Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backdrop
By the spring of 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto — once packed with more than 400,000 Jews — had been emptied by mass deportations to the Treblinka death camp. When the Germans came to finish the job on April 19, 1943, several hundred young fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) fought back with pistols, homemade bombs, and a few rifles. SS General Jürgen Stroop answered by burning the ghetto block by block. On May 8, the Germans found the ŻOB command bunker at 18 Miła Street; commander Mordechai Anielewicz and dozens of others died there.
The survivors went down into Warsaw’s sewers — narrow brick tunnels, waist-deep sewage, foul air, German gas candles and booby traps. A 19-year-old courier named Simcha “Kazik” Rotem, who had learned the tunnels smuggling weapons, went back in to find them.
Date/time and location: May 9, 1943, 11:40 p.m. — Sewer main under Prosta Street, “Aryan” Warsaw, roughly one kilometer south of the burning ghetto
Forty people stand jammed in a brick pipe not five feet high, sewage to their thighs, breathing air that burns the throat. Kazik has told them nobody moves and nobody speaks until the truck comes. Above their heads, through the manhole slots, a tram bell rings on a street they are forbidden to walk.
Date/time and location: May 10, 1943, 12:25 a.m. — Courtyard doorway, tenement off Prosta Street, Wola district
Kazik comes up a side manhole and slides into a black courtyard that smells of coal dust and cat urine. He has ninety minutes to find the man who promised trucks. His clothes are so wet they slap the cobbles with every step.
Date/time and location: May 10, 1943, 1:50 a.m. — Conspiratorial flat, ground floor, Wola district
Krzaczek sits with his cap on and his boots on the rug, saying the trucks will come at five. Kazik does the arithmetic out loud: forty people, no water, forty-eight hours already in the pipe. A woman puts bread and a glass of tea in front of him and he cannot make his hands stop shaking.
Date/time and location: May 10, 1943, 4:15 a.m. — Attic window, tenement roof, Wola district, looking north toward the ghetto
The ghetto is a low orange line under a ceiling of brown smoke. Every few minutes something collapses and sends up sparks like a mill fire. Ash drifts down on the roof tiles, warm and soft, and settles on Kazik’s sleeve.
Date/time and location: May 10, 1943, 5:35 a.m. — Prosta Street pavement, over the manhole
Five o’clock passed. No truck. Kazik kneels beside the iron lid as if fixing his bootlace and puts his mouth to the slot to tell them to hold on a little longer. From below comes a sound like an animal breathing in a box.
Date/time and location: May 10, 1943, 7:20 a.m. — Corner of Prosta and Towarowa, Wola district
Warsaw wakes up normally. Trams run, a bread queue forms, a German patrol checks papers at the corner. Kazik walks past them with a false Kennkarte in his pocket and a pistol in his waistband, and he makes himself yawn.
Date/time and location: May 10, 1943, 9:05 a.m. — Gateway on Prosta Street
Krzaczek finally appears, red-faced, with one truck instead of two and a driver who wants to be paid up front. Kazik tells him the lid comes off in the daylight, now, on a public street. Krzaczek stares at him, then picks up the hook.
Date/time and location: May 10, 1943, 9:55 a.m. — Prosta Street, at the manhole
