At her new hospital in Warsaw’s central district, Elzunia kept her distance from the staff. Her reserve was a safety net that held the fragments of her mind from disintegrating. Never again would she allow herself to become close to anyone. Attachments ended in disappointment and grief.
Ever since starting work in this hospital a week after she had escaped through the sewers, Elzunia had been desperate to find out what had happened to those left behind in the Old Town, but all her inquiries proved fruitless. Communication with other parts of Warsaw had been cut and she might as well have tried to contact a foreign country. She knew that Stefan had got away after their flight through the sewers, but no one knew the fate of the hospital, its patients or their doctor, and the most common response was the one she dreaded. In the bloodbath that had followed the pullout of the AK fighters, thousands of civilians had been slaughtered. She couldn’t bear to contemplate Andrzej’s fate, and her longing for him was like the relentless ache of phantom limbs that so many of her patients suffered.
‘I know it’s not there any more but it still hurts like hell,’ said Witek, whose right leg had been amputated. He was fourteen and, like most of the young fighters, he couldn’t wait to get back to his unit.
He looked pensive one morning when she came to change the dressing. ‘I was wondering what they did with my leg,’ he said. ‘It’s because of what I saw at a field hospital in a forest outside Warsaw when we were near the front. They kept bringing more and more bodies on stretchers and tipping them out onto the ground, and we had to hose them down to see if anyone was still alive. If they were, we’d take them to the doctor inside the tent. All he had was a tree saw — they’re not very good for amputating because the teeth are too far apart.’ He paused to make sure she understood the implication, then went on. ‘Next morning, when I looked outside the tent, there was this pile of arms and legs just lying there. I wouldn’t want my leg to end up like that. This might sound silly, Miss Elzunia, but, if I die, I’d like my leg to be buried with me.’
She nodded. ‘I’d feel exactly the same way.’
The following day, one of the nurses handed her a crumpled note. ‘From your bashful admirer,’ she said.
Elzunia unfolded the paper and read:
ODE TO NURSE ELZUNIA
On the corner of Szuch and Unia,
Lived a nursie called Elzunia.
She’s so gentle, she’s so smart,
Nurse Elzunia won my heart.
Witek’s poem continued in a similar vein for eight more stanzas. Touched by his verses, Elzunia was still smiling when she stepped outside. Although it was September, the heat was oppressive and the air in the basement was stale and clammy. But compared to the Old Town, life in the centre of the city seemed almost normal. In between mortar and artillery attacks, people ventured from their underground shelters and it seemed to Elzunia that, despite the hunger and chaos, they hadn’t altogether lost hope. Like her, some of the occupants of the shelters nearby had also emerged into the street. While they commiserated with each other about their problems, the children ran around searching for spent shells, whooping when they found them.
As usual, at the sight of children playing, Elzunia’s throat constricted and her thoughts turned to Gittel.
She was leaning against the wall feeling the warm sunshine on her face when she felt the road vibrate and heard a rumbling sound. A moment later, a tank lumbered into their street. An old man puffing a hand-rolled cigarette pointed at it. ‘It’s one of those panzers,’ he said. ‘We’ve got nothing to touch them. Our bullets just bounce off them like dried peas; they don’t even make a dent. Lord knows how we’ve managed to hold out for five weeks.’
The tank rolled towards a jumble of overturned tram carriages, sandbags, chunks of masonry and broken tables, crushing everything like a boot grinding an ant. Now there was nothing between the people in the street and the tank advancing towards them. Just then, a boy rushed out from a doorway, leapt up and pushed something into the tank-driver’s visor. There was a flash as the petrol bomb exploded. The old man whistled through his tobacco-stained teeth as the tank veered to the side, lurched off the road and became wedged in a crater. The more desperately the driver tried to reverse and free himself, the deeper the tank became embedded.
Another lad suddenly appeared in front of the tank and shouted, ‘Alles aussteigen! Everybody out!’
Elzunia and the bystanders watched and waited. Surely German soldiers wouldn’t take any notice of an unarmed Polish boy. But slowly the tank’s upper cover was raised and its occupants clambered out, arms raised above their heads.
To the approving murmurs of the onlookers, the boys jumped onto the tank and disarmed the Germans. As they swaggered off with their haul of revolvers, carbines and a crate of anti-tank mines, Elzunia saw their faces clearly for the first time.
‘Toughie! Giraffe!’ she shouted.
Giraffe was at her side in two bounds and threw his arms around her, but Toughie held back. ‘We’re insurgents now,’ he said gruffly.
In an awestruck voice Giraffe added, as though unable to believe it himself, ‘Guess what! We just captured a German tank!’
The boys came to see Elzunia at the hospital an hour later, after they had handed over their haul to their superior. She couldn’t get over her delight at seeing them again. It was like finding long-lost relatives.
‘What’s happened to Granny?’ she asked, bracing herself for bad news. ‘Is she all right?’
She breathed out when Giraffe nodded. ‘She’s a tough old bird,’ he said. ‘Her building was shelled but she was down in the cellar at the time. I think she swallowed some soot and went deaf for a while but she’s all right now. We drop some food in for her from time to time. She’s living in one of the downstairs rooms but she’ll have to move soon because the building is bound to collapse.’
