When I think back to the Uprising I can get a glimpse of my friends just as if I caught sight of an old photograph. The photographs are fading by the year and to my mind it is high time I scribbled something about myself and about them, before I become a photograph myself as well. In the first years after the war, their features were still alive, they were forlorn, horrified, seething, beaming, grinning, drunk, swearing and even puling. But over the years, they became less and less acute.
         Apparently, once the moon was spinning pell-mell around its axis, every time it revealed to the Earth a new appearance. Millions of years rolled by, the moon reduced speed even more, when finally it died down and showed to us one image only, just as in the photograph.
         By way of illustration, Tom: I remember his thinning hair, despondent and sunken eyes, just as I saw him the last time on the stretcher. I am striving to see in the mind's eye that Tom is snacking and beaming. I am concentrating my thoughts to do it, but to no avail: all I can see are those gloomy and sunken orbs.
         Or, Stasiek - Barykada: tall, well-built, corpulent, freckled, fair-haired man with a pipe in his mouth. I am doing my utmost to recall his countenance from the depths of time, to make it become animate just for a moment and speak, but all the effort is in vain, just freckles and a pipe.
         Or Rysiek, pseud. Wilit, heavily and fully armed with English Sten, stubby, blackish, determined. He attached at the back of LHD helmet brown tassels. He wasn't scared witless. The more vicious the situation was the more menacing he became. Every time I recollect him, a determined face is seen in profile, a strip under the chin and tassels.
         From the twilight of my memory, there are looming out, one by one, those con men from the city suburbs. I think that if they had been regular con men, that they thought themselves to be, they wouldn't have been found ,in their twenties, in anonymous graves.

Stanislaw Bugajski "Stasiek Barykada"

a grave of soldiers from "Chrobry I" battalion

         Confidants offer me suggestions to produce the memories the way I look back on them: truly and naturally. But strictly speaking there was: fire, smoke, dust, boom, driving, running, shooting, falling down, getting up, not getting up, driving up, going away, visible, invisible. Panzerwagen, Sprenggranat, Tiger, Panther, Flak, Pak, Heinkel, Stukas, Goliat, Messershmit, Nebelwerfer, Sturmgeschütz and Sprenggranat, Tiger, Panther, Flak and Pak. Including Heinkel, Stukas, Goliat, Messershmit and a clubby Berta and shuffling all those locutions in a countless number of combinations, one can have a bird's eye view of the whole scenery of the Uprising. Speer's Memories have deflated my audacity to write for some time. He had a hawk's eye view of WW II, while I had a marching ant's eye view of it. Who would be fascinated with experiences of an ant that stumbled over the sand grain, and could see nothing but the blades of grass?

the explosion of 610 mm bomb THOR on "Prudential" building
(Photo. Sylvester Braun, according to Wladyslaw Jewsiewicki "The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 seen by a Polish camera",
Interpress Publishing House, Warsaw 1989)

         The author is giving a rundown of the undercurrent preceding the break-up of the Uprising: the initial panic and the German vanishing act, then the reappearance of their army to Warsaw, and to the goal area. Home Army lodges for days on the starting posts till the Uprising. The alarm is called off and a private Krok comes home. He stays there by himself as his parents have withdrawn from Warsaw. The front is so close that he keeps it under observation from the highest floor of his tenement. The next day is the 1st of August 1944.

         At about five from the City Centre one could perceive a sound of a distant shooting, while after some time it could be overheard throughout the land. Only Powisle seemed to be relatively dumb. The Uprising got under way and I was at home, one part of my own gun crew on Mokotow, and the command on Wola.

         Accumulating family gold belongings, the author is getting across the City Centre, when the fight is on, to Wola, where he tracks down the assembly point for his unit. He gets to Haberbush brewery where his battalion "Chrobry I" is concentrated. His company is under the command of Lieutenant Lis.

         Over and over again the news of arms coming on the scene was spread around. Instantly we formed two lines, counting in the blue-sky light of torches and jotting down the pseudonyms. We were trooping or jostling forward to the place where they were to be doled out. We were wandering around cellars and the brewery corridors, getting wet in the rain. Water was trickling down straight into my shoes. The inky firmament was lighted up by the glows of fire. I was reluctant to get off course, so as not to be the last for the arms, and so hour by hour was passing away till it was dawning. In the whirl of hundred unkown countenances I started knowing by sight some of them... The Private Grozny, an enormous tousle-haired noggin, red, arrogant mug, talking back to his commanders. Another one with a seven-shooter on a rope around the neck. A freckled second-lieutenant in a navy-blue cycling cap, Konar or something like that. A second-lieutenant Tytus - thin, slight, with a skinny face and sunken eyes a la Goebbels. There two divisions of insurgents started to materialize. The first was armed, the second was defenceless.
         From time to time an officer dashed onto the brewery courtyard to bring together volunteers for the sally. It was the way that I, for the first time, caught sight of a towering, well-built and balding fair-haired man in the rank of captain. He was desperate for some "boys with balls." He expressed himself in a more reserved way than younger officers. I offered myself too. He took a glance at me, but opted for others. For the sally the armed were mainly taken, while the others only when an exceptionally soldierly soul was demonstrated. I suppose that maybe a bayonet, a long Finnish knife, and certainly a medieval bow and an arrow would do. Soon I learnt that it was the commander of the battalion, Cpt. Sosna. Officers stuck themselves pins, while the rest had no orders. The commander of my company, a swarthy, black-haired man, with a crooked nose Lieutenant Lis, was a Knight of the Order of Virtuti Militari. He got it in 1939.
         We fell into the clutches of that Second Lieutenant in a navy-blue cycling cap, with meaty, freckled face, a biting trap and a horrible power of speech. He constantly drilled us, hurried up, chased away, called us the worst names and gazed at us with repugnance.
         - It's not a scouting - he yelled - this is an army!!
         Having apprehended it for the fiftieth or hundredth time, I felt nauseous. Whatever one did or said, he called us "scouts". Seeing his platoon he had his tongue erection, as somebody expressed it very precisely, later on. There popped up some unnamed second lieutenants, cadets, non-commissioned officers. They plunked us the way they thought fit. counted us, drilled, recorded, dressed down.
         The cannonade increased in intensity. Reportedly, the tanks fought their way through Towarowa Street to Wolska Street and were withdrawing eastward. Then it looked as if they had got back from east and from Wolska Street and then turned into Towarowa Street. The injured came into view. I was of the opinion that the Uprising was an exceptional experience - "riding bareback, a mistress in one hand, a revolver in the second one," as my Marxist friend Lolek, sang poking fun at me.
         And then I am taking a pew in the brewery, standing to attention, spinning on my heels, pinning back my ears to the spiels about those that are skirmishing, and am biding my time when the gun assignment is ready. I am unwilling to do anything on my own, as they could cross me out from the list of insurgents and then being a deserter I would never learn the smell of gun. So the yucky day is dragging on. Those who are taking up arms are coming from the front partly crowned with German uniforms. If the uniform doesn't fit, they exchange it among themselves. Hardly ever does the trading take place. The supply decreases, the demand increases. A German cap, jacket, belt, not to mention the helmet that was the subject of gratification and praise. Officers, especially those of advanced age, on the whole, wear civilian clothes or pre-war uniforms. The insurgent crowd, in principle, wears civilian clothes, though with a gentle inclination towards a soldierly-sportive-working way of getting dressed. Here and there, there are areas spotted with caps, jackets, trousers-that fair-green ones of the Polish pre-war army- green and grey trousers of Wehrmacht and the grassy green ones of German police. Anoraks, drill jackets, breeches, ski boots, navy-blue uniforms, tramway caps, railway caps, forage caps, cycling caps, berets. The belts are standing out: barber's belts are used for razor sharpening, German belts with the inscription "Gott mit uns" and decorative officers' ones, pale-brown, encrusted with brass. To avoid execution, in case that one get imprisoned, everyone has got a white-and- red band on their arm.
         After a few days' time an order came to transfer the bands from the left arm onto the right one. The explanation for such an order was that more and more insurgents were clothed in German units and that there was a serious threat of one Pole whacking another one. When shooting, especially with a revolver, the right arm is more noticeable than the left one so the bands were to make any mistakes impossible.
         Certainly, the order didn't make any sense. Germans were faced up, to all probability, with similar spanners in the works when recognizing their own soldiers, and being in the know of the fact that they had a clear advantage of fire, the mess and difficulties in the mutual identification could work to the insurgents' advantage. Besides, while the Polish are accustomed to the disorder, the German lose their minds.
         In the intervals between the meetings I am hanging around the brewery courtyard, while the hostilities have heated up. In Warsaw, there is the Uprising, an action on the eastern outskirts of the metropolis, there is a front from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, Italy, Normandy. And here, at Haberbush, nobody realizes what is going on and not because there is no news, but because there is a surfeit of it. One can have hearing of everything: the Russian have broken the front line and are getting to Warsaw from west, Grodzisk seized, Wehrmacht is walking out and it is only SS that is fighting, the enemy is cleared out from Mokotow and Zoliborz. Germans are fighting with the Russian only, in Normandy they are defeated by Americans. Generally one rule is observed: the longer the war theatre operates the more promising the news comes. It seems that the toughest German resistance is here: in the capital.
         The centre of the world is Haberbush brewery, and principally its courtyard. Nurses as esurient she-wolves, elbow their way to a few of the injured, so as to apply a real dressing on a real wound for the first time in their lives. One must stand on their legs all the time, keep an eye on everything so as to leap where needed before the arms are getting circulated. Currently, nobody is rattling on about the guns from the disguised magazines, but about those snaffled from the German.
         From the brewery the sortie groups are advancing towards the line. The line is something unspecified, a mixture of names: Towarowa, Twarda, Walicow, Chlodna, Krochmalna, Grzybowska, Wronia, Ogrodowa, Nordwache (Nordwache: the German police headquarters for the north region of Warsaw). And the news is modifying the direction as the waves in the eye of the cyclone. It is across Towarowa Street that the tanks deluged with petrol-filled bottles, bottles filled with French polish, drying oil, spirit and ether are burning. And again, for a change, on Towarowa Street vanquishing tanks are going, houses on fire, streets overspread with the dead. So at a snail's pace Towarowa Street is becoming the most pivotal WW II front for us, clustered together in the brewery.
         In the afternoon the mood is going downhill, certainly mine anyway. The unarmed will be sent home. This is the way the spade-dream wraps up. The tanks again are taking action. No matter where one takes a gander nothing but the fire smokes can be detected.
         I stopped near the watchman in the brewery gate. Other watchmen, with just any popgun, treat us as if we were a group of draft dodgers and cowards. But this watchman doesn't give himself airs even though he's got a rifle and a German helmet. A shot-putter is firing along the street. It is the first time I have heard the rasp of bullets sliding on the wall. I feel not myself, I am running out of air. Nevertheless, I am making an effort not to cut short the conversation. The watchman took out a mirror from his pocket, wiped it, slowly moved it behind the recess of the wall and looked in the direction where the shooting took place. Suddenly something obvious strikes me: to shoot doesn't mean to hit the target, a bullet that gets close to my tummy but just around the corner is as harmless as that which is 1km distant from me and even less chancy than the unfired one. I feel a great solace.

         In the meantime, when there are no tanks nearby, together with the civilians we are putting up barricades. If it comes to the push, I will be able to pride myself on this that I constructed them under fire from Germans. There are chairs, tables, beds, armchairs, metal sheet pictures, Hitler's portraits and even duvets taking a spill on the street. In the military dialect this is a screen. The elderly, especially those that served in the tsarist army claim that a bullet could pierce a tree, but would get stuck in the down and wouldn't come out of it. Real barricades are growing out of flagstones, cobblestones and of sandbags. Generally, the state of insecurity is non-existent. One time, the shooting is discerned on the left so we conceal ourselves on the right side of the barricade, after fifteen minutes' times the other way round. When the day is dragging and dragging along, the second night of the Uprising is coming. The rain has ceased but the stars are obscured, the grey-and-red clouds are hanging over the brewery. I got down to the Haberbush's basement and just like the majority I collapsed on the floor.

a barricade on the Warsaw Street;
one of its element is the portrait of the General Governor, Hans Frank;
(photo. Eugeniusz Lokajski, according to Wladyslaw Jewsiewicki; "The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 in a Polish camera",
The Publishing House Interpress, Warsaw 1989)

(...)

         Zosia with a scar on the neck applied a dressing on an abraded skin of mine. For her it was the first dressing in her career. She got thick, woollen socks as well. An enormous scar on the neck was made by a bomb element from September 1939. I felt peaky when she cleansed my feet. I was appraised of the fact that she considered me to be a bona fide soldier and that rubbed raw skin was a real wound.
         A perilous explosion shook the brewery, the plaster came off from the ceiling. Somebody glossed that it was "tiger" that exploded. "If the bullet is so powerful," I thought "that rocked the basement of the giant building so what can eventuate if twenty "tigers" strafe us?" I cannot bethink myself of what cropped up that night. I recall that when I took my leave and stood on the street with a grenade in the hand, clouds made way for the stars and the sky started became dusk on the eastern side. I cannot perceive if somebody gave me that German grenade with a long handle resembling a mallet or if I found it myself.

Zofia Boczarowna, "Kos"

(...)

         An eleven-year boy in an elephantine helmet with a swastika clung to me.
         - Sir! Sir! I'll give you instructions where the Germans are, they want to give in! Come along.
         Probably he was scouting for somebody armed, but I was detected. I don't suppose he would be able to persuade somebody else so quickly. He had knowledge of the neighbourhood. He led me mainly through the courtyards and the tenement rears, when we got to the cinema Faun. On the way, to my great content and distress, I found a German helmet. It was too boxy, but still I could put it on the top of my head. Ears protruding from the steel metal, while the helmet was swaying and sliding down. I had to hold it with my hand. In the cinema, lying face down we were looking around the neighbourhood through a small ground floor window. In front of us, on the other side of Zelazna Street that was crossing with Chlodna Street, stood a modern edifice. Beside it there was an exit, a bunker and pillars. So this is the esteemed Nordwache about which I've heard for the last two days. It was dawning, stillness... no trace of man, dead or alive. The whole district snowed under brick elements, roof tiles, plaster, glass, steel. All covered in charcoal dust that in the dim light of morning added to the objects soft, rounded contours without contrasts, without shades. There was something of an out of the ordinary planet landscape in it.
         In the middle of Zelazna, a few steps from the bunker, there was a platform for transporting furniture loaded with sugar bags. Nearby one more. Four horses chewed a nosebag in a composed way. On the other side of the crossroads there was a Zommer's tenement from where Germans, getting out of Nordwache, were shelling.
         The situation has apparently become different since the time the boy was here the last time at night. The tenement had the air of being without life just like everything else around. Germans, as might be expected, if they had hidden themselves there, had no reason to aim at an unoccupied street. Looking into the district, I thought round the clock about helmets: the tiny one on my head and the oversized one on his head. I came up with an exchange. At first the boy turned it down even though the helmet fell down onto his eyes and rocketed together with his single step. In his way of thinking, the supremacy of the jumbo helmet over the scaled down one was analogical to that of a parabellum and a female revolver. I had to bring that transaction to a conclusion by threat. After the swapping they were a perfect fit.
         We shoved off Zommer's house at full speed along the tenement wall hearing a faint echo of our own treads and the glass rasp. We scuttled into the gate. It's here! I hold the grenade in the hand. At the end of the handle there was a metal twist. It appeared that to arm the grenade one had to twist it. I wasn't cognizant of the fact that under the twist there was a glass pearl on a rope, that should be pulled out first and then one could throw the grenade. Carefully, we moved into the deeper part of the gate.
         In the opposite corner of the courtyard there were ten Germans standing with arms at their feet, some of them hatless. We looked at one another. It was dawning so much that even at the bottom of the well of Warsaw courtyard one could see silver greenery of uniforms and shaven faces. I didn't have knowledge of what to do next. To call "Hände hoch" didn't make sense, though I knew no more German. Furthermore, they didn't manifest beastly intentions.
         A fairy-tale scene: Germans are cruel knights that somebody cast a spell on, and this way they were standing still as if turned into stones for eternity. If I holler "Hände hoch!" the spell will break, they'll rouse themselves, start cracking up and draw a bead on me. And so we had a gander at one another without a change, without a word, bending the knee a little, ready to hop at the back. Out of the blue a soldier moved slowly towards me, carrying something on his shoulder, something that looked like a machine-gun, a metal box in his fist. He parked beside me, let me have a machine-gun with a whacking, flat barrel, explaining something to me by words and gestures. He unsealed the box. There were ammunition tapes inside. Softly I nodded consent and said e few times:
         - Ja, ja...
         The German spoke without hurrying, clearly so that I could trout out the words, but I got the drift of nothing. Lastly, he was gone to the opposite corner of the courtyard, and we, enraptured, jumped out onto the street.
         The news that Germans were giving up the struggle must have reached the basement. In disbelief of the dead silence, the braver civilians started gathering in the gates, though they didn't step onto the pavement. We were going along the middle part of the road, both in helmets, tied with ammunition tapes around, me with an enormous machine-gun on the shoulder. Looking at us and watching us so self-confident the civilians started moving forward onto the street. Soon the group congregated around us. People, radiant and enraptured, helped us to cigarettes that we put into the pockets. I only once dragged on a cigarette and then I flaked out. My companion probably ran out of courage to smoke, especially in the presence of adults. Somebody ran with a camera. I lent a grenade to the boy so that he could pose for a photograph with it.
         Civilians thought us to be those who wiped the floor with Germans in three days' time. This that we spoke next to nothing was a proof. Standing beside me, for the first time since the beginning of the occupation, they had felt totally out of danger on Warsaw Street, not having knowledge of the fact that I couldn't shoot and I didn't even know how to arm the grenade. Real insurgents, hose that fought, were away. Having civilians, whose number was growing and growing we headed to the brewery where an enthusiastic reception was awaiting us.
         Our machine gun was the most impressive firearm I had ever seen in Polish hands. Bullets, giant bullets, larger than the rifle or pistol ones, they were of a 11,4 calibre. They quipped that if one was shot with it the brain would flow out from the ears. Under the crowd of unarmed civilians' very eyes we marched through the brewery courtyard to the magazine where the company command was. Lis inspected the gun with a smugness but complemented me in a moderate way. It wasn't either a conventional Polish army stuff or a regular German army one. So they took the machine gun to the armourer. Then I learnt that it was an American Thompson.

