Warsaw Ghetto Quotes

I exist not to be loved and admired, but to love and act. It is not the duty of those around me to love me. Rather, it is my duty to be concerned about the world, about man.

It's a disgrace to us all! he almost screamed. 'We're letting them take us to our death like sheep to the slaughter!.....at least we could break out of the ghetto, or at least die honourably, not as a stain on the face of history!

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.

This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.

The key to understanding every story is to find yourself in it.

Hiding compels a heightened intimacy with oneself.

He suspects you don't truly know anyone until you've seen how they cope with fear.

He loves the painting. Whenever he stands before it he feels the world is sharing a secret with him.

The Nazis understand everything except humour.

...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.

Kindness is probably the most underrated human quality. We tend to dismiss it when we come across it and seek out more exciting character traits. But kindness is often a refined form of courage. It brings light and warmth into the world. You should always value kindness when you find it.

Memories of shame have greater reserves of power to haunt than even memories of love.

There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts. To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.” - Warsaw ghetto survivor Helen Fagin

In life, the narrative must go on. We're prisoners of our storylines. No one quite knows how or why they develop. And we have to cope with them as best we can, even when they push us over a new frontier.

Ich aber lag wach, war ich doch von ihrer kleinen Fabel zutiefst erschrocken: Meine kleine Schwester wollte lieber sterben, als im Ghetto zu leben.

Jakie niebo? Jaki Bóg?! Ty nie widzisz, co się dzieje? Ty nie widzisz, że Boga już dawno tu nie ma? A jeżeli nawet jest – staruszek zniżył głos – to on jest po ich stronie.

Porządek historyczny okazuje się tylko porządkiem umierania.

The rebbe of elechów, counseling his followers to go into hiding, was alleged to have said: “Every Jew who survives openly sanctifies God.” Each Jewish survivor, he declared, is a hero resisting the Nazis because he refuses to extinguish his precious life.52 Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum in the Warsaw ghetto was reported to have said: Now is the time for the sanctification of life [kiddush ha-hayim] and not for the Sanctification of the Name [kiddush ha-shem] through death. Once when our enemies demanded our soul, the Jew martyred his body for kiddush ha-shem. Today when the enemy demands the body, it is the Jew’s obligation to defend himself, to preserve his life.53

Why did Iwanski risk so much to save Jews? He told the author, "When a Jew cries, I cry. When a Jew suffers, I am a Jew. All are of my nation, for I am a man.

I won't forget an interview I once heard on Austrian TV, given by a Polish cardiologist who, during World War II, had helped organize the Warsaw ghetto upheaval. "What a heroic deed," exclaimed the reporter. "Listen," calmly replied the doctor, "to take a gun and shoot is no great thing; but if the SS leads you to a gas chamber or to a mass grave to execute you on the spot, and you can't do anything about it - except for going your way with dignity - you see, this is what I would call heroism." Attitudinal heroism, so to speak.

The Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, including those who went on what they thought were suicide missions, had a higher rate of survival than those who went along. Never forget that. The only way out of a double bind is to smash it. Never forget that either. --Derrick Jensen

Anticipating their calamity and fright when deportation day came (August 6, 1942) he [Henryk Goldszmit, pen name: Janusz Korczak] joined them aboard the train bound for Treblinka, because, he said, he knew his presence would calm them—“You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this.” A photograph taken at the Umschlagplatz (Transshipment Square) shows him marching, hatless, in military boots, hand in hand with several children, while 192 other children and ten staff members follow, four abreast, escorted by German soldiers. Korczak and the children boarded red boxcars not much larger than chicken coops, usually stuffed with seventy-five vertical adults, though all the children easily fit. In Joshua Perle’s eyewitness account in The Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, he describes the scene: “A miracle occurred, two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their father and brother, Janusz Korczak.” In 1971, the Russians named a newly discovered asteroid after him, 2163 Korczak, but maybe they should have named it Ro, the planet he dreamed of. The Poles claim Korczak as a martyr, and the Israelis revere him as one of the Thirty-Six Just Men, whose pure souls make possible the world’s salvation. According to Jewish legend, these few, through their good hearts and good deeds, keep the too-wicked world from being destroyed. For their sake alone, all of humanity is spared. The legend tells that they are ordinary people, not flawless or magical, and that most of them remain unrecognized throughout their lives, while they choose to perpetuate goodness, even in the midst of inferno.

