Between Christmas and the new year, Tom and I got away for a week in the Swiss Alps. Basing ourselves in a mountain retreat not far from Lac Leman, we skied each morning into France for a snack of hot chocolat and crèpes, and skied back into Switzerland for mulled wine and fondue. My excitement at crossing a border on a train was nothing compared to this! The slopes were better than anything we’d ever experienced, too, but they were unremarkable to the locals and we had them virtually to ourselves. It was certainly more relaxing than last Christmas, spent dealing with Poznan and Tom’s parents. Or, for that matter, our mid-summer’s dash over the continent.
We returned to Warsaw to find that winter had seized the city with even greater enthusiasm than last year. Temperatures were parked in the mid-twenties. Minus, that is, and that was the maximums. So when Agnieszka (the benevolent’s) parents Witek (the second) and Magda invited us to visit their home just north of Warsaw near the Lomianki forest, it was a struggle to rustle up the enthusiasm to leave the house. Especially when we were told to rug up, which seemed to indicate that we would be doing something outside, which seemed ill-advised.
They greeted us at their door, and we divested ourselves of several kilos of wool and down before entering their home. I accepted Magda’s offer of coffee, although I passed on the homemade cherry liqueur. Ten in the morning was a bit early for me to engage with something that was forty percent alcohol. Although Witek’s ninety-seven-year-old mother appeared, greeted everyone, and downed hers in one.
I didn’t resist, though, when Magda passed around a plate of makowiec, a poppy-seed cake.
‘Foreigners don’t eat our makowiec, Magda,’ Witek’s mother said.
I assured her I loved the Polish cake. The older lady looked skeptical.
Witek’s job with a Polish chemical company had taken them out of Poland for most of the 1980s, and their house was filled with paintings, rugs, ceramics and knickknacks from their time away, spent in places like Yugoslavia, Italy and Austria. They showed us a handful of them, telling us the story behind each; where they’d bought it, what it meant to them. Nothing borrowed from Artbank here.
Now they lived in this cottage by a forest, filled with mementos from a life spent all over the world, their children and grandchildren just down the street – except for one in Australia, should they want to go on a holiday. Although doing so was no mean feat due to the stringent Australian visa requirements for Poles – Agnieszka had told us about the process they’d had to endure to get permission to visit her in Australia, revolving around proving they weren’t planning to stay. Seeing their life here, the fear on Australia’s part seemed ridiculous.
‘Did you read the paper today?’ Witek’s mother asked all of us, as we sat around a large kitchen table, before she launched into a commentary on some recent political events. I knew from Agnieszka that the old woman had grown up in Krakow under German occupation, and had brought up her three children by herself after her husband was killed in the war. The rest I could see for myself: how at ninety-seven, she was still so much a part of this family, living among her children, grandchildren, and even some great-grandchildren. I tried to imagine all of the things she’d seen in her life. How today’s world looked though her eyes.
‘You still read the paper, madam?’ I asked her.
‘Oh yes, every day. I vote, so it’s important to keep up with what’s going on,’ she said.
‘And so is that your secret? To be very … umm … intelligent when you are old? To read the newspaper every day?’ I said.
‘Oh no. The key is … Sudoku!’ Magda, Witek and I laughed. Tom laughed a moment later, after I’d translated.
Magda announced that it was time to leave and started shepherding us to the door.
‘Perhaps you can come and visit to us,’ I said to the grandmother, taking our leave. ‘Although, we live on the sixth floor and there is no lift, you would have to take the stairs.’ Both lies, told in jest.
‘I will do what needs to be done,’ the old lady said.
We re-layered into our down coats, scarves, beanies and mittens in preparation for the ten-metre walk to the car. The bundles of blankets and thermoses of coffee I could see made me suspect Magda and Witek doubted we would understand what ‘rugging up’ meant.
Once we’d taken off, Magda turned around to face us. ‘So now I can tell you, we are going sledging!’ She bubbled with excitement. ‘What is wrong, you don’t like sledging?’ Her smile faltered when we didn’t respond.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, it’s not that, Magda, we just don’t know what sledging –’
Which is the point we pulled up at the forest entrance, and saw the sturdy pony waiting for us, seemingly unfazed by the snow reaching up his legs and the chill air that turned his every breath into a frosty plume. Behind him, an open-topped sleigh just big enough for two Australians and two Poles.
