He pressed back against brick and stone, arms over his head, shielding himself as the buildings shook and the earth beneath him rumbled.
When the blast subsided and he opened his eyes, the square was shrouded in white dust and ash, a sight both curiously beautiful and chilling, as tiny fragments of the town and the people in it spread like unearthly snow all round. This was not destruction from a single grenade, that comparatively tiny, violent salvo of resistance, nor was this from the Nazis’ devastating Goliath tracked mines. For days the west of the city had been raided and torched, residents shot on the spot or tortured for information, and so he knew this ash was not only the remains of building and concrete, but also the remains of those who had perished within the village square during days of tireless massacre. The Verbrennungskommando, ‘the burning detachment’, was destroying evidence of the massacre here, and so his photographs, if he could smuggle them out, would matter all the more. He tried not to breathe in the deathly smoke, tried not to let it inside him. Over the past two days he had not eaten, had barely found a sip of water, and he was almost glad somehow, as the stench in the air would surely have made him retch.
There had been shouting and movement, a grenade explosion, and now the noises stopped, a kind of respite to match the eerie, slowly falling ash. He wiped his face, raised his camera.
Crouching, he moved forward on one knee. It was not safe. None of this was safe. Just a few more shots and he would retreat to the makeshift shelter inside the bombed-out building behind him, the building that for now obscured his presence, and that of his ever-present camera. But he would have to find a safer place before the dogs were let loose to seek out survivors to be killed. Already half of his focus was on escaping with his photographs. He had been in tight situations before, smuggling film out in empty toothpaste tubes, but this, he feared, was yet more serious. How would he do it?
The conflict had quickly revealed itself to be a homegrown uprising of Polish rebels against a well-planned and -resourced Nazi mission of outright extermination. The German soldiers were killing all citizens, all witnesses. If they found him, they would not let him live. That, he knew…
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