On the morning of August 6, 1944, a fourteen-year-old scout named Jerzy Bartnik strapped a leather satchel under his coat and crossed Marszalkowska Street at a run. The satchel held forty-seven letters. He delivered all of them by nightfall.
Bartnik was a courier for the Harcerska Poczta Polowa, the Scout Field Post of the Warsaw Uprising. The service he carried for was the visible end of a much older operation that had been functioning in occupied Warsaw since the autumn of 1942.
The historian Grzegorz Jasinski, writing in the journal Przeglad Historyczno-Wojskowy in 2007, dated the founding of the underground postal service to October of that year. Its first chief was Kazimierz Grobicki, a former employee of the prewar Polish Post who had escaped a transport to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942.
Grobicki built the service on the bones of what the Germans had dismantled. The General Government had abolished the Polish Post in November 1939. Polish-language correspondence was forbidden. Mail to and from prisoners of war was permitted only through the German postal system and subject to censorship.
The underground service operated parallel to the German one. It used drop points in churches, in the back rooms of bakeries, in the basements of apartment buildings on Hoza and Wilcza streets. It issued its own gummed stamps, hand-printed in small editions, and it cancelled its own mail with rubber stamps cut from school erasers.
Surviving examples of these stamps are held at the Museum of the Polish Post in Wroclaw and at the Pilsudski Institute in New York. The Wroclaw collection includes a sheet of forty Grobicki stamps, denomination one zloty, printed on cigarette paper.
The service moved three categories of correspondence. Personal letters between families separated by deportation. Coded communications between cells of the Home Army. And, in the largest single category, mail to and from Polish prisoners held in Pawiak prison and at the camp at Majdanek.
The Majdanek correspondence is the best documented. The underground postal service maintained contact with a Polish guard at the camp, identified in postwar records only as L, who passed letters in both directions through a laundry contractor's truck. Between January 1943 and April 1944, by Jasinski's count, at least 8,400 letters moved through this channel.
“The Majdanek correspondence is the best documented.”
The figure is conservative. The actual number is unknowable, because the records that survive were buried in milk cans on Lwowska Street in 1944 and dug up only partially after the war.
Grobicki was arrested on March 19, 1944. He was taken to Pawiak and, according to a fellow prisoner's later testimony, executed in the prison courtyard on April 11. He was forty-six years old.
His successor was a woman named Halina Starczewska-Chorazyna, a former telegraph operator. She ran the service for the next four months, until the outbreak of the Uprising on August 1.
On that day, the underground postal service made a decision that historians have debated since. It went above ground.
Within forty-eight hours of the start of the rising, Starczewska-Chorazyna had merged her operation with the Scout Field Post being organized by the Grey Ranks. Field offices were opened in the basements of buildings on Swietokrzyska Street and on Krakowskie Przedmiescie. New stamps were printed, this time openly, bearing the Polish eagle and the inscription Poczta Polowa.
Mail volume during the Uprising was enormous. The historian Wlodzimierz Rozycki, in his 1985 study of the field post, estimated that some 150,000 items of mail passed through the service in sixty-three days. The couriers, mostly children between eleven and sixteen, ran the length of the contested city with letters in their pockets and under their coats.
Eighteen of them were killed.
The service continued until October 2, 1944, when the Uprising capitulated. The last delivery on record was made on the morning of October 1, by a thirteen-year-old courier named Witold Modelski, who carried a single letter from a wounded soldier in a cellar on Mokotowska Street to that soldier's mother three blocks away.
Modelski survived the Uprising. He was killed in 1945 in fighting near Pomerania, three months before the end of the war in Europe.
Starczewska-Chorazyna survived. She was deported to a German prisoner of war camp at Oberlangen, and after liberation she went to Britain, where she lived in a small flat in west London until her death in 1986. She gave one interview, to the historian Norman Davies in 1983, in which she said she had kept no letters. They were not mine to keep, she said.
The archives of the underground postal service that survive are scattered. Some are in Warsaw, some in Wroclaw, some at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, some in private hands. A small collection surfaced in 2011 in the attic of a house in Pruszkow.
Of the letters themselves, only a few hundred are known to survive. Most were burned during the Uprising or destroyed in the systematic German demolition of Warsaw that followed it. What remains is fragmentary, and the fragments are private.
One letter, dated July 14, 1943, was sent from a woman named Maria K. to her husband in Majdanek. It reads, in part, The children are well. The bread is brown again. I am writing this on the back of a receipt because there is no paper.
Her husband never received it. He had been dead for three weeks. The letter was returned to the underground post and held, and after the war it was passed to her surviving daughter, who donated it to the museum in Wroclaw in 1979.
A postal service does what a postal service does. It moves the words of people who would rather be together to the places where those people are. Under occupation, this is also a kind of weapon, and a kind of grief, and a kind of insistence that the country still exists because its letters still arrive.
