Spring in Warsaw

Today, a break in the weather, Spring. In the midst of this terrible pandemic, and the awful Covid numbers here — hope. Or at least the feeling of hope, of renewal. Of life turning itself over to sunnier days such as this one. 

Today was a day for opened windows, for air, for a lazy stroll. It was a day for jackets and sweaters peeled away from shoulders and instead tied onto waists. Today was a day for sunglasses, for ice cream, for filling up the tires of one’s old bike. Today was a day to be outside, to bring a book, to find a proper bench.

After roaming awhile, eventually I spotted my own bench in Powiśle. Found it square in the center of a little park nestled between the Wisła River and the Old Town. I sat down and removed my hat, my glasses, and let the sun into my face. With no one very close, I removed even my mask. 

And breathed. 

On another bench, two girls were picking away at some fries from Okienko and giggling. On another, a woman held a slice of pizza from Nonna with one hand, and scrolled through her phone with the other. When she got up to leave, her spot was quickly taken by another young woman also dressed fashionably for spring — trendy sneakers, a blazer, trousers rolled up above the ankles. She’d been out on a lazy walk with her dog and now came to rest, to look around, to let the sun in. Her dog spotted a good stick lying in the grass, took it with him into a shady spot behind the bench, and began gnawing on it happily. 

The simple life. Oh this magnificent, and almost forgotten, simple life. 

Taking it in, I began to wonder where I was — what the name of this little park was where I’d come to settle. I’d passed it, this park, even walked through it many times en route to the riverside or somewhere else, but never knew its name. So I checked my phone, opened the map application there, and found my little blue dot resting in the midst of a green patch on the Warsaw map. When I zoomed in on the patch I couldn’t believe the name I then saw: Skwer S. Jankowskiego “Agatona”, or Jankowski “Agaton” Square. This park, it was named after Stanisław Jankowski. And most people, perhaps even most Varsovians, will not have heard of this name. But to me it arrived as a bolt of lightning: Stanisław Jankowski, see, is a character in the book I’m now working on, about a group of British soldiers who found themselves in Warsaw during World War II. The connection? Jankowski was a member of the Polish army, and fought on foreign soil once it became apparent Poland would fall and become occupied by the Germans. His wife, who remained in Warsaw and worked with the Polish Underground and resistance, then housed and cared for one of the key British soldiers in my story. That soldier had fallen terribly ill with typhus, and Jankowski’s wife and mother-in-law — a doctor — took him in and nursed him to health. In so doing, they put their own lives into grave risk.

“Agaton” was Jankowski’s code name in the Army. Jankowski was also among the famed “Cichociemni”, elite special-operations paratroopers who parachuted back into Poland during the occupation and slipped back into the resistance movement. In the latter stages of the war, Jankowski served as a master document forger for the Underground, and then fought in the Warsaw Uprising. Captured eventually by the Nazis, he was sent to Colditz Castle, the famed prisoner of war camp, where he also then met the British soldier his wife and mother-in-law had cared for back in Warsaw before they, too, were found out and rounded up.

Once liberated, Jankowski returned to Warsaw at the end of the war and spent the rest of his life working as an architect. In fact he was among the key architects who helped redesign and rebuild this ravaged city. And there I was today, roaming that city on this magnificent Spring day, and then sitting in his park.

And I’d had no idea. No idea until I’d checked my phone — even though back at my flat, on a bookshelf, there rested Jankowski’s biography; months before, I’d been painstakingly translating certain passages from Polish into my native English. 

Meanwhile, there at the park, the woman on the bench nearby got up to leave. Her dog happily followed, and carried with him his discovered stick. I also followed, getting up to walk around, and sure enough there on a corner was Jankowski, his bust in stone. Surely I must have walked past it, and also through the park, so many times and just never realized. 

But this is Warsaw, where one often walks past history, through history, without realizing. But take a closer peek at the plaster there on any building, and one may find a bullet hole. Look up, and one might well see a tablet. 

But the city, or perhaps the city’s ghost, has a way of pulling us back even as we move ahead, as we take a stroll on any old day. The city reveals itself on its own time, as it wishes, bringing us eventually to the places where we were always supposed to go.

The city knows, even if we never do.

Today, this sunny day, this place.

And what of tomorrow, and the rest of Spring, the rest of the story.