: impossible that it, too, would not fall within a matter of days.

At eight o'clock in the evening of 2 October, sixty-two days after the first shots of the Uprising had been fired, the surrender of Warsaw to the Germans was signed.

On 3 October dawn broke over a silent city. No sound of shelling, no scream of bombers, no cries, no falling buildings. As news of the capitulation spread, the doors of the cellars and basements opened, and from each house came wave after wave of thin, grey-faced people, carrying their children and their last possessions, stumbling over the rubble-strewn streets, over the planks across the craters, making their way towards the barricaded exits from where they were to walk to Oz
^·
arów and Pruszków, the German transit and prison camps ten miles away.

In a half-bombarded house not far from the street where Anna was stationed, Jan looked down at the place where two weeks ago Paweł had died. He listened blankly to the commander of the unit they had joined when they came out of the sewers, listing the terms of surrender. All those who had fought in the AK were to be protected by the Geneva Convention, treated not as terrorists, or ‘bandits'as Stalin once scornfully described them, but as prisoners of war. In the absence of full uniform, they were to be recognized by their white and red armbands, or by the insignia of the Polish eagle.

The commander was a thick-set, powerful man in his forties. His voice broke as he began to read out General Bór's last order to his troops:

‘Soldiers of fighting Warsaw!

‘Our two months' struggle in Warsaw, which has been a chain of heroic actions on the part of the Polish soldiers, is fraught with dread, yet it is a solemn proof, above all, of our mighty striving for liberty. The valour of Warsaw is the admiration of the whole world. Our struggle in the capital under the blows of death and destruction, carried on with such tenacity by us, takes first place among the glorious deeds achieved by the Polish soldiers during this war …'

Jan saw at his feet the dying body of Paweł, saw him on the first day of the Uprising, laughing and waving an imaginary gun, shouting out: ‘Poland is not yet lost!' and he closed his eyes.

The commander cleared his throat and read on:

‘Today the technical superiority of the enemy has succeeded in forcing us into the central part of the city, the only district still in our possession. The ruins and rubble are crowded with civilians cooperating valiantly with the soldiers, but already exhausted beyond measure by the ghastly conditions of existence on the field of battle. There is not sufficient food even for bare existence, and there is no prospect of a final conquest of the enemy here in the capital. We are now confronted with the prospect of the complete destruction of the population of Warsaw and the burial of thousands of fighting soldiers and civilians in its ruins.

‘I have therefore decided to break off the struggle.'

‘I can't bear it,' said Anna. ‘All this for nothing – I can't bear it.' She began to cry, helplessly, clinging to Natalia, as they all sat on the floor, hardly hearing the words which Henryk went on reading:

‘I thank all soldiers for their magnificent bearing, which did not succumb even when conditions were at their worst. I pay due tribute to the fallen for their agony. I express the admiration and gratitude of the fighting ranks of the army to the population, and declare the army's attachment to them. I ask the people to pardon the soldiers any transgressions committed against the population during the long and protracted struggle …

‘You soldiers, my dearest comrades in these two months of fighting, one and all of whom have been to the very last moment constant in the will to fight on, I ask now to fulfil obediently such orders as arise from the decision to cease fighting. I call to the population to comply with the evacuation instructions issued by me, the city's Commander, and the civil authorities.'

Henryk broke off. ‘Tomorrow,' he said, ‘we shall all assemble at the exit barricade. If any of you want to go home, and collect anything before the final evacuation, you'd better go tonight. I think we can all sleep here, though, if necessary.' He looked at them all, and then back at the thin sheet of paper from which he had been reading. ‘I suppose we must try to take courage from General Bór's last words: “With faith in ultimate victory of our just cause, with faith in a beloved, great and happy country, we shall all remain soldiers and citizens of an independent Poland, faithful to the standard of the Polish Republic.”'

He put down the paper, and they sat in silence, staring at the pattern on the floor made by the sunlight still streaming through the open window, as if it were any autumn afternoon.

She climbed the stairs to the apartment door and knocked.

‘Wiktoria? It's Anna.'

