European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

‘You’re not gonna believe this: last night there was a huge affair in our street!

They were shooting around at midnight, there was a huge fire under the bridge!

Some saboteurs burned the trucks! The Germans were shooting! The whole commotion! The ambulance sirens!’

And I asked: ‘Well, did they catch those guys?’

‘No, I guess not! Anyways, they got really mad because 12 or 13 trucks got burnt.’

Tadeusz joins the scouts, later the resistance army

In my school, the head teacher was an aunt of this boy who went to the Staszic school,

there was this very good 16th Zawisza Czarny Warsaw Scout Team.

Soon after that, the instructors from this team told our head teacher

that they wanted to recruit some people in our school.

And naturally they started in my class

and me and my schoolmates from other classes became members of this team.

Of course, we weren’t told what kind of team it was and where its headquarters was.

We weren’t told anything about this.

But they told us a great deal about conspiracy.

We didn’t know what it meant,

but our team leader, Michał Sianorzecki, who was killed in the Warsaw Uprising,

thought that it was very important for us to know what it was all about and told us a lot about it.

There was democracy in our organization and the troop council decided, because all our instructors belonged to the Home Army,