The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (31 page)

‘When we heard the Americans were coming, everyone panicked and hid their last precious things, buried their silver and porcelain, jewellery and even photo albums. I had only salvaged a few books from the rubble that had once been in my room. I never found the puppet Papa had sent from the East, the doctor. We had nothing precious left.’ Karl poured himself a glass of wine.

‘You know, I was scared what the Americans would do to us, but in the end they were quite friendly, handing us chewing gum and packages of sugar and coffee. But our lives had been turned upside down and everyone’s morale was at zero. I mean, we had lost the war and we were surrounded by ruins.

‘One day the Americans put up posters showing photos of the camps. Buchenwald. Auschwitz. Dachau. “These shameful deeds – Your Fault!” were the words plastered over them. I didn’t know where to look, what to feel. How could I have known? All Papa sent us from Warsaw was a small puppet and a letter saying he missed me. I had no idea about the ghetto, the camps, what was happening to the Jews.

‘And Papa was still missing – we had not heard from him since the end of the war. It took a whole year before we found out what had happened to him, then another few months until we got that first postcard from Siberia. For years all we’d get were those flimsy postcards, a few lines squeezed on to a card. I think that’s when I lost my connection to Papa, the feeling inside.’

Mara moved closer to her father.

‘It must’ve been so hard. The bombings, the shelter, not having Opa around. All of it.’ Mara laid her hand on his shoulder.

‘It was, Mara. That’s why I don’t talk about it much. But maybe it’s important to get it all out; at least your Opa thought so. He told me everything. And there’s so much more. You know, Mara, just before Opa died he asked me to tell you the story of the prince. His puppet.’

A long pause stretched between them. Mara looked at her father.

‘Please tell me, Papa.’

And so Karl began. They sat until deep into the night and Karl did not stop until he had told Mara everything.

‘When Opa died he asked me to look for the boy, the Puppet Boy. He was called Mika Hernsteyn. But I didn’t have the heart to search for him. I don’t think he made it.’

Mara had finally found some pieces of the giant jigsaw puzzle. But still there were few answers. Her nice Opa had been a soldier in Warsaw’s ghetto and now there was a boy with a name . . .

A week later Mara started to knit. At first it seemed harmless; just a pair of blue and white stripy socks.

‘I’m glad you’ve found something to amuse yourself with other than history books,’ Karl said, and he smiled when she showed him the socks. But soon Mara wouldn’t leave the house without her needles and she became a ferocious knitter, devouring ball after ball of yarn. Everything went into her knitting: her loneliness and fury, all her unanswered questions, the more elaborate the patterns the better. Complex starry Norwegian patterns to swallow her sadness, white mohair an antidote to agitation; a coat knitted with needles as thick as brushes to shield against guilt and shame. Like a spider creating jumpers instead of webs, Mara knitted her wool all day long and the repetitive movements filled her head with a fluffy, cocoon-like emptiness.

‘I know it’s an endless task,’ she explained to the prince one night, ‘but isn’t the list of murdered people endless too?’

Sometimes in the evenings, Mara put the puppet on the windowsill and, opening the window, looked up at the clear night sky. She did not know how often Max had sat with his prince looking at the star-studded skies over Siberia, Max pointing out the Great Bear and Cassiopeia to the puppet. That and the huge hazy band across the sky. ‘
Schau, kleiner Kerl
, it’s the Milky Way!’ he used to say. Whenever he saw it, a deep sigh sprang from Max’s chest – just as it did now from Mara’s.

S
lowly Mara grew to be an adult. When the time came to choose what she should do with her life, Mara decided to train as a nurse. Maybe being there for others could help her answer those difficult questions about the human heart . . .

She moved into a small apartment next to the hospital in the neighbouring city of Bremen. She took her puppets with her but stopped carrying the prince around. Instead she sat him on her bookshelf, slightly bent forward with his legs dangling, between Herman Hesse’s
Steppenwolf
and Saint-Exupéry’s
The Little Prince
, while neatly boxing up the rest of her puppets and storing them together with her knitting under her bed.

