"... Each day the profiles of our children, of our wives, acquire the mournful look of foxes, dingoes, kangaroos. Our howls are like the cry of jackals. " But we are not animals. We operate on our infants. It may be pointless or even criminal. But animals do not operate on their young!"
"Maybe you are destined now, of all times, in your last days, to understand the meaning of this meaninglessness that is called life, the meaning of your hideous, meaninglessly hungry days," Arke says after seeing the hospital scene. "An eternal, eternal law. An eternal, eternal process. And a kind of clarity pours over your neck, your heart. And your two propellers no longer spin round in one spot--they walk, they walk! Your legs carry you, just as in the past! Just as in the past!"
Ringelblum, like Goldin and Auerbach, was acutely aware that the soup kitchen and other charities he helped organized "did not solve the problem [of hunger], it only saves people for a short time, and then they will die anyway. The [soup kitchens] prolong the suffering but cannot bring salvation. It is an absolute fact that the clients of the soup kitchens will all die if all they have to eat is the soup they get there and the bread they get on their ration cards."
The hellish existence of the Warsaw ghetto -- where within 100 square blocks a half million Jews were deliberately starved to death, exterminated through beatings and executions or seized for transport to the gas chambers over three years, brought out the worst and the best, including the majestic moment when Dr. Janusz Korczak sacrificed himself by volunteering to accompany the nearly 200 orphans he cared for to the loading platform and eventually the gas chambers at Treblinka. Korczak dressed his orphans, some only two or three years old, in their best clothes for their final journey, gave them small blue knapsacks and let them carry a favorite toy and book.
Evil was not limited to the oppressor. Ringelblum, who in 1944 was executed by the Nazis along with his wife and 12-year-old son, described the Jewish police, most of whom were lawyers before the war, as "gangsters." [Click here to see a PDF copy of Ringelblum's journal, "Notes From the Warsaw Ghetto."] They did dirty work for the Nazis, rounding up people, including children, to fulfill deportation quotas. The Jewish police demanded bribes of money, diamonds or gold to remove fellow Jews from the transport lists. It was usually the destitute and the poor who died first. Ringelblum often went to the Umschlagplatz, the square in the ghetto where Jews were collected before being marched to the trains bound for Treblinka, to plead with the Jewish police to release some victims, especially writers, intellectuals, teachers, musicians and artists. Jewish police often responded by beating him with their truncheons.
"Where did Jews get such murderous violence?" he asked about the Jewish police. "When in our history did we ever before raise so many hundreds of killers, capable of snatching children off the street, throwing them on the wagons, dragging them to the Umschlag? It was literally the rule for the scoundrels to fling women on to the Kohn-Heller streetcars, or on to ordinary trucks, by grabbing them by the arms and legs and heaving. Merciless and violent, they beat those who tried to resist. They weren't content simply to overcome the resistance, but with the utmost severity punished the 'criminals' who refused to go to their death voluntarily."
He had a bitter contempt for the wealthy elites in the ghetto.
"Turbulent times at least have one good result," he wrote. "Like a strong searchlight, they expose things that have hitherto remained hidden. The beastly face of Jewish bourgeoisie, its cannibalistic character has recently surfaced during these hungry times. The whole activity of the Judenrat [the Jewish administrators of the ghetto] is one of heartrending injustice against the poor. If there were a God, he would destroy this nest of wickedness, hypocrisy, and exploitation."
Ringelblum called the Judenrat, the rich and most of the shopkeepers "leeches who exploit the predicament of the poor who lack money even for a piece of bread." When an appeal was made to wealthy members of the ghetto to levy a tax on themselves for the benefit of the refugees being herded into the ghetto from other parts of Poland, there was, Ringelblum wrote, a standard reply: "That won't help. The paupers will die out anyway." He documented the widespread trafficking in ration cards of the dead and the missing, calling it "a very lucrative business for certain elements in the Ghetto, particularly officials. They are hyenas of the worst sort."
The archives detailed the depths to which people sank in the desperate struggle to survive, including the unearthing of corpses to extract gold teeth and steal burial shrouds. This dark descent is characteristic of all societies in disintegration. Those who rise above the mad scramble for survival, who assist the weak and the vulnerable, jeopardize their own existence. Few who live in stable societies see what lurks beneath the surface. The blindness of the comfortable makes the archives an important contribution to the understanding of the human condition.
Cultural and political life, religious rituals, smuggling and even the black humor that helped people cope made it into the buried boxes and milk cans. Ghetto residents told a joke about the Hasidic rabbi of Ger. Winston Churchill asked the rabbi how to defeat the Germans. The rabbi told the British prime minister: "There are two possible ways, one involving natural means, the other supernatural. The natural means would be if a million angels with flaming swords were to descend on Germany and destroy it. The supernatural would be if a million Englishmen parachuted down on Germany and destroyed it."
When the Nazis shot and killed Ringelblum's close collaborator and friend Yitzhak Giterman, who had organized cultural events in the ghetto, Ringelblum knew his own chances for survival were diminishing.
"Now to this list, which includes entries in his handwriting, I have to add the name of Yitzhak Giterman," he wrote. "My hand shakes as I wrote these words; who knows if a future historian, reviewing this list, will not add my name, Emanuel Ringelblum? But so what, we have become so used to death that it can no longer scare us. If we somehow survive the war, we'll wander around the world like people from another planet, as if we stayed alive through a miracle or through a mistake."
As the ghetto was emptied in the fall of 1942 Ringelblum longed for armed resistance, a resistance that eventually came with the heroic yet doomed uprising that began April 19, 1943. The Germans burned and razed the ghetto after the uprising, as they did nearly all of Warsaw when it carried out an armed revolt in 1944. Only a few fragments of the brick wall that surrounded the ghetto and a handful of old buildings from the ghetto remain.
"We are seeing the corroboration of the well-known psychological law that slaves who are totally beaten down cannot revolt," Ringelblum wrote not long before the uprising in the ghetto. "Now it seems that the Jews are recovering a bit from the heavy blows; they have sobered up as a result of their sufferings and have concluded that [passively] going to the slaughter did not make the number of victims smaller but, on the contrary, it made the number larger. No matter whom you talk to now, you hear the same thing: we should not have allowed the Great Deportation to have taken place. We should have gone into the streets, we should have burned down everything, blasted the walls and run to the other side. The Germans would have taken their revenge. It would have cost tens of thousands of casualties, but not three hundred thousand. Now we are covered in shame and ignominy, both in our own eyes and in the eyes of the entire world, since our passivity gave us nothing. This should not happen again. Children and adults must defend themselves against the enemy."
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