Wartime Lies (11 page)

Tania’s research, confirmed eventually by my grandfather, led her quickly to conclude that for Jews like us on Aryan papers there was no apparent means of renting an apartment of our own in the capital or, for that matter, in Praga, the suburb on the other side of the Vistula. Perhaps
apartments were to be had in Warsaw, possibly even at a price we could afford, but to find one it was necessary to have connections with Poles, and such connections were precisely what we wished to avoid. Therefore, the likes of us were relegated to renting rooms in more or less spacious apartments, usually belonging to more or less elderly ladies of reduced means. These ladies did not necessarily live in shabby buildings; indeed, apartments in buildings below a certain level of petit bourgeois pretension would have been too small to lend themselves to the business. In the apartments we got to know well, a room or two, including perhaps the salon, would be reserved for the landlady, and the other rooms, in some prewar era of greater ease probably intended for children, opening on a long corridor, were at present available to lodgers. Each such room would contain a single bed, sometimes narrow, sometimes quite comfortable (two beds would not have left enough space for other furnishings), a table, a few chairs, a wardrobe, a bookcase, a washstand. At the end of the corridor, there would be, in the best of circumstances, a bathroom with a tub with running water and its own gas or oil heater, used by everyone in the apartment. Next to it would be a separate cubicle containing a toilet, also for communal use. At peak hours, in the morning when the lodgers awoke and after dinner when they prepared for the night, unpleasant questions of priority were apt to arise concerning the toilet. Our policy was to avoid unpleasantness; we made sure to have a chamber pot in our room and could yield politely to those whose needs were urgent.

The landladies of Warsaw’s communal apartments did
not feed their lodgers. One bought one’s own food, kept it in the room as best one could, iceboxes not being in general use, cooked it in the kitchen, and ate it at a common dining-room table or in one’s room, depending on the custom of the place and the lodger’s degree of dourness. And who were these lodgers? Dreary, unmarried office employees, widows and widowers whose apartments had been destroyed in some bombardment, and the deceivers: Jews with Aryan papers.

My existence continued to be a problem not susceptible to a pleasant solution. Children in these establishments were a rarity; they attracted attention and, therefore, danger. Questions of the sort Tania and I had rehearsed were to be answered before they were asked, so that the inquisitive landlady or fellow lodger would never begin the dreaded inquiry that might lead to the truth: Why did that young woman’s family not take her in, rather than let her and her boy lead a solitary, peculiar life in this place? They don’t seem poor, otherwise how could she afford the rent that we who work, or we who have a little pension, pay with difficulty? She doesn’t work. What kind of pension do young people of her sort have? Could they be Jews? Let’s see if we can find out; it’s amusing to set a trap.

The days and nights that would teach us these new skills were still to be lived. On the third day after our arrival in Warsaw, we finally saw my grandfather. He was waiting for us at the Cathedral. As always, he was bareheaded; he wore a short black leather overcoat I did not recognize. We embraced, he looked me over, lifted me up for a kiss and said I had grown but was still his little man. Tania put
her arm through his and drew us all inside. The Cathedral was nearly empty. We sat down in a pew near a side altar, and she told him what had happened. Grandfather did not cry; he seemed to sink into himself. I saw now how he had changed. Where it was not stained by nicotine, his mustache was as white as his hair; there were folds in the skin on his neck; his shirt collar looked worn and also yellowed as though from smoking. The fingers of his right hand were almost brown; he had probably stopped using a cigarette holder. After a long silence, grandfather said that Reinhard had been a fine man. He hoped that he would have had as much presence of mind himself and as much courage; if grandmother realized what was happening, she surely blessed Reinhard in her last thoughts. He was proud of Tania. The trick was for the three of us to stay alive. With America in the war and the English finally bombing Berlin it made sense to try hard.

