EVENTS APRIL 25, 1943. ENTRY MAY 12, 1943. FROM HALINKA APT. Halinka says that the pride of the couriers on the Aryan side grew as the fighting in the ghetto went into its fifth, sixth, seventh days (how was it possible that a few Jews could resist the firepower of trained troops so long?); but along with the pride, the couriers felt a bitter self-blame. Halinka suffered. She felt that she ought to be inside. She hated herself.
The seventh day of the battle was Easter Sunday, and Halinka was idle: she could get no appointments with Poles. Restlessly she went out walking. She felt herself drawn, against her better judgment, as if under hypnosis, to the vicinity of the ghetto. Among the Poles of the city, there was a holiday air. It was a good day, and thousands were out in the streets in their best clothes, going to and from church; many carried flowers. There was no holiday for the troops engaged against the Jews. One could hear the sound of cannon. Halinka walked up Miodowa toward this noise of big guns.
Up from the ghetto, in thick grey billows, rose a dreadful mass of smoke. The fires: they must be awful! Halinka thought of the letter she and the others had received from Hil Zilberzweig, the day before, describing the first five days of action, and what he had said of the peril of fire. [INSERT. ZILBERZWEIG‘S LETTER TO THE COURIERS. COPY FROM YITZHOK. IN PART:…In all our months of planning, it seems we hardly gave a thought to fire. The Germans have guessed this (seeing our otherwise undislodgeable fighters leaping from the top-storey windows of burning buildings), or else informers—a great scourge and curse, these informers; they tell where our bunkers are, and which sewers are being used for communications, and under which ruins bottle grenades are cached, and all our poor secrets—perhaps informers told the Germans that we are vulnerable to fire. Fire destroys our above-ground strongpoints. This means that daytime sniping and grenade-pitching are becoming more and more difficult. It means that we are more and more being driven underground, and from bunkers the only sort of fighting we can do is in night patrols, and even they become hazardous when fires light up the streets and the Germans can lie hidden waiting to see us pass. Another bad thing: the fires have broken some of the links in our communications, which, as you know, ran here and there above ground, through buildings and along roofs. In repairing these breaks, our friend Berson has been doing superb work, but fire is faster to destroy than human hands are to build. I must tell you about what Berson has done with his concertina on night patrols. This is superb. He goes out….] Halinka says that as she walked among the happy Poles, she began to think of Berson: the evenings of music they had had together at the Britannia. Blow, Blow, Evil Winds and I Don’t Want to Give Up My Coupon and Why is the Sky? and Who Says You Can Love Only in Palaces? and Counterattack and Poverty Jumps.…She was nearly to Dluga Street now, and the roar of the howitzers, set up in Krasinski Square, was close and awful….Berson, outwardly so casual and impersonal, but really a stove of a man: that night he made her go on with the Heine song!…
A young Polish couple walked just ahead of Halinka. They were giggling, and the girl hugged the boy’s arm (the smoke turgid across the sky did not interest them). The girl, Halinka noticed, was wearing a new green coat, proper for the season, and once Halinka got a glimpse of some lily-of-the-valley peeping over her shoulder. The girl looked up at her young man with adoring eyes.
Suddenly something up ahead—a sound—tugged at Halinka’s heart. A concertina! Berson! A roar of a round from the guns, and then this thin, tinkling sound. Had she imagined it? It seemed to come from the direction of the ghetto. In mid-morning. Greatly agitated, Halinka hastened her pace and brushed past the young couple. Now she came out into Krasinski Square, along the north side of which ran the ghetto wall. The music was more distinct. She was mad; she felt it. To run out into the square where the guns were set up (their trail spades jammed down under the disturbed paving blocks) and expose herself to full view of the German artillerists! Madness. But that music! Was it real? Was it real? The Germans seemed almost to be lounging at their work; they paid no attention to Halinka or anyone else; quite a few Poles were watching the battery, standing in their best clothes on the sidewalks, smiling, nodding, putting their fingers in their ears and squealing like children at a fireworks when a round was sent off; smoke blackened the sky overhead. The music seemed to be off to the left now, and clearer. Halinka turned and ran toward it: it was coming from the direction of Krasinski Garden. It was quite strong. Halinka ran into the park.
The music was not that of a concertina at all.
