Spring Will Be Ours (15 page)

‘Sssh! There.' With the slightest gesture he indicated another poster, across the street, another warning: any dealers in weapons whose activities were not known to the police would be regarded as saboteurs, and ‘treated with the greatest severity'. At the bottom, scrawled in black paint, she saw the rough outline of two letters, PW, joined to form a kind of anchor:

‘See it?' Jerzy asked under his breath. ‘The anchor?'

‘Yes,' Anna whispered. Whispering on a crowded street, in broad daylight! ‘What –'

‘
Polska Walcząca
,' he said, his lips scarcely moving. ‘Fighting Poland. Now come on, quick, for God's sake stop looking at it.'

They hurried to catch up with Teresa, trying to ignore the stony faces of the next patrol, as if it were nothing to walk past them, and nothing that they should be there.

Anna slipped her arm through Teresa's. ‘I'm sorry.'

Teresa's face was expressionless. ‘It's all right.' Two bright spots of colour burned on her cheeks.

‘No it isn't. I'm really sorry.'

‘Let's just forget about it, we're almost there.'

They turned into Wiktoria's apartment block and climbed the stairs. At the top, they all, as if bidden by a conductor, let out a great sigh of relief, and then they burst out laughing.

‘But it's dreadful,' said Anna shakily, wiping her eyes. ‘Only to feel safe up here. It's like, it's like …'

‘It's like living under occupation,' Teresa said simply, and rang the doorbell.

Wiktoria opened the door and fell upon them, hurrying them inside. She took their coats, exclaiming, patting Anna's cheeks.

‘Child, how thin you are!'

‘You too, Aunt,' said Anna, but although her clothes hung from her, and her face was pinched, Wiktoria's morale had clearly recovered since the first shock of the occupation.

In the kitchen they found the table laid with brown bread, not black, and a pie which smelt deliciously of bacon; dishes of potatoes, carrots and swede were on the stove; there was a bowl of yellow apples.

‘Hey!' Jerzy sat down and pulled the breadboard towards him.

‘Jerzy …' Teresa said mildly, but Wiktoria put a hand on her arm.

‘Let him, let him, poor boy – I made it for you all.'

‘Your contacts must be good ones,' Teresa said dryly.

Wiktoria smiled. ‘I have excellent friends, now – occasionally it's possible to stretch the ration book a little. Or even make a new one…'

‘What?' Jerzy mumbled through a mouthful. ‘Are they forging, now?'

‘Help yourselves,' said Wiktoria, putting the hot dishes on the table, ‘and don't ask foolish questions.'

‘But who are your friends, Aunt?' Anna asked, plunging her fork into the steaming pie.

Wiktoria spread her hands. ‘The peasants are smuggling in fruit and vegetables, sometimes even eggs. It's getting more dangerous, but so far our exchanges have not been discovered. And I have friends … in one or two shops they can produce a little from under the counter from time to time.'

‘Or forge ration books,' said Jerzy. ‘Good for you, Aunt, this is the best meal I've eaten for months.'

‘I'm glad you're enjoying it. Teresa, my dear, have some more – you've had too many sleepless nights, I can see. You need to eat all you can.'

‘I've stopped feeling hungry.'

‘Nonsense.'

They stayed the night with Wiktoria, and next morning she and Teresa went out early together, on a shopping expedition.

‘Come with me,' said Jerzy, when the door of the apartment had closed.

‘Where?' Anna was eating her third slice of toast. With homemade beetroot jam – it wasn't so bad, but the idea of it was extraordinary.

Outside, Hoz
^·
a was still misty and grey, the cracked pavements damp. They hurried, shivering a little, down to the last intersection and turned right, walking until they came again to the broad main thoroughfare of Jerozolimskie Avenue, already crowded. It seemed as if the whole of Poland had come to Warsaw, trying to scratch a living. They crossed over, and a few streets later Jerzy said: ‘Do you want to walk, or wait for a tram?'

‘I don't want to go in a tram, it makes me too angry. Where are we going?'

‘I'll show you.'

They walked on and on. After a time, Anna realized that they were approaching the Jewish quarter and, suddenly, that almost everyone in the street, which had become more and more crowded, was moving in the same direction, and that almost all of them were Jews.

