Words to Outlive Us: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto by Michal Grynberg

Description: G26 Click images to enlarge Description Words to Outlive Us: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto by Michal Grynberg LANGUAGE: ENGLISH VG CONDITION, HARDCOVER On 19 April 1943, the Nazis began to destroy the Warsaw Ghetto. It was the Jewish Passover - a special day in the 'Goebbels calendar' - and Jewish families elsewhere in Europe celebrated with unleavened bread. Unknown to the rest of the world, the ghetto was attacked. By nightfall, the bodies of children and women lay dead on the streets. The few survivors put up a heroic struggle, however, and the SS were forced to pull back in disarray. The unequal combat lasted until 16 May, when the ghetto surrendered and the Nazis razed the quarter. The Jewish revolt would have astonished the world, had the world then known about it. Apprehension of the Polish massacre came slowly to Allied Europe. After Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, British papers had given partial accounts of how Poland's Jews had been übertragen - 'transferred' - to certain 'zones'. Occupation of Poland was swift and in 1940 the Nazis set up a ghetto in the capital of Warsaw as a holding place for Jews prior to their deportation and death. Over the summer of 1942, a total of 265,000 of the city's Jews were gassed at Treblinka camp nearby. It was the largest slaughter of a single community - Jewish or non-Jewish - in the Second World War. Words to Outlive Us, an extraordinary collection of eyewitness accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, bleakly conveys the horrors of Nazism and the dangers of blind adherence to Hitler's ideology. Few books convey so unforgettably or with such harrowing immediacy the evil of the Nazi genocide in Poland. After the war, 29 testimonies (nine of them by women) were found concealed in the ruins of the ghetto and transferred to Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute. They refute Himmler's cynical pledge that the destruction of European Jewry was to be an 'unwritten page of glory'. Now, in this vital book, these testimonies are presented for the first time outside Poland. Inevitably, this is a chronicle of human loss, pestilence and famine. The Warsaw events are unspeakable, inhuman, though they are recorded in plain, everyday speech. Only once is a witness left speechless before the incredibility of the exterminations: 'The essential truth... cannot be described even with the most powerful pen.' Indeed, at the book's terrible heart is a warning to those who deliver facile judgments of condemnation: only those who survived the ghetto have the right to forgive or condemn, and even they are not properly fit to do so, for those who fathomed the depths of human degradation did not come back to tell the tale. (The same point had been made by Primo Levi in his writings on the Nazi camps.) About 42,500 Jews are said to have escaped the Warsaw Ghetto out of an estimated 489,000. Especially disturbing are the five accounts by members of the Jewish police. After the Germans established a ghetto in Warsaw, they converted decent citizens into an institutional accessory to murder. Jewish gendarmes were required to round up fellow Jews and herd them into the cattle trucks destined each day for Treblinka. In most cases, they did so in order to survive. 'Let the reader withhold judgment until he has finished these pages - and a thousand others,' writes one ex-policeman, now consumed with guilt. A dictatorship does not sanctify its victims: it engulfs them, converts them to its methods. Testimonies by these ordinary men degraded into collaboration shed valuable light on the corruption and moral ambiguity experienced under the Nazis. As the translator Philip Boehm says in his fine introduction, they 'defy our tendency to oversimplify and judge'. Some readers may flinch from the more graphic accounts. Corpses litter the streets ('they're part of the ghetto; they fit the picture') and typhus is endemic. The overcrowding is frightful and everywhere people suffer the loss of siblings, parents, children. Germany had departed from the community of civilised human beings. 'They have made murder a civic virtue,' despairs one witness. Indeed, after the Polish Jewish uprising of 1943, the Germans gleefully detonated the Grand Synagogue and left the ghetto as rubble. Today, on Warsaw's outskirts, a bronze monument commemorates the destruction. As well as an essential documentary, this book is key to understanding atrocity. Most of the Germans who ran the ghetto were not sadists, but unremarkable Schreibtischtäter - 'desk-murderers' - who condemned thousands to death at the stroke of a pen. As these witnesses make clear, apprenticeship in Nazi obedience required stunted moral imagination. Lack of imagination (not sadism) made them cruel. In the final pages, as the Red Army come to liberate Poland, a Jew discovers a group of Wehrmacht officers cowering in a barn; she is astonished to see they carry photographs of their children. Was it possible that the 'same men who smashed the heads of innocent children before the eyes of their horrified mothers' had 'family feelings'? The children of the ghetto, as potential future enemies of the Reich, had been annihilated in their thousands. Words to Outlive us is living history: all life and death is in these burning pages. We have over 500,000 books of Jewish interest in Stock, please make sure to check out our Our eBay Store Questions, comments, Requests? 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End Time: 2024-09-25T22:18:57.000Z

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