1
Humanity, Adversity, and Oppression: Jewish Testimonies
From the Holocaust Ghettos
Introduction
Throughout history human beings have struggled for freedom and equality across
cultural divides. Time and again, a dominant culture has marginalized and
disenfranchised another group. The Holocaust represents one of the most horrific periods
in the course of Western civilization, when a number of cultures were the objects of
severe hatred and injustice. The rise of Nazi power allowed the Jewish people to become
the targets of what has since been considered among the most outrageous evils in all
history. At this time Anti-Semitism permeated the European continent like a plague and
led to the establishment of Jewish ghettos and extermination camps. The Holocaust
ghettos were primarily concentrated in Poland, and essentially stood as a “first step” in
the annihilation of the Jewish population.1 The ghettos isolated the Jews from the rest of
society and stood as a “temporary concentration until it proved possible to achieve the
ultimate solution to the problem by disposing of the Jews.” 2
The ghettos were designed to be completely self-sufficient; that is, the Jewish
ghetto-dwellers were to work to maintain the ghetto. Thus, the Jewish people still made
everyday choices that directed their lives. It becomes clear that the Jewish experience in
the ghetto is a quite extraordinary disclosure of the human condition and the nature of
human choices in the framework of ‘unfreedom.’ When forced to make choices that are
framed by oppression, it appears that individual choices cannot be generalized in any one
way, save that the human response to dehumanization is invariably human: it is
1
Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, translated by Ina
Friedman and Haya Galai (New York, 1990), 164.
2
Ibid., 164.
2
emotionally and instinctively driven. Voices from the Holocaust ghettos, Jewish men,
women and children, confront the world with this brutal reality of the Holocaust. In the
ghettos, life is defined by forced separations from loved ones, and the horror of death by
hunger, disease and a multitude of ill conditions. When the Jewish ghetto-dwellers are
heard, they seem to cry for the freedom that could allow them the inalienable rights to
love and to live freely; but when these cries are suppressed and innate yearnings denied,
these individuals respond in whatever way the human mind, emotions, and instinct
determine to be the best method of survival.
This paper will confront the nature of the Jewish response to the conditions of life
in the Polish and Russian ghettos during the Holocaust through an examination of
anecdotal evidence. Using the testimony of victims I argue that humanness can be
revealed in the face of dehumanization. Historiography is not concerned with the
personal or individuated emotional aspects of experience, but personal testimonies to
history most often give insight to the essence of personal experience. Therefore, I will
first explain and validate my method of analysis, the investigation of personal
testimonies. Second, I will discuss the advantages and implications of anecdotal inquiry,
as it specifically applies to the following sub-genres: letter, diary, and memoir. These are
the sub-categories within personal accounts that will be examined as I work to convey the
Jewish experience in the ghettos. After explaining my chosen method of investigation, I
will use historiographies to provide context of ghettoization and the conditions under
which the Jewish people lived during the Holocaust. Finally, having provided a
methodological and historical framework for my research, I will endeavor to prove what I
have found to be the most unifying facet of the human response to horrendous abuse and
3
subjugation. I will show that when individuals are forced to exercise ‘free will’ in the
constructs of ‘unfreedom,’ they are forced to make choices that are not free at all, but
choices that are prompted by the powers of oppression. This condition engendered
various individual and collective responses among the Jewish people who endured the
ghetto, and it is this diverse reaction to adversity that so profoundly shows the essence of
the human body and spirit.
Methods
More than ever, researchers in the social sciences are considering the
investigation of anecdotal evidence a relevant approach to social critique and
psychological analysis. Essentially, social scientists have arrived at the understanding
that testimonials are a form of writing that “combines empirical and aesthetic descriptions
of the human condition.” 3 This combination is central both to researchers who use the
narrative to convey the lives of the people they study and to individuals who wish to
relate their own life experience through a narrative construction or documented
testimony.
Historiography and personal testimony are similar in terms of the author-textreader relationship they imply, though certain characteristics distinguish the two methods
of representation. Like anecdotal writing, historiography relies on a dialogic relationship;
however, in personal writing this relationship is between one’s historical experience and
personal point of view, and in historiography this dialogue is between historical evidence
and the writer’s theoretical viewpoint. In both of these relations “the terms are
Donna E. Alvermann, “Narrative Approaches.” [Online]. Reading Online, 2000 [cited 9 March 2003].
Available WWW: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/handbook/alvermann/, 1.
3
4
interinvolved and in part transformed by their implication and interaction.”
4
A
theoretical component in historical critique is inevitable: “for just as there is in reality no
history without theory, there is no theory without history.” 5 The danger inherent to
theory is the possibility it allows the historiographer or narrator to “hypostatize the test,
the context or the reader,” rather than to “understand the relations among them in tensely
interactive terms.” 6 It is widely accepted that “we are always present in our texts, no
matter how we try to suppress ourselves”; therefore, most accounts of past history, the
present or the future may not be without the implication of authorial point of view. 7
Historiography and anecdotal evidence, then, may not be distinguished as one having
more “truth” than the other.
A drawback typical of historiography is its tendency to resemble canonized texts,
which “are made (however problematically) to serve hegemonic interests both in ways
they invite and in ways they resist more or less compellingly.” 8 Historiographies
generally take on the homogenized, “all-knowing, all-powerful voice of the academy,”
capturing what may ultimately construct society’s schemas of history, their webs of
knowledge about their present world and the past.9 However, if we understand the
abstract nature of such a concept as ‘truth,’ we may resolve that while our writing may
fall short in representing the past objectively “as it actually was,” it may still give us “the
truths of our experiences…we come to understand only through interpretation, paying
careful attention to the contexts that shape their creation and to the world views that
4
Dominick LaCapra, History, Theory, Trauma: Representing the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1994), 2.
Ibid., 2.
6
Ibid., 5.
7
Alvermann, “Narrative Approaches,” Reading Online, 3.
8
LaCapra, History, Theory, Trauma: Representing the Holocaust, 6.
9
Alvermann, “Narrative Approaches,” Reading Online, 3.
5
5
inform them.”10 Ultimately, this may deepen our understanding of realities, because we
may more readily see truth as a tension, subject to individual interpretation.
The beauty of personal narrative or testimony rests in its provision of “three basic
axioms.”11 First, personal accounts are the fundamental means “connecting human action
and understanding.”12 Second, the writing process involved with personal testimony is
“an interactional process based on the continuous transactions between the individual self
and the historical and interpersonal aspects of our surroundings.”13 This literary genre is
particularly unique because it is able to articulate one’s journey moving and growing
through the experience of history rather than viewing individuals as “lonely
transhistorical figures”.14 Writings such as letters, diaries, and memoir thus provide an
exceptionally rich database, from which to understand the essence of the Jewish peoples’
experience in the ghettos during the Holocaust, retaining special sensitivity to the
individuation of experience. Finally, this ‘database’ gives enormous insight to the unique
conceptualizations of situations and events, but “like all inductive research” it allows
critics to “move from the specific to the general focusing on the larger system.”15 In
other words, individual voices may together speak to larger cultural contexts.
What distinguish letters, diaries, and memoirs are differences in form and
intended function. Memoir is perhaps the most difficult to make sense of because it
describes past experience after a passage of time. The experience, then, is no longer
immediate. A text is “anchored to time, place, unique events…relationships,” webs of
10
Ibid., 8.
Thomas J. Russo and Bud A. McClure, “Finding the Self: Approaches to Narrative Investigation,”
Guidance & Counselling, Fall 1996, 6.
12
Ibid., 6.
13
Ibid., 6.
14
Ibid., 6.
15
Ibid., 12.
11
6
significance that constitute the knowledge of the writer.16 However, the historical
accounts described in memoir attempt to represent another episteme: the writer as he or
she exists and self-identifies in the text. Therefore, a tension exists between how the
memoirist conveys past experience and the memoirist’s perception of that particular
experience when it was immediate. One argument cognitive psychologists put forth is
that changes in our memories are directly related to changes in our “epistemological
paradigm”; that is, our memories of experiences or “episodic memory underlies our
subjective sense of identity.”17 Because new knowledge and experiences constantly alter
the way we perceive ourselves relative to the world at large, how we conceptualize our
past experiences is also in constant flux.18
In his book On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs asserts that our memories
are constantly “reproduced” as we move through life.19 He argues that our memories are
“successively engaged in very different systems of notions, at different periods of our
lives,” and therefore our memories alter as our perceptions change with new knowledge
and experience.20 It is important, then, to recognize that especially in the case of memoir
investigation we must employ a flexible concept of ‘truth.’ In other words, we should
accept that the reality represented in memoir could differ markedly from the reality the
memoirist initially perceives. However, memoir can be seen as no less relevant than
immediate testimony of experience if ‘truth’ is understood as Donna Alvermann
contends: not necessarily what something actually was, but rather the individually
perceived truth of a past experience determined at a given point (i.e. when the memoirist
16
Ibid., 7.
