This day in history (70 years ago)

1st of September is the day school begins. Twenty years ago I first put on a navy skirt and white shirt, with my hair in braids for the first day in school. (The principal mispronounced my family name and I stood up in a crowd of over a hundred first-years to correct him. He still says hi to me when we meet in the street.)

Seventy years ago, at 4.45 AM, shots were fired that meant school wouldn't begin that day. Something else was beginning.

There had been fighting in Asia already, but these were the shots that began the war that swept the world. At the end, 15% of my country's people were dead. Often the best of them - the ones that fought, the ones that were a danger. Anielewicz and Baczynski and Fieldorf. It took us half a century to dig our way back to freedom.

Memo to world powers: this is what warmongering leads to.

Attention! Attention! It passed by!
Comma three!
Somebody runs on the stairs,
Door slammed somewhere,
One sound of the tumult and uproar
Bursts out, timidly rolls, grows,
Sound of sirens - in octave
Subsides - and rises the moan:
"Announcing alarm for the city of Warsaw!"

And silence.
Somewhere from above
Buzzes, buzzes, hums and quivers
And bursts
Deafly in the deeps.
One, two three,
Series of bombs.
It's somewhere farther. No fear.
Possibly Praga.
But now closer, still closer.
Close by, close by.
Shout like a bloody rag.
And silence, silence, which grows stronger
"Attention! Attention!
Recalling the alarm for the city of Warsaw!"

No. This alarm nobody can recall.
This alarm lasts.
Wail, sirens!
Beat, drums!
Cry, the church bells!
Let the orchestra play march
From Wagram, From Jena.
Grab this moan, regiments,
Battalions, guns, tanks,
Let it burst forth,
Let it persist
In fiery, sacred "Marseillaise!"

When people leave the church at noon,
When in the sky wind the clouds is chasing,
When a dark sleep on Paris falls,
Who makes me continually listen?
Who is that wakes and calls me?
I hear the hum of the night air raids
Floating over the city. Not the planes these are.
Demolished churches are floating,
The gardens changed into graveyards,
The ruins, the rubble, the wreckage,
From the childhood known streets and houses,
Trauguta and Swietokrzyska
Niecala and Nowy Swiat.
And the city floats on the wings of glory
And falls like a rock to the bottom of the heart.
"Announcing alarm for the city of Warsaw!"
Let it last!

(Alarm, Antoni Slonimski, translated by Stefan Golston