Personal Narrative: The Warsaw Ghetto

Over the past couple of week I have been reading the book Prisoner B-3087 which is a book about a Jewish boy named Yanek Gruener during WWII. Yanek was very young at the start of the war, around 10, and he lived in Poland his whole life in a flat apartment. He was growing up with Germans approaching him. His father always said that they would never reach them, but one day they did. The Nazis came marching in, took over the city and built a wall with gates so no one could leave. The let out all the non Jews and kept pushing more jewish families into the “Ghetto”. When the Ghetto started to fill up the Nazis would soon start killing people and taking them to the concentration camps. Yanek’s family soon started to be taken in trucks off to

During a horrible time in history, a courageous rescue operation saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children. There were among thousands of Jewish parents throughout Germany, Australia, and Czechoslovakia who were sending their children-some less than one year-to Britain to live with strangers(editors of scope, N.D.). There were many people working in the kindertransport to save the lives of thousands of children. Many of the parents hoped to get their children back but unfortunately, in some cases, they didn't. Throughout these horrible events, we are able to grasp the reality of these terrors the Jews went through, and what the children went through throughout the Kindertransport.

It has been days. I stumble, foot over foot to the crack of sunlight that beams into the car. I feel the train rock back and forth, side to side as we tumble over the tracks to a “better life.” A better life. More bread. They care about us. I hear the screech as the cars stop as we are all tossed forward. “Welcome to Auschwitz, Jews.” I hear a man scream be strong. I hear the crack of a whip and gun shots. I know they lied.

The Holocaust will forever be known as one of the largest genocides ever recorded in history. 11 million perished, and 6 million of the departed were Jewish. The concentration camps where the prisoners were held were considered to be the closest one could get to a living hell. There is no surprise that the men, women, and children there were afraid. One was considered blessed to have a family member alongside oneself. Elie Wiesel was considered to be one of those men, for he had his father working side by side with him. In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, a young boy and his father were condemned to a concentration camp located in Poland. In the concentration camps, having family members along can be a great blessing, but also a burden.

Well, after all it might be true, during World War || many Jews were going into hiding trying to survived, many did but also many didn’t. We went and decided to interview about three people that survived. From what we have heard and learned, they all experienced pain, fear, losing their families, houses, and sometimes forgetting their own name. They all have different stories but they’re somewhat related to each other, the stories are often heartbreaking, but demonstrating strength, hope, and the courage that it took to survive.

Ellen Cassedy’s memoir, We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust, charts her journey to her family’s past and her own reckoning with what she finds. As she explores her own family’s Jewish past, she struggles to learn Yiddish and gets to know the broader cultural landscape that is contemporary Lithuania, the place where her family came from. As she sets off to study Yiddish and connect with her Jewish forebears, her uncle Will, a holocaust survivor, gave her a slip pulled from his pocket and told her to read it. It was a sheet that had been folded and refolded multiple times which spoke about a day in the Shavl ghetto. It was a sheet that made her personal conquest into an exploration of Lithuania, on how Jews and non-Jews are confronting their Nazi and Soviet past in order to move forward in the future. The sheet read “On November 5, 1943, a kinder-aktsye, a roundup of children, had occurred. Soldiers were snarling dogs and bayonets had rampages through the narrow streets, ripping apart walls and floors in the search for every last child. A Jewish policeman stood at the ghetto gate as the sons and daughters of the ghetto-hundreds of them-were shoved into trucks and driven away, never to be seen again” (Cassedy, 2012, p. 51). Here she

Good morning / afternoon Mr Retsos and 10HT today I will be speaking to you about the Warsaw ghetto uprising but before that I will give you a brief summary of the Warsaw ghetto. When Poland was invaded by Germany in September 1939, more that 400,000 Jews in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, were imprisoned in an particular area of the city which was no more than 2 square miles. In November 1940, this ghetto was sealed off by brick walls, barbed wire and armed guards. If anyone was caught leaving the ghetto they would be shot on sight. The amount of food that was brought into the ghetto was controlled by the Nazis. Each month more than thousands of Jews died due to disease and starvation.

