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OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS

Editors
J. MADDICOT T R. J. W. EVANS
J. HARRIS B. WARD-PERKINS
J. ROBERTSON R. SERVICE
P. A. SL ACK
This page intentionally left blank
Writing the Holocaust
Identity, Testimony, Representation

ZOË VANIA WAXMAN

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© Zoë Vania Waxman 2006
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
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Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk

ISBN 0–19–920638–4 978–0–19–920638–4

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Sharon Hannah Levine
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgements

This book arises from my doctoral thesis. I am extremely grateful to

the Faculty of History, Oxford University, and St Antony’s College,
Oxford, for providing me with an Oxford University Graduate
Studentship, and also to the managers of the Arnold, Bryce, and Read
Funds for awarding me the 1999–2000 Lothian Studentship in
Modern History. My thesis could not have been written without the
expertise of my supervisor, Jonathan Webber. His extraordinary
knowledge of the Holocaust and Jewish history were invaluable. I
would also like to thank Connie Webber for her generous hospitality.
Nick Stargardt and Isabel Wollaston examined my thesis. Their
insightful suggestions instructed the writing of this book, and I am
indebted to Nick Stargardt for his time and patience in seeing it
through to publication.
I benefited from innumerable inspiring and challenging conversa-
tions with Mark Greenaway. We discussed many ideas over the
course of days, if not months, and without him a very different book
would have been written. He also provided friendship and support at
a time when it was greatly needed. I hope he knows how much
I appreciate it.
I would also like to thank my colleagues at Mansfield College,
Oxford, for providing me with a supportive environment in which to
finish the project, especially Michael Freeden, Kathryn Gleadle,
David Leopold, Ron Nettler, Lucinda Rumsey, Prince Saprai, and my
constantly stimulating tutees. Particular thanks go to Paul Lodge for
being such a loyal and thoughtful friend. The Oxford Centre for
Hebrew and Jewish Studies has been similarly encouraging of both
my research and my teaching. I would particularly like to thank the
many graduate students who have developed my thinking on the
Holocaust, and also David Rechter, for his kindness and advice.
viii Acknowledgements
Josie McClellan and William Whyte have been generous not only
with their considerable intellects but also with their friendship. A big
thank you to you both. I am also greatly appreciative of the many
others who have read and commented on the different parts of this
book in its various stages. Particular thanks to Susannah Heschel,
Esther Jilovsky, Matthew Reisz, David Rundle, Dan Stone, and Jean
van Altena for her much needed help in preparing the manuscript for
publication. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their love
and the constant distractions.
 Contents

Note on Foreign Language Names and Terms x

Introduction 1
1. Writing as Resistance? Bearing Witness in the Warsaw
Ghetto 7
2. Writing to Survive: The Testimony of the Concentration
Camps 50
3. Writing to Remember: The Role of the Survivor 88
4. Writing Ignored: Reading Women’s Holocaust Testimonies 122
5. Writing the Ineffable: The Representation of Testimony 152
Epilogue 185

Bibliography 189
Index 215
 Note on Foreign Language Names and Terms

To honour the original intentions of the authors, when using testi-

monies and other primary documents, or when citing historians and
other theorists, original names and spellings have been retained. When
referring to places that now have accepted English names, such as
Warsaw, names are given in that form. However, to preserve accuracy
and authenticity, and in line with current English trends, pre-war
names with their original spellings are used in other cases. Many places
in countries that were occupied were re-named by the Germans.
However, with the exception of the German-named Auschwitz (for
the Polish O∂wiçcim) and Theresienstadt (for Terezín), the original
native names are given. For example, the Polish ‘Che3mno’ is used
rather than the German ‘Kulmnof ’. Except in direct quotations, dia-
critics are used for all Latin-alphabet languages. For example, Be3≈ec
not Belzec, and #ódΩ not Lodz. For the non-Latin-alphabet languages
of Hebrew and Yiddish, non-scholarly transliteration systems are used.
In the case of books with foreign-language titles I have included an
English translation in parentheses at the first mention, and, where
appropriate, other foreign-language terms are treated in the same way.
 Introduction

