* * *
Summer had turned to autumn, and the taps no longer worked. We were going to the bathroom directly into drains, and we were surviving on rainwater, but even God seemed determined to bring the Uprising to an end, because it hadn’t rained in days. The barley at the brewery was running out, and the civilians in the blocks around us were increasingly panicked. Worse still, the AK had run out of ammunition. The city was dying.
Soldiers were going from door to door, warning us that the capitulation agreement had been drafted.
“The agreement says that Warsaw will be cleared of civilians,” a soldier told us. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go, or they’ll take you. But don’t worry, the agreement also says that civilians will be treated well.”
“But where will they take us?” Truda asked.
“First to a transit camp in Pruszków. Be prepared with your bags tomorrow morning, then come out onto the street when they call for you.”
Later that afternoon, there was a knock at our door, and Sara was there. The past weeks had taken a toll. She was visibly exhausted, but it was her hands I noticed most. The skin of her hands and arms was filthy, and her fingernails were chipped and black with dirt. I was curious, but when she saw me staring at the dirt, she simply shook her head.
“I just came back to tidy up a few things,” she said quietly. “And I wanted to say goodbye.”
“We will surrender tomorrow anyway,” Mateusz said. “Why don’t you wait here? Come with us.”
“No, I have patients at the hospital who are relying on me, and I should stay with the Sisters. They are anxious about surrendering, and I think I can support them.” She pulled Mateusz and Truda close for a hug, then turned to embrace me. “I’m proud of you, Elz·bieta.”
“Don’t make me cry,” I said unevenly.
She hugged me again.
“Have you seen him?” I asked her, one last time.
“Not for a few days.”
“Be safe,” I said, blinking away tears.
“When all of this is over, wherever I end up, I’ll come home to Warsaw. I have unfinished work here.”
“I’ll find you,” I promised, and then she was gone.
The next morning at four o’clock, the Germans were on our street with blaring loudspeakers, announcing that we all needed to be prepared for evacuation at nine. I was wide-awake and had been up long enough to pack a small bag of clothes for whatever journey lay ahead. I was sitting on the floor opposite my mural, trying to record every detail to memory.
Just before we were due to leave, I scooped up my pencils, ran to the wall and added two final figures to the mural. The first was a girl with wavy blond hair and green eyes, and she stared lovingly into the eyes of a boy with chocolate curls and hazel eyes...a boy dressed in a Boy Scouts uniform.
32
Roman
Defeat was inevitable, but that made it no less painful. Considering that we had prepared to fight for one to three days and managed to last sixty-three, ours was a proud failure—but a failure, nonetheless. We lost tens of thousands of fighters, including thousands of children fighting with the Gray Ranks. By the time we were told to stand down on the sixty-third day, Sword and I were the last two members of our squad.
I had seen and done things in those sixty-three days that I had never been prepared for, but when the capitulation agreement was formalized and we turned ourselves in to the Germans, I found myself in completely unexpected and uncharted territory. I was now a prisoner of war.
As we walked through the city under close German guard, I saw civilians being marched this way and that, flanked closely by triumphant and often mocking German soldiers. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the civilians as we walked. We had done our best, but we had failed them. Likewise, I tried hard not to notice the destruction of the city. We passed dozens of buildings that were reduced to smoldering rubble and dozens more that were freshly ablaze. As punishment for our decision to rebel, our homes, our libraries, our monuments and our infrastructure would be reduced to dust. It wasn’t enough that they had taken our people and our homes: they were going to take what was left of our culture. It was miserable, but I kept my spirits up by thinking not of what we had lost but of what I had achieved.
Against all odds, I had survived, and I had done so for Emilia Slaska. I had learned how to suppress the instinct to throw myself unthinkingly into every battle. I had learned to pause and to ask myself, How can I be smart here? How can I guard my life as I would guard hers, just as I promised her I would?
Between that small shift in my thinking and a whole lot of luck, I had made it to the end of the Uprising.
* * *
Over the weeks since the explosion, I had fought off several minor infections, even running on little food and almost no water. My face was a mess—the scarring was going to be horrific—but the pain was gradually easing.
Sword was not so lucky. Shiny pink skin had grown over the wound in his foot, but the bones beneath were visibly deformed, and he was in constant pain. He learned how to bear weight on it, but this left him with a significant limp. I had retrieved a pair of boots and thick woolen socks from the body of a dead German soldier for him, but I had a sickening feeling that if we were ever to receive proper medical attention, he would need to have the foot amputated for any chance of a pain-free life.
Perhaps I would have been less sympathetic to his plight had I not discovered his secret in the weeks since the tank bomb exploded. Sword’s real name was Kacper Kamin´ski, and rather than being twenty years old as he had told us when he enlisted, he had just turned fifteen.
“Why did you lie?” I asked. “You could have still served.” The fifteen-year-old Gray Ranks had served in the Combat School, conducting minor sabotage and reconnaissance, rather than engaging in active combat like the older boys.
“I had visions of being a hero, and people always assumed I was older than I was because of my height,” he said and barked a harsh laugh. “I felt lucky to be able to pass as an adult, so I did.”
“And your parents?”
“I told them I joined the Boy Scouts. I didn’t tell them that we were preparing for a violent uprising,” he added miserably. “Our home was in Z·oliborz. I haven’t seen or heard from them since the night before the Uprising. They probably think I’m dead. Maybe they are dead.”
After that, I had little choice but to take him under my wing. And now that we were marching toward an unknown destination as prisoners of war, I knew my protective duties had only just begun.
We marched for a full day until we reached a transit camp. That night, we were served a meal—muddy broth with vegetable scraps floating on top—and then led to a hall and told to sleep on the floor, without blankets. This led to some confusion among the other soldiers.