James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), 20.
18
Ibid., 20-21.
19
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, 1992), 47.
20
Ibid., 47.
17
7
is writing).21 In short, memoir functions to narrate, reflect, and make sense of past
experience, assuming a formation that is not caught up in the immediacy of the
experience described.
Letters and diaries stand apart from memoir not only because of their immediate
relationship to the writer’s experience at the point of explication, but also because of the
function they serve. Letters, obviously, have a specific, addressed and intended audience.
Most letters “are meant to be read only by the person to whom they are addressed,” but
when they survive across time they may be read by larger audiences and provide an
intimate look at individual lives.22 By nature of their purpose to directly communicate
with another person(s), letters characteristically seem to focus attention on place and
character.23 Consequently, when letters become public they become “a lively way to tell
others about one’s interests or culture, and a flexible form” for relating collective social
values.24 In sum, letters are “written to a certain particular other” and “they implore a
dialogue…shaped by the contingencies of distance and time between writer and recipient;
they become over time scattered in various places and must be "collected" to form a
single body of writing.”25
Diaries, on the other hand, imply a sense of personal privacy that letters, though
intimate, do not intend. Rather than inciting a discourse with another individual or group,
diaries are conceived “for oneself or an imagined other; they play on the satisfactions of
monologue.”26 In terms of immediacy a diary is very much like a letter; but a letter
Alvermann, “Narrative Approaches,” Reading Online, 8.
Steven Stowe, “Making Sense of Letters and Diaries.” [Online] Visible Knowledge Project, 2003 [cited 9
March 2003]. Available WWW: http://historymatters.gmu/mse/letters/whatkind/html, 1-2.
23
Ibid., 1.
24
Ibid., 2.
25
Ibid., 2.
26
Ibid., 2.
21
22
8
written to one’s self, as opposed to some other. Despite the fact that diaries are intended
to remain private, “diaries and letters tend to follow certain shared forms or styles of what
is considered to be appropriate or satisfying to express… following certain widespread,
"public" cultural conventions of expression.”27 Therefore, both diaries and letters are
tremendous revelations of the cultural contexts in which they are written. However,
diaries are distinguished as personal tools for self-examination, self-reflection and
experimenting with one’s own identity in the world, though “both forms play with the
tension between concealing and revealing, between "telling all" and speaking obliquely
or keeping silent. Both inscribe the risks and pleasures of expression and trust.”28
In my examination of letters, diaries, and memoirs that tell of the Jewish
experience in the ghettos, I have carefully considered the many peculiarities of these
different forms of testimony, and have ascertained that using these writings as a
qualitative research database is certainly appropriate and intriguing. I will examine and
contrast a variety of texts (letters, diaries, memoir) with specific reference to my
knowledge of the contexts represented in historiography and my understanding of the
human condition. The personal narratives I have chosen to explicate will allow me to
enter into “people’s personal worlds in the past — understanding their language,
concerns, relationships, and events,” according to my interpretations of their writing.29
At this point, I am able to assert my own “time-bound perspective” of what I believe is
the essence of the dehumanizing ‘unfreedom’ that marks the ghetto existence: the diverse
and complex, yet universal and innate expressions of humanness.
27
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 3.
29
Ibid., 3.
28
9
Ghettoization: A Brief Objective History
The Holocaust, “known in Hebrew as Sho’ah,” is generally known as the most
tragic period of Jewish history and of modern mankind.30 During this period Nazi
ideology, which espoused Aryan supremacy and racial purity, was a domineering force
deepening the virulence and prevalence of Anti-Semitism in Europe. Under the
leadership of Germany’s Adolf Hitler, a directive aimed at eliminating European Jewry
and opening up “living space” for the German people was established. Having occupied
Poland, the Germans endeavored to create much of the needed “living space” there in the
heartland of Jewry.31 The first initiative to achieve this aim was to “segregate the Jewish
population from the Poles,” closing the Jews “within ghettos along with using them as a
work force.”32 Poland, the primary locale for the ghettoization of European Jews, would
become “the Nazi laboratory for annihilation.”33 However, in addition to Polish areas,
Jews were imprisoned in ghettos and forced into labor in Polish-Soviet areas, Hungary,
Rumania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Germany.34
The ghettos were sealed off neighborhoods of larger cities that Jews from all over
Eastern Europe were moved to in mass deportations. This plan all was part of what was
called the “Final Solution,” which was a graduated program developed by Germany’s
Third Reich to eventually exterminate the Jews.35 The means to the Final Solution’s
30
Jacob Robinson, “The Holocaust,” The Catastrophe of European Jewry, edited by
Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen (Jerusalem, 1976), 243.
31
Nora Levin, The Holocaust Years: The Nazi Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945, edited by Louis
L. Snyder (Malabar, 1990), 40.
32
Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, 164.
33
Levin, The Holocaust Years: The Nazi Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945, 40.
34
Robinson, “The Holocaust,” The Catastrophe of European Jewry, 261.
35
Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, 146.
10
murderous ends was built on these fundamental measures: the eviction and deportation,
concentration and isolation, organization and maintenance of the ghetto by and for the
Jews, a destruction of the Jews’ economic base, and the exploitation of a Jewish work
force.36
The first ghetto to be established in “a systematic fashion” was the Lodz ghetto;
that is, it was carefully planned to be sealed off and guarded, and rudimentary provisions
for medical care, sewage, refuse removal, burials, and fuel were made. The Lodz
provides a good model for how the ghettos generally operated.37 The Germans largely
guarded or controlled the ghetto from outside its high brick walls, and the Jews were
expected to maintain order on the inside. The fate of the Jews was not equal across the
German power sphere. Some Jews still “salvaged comforts,” as the Nazi destruction
could “not obliterate long-standing [class] distinctions.”38 In the ghettos, and even in the
camps, stratification existed, dividing Jews by “advantages with which to endure the
German assault.”39 A Jewish body “for self-administration headed by the Elder of the
Jews and a large community administration” was established in the Lodz ghetto, and was
responsible for “creating individual departments to deal with nutrition, health, finances,
security, living quarters, and registration.”40 However, under the jurisdiction of the
Germans, the Jewish governing body was able to do little to provide for or help the
Jewish people. The survival rate of those who served in privileged council positions was
36
Ibid., 148.
Ibid., 165.
38
Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (New York: 1992),
159.
39
Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945, 159.
40
Ibid., 165.
37
11
poor. Certain councils were eliminated soon after the first stages of ghettoization, while
others were kept as long as they served a purpose that the Germans supported.41
The Third Reich’s rationale for the ghetto was that it would essentially cause the
Jews to self-destruct. The ghettos were designed to have “intolerable living and sanitary
conditions, financial ruin, hunger, hard labor, epidemics, terror, and internal social
disintegration – all to be achieved by the Jew’s administration and the instrument of the
Jewish police.”42 The ghetto, then, was to exploit and destroy the Jews “naturally.”43
Hitler claimed that the Jews had historically deprived the German people, and therefore,
must be removed, isolated, and similarly made destitute in the ghettos where they would
commit their own suicide. Hitler’s telegraphic notes clarify the Germans’ aim in the
implementation of the ghetto system:
Racial suicide
Prerequisite for this
mass madness
which can be manufactured
through mass misery – hunger,
starvation as a weapon
in all times
starvation in the service of the Jews.
Destroys physical strength and health
and addles the brain
Systematic starvation of the nation
by [raising the cost of living].
41
Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945, 160.
Ibid., 167.
43
Ibid., 167.