Show an interest in this document. It contains rich material for

the historian.
Za3man Gradowski

There is now an enormous literature attesting to the magnitude of the

Holocaust. From the beleaguered witnesses writing in the ghettos and
the concentration camps, to the émigré survivors committed to
remembering the dead, countless attempts have been made not only
to document the atrocities but to retrieve some meaning from what
the Jews were forced to endure. Increasingly, historians, philosophers,
and theologians are being left to confront this daunting task. As they
inherit the diaries and other documents written by those who knew
they would not survive, or the memoirs produced by those who have
dedicated their lives to educating future generations, they have to
decide how these testimonies should be comprehended and repre-
sented. For example: as testaments to the strength of the human
spirit; as historical documents; as attempts to describe the ineffable.
To answer such questions, it is necessary to resist the tendency of
recent Holocaust scholarship to universalize or collectivize Holocaust
testimony, and instead to revive the particular by uncovering the mul-
tiple layers within testimony. It is only by exploring the social and his-
torical context of Holocaust testimony that we can appreciate the
sheer diversity of witnesses’ experiences.
Three main theses emerge during the course of the present study.
First, Holocaust testimony has a history—a history that has been
largely ignored because testimony is usually treated as a separate,
homogenized, self-contained canon. Secondly, Holocaust testimony
2 Introduction
not only has a history, one that goes back to the events of the
Holocaust, it is also contingent upon and mediated by this history.
Bearing witness is inextricably entwined with the social and historical
conditions in which it is done; it is dependent on contemporary con-
ceptions of identity, memory, and representation. Many witnesses
were fully aware of both their role as documenters and of the historical
importance of their experiences as they unfolded, and this guided their
writing. Finally, Holocaust testimony attests to the heterogeneity of
Holocaust experiences. The Holocaust was not just one event, but
many different events, witnessed by many different people, over a time
span of several years and covering an expansive geographical area. The
following chapters will look at testimony written both during and
after the Holocaust, including the testimonies of its first chroniclers,
confined to the Nazi-enforced ghettos; the rare testimony constructed
in the concentration camps; and post-war testimony, including today’s
survivors, writing as part of a ‘collective memory’.¹
While no study of testimony can be comprehensive, as the vast
majority of victims perished without ever writing down their experi-
ences, the testimonies featured are written by a wide variety of
authors from both Eastern and Western Europe. They come from
both men and women, the old, and from those who were children
during the war. Some were educated, some religious, some both, and
some neither. The primary focus is on post-war English-language
materials readily accessible to the general reader. This allows us to
look at the construction of testimony within the context of its pub-
lication and reception, and thus reassess the manner in which we
¹ In contrast to Sigmund Freud’s conception of memory as essentially imposed, the
French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, a student of Émile Durkheim who made the ori-
ginal contribution that memory is necessarily socially constructed, proposed that ‘collective
memory’ be understood as the ‘social frameworks’ on to which individual memories are
woven. In other words, while remembering may be done individually, it is social groups
that determine the form that the remembering takes. See Maurice Halbwachs, On
Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, 1992). Peter Novick further elaborates
that collective memory should not be understood as the past living on in the present, but
rather how present and future concerns dictate which bits of the past we remember (Peter
Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London, 2000),
3; for the American publication, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New
York, 1999)).
 Introduction 3
approach the reading of testimony. Published testimonies not only
relate witnesses’ experiences, but also tell us something about collect-
ive understandings of the Holocaust. Although considerable weight is
given to witnessing as a specifically Jewish response to the events of
the Holocaust, also included are testimonies of non-Jewish victims,
including the Polish poet Tadeusz Borowksi and Charlotte Delbo, a
member of the French Resistance Movement. However, because this
work is primarily concerned with Jewish experiences, the testimonies
of other groups singled out for persecution under the Nazi regime,
such as the Sinti (German Gypsies), the Roma (Gypsies of Eastern
Europe), and Jehovah’s Witnesses are not covered.
The first chapter looks at the testimony written during the events
of the Holocaust, while the following chapters focus predominantly
on survivors’ testimonies written after the war. Along the way it will
be seen how the conditions and motivations for bearing witness
changed. Chapter 1 examines the work of Emmanuel Ringelblum, a
trained social historian and teacher, who initiated the Warsaw-based
secret archives of Oneg Shabbat (Sabbath Delight—a code-name for
the clandestine Sabbath afternoon gatherings). These archives, which
represent the most systematic attempt to record Jewish suffering dur-
ing the Holocaust, were dedicated to finding the best way to record
the uprooting of communities, and the suffering and destruction of
Polish Jewry.² Ringelblum and his colleagues in the Warsaw ghetto

