The Silver Sword (4 page)

Luckily for them, all the houses on this side of the school were joined together in one long terrace, otherwise they could not have got away. Even so, it was a miracle that none of their slips and tumbles ended in disaster.

They must have gone fully a hundred yards when the first explosion shook the air. A sheet of fire leapt up from their home into the frosty night sky. They fell flat in the snow and lay there. The roof shook, the whole city seemed to tremble. Another explosion. Smoke and flames poured from the windows. Sparks showered into the darkness.

“Come along,” said Edek. “We shan’t let them have us now.”

With growing confidence they hurried along the rooftops. At last, by descending a twisted fire escape, they reached street level. On and on they hurried, not knowing or caring where they went so long as they left those roaring flames behind them.

They did not stop till the fire was far away and the pale winter dawn was breaking.

They took shelter in the cellar of a bombed house. Exhausted, huddled together for warmth, they slept till long after midday, when cold and hunger woke them.

They made their new home in a cellar at the other end of the city. They had tunnelled their way into it. From the street it looked like a rabbit’s burrow in a mound of rubble, with part of a wall rising behind. On the far side there was a hole in the lower part of the wall, and this let in light and air as well as rain.

When they asked the Polish Council of Protection about their mother, they were told she had been taken off to Germany to work on the land. Nobody could say which part of Germany. Though they went many times to ask, they never found out any more. “The war will end soon,” they were told. “Be patient, and your mother will come back.”

But the war dragged on, and their patience was to be sorely tried.

They quickly made their new home as comfortable as they could. Edek, who could climb like a monkey, scaled three storeys of a bombed building to fetch a mattress and some curtains. The mattress he gave to Ruth and Bronia. The curtains made good sheets. On wet days they could be used over the hole in the wall to keep the rain out. With floorboards he made two beds, chairs and a table. With bricks from the rubble he built a wall to divide the cellar into two rooms, one to live in and one to sleep in. He stole blankets from a Nazi supply dump, one for each of them.

Here they lived for the rest of that winter and the following spring.

Food was not easy to find. Ruth and Bronia had green Polish ration cards and were allowed to draw the small rations that the Nazis allowed. But, except when Edek found casual work, they had no money to buy food. Edek had no ration card. He had not dared to apply for one, as that would have meant disclosing his age. Everyone over twelve had to register, and he would almost certainly have been carried off to Germany as a slave worker. Whenever possible they ate at the soup kitchens which Polish Welfare had set up. Sometimes they begged at a nearby convent. Sometimes they stole from the Nazis or scrounged from their garbage bins. They saw nothing wrong in stealing from their enemies, but they were careful never to steal from their own people.

War had made Edek sharp and self-reliant for his years. Ruth was slower to adapt herself to the new life. At first, during that long-drawn-out winter and the biting winds of early spring, it seemed as if she were too young to take on responsibility. But she learned gradually. She saw that Edek was always cheerful — because he was always busy. She knew she must get out of the habit of leaving all the practical details to him. One thing she could do was to make Bronia less miserable. She remembered that Bronia had always loved drawing. Ever since her little fist had been able to hold a pencil, she had delighted her father with her scribbles. So Ruth encouraged her to go on drawing now. They had no pencils or paper, but they had the cellar walls and plenty of charred wood from which to make charcoal. Bronia drew what she saw. Soon the walls were covered with pictures of people queueing outside the soup kitchen and of children playing hide and seek among the ruins.

Then Ruth started a school. She invited other lost children, of Bronia’s age and a little older. While Edek was out at work or finding food, she told them stories in the cellar. When she ran out of stories, the others took their turn. She made them speak out clearly, without mumbling. One day at the soup kitchen she talked about her school. Next time she went she was given slates and chalk and a pocket Bible. News of these presents spread like a heath fire, and soon she had a mob of urchins outside the cellar window begging to be allowed to join the school. But there was only room for twelve, and very reluctantly she had to turn them away.

