Aided by friends on the Aryan side, tens of thousands of Jews managed to escape from the Ghetto before the war ended, but some famously stayed, such as Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Ghetto's Hasidic rabbi. Shapira's hidden sermons and diary, unearthed after the war, reveal a tigerish struggle with faith, a man wedged between his religious teachings and history. How could anyone reconcile the agony of the Holocaust with Hasidism, a dancing religion that teaches love, joy, and celebration? Yet one of his religious duties was healing the suffering of his community (not an easy task given the suffering and with all the trappings of piety outlawed). Some scholars gathered at a shoe repair shop and discussed holy texts as they cut leather and hammered in nails, and Kiddush ha-Shem, the principle of service to God, acquired a new definition in the Ghetto, where it became "the struggle to preserve life in the face of destruction." A similar word arose in German—überleben—which meant "to prevail and stay alive," a defiant point underscored by its being an intransitive verb.
Shapira's Hasidism included transcendent meditation, training the imagination and channeling the emotions to achieve mystical visions. The ideal way, Shapira taught, was to "witness one's thoughts to correct negative habits and character traits." A thought observed will start to weaken, especially negative thoughts, which he advised students not to enter into but examine dispassionately. If they sat on the bank watching their stream of thoughts flow by, without being swept away by them, they might achieve a form of meditation called hashkatah: silencing the conscious mind. He also preached "Sensitization to Holiness," a process of discovering the holiness within oneself. The Hasidic tradition included mindfully attending to everyday life, as eighteenth-century teacher Alexander Susskind taught: "When you eat and drink, you experience enjoyment and pleasure from the food and drink. Arouse yourself every moment to ask in wonder, 'What is this enjoyment and pleasure? What is it that I am tasting?'
The most eloquent rabbi and writer of Hasidic mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, left Warsaw in 1939 to become an important professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (and in the 1960s, a vocal activist for integration). In prose full of koan-like paradoxes, epigrams, and parallels ("Man is a messenger who forgot the message," "Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds," "The search of reason ends at the shore of the known," "The stone is broken, but the words are alive," "To be human is to be a problem, and the problem expresses itself in anguish"), he felt "loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the commonplace," and that it's "in doing the finite [we] may perceive the infinite." "I have one talent, "he wrote, "and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale."
Most people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets. "In my youth, growing up in a Jewish milieu," Heschel wrote of his childhood in Warsaw, "there was one thing we did not have to look for and that was exaltation. Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment is unique."
The etymology of the Hebrew word for prophet, navi, combines three processes: navach (to cry out), nava (to gush or flow), and navuv (to be hollow). The task of this meditation was "to open the heart, to unclog the channel between the infinite and the mortal," and rise into a state of rapture known as mochin gadlut, "Great Mind." "There is only one God," Hassidic teacher Avram Davis writes,
by which we mean the Oneness that subsumes all categories. We might call this Oneness the ocean of reality and everything that swims in it [which abides by] the first teaching of the Ten Commandments. [T]here is only one zot, thisness. Zot is a feminine word for "this." The word zot is itself one of the names of God—the thisness of what is.
The weak, sick, exhausted, hungry, tortured, and insane all came to Rabbi Shapira for spiritual nourishment, which he combined with leadership and soup kitchens. How did he manage such feats of compassion while staying sane and creative? By stilling the mind and communing with nature:
One hears the [Teaching's] voice from the world as a whole, from the chirping of the birds, the mooing of the cows, from the voices and tumult of human beings; from all these one hears the voice of God. . ..
