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A Polish Film Provides a New Perspective on the Warsaw Ghetto

Sept. 16 2019

Reviewing a new Polish documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto, titled Warsaw: A City Divided, Rokhl Kafrissen reflects on the lessons of a film she terms “remarkable”:

The ghetto was officially justified by the Nazis as a “public-health” measure, serving, they said, to protect the population from “disease-carrying Jews.” The exact placement of the walls was subject to haggling with city administrators who worried about things like traffic problems. It’s odd to think about traffic patterns in relation to the murder of Jews, but it reminds us that genocide was built on thousands of acts of seemingly mundane bureaucracy.

The Warsaw Ghetto was the first and largest ghetto established by the Nazis. After the Germans finally crushed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising [in 1943], the ghetto was methodically razed, its building-by-building destruction meticulously documented by Nazi photographers and architects. Before the war, Warsaw had been the second-largest Jewish community in the world. At the end of the war, only a handful of its Jews were left alive. Today, only a few scattered pieces of the ghetto walls that imprisoned them still stand, including fragments between properties as well as the sections of the wall that were part of buildings.

Unlike Auschwitz or Dachau, the Warsaw Ghetto cannot be visited in any meaningful way. And yet, the ghetto looms large in Holocaust memory. The uprising there in 1943 is still the most famous act of Jewish resistance.

In addition to the newly discovered footage, [the film’s] writer and director, Eric Bednarski, uses a mix of archival documents, architectural plans, and, most movingly, eyewitness testimony. Irena Agata Boldok is a Jewish Warsaw resident who spent two years within the ghetto before escaping to the Aryan side. Bednarski films her in front of one of the most famous wall fragments, at Sienna Street, where a plaque commemorates the horrific events that took place inside the ghetto walls. “This was a street I was scared of, and I still am to this day. I’ve never walked this street without feeling afraid.” Boldok describes how after the war she returned, over and over, to this fragment, hoping to find the hole through which she and her mother had escaped. It’s a quietly devastating moment.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Film, Holocaust, Warsaw Ghetto

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic