Jewish Life in Occupied Poland

...But whereas Nansen confined his account mainly to his personal experience, Ringelblum hardly even mentions himself in his work...

...Reviewed by Jerzy G. Gliksman Author, "Tell the West" THE POSTWAR PERIOD has produced a growing literature devoted to the experiences of people under Nazi occupation...

...He describes the problem of housing, and gives an exact account of the methods used in constructing hiding places during the period when the Jews were trying to escape persecution...

...Elsewhere he discusses the moral question of whether one ought to save Jewish children from annihilation by giving them to strangers...

...Instead, he has given us a vast amount of detail on life in the Jewish community in Warsaw and, wherever possible, in other cities of occupied Poland...

...Thus, the book is to some extent the result of a collective Jerzy G. Gliksman, a Warsaw lawyer, who came to this country after being released from a Soviet labor camp, and worked here as a social scientist, died in September...

...It is all the more regrettable that the text here and there is marred by lapses of translation...

...Most of these books were written post factum, from the authors' recollections and with the benefit of hindsight...

...With this in mind, Ringelblum omits no detail that might throw light on life in the Ghetto...

...Beginning in the pre-Ghetto time, when the Jews were still living side by side with their Polish neighbors but had already been singled out for special suffering, it goes on to present a bread picture of life in the Ghetto and ends by depicting the extermination of the Jewish masses of Poland...

...Ringelblum's panorama of the Jewish tragedy in Poland embraces a period of almost three years (1940-1942...

...Among the more unfortunate of these is the rendering of kawiarnia (coffee-house) as "caviar store" or "caviar shop...

...Had he lived, he might well have been able to correct some of the errors that were inevitable in a work of this scope, conceived under such hardships...

...From Ringelblum's point of view, therefore, all events are important...

...The Jewish tragedy in its immensity is recreated in the portrayal of thousands of struggling and dying individuals-intellectuals, workers and businessmen-with their high professional skills, their wealth of cultural interests and their capacity for endurance...

...Although Ringelblum tries to confine his role to that of the chronicler, he occasionally digresses into reflections of an ethical and philosophical nature...

...Unfortunately, also, the author was not given the opportunity to prepare the final text for publication, as he perished on March 7, 1944...

...even a particle of information may turn out to be of value to the future historian or social scientist...

...But these are errors that can be corrected in future editions...

...His sense of the historian prompted the author to put his notes in the form of a chronicle, in which he records the facts and prepares the material, so that a future student of history might one day be able to supply the necessary interpretation and synthesis...

...He quotes the gossip and the jokes...

...Thus he wonders about possible ways in which mankind might avert the recurrence of periods of savagery in the future...

...Ringelblum tells of epidemics, dirt and lice...

...A chronicle of Jewish life in occupied Poland, it resembles the Nansen book in its vitality, the immediacy of its descriptions and the writer's own sense of participation in the events he relates...

...This review was found among his papers...

...As it is, the name of a well-known writer and educator, the heroic Janusz Korczak (Dr...

...They are insignificant by comparison with the magnitude of the translator's achievement and his great contribution in adding this valuable work to the "Ghetto literature" of the West...

...In his picture of the food situation, we are given an idea of the ever-rising prices and a detailed account of how the Ghetto got its food, chiefly through smuggling...

...The existence of such mysterious "caviar shops" in the starving Ghetto would have been a patent absurdity, whereas coffee-houses, which traditionally have been part of the social life of the East European intelligentsia, were almost a necessity for the businessmen and intellectuals who needed a gathering place in the overcrowded Ghetto...

...Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum belongs in this category...

...Unavoidably, material gathered in this manner, and facts and impressions noted on the spot, could not always be wholly accurate...

...The translator of the Notes has earned great merit by making the hook accessible to the English-reading public...

...Or, again, he reflects on the ethical right to save the more prominent members of Jewish society if it means sacrificing the masses...

...The image that arises from this document of a perishing community is that of a group of men and women, not free from weakness and failure, but in its main features strong, vital, heroic and full of the joy of living to the very last moment...

...It would have been quite in keeping with scientific tradition to preserve the original spelling of the Polish names...

...Moreover, the work of a group of people who were connected by ties of a political nature (Ringelblum was a member of the Labor Zionist movement) was bound to suffer at times from a certain slant in their interpretation of facts and events...

...But a smaller group of works stand out by their special character: They are the diaries, journals and notations of victims and participants, written at the time of the events themselves, when the very act of committing facts and thoughts to paper often meant great personal danger to the writer...

...Henryk Goldschmidt), is misspelled, and even that of General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a hero of the American Revolutionary War, is slightly garbled...

...Assembling so large a body of information was clearly beyond the capacity of a single man...

...It is also a pity that the transliteration of Polish proper names contains many errors and inconsistencies...

...He depicts the different strata of Ghetto society and draws silhouettes of individuals who distinguished themselves in that community...

...effort, and the principal contribution of Ringelblum lies in the conception and organization of the Oneg Sabbath, the selection of the material and its elaboration, later on, in the finished form-a form that shocks us by its very simplicity...

...Sloan's "Guide to Pronunciation" also contains some inaccuracies...

...Ringelblum's work benefited by the help of numerous collaborators, who met and worked in the Oneg Sabbath, a group organized by Ringelblum for the sole purpose of producing the chronicle...

...He records German cruelties and Polish indifference, but is anxious to note also any sign or act of compassion among Poles and at times even among Germans...

...One such book was Odd Nansen's From Day to Day, a notable account of the experiences of a Norwegian engineer and freedom fighter, written while the author was in a Nazi prison camp...

...The author does not spare us an insight into the demoralization wrought by Ghetto life, describing in particular the infamous role of the Jewish police and the activities of the notorious Gancwajch organization...