Spring Will Be Ours (32 page)

‘Come on,' he muttered into the bricks a few inches in front of his face. ‘For Christ's sake
come on!
'

Slowly, slowly, Paweł began the descent again, his left leg bumping and banging like a dead thing, his right trembling uncontrollably with the pressure. At last Jan was able to call up: ‘Wait!' and drop the last few feet to the ground. He stood for a moment, allowing himself the luxury of raising and lowering his head, rubbing the back of his neck until the muscles stopped looking in his mind's eye like burning rope. Then he was able to take Paweł's weight more easily; he came down and leaned, gasping, on the bottom rung.

Jan put Paweł's arm over his shoulders once again, and led him away from the ladder, so that the next man could follow; all around the dark bulk of other figures moved awkwardly in the confined space, coughing. He looked up and saw, far above them through the opening, the night sky and the stars.

‘I've found the rope,' Paweł was muttering.

‘Good. Can you just lean on me until the others are all down and we have to start crawling?'

‘Yes. Are you all right?'

‘Yes.'

They stood and waited as the rest of the men came slowly down, moving along inch by inch until they were all crammed up against each other and already feeling sick with the smell which came towards them from the narrow opening ahead.

‘Are you all there?' came the voice of the girl. ‘Call out your numbers.'

‘One …'

‘Two …'

‘Three …'

The voices of strangers echoed in the chamber.

‘Nineteen …'

‘Twenty.'

‘All right,' said the girl. ‘Follow me now.'

Jan heaved Paweł on to his back, and bent down.

There were other channels leading into the main one along which they had to crawl, and rats scuttled through them, cats, too. In some places the tunnel was high enough for them to walk, their heads lowered so that they just touched the roof, but mostly they had to bend almost double, or crawl. The sewage was several inches deep; with one hand they had to feel for the rope along the wall, with the other keep upright. Far ahead, the girl had lit a candle, and was waiting for them all to reach it: Jan kept struggling to raise his head to see it flicker – no chance at all of carrying Paweł and holding his own lighter, but at least it was there. He was in such agony it was almost impossible to stretch and look, and the lack of oxygen meant that the candle flame kept going out, so that sometimes he managed it only to find that he was staring into darkness once again. All he could hear was the heavy, rhythmic breathing and gasping of the people in front, the people behind, and the gurgling of the sewage.

He did not know how long they had been travelling, or how far they had come. He barely knew his name, or what it was that lay on his back and crucified him. He simply moved an inch, another inch, another inch, perhaps two inches the next time, then another. In the darkness searing lights began to dance and splinter behind his eyes. Another inch. Then something different happening, another sound. He didn't know any other sound; what was it?

Two sharp tugs on the rope.

The man in front had stopped moving. Jan managed to give two tugs on the rope himself, his hand slipping, and stopped, too. He let Paweł slide down a bit, and waited.

‘What's … happening?' Paweł asked hoarsely.

‘I don't know.'

They crouched, waiting in the blackness. Jan felt panic begin to rise. He fumbled for his lighter. It wasn't there. It must be. It wasn't. The button on the pocket had come off, the pocket was open, empty. Somewhere in the gurgling stream of filth, as he bent down, the lighter had fallen, and drowned. The blackness was all over him, inside his head. Everything was black. He heard himself breathing hard, like an animal.

Someone ahead was muttering. What? What was he saying? They were never going to get out of here, he had been born only to go mad in the arsehole of Warsaw, he was going to die down here, they all were. He began to sob, to shout, to scream.

‘Let me out! Let … me … out …'

‘Shut up! Stop it, you bastard, stop it, shut up, do you want us all to go mad with you?'

A man was shaking him, then holding him, holding him. ‘Look, here's a light. Look. Look. Calm down.'

The man in front had his arms round him, the next one had a stub of candle, and he could see again. Paweł was leaning up against the wall, his chest heaving.

The man who was holding Jan said: ‘They passed this back, pass it on, there's another one coming. The girl's sent a message: the sewage level has risen, it's waist high, but she thinks we can get through.'

Jan clung to the candle. Behind him, voices were rising.

‘I said pass on the fucking candle!' It was snatched away from him, and went out.

