This apparently total calm lasted until one Friday in the second half of the month of April, when a gale of fear swept unexpectedly through the ghetto. There seemed no reason for it, since as soon as you asked people why they were so frightened and distressed and what they thought was going to happen, no one had a concrete answer. None the less, directly after midday all the shops were closed and people hid at home.
I was not sure what would be happening at the café. I went to the Sztuka as usual, but it too was shut. I felt particularly nervous on my way home when, despite all the enquiries I made of usually well-informed acquaintances, I simply could not find out what was going on. Nobody knew.
We all stayed up, fully clothed, until eleven, but then we decided to go to bed, since everything was quiet outside. We were almost sure the panic had been the result of unfounded rumours. Father was the first to go out in the morning. He came back a few minutes later, pale and alarmed: the Germans had been into a great many buildings overnight, and had dragged some seventy men out into the street and shot them. So far no one had collected the corpses.
What did this mean? What had those people done to the Germans? We were horrified and indignant.
The answer did not come until that afternoon, when posters were pasted up in the empty streets. The German authorities informed us that they had been obliged to cleanse our part of the city of ‘undesirable elements’, but their action would not affect the loyal part of the population: shops and cafés must be opened again at once, and people were to resume their ordinary lives, which were not in any danger.
The following month certainly passed peacefully. It was May, and even in the ghetto lilac blossomed here and there in the few little gardens, while flower clusters in bud hung from the acacias, turning paler every day. Just as the flowers were about to come out fully the Germans remembered us. But this time there was a difference: they did not plan to deal with us themselves. Instead, they were handing over the duty of human-hunting to the Jewish police and the Jewish labour bureau.
Henryk had been right when he refused to join the police and described them as bandits. They had been recruited mainly from young men in the more prosperous classes of society, and a number of our acquaintances were among them. We were all the more horrified when we saw that men with whom we used to shake hands, whom we had treated as friends, men who had still been decent people not long ago, were now so despicable. You could have said, perhaps, that they had caught the Gestapo spirit. As soon as they put on their uniforms and police caps and picked up their rubber truncheons, their natures changed. Now their ultimate ambition was to be in close touch with the Gestapo, to be useful to Gestapo officers, parade down the street with them, show off their knowledge of the German language and vie with their masters in the harshness of their dealings with the Jewish population. That did not prevent them from forming a police jazz band which, incidentally, was excellent.
During the human-hunt in May they surrounded the streets with the professionalism of racially pure SS men. They strode about in their elegant uniforms, shouting in loud and brutal voices in imitation of the Germans and beating people with their rubber truncheons.
I was still at home when Mother came running in with news of the hunt: they had picked up Henryk. I decided to get him away at any price, although all I could count on was my popularity as a pianist; my own papers were not in order. I made my way through a series of cordons, getting picked up and then being allowed to go again, until I reached the labour bureau building. There were a number of men in front of it being herded in from all directions by the police, who acted as sheepdogs. The flock kept growing as new parties were brought in from the nearby streets. With difficulty, I managed to make my way through to the deputy director of the labour bureau and get a promise that Henryk would be home again before dark.
And so he was, although – much to my own surprise – he was furious with me. He thought I ought not to have demeaned myself by petitioning such low specimens of humanity as the police and the labour bureau staff.
‘So you’d rather they’d taken you away, would you?’
‘That’s nothing to do with you!’ he growled back. ‘It was me they wanted, not you. Why go interfering in other people’s business?’
I shrugged my shoulders. What’s the point of arguing with a madman?
That evening it was announced that curfew would be postponed until midnight, so that the families of those ‘sent for labour’ would have time to bring them blankets, a change of underwear and food for the journey. This ‘magnanimity’ on the part of the Germans was truly touching, and the Jewish police made much of it in an effort to win our confidence.
Not until much later did I learn that the thousand men rounded up in the ghetto had been taken straight to the camp at Treblinka, so that the Germans could test the efficiency of the newly built gas chambers and crematorium furnaces.
Another month of peace and quiet passed, and then, one June evening, there was a bloodbath in the ghetto. We were too far away to have any idea of what was about to happen. It was hot, and after supper we pulled up the blinds that shaded our dining room and opened the windows wide to get a breath of the cooler evening air. The Gestapo vehicle had driven past the house opposite at such speed, and the warning shots came so fast, that before we could jump up from the table and run to the window the doors of that building were already open, and we could hear the SS men shouting inside. The windows had been opened too, and were dark, but we could hear a great deal of disturbance behind them. Alarmed faces emerged from the gloom and quickly withdrew again. As the jackbooted Germans marched upstairs the lights went on, floor by floor. A businessman’s family lived in the flat directly opposite ours; we knew them well by sight. When the light went on there too and SS men in helmets stormed into the room, machine pistols ready to fire, the people inside were sitting around their table just as we had been seated at ours a moment ago. They were frozen with horror. The NCO leading the detachment took this as a personal insult. Speechless with indignation, he stood there in silence, scanning the people at the table. Only after a moment or so did he shout, in a towering rage, ‘Stand up!’
