Papers

Riley Maloney Global Dynamics Sunday, 25 September, 2011

A Life Spent in the Warsaw Ghetto

Warsaw, once a thriving city in the heart of Poland, was laid siege by the Germans and transformed into the most infamous of ghettos. In October 1940, the small “Old Town” district of Warsaw became a flea ridden, over crowded place where 400,000 Jews now find themselves forced to call “home.” In September 1939 I watched as the Germans took control of my home, Poland. I stood by helplessly in the months that followed as little by little my freedom was taken from me. It did not take the Nazis long to conclude that simple prohibition of certain freedoms was not enough to contain us. They rounded up my family as if we were cattle, ordered us to pack a single suite case, and marched us into the newly forming Warsaw ghetto. Some tried to resist, but they were silenced. Within the first month in the Warsaw ghetto, I found myself living in a three square mile area accompanied by 100,000 fellow Jews. In the beginning, my family and I experienced what seemed to resemble a normal life. Former teachers started schools for the children, publishers began to publish our own newspaper, even the cafés were open. How quickly all that changed. In a few short months as more and more people flooded in to the ghetto, the Nazi guards gave us less and less food. People began to die by the thousands. Parents dug pathways under the ghetto walls to sneak their children out in search of food. Many of these children were no more than ten or twelve years old. If caught, the lucky ones received a brutal beating by the Nazi guard. My family and I have lived in this way now for two years, sharing our small room with four other people. One week ago, film crews arrived at the gates of the ghetto with signed papers ordering them to film and document life in the ghetto. At first, we hoped that they wanted the truth. We soon realized that what they wanted to film was far from true. They began by filming people in the streets; people living in extreme poverty and those who lived in relative comfort. They filmed the masses as they wandered aimlessly around the cramped streets, some on their way to work in the Nazi factories others wandering in search of food. When these scenes became too tedious, they staged scenarios in order to get their desired affect. The camera crews brought in food the likes of which we had not seen while living within the walls of the Ghetto. They filmed people buying and trading geese and vegetables as innocent people starved to death in the streets. One day, Nazi guards fired their weapons in the air causing mass panic and a stampede of terrified people. This was done just to allow the camera crews to get the best “shot.” If the film director found the result not to his liking and unrealistic, the people of the community were often forced to do multiple takes. They filmed the Winter of 1942 when the plumbing broke down and people were forced to dump their trash in a section of the city later called the Warsaw dump. They filmed as people lay dying in the streets from starvation and disease. They filmed in this way for months until finally and without warning, they simply left. Now that they are gone I often wonder what was the purpose of this film. Some say it was a simple documentation, others say it was a Nazi publicity film. I for one believe it was the latter; a means to glorify the Nazi cause and further humiliate and degrade the Jewish people by taking away what little privacy and dignity we had left.