² The #ódΩ Ghetto Chronicle, compiled by the Department of the Archives of the
Jewish Council in #ódΩ (German: Litzmanstadt) in south-west Warsaw, documents the
life of the Jews of #ódΩ from January 1941 to July 1944. See Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.),
The Chronicle of the #ódΩ Ghetto, 1941–44, trans. Richard Lourie, Joachim Neugroschel,
et al. (New Haven, 1984). Photographs taken by Mendel Grossman have also survived as
part of the archive; see Mendel Grossman, With a Camera in the Ghetto, ed. Zvi Szner and
Alexander Sened (New York, 1977). In Kovno (Lithuanian: Kaunas) in central Lithuania,
the Judenrat (Jewish Council) commissioned artists to make a visual record of Jewish life.
An engineer by the name of Hirsh Kadushin became the photographic chronicler of the
ghetto. Using a small camera concealed in his clothing, he managed to film many aspects
of ghetto life. He obtained the film from a nurse who worked with him in the ghetto hos-
pital. Kadushin’s buried photographs were discovered after the war, and can now be
viewed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Archives were
also set up in Bia3ystok in north-east Poland; Vilna (Lithuanian: Vilnius), the capital of
Lithuania; Kraków, in southern Poland; and Lvov (Polish: Lwów, German: Lemberg) in
eastern Galicia.
4 Introduction
were able to amass a considerable amount of information; he noted:
‘The drive to write down one’s memories is powerful . . . even young
people in labour camps do it.’³ By secretly recording Jewish life in
Poland during the German occupation, and continuing the Jewish
tradition of witnessing, the Warsaw ghetto chroniclers, both individu-
ally and collectively, performed important acts of resistance. They
were able to foresee that what they were experiencing would one day
be studied as important historically, and this awareness shaped their
writing.⁴ Chaim Kaplan, a committed diarist of the Warsaw ghetto,
even went so far as to anticipate the publication of his memoir: ‘The
time may come when these words will be published. At all events they
will furnish historiographic material from the chronicle of our
agony.’⁵
Considerably fewer testimonies were written in the concentration
camps, or survived them. Chapter 2 highlights how the conditions of
the concentration camps largely militated against the writing of testi-
mony, and looks at the few important exceptions, including the writ-
ings of the Sonderkommando (special detachment) prisoners forced to
work in the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau,⁶ who consciously
resisted the Nazis not only by leaving documentation of their exist-
ence, but also by bearing witness to the destruction of the European
Jews. The testimonies of survivors reveal how the concentration
camps disconnected prisoners from their previous identities. They

³ Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel
Ringelblum, trans. Jacob Sloan (New York, 1958), 31; originally published in Yiddish as
Notitsen fun Varshever geto (Warsaw, 1952).
⁴ There are 272 diaries, written in Polish and Yiddish, held at the ˛IH (˛ydowski
Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute)) in Warsaw. Sixty-five of the diaries are
concerned with the Warsaw ghetto. Not all the diaries have been published.
⁵ Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans.
Abraham I. Katsh (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), 121; originally published in Hebrew as
Megilat yishurin: yoman geto Varshah, ed. Abraham I. Katsh (Tel Aviv, 1966).
⁶ What is commonly referred to as ‘Auschwitz’ was a conglomerate of two main camps
and some fifty subcamps and purpose-built factory compounds situated to the west and
south-west of the town of O∂wiçcim (renamed Auschwitz by the Germans), in eastern
Upper Silesia, 50 km south-west of Kraków. The name ‘Auschwitz’ will be used to refer to
the general collectivity of the camp when distinctions between its various components
are not relevant, or when referring to more than one of the camps. The two largest camps
were Auschwitz I (the Stammlager, or base camp), established by Heinrich Himmler,
 Introduction 5
also show that it was essential to regain a part of the past in order to
find some meaning that would allow them to carry on the struggle to
survive; for many, it was the desire to bear witness, and hence the
post-war memoir became a vehicle for the resurrection of identity.
Chapter 3 charts the path of the ‘liberated prisoners’ and their
gradual re-categorization over time, first as ‘Displaced Persons’, and
eventually as ‘survivors’. It shows how the post-war introduction of
the concept ‘the Holocaust’ to describe survivors’ experiences and the
adoption of the post-war identity of the survivor as witness acted as
organizational frameworks for survivors’ experiences, enabling per-
sonal experiences of suffering to be viewed as essential components of
a collective historical event. To illustrate the hegemony of collective
memory, Chapter 4 looks at the representation of women’s Holocaust
testimonies, to show how studies of women’s lives during the
Holocaust, in attempting to portray women in a specific manner, seek
a homogeneity of experience that did not exist, overlooking testi-
monies that do not fit with preconceived gender roles. These studies
often project their own concerns, selecting testimonies that reinforce
their pre-existing ideals and ignoring ‘difficult’ testimonies that reveal
experiences outside the dictates of collective memory—such as the
female Jewish Kapos (heads of work commandos) who came to mimic
the behaviour of their SS (Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad)) captors.
The concluding chapter argues that while the role of the witness
has given survivors a sense of purpose, their bearing of witness is

