In Europe (62 page)

The problem was not only the mass murders themselves, it was also, as Daniel Goldhagen puts it, ‘the ease, the incredible ease with which the razzias could take place, the punctuality of the trains, the efficiency with which executions were carried out, the unthinkability of the number of victims: not dozens or even hundreds, but millions. The Holocaust was a very different phenomenon from those other, all too frequent antiSemitic atrocities in European history. It was, in addition to all the rest, a bureaucratic excess in which hundreds of thousands of Europeans calmly took part, simply because they attached greater importance to the order and regularity of their section, service, army unit or business department than to their individual conscience.

In the
Observer
of 9 April, 1944, Sebastian Haffner published a lucid, nigh-prophetic portrait of Albert Speer. According to Haffner, Speer was the ‘embodiment of the revolution of managers’: not corrupt, gaudy or garish like the Nazis, but intelligent and courteous. He was the prototype of the kind of man who became increasingly important in this war:
‘the pure technocrat, the classless, brilliant sort with no background, whose only goal is to make a career for himself.’ Precisely that lightness, that lack of reflection, allowed all young men of his ilk to continue operating ‘the horrifying machinery of our age’, right up until the end.

In a certain sense the Holocaust can be seen as an expression of an almost religious fanaticism, and at the same time as a wilful blindness, a deep, collective moral lapse. This is not a popular explanation. It is, after all, much more disturbing than all the theories that grasp at antiSemitism and the evil of the German Nazi elite. It implies that a similar mass persecution, using the current technology, bureaucracies and systems of repression and manipulation, could take place again tomorrow in a different place and against a different group. The technocrats will remain. In Haffner's words: ‘This is their age. We shall be rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but the Speers, whatever happens to them as individuals, shall be with us for a long time.’

IN 1941, A VISITOR WROTE OF THE WARSAW GHETTO:

The streets are so crowded that one can barely move ahead. Everyone walks about in rags and tatters. People often possess nothing but a shirt. There is noise and shouting everywhere. High, plaintive children's voices cut through it all. From the ‘Aryan’ side, curiosity seekers peer at the pitiful spectacle of the tattered crowd. The children are the ghetto's true breadwinners. When a German looks the other way for only a second, they slip handily to the Aryan side. The things they buy there, bread, potatoes and such, are hidden skilfully under their rags. The challenge then is to slip back in the same fashion.

Thousands of shabby beggars elicit memories of famines in India. A half-starved mother tries to feed her child from a desiccated breast. An older child lies beside her, presumably dead. You see dying people lying spreadeagled in the middle of the street. Their legs are swollen, often frozen, their faces twisted in agony.

Sometimes the sentries will stop a group of Jews and order them to undress and roll in the muck. They are often forced to dance as well. The sentries stand and watch, bent double with laughter.

A few rather ramshackle houses, a section of tram rails, an ornament in a hallway, a potholed street a few hundred metres long is all that is left of the neighbourhood where this once happened. A grey neighbourhood of apartment buildings has been built where the old ghetto once stood. I find one section of the infamous wall with which the ghetto was sealed
off: behind a stinking courtyard, along a little street where dubious men use a gentle form of extortion to horn in on the municipal parking revenues, behind Elektroland, the Holiday Inn and a branch of the Nationale Nederlanden insurance company.

Little children are playing between the apartment blocks, it is a warm day, the leaves of poplars sway above the children's heads, making dancing spots of sunlight. I ask directions from a young woman walking along with a little girl; they say they are each other's favourite niece and favourite aunt. They walk along with me for a while, then go skipping off, it looks as if they are floating with pleasure.

The young woman turns and points around her.

Yes, here was the Jewish ghetto.

On 19 April, 1943, when most of the ghetto's residents had already been taken away, a final, desperate uprising took place. The Jewish organisation – there were even kibbutzim in the ghetto – had gradually found out exactly what was happening in the camps, and no one harboured any more illusions. Starting in spring 1942, dozens of young Jewish people had started setting up a military organisation, weapons were smuggled in and, finally, about 30 combat groups were formed, comprising 750 partisans.