At sixteen John escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, leaving behind his parents and his sister. They were killed. Everyone was killed. John somehow obtained Polish seaman’s papers, and for several years he worked in the engine rooms of German freighters. When the war ended he came to Israel via Cyprus,

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori Baskets of olives and lemons, Cobbles spattered with wine And the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles With rose-pink fish; Armfuls of dark grapes Heaped on peach-down. On this same square They burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre Close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died The taverns were full again, Baskets of olives and lemons Again on the vendors' shoulders. I thought of the Campo dei Fiori In Warsaw by the sky-carousel One clear spring evening To the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned The salvos from the ghetto wall, And couples were flying High in the cloudless sky. At times wind from the burning Would drift dark kites along And riders on the carousel Caught petals in midair. That same hot wind Blew open the skirts of the girls And the crowds were laughing On that beautiful Warsaw Sunday. Someone will read as moral That the people of Rome or Warsaw Haggle, laugh, make love As they pass by martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read Of the passing of things human, Of the oblivion Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only Of the loneliness of the dying, Of how, when Giordano Climbed to his burning There were no words In any human tongue To be left for mankind, Mankind who live on. Already they were back at their wine Or peddled their white starfish, Baskets of olives and lemons They had shouldered to the fair, And he already distanced As if centuries had passed While they paused just a moment For his flying in the fire. Those dying here, the lonely Forgotten by the world, Our tongue becomes for them The language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend And many years have passed, On a great Campo dei Fiori Rage will kindle at a poet's word.

Pfefferberg still saw Cracow as a genial city, and dogs like that looked foreign, as if they'd been brought in from some other and harsher ghetto. For even in this last hour, among the litter of packages, behind an iron gate, he was grateful for the city and presumed that the ultimate frightfulness was always performed in some other, less gracious place. This last assumption was wiped away in the next half-minute. The worst thing, that is, occurred in Cracow. Through the crack of the gate, he saw the event which revealed that if there was a pole of evil it was not situated in Tarnow, Czestochowa, Lwow or Warsaw as you thought. It was at the north side of Jozefinska Street a hundred and twenty paces away. From 41 came a screaming woman and a child. One dog had the woman by the cloth of her dress, the flesh of her hip. The SS man who was the servant of the dogs took the child and flung it against the wall. The sound of it made Pfefferberg close his eyes, and he heard the shot which put an end to the woman's howling protest.

Why did Iwanski risk so much to save Jews? He told the author, "When a Jew cries, I cry. When a Jew suffers, I am a Jew. All are of my nation, for I am a man."i

But sometimes someone will wear something that allows you a glimpse of their secret self. The essence becomes distinct for a moment.

To hold an object that belonged to someone you have loved and lost alters for a moment the weight of your hand and then the weight of your entire body.

Stanisław Krzyżanowski believed in democracy, equal rights for everyone, fair access to health care, an eight-hour workday, and an end to the crippling tradition of child labor.

My wiedzieliśmy, że trzeba umierać publicznie, na oczach świata.

Sacrifice is perhaps the hardest discipline of all to learn in life. It's often to belittle yourself to the agency of something greater. You have to believe in that something greater.

I tell their stories here to do all of them some small honor. Their lives and, sometimes, their deaths speak to what we are capable of as average people in the face of evil and horror.

There was nothing rational about a wall, whether it encircled Berlin, San Quentin or the ghettos of Warsaw. A wall was a symbol, fortified as much by the idea behind it as by bricks and guns.

Sometimes you begin something believing it will soon be over but discover it carries on under its own steam. Perhaps there's some mysterious untouchable law that dictates the length of everything.

It's astonishing how much of our resilience resides is our routines, even in our things. I sometimes think every person's chances of surviving this war will be largely how adaptable they are to change.

I suspect nothing has more power to alienate one from the wellsprings of all one's creative vitality than being trapped in a loveless marriage. Probably they are the people who no longer feel special, the unhappily married.

