Warsaw by Richard Foreman Page A

himself that it was the family and not just
Jessica he was intending to nobly protect and save, Adam also spent a lively
day trying to keep up with the rascally Kolya. Duritz couldn't but help but
admire the enterprising boy who braved the sewers and risk of being shot in acting
as a mule for one of the ghetto's many clans of black market smugglers. As
pleased as Adam was at seeing how temporarily safe Jessica and her brother
seemed - owning a roof over the heads, work cards and regular food in their
bellies - he feared for the mother and father. Again he was shocked and
saddened upon seeing Mrs Rubenstein when she came out of the building the other
day. She shielded her eyes from the scorching sun; her face appeared flabby yet
starved of life and vitality. Skin like mouldy plasticine. Her ankles were
painfully swollen and her hands appeared craggy with arthritis, which was all
the more disturbing when Adam witnessed her going around trying to sell or
barter some woollen scarves that she had knitted. There was nothing left of the
elegant society hostess who Adam once esteemed for being the mother of such
perfection. Her language and bourgeois voice had even changed since living in
the tenement building Duritz reflected. Which came first, the change in her
language or character? - the ex-philosophy student briefly posed. If Mister
Rubenstein was no better than he was when Duritz had last observed him then he
was already lost; Solomon Rubenstein was powerless to restore himself, never
mind his family. If, or rather when, the SS raided the building the unessential
elderly couple would be evacuated.
    Again Adam momentarily dwelt upon the morsel of hope that
the British or Russians could arrive before the Rubenstein’s were taken away,
murdered. Again he reasoned how the Allies must've known by now from their
intelligence about the camps and the killings. Indignation fired his thoughts
and features that they were doing nothing. In truth Duritz may have had cause
to feel even more indignant as not only did the Allies know about the camps and
evacuations but it was "de-prioritised" as an objective due to the
strain of thought that the Nazi's strategy towards the Jews directed valuable
resources away from Germany's War effort. Churchill was almost a lone voice
among Allied Command who desired to address and prioritise the issue, wishing
to bomb the gas chambers and camps as soon as possible. He called the killing
"probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole
history of the world". Others did not, nor do not.
    Adam's reverie was interrupted however as Jessica, wearing a
fetching flower-print dress and pretty wide-brimmed bonnet, descended the steps
from her building. To Adam she looked as achingly alluring as to when he had
first glimpsed her figure upon that fateful afternoon. He wiped the gathering
sweat away from his forehead and eyes to view her more clearly. Was she not
even more fascinating, beautiful now - for suffering lined her features and
compassion swayed Adam's heart? Yet as quietly enraptured as Duritz was at the
sight of a dressed-up Jessica a vicious melancholy suddenly assailed his chest.
Jessica was with Andrzej and she was smiling coquettishly, falsely. Andrzej
Nelkin was in some of Adam's classes at college, before he dropped out to be a
professional sponger off his senior Civil Servant father. He was the first
student at the school to drive his own automobile. He preened himself and
puffed out his chest as if he were an alpha male in those days. Fatuous.
Privileged. He used to amuse and disgust Duritz in equal measure. But now this
anti-thesis of Adam, as he himself once called Andrzej, was fawning over and
winning her. Dispossessed.
     
    Christian Kleist had just finished his lunch - a steak
cutlet, rare to the point of being bloody, with a side order of various fresh
seasonal vegetables. He sat alone at his desk in his opulent apartment. Upon
the desk, under a large portrait of the