They rose to their feet as fast as they could, all except for the head of the family, an old man with lame legs. The NCO was seething with anger. He went up to the table, braced his arms on it, stared hard at the cripple, and growled for the second time, ‘Stand up!’
The old man gripped the arms of his chair to support himself and made desperate efforts to stand, but in vain. Before we realized what was going on, the Germans had seized the sick man, picked him up, armchair and all, carried the chair on to the balcony, and thrown it out into the street from the third floor.
Mother screamed and closed her eyes. Father shrank far back from the window into the room. Halina hurried over to him, and Regina put her arm around Mother’s shoulders, saying quite loudly and very clearly, in an authoritative tone, ‘Quiet!’
Henryk and I could not tear ourselves away from the window. We saw the old man still hanging in his armchair in the air for a second or two, and then he fell out of it. We heard the chair fall to the road separately, and the smack of a human body landing on the stones of the pavement. We stood there in silence, rooted to the spot, unable to move back or look away from the scene in front of us.
Meanwhile the SS had already taken a couple of dozen men from the building out into the street. They switched on the headlights of their car, forced their prisoners to stand in the beam, started the engines and made the men run ahead of them in the white cone of light. We heard convulsive screaming from the windows of the building, and a volley of machine-gun fire from the car. The men running ahead of it fell one by one, lifted into the air by the bullets, turning somersaults and describing a circle, as if the passage from life to death consisted of an extremely difficult and complicated leap. Only one of them succeeded in dodging aside and out of the cone of light. He ran with all his might, and it looked as if he would reach the street that
intersected with ours. But the car had a swivelling floodlight mounted on top for such contingencies. It flared into light, sought the fugitive, there was another volley, and now it was his turn to leap into the air. He raised his arms above his head, arched backwards as he jumped, and fell on his back.
The SS men all got into the car and drove away over the dead bodies. The vehicle swayed slightly as it passed over them, as if it were bumping over shallow potholes.
That night about a hundred people were shot in the ghetto, but this operation did not make nearly as much of an impression as the first. The shops and cafés were open as usual next day.
There was something else to interest people at this time: among their other daily activities, the Germans had taken to making films. We wondered why. They would burst into a restaurant and tell the waiters to lay a table with the finest food and drink. Then they ordered the customers to laugh, eat and drink, and they were captured on celluloid amusing themselves in this way. The Germans filmed performances of operetta at the Femina cinema in Leszno Street, and the symphony concerts conducted by Marian Neuteich given at the same venue once a week. They insisted that the chairman of the Jewish Council should hold a luxurious reception and invite all the prominent people in the ghetto, and they filmed this reception too. One day, finally, they herded a certain number of men and women into the public baths, told them to get undressed and bathe in the same room, and they filmed this curious scene in detail. Only much, much later did I discover that these films were intended for the German population at home in the Reich and abroad. The Germans were making these films before they liquidated the ghetto, to give the lie to any disconcerting rumours if news of the action should reach the outside world. They would show how well off the Jews of Warsaw were – and how immoral and despicable they were too, hence the scenes of Jewish men and women sharing the baths, immodestly stripping naked in front of each other.
At more or less the same time, increasingly alarming rumours began to circulate in the ghetto at ever shorter intervals, although as usual they were unfounded and you could never find anyone who was the source of them, or who could provide the slightest confirmation that they were based on fact. One day, for instance, people began talking about the dreadful conditions in the Łódź ghetto, where the Jews had been forced to put their own iron currency into circulation – you could not buy anything with it, and now they were dying of starvation in their thousands. Some took this news very much to heart; with others it went in one ear and out the other. After a while people stopped talking about łódź and began on Lublin and Tarnów, where apparently the Jews were being poisoned with gas, although no one could really believe that story. More credible was the rumour that the Jewish ghettos in Poland were to be limited to four: Warsaw, Lublin, Cracow and Radom. Then, for a change, rumours began going around suggesting that the people in the Warsaw ghetto were to be resettled in the east and were to leave in transports of six thousand people a day. In some people’s opinion this action would have been carried out a long time ago but for that mysterious conference of the Jewish Council which succeeded in persuading the Gestapo (undoubtedly through bribery) not to resettle us.
On 18 July, a Saturday, Goldfeder and I were playing in a concert at the Café Pod Fontanną (Fountain) in Leszno Street, a benefit for the famous pianist Leon Boruński who had once won the Chopin competition. Now he had tuberculosis and was living in destitution in the ghetto in Otwock. The garden of the café was crammed. About four hundred people of the social élite and would-be élite had attended. Scarcely anyone could remember the last function on such a scale, but if there was excitement among the audience it was for other reasons entirely: the fine ladies of the wealthy classes and the smart social parvenus were all agog to discover whether Mrs L would speak to Mrs K today. Both these ladies engaged in charity work, playing an active part in the operations of the house committees that had been formed in many of the more prosperous buildings to help the poor. This charity work was particularly enjoyable because it involved frequent balls at which people danced, amused themselves and drank, donating the proceeds to charitable purposes.
