The author was born and lived in Warsaw. When the war started she was eight.

The winter of 1940 was awful. The temperature dropped to minus thirty. There was no heating in the kitchen for lack of fuel – no wood, no coal, no coke. The pipes burst and there was no water in the taps and the toilets did not work.

Food was in short supply. One could only buy on the black market but we could not afford the prices. For breakfast we had black bread and coffee without sugar. Lunch was soup without vegetables as we could not buy them. Dinner was coffee and bread. Each meal began with tears, as I did not want to eat that rubbish and often I did not eat. Our lot was hunger and cold. It was awful. Each day we could see the funeral processions in Puławska street taking the dead to the cemetery. There were not many mourners and more and more dead. Only rarely were people crying in the procession and that was a sign that the dead was Jewish.

When the temperature dropped below minus 35 °C, schools were closed. The food ran out and now even bread and potatoes were in short supply. Through hunger and tuberculosis, people were dying en masse.

Our home was sad even though we all helped each other and shared what little we had. The neighbours would come to our tiled kitchen and enjoy the little coke we had. To get the fire going we used what wood we could find from the furniture. We spent long evenings chatting about the news and the end of the war.

Sometimes the occupiers opened factories for the needs of the army. My father got a job in a German ran factory making blankets and sheets in Powązki. He did not earn much, it was a long way from home but it did provide an Ausweis which gave a certain amount of protection from being arrested.

In the spring of 1940 our Jewish friends had to wear a Star of David and talked increasingly of moving into the ghetto. When neighbours left their flat, they would leave some of their property that would not fit into a cart. They went into the home, saying affectionate goodbyes to us. We did not understand why this was happening to them, we had lived together for many years without any problems. None of them came back. All of our Jewish friends died in the ghetto. It was sad. Other people took their flats, sometimes they were people who had been forced out of their own homes, at other times they were Germans and it was hard to trust them.

Uniformed Germans increasingly appeared in the building. They got the best flats. There were also civilian Germans who worked in offices such as the Gestapo. The older people knew who they were and were careful. Sometimes there were surprises. One day we were sitting in our kitchen around the fire reading the underground press. Then someone put a key in our lock and opened the door. We managed to get the papers in the fire. It was one of our neighbours who worked for the Gestapo. She said that her key fitted our door. We don’t know how many times she was there or how many times she checked our things but she never found the forbidden papers.

It got worse and worse. There was hardly anything except on the black market and we did not have the money for that. My father went to the countryside several times and bought things there. Unfortunately he was checked on the train or in the station and everything was taken from him. We lost not only the food but also our money. The only thing that improved in our lives was that we got onions and rape seed oil. That was superb. Onion in oil with the black mud like bread we could get with our ration coupons. We had something like tea although I don’t know what it was. It was sweetened with saccharine. It was horrible. Sometimes there was a ration card for everything and a horrible jam appeared which was poured into dishes in measured amounts. The jam fermented after several days and we could hear it bubbling in the pot. There was also artificial honey which was just as disgusting as the jam. The black bread was like mud, the smelly margarine like soap and there were other specialities which the occupation authorities allowed us.

There was a shop on ul. Willowa. It was below ground level next to the gendarme HQ and guarded by two soldiers. The three floor building was also protected by sandbags. When they went to round people up, the gendarmes would sit on benches on either side of the truck. We would often hear shots in the courtyard. On the other side of the shop on ul. Willowa 8 – 10, there was a building of several floors which was used by the Gestapo for their private flats and was also closely guarded. There were green and black uniforms everywhere which frightened us Poles. If one did not have to go there, one would not go to ul. Willowa. That was a place for important Germans. That was why the only ones going to the shop would be children using their ration cards. My mother never went there as she was too frightened even to look at it. Even after the war the street frightened us and we still did not want to go there. One of the streets that ran parallel to ul. Willowa was ul. Dworkowa which had a similar role. The gendarme HQ was there too and nearly all the houses were taken by Germans. Ul. Puławska from the corner of Rakowiecka to Madalińska was also almost entirely occupied by uniformed Germans. The houses were new, built just before the war. I remember how a high ranking office left the Wedel house on ul. Madalińska and fell under a tram which killed him. They got the driver of the tram. The poor man was ready to die but it turned out that the German had committed suicide. A message found on is uniform revealed that all his family had been killed in Berlin. This saved the life of the driver. I saw this from the balcony and the details we learned from the underground press.

We could not go out in the evening and so I read various books, even those which were hard for a 12 year old. Children then grew up quickly. On day I saw a German who apparently worked for the Gestapo at al. Szucha return home at 2 p.m. I saw two boys, one not much older than me, following him. I had seen them before. They had walked to the final stairwell in the building. That day they left the courtyard quite quickly one after the other. The dead Gestapo functionary was found in the lift. He had been killed by a penknife. I only told my parents. Apparently the boys managed to escape.