Household Under Siege

THE MERMAID* AND THE MESSERSCHMITT --Rulka Longer--Roy ($2.75).

Mrs. Rulka Langer is a Vassar-educated Pole who, with her two children and her mother, lived in a six-room apartment in Warsaw during its three-week siege. Her book about those weeks is far from being literature, but it has its moments as a human document.

She learned that under the tension of an air raid some people become indecently ravenous, others, like herself, irrationally sleepy. She saw a woman's panic soothed by the mere act of counting her pay. She learned how, five minutes after planes have vanished and firing has ceased, the boomerang threat of anti-aircraft shrapnel comes hissing down like rain out of new sunlight.* She saw, for the first time, the "refugee look"--faces looking so stunned that they suggested that the brain's gyroscope had been removed.

The City Stands. At first, it was not so bad. In the long food lines the citizens of Warsaw, "never noted for their friendliness,'' began to enjoy each other; and whenever, briefly, the shelling relaxed, the sidewalks bloomed with a dense, almost festal leisure.

The Langers had tea for breakfast and, being both provident and well-heeled, a thin slice of bread each. At noon they had cabbage soup. At night they had it again. All they could normally buy was cabbage, which was raised in every vacant lot; and horse meat. Once they got a "terribly skinny" pigeon, his wing broken by shrapnel. The children ate it "with shouts of joy." Rulka chewed the bones.

Afternoons, Rulka and her mother and Aunt Madzia rolled bandages for the hospitals--clean at first, then nicely laundered, then, "yellowish and frayed, some had horrible half-washed streaks on them." The cook and an unpleasant refugee named Mrs. Gruda worked and reveled together over atrocity stories, while with loud laughter the children built block cities and destroyed them. In the evenings, the Langers took heart in the speeches of their Mayor Starzynski.

Most families, by now, slept in shelters or on staircases or in the halls, to be nearer quick exits. For Rulka's mother that was no way either to live or die. Every night she "brushed her hair for 15 minutes [and] went through all her ordinary ablutions," making, apologetically, one concession: in order not to delay the others if the time should come for haste, she put on her 80-hook corset over her nightgown. Rulka undressed the children "mostly for psychological reasons."

The City Falls. More & more, bright plywood replaced Warsaw's windowpanes. In the food lines, faces were sleepless and remote, and bitter quarrels broke out. Rulka saw a dead, horse in the street, stripped of its meat save for the haggard mask and stockings of hide. In a patch of grass at a street crossing, she found a little grave. At the foot was a glass with , two or three flowers in it. At the head was an amateur cross to which was thumbtacked a visiting card.

The bombing and shelling grew steadily worse. From their balcony, Rulka Langer and her mother watched the Church of the Savior go up like a great torch. Their own apartment building caught fire and they exhausted their one bathtub of water without quenching it. A neat elderly gentleman wandered in urging everyone to keep his head, and was soon hopelessly out of his. "Orange lightning" and "a terrific jolt" brought Rulka rushing to her children. George, eight, was very proud of a trickle on his thigh; a great, fanged sheet of broken glass had slid beneath Ania, 3, in her bed, without grazing her.

The City Convalesces. The family moved back to their apartment on the day of Warsaw's surrender. The floor was littered with plaster and glass and the furniture was colorless under the great clouds of dust which the windows let in. Vast, bandaged, silent crowds streamed along the ruined streets. Vendors of loot set up "a weird, noisy, cheap fair" among the ruins. There was a tattoo of hammers within still unopened stores while, like the delayed hail of shrapnel, but on a greater scale, charred, buildings roared and collapsed. Against this background appeared the grey-green uniforms of the victors.

They seemed neat as engravings, pleasant, deeply impressed by what they had done; they made snapshots everywhere. The first German face Rulka saw was that of an airman; it was the face of a clean child. The face of a criminal would have shocked her less. She also saw an officer in tears as he watched the burial of a child--"he noticed that I was looking at him and quickly turned away."

On Christmas Eve the Langers had a tree and the traditional Polish supper of mushrooms and fish. They sang the most ancient of Polish carols:

Oh hay, oh hay!

Hay like a lily

On which the baby

Is laid by Mary.

On New Year's Eve the German, with a rattling of machine guns, drove their armored trucks at full speed through the deserted streets. Mrs. Langer was shortly faced with the choice of joining her husband in the U.S. or of remaining with her mother and her city. For her children's sake, she chose the former. When she arrived in the U.S., many people exclaimed to her, "Aren't you lucky to be out of that hell!" She answered, hesitantly, "I don't know. . . ."

* The emblem of the city of Warsaw is a warlike mermaid.

* Many observers get the impression that five minutes sometimes elapse between the cessation of anti-aircraft fire and the final falling of shrapnel; however, ordnance experts point out that it is physically impossible for the time lag to be longer than two or three minutes.

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