the whereabouts of Nordwache

a group of soldiers from "Chrobry I" battalion in front of the bunker leading to the entrance of Nordwache

(...)

         I took a seat and lingered. Different second lieutenants, cadets, non-commissioned officers, liaison officers dropped in, having a chinwag made themselves scarce. Second Lieutenant Konar also put in an appearance in a navy-blue cycling cap, with a pale, greasy, freckle-speckled face. Right away he chewed me out and ordered me to get out. For the first time I had stood up to him and said about Thompson and that I was anticipating Lieutenant Lis that had already come out.
         - You'll get another gun - Konar gave his word and ordered me to go to my platoon as the company commander headquarters wasn't for the tramps.
         I didn't carry out his order. Second Lieutenants, cadets, sergeants, platoon sergeants, corporals carped at me as well, but I brushed them off with the Thompson tale and a statement that I am expecting Lis. This way two hours had passed before Lis came again. He must have seen me getting in, but ignored me. I waited for some time: then I got closer, clicked my heels, stiffened to attention. Hardly did I start with:
         - Lieutenant, Elder Rifleman is reporting..., when Lis said:
         - And why are you twiddling your thumbs? March away to your platoon. I responded in a semi-stifled voice:
         - Lieutenant, and where is my machine gun?
         - Machine gun is on the line and isn't yours anymore. It's Home Army property. Don't bother me with odds and sods.
         He turned away and talking with another officer made an exit. It wasn't the way I had imagined the Knight of the Order of Virtuti Militari. It was the way I was robbed and disarmed for the first time. I am loitering around the brewery courtyard, again I'm one of the unnamed and depressed several hundred people, with a sense of personal defeat.

Mikolaj Dunin-Marcinkiewicz "Lis", the Commander of the Assault Company "Lis")

(...)

         A grenade tucked into my belt is the only thing that grants me the status of an armed soldier, so I guard it with my life. As long as I have it I am of a certain military value and of fire power. If I throw it towards the German then I'll become an observer.

         Among soldiers passing by the company, the author recognizes his friend from school Edek. He joins the platoon belonging to the company of "Wierny" that was commanded by "Kobuz". He receives a company rifle. For the first time he has taken action stations that was the security of the brewery from the side where the fighting is taking place - Towarowa Street.

         I entered a house for a moment. Getting back I found the barricade in commotion. A German roof-sniper aimed at the insurgent who slept on the stretcher. The bullet hit into the wall maybe twenty centimeters above his head. Brick and plaster splinters fell down onto his face. Really, there is a hole in the wall! I am fumbling about as well, forgetting that the sniper can shoot again. I am looking around the local houses and am wondering where the bullet has come from. Three tenements are taken into consideration. Around, in the darkness, about one hundred window outlines are discerned. Everyone understands, that a chance of finding "the pigeon shooter" is none, but something must be done as he has shot.
         In groups, in pairs, we set off for the hunting. I am together with Kawka. The three of us climb the stairs leading to the loft, fingers on the triggers. Of course, there is nobody, it is so dark that one can see nothing. I don't know why but it was widely accepted that the "pigeon shooters" were firing from the loft. To look for them on the ground floor wouldn't cross our mind. If he cannot be found on the loft so maybe he has hidden himself among the civilians. We are getting downstairs to the cellar where the residents are sleeping. We are calling the janitor in and asking whether anybody hadn't come from upstairs during the last half an hour. Nobody had.
         - Are there any Volksdeutsch's, Germans or Ukrainians?
         - No, there aren't - he says.
         There is a stir among the civilians, all eyes are directed at us. For the first time I feel as if on the stage. First I feel a little uncomfortable, but the confidence is added to me thanks to respect and a little bit of fear found in the behaviour of civilians and a belief that a helmet suits me and so does the rifle. Our mission comes to an end. Then suddenly I hit upon an idea of asking the caretaker whether there were strangers among the civilians that could live in that house. Yes, there are and even quite a few. We make them stand nearby, separately. KAVKA from the cellar step, with a rifle butt under his arm, and a barrel directed at people, speaks to them in Wiech's language. In the light of a kerosene lamp and candles his lips seem to be even thicker, his nose clumsier, while ears more sticking out. He had started slowly, but as he spoke longer, he unwound in the course of speaking and preached that we, insurgents, were fighting, shedding blood while they gave shelter to "pigeon shooters." I am ashamed of his behaviour and am trying to cover over the bad impression.
         I am checking the documents of immigrants. A woman about fifty years old, at the age of twenty two, fair-haired, well-fed man boy- they are handing to me factory worker cards. Both names "Miller". A mother and a son. I ask them to show me kennkarts, but they refuse to do it as they forgot to take them when leaving home.
         - Where do you live?
         - On Powisle - they answer.
         That is a few kilometres from here. They speak Polish as if they were born here. I am thinking: a Pole would be afraid of going out without a kennkarte. Germans would smash him in the face, and kick him black and blue at the best. Probably, they are Volksdeutsche's and threw out their kennkartes.
         - Show me the ration cards - I repeat. They don't have them. Left behind at home. I even aimed the gun barrel at them and repeated : - You are Volksdeutsche's!" but they said not a word standing as if paralysed.
         This way we picked out six people we are leading them out onto the street. It is already dawning. I know that none of them has aimed at us, but one of us admits it. We get them to stand on an empty small square under the highest wall without window, facing the wall. I am wondering for a moment what I could say to my fair-haired man that would sound stunning.
         - For five years you've eaten Polish butter, now you'll be six feet under.
         He says nothing. I am clanging the lock of a rifle just for show so as to make him scared even more. The bullet stops in the barrel in case that he runs away. I have never threatened to kill anyone so far and I feel pride that such a nice answer was made by me on the spot.
         I am getting seized with curiosity and excitement of learning how it is to kill a man. To put a bullet in his back, or at the back of his head I think it wouldn't be appropriate. Never before have I fired a rifle and I am scared that if I put it the wrong way on the shoulder then it'll kick me and kick the teeth out. Somewhere on the periphery of my consciousness a fear appears that if I shoot him then such a thing will happen that I'll never make up for it. I am yelling to those under the wall:
         - Get the hands higher! - they are putting them up higher.
         - Stand on tiptoes!- they are standing on tiptoes.
         It amazes me and excites at the same time that they do whatever I order them to do although they are my seniors. In the meantime Kawka has become merry for good, and wants to do away with the saboteurs and get down to shooting. I am not allowing him to do it, others are supporting me and after a few minute argument Kawka gives in. The discussion is taking place behind the back of those who are facing the wall. On the order, the caught are clumsily making turn to the left. They, in front, with hands in the air, we, at the back, are going along an empty street to Haberbush. Hobnailed boots are grating on the cobblestones and the echo is produced. Our military policemen (some of them stuck themselves yellow stripes following the example of the pre-war canaries) receive the arrested with open arms and lock them in the garage on the spot. They suffered from underemployment, though the number of the jobless was constantly growing day by day and it grew faster than the number of prisoners and prisoners of war. It was the only group of people that didn't jump out of their skin voluntarily for the action.

Wladyslaw Wisniewski "Kawka"

         In the sally on Wola, together with friends, the author gets a German pilot uniform, soldier boots and some revolver ammunition.

         I resembled a regular soldier that couldn't be met at Haberbush. All I wore was German, ranging from shoes to the helmet, and it suited me perfectly well. On the blue-sky collar of the uniform there was an orange stripe, and on it there were three silver birds in flight- probably of the anti-air-craft defence platoon sergeant, as pilots had yellow stripes. The only thing missing was a belt with the inscription :"Gott mit uns." I imagined myself to be encircled by enraptured civilians and former companions in misery from the epoch of hanging around the brewery courtyard. Companions that hid the admiration for me.

         The author is forced to join the "Lis" company again. He hopes that it is just for a moment, so he leaves a helmet, ammunition and a revolver to his friends. Because he's unarmed another time, he tries anew and fruitlessly to get back from Lieutenant Lis the machine gun he had got. Finally, he receives an assignment to another unit (that of Lieutenant Tadzik) and receives another company rifle. He is appointed to a protruding post from the Wola district, where fierce fights are taking place. From there the German relief forces sent by Himmler rushed to fight the Uprising...

(...)

         It was an early morning, when from the west side a distant rumbling had come and a faint growl, that hadn't ceased since then. House shades got shrunken, while the street got into the full bright sunlight. Rails were gleaming like the edge of a knife, the glass slivers sparkled, the air was twitching above the burning cobbled road. Rarely did any civilian sneak along the wall. I was going round in circles, looking around, listening out and so the time was passing by.
         The afternoon had already passed when the first escapees appeared, individually, in pairs, without bundles. They were coming from the direction where ,for some hours, the fighting sounds had been coming from. Silent, without stopping they dashed eastwards into the heart of the city. One thing was repeated by them: "Germans are doing away with everybody." They made an untold impression, especially their eyes were specific; sometimes such burnt eyes are found among those rescued from the fire.
         Inside "Staszic Foundation" the shades were running around in circles, and nobody looked out of the windows as before. I had just started pondering whether I shouldn't drop in there officially, so as to learn some news, when in a flash, by a sudden jerking movement a thick dust went up that covered part of the barricade. It was like a cloud of grey cotton wool that hung stagnant in the air for a moment and slowly trickled down with the wind. Some pieces fell down onto the crossroads and jumping they rolled down along the cobbled road.
         I read many descriptions of battles, and I had been asking former soldiers about the war years how the bullet explosion look like from close up. Do the eardrums burst? Does the blast knock people down and paralyse breathing? Then I saw it myself.
         First I wanted to shoot and I was even going to do so; at the same moment I thought that there was no point of shooting on the side into the barricade, when in front the heavy gun was aiming at it. So I rushed into the barricade but got awaken after a few paces, just on time, as Germans fired two more times. What may happen if the infantry enters the barricade? To shoot and run for support, or run for it at first?
         Suddenly one insurgent, behind me, yelling like a madman, that I was German, that he had already aimed at my back before he saw my white and red band, and it was his presence of mind kept that saved my life. He was a little bit jittery and he didn't know what to do besides this that he could shoot. Soon somebody came, maybe it was he himself, Second Lieutenant Tadzik, and he rolled up our feelers. It was the way the defence of the west side of TOWAROVA Street ended.

Corpses of civilians murdered by the German.
In e few days' time Germans murdered about forty thousand civilians (men, women and children)
(photo. Stanislaw Kopf "The Uprising Days," The Publishing House PAX, Warsaw 1984)

(...)

         Together with his friends he occupies another position observing the fire and smoke wall coming from Wola and moving towards them. They are raked by the tanks. Germans are so close that he can hear commands issued by them. They are withdrawing deep into the Polish positions.

(...)

         Beside the barricade a crowd. Civilians mixed up with insurgents are looking around in all directions. Being the only one with a rifle I was surrounded by a few elder men, who, to make my job easier, were looking for Germans. It came down to them detecting Germans everywhere and me seeing them nowhere. One advised me how to hold a rifle so that it wouldn't kick; another offered to shoot for me when the sight had deceived me for another time. I got nervous and started sweating not because of fear, but because of shame that my advisers knew more than I did. They are more resolute and they have already sniffed out I couldn't shoot. Even worse was this that I met some insurgents, participants of meetings on the brewery courtyard and among them Corporal Jur, a friend from the underground activity. Some years later I saw a similar scene on the arena in Mexico. An inexperienced matador couldn't finish off a staggering, heavily panting bull and they both were standing, eyeing each other up and down. A crowd of men rushed into the arena, surrounded the matador in a semi-circle and suddenly encouraged him to the further action.
         The public opinion pressure on me reached the climax when a German was seen in a separate window high in the top wall, probably one hundred metres distant. I broke down under the pressure in fear they would take a rifle away from me or they would tell on me.
         - Don't be afraid, Sir! Hold fast the butt to the shoulder.
         My heart was thumping because of fear that I kept the rifle too loosely and it would kick me. Then there would be a laughingstock if I fell onto the ground and spat up the teeth. I aimed at an empty window, then a bead was on the left from it, then a rear sight was on the right from the bead or the other way round. Every time I pressed the butt on the shoulder the barrel went up. I pulled up the trigger.
         - OK, OK. You'll hit the target near the window frame - he showered me with compliments - and a Kraut will be put to shame.
         I am cocking a rifle. It has jammed. I am trying again and again, the cartridge case doesn't come out. I am taking out the lock, civilians are examining it. They are telling me that the extractor claw is broken off. The butt cartridge cases I am unable to take out and the rifle breaks down just after the very first shot. Wise guys are explaining to me why I have broken the claw.

         With an-out-of-order rifle I am going to the armourer. And it seems that one can fire this rifle but one has to do lots of complicated things like a musketeer from the XVII century. The breaking down of the rifle was very beneficial. Soon after the author had left the barricade a grenade launcher attacked it. Civilians and insurgents got hurt. For some time, the author was sent to the Old Town that, in those times, was in the deep back rooms of the fighting. After some time he got sent to Wola again, with some unknown insurgents.

(...)