Paweł had his arms round his neck, and they were wading through shit. From somewhere in a channel off to the right he could hear someone laughing dementedly, but it might have been him. He went on, step by step, slipping, staggering, somehow keeping upright, his eyes only on a flickering pinpoint of light far far down the tunnel.

It began to get warmer, warmer still. Sweat was already pouring down him, but as the level of the sewage dropped, and they were able after a long break to move on again, he realized that the tunnel itself was getting hot, and that they must be passing underneath a burning house. They went on, gasping in the heat, and then the man in front was passing back a message: ‘A hundred yards to go.'

Impossible to believe they could go further. The level had dropped right down, now, but the tunnel roof was also low again, and they had to go almost on their bellies.

‘Paweł?'

There was no answer.

‘Paweł … get off me, you bastard, let me get down.'

He struggled to lower himself without dropping Paweł, crawled the last, pitiless yards through the passageway with the weight on his back. There were voices ahead, and air. There was air. He went on, sobbing, his head banging the feet of the man in front until he felt him stop and scramble upright, then turn and pull Paweł off his back so that he could stand, too, and stare up at the ladder of the exit shaft, where faces were peering down, and arms ready to help them up, and out into the precious light of dawn.

Anna sat on a broad, leather-topped desk at the open window of an apartment in Three Crosses Square, looking along the length of Ujazdowskie Avenue. She was on observation duty, had been posted here with Natalia and Wojtek early this morning, making their way through the network of trenches and barricades. On their way, they'd seen something which until now she'd only heard people talking about: a little knot of AK soldiers bent down round a lifted manhole cover, hauling out thin, grey-faced, gasping men and women who'd crawled all the way through the sewers from Stare Miasto. They looked terrible, half-dead, and the stench made her heave. But at least they were alive, safe behind Polish lines again.

Here, it was quiet this morning, with little movement along the broad, leafy avenue: she looked through the heavy binoculars which had once belonged to Natalia's father, watching every corner of every street opening into it. At the far end, a tank stood motionless: she was to report any change in its position, any new patrols. The surface of the road and the pavements were pitted with craters; many of the stone balconies and window arches on the five-storey houses shattered. On the whole, however, Ujazdowskie and much, of the city centre generally had so far escaped major damage: they knew that at the moment the Germans were concentrating their attack on what had been the stronghold of Stare Miasto.

Anna put down her binoculars to rest. The room they were in must have been someone's study: it made her think of Tata, with the bookshelves, the spacious desk, the sunlight. The door was heavy, thickly padded against noise from the rest of the apartment. Who had sat here before the war, reading and making notes, watching the peaceful rustling of the treetops down the centre of the avenue? Natalia and Wojtek were resting in armchairs pushed back against the far wall: for a moment, it felt as if they were all simply spending an ordinary morning together, on summer vacation from the
liceum:
if the war had not happened, that was what they would be doing now, preparing for university, visiting each other in the summer, going to parties, on holidays. The darkness inside her yawned open once again. If Tata were alive … if Jerzy and Andrzej were alive …

Wojtek looked up from the chair where he was reading yesterday's edition of
Walka.
‘Anything happening?'

She shook her head, turned back to the window and raised her binoculars again. The tank she'd noted an hour ago, right at the far end, was slowly moving up the avenue. It came past the Botanical Gardens, past the park, on past each intersection, moving a little faster now. She shifted the binoculars, and was dazzled for a moment by the midday sun. The tank came on; as if in a dream of summer heat and haziness, she saw the cannon being raised, higher, then higher still, until it was pointing directly at their building, at the window where her binoculars must be glinting, and she suddenly flung them down and yelled to the others: ‘Run! Run for your lives!'

She leapt off the desk, Natalia and Wojtek sprang from their chairs, and they flung open the heavy door and ran into the corridor, slamming it behind them. Within a moment, the study shook with a deafening blast; they were flung flat on the floor and lay there, immobile, listening until the roar at last diminished to the crumbling of bricks, and tinkling glass, and silence. Then came the sound of the tank again, moving closer, stopping, then turning off into another street. They raised their heads, stared at each other, then scrambled up, shaking, and slowly pushed open the door which had saved them.

