What is best Sehora?
My baby will learn Torah,
Seforim he will write for me,
And a pious Jew he’ll always be.
“Know from where you came.”
Dawn cast an ugly light on Warsaw. Andrei’s heavy eyes blinked at the sharpening outlines of the rooftops. He felt the presence of someone behind him.
“It is very chilly. You’d better come inside,” Gabriela said.
Chapter Eight
Journal Entry
WE ARE WITHIN AN inch of war.
The Polish delegation arrived in Berlin for last-minute talks but are without authority to make direct negotiations. It is the consensus that Hitler doesn’t really want to negotiate. His pact with Russia puts the Soviet army on the shelf for the time being, and no one is under the illusion that France and England are going to do very much if Germany attacks us.
I was finally able to get hold of Andrei. Ana Grinspan came up from Krakow, so we will be able to hold an executive meeting later this morning.
ALEXANDER BRANDEL
Throughout Warsaw bells pealed. They pealed from the towers of large and small churches and the cathedral. They pealed from St. Antoine’s and St. Anne’s and from the Carmelites’ and from Notre Dame and the Dominican and Franciscan churches and St. Casimir’s and the Jesuits’ and from the Holy Cross where Chopin’s heart is kept in a little black box near the altar.
Warsaw is filled with churches, and all their bells pealed. For it was Sunday.
A smattering of white sails billowed on the Vistula River to test out the first brisk late-summer breeze, and bathers and sunners packed the shore of the beach at Praga Park.
The Poniatowski Bridge and the Kierbedzia Bridge buckled with the heavy traffic to and from Praga as relatives exchanged visits.
Beneath the Poniatowski Bridge was the Solec district. And this was filled with the odor of freshly dropped horse dung, as most of the teamsters lived in Solec and stabled their horses in the courtyards alongside their homes.
In the winding steps beneath the bridge in Solec the police investigated the knifing of a well-known whore. However, the usual smuggling, mugging, fencing, prostitution, pickpocketing, gambling, and thieving which made the Solec the Solec had decreased, for most of the whores and hoodlums were in church.
All of Christian Warsaw, two thirds of its population, piously promenaded in and out of church. The day before, Jewish Warsaw, the other third, had piously promenaded in and out of synagogue.
It was a pleasant day, As Gabriela dressed for Mass she could see beyond her balcony into the square and along the Aleja Ujazdowska, where the elegant promenaded. The men cut fastidious figures with their homburgs and canes and spats and pin stripes, and there were the dashing army officers, and women elegant in Paris hats and Paris dresses and fur pieces.
The new rich paraded along Jerusalem Boulevard and the grand Avenue of the Marshals.
The hopeful young lovers and the soldiers of the rank and their girls promenaded up and down New World Street, looking longingly into the barred shop windows.
The visitors from the country flooded the Old Town Square to saturate themselves with Polish lore.
The neither rich nor poor filled the Saxony Gardens. And, since the super-nationalistic marshal, Pilsudski, had died, the crowds were allowed to spill into and examine the wonders of his personal botanical gardens in the Lazienki around his Belvedere Palace.
In the Old Town, boys took photographs of their girls posing on the medieval walls.
And the poor people went to the Krasinski Gardens to look at trees and grass and eat hard-boiled eggs and onions and pull their children out of the lake.
Amid squirting fountains and palaces and church bells, Warsaw promenaded and little girls in knee-length white stockings and bows and pigtails walked before parents who felt rather saintly after their visit to the holy domains and little boys ran after the little girls and pulled their pigtails.
In the middle of the broad sidewalks, life centered about the circular-shaped concrete billboard structures upon which handbills were posted announcing cultural events, news, bargains, and Irene Dunne movies.
The monuments of Pilsudski riding his horse, Stefan riding his horse, Casimir riding his horse, Poniatowski riding his horse, and Chopin merely standing were smothered with fresh-cut flowers in the Polish tradition of reverence to her heroes.
Over Pilsudski Square, Warsaw’s ground for political and military rallies, stood eleven massive columns forming an entrance to the Saxony Gardens, and in its center the eternal flame to the unknown soldier. This, too, was surrounded with cut flowers.
After church the rich went to the swanky Bruhl House and ate ices and sipped tea after their hour with God, and the poor stared at them from the street through the long, low windows. The rich did not seem to mind.
Not all of Warsaw was so reverent.
The Jews had celebrated their Sabbath a day earlier, and while their Christian brethren purged their sins the Jews quietly circumvented the stringent blue laws. The center of Jewish gangsterism on Wolynska Street smuggled and thieved, the textile workshops on Gensia bartered for raw material, and the stores of the building-material owners that lined Grzybow Square could be opened with the proper combination of knocks.
In the mixed Christian and Jewish quarters of the smart Sienna and Zlota streets, Jewish professionals and businessmen let their neighbors know they were good Poles and joined in the promenading.
And the bells pealed.
Everything seemed quite in place for a Sunday in Warsaw. That is, if you did not go near the tension-filled ministries or the rumor-riddled lobbies of the Polonia and Bristol and Europa. Or if you were not among those who stopped before the President’s Palace and watched and waited for word of a miracle which was not coming. Or if you were not in your home before the radios bringing invoices from the BBC and Berlin and America and Moscow. For under the normalcy, everyone seemed to know that the bells of Warsaw could well be sounding the death knell of Poland.
The meeting of the Bathyran Council was held in the flat of its general secretary, Alexander Brandel. His place faced the Great Synagogue on Tlomatskie Street and was conveniently near the Writers’ Club, which was the meeting place of the journalists, actors, writers, artists, and intellectuals who admitted they were Jewish. The Jewish journalists, actors, writers, artists, and intellectuals who did not admit they were Jewish met in another club a few blocks away.
A dozen routine matters, left unresolved during Andrei’s absence, were dispensed with, then the discussion turned to what they should do in the event of war.
“War will bring us to terrible times,” Alex said. “I do not think it is too premature to set up on an emergency footing. Perhaps even think about what we will do, God forbid, if the Germans come.”
Ana Grinspan, the liaison secretary, was up first. “The very first thing we should do is close ranks as never before. We must establish a system of communications between all our chapters in case of German occupation.”
Andrei was looking wistfully out of the window. When Ana began to talk, he turned and looked at her. She was still very attractive, he thought. She had been his girl before Gabriela. Funny, she is a lot like Gabriela. Ana was twenty-five and very Polish in appearance. She lived in Krakow and was from an upper-middle-class family. Most half Jews went to one of two excesses—an abnormal hate of their Jewishness or the embracing of it with an abnormal passion. When Ana discovered her father’s Jewishness she became a rabid Zionist. It was this obsession that cooled Andrei towards her. There are times when a woman must be a woman and to hell with Zionism. It’s too much to hear it going to bed and waking up. At any rate, their parting was completely civilized.