42
12
Hitler’s notes basically assert that “deprivation of the masses leads to derangement,
meaning the suicide of the race.”44 The Nazi’s ascribed this role to the ghetto.45
In order to conceal mass murder from the Jewish population, the Germans used
“deliberate deception,” forcefully expressing denials and threats of investigation when
the Jews voiced concern that deportations were moving Jews to death camps. The Nazi
authorities adamantly rejected these accusations claiming, for example, that deportees
were being used for agricultural labor in the Ukraine or taken somewhere to continue
their “normal life.”46 In many cases, Jews were ordered to “write their relatives that they
were in Waldsee, a summer resort in Austria.”47
The number of victims of Nazi terror during the Holocaust period cannot even be
exactly quantified, and certainly the number of Jews that died in the ghettos cannot be
known for certain. It is estimated that about 500,000 Jews died “in the ghettos of Eastern
Europe of hunger, disease, exhaustion, and as victims of random terror and reprisals.”48
Those that died in the ghetto are joined by another 2 million that were killed by the
German killing force (Einsatzgruppen) and 3.5 million that were put to death in the gas
chambers; together these deaths comprise the total of nearly 6 million Jewish victims of
the Holocaust.49
44
Ibid., 168.
Ibid., 168.
46
Robinson, “The Holocaust,” The Catastrophe of European Jewry, 266-267.
47
Ibid., 267.
48
Judah Gribetz and Edward L. Greenstein et al., The Timetables of Jewish History: A Chronology of the
Most Important People and Events in Jewish History, (New York, 1993), 479.
49
Ibid., 497.
45
13
Life and Fate: A Starting Point
Vasily Grossman conveys an extraordinarily moving, though fictional, portrayal
of life in the ghetto in his profound historical novel, Life and Fate. In this evocative text
is a farewell letter from a Jewish doctor trapped “behind the barbed wire of the Jewish
ghetto” to her son, Viktor.50 Though this letter is Grossman’s creative construction, the
emotions that permeate it are not fabrications. Grossman, a Soviet Jew himself,
experienced firsthand the agony of separation from his mother, as well as feelings of guilt
and shame, knowing that had he chosen to take certain different actions he could have
saved his mother’s life.51 In Life and Fate “Grossman projects his feelings about this
shameful episode onto the character of Victor.”52 Grossman’s fictional narrative, then, is
a reflection of his emotional reality. This letter, I believe, provides a springboard for
discussion of the humanness that prevails even under the conditions of ‘unfreedom.’
Within this letter reside realizations about dehumanization that may be discerned as
epiphanies of Grossman’s, of course, translated through the character of Viktor’s mother.
First, the incredible pain and torment of permanent separation from a loved one is
conveyed:
Vitya, I’m certain this letter will reach you, even though
I’m now behind the German frontline, behind the barbed
wire of the Jewish ghetto. I won’t receive your answer,
though; I won’t be here to receive it. I want you to know
about my last days. Like that, it will be easier for me to
die. (L&F 80)…Remember that your mother’s love is
always with you, in grief and in happiness, no one has the
strength to destroy it.53
50
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (London, 1985), 80.
John Gerrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev (New York, 1996), 136-137.
52
Ibid., 137-138.
53
Grossman, Life and Fate, 93.
51
14
These are the lines that most strikingly reveal the anguish of forced separation, the
seizure of freedom to control the course of one’s relationships. Here one human being
tells of her love that transgresses the physical world wherein boundaries have been
constructed to frame her freedom. She seems to say that the intangible and immaterial
yet bodily power of love, is not restricted by barbed wire or geography, nor is it mediated
by life and death. Its power lies in its admission of reciprocity, its ability to be shared
and salvaged between human beings. The enduring power of such a consuming emotion
as love, then, can transcend the physical boundaries of imprisonment, remaining a
perpetual source of turmoil, but nonetheless, a profound freedom. The internal torture
love creates, pervades the non-fictional testimonies of Jewish ghetto-dwellers whether
emotional devastation is evoked by love or any combination of human emotions. The
bottom line is that the reciprocal, nonphysical, purely human nature of emotions is what
defines the agony of the ghetto experience.
The fact that Grossman uses a separate chapter of his novel to bring readers a
testimony from the ghetto is especially meaningful. The letter, more than any other form
of writing, plainly demonstrates the human need to have emotional connection to other
human beings. Grossman’s letter also serves to extend the notion of emotional
reciprocity by virtue of the letter writer’s focus on the experience of various Jews in the
ghetto, as well as her own personal experience:
Can you guess what I felt, Vityenka, once I was behind
barbed wire? I’d expected to feel horror. But just imagine
– I actually felt relieved to be inside this cattle-pen. Don’t
think it’s because I’m a born slave. No. No. It’s because
everyone around me shares my fate…I’m no longer a beast
deprived of rights – simply an unfortunate human being.
And that’s easier to bear.54
54
Grossman, Life and Fate, 85.
15
Here a woman is “relieved” at feeling connected to people who share her experience and
her belief that she does not bear her burden alone. This concept of shared experience
effectually bonds the individuals of the ghetto, and it seems that this reciprocal
relationship is one revelation of the kernel of humanness that endures despite
dehumanizing conditions. Real life testimonies likewise appear to show that the strength
to withstand ghetto horror in part rests in the mutual awareness and experience of
annihilation among human beings. This is not to say that there is one universally
regarded psychological or emotional conceptualization of experience, but rather to say
that what bonds human beings in a struggle is their humanity, their shared capacity to feel
and respond to the same fate with any mixture of emotions:
What can I say about the people? They amaze me as much
by their good qualities as by their bad qualities. They are
all so different, even though they must undergo the same
fate. But then if there’s a downpour and most people try to
hide, that doesn’t mean that they’re all the same. People
even have their own particular ways of sheltering from the
rain.55
Viktor’s mother realizes that no matter what freedom is stolen away and no matter how
dehumanizing the state of ‘unfreedom’ may be, good and evil, joy and pain, and the
diversity and vicissitudes of life go on. She sees that amidst crises that challenge the very
essence of human life, human beings continue to reveal unique beauty as well as
imperfection. Furthermore, it appears inherent that it is in times of grave distress that
human beings often demonstrate the greatest sensitivity and integrity, but it may also be
the time they come into serious moral and ethical conflict. Non-fictional testimonies
show the dramatic necessity of making amoral choices to combat dehumanizing
55
Grossman, Life and Fate, 87.
16
conditions. Ironically, “inhuman choices” seem to be driven by instinct, and therefore,
seem to show how powerful instinctual drives are in mediating human action, particularly
in the face of adversity.
My conclusions in the proceeding sections of this paper are by no means attempts
to generalize or reduce the fullness of the Jewish experience in the ghettos. The realm of
human experience is too vast to articulate in its totality, and of course, this is what makes
the human condition what it is: undefined, infinite in its potential for uniqueness and
diversity, and extraordinarily complex.
Relationships in the Ghetto
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the ghetto is its manifestation of the
beauty, the agony and the ecstasy, that human relationships embody. The ghetto was a
place where relationships became complicated by dehumanizing conditions. While love
is certainly revealed in personal testimonies, an image of human brutality and bestial
competition is also presented. In his memoir, Adam Starkopf relates his experience in the
Warsaw ghetto, and what he saw in human beings as they were stifled by oppression and
confronted with death. He reflects upon this time in his life and seems to resolve that
human connectedness is instinctive as much as it is a guiding principle of life. The
following excerpt reflects upon the power of this phenomenon:
I want my grandchildren’s generation to understand that
mighty force which maintained in life so many of us who
otherwise could have died or would have broken under the
burden of subsisting for years as fugitives in perpetual
flight and hiding: the love and devotion between husbands
and wives, parents and children. We endeavored to survive
17
not so much for our own sake as for the purpose of
upholding one another.56
Similar to the fictional testimony of Viktor Shtrum’s mother, this real life narrative
reasons that the “will to live” is rooted in an innate yearning to love. The speaker seems
to question what life is worth without human relationships of love and tenderness. In the
ghettos, farewells were a complicated part of everyday life; separations were not only
defined by distance, but also quite evidently by death. Therefore, the desire to keep
living may have become shaken by fractured relationships.
The formation of the ghettos as a first step toward extermination meant that life in
the ghetto was transient. The statistical data that exists to account for the mortality of the
Jewish people is largely unreliable, and therefore, the extent of the German atrocity
cannot even be known. In the Warsaw ghetto Jewish deaths numbered 50 to 70 per day,
and by the end of the war it is estimated that 350,000 Jewish people died of starvation,
disease, or murder in Warsaw alone.57 Hospitals were very often sites of execution,58 and
nearly all labor camps were liquidated.59 Starvation stole thousands of lives, and many
froze or bled to death in fear.60 The sum of these horrendous circumstances made
relational separation a constant source of anxiety; in many ways it seemed to arbitrate the
will to live. The following piece of memoir clearly speaks to this dynamic:
By nightfall we reached our new residence…I was weak
from the loss of blood and fell to the ground unconscious. I
was awakened by screams, the screams of a woman and her
baby. More and more people were arriving; it was very
Adam Starkoppf, Will to Live: One Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust (New York, 1995), 242.
