Читать книгу Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City - Alexandra Richie - Страница 22

Warsaw has the fortune – or misfortune – to be situated at the very centre of the immense flat, sandy plains of Mazowia, along the Berlin–Minsk–Moscow road. Although this vast unimpeded landscape gave the fledgling settlement great advantages in trade, the lack of natural barriers meant that it was at the mercy of any army that marched through. And march they did. Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia invaded and occupied the city numerous times, and its destiny has been written as much by foreign armies as by Warsawians themselves.

Today, evidence of this often violent past is visible everywhere. It is there in the huge swathes of overgrown fields in Wola, where pavements and houses once stood. It is there on the ancient steps where Napoleon stood before leaving on his march on Moscow. It is there in the Tartar and Protestant and Jewish cemeteries, which stand as a testament to a history of openness, and in the beautiful Gothic and Renaissance buildings so carefully rebuilt after the war. It is also there in the hill of rubble – 121 metres high – which was created from the ruins of the city after 1945. Ghosts are everywhere, too. They meet in the Art Deco bar of the Bristol Hotel, or in the white halls of the Wolski hospital, or hover in the spaces between the 1950s housing blocks that criss-cross the former ghetto, once home to the second-largest Jewish community in the world. There, the silence is palpable.

Ancient Warsaw started as a trading centre. Everything, from amber and fur to timber and salt, was carried by barges on the Vistula or hauled by road to Germany, Holland, Ukraine and Russia. The settlement prospered. It had become rich enough by the thirteenth century to be named a seat by the Dukes of Masovia, and before long the skyline was punctuated by the pretty rooftops of the cathedral and the red-brick church of St Mary’s, and by the merchants’ houses, churches and high walls of the Old and New Towns. In 1596 Warsaw’s star rose again when it was named capital of the now powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Polish court moved from gracious Kraków to the ‘upstart’ city in the north.

It was a time of great prosperity for the new capital. Aristocrats, merchants, traders and soldiers moved to the city, and with them architects from all over Europe who built glorious churches, administrative buildings and palaces along the Royal Way, each one more beautiful than the last. This time of peace ended with the coming in 1654 of the Northern Wars, in which Swedish and Russian armies burned and pillaged their way across Polish territory in a seemingly endless orgy of violence. The wars lasted for decades, the worst being the invasion by the Swedes, which came to be known as the ‘Deluge’ and which saw much of Warsaw destroyed. Half a century later, Poland began to rebuild. The new king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, began to renew Warsaw’s battered cultural life. Dozens of institutions were founded in the eighteenth century, not least the Załuski Library – the first Polish public library – and the Collegium Nobilium, the predecessor of the University of Warsaw. But the peace would be short-lived. Poland’s avaricious neighbours Austria, Prussia and Russia carved up the country between them in three separate partitions; by 1795 Poland had ceased to exist.

Warsaw’s unlikely saviour came in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte, who marched through Poland in 1812 on his way to Russia. In 1807 he had created the ‘Duchy of Warsaw’, giving the Poles some autonomy at last, but his demise spelled another period of stagnation for Warsaw, this time under Russian rule. Tsar Alexander I was not particularly hostile to the city and allowed some development – the railways brought wealth, and new streets like Jerusalem Avenue were laid out. The Jewish population, which had numbered only 15,600 in 1816, was bolstered by mass migration of victims fleeing the pogroms in Russia, and had reached 337,000 by the end of the century.

In 1863, following the reign of the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I, an uprising against Russia ended in another humiliating defeat for the Poles. An oppressive military rule was imposed on the country, epitomized by the gigantic red-brick Citadel in Warsaw’s Żoliborz, built after the first uprising in 1830, which was both an administrative centre and a vast prison. Thousands of Poles were sent to Siberia from its cells. Some growth was permitted under the Russian-born mayor Sokrates Starynkiewicz, who under Tsar Alexander III built the city’s sewer system, introduced trams and street lights, and saw the creation of the Warsaw University Library, the Philharmonic Hall and the Polytechnic. Even so, when compared to the explosive growth of similar cities like Berlin and Vienna, Warsaw seemed stunted. By the end of the nineteenth century it had the reputation of being little more than a provincial city in the Russian Empire.