Reichsführer (Reich Leader) of the SS in April 1940, as a concentration camp for Polish
political prisoners, but which operated a gas chamber and crematorium I from September
1940 until July 1943, and Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II), hereafter referred to simply
as Birkenau (Polish: Brzezinka). Birkenau, an extension camp built less than 3 km to the
north-west of the original camp in October 1941, was originally intended for Soviet pris-
oners of war. Approximately five times the size of Auschwitz I, it later became a death camp
housing the principal gas chambers and crematoria (crematoria II, III, IV, and V). Prisoners
not murdered on arrival were housed in the Gypsy family camp, the Czech family camp,
the Frauenabteilung (women’s section), or one of the many men’s barracks. Auschwitz-
Monowitz (Auschwitz III), hereafter referred to as Monowitz (Polish: Monowice), became
a slave labour camp in 1941, and included Buna Werke, a synthetic-rubber works erected
by I. G. Farben. See Jonathan Webber, The Future of Auschwitz: Some Personal Reflections
(Oxford, 1992), 4 n. 3, and Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the
Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, Ind., 1994).
6 Introduction
inextricably mediated by the post-war concept of the Holocaust and
by collective memory, both of which determine the parameters of
Holocaust representation. It can be seen that the function of collect-
ive memory is not to focus on the past in order to find out more
about the Holocaust, but to use the past to inform and address pres-
ent concerns. Also, it shows how the role of the witness has expanded,
so that survivors—who are considered unique—now inform us not
just about the Holocaust, but provide universal lessons regarding
morality and the human condition. As the historian Christopher
Browning has observed, ‘perhaps the most serious challenge in the use
of survivor testimony as historical evidence is posed not by those who
are inherently hostile to it but by those who embrace it too uncrit-
ically and emotionally.’⁷ The sanctification of testimony further serves
to entrench and concretize the position of accepted Holocaust narrat-
ives and forms of representation. Inevitably, this leaves the difficult
testimonies that stand outside official narratives in an awkward posi-
tion; it also sets the agenda for the representation of further testi-
monies that have to negotiate the political and ideological concerns of
collective memory.
⁷ Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar
Testimony (Madison, 2003), 40.
 1
Writing as Resistance? Bearing Witness
in the Warsaw Ghetto

