A Winter Night in Warsaw

This is something a little different from my usual style and content. I originally wrote this for a more literary-style context and not as a blog post, but I thought it was fitting today, as you’ll soon see.

Somewhere on my walk between the modern gray blocks of Soviet-era buildings and the old town center, the day had started to turn to darkness, the sky fading out to an inky blue. It was not quite five o’clock, and the damp chill of the January evening cut through my coat and numbed my toes. I shivered, and scanned the length of the block for the coffee shop I had spotted earlier. The soft thud of my boots, the occasional passing car blaring a song in English or Polish, and the distant background hum that comes with any city were the only sounds on the wide, curving street.

This was my third day in Warsaw, and by far it had been the most important. My meeting had just ended, a meeting with someone I may never have spoken with had circumstances been different, had the past been different.

I sipped my coffee, the steam warming my face, the familiar rich smell reinvigorating me in a way that the cold had not. I didn’t intend to stay in the shop for long. The bright lights and modern atmosphere, the walls in bold colors and comfortable chairs, jarred with the thoughts swirling around in my head.

An empty evening loomed, but I looked forward to the winter solitude in this city, a city I had seen with new friends in the heat and liveliness of summer, but never like this. I was a long walk away from the little studio I had rented for the week, but it was a walk I wanted to take, needed to take, today. Though I had a few notes from my meeting, I wanted to recall every detail about what had just happened, and a solitary walk through the streets of this cold town was the way to protect my short-term memory from the cramped rush hour streams of people chatting away on their cell phones, the buzzes and dings and wheezes and automated voices of the bus or metro.

Snow had started to fall by the time I reached the Stare Miasto, the old town, with its beautifully restored buildings that had been both reconstructed and repainted with intricate details. Replicas of the past, giving the illusion that they had always looked that way. Yet some had been built back up from nothing, from the rubble and ruins that had at one time comprised ninety percent of the old town.

I turned onto the plac Zamkowy. A tree covered in candy-shaped lights and left over from the holidays dominated the square. Purple, blue, silver, and gold strands of lights formed in the shape of gifts at the foot of the tree added to its festiveness. Images of snowflakes were projected onto the Royal Castle behind. Here in the square there were people, and with them the quiet hum of voices, the occasional laugh or shout. Perhaps a few were tourists, some students, some locals. Beauty and cheerfulness that felt odd to me after my afternoon, but also strangely fitting, comforting, a reminder of the present. Just past the tree, in the main square of the old town, the Rynek, children ice skated against a backdrop of lights and buildings painted in rich blues, reds, yellows, and greens. Music played, the words only vaguely discernible. The scene made me smile, but I continued on my way.

After walking for well over a half hour, I had warmed up by the time I reached my neighborhood. The sounds of the Rynek began to fade as I crossed the bridge that traversed an old castle defense wall, dividing the Stare Miasto from the Nowe Miasto—new town. I made my way along the cobblestone street that stretched up into the Nowe Miasto and led almost directly to my door. In the summer, this area was bustling with outdoor cafés, tourists, and lively chatter. Tonight, in the cold, a few locals ducked in and out of the grocery store, grabbing a few needed items. I joined them under the bright fluorescent lights, but left as quickly as possible, eager to reach the coziness of my little rental and write down the details of my afternoon.

With grocery bag in hand, keys in another, I rounded the corner of the apartment block and looked down deliberately at the sidewalk. Wanting to see it again, to remember, to somehow let the past know that someone, somewhere, was trying to pay attention. There was the narrow strip of stone, less than a foot wide, maybe just six or seven feet long.

“Mur getta, Ghetto wall, 1940-1943.”

Passersby would probably miss it if they weren’t looking down. Mur getta. A simple strip of stone, one of many throughout the city, this one right outside the courtyard gates of my apartment. It marked the boundaries of a place that no longer existed. But it had existed, once, an instrument of destruction. The jolt of realizing the proximity of where I was staying to this piece of history, a jolt I had felt when I had noticed the words on my first night in Warsaw, returned.

It was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2015, the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. I had been wandering through a city’s history. My meeting had been with a Holocaust survivor, someone who had been a child during the Nazi occupation of Poland, a Jewish child forced into hiding. Our questions and answers, the conversation we had had, focused on the past, but also took the time to consider the present. While I did not attend one of the memorial ceremonies taking place that day, I chose instead to remember the past by processing what I had just heard on my walk. It was a past visible in Warsaw, but only when looking and listening closely enough.

I looked up, turned the key in the lock of the courtyard gate, and stepped inside the apartment block. The metal clank behind me echoed in the empty street.

April 12, 2018, is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.