         There are six of us in the dark room, whose windows are looking out onto Chlodna Street immersed in the moonlight and the glow of fires. Just on the right the same barricade is seen, where I broke down the rifle in the afternoon. On the left, at a distance of two hundred metres, by "Staszic Foundation" there should stand a barricade across Wolska Street, now invisible in the darkness and smoke. From the darkness they will rush towards us any time. I recognize Rifleman Maly by the voice and the considerable height. Every now and then somebody looks out onto the street. The whole life concentrates around windows. We are chatting in hushed tones. Slowly it is dawning on me that there is nobody to lead us.
         Soon two tanks are approaching us from Kercelak, motors are heard in a more and more audible way. Maly finds a new armour-piercing gun. On his command we are screaming:
         - Uraaa, uraaa, uraaa!... and the tanks gleaming, withdrawing to Kercelak. The first in my life meeting with an armour-piercing gun was a victory. Since then Maly's voice has mattered more than those voices of others. The bullets are breaking on the crossroads behind us and on the barricade. Clouds of dust, that cannot be pierced either by a greenish moonlit or by a red gleam of fire, is getting up in the shape of giant cauliflowers. It is swelling, growing, billowing and merging into one cloud. I am moving the wardrobe by the window, so that the shrapnels couldn't get into the room if the bullet hits the window frame. For the first time in my life I've moved the furniture I liked, without asking for permission. Again the motors are heard. They are driving up, firing machine guns. Under the baton of Maly we are screaming in chorus: "uraaa, uraaa," and the tanks are withdrawing again. We are as merry as school-kids that could have the teacher on.
         Somebody may be surprised why instead of screaming Polish "hurrah" we screamed a Russian "uraaa." Polish "hurrah" smacked too much of a scouting, "uraaa" was more serious, and probably reminded Germans of the front. Besides, Polish "hurrah" is more difficult to pronounce than the Russian one, not to mention screaming it.
         Again the bullets are breaking on the crossroads while the dust-clouds veiled the barricade. Black silhouettes are appearing on the left street side. I am shooting, taking out the lock, putting the bar into the barrel, knocking out the cartridge case ,putting the lock in, bolting. Silhouettes disappeared, shot-putters are working without a break. Because of the rifle broken down somebody called me Musketeer. Everybody jumped at it and over and over again they are yelling: "Musketeer here! Musketeer there! Musketeer is right." The sound of their voices reveals they are joking.
         I am running into the left to look for a position from where I could keep an eye on the whole street. I am going around gloomy, fire-lighted up flats, looking into almost every nook and cranny, without a fear that friends would withdraw without me. Never before have I trusted anyone so much as I trusted them. All doors are open, there's not a soul. All I can hear is the dry rasp of shooting and the clack of my hobbled shoes. I am coming across a window in the side wall looking out in the west, straight into Germans. It is a good position for an MG shooter. From here one could probably notice the outlines of "Staszic Foundation" unless the smoke was present. I am running downstairs. In the darkness even the silhouettes are hardly seen. We are just shadows and voices, but we understand each other as if we always knew one another or as if we were born under the same star. There is no leader among us. You put forward a suggestion, if it makes sense, everyone cuts on it. When I screamed: "Draw up the wardrobe to the window" some arrived with help on the spot. We are the island of life, at night, in an empty house at a burning street. I cannot remember who was with me, probably I had never met them before, except for Maly, and never met later on. If any of them is still alive all he can remember about me is that one of six was called Musketeer.
         One cannot lean anymore. I can recognize a familiar sound-the rasp of bullets sliding down along our wall and instantly I am sharing that observation with others. Germans had to notice the flash of bullets. It's better to change the position.
         The tanks are again slowly rolling along the streets, and we are using our tried-and-tested "Wunderwaffe."
         - Uraaa! Uraaa!, and as it was expected the tanks stopped. I am going to the restroom. The door is slamming behind me, and when I jump out from it, I can see that everyone is spitting, snorting and wiping out their faces.
         - Musketeer on the fire position!
         Black silhouettes are appearing on the left. I am shooting, deserting deep into the room, taking out the lock, putting the rod into the barrel, breaking the cartridge case, putting the lock in, bolting. Others are shooting from the windows. Machine guns are aiming probably at us. A great excitement, two Germans are lying diagonally on the other street side. I am watching out for something but I can see nothing. They are pointing their fingers at something, explaining something, though hardly have I noticed one. I say nothing so as to hear the advice: "Musketeer, take off your gloves." A German is lying at the base of two pillars, probably the uniform is burning on his body. Over the corpse there is a house on fire. The longer I am looking at him the less he looks like a human being. Maybe it's just the rags that are smouldering. I am running for help to Haberbush brewery.

Jozef Golebiowski "Maly", from the Assault Grouping "Lis"

         On the road to the brewery, the author meets an armed company. He explains to its commander a difficult situation of the place defended by him. He gets a new rifle and is nominated, by the company front, for the rank of the corporal. The situation on Wola gets complicated: some parts of the units are withdrawing onto the Old Town. German relief gets far deeper into the city on the west-east axis. On Wola, in the region of graveyards ,in a fierce defence, "Radoslaw" grouping lasts what gives time to commanders for organizing the defence of the Old Town. In the meantime the author joins the company "Wierny" which his friends belong to.

         After a well-slept night, just after the breakfast, one ordered the meeting of the whole battalion in the Krasinskich Garden - probably it is about a marching out from Warsaw. Among trees, directed at school, we are standing in a semi-circle in companies Klim, Konar, Edward, Lis...
         Under the school-wall a temporary altar was built up. Firstly the camp service-without flags, without an orchestra, without uniforms, almost unarmed.
         The camp service before the battle. Of course the battle won't take place, and we are doing a runner on the spot. So what's the show for? Officers always go hand in hand with priests, and make us believe that God's on our side. We are wasting time, while Germans are surrounding us. I am getting angry and nervous but am silent. During the camp service I am kneeling down and am getting up like everyone else. From under the eye I am observing the others to see whether they treat it seriously. The priest is giving blessing together with absolutio in articulo mortis. Does it really mean we are going to our certain death?
         I have read such descriptions for so many times. Knights and horses enclosed in armour, a thicket of lances- on the hills near the village of Grunwald. The sunrise reddens the bayonet blades and a blackbird on the field near Maciejovice. Forest, night, moon, 1863 insurgents with double-barrelled guns are kneeling down in the snow.
         The rain filters through my body. Around me attentive faces. To recover the balance of my soul, I am starting to philosophize... So not everybody will come home, I am looking around, maybe that one, maybe this one, I am trying to guess who... Everyone thinks that it will be everyone but he himself...
         After the camp service we are awaiting the marching out, but a surprise has sprung on us. A trip to German magazine on Stawki.

Photographs from the camp service described by the author.
In the foreground a military chaplain, Henryk Cybulsky "Czeslaw" giving In articulo mortis blessing.

         Those magazines on Stawki conquered by the units of "Radoslaw" grouping included apart from food, enormous quantities of German battledresses for camouflage called: "army-camouflage." Since that time all defenders of the Old Town, that in the meantime found itself encircled, have been identically uniformed. Corporal Krok puts on the army camouflage as well. This is the third layer of clothes that he is wearing at the moment. This is the eleventh day of the Uprising. "Radoslaw" units are withdrawing from Wola fighting to the Old Town. The unit of "Wierny" is taking part in the attack on Stawki that is to help "Radoslaw" units to withdraw.

         Cpt. Kamien appeared. On his order we moved forward with a guide: on the double along the street, then through the small ruins and the tramway depot. Violent shooting was getting intensified. We stopped among the walls without a roof, or rather among the partition walls made from sawdust concrete. A regular bullet could pierce it. I was terribly hungry. I put into my mouth a few lumps of sugar. I heard it was the way marathon runners fortified themselves when the Olympiad was held. Heat was pouring down from the sky, where was no air circulation. The whole body of mine was bathed in a thick, sticky sweat. Again we set of at a fast pace. Soon an open area stood before our eyes- a bluff and below the greenery of allotments. One couldn't distinguish individual shots, as there was just a whirr. Fear choked me up, I knew nothing good might come out of it. I felt the air vibration on my face. No wall, no screen, apart from bushes and small trees. Officers standing on the bluff showed the attack direction and rushed us. One of them yelled at me:
         - You in spectacles! Faster! Don't be afraid!
         I ran down and fell down among the bushes. In a while a part of Wierny's group gathered. We sprang out after some meters, we fell down again on the ground. We are crawling among apple-trees, pea-trees, plum-trees, sunflowers, tomatoes, among potatoes, carrots, parsley, beetroots. When lying I am lifting up my head, my Luft-Hilfs-Dienst helmet sliding down on eyes and every now and then I have to adjust it. Here and there brick huts of allotment holders are standing. I am trying to jump from one to another. Stryjo criticizes us that we were revealing the direction of attack, and orders to zigzag. I don't know what's on his mind. Germans know that we are running towards them. His yelling cheers me up. I am terribly sweating, dressed in a woollen uniform of a pilot and a water resistant army-camouflage.
         There goes with it a rucksack stuffed with clothes, a bottle of cognac. Inside of me there is something burning and itching. A tongue sticks to the palate, because there is no saliva in the mouth, sugar dissolves with difficulties, a thick syrup trickles down the throat, I am choking- neither can I swallow up nor can I spit out- if I only had water instead of alcohol. R-42 hand grenade (Sidolowka) blocks the way. Sweat is flooding my glasses, trickling down my eyes. Still I have to wipe up the forehead and eyebrows, adjust the helmet otherwise I am almost blind. LHD helmet is good for fire fighters, gets deep down the back, but is bad for crawling. To aim at Germans is impossible as nobody knows where they are and all is invisible in the thicket. We are looking at the bluff where we've set off and are zigzagging in the opposite direction. Finally even the bluff got hidden behind the leaves. Stryjo and Kobuz are the first to jump up ready, so as to take care that we are moving along the line, that we aren't lost in the thicket, though the group has decreased nevertheless. There is no Edek. The visibility is poor, just for a few steps. The whole terrain gets disintegrated into small vegetable fields surrounded by the gooseberry bushes, currants and raspberries. Lots of small fruit trees and sunflowers. I am calming down even more and I feel like enjoying it. So far, despite the rumble, nobody has been injured. Now we don't get up suddenly from the ground, but we are crawling. It seems as if nobody was shooting in our direction, but the pear falling down, the shower of plums, something rustling in the tree crown and a green leaf whirling in the air, all they say something else. High tomato props jump out of the ground. One of us lying on his back, tried to get to apples; hardly had he knocked some of them with a butt when the rest fell off. Small dust clouds are blooming out some metres high above our heads. In the army-camouflage we have to be invisible.
         Crawling we got to the edge of allotments. Before our eyes a small valley covered with grass, a torn wire netting and three elevated edifices: white, red and pink. Forty metres of an open area. Flattened to the ground we are looking out for Germans. Now, getting ready for the assault I noticed the absence of R-42 - it must have been detached when I was crawling through the bushes. Kobuz got up suddenly, ran one third of the road and didn't fall. Seeing this, we are getting up as well and rushing behind him. In a moment we are in-between the buildings. On the left side, at the end of the rail, there are insurgents. They had just entered. On the platform there is standing a fast twenty-millimetre small cannon aimed at the allotments, and nearby a huge hip of fired amber-and-copper cartridge cases. I put one of them into the left pocket of the army camouflage as a keepsake, having no knowledge of the fact that it was one of the most important moves in my life.

Stanislaw Pietras "Kobuz"

Mieczyslaw Kalinowski, "Wierny"

(...)

         At the beginning there is quietness in the Old Town. The units of "Chrobry" battalion get headquarters in a giant ferroconcrete edifice called Simons' Passage. This is a position on the west defence unit of the Old Town.
         Simons' Passage turned into a somewhat slave market. Day and night somebody dropped in and asked for some people for support. Nobody yelled as it was in Haberbush brewery for two boys "with the balls", though the crowd of volunteers was pressing forward. They took ten, twenty, thirty people. The guides led us to the front, that is on the line, as it was called then. It confirmed our belief that where others fell short of expectation we had to support the firmament as an old Napoleon guard. A regular sleeping came to an end as well. When we returned from the action we collapsed on the mattresses, and because we didn't know when we would suddenly get up it was pointless to dress down, and also the larceny made it such. First we stopped washing ourselves apart from a few sticklers for cleanliness. We just changed underwear and shirts, the dirty ones were thrown into the dustbin. It was a real life! Then the end of everyday underwear came, the time was missing and so was the willingness for issuing things from magazines that meant breaking the guard resistance. To improve the ventilation, I loosened the blouse straps under the chin and undid two flies- this of the army-camouflage and that of Luftwaffe, when nobody saw me. Socks not as much drenched with sweat as worn out, I threw out and put on new ones, till I ran out of their supply in the rucksack. Then I put on two pairs predicting a soon ending of the Uprising, being unaware of the fact that the defence of the Old Town hadn't come into being yet, while the Uprising had just started.

The soldiers of "Chrobry I" battalion in Krasinskich Garden in the period preceding the fight for the Old Town

(...)

         Fighting with Germans, who are pushing forward from the ghetto, is on the way. The author takes part in one of the counterattacks.

         Having heard that a well-armed unit, whose name "Zoska" I had heard for some times, stopped nearby, by Nalewki at number four, I went to see who they were. The insurgents were standing on the landing, neither straight nor loose, quite dirty, rather greyer than blacker. At once I felt the strength beaming from them, that was underlined even more by the fatigue on their faces. They hardly spoke anything. Suddenly I saw BASIA dressed in the army camouflage like everyone else. I realized on the spot, that orange facing of Luftwaffe taken out on the army-camouflage blouse, an officer incrusted belt and a rucksack with a fur, they made such an impression like a feather tucked behind the helmet cover. The conversation was heavy going. It got totally stuck when, as if in passing, I showed a beetroot band with the claret letters GS LIS. The awareness they knew something about the war I hadn't learnt yet paralysed me.
         Once in the ruins of Szczecin, a month after the war, a shabby and drawn German soldier asked me for a light. It was the time when Germans didn't have matches, while Poles had the German ones. Neither tall nor fair-haired or young, but standing he lighted up the cigarette, gave back the matches to me and with a gentle, but a clear gesture he thanked! One can tell from something that they are real soldiers. There is a kind of harmony in their movements, or maybe this is a kind of peace that results from the fact they survived and never have been defeated by death. As if all that is useless burnt out in them for good.

The soldiers from "Zoska" battalion

(...)

         The battle for the Old Town becomes exacerbated. Due to the increasing gun-fire, one cannot go along the streets. Corporal Krok takes part in a few night-time attacks on Germans.

