Spring Will Be Ours (19 page)

Over the next few weeks, Anna and the family learned that in London General Sikorski had demanded an international Red Cross investigation, and that Stalin had angrily refused, calling the demand an insult: the bullets found in the skulls of the murdered men were German! Within a day, he had severed diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in Exile. Without Stalin's agreement, the Red Cross were forced to abandon their own plans; instead, an international commission with members drawn from twelve German-occupied countries travelled to Katyń in May.

Gradually Anna, Teresa and Jerzy learned that Tata, like the thousands of other prisoners of Kozielsk, must have been murdered in 1940, in April – that was when all the letters and diaries found on the bodies abruptly broke off. They had been deported from Kozielsk in sealed trains, taken off at the tiny forest station of Gniezdovo, near Smoleńsk, and from there driven in covered lorries deep along the road through the trees. When they were taken out, each man's hands were roughly tied behind his back, in many cases using a rope which was then looped up to wind round the throat, so that anyone struggling to get free would only strangle himself. Many of the bodies showed bayonet wounds, many of the jaws were broken, showing the violent resistance put up before the men were bound in this way and gagged. They were then shot, one by one, at point-blank range at the base of the skull, probably as they stood on the edge of the freshly dug mass graves. When the graves were filled in, young pine trees were planted in the light sandy soil, in an attempt at disguise.

It was the freshness of these trees, however, which had alerted forest workers this year, noticing the mounds for the first time, and growing suspicious. And then the German troops arrived, pushing their way through in their retreat from Moscow, and the discovery was made.

No one in Warsaw could talk about anything except Katyń, and the evidence emerging from the grim exhumations. The bullets used were German, as the Russians repeated again and again. But they were of a manufacture which had been widely sold both to Poland and Russia until 1941. Everything else – the make of bayonet, the make of rope, that particular knot in the ropes, the location, and the fact that for two years Stalin had been unable to give Sikorski a convincing answer as to the whereabouts of the missing men – all this pointed to the murders being the work of the Soviet Union.

Gradually, all these facts and findings were published and pinned up on the walls of Warsaw or blared through the loudspeakers. For Anna, for a long time, there was only one fact: that Tata had died in April 1940. That meant that all the time they had been writing to him, until the June or July, when the letters had been returned, he had been dead.

Retour – parti
…

All the time they had talked about him, or thought about him, and wondered what he was doing, and missed him, and longed for him to come home, all the time they had prayed that with the amnesty of 1941 he would be released, he had been dead.

Retour – parti
…

She couldn't get that brief, bleak phrase out of her head. And as she walked the distance to and from the hospital each day, she could not rid herself of the image of a dark, unseeing figure, somewhere infinitely far away, waiting to be found.

In the middle of April, Anna arrived on the ward to find patients being helped into the corridors outside, and stretchers bumping down the stairs. Many of the beds were stripped; a nurse, distracted, told her to pile up the linen and help take it down to the basement, where the patients were to be resettled.

‘Why? What's happening?'

The nurse bit her lip, shaking her head. ‘I don't know.'

‘The ghetto …' said Anna, her stomach turning. ‘Something in the ghetto.'

‘I think it must be. Come on – give me a hand.'

Down in the stuffy, half-lit basement, the sister supervised the patients being helped back into beds and on to mattresses, then summoned staff and helpers into a small side room. ‘We have received an order,' she said tersely. ‘Until further notice, no one is to go to any upper floor or look out of any window for any reason whatsoever. Anyone found up there will be shot.' She paused, very pale. ‘I believe that something particularly terrible is about to happen – I need hardly say that our patients will need us to appear calm.'

Within days, the ghetto was surrounded by German troops, and in the small hours of 19 April, Anna and Jerzy were woken once again by bursts of machine-gun fire. But this time there was something else, as well. They ran to the window: between the gunfire and the screams they could hear a dull patter of small explosions.

‘They're fighting back!' said Jerzy. ‘We knew they were going to – they've got tommy guns and
filipinki
.'

‘
Filipinki?
Hand grenades? Do they think they can stop the Germans with hand grenades?'