I leapt out of the car and started jumping up and down on the crunchy snow. Partly from excitement, and partly to keep warm.
The three others got into the back of the sled, while I sat up front with the driver. Witek had piled the blankets he’d brought on top of us all, tucking us in at the edges. A tap of the driver’s reins on the pony’s snowy bum and we were off.
We slid along a snowy road spread out before us, nestled under our blankets. Every twig of fir, pine, and birch of the forest was heavy with white; there wasn’t a breath of wind to dislodge it. A couple glided by on cross-country skis, two men marched past on snowshoes, a girl on a horse trotted by. On the one hand, I was astounded to find anyone out on a day like today. On the other, if you didn’t get out and do something when the weather was like this, it was going to be a long winter.
I turned to the driver. ‘It beautiful here. I never see anything like this before in whole world! Are there animals here?’ Perhaps they were tucked under the blanket of snow, like we were under ours of wool.
He listed the ones that lived here – wild pigs, deer, hares, foxes. I was glad for all the children’s stories I’d read that featured the vocabulary of this forest.
Behind us, Magda was translating our conversation for Tom. ‘He says there are hares, foxes … ryś … I don’t know this in English.’
The woman in The Zookeeper’s Wife, one of the first books we’d read for book club, had named her son Ryszard, after her favourite animal.
‘Lynx,’ I said. I knew the word in two languages, although I didn’t know what one actually looked like.
The driver pointed out some tracks to me. ‘That one is a hare. And that one is deer. See?’ Now that he pointed them out, I saw that they were all around us. ‘We will try to look for elk.’
‘Elk? But aren’t they …’ I paused over the word I didn’t know, ‘aren’t they sleeping now?’
‘No, they don’t winter sleep,’ he replied. Winter sleep. Yes. Perfect.
Our driver led us down this path and that. He operated at pony pace.
‘Do you no get lost ever in forest?’ I asked him.
He told me how he’d lived here all his life. ‘You know, in the war, the partisans hid there.’ He pointed at a gully. ‘I used to bring them food and supplies sometimes.’ I imagined him, looking around, and seeing not this forest that I saw, but one with hungry, freezing soldiers, hidden behind rocks.
‘And hide here against Russians, too?’ I asked.
‘Soviets, not Russians,’ he said. ‘I have plenty of Russian friends. It’s the Soviets that were the problem.’
‘Yes. Russian also victims of Soviets,’ I agreed.
He nodded. ‘Yes, the Russians also suffered. Not as much as the Poles, of course.’
Of course.
Our driver pulled the pony to a halt and Magda unpacked a thermos, pouring out cups of hot, sweet coffee for us all.
‘Witek, Magda, can I ask you something?’ I said, thinking about the houseful of items they’d collected during their years away. ‘Did you ever feel guilty about having escaped communism by going abroad, when things at home were so hard?’
‘But were they hard?’ Witek asked.
‘But there was nothing to buy in the shops, wasn’t there?’ As Harry and Jagoda and Basia had all agreed, as Svetlana had told me of her grandmother in Russia.
‘Nothing in the shops, no, but people always had things on their tables. You didn’t buy things then. You organised them. Especially in the country. You could make liquor – like we still do – and pickle vegetables and so on, and swap them with people who had other things. There was the life we were supposed to live, and then there was the one we did live. They were very different things,’ Witek said.
Was communism why Poles were so pragmatic, or was it because Poles were pragmatic that they survived communism?
Madga unwrapped a bar of dark chocolate and passed out squares. Witek opened a hipflask of his cherry liquor, which he’d brought along. I took a draft of the sweet liquid this time. A toasty glow grew from my stomach, warming every muscle and every bone from the inside out.
The driver flicked his reins and pointed our pony for home. ‘So, why do you speak Polish?’ he asked me.
‘Well, I live here …’
He looked like he was considering this. ‘You know, I didn’t realise a foreigner would ever bother to learn Polish,’ he said. ‘It’s nice. If you didn’t, what would we do? Just sit here and not talk to each other? Next time you do this, though, you should do it with an ognisko,’ he said.
