Necessary Lies(45)
“Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk—in Warschau mehr! The Jewish district in Warsaw is no more,” wrote Herr Kommandant in his official report, in 1943. Burnt down, blown to pieces, with its mazes of bunkers and hiding places, the sewers and corridors, booby-trapped bunkers, killing German soldiers long after those inside took their own lives. “So damn clever,” Herr Stroop marvelled, “who would have thought? These sub-humans?” The glorious victory of Grossaktion. He described the behaviour of entire families, first throwing out their bedding in the street and then jumping from the roofs of burning buildings. “Paratroopers” Herr Kommandant laughed, and urged his men to take aim at the moving targets. “How they hated us,” he said, “these lean catlike men,” jumping back into the scorching buildings, with a blob of spit at Herr Stroop, arms jerking in a last gesture of contempt. The women, “these young witches, with smooth skin and wild black eyes” who aimed their last shots at SS officers from pistols smuggled on their snow white bodies.
The world, Herr Kommandant wrote in his reports, has entered the luminous, prosperous era of strength and order when all that is weak and imperfect will be eliminated. After the victory, on this scorched land, German architects would build a district of spacious villas and well-tended gardens. There would be red tiled roofs and green shutters, fountains, oak trees, rose bushes and wide, elegant streets. The biggest of them, charted by Himmler himself, would be named Jürgen-Stroop-Allee.
Jürgen Stroop was arrested by the Polish army, tried, and executed for war crimes. But in the post-war settling of accounts something incredible had happened. The Communist authorities put Jürgen Stroop in one cell with Kazimierz Moczarski, a Polish partisan from the Home Army arrested as part of post-war repressions for backing up the London government. The outcome of this nightmarish encounter is Moczarskis’s book Conversations with the Executioner.
For nine months, in between interrogations, a Polish partisan listened to his cell mate talk about his childhood, the war, the destruction of the Ghetto. His Aleja Ró apartment of ten rooms, so close to the Lazienki palace that Herr Stroop could ride his horse there. His terry robe in SS colours, white and black. Marches in the glory of standards, swastikas and eagles. An encounter with a Polish owl that had attacked him in his open car on a night journey to Posen. The owl he had ordered tied to a tree and shot.
He spoke of Otto Dehmke, his SS friend, killed by the Jews in the ghetto when he tried to remove the flags of defiance. Polish black and white and Jewish white and blue. Of the long letter he wrote that night to his bereaved mother. Of the day he himself pressed the button on the electrical unit that triggered the explosion of the Great Synagogue in Tomackie Street. Of his tired but happy soldiers and officers who watched these fantastic fireworks of triumph.
“No, I wasn’t able to forgive,” Moczarski wrote, “but I still wanted to understand.”
The sky in Warsaw is overcast, but it isn’t raining anymore and the morning snow has left no trace.
“You don’t need his absolution,” Marie told her back in Montreal, meaning Piotr. “Get a lawyer to talk to him,” and Anna registered the thought, briefly, without conviction. It was a joke between them now, this North American need for resolutions. A habit of thought, they laughed. Here, on this side of the world, problems were to be suffered through; you proved your strength through endurance.
She takes a white Marriott taxi to the Powzki cemetery where her grandparents lie buried. The taxi takes her past the new apartment houses, built on the ruins of pre-war Warsaw. Somewhere, in one of these non-existent streets, her grandparents had their grocery store.
A group of children runs out of one of the apartment houses, an ugly concrete block covered with grey stains, slamming the door behind them. They are dressed in jeans and T-shirts with the emblems of New York Rangers, California Angels, Chicago Bulls. One of the boys has a soccer ball, and he kicks it ahead of him, past the rows of cars parked everywhere, along the street, on the sidewalks, filling up even the smallest of space.
In front of the cemetery gate Anna buys two wreaths of fir branches braided with white calla lilies and two candles in glass containers. The containers have perforated metal caps that will allow them to hold the flame, in spite of the gusts of wind.
Her grandparents are buried at the edge of the newer part of Pow?zki, far from its distinguished quarters. Their grave is a square of black marble with space for flowers along both edges, the earth neatly raked and ready for spring planting. Someone is taking care of it, a successor of the old crippled man who took care of the grave when only Dziadek was buried there. The small bench Babcia had put in beside it is still there, with its storage bin, cleverly built into it. Inside there was always a vase for cut flowers. A simple one, made of a milk bottle, for anything better would have been stolen in no time.
“This is what happens,” Babcia had said every time they came here for All Souls day, “when you live so far away. If you cannot come and check things for yourself.”
But when Anna asked her why she had to bring Dziadek’s body here, why she did not bury him in Wroclaw, Babcia would only scowl at her. That was one of these questions, Anna shouldn’t have asked. Babcia did not trust Wroclaw. It was enough to have her own parents lie in a village cemetery near Tarnopol, now in Ukraine, where she could never go. Why tempt fate? No, he was her husband after all, and he would rest in Polish soil. And so will she when her time comes.