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By Root 419 0

in the hell of Poland was undeserved, and they were morally right to defy it. In the Inferno, the punishment is always deserved, a primordial part of the universal order over which presides the God of Love. And yet, when proud or physically courageous damned are defiant and disdainful, admiration and even pity stir in the heart. Why is this so in the Commedia and in life? We should more properly be outraged at these sinners’ failure to welcome their torments meekly, assuming as we must, that their crimes are abhorrent and that Minòs, that connoisseur of sins, conoscitor de le peccata, has consigned them to fit punishments. Why does a Jew, hunted by the Gestapo, captured, and on his way to the gas chamber, have to be disdainful or defiant to awaken sympathy, avoid disdain? Why cluck one’s tongue over the courage of fat Göring at Nuremberg? In the vestibule of hell dwell the sorry souls of those who lived without infamy and without praise. These wretches run in a long train after a banner, naked, as Dante takes the trouble to emphasize, and stung by gadflies and wasps so that blood mixed with tears streaks their faces. It is clear that Dante disdains them more than any of the other damned: neither heaven nor deep hell will receive them; mercy and justice scorn them; Virgil refuses to discuss their condition. Why are they worse than the damned who lived in infamy and were notorious on this earth for their sins? Why do we find it so difficult to admire those who are tormented and make no defiant gesture? Suppose they are neither meek nor proud, only frightened. Why do we care whether a fallen demon outshines legions though bright?

V

SHORTLY after my first Communion, I turned yellow. My liver hurt and I was feverish. It was obvious to Tania that I had jaundice, like my grandmother just before the end. Through my previous maladies Tania had treated me with aspirin, compresses and chicken bouillon. Summoning a doctor was excluded; he would want to examine me, he might see my penis. I was not a girl, and we were not in old China: I could not show the physician what hurt me by pointing, from behind a curtain, to the body of an ivory doll. This time, Tania was worried. She was not sure how my father cured jaundice. Apparently, Pan Władek was worried too. He came to our room and said, I can recommend a doctor you can trust in every way; please let him examine the child, Pani need not be afraid. Tania agreed. The diet and pills the doctor prescribed worked rapidly. I was able to resume lessons and even to go out to meet my grandfather.

It was a glorious hot summer, one sun-filled day succeeding another. As my grandfather had foreseen, the Wehrmacht was crumbling in the East. In three weeks, fifteen German divisions were annihilated; in the two or three weeks that followed, the Russians advanced almost four hundred kilometers. We had already seen an army routed and in full retreat: the Red Army fleeing from T. in June 1941. But at that time, from the outset, the front was never far from us, and then the Russians seemed to disappear overnight. Now we saw a defeat as though in slow motion: trucks in the streets of Warsaw as well as trains with German wounded, trucks and trains with bedraggled units being withdrawn from the front—all heading west. One heard of German soldiers asking to be hidden or to trade their pistols and rifles for civilian clothes.

Meanwhile, the police were everywhere. Feldgendarmerie patrols were stationed at important intersections. There were more and more controls of identification papers and random arrests. A loudspeaker would suddenly bellow over a marketplace with orders to freeze, and police, sometimes only Germans and sometimes Germans and Poles, would appear from abutting streets and search the crowd. On certain days, Pan Władek advised us not to go out; it seemed that he no longer went to work; he would leave the apartment and reappear at unusual hours. On other days he would ask Tania and sometimes me to carry packages for him. We were to hand them over to such and such person who would approach