He was standing on tiptoe, craning to hear more. ‘What else can we give them? It's something, isn't it – look!'

The sky was suddenly lit by a billow of flame. Anna grabbed his arm. ‘They're burning them out – no! They can't, they can't!'

‘Shut up! It might not be that – the Jews might be burning the workshops.'

There was a thunder of shelling, and they clung to each other. Then the door was flung open, and Teresa burst into the room, sobbing.

‘I can't bear it, I can't bear it …'

Anna ran to her. ‘It's all right, it's all right, we're here, we'll look after you …'

Teresa held her close. ‘Look after me? Darling, I don't need looking after – I came to look after you.' She wiped her eyes. ‘I'm sorry … But those poor, poor people.'

‘But –' Anna broke off, and buried her face in Teresa's shoulder.

No one went back to sleep that night. Next day, Anna had to make her way to the hospital a long way round, past lines of troops guarding all the streets near the ghetto. No one could get near the walls, and everyone was talking about how at least one German armoured car had been destroyed in the battle last night. Today, it was Hitler's birthday.

On Easter Monday, at six in the evening, whole batteries of German artillery were assembled, and to the stirring blare of a military band they marched inside the gates, and began shelling houses at close range. The walls of the hospital shook: down in the basement next day, Anna and the others could hear windows shattering on the upper floors. For days, the whole quarter reverberated with the sounds of gunfire and explosions: what was the point of being confined below ground in the hospital? All day and all night, the glow of burning houses lit up the sky, and great clouds of black smoke billowed from above the ghetto walls and out across the city. All day and all night, German planes circled the site of the massacre. Jerzy told Anna he'd heard that from the rooftops and windows of the houses still held by the desperate Jews, banners were flying: ‘We shall fight till the last.'

The last came on 16 May. Every house had been bombarded, every hide-out discovered. Petrol-brands had been flung down the entrances to the sewers, where the last emaciated survivors were crawling, led through the filth by AK men and women who had themselves crawled in from beyond the walls. A few, perhaps a hundred, escaped like this, and made it to the forests outside the city. For the rest, some sixty thousand – where before the ‘transports to the east'there had been four hundred and fifty thousand – men, women and children, it was over, and in the smoking ruins of the ghetto there was only silence.

When Anna's ward, and the others, were finally allowed to return to the upper floors, and she dared to look out through the broken, blackened window panes, she could see only a grey, bleak moonscape of rubble, littering the streets between the gaping buildings.

Soon, this lifeless limb of the city was to be used by the Germans as a more convenient, secret place for the mass execution of Poles, rounded up at random on the streets outside the walls.

In the autumn the terror began a new wave: between October 1943 and August 1944 over eight thousand Poles, men and women, were shot or hanged.

They came out of the safety of the courtyard one at a time. First Andrzej, with the torch up his sleeve and the rolls of paper buttoned inside his jacket; he coughed very softly, and Jerzy came, the old stiff brushes thrust uncomfortably into his trouser pockets. He snapped his fingers and Wilk was behind him, holding two pots of glue and paint. Outside the wrought-iron gateway, on the dark street, they pressed up against the wall, and looked quickly to right and left.

‘Okay,' whispered Andrzej, and they crept along to where the posters were thickest, and peered up at them. Carefully, Wilk put the pots down on the pavement, and stood with his back to the others, watching the deserted street. The clock of the nearby church chimed twice.

‘Quick!' Andrzej thrust the torch at Wilk and he clicked it on, pointing it downwards so that only a small circle of light rested on the pavement, just enough for Andrzej and Jerzy to see by as they quickly separated the paper into posters and blank sheets. The rustling was louder than he could ever have imagined. They pinned down the posters with the glue pot, and then Andrzej held the blank sheets as Jerzy dipped a brush in the black paint and with a steady hand sketched out a gallows in the torchlight. Hanging from it, he painted the outline of a swastika. Andrzej swiftly slid the paper away, and he did another, then a sketch of a city lamp post, with a little dummy of Hitler, swinging from it on a broken neck.

