The whisper of these walls

In the rear garden of a Warsaw tenement building, on a pleasant summer afternoon, a pile of old radiators and rusted piping rests on some grass. Garbage, now. But once? Once these were a savior to the shivering. And they were other things: a place to prop one’s feet while reading, or to dry laundered socks; surely these also made for a cat’s favorite spot; and for several weeks during the war, one among these radiators was the anchor from which a young Scottish soldier, an escaped prisoner of war, every night fastened a rope.

Funny how such banality — this pile of piping, today’s rubbish — can still carry along some of yesterday’s stories, some whispers of history. Eyeing them here, one may wonder which of these pipes carried water and warmth up to the toes of Mieczysława Ćwiklinska, the regarded actress who long ago lived up in the six-room apartment on the top floor? And which of these were the more trusty workers, the ones always humming along just so, and which were the stubborn kind, those in need of a kicking?

In the stack of radiators here today, most are painted white, with some of that white having flaked with age, but then there are three sets painted red, and another purple, and did these come from the same colorful flat? Tomorrow there will be others — other radiators, other pipes, and maybe other colors too. And the next day the same. And this cycle will continue until this one large tenement building, in a city full of such buildings, is fully turned over and retrofitted to a new set of materials long overdue, installations which will be tasked to warm tomorrow’s toes, tomorrow’s cats.

But what other secrets still remain here? Here on this patch of garden grass? The outgoing pipes here, they’re nearly a century old. Actually they’re the same age as my grandmother, born in 1929, just as the first residents of this building were moving in. And among those maiden families being handed the first keys to the building was a couple, the Jastrzębskis, both doctors. And that couple would raise a son here, and a dog, and one day the son would take that dog over to the other side of the river — the side less ruined from the war — for a walk, and on that walk that boy and dog would come across a girl walking her family’s new puppy, and then tails were wagging, and in this tale of course the boy and that girl will later be married, and live as husband and wife here in this building too, and raise their own children here, and eventually become grandparents — my grandparents — and yes, in this story all of these people and all of their paws will have been warmed through many a long and dark Warsaw winter by the very parts now rusted and resting here.

Water and warmth, for generations.

And now?

Now this rust, this iron carries yet more clanking, more hissing, even in retirement.

See, here inside the building now, here where a team of hardworking young men in masks and dusty overalls continues to work its way through, flat by flat, covering furniture and floors with plastic and paper and then cutting into the walls… Well here inside also, amid this drilling and trembling and falling brick there is one door which remains shut and locked away from it all, and a middle-aged man who lives behind it and is refusing to let go, to let anyone in, let anyone touch his pipes, his radiators. They’re fine, he says. And we’re in a pandemic, he says.

Such attachment or belief in old things, or such caution in the name of health and well-being, might ordinarily be believed, understood, respected. But here in this building it just so happens that this man’s neighbors also have some further context; they know, for instance, that for more than twenty years now since he first moved in, he’s refused other renovation works too, like the update to the building’s sewage lines. That refusal then to allow plumbers into his flat led to flooding disasters in two apartments on the floors above him. It also prevented my grandmother, whose bathroom is unfortunately directly above his, to replace her outdated tub with a more modern walk-in shower more suitable for her age and needs. Now this lone man’s stonewalling threatens the heating of his flat as well as more than ten others all around him for the coming winter.

And so? So this new work, which was twice approved by the building’s residents and co-op board, now continues on all around him, and there are whispers of the case maybe ending up in court, or little prayers that he may finally relent, though rumors also of him trying to escape it all by locking his door and going to the seaside. And so: in this way this banality, this pile of piping, today’s rubbish, again it becomes something more, a symbol, another hill for someone to stand on, to shout out from, in a country and in a world full of such hills now, such shouting, such division between neighbors.

Is it any wonder, then, that one of the old radiators out in the garden now — one of the ones painted red — is it any wonder that it also shows some old white on its other side, thus forming a kind of Polish flag, a kind of battlecry, out of even this?

But we should close this little piece about a little rubbish here in the back of one Warsaw apartment building with the words of another resident, words more eloquent than my own and from a source more deserving of a voice here. These will be the words of Mrs. Jastrzębska, though not the Mrs. Jastrzębska who lives here now — my grandmother who in her 91st year, inside of this 91-year-old building, must still climb over her tall bathtub basin every morning because her downstairs neighbor can’t be bothered.

No, I’d like to reserve the last words here for the Mrs. Jastrzębska who lived here once, the Mrs. Zofia Jastrzębska who moved in with her husband back in 1929 and would, in time, become my grandmother’s mother-in-law. Here was her home. Her sanctuary. Here she and her husband remained even when the German bombs began to fall and many of their neighbors fled. And here they always opened their door, first to members of the Polish military who operated an anti-aircraft cannon installed on the building’s roof; and later to a 2-year-old girl whose mother and grandmother were imprisoned and ultimately executed, for reasons unknown, by a German firing squad; and also to that young British soldier who made it to Warsaw after escaping, along with three others, from a German prisoner of war camp.

Throughout their time here, those Jastrzębskis opened their door to their neighbors and these other strangers, and helped. They fed and clothed and gave these people a place to rest.