Halinka stopped running. She felt very foolish, and she looked around to see whether anyone had been watching her. Then going on, Halinka saw that the music came from a little automatic organ in a merry-go-round. Booths were set up in a circle about the carrousel. There were sounds of high laughter and the little snappings of a shooting gallery. Halinka walked around inside the cheerful carnival. How happy the people were! The white horses bobbed up and down in the merry-go-round, and the music was gay and inviting. Slowly Halinka moved toward the glad round machine. It coasted down; the music dwindled and stopped. Halinka stepped quickly to the booth beside the merry-go-round and handed in a zloty; a girl inside pushed out fifty groszy in change. Halinka skipped up onto the platform and chose a horse with a light blue saddle and golden reins. She mounted sidesaddle and waited. Others clambered onto the platform and selected their mounts; there were children. The young lovers she had passed on Miodowa Street came trotting up, calling out to the guard in his shabby uniform not to start up the motor until they could get aboard.
The guard, in a sour voice, very unbecoming to this holiday contraption: —— Can’t wait all day!
The couple jumped up. They took a pair of horses just in front of Halinka. The guard blew a tiny whistle and then threw a heavy brake-lever. With a shudder the platform began to move, and the tootle-organ began again. The Merry Widow.
For a few moments, with the music in her ears and the wind in her face, rising and falling and swinging around, Halinka was lost and rapturous. The young lovers ahead of her were holding hands, reaching out between their two horses: one went up as the other swooped down, and they laughed. Everything was a whirl of sweet primary colors. Spring!
Then Halinka, looking across the revolving platform, saw the face of an old man who was flirting with a pretty young girl, and she was shocked back to her own world. The merry-go-round turned, and she was aware again of the horrible grey smoke coming up beyond the brick wall at the edge of the park. The old man was Tomasz Kucharski, the former janitor.
Halinka remembered Yitzhok’s words, coming thinned and far-hollow over the telephone that day. [INSERT. FROM EVENTS APRIL 20, 1943. Yitzhok: You have not yet reported fulfillment of our promises to execute the swindlers Urbaniak and Kucharski.…] At first Halinka was frightened. But she did not think he had seen her. Then at, once she wondered how she had let herself slip into a carnival mood. The smoke pushed up sullenly from the ghetto.
Halinka kept her head averted from the old man’s direction. Above all she must not let him see her. She remembered: she had not brought her revolver: she despised herself: she was giddy with self-hate. At last the roundel stopped. Halinka hurried off. Then near one of the booths she turned and looked: she saw him, with his hands on the girl, leading her off to one of the amusements under the half-tent on the other side of the carnival. Halinka loitered, trying to look casual but keeping track of the couple. How interminable their tolerance of the gaiety around them (the smoke, the heavy smoke!)! They moved from booth to booth, and the old man leered at the girl, and patted her, and gripped her arm.
It was nearly noon before the couple left the park. Halinka followed. On the street she kept nearly a block behind the pair. Once, after a turn, she was afraid she had lost them, but they had ducked into a store entrance in order to window-shop; she almost bumped into them as they came out. Kucharski took the girl into a restaurant on Teatralny Place. Halinka was afraid she would be noticed waiting for them; she moved back and forth as much as she could. They came out after about an hour, and they walked now down around the old ghetto boundaries and then northward on Zelazna. Just beyond the intersection at Chlodna, Halinka saw Kucharski stop the girl abruptly. Up ahead, at the corner of Ogrodowa, a manhole cover had suddenly seemed to lift itself. Up from the sewer opening came about a dozen Jews. They were horribly filthy. Their hair was matted, their clothes were slimy. They scattered like animals in the streets. The Easter Poles with the celebrant bouquets nodded and smiled and shrugged at this bizarre sight. But Halinka, who had closed up behind old Kucharski in this while, noticed that he seemed suddenly nervous and jerky. Halinka herself felt physically sick.
Kucharski doubled back (Halinka hurried past and eventually turned back herself) and out across Chlodna to Wronia, for apparently he could not bring himself to pass the still open sewer at Ogrodowa and Zelazna. He took the girl to an address on Zytnia Street and went in with her.
How long would an old man want on an Easter Sunday afternoon…? Would there be time to get the pistol?
Halinka did not dare leave. She strolled and hung about and worried. At about seven o’clock, the old man came out alone. He seemed to be drunk. He walked to Wolska Street and waited for a streetcar. Halinka took her courage and waited behind him. She boarded the same crowded streetcar and stood on the end platform, not five feet from the old man. Once his eyes swept across her face, but did not pause, except perhaps for a moment’s speculation….
Kucharski rode across the river to Praga. Halinka followed him to Stolarska Street 43. Kucharski did not come out again during two hours that Halinka waited. Stolarska 43. She would have to remember that address.