Re: [blind-democracy] Writing as Resistance

vVery moving. Very disturbing. It can happen again.

Carl Jarvis


On 7/18/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Writing as Resistance
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/writing_as_resistance_20160717/
> Posted on Jul 17, 2016
> By Chris Hedges
>
> Jews are forced from the Warsaw ghetto by German soldiers in 1943. (AP)
> WARSAW, Poland—Dreary, Soviet-style concrete apartments rise up where 68
> Nowolipki St. was during World War II. It was at this spot, although there
> is no marker to record the event, that some of the milk cans and metal
> boxes
> crammed full of essays, reports, official communiqués, wall posters,
> pictures, drawings and diaries that recorded life in the Warsaw ghetto were
> unearthed from the rubble shortly after the war.
>
> The cache of material, known as the Oyneg Shabes Archive, was buried by
> writers, led by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, as German occupation
> forces were liquidating the ghetto. They meticulously documented all
> aspects
> of life in the ghetto and the annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis.
>
> Writing was an act of resistance and faith. It affirmed the belief that one
> day, a day the writers knew they would probably never see, these words
> would
> evoke pity, understanding and outrage and provide wisdom. They struggled to
> make sense of the stark contrasts of good, evil and indifference. They
> explored what it meant to live a life of meaning in the face of death. They
> did not know if their writing would survive. Some of the archive was never
> found. They did not know who, if anyone, would read their work. But they
> wrote with a messianic fury. Their words were the last link to the living.
>
>
> Dawid Graber hastily buried some of the archives in August 1942 as
> deportations in the ghetto were being accelerated—between July 22 and Sept.
> 12 some 300,000 Jews were driven out of the ghetto to the gas chambers at
> Treblinka. He wrote: "What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the
> world
> we buried in the ground. I would love to see the moment in which the great
> treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. So the world may
> know all." He ends with the words: "We may now die in peace. We fulfilled
> our mission. May history attest for us."
>
> Ringelblum formed his small army of writers clandestinely. Nazi discovery
> of
> any writer's involvement meant his or her immediate execution or
> deportation
> to a death camp.
>
> Ringelblum did not want a hagiography of the Jews. He demanded "the whole
> truth … however bitter." He admonished his writers to eschew
> preconceptions,
> even about the Nazis. He called for them to describe the horror around them
> with an "epic calm … the calm of the graveyard." He told them to capture
> "what the common man experienced, thought, and suffered." The job of the
> writer, he said, was to document every aspect of reality, including the
> degeneration and immorality that beset many of the Jews trapped in the
> ghetto. Writers should collect enough fragments of life, with enough
> dispassion, to allow readers to sense the ghetto's totality.
>
> Ringelblum's ruthless commitment to the truth gives to the archive, only
> parts of which have been translated into English, an immediacy and profound
> moral force. He and his writing collective, which he called a "free society
> of slaves," left behind insights into human nature, tyranny and resistance.
>
>
> The stories and reports were often about people who would otherwise have
> been forgotten. Rachel Auerbach wrote in the archive about the soup kitchen
> she managed in the ghetto. She described her voluble cook, Gutchke, who
> exuberantly sang Yiddish ballads in the kitchen, gave her pots nicknames
> and
> had a casual approach to hygiene that saw her routinely dip her fingers in
> the soup. Gutchke, who had recently married an elderly widower and scholar,
> was barely literate, and she took great pride in her husband's erudition.
> Auerbach, at one point, caught her trying to sneak food home to him. "Why
> did I shame her and depress her?" Auerbach wrote. "Why didn't I understand
> that through this little transgression she wanted to gladden and strengthen
> her elderly helpless husband who had become like a child? How blind, how
> stupid we were then—on the brink of extermination."
>
> Leyb Goldin, a journalist and translator of European literature, left
> behind
> a short story called "Chronicle of a Single Day." The main character in his
> story, an intellectual and former revolutionary named Arke, is wasting
> away.
