However, Reichenbach envisions an important role for the Hecks’ creations: “They can still help preserve a natural environment of mixed forest and meadows…. And as a feral type of cattle, the aurochsen may also be able to enhance the gene pool of a domestic animal that has become impoverished genetically during the last decades. Attempting to back-breed the aurochs may have been a folly, but it was not a crime.” Professor Z. Pucek of the Białowieża Nature Preserve denounces the Heck cattle as “the biggest scientific swindle of the twentieth century.” And so the controversy continues, debated in journals and online, with a passage from American C. William Beebe often cited. In The Bird: Its Form and Function (1906), Beebe writes: “The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”
There are many forms of obsession, some diabolical, some fortuitous. Strolling through Białowieża’s mass of life, one would never guess the role it played in Lutz Heck’s ambitions, the Warsaw Zoo’s fate, and the altruistic opportunism of Jan and Antonina, who capitalized on the Nazis’ obsession with prehistoric animals and a forest primeval to rescue scores of endangered neighbors and friends.
WARSAW TODAY IS A SPACIOUS GREEN CITY WITH ACRES OF sky, in which tree-lined avenues flow down to the river, ruins mix with new trends, and everywhere tall old trees offer scent and shade. In the zoo district, Praski Park still teems with cloyingly sweet lindens and, in summer, honeying bees; and across the river, where the Jewish Ghetto once stood, a park of chestnut trees surrounds a plaza and stark monument. After the defeat of Communism in 1989, with characteristic humor the Poles turned the former Gestapo headquarters into the Ministry of Education, the former KGB headquarters into the Ministry of Justice, the Communist Party headquarters into the Stock Exchange, and so on. But the architecture of Old Town is a visual hymn, rebuilt after the war in Vistula Gothic, based on old drawings and paintings by seventeenth-century Venetian Bernardo Bellotto—a feat organized by Emilia Hizowa (who invented Zegota’s push-button sliding walls). Some buildings show recycled rubble from the bombed city embedded in their facades. Dozens of statues and monuments grace Warsaw’s streets, because Poland is a country half submerged in its heavily invaded past, fed by progress, but always partly in mourning.
Retracing Antonina’s footsteps from the downtown apartment where she lodged with relatives during the siege of Warsaw, I walked to Miodowa Street, crossed the old moat, and slipped through the crumbling brick walls encircling Old Town. As one enters a world of tightly knit row houses, shoes slide over cobblestones and the body continuously balances itself in tiny increments until the stones grow larger, smoothed by centuries of footsteps. In rebuilding the city after the war, planners used as many of the original stones as possible, and in The Street of Crocodiles, Antonina’s contemporary Bruno Schulz describes the same colorful mosaic underfoot that exists today: “some of the pale pink of human skin, some golden, some blue-gray, all flat, warm and velvety in the sun, like sundials trodden to the point of obliteration, into blessed nothingness.”[98]
On such narrow streets, electric streetlamps (once gas) sprout from corner buildings and double-sashed windows stand open like an Advent calendar. Black stovepipe gutters underscore the terra-cotta rooftops, and some of the painted stucco walls have chipped to reveal the flesh-red brick foundations underneath.
I turned down Ulica Piekarska (Bakers Street), as cobblestones fanned and eddied like a petrified creek bed, then turned left into Piwna (Beer) Street, past a shrine recessed into the second story of a housefront and filled with a wooden saint flanked by floral offerings. Next I passed Karola Beyera, the coin collectors’ club, and three short wooden doors leading into courtyards, then turned left at the pyramidal wall of a corner building, and finally entered the large open Market Square. In the early days of the war, when Antonina shopped there, few vendors risked setting up, the amber and antiques stores stayed closed, patrician homes locked their doors, and the fortune-telling parrot of the 1930s was nowhere to be seen.
Leaving the square, I strolled toward the old fortifications to visit the closest well, following a wall of sooty bricks that curves around to medieval towers with funnel-capped lookouts and narrow slits that once hid archers. In summer, the mock orange trees along this walk froth with white flowers visited by fat black-and-white magpies. Floating above the wall, the canopies of crab apple trees scramble for sun. On Rycerka (Knight) Street, I reached a small square and a black pillar emblazoned with a mermaid wielding a sword—Warsaw’s symbol. It’s a chimera I think Antonina would have identified with: a defender half woman, half animal. On both sides of the pillar, a bearded god spills water from his mouth, and it’s easy to picture Antonina setting down her basket, angling a jug under a spout, and waiting as life gurgled up from the earth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aly, Götz, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Beebe, C. William. The Bird: Its Form and Function. Photos by Beebe. New York: Henry Holt, 1906.
Block, Gay, and Malka Drucker. Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust. Prologue by Cynthia Ozick. Revised ed. New York: TV Books, 1998.
Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Translated by Tim Parks. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Cooper, Rabbi David A. God Is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.
Cornwell, John. Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. Vol. 1, The Origins to 1795. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
———. Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
———. Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw. London: Pan Books, 2004.
Davis, Avram. The Way of Flame: A Guide to the Forgotten Mystical Tradition of Jewish Meditation. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
98
Bruno Schulz,