Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto

"This again is a way of having access to the Jewish side of the tragedy. There was an organisation started in the Warsaw ghetto by a great man named Emmanuel Ringelblum. Ringelblum had been a historian before the war, and when the war began he had a stroke of genius, of tragic genius. He organised a team of people to go out and save all the material they could find about the life of the ghetto. He also commissioned some of his colleagues to go out and do investigations of subjects that might be important to future generations: for example, how did the Jewish children behave in the ghetto? How did Jewish women behave in the ghetto? What was the self-help operation in the ghetto? What happened to orphans? What was the food supply like? How was it distributed? What about religious services? What about traditional religious communities, the rabbis and students? His group was called the Oneg Shabbat group, because they met on the Sabbath, and they collected enormous quantities of material, because they were anxious that the world should have information the Nazis would not give them. They did not want the Nazi voice to be the only voice about the ghetto; they wanted the Jewish voice to be heard. So they collected this material and near the end of the war, when it was clear that the Warsaw ghetto was going to go up in smoke as a result of the uprising in Passover of ’43, they put it in big metal milk cans and buried them. After the war, they found most of these cans, not all of them. So the single most important source of information about Jewish behaviour during the war in the ghettos comes to us from these Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto from Ringelblum and his team. The Oneg Shabbat records are absolutely the most essential Jewish documents we have from the Holocaust. He did survive for a while after the Warsaw uprising, but, yes, he was killed during the war. He tries not to. He certainly has his point of view. He is critical of certain kinds of Jewish behaviour, he is critical of certain actions – but the idea was really to be an objective ghetto chronicler, and he tries very hard to do that, not to let his own emotions get in the way. Though, of course, in the situation in which he found himself, and the Jewish people found themselves, it was impossible to separate out judgments altogether. So you get some very critical judgments about the Jewish council, about the Jewish police in the ghetto, and some of the other people who are in leadership roles. But, by and large, the importance of the collection, of the material, is this good faith effort to collect material and provide for future generations a record of what was going on, on a daily basis, in the Jewish communities under siege. It was an important article, but it wasn’t anything new. He made it sound as if he had discovered the wheel. The fact is that scholars know that the centre of the Holocaust was not in western Europe, but in eastern Europe – in Poland, and in the Baltic states, the Ukraine, the borderlands of Russia, Romania, and eventually Hungary. That was the great central Jewish community of Europe, and that was where the big ghettos existed and that was where the policy of the Einsatzgruppen took place, with the invasion of Russia. Finally, the six death camps – camps that were set up specifically for the production of corpses – were all in Poland. So people were brought to Poland from other places, and they were put in Poland because Poland was at the centre of Jewish life. There were 3.3 million Jews in Poland before the war, there were another four or five million Jews in the Pale of Settlement, the westernmost part of the Soviet Union. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Baltic states, there were almost 800,000 in Hungary, three-quarters of a million in Romania. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So, it comes as no surprise that, if you’re going to kill the Jews of Europe, you’re going to do it in central and eastern Europe, and the Nazis knew that and did that. So the emphasis in that article is correct – it’s only outsiders, people who don’t really know all the details, who get their information from Hollywood, who concentrate on western Europe. But scholars knew that eastern Europe was the centre of the storm and that’s why Hilberg, for example, concentrates so much on Polish activity, the role of the German state in Poland, that’s why the Jewish council book by Trunk is primarily about Polish ghettos, Browning’s book is about war on the eastern front with the invasion of Russia, and so on. Himmler himself had come up with a number through various methods when he wanted to find out what he had accomplished, and that was six million. And that became a kind of canonical number at Nuremberg and afterwards. There are different totals that have been offered by scholars who have gone back to study the death camp records, the Einsatzgruppen records, etc. The numbers all fall somewhere in the five to six million range. That’s the overwhelming consensus, and nobody who is not a Holocaust denier has any trouble finding that there were at least 5.1, 5.2 million, up to 6 million, 6.2 million deaths when you total all the various places people were killed in the records we have. It includes eastern Europe. For example, of the 3.3 million Jews in Poland, after the war 92-93 per cent were dead. In Vilnius and Riga and other parts of those Baltic states you have a 96 per cent death rate, the highest anywhere. We have lots of evidence – the Nuremberg tribunal did a pretty thorough job of collecting documentation, the Russians collected documentation, and the Germans themselves kept lots of documents that were captured. So we have a pretty good idea of where and how this was done. It’s not exact, there are still things to learn and important information to be discovered, but the broad outline, especially the numerical, demographic outline, is pretty clear."