Elzunia had tears of relief in her eyes. ‘Thank God she’s safe,’ she kept saying.
‘What about Zbyszek?’ she asked. ‘Any news of him?’
The look on their faces gave her the answer. Zbyszek had vanished without a trace.
It only took a few days for the relative calm of the central district to be shattered. Having pulverised the Old Town, the Germans turned their attention to the city centre. Ever since running into Toughie and Giraffe, Elzunia couldn’t wait to see Granny, and, despite the increasing ferocity of the shelling, she set off as soon as she was able to get away from the hospital. Most of the journey was through a passage of cellars that connected apartment buildings and stretched beneath several streets. On the corner of each cellar, arrows and signs indicated the streets above, and she felt she’d entered a surreal subterranean world. Inside the shelters, people sat huddled with listless faces, while others quarrelled with their neighbours for taking up too much space, or allowing their children to run riot.
‘See what we’re reduced to?’ a woman called out to her. ‘What did we need this wretched Uprising for? We’re the ones that are copping it. Those that brought it on our heads should come and see what they’ve done to us.’
Elzunia couldn’t get out of the labyrinth of underground passages fast enough. But once above ground, she craved the safety of the cellars as bullets whistled overhead and bursts of artillery exploded nearby. Every few metres she had to find shelter in a doorway, under a clump of shrubbery or behind a pile of rubble. A journey that should have taken twenty minutes had already lasted three hours and she still hadn’t reached Granny’s street.
She ran into another doorway, and leaned against it, panting. It was crazy to risk her life like this. As soon as the shelling stopped, she’d go back to the hospital. As she stood there, trying to catch her breath, she heard something that made her scalp shrink and tighten around her skull. Somewhere nearby, children were singing a familiar tune but she didn’t recognise the words. Then it hit her. The song was ‘Almonds and Raisins’ but the children seemed to be making up garbled Polish words to fit the tune. Intrigued, she crept forward in the direction of the sound, and found herself in a large courtyard. At the far end of the yard stood two small children. They sang at the top of their voices, occasionally missing out words but keeping the melody going, as they swung their arms in time to the rhythm. The little boy in broken clogs and a piece of fur wrapped around his skinny shoulders was holding the small girl’s hand. Before she realised it, Elzunia was racing across the courtyard.
‘Gittel!’ she said hoarsely, as she cradled the child’s head against her shoulder. ‘Gittel! I’ve found you!’
The little girl wriggled from her embrace and hid behind her companion.
‘Gittel, don’t you recognise me? It’s Elzunia!’
The little girl peered from behind Zbyszek and pushed her tousled curls from her face. ‘Elzunia,’ she repeated uncertainly. Her huge dark eyes rested on Elzunia’s red-and-white armband.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, and, without waiting for a reply, she added, ‘Where’s Mama Lusia?’
Zbyszek hadn’t let go of Gittel’s hand and clutched it as he stepped forward.
‘Me and Gittel sing together,’ he said.
Some of the people from the surrounding cellars stood in their doorways, watching.
‘That’s right,’ a woman called out. ‘Those two go round the courtyards together every day, singing. That funny little kid with the fur, he seems to take care of the little girl.’
Emboldened by the woman’s words, Zbyszek raised his voice. ‘I don’t want you to take her away,’ he said defiantly.
He was already pulling Gittel away when Elzunia knelt down and put her arms around them both. ‘I wouldn’t take her away from you,’ she said. ‘I’d like both of you to come and stay with me. You’ll have a safe place to sleep and something to eat every day. Will you come?’
Zbyszek hesitated and Elzunia saw that he was weighing up her offer. After a pause, he nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But we want to stay together.’
The cold, hollow feeling that she’d had in the pit of her stomach for the past few weeks was gone and she couldn’t stop hugging them, but when she tried to pick Gittel up, the child scrambled from her arms like a scalded kitten.
‘I’m not a baby,’ she said, pouting. ‘I’m a big girl now.’ Then she put her thin arms around Elzunia’s neck and said, ‘You can give me a kiss if you like.’
As they walked towards the hospital, Elzunia suddenly asked, ‘That song you were singing. Did you forget the words?’
Zbyszek gave her a withering look. ‘We couldn’t sing in Yiddish out here, so we made up Polish words.’
She looked at the children with admiration. Life had made them wise, far beyond their years.
The firing grew louder as they approached Marszalkowska Street. Elzunia edged slowly towards the main street and flattened herself against a wall, keeping the children behind her. A tank stopped in the middle of the road and two German soldiers climbed out. The afternoon sun glinted off their helmets as they pointed their rifles at a group of terrified women on the pavement and motioned for them to climb up onto the front of the tank. One of the women, who was wrenched from her small son, grabbed hold of his hand and scrawled something on it.
‘That’s your name; never ever wash it off,’ Elzunia heard her say as the tank rumbled off with its human shields, leaving the bewildered child crying on the roadway for his mother. Elzunia let out a sigh of relief as an elderly woman stepped from a doorway and picked up the boy. She drew Gittel and Zbyszek closer and walked on. Whatever happened, she was never going to let them out of her sight again.