         One morning I set out on my own, making a round of the Polish line, to the neighbours on the right. Edek did it regularly. I cannot remember precisely why I visited that place. Maybe I sensed playing cards incompatible with the times, maybe I wanted to meet famous friends from "Parasol", taunt them a little bit and see whether they equalled us. I was planning to visit other units as well so as to satisfy my own curiosity and to impress my friends from Wierny with the knowledge of military issues straight from the horse's mouth. Those from "Parasol" were thought to be sharp operators that would be the first to know where and when do a bunk. The spiritual leader and the example to follow was Edek that was bringing all the time from the contact point of Home Army Secret Service and from the hidden communist cell news not always good and not always true, but interesting.
         I went out through a big window of our bedroom at the rear of Pusta Sala, and from here down the ladder behind the Passage, through courtyards to Dluga Street and towards Krasinsky Square. Easier, but not safer it would be to go out from the Passage through the gate and towards Wyjazd Street.
         The final stretch of Dluga Street, between Wyjazd and Przejazd Streets, looked like a lengthened rectangle ended with a massive five-stored house. On the left side there were tenements of different height, on the right- a flat Arsenal, and behind it a low, small house or ruins that gave no shelter. In those days it was better not to wander around open areas. Not only were the grenade launchers and the artillery dangerous -as people were dying from stray bullets. Behind the Arsenal there was overlooking a church tower very often covered in smoke; thin, high, pale grey, as if woven from steel rails, something of a plait, or of a sawfish. A little bit too late we started suspecting it of a connection with stray bullets.
         Above the entrance to Krasinsky Palace there hung an open, black umbrella, the emblem of the unit stationing there. The unit was more popular, or even famous at the Old Town and because of that he was unanimously criticized by nationalists and internationalists from Wierny. "Parasol" (=umbrella) was especially accused of self-advertisement and camouflaged cowardice. When we were hanging around in battle gear with scarves around the necks on the square we were asked many a time whether we didn't belong to "Parasol". Just as if one had said a Czech about a Slovak. When we were led to counterattack, many a time did we chaff that "Parasol" must have taken off. The name itself easy to remember, reminded of times when rain belonged to everyday problems. In Poland, an umbrella in a man's hands was an indication of effeminacy and spinsterhood. A Lieutenant carrying an umbrella couldn't become a captain unless his father-in-law was a general. Somehow it escaped Poles' notice, that the Englishmen had built an empire even though they hadn't parted with an umbrella and Wellington boots.
         For the first time I entered the place without permission, without a guide, in hobbled shoes. I was there when I was eleven, with the whole class watched by the teacher. We were forbidden to touch anything, and like everywhere in any museum we had to put flannel slippers on our shoes so as not to muddy and scratch the floor. In the ballroom, on the floor, some "parasolmen" were sitting on ancient armchairs in some distance from windows, peeping at the garden. Giant mirrors cracked, white-stone statues of goddesses and gods pitted, plafonds pinched, plaster crunching under feet. One says about the majesty of man's death. Then I felt the end of the civilization majesty. A visit of a guest from another battalion caused surprise to us. We started with a mutual asking about the situation on our sections, then we went to giving advice to one another and finally I expressed my regret over the fact they didn't keep Stawki and Gdansk Train Station. In this regard, they said that they and other units were present there, but there was nothing either to keep or to garrison - nothing but rails and some barracks no good for the shelter. Lack of enthusiasm and a kind of fatigue with the Uprising were striking. Right away it roused a suspicion in me that they were criticizing the Uprising but in fact they enjoyed it very much.
         Just on the left, on the park edge, under the very wall benches were standing, where a week earlier, sitting there with Bajkop, I had lifted up a hot rifle bullet. I had it still in my pocket and didn't fail to show it. Nearby, opposite the window there was lying on the grass a burnt shell of Citroen bullet that not long ago had gleamed with black paint.
         They have so much ammunition - said bitterly the parasol-man - and they know that there's nobody in the car on a no-man's-land but still they will treat us with the bursts.
         In fact, in a burnt-out car one could see many holes, one by one. A hungry man cannot understand that a replete man eats just for fun and so neither could we understand why they had put so many bullets there. Germans where firing improbable quantities of ammunition. First it horrified us, then the extravagance thought to be a sign of cowardice, then bitterness came, and finally torpor and despair.
         Paths were meandering among trees and bushes flooded with sunrays. During the German occupation probably the garden was looked after by nobody; it was overgrowing with weed and grass. Probably it was the first time since time immemorial that the Park of Krasinsky Dukes was empty even though it was sticky-hot. But then on its edge, about hundred people in helmets, caps, shoes, woollen socks were looking at the greenery, sweating and twitching with every move of branches and rustle of leaves.
         I came here ready for a fight with somebody, looking for an opportunity to tease those loyalists and propagandists, but I behaved in a reserved and friendly way.
         I abandoned visits to other sections. Playing scouts, as used to say, probably dead already, a freckled Second Lieutenant Konar was over. The situation worsened so much, that every day seemed to be the last but one.

soldiers from "Parasol"

(...)

         The enemy stopped using large numbers of civilians as a cover for infantry and tanks. That cover was to enable Germans to approach, in some distance, our positions without any losses on their side. Insurgents armed, in some certain per cent, with revolvers were firing from a very short distance. When the exchange of fire took place, the cover scattered unless it had been well-bound. Germans, if they aimed at escaping civilians- they exposed themselves to the fire of insurgents, if they aimed at insurgents, civilians escaped with impunity, if they aimed at both groups- they dispersed the fire. When Germans stopped using "live covers" it was ascribed to the intention of our west allies as well. Somebody, I remember, said nevertheless that they didn't drive civilians in front of tanks, as the bones got into the link tacks and the tanks couldn't turn.

         Insurgents defending the Arsenal. The barricade joins the Arsenal and battalion headquarters in the Simons' Passage. On the barricade there is a small cannon got during the attack on Stawki.

Krasinsky Garden and insurgents from "Chrobry I" battalion with a trophy small cannon

         About five in the afternoon, without an artillery preparation, from the White House Germans ran out onto Nalewki Street, from the left on our right flank to the Krasinsky Garden. I was standing propping the barrel in the loophole when suddenly black figures jumped before my eyes. Before I pulled the trigger they had already jumped onto the street. They ran up to the fence. I am shooting, putting the cartridge into the barrel, taking aim but before I fired some motionless bodies had been already lying on an empty street. And it was the artillerymen that didn't allow anybody either to surprise them or scare and they had fired at Germans with a cannon.
         Lieutenant Konar appeared with some insurgents and seeing that one German didn't move he aimed at him. One of his soldiers flicked up his revolver: Lieutenant, a Pole doesn't finish off injured Germans! A German reeled and staggered to the White House.

discussing battle situation in the headquarters of the First Company Commander in the Simons' Passage

         The sight of the victims' bodies made me philosophize about death. Pretending to be not a shallow man I found platitudes that I would be ashamed of saying in public. For example: how much would the killed in action accomplish in his life; how much suffering would miss him; never will we meet after the war; he doesn't even know that he's already died. Death of a young man surprises so much like the sight of a branch new pair of officer shoes straight from a last and standing on the edge of the courtyard.
         In spite of the cannonade silence in the nature around was striking, and underlined by the stillness of figures. I made a mental note of the place where killed military policemen were lying: some steps from the gate of Krasinsky Garden in our direction, between two holes in the fence underpinning. I tried to guess what Germans, opposite us, are doing at the moment. Probably the same like me- looking at the fallen. Everybody has got memories that aren't erased by time. For me, one of them, it is that empty one, the crossroads covered with dust, greenery on both sides, a red stretch of ruins in the distance, bodies scattered in the rays of an oblique sun and the happiness of freedom.

(...)

         Of course, like everyone I took care of my health, but the sight of bullets pinching the wall nearby didn't arise either fear or any associations resembling dulce et decorum est pro patria moris and hardly ever did it disturb the meal. Lately I have stopped being scared for growth, for example, that one can aim at me in a five minutes' time. I experienced fear only then when one was shooting at me, but neither earlier nor later.

(...)

         What did the German see when they looked at us from the ghetto? Apart from a massive barricade, connecting the Passage with the Arsenal, the screen in the entrance from Nalewki under the arcades was clearly visible. Built from flagstones, with symmetrical loopholes looked like a theatrical decoration. It would resist a small calibre bullet shot, but an 88-millimetre bullet, which usually "tigers" are equipped with and assault cannons, would blow it over with one shot. Germans didn't realize that anyone of sound mind would hide behind flagstones and this way they shot at the barricade only, the corner of the Passage and that of the White House. Treating us like mature soldiers, though bandits, they conducted the battle according to the rules of the art of war, which we didn't even hear about. If they had shot at the flagstone screen or above, under the arch of the arcade, we would have been, as it was said, scraped off the wall with a spoon.

fires above the east side of the city seen from the Arsenal side; in the foreground the wall of the former ghetto

a barricade on Nalewki Street, between the Simons' Passage and the Arsenal

(...)

         The Arsenal position is raked by the German cannons and tanks. The author takes part in an unusually dangerous night-time sally on the German position situated in the White House located in front of the Krasinsky Garden gate. For his courage he is nominated for the Cross of Valour, but formally he has never received it. Germans had it in for the barricade, that in the end it was blown up with the help of "goliath" that was a small remote-controlled tracked vehicle packed with explosive materials. One of the "goliaths" explodes at the time when the author is on the barricade. Due to an immense explosion he looses consciousness and gets an injured ear. The injury will last up to the end of the Uprising. His friend Edek, becomes hurt. In this time the Old Town is as much devastated as Stalingrad. Germans seized the Arsenal and were from ten to thirty metres apart from the insurgents.
         The defence line runs along the Simons' Passage now. Suddenly, Germans rushed into the inside of the Passage, blocking there a group of insurgents including the author himself. The situation is critical, but the counterattack is somehow organized. During the counterattack, a German MG is fiercely shooting at the author hidden behind the ruins. As it later turned out his life was saved by a shell from a small cannon got on Stawki, that stopped the impetus of the shot bullet that came inside the shell, and became a rattle. On the same day, one more adventure is awaiting him...

         Suddenly Second Lieutenant Marian ordered me to take one of the seventeen-year-old boys, a liaison officer Muszka and gallop to the gate of the house at number 44/46; on the other side of Dluga Street there supposed to be Germans. On the road I put in an oil dripping lock. Hardly did we run to the gate, fortunately closed with a metal grating from the street side, when Stukas hooted above the roof. It was said that Germans dropped bombs with a delayed fuse, probably of sixteen minutes' delay. I wondered whether to jump onto the courtyard. It crossed my mind that Marian had chosen me as he knew I wouldn't disappoint him. Besides I didn't hear the impact of a bomb on the roof and ceilings. From the street we were seen in the gate, so I wanted to withdraw when I noticed a crack along the ceiling that started slowly ballooning, as if a film in slow motion. I pulled Muszka, still we managed to jump three steps backwards to the landing entrance before an absolute darkness fell.
         I don't know what was more choking fear or dust. Unclear sounds, thumping, rasping, noise till the quietness fell. I opened slightly the eyelids. It was dark, but the dawn was on the way - from red through its different shades to the full daylight. Muszka was standing nearby. As if a vacuum-cleaner had blown us from his stomach. We snorted with an artificial laughter. I wiped the face, hawked, spat out and blew my nose. The whole gate collapsed, except for a narrow area, through which one could squeeze to the grating from the street side. Any passage back onto the courtyard was unavailable. Though the landing stayed untouched, it was enough to climb it and to jump down.
         - Let's wait for a while - I said to Muszka - it will come the next time, if we go out now, we'll get under another bomb, while he won't drop it two times in the same place.
         It wasn't only a military experience that advised me to make such a decision. I wanted our friends to get worried, treat us like the fallen, and then we would loom out from heaps of debris as if from the tomb. I didn't brush down the uniform, so as to make it "nicer." Muszka, even he hadn't succumbed to my authority as my subordinate, he had to obey the order. I was right, the next Stukas was lowering.
         I don't know how to describe it to somebody who has never laid under the bombs or the artillery fire. As if at a dentist - you are sitting on a chair, holding the armrest fast, screaming is impolite, for running away is too late. Then you are having a large hole in the molar and somewhere, in one point, the nerve is naked. The dentist is drilling using a not very modern machine- three hundred thousand turns per minute with a cooling fountain but an ancient pedal-powered burr drill. You are praying he wouldn't hit you on the nerve, the whole body is getting stiffened, you are breaking out in a sweat. The dentist stops drilling, you think it's for good while he's adjusting the pedal.
         He dived straight onto us. I closed my eyelids and felt the blast. We held our hands together and again the night overpowered us. I was choking, let off the rifle, covered my face with hands and breathed through fingers. Something was clanging, ringing, blowing. When got calmed down, I knew I was standing and that nobody would dig me out and I wouldn't see anybody anymore and that the darkness would stay for eternity.
         Slowly I was opening my eyes; it was so dark I wasn't sure whether I had really opened them. I didn't move so as not to fall into any hole. I gripped around and touched Muszka. It started dawning. The ceiling fell down onto stairs in front of us, while on the right side the explosion perforated the wall. Hardly did the day start when I had "resurrected" for the second time. We climbed the debris carefully but earlier we had tested with our feet whether it would stand the body weight. Jumping on the blocks of the collapsed wall, we got onto the courtyard. Kobuz had already fetched the excavation team. I doubt whether they could achieve anything, especially under the fire of grenade launchers.
         Joyful friends were telling about Stukas planes diving onto the very roof. They didn't suppose we would be alive, as the last time they had seen us was when the wall was collapsing . Mushka behaved as if nothing had happened brushing down the face and the uniform in a hurry, though in fact it had been the hardest day in his insurgent career.

         It is a description of one day-off, when the author's unit was withdrawn from the front line:

         The unit stops in a small tenement at Freta Street 13. Houses here in comparison with the Passage resemble a house of cards. The last hour on Starowka. Tomorrow we'll be observing the fighting from the lofts of Zoliborz, the next day after tomorrow from the Kampinos Forest. We are lying on a small courtyard. When you don't have to stand then you lie down on the spot and close your eyes. It is so safe here, that even the sight of a starry night doesn't give you sleepless nights. I am unaware of the fact that German grenade launchers are standing about three hundred metres apart from Wislostrada. But we are three quarters of a kilometre far from the Passage and it seems that an endless ocean of houses separates us from the German and every house is a fortress.
         Although we are constantly making a laughing stock of our sister units, never did I quit the thought that maybe there were better soldiers among them than we. Sometimes, especially now, it lifts my spirit up. I don't know whether I am a brave man me myself. There were many dangerous situations that proved I was, but then, unexpectedly a trifle scares me, depresses and then I start having doubts. Maybe I am just pretending? Then I am thinking that the majority of things is about pretending. This is a play. There are some who believe I don't pretend. I do observe those fearless and get worried whether they don't pretend as well. I don't believe that the life end would be trivial to man. What will happen if we outlive one another? Those who don't have to pretend are cast from a different mould.
         Wlad?... Lis?... Wilit?... Wilit, when attacked by bullets, instead of getting scared, he is getting angry, his chin protruding, the lower teeth overlapping the upper ones, he's ready to bite- no trace of fear.
         Corporal Jur?... a polite, reserved, correct and economical stickler. Without an order he isn't itching to meet a bullet and there's no fear seen even when he runs away. Maybe this is a soldier by calling that lost himself in ordinary life and he's pulling himself together now? When I am thinking about Jur, a story about a man that gave advice to his son before his going away to Cracow comes to my mind: "Don't push towards the front, don't stay at the end, and don't stick to the middle."
         But Kobuz it's a civilian dressed up as a soldier, that I see behind the desk sorting documents. Even when he gives a telling off he does it with a raised voice, but a quiet one just as if he screamed in a whisper. Sometimes he bents down, but never does he break down. He is taking the strength from somewhere that allows him to jump from one position to another among the bullet shots while others are hiding under the ceilings.
         Zosia Kos and Wanda Zydowka are running in attack together with us, without guns. In night-time sallies they are crawling in front of the column. Under the grenade launchers they are sneaking along many times a day from the Passage with the reports to the command. What do they feel? Aren't they scared? Maybe they believe that not everything comes to an end with death?

         The front line getting through the Simons Passage was kept till the end of fighting on the Old Town, that is till the beginning of September 1944.

(...)

         Everything is done here with the risk of losing our lives. Naturally, one is fighting together with the risk of losing life and the same about running away. One is standing under the open sky and risking his life, he is hiding in the cellar with risking his life. One is going onto the landing with a need to relieve himself. We are living risking our lives.

(...)

         When I heard from Kobuz that he proposed me for the order, the desire for the Cross of Valour turned even to a suicidal level of excitement, and I would have almost finished being decorated posthumously or not decorated at all. It was the meeting with "goliath" that revived my reason.
         The same happened with others. Nobody had felt any shame anymore of leaving hurriedly the position at which the cannon barrel was aiming. The neighbours are then informed it time allows and one is hiding in another, usually a beforehand chosen nook.
         In those last two weeks the blast of war tore out from our tail all peacock feathers. It is difficult to recognize me myself. The army camouflage lost its beautiful colours of a birch grove late in the spring, while mine with the pattern of a golden Polish autumn resembles last year leaves. Faces darkened, blackened, cheeks sunken. Colourful scarves in the rucksacks.

(...)