> His legs are nearly useless sticks. He has nothing left to sell. A soup
> kitchen is his only source of food. He staggers slowly through the streets,
> past the emaciated corpses, usually stripped of their clothes, and the
> gaunt
> army of beggars. He wonders when death will take him. The Nazi blockage of
> food intended for the ghetto has led to 100,000 people dying of starvation.
> There is an internal war between Arke and his stomach. "If you're hungry,
> you cease to be human, you become a beast," he says.
>
> "... It's your stomach and you," he says. "It's 90 percent your stomach and
> a little bit you. A small remnant, an insignificant remnant of the Arke who
> once was. The one who thought, read, taught, dreamed. ...
>
> "... The war has been going on for a full two years, and you've eaten
> nothing but soup for some four months—no, longer than your whole life until
> now. From yesterday's soup to today's is an eternity, and I can't imagine
> that I'll be able to survive another twenty-four hours of this overpowering
> hunger. But these four months are no more than a dark, empty nightmare. Try
> to salvage something from them, remember something in particular—it's
> impossible. One black, dark mass."
>
> Arke gets a second bowl of soup when the soup-kitchen waitress forgets to
> collect his ticket, and he is plagued by guilt.
>
> He peers late in the afternoon into the window of a hospital where doctors
> are operating on a child.
> But why, why? Why save? Why, to whom, to what is the child being brought
> back?
> And suddenly you remember that dead Jew, whom you nearly tripped over
> today.
> What's more, you now see him more clearly than before, when you were
> actually looking at him. Somewhere, years ago, there was a mother who fed
> him and, while cleaning his head, knew that her son was the cleverest, the
> most talented, the most beautiful. Told her aunt, her neighbors his funny
> sayings. Sought and delighted in every feature in which he resembled his
> father, his father. And the word Berishl was not just a name to her, but an
> idea, the content of a life, a philosophy. And now the brightest and most
> beautiful child in the world lies in a strange street, and his name isn't
> even known; and there's a stink, and instead of his mother, a brick kisses
> his head and a drizzling rain soaks the well-known newspaper around his
> face. And over there, they're operating on a child, just as if this hadn't
> happened, and they save it; and below, in front of the gate stands the
> mother, who knows that her Berishl is the cleverest and the most beautiful
> and the most talented—Why? For whom? For whom? ...
> ... 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 2 or 3 years old, in their best clothes for their final journey, gave
> them small blue knapsacks and let them carry a favorite toy and book.
>
> Rabbi Shimon Huberband, who too was murdered at Treblinka, explained how
> the
> occupation provided a demented and uninhibited playground for sadists. He
> writes of being seized with other Jews and held for a week in a
> forced-labor
> site called Dynasty where cars of the SS were repaired. A German named
> Schultz beat the rabbi, spat in his mouth, forced him to lick his boots and
> then, after a savage assault that saw Huberband briefly lose consciousness,
> ordered him to drink the contents of a spittoon. The Germans made kidnapped
> Jews at the repair yard get on all fours and play what was called the "dog
> game." Pieces of brick and plaster were hurled at the men. They had to
> catch
> the objects in their mouths. Those who did not catch the objects were
> beaten
> again. Schultz periodically left the repair yard "hunting for individual
> Jews." He targeted "only fat, rich, and elegantly dressed Jews." He forced
> them to pay him huge bribes to avoid the degradation. Those who could not
> pay became his toys. Sadism was often a prelude to murder.
>
> 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."
>
> Ringelblum, as Samuel D. Kassow wrote in "Who Will Write Our History?:
> Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto," "was absolutely
> convinced that the story of Jewish suffering, no matter how terrible, was a
> universal story and not just a Jewish one. And evil, no matter how great,
> could not be placed outside of history."
>
> We all have the capacity for evil. The line between the executioner and the
> victim is razor-thin. Ringelblum and his writers warned us of how easy it
> is
> to surrender our better selves in the name of survival. They cautioned us
> against the danger of political ideologies, careerism, opportunism, the
> lust
> for violence and the loss of empathy. They excoriated those who survived at
> the expense of another. Ringelblum and his writers buried their records
> shortly before most of them were killed. In their final moments they cried
> out for us to be faithful to the good. They could not save themselves. But
> they could, they hoped, save us.