In 1942 the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski gave eye witness testimony to the Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter of the clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto and the systematic murder of Polish Jews in the Belzec concentration camp. Listening to him, Frankfurter, himself a Jew, and one of the outstanding legal minds of his generation, replied, "I must be frank. I am unable to believe him." He added: "I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.

Gandhi, who once said, “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” Such were Irena and all her friends, and this is their story. Afterword Author’s Note on the Story of Irena’s Children

There are no parks in the ghetto; barely any trees. She misses the smell of the refreshed earth, the flickering green light beneath overhanging foliage, the flight of birds over water. She misses the distinctive individual timbre of each of Warsaw’s church bells. She misses walking home at night through the fragrance of tree pollen and the laughter of lovers. Only books now enable her to experience many of the blessings of the natural world she loves but has never until now fully appreciated. She lives wholeheartedly inside every novel she reads.

This part of Warsaw has always been an extension of home for her, part of her shape, a responsive intimate part of her identity. So much she was attached to, so much that lent her footholding weight is now obliterated. It’s as if one of the mirrors by which she recognises herself has ceased to reflect her. The teetering balancing act of unsupported walls makes her feel unsteady on her own legs. Buildings taken for granted are no longer standing. There are voids where previously history stood. Feathers like snowflakes rise up into the smoke infested air as if she is inside a macabre snow globe.

I know, Elz·bieta,” she said quietly. “There is a whole city who would much rather turn a blind eye to the suffering behind the wall, and sometimes that is very difficult to bear. I tell myself that it is enough that history will harshly judge those who did not act, but I know in my heart that it is not enough. I wish I could drag some of these people into the ghetto and force them to look into the eyes of the people we have seen. You understand the problem, don’t you? Bystanders have allowed themselves to be convinced that the Jews are not like us, and as soon as you convince someone that a group of people is not human, they will allow you to treat them as badly as you wish.

Ravensbrück was built for 3000 prisoners. At its height it held 35,000, 30,000 of whom were killed here. From the beginning, the SS did not want women with children in the camp; but as more and more territory was overrun, the camp swelled. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, there were hundreds of pregnant women deported here. Some are forced to abort; as numbers grow, women give birth and the babies are taken to a ‘hospital’ where they are slowly starved to death. The crematorium worked nonstop. Ash piles were dumped into the nearby lake as the Russians closed in. When the camp was overrun by the Red Army, 2000 women and 2000 men, mostly too infirm to be death-marched out of the camp, are found. Here

When today Oskar, lying or sitting in his hospital bed but in either case drumming, revisits Arsenal Passage and the Stockturm with the scribbles on its dungeon walls and its well-oiled instruments of torture, when once again he looks down on those three windows outside the lobby of the Stadt-Theater and thereafter returns to Arsenal Passage and Sigismund Markus' store, searching for the particulars of a day in September, he cannot help looking for Poland at the same time. How does he look for it? With his drumsticks. Does he also look for Poland with his soul? He looks for it with every organ of his being, but the soul is not an organ. I look for the land of the Poles that is lost to the Germans, for the moment at least. Nowadays the Germans have started searching for Poland with credits, Leicas, and compasses, with radar, divining rods, delegations, and moth-eaten provincial students' associations in costume. Some carry Chopin in their hearts, others thoughts of revenge. Condemning the first four partitions of Poland, they are busily planning a fifth; in the meantime flying to Warsaw via Air France in order to deposit, with appropriate remorse, a wreath on the spot that was once the ghetto. One of these days they will go searching for Poland with rockets. I, meanwhile, conjure up Poland on my drum. And this is what I drum: Poland's lost, but not forever, all's lost, but not forever, Poland's not lost forever.

He finds himself remembering the night boat trips with his father. The boat easing through the black current. The moonlight silvering the whispering reeds and the leaves overhead. The air pungent with resin and algae and wet earth. The whisper of the willow leaves trailing in the water. His father standing with the oar, as if he owned and orchestrated the entire night.

Halina tries to picture the American president seated triumphantly behind his desk some 6,000 kilometers west of them. V-E Day, Truman called it: Victory in Europe. But to Halina, the word victory feels hollow. False, even. here's hardly anything victorious about the ruined Warsaw they left, or about the fact that so much of the family is still missing, or about how all around them in what was once Lodz's massive ghetto, they can feel the ghosts of 200,000 Jews - most of whom, it's rumored, met their deaths in the gas vans and chambers of Chelmno and Auschwitz.

