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====== Aureliusz Dembiński interview transcript ======

This is a full text transcript of [[:stories:us:aureliusz-dembinski]].




  Oral history recording transcript
  Duration: :?: minutes
  ----
  Chapters
  01 Early Fighting in the Old Town
  02 Tank Explosion and Daring Escape
  03 Sewer Evacuation and Losing His Original Unit
  04 Captivity, Lamsdorf Camp and Separation from His Father
  05 Memmingen Camp, Liberation and the Christmas Tree




[Ula Sołtys]: So we're so uprising now. You were 14?

[Aureliusz Dembiński]: Yes, in our unit there were only about three rifles, 480 people, and maybe about 10 pistols, and a few grenades made secretly by the Polish underground, and bottles of petrol, special petrol that because the Molotov cocktails, I think they're called nowadays, where you throw the bottle and as the glass breaks, the flames immediately start. So that's what I had. I had one of those bottles and that's it, I think, more or less. That's how I started.

[US]: And do you remember that first...

[AD]: Yes, I didn't use it that first day because by midnight we were told to change our position, from one street to move to the Old Town. So we, midnight, midnight, on the first day of uprising, the whole unit marched out and we had to move in single file very quickly because the Germans were everywhere, so we had to watch for the Germans all the time.

We moved to a different part of Warsaw, to the Old Town, which probably took us, because of the, normally, if you walk normally, probably take you about half an hour, but we probably took about a couple of hours to do it, because we had to keep hiding every night again, and then move about further, and then hide again. But anyway, we got to the Old Town. The street was called Kilińskiego Street, street number three, which was very close to the castle in Warsaw, the Royal Castle in the Old Town. And that's where we stayed for the whole month.

And we were manning the barricades on Podwale Street, which is, Podwale runs into the castle square where the column of one of our kings, Sigmund, is. We were opposite that barricade there and that's where we were doing 12 hours on and 12 hours off duty, on the barricades, and sometimes during the night. We had other duties, into different areas to assist other units to keep the area safe.

[US]: So where did you all sleep? Did you have one place where you were spending nights?

[AD]: In Kilińskiego 3, we just slept on the floor. And the girls that were in the uprising, they made some food that... well, if you can call it food, whatever they could find. They found some stores of various things and they were making up mainly soups, that sort of thing. But I wouldn't call that proper eating, really. We didn't have any vegetables or fruit or that, forget it, that was completely out of the question.

[US]: So where did you get energy from? Well, that's it.

[AD]: From that soup, that was given to us. And we were all very young, so we managed somehow.

[US]: And you strongly believed you're going to win. You strongly believed that you can fight it.

[AD]: Oh, yes, yeah. We thought that we would drive the Germans out. But, of course, they had the tanks and all the... rifles and the Germans we had against us and a lot of them were not Germans they were Ukrainians and Russians because some of the Russian prisoners of war turned sides and joined the German army and wore German uniforms and lots of Ukrainians as well joined the German army so they were wearing uniforms and I remember at night we were because sometimes we were on duty when I was all night long and you could hear that they were so close to us just across the narrow street on the other side so there could be something like 30 meters away from us and you could hear them talking and calling to us as well and coming in Ukrainian about coming to their sides and that sort of thing.

But anyway, eventually, I think, I don't know whether you want to hear about the tank, because I was, I just got back from my duty on the barricades, and I was lying on the floor, late in the afternoon having a rest and suddenly we heard a lot of noise outside our building was still standing. There was a lot of people singing and so on; we thought, "what's going on?" Everyone rushed to the balcony.

By the time I got to the balcony, it was packed—about 15 men in front of me. Straining to see the street two floors below, I saw a small tank stopped between numbers one and three on Kilińskiego Street. Suddenly, there was an enormous explosion. You just can't describe it.

The blast was so severe that many people on the balcony were injured or killed. The man in front of me turned around: smoke had darkened the room and his nose and mouth were torn out, bleeding badly. I grabbed his hand, put it on my shoulder, and together we made our way to the staircase amid choking smoke.

Reaching the ground floor, we discovered the entrance blocked by fire—our store of 600 Molotov cocktails had ignited. Unable to escape there, I helped him back up the stairs to a landing between the ground and first floors, where a window offered our only chance.

The window was closed, so I kicked out the glass and frame. Placing my friend on the ledge, I looked down at people below. "Jump!" I shouted. They caught him by the arms, and he landed safely.

