Ringelblum, like Goldin and Auerbach, was acutely aware that the soup kitchen and other charities he helped organized “did not solve the problem [of hunger], it only saves people for a short time, and then they will die anyway. The [soup kitchens] prolong the suffering but cannot bring salvation. It is an absolute fact that the clients of the soup kitchens will all die if all they have to eat is the soup they get there and the bread they get on their ration cards.” The hellish existence of the Warsaw ghetto—where within 100 square blocks a half million Jews were deliberately starved to death, exterminated through beatings and executions or seized for transport to the gas chambers over three years, brought out the worst and the best, including the majestic moment when Dr. Janusz Korczak sacrificed himself by volunteering to accompany the nearly 200 orphans he cared for to the loading platform and eventually the gas chambers at Treblinka. Korczak dressed his orphans, some only 2 or 3 years old, in their best clothes for their final journey, gave them small blue knapsacks and let them carry a favorite toy and book. Rabbi Shimon Huberband, who too was murdered at Treblinka, explained how the occupation provided a demented and uninhibited playground for sadists. He writes of being seized with other Jews and held for a week in a forced-labor site called Dynasty where cars of the SS were repaired. A German named Schultz beat the rabbi, spat in his mouth, forced him to lick his boots and then, after a savage assault that saw Huberband briefly lose consciousness, ordered him to drink the contents of a spittoon. The Germans made kidnapped Jews at the repair yard get on all fours and play what was called the “dog game.” Pieces of brick and plaster were hurled at the men. They had to catch the objects in their mouths. Those who did not catch the objects were beaten again. Schultz periodically left the repair yard “hunting for individual Jews.” He targeted “only fat, rich, and elegantly dressed Jews.” He forced them to pay him huge bribes to avoid the degradation. Those who could not pay became his toys. Sadism was often a prelude to murder. Evil was not limited to the oppressor. Ringelblum, who in 1944 was executed by the Nazis along with his wife and 12-year-old son, described the Jewish police, most of whom were lawyers before the war, as “gangsters.” [Click here to see a .PDF copy of Ringelblum’s journal, “Notes From the Warsaw Ghetto.”] They did dirty work for the Nazis, rounding up people, including children, to fulfill deportation quotas. The Jewish police demanded bribes of money, diamonds or gold to remove fellow Jews from the transport lists. It was usually the destitute and the poor who died first. Ringelblum often went to the Umschlagplatz, the square in the ghetto where Jews were collected before being marched to the trains bound for Treblinka, to plead with the Jewish police to release some victims, especially writers, intellectuals, teachers, musicians and artists. Jewish police often responded by beating him with their truncheons. “Where did Jews get such murderous violence?” he asked about the Jewish police. “When in our history did we ever before raise so many hundreds of killers, capable of snatching children off the street, throwing them on the wagons, dragging them to the Umschlag? It was literally the rule for the scoundrels to fling women on to the Kohn-Heller streetcars, or on to ordinary trucks, by grabbing them by the arms and legs and heaving. Merciless and violent, they beat those who tried to resist. They weren’t content simply to overcome the resistance, but with the utmost severity punished the ‘criminals’ who refused to go to their death voluntarily.” Your support matters…

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