Graveyard Epic

NOTES FROM THE WARSAW GHETTO: THE JOURNAL OF EMMANUEL RINGELBLUM (369 pp.)--Edited and Translated by Jacob Sloan--McGraw-Hill ($5.95).

This book aspires to "an epic calm . . . the calm of the graveyard." The graveyard is the Warsaw ghetto. The epic is the story of the last hopeless resistance of 500,000 Jews to their Nazi exterminators. Nearly two decades after the event, the reader feels not only horror but a sense of wonder at having lived through a time that gave birth to such crimes.

This book was literally dug up. It is a translation of records that were scribbled in Yiddish and Hebrew. They were sealed (in a milk can) and buried at a secret point in the ghetto. Not until 1946 did searchers find them in bombed Warsaw's featureless rubble. The man who originally compiled, wrote and preserved the records was named Emmanuel Ringelblum, a teacher of history; he recalls Noach Levinson, hero of John Mersey's bestselling novel, The Wall, who was supposed to have preserved archives of the Warsaw ghetto. In 1939 Ringelblum was safe in Switzerland, but he went back home to Warsaw to share the fate of his fellow Jews, and to record the manner of their end. Ringelblum and his friends recruited a kind of intelligence staff who, with fantastic dedication, took time off from the task of survival to write notes on what they saw and suffered.

Remnants of Gallows' Humor. Only slowly did the full content of the Hitler horror dawn on the Warsaw Jews. At first it seemed that in the German victory over Poland, they would only exchange one anti-Semitic prison for another. Even when that illusion died, much wry humor remained. The Germans were "the others." An "organist" was a reliably bribed German or official. A "musical" was a man who would take an occasional bribe. "Caterpillar tanks" was the word for those refugees so heavily burdened with their belongings that they could barely crawl. Deported Jews coming into Poland wearing JUDE patches stitched on their clothing said the initials stood for "End of Italy and Germany" (Italiens und Deutschlands Ende).

But even gallows' humor wore thin as the Germans developed their policy of divide and kill. The leaders of the Jewish community were conscripted into a council and forced to help doom their own people. They had to deliver a certain quota of slave laborers, and so it was agents of the council itself who fingered the victims. Another council--the Thirteen--came into being. Its job was to tie off the last artery of hope, the flow of smuggled goods from somewhere outside hell. The Thirteen hoped to buy time from the Nazis, and many a Jew hoped to buy time from the Thirteen. Corruption at the top was symbolized by a party given by one of the Thirteen for Gestapo officers; it cost 25,000 zlotys. At the dregs of the ghetto, corruption was symbolized by the episode of a famished woman who stole a bagel, still enjoying a morsel while the blows of the bagel seller fell upon her.

No One Left. These notes have all the casual aspect of horror encountered in nightmares. One account records, in the midst of gossip about prices, the story of a baby thrown from a refugee train. Another tells of "benzine poured over a young Jew" and fired. So common was death in the ghetto courtyards that the dead lay unburied, and children were seen at a game of "tickling the corpse."

This book is a penance to read, redeemed from sheer horror only by a few episodes, such as the Jewish tailors working on a German army order and sewing pockets upside down on uniforms, or the story of the men who argued that the Israelites' true revenge was to forgive their enemies. Above all, there is the bravery of Emmanuel Ringelblum, who continued to set down the terrible truth until, when there seemed almost no one left to kill, he was executed with his wife and son Uri.

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