All our senses feed the brain, and if it diets mainly on cruelty and suffering, how can it remain healthy? Change that diet, on purpose, train mentally to refocus the mind, and one nourishes the brain. Rabbi Shapira's message was that, even in the Ghetto, common people could temper their suffering in this way, not just monks, ascetics, or rabbis. It's especially poignant that he chose for meditative practice the beauty of nature, because for most people in the Ghetto nature lived only in memory—no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto—and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom. As one Ghetto inhabitant wrote:
In the ghetto, a mother is trying to explain to her child the concept of distance. Distance, she says, "is more than our Leszno Street. It is an open field, and a field is a large area where the grass grows, or ears of corn, and when one is standing in its midst, one does not see its beginning or its end. Distance is so large and open and empty that the sky and the earth meet there. . .. [Distance is] a continuous journey for many hours and sometimes for days and nights, in a train or a car, and perhaps aboard an airplane. . .. The railway train breathes and puffs and swallows lots of coal, like the ones pictured in your book, but is real, and the sea is a huge and real bath where the waves rise and fall in an endless game. And these forests are trees, trees like those in Karmelicka Street and Nowolipie, so many trees one cannot count them. They are strong and upright, with crowns of green leaves, and the forest is full of such trees, trees as far as the eye can see and full of leaves and bushes and the song of birds."
Before annihilation comes an exile from Nature, and then only through wonder and transcendence, the Ghetto rabbi taught, may one combat the psychic disintegration of everyday life.
CHAPTER 18
1941
AS SUMMER PASSED INTO AUTUMN, FLOCKS OF BULLFINCHES, red crossbills, and waxwings began streaming south from Siberia and northern Europe along sky corridors older than the Silk Road, passing overhead in squadron V-formations. Because Poland lies at the intersection of several great flyways—south from Siberia, north from Africa, west from China—autumn laced the air with a stitchery of migrating songbirds and chevrons of blaring geese. Insect-eating birds flew deep into Africa, with the spotted flycatcher, for example, covering thousands of miles and flying nonstop for about sixty hours over the Sahara. Not needing to fly quite so far, great blue herons and other waders settled along the shores of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Caspian, or Nile. Nomadic birds needn't follow a strict route; during the war, some veered off east and west, avoiding bomb-scented Warsaw entirely, though much of Europe proved equally inhospitable.
At the villa, Guests and visitors migrated in late autumn to warmer rooms or more durable hideouts. The Żabíńskis faced their third wartime winter with a stockpile of coal so meager they could warm only the dining room, provided they first drained the water from the radiators and sealed off the staircase and second floor. That divided the house into three climates: subterranean dank, first-floor equator, and polar bedrooms. An old American woodstove borrowed from the Lions House smoked irritably, but they huddled beside it anyway, peering through a small glass door at red-and-blue flames licking chunks of coal and periodically rinsing them with fire. As the chimney piped a hymn of warmth, they enjoyed the wordless magic of conjuring heat indoors on frigid days. Bundled up in fleece and flannel, Jan and Ryś could sleep beneath further layers of blankets and down comforters, then spring from bed and stay warm just long enough to dress for work or school. The kitc
hen felt like a meat locker, frost embroidered the windows inside and out, and fixing meals, doing dishes or, worse yet, the laundry—any chore that meant dipping her hands in water—tortured Antonina, whose skin chapped until it bled. "Slick-skinned humans just aren't adapted to fierce cold," she mused, except by using their wits, donning the hides of animals, trapping smoky fires.
Each day, after Jan and Ryś had left, she hitched up a sled and pulled a barrel of scraps from the slaughterhouse to the chicken shed, then fed the rabbits hay and carrots from the summer garden. While Ryś attended Underground school several blocks away, Jan worked downtown, in a small lab that inspected and disinfected buildings, a minor job that doled out useful perks: food stamps, a daily meal of meat and soup, a work permit, a little pay, and something priceless to the Underground—legal access to all parts of the city.
Because they hadn't enough fuel to heat the cages, sheds, and three floors of the villa, all the Guests were spirited away to other winter safe houses, either in Warsaw or the suburbs. The Underground hid some Jews on country estates that, instead of being confiscated, stayed in the owners' hands to produce food for German troops. There, an illegal woman could assume the role of governess, maid, nanny, cook, or tailor; and a man work in the fields or at the mill. Others might hide with peasant farmers or as teachers in the communal schools. One such estate, owned by Maurycy Herling-Grudziński, lay only about five miles west of downtown Warsaw, and at one time or another, five hundred or so refugees sheltered there.
