Hell on earth: account of the last days of the Warsaw ghetto found

[emad]

The Independent
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
08 December 2004


A Jewish woman hiding in a lice-infested basement while the ghetto around her was engulfed by fire documented how "hell has come to Earth" in a graphic diary of the last, desperate, weeks of the Warsaw uprising in 1943.

The harrowing day-to-day description of a few dozen unarmed and starving people awaiting their fate in the surrounded and overcrowded shelter is the only surviving contemporary account of life in the burning ghetto as the Nazis systematically razed it to the ground.

The diary, which ends with the poignant observation that "we are living by the day, the hour, the moment", was only recently unearthed from among the archives at the Ghetto Fighters' House, a museum in the Kibbutz Lochamei Haghettaot in northern Israel.

It begins on 24 April, just five days after some 200 starving Jewish fighters began an uprising that lasted for almost four weeks despite the overwhelming superiority of the Nazi forces determined to extinguish it.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=590829

[gingergreen]

1. now that's intense

I was at Dachau a couple of months ago (concentration camp outside of Munich).

It really is incomprehensible the hell those poor people endured.

[Quakerfriend]

2. Yes, absolutely incomprehensible

The power of the human spirit is incredible.

[goclark]

8. It is incomprehensible

that this ever happened on this earth.

And it is incomprehensible that anyone would ever let anything remotely like this EVER happen again.

Wake up America!

[moondust]

3. God is great!

When he's not on vacation.

[Octafish]

4. Never Again.

Yet today the BFEE works to bring back fascist rule.

[Disturbed]

5. Falloujah

Has mankind improved?

[Octafish]

7. Not the wealthiest and most powerful.

Those with the means to transform the world into a paradise use their power and wealth to lord it over a vast wasteland.

In the mid-1970s I read that if the USA and then-USSR were to devote one year's defense expenditures they could, literally, change the direction of the world.

With that money, every community of more than 10,000 people without a hospital would receive one and every town of more than 10k without running water would receive it.

That's just one year. Imagine what could've been done with all the trillions Reagan, the Wimp and Smirk have squandered: Diseases cured. People fed. People educated. Poverty eliminated.

(That's not redistribution of wealth. it's a change in fiscal policy. Still, the reich wing calls it "class-warfare." In reality, it's called "empowerment.")

[knight_of_the_star]

6. I pray to the Gods that we need not act so radically

Yet I stay ready in the worst situation that we must.

[bobbieinok]

9. I first learned about the Warsaw ghetto when I read John Hersey's

book The Wall, published in 1950.

I think I read it either in undergrad or grad school.

It really upset me. It was also where I first heard about the British trying to stop the Jews from escaping to Palestine.

The book was later made into a movie with Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood, I think.

One event in the book that has remained with me: as the group is trying to escape (through the sewers?), a baby starts to cry. Since any sound might betray them to the Nazis, the mother smothers her child.

[kurtyboy]

10. When I was a younger man, I visited the site. Macabre day for me.

I was part of a group of American HS students touring through Europe on an old-time (1950s era) exchange program to promote a better world. We were called "student ambassadors" and our program's slogan was "Peace through Understanding." (check out the Eisenhower-conceived program here: http://www.studentambassadors.org/ ...still goin' strong after five decades.)

Anyway, the year was 1980, and our trip to see the Olympics in the USSR was rerouted because of Afghanistan. Instead we went to Poland.

Tonight I don't have the energy to relate just how profound this visit to a nation behind the Iron Curtain was for me--and how it's effects on the way I see politics are marked, even now.

Anyway, at one point in our trip, we visited the area that had been the Warsaw Ghetto. I remember it like it happened yesterday. It was an open field. Our communist guide (minder) informed us that since the end of the war, nothing had been built on the site in honor of the dead and as a way of reminding everyone of the hoorors of the Holocaust. (I wonder if this is still the case). Our group walked around the field, more or less in a loose clump, for several minutes.

It was a gray day--like every building, road, face, and blade of grass in Poland--Gray. The air was still. And yet a familiar smell came to my nostrils--the smell of meat. I don't mean the smell of a steak you just picked up at the Safeway, either. I mean the smell of fresh kills.

I grew up on a small farm, and my Dad supplemented his niggardly disability pension by raising and selling meat--beef, pork, chicken. I had taken part in the deaths of hundreds or maybe thousands of animals, and I knew the smell---

It was the smell of slaughter: of skinning, of evisceration, of bleeding, of cutting. The smell of fresh kills--you cannot mistake it if you know it--

I smelled it there for about five minutes. I looked around, terribly confused. No one else in our group of thirty seemed to notice what to me was completely overwhelming. Nobody.

I didn't say a word--but I was freaking out. A minute later, another kid in our group--a bible-thumping Catholic named Jerry--walked over to me, looking almost as confused.

"Do you smell that?" he asked with saucer-shaped eyes. I only nodded, because NOBODY else was saying a word about it. We stared at each other, wide-eyed, for what seemed like an hour (only a minute) and walked away from the field.

I never spoke of it again, until now. I wonder where Jerry is. I wonder if he has the same haunting memory twenty-five years later.

We were in Krakow two days after this event, and our whole group snuck out of sight of our minders and went to Auschwitz, against the wishes of the Communist government. We spent several hours there, and I cried like a baby when nobody was looking.

I'm crying now, also.

I cry a lot over such matters, but I'm beginning to forget why, and for whom.

Maybe for me?

That'll be all for now
Kurt

[Tsiyu]

11. You haven't forgotten why

Strange and awesome experience you had.

There is a reason for everything.

I hope you and I never have to smell that fresh kill.