Roland, Courage Under Siege: Starvation, Disease and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto, 223.
58
Ibid., 223.
59
Isaiah Trunk, Jewish History of Poland. [Online]. Heritage Films, no date [cited 9 March 2003].
Available WWW: http://www.heritagefilms.com/POLAND2.htm, 1,5,16.
60
Lodz Ghetto, prod. Alan Adelson, dir. Kathryn and Alan Adelson, 118 min., PBS, 1992, videocassette.
56
57
18
crowded, and in the darkness someone had fallen on the
woman and her baby. The little one cried out, and then,
seeing that the infant was not moving, the mother
screamed, “Save my baby! She’s all I have left! They
hanged my husband and son!” But what could be done?
Lights were forbidden. The baby girl died.61
In this memoir from the Kjarkov ghetto, the speaker describes a separation between a
mother and child that is not created by distance but by death. The mother expresses that
without her family, her life is empty. Her baby is all she has left, her last familial bond,
and she cannot imagine what happiness life could have in store if she is to have lost all
those who are most dear to her. A letter from a Red Army soldier is another testimony to
the complexities of parting:
I found out that the day before they were executed, when
they were no longer permitted to leave the ghetto, my wife,
the badge of shame on her chest, managed to make her way
into town to get some dried apples for our sick son. She
wanted to prolong his life, even if it were just for a day; her
love for our son kept her poor heart beating.62
This account relates a story of the overwhelming power of one woman’s love for her son,
the lengths she will go to protect him, and her need to hold on to his life as much as her
own. Amidst inhumane treatment in the ghetto, a woman wills to hold on to her life,
which is boundlessly intertwined with the ones she loves.
Separation from a loved one may also contain the power of hope. An uncertain
knowledge of another’s fate brings with it the possibility of good. What is unknown,
then, may be driving the will to live. The following diarist writes from the Warsaw
ghetto:
61
Illya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman et al., The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, ed. and trans.
David Patterson (New Brunswick, 2002), 37.
62
Ibid., 185.
19
My Luba was taken away during a blockade on 30 Gesia
Street. There is still a glimmer of hope in front of me.
Perhaps she will be saved. And if, God forbid, she is not?
My journey to the Umschlagplatz – the appearance of the
streets – fills me with dread.63
This passage from a diary of the Great Deportation supports the idea that our most
cherished relationships can be what make life worth living or completely miserable.
Moreover, experience is shown as being very much determined by our emotions and
instinctive human drive to feel the belongingness, nurturance, and love relationships
imply. Ghetto life did not dependably provide for these human needs nor did it support
other most basic physiological necessities: safety, food, or water. Hope was very often
all that was left. When reading of this mother’s lingering hope we may certainly be
reminded of Viktor’s mother in Life and Fate.
Feelings of anger, hatred, and vengeance also appear to be profound elements of
the experience surviving dehumanizing, brutal treatment in the ghettos. A letter from
Syunya Deresh to his Uncle Misha captures Syunya’s bitter frustration as he tells of the
loss of his entire immediate family in Radzivillov (Krasnoarmeisk):
My dear Mama and Papa, my sweet brother Zyama, Iza,
Sarra, Borukh – all of them are gone…What a horrible
death all of our loved ones died!!! Kill the fascist, cut him
to pieces! Never fall into his hands. This letter is
incoherent, as my life is incoherent and [worthless].
Nevertheless I am still alive…For the sake of vengeance.64
These words speak to not only the power relationships wield over the human soul, but
also the capacity for evil that stems from the need for vengeance that love seems to
produce; this is a tremendous paradox and a seemingly universal reality of humanness.
63
Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Antony Polonsky, trans.
Christopher Hutton (Oxford, 1988), 153.
64
Ehrenburg & Grossman et al., The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, 98.
20
History certainly bears evidence to the dichotomous emotions of the human psyche:
without pain one cannot know the fullness of joy, and without love one cannot experience
the intensity of hatred. In this letter it appears that the writer’s love for his deceased
family transforms into a hatred for their murderers. Syunya even admits himself that his
new purpose in life is to avenge his family’s death.
The dynamics of human relationships are certainly transformed under the
conditions of ‘unfreedom,’ often in such a way that the civilized moral conscious is
displaced. What exactly are one’s motives to live when robbed of every fundamental
human need? What determines a human being’s will to survive or resignation to die?
Testimonies also speak to the denigration of morality and a change in priorities as
survival becomes more and more a matter of meeting specific emotional and
physiological needs. At the point of crisis human relationships may be characterized by
love, but also they may gradually lose the elements of reciprocity and mutual caring;
individuals become overwhelmed by an intensifying struggle to survive and are
increasingly more concerned with their own self-interests:
Mother cried when I came home today. She’s the only one
in our family who [as unemployed] is in danger. Father,
whose rage intensifies all the time, revealed his true nature
today. He wants to get rid of Mother, as he has not even
lifted a finger to do anything for her. All he does is scream
at her and annoy her on purpose.65
This diary from the Lodz ghetto reveals a relationship between a husband and wife that
appears to be rather loveless and devoid of intimacy. The mother is at risk of being
separated from her family, and her husband only shows anger and insensitivity toward
her, as he is absorbed with the conditions of his own life. It certainly cannot be said for
65
Jean E. Brown and Elaine C. Stephens et al., Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology,
Instructor’s ed. (Illinois, 1997), 128.
21
certain what inner motivations drive the husband to treat his wife with such hostility, but
what can be said is that he seems to suffer from emotional and psychological turmoil
inherent to ghetto life. His relationship with his wife, as portrayed in the diary, is a
pervasive element of concern, also impacting a child’s existence. It is clear that the
influence of crisis permeates human relationships and interactions, twisting and changing
how people interrelate on many levels. In the following memoir passage a boy describes
his mother who fears for her life in the Warsaw ghetto during a powerful Soviet air raid.
It was the night of May 12, 1943; the bombs put numerous buildings inside and out of the
Warsaw ghetto in flames, “149 people died, 11 ended up missing, and 233 people
suffered serious or light injuries.”66
In the evening, Mother gave proof of her own selfishness
and desire to live at any cost. Now many Poles, expecting
new air raids, left on May 13 for places in the suburbs of
Warsaw. Miss Hela also decided to spend the nights in
Falenica; in the evening she came to Waclaw for her things.
Mother, practically on her knees and with tears in her eyes,
asked to be taken along. She was ready to do anything, if
only not to be in danger of the succeeding air raids. She
was asking only for herself. She forgot that I was also in
danger.67
This passage of memoir relates an account of a mother who is so wrought with fear that
she becomes absorbed by her instincts to protect herself, which supercede any impulse
she has to take care of her son’s life. The moral conscience might declare this an
appalling, inhuman act for a mother to commit; however, this mother’s immorality must
at least in part be accounted for by instinct. It becomes evident that the instincts and
66
Calel Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Poiceman, ed. and trans. Frank Fox
(Oxford, 1996), 250.
67
Ibid, 156.
22
emotions that drive human actions and interactions are often obscure or confusing, but
nonetheless, they are human.
As I move into a discussion of human choices amidst the hunger, disease, and ill
conditions that framed life in the ghetto, it will become ever clearer that the spirit of
moral consciousness is crushed and human ethics are reconfigured in response to
instinctive drives. When human beings are broken down so completely that their only
mechanism for survival is acting according to instinct, and they take whatever action
physically possible to stay alive, there becomes a dramatic necessity of making
“inhuman” or amoral choices.
Hunger
Under the dehumanizing and severely oppressive conditions of the ghetto,
maintaining a diary was an extremely difficult task, exposing the writer to tremendous
danger in the case of being caught 68. In addition, once so weakened by hunger and
illness, writing was inevitably a rare activity. Consequently, most testimonies to
starvation and other bodily torture are in the form of memoir or secondhand descriptions
in diaries, letters, or chronicles.69
The agonizing starvation is possibly the most enduring image of the ghetto. It
was the food supply situation that in many respects mediated the other aspects of ghetto
life. It is often questioned why the Germans used starvation as a silent weapon when
Jewish slave labor provided at least some economic value to the Nazi’s.70 However,
those who were starved to death were quickly replaced, and therefore of no loss to the
68
Ehrenburg & Grossman et al., The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, 295.
