Necessary Lies (21 page)

“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 Pow
zki 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 Powązki, 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.

Quickly, Anna lays the wreaths on the marble slate and lights her candles. Then, kneeling on the marble ledge at the graveside, she says her prayers for the dead. From the two oval photographs on the headstone her grandparents look at her. Time has paled their sepia faces, lighted their contours. She tries to remember them the way they were, but all she can think of are the two black spots on her grandmother's lower lip. When she was little, she watched
Babcia
cover them up with lipstick. Two layers, always two layers, so they wouldn't show.

In September 1939, after the first German bombs fell on Warsaw,
Babcia
packed two of her most sturdy suitcases and decided to go back east, to her parents. She took her daughter with her.
Dziadek
refused to leave the store. The
Prezydent
of Warsaw was appealing to everyone for calm, he kept saying. Britain and France had declared war against Hitler.

Babcia
did not want to listen. Her daughter was only eleven, she said, too young to die. They were in a column of refugees when a German
Messerschmidt
dived right over them and this was when
Babcia
bit her lip. She said the plane dived so low that she could see the pilot's face. His square jaw, the shining buckle on his leather cap. Then she heard the sounds of machine-gun fire and saw people fall down dead. With bullet holes digging into their chests, exploding inside their heads.

“We were nothing to them but prey,” she said. “You can't forget that, Anna.”

Babcia
had been sent to Warsaw, in 1922, to live with a distant aunt who, after much coaxing, agreed to look after her.
Her parents did not trust the new world order. True, Poland had just been made free after 123 years of partitions, but the Germans called it the “Seasonal State,” and for the Russians it was “the bastard of Versailles,” a “persecutor of the working class.” Borderlands were never safe. Such calculations were always important, here: the constant reassessment of which territories had a chance to survive and which would most likely succumb.
Babcia
was 23 years old, with long auburn hair and almond-shaped eyes. Her parents thought she would be better off in the capital.

In Warsaw, in her Aunt's house, for seven long months
Babcia
waited for a husband. She imagined herself charming a handsome army officer, or one of the young lawyers in her Uncle's chambers. Her Aunt laughed at the dreams of a poor relation, really no better than a servant. “Sausage is not for the dogs,” she had said, “a pretty face is not enough.” Time was running out. Picky women were left alone in the world, stale buns on the shelf.

Dziadek
owned a small corner store in Podlaska street and above it, on the first floor, he rented a three-room apartment. He liked the shy, pretty woman he saw praying in church, pressing a lace handkerchief to her full red lips. Liked her enough to make inquiries about her position and prospects through one of her Aunt's servants. Enough to pursue her for weeks, to send her flowers, cakes, a pair of kid gloves. She tried to return the gloves, but they came back accompanied by another bouquet of red roses. Her Aunt smiled approvingly, called
Dziadek
a respectable young man and asked him to come and have tea in the best parlour. He sat there stiffly, playing with a silver teaspoon, elaborating on the prospects of his colonial store and his need for a woman who would not be afraid of work. One afternoon, when
Babcia
was in church, praying for deliverance, he proposed. It was the Aunt who was given the mission of persuading
Babcia
to accept him, hinting at the hardships of having another mouth to feed. “And you, my dear, are not getting any younger.”

They were married three months later. To Anna,
Babcia
often said that she knew of a wife's duties. Of the vale of tears
this life was supposed to be. She knew of all her sins for which she deserved her lot in life. But one thing she couldn't do. She couldn't learn to love the man who ignored her pleas to leave her alone.

To Anna the existence of
Dziadek's
grocery store has always been something of a mystery. “A colonial store,”
Babcia
said, and the word had something delicious about it, but also hard to imagine. For it was hard to believe that the pre-war customers could choose between brands of produce, have their shopping delivered to their homes. No line-ups, no shortages, no pushing and shoving. It was in the rented apartment above this grocery store, after three miscarriages and a baby boy who died a few days short of his first birthday, that Anna's mother was born.

“They always quarrelled,”
Mama
said about her parents. “Something was always wrong.”

A beloved daughter, the apple of her father's eye. Spoilt with the gift of a gold watch for her First Communion, Belgian lace for her dress. Visits to Blikle café, carefully hidden from her mother, where she was allowed to order and eat as many cakes as she wanted. When they came home, giggling and swearing to keep it all their secret, she would be served her supper and she would not be able to eat it. It was then, after expert questioning, that the truth would be revealed, and her parents would quarrel again. Over her, over the sweets, over the future of a daughter brought up in such indulgent manner. The same daughter whose freedom
Babcia
would one day buy from the Gestapo when, arrested in a street
tapanka,
Anna's mother would be taken with other passers-by to witness a street execution and told she would be sent to Germany for forced labour.

Mama
recalled bars of chocolate on the counter of the store, oranges and lemons wrapped in delicate tissue paper with pictures on them, the smell of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, the scent of soap, the taste of exotic teas. But she also remembered how the children at school teased her, a shopkeeper's daughter. Once on their way to Lazienki Palace she pointed out the second floor windows of an apartment in
Aleja Ró
to Anna.