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In Kolo there were blocks of one-room apartments with kitchen annexes. We lived there until the uprising.
Just before the Warsaw Uprising [1944] [36] my husband went to see Zbyszek Paszkowski, who lived in the Old Town. I was alone when I heard shooting. Jadzia Koszutska came to see me and told me that the uprising had broken out and that we were going to the Old Town to meet them.
We went on foot, and all the way we didn’t meet a single German or a single insurrectionist. Only when we burst onto the Market Square did we see a procession of people with red and white flags. They were singing ‘Rota’ [a very popular patriotic and anti-German song written by Polish poet Maria Konopnicka in 1896] or some other patriotic song.
We stood bewitched. Suddenly freedom had come to the whole of the Old Town, it was incredible – rarely in one’s life does one have a feeling of such happiness. I experienced it then. We joined the demonstration. My husband dashed out of a café, because they had gathered there, and from then on we were together all the time.
Right at the start of the uprising my husband said to me, ‘There won’t be victory here, only defeat,’ but it didn’t occur to us not to fight. To fight the Germans was happiness; it was suddenly freedom after so many years. We knew we would lose, but what did that have to do with our will to fight? Nothing.
Though I don’t know why ‘Bor’ [General Tadeusz Komorowski, pseudonym ‘Bor’ (1895-1966), a commandant of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) from July 1943 to October 1944] had to stage the uprising then – 200,000 people died – Polish intelligentsia and youth. It is portrayed as heroism. I think that the heroes were the people who fought, but it was the heroism of people betrayed by their leaders.
In the Old Town I divided up the food among the boys on the barricades. Later I printed our newssheet. It came out every day, it was four pages long. The printing shop was on Freta Street. I certainly built barricades, and had a gun, but I don’t remember standing on the barricades.
Later on we went round making holes in cellar walls to be able to move from house to house without going up onto the street. People were angry with us. The Old Town was simply massacred, they bombarded it terribly; houses collapsed, people were killed under them, there was no escape. The Germans sat on the roofs and shot at passers-by, and there was nothing to eat. So the people blamed us, the insurrectionists.
On 26th August [1944] my husband was killed. We were in the same house; he was standing nearer the street and I was standing nearer the courtyard. I was printing the newspaper, and suddenly a bomb with a time delay fell on the house.
The last thing I heard was my husband calling: ‘Hania!’ I said, ‘I’m here,’ and some guy standing next to me threw me out onto the street through a hole in the wall. The bomb exploded, that guy was killed instantly, and I lost consciousness.
I was wounded in the head and the leg. I was taken to a hospital in a cellar. I regained consciousness there and they bandaged me up. I found it hard to walk on that leg, and I think I had a slight concussion, because I was constantly dazed.
Only later did they tell me that my husband had died. He was buried in a mass grave for the insurrectionists on Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street, next to the statue of Mickiewicz.
Just before the Warsaw Uprising [1944] [36] my husband went to see Zbyszek Paszkowski, who lived in the Old Town. I was alone when I heard shooting. Jadzia Koszutska came to see me and told me that the uprising had broken out and that we were going to the Old Town to meet them.
We went on foot, and all the way we didn’t meet a single German or a single insurrectionist. Only when we burst onto the Market Square did we see a procession of people with red and white flags. They were singing ‘Rota’ [a very popular patriotic and anti-German song written by Polish poet Maria Konopnicka in 1896] or some other patriotic song.
We stood bewitched. Suddenly freedom had come to the whole of the Old Town, it was incredible – rarely in one’s life does one have a feeling of such happiness. I experienced it then. We joined the demonstration. My husband dashed out of a café, because they had gathered there, and from then on we were together all the time.
Right at the start of the uprising my husband said to me, ‘There won’t be victory here, only defeat,’ but it didn’t occur to us not to fight. To fight the Germans was happiness; it was suddenly freedom after so many years. We knew we would lose, but what did that have to do with our will to fight? Nothing.
Though I don’t know why ‘Bor’ [General Tadeusz Komorowski, pseudonym ‘Bor’ (1895-1966), a commandant of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) from July 1943 to October 1944] had to stage the uprising then – 200,000 people died – Polish intelligentsia and youth. It is portrayed as heroism. I think that the heroes were the people who fought, but it was the heroism of people betrayed by their leaders.
In the Old Town I divided up the food among the boys on the barricades. Later I printed our newssheet. It came out every day, it was four pages long. The printing shop was on Freta Street. I certainly built barricades, and had a gun, but I don’t remember standing on the barricades.
Later on we went round making holes in cellar walls to be able to move from house to house without going up onto the street. People were angry with us. The Old Town was simply massacred, they bombarded it terribly; houses collapsed, people were killed under them, there was no escape. The Germans sat on the roofs and shot at passers-by, and there was nothing to eat. So the people blamed us, the insurrectionists.
On 26th August [1944] my husband was killed. We were in the same house; he was standing nearer the street and I was standing nearer the courtyard. I was printing the newspaper, and suddenly a bomb with a time delay fell on the house.
The last thing I heard was my husband calling: ‘Hania!’ I said, ‘I’m here,’ and some guy standing next to me threw me out onto the street through a hole in the wall. The bomb exploded, that guy was killed instantly, and I lost consciousness.
I was wounded in the head and the leg. I was taken to a hospital in a cellar. I regained consciousness there and they bandaged me up. I found it hard to walk on that leg, and I think I had a slight concussion, because I was constantly dazed.
Only later did they tell me that my husband had died. He was buried in a mass grave for the insurrectionists on Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street, next to the statue of Mickiewicz.
Period
Year
1944
Interview
Anna Lanota