>
>
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
> Writing as Resistance
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/writing_as_resistance_20160717/
> AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookShare to TwitterMore AddThis Share
> optionsShare to Email
> Posted on Jul 17, 2016
> By Chris Hedges
>
> Jews are forced from the Warsaw ghetto by German soldiers in 1943. (AP)
> WARSAW, Poland—Dreary, Soviet-style concrete apartments rise up where 68
> Nowolipki St. was during World War II. It was at this spot, although there
> is no marker to record the event, that some of the milk cans and metal
> boxes
> crammed full of essays, reports, official communiqués, wall posters,
> pictures, drawings and diaries that recorded life in the Warsaw ghetto were
> unearthed from the rubble shortly after the war.
>
> The cache of material, known as the Oyneg Shabes Archive, was buried by
> writers, led by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, as German occupation
> forces were liquidating the ghetto. They meticulously documented all
> aspects
> of life in the ghetto and the annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis.
>
> Writing was an act of resistance and faith. It affirmed the belief that one
> day, a day the writers knew they would probably never see, these words
> would
> evoke pity, understanding and outrage and provide wisdom. They struggled to
> make sense of the stark contrasts of good, evil and indifference. They
> explored what it meant to live a life of meaning in the face of death. They
> did not know if their writing would survive. Some of the archive was never
> found. They did not know who, if anyone, would read their work. But they
> wrote with a messianic fury. Their words were the last link to the living.
>
> Dawid Graber hastily buried some of the archives in August 1942 as
> deportations in the ghetto were being accelerated—between July 22 and Sept.
> 12 some 300,000 Jews were driven out of the ghetto to the gas chambers at
> Treblinka. He wrote: "What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the
> world
> we buried in the ground. I would love to see the moment in which the great
> treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world. So the world may
> know all." He ends with the words: "We may now die in peace. We fulfilled
> our mission. May history attest for us."
>
> Ringelblum formed his small army of writers clandestinely. Nazi discovery
> of
> any writer's involvement meant his or her immediate execution or
> deportation
> to a death camp.
>
> Ringelblum did not want a hagiography of the Jews. He demanded "the whole
> truth … however bitter." He admonished his writers to eschew
> preconceptions,
> even about the Nazis. He called for them to describe the horror around them
> with an "epic calm … the calm of the graveyard." He told them to capture
> "what the common man experienced, thought, and suffered." The job of the
> writer, he said, was to document every aspect of reality, including the
> degeneration and immorality that beset many of the Jews trapped in the
> ghetto. Writers should collect enough fragments of life, with enough
> dispassion, to allow readers to sense the ghetto's totality.
>
> Ringelblum's ruthless commitment to the truth gives to the archive, only
> parts of which have been translated into English, an immediacy and profound
> moral force. He and his writing collective, which he called a "free society
> of slaves," left behind insights into human nature, tyranny and resistance.
>
>
> The stories and reports were often about people who would otherwise have
> been forgotten. Rachel Auerbach wrote in the archive about the soup kitchen
> she managed in the ghetto. She described her voluble cook, Gutchke, who
> exuberantly sang Yiddish ballads in the kitchen, gave her pots nicknames
> and
> had a casual approach to hygiene that saw her routinely dip her fingers in
> the soup. Gutchke, who had recently married an elderly widower and scholar,
> was barely literate, and she took great pride in her husband's erudition.
> Auerbach, at one point, caught her trying to sneak food home to him. "Why
> did I shame her and depress her?" Auerbach wrote. "Why didn't I understand
> that through this little transgression she wanted to gladden and strengthen
> her elderly helpless husband who had become like a child? How blind, how
> stupid we were then—on the brink of extermination."
>
> Leyb Goldin, a journalist and translator of European literature, left
> behind
> a short story called "Chronicle of a Single Day." The main character in his
> story, an intellectual and former revolutionary named Arke, is wasting
> away.