Ruth was a born teacher. She could hold the children spellbound for as long as she liked. She varied the work as much as possible, giving the mornings to lessons and the afternoons to play. The day started with a Bible story. She read it herself, with the children round her — three to a blanket if it was cold. Next came reading and writing, followed by a break in the open air. Up they shot from their rabbits’ warren into the sunlight. They ran down the street to the wooden fence which they called “the Riviera”. Here they would sit in a long line, pressing their backs to the sun-drenched wood, soaking up the warmth till their bodies were glowing all over. On sunless days they played a brisk game before returning to the cellar for another story.

They liked the stories from the Old Testament best. Their favourite was always Daniel in the lions’ den. They enjoyed it just as a story, but for Ruth it had a deeper meaning. She thought of it as the story of their own troubles. The lions were the cold and the hunger and the hardships of their life. If only they were patient and trustful like Daniel, they would be delivered from them. She remembered a picture of Daniel that her mother had once given her. He was standing in the dungeon, with his hands chained behind him and his face lifted towards a small barred window high above his head. He was smiling and did not notice the lions that prowled about his feet, powerless to touch him. At night she liked to fall asleep with this picture on her mind. She could not always see it clearly. Sometimes Daniel’s face was clouded and the light from the window fell upon the lions. They were scowling and snarling, and they filled her dreams with terror.

In the early summer they left the city and went to live in the woods outside. It was cold at night out in the open. They slept huddled together in their blankets under an oak tree which Edek had chosen for the shelter of its branches. There was not much rain that summer, though they had one or two drenchings in May. After that Edek cut down some branches, lashed them together and made a lean-to. This was thick enough to keep out all but the heaviest rain.

Life was much healthier here than in the city. The sun browned their limbs. There were plenty of other families to play with, some of them Jews who had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto. They could run about freely and hold their classes under the trees, without having to keep a look-out for police patrols. Sometimes Ruth had as many as twenty-five in her school. She would have taken more, but they had no paper, very few slates, and no books at all. Occasionally they received a smuggled copy of a secret journal specially published for children by the Polish Underground press. It was called Biedronka, “The Ladybird”, and was full of the kind of stories and pictures and jokes that children enjoy. The grubby finger marks showed that other families had seen it before them. When Ruth’s children had finished with it, there was nothing left but a few tattered strips.

Because of the kindness of the peasants, food was more plentiful. Though they were forbidden to store food or to sell it to anyone but the Nazis, they gave the children whatever they could spare. They hid it, too, in cellars, in haystacks, in holes in the ground. With the help of the older children they smuggled it to the towns and sold it to the Poles on the black market.

Edek was one of the chief smugglers. In return for his services, he was given all the food he needed for the family. One of his dodges was to go off to town with pats of butter sewn into the lining of his coat. But he could only do this on cool days or at night. On hot days the butter melted. So he preferred to work at night if he could. In time the Germans became wary and posted patrols on all the main roads into the city. After that he cut across country, using paths and rough tracks. He was well aware of the penalties if he was caught. A younger child might get away with a beating. But boys as strong as he was would be carried off to Germany, for the Nazis were getting short of labour at home.

Another of Edek’s dodges was the cartload of logs which he drove into the suburbs.

Some of the logs were split, their centres scraped out and packed with butter and eggs, then glued together again. Once he drove his cartload into a police patrol, which was searching everything on the road. They emptied the logs on to the pavement. Edek didn’t stay to see if the glue would stand up to that treatment. He dived into the crowd and made off. Police whistles were blowing and the chase had started, when some kind friend lifted him up and pitched him head first into a garbage cart. Here he lay hidden, under cinders and dust and rotting vegetables.

After that, Edek did all his smuggling at night.

There came a morning, towards the end of August, when he failed to return. Ruth questioned other families in the forest, but no one had seen him. After some days of searching, she traced him to a village ten miles away. Edek had called at a house there while the secret police were searching for hidden stores. They had found cheese sewn into the lining of his coat. After setting fire to the house, they had taken him away in the van, with the house owner as well.