In most Western European countries 11 November, which marks the end of the First World War, is a day of mourning. But not in Poland. The ‘war to end all wars’ might have been a horrific conflict, but it freed Poland from despised Russian rule, and marked the beginning of a period of such energy and creativity and optimism that it remains unique in Warsaw’s history. The era was not without complications. In 1920 Lenin invaded the new country in an attempt to bring Bolshevism to Germany by force: ‘The road to worldwide conflagration will run over the corpse of Poland,’ he said. To his surprise the Poles defeated the Soviet forces in the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’, the last time Russia would lose a war until its foray into Afghanistan in the 1980s, persuading Lenin to rein in his global ambitions and to pursue Communism in Russia alone for the time being. Poland also endured hyperinflation and other economic problems, political strife and ethnic conflicts, but none of this could dampen the sheer optimism felt by its young people, the so-called ‘Columbus Generation’, who were growing up in freedom at last.

Warsaw had now become an important capital city. Though riven with serious social, political and economic problems, it was a major centre of political, diplomatic and military life, and its two main airports and roads and rail lines and five bridges across the Vistula to Praga brought diplomats, dignitaries and people from all over the world to trade, work and live. The city had always been a melting pot, and it continued to welcome foreigners, whether refugees from Bolshevik Russia or, later, those fleeing Hitler’s Germany. With its museums and concert halls, publishing houses and newspapers, museums and galleries, cabarets and film companies, it was a magnet for anyone who wanted to make a mark in the country. Its population increased from 700,000 at the turn of the century to 1.3 million by 1939.

The massive influx of people created a need for housing, and Warsaw exploded outwards, with entirely new districts created beyond the boundaries once imposed by the tsars. The Warsaw Housing Cooperative constructed huge modernist complexes with all the latest conveniences, and gleaming hospitals and innovative schools were built. Public landmarks like the Sejm (Parliament), the ZUS insurance building and the grand new National Museum were built in the new modernist style, but the past was cherished too. The formerly drab façades of the Old Town were restored to their exuberant original Renaissance colours, and many other revered buildings such as the Warsaw Castle were given much-needed facelifts after decades of neglect by the Russian occupiers.

Science, culture, history and the arts were celebrated, and dozens of new institutions – including the Geological Institute and the Higher School of Commerce – opened their doors in the 1920s and 30s. When Madame Marie Curie, who had been born in Warsaw, opened her new Radium Institute in 1932 the whole city turned out to cheer her. It was a time of great innovation and excitement in science and the arts. Kazimierz Funk, then at Warsaw University, discovered B vitamins there, while Józef Kosacki, who invented the mine detector, worked with Rudolf Gundlach, who in turn had created an ingenious periscope which was later used in virtually every tank in the Second World War. Kazimierz Prószyński, who developed the film camera, listened to the first broadcast from Europe’s most powerful radio station, opened near Warsaw in 1931. All scientific fields – biology, chemistry, anthropology – flourished. Jerzy Nomarski developed a way to look at live specimens under a microscope without damaging them, while mathematicians flocked to work with Stefan Mazurkiewicz, the genius who had broken the Russian ciphers during the 1920 war. Stanisław Mazur, Stanisław Ulam (who went on to co-design the hydrogen bomb with Edward Teller) and Stefan Banach worked in Lwów, but greatly influenced mathematics in Warsaw. When the Nazis invaded they fired them all from their academic positions; Banach, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was forced to make his living during the war feeding lice in a laboratory.

Artists, actors, set designers and playwrights were drawn to Warsaw in the 1920s, and all the great stars performed there on their European tours. The city had the largest opera house on the continent, and everyone from Enrico Caruso to the Ballets Russes appeared on its stage. Warsaw also housed the National Theatre, the Mały and Nowy Theatres and the Wojciech Bogusławski Theatre, which produced all the classics – Shakespeare was a particular favourite. Newer venues like Momus, the city’s first literary cabaret, and Leon Schiller’s Melodram, a highly successful musical theatre, experimented with entirely new forms of entertainment. By 1939 there were literally thousands of cabarets and revues in Warsaw, their actors, directors and set designers fuelling a burgeoning film industry. After appearing in films like The Polish Dancer and The Wife, Pola Negri became the first European film star to be invited to Hollywood, where she became as famous for her fashion (turbans, red-painted toenails) as for her love affairs with the likes of Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin.

At the same time Warsaw grew into one of the world’s leading musical cities, and was home to some of the twentieth century’s most famous composers, not least Karol Szymanowski. The Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, still one of the most important in the world, was first held in Warsaw in 1927. Witold Lutosławski attended the first ever performance of Szymanowski’s Third Symphony in Warsaw, the event that made him want to be a composer. But the road was not easy for many of the artists of that generation, a large number of whom would either lose their lives in or have to flee the conflagration to come. During the war Lutosławski was forced to make a living playing the piano in the Café Adria alongside his friend and fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik – who later settled in Britain, where he would be knighted – and the original scores of most of his pre-war compositions were lost in the flames of the Warsaw Uprising. The composer Mieczysław Wainberg made his debut as a pianist in Warsaw in 1929, at the age of ten; a decade later his entire family was murdered in the ghetto, and he fled to Moscow. Moshe Wilensky was educated and worked in the city before emigrating to Palestine in 1932, and would become one of Israel’s most important composers. But at the time, few realized that such grave danger was looming.

