Spring Will Be Ours (23 page)

Then the Soviet planes dropped leaflets, swirling and fluttering on to the streets. Walking arm in arm down Jerozolimskie Avenue, Anna and Natalia found themselves in a snowstorm of paper. Anna reached out and grabbed one; they stood reading it, as more tumbled out of the sky.

‘Poles! The time of liberation is at hand! Poles, to arms! … Every Polish homestead must become a stronghold in the struggle against the invader … There is not a moment to lose.'

They looked at each other, excited and afraid, and hurried to find Henryk.

On Sunday 30 July, tanks patrolled the streets which were suddenly calm and quiet, and which seemed to have no more than the ordinary amount of traffic, except, perhaps, that there were an unusual number of young people out, heavily dressed in unseasonal anoraks or windcheaters. Many carried knapsacks or bags. They ignored the tanks, the police and military patrols as they made their way through the city; some, enjoying the sun in the parks, were openly reading underground newspapers.

Fourteen hundred men and over four hundred women were deported that day from Pawiak, and sent to concentration camps.

On 31 July, in his staff headquarters, General Bór was told by his intelligence units that Russian tanks had been sighted in Praga. Already, the suburbs of Otwock, Falencia, Józefów, Radzymin – all within ten miles of the city – had been taken. Now, in urgent consultation with the Governor Delegate, Jan Jankowski, Bór judged that the time for open insurrection had arrived.

‘Very well, then,' said Jankowski. ‘Begin.'

Bór turned to General Monter, Commander of the whole Warsaw District of the AK. ‘Tomorrow,' he said, ‘at five p.m. precisely, you will start operations in Warsaw.'

The telephone rang in the empty hall.

‘Anna?' Wiktoria was still in her bedroom.

‘I'll take it.' She turned down the gas under the kettle, went quickly out of the kitchen, and picked up the receiver.

‘
Słucham.
I'm listening.'

‘It's me,' said Natalia. ‘Are you ready for our outing?'

‘Today?'

‘Today.' Anna could hear Natalia trying to control the excitement in her voice. ‘I'll ring you again later, to confirm the time, but can you have everything ready for the picnic?'

Anna saw herself smile in the shadows of the mirror above the phone. ‘Of course. I'll have everything we need. We're … we're going to the picnic spot we've talked about?'

‘Yes.' Her voice dropped. ‘Don't move until you hear more.' The phone clicked.

Anna put down the receiver. ‘Wiktoria!' She ran down the corridor to Wiktoria's room, and stood in the door. ‘Guess!'

Wiktoria sat up on the pillows, pulling a cardigan round her shoulders.

‘It's starting?'

‘Yes! Natalia's going to ring back with the time.' She ran across and hugged her. ‘I'm going to explode.'

‘Perhaps you'd get me some tea first.'

‘Of course.' Anna raced back to the kitchen, and while the kettle came to the boil she stood and looked down on to the street. A grey morning suddenly, after the heat of the last days of July. The pavement was beginning to fill with people, although it was still early, and they were hurrying, purposeful, the atmosphere surely already changed: these people did not look as though they were simply going drearily to work in an occupied city.

The kettle sputtered, and she switched it off and poured boiling water into the glasses through the strainer with just a pinch of tea. She carried them through to Wiktoria's room, and found her already out of bed and dressing. ‘I'll leave it here,' said Anna, putting the glass on the chest of drawers, and went back to her own small room. She left her glass to cool, and bent to open the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. She pulled out the small parcel, and spread the contents carefully on the bed.

Bandages – mostly made from strips of old sheet. A bottle of iodine. Safety pins, two dozen. The nail scissors she'd had since she was twelve. And the small piece of paper she'd been given in the meeting three days ago, heavily printed in small, smudged black letters: AK Courier Pass.

From the wardrobe she took out the canvas shoulder bag hanging inside, and she put all these things into it, fastening and unfastening the stiff buckles and straps until they would open quickly and she didn't need to fumble with them. Then she took her needlecase from the drawer of the little table by her bed, and the two strips of material, one white, one red, which she had hoarded from the dressmakers' school, as they all had. She folded the white one round her arm to check the length, then sat on the bed, sewing them together until she had an armband, in the colours of the Polish flag, and was ready, now, for the next phone call.