Professor, Sie sind doch ein gebildeter Mann", sagte Frau Blemmer. "Was wird man in hundert Jahren über diese Zeit sagen?" [...] "Liebe Frau Blemmer, um ehrlich zu sein, ich weiß es nicht. Aber ich hoffe, dass man nicht vergessen wird, dass es Menschen waren, die uns vertrieben haben, dass es Menschen waren, die dieses Ghetto errichtet haben, dass es Menschen sind, die da draußen schießen, dass es Menschen sind, die diese Züge in Bewegung setzten." "Dass es Menschen sind? Verlangen Sie etwa Verständnis, Menden?" "Nein, das meine ich nicht. Es gibt höhere Gewalten, Orkane und Erdbeben. Aber was wir hier erleben, ist keine Naturkatastrophe, sondern das Werk von Menschen.

Michał Grynberg, ed., Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Granta Books, 2003), p. 46. At one point Himmler invited Werner Heisenberg to establish an institute to study icy stars because, according to the cosmology of Welteislehre, based on the observations of the Austrian Hanns Hörbiger (author of Glazial-Kosmogonie[1913]), most bodies in the solar system, our moon included, are giant icebergs. A refrigeration engineer, Hörbiger was persuaded by how shiny the moon and planets appeared at night, and also by Norse mythology, in which the solar system emerged from a gigantic collision between fire and ice, with ice winning. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory became popular among Nazi scientists and Hitler swore that the unusually cold winters in the 1940s proved the reality of Welteislehre. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism explores the influence of such magnetic lunatics as Karl Maria Wiligut, "the Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler," whose doctrines influenced SS ideology, logos, ceremonies, and the image of its members as latter-day Knights Templars and future breeding stock for the coming Aryan utopia. To this end, Himmler founded Ahnenerbe, an institute for the study of German prehistory, archaeology, and race, whose staff wore SS uniforms. Himmler also acquired Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia to use immediately for SS education and pseudoreligious ceremonies, and remodel into a future site altogether more ambitious, "creating an SS vati-can on an enormous scale at the center of the millenarian greater Germanic Reich."   "In

The Axis was growing bolder in the final months of 1940. Japan invaded Vietnam, expanding its empire in East Asia. The Nazis confiscated the private radios and telephones of Jewish families and cordoned off the Warsaw Ghetto with barbed wire, trapping 400,000 adults and children, most of them Polish Jews.

[On kneeling down at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument during his 1970 state visit to Poland:] "Es war eine ungewöhnliche Last, die ich auf meinem Weg nach Warschau mitnahm. Nirgends hatte das Volk, hatten die Menschen so gelitten wie in Polen. Die maschinelle Vernichtung der polnischen Judenheit stellte eine Steigerung der Mordlust dar, die niemand für möglich gehalten hatte. [...] Ich hatte nichts geplant, aber Schloß Wilanow, wo ich untergebracht war, in dem Gefühl verlassen, die Besonderheit des Gedenkens am Ghetto-Monument zum Ausdruck bringen zu müssen. Am Abgrund der deutschen Geschichte und unter der Last der Millionen Ermordeten tat ich, was Menschen tun, wenn die Sprache versagt. Ich weiß es auch nach zwanzig Jahren nicht besser als jener Berichterstatter, der festhielt: 'Dann kniet er, der das nicht nötig hat, für alle, die es nötig haben, aber nicht knien – weil sie es nicht wagen oder nicht können oder nicht wagen können.'" ("I took an extraordinary burden to Warsaw. Nowhere else had a people suffered as much as in Poland. The robotic mass annihilation of the Polish Jews had brought human blood lust to a climax which nobody had considered possible. [...] Although I had made no plans, I left my accommodations at Wilanow Castle feeling that I was called upon to mark in some way the special moment of commemoration at the Ghetto Monument. At the abyss of German history and burdened by millions of murdered humans, I acted in the way of those whom language fails. Even twenty years later, I wouldn't know better than the journalist who recorded the moment by saying, 'Then he, who would not need to do this, kneels down in lieu of all those who should, but who do not kneel down – because they do not dare, cannot kneel, or cannot dare to kneel.'") [Note: The quotation used by Brandt is from the article Ein Stück Heimkehr [A Partial Homecoming] (Hermann Schreiber/ Der Spiegel No. 51/1970, Dec. 14, 1970]

