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Introduction
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
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1 At dawn one morning in October 1945, eleven-year-old Zofia Bergman arrived with her mother, Aleksandra, by train into Warsaw, the demolished capital of liberated Poland, after a long journey from the Soviet Union. The cold days of early winter had already set in. Mother and daughter walked through rubble-lined streets, past skeletons of buildings in a barely living city that just six years earlier had been known as the “Paris of the East.” Zofia did not want to make this journey. More than a decade earlier, her parents, Polish Jews from Vilnius and Hrodno who were prewar communists, had been arrested in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist purges and sent to the Gulag. They were forced to leave Zofia in the care of the infant’s grandmother. Now, in 1945, the child had grown into a serious young girl, strong-willed but good-natured, who wore her hair in long braids and spoke only Russian. Zofia had only recently reunited with a mother she did not know. The girl did not want to leave behind her grandmother and cousins, who did not yet have permission to leave the Soviet Union for Poland. On Warsaw’s right bank, called Praga, Zofia and her mother headed toacrowdedbuildingwheremanyPolishJewsreturningfromtheSoviet Union were finding temporary shelter. A few hours after their arrival, Introduction 2 The House at Ujazdowskie 16 mother and daughter walked across a makeshift bridge to the city center and toward the deserted streets of Muranów, the prewar Jewish neighborhood , where the Nazis had established the wartime ghetto. They walked in the area around Dzielna Street, where Aleksandra and her husband Stefan had lived briefly in the early 1930s. But it was difficult to make out the street grid in the rubble. The Polish capital was a landscape of ruin, and the Nazi destruction of the wartime Jewish ghetto was only one element of the city’s devastation . After the failed uprising led by the Polish underground in 1944, the Germans leveled the city center and sent remaining Warsaw residents to transit camps outside the city. Tens of thousands were deported to concentration and labor camps. Among the few parts of the city center that escaped destruction was the area along Ujazdowskie Avenue, which extended south from the main thoroughfare of Jerusalem Avenue toward the picturesque Łazienki Park. German officials lived in Ujazdowskie Avenue’s elegant buildings during the occupation. For this reason, the avenue and nearby streets suffered less devastation than the rest of the city center. It was here that three generations of Zofia and Aleksandra Bergman ’s family would make their home in 1948, at 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue near the church of Saint Aleksander, in an area known before the war as Warsaw’s “summer salon.” Among their neighbors in the building were nine other families of Jewish background. Within the walls of their homes, they reconstructed their lives in a reconstructing city. k All along Ujazdowskie Avenue in the contemporary capital are architectural remnants of old Warsaw. At number 16, echoes of the past are displayed in the windows of the ground floor, where an antiquarian bookstore beckons passersby with maps from centuries past. Avisitormightpauseinfrontofthebookstore’swindowbeforeringing an apartment upstairs, then passing through the wooden doors and arched entranceway before entering the building. The hallway is dim, but the stairway’s expansive steps and open staircase are reminiscent of faded prewar elegance. On the second-floor landing, however, a window looking out onto the back of the building reveals dilapidated brick structures surrounding a courtyard on three sides, adjoined to the front 3 Introduction but hidden from the street. Decades ago an empty stone fountain would have been visible below. At apartment 13 on the second floor lives Aleksandra Bergman’s younger daughter, Lena, who was born two years after her mother and sister Zofia first walked through the rubble of postwar Warsaw. Lena livesinthesameapartmentwhereherfamilyhadmadeitshomeformore than a half-century. A visitor might find her apartment door slightly ajar as she waits inside. In the foyer, where a framed nineteenth-century map of Warsaw hangs on the wall, glimpses of the high-ceilinged apartment come into view. The room to the right is spacious, dominated by a large wooden desk beside a window looking out onto the street. From the room just behind, the apartment’s residents could lean over the iron railing of the balcony and take in the bustle of the city below. Long ago, Hitler oversaw a victory parade along the avenue. Throughout...