Inside the study they saw a great hole ripped into the wall where the window had been, the desk, the floor and furniture completely covered with glass and bricks and plaster.

‘My God …' said Anna, and they stood there staring, watching the dust from the explosion rise into the air and float towards the trees. They left
^·
the building and made their way slowly back to the base in Hoza. Henryk was about to leave to meet them: he looked at their white faces, listened as they told him what had happened. Then he passed them a sheet of paper: an additional communiqué to the usual bulletin. They read it in disbelief at first, and then Natalia began to cry.

Since the second week of August, hardly a single airdrop had been made over Warsaw – the distance from Brindisi, the base in southern Italy, meant that there was barely a hope of making it there and back without refuelling. Now they read that Stalin had refused to allow British and American planes the right to land and refuel on the nearby Soviet-held airfields: his price had been the arrest of the leaders of the Uprising.

The Old Town had fallen. The lovely squares and houses lay in smoking ruins, and now the Germans seized a great mass of women prisoners, and began to herd them towards the barricade which separated the Old Town from the next district to the south, Powislé, on the riverside, still in Polish hands. Those defending the barricade saw the women approach, and the German infantry behind, and held their fire: how could they shoot at their own people? The Germans pushed on, and as they reached the barricade they shoved the helpless women on to it, and scrambled over them, kicking and punching, into the street behind it. At the sight of Germans in their midst, pounding down the streets and firing indiscriminately, panic spread through Powislé. Thousands of civilians pressed up to the great barricades transecting Jerozolimskie Avenue and Nowy Świat, the main arteries of the city, partly in German and partly in Polish hands. They stumbled through the deep trenches, and many of those who had managed to reach them were buried by falling earth and sand: as fast as they were repaired, the barricades fell in, under the pressure of the people passing beneath them.

Powislé was lost, and with it the electricity plant, tenaciously held and defended for over four weeks. Now, at night, the city was plunged into total darkness. The civilians crouching in the cellars of the houses still standing, and in the ruins of those which had been destroyed, were without light, without any but the most pitiful of rations: many of the warehouses had been bombed, and it was becoming more and more difficult to move what little supplies remained from the tunnels connecting one district to another. Babies and children were dying: dysentery swept through the cellars like a medieval plague. On the surface, bodies rotted in the street. The exhausted AK platoons and commanders who moved through the shelters were besieged, now, with pleas for surrender.

On the night of 10 September there came at last the sound the whole of Warsaw had been waiting for: the thunder of Soviet artillery from across the Vistula.

At 8.30 in the evening of 14 September, Moscow radio sent out another broadcast. It was picked up in the AK headquarters: they had been bombed out of the Old Town, bombed out of the cellar of the Polish Savings Bank in the city centre, and were now in hiding in a house to the south of Jerozolimskie Avenue. Here the monitoring staff heard:

‘To fighting Warsaw: the hour of liberation for heroic Warsaw is near. Your sufferings and martyrdom will soon be over. The Germans will pay dearly for the ruins and blood of Warsaw. The first Polish Division Kościuszko has entered Praga. It is fighting side by side with the heroic Red Army. Relief is coming. Keep fighting! Whatever may have been the motives of those who started the rising prematurely, without agreement with the High Command of the Red Army, we are with you with all our hearts. The whole Polish nation is with you in your self-sacrificing struggle against the German invaders. A decisive fight is now taking place on the banks of the Vistula. Help is coming. Victory is near. Keep fighting!'

Soviet planes reappeared in the sky, and for the first time since the Uprising began, there were dogfights between them and the
Luftwaffe.
At night, the Russians made their first drops, but they were without parachutes, and containers of arms and sacks of grain smashed and split on the roofs and pavements. Much of the ammunition which fell did not, naturally, fit the British and American arms, or those arms captured from the Germans in the early battles, but the talk of surrender died down: the Russians had shown themselves ready to help at last, and the battle in Praga was raging. By 15 September, the district had been seized from the Germans. Now, each day, everyone waited to hear that the Russian troops had crossed the river: after five weeks without rain, the water level was so low that in some places whole stretches of sand could be seen: you could almost have walked across.