Happy to be here

Yolanda Dwornik is a freelance building control officer presently working for Barnet council. Her work has taken her from Holloway Prison to Foster and Partners' Greater London Authority building. Her story is partly about how hard it was to make progress as a female engineer in the 1960s and 1970s, but before that, she faced challenges that few of her British colleagues could imagine possible.
Yolanda was born in Warsaw in the decade before the war. She's a little reticent about the year, but she didn't get long to familiarise herself with her surroundings before the Germans arrived and changed them forever. From September 1939, Warsaw and south-eastern Poland became a colony of the Third Reich. The Nazis closed down all the schools and imposed a 10pm curfew.
Yolanda's parents were graduates of the Warsaw School of Economics. Bogdan found a job in a bank. He helped its gold flee to Romania, then disappeared with it. Stefania, who was in her early 30s and spoke fluent French and good German, worked for an import–export company. After the occupation she was a waitress in Gospoda Warszawska, the posh restaurant in the centre of town. This was more dangerous work than it sounds, because her real employer was the Armija Krajowa, the Polish underground. They paid in American dollars.
Once a group of soldiers came in to have a drink before they made a round of arrests. Stefania was very good looking. She took time to chat with the men, she laughed at their jokes, teased them, flirted, got close. They ordered one round after another. And when they finally left to start work, it seemed that they had misplaced an important list.
Yolanda, her mother and grandmother lived in a block of flats in the city centre, near the technical university. As Yolanda carried on with her schoolwork, people often came and went, carrying messages or waiting for the curfew to lift at 5.30am. Every so often, the phone would ring with the news that someone they knew had been arrested. That was normal.
In the summer of 1944, rumours began to circulate that the Germans had suffered a catastrophic defeat in Russia. Towards the end of July some civilian administration units started to head west, and more and more German armour appeared in the city.
On Tuesday, 1 August 1944, while Red Army units were standing-to on the Vistula a few miles to the east, Yolanda was outside with some friends. "We were always playing in the courtyard and whoever came with the bicycle we'd ask them if we could look after it because that gave us a chance to ride on it. That day was very quiet, there was nobody about, except some young men wearing very long raincoats, which were really very suspicious, and with something bulging in the pockets." Inside the flat, her grandmother was on the phone to somebody. "Are you sure? Are you sure? What are you going to do?" At 5pm she heard whistles and small groups of men began waving the Polish flag. Then the gunfire started. In the flat, bullets were coming through the windows from a German strongpoint across the courtyard. The family moved out of their flat and into the hall. The Warsaw Uprising had begun.
Yolanda volunteered for duty. "I wanted to be a courier because they were looking for young people, for teenagers, to take messages. I went and they said they would take me if I was 11 – but I wasn't 11." Stefania gave up waitressing to work in the AK's headquarters, which was down the road in the architecture faculty of the technical university. At first the Poles could take messages through the streets: the Germans just held isolated pockets of the city. Later, they had to crawl through holes from basement to basement, and they had to tiptoe through the sewers beneath men who sat beside manhole covers, waiting for them with bags of gas grenades by their sides.
For Yolanda, the war was vivid, disconnected – fun. She made friends with the couriers and learned their passwords, and when nobody was looking she followed their routes. She didn't like it when informers were shot in the street outside her flat, but when the women who'd had their heads shaved passed on their way to take water to the hospital, she assembled the children in the apartments to throw their toy blocks at them.
As August passed, the revolt became a siege. The Germans brought up reinforcements supported by heavy artillery and flamethrowers. Yolanda and Stefania were lucky. They were lucky to live in a block with a smart manager: he had sunk a borehole in the basement and so they had water to make porridge. Some, made silly with hunger, went to their allotments and risked their lives for carrots, others butchered their dogs and invited friends.
The worst moment for mother and daughter came on the night of 19 September. The AK commanders believed the headquarters would be overrun, and staff were told they could bring their children to work. "We thought we would all die because the German tanks were coming down Lwowska Street and the Ukranians were following behind. The Ukranians had the job of killing civilians with knives. We had built barricades across the street and the German tanks were coming closer and closer and we were all waiting." Yolanda knew a prayer her grandmother had taught her, something about the Virgin Mary and the hour of our need. People asked her to write it out for them. A woman slowly, carefully made up her face in a mirror. She wanted to show the Germans that Polish women were good looking. Another had brought a suitcase full of shoes. She unpacked them, lined them against the wall, and tried to choose the best pair. The young men were there, too, with bottles full of petrol, coming and going. They could see tanks on fire at the barricade, about 50 m away. When morning came, it became clear that the Germans and their allies had retreated. "So we didn't die." On 1 October, the leader of the uprising, General Bor-Komorowski, surrendered, having achieved a kind of victory: a German agreement to treat the AK as prisoners of war. Both sides had lost about 15,000 soldiers, but the real victims were the civilians: between 150,000 and 200,000 were slaughtered.