He told us that in Mokotów he had a room and the use of the kitchen in an apartment. The landlady was a pleasant old cocotte, he liked her, and in fact the room wasn’t bad. But he did not think we could move in with him. For one thing, he doubted that the landlady would agree to giving up another room. More important, the only other lodgers were a young woman about Tania’s age and her boy, a little younger than I. He was quite sure they were Jews; the woman had a strange look about her, probably she bleached her hair to make it less red, and there was something too tender about her eyes. He was less sure that they understood about him. Having more Jews than absolutely necessary under one roof made no sense, it multiplied
the danger, and this Jewish lady could be a real menace; she acted scatterbrained. He might have moved out on account of her if the place were not so satisfactory in all other ways. He would talk to the landlady; she would recommend something. The landladies all knew one another in this business.

I complained about his not wanting to look for a place where all three of us could live together, but Tania said he was right. She believed that we were safer without him, and he was safer without us. If the three of us were together, we would be drawing attention to ourselves; all the questions about our situation, why we were living in Warsaw in a rooming house, why we had no other family or friends, would be multiplied and become even harder to answer. The imperative need to avoid attracting attention, even at a cost as great as this, was another leitmotiv of our existence.

Grandfather told us he had not had any problems with the police and only minor problems with blackmailers; nothing expensive. Usually, it was some low-life youth who followed him for a while in the street, then asked for a light and said, Pan looks familiar to me, could he help with a little cash? These people had a look one could not mistake when they made their approach, like pimps in the old days. For the benefit of the landlady, so that she would understand where he got his money, he pretended he dealt in leather coats, the height of fashion in those days, on the black market; that is why he was wearing such a strange garment. His supposed black-market activity meant he had to be out of the apartment several hours each day.
Being obliged to find someplace to drag himself to each day probably had kept him from going insane; he was so lonely. There was a
mleczarnia
where he went to eat cheese pierogi and sit over tea. He told Tania that she should not worry about being able to sell a piece of jewelry if she needed to. There was an intelligent jeweler who dealt in everything—stolen goods, Jewish diamonds and gold coins included. The man understood values. When grandfather was short of cash, he paid the jeweler a little visit. He told us he kept a couple of rings taped to his body, just in case it turned out he could not return to the apartment; the rest was hidden under a floorboard he had loosened with a knife. He would show Tania how to do it as soon as we had a place to live. As he talked, the mechanics of existence began to seem less impossible to master. Tania and he agreed that we would meet the next day at the same place, only earlier. He hoped to have addresses of rooms we could look at. When we were about to say good-bye, he started to cry very hard, and as though he had been freed from some restraint that had held him frozen, Tania and I wept with him.

All at once, grandfather wiped his face dry, stood up very straight and said in a loud voice, My dear children, God will bring us consolation, this is His place, let us pray once more for your dear mother’s soul. He took Tania and me by the arms and led us up to the side altar. There, he pushed us down to our knees and whispered, Quick, start crossing yourselves, put your hands over your faces and pray. I knew how to do it; Zosia had taught me long ago to make the sign of the cross, and we now
crossed ourselves each time we walked by a church. We remained in that position until grandfather whispered that we should cross ourselves again, stand up, and follow him. He showed us at a distance two men who had left the Cathedral and were walking toward the other end of the Rynek. This pair looked to him like real policemen, he said, not the usual trash. He had noticed them standing nearby, studying us with great interest, intently. He was surprised the prayer performance had fooled them; more likely, they didn’t want to be seen picking people up in the Cathedral even when it was half-deserted. It was his fault: he should never have allowed us to stay so long on that bench talking. It was bound to attract attention.

By the end of the following week, we were installed at the apartment of Pani Z. in a street of Długa. This lady turned out to be the widow of a physician. Tania discovered the unfortunate coincidence of the late husband’s profession over a cup of tea; the deal to rent the room had been concluded. As soon as Tania began to try out her speech about being the wife of a doctor from Lwów and the officers’ prison camp in Russia, Pani Z. told Tania about her natural sympathy for the family of a colleague. Tania said she almost spilled her tea when she heard this news, and she continued to think the medical connection meant serious trouble.