My utmost concern is for hiding my diary so that it will be

preserved for future generations.
Kaplan, Scroll of Agony

Jews writing in the ghettos consciously defied the Nazis’ intention

to leave no trace of Jewish existence. By secretly recording Jewish
life in Poland during the German occupation, the Warsaw ghetto
chroniclers—both on an individual and a collective level, and medi-
ated by their Jewish identity—performed an important act of resist-
ance. This chapter documents the various motivations for their
writing, including personal confession, the need to produce historical
testimony, to resist, to assert individual agency, to continue the Jewish
tradition of witnessing, and to provide a memorial.
The writings cited in this chapter—the journal of Emmanuel
Ringelblum and the diaries of Chaim Kaplan, Janusz Korczak, and
Mary Berg, among others—were written by those not only inextricably
immersed in the events they describe, but also inextricably linked to
their historically contingent Jewish identities. While memory and
post-Holocaust identity are coming to be acknowledged as factors
that mediate the memories of survivors, the observations of the
ghetto diarists are treated almost reverentially, as if providing snap-
shots of history, unaffected by the social, economic, and political
8 Writing as Resistance?
circumstances in which they were written. However, this chapter
demonstrates that the ghetto diaries cannot be read as accounts of
pure, unmediated experiences, for they are subject to the negotiation
of particular identities—predominantly a shared sense of Jewish
identity and the need to bear witness.
Emmanuel Ringelblum’s journal indicates that he, like many other
ghetto diarists, saw himself as writing from within and for a specific
community, rather than as an isolated individual. Chaim Kaplan
describes the suffering experienced daily in the Warsaw ghetto, in
particular the hunger and frustration of the Jews; he saw it as his
duty to describe the suffering, and suggests that the recording of it
instilled in him a sense of purpose. Even personal accounts like Janusz
Korczak’s, which make little reference to the growing turmoil in the
ghetto and the deportations, are concerned with the transmitting of
experience from the realization of its cultural, religious, and historical
importance.
A further important category of testimony included in this chapter
is the testimony of the escapees. For example, Yakov Grojanowski,
who managed to escape from the Che3mno (Kulmhof during the
German occupation) death camp and reach Warsaw to recount his
experiences. His testimony shows that during the war testimony had
a very concrete function: to warn the Jews of their impending fate and
to inform the free world of the tragedy befalling the Jews.¹ It also
demonstrates that bearing witness can be regarded as resistance not
just in a spiritual or emotional sense, but also in practical terms. In
Chapter 5 it will be seen how the concept of resistance has continued
to occupy a central place in the comprehension of Holocaust testi-
mony, not only when looking at writings produced during the war,
but also when considering the post-war recollections of survivors. In
particular, the idea of testimony as collective Jewish resistance against
the Nazi attempt to erase any trace of the Jews of German-occupied

¹ The testimony of Yakov Grojanowski has been published in full in Martin Gilbert,
The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London, 1987), 252–79.
 Writing as Resistance? 9
Europe continued to be a substantial part of the motivation for sur-
vivors to come forward to tell their stories.
However, not all the ghetto diarists were concerned with collective
resistance. For example, the diaries of Adam Czerniaków, head of
the Warsaw Judenrat, and Calel Perechodnik, a member of the
Ordnungsdienst (Order Service—the official name for the German-
organized Jewish police), elude the rhetoric of resistance. Their
morally ambiguous position within the structure of ghetto life is mir-
rored in their writings. Czerniaków and Perechodnik write not of a
shared sense of suffering, but of isolation and disconnection. While
Czerniaków’s rather emotionless diary is widely cited as an important
source for exploring the role of the Judenrat in the fate of Polish Jewry,
Perechodnik’s moral indictment of himself has been largely over-
looked. Arguably, despite the many errors of judgement with which
he is charged, Czerniaków was still trying to work for the Jewish
community, whereas Perechodnik admits that he joined the
Ordnungsdienst in a desperate attempt to save himself and his family.
Their writings, like those cited above, offer important insights into
how these men perceived their position in the ghetto and what
prompted them to act the way they did. Also, they attest to the
heterogeneous nature of Holocaust testimony.
The mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto, which began on
22 July 1942, brought renewed urgency to the matter of resistance.
They showed that cultural resistance in the form of the continuation
of intellectual and spiritual life was no longer enough to sustain the
survival of the Jews. Jewish leaders instead called for armed resistance.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, although an extraordinary act, was
limited in scope. However, its significance for Jewish self-identity is
clear; as Mordecai Anielewicz wrote shortly before his death, ‘The last
desire of my life has been fulfilled. Jewish self-defence is a fact.’²

² ‘The Last Letter from Mordecai Anielewicz, Warsaw Ghetto Revolt Commander,
April 23, 1943’, in Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot (eds.),
Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and
Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union, 4th edn. (Jerusalem, 1981), 315–16.
10 Writing as Resistance?