It came within the hour. ‘Five o'clock. Be there by four.' The number of an apartment house, a coded street, not far from the coded Three Crosses Square. She stood at the window of the sitting room, watching the movement of the people on the street below, as a fine rain began to fall.

That afternoon, 1 August, over ten thousand members of the AK took up their positions in Stare Miasto, the Old Town. In the most overcrowded area of Warsaw, they were preparing to seize and defend key points: Krasiński Square, the Royal Palace, St John's Cathedral; the Polish Bank, the Market Square. In every cobbled street, every winding alleyway in Stare Miasto's few square miles, doors in the tall narrow houses opened quickly, and the people behind them let in men and women from outside without greeting, closing them quickly again.

Inside, the officers and men, the women nurses and cooks and couriers, piled up sandbags at the windows of the first and second floors – rooms where, usually, whole families ate and slept. They ran up the winding stairs to the attics, peering down from gabled windows on to the open squares, and German patrols. They ran down worn stone steps to the sprawling cellars, swiftly assembling and setting out equipment secretly stored there, to turn them into kitchens and field hospitals. They scribbled the names of the streets overhead on the walls, so that you could follow a whole underground route through the district, if necessary, by knocking through from one house cellar to another, and another. Perhaps it wouldn't be necessary – everyone hoped it would be over in days. In every house, the atmosphere was a feverish, heady mixture of nerves and elation.

In a ground-floor room on a street not far from the river bank, the last man in Boar unit had just arrived, panting, furious with himself for missing the deadline by ten minutes.

‘Sir. Reporting for duty.' He stood in front of his lieutenant, sweating. ‘Sorry I'm late, sir – I was waiting for my mother, to say goodbye, she must have got held up somewhere … Sorry, sir.'

The lieutenant looked him up and down, and nodded curtly. ‘Uniforms in the next room – go and get dressed, and come back here with the other men for orders.'

‘Sir.' Jan Prawicki was seventeen years old, as scrawny as the other boys in Boar, but tough, quick on the uptake, witty. He'd always wanted to join the army – if it hadn't been for the war, he'd have gone to military academy after the
liceum
, and enlisted with the regulars, like his father.

Jan's father was originally from Wilno, a kindly man who in the First World War, in his early twenties, been decorated for bravery. In the golden period of Polish independence which followed, he had commanded a division of the army stationed just outside Warsaw. Like thousands upon thousands of others, Major Prawicki had been captured in September 1939, and taken, the following spring, to the Polish officers'prison camp in the German mountain town of Murnau. Throughout the occupation, Jan and his mother had received brief, lonely, censored letters. Meanwhile, they eked out a living.

Zofia, who had read economics at the university of Kraków, was now a dressmaker. Jan did anything – he had mended burst pipes, sold paraffin, been a porter, mended windows. He had joined the AK very early, recruited by a teacher from the
gimnazium komplet
with his best friend, Paweł Staszewicz.

Paweł was in the room with the uniforms, fighting like the others to grab from the heap of old clothes on the floor. He seized an outsize tin hat and emerged from the scrum, looking up to see Jan come in to the room, panting.

‘Hey!' Paweł pulled the tin hat down over his eyes and raised an imaginary rifle. ‘You've got here – Poland is not yet lost!'

Jan grinned. ‘Idiot.'

The room smelt like a jumble sale. He looked at the heap on the floor, and the other boys frantically trying on khaki trousers and combat jackets which looked like his father's First World War uniforms. They probably were – his mother, and plenty of other women whose men were held prisoners of war, had turned out every wardrobe and chest of drawers for the AK. His mother had taken the oath last year: she was supposed to join up today, too, on the other side of Stare Miasto – why the hell hadn't she come back from work first, as they'd arranged?

‘Come on, there's not much left.' Paweł dragged him over, and Jan knelt down, rummaging. He yanked out a pair of cotton trousers and a thick khaki shirt, and stripped fast, pulling them on.

‘How do I look?' The trousers were too big; Paweł threw him a belt, and he buckled it to the last hole. Not so bad. ‘What about the armbands?'

