ja chank 2008 - South African Jewish Board of Deputies

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Hungarian government concerning Jewish deportations. This intervention Gilbert links to the saving of “more than a hundred thousand Jews”. 24 By the time these events had occurred, over ninety percent of Hitler’s Jewish victims in Europe were already dead, and the issue of Allied victory over the Third Reich was no longer a matter of any serious dispute - at least outside the Führer's bunker. The Warsaw Beginnings For the morally challenged, the question arises as to how one might exonerate British leadership for its silence during the early years of Hitler’s butchery of European Jewry, during 1940 and 1941 when the murders were more gradual but when they were also embarrassingly more in public view. Gilbert suggests an answer to this in his treatment of Nazi policies toward Jews before Barbarossa, i.e., before June 1941 and the introduction of the so-called Einsatzgruppen in the east. The effect of this is to conceptually soften the earlier form of mass murder involved in ‘ghetto-ization’. The genocidal misery of the Warsaw Ghetto, unlike Auschwitz, was virtually on public display, prominently located as it was in one of the great capitals of Europe, governed by decrees posted on public streets and walls, visible from many intersections outside the Ghetto, connected to the city by a public telephone network and accessible to public streetcars from which non-Jews could see the emaciated corpses of Jews scattered on the sidewalks. In this instance, Gilbert's vehicle for a sugarcoated interpretation is an essay on the Final Solution in the 1995 Oxford Companion to World War II. 25 Here we find him saying that after their conquest of Poland the Nazis began to implement a scheme confining Jews in “restricted areas”. He defines the situation of the Jews as follows: “A medieval concept, that of the ghetto, was revived. But whereas in medieval times the ghetto, such as the one in Venice, was a centre of Jewish creativity, under the Nazi scheme it was a place of confinement and poverty”. 26 He goes on to say that the “food ration imposed upon [Jews] was even smaller than that imposed upon the non-Jewish inhabitants of Poland”. 27 Clearly this interpretation, in light of the officially promulgated Nazi decrees and actual experience, leaves much to be desired. ‘Poverty’ is something people can live with for centuries. The size of the Jewish food ration being smaller than that of the Poles is the least important aspect of the Nazi ghetto regime. The importance of a 184-calorie per day ration is not that it was smaller than the Polish food ration. Its real importance derives from the fact that human beings cannot survive very long if they are fed a 184 calorie daily diet. And if such a diet is reinforced by deliberate crowding of many people into a very small area (actually hundreds of thousands of people forced into about 2 square miles of urban space), hunger and exposure combine to terminate lives. Deprived of fuel, as well as food, over 90 percent of ghetto households did not have any heating in an area 24 Gilbert, Churchill, p783. 25 See Martin Gilbert, ‘Final Solution’, in I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (eds.) The Oxford Companion to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) pp. 364-371 26 Ibid., p364. 27 Ibid.
where the mean high temperature in January is 2 degrees below freezing and the mean low is 12 degrees below. The regime of death from starvation, disease and exposure was made possible by cutting off the Jewish population of the ghetto from virtually all regular and lawful economic intercourse with the external world, from the sort of linkages which precisely characterized medieval and renaissance ghettos of Europe. Jews who entered the Nazi ghetto were stripped of all their real and large-object property beyond whatever they could carry on their persons or drag on a cart. Thus, even for purposes of smuggling and illicit trade, there was an overwhelming dearth of appropriate resources which that sort of activity could be conducted. Most of the inhabitants of the ghetto had no gainful employment. There was a relatively small class of high-risk smugglers and well-to-do people who could sell their jewelry, gold, foreign currency, furs, or other such assets, in order to meet personal needs. These people were a source of employment - but a constantly declining and doomed source - to thousands of other Jews, on the model of Wladyslaw Szpilman playing piano in a popular ghetto café for the economic elite. There were tailors, barbers, shoemakers, tutors, doctors, nurses and sundry others who could delay starvation by servicing this trade. There were also people working for the Germans, but most of them at extremely low, near-starvation level wages. What extended the existence of some inhabitants of the ghetto - at a terrible price - was smuggling, which the Nazis routinely punished with death, often of very young children who engaged in this desperate trade at an unspeakably desperate time. While Gilbert does say in another part of his article that the ghetto “was in itself a horrifying solution, the murder of whole communities of people by slow starvation”, 28 he also presents misleading and inaccurate information likely to persuade the reader that things in reality were not quite so bad. He claims that by June 1941 “the death toll ... had reached 2000 a month in Warsaw” and concludes that it would take “20 years or more” to achieve total destruction of Polish Jewry. According to Jewish Warsaw expert, Israel Gutman, the average rate of mortality for the period from May 1940 to June 1941, was 4,219 whereas Gilbert's language suggests that the alleged 2000 in June 1941 was the apogee of the ghetto death rate. Given mortality figures by Danuta Dombrowska in the 1972 Encyclopedia Judaica, the Jewish population of Warsaw - using linear extrapolation - would have been extinguished not in twenty years but in about five. 29 Unfortunately, any presumed linear extrapolation is absurd in its fundamental assumption. If one locked up a hundred people in a room, depriving them of food and water, and extrapolated the death rate from the results obtainable after the first day - to what might happen in 6 months or a year - one could actually conclude that most people could live without food or water for months, or even indefinitely. 28 Ibid., p367. 29 Note Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). See Table 1 on p63 and Table 2 on p64. See also Raul Hilberg, S. Staron and J. Kermisz (eds.) The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1979), p310. Czerniakow reports the number of funerals in the Ghetto in October 1941 at 4,716 and at 4,801 in November. He reports 5,550 deaths in July 1941 and 5,560 in August 1941 (p398). His figure for January 1942 is 5,123 (p328).
Page 3 and 4: OBITUARIES Shortly before going to
Page 5 and 6: Johannesburg College of Education.
Page 7 and 8: To put the matter into proper persp
Page 9 and 10: Eden did not say that the Jews had
Page 11 and 12: have been humane and far-sighted”
Page 13: As is evident from the Rosenman col
Page 17 and 18: Auschwitz book, p322 for example, t
Page 19 and 20: Was this a problem solved or a prob
Page 21 and 22: them, his brothers held him fast so
Page 23 and 24: prevalent. 58 The subsequent 1902 a
Page 25 and 26: associated with darkness and dampne
Page 27 and 28: and rebuilt. 82 Those living in the
Page 29 and 30: stories overheard as I walk, everyb
Page 31 and 32: from every part of the Continent, c
Page 33 and 34: perform those practices one chooses
Page 35 and 36: invoke absent health benefits in fe
Page 37 and 38: of circumciser to women but not usi
Page 39 and 40: If the above facts are accepted, an
Page 41 and 42: salesmen, butchers and bakers. From
Page 43 and 44: surviving children, Clarrice Jeanet
Page 45 and 46: These days, a Jewish left wing acti
Page 47 and 48: While still a member of the Hashome
Page 49 and 50: ostracized Jewish victims of bannin
Page 51 and 52: One could add several more expressi
Page 53 and 54: SOME JEWISH BOOKSELLERS AND BOOKSHO
Page 55 and 56: Wendy Levitt, the present Manager o
Page 57 and 58: usiness. In 2000, Hyman expressed p
Page 59: this. Please accept this record of

ja chank 2008 - South African Jewish Board of Deputies

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