‘Okay, come on,' Andrzej hissed, and bent so that Jerzy could clamber on to his shoulders and paste the sheets up quickly in the torch beam Wilk directed, over the hateful German slogans,
Bekanntmachung!
and fists of punishments. He dropped down and changed places with Wilk, watching the street, his heart thudding until his chest hurt. The other two were breathing heavily as they slapped glue on to the posters and then Wilk was on Andrzej's shoulders and as Jerzy pointed the torch he plastered them up: circles of bayonets, pointing at the swastika imprisoned in their midst.

The church clock chimed the quarter hour. Wilk jumped down. He looked swiftly up and down the street again, and then they each, in the last moments allowed, grabbed a brush and daubed, over and over again, in every blank space or corner on the German posters, the symbol
^p
of resistance which everyone knew now: PW, forming an anchor: w:
Polska Walcząca
: Fighting Poland. Fighting Poland. Fighting Poland.

Then they ran.

A warm golden evening in early July, sun in the leaves of the trees all along the avenues. The meeting tonight was to be held in Wilk's family apartment, in a street running off the broad and beautiful
^·
Krakowskie Przedmieście: walking through the market stalls in Zelazna Brama, through the Iron Gate and into the Saxon Gardens, Jerzy might have been out on almost any summer evening. On the long path through the Gardens families pushed prams, lovers held hands: the patrols were not usually much in evidence here, until the approach of curfew.

As soon as he left the Gardens, of course, the brief illusion of freedom and safety disappeared: as always, on the way to any meeting, he felt as though his every step were being watched. And yet, strangely, since they had learned of Tata's death he also felt in some obscure way protected. Before, when they had waited and waited for him to come home, not knowing where he could be, Jerzy had felt alone, adrift, exposed. Now, it was as if his father's spirit were watching over him, standing between him and danger.

The apartment was lit by the evening sun: at last there was no need for candles, or to sit shivering in their coats. Wilk's mother had baked pastries – they stood on the table in the drawing room, where she poured out glasses of weak barley coffee. Pani Wilk, Jerzy found himself thinking of her, not knowing her real name. Pani Wolf. She had taken the oath last year. Her husband, taken prisoner by the Russians in 1939, like Tata, had been released under the amnesty of 1941 – they hoped he was in Palestine now, serving under General Anders with the British troops.

‘Antylopa …' Pani Wilk was smiling, leading him towards the table. ‘No problems getting here? Good, good. The Captain is late this evening, but I'm sure he won't mind if we eat while we're waiting. Help yourself.'

‘Thank you, Pani.'

He stood with the others, all a little subdued. Why was the Captain not here? He was almost always the first.

‘How's Anna?' Andrzej asked.

Jerzy hesitated. ‘Low,' he said. ‘Very low.'

‘Because of your father.'

‘Yes. My stepmother, too – well, all of us. I mean, I know it's been a few months, now, but…'

Andrzej shuffled his feet. ‘I'm very sorry.'

‘I know. Thanks. It's the same for Natalia – Anna's friend, d'you remember her? Her father's name was on the list, as well.'

Two quick taps came on the apartment door. ‘That's him!' Pani Wilk hurried to open it.

When the Captain came into the drawing room, they all knew at once that something was wrong. He stood for a moment, shaking his head, as Pani Wilk took his jacket, then followed her across the room to the boys. They looked at him awkwardly.

‘Something has happened,' said Pani Wilk. ‘You were followed here?'

‘No, no. I'm afraid that what has happened is to someone far more important.' He looked at the waiting boys. ‘You are all aware that the whole AK is under the secret command of “Grot”.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Before I came here tonight,' the Captain said slowly, ‘I was contacted with the information that Grot has been arrested.'

‘No!' Pani Wilk's hands flew to her mouth. The boys looked at each other in silence. ‘It's absolutely certain?' she asked.

The Captain nodded. ‘Yes – he was seized four days ago, here in Warsaw. They've been looking for him for years, of course – he was on the way to a meeting, and must have been recognized. Apparently he'd hardly got inside the house when the Gestapo sealed off the street and … and got him.'