Mara worked hard, and as the months and then years passed, the prince gathered a layer of fine dust, his muted colours fading even more. And yet Mara’s passion for puppets never completely disappeared. Once she had passed her exams, she started to create animal glove puppets: her first, a lion with fur around its papier-mâché head, followed by a zebra, a wolf then a giraffe. Soon she had a whole troupe.

As a nurse, Mara specialised in working with children. One evening, after a difficult day on the cancer ward, she pulled out her old puppets from underneath her bed. She cleaned the dust off the prince’s cloak, polished his little crown and painted new apple-red cheeks and lips on his face.

‘There you go!’ she said, making up a short play on the spot.

When Mara took the prince into the hospital he was in his element, as if acting in front of a crowd of sick children had always been his favourite occupation. Soon she added her animals and the rest of the troupe, bringing a bit of lightness among so much suffering.

Many years passed. Twenty years to be precise. Then, on a sunny day in July on Mara’s fortieth birthday, she sat the prince on her hand.

‘I’ve thought about it. I want to be a puppeteer, my prince. Nothing else feels right any more. You puppets bring so much joy and fun to people. I’m going to make this my job!’ From then on she lived and breathed puppets. And during all that time she never forgot the story her father had told her – about the boy from Warsaw, Mika, and her Opa Max. The story about what had happened in the war. This was the story she wanted her puppets to tell.

Mara got stuck in, working long days and sometimes nights, modelling, sewing, creating more and more puppets, painting backdrops, carving props and writing the lines for her play. She had a vision and she hung on to it like a dog with a bone.

Often late at night doubts would push their way to the surface.

Will I get the story right? Do I even know all the pieces? I know I mean well, but perhaps that’s not enough? How can I really show the desperate situation in the ghetto using a bit of cardboard, plywood and some puppets?

For weeks Mara slept badly but she didn’t give up. She took particular care in creating a puppet of Mika as she imagined him. As he would be the main character, she made this puppet larger than the rest.

Then one autumn day, with the puppets and props nearly finished, Mara realised what was missing – she had to see the city for herself, feel the place, and maybe find out something about the boy too.

And so the following week, Mara packed a small suitcase, put the prince into her coat pocket and set off for Warsaw.

‘We’ll make a good team, you’ll see,’ she whispered as she squeezed into her seat in the small plane. Sipping an orange juice, she gazed out of the small window, admiring the endless field of white clouds.
Like Siberia, only softer.
For a moment her thoughts wandered to her grandfather. The secrets he never shared with her, his escape from Siberia’s brutal claws.

On the train journey from the airport into Warsaw, Mara calculated that if her father had told her the truth about Opa, the prince had changed hands about sixtysix years ago. In 1942, right here, in Warsaw. Her hands found the fur trim on the prince’s coat. She smiled, reassured by his presence.

She arrived at Warsaw’s Centralna railway station, a grey, ugly square of a building that smelled of burned rubber. She took the first exit then stopped dead in her tracks: a colossal, multi-tiered building crowned with a large antenna stretched up into the bright blue sky in front of her.

The Palace of Culture – a gift from the Russians to the Polish people. ‘The Russian Wedding Cake’, they called it.
Mara had done her homework, studying the travel guide thoroughly. She checked into the Polonia Palace hotel, one of the few buildings that had not been destroyed in the war. She dropped her luggage in her room and within minutes found herself back on the street. She placed the prince in her coat pocket and, clutching a travel guide and map, made her way north. Wherever she looked, grey high-rise tower blocks flashed neon signs and sported large advertising boards on their roofstops. Between the concrete giants, cars zoomed along broad avenues, revving their engines.

Reaching the farther corner of the Palace of Culture she found a plaque, marking where the wall had stood:
MUR GETTA
– GHETTO WALL 1940–1943. But there was no wall, not a single brick, only rusty iron letter-markings among the cobbled stones, like lines on a map. This was the beginning of the ghetto walk. Poring over her map, Mara roamed northwards, street after street.

Where once proud three-storey buildings with iron balconies had stood, only high-rise tower blocks with sad squares for windows remained, interrupted every now and again by ultramodern steel and glass skyscrapers.

Then, all of a sudden, Mara found herself opposite some of the old apartment blocks. They stood like blind witnesses with boarded-up windows, a small birch tree growing from the balcony of one, sticking out like a feather on a hat. But there was nobody home there. Hadn’t been for a long time.

