CONVERSATIONS IN WARSAW
267
been broken off, and the last curved spike, twisted ominously down–
ward, was "threaded" with some barbed wire, which looked in–
congruously like an ivy creeper growing around the spike. On the
stone facing of the post, which was chipped and cracked, revealing
the brick underneath, someone had painted the word "PANIAK."
A few feet away were 'the remnants of a stone wall. The post and the
wall were the sole, mute evidence of what had once been the world
of Warsaw Jewry.
Across from the rubbled ghetto, a new housing project was
going up, and in its main square the government had erected a
large memorial commemorating the Jewish uprising. It consisted of
a raised stone platform about forty feet square. At the center was
a light-grey marble backdrop, built up with alternating rectangular
slabs and squares making a simple abstract pattern, and in front
of it a bas-relief depicted figures crowded together in heroic poses.
I
At either side of a small flight of steps going up to the platform
were two stone menorahs supported by upright stone lions acting
as caryatids. Clearly, the memorial had misfired. It was not just a
matter of bad taste in .design; the idea that
any
conventional me–
morial could serve as a gesture, or a communication, indicates the
stilted emotional response to the meaning of the ghetto. The decision
of the Berliners to leave the blackened ruins of the Gedachtniskirche
in the center of the city as a reminder of the horrors of war was the
only meaningful gesture possible. As for the ghetto, the "natural"
ruin-the wall and the brick post with its jutting steel beam and
barbed wire and spikes etched against the sky and the open space--–
was more compelling and agonizing than any artificial
Denkmal.
As Simmel has said, ruins becoming landscape are man's link with
nature. Here the ruins are the sum total of human nature, its great–
ness and its horror, and there is nothing one can add, or subtract,
from them.
In the evening, I had dinner with
L.,
a young journalist who
had left the party after October. He was a medium-sized man,
about ten years younger than myself, I judged, his strikingly hand–
some face marred by a weak mouth and thin lips. He had been a
deeply committed Communist in his youth, had attended party
schools, but had then become increasingly disillusioned. Together
with some friends, he had formed a revisionist group. (This much
