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military personnel and were told to rid themselves of anything that might label them Polish. They bought themselves civilian suits, but Jan hung on to a snapshot of Rulka and his pilot’s wings. ‘I might need to prove I can fly,’ he told Witold with an attempt at a grin.
    They had been told to report to a secret evacuation centre set up in a private apartment, where they were issued with false passports manufactured secretly in the basement of the Polish Embassy. These they used to make their way to the Black Sea and onto ships which would take them to freedom. Freedom yes,but not in Poland, not even in Romania. They were heading for France, away from the people and places they loved. Jan stood at the ship’s rail and watched the land disappear and wondered when, if ever, he would see his country and his wife again.
     
    Rulka was burying her parents when a lone Messerschmitt flew over and machine-gunned the cortège. There was nothing and nobody to stop it. The pall-bearers hesitated only a second or two before dropping the coffins and scattering to take shelter among the gravestones as bullets spattered along the cemetery path. Two of them were killed and one injured. The black-clad Rulka, grieving for her parents, went to the latter’s help. The living took precedence over the dead. And nowadays there were so many dead.
    Her parents, Jozef and Rosa Kilinski, were not alone. They had ventured out between air raids to try and buy provisions. There were so many air raids that the all-clear no sooner sounded on one than the siren went again for the next. Standing in a queue hoping to buy bread, they ignored it and paid for that with their lives.
    It was lucky that the family had a plot in the Pow ą zki cemetery, otherwise they could have been buried anywhere. There were so many bodies they were being interred in parks and gardens and even along grass verges, usually by their relatives; there were too many for the city’s regular gravediggers. And it wasn’t just bombs the people were having to contend with. The Germans were now close enough to train their heavy guns on the city. Walls tumbled, glass was scattered everywhere, fires started and smoke billowed over it all, making the already red-rimmed eyes of those who ventured out of their holes smart and fill with tears. Food was running short and it was a case of risking death or injury in order to find something to eat.
    Since Jan had left what had been bad had become infinitelyworse. As far as Rulka was concerned the desecration of her parents’ funeral was the last straw. Far from making her cowed, it put steel into her backbone and turned her heart to stone. Not until Hitler and his minions had been defeated and the death of every Polish man, woman and child avenged, would she soften.
    She went back to work at the hospital, sleeping on a truckle bed put up in the basement whenever there was a lull in the number of patients needing her, and eating in the hospital canteen. But supplies were dwindling and she didn’t like to take food meant for the patients, though most of them were too ill to eat. The defending troops were doing their best, but she knew it could not go on. More than half the city had been destroyed, its houses, shops, cafes, churches and monuments reduced to rubble, many thousands of its citizens killed or injured.
    On 27th September, less than a month after the war began, when there was no more food, medicines, water or electricity and the defending troops ran out of ammunition, Warsaw surrendered. The enemy had had to fight hard for their victory, but defeat tasted bitter to those Varsovians who remained and were obliged to watch helplessly as German troops stormed in and took control, shooting anyone who showed the least sign of resisting. And in the east the Soviets, far from coming to the aid of Poland as many believed, were doing the same.
    ‘We are not beaten,’ Rulka insisted, when she and Lech were scrubbing up in the theatre for yet