Ibid., 295.
70
Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, 167.
69
23
Germans’ economic operations.71 The following testimonies to the ghetto food supply
are taken primarily from Warsaw and Lodz; however, conditions are known to be similar
across all of the ghettos:72
Rumkowski has given another treat to the starving ghetto
population. Because he received a little wheat flour, he had
40 dkg strudels baked, and they are now given out as
special allocation with 5dkg of artificial honey…The bad
news, however, is that dinners in the kitchen have become
aweful because there are no potatoes, vegetables, or barley
in the ghetto at all. There’s only a small quantity of peas, a
little wheat flour, and barley flakes of some sort. These are
the ingredients that the “soup” is fixed from. A liter of
water and 7dkg of “solids.” You may also spot sauerkraut
from time to time.73
This passage from the diary of Dawid Sierakowiak reveals not only the insufficient
quantity of food in the ghetto, but also the inadequate nutrition the available food
provided. A Polish source indicates that “the daily caloric content of food distributed to
the various national groups in 1941 was as follows: Germans – 2,613 calories; Poles –
699 calories; Jews – 184 calories.”74 Starvation was unquestionably a primary concern of
the Jewish populace:
To all the starving –
Our unwanted representatives want us to starve.
The facts are:
1. The allowance (12 marks) was supposed to be
given out November 1, but to this day hundreds of
people have not yet received it.
2. Potato coupons, which could have saved us from
starvation, were withdrawn. Instead, they issued
rations. This way they take our last pennies, so that
we’ll have nothing left with which to buy bread.
71
72
73
Ibid., 167.
Roland, Courage Under Siege: Starvation, Disease and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto, 223.
Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Alan
Adelson, trans. Kamil Turowski (New York, 1996), 111.
74
Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Boston, 1994), 66.
24
They will sell the potatoes after they are no longer
fit for consumption.
We therefore call on you…to demonstrate that we
would rather die by the sword than from hunger.75
This appeal in Lodz from the committee to protect the Jewish ghetto population from
hunger is striking evidence of the mass starvation that pervaded the ghetto. In addition,
this article calls the hungry Jewish people to protest their hunger and show that if they
should be murdered they’d rather die some other way than by the slow, painful death by
starvation. This clearly speaks to the certain brand of torture starvation induces.
According to this letter, being sliced by the blade of a sword would be a better end than
the misery of hunger, and the gradual dissolution of the body and mind as it is starved to
death. Here we also see human courage revealed, as the Jewish people are willing to
come together, placing their lives on the line for their cause.
As time in the ghettos wore on, food was in increasingly shorter supply,
malnutrition was widespread, and death by starvation was a fact of everyday life.
Between 1941 and 1942, over 112,000 people starved to death in the Warsaw and Lodz
ghettos (20 percent of the population). In order to survive, many Jews obtained food that
had been smuggled in, while others slowly broke down sick with hunger or desperately
ravaged for food.76 Starving the Jewish people was one of the most profound weapons
the Germans were able to use against them; starvation was both a form of physical and
psychological annihilation. The horror of hunger reveals the degree to which human
psychological well-being is dependent upon bodily health:
75
Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, eds., Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege (New York,
1989), 163-164.
76
Witness, prod. and dir. Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar, 86 min., Joshua M. Green Productions, Inc.,
1999, videocassette.
25
Heavy sins have been committed in the ghetto. The
greatest sin has been that people raised in a spirit of
civilized decency have been changed, after just half a year
of living under inhuman ghetto conditions, into beasts of
prey. Overnight they lost whatever sense of ethics and
shame they once had. While many were dying of hunger,
while many searched through waste heaps for edible refuse,
eating it right there, there where those who stole and
robbed at every opportunity and who gorged and
devoured.77
The description here is an excerpt from the diary of Jozef Zelkowicz, written in Lodz
during March of 1941. Jozef illuminates the human dynamics of hunger crisis, the
obvious transformation of ethics and the twisted interaction of human beings when severe
hunger strikes. No longer do the rules of the moral world necessarily apply. Human
beings are broken down to a state of savagery, as when one is starving every action and
thought revolves around food, a required component of human bodily processes.
As the need for food became overwhelming, as human beings became more
driven by their bodily instincts than their moral conscience, their relationships, identities,
and perceptions of the world changed. Therefore, starving the Jewish ghetto population
was essentially one of the most potent weapons the Germans had. Death by hunger was
not bloody, yet its manifestation was far worse. By starving the Jews, the Germans could
take their lives, but first they could humiliate and demoralize them as they tore down
their bodies and their physical capacity to survive:
I committed this week an act which is best able to illustrate
to what degree of dehumanization we have been reduced.
Namely, I have finished up my loaf of bread at a space of
three days, that is to say on Sunday, so I had to wait till the
next Saturday for a new one. I was terribly hungry. I had
the prospect of living only from the resort soups which
consist of three little potato pieces and two decagrams of
flour. I was lying on Monday morning quite dejectedly in
77
Adelson and Lapides, eds., Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, 117.
26
my bed and there was the half loaf of bread of my darling
sister…I could not resist the temptation and totally ate it
up…I have told people that it was stolen by a supposed
reckless thief and, for keeping up appearance, I have to
keep up curses and condemnations on the imaginary thief:
“I would hang him with my own hands had I come across
him.”78
Admitted in the diary of an unknown boy trapped in the Lodz ghetto, this act presents one
example of individual mores being eroded by overwhelming hunger, a deep-pitted pain in
the stomach that is able to make the mind and conscience weak in order to fulfill a bodily
requirement. Of course, this anonymous boy is eaten up by a guilty conscience after his
selfish act and lies to protect his dignity, however, reassured that he could not have kept
himself from devouring that half loaf of bread.
A mind-body response to hunger takes shape in countless ways that are often
outwardly visible in the hungry person’s disposition or attitude toward life. This entry of
Halina Nelken’s diary from the ghetto in Krakow conveys this reality:
Felek earns a lot more than any of us, but he never has any
money and his shoes are completely worn out. He seems to
hate the whole world because he’s hungry, but who isn’t
nowadays? It’s been so long since we had butter to put on
our bread, eggs, coffee with milk and sugar on the table.
And poor Mama! How worn out she is, how frightfully
thin and overworked! My father…No, my helplessness
drives me crazy. There is no way out, simply NO WAY
OUT.79
In this diary passage, the writer describes her family’s slow moral and physical demise.
Her brother, Felek, is described as having lost his spirit in response to hunger, and quite
obviously the writer has lost much of her hope as well. She feels that there is “NO WAY
OUT” of the misery she and her family suffer, and this seems only to be an appropriate
78
79
Brown and Stephens et al., eds., Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology, 170.
Halina Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here, trans. Halina Nelken and Alicia Nitecki (Amherst, 1986), 163.
27
response to an existence where freedom is denied and death by starvation is no easy
scapegoat from a dreadful life. There is no way out of hunger, when no food is in sight;
there is no way out of the ghetto, when barbed wire and loaded German guns surround
the walls; and, there is no freedom, if by acting according to one’s will is punishable by
death. This diarist conveys a sort of helplessness that is a source of power for the
German oppressors. The Germans deprive the Jewish people of their fundamental need
to food, and force them into a state of helpless physical and psychological turmoil.
It is obvious that hunger is a powerful weapon because it eventually takes over the
mind, valued over freedom and even life and death. Food becomes the central axis of
life; without it life is hopeless, and with it life may still hold promise:
Have you noticed how people in the ghetto are different
today? Their faces are radiant, their eyes have a spark of
hope, as if they’ve finally found their way out of the pale.
And what do you think is the reason for this? Potatoes.
This is what’s happened: people who for months vegetated
on a daily subsistence of 30 pfennigs, people who could not
afford to eat their bread ration because they had to give it to
their hungry children, these people were told that everyone
on relief will receive an extra 10 kilograms of potatoes. So,
wherever you go, people are celebrating: “Don’t you see?
God did not abandon us!”80
This sketch of the Lodz ghetto portrays the impact of food on the collective hope of a
starving populace. When potatoes come and temporarily relieve the tremendous hunger,
it is as though a sense of vitality returns to the people. Their faith in life returns and their
will to live is rekindled when their bodies are consoled. This passage also calls attention
to an innate human goodness that may persist even in spite of the worst bodily
deprivation. People who worked tirelessly for their meager rations often themselves did
not eat in order to feed their starving children who could not work to get food. Therefore,
80
Adelson and Lapides, eds., Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, 122.