When all the chances of breaking free from what was in store for them were pushed away, I wondered what would have happen if the Wiesel family had taken the chances they were given. If they had taken the opportunity to leave, maybe the family would be safe. Maybe they wouldn’t have had to face the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust; maybe the light behind their eyes wouldn’t have faded away along with their faith in God. Maybe, just maybe, the Wiesel family would have been all right, trying to restart a new life in Palestine, only to remain ignorant of what was happening around them…But ignorance comes with the consequences of harsh realization and the truth is never sugarcoated. The truth is cold and bitter, like poison forced down a person’s

The Holocaust can be described by facts, pictures, history lessons, among others, that can make a strong and lasting impression on an individual. However, testimonies are when the true horrors of this event become real. Testimonies are personal. Their authentic emotions, thoughts, and feelings are wrapped up in a little box with a red bow and given to the public as a fragile gift. Survivor Manya Friedman wrote, “I had little confidence when I started. My hands were so shaky I could barely read my own writing. As I started writing, I was given confidence, support, and encouragement. If I can do this, then you can too” (“The Transition”). Due to her strength and many others, individuals who weren’t affected by the holocaust are fortunate to be provided with such thoughtful insight about how the lives of these Jewish individuals were affected and remain affected. Even so, their experiences are something we will never be able to fathom.

When Abraham Sutzkever wrote “How?” in February 1943, he was only seven months from his own freedom, yet the ghetto itself was still one year and five months from emancipation. Yet his portrayal of “the day of Liberation” appears very similar to a day in the Nazi ghettos, where time is extended through pain, devastation, and fear. The only difference felt is the frustration of their memories and their powerlessness to proceed past the hatred and pain that were connected to the deaths of thousands, both literally and figuratively. These dark memories are not forgotten by time, and his imagined survival of the Jews appears bleak and tedious; the pain and gloom of their experiences overshadowing their

The Holocaust was a horrible time for many people, but it was worse for the Jews. They had to live in towns where they were not wanted and when the war began they had to go into hiding or they would be captured and murdered. Jews that did not escape in time, or those who were found in hiding, were sent to ghettos before they were sent to concentration camps. One of these ghettos was the Warsaw Ghetto.

The holocaust was an event that undoubtedly left a mark on millions of people’s lives. But among those people, those most affected were the survivors who, by chance, could walk away from Auschwitz with their lives. Upon reflection of the tragedies we now know occurred within the Jewish internment camps, one can only imagine the scarring effects that must have been left on the survivors. Through three texts I was able to identify a conversation of just how deteriorating the Jewish internment camps were to those who managed to live through them.

Nature proved itself cruel. In the Zamosc region of Poland 30 thousand Polish children were evicted in the freezing winter months. They were transported under deplorable conditions to concentration camps where many were killed in gas chambers. However 4,454 of the evicted children passed “racial examination” and were sent to the Reich for “Germanization”.

Today my job was to force the Jews into the ghetto. I went into their house, took their homes and kicked them out. The ghettos being only sixteen square miles and we managed to fit over double its capacity. Oh how fun it was for my friends and I to pick on them. I cut the hair of a random Jew and put it on myself mimicking those worthless animals. One of my favorite parts of my day was determining which one of those pests can actually be useful. Those who can work would become slaves and their pay would go to us. That’s the least I deserve for watching over these

It was one of the worst human rights disasters ever to face our planet. Tens of millions of people, told they were not worth their own lives, were rounded up and marched off to camps where death was their almost certain fate. The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime during World War II has become the centerpiece for countless movies, books, essays, tv shows, and plays, each and every one shedding it’s own light on how it has affected different people and their families. Aryeh Lev Stollman and Art Speigelman are just two of the countless writers that have brought us emotional stories of families affected by the Holocaust. Stollman’s piece, Die Grosse Liebe, from his 2003 short story collection entitled The Dialogues of Time and Entropy, portrays a young boy who, after his father’s death, begins to learn more and more about his sometimes mysterious and self-hidden mother who has, for as long as young Joseph has known, been exiled in her own home where she speaks little and with almost no emotion whatsoever. Speigelman’s piece, an excerpt from his serialized book Maus, is a memoir in graphic form in which Speigelman himself asks his father to recount his days before, during, and shortly after the war. Both pieces provide an in depth look into the way the narrators learn about themselves, their family history, and the world in general.