‘Ognisko? What is that?’
‘You stop and collect some wood and you light a big fire. You can cook something if you want. It’s really nice. If you don’t have the ognisko fire, there’s nothing so interesting here.’
I would never see this world through his eyes. And he would never see it through mine.
***
A few days later, we welcomed our new house guest. We now had a cat. A loan cat, technically. Anthea had called out of the blue and asked if I could take him for four months. Her husband had bought him for their daughter, but then they’d found out a few days later work was transferring him to Malaysia. ‘How great!’ I’d said, visions of gin and tonics on tropical islands coming to mind when she’d told me.
Except that Anthea wasn’t going.
‘I’ve had enough. I’m going home,’ she said. I remembered how she’d argued that them going home wouldn’t ‘make sense’. So she’d go to Dublin and live in their two-storey house, he’d go to Malaysia and pay for it. Sensible in the expat world.
The kitten, however, was too young to have the shots he needed to clear quarantine and leave the continent. Anthea had arrived a few days later with a grey ball of fur called Bardzo. They’d wanted to give it a name that said something about their relationship, she explained. Liebe, Amour, Amore, they’d contemplated, running through European versions of the word ‘love’. But they’d wanted a Polish angle as well. Amore sounds like ‘more’, which they translated into Polish as Bardzo. Actually, bardzo meant ‘very’. Tomek and Natalia collapsed with laughter when I told them about the new addition to our family – a cat called Very. I never told Anthea. I hoped the mistranslation wasn’t responsible for the separation.
So I was at home with the plumber, the cleaner, and a newly acquired fluff ball, when Shannon dropped round for a cuppa. I’d offered to go to her place, but she was trying out a series of nannies for now three-month-old Fee. I suspected our apartment was a good distance for a test run – for the nanny, and for Shannon. I found chocolate biscuits for both of us and put the kettle on. Our new houseguest, Very, hid under the sofa. I hoped all this commotion wasn’t going to cause him to do anything undiplomatic under there.
The plumber came out from the bathroom. ‘Do you have a shshshsh?’ he asked.
‘Sorry, one more time please?’ I asked.
‘A shshshsh! A shshshsh!’ he repeated the word I didn’t know twice more, the volume escalating with each shhh. I was comforted to find it wasn’t just English speakers who did that. But I may as well have been trying to interpret the static of a wrongly tuned TV set.
‘Sir!’ I mounted my hands firmly on my hips. ‘I am trying. But I do not know that word mean! It not help you just to keep saying it louder! You must to explain it different!’
He made a semi-circular shape with his hands. ‘Like a … a dish,’ he said, using a word I knew.
I indicated he should follow me into the kitchen, where I offered him a stainless steel mixing bowl.
‘Yes, that one will be perfect,’ he said.
I sat back on the couch, and reached over for a biscuit.
‘You know you’ll never win an argument against a Pole.’ Shannon dipped her biscuit in her tea.
‘I don’t think they call it arguing. I think they just call it communicating.’
‘They seem to be getting along OK.’ Shannon pointed to the plumber and my cleaner, Pani Henryka, who were chatting in the guest bathroom, visible from our position on the couch. Despite the fact that she had made my bed and handwashed my jumpers for a year and a half, I couldn’t bring myself to refer to her as anything but the formal pani, or ‘madam’.
‘That’s because they’ve got a common enemy – they’re both complaining about how poorly built the apartment building is.’ A conversation between two Poles who didn’t know each other always went the same way – I could attest, after extensive research in supermarkets, chemists, and buses. First, they would find something they could both complain about. How long something was taking, the traffic, how it was too hot or too cold – or if it was nice, then how it surely would be terrible tomorrow. Eventually, they would find something to disagree about, and then they would fight about that for a while. They’d end up coming round when they found something else they could agree to complain about. Usually that their children never visited them. The art of Polish conversation in one easy lesson. ‘They’ll probably start on me soon,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Pani Henryka thinks I’m much of a wife.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘She told me.’ Pani Henryka had given me a long lecture on how Tom would find himself a Polish girl if I kept going away and leaving him to fend for himself. ‘Yes, Pani Henryka,’ I’d replied.