Ruth returned to the forest with a heavy heart, dreading to break the news to Bronia.

Edek had been their lifeline. Food, clothes, money — they depended on him for all these. In the city he had made a home out of a ruin. In the woods no tree gave better shelter than the oak he had chosen. And after dark, when the wind blew cold and the damp oozed out of the ground, none knew better than he how to keep the fire in untended till dawn, so that the glow from the embers should warm them all night as they slept.

Now Ruth and Bronia must fend for themselves. It was an ordeal before which the bravest spirit might quail.

Two years passed without any news of Edek. Ruth and Bronia returned to Warsaw each winter, and back to the woods again the following summer.

It was the summer of 1944. Out in the woods they began to realize that things were changing. Day and night the air was full of planes. From the distant city they could hear the boom of guns and the explosion of bombs. It was rumoured that the Nazis were on the defensive. Though the children did not know it till later, the Russian Marshal Rokossovsky was sweeping westwards with seven great army groups, driving the Nazis before him. Radio-Moscow had broadcast a call to the Resistance in Warsaw: “Poles, the hour of freedom is at hand! Poles, to arms! Do not lose a moment. The suburbs of Warsaw are already within range of Russian guns.”

At once the Poles, under their own General Bor, rose up against the German garrison. At 5 p.m. on August 1st a bomb went off in the Nazi Gestapo Headquarters. At the same moment thousands of windows in the city were flung open, and a hail of bullets struck the passing Germans. All traffic ceased as the Polish Underground rushed to the attack. Starving people streamed out of the cellars and flung themselves upon the Nazis, with weapons if they had them, with their fists if they had nothing else.

But the Germans counter-attacked from their strong-points. Hastily they concentrated five divisions, and their Tiger tanks drove a wedge through the city as far as the Vistula. The Soviet troops outside withdrew six miles under orders from Moscow, leaving the Poles to fight their own battle.

General Bor was short of arms and ammunition and could not continue the struggle alone. He radioed for help to Britain and America. But the British and Americans were too busy fighting the Nazis in the west. Prime Minister Churchill cabled to Stalin a request to help the Poles, but Stalin refused. He even refused to allow British and American planes carrying supplies to land on Soviet airfields. So the Poles, desperately short of food and arms, were left to fight it out to the bitter end.

A few stragglers from the city, turned out by the Nazis to find their own safety, reached the woods. From them Ruth learned of Nazis having to fight for every inch of ground, of Poles tearing up the pavement slabs and using them as barricades in the streets, and of a message sent to the Pope by the women of Warsaw: “Most Holy Father, for three weeks we have lacked food and medicine. Warsaw is in ruins. No one is helping us. The world is ignorant of our fight.”

On October 2nd, the sixty-third day of fighting, when the defenders had no more ammunition left, Warsaw broadcast its last appeal to the people of the world: “Without help this struggle has become hopeless. God is righteous, and in His omnipotence He will punish all those responsible for this terrible injury to the Polish nation.”

Too late to save the gallant defenders, Stalin changed his plans and ordered the Russians to march. By January 1945 the Nazis had gone and Warsaw was in Russian hands.

Because of the fighting, Ruth and Bronia had put off their return to the city till as late as possible. They had left it till winter had already set in and cold and hunger drove them and the other families from the woods.

A rude shock awaited them. The Warsaw they had known and lived in all their lives had vanished. The Old Town had been wiped out, and there were no streets left. Food was shorter than it had ever been — only a little flour, fat and sugar, no milk at all. Luckily, there was water. Though the mains had been damaged, fresh wells had been dug.

Somehow they found their way to the cellar that had been their home for two years. There were signs that it had been occupied during the summer, then abandoned. The chairs and beds had gone — probably used as firewood — and the table was broken. There was a dark hole at one end, which Ruth found to be the beginning of a tunnel. It led under the street, joining up with other cellars, other homes. Because of the firing and bombing, nobody had used the streets unless they had to. With the help of this clever network of tunnels the brave defenders had kept the struggle going all autumn.