A wrenching tragedy In The Warsaw Ghetto
Please note that I am now an Affiliate Marketer on Amazon. This means my book reviews will include a link to the book on Amazon. If you purchase the book using my link, I will earn a small commission. This is at no additional cost to you. More details here. Thank you for supporting my Book Blog in this manner.
*****
This book is historical fiction. It tells of the Warsaw Ghetto in the 1940s during WWII. Wanting to get the facts straight about this time in Poland before reading a fictional account, I turned to the website of Yad Vashem, which is the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. There I learned a succinct history of the Warsaw Ghetto.
There were 375,000 Jewish people living in Warsaw before the war. This was 30% of the population. When Poland surrendered to the Germans in September 1939, anti-Jewish decrees started to be issued slowly stripping the Jews of their rights. By November 1940 they were moved to and sealed inside the Warsaw ghetto, which was less than 3% of the city’s surface area. Many died from the appalling conditions, overcrowding, and lack of food there. In July 1942, deportations to death camps began. About 300,000 Jews were deported. The famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took place on April 19, 1943. The Nazis quelled the uprising on May 16th by destroying the ghetto and wiping out the remaining Jews.
The novel tells the story from December 1940 to July 1942 with flashbacks to earlier times in Poland, pre-ghetto. Our narrator through the book is Adam Paskow, a 42-year-old man who was a teacher of foreign languages before the war and who now teaches English to the children in the ghetto.
In the first chapter of the book, he is approached by a man named Emanuel Ringelblum, who is an organizer of relief agencies and soup kitchens in the ghetto. Ringelblum also has an “archival project” he’s working on. He wants to enlist Paskow’s aid on it. He wants to record the experience of the Jews in the ghetto – and their lives before when they were still free. The goal is for the Jews to write their own history, to write it all down so that after the war the world could learn what happened.
The group of archivists was called Oneg Shabbat, which means the joy of the sabbath. The group got this name because they would meet weekly on the sabbath to give their reports. When Ringelblum asked Paskow if he were so religious that he would mind meeting on the sabbath, Paskow replies, “Before all this, I had barely remembered I was a Jew.” Indeed, the not-at-all observant Paskow was a widower, and his late wife was not Jewish.
In her afterward, the author tells us that Ringelblum was a real person who really did create the Oneg Shabbat Archives. Here is an eight-minute video from Yad Vashem with all the details of the project. We also learn that the recorded histories were buried in the ghetto and located after the war. Two surviving members of the Oneg Shabbat staff led members of the Jewish Historical Commission of Poland to the first burial site in 1946. Ten metal boxes were recovered. More boxes were found in 1950.
This very real archival project makes a perfect vehicle for the author to tell us about Adam Paskow and his acquaintances in the ghetto. It’s also a perfect vehicle for evoking the readers’ tears as these stories break our hearts many times over.
As I read this book, I was reminded of the cautionary tale of the frog and the pot of water. If the frog was put in a pot of boiling water, it would jump out immediately! But if it was put in a pot of tepid water which was then brought slowly to a boil, it would not perceive the danger and not jump out. And it would die.
That’s what happened in this book except it happened to people and not to frogs. The heat kept getting turned up. The water did not reach the boiling point within the pages of the book itself, but history will not let us forget that most of the 375,000 Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto died.
My father’s extended family was among those who perished.
Bringing the conversation to 2025: If you are wondering why your Jewish friends are a bit skittish as anti-Semitism rises in America, understand that we know all about tepid water.
*****
Click here to learn more about We Must Not Think of Ourselves on Amazon.
*****
Thank you for reading this review. It would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to my blog/newsletter. You will receive exactly 28 emails from me in a year’s time. They will include 4 reports for book lovers and 24 slice-of-life blogs. Thanks for considering this. Lorie
Leave a Reply