Then it was my turn. I jumped and landed without injury. But as I stood, I felt warmth on my neck and discovered a piece of shrapnel protruding behind my ear—a mystery how it reached me. I ran to someone nearby and asked, "Can you pull this out?" They did, and blood poured out.

I tore a tea towel from a hook, wrapped it around my neck, and fled through entrance number one onto Kilińskiego Street. The scene was indescribable: hundreds of bodies, wounded and dead, women and children—pandemonium and hell.

Remembering a first aid post on Długa Street, a three-minute walk away, I ran over bodies, reached the post, and found they had no bandages. They tore sheets into strips, wrapped my head, and then I managed to return to my station to report to our commanding officer.

[US]: Pardon? You were ready to fight again?

[AD]: Well, I had to go back to my unit and see what happens, how many people are alive. And when I got there, in a roundabout way because the main entrance was still blocked, I found the company commander gathering survivors. About half our company was left; many died in the explosion near the tank.

Then we received orders: the Germans were attacking the barricades intensely and needed help. We ran to support them, staying over 20 hours before relief.

[AD]: Eventually came the day when the Old Town was evacuated to the city center because we couldn't hold it. The Germans were closing in, and our only escape was through the sewers. Despite my wound and a German helmet stuck on my bandaged head, at about three or four in the afternoon I ran bent low to avoid machine-gun fire and jumped into the sewer entrance.

The journey underground took seven hours—above ground it would have been 20 minutes. We held onto each other, moving through large communal canals and then narrow branches, stopping at every exposed cover to check for Germans before re-entering.

Finally, we saw candlelight and men pulled us out. We emerged soaking, and Polish Red Cross women served us tea and food. We lay in the relatively intact city center, unlike the devastated Old Town.

[US]: Have you seen the movie In Darkness by Agnieszka Holland?

[AD]: No.

[US]: She made a movie about hours in a sewage—Kanał. I cried through it, not knowing you went through the sewers yourself.

[AD]: Yeah, yeah.

[US]: It's amazing you survived this.

[AD]: After we came out around 9 PM, I didn't notice any blindness from the light. We were taken by locals, given a wash, and changed into German uniforms captured earlier from a store in the Old Town.

[AD]: ...lady to her house where we got washed and she washed all our clothes and so on and we were we were there for about two days while the clothes were drying and when they were dried we tried to find our unit then because they didn’t didn’t know where they were and eventually when i found where the unit my unit was going to be stationed the whole building was flat, completely flat.

And somebody said, oh, they were all killed in that explosion, you know, the bomb. So I suddenly found that I had nowhere to go.

But I remembered my parents had friends who lived about half an hour’s walk from that place in Warsaw. So I decided to see their house and see what I was going to do next.

So I made my way to my parents’ friend’s place and I found the lady was there, my parents’ friend. She was there and she said, "Oh, your father is just a few blocks away from here. He’s commanding a company there." That was news to me because I didn’t know where he was at all. I thought he was out in the country somewhere, you know, seeing another parachute drop from England. But he happened to be in Warsaw taking part in the uprising.

So I went there. And we decided, and my father checked with the headquarters, that I’ll be transferred from the unit that I was in, in the Old Town, which I couldn’t find when I got into the centre of Warsaw, and be transferred from that unit to his unit.

So I was transferred officially from the unit I was in the first month to the company that my father was commanding. I stayed in my father’s unit for the next month and we had a couple of barricades we were manning but there wasn’t much action going on.

Eventually the surrender was announced and all units had to walk out to the German side. My father and I went together with his unit and the rest of the battalion, and we walked into the German side and we went to prison together by train via Częstochowa.

We stopped just outside Częstochowa for some reason — the train stopped for about two or three hours. The local people found that there were some Polish people on that train; they were goods wagons of course, so we had a hole cut out in the floor for doing what comes naturally. Somebody had a saw and so on; we managed to cut a hole in the floor.

The Polish people started to bring us bread because we were all starving. They brought bread and we had Polish money, so through that hole we gave them some money and they passed us bread.

Eventually the train moved off and we finished up in a place called Lamsdorf (German), now called Łambinowice in Poland. There were about 4,000 British prisoners there because it was an enormous camp dating back to Napoleon days. I was told that between 30,000 and 40,000 Russian prisoners of war died in that camp — that’s how bad it was.