Even with the Guests and relatives gone, the wintry villa included two eccentric tenants, and according to Antonina, the first to arrive, Wicek (Vincent), belonged to an aristocratic family of impeccable lineage. "His mother was a member of a famous line of silver rabbits" known as arctic hares, a breed whose young start out glossy black and silver up later on as they pale into adolescence. October's wet gales made Wicek shiver in a garden hutch, so Antonina brought him indoors to the relative warmth of the dining room by day and Ryś's heavily blanketed bed at night. Each morning, while Ryś dressed for school, Wicek slid from between the bedcovers and hopped along the hallway to the stairwell, then carefully descended the narrow steps and nosed open the wooden divider to scurry into the dining room, where he nestled beside the stove's glass door. There he flattened his long ears against his back for added warmth, and stretched one rear leg straight out while tucking the other three in tight. Naturally gifted with amber eyes outlined in black like Egyptian hieroglyphs, three layers of fur, large snowshoe feet, and extra long incisors for gnawing moss and lichen, he quickly developed habits and tastes unknown to rabbit culture and a bizarre griffin-like personality.
At first, whenever Ryś sat down to dinner, Wicek draped himself along Ryś's foot like one furry black slipper, instinctively crouching as hares do in arctic windstorms. Then, as Wicek grew large and muscular, he bounced around the house like hard rubber, and at meals hopped from the floor straight onto Ryś's lap, thrust his front paws onto the table, and grabbed Ryś's food. Naturally vegetarian, arctic hares may resort to tree bark and pinecones at times, but Wicek preferred stealing a horse cutlet or slice of beef, and bouncing away to devour it in a shadowy corner. According to Antonina, he'd zoom into the kitchen whenever he heard the thud of her meat-tenderizing hammer, hop onto a stool, leap from there to the table and snatch a slice of raw meat, then dart away with his trophy and feast like a small panther.
During the holidays, when a friend sent the Żabíńskis a gift of kielbasa, Wicek became a razor-toothed pest, begging for scraps and mugging anyone he found eating sausage. In time, he also discovered cold cuts hidden atop a piano in Jan's office next to the kitchen. In theory, the piano's slippery legs deterred hungry mice; not so, hungry hares. With all his pilfering, Wicek quickly grew into a fat, furry thug, and whenever they left the house, they jailed him behind a corner cupboard, since he'd begun eating their clothes. One day he chewed the collar of Jan's jacket hanging on a chair in the bedroom; another, he scalloped a felt hat and hemmed a visitor's coat. They joked about his being an attack rabbit, but in a more solemn mood, Antonina wrote that wherever she turned in the human or animal world, she found "shocking and unpredictable behavior."
When a sickly male chicken joined the household, Antonina nursed it back to health and Ryś claimed it as another pet, naming it Kuba (Jacob). In prewar days, the villa had harbored more exotic animals, including a frisky pair of baby otters, but the Żabíńskis continued their tradition of people and animals coexisting under one roof, over and over welcoming stray animals into their lives and an already stressed household. Zookeepers by disposition, not fate, even in wartime with food scarce, they needed to remain among animals for life to feel true and for Jan to continue his research in animal psychology. According to Jan, "The personality of animals will develop according to how you raise, train, educate them—you can't generalize about them. Just like people who own dogs and cats will tell you, no two are exactly alike. Who knew that a rabbit could learn to kiss a human, open doors, or give us reminders about dinnertime?"
Wicek's personality intrigued Antonina, too, who declared him "insolent," preternaturally cunning, and even scary at times. A kissing, predatory, carnivorous rabbit—it was the stuff of fairy tales and a good subject for one of her children's books. She kept tabs on his escapades, watching him crouch in wait, ears alert as radar dishes, tracking every noise, straining to decipher sounds.
The indoor zoo created a diverting circus of rituals, odors, and noises, with the bonus of play and laughter, a tonic for everyone, especially Ryś. Animals helped distract him from the war, Antonina thought, so feathered or four-legged, clawed or hoofed, reeking of badger musk or scentless as a newborn fawn, in time all entered his zoo within the villa's menagerie within the old Warsaw Zoo: a matryoshka doll of zoos.
In the villa, some of Antonina's clan sprayed table legs and chairs, some shredded and gnawed or leapt onto the furniture, but she enjoyed them as specially exempt children or wards. House rules decreed that Ryś looked after pets, as a mini-zookeeper who tended a small fiefdom of gnomes even needier than he. This kept Ryś busy with important chores, ones he could master, at a time when everyone else seemed to have grown-up secrets and responsibilities.