> His legs are nearly useless sticks. He has nothing left to sell. A soup
> kitchen is his only source of food. He staggers slowly through the streets,
> past the emaciated corpses, usually stripped of their clothes, and the
> gaunt
> army of beggars. He wonders when death will take him. The Nazi blockage of
> food intended for the ghetto has led to 100,000 people dying of starvation.
> There is an internal war between Arke and his stomach. "If you're hungry,
> you cease to be human, you become a beast," he says.
>
> "... It's your stomach and you," he says. "It's 90 percent your stomach and
> a little bit you. A small remnant, an insignificant remnant of the Arke who
> once was. The one who thought, read, taught, dreamed. ...
>
> "... The war has been going on for a full two years, and you've eaten
> nothing but soup for some four months—no, longer than your whole life until
> now. From yesterday's soup to today's is an eternity, and I can't imagine
> that I'll be able to survive another twenty-four hours of this overpowering
> hunger. But these four months are no more than a dark, empty nightmare. Try
> to salvage something from them, remember something in particular—it's
> impossible. One black, dark mass."
>
> Arke gets a second bowl of soup when the soup-kitchen waitress forgets to
> collect his ticket, and he is plagued by guilt.
>
> He peers late in the afternoon into the window of a hospital where doctors
> are operating on a child.
> But why, why? Why save? Why, to whom, to what is the child being brought
> back?
> And suddenly you remember that dead Jew, whom you nearly tripped over
> today.
> What's more, you now see him more clearly than before, when you were
> actually looking at him. Somewhere, years ago, there was a mother who fed
> him and, while cleaning his head, knew that her son was the cleverest, the
> most talented, the most beautiful. Told her aunt, her neighbors his funny
> sayings. Sought and delighted in every feature in which he resembled his
> father, his father. And the word Berishl was not just a name to her, but an
> idea, the content of a life, a philosophy. And now the brightest and most
> beautiful child in the world lies in a strange street, and his name isn't
> even known; and there's a stink, and instead of his mother, a brick kisses
> his head and a drizzling rain soaks the well-known newspaper around his
> face. And over there, they're operating on a child, just as if this hadn't
> happened, and they save it; and below, in front of the gate stands the
> mother, who knows that her Berishl is the cleverest and the most beautiful
> and the most talented—Why? For whom? For whom? ...
> ... 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 2 or 3 years old, in their best clothes for their final journey, gave
> them small blue knapsacks and let them carry a favorite toy and book.
>
> Rabbi Shimon Huberband, who too was murdered at Treblinka, explained how
> the
> occupation provided a demented and uninhibited playground for sadists. He
> writes of being seized with other Jews and held for a week in a
> forced-labor
> site called Dynasty where cars of the SS were repaired. A German named
> Schultz beat the rabbi, spat in his mouth, forced him to lick his boots and
> then, after a savage assault that saw Huberband briefly lose consciousness,
> ordered him to drink the contents of a spittoon. The Germans made kidnapped
> Jews at the repair yard get on all fours and play what was called the "dog
> game." Pieces of brick and plaster were hurled at the men. They had to
> catch
> the objects in their mouths. Those who did not catch the objects were
> beaten
> again. Schultz periodically left the repair yard "hunting for individual
> Jews." He targeted "only fat, rich, and elegantly dressed Jews." He forced
> them to pay him huge bribes to avoid the degradation. Those who could not
> pay became his toys. Sadism was often a prelude to murder.
>
> 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."
>
> Ringelblum, as Samuel D. Kassow wrote in "Who Will Write Our History?:
> Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto," "was absolutely
> convinced that the story of Jewish suffering, no matter how terrible, was a
> universal story and not just a Jewish one. And evil, no matter how great,
> could not be placed outside of history."
>
> We all have the capacity for evil. The line between the executioner and the
> victim is razor-thin. Ringelblum and his writers warned us of how easy it
> is
> to surrender our better selves in the name of survival. They cautioned us
> against the danger of political ideologies, careerism, opportunism, the
> lust
> for violence and the loss of empathy. They excoriated those who survived at
> the expense of another. Ringelblum and his writers buried their records
> shortly before most of them were killed. In their final moments they cried
> out for us to be faithful to the good. They could not save themselves. But
> they could, they hoped, save us.
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