Jenny Erpenbeck (1967), German writer. In 2015 she won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for her novel End of days and in 2024 the International Booker Prize for the novel Kairos
WARSAW GHETTO
In the backyards of a couple of apartment buildings left over from the Warsaw ghetto, Catholic residents have installed glass arks for the Virgin Mary. All around the Virgin, the smell of food, beer, and factory-made fabric softeners wafted through the open windows, the crumbling corners of the walls reeked of cat urine, and a fresh, musty smell wafted from the open pantry door. The Virgin could not wipe away the dust from the glass that was obscuring her view. A child came galloping diagonally around the yard, then disappeared down a flight of stairs into the darkness of one of the buildings that intersected the other at a right angle; a woman came out of the front door, dragging her feet, a television set on. Almost all of the two remaining residential buildings from the Warsaw ghetto have been reinforced with iron beams that span the yard, they have nests and planks to accommodate fallen stones, balconies without floors protruding from the facade, and the plaster has long since fallen off.
These nearly two-story apartment buildings with their bare brick walls have stood like this for sixty years now, but were destined to collapse at some point.
Where the smallest part of the ghetto stood for over sixty years, there is now a nine-story hotel, and that is where I am standing. In front of my window, three glass elevators go up and down inside a glass tube. Where the Aryans used to break the Aryan cobblestones to throw them over the three-meter-high wall at the Jews, the holes have been covered with asphalt, and all that remains today of the Aryan tram that once ran across the Jewish bridge are a few pieces of track.
Most of the new houses that were built on the ghetto side after the war were built on the rubble and foundations of old houses that the Germans had burned to the ground, which is probably why there is often a slight slope to the right and left of the sidewalk, covered with grass and bushes, and the buildings themselves are a little higher. At Milastrasse 18, where the last ghetto fighters in the uprising took their own lives, geraniums grow on the balcony, the curtains are bright white and birds chirp from the quince tree. At the spot where the historian Emanuel Ringelblum fled from the bays to hide on the Aryan side is a wonderful park with large chestnut trees. The only large trees in Warsaw are outside the area where the ghetto used to be. And at the Jewish cemetery. There was a woman pushing a baby stroller in front of her, and when I turned my head to look at the baby as I passed, there was nothing in the stroller except a wrinkled white wool blanket.
courtesy
I have never been one of those women who thinks it is disrespectful to some gentlemen to be helped into their coats. I like to be helped into my coat, and there have been times in my life when I have been accustomed to it. Sometimes, very rarely, I still experience that brief confusion when I think, he wants this, and he thinks, she knows this, and he and I grab the coat and we move and twirle back and forth and turn to face each other and turn our backs and don't quite know what to do. Confusions of this nature have increased recently.
Can I take it for granted today that a gentleman will hold the door open for me, or that a lady will thank me for holding the door open for her? That it is not my fault if someone pushes me? Do mothers with prams stand at the foot or top of the stairs at night, waiting for some help? If a seventeen-year-old salesman addresses me informally, does that mean I am forever young? Will you please help me carry this (solid birch) table to the car? I would prefer not to, replies the modern-day Bartleby, a man in his prime; then he gets into his car and drives after me, leaving me by the solid birch table in the parking lot. There is a hairpin on the ground, is it your daughter's? No, it is not. Is it the lack of dialogue that leads, at other times, to such a cry? Is this why, when my child accidentally bumps into a man on his bike, that man starts yelling at us so loudly that everyone in the square notices, some of them carefully driving away and others watching from behind bushes? Or when a friend takes their dog out for a walk and it tries to sniff its friend, the owner of the other dog starts yelling and pulling its dog by the leash?
When I was a child, there were always some old women in the line at the bakery who had experienced the war and knew how hard it was to survive. They kept walking forward, never looking to the right or left, just keeping their eyes on the bread and minding their own business. Today there are young women who know how hard it is to survive in peacetime; they walk forward, never looking to the right or left, but sometimes, very rarely, when they realize their mistake, they apologize, and since the German word “Entschuldigung” is used so rarely that they almost don’t recognize it anymore, they say: “Sorry.”
/Taken from Jenny Erpenbeck, 'Things That Disappear', New Directions/Granta, 2025
/Translation Gazeta Express
edition
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