We took over the barracks where the Russians had been, they were full of lice and vermin, and the Germans put us in there. After about two days, we saw women coming to the barracks. There was barbed wire near ours and another set of barracks behind it. The police women from the uprising, about a thousand of them, were brought to the prison on the other side of the wire.

There were about 3,000 of us men on one side and about a thousand police women on the other, and many men found their wives, fiancés, or girlfriends there. They communicated by wrapping messages in paper with stones and throwing them across the barbed wire.

After a few days, the police women were taken out and marched off to the train station a few miles away, then on to another part of Germany.

Also after about three weeks, as my father was an officer, all officers were called out to a large assembly field. On about 11th November we were marched to the railway station in Lamsdorf; 400 of us by name were loaded onto wagons and travelled for five days and nights to Augsburg in Germany.

There we were told to leave the train and march through the town to a building which became our quarters. After two or three days, a German doctor examined us; I had developed bronchitis, so he sent me to the hospital in Augsburg.

A German sentry with a rifle marched me to the hospital. They put me in with Greek prisoners of war, Greek partisans, because their ward had space. They were very generous, sharing cake and chocolate from Red Cross parcels. I was 16 at the time.

I stayed about two weeks in the hospital. One day a German sentry came with a rifle, called my name, and marched me through the town back to the railway station. I boarded a passenger train with the sentry and some civilian Germans; they asked who I was and he called me a "Polish bandit" I was abandoned, looking at age 16.

We reached Memmingen, where the sentry marched me to a proper POW camp with about 2,000 Americans, a few thousand Russians, and many French and Yugoslavians. There were 400 of us Polish men in separate barracks.

I stayed there until liberation by the Americans on 26th April 1945; the war ended in May.

[US]: Do you remember that day? Obviously very... You remember this day, how happy you were?

[AD]: I was in… because I cut my hand accidentally. I fell off the top bunk. There were three levels, and the top was right by the roof—so you had to get off sideways. I stood on the table to climb down, the table legs gave in, and I fell. There was a metal tin of powdered milk from an American parcel on the table; my hand went on it and it opened up, bleeding badly. The men called the German sentry at about 10 o’clock at night, and he marched me through all the gates to the camp hospital.

I was there until liberation by the Americans. I was placed with the English because the English doctor stitched my hand and said, "You’re not going into the Polish hospital upstairs," so I stayed with the English until liberation.

[US]: Can you tell me more about that day?

[AD]: Pardon?

[US]: Can you tell me more about that day when you were liberated? What do you remember?

[AD]: Well, we knew the Americans were coming because at night I used to visit a Polish-American soldier whose parents were Polish. He was in the American army, about 20 years old, and we communicated in broken Polish and German.

We watched artillery fire through the hospital window toward the front, which approached closer each day. Three days before liberation, the Germans wanted a POW to walk with each sentry around the camp; that went on for three days.

Then one day an American plane landed outside the camp. The pilot got out, looked at his map, made marks—presumably "Memmingen"—and flew off.

A few hours later we saw an American tank arrive. German soldiers lined up outside the camp with folded rifles. The Americans disarmed the Germans, who became prisoners, and we were free.

Prisoners of all nationalities climbed on the tanks in celebration. I have photographs of that day, including the first American tank.

[US]: Can I ask you about a story before? Because I read in your memories about Christmas; we have a strong Polish tradition about the Christmas tree.

[AD]: Yes. Before I got a job in the tailor shop, we were marched outside daily to work. For about a week, we dug trenches in frozen ground with pickaxes; nearby were small woods with Christmas trees of various sizes.

When I needed to relieve myself, I asked a German sentry and walked into the wood. I found a little tree, about that big, cut it with my knife, used string to flatten it, and carried it under my First World War French overcoat, which almost reached the ground.

At the sentry post he saw what I carried and was horrified, but after we gave him chocolates and cigarettes from Red Cross parcels, he looked away. I, surrounded by other men, passed through the main gate unsearched and smuggled the tree into camp.

Everyone was thrilled; we made ornaments from cardboard and paper. I crafted a little decoration with a Polish eagle and red and white accents. We sang Polish carols quietly beneath our hidden tree.

When the German sergeant in charge discovered it, he ordered us to dismantle it quickly to avoid trouble. We negotiated with chocolates and cigarettes, and kept the tree for two or three days before removing it quietly.

That is the story of how we celebrated Christmas in the camp. Do you want to know anything more before I fetch the photographs?