A Writer at War (49 page)

‘
It’s the first time in my life
,’ he said, ‘that I’ve used a fire ladder to enter a city.’ The change in Grossman and in other correspondents, who had been civilians before the war, was commented upon by Ilya Ehrenburg. ‘It is amazing how people changed at the front! In peacetime no one could have mistaken Grossman for a military man, but at the front he gave the impression of an ordinary commander of an infantry regiment.’

Along the crumpled and explosion-twisted
steel lace of a blown-up bridge, we approached a tall stone pier on the left bank of the
Vistula. The sentry, an old Red Army soldier, was standing by a small fire he had made on the quay. He said good-naturedly to the sub-machine-gunner who was standing near him: ‘See, brother, what a good bit of dried bread I’ve found in my pocket.’ These were the first words that I heard in Warsaw. And later I learned that this man in a grey crumpled greatcoat was one of those who had saved Moscow in that terrible year [of 1941] and marched 12,000 kilometres as his part in that great task, the war of liberation.

When we arrived, liberated Warsaw
was looking majestic and sad, even tragic. City streets were filled with heaps of broken brick. The wide squares and straight streets in the central area of the city were covered by a network of intricate, meandering little paths, which reminded me of those made by hunters in the dense forests and in the mountains. Its inhabitants, who were now returning to Warsaw, had to climb over the piles of brick; there were only a few streets where vehicles and carts could get through.

A file of old and young men in crumpled hats, berets, autumn coats or macintoshes were walking and pushing in front of them little handcarts with thick tyres, loaded with bundles, bags and suitcases. Girls and young women were walking blowing on their frozen fingers and looking at the ruins with sorrow-filled eyes. There were already hundreds and thousands of them.

Vladislava and Sofia Kobus, two Polish girls who had been living in a cellar with Jews – Jews who have emerged from under the ground, who had spent years in the Warsaw sewer system and in cellars. Yakov Menzhitsky, a worker from a
ód
stocking factory, and his brother Aron. Isai Davidovich Ragozhek, an accountant from Warsaw. Abram Klinker, ragged, with a bruise, a shoemaker from
ód
who worked the incinerator at the Warsaw Gestapo [headquarters]. I came across these people in the deserted streets. Their faces made of paper. A shocking figure – a small stocking-maker, carrying from the ghetto to his hole in the ground a child’s basket filled with Jewish ashes. He had collected these ashes in the yard of the Judenrat, at the ghetto. He will leave for
ód
tomorrow on foot, with these ashes.

The Warsaw ghetto. A wall, one and a half times the height of a man, made of red bricks, two bricks thick, with broken glass
cemented along the top of it. The bricks are laid so neatly. Whose hands built this wall?

The ghetto: waves of stone, crushed bricks, a sea of brick. There isn’t a single wall intact – one can seldom see an unbroken brick. The beast’s anger was terrible.

Our meeting. People from the cellar [of] Zhelyaznaya 95z. People who have turned into rats and monkeys. Story about the encounter of two Jews from
ód
, in the darkness of a boiler room, in a destroyed building in Warsaw, where rats and Jews came at night to drink water. Klinker shouted when he heard a noise: ‘I am a Jew. If you are rebels, please take me with you.’ A voice replied from the darkness: ‘I am a Jew, too.’ They both turned out to be from
ód
. They found each other in the dark and hugged each other sobbing.

Their hiding place was between the Gendarmerie and Gestapo, on the fourth floor of a half-destroyed building. A Polish girl, with locks and ringlets, gave them shelter. The Polish father of their rescuer had demanded one zloty to get alcohol, ‘Otherwise I will denounce you.’ The ragged Abram Klinker, wanted to give me his only treasure – a fountain pen.

Grossman recounted in his
Krasnaya Zvezda
article the story of the ‘bunker’ hiding place on the fourth floor of a ruined building.

We have visited the ‘bunker’
– a secret refuge where six Poles and four Jews had been hiding for many long months. The wildest imagination would be unable to picture this stone hole made in the fourth floor of a destroyed building. To get there, one has to climb the vertical walls of a sunken staircase, run over an abyss by a girder that had been part of a floor, and squeeze oneself through a narrow black slit made in a dark storeroom. We were guided by a Polish girl who had lived in the hiding place. She walked so calmly over the abyss. And I have to confess that although I’d spent three and a half years at the front, my heart sometimes froze during this trip, sweat poured down, and everything went black in my eyes. And the people from the bunker did this trip only on dark, moonless nights.