‘Here.' Paweł picked up a little heap of red and white from the window sill. Jan's mother had made all of them, she had made dozens, from an old flag hidden in a chest in their apartment – he'd spent two days last week, distributing them to different units. If he'd been stopped with that lot on him … well, he hadn't been. He pulled one on, over the right sleeve, and immediately felt a rush of excitement.

‘Yerrrrrrow!' He leapt into the air, making a mock salute. ‘
Polska Walczącd!
Hitler has only got one ball –
forwarrrrd!'

The roomful of half-naked, undernourished boys collapsed.

‘Men!' Lieutenant Wroński stood at the door, perhaps not more than five years older than any of them. There was instant silence. ‘You will all be lined up and dressed and reporting next door within one minute. Kozica – kindly calm down.'

‘Sir.' Jan was scarlet. Kozica – chamois – swift and graceful.

Humiliating to be reprimanded. But for God's sake – they'd waited four years for this.

‘You're a soldier now,' said Paweł, rapidly buttoning his own shirt, grabbing an armband. ‘Don't cock it up.'

Behind him, the others pulled up zips and put on caps and armbands, caught each other's eyes and spluttered.

‘Hitler's only got one ball,' Piotr sang under his breath.

‘Shut up!' Jan snapped. Quickly, he emptied his old pockets and stuffed lighter and cigarettes into the chest pocket of the khaki shirt.

They all filed back into the next room, where the lieutenant was waiting. A wooden box stood on the table beside him. No one could take his eyes off it.

‘In this box,' the lieutenant said flatly, ‘is the allocation of arms for this unit.' He lifted the lid, and took out a small brown pistol. ‘This, and two others. We have twenty rounds of ammunition. Two rifles – fifteen cartridges. Thirty-five
filipinki
– grenades.'

There was an uneasy, incredulous silence. Then Jan said cautiously:

‘Between all of us, sir?'

‘Between all of us. You must understand that until recently many units outside the city were being supplied with arms from here – it has only been decided in the last two weeks that Warsaw herself should take full part in an armed uprising. After all …' He hesitated. ‘After all, we suffered a very great deal in the siege. Our leaders have wanted to spare more mutilation to the city itself, and more suffering for the civilians. However – all that has changed. The Russians are approaching, they have encouraged us to seize the moment, and we are expecting reinforcements of arms from them and from Great Britain at any time.' He tapped the little pistol against the palm of his hand. ‘In the meantime – this is what we have. The very strictest discipline is to be maintained in the use of ammunition. Weapons will be shared on a rota system.'

The lieutenant looked at them all, subdued scarecrows in caps, tin hats, old patched shirts and trousers, the hastily stitched white and red armbands their only true uniform.

‘We are not making a film,' he said quietly. ‘We are going into Battle. We are going to liberate Warsaw.'

Jan felt for his cigarettes.

At three o'clock Jerzy's unit, Lion, assembled. He, Andrzej, the Captain and the other boys walked one by one to a block on the corner of Krucza and Jerozolimskie Avenue, turning casually in at the entrance, ignoring the German patrol which suddenly appeared across the street, and then pounded up the stairs of the requisitioned apartment, each one let in by Pan Wójcik and his wife, the old couple who had lived there for fifteen years.

When they had all arrived, the Captain gave out the arms which they had smuggled in on Sunday. Two rifles to be shared between the six of them, forty cartridges. A large box by the window was filled with
filipinki
, homemade hand grenades. They had bakelite casings and key rings as detonators.

They stood round, looking at the pile.

‘Is … is this all, sir?' Andrzej asked.

‘At the moment, yes,' said the Captain. ‘You are all under the strictest orders not to waste a single bullet: shoot only when you are quite certain you have the enemy within your sights. We expect to be replenished soon.'

‘But we'll take the city in a few days, won't we?' said Jerzy.

‘We hope to.'

Wilk was at the window. A pale sun had broken through the morning's cloud, and the room was filled with light. ‘Things are happening,' he said. They all went over and stood looking down on the crowded trams, on the broad avenue filled with people on both sides, hurrying in all directions. From across the river, which they could not see, came the thunder of the Soviet artillery.