There was a sense of excitement, experimentation and daring in all the arts. Painting flourished, with artists, spurred on by the breathtaking movements sweeping Europe and helped by the Institute for the Promotion of Art and the Polish Artists’ Club, being exhibited at the dozens of salons and galleries in Warsaw. Rytm (‘Rhythm’), the Warsaw Association for Polish Artists, was rivalled by Blok, which attracted the avant garde. Józef Pankiewicz pioneered the colourist movement in Polish painting, while graphic art took on an entirely new direction through the eerie woodcuts of Władysław Skoczylas and the dark, swirling figures in Edmund Bartłomiejczyk’s work. Jewish painters like Moshe Rynecki documented daily life in Warsaw; Jakub Adler first exhibited at the Polish Artistic Club in 1919, and returned to the city in 1935, having come under the influence of the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ movement in Germany. Roman Kramsztyk and Eugeniusz Żak found a public eager and hungry for new ideas.

Literature, too, enjoyed a renaissance. Dozens of clubs and salons sprang up in the interwar years, including the famous Pikador, where writers would meet to discuss the latest works by the likes of Stefan Żeromski, author of The Coming Spring, or Zofia Nałkowska, who dared to write about women, eroticism and sexuality. Skamander, a group of experimental poets, included the brilliant Julian Tuwim, Antoni Słonimski and Jan Lechoń in its ranks; their witty and perceptive analysis of the period remains extremely funny nearly a century later.

Tuwim’s satire poked fun at a society which was changing beyond recognition. The glamorous women painted by Tamara de Lempicka, also born in Warsaw, epitomized the new look as girls threw out their corsets in favour of the unstructured clothes pioneered in Paris by Coco Chanel. To the horror of the older generation they began to wear make-up and have ‘cigarette parties’ and to dance the Charleston and the Shimmy in public. Dozens of new nightclubs catering to men in dinner jackets and women with stylish bobs, red lipstick and bias-cut dresses opened up in the city centre. Warsaw had its risqué side too, complete with drugs, drink and erotic dancing. Jan Kiepura sang ‘I Love All Women’ (in German) to adoring crowds, Zula Pogorzelska had a hit with ‘She’s Tipsy, That Girl’, while night owls danced to dubious tunes with titles like ‘Opium’ and ‘Sex Appeal’. Warsaw’s cultural life may have been outshone by Weimar Berlin, but it was a daring centre in its own right, and embraced the new avant-garde ideas from Paris, Vienna and beyond. It also took on the exciting new mediums of radio and film, and an experimental television studio made its first broadcast in 1938.

Above all, Warsaw revelled in all things from across the Atlantic. The Poles have long had a love affair with the optimism and energy epitomized by the United States, and in the 1920s America was all the rage. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were popular, and other black stars were invited to play in the new clubs. August Agbala, a Nigerian-born jazz musician, even stayed on in the city and ended up fighting in the Warsaw Uprising. George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter were idolized, and their music was everywhere.

The first Polish jazz band, the Karasiński and Kataszek Jazz-Tango Orchestra, was founded in 1923. It became a sensation, playing in clubs like Morskie Oko and Wesoły Wieczór, and later touring Europe and the Middle East. Another famous band, the Petersburski and Gold Orchestra, regularly appeared in glamorous hotspots like the Adria, with its unique revolving dance floor. All of them recorded for the new Syrena record company, and provided the soundtracks for the hundreds of films being produced in the capital. Even the venerable Polish National Opera embraced the change, premiering the opera Jazz Band, Negro and Woman to great acclaim in 1934. Ironically, Warsaw’s cultural life benefited when Hitler took power, as thousands of artists fled Berlin for the Polish capital; musicians like Ady Rosner, whom the British magazine Melody Maker called ‘the Polish Armstrong’, found safe haven there for a time.