There was no answer, and she knocked again, but louder. ‘Wiktoria! Wiktoria!'

How could she have hoped that she would still be here? She put her shoulder to the door, and pushed. It gave way quite easily: weeks of vibration from the shelling must have loosened every hinge and lock in the city. Inside, she stood in the corridor and called again, but then she began to be frightened by the image of herself standing alone in an abandoned apartment, and moved quickly from room to empty room.

Dust lay thickly on every chair and bed and table; the windows were shattered. It was like returning to the apartment house in Praga, after the siege, but now she no longer had the hope that her father would be coming home, and now she did not have Jerzy, either.

On the bookshelf in Wiktoria's room was a photograph of Tata and Mama: he stood behind her, his head on her shoulder; two-year-old Jerzy leaned against her lap; Anna, a baby, sat there staring very gravely at the camera. There was another photograph, of Tata with Teresa laughing.

Where was Teresa now?

Anna went out into the corridor, along to her own small room.

From the chest of drawers there she took out a postcard, carefully wrapped, and all her own photographs, some in an album, some still loose in envelopes. Mama. Mama and Tata. Teresa – a print of the photograph she'd had taken for her identity card. Tata and Jerzy on their last holiday together, rowing down the river past the silver birch trees. Wiktoria, holding both their hands when they were tiny, walking in a snowy garden somewhere: that must have been the winter Mama died.

She put all of them into a small, flat, pre-war sweet tin she found in a drawer in the kitchen, and tied it with a piece of string. Then she searched until she found a pencil, and wrote a note to Wiktoria on the back of an envelope:

Leaving Warsaw tomorrow, like everybody else. To a transit camp, and then God knows. Jerzy was killed 8.8 on Jerozolimskie: he is buried in
^·
Zórawia.

Thank you for everything. Will be near Three Crosses Square tonight – same place we've been at through the Uprising. Come if you can.

Anna
3 October 1944

She put the note on the kitchen table, the corner under a cup: it lifted a little in the breeze from the shattered window. Then she picked up the box of photographs, went out of the apartment and closed the door.

Paris was liberated, Warsaw fell. Anna stood in a long, long line of people, each with an AK armband, moving slowly over the torn-up pavements under the eye of the German guards. They went past the skeletons of houses; past the silhouettes of burned-out churches where only a few stone frames of stained-glass windows hung; past courtyards filled with burial mounds and crosses, and courtyards where piles of bodies lay still unburied. All the way through the city the only sounds were the crunch of bricks and rubble under thousands of moving feet, and the voices of the Germans, talking quietly to each other as they watched.

A towering barricade loomed ahead, with a gap cleared away in the middle. They reached it, and Anna looked up. Far above, from a gaping window, a white flag hung limply, like a broken arm. Then the order to march was given, and she followed the people in front, stumbling through the gap in the barricade, and out to the other side.

When all the inhabitants of Warsaw had left, the Germans, on Hitler's orders, razed every last building to the ground. They destroyed it all methodically, street by street, house by house. On 17 January 1945, the Russians crossed the Vistula at last, and liberated a dead city. The following day, down the snow-covered ruins of Jerozolimskie Avenue, they held a Victory Parade.

1. The Polish Constitution, the most liberal in its day of any in Europe, was decreed in 1791. Russian intervention prevented it from being enforced, and in 1795 Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. May 3rd is one of the most important dates in the Polish calendar.
   

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The classroom smelt of powder paint and chalk dust. There were two posters on the long corridor wall opposite the window: one of British Birds, perched in stiff profile on twigs – blackbird, thrush, chaffinch and blue tit, starling and robin, each with its own black silhouette behind, in flight. The finches rose and dipped – there was a curving line of dashes, to make it clear. Next to it was Road Safety, where two small children, a boy and a girl, tightly held their mother's hand on the edge of a zebra crossing. The mother wore a hat; across the road a policeman beckoned, smiling. Pinned up by the blackboard was a map of the world, where all the countries in pink belonged to Great Britain. A lot of Africa was pink. From where he sat, near the back of the class and by the window, Poland was almost invisible, a little splash of purple before the great expanse of green that was Russia.