         The injured are interested in the location of Wehrmacht fighting and police fighting and that of SS as well - a subject that matters very little to us; we don't give up as this way or another we'll get the shot. Whatever I say for lifting up the spirit nothing will change the fact that we are separated with one another with a glass wall.
         Their only hope is an instant capitulation of Germany or the arrival of Russians. They cannot depend on this that their injuries will be cured before Germans arrive.
         In the Passage we are a little bit isolated, but here we can learn firsthand news from the injured that are carried off from all Starowka sections. Among terrible news there are some heartening pieces too, though the latter are changing hour by hour, and undermine our spirit even more. The injured that have no influence on their well-being, and for whom the only thing they can do is to look at watches, calculate when the night comes. From the morning the artillery has been hell-bent on the tower of the Garrison Church nearby, so to kill the time and to steady their tense nerves they count the explosions.
         I am looking at a German soldier, an Austrian, lying in the coal-hole corner. He supposedly looks like we, but still he is not the same. We, Poles, we live as if under the eternal burden of original sin and we have to repent constantly, while he is considered to be one of them. Everybody wants to be an Austrian in such times. Our people are polite to him not only because he is an Austrian and can rescue the injured when his friends come - a Pole cares about foreigners saying good things about him.

Remains of the injured burnt alive by the Germans
on the Old Town [The Archive of Former Files],
(photo. Stanislav Kopf, "The Uprising Days," The Publishing House PAX, Warsaw 1984)

(...)

         The day coming-as usually- was announced by snipers and not by birds. The semi-darkness was still falling in the corners, cavities, cracks, within windows and it was easy to spy a human shape in places where the shape was absent. Sub-machine guns are added, shot-putters, quick firing small cannons shooting slower and with a grunting, then bigger calibers are heard and they don't cease. It's hard to describe this whole shooting that, during the day, merges to a constant whirring or roaring. This, that is experienced by the ear is difficult to compare with anything else. Maybe the same impression one could get standing between a vertical rock and a waterfall, if tons of water floated above the head. Or if one could stay in a giant cave with a thousand of typing machines, where one secretary would be typing one page per minute. Almost everyday the moment of quietness happens, maybe a quarter of a second, as much amazing as if the waterfall stopped pouring down and hang in the air, or if a thousand of secretaries suddenly put up their hands from under the typing machines. At the same time it seems as if everyone at the same time pulled the triggers.

(...)

         It's been a while when I reached this stage of development where shooting is better than silence which deceives .A good soldier will recognize by ear what's going on, and so will the native in the Amazon jungle- he will guess without opening eyes who, where and to whom is getting to.

(...)

         For two days nothing has happened on our section between the Passage and Dluga Street. It is not that the front has died, but it has frozen. And we, and Germans we dug into the debris so much and shoot into it so much that the surprise has become impossible. Neither do they have any chance during a day and neither do we have it during a night-time attack. About one week ago one could crawl along Nalewki to the White House, now the area is so crowded that the no-man's-land almost doesn't exist. Before one would run some steps to the Empty House, or to the Arsenal, a bullet wall would grow up in front of the brave soul like a barbed wire as they have such amounts of machine-gun ammunition. Germans probably think the same and so they stopped attacking with the infantry.
         In the time when I was on duty between the Passage and Dluga, among the Wyjazd or in the storehouse of tiles, Germans more than once burst into the Passage from Nalewki side, but they were driven from the counterattack. I had learnt about it only when I got back to the Room of Machine Tools. The post in the outhouse is more isolated than one could suppose at first glance. Although there is a view from here on the courtyard on both sides one cannot see what's going on in the Passage. There is just seen its uppermost wall without ruins, while ruins obstruct the passage to the large window. Then from the warehouse of tiles the invisible Simons' Passage seems to be a distant armadillo with its head far, far away over hill, over dale.
         During the whole siege of the Passage it was only two times I was brave enough to go onto the second side of the great corridor-being scared with the unknown. This is about digging into the debris, that you precisely know where one can stay and where one mustn't. Bullets are crushing the bricks on the right side, chipping the plaster off from the left side, while you are lying calmly in the middle, as smug as a bug in a rug here ,till the tank doesn't come. For hours I have been standing in the outhouse gate watching the rain of shrapnels or brick chips sweep the courtyards on both sides over and over again. Sometimes I feel nauseous, and something shivers inside of me.

the sight from the inside of the Simons' Passage at the crossroads of Dluga and Bielanska Streets,
deep inside houses garrisoned by Germans. The photo was taken during the fights

(...)

         The working week of the Old Town soldier is one hundred sixty eight hours, nearly seven hundred quarters, not to say about minutes. When they were blasting away with machine-guns at me, it wasn't the minutes, but seconds that were dragging on. A week ago I was still childish in comparison with a man that I am now.
         The here and now absorbs me wholly, and to write a diary for the posterity didn't even cross my mind. Even if somebody had advised me - "write!", I would have thought, no matter which day the Uprising was, that it was too late, that all the most important and worth noting down was behind me. To keep a diary, even five minutes a day, is five minutes lost for life, and even for life saving. The here and now could be presented in a narrow way like a sword blade of a dazzling light streak, gliding faster and faster across the area of an absolute darkness, showing for a moment every now and then different faces ,configurations, horizons, contours. When only the cheeks stopped burning, and the pulse became normal, the event sank into the past, similarly like with a new turn of a roulette wheel the previous one didn't matter. The longer the Uprising lasted the more difficult it was to imagine its ending, though each day seemed to be the next to last one. So many impressions, scenes constantly overlapping one another and under such pressure that the beginning got blurred in the fog of distance. As if it wasn't me, but my twin-brother who once had been fighting on Wola.
         The war was unknown to me even from the screen as according to the social code of the Polish intelligentsia during the whole occupation I didn't go to the cinema. I didn't see any documentary on the front, so I joined the Uprising even visually unprepared. I have changed a lot since Wola times, as if I had jumped from a kindergarten to university. If we had been to fight for Chlodna Street again being such soldiers that we were then, we would have stopped some tanks and a battalion of SS criminals playing bridge at the same time.

(...)

         I'm still thinking about means of survival. For example, to dress up as a civilian... I'm rejecting that thought, I won't part with my gun besides men will be done away for sure. Maybe to sneak up by myself along the German line the last night? I wouldn't dare to do it by myself, but I would take up the risk with Edek. Finally, I hit upon a better idea that a destroyed house will become my hideout, and in the cracks among the walls of blocks nobody will dare to look up for me. Many a time do I imagine such a scene: there are no insurgents. A night, quietness. Me, by myself, hidden in the crack. The daylight starts trickling down. Suddenly a familiar scream:
         - Rrraus, rrraus, alle raus!
         At the very thought about it the breath is taken away... Muffled explosions, throwing grenades to the cellars for encouragement so as to go out faster. Feet stamping... an individual, dry bang of revolver shootings... the injured are being finished off... scream... an incomprehensible barking... Series of machine guns... doing away with the suspects. It is fading away...steps, voices...going through the ruins...grenade explosions...sometimes short series...individual shots...

After the collapse of the Old Town , Germans went through the ruins abandoned by Poles;
(photo. Stanislav Kopf "The Uprising Days," The Publishing House PAX, Warsaw 1984)).

(...)

         Usually someone less experienced, or just a whelp from the former company of LIS was assigned to me as my companion. With others it was probably the same, though Cygan and Pietrek stood with each other very often. In more difficult moments I wanted to stand by Wilit, Ochotnik, Maly, Jablonski. Later I noticed that there were some insurgents who, when danger , were clinging to me.
         Up to now I haven't learnt whether I was less scared than others or whether I pretended better. I couldn't imagine that I could be injured like others cannot imagine that the world will still exist without them. In spite of that certainty I was pedantically careful.
         I chose carefully my post, where to stand, here or maybe a half of step further; I planned carefully how to put furniture. Not all insurgents, even those at home with fighting, were so much foresighted. I behaved like a tightrope walker before the show, or like a responsible and experienced surgeon who doesn't omit anything so as to maximize the patients' chance.

(...)

         Suddenly, at twilight, the thought that Germans wanted to kill us and that they were nearby terrified me. "I'll die," I was thinking "I'll die, die..." and that word didn't abandon me even for a while, and the longer it turned around in my head the less I understood it. I looked at friends' faces to trace any signs of fear. Won't they run away? I was afraid of falling asleep, half-dozing, every now and then I opened eyes to check whether they were still present. But insurgents as usually were floating about among machines. Wilit took out a bottle of cognac and got around starting from Wierny, pouring to everyone in deep gulps into glasses.

(...)

         Lately it has been quieter there in our place. It is true that the ammunition for piats ran out, but there is still some petrol. Tanks learnt the discipline and don't come within the range of a liter bottle throw. The war turned into a positional one, and to depict this that's happening one has to repeat themselves. It was easier to describe a battle from former times and the reading would be more pleasant: grenadiers in blue pantaloons and white braces on red jackets charging the cannoneers dressed in black with bayonets, hussars in yellow caps with a plume are fleeing the uhlans in orange pantaloons... and so on and so forth.
         The contemporary moving war is in fact less colourful, but still interesting to be read about. Tanks are running down tangles of a barbed wire, torched with petrol they are running away like torches, exploding into the air hitting a mine, airplanes are falling down like burning comets and so on and so forth.
         The dullest in reading is the positional war. As the death put on a cap of invisibility. It isn't seen when it is getting closer. It is seen when hitting and even then not always.
         Earlier the chopped hands, legs, heads, a feathered arrow in the breast looked very forbidding. Now a killed man looks as if he was alive though a little bit paler. Unexpectedly the air bursts above the head so does the ground under the feet as in the ghosts' fighting. How to describe it and not to bore the reader? On the one hand one cannot remind him every now and then that shot-putters and machine guns are shooting without a break, similarly like in a novel from the times of peace it would be useless to stress the fact that the hero eats four times a day, breathes sixteen times per minute and so on. On the other hand how to restrain from it? But for the bullets it would have been manoeuvres or a picnic.
         Anybody that describes the contemporary history, stumbles over the same problem and so the authors make up verbs of all sorts so that the reader wouldn't be bored with thumbing through. In the books machine guns, apart from a regular shooting, they are raking, shooting through, shooting in torrents, besides they are clattering, rattling, clanging, clinking, blasting away, beating, discharging, grating, barking, yapping, frantically barking back, playing, knocking, tapping out, yammering, sewing with bullets, spitting up lead, sweeping with fire, blazing away, blazing away with at full blast (if machine guns are ours),clapping all of a sudden and sputtering, if necessary. Other guns have their own voices as well, like everything else that exists. A bomb from a grenade launcher falls down noiselessly like a hawk. If you don't stand too close, then you'll recognize it from shShSh...when it hits something. That one heralds its approaching with a rumble as if some beast was galloping through the sky. A six-finger launcher first is mooing in a cow's husky voice six times. After a few seconds, if the rockets are flying above you, then you'll hear a gentle chirping from the distant sky and in the end clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, Clap. As if one had slammed the door five times, and closed it the sixth time round." A fat Berta" is howling in a voice that defies description, resembles a michurinsk crossword - an ambulance with a hippopotamus. I have never heard hippopotamus, but having seen the way he opened the mouth wide, so as to swallow up a bun one could imagine how deep voice he had. Bertha bomb is lowering and falling silently for a moment. If you're inexperienced, you'll think: "an unexploded bomb." Suddenly shreds of houses and shrapnels are kicking up in the open air... whistling, whizzing, rattling, wheezing, whirring as if it wasn't a bullet, but a piano that had fallen from the sky. Everything that howls and bubbles when flying matters very little to me- and even less when it's louder, because it falls down in Starowka Centre.

Germans are raking the Old Town with heavy guns from the area of former ghetto ruins;

The consequence of raking

(photo.:Stanislav Kopf "The Uprising Days," The Publishing House PAX, Warsaw 1984)

(...)

         Wherever you look (similar phrases you could encounter in poetical descriptions of battlefields) chimneys are sadly protruding into the sky, balconies are hanging miserably, window sockets are looking at you grimly, breaches in the wall grinning at you, metal roofings are creaking plaintively... Krasinsky Garden day by day is getting older in a week-time. Leaves yellowed, turned red, they are falling down and the copse looks strange in colours of late autumn, when it's boiling hot.

the Old Town ruins, Rynek visible
Photo. Viktor Brodzikovsky ,"Warsaw 1945-1950 in photographs;" Brodzikovsky Publishing House, Warsaw 2005

(...)

         The most mysterious officer is Wlad.
         Wlad doesn't match any category. On the one hand he is full of life, he jokes, talks with everyone if time allows. He doesn't raise his voice, moves energetically. Even if he put on a tailcoat, you would recognize a soldier; on the other hand... this that strikes is his grey, cheerful but then blank face. He is fearless, slack as if he had already resurrected and known everything about death. That's probably why rumours are circulating that he drinks ether. He is floating about like a tutelary spirit of the Simons' Passage. It is a more peaceful doze when you know that somewhere high above eagle-sighted Wlad-sniper is watching over you. Sometimes I am smiling me myself when he stops at the Room of Machine Tools, reacting to friendly taunts. He is said to be a good commander that is a father of the regiment. Wlad was worthy of getting the title of an uncle or a granddad of a battalion, as there was no way of guessing his age. He helped, but he didn't butt in.
         One of his six told me about the following event. They were climbing the Passage top. The higher the more on all fours. Wlad crept up to the window and through binoculars he was looking at the surroundings. As usually they expected that it was the last look at the world if not everybody's then his for sure. Wlad noticed a camouflaged grenade launcher and handed binoculars to the back. My interlocutor being without a choice, stood by and put binoculars to eyes.
         - Can you see the motherfucker? - asked Captain.
         - Yes, I can, I can. His hands were shaking, he saw nothing, but as he didn't want Wlad to see he's scared he stood with binoculars to eyes as long as necessary.

Cpt. Pilot Wiktor Dobrzanski "Wlad".

(...)