The Germans' plan was to erase Warsaw by rounding up the survivors, and taking them to a holding area at the town of Pruskow for transportation to slave labour camps. They would then incinerate what was left of the city. On the day they were to be sent to the station, Yolanda developed a high fever. Her mother managed to get her to a children's hospital. While she was being carried on a stretcher, a German officer approached. "He said he was a doctor and wanted to help. I shouted at him, 'no Germans!' He could have shot us but he said he understood and saluted my mother. She was very good looking." At the hospital, Stefania pretended to be a nurse to avoid immediate deportation. Yolanda had scarlet fever, but the doctors had no drugs. The situation now was utterly desperate. Stefania had just hours to find a way to avoid Pruskow or her only child was going to die.
On 13 October, Wehrmacht troops arrived with a van. Yolanda was wearing her two best dresses and a coat into which was stitched money and the address of a great aunt in Czestochowa. The van made its way to the station and the cattle trucks. Stefania whispered to her daughter: "Don't talk; don't say anything. When I tell you to get out, get out." The van stopped. Stefania had bribed the soldiers with her American dollars, but had no way of knowing whether they'd keep their end of the bargain. The doors opened. They were in a field just outside the city.
The soldiers said: "You can go." Yolanda and Stefania, so lucky so far, almost didn't survive the journey to her great aunt's. The trains were constantly being requisitioned by the army; they slept where they could. In the end, they were rescued by a German soldier. He came onto the train as all the passengers were being ordered off and saw how ill Yolanda was. He told Stefania that she could pretend to be his wife. They survived.
Ten years later, Poland was a Soviet satellite and Yolanda was a student of civil engineering at the same technical university in which she'd endured the night of the 19 September. Stefania had stayed out of the city and avoided the wave of arrests intended to wipe out the "London Poles" of the AK. One of Yolanda's classmates suggested they should organise some kind of resistance. "I said there's no chance, so there's no point." Somebody informed on him, and he was given five years in a camp. That was normal.
Some time previously, Yolanda had received a letter from a woman called Barbara. It had a Swiss postmark, which made it dangerous, particularly since Barbara was not Barbara; she was Bogdan. He had survived the war as well, survived another slaughter of the Poles at Monte Cassino, and was living in London. Yolanda inquired about a passport for a two-month visit to Britain. The Polish government agreed, with one condition. Would she mind joining some emigré groups and informing the Polish High Commission in London what they were talking about? The journey through Germany took two nights and a day. "I spoke a little English and I remember a lady on the train in England. I told her my story and that I was going to meet my father at Liverpool Street station. I remember she was crying. I wasn't, but she was." She met her father in 1957, after an 18 year separation. It was the middle of May.
Two weeks after she arrived, she started work at a cafe on Gloucester Road and memorised the menu. Stefania got a passport by telling the authorities that Yolanda was still in the country, and joined her family.
Yolanda wanted to work as an engineer or a surveyor, but she was the wrong sex and had the wrong accent. It took a lot of applications and a lot of interviews. At one, for the engineer Bylander Waddell, she was asked if she'd come to say her husband had been unable to attend. At another, the interviewer said he'd have to ask his wife if she'd mind if he gave her the job.
Yolanda got her first break working as a draftsperson in Wimpey's Hammersmith office, and she did a spell in the early 1970s as an engineer at RMJM, where she worked on an accommodation block at Holloway Prison.
Around this time she joined the Institution of Civil Engineers and started going into schools to persuade girls to consider engineering as a career. She also started looking for site work, eventually finding it as a building control officer at the Greater London Council, then, after it was dissolved, as a part of Southwark council's special project group.
One of her projects was Foster and Partner's Greater London Authority headquarters, which she oversaw from the first pile. Bob Jones, who runs the building control team at Southwark remarks on her tact and diplomacy, especially when telling people they've got it wrong.
This quality emerged during the latest phase of her career, working at Barnet council as a freelance building control officer. She was inspecting some foundations dug by labourers against a wall. After five seconds, she told them to put down their spades and move gently towards her, as the whole thing could come down at any moment. But mostly, she handles loft conversions, which she regards as a bit of a comedown.
So, how does she connect up the different parts of her life? Was everything that followed the intensity of the uprising and the night of 19 September 1944 an anticlimax? Yolanda says she does not dwell on the past, although sometimes she is reminded of it. She dreams she is coming out of a cellar and if she turns right she will live and if she turns left she will be shot. During the uprising, she attended the funeral of one of the leaders. While everyone was singing the national anthem it was strafed by a German plane. Later the BBC showed the film shot by that plane as it was machine-gunning the mourners. She saw a murderer's eye view of her own attempted murder. "I wrote to them to ask for the footage but they never replied." Surely the experience must have had some effect? "Well, I learned that the most important thing is what you have in your head, not what you have got, because you could lose everything. My mother lost three times everything she had, in 1939, 1944 and 1958 when she came to England. I don't look at possession in the same way as people who are brought up in this country.
"Everybody has an instinct to survive and it's the luck of the draw what sort of situation you face. I don't think I've ever told the whole story; I don't want to forget it because it is so bad. I want to be able to say I've survived. It's an achievement to be alive after all of this … Maybe the most important thing to have is good luck."

Everybody has an instinct to survive and it’s the luck of the draw what sort of situation you face. I don’t want to forget it because it is so bad. I want to be able to say I’ve survived. It’s an achievement to be alive after all of this