Mila 18 - Leon Uris [50]
The women waiting in lines stay put despite artillery fire and air raids. Yesterday nearly a hundred were buried by a collapsing wall.
Around the city, both famous and unknown buildings and landmarks are pocked with shell holes. Warsaw’s only skyscraper, the fifteen-story Prudential building, a visible target for German long guns, has suffered better than eighty hits. It still stands intact, although only a single window on the tenth floor remains unshattered.
Poland’s pride, the Stare Miasto, the Old Town Square with meticulously preserved Renaissance houses and historic shrines, is being leveled lower each day.
Statues of Poland’s heroes which adorn her many squares and parks are now headless, armless, and swordless. The magnificent fountains of the Saxony Gardens and the Lazienki are dry; the swans that filled their lakes have fled, and no one seems to know where.
Despite the situation, a strange calm has fallen over the city. There are amazing semblances of normalcy, and the Poles have not lost their traditional sense of humor. Two papers manage to get published each day. Radio Polskie plays Chopin around the clock between dramatic urgings from Mayor Starzynski. The long-awaited German frontal assault must come sooner or later. How long can Warsaw hold?
Chris pulled his report from the typewriter, hastily marked over the errors with a green grease pencil, and put it into a large envelope.
When the phones went out a week before, Chris was able to obtain a wire until that was broken, then radio. Now Warsaw was completely cut off from communication with the outside world except for the one Radio Polskie station operating for the city on an emergency basis.
There was a sudden break for Chris when arrangements were made for a two-hour truce the next day to allow the balance of the American Embassy personnel to evacuate to Krakow. Chris went to Thompson, who agreed to carry out his reports and Rosy’s photos in a diplomatic pouch. Both of them worked feverishly, Rosy shooting up film and Chris doing a series of articles not requiring a dateline but which could run as an “eyewitness” account in papers around the world even after Warsaw’s fall. It would stand as a great scoop for Swiss News.
Rosy handed Chris a stack of photographs, and he went through them, marking them and checking their captions. Pictures of broken houses and twisted girders dangling in grotesque shapes and stunned mothers kneeling beside dead children and stunned children kneeling beside dead mothers. War’s harvest, a photographer’s field day. Dead, bloated animals whose curious expressions asked what they did to be caught in the middle of man’s folly, and the images of old ladies praying to Gods and Virgins who do not hear them and trench diggers and exhausted bucket brigades.
Ervin Rosenblum’s camera did justice to war. Chris put the pictures into folders.
“Where’re the rest of them?” he asked.
“The Kodak lab just went out of action. I’m going to see if I can’t get enough junk to rig up a darkroom in my basement.”
“Well, if you can’t make prints, you’ll have to let me send your negatives.”
Rosy grumbled. The most horrible thought to any photographer was to surrender exposed film which could not be duplicated if ruined. But Chris was right. It would probably be the last chance to get the pictures out of Warsaw.
Rosy went into his familiar routine of jiggling flash bulbs in his pocket and playing with the shutter stops on his camera. “It’s going to be rough on the morale, watching the last of the Americans leave tomorrow,” he said. “It will affect us worse than a half dozen bombing raids. You know how it is—everyone has an uncle in Gary or a brother in Milwaukee.”
“Yeah,” Chris agreed, “it will be rough all right.”
“How come you’re not evacuating?”
“Why should I? I’ve got an Italian passport and this is a Swiss News Agency bureau. Switzerland isn’t at war. Maybe I want to be on the welcoming committee for my liberators.”
“Chris, you don’t even make a third-rate Fascist. You think those fellows at the Italian Embassy are going