Warsaw Ghetto

In the rear courtyards of the approximately two buildings to survive from the Warsaw Ghetto, the Catholic residents have installed glass boxes for the Holy Mother of God Maria. All around the Virgin, windows send forth a stench of cooking, beer and fabric softener, with crumbling bits of wall contributing the odours of urination and cat, while open cellar doors exhale a cold, mildewy breath. The Virgin cannot wipe away the dust that screens her from my gaze. A child comes galloping diagonally across the courtyard, disappearing up a worn staircase into the darkness of a side building, a woman in heels emerges from the entry hall, a television can be heard. The approximately two buildings to survive from the Warsaw Ghetto have been propped up with iron bars extending right across the courtyard, with netting and boards strung below to catch falling masonry, and floorless balconies stick out from the wall whose plaster is long gone. For more than sixty years, these approximately two buildings have stood here with their bare bricks exposed, sooner or later they will no doubt collapse.

In the place that sixty years ago was the smaller part of the Ghetto, I am staying in a nine-storey hotel. Right in front of my window, three glass elevators move up and down in a glass tube. In the place where Aryans dug Aryan cobblestones out of the street in order to throw them over the three-metre-high wall at the Jews, the holes have been filled with asphalt, and all that is left today of the Aryan streetcar that page 246 travelled back and forth beneath the Jewish bridge are a few remnants of track. Many of the new buildings constructed after the war on the grounds of the Ghetto stand upon the rubble and foundations of the old buildings the Germans burnt to the ground, for which reason there is often a little slope to the right and left of the sidewalk covered with grass and bushes, and the buildings themselves are slightly raised. At the address Milastrasse 18, where the last fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took their own lives, geraniums are growing on a balcony, curtains have been bleached white, and birds are twittering in a quince tree. In the place where the historian Emanuel Ringelblum climbed out of the sewers to go into hiding on the Aryan side, a beautiful park is filled with large chestnut trees. Large trees can be found in Warsaw only in places where the Ghetto was not. And in the Jewish cemetery. There a woman is pushing a baby carriage, and when I try to catch a glimpse of her child as I walk past, all I see lying there is a wadded-up white woollen blanket.