The Puppet Boy of Warsaw Read Free

killed!’
    Mama worried we would draw the planes to us with our spying, while I thought that if I could keep an eye on the planes, the bombs wouldn’t fall on us. It was a foolish thought but on many nights Tatus joined me. What else could we do? After days locked in our apartment, our limbs and eyes ached, and we were raw with sleeplessness.
    And the hellish noise! I feared our eardrums would burst. Then, when the planes disappeared, the strange emptiness of silence scared us even more. But this was only the beginning. A few days later the ‘Stukas’ arrived – Germany’s fiercest fighter planes, fitted with ear-splitting sirens designed to break our nerve and drive us into submission. I heard them from a long way off before I spotted the first one, circling above us like a sinister bird of prey. Suddenly it dropped out of the sky, nose-diving with breathtaking speed and a high-pitched scream, sliding down in a diabolical crescendo.
    ‘We took one down.’ I cupped my hands over my ears and shouted.
    ‘Tatus, come, look!’ I was hopping up and down but my elation quickly burst like a soap bubble. A second before impact the plane dropped its bombs. Our sky lit up in flames, followed by thick black clouds of smoke while the plane began to climb again. The bastards had hit us and escaped. This was bad, very bad. If they could pull a stunt like that, what else did they have in store for us? That night I did not return to the window.
    Our small family pulled together tight as glue. Mama still managed to cook a soup or a simple stew most days, while Grandpa entertained me with algebra and geometry. Sometimes we spent a few hours with our neighbours, but mostly we just held our breath, peeping from behind our blacked-out windows, listening to the crackle of the radio. There were fewer announcements now, only Chopin’s polonaises and waltzes floated through the ether, reminding us of our Polish heritage and pride. Sometimes the music stopped in mid-phrase, interrupted by a broadcast, but they were never heartening.
    We were the first to experience Germany’s newest tactic, their ‘Blitzkrieg’, taking us by surprise with intense, overpowering might and forcing Poland to her knees. Our cavalry had fought so bravely, but what were horses and guns against roaring planes, armoured tanks and mortars? People fell like flies in the fierce onslaught, ripped apart by the explosions, buried under the rubble of their own homes, mowed down by machine-gun fire from planes, when all they had done was go out to fetch some water or barter for food.
    On 29 September, after a month of bombing which left the city in smouldering ruins and with no more water to extinguish the fires, Warsaw surrendered. Stepping outside, I emerged into a different world. At 46 Pawia Street, where the Chrotowskis had once lived, only an ugly, burnt-out façade remained. The Karsinskis had lost two of their children and my friend Jacob’s house was a smoking shell, his father buried under the debris. The old Rosenzweig couple next door had survived but Steynberg’s bakery opposite Nathan’s shop had burnt to the ground. There would be no more of Steynberg’s fluffy white bread. The cobbled streets were littered with rubble and mangled belongings. And the horses. Their bloated carcasses lay everywhere, black clouds of flies lifting as we passed.
    That evening we saw a long line of our brave, wretched soldiers being marched out of town. To see them trudge like beaten dogs, barely held together by their dirty, ripped uniforms, made me cringe. What would happen to them? To us?
    The next day the German Wehrmacht moved in. And I tell you, they did not do so quietly. Even their Führer, Hitler himself, arrived to inspect his troops and his new, conquered city. The tanks that had so brutally overrun our country now rolled into our city, their treads clattering over our old cobbled streets. And the marching of their troops, endless squares of helmeted soldiers,