Page 31 - Excerpts from the diary

A noisy, idle crowd. Women in special white hats, apparently worn against the wind, which make them look like magpies and surprise me
by their novelty. Men in triangular caps and hats—fat, neat, self-satisfied people. How many of them! Painted lips, penciled eyebrows,
affectation, excessive sensitivity. How unlike natural human life it all is. It seems as though people here live and move chiefly so that
others will look at them.

A white church, enormous and beautiful. And bicycles everywhere; for Poles they are an ordinary means of transportation. Women, men,
children, even old people—all ride bicycles.

The market is very large and crowded. I have never in my life seen a better flea market. Traders shout their wares in eager rivalry, and
when a buyer approaches a stall they turn on that weapon of Polish politeness, “proszę.” Everything is expensive. A box of matches costs
forty rubles, a comb—even the most useless one—two hundred or two hundred and fifty. The rest did not interest me very much,
although I was surprised to learn that one hundred grams of fat cost forty rubles. At present prices that is cheap.

In a shop I bought three nibs for my fountain pen at forty rubles each. Ruinous for a “rich man” like me, but there was nothing to be
done. For the time being I refused a comb, but not the nibs. I have a weakness for such goods. I bought some special blacking too. I still
cannot repair the pen, and I am afraid to go to a craftsman because he may skin me alive with his price.

I remember the village of Strachówka, where I spent last night. In the morning a pleasant-looking “panienka”—a young girl in
Polish—was in the house where I stayed. I offered her a chair and almost forced her to sit down. She pulled away from my caresses, then
suddenly said, “The gentleman looks like a Jew.”

“How am I to understand that?” I asked in surprise.

“The gentleman resembles a Jew,” the girl explained.

“Perhaps I am a Jew,” I answered, and the “panienka” suddenly became repulsive to me.

How Jews are hated here! It is frightening to think what vulgarity of thought and narrowness of outlook Polish reaction has cultivated in
people, and how deeply this rotten idea about people of other nations and nationalities has been absorbed by a Polish society permeated
with the bitter odor of Piłsudski-style nationalism.

I went to the propaganda center club, but found nothing newer than newspapers from the eighteenth. There is no military trading store
here; it comes only from time to time. Warsaw is forty-five kilometers away, and according to residents the Germans have more than
once shelled Mińsk Mazowiecki with long-range artillery. Many residents were killed and many wounded.

At the beginning of my tour of Polish Mińsk I came upon a huge gathering of people with horses and pigs. I thought it was a market, but
when I went inside and asked what they were selling, people laughed and told me that horses were being mobilized and a quota of pigs
and other livestock was being collected.

I read a sign: “Księgarnia.” I went in.

“Good day. What do you sell, madam?”

“There is a library here, and in the other half a bookshop.”

I liked the idea of a library and shop together, but there was nothing in Russian, and in Polish I am still a baby. I asked for a dictionary or
a primer, but they had neither. The very young salesgirl stood beside her mother as though spellbound and stared at me with wide eyes.

I left and said goodbye: “Do widzenia.”

In another shop I encountered Polish military girls. I looked closely at their faces. There were two of them, both with such pale, youthful,
delicate faces, slightly unnatural in their excessive maidenly purity, that I wanted to go up and touch their cheeks: were these girls really
alive, or were they wonderful creations of an artist?

I wandered around the town almost until evening, and when I tired of it I seriously began thinking about finding my unit. I asked at every
commandant’s office and questioned soldiers and officers; no one knew. Vehicles with familiar numbers and letters flashed past in every
direction, finally confusing me completely and leaving me perplexed at a street intersection.

Suddenly a vehicle loaded with bricks drove past me. On its front, in large but faded characters, I made out the figure “8.” “URR!” I
thought, when the vehicle had already gone far ahead, and ran after it.

The soldiers on the vehicle told me that divisional headquarters was nearby in a small town and that the regiments were even closer, in
the forest, three to five kilometers from Mińsk Mazowiecki. My heart grew lighter.
I stayed there to spend the night, and once again, as everywhere before, there followed a long and almost hopeless search for lodgings:
the innocent gestures of residents—“There is no room here,” “You must go to the commandant’s office”—and finally, like a fairy
godmother, a kind old hostess who took me in without conditions, warmed me, and gave me food.