Empty Streets

At the end of this month, my girlfriend and I will be residents of Warsaw for 7 months. On my daily walks around my neighborhood, the empty streets give me a rare, unobstructed view of the city. The vacant streets—free of the typical bustle and hum—remind me of just how lively Warsaw life usually is. They are normally packed with people who all seem convinced that they are late—late to get to work, late for the next tram, or impatient at the restaurant service for making them late for their next engagement. In this way, it’s interesting to pull back and realize that this is what growth in Europe looks like. The commotion of everyday life is the byproduct of the churning economic engine that allows the country to sustain 4% year over year growth. Only now that the machine has stopped do I realize how frantically it moves.

However, the bare sidewalks also reveal a different emptiness—one usually masked by the activity of daily life. In the deserted streets, it is easier than usual to glimpse the plaques strewn about the city which commemorate places in which Polish freedom-fighters died during WWII. These plaques occupy conspicuous places throughout the city. They are a commonplace feature of Warsaw streets, as familiar as stoplights and crosswalks.

This past month these plaques have an unexpected effect on me. They remind me to reflect on the lives of those who are not commemorated on plaques or with monuments. And they remind me that Warsaw, more than any other, is a city that looks to the future in the shadow of the past.

Favored Narratives

This past month celebrates the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a desperate effort of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943 to oppose Nazi deportation to concentration camps. Approximately 13,000 Jews died in the Uprising, which started on April 19th and lasted until May 16th.

While the effort was no less heroic than the Polish resistance effort in the Warsaw Uprising in the following year, it was of a different nature. The Jews who fought in the Uprising did so in true desperation. While the Warsaw Uprising was tinged with patriotic pride, the Ghetto Uprising was truly a hopeless effort for survival. This in no way makes the event any less worthy of respect or commemoration. Yet, besides a monument outside of POLIN—the museum of the history of Polish Jews—there are decidedly fewer plaques (if any at all) that commemorate Jewish participants in this Uprising, or places where Jews fell in their struggle to avoid extermination.

It is important to note that the buildings and streets with the plaques memorializing fallen Poles are not in any way original. Only a few scattered buildings, mostly in the district of Praga across the Wisła river, can be considered original. It’s hard to understand the extent to which Warsaw was destroyed because there is no modern equivalent. The nearest parallel is perhaps Aleppo, an ancient and important cultural city in Syria that is almost completely destroyed as the result of the raging conflict there. It’s an important distinction to make that such plaques are not there to remind people of the importance of a specific building or street. Instead, they remind us of a history that we have to imagine ourselves.

This is a subtle but powerful idea. Since there is no concrete evidence that suggests the event that the plaque commemorates happened in the indicated spot, it is our duty to imagine the historical circumstances and what it could have looked like. Where there is room for interpretation, there is room for manipulation. This reality gives people in power an extraordinary opportunity to influence what people are supposed to imagine.

In Poland, the result of this war over the scope of the imagination is that we get plaques of Polish heroes, and none devoted to Jewish fighters or victims. Since the rebuilding effort after WWII, the powers that be in Poland have pursued a nationalist-tinged agenda towards historical commemoration. The official narrative is one of historical victimhood. It presents Poland as a nation endlessly defending itself against invading foreigners thanks to the efforts of Poles who gave their lives for their Fatherland. The giant banner on the Ministry of Defense government building gives insight into exactly the kind of glorified narrative Poland crafts for itself:

The Histories We Choose to Imagine

History is an essential part of this city in a way I’ve never seen in any other. Yet, all the historical points of interest are so hidden that it’s easy to overlook the histories that are not state-sponsored. A perfect example is this small commemorative sign a block away from the giant banner shown above:

This sign marks the abandoned building in which Wladyslaw Szpilman—the real-life protagonist of Polanski’s film The Pianist—survived until the end of the war, thanks to the benevolence of a German captain Wilm Hosenfeld. My girlfriend and I learned of this place after watching The Pianist for the hundredth time and reading Szpilman’s Wikipedia page. The process of finding this commemorative spot—it is not obvious where the sign is, and once we found it we were gawked at by curious passersby who wondered what on Earth we were looking at—underscored just how little energy the government devotes to commemorating non-Poles who fought the same common enemy.

Inspired by this moment, my girlfriend and I sought out prominent sites of Jewish life in the city. One of these sites is Nalewki Street, a street that in pre-war Warsaw life was synonymous with Jewish life and culture. Finding such points of interest is not easy. The streets of pre and post-war Warsaw are not at all aligned. A map that compares the layout of the city around historical Nalewki street shows just how much the city’s geography changed:

Guided by pictures in a book we have on the history of Nalewki street, we tried our best to map the images in the book to the spots in front of us. We even managed to pinpoint, to the best of our knowledge, the spot in which the historical photos were taken, and compare them to the photos of contemporary life. We believe this to be the location of one of my favorite photos:

Parallel to this street is a line of brick that indicates the borders of the Warsaw ghetto. This line of bricks is one of the only reminders of Jewish life that one can find in the streets. This line of brick is one of a few other small and inconspicuous reminders of the great cultural vitality of Jewish life one can find in other Polish cities, such as a yeshiva-turned hotel in Lublin and a kitschy Jewish restaurant in Lodz.

It is not easy to conjure these hidden histories. It takes time, effort and meticulous research, not to mention a significant amount of imagination and patience to envision these stories. The choice is ours whether we want to seek them out. However, we all have the capacity to hear and understand more than a single narrative. It is up to us to find and share the ones that are not the most favored.

This is why it is worth taking seriously historical anniversaries like that of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They are important not just because they remind us to commemorate them. They also give us a reason to set aside the images of our daily lives that come so easily to mind in favor of an imagined reality that was once just as real.