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE

WARSAW GHET TO

German troops invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and Warsaw

surrendered on 27 September 1939. In the pre-war period the Jewish
community in Poland had represented the largest community of
European Jewry; by 1939 there were around 3.3 million Jews living in
Poland, and 375,000 in Warsaw, which was a major centre of Jewish
cultural and political life.³ On 21 September 1939, Reinhard
Heydrich, head of the Security Police, sent a letter to the commanders
of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) setting out instructions
regarding Jews in the occupied territories and specifying the concen-
tration of Jews in large cities and the introduction of the Judenräte.⁴
Around 90,000 more Jews came to Warsaw from #ódΩ, W3oc3awek,
Kalisz, and other cities and towns in the Western District of Poland—
either as refugees or because they were deported by the Germans. On
26 October 1939, the Generalgouvernement was established to admin-
ister the central section of Poland covering Kraków, Lublin, Warsaw,
and Radom. It was ruled from Kraków by the German governor-
general, Hans Frank.⁵ The Warsaw Judenrat was ordered to produce
lists of all Jews living in their vicinity; all Jewish bank accounts and
deposit accounts were blocked, and Jews were forbidden to have more
than 2,000 z3otys in cash.⁶ On 17 October 1939, Ludwig Fischer, the
governor of the Warsaw district, had issued a decree for the ‘disposal

³ On the history of Jews in Poland, see Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the
Jews in Poland, 1919–1939 (Berlin, 1983). For an account of the worsening situation of
European Jewry, see Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New
York, 1975). For a study of Warsaw Jewry during the Holocaust, see Israel Gutman, The
Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, trans. Ina Friedman (Brighton,
1982). Gutman himself participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
⁴ See Document 73, in Arad et al. (eds.), Documents on the Holocaust, 173–8.
⁵ After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the province of Galicia, made up of
parts of the pre-war Polish provinces of Lwów, Stanis3ów, and Tarnapol, was added to the
Generalgouvernement.
⁶ Cited in Barbara Engelking, Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust
and its Consequences. An Investigation Based on Personal Narratives, trans. Emma Harris,
ed. Gunnar S. Paulsson (London, 2001), 21. In 1939, 1 US dollar was worth approxi-
mately 2.6 Polish z3otys (ibid. 73).
 Writing as Resistance? 11
and leasing of Jewish enterprises’, and on 30 November 1939, a fur-
ther decree ordered Jews to wear a white armband imprinted with a
blue Star of David on the sleeve of their outer clothing. On the same
day it was ordered that Jewish shops be marked with the Jewish star,
and on 18 December, all Jewish property had to be registered.⁷ By 2
October 1940, Fischer drafted an order for the establishment of a
ghetto in Warsaw.⁸ The decree was announced on 12 October 1940,
which coincided with Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). On that
day, Chaim Kaplan, a teacher and diarist of the Warsaw ghetto, noted:
The Jewish community of Warsaw left nothing out in its prayers, but poured
its supplications before its Father in Heaven in accordance with the ancient
custom of Israel. To our greatest sorrow, as the day drew to a close, at a time
when the gates of tears were still open, we learned that a new edict had been
issued for us, a barbaric edict which by its weight and results is greater than all
the other edicts made against us up to now, to which we have become accus-
tomed. At last the ghetto edict has gone into effect. For the time being it will
be an open ghetto, but there is no doubt that in short order it will be closed.⁹

Kaplan was right: on 16 November 1940, the ghetto was declared a

Seuchensperrgebiet (quarantine area) and was sealed with a 10-foot
wall, imprisoning 138,000 Jews (the 113,000 non-Jewish Poles living
in the area were forced to leave). It was soon supplemented by the
arrival of numerous refugees. Around 30 per cent of the population of
Warsaw was forced into 2.4 per cent of the city’s area, and it became
the largest ghetto in European history. At its height, more than
400,000 people were imprisoned there.

EMMANUEL RINGELBLUM AND ONEG SHABB AT

When the war began, Emmanuel Ringelblum was in Geneva, serving

as a delegate to the Twenty-first World Zionist Congress. He returned

⁷ Ibid. These are only a sample of the anti-Jewish decrees issued; they give a succinct
insight into the social and economic conditions to which the Jews of Warsaw were subjected.
⁸ See Document 100, in Arad et al. (eds.), Documents on the Holocaust, 220–1.
⁹ Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 207–8.
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