Recently I found a 1863 litograph by Felicien Rops. Its’ title (L’ordre r?gne ? Varsovie) could be roughly translated as “All quiet in Warsaw”. Eighty years after Ross created it the same silence fell upon Warsaw.

Same old story, it happens every several dozen years. Stakes, baricades, graves, mass executions, pits filled with dead bodies. And all over it streets and houses, rebuilt every now and then from the ashes. Living in a cemetery is a terrible thing.

L'ordre r?gne ? Varsovie

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It has been happening for more than 20 years. On August the 1st the academies, conferences and public speeches start. The vets, a group of increasingly old gentlemen, with every year find it more and more difficult to make their voices heard through the mumbo-jumbo of politicians who praise the “national upheaval”. Every anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising looks the same way.

Soon after the show starts, the TV starts airing short documentaries, the chronicle of the Warsaw Uprising. Day after day, each of them informing that “on this day the Royal Castle was destroyed” or “hospital at Bracka street bombed” or “120 people murdered in the Old Town”.

Every August I happen to watch an episode or two. As horrible as it is, the documentary ends and I get back to normal life. I go on vacations, I get back, I get to work, do the shopping, go to pubs, I live. And then the end of September comes and – every year the same thing – I turn on the TV and find yet another episode of the chronicle of the Uprising. “God, the Uprising still goes on” I realize. Always that way, present tense, as if it was going on over and over again.

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Felicien Rops was a painter, Baudelaire’s friend, a pornographer, and anticlerical iconoclast. At the same time he was also one of the precursors to art nouveau and a popular book illustrator. His “All quiet in Warsaw” is much less known than, say, “Temptation of Saint Anthony” or “Don Juan’s Beauty“, not to mention the “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa“. No wonder, Rops is best known for being crazy about the women. In modern times his passion for under-aged models would most probably make him end up in jail. For mocking the Catholic Saints he’d spend some more years behind the bars.

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Bombs. Have you ever heard of any other capital city in Europe, where nobody cares about a live aerial bomb found somewhere? Some time ago I was rushing for a meeting somewhere in southern downtown area of Warsaw. I was almost there, when a policeman stopped me. “Where to”, he asked. “To a cafe, sir” I replied politely. “Not now” he said. “Now” I replied, “I have a meeting in a matter of minutes”. “Well, young man, you’ll have to wait, they found a bomb” the officer said calmly.

So I spent some minutes waiting for the military to pick the bomb and transport it to some training ground outside of town. The following day I bought all daily newspapers published in Warsaw. Half-a-ton of TNT was mentioned in only two of them, far from the front page, somewhere between invitations to a pensioneers’ party and articles on a festival of Bulgarian folk songs. Only two newspapers found the bomb interesting, the rest did not mention it at all.

Only once did the press find such findings interesting: when they found a huge mortar round in the ceiling of Prime Ministers’ Chancellery. Just try to imagine this most of the times a huge bomb found in the centre of the largest city in Poland is not interesting to anyone. No news in that.

Powstanie warszawskie

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At Krakow’s borough of Kazimierz there’s a place, where a street runs over what used to be a part of a Jewish cemetery. There’s a singn there warning the Cohanim to avoid that side of the street, as the religion forbids them from entering cemeteries. In Warsaw such tablets should be placed on every enterance to the city.

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Take the newly-built National Stadium, for instance. It’s being built on top of the old 10th Anniversary Stadiu, which in turn was built on top of a huge pile of rubble. Quite precisely so: after 1945 the remnants of what used to be Warsaw were shipped to the other side of the Vistula river and piled up just across the bridge. With time benches were added to this volcano-shaped mound and city’s ashes became a stadium.

When the construction of the new stadium started, the Polish press was puzzled whether the works will proceed as planned, as there’s lots of bodies buried there together with the bricks. Hold on a second, think of it for a while. Imagine respected western journals, say, the Times or Le Monde, discussing such issues in a neutral tone.

A couple of years ago some moron wanted to build a supermarket in a place that used to be a Nazi execution site at Auschwitz. The public opinion all around the world was outraged. Luckily for us here nobody cares for Warsaw. Where would we live if every single war cemetery was declared a national memorial site?

Thanks to the powers that occupied Poland in late 18th century, all smaller cemeteries in Warsaw were moved out from within the city to Powązki. However, during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 the frontline passed right through the Powązki cemetery complex (military cemetery, one Catholic, one Jewish, two Protestant). Because of that the victims of the German war machine had to be buried in the streets of Warsaw, in the squares and courtyards – or under the piles of rubble. So what now, should we erect a fence surrounding the entire city and put a sign on it “Here used to be Warsaw”?

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I had a friend once, let’s call her H. H’s grandmother spent her childhood here, in Warsaw’s downtown. What she remembers the best from the Uprising of 1944 was her home’s courtyard. In a house next door there used to be a military hospital, two houses away used to be a Polish barricade defending the Polish-held part of the city. After every skirmish dozens of dead Germans were brought to her courtyard. Gentlemen in Feldgrau were lined up nicely on the ground, row after row. Polish soldiers were stacked up in the courtyard right across the street, apparently nobody believed that God will know his own. What did the 8-years old girls do? They invented a new sports discipline: whichever could jump across more dead Germans won. Polish people love all kinds of sports, you know.

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I’m 27. Why the hell do I know all of this? What did I do to anyone that I remember of all the street graves, know the addresses of now non-existent barricades, the destroyed houses and murdered streets?

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