Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

      Artists, actors, set designers and playwrights were drawn to Warsaw in the 1920s, and all the great stars performed there on their European tours. The city had the largest opera house on the continent, and everyone from Enrico Caruso to the Ballets Russes appeared on its stage. Warsaw also housed the National Theatre, the Mały and Nowy Theatres and the Wojciech Bogusławski Theatre, which produced all the classics – Shakespeare was a particular favourite. Newer venues like Momus, the city’s first literary cabaret, and Leon Schiller’s Melodram, a highly successful musical theatre, experimented with entirely new forms of entertainment. By 1939 there were literally thousands of cabarets and revues in Warsaw, their actors, directors and set designers fuelling a burgeoning film industry. After appearing in films like The Polish Dancer and The Wife, Pola Negri became the first European film star to be invited to Hollywood, where she became as famous for her fashion (turbans, red-painted toenails) as for her love affairs with the likes of Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin.

      At the same time Warsaw grew into one of the world’s leading musical cities, and was home to some of the twentieth century’s most famous composers, not least Karol Szymanowski. The Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, still one of the most important in the world, was first held in Warsaw in 1927. Witold Lutosławski attended the first ever performance of Szymanowski’s Third Symphony in Warsaw, the event that made him want to be a composer. But the road was not easy for many of the artists of that generation, a large number of whom would either lose their lives in or have to flee the conflagration to come. During the war Lutosławski was forced to make a living playing the piano in the Café Adria alongside his friend and fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik – who later settled in Britain, where he would be knighted – and the original scores of most of his pre-war compositions were lost in the flames of the Warsaw Uprising. The composer Mieczysław Wainberg made his debut as a pianist in Warsaw in 1929, at the age of ten; a decade later his entire family was murdered in the ghetto, and he fled to Moscow. Moshe Wilensky was educated and worked in the city before emigrating to Palestine in 1932, and would become one of Israel’s most important composers. But at the time, few realized that such grave danger was looming.

      There was a sense of excitement, experimentation and daring in all the arts. Painting flourished, with artists, spurred on by the breathtaking movements sweeping Europe and helped by the Institute for the Promotion of Art and the Polish Artists’ Club, being exhibited at the dozens of salons and galleries in Warsaw. Rytm (‘Rhythm’), the Warsaw Association for Polish Artists, was rivalled by Blok, which attracted the avant garde. Józef Pankiewicz pioneered the colourist movement in Polish painting, while graphic art took on an entirely new direction through the eerie woodcuts of Władysław Skoczylas and the dark, swirling figures in Edmund Bartłomiejczyk’s work. Jewish painters like Moshe Rynecki documented daily life in Warsaw; Jakub Adler first exhibited at the Polish Artistic Club in 1919, and returned to the city in 1935, having come under the influence of the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ movement in Germany. Roman Kramsztyk and Eugeniusz Żak found a public eager and hungry for new ideas.

      Literature, too, enjoyed a renaissance. Dozens of clubs and salons sprang up in the interwar years, including the famous Pikador, where writers would meet to discuss the latest works by the likes of Stefan Żeromski, author of The Coming Spring, or Zofia Nałkowska, who dared to write about women, eroticism and sexuality. Skamander, a group of experimental poets, included the brilliant Julian Tuwim, Antoni Słonimski and Jan Lechoń in its ranks; their witty and perceptive analysis of the period remains extremely funny nearly a century later.

      Tuwim’s satire poked fun at a society which was changing beyond recognition. The glamorous women painted by Tamara de Lempicka, also born in Warsaw, epitomized the new look as girls threw out their corsets in favour of the unstructured clothes pioneered in Paris by Coco Chanel. To the horror of the older generation they began to wear make-up and have ‘cigarette parties’ and to dance the Charleston and the Shimmy in public. Dozens of new nightclubs catering to men in dinner jackets and women with stylish bobs, red lipstick and bias-cut dresses opened up in the city centre. Warsaw had its risqué side too, complete with drugs, drink and erotic dancing. Jan Kiepura sang ‘I Love All Women’ (in German) to adoring crowds, Zula Pogorzelska had a hit with ‘She’s Tipsy, That Girl’, while night owls danced to dubious tunes with titles like ‘Opium’ and ‘Sex Appeal’. Warsaw’s cultural life may have been outshone by Weimar Berlin, but it was a daring centre in its own right, and embraced the new avant-garde ideas from Paris, Vienna and beyond. It also took on the exciting new mediums of radio and film, and an experimental television studio made its first broadcast in 1938.