There was no doubt about Tania’s being able to pass for a doctor’s wife. She could display a knowledge of medicine and the honorarium structure of the profession that would do credit to any doctor’s wife or widow, as well as an appropriate capacity for instant diagnosis. But what acquaintances
might this she-devil of a landlady have among doctors in Lwów, of whom she could inquire, if she felt a stirring of curiosity, about Tania’s husband? Would she attempt to look him up in professional lists? Anything like that might be fatal. To begin with, we had no idea of the profession of the man whose name appeared on our papers; that information wasn’t required to be mentioned. All we knew was that his name was Tadeusz. That appeared on my birth certificate and Tania’s identity card and marriage certificate. But we weren’t really sure that such a Tadeusz had ever existed in Lwów or elsewhere. Hertz said the papers were genuine, but he might have been sold very skillful forgeries. It was also possible that he had told Tania they were real only to give her greater self-assurance in the event we were ordered to show them to the police.

The solution was to move, but we couldn’t do it immediately; that might arouse suspicion. We would look for another place, rent it, and leave here within two or three weeks, paying Pani Z. a month’s rent in place of notice. It was unlikely she would begin prying and get information right away; it was a risk we had to take. Grandfather agreed with this plan. He had not met Pani Z. or come to our room. If he had, his relationship to us would have had to be acknowledged: we three looked alike and it would be hard to lie about it, yet telling Pani Z. that he was Tania’s father and my grandfather was awkward, too. Her new maiden name did not match his, and he had not mentioned to his own landlady that he was looking for a room for his daughter and grandson. In fact,
he had not told his landlady that his friends had rented a room from Pani Z. That was another precaution; let them talk and put two and two together if they have nothing better to do, but he was not going to make finding us through his landlady easier. He decided that we would see one another every morning, at the Cathedral if it rained, and otherwise in different parts of the Saxon Gardens we would agree on as time passed.

In the meantime, Tania and I were learning the routine of communal apartment living, studying the street map of Warsaw, and rehearsing what she and I should and should not say at the dining table, Pani Z.’s being an establishment where eating in one’s room was frowned upon as messy and unfriendly. To make it easier for herself to stay out of Pani Z.’s salon, Tania quietly made it clear that, whenever my health permitted, she and I would be busy with my lessons in our room. This was a reason for keeping to ourselves that could not be criticized or cause undue comment, and yet it reduced our contacts with Pani Z.

There was a special sort of social occasion, however, in addition to meals, for which we could not fail to emerge and join Pani Z. and our fellow lodgers. Since mid-April, there had been fighting in the Warsaw ghetto; at the dinner table the lodgers and Pani Z. talked of little else. Jews had actually attacked Germans, even forcing the SS unit that was sent to restore order to retreat. Some said that many of the SS had been killed. But now Germans were teaching the Jews a final lesson, and at the end of every afternoon, the weather being very mild, we all went to the roof under Pani Z.’s direction and gathered around her to
watch what she liked to call our fireworks. She claimed it was the first real entertainment the Germans had provided in all this sad time. Pani Z. and her little band were not alone; it seemed that most of the tenants were on the roof, and the roofs of adjoining buildings were equally crowded. No wonder: the view from Długa in the direction of Zamenhof and the ghetto was almost unobstructed, and one could hear very well.

People on the roof explained that the Germans were using artillery. That was why the buildings in the ghetto were exploding and crumbling. Then they set them on fire, so that black-and-orange clouds rose in the evening sky. One could not see it, but in what was left of the buildings, and in whatever other holes they were hidden, Jews were burning. The incineration process was fortunate, our neighbors said: otherwise, decaying corpses would have caused disease that rats could spread far beyond the ghetto. Occasional bets were made on how long it would be until the whole place was one black pile of rubble, and whether any Jews would be left alive inside it.

We did not remain in the house of Długa long enough to see these wagers settled. We left Pani Z.’s according to Tania’s plan, moved twice to rooming houses for transients, and, on the day when the SS removed the surviving Jews from the ghetto, we were already living on the other side of the Saxon Gardens, in the apartment of Pani Dumont. We continued to witness the daily spectacle from the roofs of our successive abodes, including Pani Dumont’s, until it ended. All of Warsaw was watching with us, but the level of joviality was never again so high.
The novelty wore off; also, the view from Pani Z.’s roof had been exceptionally good.