What the Living Do.

World War II started with the invasion of Poland. I’ve known that for ten years. But I don’t think I realized what that meant until I got to Warsaw.

It meant that Warsaw was absolutely demolished. Destroyed. Burned to the ground. At the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising we watched a video, flying over a reconstruction of the ruined city. Smoke billows across the skeletons of buildings, their bricks sticking out like punched out teeth. There was music playing in the background of the video, but I’m picturing the silent ruins. Nothing but the wind. Nothing but the smell. Burnt city. Burnt flesh. Nothing left but the ashes and rats.

Before the Nazis invaded there were a million people in Warsaw. After they invaded there were 900,000. By the end of the bombings, 1,000 people lived among the ruins.

It meant a city that threw everything, absolutely everything, it had into a resistance. The Warsaw Uprising, part of Operation Tempest, was the largest resistance movement by occupied people in Europe. The entire city, civilians and home army soldiers, was involved, together and fighting. Children hid plans in their toys, women in their ink blotters, and the elderly in their walking sticks. Men and women fought with weapons and ideas, reading, talking, and tearing the Nazi flag down in the streets when they could.

The girls who could run fastest acted as couriers. They took messages of plans between the troops, around the city. Often they used the sewers to do so. Dirty, stinking tunnels with two inches of cold water on the ground and slime on the walls. Accessed by climbing down a hole, like a rat. The smell must have been horrendous. Running through the water, filth splashing up into your socks. Torn between covering your nose and taking a deep breath so you can run faster.

The Germans knew what these tunnels were used for. When they walked by the holes, they would causally drop grenades in. Girls, younger than I am, running through that water, trying not to make too much noise. Knowing that at any moment there could be a flash and they’d be blasted against the wall. Wind knocked out of them, stars in their eyes. Can’t breathe, can’t see, lying below the ground. Knowing that at any moment, they might never take a deep breath again.

Can you imagine?

The Warsaw Uprising eventually failed. It was supposed to be timed so that the Germans would be hit from an internal uprising in Poland just as Russian tanks bombarded them from the East. But the tanks were late. The Poles were left flailing.

We walk around Old Town the day after seeing the museum. I’m trying to imagine all these gorgeous walls in ruin, trying to superimpose the damage I know happened over the beauty I can see. But it’s hard. The rest of the city seems haunted to me — the buildings loom up all around you, beautiful, shining, glittering as the sun reflects off their windows. But their very newness reminds me of what they replaced. Old Town is different. It doesn’t look replaced. It doesn’t feel haunted by the ghosts of girls in sewers. But it is.

I walk over to take a picture of the Child Insurgent, the first monument erected to the uprising. It shows a small child, cute, with small hands and puckered lips. His hat is too big for him. So is the rifle he carries. But he looks hopeful. Hopeful and proud.

Just as I’m snapping the picture of the little guy, it starts to hail. Just like that. One moment the sky is practically blue. The next there are chunks of ice careening down, gathering in our coats, hitting us in the face.

The locals walk on, hardly seeming to notice. But we’re entranced, laughing like crazy, holding out our tongues, trying to catch the stuff.

A few moments later, our world is covered in white and our hair is frozen. Everything has changed.

And I realize, walking back, laughing at the snow in our hair, that this is what I didn’t understand about Poland. The idea that in a moment, everything, absolutely everything, can change. Poland is a country where some of their biggest historical events have been like the weather — sudden, drastic, and out of control. As foreigners, we’re shocked that they are still walking around, that they are not consumed everyday by the horrors that happened there. That they aren’t haunted. We cannot wrap our heads around the fact that that was then and this is now.

But for the Polish people, as far as I understand it, things have changed. It’s not that they are trying to forget the past, to never take the time to imagine what the lives of the girls in the sewer were like. But rather that they are trying to move forward. To not be haunted.

I look around at the suddenly new, suddenly frozen world and I remember a poem by Marie Howemy best friend showed me. The last line goes like this; “I am doing what the living do. I am living, and I remember you”. And that is what the Polish people are doing. They are living, and they remember you.