Warsaw. Grażyna Zielińska was born in a basement during the Warsaw Uprising

“These were two families from Warsaw, from my mother’s and father’s side, for generations. The parents were very young. My mother did not work yet, she was a 19-year-old girl. My father was 20 years old, he worked in a pharmacy, now called a drugstore, on the corner of Krucza Street. and Nowogrodzka. It was a huge warehouse run by his uncle Leon Szamotulski. He worked as a salesman. His parents met during the war through mutual friends, they all came from Żoliborz. Suzin, Pruchnik, Słowacki… they all lived in this area.

Mrs. Grażyna’s father – Jan Waliszewski wrote down everything in the book “The Story of One Life. Years 1940-1995”. He collected his memories very carefully. The family chronicle has over 330 pages. In 1941 I met Basia. I actually knew her much earlier, but she didn’t exist for me as a girl – he notes matter-of-factly in the chronicle. However, something sparked during the war.

Barbara Pietrzakowska and Jan Waliszewski stood in front of the altar in the church of Saint Stanisław Kostka, in Żoliborz, of course, on the second day of Christmas. As Mrs. Grażyna says, they arrived in a horse-drawn carriage, but that was where the luxuries ended, because times were hard. “The bride in a wedding dress, but a summer one, and it’s snowing here. The reception was at my father’s parents’ house, because they had a slightly larger apartment than my mother’s parents. It was modest. They lived together in colony VIII.”

These are houses built in the 1920s by the Warsaw Housing Cooperative. Every old resident hesitates to call the colony a block of flats or a tenement house. It’s like pronouncing Wilson Square with “ł”.

From Jan Waliszewski’s memories: Our house in Żoliborz was to be expanded by one more resident. Basia was pregnant. The ecstasy of love and young strength must have resulted in offspring. It would be Michaś, as Basia announced.

July 31 was, considering wartime conditions, calm. On a warm summer evening, we sat in the yard of the 8th colony for a long time (…) wondering what tomorrow would be like. (…) August 1 was nice, sunny and warm. We spent the morning in the apartment. There was no need to rush to work. Then a short walk along the nearby streets. Back home. Around noon, Kazik came with an offer to play bridge at his house. (…) After a few hands, around 2 p.m., suddenly shots were fired outside the apartment windows overlooking Suzina Street, near the boiler room of the Warsaw Housing Cooperative. These weren’t single shots, but series that had clearly been in the fight for a long time. A moment later, powerful detonations shook the apartment’s windows. We weren’t sure it was grenade explosions. We ran to the window. German soldiers were running down Suzina Street towards Słowackiego Street towards the boiler room. The shooting continued. The bridge is over.

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Young people with red and white armbands confirmed the uprising. In Żoliborz, as a result of an unforeseen shooting with the Germans, an outbreak occurred just before W.W. The emotions expressed by Waliszewski in his memoirs are typical of the first days of August: joy, faith, hope, but also naivety. How long will it last? We don’t know, but probably soon. A day or two. The Russians are already in Prague, and besides, the West will help.

However, this did not happen. The lives of the inhabitants of colony VIII moved to the basements. They were not connected, so already in the first hours of the uprising, holes were punched in the walls: with hammers, axes, pickaxes, whatever they could. It was about safety, to ensure that the collapsed ceiling did not cut off the escape route and that the basement did not become a tomb.

Meals were prepared there, and they became more and more modest. You read bulletins there, had endless conversations, and slept there. After the first days of insurgent fighting, there was a shortage of electricity, gas and water. Of course, the most painful thing was the lack of the latter.

And what was it like in the basements? These small cells where people stored coal and unnecessary junk from their apartments have now become almost permanent places of residence for entire, sometimes large, families. They were mainly equipped with beds, couches, couches or simply mattresses or mattresses for sleeping. Individual cellars, separated by partition walls made of bricks placed next to each other at certain intervals, only apparently separated the inhabitants of neighboring cells. This created the impression that everyone was in one room. You could hear conversations from nearby cages, you could see what everyone was doing and eating. Life became as if common to everyone.

On the night of September 24-25, something happened that united the neighbors even more closely. And this extended the list of tenants of colony VIII, at Słowackiego 15/19.

“There was an air raid going on, everyone was in the basement, it was dark. My mother fell while walking from one room to another, and at that moment she went into labor. It would probably have taken longer under normal conditions, but the situation made it happen suddenly. What what to do? The neighbors were unanimous: we need a doctor. But where is the doctor? Someone said it was on the other side of Słowacki Street.

Both sides of the main artery of Żoliborz were connected by a passage in a trench.