         The list of reports coming from the world fronts and the Old Town sections, sometimes delayed, sometimes too early looks the following way:
         Friday , 18th August - Americans conquered Chartres and Orlean. On the Old Town they repulsed the attack on Polish Security Printing Works (PWPW), PKO Polish Bank, Quebracho factory, Cathedral, Mostovsky Palace, the Town Hall and Blanca Palace. The enemy took control of Canonesses Church.
         Saturday - Americans crossed Seine to the north of Paris. On the Old Town they repulsed the attacks on PKO Polish Bank. The fight is taking place inside the Cathedral. The enemy made their way through Bielanska Street between Radziwil Palace and Polish Bank, a counterattack from Radziwil Palace threw him away on Tlomackie Street. The attack on the Town Hall from the Opera and Canonesses Church was repulsed. The enemy captured Quebracho factory, it was regained in a counterattack, apart from garages. Mostovski Palace is defending itself.
         Sunday - Russians assaulted Romania. Americans crossed Seine to the south of Paris. On the Old Town the enemy captured Radziwil Palace and the northern wing of Polish Bank. The attacks on Bolesc Street. The Town Hall, Blanca Palace, Jan Bozy Hospital and PWPW were repulsed. Mostovski Palace was abandoned. During evening hours the enemy burst into the boiler room of Jan Bozy hospital.
         Monday - Russians broke the front in Romania. Americans seized Versailles and Fontainebleau. On the Old Town, having blown out the enemy positions, the northern wing of Polish Bank was regained. The enemy was driven away from Radziwil Palace and Canonesses Church. At twelve through the breach in the wall the enemy unit burst into the inside of the Cathedral with a tank. In spite of rejecting the infantry one couldn't get closer to the tank. In the evening the enemy captured PKO printing house. The attacks on the Town Hall, Blanca Palace and Jan Bozy hospital were repulsed.
         Tuesday - Russians captured Jassy. Americans got rid of the encirclement under Falaise. On the Old Town the enemy seized the ruins on the east side of PWPW. The attacks on the Town Hall and Canonesses Church were repulsed.
         Wednesday - the French and Americans fought their way to Paris; there is an uprising in the town. A coup in Romania, Antonescu arrested. On the Old Town the attack on Jan Bozy, FIAT garages and PWPW was repulsed.
         Thursday - Russians seized Kishyniov, Englishmen Grenoble. Americans surrounded Paris. In Paris there are street riots. On the Old Town the attacks on PWPW, FIAT factory, Bolesc Street and Cathedral were repulsed. The enemy captured the west side of Jan Bozy hospital, in a counterattack the hospital was cleaned, but the enemy stayed in a chapel. RadziwilPalace was lost.
         Friday - Englishmen captured Avignon, the sixth German army was encircled near Kishyniov. German capitulation in Paris. On the Old Town the attacks on the Town Hall, Canonesses Church and PWPW were repulsed. Radziwill Palace attack regained.
         Saturday - Bulgary proclaimed neutrality. The remains of the sixth army gave up. The Fortress Ismailia of the Danube delta captured by Russians. On the Old Town the attacks on Polish Bank, the Town Hall, Blanca Palace and Bolesc Street were repulsed. The enemy invaded Radziwill Palace, Quebracho and the middle part of PWPW. In the night counterattack the enemy was thrown away from PWPW, garrisoning the ground floor and the first floor, the enemy stayed on the upper floors. During evening hours the enemy that had captured the central nave of Cathedral was driven away. The enemy that burst into Jan Bozy was impossible to be driven away.
         Sunday - Englishmen captured Marseilles. Russians seized Galach in the Danube delta. Americans crossed Marne. On the Old Town the enemy garrisoned the central nave of Cathedral, in a counterattack the inside of Cathedral was cleaned away. During afternoon hours the enemy burst into Cathedral again. From Quebracho factory the enemy was attacking Mostova Street. In PWPW some part of western block was regained.
         Monday - Englishmen seized Tulon. On the Old Town the enemy captured the ruins of Cathedral and PWPW. Magazines of Quebracho factory were regained. The attacks on FIAT factory, the Town Hall and Mostowa Street were repulsed.
         Tuesday - Russians on the outskirts of Bucharest, Americans seized Reims. On the Old Town the enemy captured the Town Hall front and the fronts of Blanca Palace and Canonesses Church. In a counterattack part of the church was retrieved. The attack on Mostowa was repulsed.
         Wednesday, 30th August - Russians captured Ploeshty and Bucharest. On the Old Town the enemy was thrown away from the Town Hall and Blanca Palace. The attacks on Mostowa were repulsed. The enemy attack from PWPW and Jan Bozy on FIAT factory was repulsed, though the magazines of FIAT were successfully garrisoned by the enemy.

fights in the Old Town: Germans on the left

... Insurgents on the right

(photo.on the left: Stanislaw Kopf "The Uprising Days," The Publishing House PAX, Warsaw 1984,
on the right: Vitold Romanowski in " the 1944 Warsaw Uprising seen by a Polish camera," ,
The Publishing House Interpress, Warsaw 1989)

(...)

         Wlad was carried on a blanket .Slowly we were going downstairs right up to the subway. Every now and then new people joined us. They laid down Wlad at the very garden exit, at the foot of stairs, where a get-through ditch started. Insurgents were still arriving, surrounding him in a semi-circle. Those, who carried him, his very men, they kneeled down. The most distant could hardly be noticed in the darkness.
         Shot in the forehead, in the left upper corner. The groove made with the bullet got lost somewhere in the hair. I handed a beret. They put it on the head covering the head wound. He was lying turned to the light, neither grimaced nor smiling - a relaxed, neutral, grey face covered with a web of tiny wrinkles. Then one of his men, pseud. Czarny leant over Wlad and in a horrible voice he cried out:
         - Captain!... Why did you abandon us? Captain! Captain!
         So as to control myself, I tried to recall a similar scene description of which I had read. I was stifling my tears so much so as not to burst crying loud, I clenched my fists on the barrel with all my might, averted my eyes from Wlad and directed them at insurgents. Rifles, revolvers, helmets, army-camouflage, bandages. Tears dribble down dirty faces.

The last days of August 1944. The Uprising has already lasted for a month. In view of running out of possibilities of further defence of the Old Town, the command decides about an action of getting to the City Centre. The attempt unfortunately ends in a misfortune. Units of "Chrobry I" battalion didn't even manage to get to the exit positions for the attack because of being stuck in the crowd of civilians wanting to leave Starowka together with the army. After that night the last day of the Simons' Passage is coming. German planes are arriving and dropping bombs on the building that collapses and buries under its debris over two hundred Battalion Insurgents. The author went to wash himself then and so he avoided the bombing. Now he's on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

(...)

         Tens of times I looked at the Passage from here. Always unchanging, invincible like a rock, overlooking the surroundings. Then the Passage looked like a paunched giant and seemed even higher.

The ruins of the Simons' Passage; a photo taken after the war end (photo.Jan Kurdwanowski)

(...)

         An unclear grunting and groans from time to time were coming out from the bottom. I thought about soap. If I hadn't been robbed I would have washed myself earlier, I would have been on time in the Room of Machine Tools for bombs, and would lie there in the darkness under the debris together with others. Suddenly, probably for the first time I had realized, that some metres lower there are Wilit, Pietrek, Goral, Jasio whom I entrusted with my rifle and gold, Marian, Zosia with a scar on the neck, Bajkop, Ochotnik, Stryjo, Manius, Wanda Zydowka...

a post- war exhumation of soldiers' from "Chrobry I" battalion

Wanda Blazucka, "Zydowka"

(...)

         Then to the Arsenal through a megaphone a sonorous voice cried:
         - Insurgents!... We admire your courage!... You do know that any further resistance is pointless... it's a waste of your lives... Give up!... Get out with guns in your hands!... You'll be treated like prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention!... Insurgents, we admire your courage!...
         Moses on Sinai Mountain must have been less surprised when he heard God's voice. From there where death built a nest, from under the arcades Polish language was spreading. I had a lump in my throat. I expected that Insurgents would get up and move towards the Arsenal through the sun-flooded no-man's-land. I got scared. The words of Germans didn't impress me in any noticeable way, though they sounded to me like a call for brotherhood.

the Simons' Passage ruins

Zbigniew Stankiewicz, "Bajkop"

(...)

         The author joins the small group of the injured that obtained permission of entering the canal and making that way here to the City Centre.

(...)

         The order was given: to the canal! Moving was slow, because one had to crawl behind the rucksack cover. I was scared that the artillery would open fire or tanks in the last moment would arrive on the square or Stukas would notice us. The order calling off was the most frightful thing for me nevertheless. Finally I lowered myself down on legs in the darkness and coolness.

the surroundings of manhole, through which defenders and civilians of the Old Town evacuated themselves to the City Centre
(photo. Wieslaw Chrzanowski in "The 1994 Warsaw Uprising seen by a Polish camera" The Publishing House Interpress Warsaw 1989).

(...)

         Getting out of the canal took more time than getting in. Some people were taken out. The night surprised me and so did the glass in the windows. By the manhole there were standing some people, civilians and insurgents in semi-civilian clothes, all combed, girls in summer court shoes. I was ashamed of my appearance: without guns, without a uniform, like a fugitive. I haven't accustomed myself yet to them looking at me with compassion.

Defenders of the Old Town are getting out of the manhole in the City Centre
(photo. Joachim Jachimczyk in "The 1944 Warsaw Uprising seen by a Polish camera," The Publishing House Interpress 1989).

(...)

         I was as without a gun and as lonely as month ago. With curiosity I was gazing at local insurgents. They got PASTA, the Police Headquarters, they didn't surrender to Germans. Finally somebody stronger than me, but friendly. Standing in the cinema hall, I made some statements about the canal, Starowka, but more willingly I listened to their stories about PASTA and the Police Headquarters. Though it happened a week ago, they still lived for it. Some insurgents showed to me a defensive grenade, paved with a detachable handle, so beautiful it would be a pity to throw it. He spoke like a son boasting about his successes to a father worn out by life, but not without a dignity in his voice. It stayed in my mind, that Germans would always have the upper hand over a Pole. I felt a little bit as after having landed in a friendly but a foreign country. We speak the same language with its inhabitants, but we miss a shared history. As if brothers that had grown up separately. One among wolves and the other among ally cats. The former on the needles, the latter on the straw. Does this one, who take off shoes for sleeping, understand that one who cannot fall asleep without shoes?

The City Centre Insurgents who captured the Police Headquarters

the PASTA building storm in the City Centre

photo.Stanislaw Kopf "The Days of the 1944 Uprising seen by a Polish camera," The Publishing House PAX Warsaw 1984

(...)

         People accustomed themselves to the looks of insurgents from Starowka, they are turning around, stopping. The authorities would have displayed more reason detaining us just after getting out from the canal, with the aim of subjecting us to an obligatory dusting, washing, shaving, hair-cutting and sleeping for two days and nights instead of contaminating the air with stupid propaganda that it was all right and it'd be better.
         Every point of the City Centre was within the range of grenade launchers, not to mention heavier weapons, nevertheless people were walking and not sneaking along. As if there was a deal or a custom that bombs and bullets fall down onto Starowka. Everyone here got accustomed to this state of affairs, as if to the law of nature. With pride they were talking about successes of the City Centre, ignoring an obvious fact for us from Starowka, that they had never personally found out a full impetus of German offensive.
         Starowka was still fighting. It could be recognized from Stukas flying to the north, where a smoke covered the sky and a gurgling coming from here, as if somebody was boiling tar over high heat.

soldiers from Starowka after getting out from the canal photo. Jerzy Tomaszewski "The Warsaw Uprising 1944 seen by a Polish camera", The Publishing House Interpress 1989

soldiers from Starowka after going out from the canal photo.Joachim Jachimowczyk, in Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert's "The Warsaw Uprising Chronicle" The Publishing House Edipresse Polska, Warszawa 2004

(...)

         Everyone from Starowka was talking loud and aggressively, especially when the locals annoyed them. Still an unceasing gurgling was coming from the Old Town side. They were still fighting. Somewhere among the smokes there were Edek, Hanka, Kawka, Kobuz, Corporal Jur, Jasmin, Barykada, Anka, Kuba, Krypo, Szofer... How good it is to be an observer again.

dirty and shabby, but happy after leaving Starowka
(photo. Whatfor page)

(...)

         On the Old Town saluting regardless of the rules, not having two stripes, I am stressing that, I am a fighting civilian, a volunteer and an anarchist. Here, in the meantime, a bureaucratic ladder grew up, they didn't have to fight, so they tried their hands at fighting. In a month's time I trained my eye and knew on the spot the value of the army. The majority of those non-commissioned officers, cadets, and second lieutenants filling the void between the line and the high command was characterized by conceit that camouflaged envy of Starowka popularity. Over and over again one could hear: - Too poorly, too much of saluting and gathering and too little of experience. They thought university skirmishes to be a tough fighting. The only units to the west of Nowy Swiat were well-trained in fighting, we read about them a lot in the Old Town.

(...)

         By accident, the author meets his friends in the City Centre in the company of Hanka and Witold, who went along the canal from the Old Town to the City Centre as well. Now they'll stick together.

(...)

         Local insurgents repulsed a patrol attack and the spirit got stronger. The day was passing without any events. It seemed to be a great prelude to an attack. I knew how it happened, in a day, in two, three days' time.
         A brisk morning, a light-blue sky, above the planes are rattling, unthreatening, as everybody knows they are attacking somebody else. Insurgents are sitting quietly and safely on the positions as snug as a bug in a rug. And suddenly from the light-blue sky an ear-piercing whine is approaching, the earth is shaking, the dust is choking and dazzling. Only the bravest and the alertest are shaking the scared, officers are restoring order, again they are manning the fire positions, hearts are thumping, hands clenched on the revolver handles. And here Stukas are diving in file. Stupefied, dusty castaways are hanging around, spreading terror. The injured are carried. One has white bones sticking out from the shins as if broken, sticks with bark stripped off, the other one is bubbling with a bloody foam, while Stukas are lowering for the third time. Here and there people are escaping from bombs. At the back grenade launchers are densely shooting. There's already somebody who's lying and howling. The assault cannons and tanks opening fire, the dust every now and then obscures the field of vision. The whole universe is quivering and pulsating. Braver but inexperienced insurgents are leaning out so as not to miss the infantry and they are done for. The scream is bursting inside, this one killed, that one injured. Some have become so addled by the thud and blasts that the Geneva Convention and the public opinion untimely are recollected to them. Suddenly everyone wants to live longer than others and so the defence is finished.

(...)

         I am depicting the terror of the situation to Edek.
         For a third day - I am saying - I have been observing that army, it'll get dispersed when the very first attack comes. It is necessary to go to the South of the City Centre, it is safer there and we'll go in time, as Germans first will stay in the North of the City Centre, while we won't be too far from the main headquarters. If it comes to the push, so as to avoid a general manslaughter, Bor won't imitate General Sowinsky, but will surrender together with the rest of Home Army. We'll then go out with civilians. Besides Germans may capitulate to this time, as Russians and Americans are moving towards without any resistance.

(...)

         Having contacts Edek included us in a list of one of the company of "Rudy" platoons. The decision is made fast and in the evening, together with them, we are going down on Czerniakow where it is supposed to be quiet. Before the darkness falls we'll join "Rudy". A rallying point somewhere at the junction of Zurawia Street and Three Crosses Square. For the first time in my life I've had a chance of talking with people described in the newspapers, with those who fought their way through Saski Garden.
         During the time when Lis was jostling through Hipoteczna Street to the Polish Bank, a section of "Rudy" company jumped Bielanska Street and made its way to Senatorska Street. It had been already dawning and still one couldn't move along so they hid themselves in the cellar of a burnt house. Soon a unit of German military police approached them, but it was surprised with a machine-gunfire and they wiped them out. Then they had to move. Having thrown a smoke bomb, they ran on the other side of Senatorska Street to St. Anthony Church, where SS-men's camp was located. From the church they stole to the cellars of Zamoyskys' Library. During the day a German military police arrived and cleared one by one the burnt houses throwing grenades inside. Our people stood on the corridor that ran along the very middle of the cellar. They arranged that if a grenade rolled onto the corridor this who was standing closest would grab it and throw away to the empty cellar. A watcher informed what was happening outside. At first they hoped that Germans would omit their house. But doing nothing they were moving towards systematically, surrounded every ruin separately with a gun ready for firing and throwing in grenades. The watcher reported they were standing at the house nearby. The footsteps reverberated. Grenades flew into cellars, one of the insurgents got a nervous attack, just that they had to muzzle him. Dust filled up the cellars. Suddenly it quietened. The military policemen went to another ruin. During the day they came up many times, threw the grenades and shot from the cellar windows at random. At night our people took off the white and red bands, lined up and pretending to be Germans they marched through the garden passing patrols up to the last enemy positions and in a horde they ran onto the Polish side of Krolewska Street. Insurgents mistook them for Germans, shot at them and killed one.
         They are not soldiers any more - they are wolves, and all they need is a regular weaponry. When I listened to it, my heart was thumping, as if I had been there myself. Who could feel now what was it like to have Germans around? I doubt whether the participants of those events could.

         Together with a small group of friends, the author gets to a quiet near-Vistula district - Czerniakow.

(...)

         The next day, 5th of September, passed away with us waiting a night with the accompaniment of a cannonade from the North of the City Centre. So as not to lose "Radoslaw" grouping from our eyes, we stopped nearby. Edek, though he spent almost a day in their headquarters didn't learn anything new. "Zoska" and "Parasol" units were going down to Czerniakow, although it was obvious that it was being prepared, or maybe the attack on the North from Jerozolimskie Avenues had already started. This fact confirmed our speculations that they would try to sneak out from Warsaw. Their whole twaddling about any further fighting seemed to be nothing but pulling the wool over our eyes. Con men, everyone says the same. It was advisable to stick to them at all costs. So that is why I didn't leave them alone for a minute.