In the eyes of those who took part in it, the uprising was above all a confirmation of the value of human life, nothing less than that. They knew it was hopeless, but they wanted to ‘die honourably’. ‘Life belongs to us!’ they wrote in a pamphlet. ‘We, too, have a right to that! We must only understand that we must fight for it … Let every mother be a lioness defending her young! No father calmly watches his children die any more! The shame of the first act of our destruction must not repeat itself!’

Historians have succeeded in digging up the names and histories of 235 of those who participated in the revolt. What is remarkable is their youth: most of them were between the ages of eighteen and twenty. The oldest was the forty-three-year-old Abram Diamant. He died during the fighting in the streets of the ghetto. The youngest was Lusiek Blones. This thirteen-year-old was killed in the final hours of the uprising, while trying to escape through the ghetto's sewers. The commander of the revolt,
Mordechai Anielewicz, was twenty-four. He committed suicide along with the other leaders on 8 May, when their commando post at Milastraat 18 was surrounded and pumped full of poison gas. An impressive number of women took part: approximately a third of the membership of the resistance groups consisted of girls and young women. Almost all of them were in love.

At first, the Germans were taken by surprise. Fighting went on everywhere in the ghetto during the first few days, and both sides suffered heavy losses. But soon entire streets had been set alight by tank and artillery fire, the partisans fought back from underground bunkers, air strikes followed, and finally the resistance strongholds were taken one by one, houses and entire streets were wiped off the map.

Of the 235 Jewish partisans we know about, 72 survived the revolt and 28 died in the ghetto's sewers. Forty-four of them succeeded in escaping, but most of those died soon afterwards in fighting between Germans and partisans. Others were betrayed and sent to Majdanek or Auschwitz. Three were killed in the great uprising in August and September 1944. By 1945, only 12 of the 750 insurgents were still alive.

The ZIH-INB, Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute, tries to document as many of the memories as possible. Local historians Jan Jagielski and Tomasz Lec have carefully located the spots from which the most famous photographs of the starving ghetto were made, and published their findings in book form. Following their lead, I now walk through the neigh-bourhood and see it through other eyes.

It is hard, as it turns out, to find surviving remnants of the former ghetto. Most of the locations can only be identified on the basis of kerbs, posts and other topographical details. A photograph of an emaciated corpse lying in the street, for example, turns out to have been taken from the portico of Waliców Street 6.10. The only thing marking the spot is an oval-shaped post in the foreground. The kerb against which another corpse was photographed is still there too, in front of the Church of the Holy Virgin's Birth at what is today Solidarnosći Boulevard 80. The set of stairs turns out to be much smaller than it looks in the photograph, the body must not have been very big either, probably a child.

Here, a photograph of a stone bench in front of the courthouse, where
two Jewish men and a woman are trying to sell a few wares: the same bench, against the same wall, now stands vacant in sunlight, the wall behind it covered in graffiti. A picture taken in 1941: the burial of an emaciated man beside a wall. It turns out to be the wall of a cemetery, the stones are still clearly recognisable, a tiled path now runs straight over the grave.

When I stopped to take a picture of my own, in the portico on Waliców Street, an old lady came to take a look. She spoke a little German, and I explained what I was doing. Yes, she knew the photograph, that's the way it was here, she had seen it herself. Did I happen to have two zlotys for her, she whispered. She was hungry.

I try to find the gate that once led to the ghetto, the place where Jews had once been forced to dance naked. In the background of the photograph taken in 1940, the city rolls on, big and modern. Today there is a Pizza Hut on the corner. The only surviving point of reference is an old stone wall to one side. The gate, of course, has disappeared, but the most amazing thing is what has happened to that background: where Nalewki Street once stood, a busy shopping street with cars, trams and department stores, is today a quiet park. Only the rusty tram rails, which come to a stop somewhere under the grass, show that once this really was a busy urban neighbourhood, that the whole history is not a hallucination.