In caps and shirtsleeves, or threadbare coats, the men were trundling handcarts, piled with mattresses and chairs. Bearded Hassidic men and rabbis in long gaberdines and dark hats were among the crowd; women in headscarves and cardigans held white-faced children by the hand, and carried bundles. Some of the little boys, each carrying a chair, wore caps and earlocks, many looked simply like some of the Polish children they'd seen in the streets yesterday, but even more undernourished, their clothes patched, holes gaping in their boots and shoes. Everyone wore an armband, white, with a blue star.

They turned into a narrow street. Pressed back on to the pavement, Anna and Jerzy watched the river of Jews move slowly on, through a wooden gate set in a high brick wall mounted with jagged glass and ugly great rolls of barbed wire.

‘This is the place?' Anna whispered. ‘The ghetto?'

‘Yes.'

At the gate stood armed Nazi and Polish police, and they could also see Jewish police, in a different uniform, wearing armbands; their belts bulged with truncheons. At intervals along the wall there were wooden watchtowers: craning her neck up at the nearest, Anna could see two Nazi-uniformed guards inside. Both had machine guns, trained on the slowly moving crowd.

Through the open gate she could see that the great mass of people already inside was simply milling about, still carrying their few possessions, their bundles of clothes or rolls of bedding, their chairs – walking up and down the narrow streets, lined with tenements, looking, it was obvious, for somewhere to stay. But the ghetto was no size at all! And there were hundreds still moving through the gate, hundreds more behind them, there must be thousand upon thousand, hundreds of thousands … What were they all going to do in there? How were they going to be fed? Among the crowd pacing up and down, looking into doorways, she could see that some were quite well dressed, carrying suitcases, women in furs and high heels, men in good suits and soft hats. It wasn't just the Hassidic Jews from the old quarter, then, it really was every Jew in Warsaw, it must be, from professors to cleaners, every single one swept up like dirt, and pushed inside the walls.

‘Look down there!' Jerzy hissed, and he pointed to a corner of a side street. A uniformed Nazi was crouched behind a movie camera.

‘I'm frightened,' said Anna. ‘I'm frightened! For God's sake let's go.'

They turned and made their way back, pushing their way through the crowd, past the rattling carts, the silent families.

Throughout the spring of the following year, 1941, there was a continuous stream of German traffic across southern Poland, and some through the streets and stations of Warsaw. Tanks, troops, armoured vehicles all moved across the bridges over the Vistula, making their way east, towards the river Bug, the border with Russia agreed under the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. In Praga, from their sitting room windows, Jerzy, Teresa and Anna watched and speculated.

Then, in late summer, every newsboy was suddenly calling out that in June the Germans had crossed the river Bug, and attacked Russia. The Pact was broken; the headlines in the
Nowy Kurier
were triumphant. Now, new posters appeared: anti-Soviet slogans plastered the walls.

‘But what's going to happen to all the Polish prisoners?' Anna asked in
komplety.
‘All those officers taken by the Russians? What's going to happen to my father?'

‘And mine,' said Natalia, twisting her hands.

‘And my husband,' said Pani Sokołowa, whose bedroom now held a cot for baby Adela. She sat at the table with her glass of tea and shook her head. ‘We can only keep hoping. No one has heard any more? Not a single card?'

‘Nothing,' said Natalia.

‘Nothing,' said Anna, remembering
retour – parti
stamped on each of the bundle of letters sent back from Kozielsk. Natalia's mother had had a bundle like that, too.
Parti … parti
… Where had they all gone?

‘I believe there are a quarter of a million missing prisoners,' said Pani Sokołowa. ‘That's what Pani Jawicz tells me, from the latest bulletins …'

On a darkening afternoon, early in December, Anna and Jerzy were struggling to get the kitchen stove alight with a new firebrick. Teresa had been out since the morning, queueing across the river for cooking oil.

‘I think that's it,' Anna said at last, and they both coughed as threads of acrid smoke escaped through a gap in the tiles.

‘Damn thing,' Jerzy said irritably, and went to wring out a cloth in the sink. He pressed it over the gap, and there was a hissing from inside the stove.

