“Babu Stefa!” because she really was sitting there in an armchair. In the living room. Just like that. I called her Babu Stefa because I was reading Rabindranath Tagore then, in which Panu Babu is a character. Stefa, a Jew, was our boarder until the spring of 1944. Half family. Before that she’d lived with my father’s second wife (common law, Zocha), at 32 Chmielna Street, with Zocha, my father, and Halina. I don’t know if there were some other reasons or if they simply had quarreled, but one day in 1942, after we’d gotten hold of this apartment on Chłodna Street which had belonged to Jews, because up to that time the ghetto was here, the wall of the ghetto crossed Chłodna between Wronia and Towarowa Streets, they’d constricted the ghetto slightly, they were always constricting the ghetto, so that a number of apartments were vacant, and Father arranged to get this one, 4 °Chłodna, and it was not that these apartments were destroyed so much as that they had a certain peculiar appearance: in the middle of our kitchen there were dried-up feces, obviously human, and Stefa made herself at home right there in the kitchen, concealing herself behind a green half curtain as soon as someone came to see us, although she often showed herself later on because she knew several of our friends and relatives, trusted them, and anyway very little was known about her.
So I cry out, “Where did you come from?!” and we are delighted, we greet each other, shout in amazement, what a coincidence! Probably I was more excited than she. “Babu Stefa, is it possible… are you really here?”
“Oh!”
The armchair in which Stefa was sitting also belonged to a Jew, not from this building but from an apartment house that I think is standing to this day, either it was never damaged or it was rebuilt, in a blind alley, literally blind, which led from Żelazna Street right into Chłodna on the left side, the side nearer the Vistula. They were holding an auction there. Of Jewish furniture. Father rushed into our house. He shouted at me to follow him. Swen happened to be there, so he rushed out to keep me company. Although I didn’t want to go. There. But it was hard to say no because of Father. The gate of this apartment house where the Jewish auction was being held was filled with a heap of junk. Rubbish. A racket. Human. Father grabbed a number of chairs, each one from a different village so that each had its own weight and size, and off they all went to 4 °Chłodna Street. And so in 1942 first of all Father brought Stefa from 32 Chmielna straight to us, supposedly for one night, for two, and so she stayed on for two years. He made up documents for her in the name of Zosia Romanowska. Because Zosia Romanowska had gone to Grochów to see her sister and brother-in-law on September 8, 1939, and she’d taken along her sister-in-law Nora — only to have the door there slam closed on them so that they couldn’t work their keys to get it open, and when the planes flew over, before anything could be done, they had already fallen through to the cellar and only one person survived, Hanka (up above and under the ruins), Zosia’s other sister-in-law who was holding by the hand her neighbor’s little daughter, already dead, and she herself was buried alive in the ruins, and when later she lived next to us on Leszno Street with Nanka (when we had already lost the apartment in Śródmieście), that is, when she was living in the room that had been Zosia’s, she was afraid, I know, to cover herself to the neck with her quilt. Because as she lost her awareness of the quilt it became confused in her mind with rubble that was up to her neck. So Stefa had identity papers in Zosia’s name; a little older than she, but in any case Stefa’s hair was bleached, not really red but sort of a ginger color, resembling a Jewish woman more or less, so it was fortunate that the Germans weren’t aware of these things and our thugs weren’t either, and even more fortunate that Stefa had great courage and a saving self-assurance; when she saw Germans on the road — for she walked along various roads from Służewiec down to Wilanów or Augustówka with her so-called petty wares, very petty, safety pins, Czech jewelry, in order to have something to live on and a bit of money to spare — well, when she saw Germans she approached them herself and asked, “Wie spät ist?” and she always came back by tram on the “Nur für Deutsche” platform; once when she met me in the city and we were going to go home together, she said, “Why don’t you ride with me; I’ll teach you a lesson.” And actually, not only did she get on at the “Nur für Deutsche” platform but she shoved her way to the front end of the car which was separated from the rest of the car and the crowd by a chain (it was empty here); I followed her, standing there rather stupidly and she sat down and began arguing with a Volksdeutscher woman, who, she said, was crowding her.
So, Father brought over the chairs after he brought over Stefa. Two Jewish matters. Which went their separate ways for a short while. And then met again.
In 1943, I think, we held one of our so-called “soirées” in the building where the chairs had been auctioned, or perhaps in the one directly across from it, at any rate, in that appendix to Żelazna— Swen, Halina, Irena, Staszek, and I. In the apartment of whoever it was who lived there. A patriotic-literary soirée, with theatrical performances; Swen performed, he was playing Nick at the time, and I, having practically the rights of an extra according to him, played the king. Out of timidity, woodenness, I sat stiffly the whole time and spoke the same way. My colleague in the secret university, Wojtek, who also perished in the uprising, in Żoliborz, said that he’d really enjoyed it. I told him why I acted that way.
“It doesn’t matter; it was very nice.”
I remember that we performed an excerpt from Wyspiański’s The Wedding there. Swen played Stańczyk, wearing the national flag, which he’d carelessly brought over either in his briefcase or in a little bundle.[3]
In his own way, Father had the most unusual business projects. Once, he dragged a whole bushel of potatoes from Kercelak to Leszno Street, to the fourth floor, at that. Rotten. Frozen. But even so they were priceless. Nanka, Father, Mama, and Sabina remembered from the last war that you could make potato pancakes from such frozen potatoes. They made them and they were good. Another time Father bought an icebox at an auction. Mama and Stefa kept wondering why. Because it was broken. And once, he arrived at Chłodna with a whole coatful of fish, very tiny ones. Just like that. In the skirt of his coat. They were slipping out all over the place. He told Mama that she should make croquettes from them. She did. There were so many of them! Enough to line all the windowsills. And we had four windows then. Once, on Christmas Eve of ’42 or ’43, the door opened and in walked Father carrying a Christmas tree — a skinny pine. Mama was astounded. So was I. Father acted as if it were perfectly natural. We ought to begin decorating it. I got started. It was strange hanging the decorations on those pine branches. In general, a pine isn’t a tree, if you ask me. It was like decorating a pine in Otwock. It had nothing in common with a Christmas tree, or so it seemed to me then. An entirely different species. None of the fragrance. Nor the prickliness.
Among Father’s many ideas was that of profiting from the dead, one example of which I’ve already given. But there were more. We received marmalade, bread, and various other foods on the basis of ration cards in the names of about four deceased persons. Relatives, of course. But such things were done in those days. What wasn’t done then?
It’s time to explain the case of Stefa. Stefa would have lived with us until the end. But one day in the spring of 1944 I came back from the city and Mama (she sewed dresses for women so that she and I would have something to live on, or rather, she re-remade them, because these were clothes made from already remade clothing, so-called fripperies, and if a woman wanted to combine a coat with fur, she used rabbit fur; they knew it would shed like cats in springtime, but what could they do)… Anyway, Mama, who sewed for our custodian, too, told me at the door, “You can’t imagine how deathly frightened I was today. The janitress shows up for that rag of hers and she says to me, ‘That lady who’s your boarder, well, when she walks across the yard she twists her head like this and walks sort of sideways; oy, you can tell from a mile away that she’s a Jewess.’ ”