In 1943, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who was living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, wrote “Campo dei Fiori,” his great poem about the coexistence of normality and atrocity. The Campo dei Fiori is the plaza in Rome where, in the year 1600, the heretical philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned alive by the Catholic Church; “before the flames had died,” Milosz writes, “the taverns were full again.” The same willed blindness could be noted in Warsaw, the poem declares. Just outside the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews were being starved and shot, a Ferris wheel was operating: “The bright melody drowned/the salvos from the ghetto wall,/and couples were flying/high in the cloudless sky.”
Milosz draws the comparison not to chastise “the people of Rome or Warsaw,” he says, but rather to capture
the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.
The poem, one of the first ever written about the Holocaust, captures what is perhaps its essential terror--the way the Nazis cut off their Jewish victims, legally, morally, and physically, from the rest of mankind. The Warsaw Ghetto was the logical culmination of Nazi anti-Semitism, a place where Jews could be murdered literally under the eyes of their neighbors, without anyone protesting or even paying attention.
This silencing of the Jews is one reason why every new communication from the Holocaust’s victims and witnesses--and they are still being found, 65 years later--represents not just an addition to our historical knowledge, but a kind of moral and metaphysical victory. From the diary of Anne Frank to the Ponary Diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz--buried in empty lemonade bottles in 1943, not published until 1999--such testimony refutes the Nazi idea that any part of the human race could be permanently forgotten. Hannah Arendt made this point in Eichmann in Jerusalem: “The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible.” It follows, Arendt writes, that “nothing”--no act of resistance or commemoration, even by those who consider themselves totally abandoned--”can ever be ‘practically useless,’ at least, not in the long run.”
The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (Yale University Press), an encyclopedic study by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, is a monument to that saving principle. The book, published in Polish in 2001 and now translated into English by Emma Harris, offers a decisive answer to Milosz’s despairing poem. Far from leaving no words “in any human tongue,” Engelking and Leociak show, the Jews who lived and died in the Warsaw Ghetto left so much evidence and testimony that we can reconstruct their world in amazing detail.
Simply listing some of the information Engelking and Leociak have recovered--from published memoirs, private documents, and Jewish and Polish archives--gives a sense of the scope of their undertaking. The names, phone numbers, and addresses of the functionaries in the Judenrat; the street corners where the Jewish “Order Service” police maintained permanent posts; the average number of calories consumed daily by different social groups (ranging from a minimal “high” of 1,665 for Judenrat officials to a mere 784 for beggars); a list of all the shops and businesses in the Ghetto (at 72 Zelazna Street, for instance, were a food shop run by M. Kotman, a florist run by M. Stok, a “shop” run by Sz. Rosenberg, and a clothing bazaar, owner unknown); and a calendar of all the concerts and plays performed in the Ghetto, complete with excerpts from newspaper reviews (at a concert in March 1942, David Zajdel and Maksymilian Filar played violin sonatas by Handel and Mozart, but “the pianist was insufficiently attuned to the violinist”).
Even these scattered details begin to show what was so uncanny about the Warsaw Ghetto: the persistence of the ordinary forms of modern urban life, in a place that was essentially a waiting room for Treblinka. Engelking and Leociak divide their book into six major sections, and the first four--”Topography and Communications,” “Institutions,” “Economic Life,” and “Community Life”--deal not with dying but with living. Not until the final two sections, “Deportation” and “The Armed Struggle,” does the reader encounter the inevitable fate of almost everyone in the Warsaw Ghetto.
This is an accurate reflection of the way the Jews of Warsaw experienced the Ghetto. Unlike the millions of Jews killed in Soviet territory by the mobile death squads or Einsatzgruppen, or the millions more deported to labor and death camps like Auschwitz, the 400,000 or so Jews who occupied the Ghetto were not instantly condemned to death by the Nazis. Rather, they lived in the strange interlude between the German occupation of Poland, in September 1939, and the official decision of the Nazi leadership to exterminate all the Jews, in early 1942. During this period, the Germans chose to torment the Jews of Warsaw--the largest Jewish population in the world, outside of New York--by concentrating them in a walled ghetto, destroying their religious and economic life, reducing them to starvation rations, and allowing epidemics, especially typhus, to rage freely.