‘You know, I thought I would have more Polish friends here,’ Shannon said. ‘It’s harder than you think, isn’t it?’
‘It is. But if you think about it, would we be friends with diplomats at home? Or would we invest in people who are sticking around? It’s like we had this Polish girl who wanted to join our IWG book club – ’
Shannon gasped. ‘You joined the IWG?’
I felt like I’d being caught stealing from the church collection plate. ‘Oh yeah. I wasn’t going to tell you that. I just thought I might meet some interesting people there. Or some people, full stop. It was pretty lonely here at first. I was pretty lonely here at first.’
‘Really? You always seemed so busy. Always off doing something.’
‘I have been. But I’ve actually found it hard, not working. And you just always seemed to be getting on with your studies, and now Fee of course …’
‘How interesting do you think accounting is? Never mind a three-month-old.’ She shook her head. ‘Why have we never talked about this before?’
‘I guess I’d been looking forward to this for so long that I didn’t want to admit that it’s turned out to be harder than I expected. It seems ungrateful.’
‘When so many people would love to be in our position …’
‘Exactly. And so much of it is great. But meeting all these new people all the time … it comes easily to Tom. But not so much to me. And Tom doesn’t want to hear me complain about it anymore.’ I took another biscuit.
So did Shannon. ‘Well, complain to me anytime. I don’t know if I can help, but I’ll always listen.’
‘Thanks, Shannon.’ Even hearing that helped.
‘So you joined the IWG book club,’ she smiled and shook her head, ‘and a Polish girl wanted to join …’
‘Yes. She wanted to join to improve her English. And there was an outcry. “Why does a Polish girl need to join a book club about Poland?” and so on. But she’s ended up bringing a completely different perspective to it. Did you ever hear of the book Snow White and Russian Red?’
Shannon shook her head.
‘It’s by a young girl called Dorota Maslowska. She wrote it when she was eighteen, when she was studying for her final exams, apparently. A nihilistic tale about Polish post-communist youth.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
‘I wouldn’t know. It’s impenetrable. They made a film of it – it’s no better. But the Polish girl, Magda, read it in Polish, and said to us, “Isn’t it funny?” and we all said, “No, it isn’t.” And she said that in Polish it’s hilarious. I have no idea why.’
The sounds of a mounting row erupted from the bathroom. ‘And you were there for communism and all!’ Pani Henryka yelled at the plumber, which was obviously old Polish people talk for ‘and you should know better’. She yanked her vacuum out of there.
They’d reached Stage Two.
Shannon finished her tea. Anglo-Saxons drink a lot of tea, apparently. Tomek could not understand it.
‘Hey, I’m doing a commissary run later. Do you need anything?’ I said. The US Embassy had a shop in their building that stocked everything an American away from home would want, directly imported from the US. Dozens of types of breakfast cereals, bread and cakes chock full of preservatives and high-fructose corn syrup, low-fat everything, steak from American cows – even American brands of dog food, so their pets could do their bit for the American economy. As long as you were with an embassy, you could use it. You could even pay in US dollars. There wasn’t much I hadn’t found in Warsaw these days, but there were a few things that weren’t available elsewhere – thanks to the Commmissary, no longer was Poland a land without vegetarian sausages for me.
‘Oh, I do need some jalapeno chillies,’ she said.
‘Of course. No tinned soup today?’
‘No thanks. Why hasn’t tinned soup made it to Poland anyway?’
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘You know what there is in Poland that I’m going to miss when I leave, though? Boil-in-a-bag rice.’ Parcooked rice that came in pre-sealed perforated plastic bags. You put them into boiling water and ten minutes later, you had perfectly cooked rice. I’d never seen anything like it. ‘Do you have that in Canada?’
‘Of course! It is the twenty-first century in Canada, you know! Even if it’s not in Australia.’
The plumber came out and told me the shower was fixed. ‘One twenty with a receipt, one hundred gotówką – for cash,’ he said. It was good to know some things were the same wherever you went. I handed him a note from my wallet, thanked him, and saw him out.
Pani Henryka came out, holding a brand new white-topped mop. She’d asked me to replace our old one. This had been my third attempt.