28
demoralization was certainly not only the cause of human selfishness in an instinctive
struggle to survive, but people also responded to the horrible conditions of hunger with
extraordinary selflessness. Human goodness is also revealed, as human beings place the
lives of others, particularly those of their loved ones, ahead of their own.
The effects of hunger on the Jewish people in ghettos were collectively
overwhelming in terms of physical and psychological harm; however, the hunger struggle
brought forth in human beings expressions of both innate goodness and evil. This twofold (physical-psychological) brand of torture very clearly demonstrates the humanity
that defines even the most inhuman of acts.
The Conditions of Madness
As I have shown so far, the horrifying conditions of the ghettos had implications
on both a physical and psychological level. In essence, the ghetto existence was
characterized by internal and external chaos, a state of complete disorder that
complicated every aspect of life:
The ghetto. Tiny, narrow streets. Little houses without
conveniences. A well in the backyard. A refuse dump
infested with rats. A stinking toilet full of melting snow,
impossible to use. A leaking roof, dilapidated walls. One
little room and a small kitchen for seven people.81
This description related in a diary excerpt portrays the living conditions the Jewish
people were forced into in Lodz. This next scene is of the Warsaw ghetto after a bloody
revolt. This is the testimony of William Kornbluth, one of the major leaders of this
Warsaw ghetto uprising:
81
Ibid., 35.
29
Much of the area was covered with blood, and the
curbsides turned into red rivulets. Some of the blood
flowed over the cobblestones into adjacent streets and had
to be hosed off, later in the evening, to disinfect the area.
The place resembled a slaughterhouse, where the victims
were not chickens or cattle… 82
Though this passage describes the ghetto atmosphere after a particularly bloody
resistance fight, in general, this description still captures the ghetto atmosphere: filth,
infestation, and cramped living quarters lining the narrow streets that stank of murderous
death. Here people were to live their lives constrained by these hellish conditions, the
implications of which wrought fear, anxiety and immense psychological disarray. The
following discussion will examine various sides of the bodily and psychological torture
the Jewish people typically endured.
The squalor and horror of the ghetto was compounded by the frigid weather
conditions. Death was not only a consequence of murder and starvation, but also it was
caused by the terrible cold that many ghetto-dwellers had neither the clothing nor the
housing to provide them protection against:
In the fall, cold winds emptied the streets and kept
everyone at home. But indoors, too, bitter cold and hunger
grew stronger with each day. The ration of coal and wood
was so small that it wasn’t enough even for one good fire in
the stove…People were freezing in their homes. The
number of people dead from hypothermia was much higher
than the Department of Statistics acknowledged.83
This piece of memoir from the Lodz ghetto frames the hunger that, like the cold, tried
people’s bodies and souls. The tension between one’s moral conscience and method for
survival grew stronger. While the body suffered freezing temperatures, the mind was
82
William Kornbluth, Sentenced to Remember: My Legacy of Life in Pre-1939 Poland and Sixty-Eight
Months of Nazi Occupation, ed. Carl Calendar (London, 1994), 81.
83
Adelson and Lapides, eds., Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, 94.
30
fraught with fear, confusion, and the sight of human lives breaking down due to the cold,
hunger, and brutality.
In order to receive rations and avoid immediate execution, the Jewish people were
very often subjected to fierce slave-like labor, if not other miserable jobs within the
structure of the ghetto. Jews who were assigned to forced labor often went home “with
blood oozing from their bodies.”84 This sketch is an account of one such horrible labor
forced upon the Jewish people of the “ghetto without walls” in Czech territory:
And in fact this sort of work, this splitting of mica is as
though specially designed for the ghetto. In prisons all
over the world, this job is assigned to criminals. No
healthy, normal person would agree to work at it, because
the dust from the mineral pierces the lungs, causing them to
swell. A perfect job for the ghetto where everyone must be
made productive. That is why this work is done by people
who are not fit to work at anything else, people with weak
eyes, trembling hands, eaten-up lungs, and by children, too,
who have the prospect of surviving the war and of then
“fixing” their lungs…And as for the dust, well, they do not
understand the dust yet… 85
Mica, an insulating material needed for airplane production, was “split” by the Jews and
then used by the Germans in their war effort.86 This labor, like most pressed upon the
Jewish people had horrible health repercussions and served only to advance German
tyranny. The description above speaks to the complete enslavement that defined Jewish
labor. The Jews’ jobs compromised their health and contributed to their own
annihilation. The Jews were faced with the reality that they must participate in their own
genocide, and this was certainly a large part of their horror. Many Jews motivated by
hopes of food and other privileges chose to work for the Germans in administrative
84
Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945, 167.
Adelson and Lapides, eds., Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, 126.
86
Miroslav Karny, “The Genocide of the Czech Jews.” [Online]. no date [cited 9 March 2003]. Available
WWW: http://www.hrad.cz/kpr/holocaust/hist_zid_uk.html#0,.
85
31
positions, such as offices in the Jewish police force. What were the psychological
consequences of willfully taking part in the German atrocity? It appears that by
becoming a part of the terror, inner torture could in fact be intensified:
To be exact, this is a confession about my lifetime, a
sincere and true confession. Alas, I don’t believe in divine
absolution, and as far as others are concerned, only my wife
could – although she shouldn’t – absolve me. However,
she is no longer among the living. She was killed as a
result of German barbarity, and to a considerable extent, on
account of my recklessness.87
These words begin the memoir of a Jewish ghetto policeman in Warsaw, who lives with
the knowledge that his choices contributed to his wife’s death. Not only must he cope
with the sadness of the loss of his wife, but also he must spend a lifetime dealing with the
guilt of having been a part of her death. In his position within the ghetto, whatever
privilege he is allowed is ultimately overshadowed by his guilt and sense of moral
conscience. He admits and recognizes in his memoir that “human swinishness is the
greatest ally of the Germans in their war on Jews.”88 Sadly, he must also realize that he
made choices to act as a part of this alliance. This reality will be his madness. It is
additionally important to note that positions of privilege were guarantees to life; most
ghetto policemen and administrative officers endured the same fate of death.89
When making sense of individual responses to the conditions in the ghetto, a
major point Jewish testimonials wrestle with is how German deceit was a collective
struggle and in effect shaped the Jews’ reactions to their circumstances. Moreover, the
Germans’ deceptive practices intensified the Jewish peoples’ feelings of fear, thrusting
them into an even greater state of confusion and disillusionment. This memoir of the
87
Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer?: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, xxi.
Ibid., 199.
89
Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, 165.
88
32
Warsaw ghetto relates some of the cruelest examples of German deceit and the Gestapo’s
lies:
Acting on the orders of the Gestapo, the Judenrat put up
posters throughout the ghetto reassuring the Jews that they
would come to no harm. The Gestapo was going to round
up Jews, but merely for the purpose of “resettlement”; they
would be taken away from the overcrowded ghetto and
moved to the eastern part of Nazi-occupied Poland, where
they would be given work and shelter in camps set up
especially for them…This offer seemed most tempting to
the starving Jews of the ghetto. Many young, healthy
individuals were only too ready to believe what they read,
and so they volunteered for their own deportation to the
death camp of Treblinka.90
As if physical annihilation was not enough, the Germans were able to psychologically
torture the Jews by creating an atmosphere of uncertainty, where the Germans arbitrarily
determined who should live and who would die. I have previously identified uncertainty
as a space for hope, which I still contend is true in many respects; however, uncertainty
also created the great discomfort of knowing that one’s fate was at the disposal of the
Germans. The Jewish people were inevitably bewildered, unsure of what choices to
make or what options even existed in such an insecure existence. This sort of perpetual
torment seemed to drive the Jewish people into a state of despair. As they fought to
withstand the gruesome conditions of the ghetto, they also were exhausted by conflict
distressing their minds and hearts. The combination of these factors in essence
accomplished the German prerogative to degrade the Jewish people, though humanity
endured so long as life went on; it was and remains an indomitable force.
The Nazi ideology was so atrocious that its evil was not always even fully
realized by the Jews who were trapped within the ghetto:
90
Starkopf, Will to Live: One Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust, 97-98.
33
Some of the Jews in the ghetto, who couldn’t imagine the
evil intentions of the Germans, were steeped in delusions,
one of which was that they had to fight the resistance
movements and its allies. Other Jews said, “This too shall
pass. There have been similar things in the history of our
nation.” Religious people put their faith in God. Some in
the ghetto were simple cowards, paralyzed with fear.
