Spring Will Be Ours (11 page)

New notices went up: all wireless sets were to be handed in to collecting points all over Warsaw. To own a wireless, even to be found listening to one, was punishable by death. It was also punishable by death to go out after curfew. In the long, freezing winter evenings, people were trapped in their bombarded homes; they sat in the dark, eking out candles, isolated and afraid.

Early one morning Anna woke to hear something being smashed. For a few moments, dazed and sleepy, she thought it was a window breaking; then she realized that the sound was coming from right inside the apartment, from the sitting room. She scrambled out of bed, and ran down the corridor. The banging and smashing grew louder; she could hear Jerzy swearing.

‘What on earth –'

Inside the sitting room, she found him with a hammer, sweating. On the floor at his feet lay pieces of Bakelite, brown mesh, wires and glass valves.

‘Jerzy!'

‘If they have it, they have it in pieces,' he said, kicking the mess into a heap. ‘Do they think we're going to let them confiscate
our
wireless, and have them and their fat wives sit listening to it?' He marched out of the room, and came back with a cardboard box. ‘Come on, give me a hand.'

They knelt down and scooped it all into the box. Anna picked up a broken piece from the front, with half of the company name snapped off. Tele – Telefunken, it had been. A German set. They'd all been so pleased when Tata brought it home two years ago. She dropped the piece on to the heap.

‘Right,' said Jerzy. ‘I'm off.'

‘Do be careful,' said Anna, following him to the front door. ‘I mean – don't say anything to upset them.'

‘Oh, but I want to upset them! I'm looking forward to this.' He went out of the door and down the stairs, whistling.

Within weeks, secret listening stations had been set up, monitoring the
^·
broadcasts from London and Paris. The first underground paper,
Polska Z yje
, Poland Alive, began to circulate. Soon, through the underground
komurakats
– news bulletins mimeographed on wafer-thin paper, distributed and instantly destroyed – everyone knew that a Government in Exile had been formed in Paris, under the leadership of President Raczkiewicz and General Sikorski, Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces abroad.

From all over the country, disguised as railway workers and peasant farmers, men travelled south to the frozen Carpathian Mountains and attempted the dangerous and punishing journey across them at night. There were German dog patrols up to forty miles deep into the frontier territory, and escapees were arrested if they were caught, and later sent to Auschwitz. But thousands reached Romania, and from there made the long journey to France, to join the Polish forces.

Those who remained formed themselves into what was to become the most powerful resistance movement in occupied Europe. There was an entire civilian administration, the
Delegatura
, the Government Delegate. Responsible to the Government in Exile, the
Delegatura
secretly ran a judiciary, schools and hospitals – all the functions of the state, ready to assume power as soon as the war was over.

There was, too, an underground military resistance, organized in clandestine cells all over the country. The Union of Armed Struggle, as it was first known, was responsible to General Sikorski in Paris, and directed from Warsaw by Colonel ‘Grot'Rowecki. His deputy was eventually to be General ‘Bór'Komorowski.

‘Anna, Jerzy! Wake up – there's a letter from your father.'

They woke in the kitchen, where they all slept each night on mattresses next to the tall tiled stove. Teresa in her dressing gown, was holding a small grey sealed card.

‘Where's it from?' Jerzy leaned across and peered at the postmark as she sat down beside Anna. ‘Kozielsk … where's that?'

Teresa shook her head. ‘We'll have to look it up.' She carefully slit open the card, and they read:

30.11.39

My darlings,

I am in good health. Write to me often about everything. Are the children going to school? I hug and kiss you with all my heart.

Tomasz

‘He's a prisoner?' asked Anna. She looked again the Russian lettering on the front of the card.

‘Yes – but at least we can write to him now.' Teresa looked suddenly calmer than she had for months. ‘Let's have breakfast.'

They sat at the table in their overcoats. Breakfast was black bread, available only on rations, which Jerzy had queued for an hour to get the day before, and weak ersatz coffee.

‘Disgusting,' he said. ‘What the hell do they make it from?'

Anna swallowed and grimaced. ‘Do you think it's acorns?'

‘It's barley,' said Teresa. ‘Go and get the atlas, Jerzy.'

He returned with it from the sitting room and they pored over Russia, searching for Kozielsk. ‘Oh, here it is,' Teresa said at last. It was deep inside Russia, east of Smoleńsk.

