Wartime lies - Louis Begley [39]
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.
PANI Dumont had met her much regretted late husband, a Walloon railroad engineer, in Kielce, directly after the end of the Great War. He had made his way there as a member of a Belgian relief and technical assistance team. Why Belgians were helping rebuild Polish railroads when their own country had been mauled by the Germans was something Tania wondered about, but that is how Pani Dumont accounted for his presence. She told us that she had learned good French in school