A City of Ashes and Song

Dear Jan,

I am writing this in a cellar on Wolska Street, with rubble in my hair and dust in my throat, and I know — I know — that this letter may never reach you. But I have to write it anyway. The courier who will carry it out of the city is waiting, and I must make every word count.

It is the fifteenth day of the uprising. I have stopped counting the number of wounded I have treated. I have stopped counting the dead. There is a child, maybe seven years old, whom I bandaged this morning — a piece of shrapnel caught her arm while she was fetching water from a courtyard well. She did not cry. She looked at me with eyes that have seen too much, and she said, “Thank you, Pani.” Jan, a seven-year-old child thanking me for bandaging her while the city burns.

The Germans are in the buildings across the street. We trade fire through windows. Below us, in the next cellar, I can hear people singing. A woman’s voice, clear and true, rising through the cracks in the floorboards. They are singing a lullaby. Even now, in the middle of all this, a mother is singing her child to sleep.

This city is made not of bricks but of the will of its people.

Jan, I know you would be doing the same if you were here. I know it because you taught me what courage looks like. I remember the winter we went sledding on Krakowskie Przedmieście, how you let me go first and then ran behind me shouting with laughter. I remember Mother’s pierogi, the ones she made for Christmas, the smell of them filling the whole flat. I remember Father lifting us onto his shoulders so we could see the parade.

If I don’t survive, you must tell them. Tell everyone. That Warsaw fought. That we were here. We did not go quietly into the dark. We fought with our hands and our teeth and our hearts, and we made them pay for every brick of this city.

Take care of yourself, Jan. Live. Remember me when the chestnuts bloom.

Your sister, Krystyna

Warszawa walczyła. Byliśmy tutaj. Miasto powstanie z popiołów, jak feniks.