Silver Sword

The Silver Sword

Joseph Balicki, the headmaster of a school in Warsaw, was arrested in early 1940 and taken away to a prison camp. He was in the prison for more than a year before escaping, after knocking food to his cell and stealing the guard’s uniform. He then decides to head to his hometown of Warsaw. After fleeing the prison, he arrived in a nearby village and took refuge with an elderly couple who lived there. They are at first confused by his Polish appearance and speech combined with the fact he is in a Nazi uniform, but they accept him as a friend after he explains what has happened to him and he shows them his prison number branded on his arm as proof.

Shortly after his arrival, they hear the escape bell ringing in the distance, and he realizes that his escape has been discovered. Nazi soldiers arrived at the house searching for the escape, but Joseph was hid up in a chimney to avoid being captured. Joseph spent two more weeks in the house before deciding to return to Warsaw. The old man came with him for the first part of the journey, after which he ventures on alone.

When Joseph eventually returned to Warsaw, he found it unrecognizable owing to extensive bomb damage. His old house was one of the many buildings to have been wrecked, and he asks Mrs. Krause for information about his family. She tells Joseph that his wife was taken away, probably to work on farmland in Germany and the children were never found and Mrs. Krause says that they had probably died.

When Joseph returns to the ruins of his old house, he finds a boy sitting among the ruins with a black cat. Joseph tells Jan that he is planning to track down his wife who would have tried to make her way to Switzerland as she has family there, and if he ever sees his children to tell them where he has gone, Jan helps Joseph find a good train going towards Germany in which he makes his escape. On the night of Mrs. Balicki’s disappearance, the children were climbing along the rooftops of the adjacent houses, and watched from a distance as their house was blown up.

The three children then spent the winter living in the cellar of a bombed house on the other side of Warsaw, and the summer living in woodland outside the city. Edek regularly stole food and clothes for his sisters, until one evening he failed to return. In 1944, Warsaw was liberated, but there was still no news of Edek’s whereabouts, nor those of their parents. Ruth and Bronia were still living in the city, in a new shelter, and one day Bronia finds an older boy lying prone in the street. He introduces himself as Jan, and in his possession he has a wooden box.

Ruth makes friends with a Russian sentry called Ivan, who is stationed at a nearby control post. He eventually manages to find out that Edek is in Posen, having escaped from the prison camp where he had been held. Ruth, Bronia and Jan make their way to the city and eventually find

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