The Warsaw Ghetto:
Kosciesza, Bogumil
THROUGH THE EYE OF HISTORY THE WARSAW GHETTO A Christian's Testimony Wladyslaw Bartoszewski Beacon Press, $14.95, 115 pp. Bogumil Kosciesza There was no ghetto in Warsaw in 1940 when...
...The Warsaw Ghetto was first written in German to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the ghetto uprising...
...It may even serve to make the incomprehensible a little less so...
...ctive antidote to complacency...
...Ringelblum conservatively estimated that at least 60,000 people (of Warsaw's wartime Polish population of 700,000) had to be involved in providing this refuge...
...One such distortion is that the ghetto uprising was an act of desperation undertaken after everything else had failed...
...A Christian's Testimony is a testimony to the suffering of the Jews...
...It is a story of an abyss within an abyss...
...Do not let yourselves be slaughtered...
...Will we still let ourselves be deluded by a kind word from one or another Nazi killer, from some Jewish Gestapo man, from hirelings or traitors...
...It is no surprise to someone who lived those events, that this perspective does not diminish but rather augments the horror of the ghetto...
...The translation suffers from some minor problems...
...The Warsaw Ghetto is not that book...
...Bartoszewski's book clearly documents that the aid was massive, and not limited to the cities or to a particular social or political group...
...Bartoszewski is the author of eighteen books and of nearly 500 articles, and an indefatigable lecturer on the Shoah around the world...
...Demolished in this way is the fiction that Polish Jews received no financial aid from world Jewry...
...This year marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising...
...The book is almost frighteningly matter-of-fact ("this was a time when there were as yet no gas chambers and mass executions-only 'normal' deaths from exhaustion...
...Much of it is a translation of contemporary Jewish, Polish, and Nazi documents interspersed with Bartoszewski's paragraphs providing continuity and putting the documentation in its historical context...
...The Warsaw Ghetto is not an apologia...
...Some of it is harmless...
...Emanuel Ringelblum wrote that, in the autumn of 1943, tens of thousands of Jews were being hidden by the Poles in Warsaw alone...
...The passage of years has created a mythology of the ghetto...
...The impossibility of comprehending makes it easier to avoid discomforting identification with the victims, the perpetrators, or both...
...Through his writings and lectures, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski bore witness to the truth...
...The Warsaw Ghetto is part of that witness...
...The book fully lives up to its original German title: Das War-schauer Ghetto-wie es wirklich war (as it really was...
...The Warsaw Ghetto proves that axiom false...
...They decided that only children and those individuals who will be no use" in the armed struggle, because of reasons of health or age, should go...
...The opposite was in fact true:" Bartoszewski writes, "the chief organizers and leaders of the uprising were people who could have easily saved their own lives, who had secure contacts with the Polish underground movement, and had a good chance of surviving the war among the Christian Polish population...
...His concentration camp (lager) "reeducation" obviously had not taken...
...He tells of a Jewish leader (Arie Wilner) who, after he was helped by the Poles to escape the Gestapo prison, refused an offer of refHas our terrible experience taught us nothing...
...It is often said that eyewitnesses make bad historians...
...And The Warsaw Ghetto is honest: it does not shirk from telling of criminals who aided the Nazis, be those criminals Polish or Jewish...
...By the same means the book refutes the slander that the Catholic church in Poland stood idly by in the face of the genocide...
...There are, however, some myths that detract, that distort, that lie...
...Bogumil Kosciesza There was no ghetto in Warsaw in 1940 when nineteen-year-old Wladek Bartoszewski was arrested by the Nazis...
...The end of the war did not put a stop to Bartoszewski's efforts on behalf of the victims of the Nazi persecution...
...Bartoszewski puts these to rest...
...Bartoszewski, now code-named "Lud-wik," immediately became one of the leaders of the Polish effort to save Jewry from extinction...
...It thus gives the lie to the myth of "the exceptional few...
...relating and documenting the facts, Bartoszewski discredits the lie...
...But, like anything written honestly on the subject, it does provide a few pages toward it...
...Bartoszewski's The Warsaw Ghetto is an effective antidote to complacency...
...The late Adolf Berman, an underground leader and later a Knesset member, wrote:' 'The time for the Great Golden Book of the Christian Poles who reached out a helping hand to the Jews and saved them from death during the terrible 'period of contempt' will come...
...Other myths are exploded indirectly...
...I specify Poland, because the situation there was unique and without parallel in the rest of Nazi-held Europe...
...This is a tightly written book...
...Prepare to defend your own lives.' -Declaration of the Jewish Combat Association...
...It is perhaps natural to want to focus on the enormous...
...When he returned from Auschwitz in early summer 1941, the city had been forcibly torn into three districts: German, Polish, and Jewish...
...The present commemorative observances of the event and the constant focusing of attention on the cataclysms of Auschwitz and other extermination lagers, proper as they are, may tend to blur the consciousness of the perduring hell that was daily life in Nazi-occupied Poland...
...Of more than three million ethnic Poles murdered by the Nazis, some 200,000 died as a direct result of helping the Jews...
...Bartoszewski has no axe to grind, no personal guilt, real or imagined, to motivate and color his testimony...
...Bartoszewski tells the story of the Warsaw Ghetto not in a vacuum, but against the background of Nazi-occupied Poland, a background of "indescribable conditions . . . amid the ragings of German terror that were also directed at the Christian Poles, while the blood of masses of executed Polish hostages was flowing in the streets every day" (Report of the Jewish National Committee, Warsaw, 1943...
...Warsaw, 1942 uge and returned to fight and to die in the ghetto...
...It is to be hoped they will be corrected in the next edition...
...Bartoszewski quotes the decision by the Jewish combat organizations and the associated political branches to refuse the Polish underground's offer of asylum for the Jewish cultural, intellectual, political, and social leaders...
...Thus the only good that could come from the evil of those events is lost...
Vol. 115 • September 1988 • No. 15