‘What do you think he's doing?' Anna asked. ‘Do you think he really is in good health?'

‘He wouldn't tell us if he wasn't, would he?' Jerzy said.

‘But his writing's quite strong, isn't it?' said Teresa.

‘He won't get a letter from us until next year, now,' Jerzy said, tearing off another hunk of bread. ‘I can't imagine Christmas without him.'

‘I can't imagine Christmas at all,' said Anna.

Last year, at
Wigilia
, they had all gone together to midnight mass. This year, the curfew made that impossible. Wiktoria came to stay with them, and they all went to mass on Christmas Day morning, in a church which had escaped any damage in the bombing.

It was bitterly cold, but the church was packed; the unheated aisles were clouded with breath, and when they knelt to pray the scraping of boots and shoes echoed on the icy stone. A single tall candle burned on the altar, from where the crucifix and all the tapestries had been removed: Anna imagined the priest hiding them somewhere deep in the crypt, perhaps even daring to keep them in his own apartment – anywhere, as long as the Germans could not take them away. Throughout the service people's eyes wandered upwards, to look at the shattered stained-glass windows, roughly patched with pieces of wood. After the mass, and prayers for the souls of those who had died in the siege, the priest said: ‘Let us have a few moments of silent prayer for those dear to us.'

Kneeling between Jerzy and Teresa, Anna clenched her hands.
Please, please let Tata come home to us soon.
She struggled to imagine her father as a prisoner, could not even begin to imagine what his prison might look like. A fortress? A row of huts? Then she had a sudden image of lines and lines of men in heavy coats, stamping up and down in the cold, being shouted at, and she began to cry.
Please look after him.

‘And now,' the priest was saying quietly, ‘perhaps you would all like to join me in the National Anthem.' Still kneeling, they began to whisper:

‘Poland is not yet lost,
As long as we are alive,
We will take back with our sabre
What the enemy have taken from us …'

At the end, when they slowly stood up again, almost everyone was crying.

‘Did you pray for Tata?' Jerzy asked as they came out, stiff with cold, on to the steps.

‘Sort of,' said Anna. ‘Did you?'

‘I tried. I don't know if … if I really can believe any more.'

On the corner of the street a group of German soldiers was watching the congregation come out, blowing into their hands.

‘Hope they freeze to death,' he said loudly.

Teresa and Wiktoria came up behind them. ‘Come on, children, quickly.'

By January, they had all lost so much weight that their clothes hung loosely and hunger and the monotonous diet were fraying their nerves. Rationing had been introduced two weeks before Christmas, but there was little to buy with their cards. There was no fruit, few vegetables, only potatoes, potatoes. Teresa made potato soup, baked potatoes, potato cutlets and
placki
– potato cakes fried in oil, for there was no butter, though later the Germans introduced margarine. There were pulses, there was pasta; they ate endless bowls of soup. Each day they took it in turns to queue for the coarse dark bread which was now the only loaf you could buy.

‘It makes you fart,' said Jerzy. ‘Only the Nazis could make bread that makes you fart.'

Occasionally they were able to get
słonina
from the butcher – pieces of salted bacon fat with the rind still on, and that did add flavour to the soups and dumplings. Anna dreamed of oranges, and juicy apples. She was getting spots. Restless and uneasy, she longed to be back at school, but even by February the gates were still closed.

In the first week of March, they had a visitor.

It was still bitterly cold, and they still spent most of their time in the kitchen. This morning they were using the last of the coal, the stove was almost out, and it wasn't much warmer in here than in the sitting room, where the windows even now were partly boarded up. Putty and glass were like gold now, impossible to find except on the black market, and barely affordable then. Jerzy was in the sitting room, practising half-heartedly in the semi-darkness, from the kitchen, where she and Teresa were peeling potatoes, Anna heard the doorbell ring once, sharply, and Jerzy break off, and go to answer it. She looked at Teresa, who pursed her lips, shrugging.

‘I'd better go and see.'

Anna followed her out, and found her headmistress standing in the hall. She was panting a little beneath her coat and scarf; wet snow dripped from her boots.