Farewell Warsaw, the city of joy and anguish, we shall never return! You stood uncaring when we cried to you for help in our despair. I hate you, you let a third of your inhabitants die before your eyes, without a word of protest against that terrible injustice! The ghetto was lit from above by the bright summer sun, but darkness, the smell of burning, and stench of corpses reigned inside. [*]

Comparing the Gaza Strip and the Warsaw Ghetto ... Which opens up the whole Mein Kampf-ed, blood-libel, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, rampantly racist full-on-fascism-to-keep-us-safe-from-vermin situation. MAGA Unleashed. By the time you read this, the camps may already be opening.

My father, mother, my brother Yehezkel, and I left to save ourselves from the Warsaw ghetto. We ripped the identifying blue armbands with the stars of David off of our sleeves, concealed ourselves in a hiding place in the factory where we worked and waited until the appointed time when we were to emerge and set out for the train station.

Hanna Krall’s book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Irena wrote to us that many Jews wouldn’t give up their children because they didn’t believe the Germans would kill them. When did the Jews know that they would die?” “This is a profound question. The first message about the mass killings in Eastern Poland, like Ponary, around Vilna, comes to Warsaw almost a year before the liquidation of the ghetto. But this news only reaches a very small circle of people in the ghetto. The Ringelblum archives tell us that in the autumn of 1941 some people believed this, especially those active in the Underground. In March 1942, when Aktion Reinhard, the murder of the Jews in the General Gouvernement, began, a lot of common people from the east sent letters through the post to their relatives and friends in the Warsaw ghetto with the message: ‘They are killing us. Be careful. Take refuge, because they are killing us.

April 19 to May 16—The Germans chose the Jewish holiday of Passover for the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The demolition was met by the members of the Jewish resistance, about one thousand in number. Although the fighters held out for almost a month, the heavily armed and well-trained Germans crushed the revolt, capturing 56,000 Jews still in the ghetto, shooting 7,000, and deporting the rest to concentration camps.

Last week, on the fifth anniversary of the ghetto uprising, 12,000 Jews assembled on the spot where the first shots were fired. There they dedicated a monument to the heroes of the ghetto and to the 3,500,000 other Jews killed in Poland. Delegations of Jews from 20 nations, including the U.S., laid wreaths and banners against the monument—a wall built of broken bricks from the ghetto‘s rubble piles. Mounted in a front niche was a bronze plaque showing armed men & women straining toward freedom. These were moving symbols to the Jews of Warsaw. But what they liked best, perhaps, was the shining granite that sheathed the monument’s wall: it was some of the Swedish granite that Adolf Hitler had ordered for his monument in Berlin.

I cannot be silent,” wrote Szmul Zygielbojm (the Polish Jew who went on the BBC and pleaded with the Allied governments to come to the aid of those in the Warsaw ghetto). “I cannot live while the remnants of the Jewish population of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing. My friends in the Warsaw ghetto died with weapons in their hands in the last heroic battle. It was not my destiny to die together with them but I belong to them and in their mass graves. By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little life is worth today, but as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to breaking down the indifference of those who may now at the last moment rescue the few Polish Jews still alive.”10 A few weeks after the Bermuda Conference concluded, and four days before the German commander in Warsaw declared the ghetto no longer in existence, Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide.

The Chief Rabbi of Poland, American-born Michael Schudrich, greeted Mr. C. and the students. “You know,” the rabbi said to them. “This moment is the ultimate revenge on Hitler. Protestant kids, celebrating a Catholic rescuer of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, performing in a Jewish theater in Warsaw. And they are being filmed by German television.” * * * * * * * * * * Before

It’s a hackneyed trope of Holocaust revisionism in service of the Palestinian cause to equate Hamas-controlled Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto. This portrayal is designed to gain sympathy for the Arabs in the Gaza Strip. It also equates Israel, the Jewish State, as the new Nazis.

