The Madonna meets us in every courtyard. Extravagant, painted in blue and white colours, crowned with a halo of electric lights, she stands here among dingy brick walls, blackened by the decades. These courtyards seem beyond saving. Drug addicts don’t especially conceal themselves, hoodlums in Adidas sportswear drink vodka, and children play ball. They run very fast, kicking the ball around the hollow, well-like courtyard, which repeats their endless echoes. The sign ‘Playing ball is prohibited’ stops no one.
If you follow the chain of arches around the yard, you might find yourself in an empty space with a pigeon house. The fat caretaker never takes the cigarette from his mouth, even when feeding the pigeons and cleaning the cages. Cursing wildly, with the cigarette butt in his teeth, he climbs onto the roof, whisking in his wards and brushing away the bird droppings. The birds fly off in fright and flock into a large cloud above the head of their caretaker. The aroma of flowers that are just beginning to bloom in the spring mix with the smell of the ubiquitous garbage.
It seems that there is not a more morose nor attractive street in all of Warsaw. The sombre houses of red brick here were built at the end of the 19th century. They were erected mainly by Jewish merchants to provide apartments for railroad men, craftsmen and labourers. The train stations Vilnius (Dworzec Wileński) and Terespol were not far from here, so those in need of housing tolerated the surroundings. Then came one war, and after that came another. This street was awash with strange people: on it was Różycki Bazaar where it was possible to buy many things even during the German occupation. It was also during this time that the Madonna statues began to appear in the courtyards: what else was there left to believe in? And then came the Soviet forces. On the other side of the Wisła, everything was burning and dying in the Warsaw Uprising, but in Praga the war was already over, and no one touched the crumbling brick houses.
In the 1960s, a young student of the Łódź Film School, Krzysztof Kieślowski, came to one of the courtyards on this street. He wanted to seek out those boys in Polish army hats, holding machine guns, who had been photographed by a war correspondent on the day this district was liberated from Hitler’s forces. A cameraman and sound engineer came along with Kieślowski. They filmed the street and its inhabitants, ordinary Varsovians. It was Kieślowski’s first film in which we see Warsaw. The houses looked just as dilapidated as their residents looked unsettled. Yet you could find many similar places during those years in the Polish capital.
The street continued to age. The city around it changed, got better. A new age arrived, one that brought good changes. At the end of the street, a gigantic shopping centre emerged, absorbing Dworzec Wileński. Shops and supermarkets began to open all around, and the Różycki Bazaar no longer interested anyone anymore, as it had faded from Warsaw’s chief marketplace into an ordinary clutter of Chinese commercial goods.
Everyone who could emigrate left. Neither the city nor district authorities were concerned with the fate of the street. No one wished to install central heating in the old brick houses, to equip them with plumbing, or repair the electricity. In the 1990s, it became truly dangerous here. Brzeska became an edge of the so-called ‘Warsaw Bermuda Triangle’, the other sides being Ząbkowska and Targowa streets.
At night there was nothing but the night itself. The streetlamps didn’t turn on. Unsteady light seeped out only from windows and the ridiculous halos of the courtyard Madonnas. The careless pedestrian or the occasional tourist might be assaulted and robbed. The street became the most criminal place in Warsaw. It returned to being a separate settlement inside the big city with its own unique community and culture. Those who were not able to leave took a dislike to other Varsovians and separated themselves from them.
In other districts of the capital city, the inhabitants tried to enrich their homes and courtyards, they cared about maintaining their apartments and the façades of their buildings, but here no one had any money, or the will to exert any effort. Well-to-do Varsovians shopped in big shopping centres, but the residents of Brzeska Street preferred to steal shopping carts from there. They stuffed the carts with various junk and trash, and afterwards brought them into the courtyards, not knowing what else to do with them.