‘Pani Jawicz!' Anna stood uncertainly, then hurried across to her. If Pani Jawicz were here, stout and ordinary, she could be ordinary again. Perhaps school
was
starting – thank God. The boredom, the dreariness, of being shut up here!

Teresa was offering to take her coat, but it was a gesture only.

‘Thank you, my dear, but I'll keep it on, this cold is terrible.' She smiled at Anna's eager face. ‘How are you all managing?' She followed Jerzy down the corridor to the kitchen, where they all sat round the table like old friends. ‘Ah, that's better. Now tell me – have you any news of the doctor?'

They told her about the postcard, the few lines.

‘We write to him,' said Anna. ‘I write all the time, to this Kozielsk, but he never writes back.'

Jerzy got up and riddled the stove.

‘Tch, tch, tch.' Pani Jawicz was shaking her head. ‘Such a good man, and you are not alone, my dears, we have many, many pupils in the same situation, waiting for news from their fathers.' She leaned across the table and patted Anna's hand. ‘You need something to take your minds off it, and besides, we cannot let you all sit about, learning nothing!'

Anna smiled, feeling better than she had for months. ‘Is school opening up again?'

‘Not … exactly. You don't know what's happened to the schools?'

‘What? What's happening?' Behind her, Jerzy had stopped raking the few remaining coals. He came over, and pulled out a chair.

‘They have been permanently closed,' said Pani Jawicz. ‘In the primary schools, the German “authorities”' – she pulled a face at the word –‘have forbidden the teaching of anything except arithmetic and the German language. As for the
gimnazium
and
liceum
– pupils of secondary age are to learn a trade, nothing more. You should be working towards your exams, both of you, but there is no question of your going back to school for that.' She paused. ‘May I ask what you were reading last summer?'

Jerzy and Anna looked at each other. ‘Tata was reading us short stories by Sienkiewicz,' Anna said slowly. ‘When we were on holiday. And I was reading
A Tale of Two Cities.'

‘And did you finish them?'

‘No.' The Sienkiewicz volume must still be somewhere in Tata's study – perhaps it had never been unpacked from his bag.

‘That's a pity,' said Pani Jawicz, ‘because from now on they are banned.'

‘Banned?'

‘Sienkiewicz is banned. Mickiewicz is banned. You may take it that all Polish authors – and, I expect, all English ones, too – are now strictly forbidden. Almost all the textbooks at school have been impounded. It is forbidden to display pictures of any national hero, either – last week I spent the day in school taking down all the pictures: Chopin, Marie-Curie, Piłsudski, Paderewski, … I had to take down the map of Poland, too – you remember that large one in the assembly hall?'

‘Yes.' Anna had sat underneath it scores of times. She thought of it being taken down, and handed over to some Nazi bureaucrat, leaving a dusty oblong on the wall. There would be shapes like that all through the school – the walls were filled with pictures from Polish history.

‘And naturally,' said Pani Jawicz, ‘I had to take down the flag behind the dais.'

‘You gave it to them?'

‘I … put it away,' she said, with an almost imperceptible smile. ‘So – you understand the situation. Education – Polish education – has been crushed. Officially, Anna, you may train as dressmaker. Or perhaps a cook. You would like that?'

She slowly shook her head, feeling a great lump in her throat.

‘And you, Jerzy –' Pani Jawicz turned to him. ‘An electrician? A plumber? A mechanic?'

He shrugged, looking at the tablecloth.

‘They have closed the universities, the medical schools, the academies,' Pani Jawicz said bitterly. ‘In Kraków, we understand, the professors have been imprisoned, perhaps even –' She broke off. ‘So. You work, or you train for a trade. However – Jerzy, please, come and sit down, my dear, I haven't come only to bring bad news.' She lowered her voice as he came over and pulled out a chair. ‘Naturally, we are not putting up with this. We are setting up a network of schools – TON, we are calling it: Tajna Organizacja Nanczycielstwa, the Secret Schooling Organization, responsible to the Education Department of the Delegatura. All our staff are joining, so you will have the same teachers, Anna, for the same subjects – Pani Sokołowa for Latin, and so on – but you will be taught in their own homes. You will study in a small group, a
komplet
of perhaps five or six girls, and you will go to a different address each time, and arrive one by one. You understand why? You understand that you must be absolutely scrupulous in never discussing it, where you are to meet next, or who with, except in the teacher's house?'