J’ai déjà dit que la Communauté juive s’était chargée de recruter les travailleurs pour le service obligatoire afin d’épargner à la population la terreur des rafles. Chaque jour, les autorités allemandes lui communiquaient les instructions concernant le nombre d’hommes à fournir et le lieux où ceux-ci devaient se rendre. La Communauté envoyait des convocations aux personnes désignées. Ces billets indiquaient la date de la prestation et portaient l’avertissement suivant : les requis qui ne se présenteraient pas seraient signalés immédiatement à la police et sévèrement punis. Les rassemblements se faisaient à six heures du matin devant l’immeuble de la Communauté ou place Grzybow. Des chefs d’équipe permanents inscrivaient les ouvriers et les accompagnaient sur les chantiers sous la garde de soldats allemands. En décembre 1939, une nouvelle ordonnance obligea tous les Juifs de sexe masculin, âgés de douze à soixante ans, à se faire procéder à leur enregistrement. Tout homme inscrit reçut une carte portant sa photographie et mentionnant son identité, sa profession, ses occupations. Chaque mois, il lui fallait faire timbrer cette carte au bureau de la Communauté. Celui qui exerçait un travail régulier devait, en outre, verser au moins 20 zlotys à chaque vérification de sa fiche. Grâce à cette taxe, il était plus ou moins assuré de travailler à l’intérieur de la ville. Les Juifs sans emploi étaient portés sur la liste des « bataillons de travailleurs » envoyés, en général, dans des camps, à l’extérieur de la ville ; ils subissaient là l’enfer de l’esclavage, des souffrances morales et physiques ainsi que les pires humiliations. Ces bataillons de travailleurs étaient habituellement chargés de la construction des routes, de l’élargissement et de la consolidation des berges de la Vistule. Ils travaillaient comme de véritables bagnards. Des milliers d’entre eux ne revinrent jamais. Lorsqu’un requis n’obéissait pas à la convocation, la police arrêtait une personne de son entourage - souvent un malade ou un vieillard. Le ghetto faisait partie intégrante du mécanisme économique de l’appareil de guerre nazi. Des Allemands, comme Tebenz, mirent sur pied dans le ghetto même de gigantesques fabriques où l’on confectionna des vêtements militaires et civils dans les étoffes d’excellente qualité volées par les Allemands dans toute la Pologne. Un Allemand de Dantzig, Shulz, qui avant la guerre traitait des affaires avec des Juifs polonais, ouvrit rue Nowolipie plusieurs ateliers où l’on travailla le cuir et la fourrure. Leszczinsky, un Polonais, monta rue Ogrodowa de vastes ateliers d’habillement. Une société commerciale composée d’Allemands, de Volksdeutschen, de Polonais et de Juifs entreprit la fabrication d’articles de brosserie. La matière première fut fournie par les autorités allemandes. La production était utilisée généralement pour les besoins militaires et, peut-être, en partie, pour satisfaire la demande de milieux privés ayant quelque attache avec l’armée. Dans ces usines ne travaillèrent que des Juifs du ghetto. Leur nombre atteignit plusieurs dizaines de milliers. Chez Tebenz les effectifs, au début de 1943, dépassèrent quinze mille ouvriers. Leur salaire était infime. Chaque ouvrier avait droit à deux litres de soupe par jour au prix de 60 à 70 groschen ; sa condition était celle d’un esclave.

showing how sometimes even the most insignificant events can take on the greatest importance later on.

In 1949, the African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois visited Warsaw, where he saw the ruins of the ghetto the Nazis had established there and then completely destroyed after suppressing the uprising. Three years later, Du Bois wrote a short article a recounting his trip called “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto”: “In the first place, the problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind as a separate and unique thing, as I had so long conceived it. It was not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery…. The race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status, and was a matter of cultural patterns, teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.» [...] Moving beyond a conception of his own experience as “a separate and unique thing”, Du Bois comes to an understanding of race that is instead multidirectional. […] Du Bois’s post-Warsaw vision brings black and Jewish histories into relation without erasing their differences or fetishizing their uniqueness. Proximate pasts are neither “separate and unique” nor “equal”; rather, a form of modified “double consciousness” arises capable of conjoining them in an open-ended assemblage.

