Church of the Holy Cross

This guide to the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw opens in August nineteen forty-four, when a German army chaplain walks into the half-ruined church during the Warsaw Uprising and asks, quite politely, for a heart. It traces how that heart, Fryderyk Chopin's, came to be bricked into a pillar here in the first place, carried home from Paris by his sister Ludwika, who smuggled the jar past border guards under her clothes rather than let Russian authorities seize it. Stand near the pillar and picture the fires spreading through the fighting outside as the chaplain makes his request.