When, on a chill autumn afternoon in 1937, the German armaments engineer, cheating husband and spy Edvard Uhl arrives in Warsaw to engage in a Champagne- and espionage-fueled tryst with a ravishing Polish countess, the glittering but doomed capital is enjoying its own final fling with peace.
—Above the city, the sky was at war,— the novelist Alan Furst writes in the opening passage of —The Spies of Warsaw— (Random House), the latest of his 10 taut and richly atmospheric World War II-era espionage thrillers.
For the moment, it is just a gathering storm: two ominous weather systems, one sweeping in from Germany, the other extending all the way east to Russia, are about to clash over Poland’s capital. But the charged atmosphere, which will soon bring Armageddon to Warsaw, only serves to heighten the thrill for the wayward Uhl and the countess, herself a spy and, like Uhl, a pivotal and colorfully portrayed minor character who helps kick off the action.
The two first become acquainted in a small German restaurant, and after adroit maneuvers by the countess find themselves in Warsaw in the elegant Hotel Europejski dining room two weeks later, where they drink Champagne and down langoustines. And then, —after the cream cake,— Mr. Furst writes, —up they went.—
The author leaves what follows to the reader’s deftly teased imagination. But the setting for his spies’ intrigues —” the leafy boulevards, grand ballrooms, romantic cafes, lively salons and sinister back streets of a city on the cusp of catastrophe —” is vividly rendered. He also provides a dandy visual aid at the front of the book: a map of Warsaw before the deluge. Where fiction intertwines with history, the map superimposes one upon the other so that present-day visitors can track the movements of Mr. Furst’s star-crossed and SS-stalked characters through the streets of prewar Warsaw.
—There is something about the city and Poland itself that I find magnetic,— Mr. Furst said from his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., on the eve of the paperback release of —The Spies of Warsaw— earlier this summer. —Even though Warsaw was completely destroyed in the Second World War, its past is still alive. It’s there —” you can feel it when you stand in the Old Town and look down at the Vistula and see the river winding through the city. It’s like looking at history.—
Many European cities suffered the conflagrations and miseries unleashed by Adolf Hitler 70 summers ago, but none more so than Warsaw —” the first city he bombed and the last that he destroyed. A beautiful city at the heart of a fruited plain, it had no mountain ranges or oceans to deter attacks. With only muddy roads as a —seasonal barrier against German expansion,— Mr. Furst writes, Warsaw made an easy first target for the unprovoked Nazi blitzkrieg that ignited World War II on Sept. 1, 1939.
Five years later, in a last epic act of hatred, a defeated Hitler ordered the systematic destruction of Warsaw. The city was burned, bombed and dynamited to rubble. It was Hitler’s final brutalization of a city already damned as a staging area for genocide. Six million Poles were murdered —” the Jewish and the non-Jewish died in roughly equal number —” and their ghosts are everywhere. —Thanks to Hitler,— said Juliusz Lichwa, a University of Warsaw student whose grandfather survived Dachau, —all our streets are graves.—
Determined to reclaim their capital from death’s dominion, Poles reconstructed the city brick by brick —” no easy task since much of Warsaw had been pulverized. Using everything from oil paintings to postcards, news photos and old family albums, architects and engineers painstakingly rebuilt the medieval Old Town Market Square and the adjacent 15th-century New Town, from scratch. Virtually everything a visitor sees there today is a re-creation, as are most of the city’s palaces, cathedrals and landmarks.
Even so, the Warsaw of old is gone forever. And it is that lost city, the grand, glittering and vibrant prewar capital, that Mr. Furst conjures in —The Spies of Warsaw.— In his city, the Warsaw of memory is in the present, and the future ticks ominously on every page…
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