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55 The Jewish quarter in Warsaw occupied one-fifth of the city, two-hundred fifty thousand people were concentrated there, so one-third of the city’s residents. . . . This little world seemed very big to me. I admired the passageway of Friedman on Swiętojerska [Street] with an exit onto Wałowa [Street]. It was possible to live there without going out onto the street at all. There were two prayerhouses, a shtibl for Ger Hasidim, two chederim, a bakery, grocery stories, several eateries and cafes, one hotel and two institutions with the strange name “furnished rooms.” . . . Lace, haberdashery and stockings were sold on Nalewki [Street]. Gęsia [Street] traded in goods made in Moscow and Łódź. . . . Merchants lived most often close to their stores. They prayed not far from their apartments. —Bernard Singer (Regnis), Moje Nalewki Warsaw dust . . . Warsaw dust and the dust of the years of reconstruction . . . One of the philosophers calculated that Varsovians inhaled four bricks each year at that time. Varsovians breathe construction—this was not a metaphor, but a heavy, brick and dusty truth. One must love one’s city in order to rebuild it at the cost of one’s own breathing. And it is perhaps for this reason that from the battlefield of rubble and ruins Warsaw became once more the old Warsaw, eternal Warsaw, the same Warsaw—despite the new shapes of the streets and the new contours of the homes—that Varsovians brought it to life, filling its brick body with their own, hot breath. —Leopold Tyrmand, Zły The Entire Nation Builds Its Capital Ujazdowskie Avenue and Reconstructed Warsaw C H A P T E R T H R E E 56 The House at Ujazdowskie 16 As the families of 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue rebuilt from the ashes of wartime , so, too, was Warsaw being reconstructed and transformed. Few cities in Nazi-occupied Europe were destroyed on the same scale as Warsaw was, and nowhere else was the size of a city’s murdered Jewish population so large. Wartime destruction dispersed prewar communities . Neighbors were scattered, many prewar political leaders fled, and throughout Poland thousands of priests were killed in wartime. TheruptureinJewishlifewasdeeper.Approximatelyninetypercent of Warsaw Jewry had been killed, and rubble lined the streets of former Jewishneighborhoods.TheYiddishsigns,themeninthelongblackcoats called capotes worn by Chasidic Jews, and the women with covered hair were gone. Gray apartment blocs that were built on the remains of the ghetto had few storefronts on the ground level, depriving the neighborhoods of the shops, busy streets, and courtyards that once characterized this part of the city. After the war Jewish life on Warsaw’s landscape was reduced to a square around the only operating synagogue, a nearby community building, a Yiddish theater in the city center, and a handful of other locations. Jewish absence resulted not only from the murder of Warsaw Jewry, however. Even in 1955, after early postwar emigration, nearly 70,000 Jews still lived in Poland, and a more visible Jewish neighborhood might have been resurrected in the capital, even if a mere shadow of the past.1 But just after the war Warsaw’s devastated infrastructure made it difficult to settle there, and later on, the stronger presence of central political authorities discouraged religious observance while drawing individuals whose association with the government often made involvement in Jewish institutions untenable. The absence of more than a shadow of a Jewish presence on the streets of postwar Warsaw was rooted not in the complete absence of Jews, but in the distance from Jewish tradition, culture, and often from Jewish identity itself. In 1960, when the Jewish communal leadership took stock of the population that remained in Poland after the emigration wave of the late 1950s, its report seemed to recognize the distance of many Warsaw Jews from Jewish institutions: while the leadership provided detailed demographic estimates of Jewish populations elsewhere in Poland, it gave only a rough number of 10,000 for the capital. It was perhaps an 57 The Entire Nation Builds Its Capital acknowledgment of the hesitancy of many Warsaw Jews to declare affiliation with Jewish institutions and of the difficulty of defining who could be considered Jewish in assimilating circles.2 As in the postwar capital more broadly, however, surviving Jews sought refuge in old bonds, even if those bonds were with new acquaintances after the wartime murder of friends and family. Often traces of shared Jewish background remained confined to their home and friendships with others of Jewish background...

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