On the other hand, the government had just passed a law making it illegal to blame Poland for any crimes committed in the Holocaust, and that doing so could result in incarceration. After decades of Soviet repression and Nazi conquest before that, the Poles were in a new nationalist phase. Their own victim status in WWII was important. The Polish underground was hugely popular; its anchor symbol graffitied across Warsaw buildings. People wore T-shirts with sleeve decorations that mimicked the Resistance armbands.

The children were grinning with joy like they had before the ghetto. While desolation continued its march to destroy the world we knew and loved outside Dom Sierot, the small, beautiful things of life had filled the room.

Anyone could have money, and many people would amass large fortunes, but I had two hundred children whom I loved and who loved me. I was undoubtedly the richest man in the Warsaw ghetto.

The poor orphans needed much more than food and clothes. Their souls were so withered and numb that a simple smile or a story read aloud softly lit up their faces and improved their health as much as ghetto existence allowed.

I thought of the hundreds of children I had tried to save over the years. Many of them were now dying because of the ghetto’s harsh conditions, but the work had still been worth the effort. After all, what is existence? Hardly a minute of infinity; we are like shadows God has entrusted with a flame that will never go out.

If people outside the ghetto could see us, they’d think we’re the unluckiest people in the world. They may be right, but what matters is how we see ourselves. The way we see ourselves is the way everyone else will end up seeing us.

The Judenrat estimated that nearly one hundred thousand people had died since the ghetto had been established, most of starvation and disease. Those of us who were left knew that most would not make it through another winter. We were too weak to survive the cold again.

Most would be forced to leave the ghetto on the trains, and those who stayed a little longer would only be postponing the inevitable. It is hard to be born and learn how to die. We are never prepared to abandon this world.

Though many moving individual instances of Poles risking their lives to save Jews are recorded, such as the seven Poles who smuggled arms into the Warsaw Ghetto and several thousand Poles who hid Jews, Poles overwhelmingly reacted to the Nazi genocide of the Jews with, at best, indifference, and often, support. Only with Polish cooperation could the Nazis have murdered over 90 percent of the more than three million Jews of Poland. And it was not coincidental that the major Nazi death camps were located in Poland.

I wish wise words could rewire the circuit along which we think.

He feels he has to accept their bond isn't as exalted as he believed. Just another ordinary relationship with niggling unspoken grudges, mistimed or inappropriate interventions, gross failures in code breaking, secret yearnings for escape, a growing litany of treasons and resentments.

Nie denerwowałem się – pewnie dlatego, że właściwie nic nie mogło się zdarzyć. Nic większego niż śmierć, zawsze chodziło przecież o śmierć, nigdy o życie. Być może tam wcale nie było dramatu. Dramat jest wtedy, kiedy możesz podjąć jakąś decyzję, kiedy coś zależy od ciebie, a tam wszystko było z góry przesądzone.

When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust.

Sometimes, to speak eloquently, you must remain silent. Max knows this. But often to remain silent is a crime.

In Max's experience whenever a person ceases to be a stranger reality either expands or constricts.

Relationships bring out the best in one, but they also bring out the worst. I'm not sure I want to subject anyone to the worst in me. Neither do I want to experience it myself. My insufficiencies, my immaturities, my insecurities. Alone, I avoid the worst of myself.

Pour qui est né après la seconde guerre mondiale, ces événements vieux d'un demi-siècle sont comme des histoires de loups-garous. Cependant le message par lequel s'achève le compte-rendu de ces événements, et qui ne devait être que symbolique, est devenu d'actualité. (postface, 1993)

Folk ser ud til at forlade udstillingen fulde af indtryk, og på gaden fortsætter de i lang tid med at diskutere de forskellige tegninger og projekter. Alle nægter at tro, at sådanne værker kan laves inden for ghettoens mure, især under de nuværende forhold med konstante menneskejagter, sult, epidemier og terror. Og dog er det tilfældet! Vores ungdom har givet håndgribelige beviser på sit mod og sin åndelig styrke, modstandskraft og tro på en ny og mere retfærdig verden.