Others were collaborators.91
This excerpt from a Warsaw ghetto fighter’s memoir portrays how much of the Jewish
population was naïve to the true nature of the Germans’ plans for the Jews. However, the
utter confusion of the mind and emotions amidst physical and psychological terror did
more than just intensify the struggle to survive; it likewise had very serious effects on the
Jewish peoples’ individual and collective identity. It thus appears to be undeniably true
that the German power over the Jews was psychological as much as it was physical. If it
is true that who we are is a product of both our biological nature and our experience, and
that how we respond to the world is determined by both our nature and nurture, then it
follows that the Jewish people’s concepts of self is a very important notion to explore in
order to fully comprehend their response to life under German occupation. In the ghetto,
perception appears to be inextricably tied to one’s experience of hatred, brutality, and the
constraints of “unfreedom”; and conversely, how the Jewish people respond to ghetto life
seems to be largely influenced by their individual and collective self-image.
Identity
The diversity of human nature is certainly shown through the multitude of ways
the Jewish people responded to their life in the ghetto. The conditions under which the
91
Simha Rotem (Kazik), Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter: The Past Within Me, trans. and ed. Barbara
Harshav (New Haven, 1994), 23.
34
Jews were forced live to strained their relationships and their own personal sense of
dignity. It seems quite evident that the Jewish ghetto experience is very much shaped and
directed by the Jewish individual’s self image, perception of Jewry, and understanding of
how these identities are compatible with the conditions within and outside of the ghetto.
What is important to realize about identity, then, is that who one becomes is
inseparable from the plight or course one endures. Therefore, before ghettoization the
Jewish people had a different outlook on life; however, once under the strains of physical
and psychological torture they undoubtedly had to deal with questions about their
identity, concerning such concepts as their faith, self-worth, personal agency, and cultural
autonomy. The Jewish people had to come to terms with a new oppressive reality
wherein many of their prior understandings of the world were confused or contradicted
by their experience in the ghetto. Thrust into this world of torturous conditions, many of
their prior notions of selfhood and the world were upset, and thus they were weakened as
much in mind as in body. By contrast, many Jews withstood annihilation maintaining a
strong sense of identity. For many Jews, identity was a source of strength; what they
stood for or what they would will to live and die for shaped their reactions to crisis.
The Jewish individual’s concept of God or one’s perceived relationship to a
supreme being appears to have been a highly influential factor guiding the Holocaust
experience. In the depths of despair, the Jews seemed often to confront the issue of the
existence of a higher power as they tried to discern what faith they could have left in their
earthly lives. Therefore, how the Jewish person perceived God largely impacted how the
individual saw him or herself and made meaning of personal experience in the ghetto:
I ascribe the entire blame to the Jewish religion. One
cannot enjoy the hospitality of other peoples and consider
35
oneself as a chosen people, better and wiser…Perhaps God
did choose us, but for what? So that we would be the
scapegoat for all other people, to make us responsible for
all the sins in the world?…No! Jews, if you believe this you
are mistaken! We have lost the war. If maybe there is a
God in the world, the worst for him – evidently it is the
God of the strong and mighty, not of the weak and
persecuted. And if there is no God at all, well then there is
nothing to argue about.92
This memoir passage of a Warsaw ghetto policeman tries to make sense of the German
atrocity, analyzing the terror of the Holocaust in terms of religious disparity among the
world’s people. This writer seems to question whether there may even be a God in a
world that allows for such horrific oppression, and reasons that if there is no God at all
then it is entirely futile for a dominant people to work toward the destruction of
“targeted” others, who do not share a particular value. In other words, if hatred for the
Jews is an outgrowth of religious conflict, then concluding that God does not exist would
destroy the ideological foundation guiding Nazism and the event of the Holocaust.
A faith in God is also revealed as being an extraordinary source of hope that the
horrors in the ghetto, the murder, brutality, starvation and squalor, will eventually end.
Those who embrace an unyielding faith in God’s goodness are often morally
strengthened, if not convinced that the Jewish people will have their salvation. This Lodz
ghetto sketch conveys one individual’s faith in God, which seems renewed by the
provision of food:
I had another thought: “God must know very well how I
suffer over my children being buried in others’ shrouds. So
He sent me these potatoes. Now I am going to sell them
and give the money back to the house committee. They can
use the money for a good purpose. Lots of people die
92
Perechodnik, Am I a Murderer?: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman, 173.
36
nowadays in the ghetto.” You see, God does not
abandon.93
Rather then determining one’s terrible fate to be a sign that there exists no merciful God,
many people were steadfast in their belief that God would one day answer their prayers,
end their misery, and punish their oppressors. This woman’s testimony reveals a design
of faith that shapes her actions. She believes that God does not abandon, and therefore,
she acts in accordance with this creed, doing what she determines is allowed to her by
virtue of God’s goodness.
Jewish resistance to German brutality was in fact profound. Generally speaking,
the Jewish people were able to maneuver a number of resistance measures. They
organized economic resistance, involving the transfer of articles and products in and out
of the ghetto walls. Jewish aid organizations were created to contain epidemics, curb
starvation, and provide sanitation. Moral resistance was established through spiritual and
intellectual gatherings, and organized physical and armed resistance movements upset
German order in many of the ghettos.94 These operations by and large embodied
principles venerating Jewish strength and resolve for freedom, which in theory could
overcome German barbarity. The following excerpt from the memoirs of a Warsaw
ghetto fighter describes the qualities Jewish resistance fighters possessed:
It was during the so-called Great Aktsia that the Jewish
Fighting Organization (known by its Polish initials, ZOB)
was established; its objective was to mount an armed
resistance against the Nazi death machine. To appreciate
the magnitude of this undertaking, it is necessary to recall
that the organization consisted almost entirely of young
men and women (the oldest were in their late twenties;
most were between 18 and 21) who had virtually no
weapons, no influence, no money, and no experience in
93
94
Adelson and Lapides, eds., Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, 125.
Trunk, “Jewish History of Poland”, 17-19.
37
warfare. All they had were a remarkable strength of will,
tremendous reserves of intelligence and courage, and
amazing talents for initiative and innovation.95
This memoir describes the ZOB during the Aktion, the “Nazi attempt to liquidate the
Warsaw ghetto, first on January 18 and later on April 19, 1943.”96 The passage speaks to
the determination and steadfast conviction of many Jews who believed that the German
atrocities demanded resistance. The Nazis were able to commit heinous crimes to beat
down the Jews, but for all their brutality, they did not completely destroy the entire
Jewish population’s fighting spirit or will to persevere against extraordinary odds.
Throughout history oppressed human beings have demonstrated this remarkable quality
exemplified by the Jewish people. There will always be those amongst us whose spirit is
indestructible, those who will cling to their convictions, even as they are physically
broken down to their death. This strength of purpose is often strengthened by crisis and
this is perhaps one of the most inspirational aspects of the human condition.
Ethnic pride also undoubtedly strengthened the ghetto fighters’ and underground
resistance groups’ morale. Likewise, in the ghetto at large, pride in one’s Jewishness
seems to have been a common sentiment. To a great extent, Jewish cultural life was
paralyzed by the Nazi regime; however, Jewish pride survived despite great ethnic
persecution due to the fact that the ghetto was sealed off from outside influences and
subsisted as a community bound, and in many ways, preserved by a common Jewish
heritage97. The principles of Nazism undeniably raised questions of ethnic identity
amongst the Jewish people. Why had the Jews to be ashamed of their Jewish ancestry?
95
Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter, viii.
Ibid, viii.
97
Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, trans. Ina Friedman
(Bloomington, 1982), 119.
96
38
What had they done to deserve the persecution and extermination of their people? They
certainly had not stooped to the level of German savagery. Perhaps the combination of
isolation and anti-Semitism effectually stirred up a great deal of Jewish pride:
Papa said that there’s no point turning up our noses to the
fact that we are the Chosen People, it is not up to us where
and as whom we are born. The Germans are the ones who
should be ashamed of the armband, and not us. He’s going
to wear the star of David with pride. At this, Mama smiled
a bit ironically. “Since when did you become such a
devoted Jew?” But Papa was not joking. “If being of
Jewish origin is a sentence of death, I will die as a Jew. I
do not want a different fate from the rest of my people.”98
In her memoir account from the ghetto in Krakow, Halina Nelken describes her father’s
adamant assertion of his Jewish roots. He will not separate himself from his people,
because as an individual he cannot remove himself from those with whom he identifies. It
appears that in this case, the father considers his Jewish identity to be a fundamental facet
of his experience or existence on earth. Nazism works against this concept of Jewish
identity, destroying Jewish pride along with the Jewish people, under the principle of
Aryan supremacy.