‘This is not the right kind of mop.’ The mop head flopped about like a stick figure with a shock of white hair.
‘What kind of mop you want, Pani Henryka?’
‘A normal one!’ She rolled her eyes and throttled the mop some more.
‘Pani Henryka, perhaps best thing you buy right kind mop, I pay you,’ I said.
She pursed her lips and stormed off down the corridor. ‘How am I supposed to mop with this?’ she grumbled, shaking her moppy victim as she went. Bardzo was still under the sofa. I didn’t blame him.
‘Actually,’ Shannon said, ‘I wouldn’t mind a walk. Shall we go to the commissary together?’
‘No, I’ll be …’ I stopped. If you treat people like you’ll only know them a short time, you probably will. ‘You know what, some company would be lovely. Let’s do that. Got time for another cup first?’
‘Of course.’
I put the czajnik on again.
***
Having cleared the hurdle of filling in the form, the Warsaw Uprising Museum’s volunteer program accepted me and I reported for the first meeting with my new supervisor, Gosia. Gosia was a middle-aged woman with mousey blonde hair who, at first impressions, didn’t seem much given to emotion. Except where the heroes of the Uprising were concerned, that was. My first day, she showed me some archival footage from the Uprising – the sixty-three day effort by the Polish Home Army, or underground resistance forces, to liberate the city from its Nazi occupiers. I recognised the former telecommunications building, known as PAST from the acronym of its name in Polish. Grainy footage showed Nazi hand-thrown grenades flying into one of its windows. There was now an excellent restaurant there. Gosia and I sat in silence, watching people running from falling bombs and flying bullets, across a square I walked through almost every day. Women bandaged the wounded in a makeshift hospital in what looked like one of the buildings that was now the university; priests buried the dead in a courtyard, perhaps one like where makeshift bars now popped up.
She told me something of the footage’s history – that it was mainly because of Americans that it still existed. How, after the war, even talking about the Uprising was banned, and the communists destroyed many of the records that stayed in the country. Most of what survived only did so because it was smuggled out of the country, often to the US. Some of it was still turning up now, she told me – the old insurgents died and their grandchildren found it in dusty suitcases in attics. Her eyes never left the grey and white images.
‘I’m sure the Americans would have been proud to know they were playing a part in thwarting their Cold War enemies, even an unwitting one,’ was what I would have liked to say.
‘Very interesting that story,’ was what my Polish allowed.
I could understand almost everything people said to me now. I had a near native ability to upset storekeepers by telling them I had no change. It was taking the next step – expressing something more complicated than immediate needs and wants – that was a struggle. I hoped interacting with Polish people in an office environment would help get me to that next level. And here was my opportunity. I ran my next sentence over in my mind a few times – how often I would come and when – before trying it out. ‘So, I think I come here one morning every week, three hours, maybe Thursday, but day up to you is OK.’ It was more complicated than most things I had the opportunity to talk about during the day, and I was pleased to have been able to express my flexibility if not perfectly, then clearly. I waited for her to accept my generous offer.
‘Volunteers have to work at least six hours per week,’ she said. ‘It’s in your agreement.’
The agreement I had signed without reading it because of the complicated legal Polish. ‘I no reading …’ When I didn’t have time to rehearse – and under pressure to boot – my Polish disintegrated like the PAST building under fire. If only I could run across the square and duck for cover.
She closed the footage and turned her chair away from me.
An email formed in my mind.
Dear Gosia, sorry I decide I not able to come to be volunteer for you. It turn out I be very busy and not able to commit necessary time, but thank you for show me film of Warsaw Uprising, very interesting that film, appreciate it very much.
I hit the mental delete button. I wasn’t going to give in that easily. I had the reputation of the Anglo-Saxon race – or was that races? – to uphold.
Instead, I applied myself to the task I’d been given: to look through every copy of the Biuletyn Informacyjny – the daily news bulletins that the insurgents had produced, to find any references to films or photographs that would help date the other footage the museum had. At least that was the task as best as I’d understood it when Gosia had explained it to me in her machine-gun Polish. I was too sick of asking for clarification all the time. While I still hadn’t tackled a whole book, I could read Polish newspapers almost as fluently as I could read English ones these days, even when they dealt with fairly technical political or economic subjects. So as long as I had understood what I had to do, I thought I was capable of it. I reported every Thursday for three hours (having extracted special dispensation), and did what I thought I was supposed to be doing.
