WORDS TO OUTLIVE US: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto
edited by Michal GrynbergGranta £20 pp493Facing his Nazi executioners, the Polish historian Simon Dubnow had a last message for his fellow Jews: “Write and record.” With their traditional reverence for the text, the Jews are great receivers and transmitters of history. Primo Levi and other Shoah remembrancers may have steered the tradition from the sacred to the secular, yet their compulsion to record for future generations had its own spiritual dynamic.
Inmates of the concentration camps and ghettos feared during their darkest days that the crimes committed against them and their people would remain unknown to the outside world or, if revealed, would not be believed or, if believed, would be forgotten. While all around him people were dying of hunger and disease, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum (the most important of the Warsaw ghetto chroniclers) became an obsessive archivist, writing and collecting material as evidence for future use against the oppressor. Unlike him, the archive survived, buried in milk churns and other containers, unearthed from the rubble after the war.
The 29 diaries and journals drawn on to make this book sprang from the same compulsion to bear witness. These, however, come not from the practised pens of historians and scholars but from “ordinary” men and women, most of them writing while struggling for survival. Their names are not always known. Many disappeared, their fates unrecorded. One man laments the inadequacy of words to describe the indescribable: “No, this is not the truth, it is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth.”
These eyewitness accounts, preserved in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, came to light several decades ago, but only one has appeared in English until now. All but three were written in Polish rather than Yiddish, placing their authors among the acculturated class of Polish Jewry. Ranging in age from 11 to 45, they have posthumously collaborated to produce a gift of collective memory, a poignant document of life and death in what was not so much a ghetto as a concentration camp created in the heart of a European capital.
At the height of its overcrowding, close to half a million people were crammed into approximately 1.3 square miles, living 10- 20 in a room, often without sanitation, water or fuel. Some 100,000 died from disease, starvation and execution before most of those remaining were transported to the death camp of Treblinka in July 1942. Photographs published after the second world war captured sights that were common on Warsaw’s ghetto streets: feverish-eyed beggars too weak to beg, typhus victims left lying in the road, corpses tipped into open pits in the Jewish cemetery — powerful, indisputable images. And yet the words of these 29 eyewitnesses reveal the thoughts and emotional pain of the persecuted, the panic of the hunted, the despair leading to suicide, the cries of mothers as children are torn from their arms, more piercingly than any lens.
Plain language works to great effect: “One day a small Jewish boy on Biala Street attempted to pull a carrot lying in the gutter on the Aryan side through a hole in the fence. A German spotted him, inserted his gun in the hole, and killed the boy with one well-aimed shot.” Black burial wagons “circulated through the streets, frequently leaking streams of blood as they passed”. By 1942 the ghetto residents had “grown indifferent even to the dry shrivelled faces and dull stares of children who were alive but unable to walk, whose mouths could no longer form words . . . Their eyes showed neither tears nor hunger, but only death, painting its features inside their faces”.
The writers do not focus exclusively on what one of them calls the “carnival of horrors”. Fastidiously edited by the late Michal Grynberg, and well translated by Philip Boehm, they cast light on the institutions and organisation of the ghetto, the role (at times ignominious) of the Jewish police, the ghetto uprising of April 1943, and the day of liberation when the handful of survivors crawled out of their hiding places in cellars and sewers.
Outside the ghetto walls we share the terror of Jews posing as Aryans, at the mercy of Polish blackmailers and informers able to sniff out a Jew faster than any German. The few noble souls who gave them shelter felt as though they were living behind “transparent walls”, in dread of denunciation by the concierge or prying neighbours. German propaganda inflamed the anti-semitism that already existed in Poland. Philip Boehm, in his excellent Introduction, cites the German posters depicting Jews as “vampires sucking Polish blood . . . Public lectures were held asserting that Jews were immune to typhus but functioned as carriers of the disease and could pass it on to Aryans . . . No wonder,” he concludes, “that so many Poles, unaware of these devious plots, began to curse the Jews”.
Perhaps the most extraordinary of these accounts is by Henryk Ryszewski, a journalist. Not only was he not Jewish, he had a self-confessed record as an “outspoken anti-semite” and a supporter of Poland’s extremist nationalist party, the Endecja, that whipped up Judeophobia in the inter-war years. The “terrible cruelties spawned by Nazism” that he observed in Warsaw stirred his conscience and compassion, converting him into a “staunch defender of Jews . . . I had no choice but to become reborn . . . in the name of our Lord”.
For almost two years, he and his wife hid 13 people in their apartment, risking their lives at a time when, as he points out, “not even family could be trusted”. In what must surely count as one of the most moving scenes in all Holocaust literature, he describes Christmas Day celebrated over a meagre but festive meal, when he felt the “true meaning of universal love”. The company exchanged small gifts and “everyone felt light of heart”. Mr and Mrs R sang carols, the Jews sang folk songs and hymns, united, as he says, in brotherhood. Is there perhaps hope for our species after all?
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Marked out
Having invaded Warsaw in 1939, the Germans swiftly identified its Jewish population; less than three months later, all Jewish businesses were marked out and yellow stars issued. In 1940, 10 miles of walls, built and paid for by the Jews, went up around the ghetto. “It’s a strange feeling,” wrote one lawyer, “for someone who has always held his head high and thought of himself as a citizen with the same full rights as everyone else.”
Read on... websites:
www.treko.net.au/~jerry/why/whytoc.html
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