      Above all, Warsaw revelled in all things from across the Atlantic. The Poles have long had a love affair with the optimism and energy epitomized by the United States, and in the 1920s America was all the rage. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were popular, and other black stars were invited to play in the new clubs. August Agbala, a Nigerian-born jazz musician, even stayed on in the city and ended up fighting in the Warsaw Uprising. George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter were idolized, and their music was everywhere.

      The first Polish jazz band, the Karasiński and Kataszek Jazz-Tango Orchestra, was founded in 1923. It became a sensation, playing in clubs like Morskie Oko and Wesoły Wieczór, and later touring Europe and the Middle East. Another famous band, the Petersburski and Gold Orchestra, regularly appeared in glamorous hotspots like the Adria, with its unique revolving dance floor. All of them recorded for the new Syrena record company, and provided the soundtracks for the hundreds of films being produced in the capital. Even the venerable Polish National Opera embraced the change, premiering the opera Jazz Band, Negro and Woman to great acclaim in 1934. Ironically, Warsaw’s cultural life benefited when Hitler took power, as thousands of artists fled Berlin for the Polish capital; musicians like Ady Rosner, whom the British magazine Melody Maker called ‘the Polish Armstrong’, found safe haven there for a time.

      Many of the most famous artists, writers, film-makers and musicians of the interwar period were of Jewish origin. The Jewish community had been an integral part of Warsaw society for centuries. Their lives revolved around the Great Synagogue in Tlomackie Square, designed by Leandro Marconi in the nineteenth century to hold 2,400 people, and later the vast Judaic Library, which opened in 1936. There were hundreds of smaller synagogues and 433 Jewish schools catering for a population which had reached 393,950 by 1939. Life was often hard, particularly for the refugees who had been forced to leave Russian-held lands, but there was also great wealth and a dynamic cultural life, from theatres and music to galleries and cabarets. The list of artists is vast. Władysław Szlengel, the popular songwriter of interwar hits and later the most popular poet of the ghetto, rubbed shoulders with the great Yiddish writer Yisroel Shtern, who was in turn a friend of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gerszon Sirota, ‘the Jewish Caruso’, sang in Warsaw before giving his sell-out concerts at Carnegie Hall. Groups like the Kultur Lige promoted Yiddish culture in a whole new way; set designer Boris Aronson, who eventually made his name on Broadway, the artist El Lissitzky and the sculptor Joseph Chaikov developed a new kind of Jewish modernism using abstract art and innovative techniques; the movement they founded would later be based in Warsaw.

      Memoirs, photographs and films hint at the dynamism of the Jewish quarter before the Germans came. Nazi propaganda was keen to show Warsaw’s Jews as poverty-stricken and the ghetto as filthy and disease-ridden, but history tells a different story. There was poverty, of course, but films show clean, elegant streets lined with beautiful apartments, and prosperous men and women wearing the latest fashions and heading out to go shopping or to the cafés, restaurants, thriving theatres and revues. The traditional Jewish world was changing, as many young people were choosing to study at Warsaw University, to join the army or engage in politics, often to the ire of their parents, who cherished tradition.

      For the most part Warsawians loved their city, ‘the Paris of the east’, and many would remember this brief era as a joyous and optimistic time. For the vast majority life was better than it had been before the First World War, and people revelled in the new prosperity. A typical weekend in the capital would see couples strolling in Łazienki Park, going on a river cruise or swimming in the Vistula. Families took their beautifully dressed children to the zoo or to the fun park, stopping on the way home for an ice cream. In the evenings Warsawians and visitors flocked