The Uprising was only supposed to last a matter of days. That’s all the Poles imagined it would take for the Soviets, who they knew were about to reach the Praga side of the river, to join their efforts to defeat Nazi Germany. Without arousing the suspicions of the occupiers, the Poles had managed to stash away weapons, food and other supplies – including printing presses, ink, and photographic film. Through an underground information network, the men and women, girls and boys of the Uprising launched an all-out assault on the unsuspecting enemy. All they had to do was hold out until the Red Army joined in. Using the stolen ink and hidden presses, they produced daily bulletins to keep themselves informed of what was happening. A double-sided A3 sheet, put together and distributed through a city under siege. Starting at the beginning, I read every one, cover to cover.
There was another staff member in the office, Agata, with thick-rimmed glasses, who looked like she was not long out of university. When Gosia left our room, I would turn my seat around towards Agata and say, ‘Aga, I have a question,’ before launching into the things I’d saved up regarding the technicalities of the Uprising I had come across and not understood. ‘What is a “cow bomb”?’, ‘What is a “Spanish horse”?’ ‘What is “W hour”?’ Perhaps they weren’t stupid questions. But I was fed up with feeling stupid for not knowing that a Spanish horse was a particular kind of barricade made of crossed timber, W hour was the exact moment – seventeen hundred hours on the first of August, 1944 – that the Uprising broke out, or that a cow bomb made a mooing sound as it fell, and was especially dangerous because it exploded into thousands of tiny pieces on impact. Not things that would help me in my day-to-day interactions with Poland, I supposed, but all things I needed to know to understand the bulletins. Agata also told me a host of other things I would never have known without her. Like that all the insurgents used code names so they couldn’t betray each other. Pawel was known as Witek. Tomek was known as Wladek. Agnieszka was known as Ewa. I wondered if it had anything to do with how Poles introduced themselves now. As though anything more than a first name were still a state secret.
The main streets and features of the Old Town, where the battle was principally fought, I knew – the restaurants and shops that were there now, anyway. But Agata could tell me what shops and restaurants were there seventy years ago.
‘That street used to go through from here to here,’ she’d explain. ‘It ended at the monument then – there used to be an old warehouse there, and a brewery. They used the basement as an ammunition store. Now it ends here,’ she’d point at the Google Maps page I’d been poring over, trying to understand where something had been. It was as though she’d seen both with her own eyes.
‘I don’t even know that word in English. Maybe we don’t even have a term for that,’ I joked to her once.
‘But you must. England was also at war,’ she’d said.
Maybe, but that didn’t mean the language of war had made it to me in Australia.
A range of other people came and went from the office over the weeks. They didn’t usually introduce themselves to the volunteer in the corner. Perhaps their identities were still classified. And after each had passed my desk in the corridor a number of times, not greeting me, it seemed too late to introduce myself. A woman came in – from another department, maybe? – and offered Agata a piece of cake from a platter. She walked past me with the full plate, into the next room.
‘What are Polish people like?’ Aga took her turn at asking me once.
‘I find it difficult to … understand them, sometimes,’ I said.
‘Yes, the language barrier must be very difficult for you.’
When Gosia’s footsteps approached, our chatting would stop.
‘Did you find anything yet?’ she’d ask me, passing by my desk.
I’d shake my head, and go back to the bulletins.
The early editions were full of optimism. The progress of peace talks in Western Europe, how far the Russians were thought to have gotten, updates from the government-in-exile in the UK. They were hopeful, chatty even. As though it would be just a matter of time before they won. Alongside the news, they painted a picture of life in the Uprising. Details of a blood drive, calls for workers to staff various health or sanitation posts, even a lost-and-found section. ‘One woman’s purse, brown leather. Apply to Ewa at …’ I wondered what Ewa’s real name had been.