The Treasury House was and is huge, with several, if not several dozen, staircases. At night, I was supposed to find Dr. Blichowski in this house. And yet I found it. I don’t remember how. But I stood behind the basement door, behind which was sleeping the man who was to take on my problems related to the fact that I was to become a father in such conditions. He was to take on the responsibility of taking the child and securing the health, and perhaps even the life, of my wife Basia and the one who was about to see the world. World? A basement hole that can be forced into the ground at any moment or fly into the air in pieces.

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“The father, a 20-year-old boy, ran, she found a doctor, Dr. Blichowski, who said: Sir, I have just returned from the hospital, from duty, I will not fly to deliver the baby now, there is no way. But the father asked him. The doctor said : okay, but you have to organize a lot of water and a midwife, someone to help. My father carried him in buckets under the bombs, the neighbors helped, he even pulled the midwife out of the ground. The neighbors found some sheets so that dirt, dust and dirt wouldn’t fall on the woman giving birth. rubble. They hung the entire ceiling with these sheets so that it would stay on them. The labor was short and a girl was born.

I don’t know what time or who picked her up, whether Dr. Blichowski or the midwife. How did it all happen in this basement without running water, without the possibility of bathing, without the possibility of performing any treatment? A man was born under bombs and bullets, in the dust and dust of crumbling walls. The Word became flesh (…) Now we had to live or die, not in two, but in three. This is how you had to look at reality. The Germans attacked more and more strongly.

The uprising was dying out. As the Germans took over subsequent districts of the city, they expelled their inhabitants. The civilian population was sent to the transit camp in Pruszków. Years later, an inscription saying everything will appear on the Dulag 121 monument: “Warsaw passed this way.”

On September 29, the shooting suddenly stopped. We sat scared in the basements, as if waiting for something terrible, for the end, for the worst. Suddenly, from somewhere at the end of the underground corridors, a voice rang out: Alles raus! And that was the end of the uprising. Haggard, dirty, blackened, unshaven, hungry, we started going out into the basements.

The description of this journey in “The Story of One Life” shows how horror and absurdity intertwine in war: People left with only what they could take in their hands and carry, knowing that they did not know how long, how far they would have to go and how quickly the march would take place. So people took the strangest things out of their basements and homes. Some women put on fur coats, others put on coats with some ball gowns peeking out from under them, and carried leather suitcases next to potato sacks (…) Some took cages with canaries, others took pistons or briefcases. Tragic were these columns of people who, after sixty days of freedom spent in the basements, went back to slavery in the sun.

The author of these words must have looked strange too. To confirm his daughter’s words: “My father carried me and the chair. Every now and then they stopped so my mother could feed me.”

The first stage of this road ended at the Western Railway Station. From there, the young parents with their baby in a baby carriage went to Pruszków by train transporting coal. In the transit camp, they were sent to hall number two, intended for sick and disabled people.

“They slept on some tables. In order to separate me as much as possible from the man suffering from tuberculosis, they arranged themselves like this: first the patient, his wife next to him, then my mother, then my father, and only last me. To be as far away from the sick person as possible. With food “It was very bad. My parents thought I might not survive because the hygienic conditions were disastrous, so the child had to be baptized quickly.”

They chose the name quickly and unanimously. She was born in the heat of battle, for me she was a symbol, or perhaps the embodiment of Grażyna Mickiewiczowska, that heroic girl – a Lithuanian woman from Master Adam’s drama. And secondly, Mary – let the mother of Jesus be her guardian.

Father (found in some package) He didn’t like the proposal. He considered the name Grażyna as pagan. “They tell the priest that it’s Grażyna, but the priest is outraged that such invented names are no longer possible. It’s impossible, her name must be Maria, the Mother of God will watch over her. They were 19 and 20 years old and they had to agree. And that’s how I became Maria Grażyna, but all my life I functioned as Grażyna Maria. Nobody calls me Maria. I don’t react.

Finally, Jan, Barbara and Grażynka returned to Żoliborz. “The neighbors got together and comforted the parents because the child was dead. Born in terrible conditions, exiled to Pruszków… They decided that the child had no chance of surviving. And yet.”

Grażyna Zielińska still lives in Żoliborz, no longer in a colony, in a block of flats. But he looks around the place of his birth. “I come often, I’m glad that something is happening at the Tęcza cinema again, that the kindergarten where I started my education is still open, and that new cafes are being created.” He refuses a ride, he wants to go to Mercury because “they have the best cheese there.”

All quotes from “Chronicle of One Life. Years 1940-1995” are marked in italics.