Powisle district is ablaze as a result of gunfire

         On Czerniakow the author finds his mother and father and visits his flat, though he cannot stay there, as it is under fire. Generally it's quiet here.

(...)

         Having "Radoslaw" for a neighbour I am stripping down to my shirt without any fears. Behind Vistula, where a black sky is without a glow, a fresh air is floating in. A distant muffled murmur of the war makes me fall asleep. It is neither louder nor more dangerous than the chirruping of grasshoppers, the croaking of frogs and a distant barking of dogs. In the very morning Edek hobbled to do a bit of spying on our friends from Starowka. It is obvious that during a day they won't fight their way southwards, but it's good to know in advance, what's going on. I am visiting my friend with a double-barrelled shotgun and having investigated the local situation I tell him about this and that, about all that's a real war, emphasizing my experiences, though not degrading his.

(...)

         Meeting with housemates is rich in surprises. As if an extremely long time had passed since the last get-together. Me, a stranger, from a mythical Starowka, they hold me in high esteem. I, in turn, speak harder, in a more confident and conceited way. They invite me for a bridge or rather its "talking" variation. We sit downstairs by the window overlooking the courtyard. I am learning more details from the history of this district. On the first September the Polish offensive didn't succeed. For some days Czerniakow had been, in fact, a no-man's-land. SA-men from Gornoslaska Street made some sorties without any success. Then our people assaulted them, without any success too, and gradually the front crystallized along Lazienkovska Street and Rozbrat Street, through the gasworks to Vistula. Some Volksdeutscher families were caught, but later, apart from men, were let off to the German side. Otherwise everyone had to be looked after and fed. Probably one of the reasons for letting them off was a willingness to put a local German unit in friendly moods towards Polish population. This method was as helping as straws for a drowning man, because for the attack special units from other sections came, furious about the latest losses. In fact nobody is either talking about drowning or thinking about it now. Wola broke down and so did Starowka, bad news are coming from Powisle, but Czerniakow overlooks the waves like a Gibraltar rock.

(...)

         Many a time do I think me myself what was my contribution to the victory over the Third Reich. The truth is I didn't shoot any German, though I couldn't swear- in such a confusion sometimes one cannot realize it. Having thought about it longer, I came to a conclusion that it got down mainly to the fact I didn't give in and wasn't killed. How much ammunition did Germans waste on me, how many bullets whizzed nearby, how many grenade-launchers, bullets, bombs. And what about petrol for Stukas; oil for tanks; coal for steam engines that transported supplies and spare elements to Warsaw; expensive photo flash rockets, that flared up on the sky every time I stumbled over bricks. Pilots, artillerymen, fusiliers, railwaymen, workers in the ammunition factory. How much time did they spend so as to kill me? And how many Russians, Americans survived because all those bullets, missiles, bombs didn't fall on them.

(...)

         So far I have watched the Uprising on the fronts as if from the bottom of a bomb crater. Since I came to Czerniakow I have been observing the world more as if from the Olympus.

(...)

         In a family tenement some squabbles. They learnt Edek and Hanka weren't a marriage anymore, but then why they still slept together. Edek retorted:
         - You have nothing to worry about, wait for some days.
         This, in turn, led to new accusations of undermining the spirit and murmurs of communism. Edek riposted - there was nothing to undermine. An older gunnery-sergeant, accommodated on the ground floor on the other side of the courtyard, came up with "the Old Town deserters."
         - We are shedding our blood here, while those deserters are making propaganda.
         Unfortunately, I didn't witness this scene, but the details were reported to me. A verbal duelling heated up between the window where the gunnery sergeant was standing and in the middle of the courtyard, with a silent participation of the majority of residents. Edek riposted instantly instructing the gunnery sergeant that he shouldn't think a finger cut by opening tins to be a blood-shedding for the country, and called him, if he wasn't a coward, to take part in a night-time patrol in Frascati Street. He himself proposed to accompany him there( as he was sent there voluntarily only).Finally he drove the gunnery sergeant to such a state of fury that he, not a youngster anymore, screamed for the whole courtyard something that "with his own body," that "tanks," that "he'll fall dead," that "he won't give in." The public opinion supported the mature age and patriotism and being against youth and cynicism.

(...)

         Germans got to the South of the City Centre as well, and systematically they were bombarding house by house between Three Crosses Square and Marszalkowska Street. Gen. Monter announced coming of help in four-five days' time. They have announced it without any result and still they couldn't believe in it. It seems from the announcement that Germans summoned up their strength so as to do away with the North of the City Centre. As long as the City Centre is fighting, Czerniakow is resting. Unofficial news came that when Powisle had broken down, panic broke up, commanders couldn't organize any defence, took survivors from Starowka and then they stopped Germans that crossed Nowy Swiat.

(...)

         Edek visited "Zoska" battalion everyday, so as to find out any news. We were still suspecting that in the face of coming capitulation of Warsaw, "Radoslaw" instead of laying down their arms, would make their way southwards to the woods and go to Kielce. Somebody from Starowka gave me a spotted cover for a helmet. Local insurgents ready to pay large sums for SS-man army camouflage: blouses, trousers, caps, anything. I hid the cover into the pocket. It'll be of use if I want to confirm my belonging to Home Army.

         The period of "convalescence" finished as Germans with a great impetus attacked Czerniakow, that in the face of conquering Prague (the right-bank Warsaw district) by a Soviet army became the only area through which Insurgents could get in touch with Russians.

(...)

         The cannonade was such as that on the Old Town.

(...)

         I couldn't skip that we hadn't set off earlier- yesterday, or even today the road was empty. I would be in the City Centre and I could watch Czerniakow through binoculars. When the first bombs from "Berta" fell it was obvious whose turn it was then.

(...)

         We ran up the house top floor, on the uneven side of Idzikowskiego Street. The sight was similar to this one from yesterday early evening, with the difference that, instead of house-walls on Saska Kepa, low standing sun was pinking the river.
         In normal times, when walking the dog in the morning, one wouldn't pay attention to leaves glistening in the tree-crowns, a small fog, hovering over water and waves glittering. Calmness in the nature was stressed by sparse, muffled shots.
         Suddenly the storm has broken and doesn't cease even for a moment. Communication breaks down. Everyone has pressed themselves somewhere and doesn't move. A thud, and a thud only. Sometimes the name is said: Maczna. The rest of Czerniakow disappears from the map. They are going to Maczna, somebody sneaked through to Maczna, it's no good at Maczna, it's not so bad at Maczna, it's hard to say what's going on at Maczna. Where is Maczna I am pondering. We are as if on an island. Houses on Zagorna Street from the number sixteen to ten have connections through cellars, but then to get to smaller numbers and up Vistula, it's necessary to run across Idzikowskiego Street. The tenement at Zagorna Street 16 on the corner of Czerniakowska is the most exposed street to gunfire, so we don't go there at all. The whole day we spend with civilians and injured insurgents in the cellar, between fourteen and ten, not even leaning out onto the ground floor.

(...)

         We decided to join "Radoslaw" units that the previous day had garrisoned blocks at Wilanowska Street and Okrag Street.

         "Radoslav" units were distant for only about 200-300 metres, but the road had to be cleared under gunfire, and it meant that life would be too short to cover that distance...

(...)

         We were isolated on the small island of ruins.
         The wall started chipping off in the middle of us and we had to squeeze up in a few-step space. The brick was crushing nearby, I could reach with my hand. I was thinking... this is a death, death, death. The sound of this word like an echo endlessly reverberated inside of my head. So many times had the bullets pinched the wall beside me, but never did I start to reflect on it. Civilians didn't take their eyes off me, as I was standing just around the corner of a place where bursts of shots hit again and again. They didn't understand that most of them should be afraid of a grenade launcher. A fifteen-year-old boy addressed an older, polite gentleman using the familiar form and I realized everybody used it. Hi!
         Rubble crunched and a she-liaison officer or rather a woman-liaison officer, more or less thirty years old, covered in dust from top to toe. We stood around her in a semi-circle. She stopped here on the way from Wilanowska to Zagorna so as to get some machine gunfire and she had to crawl. Since the escape from Zagorna she'd been our first contact with the world. She spoke slowly with a gentle Czarnikau drawl. Not often were liaison officers seen, at such an age, and I thought she carried important reports. Civilians showered her with questions.
         - On Wilanowska it's good, generally the position is good- she answered.
         I looked at her carefully. It's not the words, but her mood that was deceiving. I guessed she belonged to people for whom life meant less than Truth whose servants they were. Never could I understand them. To die by oneself is less terrifying when together with them. Quickly she assuaged the civilians' fear. It was seen how they relaxed when listening. Their voices sounded different, they didn't address themselves using familiar forms anymore, but started using formal ones. One needed to display an enormous fortitude in order to lie perfectly well in such a situation. I knew she was lying. I didn't know to what extent. I believed her and didn't believe her and that effort not to be deceived tensed my nerves even more. She was advised not to go any further. Having thoroughly asked about the area configuration she calmed us down:
         - Nothing will happen. Bullets have no effect on me. And she ran up to Zagorna. We listened whether they didn't shoot at her, but it was no way of finding that out in the rattle. Hardly did she disappear I felt that I missed this amazing woman. Others probably reacted the same way to her walking away, judging from the fact they had strongly advised her to stay. As a result, her short stay intensified my fear, as if I had seen a herald of misfortune that assumed the form of an angel.

         In the upheaval, the author loses his contact with Edek, Hanka and Witold. Clearing another metres under gunfire, he finds some shelter in a small hole in the ground dug by one of incidentally met insurgents. The shelter is two square metres in area. There are staying three people and the author.

(...)

         A dense, uneven fire of machine gun didn't stop, blurred like everything I heard. Either it got closer or my eardrums retrieved suppleness with the quietness setting in. I recognized hand grenades. It could only mean one thing, that the infantry moved into the assault. Then I heard distinctly- somebody was screaming and screaming. This made me think an awful suspicion. I couldn't distinguish the words. I looked at Adamczyk - the dead bodies didn't look so horrifying. I saw a net of small veins on thin, white, parchment ears; in the middle of face there was a dry, pointed nose that stood out like a white beak.
         - Germans? - I whispered.
         He nodded assent. His whole face turned white. We drew the lid. I was deluding myself knowing that I was deluding myself that Roman, who wore Wehrmacht uniform, would be thought to be an owner of the helmet, and the three of us wouldn't be executed. Adamczyk took out a wallet and started rummaging in it hurriedly he found a Home Army card, he folded it many times and pressed into a gap between the planks. German voices were coming from the gap, from where we had run together with Roman. So Germans were on both sides of the square. They would come to the lid right away. I felt uneasy in my chest, as if I had breathed in drawing pins. Roman untied the bundle, a gift from a fiancée, he took out a three-fourth-litre bottle of cacao chois, he took some sips and gave it to me. I took a sip remembering then not to drink the whole portion at once and I handed it to Adamczyk. He then lifted the head so that the bottom of the bottle touched the lid, and he drank and drank; a protruding Adam's apple got up and fell down on a thick neck rhythmically like a piston. I thought he was very unfriendly and drank this I hadn't drunk up, my ration. The boy got the least portion. I was looking at my hands if they didn't tremble. The whole body under the shin was in a constant motion, my face got stiffened, lips got swollen. Although it calmed down, every now and then bursts of machine gun got up and Lord could only know if they were still shooting or if they were executing. Hearing the steps, I stared at the faces to guess whether they heard as well. Would they shoot through the lid thinking we were armed, or they would move it first aside? "How to get rid of the helmet," I was thinking frantically as if it made any difference. Keep it under the knees, sit on it. Soon all my thoughts stopped flowing. All that remained was hearing and steps awaiting. The time stood still, though both seconds and minutes were passing. Nothing could happen now in my life between the present moment and the moment when the lid kicked with a shoe would move aside and the sun would shine above my head for the last time. Then I was scared that one of my companions would jump out and start screaming, then deceived by the quietness I suspected that the truce had taken place.
         Why do we kill one another? I'll go out to Germans and tell them we should be brothers...brothers for eternity... I was translating this into German.. .wir sollen bruder sein... enough of war... nie wieder Krieg... nie wieder Krig... wir sollen bruder sein - we would sit around the fire... I'd tell them about the Passage, the Arsenal... about Wlad, and Szofer.
         Then I thought that I heard steps. The whole body of mine was as if made up of tiny springs or full glass dust, everything vibrating and incessantly stinging. I felt I would be vomiting to the end of my life. Adamczyk will speak German, get rescued, as it's a boy too young to be executed. It darkened in the manhole. Apparently, we were in the shadow.

An aerial photograph of the fighting areas on Czerniakow.
Number "1" pinpoints the place where the author sheltered himself from the gunfire.
Number "2" pinpoints a place where the author wished to get to - this is a building at Okrag 2 Street.

(...)

         Crawling at night at Germans' nose, the author finally managed to reach the desirable address: Okrag 2. In this building there were staying, known for valour and courage, Insurgents from "Radoslav" grouping. It turned out soon that Berling's soldiers had reached it as well. Berling - he was a commander of Polish armies formed by the government of Polish communists under Moscow surveillance. In such conditions, it seemed the situation was under control- Russians finally made up their minds and gave Insurgents their support.

(...)

         Sometimes when I was really close to Germans, I thought that even if they hadn't heard my breathing, heart-beating still they would have seized my thoughts and found me.

(...)

         Bread was being distributed among soldiers and so I got it as well. I hadn't eaten since the conversation with Zabawa. Then they gave a little bit of sago. He, who hosted me, introduced himself as a platoon sergeant Tur, a commander of the local unit, or something broken up and not fully dressed. He gave me to understand that I could be enrolled for his sub-unit, if I was a real insurgent. Having heard some pieces about the Arsenal he apparently had no doubts. Nevertheless I was unwilling to get entangled into a situation where somebody considered himself to be entitled to give orders to me, or to accuse me of desertion if possibly I separated myself from the unit. In this regard my answer was non-committal and positive as obtaining food was taken into consideration by me. The most relevant was, to say it vividly, to sit by the fire, chewing on bones, spitting into the flames and giving advice. I wasn't going to come back to the status of soldier, who was shedding blood, on the other hand then, I thought that never ever in my civilian life would I become a normal person.
         The platoon sergeant Tur - may he rest in peace, though I didn't see the body in person - caused more liking than respect. Past his prime, kind-hearted, chubby, sculpted by nature to be the magazine chief and probably unexpectedly for he himself he got entangled with the very line. I don't think he'd have survived. I thought that when the fear paralysed his senses he would forget to take off the white and red band.

(...)

         The house at Okrag 2 Street seemed to be a solid edifice and it was almost a fortress as the unit was made of insurgents from "Zoska" battalion, supported with Russian automatic pistols and Berling armour piercing rifles...
         The house was gently shaking from the impact of bullets shot at the wall from the side of Wilanowska Street. An incessant rattle of machine gun from many barrels at the same time was dominating. Every now and then "Radoslaw" insurgents were brought with shots in heads. Graves weren't dug anymore as stretcher carriers put bodies on the other side of the courtyard sneaking quickly up onto the landing.

a house at Okrag 2 Street (after fights)
in the bottom right-hand corner - a house gate, where the author was on guard (a contemporary photograph)

(...)

         For some time, the author took part in the defence of the building at Okrag 2 Street. In the end, the building is taken by Germans. The author becomes a castaway looking for means of crossing Vistula.

(...)