I leaf through other books of photographs. The earliest pictures of Warsaw show a city of well-to-do citizens, broad streets full of pedestrians, horse-drawn trams, churches and palaces in the familiar eclectic and pseudo-styles. Around the turn of the twentieth century the city was experiencing the same rapid growth as other European metropolises: industrialisation, prosperity in the city and poverty in the countryside, farmers who came pouring in by the tens of thousands, expansion after expansion, a growth from 261,000 inhabitants in 1874 to 797,000 in 1911.

Then came the start of the Polish Republic, the panic of the Russian Revolution – the Soviets advanced to just outside the city – and then the photographs show the cheerful, elegant Warsaw of the 1920s and 1930s, with coffee houses, theatres, universities, boulevards, newspaper boys and clanging trams. Then the war.

Pictures of Warsaw in 1945 resemble pictures of Hiroshima. Only a
quarter of the city was still standing. Ninety per cent of all the large buildings had been reduced to rubble. Of the 1.3 million people who lived in Warsaw in 1940, only 378,000 were still there. Almost two thirds of the city's population was either dead or missing.

Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the city has something artificial about it, as though the old city centre has been reconstructed by expert stage designers. Every crack seems to have been put there for effect, many of the houses actually look older and more authentic than they ever were. And that impression is correct: almost every stone here was first blown away, then returned to its place. In the Rynek, the central square of the Old City, a melancholy organ-grinder is turning the crank on a fake antique barrel organ, handsome men are selling ugly paintings, the beggars have crutches and infants, the American ladies are just asking to be swindled. Polish vendors lurk around the ghetto, selling souvenir dolls, funny Jewish figurines, laughing and dancing rabbis; the folklore lives on, but the dancers have died.

This is a city full of memorial plaques, probably because nothing else is left. Every street corner has its monument, every house saw the birth of a poet or the death of a hero, and new plaques are being put up all the time. Just outside the centre of town I pass a brand-new monument for an entire army corps. A little group of old ladies is standing there in the twilight, looking at the gleaming pillar. A woman in a black suit dress walks up to it, searches among the many, many names, brushes one of them lightly with a gloved finger.

Warsaw's parks are the most pleasant place to be on long summer evenings like this. They lie in a circle around the Old City, often behind the gardens of the homes themselves. Neighbours are talking across the hedges, children are running around, little boys are playing soccer, babies and prams are out on parade, the girls are the most beautiful in all Europe.

I take a walk around one of the ponds with Wladyslaw Matwin. Matwin is a historian and former politician, he was born in 1916 and has himself gradually become a living chronicle of history. ‘My life was a time full of violence,’ he says. ‘There were always huge forces at work that kept turning it all upside down.’

He studied in Poznań, was a member of a communist youth organisation, was arrested for ‘some innocent work among children’, and after
that no university would have him. ‘In 1938, at the time of the Munich Agreement, I was studying in Czechoslovakia. I had to pick up everything and run for it. When Hitler invaded Poland I had to run again, this time to the East. In 1941 I worked in a steel mill in the Ukraine, but I had to leave there too. In Poland I was taken for a Russian agent, in Russia I was suddenly a Polish agent. The fourth time I had to run from the Germans was in the Caucasus, and after that I joined the Red Army.’

The sky is turning a hot red, the croaking of the frogs is deafening. He talks about old Warsaw. ‘Today Warsaw is a monocultural city, which is some people's ideal. But before 1939 it was a typically multicultural society. Those were the city's most productive years. We lost that multi-cultural character during the war; along with all the rest; that was one of the greatest losses for this city, and for this country.’

By August 1944, Matwin was a lieutenant in the Red Army. He witnessed the second great uprising in Warsaw from close up; this time the revolt was led by Polish partisans and was fought out all over the city. ‘We were right outside Warsaw, on the other bank of the Vistula, but we couldn't do a thing.’ He still finds it hard to talk about it. ‘I don't think I'm the only one. Almost every Pole here, looking back on things, has mixed emotions about it. It was a bitter tragedy. It cost us a large part of the city, and tens of thousands of lives. They fought like tigers all over town, using the strangest weapons. The girls in particular did the craziest things. Almost all of them were killed. The whole thing was very badly planned.’