The cause of the ill feeling between the two ladies was an incident in the Sztuka café a few days earlier. They were both very pretty in their different ways, and they heartily disliked each other, making great efforts to entice one another’s admirers away. The greatest prize among these was Maurycy Kohn, a railway proprietor and Gestapo agent, a man with the attractive and sensitive face of an actor.
That evening both ladies had been enjoying themselves in the Sztuka. They sat at the bar, each in the small circle of her admirers, trying to outdo one another in ordering the most recherché drinks and getting the accordionist of the jazz band to play the best of the hit tunes at their tables. Mrs L left first. She had no idea that while she was inside a starving woman had dragged herself along the street, and then collapsed and died just outside the door to the bar. Dazzled by the light from the café, Mrs L stumbled over the dead woman as she left. On seeing the corpse she fell into convulsions and could not be calmed. Not so Mrs K, who had now been told of the incident. When she too went out of the door she uttered a shriek of horror, but then immediately, as if overcome by the depth of her sympathy, went over to the dead woman, took five hundred złoty from her own handbag and gave the money to Kohn, who was just behind her. ‘Please deal with this for me,’ she asked him. ‘See she gets a decent burial.’
Whereupon one of the ladies of her circle whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘An angel, as always!’
Mrs L could not forgive Mrs K for this. She described her the next day as ‘a low-class slut’, and said she was never going to speak to her again. Today both ladies were to be at the Pod Fontanną café, and the jeunesse dorée of the ghetto was waiting curiously to see what would happen when they met.
The first half of the concert was now over, and Goldfeder and I went out into the street to smoke a cigarette at leisure. We had made friends and had been appearing as a duo for a year; he is dead now, although his prospects of survival looked better than mine at the time. He was an excellent pianist and also a lawyer. He had graduated from the conservatory and the university faculty of law at the same time, but he was extremely self-critical and had come to the conclusion that he would never be a really top-ranking pianist, so he had entered the law instead; only during the war did he become a pianist again.
He was outstandingly popular in pre-war Warsaw, thanks to his intelligence, his personal charm and his elegance. Later, he managed to escape the ghetto and survive for two years hidden in the home of the writer Gabriel Karski. A week before the Soviet army invaded, he was shot by Germans in a little town not far from the ruins of Warsaw.
We smoked and talked, feeling less exhausted with each breath we took. It had been a beautiful day. The sun had already disappeared behind the buildings; only the roofs and windows of the upper storeys still glowed crimson. The deep blue of the sky was fading to a paler colour; swallows swooped across it. The crowds in the street were thinning out, and even they looked less dirty and unhappy than usual as they walked by, bathed in the blue, crimson and dull gold evening light.
Then we saw Kramsztyk walking towards us. We both felt pleased: we must get him into the second half of the concert. He had promised to paint my portrait, and I wanted to discuss the details with him.
However, he would not be persuaded to come in. He seemed subdued, immersed in his own gloomy thoughts. A little while ago he had heard, from a reliable source, that this time the forthcoming resettlement of the ghetto was unavoidable: the German extermination commando was already poised for action on the other side of the wall, ready to begin operations.
8 ∼ An Anthill Under Threat
Around this time Goldfeder and I were trying to organize a midday concert for the anniversary of the formation of our duo. It was to be in the garden of the Sztuka on Saturday, 25 July 1942. We were optimists. Our hearts were set on this concert, and we had gone to a
lot of trouble preparing for it. Now, on the eve of the event, we just could not believe it was not to take place. We simply trusted that the rumours of resettlement would turn out to be unfounded once more. On Sunday, 19 July I played again in the garden of a café in Nowolipki Street, never guessing that this was to be my last performance in the ghetto. The garden café was full, but the mood was rather sombre.
After the performance I looked in at the Sztuka. It was late, and there was no one left in the café; only the staff were still busy with the final chores of the day. I sat down for a moment with the manager. He was in a gloomy mood, giving orders without any conviction, as if for form’s sake.
‘Are you getting the place ready for our concert on Saturday yet?’ I asked.
He looked at me as if he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then his face showed ironic sympathy for my ignorance of the events that had given a completely different turn to the fate of the ghetto.
‘You really think we’ll still be alive on Saturday?’ he enquired, leaning over the table towards me.
‘I’m sure we will!’ I replied.
At this, as if my answer had opened up new prospects of safety, and that safety depended on me, he grasped my hand and said fervently, ‘Well, if we really are still alive, you can order anything you like for supper here on Saturday, at my expense, and –’ Here he hesitated briefly, but then decided to do the thing properly, and added, ‘And you can order the best the Sztuka cellars can offer – on me too, and as much of it as you want!’
The Pianist Page 7