The murder program accelerated in the spring of 1943. German troops entered the Warsaw ghetto and killed thousands of Jews in street fighting. In the south, the Nazis began deporting Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz. In the north, they deported Dutch Jews to Sobibor, gassing about 34,000 people there as they arrived. The SS also arranged a special transport for 3,000 Jewish mothers and children from the Netherlands; they murdered all of them.11

Nor was this lessened by the knowledge that it was only a wall. There was nothing rational about a wall, whether it encircled Berlin, San Quentin or the ghettos of Warsaw. A wall was a symbol, fortified as much by the idea behind it as by bricks and guns.

A young Jewish man escapes the Holocaust and makes his way to England, where he manages, through sheer entrepreneurial genius, to make a fortune. His old widower father remains behind in the Warsaw ghetto and the young man is able to pay for an incredible, daring, and expensive airlift to rescue him. Once his father is safe in England, the young man tells him he must think of himself as an Englishman. “That is what I am now, Papa,” he explains to the old man. “This land has given me refuge and a haven and I have succeeded here. I am, by God, an Englishman and you must think of yourself as one from now on, too.” He takes his father to Bond Street and has him fitted for and dressed in a brand-new expensive suit in a haberdashery there. Then he takes him to a fancy tonsorial place where the old man is put in the barber chair and the hair cutter begins cutting the old man’s payos, the locks of hair worn by religious Hasidim. The father is suddenly sobbing convulsively and his son, with deep compassion as he watches his father’s hair locks tumble to the floor, sympathetically asks: “What, Papa? Are you crying because you feel you are losing your Jewish identity?” The old man shakes his head, sniffs, and, with another convulsive sob, says: “No, son. I’m crying because we lost India.

The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, where up to half a million Jews were crammed into an area only a few blocks long and surrounded by a brick wall.

The truth about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising begins with the existence of two resistance organizations in the ghetto that did not unite despite the desperate battle they were facing. The rivalry between these two organizations – the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), led by Mordechai Anielewicz, and the Jewish Military Organization (ZZW), led by Pawel Frenkel – was rooted in past ideological differences that had become completely irrelevant in the ghetto. Nevertheless, these ideological differences prevented the two organizations from uniting even after most of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto had been sent to the Treblinka gas chambers,

Post-Holocaust philosophical thought can occur today because there was already a resisting philosophical moment – what he calls a tikkun [mending] – during that event, by Kurt Huber and the “White Rose” in Munich (the German-Catholic resistance group). Post-Holocaust Christianity is possible now because of the resistance of one such Christian as Bernhard Lichtenberg, who responded to Kristallnacht with a public prayer in behalf of Jews. And post-Holocaust Jewish life is possible for Jews because of the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, the Buchenwald Hasidim, and honorary Jews such as Pelagia Lewinska. All this is to say that the testimony by witnesses of acts of resistance, and in particular the “indispensable testimony” of

Osiemnastego wieczorem zebraliśmy się u Anielewicza, cała piątka, sztab. Ja chyba byłem najstarszy, miałem dwadzieścia dwa lata, Anielewicz był młodszy o rok, razem, w pięciu, mieliśmy sto dziesięć lat.

Słuchaj, moje dziecko. Czy ty wiesz, czym był chleb w getcie? Bo jak nie wiesz, to nigdy nie zrozumiesz, dlaczego tysiące ludzi mogło dobrowolnie przyjść i z chlebem jechać do Treblinki. Nikt przecież tego dotychczas nie zrozumiał.

there is no complete written Polish history of the Warsaw ghetto. Think about what this means. How could something so important in a nation’s history be ignored? It is not forgotten. Every Pole knows. It is ignored.

Teresa Prekerowa later became a historian of the Holocaust, writing about the Warsaw ghetto and about others who helped to aid Jews. But she preferred not to write about herself. When, much later, she was asked to speak about her own life, she called her actions normal. From our perspective, her actions seem exceptional. She stood out.

The monthly rations that the Germans allocated to the ghetto could not feed someone for more than a week.

that hung on the walls of the shrunken ghetto and of the shops. They warned the remaining Jews of the ghetto not to believe German promises, to stay in the ghetto and resist blandishments to move with their shops to the provinces.4 These documents also described the preparations to fight back against

This is what Israel Lichtenstein, the guardian of the secret ghetto archive, wrote in his final testament, which he buried along with all the other documents on August 3,

1942, the thirteenth day of the Great Deportation in the Warsaw Ghetto.

ghetto, trapped between the jaws of a ferocious beast.