         Through ruins I turned right, turned left and got onto an oblong courtyard where some canoes were lying. I had been here before. On the right, a high top wall and a burnt house attached to it, garages on the left, directly opposite a one-storey outhouse with a gate in the middle, through which a river was seen. Too bright to set out on the water.
         I wasted two nights at Wilanowska. I thought: I'll choose a canoe in the best condition and put it aside, I'll wait for the darkness falling and I'll paddle to the other bank. I examined the canoes, some of them shot, but there were some in quite a good condition.
         Near garages there were grenade launchers. I embarked on a discussion with their service. I wanted to check the easiness of shooting but the ammunition had already run out. I approached a soldier who spoke Polish and asked out about his front experiences. I did it not only because of curiosity, that was getting back whenever I regained my good humour, but also to keep up the fighting spirit of soldiers. A Berling-man said he had served for a long time on the front, but nowhere had been so tough as it was here.
         - Where had you been? - I asked.
         He enumerated some places in the Central Russia, that apparently had an exceptional reputation in the Soviet Army. One of them was even popular to me with heavy fights. I expressed my surprise, partly true, so as to encourage him in further confessions.
         - It's worse here than in Stalingrad- he observed.
         I was very flattered by it. "If they had ever experienced Starowka," I thought. A surprise must have been seen on my face.
         "You don't believe?... We've got one that was in Stalingrad." He called for the soldier, who on the other side of the courtyard was messing around with the radio station:
         - Grisha!- Gdie huże, zdieś ili w Stalingradie? (What's worse this one here or Stalingrad?)
         - Zdieś huże!

(...)

         The canoes turned out to be useless. In the meantime, the majority of "Radoslaw" units made their way through the canals to Mokotow. The main lines of resistance were made of some buildings conquered by Insurgents. The author is in one of them.

(...)

         Suddenly I saw Wis II (there were two Wises at Lis; I thought both of them were buried in the Passage). A seventeen-year-old boy, quiet, shy, dainty. Lately, on Starowka, he had had his arm in a sling. Now he was going down the wide stairs, gently treading, self-confident, calm, in the army camouflage, bare-headed, chestnut hair spread on the temples, wrapped around with a machine gun strap.
         - Wis! - I yelled. He looked and recognized me in spite of the spring coat.
         - Wis! Wis! - I wanted to say something to him.
         And I wanted to warn him, like an old man to a son, and I was proud of him. I had a lump in my throat. I hadn't touched the ground floor with a foot yet when we got separated with Berling-men. A non-commissioned officer jumped up to him.
         - Bravo, bravo, six are lying - he cried.
         Hardly did the corner of his lips move. The cannonade intensified. Vis got back on the ground floor, I went downstairs to the cellar. I felt like a scumbag, I was short of courage to take him by the hand and go together upstairs. Didn't he understand it was over?
         The most frightening was the belief, that it was only me who knew the truth that there was no hope for us. This way or another... the chop. Everyone else seemed to rely on something, that things would work out, that boats, that Russians, that not everyone would be shot. I had to rely on something as well, otherwise I'd have asked for a Russian automatic pistol. And what would it matter to me? To die anonymously with a gun in the hand, instead of being anonymously shot in the nape of my neck, to be burnt alive anonymously, to drown anonymously. All that mattered was not to die in the nearby hour and to live minute by minute. Having survived from the sunset meant getting the immortality, as if the night had lasted forever.

(...)

         The author is now on a semi-uncovered area, that gave a slight shelter from gunfire. It's night and he's making his plans for getting out of Czerniakow.

(...)

         Uneasiness was replaced by the flow of creative energy. An insurgent had a revolver and demanded that I should get gun as well. Otherwise he refused to move on. My quest didn't yield any results. It's true I had found a Russian automatic pistol, and I remembered during a day where it was, but unfortunately damaged and without ammunition. I didn't know to whom I should turn for gun. When I asked about it some insurgents, they looked at me as if I'd been a madman. On Wilanowska 5, there were more guns than those trained and willing to use them. I thought, here however, there was neither ammunition nor volunteers.
         News was received that boats were coming up.
         Commotion broke out. In spite of warnings not to go out onto the bank too early, those impatient were skipping out one by one. The crowd was ballooning on the courtyard. More and more injured were piled up near the wall. I lost sight of an insurgent, my failed companion for the bridge expedition. I decided that the uncovered area between Solec and Vistula I wouldn't step on. Standing in the doorway from the gate to the kitchen I looked at a string of people passing by, almost rubbing against me. They were emerging from the twilit courtyard, went through the gate lighted and heated up by the flames and disappeared in the darkness. What was left that they didn't carry? Canoes, boats, planks, a bundle of wood, bicycle inner tubes wrapped around naked chests. Girls supported the limping; men carried the injured on the stretchers, on the door. More and more armed people were going down to the river. Something was screaming inside of me... don't go, you'll die, don't leave me alone. In the light of fire every now and then barrels were the last to flare up, eagles with a crown and without it, clasps of hairdressers' belts, clasps with an inscription "Gott mit uns."
         I recognized a gunner Slaw, one of the five that survived from Lis company, a friend from a gun crew of 20mm small cannons. Together, with two others he was carrying a canoe. He was as surprised as I, and repeated many times:
         - Krok, Krok what are you doing here?
         - I am by myself... do you have water? - I asked.
         Slaw handed to me a canteen. I took a large gulp.
         - Drink, drink - Slav said - we've already been on the bank.
         When we were standing blocking the passage, others were passing us, squeezing between the canoe and the wall, catching on us, jostling. It was impossible to get back against the tide on the courtyard.
         - Go with us, and be the fourth - Slav proposed.
         - One will sit on the prow, the other one at the back. I have examined the canoe.- It's a capsize, and it won't carry three people. They had a saucepan for drawing water.
         - No, I am not going .In spite of the refusal they were still waiting as if I had been hesitating.
         - Have you got anything to eat? - I asked. He handed to me a lump of sugar.
         - I am not going - I repeated.
         They took up the canoe and went into darkness. That failed companion of the bridge expedition came to my mind. I went on quest for him. During the day it was easy to mistake people, to say nothing about recognizing them now. I came close to those standing in small groups. I looked into the faces, this one and that one eyed me up and down, not knowing what I meant. Probably if the times had been different more than one would have grunted or told me off. I went round the courtyard and garages. I thought that I was the only one roaming alone, while everybody else had somebody, a companion, a friend. Far from the flames insurgents were taking off German uniforms, blinking with naked bodies opposite fire. Somebody appeared in trunks only, wrapped around with a chain of bottles and rattling dashed in the darkness towards the river. It began to empty. The motion gradually was ceasing and torpor invaded the gate, the courtyard and the outhouse. But from Vistula voices were coming. At one time individual, at another time muffled, gradually braver, turning into the hubbub. From time to time I could even distinguish words.
         - There's no room.
         Somebody howled:
         - Quieee...t, quiet, Germans will hear.
         I was sitting in the gate keeping my eyes fixed on the invisible Saska Kepa. Judging from the increasing noise, the expedition didn't go smooth. Everybody knows what's going on in such a situation. Too many people get on, the boat makes water, goes under, everybody gets off, pouring water out, then gets on again, the boat makes water...
         Meanwhile good people collected the injured from the courtyard and the adjoining ruins and took them to the gate that they didn't lie in the open air.
         And happened this that had to happen. Something whistled above and salvoes exploded, one by one. Incessantly the grenade launchers were flying. Sparks were flickering diagonally opposite the gate exit for Solec and Vistula. It was flashing in the darkness. I hid on a narrow area between a dying-down multi-storey house and a one-storey outhouse. On the bank it was seething and seething when it calmed down, just some people returned.
         I went out on the courtyard in front of the garages. It was empty there, dim, reddish, as if a red moon was shining through the clouds. In the morning Germans will burst inside after a short shooting, the resistance will break down and the death by firing will start. How to position myself far away from soldiers, together with civilians. The best would be to stay among some women and children and a few not longer young men. To find a sheltered place, closest to Germans. When at dawn, they move forward, they'll force us out before the fighting start, before they infuriate. To hide far away from Wilanovska 5 and Solec 53,where lots of the injured and healthy insurgents, Berling-men and castaways in German uniforms were present. I went round the courtyard examining every nook and cranny. Between the top wall of the burnt-out multi-storey house with windows out on the garages and a top wall of the adjoining ruin directed in the opposite to the courtyard Solec 51, I discovered a metre wide crack. It was enough far away from Wilanowska 5,but too close to the outhouse gate.
         The main vice of the crack was, that although it ran almost along the whole length of the courtyard it ended blindly from the west side, where Germans were to come from. The only exit was on the east side, some steps from the gate. Such landform allowed Germans to force civilians out from the crack and insurgents from the outhouse and in the commotion shoot everybody dead. They couldn't take us from the crack as long as they hadn't seized the outhouse. It undermined the whole concept that was about getting into Germans' hands in the morning, before the fight started, separately from the soldiers in the outhouse. Still I didn't find any appropriate place for a hideout. So I could do nothing else, but make use of the crack and hope that a short distance between the crack and the outhouse would decide about our life.
         I returned to the outhouse and described to the civilians, squeezed on stairs and in the cellar, the crack advantages. I presented the situation as vividly as I could and said what might happen when Germans would enter and see insurgents and lots of scattered uniforms. It was listened to with interest, but, as usual, nobody wanted to move. Finally, one of middle-aged women agreed to see the recommended place. Hardly had she seen it, when she bridled with outrage at me that was bugging people with such ideas.
         Hearing every now and then how good it was at Zagorna I started having doubts whether I did the right thing not going there. Of course nobody knew how to reach that place, as everywhere on the way Germans were hampering the road.

Ryszard Chalupinski " Slaw "

         Getting behind Vistula seemed to be impossible. Staying in the burnt out ruins at the river bank and living the last-as it seems- moments in life is the only thing that remains.

(...)

         Some injured insurgents and Berling-men settled down here. Seldom did anyone say anything.
         I sat down and lowered my legs into a cemented hollow nearby the cellar window so as to warm myself in the stream of a hovering, sweetish, warm air. I gazed at the inside of the cellar. A heap of coke was glowing, though it was getting dark, covered with a net of small, grey veins. A light-blue flame every now and then jumped onto the surface, fluttered and hid itself. Sometimes, it moved along the coke top, as if invisible fingers had been moving over the keyboard. Though I was aware of the fact that behind my back the whole world was found, this that was happening in the cellar, more and more, attracted my attention. Dark walls and the ceiling made a frame of a stage directed at me, in the middle of which flames were cavorting about. A thought came to my mind to remember that dance, that I would describe it one day. Flames were airy, supple, light and contrary. When I expected they'd flutter they were burning evenly. More than one started a pirouette, with a great fervour whirling across the stage, then suddenly it fell in and that was all.
         Looking at it I imagined I would tell the scene to Rysiek, emphasizing it and overestimating, while he would raise his eyebrows above the steel-rimmed glasses, wrinkle his forehead, the chin and would shake his head. It was the way he behaved when in jest he pretended surprise.
         A Berling-soldier crouching behind me shook me.
         - Move back, you'll get asphyxiated.
         I felt moved. Somebody that I'd never met and never would meet, injured himself, took care about my health. On the left side a wounded second-lieutenant, a Berling-man as well, speaking with a borderland drawl slowly and with breaks to a she-liaison officer from "Parasol" with a hand amputated in the wrist. I hadn't noticed it so far...
         It rang a bell with me:
         - You are a heroic youth.
         ... and then I felt an untold happiness... the trembling finished and the inner flame, that useless burnt to ashes, extinguished. I have already considered me myself to be a scrap of cannon fodder, and here somebody, who is waiting for death as well, says that we were a heroic youth. If he says so then he's not afraid of that strange thing called death. He isn't scared because death doesn't exist. As if existed, but it doesn't. Death isn't the way everybody thinks it is, I have suspected it me myself for a long time. Let's hold one another by the hand and go through the death like through the fog. When they shoot and it'll prick in the chest and the world will twinkle, we need to breathe deeply and hold one another by the hand fast… so as not to fall down but go through.

(...)

         Compensating for the body inertia, my mind was constantly galloping in circles. I didn't feel any hatred for Germans, but fear. And maybe everything will turn into a horrible misunderstanding and will be explained somehow? I'll never feel deep resentment towards Germans, if they take me to Reich for eternal labour. I could dig ditches and trenches to the end of my life, under the light-blue sky, in the sun, inhaling a brisk air from dawn till dusk, and sleeping at night. I somebody had asked me whom I wanted to be, where I wanted to live, with whom I would like to make friends I couldn't have answered it.
         That despair took possession of me, why I had sat too long at Okrag Street, why I had lost two nights at Wilanowska Street. I could have chosen the best canoe, I had had time to seal the worst one, wrapped the bicycle inner tubes around my body, hang the bottles on it. Where is Edek, maybe he's alive and is scheming and conniving, he would know how to put himself and friends on the boat.
         That thought came back to better times, to the Passage, but the image of the Passage teeming with life obstructed the view of the Passage deserted. Dark, empty, there are no Germans, under a huge rubble all of them are lying...
         A kitchen. So many motionless figures in the darkness. What are they waiting for? I knew they would kill all of us, I felt, nevertheless, that it was only me that was to stop existing.
         They'll kill me... kill me...
         The word "chop" belonged to another times, when the death was approached in a more swashbuckling way.
         They'll kill me.. kill-me... kill-me... kill-me - kill-me...
         I could comprehend somebody else's death only. As the words "death" and "they'll kill" were constantly repeated in my thoughts I comprehended less, they terrified me more and more.
         I felt I would faint, I was short of air. I pushed my way from the kitchen to the gate and I went onto the courtyard for the last time. Fires had already extinguished, a red gleam was replaced by darkness. Once again I walked around looking for a hideout, in hopes of having overlooked something earlier. Just nearby the gate exit on the right there was a vacant, of a few metres, area fenced off with a log barricade, with the view on Wilanowska Street in Polish hands, and on the houses on the even street-side where, according to my perception, there were Germans.

(...)

         Finally, the author decides to go out to Germans together with a group of civilians. The moment was precisely calculated: Germans haven't started the next work-day yet, they haven't got any killed people, and probably they are in a better mood and won't execute those civil castaways.

(...)

         We were walking slowly, the more slowly the safer, on a no-man's-land, like on the arena, in the rays of raising sun behind the river, in view of four armies- Home Army, Berling's, Russians' and Germans'- waving white towels, pillowcases, duvet covers. Some people had one sheet in each hand. A similar rapture I hadn't experienced since the time when I was in the canal under Krasinsky Palace. Having accustomed myself to the new situation I was looking around, of course, with my eyes only. The exit of Wilanowska stayed at the back long time ago, when I noticed two Germans in the ruins on the left, lying down with a machine gun. Looking ahead they didn't even move when we were passing them. "Well, they are really lying in wait," I got surprised being unaware of the fact that at Vilanovska Street at numbers 2 and 4 there were still Poles. I doubted whether anybody else from our group had noticed Germans as they were so occupied with that energetic waiting. For the first time since the battle started I had dared go through the very centre of the street and in front of invisible Germans', Poles' and Russians' eyes. I became nervous, but I wasn't scared. I thought that after so many years of war Germans weren't so bloodthirsty as in the past, that they got accustomed to it, and they didn't care about killing or not killing. It depended on the time and the way that one could approach them.

a post-war photograph of ruins of the building at Wilanowska 1 Street,
from these surroundings the author went onto the German side.

         The defence of the Cherniakow bridgehead still lasted for two days. In order to emphasize the German soldiers' valour in the Wehrmacht report there was written that the defence of the last building (seen in the picture above) lasted twenty four hours.

         Then from a corner shrine on the right side soldiers piled off; not in feldgrau but in sharp-green uniforms. The police.
         They have been waving hands towards us and in a while we're among them. I am telling from the light-brown insets they are Feldgendarmerie. They look fresh, clean, shaven, relaxed, as if they have just started the war. Happy faces- as the rats are running away so the ship is sinking. Again I'm under occupation.

Jan Kurdwanowski

the selection and the commentaries drawing up: Wojciech Włodarczyk
the final working out: Maciej Janaszek-Seydlitz

translation: Małgorzata Szyszkowska

The whole book is available on-line:Jan Kurdwanowski

Corporal Jan Kurdwanowski pseud. "Krok" "Sosna" grouping "Chrobry I" battalion "Lis" company

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