There was no way so young a child could comprehend the network of social contacts, payoffs, barter, reciprocal altruism, petty bribes, black market, hush money, and sheer idealism of wartime Warsaw. A house "under a crazy star" helped everyone forget the crazier world for minutes, sometimes hours, at a time, by serving up the moment as a flowing chain of sensations, gusts of play, focused chores, chiming voices. The rapt brain-state of living from moment to moment arises naturally in times of danger and uncertainty, but it's also a rhythm of remedy which Antonina cultivated for herself and her family. One of the most remarkable things about Antonina was her determination to include play, animals, wonder, curiosity, marvel, and a wide blaze of innocence in a household where all dodged the ambient dangers, horrors, and uncertainties. That takes a special stripe of bravery rarely valued in wartime.
While Rabbi Shapira preached meditating on beauty, holiness, and nature as a way to transcend suffering and stay sane, Antonina was filling the villa with the innocent distractions of muskrat, rooster, hare, dogs, eagle, hamster, cats, and baby foxes, which drew people into a timeless natural world both habitual and novel. Paying attention to the villa's unique ecosystem and routines, they could rest awhile as the needs and rhythms of different species mingled. The zoo vistas still offered trees, birds, and garden; sweet linden blooms still hung like pomanders; and, after dark, piano music capped the day.
This sensory blend grew more vital as dozens more Guests arrived with horrific tales of Nazi brutality, and the Żabíńskis embraced them, drawing support from "clandestine groups and contacts, some very strange indeed," as Irena Sendler (code name "Jolanta") described it. A Christian doctor's daughter with many Jewish friends, she reconfigured her job at the Social Welfare Department, recruited ten l
ike-minded others, and began issuing false documents with forged signatures. She also wangled a legal pass into the Ghetto via a "sanitary-epidemiological station," supposedly to deal with infectious diseases. In truth the social workers "smuggled in food, medicine, clothing, and money, while freeing as many people as possible, particularly children." That meant first persuading parents to give her their children, then finding ways to smuggle the little ones out—in body bags, boxes, coffins, through the old courthouse or All Saints church—finally placing them with Catholic families or in orphanages. A jar she buried in a garden held lists of the children's real names, so that after the war they might be reunited with family. Nuns often hid children in orphanages in or near Warsaw, with some specializing in hard-to-place Semitic-looking boys, whose heads and faces were bandaged, as if they'd been wounded.
The Żabíńskis received word, by telephone or messenger, to expect a Guest for a brief stay, and Irena often visited them in person, with news, just to talk, or to hide when her office fell under surveillance. Later, captured by the Gestapo and brutally tortured in Pawiak Prison, Irena escaped with the Underground's help; she became one of the zoo's favorite Guests.
The Polish government-in-exile, based in London, staffed a radio station and planned missions, borrowing British planes, agents, and resources. Smuggling in cash strapped to parachutists whose money belts held as much as $100,000 and the addresses of recipients in code, Polish agents known as cichociemni (pronounced cheekoh-chemnee), "the dark and silent ones," also packed weapons, weapon-making kits, and plans. According to one cichociemni's account, to keep dispersal to a minimum his group jumped from 300 feet and aimed for "a cross of red and white flowers impudently alight in a large clearing." Whooshing between pine trees, he landed on his feet and was met by a helmeted man who quickly exchanged password and handshake. Then rural youths appeared to claim the boxes and gather up the parachutes, from which women would sew blouses and underwear. After delivering an encrypted message from the commander-in-chief to the commander of the Home Army, he swallowed the regulation dose of caffeine-laced Excedrin to stay alert and put a cyanide pill in a special pocket of his trousers, before being led to a schoolhouse where a zaftig headmistress fed him a bacon and tomato omelette, sending him on his way at dawn. Some of the jumpers joined local units and many fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Of 365 couriers, 11 died; 63 aircraft were shot down; and only about half of the 858 drops were successful. But they supplied a tireless Underground, described by ally and enemy alike as the best organized in Europe, and it needed to be, since the Third Reich had singled out the Poles for special punishment.