Many of the most famous artists, writers, film-makers and musicians of the interwar period were of Jewish origin. The Jewish community had been an integral part of Warsaw society for centuries. Their lives revolved around the Great Synagogue in Tlomackie Square, designed by Leandro Marconi in the nineteenth century to hold 2,400 people, and later the vast Judaic Library, which opened in 1936. There were hundreds of smaller synagogues and 433 Jewish schools catering for a population which had reached 393,950 by 1939. Life was often hard, particularly for the refugees who had been forced to leave Russian-held lands, but there was also great wealth and a dynamic cultural life, from theatres and music to galleries and cabarets. The list of artists is vast. Władysław Szlengel, the popular songwriter of interwar hits and later the most popular poet of the ghetto, rubbed shoulders with the great Yiddish writer Yisroel Shtern, who was in turn a friend of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gerszon Sirota, ‘the Jewish Caruso’, sang in Warsaw before giving his sell-out concerts at Carnegie Hall. Groups like the Kultur Lige promoted Yiddish culture in a whole new way; set designer Boris Aronson, who eventually made his name on Broadway, the artist El Lissitzky and the sculptor Joseph Chaikov developed a new kind of Jewish modernism using abstract art and innovative techniques; the movement they founded would later be based in Warsaw.

Memoirs, photographs and films hint at the dynamism of the Jewish quarter before the Germans came. Nazi propaganda was keen to show Warsaw’s Jews as poverty-stricken and the ghetto as filthy and disease-ridden, but history tells a different story. There was poverty, of course, but films show clean, elegant streets lined with beautiful apartments, and prosperous men and women wearing the latest fashions and heading out to go shopping or to the cafés, restaurants, thriving theatres and revues. The traditional Jewish world was changing, as many young people were choosing to study at Warsaw University, to join the army or engage in politics, often to the ire of their parents, who cherished tradition.

For the most part Warsawians loved their city, ‘the Paris of the east’, and many would remember this brief era as a joyous and optimistic time. For the vast majority life was better than it had been before the First World War, and people revelled in the new prosperity. A typical weekend in the capital would see couples strolling in Łazienki Park, going on a river cruise or swimming in the Vistula. Families took their beautifully dressed children to the zoo or to the fun park, stopping on the way home for an ice cream. In the evenings Warsawians and visitors flocked to the grand hotels – the Europejski or the Bristol – for cocktails and dancing before moving on to the opera or to one of the dozens of cinemas or theatres, while others headed to the neon-lit nightclubs to dance the night away.

The last pre-war President of Warsaw, Stefan Starzyński, had set out to make his capital a world-class city, and he succeeded. After many years of occupation the reborn capital city blossomed as the centre of Polish life. Warsaw had new roads, trains, housing, factories and institutions; its museums and archives, libraries and laboratories were rebuilt or improved, and science, the arts and culture flourished. It was the centre of Polish and Jewish writing, publishing, painting, film-making and photography, and new ideas were quickly embraced. The changes brought not only cultural renewal but also investment, with companies like Opel, Philips and Prudential moving into landmark headquarters which were often the envy of their counterparts in other European cities. Warsaw was a ‘city of the future’, and its trajectory was ‘always up’. A 1938 exhibition at the National Museum, ‘Warsaw – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, which celebrated this new identity attracted half a million visitors.¹ The generation that grew up in this climate could not imagine that it would end so suddenly. When it did, they were indignant. They knew that something wonderful had been cut short, and their anger prompted many who had come of age in the 1920s and 1930s to fight against impossible odds to regain their freedom. That generation was unique. It was also doomed.

On the morning of 1 September 1939 confused Warsawians awoke to the sound of aeroplanes flying overhead, followed by the crashing of bombs. Hitler had started his Blitzkrieg.

The German surprise attack on Warsaw was as quick and merciless as it was unexpected, and from the very beginning of the war the city was subjected to a campaign of terror bombing of a kind that had never previously been experienced anywhere in the world. It had been personally ordered by Hitler, who detested the Polish capital and all it stood for; indeed, his hatred was so great that when Generaloberst Franz Halder suggested to the Führer that Warsaw could easily be bypassed on military grounds he was shouted down. ‘No!’ Hitler yelled. ‘Warsaw must be attacked!’ The war against Poland ‘will only be over when Warsaw has fallen’. Hitler set out his vision: ‘how the skies would be darkened, how millions of tons of shells would rain down on Warsaw, how people would drown in blood. Then his eyes nearly popped out of his head and he became a different person. He was suddenly seized by a lust for blood.’²

The city was pounded for twenty-five terrible days. Then, on 26 September, nine German divisions attacked simultaneously, blasting their way into the city centre. The Warsawians had no choice but to surrender the next day. When he toured the fallen city in October, General Erwin Rommel was shocked by the devastation, and wrote to his wife that there was no water, no power, no gas and no food; 25,000 people lay dead in the rubble. But for Warsaw this was only the beginning.