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‘Get down, Noemi! There’s a Goliath coming straight towards you. If you can get to a vantage point, try and take it out.’

Noemi flung herself onto the blood-sodden ground and began half scuttling, half crawling out of the miniature tank’s range.

She couldn’t see who’d shouted at her, and she hadn’t heard the remote-controlled mine clattering towards the pile of bricks where she’d stopped in a hopeless attempt to hide and draw breath.

She could hardly hear anything above the whirlwind of noise that roared relentlessly round the city.

The last remnants of mercy had been stripped from Warsaw.

The misery and chaos which had once been confined to the ghetto had spilled out over the whole city.

Its streets rang day and night to the thump of pounding shells and collapsing buildings, to the bellow of rocket launchers and the wail of agonised screams. Peace no longer existed in any form.

The Germans only paused the flames and the bullets so they could switch on their loudspeakers.

‘Surrender now – your allies have deserted you. Surrender now and no one will be harmed.’

Explosions and lies followed by more ear-shattering explosions, which left a silence behind them that sucked in the whole world.

The cycle of destruction and threats was endless and nerve-shredding, and the Germans had long held the upper hand.

The orders from the resistance commanders to keep striking back flew as thick as the grenades, but it was almost impossible to carry them out.

There was nowhere left standing that could safely act as a vantage point.

Noemi had nothing left to use which could take out a Goliath.

And – unlike some of the more fervent Polish fighters who were prepared to die for their city – she wasn’t going to use her body to throw the miniature tank off course.

Despite everything she’d lived through, and everything she’d lost, she wanted to stay alive too much to make that kind of sacrifice.

‘It’s seconds away from you – move!’

Noemi stopped waiting for a brief break in the bullets and threw herself through a hole in the nearest wall as the Goliath swivelled and homed in on its target.

‘In here, quickly.’

She plunged after the voice, hurling herself through another ragged opening and down a cracked flight of stairs, praying she wasn’t about to swap fire for fire and find herself trapped in an overcrowded cellar.

Thankfully her luck held. Her invisible saviour had led her into one of the few underground hospitals the Germans hadn’t yet destroyed.

Noemi stopped and tried to take stock of herself.

Her hands were cut and bleeding; one of her knees was torn.

Her throat was so parched every breath spluttered out on a cough, and her legs had no more substance than water.

She sank down onto the damp floor and dropped her head into her arms. Warsaw needed her, it needed them all, but it had almost broken her too.

The partisans had spent over a year hiding out in the forest, waiting for Warsaw to finally decide to fight.

It took until summer 1944 for the war’s tide to turn strongly enough for the citizens to believe they could do it.

Germany’s armies were no longer the sole rulers of Europe by then.

That stranglehold was broken in June, when the Allies had invaded Normandy and started to take the continent slowly back.

And if that hadn’t been cause for celebration enough, the Russian army was also on the march and had reached the Bug River, the border between Poland and the Soviet Union.

The partisans had celebrated deep into the night when that news filtered through the forest.

‘Once the Russians cross that, they’ll be unstoppable. It’s a straight path from the Bug to Warsaw, and on to Berlin.’

‘The German garrisons won’t stay around for this – they’ll retreat rather than face the Soviets after what happened at Stalingrad. And the city will finally rise up.’

‘Warsaw can be taken; it can be won back for Poland. This is the end for the Nazis.’

The battle cries had rung like church bells round the trees, and the partisans had put all the frustrations and betrayals of the failed ghetto uprising behind them.

They’d formed themselves up for battle and marched back into the city, expecting a vast people’s army to come running to greet them.

Expecting the Soviets to swarm over the Vistula River and the Germans to take to their heels.

Acting as if the stars were aligned and fixed on their course. Acting as if the Nazis would simply accept the fate we’d assigned them. Except it’s been three months and they haven’t accepted that yet.

Noemi opened her eyes and blinked until they adjusted to the gloom.

Once her legs felt a little less shaky, she got up and went in search of anything clean she could use to bandage the mess the broken glass and brick fragments had made of her hands and her knee.

She knew better than to disturb the nurses moving from one hopeless case to another.

The makeshift hospital was dark, lit only by candles and paraffin lamps which flickered and jumped with every explosion.

Noemi was glad of the shadows: she had no desire to see the twisted and crying bodies crowded onto the floors and planks of wood that stood in for stretchers any more clearly than she already could.

The partisans had marched into Warsaw confident of victory, but the Germans hadn’t given up and retreated the way they were supposed to do.

They’d brought their ghetto tactics onto the city’s streets instead, driving Warsaw’s citizens into shelters they’d already laid with mines or into cellars they immediately stuffed with grenades.

They’d employed flamethrowers too, wielding them like tamed dragons through the closely packed streets.

The charred smell of their violence hung everywhere.

Noemi cleaned and repaired her hands as best as she could – the wounds were superficial, which was one good thing because there was no medicine left to fight an infection – and made her way back out into the ash-darkened streets.

She was so weary every step was a punishment, but there was no time to rest. They’d lost far too many fighters for anyone who could function to stand idle.

‘The dawn of freedom is burning.’

The partisans had sung that on their first night in the city, weeks ago at the start of August when the Home Army resistance fighters, if not Warsaw’s frightened people, had clapped their arrival out of the woods. They’d been confident the battle’s outcome would be quick and decisive.

And now?

Noemi picked her way round landmarks that were so shattered, she could no longer remember what they’d once been. The city was long past the point where street maps had any value – it redrew itself every day.

And now we’re fighting over broken walls and brick dust and Warsaw is barely an idea.

She’d lost sight of how or when the battle for the city would end.

She wanted to live, but she couldn’t picture that actually happening.

She measured her life in seconds, by the distance from a corner to a doorway, from one tiny patch of shelter to the next.

She’d lost count of the number of bullets she’d fired, or the number of bodies that had fallen dead as a result.

She threw grenades and Molotov cocktails at soldiers and snipers she no longer gave any thought to.

The days of worrying about taking a life and wondering how that act would make her feel were long gone.

She’d lost sight of everything except the need to kill or be killed. She’d become… Part of the war machine .

The tears came out of nowhere then, flooding her face, pouring over her bandaged hands. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The fight for the city wasn’t supposed to be a repeat of the uprising in the ghetto, but that’s exactly what it was.

On the first day, the combined resistance forces had achieved success after success: they’d captured a key German arsenal, a train station, the main post office, a power plant and a great swathe of the city.

The celebrations had continued until dawn.

But then the second day had come, and the next, and the Russian troops hadn’t.

The two to three days the Home Army had expected to have to hold Warsaw on their own had stretched into weeks and stretched their numbers and nerves and resources.

Tens of thousands of civilians had been caught in the crossfire and killed.

And the Germans hadn’t run. They’d decided to punish the city for its arrogance instead, and they’d unleashed hell across it.

And they won’t stop until they’ve wiped every trace of it from the planet. And we won’t stop either. There’ll be nothing left to say Warsaw was ever here. There’ll be nobody left but the dead and the dying.

The atrocities had escalated on both sides.

A group of young boys had thrown petrol bombs at a German tank and set it on fire, burning the crew alive.

The next day the Germans had left a second tank in Kilinski Square, but this one was packed with explosives.

More pointlessly brave boys and girls had died that day than the Home Army could count.

They had retaliated by blowing up the German barracks on Listopada Street; the Germans had burned down a hospital packed with civilians in the beleaguered Praga district in revenge for that.

On and on it went, blow for blow, savagery matching savagery, until Noemi could no longer remember why she was fighting.

Because our dreams of freedom and a future have vanished in the smoke and the rubble and the ruins. And the fighting has become an end in itself.