At the corner of that same street Mara found another plaque, marking the spot where one of the main ghetto gates had stood, the entrance from Zelazna Street. A photograph mounted underneath the plaque showed soldiers patrolling the gate, flanked by a sign spelling out in bold letters ‘
Seuchengefahr
: Danger of epidemic – keep out’. That was how the Germans justified the ghetto to the Poles on the Aryan side, she knew. She was close to the spot where there used to be a wooden bridge connecting the small and the big ghetto. Chlodna Street. Farther up were some houses that stood higher than the others. There had been so much rubble left after the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground that, instead of clearing it away, new houses, even whole estates, were constructed right on top of it.

Nothing left of the whole ghetto, only a metre of overgrown rubble?
Mara thought to herself.
Do the people here ever think about what their houses are built on, sense the ghetto’s ghosts late at night, trying to find their way out?
Mara looked out for a bench but couldn’t see one. She stuck her head back into the guidebook.

It told her that after the ghetto uprising, the Germans systematically razed the ghetto to the ground. The rest of the city was destroyed during the big Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and in the time up to its liberation in 1945. Warsaw had 1.3 million inhabitants before the war. When the Red Army moved in, only one thousand people emerged from the rubble. During the entire German occupation over 400,000 Jews perished.

Mara began to feel faint. She didn’t know what exactly she had hoped to find here, but there was nothing, nothing at all. She shivered and pulled her coat closer. All of a sudden she remembered an image of Nuremberg’s burnt-out buildings after the bombings she’d seen in one of her father’s books. ‘A ruin is a ruin,’ she had thought then, ‘it breaks your heart.’

But what do you do if there is not even a ruin left? Only grass. And houses that stand a bit taller than the rest of the city?

Mara shook herself. It was still not even lunchtime. She pulled a chocolate bar from her pocket and took a large bite, then headed on towards the location of the former Pawiak prison, making her way along Dzielna Street. All of a sudden the remains of the prison’s entry gate greeted her: a barbed-wire gate, cut off in midair. In the centre of the empty prison yard, stretching its branches towards the sky like bare arms, stood a lone tree, covered in name-plaques nailed to its trunk like a metal cloak. A tree of remembrance, a monument to those who died.

As she silently read the plaques, she realised that her eyes were searching for the boy’s name. Mika, Mika Hernsteyn. His name wasn’t among them. She took a deep breath and went a few steps into the Pawiak’s belly. The damp and musty air hit her and she patted the prince’s head in her pocket.

She wandered along the dark corridor. The cells’ heavy iron doors stood wide open and Mara entered each room. Glass vitrines displaying fragments of the prisoner’s lives were displayed on all sides: faint pencil drawings of faces and landscapes, letters, photographs, postcards, a handmade chess set modelled out of bread, dice cut from wood, a tiny set of hand-drawn playing cards, knitted bags, a musical composition. Everything laid out like treasure. The last traces of those who had endured this dark place. What happened to the woman in the photograph, the chess and card players? The composer? In one of the cells Mara found out about the tree in the yard – an elm tree, the only witness to what happened in that place, and one of the few things that survived all the destruction.

In one of the last cells Mara crouched over the glass vitrines for a long time, deciphering letters and postcards, staring at the black and white photographs. None of the letters mentioned Mika’s name. As for the blurry photographs, she did not know. She gazed at one message, sprawled pale pencil marks on a small grey postcard, a missive from a prisoner of Auschwitz to his beloved in Warsaw, written in clear, polite German. A wave of nausea shook Mara and she found it hard to breathe.

As she emerged from the Pawiak’s dark bowels, she gulped at the fresh air. The light had faded but the sky still shone an intense cobalt blue.
Wie Samt. Soft as velvet
, Mara thought, looking up. Cut loose from somewhere, a bright red balloon meandered higher and higher, dancing into the expanse of Warsaw’s autumnal sky. She watched until she couldn’t see it any more.

‘Let’s call it a day, I think we’ve seen enough.’ Only now did she notice her wet cheeks. She had been worried that once she started she might not be able to stop crying. But walking back to the hotel, she let her tears run freely, grateful for the anonymity of this city where no one knew her.