Here they also pieced together bandages for the city’s wounded, cutting up and sewing together pieces of their and their neighbors’ lace curtains, their bedsheets — any usable cloth, really, when the Uprising broke out and the whole of the city was bleeding and there weren’t enough bandages to go around.

And here throughout the war, when the heating went out, when the very pipes aforementioned drained of their water and warmth just as the other taps went dry, and the lights dark, well here is where they then warmed themselves and their visitors by their kitchen oven in which they fed coal or bits of their furniture, or by the two retention stoves they purchased and installed later on. “Heating our apartment was the biggest challenge,” my great grandmother once wrote.

I have no memory of those Jastrzębskis, those great grandparents of mine — my great grandfather died well before I was born and I met my great grandmother only when I was too little to remember. But we did find their whisper, their story one day, tucked inside of an old cabinet here. In a kind of testament she prepared for a museum exhibit not long before her death in 1990, my great grandmother wrote on some old paper her memories of this place, and those times, and of the people who lived here through the bombardment, the occupation, and eventually the Uprising:

We lived like one big family, washing clothes, cleaning windows, watching the children in groups and lending each other anything the others might have needed. We chose Mr P. from the ground floor to be the director of our gypsy village, for that was the name we gave to our life at the time.

In that little notebook, my great grandmother wrote of the time she and her neighbors ran buckets of water from the basement up to the seventh floor, dousing a fire there. And of the two instances she and her neighbors had to bury bodies down in the courtyard — yes somewhere there where the radiators and piping are now, between today’s bicycles and a bed of sunflowers. Because in Warsaw then, bodies had to be buried hurriedly and where possible, and thus the squares, the sidewalks, and apartment courtyards such as these turned also into makeshift graveyards before those remains could be transferred to proper cemeteries later on.

And she wrote of Ania, that little girl who’d spent the first two years of her life within the dark walls of Pawiak Prison with her mother, and how when Ania first arrived she “stood for a long time in front the mirror, surprised by the sight of another little girl.” And of Kenneth — or Ken, as he said to call him — that young Scottish lad who’d escaped from that other sort of prison only to end up in hiding here, under their roof, and how Ken, with their son’s help, always fastened that one rope to the radiator every night, just in case the Germans came; the idea was for Ken to then rope his way down from their second-story window in case the Germans did come looking, and run.

And of course, my great grandmother wrote also of her husband, the venerable Dr. Wacław Jastrzębski, and how he volunteered his skills as a surgeon over to the insurgents. And how they wrapped his shoes in a thick layer of rags and string so that his shoes wouldn’t clatter so loudly along the pavement when he ran, through the dark of night and past the hour of the German curfew, towards those in need of his care.

Carrying a small backpack, he set off along the viaduct, across the Red Cross Hospital and Tamka Street, heading towards Kopernika Street. I can still recall the horror with which I listened to his footsteps in that awful nighttime silence. Yet, he managed to get across successfully…

My great grandparents both survived that awful war, along with their son, and the little girl Ania, and even Ken — Ken in spite of one day being recaptured by the Germans, and tortured while in Gestapo hands. Under that torture he never gave up my family’s name, nor the names of the other Poles who helped him, nor any of the addresses where he stayed. Doing so would likely have meant a death sentence for my family as well as the others, and me never existing, but here instead these characters lived on, and a letter from Ken arrived after the war expressing his gratitude for their help, and for having learned that they all survived — the family as well as their home, this very building. In his letter of Oct. 11, 1945, Kenneth Sutherland wrote:

When we used to talk about our recollections of Warsaw I used always to remember that your house was so close to the main bridge over the Vistula and I always thought that as soon as the battle starts the bridge will be blown up and that may destroy your house. But you have come through it all which is the best news.

The bridge was indeed blown up over the river, and 85 percent of Warsaw’s buildings destroyed, yet this building remained standing. And all around it, then and over time, the pieces of Poland were picked up, and the bridge repaired, and the bodies moved and reburied in the all-too-crowded cemeteries.

And the lights came back on. And the water returned to the taps. And the radiators again boiled.

New curtains went up over the windows, and new sheets across the beds, the pillows.

And here, then, my great grandmother could peer out through those curtains and see the Poniatowski Bridge out there humming with people, with life again — with life moving in both directions now, rather than just away from here, to the East as she once saw from the same window. And she could write all of this down, leave a whisper of this history in a cabinet, to be found years into the future and echoed here again.

An unending procession of people came walking across the viaduct, all heading to the east. This movement of people increased following radio service appeals, encouraging the population to seek safety in the east, day and night crowds of frightened, chattering people walking on foot, bearing all of their goods on their backs. …

Once Warsaw surrendered, a great many people were searching for their families, taking care of all sorts of business, while problems with transportation were forcing people to often travel long distances on foot. People helped each other out during such long treks. They often warned about the appearance, on a given piece of occupied territory, of hordes of Hitler's soldiers who confiscated everything and anything people had on them. When I compare people of that time with those today, their friendly attitude to folks traveling with them whom they did not know at all, I am inclined to think [about] human habits, this rapacity, this greed and this indifference to the needs of others, egoism in spite of this talk of culture. Culture is not how many concerts one has listened to, how many exhibitions and plays attended... it is the way we conduct ourselves and the attitude we have to our fellow men, the ability to give up that which is attained at the expense of others. Will we ever grow up to really deserve being called people who are cultured?