‘If you put it out now,' said Anna, ‘I'll scream.'

‘Oh, shut up.'

The door of the apartment banged, and Teresa came running down the corridor. ‘They're being released! There's an amnesty – they're being released!'

‘What?' They swung round, and Teresa danced in to the kitchen.

‘The prisoners in Russia! Everyone's been whispering about it in the queue. The Poles are being released to fight the Nazis!'

‘Oh, my God,' said Anna. ‘Are they coming home? Is Tata coming home?'

‘I don't know – no one seems to know yet. But at least we should hear something from him, shouldn't we?'

‘If he's home for Christmas …' said Jerzy.

‘For Christmas!' said Anna. ‘Oh, wouldn't that be wonderful?'

They hugged each other, they hugged Teresa, jumping up and down until a loose floorboard cracked. Jerzy spent the whole evening mending it, and then every cracked or broken window frame in the apartment, humming.

By Christmas, hundreds of thousands had been released under Stalin's amnesty. They were formed into an army under the command of General Anders, himself released from solitary confinement. In prison, he had been flogged and half-starved; now he formed his men into the Polish Second Corps, responsible to the Polish Government in London. Since their capture in 1939, these men had been held in freezing labour camps, taken out to work as roadbuilders in the snow. Their fingers and toes dropped off from frostbite; they had seen thousands of their fellow prisoners die in these camps. Now they, the survivors, began the long icy trek out of Russia, towards the Middle East. Thousands more perished on the journey. Those who struggled through eventually formed the Polish forces in Palestine, and later, under British command, took part in Allied Forces fighting in Egypt and Italy.

By Christmas, the Polish underground press had still not a word to report on what had happened to any of the men in the three particular Russian camps where thousands of Reserve Officers and priests had been held: 4,500 in Kozielsk, 3,900 in Starobielsk, almost 6,500 in Ostaszków.

As the new year opened, Anna and Jerzy had still heard nothing from their father. The underground bulletins, so Pani Sokołowa told the girls in December, did report that General Sikorski had flown from London to Moscow, and in a meeting with Stalin had demanded that he explain where the missing men were now held. He was given no answer. Perhaps, Stalin suggested, the fifteen thousand had escaped, and walked the thousands of miles to Manchuria. Why should they do that? He didn't know. How could they do that? He shrugged. Other than that, he had no idea, though inquiries would certainly be made.

The
burka
hung on the back of the surgery door. It was heavy and very warm, a thick, rough brown fabric with a soft woollen lining; Tomasz had had it for years, always wore it to visit his country patients in the winter. Teresa pressed her face against it for a moment, then carefully lifted it from the hanger and went out, closing the door behind her. She did not like to stay in the surgery for long.

In the sitting room she spread the coat over the table, examining the seams, and with difficulty, because of the weight, turned it inside out and examined them again. She had been right: it would make two coats quite adequately, even elegantly, the heavy outer fabric for Jerzy, the beige lining for Anna, who had left for
komplety
shivering in her worn school coat, now much too small.

Could she do it herself? It was really a job for a professional dressmaker, but she had been sewing clothes for the children for years, she should be able to manage. She went into the ice-cold bedroom, where her needlework box stood on the chest of drawers; an oblong of light, caught between two boarded window panes, lay across the bed; she sank down suddenly and put her head in her hands. Was he thinking about her, now? Was he able to think? Had he loved her at all? Was it an act of apostasy not to keep the coat for his return?

It was bitter in here; Teresa shivered, coughing. Then she got up, and took her sewing box into the kitchen. She took out her scissors, made the first cuts in the coat, and ripped the seams apart.

In the spring of 1942, two German officers came to visit the apartment. They were formal, remote, barely looking Teresa in the eye as they asked to be conducted round, and although the family had known for a week that they were coming, and why, it felt quite shocking to have them there. They went without comment from room to room, indifferent eyes glancing at pictures, at bookshelves, into bedrooms. At the end of the corridor one of the men clicked open the door to the surgery. Anna watched him appraise its size, the generous oak desk and the couch, the fresh green leaves of the chestnut tree at the window, and then he nodded to his companion and she knew that they had lost their home.