In the cellars of Warsaw, women cooked barley for whoever came down the stairs. The grain was hauled by hand from the brewery stores, and the water came from wells and street pumps that people queued at under fire; the thin soup they made of it got a bitter nickname. They fed soldiers, neighbours and children on it for sixty-three days, until the commanders signed the capitulation in 1944, with the city in ruins and some two hundred thousand dead, most of them civilians.
There were small chapels in those same cellars, Rosa: insurgent chaplains said mass between the stores, and people kept registers of the dead by name, with the street and the house number, so burials in courtyards could be found again later. Many of those lists survived when almost nothing else did.
The capitulation was signed at Ożarów, just west of the city, and its terms recognised the insurgents as combatants, so those who surrendered went to prisoner-of-war camps rather than being treated as partisans. Women who had fought were included in that, which was unusual for the time.