I went looking for a photograph to help me describe what “indifference” means, and I found a thirty-year argument instead.

I had been writing about my mother-in-law, who was born at Miła 18, became a child smuggler in the Warsaw Ghetto, and escaped to the Aryan side before the uprising. I wanted an image for the essay. I knew the one I wanted: the carousel by the ghetto wall in the spring of 1943. Everyone knows it, or thinks they do.

Here is the story as most of us carry it. Holy Week in 1943 ran from April 19 to April 25. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on Monday, the first day of that week. On the Aryan side, a small amusement ground stood near the wall. On Easter Sunday, Czesław Miłosz was traveling with his wife, Janina, from Mokotów to Bielany to visit the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski. Their tram stopped at Długa Street because nothing was being let through to plac Krasińskich. Miłosz saw something there that he could not put down. He wrote “Campo di Fiori,” and the image of Poles riding a carousel while Jews burned behind a wall entered the world and never left it.

What I did not know is that in Warsaw, the question of whether that actually happened has been fought over in newspapers and essays for more than thirty years, and it is still not settled.

The historian Tomasz Szarota gathered the dispute into an essay whose title is a question rather than a verdict: “Did the Merry Crowds Really Laugh?” Reading it, you understand why he declined to rule.

In 1993, Zbigniew Wójcik wrote to Życie Warszawy to say he had seen with his........

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