CONVERSATIONS IN WARSAW
2"
a stand next door for a a few more, and contentedly munched my
breakfast as I strolled back to the hotel.
A.,
a young sociologist, was already waiting in the lobby when
I returned. We shook hands and sized each other up quickly. I
liked him immediately. Tall, blond, open-faced, in
his
mid-thirties,
A.
was easy and informal in manner. He spoke English extremely
well, and our first moments of conversation consisted of finding
people we knew in common. A. had a car, and he offered to drive
me around the city. We crossed the Vistula to Praga, so that I could
see the skyline of Warsaw, particularly of the old city. The Vistula
is
a broad, lazy river, and the farther bank has a sand beach. On
that warm summer day several hundred people were lying in the
sun, and a few were swimming in the river. We stopped at a promon–
tory on the other side, and I looked at Warsaw through the distance.
In the foreground was the low line of the Stare Miasto, beyond it
the spire of the Palace of Culture, that extraordinarily ugly wedding–
cake building, thirty-two stories high, which the Russians had built
and given as a gift to the Polish people. This was Warsaw old and
new, and new and old-the old and new because the Stare Miasto
represented the traditional past, and the spire the recent, brutal
present; the new and old because the re-building of the old city was
a gesture of affirmation to the future and because the sign of the
foreign intruder was itself as old as the plains of Poland.
We drove through Praga, itself a city of contrasts. The
northern part had wide boulevards fronted by huge housing de–
velopments, laid out in rectangular court patterns and built in heavy
stone style. These had been put up during the Stalinist period, and
were reserved primarily for middle-rank government functionaries.
To the south was the old section, with a surprising number of
wood-timbered buildings and log cabins along the narrow, smelly
cobbled streets. This was the worker's slum, redolent-in sight,
smell, and sound--of Marek Hlasko's angry novel
The Eighth Day
of the Week.
While so much of Warsaw had been destroyed
by
shells and by fire, Praga had not. And as I stood there looking at
Warsaw across the river, I realized that when the Red Army had
halted outside Praga, when the Home Army had begun in 1944, it
was within eyesight distance of the city. And Praga had watched
Warsaw being destroyed while its own hovels remained.
