dressed. The unkemptness only underscored his Semitic appearance. He now closely resembled his dead father, who in his old age had looked unmistakably Jewish. Mrs. Lilien, likewise, looked the worse for her experiences and was even quieter and more withdrawn than usual. Only Irena was holding up well, as she attempted to turn the situation into a joke or some adventure that would certainly end both soon and favorably. Her nervous, restless gaiety was even harder to take than her parents’ depression. Collectively, they did not know what to do with themselves. Ptaszycka lived in Saska Kępa6 in her mother’s villa, and, despite her best intentions, she could not keep Irena with her for more than a week, two at most. The Lilien family had fallen into unforeseen difficulties. The professor was lodging for the time being with one of his students, but this arrangement was not permanent. From what the professor said, one could guess that he had been disappointed by many people on whose help he had counted. It seemed that, for him, this blow was the most painful of all. He felt at once vulnerable and powerless. As the three sat in Ptaszycka’s studio on that sunny spring afternoon, drinking tea out of beautiful English porcelain, they seemed like hopelessly sad and dismal castaways with no place to turn.
A few weeks later, Malecki received a letter from Irena. She wrote from Kraków. By this time, Jan had become absorbed in important matters of a personal nature, and then he had to leave again for the Cistercian monastery; and so, not having answered her letter immediately, he did not answer it at all. After that, one more letter arrived from Irena, short and very sad, and in its tone not at all like her usual self. This time he wanted to answer, but the afore-mentioned affairs had so distanced him from Irena that he did not know what to say. He saw that Irena was unhappy, lonely, and that her life was going badly. He, by contrast, was happy. Despite all the wartime calamities, he was beginning a new life, and there is among people no dividing line greater or more absolute than that between the happiness of some and the suffering of others. Affairs great and small divide people, yet none so sharply as the inequality of fate.
By the time his marriage with Anna was finalized, the figure of Irena had receded into a far corner of Malecki’s thoughts, and neither sympathy for her situation nor the remnants of their former friendship were enough to prompt him to reach out to her. Finally, Irena stopped writing. For a time, Fela Ptaszycka still had news of her, but later even that broke off. Malecki visited his Cistercians a few more times, each time stopping en route in Kraków, but his attempts to look Irena up ended only with good intentions. In the summer of 1942, when the Germans began liquidating the ghettos and organizing the mass slaughter of Jews throughout the country, rumors spread about the death of Professor Lilien. But different versions circulated, and it was difficult to verify how much truth there was to them.
It was not until spring of the following year that Malecki unexpectedly, and amid quite special circumstances, met Irena again. It was the Tuesday before Easter.
Chapter 2
IT WAS A GLOOMY Holy Week for Warsaw. Just the day before Malecki’s encounter with Irena, on Monday the nineteenth of April, some of the Jews still remaining in the ghetto had begun to defend themselves against new German repressions. In the early morning, as SS1 detachments moved inside the ghetto walls, the first shots rang out on Stawki and Leszno streets. The Germans, who had not expected any resistance, withdrew. The battle had begun.
News of the first collective Jewish resistance in centuries did not immediately get about the city. Various versions circulated around Warsaw. In the first hours it was known only that the Germans intended to liquidate the ghetto once and for all and to kill all the Jews who had survived the previous year’s massacres.
The neighborhoods bordering the walls swarmed with people, for there it was easiest to find out what was happening. One after another, shots rang out from the windows of the apartment houses adjoining the walls. The Germans brought their military police up to the ghetto. Hour after hour, the intensity of the gunfire increased. The defense, at first chaotic and random, quickly assumed the shape of a regular organized resistance. Machine-gun fire rang out in many places, and grenades flew.
Street traffic still functioned normally, and in many places the conflict took place amid a throng of spectators and the rattle of passing streetcars. At the same time, the remaining Jews were being taken away from those neighborhoods where no resistance had been raised. Few realized on that first day that the destruction of the ghetto would be drawn out for many long weeks. But for as many days as the Jews defended themselves, the ghetto would continue to burn. And so it was, amid the springtime atmosphere of Holy Week, in the heart of Warsaw, which four years of terror had been unable to subdue, that the Jewish insurrection got under way, the loneliest and most agonizing of all the struggles undertaken in those times in defense of life and freedom.
Malecki lived on the edge of Bielany, a distant settlement on the northern part of town. It was as he returned home from work on Monday evening that he first encountered the uprising. Just past Krasiński Square, as the streetcar passed along the walls of the ghetto, one could sense an atmosphere of excitement. People pressed up against the windows, but nothing could be seen. Beyond the ghetto ramparts stretched the high gray walls of tenement houses, cut through here and there by narrow windows, like arrow slits. Suddenly on Bonifraterska Street, in front of Saint John the Divine Hospital, the streetcar came to a violent stop. Simultaneously, from somewhere high up, a short, even burst of rifle fire rang out. A machine gun responded from the street.
Panic broke out in the streetcar. People quickly pulled back from the windows. Some squatted on the floor, while others pushed forward toward the exit. In the meantime, shots rained down more and more heavily from the Jewish apartment buildings. A machine gun set up in the middle of the pavement at the intersection of Bonifraterska and Konwiktorska streets answered with a ferocious chatter. Along the narrow stretch of roadway between the streetcar tracks and the walls of the ghetto an ambulance rushed by.
The next day, the streetcar to Żoliborz went only as far as Krasiński Square. Malecki, having completed his work at the firm more quickly than usual, was returning home early in the afternoon. At that moment, streetcar traffic came to a halt, and Miodowa Street was clogged with abandoned cars. Crowds stretched out along the sidewalks.
After a night of gunfire, with the morning came a short interruption in the fighting. Now, however, the pounding began anew, more ferocious than on the previous day. No vehicles were allowed to pass through Krasiński Square, but a restless, noisy, and excited crowd filled the openings of Długa and Nowiniarska streets. As with all major happenings in Warsaw, when observed from the outside it was something of a spectacle. Residents of Warsaw eagerly join a fight and just as eagerly observe one in progress.
A swarm of young boys and coiffed and elegantly dressed girls came running from the streets of the Old Town. The more curious pushed forward into the center of Nowiniarska Street, from which the most extensive view of the ghetto walls could be had. Hardly anyone pitied the Jews. The populace was mainly glad that the despised Germans were now beset by a new worry. In the estimation of the average person on the street, the very fact that fighting was taking place with a handful of solitary Jews made the victorious occupiers look ridiculous.
The fighting became increasingly fierce. In the heart of Krasiński Square, military policemen and SS guards bustled about in front of the judicial building. No one was allowed onto Bonifraterska Street.
When Malecki found himself at the corner of Miodowa Street, he was passed by an enormous truck loaded with soldiers dressed in full combat gear. Laughter broke out among the crowd, as rifle fire continued without interruption. This was the Jews shooting. The Germans responded with a long volley from their heavy machine guns and automatics.
Malecki had a business matter to take care of in the district bordering the field