Another psychological weapon the Germans used to demoralize the Jewish people
was humiliation. Through various methods of torture (abuse, starvation, deprivation,
murder etc.), the Germans sought to strip the Jewish people of their dignity, their
humanity, and their identity. The Germans’ efforts to reduce the Jews to animal-like
versions of human beings seem to show humiliating treatment at its most extreme:
German workers were repairing the electric wire and were
pitching a tent. A woman passed by the tent. One of the
workers pushed her to the ground and started beating and
kicking her. People ran, scared, in every direction.
Nobody said a word. For each word not to their liking,
98
Halina Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here, trans. Halina Nelken and Alicia Nitecki (Amherst, 1986), 59.
39
hundreds of Jews could perish. How tragic is our life, how
humiliating. We are treated worse than pigs. We Jews of
the ghetto, we work so hard, we help them in the war,
making beautiful things from rags – military uniforms,
rugs, everything a person needs. They treat us worse than
slaves.99
These are the words recorded in the diary of a young Jewish girl in the Lodz, who
recognizes that the treatment of the Jews, the dehumanizing conditions that have been set
upon their lives, are humiliating; they are treated like animals, or worse, wild beasts.
When one’s humanity is so abused, and one’s identity so degraded, what constitutes the
will to carry on?
Very often the demeaning circumstances of Jew’s oppression led to suicide,
which for some provided an easy escape from torture, while for others a better way to die
than by the hands of the German enemy. An estimated 5,000 suicides occurred “over the
twelve years of Nazi rule.”100 The following memoir from the Bialystok ghetto relates an
account of attempted suicide:
All the jews in the surrounding villages had already been
killed, and we knew what lay in store for us. Many decided
to die right there and rushed to their medicine cabinets for
poison. Forty-seven people took poison and died. I too
decided to die. We had a supply of morphine and divided it
among ourselves: a gram per person. I swallowed a gram
and injected a gram into my vein. Then we locked
ourselves in our apartment and tried to poison ourselves
with carbon monoxide.101
This memoir account tells the story of people who choose death over the life they are
being forced to live. What can be said of the people who made this choice? They were
lost souls unable to cope with another moment of pain? They were strong-minded, brave
99
Adelson and Lapides, eds., Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, 245.
Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945, 171.
101
Ehrenburg & Grossman et al., The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, 173.
100
40
hearts, who would not allow the Germans the satisfaction of their execution? Whatever
inner torment it is that breaks down the human will to live, resigning oneself to die seems
to be a human response to a life that does not nurture humanness. If one is to be treated
inhumanly, denied of the freedoms of life, what good is there in living? Perhaps death
could be liberating. At least in death one’s identity is masked and one’s spirit is
unfettered; the body decays or is burnt to ashes, and the soul is free from the judgment of
the mortal world.
Conclusion
The Jewish people’s struggle to survive torture in the ghetto took many forms. As
they endured horrendous oppression, both physical and psychological annihilation, they
were confronted by a totally foreign reality, which challenged their ideologies, their faith
and their will. However, as lives in the ghetto are transformed, the essence of humanness
and the fullness of humanity are shown to bear innumerable reactions to adversity. These
reactions are defined by the complex intercourse between the body and mind. All the
German barbarity in the world could not suffocate the complex intricacies and unique
nature of human response. With a diverse collection of personal testimonies as my data, I
have shown the vast bodily and psychological devastation the Jews endured as a result of
oppression and the individuated nature of human responses to crises.
It is also important to recognize the German atrocities – physical and
psychological torture – were as damaging to the dehumanized subject as to the
dehumanizing object. There is a huge irony here. The Germans sought to exercise
dominance, such that Jewish bestiality would highlight German humanity, and Jewish
41
inferiority would highlight German power. However, in truth German brutality
highlighted Jewish humanness, and Jewish oppression highlighted German baseness. In
sum, despite the inhuman acts Germans committed against the Jews, the outgrowth of
these actions were human nonetheless. In the words of an unknown diarist, “Truly,
humanity has not progressed very far from the cave of the wild beast.”102 Perhaps this
animalism is not a matter of false moral progression, but rather of the continuity of
human nature, which transcends all cultures, conditions, and time.
102
Brown and Stephens et al., eds., Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology, 171.
42
Bibliography
Memoir and Narrative Study
Alvermann, Donna E. “Narrative Approaches.” Reading Online. [Online]. 2000 [cited
9 March 2003]. Available WWW:
http://www.readingonline.org/articles/handbook/alvermann/.
Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 3rd ed.
New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Fentress, James and Chris Wickham. Social Memory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1992.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
LaCapra, Dominick. History, Theory, Trauma: Representing the Holocaust. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994.
Russo, Thomas J. and Bud A. McClure. “Finding the Self: Approaches to Narrative
Investigation.” Academic Search Elite. [Online]. 22 August 2000 [cited 9 March
2003]. Available WWW: http://www.uwrf.edu/~tr00/narr.html.
Histories of the Ghettos
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gribetz, Judah and Edward L. Greenstein et al. The Timetables of Jewish History: A
Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in Jewish History. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Gutman, Israel. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1994.
Gutman, Yisrael. The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt.
Translated by Ina Friedman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945.
New York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992.
43
Levin, Nora. The Holocaust Years: The Nazi Destruction of European Jewry, 19331945. Edited by Louis L. Snyder. Malabar: Robert E. Krieger Publishing
Company, 1990.
Lodz Ghetto. Produced by Alan Adelson. Directed by Kathryn and Alan Adelson. 118
min. PBS, 1992. Videocassette.
“The Lodz Ghetto.” Jewish Virtual Library. [Online]. 2003 [cited 9 March 2003].
Available WWW: http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/lodz.html.
Robinson, Jacob. “The Holocaust.” The Catastrophe of European Jewry. Edited by
Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen. Jerusalem: Ahva Cooperative Press,
1976.
Roland, Charles G. Courage Under Siege: Starvation, Disease and Death in the Warsaw
Ghetto. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Trunk, Isaiah. “Jewish History of Poland.” Heritage Films. [Online]. no date [cited 9
March 2003]. Available WWW: http://www.heritagefilms.com/POLAND2.htm.
Witness. Produced and directed by Joshua M. Greene and Shiva Kumar. 86 min. Joshua
M. Green Productions, Inc., 1999. Videocassette.
Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945. Translated by Ina
Friedman and Haya Galai. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Vasily Grossman
Garrard, John and Carol. The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily
Grossman. New York: The Free Press, 1996.
Grossman, Vasily. Life and Fate. Translated by Robert Chandler. London: The Harvill
Press, 1985.
Personal Testimony: The Warsaw Ghetto
Lewin, Abraham. A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Edited by Antony
Polonsky. Translated by Christopher Hutton. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.,
1988.
Rotem, Simha (Kazik). Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter: The Past Within Me.
Translated by Barbara Harshav. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
44
Personal Testimony: The Lodz Ghetto
Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege. Compiled and Edited by Alan Adelson
and Robert Lapides. New York: The Jewish Heritage Writing Project, Inc., 1989.
Sierakowiak, Dawid. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz
Ghetto. Edited by Alan Adelson. Translated by Kamil Turowski. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996.
Personal Testimony: The Ghetto at Large
Brown, Jean E. and Elaine C. Stephens et al., eds. Images from the Holocaust: A
Literature Anthology. Instructor’s Edition. Illinois: NTC Publishing Group,
1997.
Ehrenburg, Ilya and Vasily Grossman. The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry.
Translated and edited by David Patterson. New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 2002.
“Evidence of Jewish Escapees from Kovno on the Burning of the Bodies.” Jewish
Virtual Library. [Online]. 2003 [cited 9 March 2003]. Available WWW:
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/kovnurn.html.
Kornbluth, William. Sentenced to Remember: My Legacy of Life in Pre-1939 Poland
and Sixty-Eight Months of Nazi Occupation. Edited by Carl Calendar.
Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1994.
Nelken, Halina. And Yet, I Am Here. Translated by Halina Nelken with Alicia Nitecki.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
Perechodnik, Calel. Am I a Murderer?: Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman. Edited
and translated by Frank Fox. Boulder: Westview Press, Inc., 1996.
Starkopf, Adam. Will to Live: One Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust. New
York: State University of New York Press, 1995.