The woman who shows up
Her name is Wanda Traczyk-Stawska. She’s 94. And still she arrives, she stands up, even if these days she may require the help of a wheelchair to get there or someone to hold her by the elbow when it’s time again to stand, to stand for something.
This past Sunday, before an estimated crowd of between 80,000 and 100,000 people in Warsaw’s Old Town, Wanda Traczyk-Stawska came and stood for Poland’s place within the European Union. The year before, she stood for women. And the year before that, it was for Poland’s mentally handicapped children and their families, who were asking the government for more help. On that day Traczyk-Stawska was not allowed to go inside the Sejm doors to join those families where they were, but still she stood, she stood outside and spoke for them there, and eventually handed one of those children an old toy she’d cherished nearly all her life — a tattered and stuffed toy monkey she received at the end of the Warsaw Uprising, something she’d held onto through prisoner of war camps, through decades to come. “Take care of this monkey, because it is a very important monkey,” she said to the girl she handed it to. “This monkey holds the memory of the Warsaw Uprising, but also of many, many kisses.”
It’s simple, really. In this complicated country, complicated world, most everyone stands for something, and not everyone may believe in each of Wanda Traczyk-Stawska’s beliefs, her causes, her political leanings. This is anyone’s right. But as for who she is, and why she at least deserves the decency of silence when she does have something to say, of a voice within the cacophony of voices forever arguing over what Poland should be, deserves mention. And yes it’s simple: it’s because hers is a voice which bears the weight of the Polish experience, the embers of that awful war, the timbre of this country’s harrowed past.
So who is Wanda Traczyk-Stawska? She was born near Łazienki Park in Warsaw in 1927, and quickly grew into a happy child with a wide smile, long braids, and with unusual speed — playing football is what she loved, and in fact she ran faster than the boys. She also loved her dog, a fox terrier named Lalka. And for Lalka she knitted sweaters or pushed the dog along in a pram. And for Lalka, too, Wanda once stood: the girl was 12, and bombs were now raining from the sky, and the people around her were taking shelter inside of a laundry room but refusing to let Lalka inside. So Wanda chose to remain outside with the dog, and was clutching Lalka when a bomb then exploded into the apartment building across the street. Wanda, still holding the dog, then witnessed a mother emerging from that rubble and clutching her baby, and also some Germans nearby who aimed and fired, and then the baby was gone, along with that mother’s hand.
“My childhood ended that day,” Traczyk-Stawska would later remember. “From then on, I saw the world differently. I wanted to grow up quickly to become a soldier and defend people.”
Half a year later, a German officer entered the apartment where Wanda’s family lived. Suspecting her family of hiding something or someone behind a locked door, Wanda was shoved aside and Lalka jumped on the officer’s shoe. The man threw the dog against a wall, a blow that broke Lalka’s back. Maybe then is when little Wanda first dreamed of clutching a gun. If not then, the idea solidified when she later witnessed the carnage of a mass execution on Puławska Street, blood and the fragments of bodies getting swept into a gutter with a broom.
And Wanda did eventually acquire that gun — a rarity, then, for women were rarely allowed to take arms, let alone younger girls. But before then she had to prove herself, and she did so by first serving as a liaison for the Home Army, an unarmed child who used only her legs and speed — that same speed she once used on the football pitch — to streak through the streets of her occupied city to deliver messages from one AK soldier to another; or to deliver letters containing ominous threats to the enemy, or a traitor; and other times it was news bulletins she carried, bulletins printed by the underground and hidden inside of other newspapers for distribution.
As those days wore on, and the potential of a true uprising simmered, Wanda said to her father, who was preparing to fight, that she wished to fight also. Her father’s reply? It’d be best to cut off those braids, he said, for they could interfere with crawling. So she snapped the braids away, and like all Home Army soldiers who rushed out into that uncertain light of August 1, 1944, she acquired a code name — hers being Pączek, or Doughnut. Sometimes, in between the bullets that sailed over them, some of the boys she fought alongside would playfully joke around with her, asking which bakery she’d come from, Blikle or Róża.
And she fought on. They all fought on. In the span of that occupation and war, Wanda lost her mother and brother, witnessed a Jewish friend and her family getting taken to the ghetto, and of course countless atrocities. She herself was once injured by a grenade blast, and when Warsaw ultimately surrendered and she was forced to relinquish her cherished gun, her comrades in arms — all boys, and thus now on their way to different prisoner of war camps — gave her that stuffed monkey as a means of comfort, as something to hang onto and a symbol of their togetherness until the day they could meet again.
In 1947, Wanda Traczyk returned to her ruined but rebuilding Warsaw. She got married and had children. She earned a degree in psychology from the University of Warsaw, and spent the coming decades devoted to various causes but especially two: one, identifying and honoring the countless people who died all around her during the Uprising and were buried in unmarked graves; and two, using her skills as a psychologist to work with children with Down syndrome or other mental handicaps. And so it was that in 2018, when the plight of those children emerged front and center in the news, well of course she showed up for them, stood for them, fought for them however she could. By then a sit-in protest had developed, with several of the children and their parents having remained inside the Sejm for more than a month. Wanda showed up for them with doughnuts — what else — along with the stuffed monkey she’d called Peemek, after the “PM” gun she’d long ago handled and relinquished in exchange for that very toy.
“I came because I have to send along the souvenir most dear to me, so that it will help those mothers, these boys, those girls who have been in the Sejm for so many days,” Traczyk-Stawska said then. “To make them believe that anything can be done if you have an important mission.”
And last Sunday, there at Castle Square in the Old Town, there Pani Wanda was again. Another mission, another cause. Taking part in the largest of the pro-EU rallies held across Poland amid escalating tensions between the ruling government and the EU, Traczyk-Stawska arrived and eventually rose to her feet, and took a microphone, and spoke.
“Beloved, my beloved,” she called out. “We have always been in Europe. And no one will lead us out of it. Because we were born here from the beginning. These are our roots, and we have in our slogan, as you remember: ‘For our freedom and yours.’”
As her words rang out, so too did some others. A middle-aged man, a nationalist who’d organized a counter demonstration nearby, had a megaphone and through it was now screaming out, attempting to drown out Wanda’s moment, Wanda’s words with his own. So Pani Wanda spoke louder.
“Shut up, stupid man,” she said. “Be silent, because I am a soldier who remembers how blood was shed, how my colleagues died. I am here to cry out on their behalf. No one will ever take us out of my homeland, which is Poland, but also no one from Europe, because Europe is also my mother.”
Cheers rippled out, and blue flags waved. Later Traczyk-Stawska left the stage, left the microphone to someone else, and eventually the crowd dispersed, those tens of thousands finding their way back to their own homes, their own pillows for a hopefully quieter night. But this is Poland, and in Poland there is always conflict — between neighbors now and behind their many walls. So surely this would all happen again. The raised voices, raised tensions. Other protests, further causes. And somewhere within all that, for as long as she has a voice, Wanda Traczyk-Stawska may well be there. And on her sleeve will be her heart, her colors. And rather likely, she will stand.
Photos provided by Mikołaj Kaczmarek - Kolor Historii. For more of Kaczmarek’s work, please visit his Facebook or Instagram pages.
Related links:
Wanda Traczyk-Stawska interview with the Warsaw Rising Museum
Peemek the monkey, now held at the Museum of Warsaw
