In memory of the six million murdered Jews

Warsaw, April 19, 1943

The hunger that raged through the Polish ghettos was the theme not only of German scientific experiments, but also of Jewish poetry. In this body of literature, the “testament of lost men,” is a poem called “Hunger,” written by Joseph Bau during the summer deportations:

Flour, curdled into a loaf of concrete

a condensed payment for a day of torment,

here is bread.

Eight stomachs creeping out through the

eyes divide it into equal parts,

to the last little crumb,

here is the idol to which the mind is praying

(see Nora Levin, The Holocaust, NY, 1968).

Such hunger, the highest Nazi circles believed, would extinguish Jewish life. Before the extermination began, it was assumed that hunger would do the killing in the ghettos. Hunger was a big killer, though not as big as the Nazis wished, as was typhus. In the Warsaw Ghetto, of a half-million Jews, starvation and typhus caused the deaths of eighty thousand Jews in 1941 and in the first nine months of 1942 (ibid). The Nazi General Frank’s threat: “If the Jews do not die of hunger the measures will be intensified—and the measure was swiftly carried out” (ibid).

Despite these conditions, the Nazi General Jurgen Stroop, who commanded the overall Ghetto action, later commented on the Jewish resistance: “the conditions discovered are indescribable. I cannot imagine greater chaos than the Ghetto Warsaw. The Jews had control of everything, from the chemical substances used in manufacturing explosives to clothing and equipment for their armed forces. They produced inside their shops arms of every kind, especially hand grenades, Molotov cocktails and the like. Moreover, the Jews had succeeded in fortifying some of these factories as centers of resistance” (ibid).

“What we have lived through,” wrote Mordechai Anielewicz to his second-in-command, Isaac Zuckerman, “after two days of defense, defies description in words. We must realize that what has happened exceeds our most audacious dreams. Germans twice fled the Ghetto. One of our sectors held out for forty minutes…another six hours…. Our losses in men are very small. I have the feeling that what we have dared is of great significance” (ibid).

From the ghettos, the struggle moved to the forest and swamps, and this fighting spirit of the Jewish people continued with the creation of the State of Israel. A new breed of Jew, tough yet idealistic, realistic, resourceful, and determined, is today’s Israeli soldier! “And they shall abide in the land that I have given unto Jacob my servant wherein your fathers abode, and they shall abide therein, even they and their children, and their children’s children forever” (Ezekiel, 37).

(Baruch Cohen is the Research Chairman of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research)