I’d pause from reading the files every so often and flick through the thousands of photos in the museum’s electronic system. Images of the men and women and children who were writing the articles, and those about whom they were written. I tried to imagine them, digging the trenches and building the Spanish horses, throwing home-made explosives, staffing the health clinics, and losing their brown leather purses. I’d look up Wikipedia, to fill in other gaps. It told me that Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler had issued a directive at the time that Polish children not be educated above grade four, with teaching to be limited to counting to five hundred only, and writing to be of their names only. Poles were supposed to end up the slaves of the occupying Germans, what was the point of more education?
How had I never known any of this?
‘Aga, I have a question,’ I said once, when Gosia stepped out to a meeting. Aga turned her chair so we could chat over the few metres that separated our desks. ‘In Czas Honoru, all the Nazi soldiers living in Warsaw spoke Polish. In real would they speak Polish, or is that just for the TV?’ Czas Honoru, or Days of Honour in English – was one of Tom’s and my favourite Polish TV series. It was a period drama set in Warsaw during the war – a cross between documentary and soap opera.
‘Some would just be for TV, but some of them would have spoken Polish. The ones who’d been here for a long time, or if they grew up near the border.’
‘Do you watch that show?’ I said. Aga held her hands up at the room full of photos, films and images of the war around her. I figured she was telling me she had enough of it in her daily life. ‘I like the actor in it very much … Bronek. You know him?’ I quickly googled him to find out his real name. ‘Maciej Zakoscielny?’ I said, wondering if she’d heard of him.
From her dreamy-eyed response, she clearly had. ‘Polish Brad Pitt,’ she said.
‘Mmm. Although Bronek much better name than Maciej. Bronek strong, like man. Very … make decision.’ The name came from the word ‘defend’, and sounded like the word for weapon. ‘Maciej too … soft. Too …’ I wrinkled my nose at my Bronek’s real name. Exaggerated facial features could fill vocabulary gaps, I had learned.
Gosia’s footsteps fell on the stairs and Aga and I turned back to our computers.
The insurgents waited in vain. While the British they’d expected support from didn’t come. While the Soviets massed on the right bank of the river, not to help, but to plot against Poland. They were planning to invade, and their first task would have been to identify – and eliminate – those with the courage, intelligence and determination to rise up against an occupying force. It was far more efficient to allow the Nazis to do it for them. In the war I’d known about, there were two sides: those allied with the Nazis, and those allied against the Nazis. In the Polish war, there were three: those plotting against Poland on the Nazi side, those plotting against Poland on the Soviet side, and Poland, in the middle. All alone.
As I read further, the character of the bulletins started to change. The days they expected the siege to last turned into weeks, and then months. I felt how tired they got. How worn down and hungry. And, as autumn arrived, how cold. The ‘public interest’ stories grew rarer. There was no more reporting of missing wallets, or reminders to save electricity. It was just the facts. No longer was there the sense that it would just be a matter of time. It had become a question of how much longer they could last.
I flicked through some more of the thousands of photographs on file. The neighbourhood I lived in, when the pockmarks many buildings still bore today were fresh. A couple of young girls, their hair elaborately styled, smiling for the camera. They used sugar syrup for hair product, Aga told me. A baby, being bathed in a silver bowl, in a candlelit basement. Did she make it? Is that baby now one of the babcias who pushes her own grandchildren in prams near our apartment? Or was that her in another photo, being buried in a makeshift grave in a courtyard?
Another shift over, I donned the layers I’d need to brave the late winter weather outside. ‘Gosia, I find this.’ I held out a copy of one of the articles over her desk. She looked up from her computer. ‘It say about screening for film – talking about the blow up of the PAST building on Zielna Street – where building was that time then. Say that happen two days before, must be right date, because look, this photo we know was that campaign, and that already we know date from here.’ I’d cross-referenced it with other documents and photographic resources.
She seized it from my hand, the smile on her face growing as she scanned it. ‘But … that’s great! Really excellent!’
I glowed.
‘And all along I thought you didn’t know what you were doing!’ she said.
I walked out of the office. A chilling wind whipped wet, icy flakes into my face. I pulled my beanie down, and wrapped my scarf another time around my mouth and nose, and closed my eyes. In case it was actually possible for eyeballs to freeze.