1“We Don’t Want to Save Our Lives”We don’t want to save our lives.Nobody gets out alive.We only want to save our human dignity.Mordechai Anielewicz speaks.
The angel Mordechai.
He speaks, and calmly declares war.
April 18, 1943. Evening already, maybe our last. Outside it’s so dark but there’s a light inside us, an ardent little fire lit by him, our sweet commander.
He speaks and everyone listens, because he’s our leader, the one with the vision, will, and ability to lead us far away from here in glory and in beauty. So we can go with pride, go standing, strike out at death, live right up to the final moment.
The final moment is now, and tomorrow is the end.
Around Mordechai Anielewicz stand his five commanders.
Put together, their ages barely total one hundred and ten, and their soldiers are children of thirteen, seventeen, or twenty. Mordechai is twenty-four and he’s the oldest. Twenty-four is young to be old, to be a leader, to know. But it’s really not such a short time because these days life doesn’t last. For us it will end tomorrow, in three days, a week, or maybe a month if the miracle occurs, the one Mordechai is talking about: the miracle of weapons, and of us, as attackers, assailants, fighters; the miracle of Germans fleeing, losing, of Germans dying.
Mordechai speaks and his words enlighten us, because his words are simple and strong. He says that we’re going to fight without help, almost without weapons. That of course we’ll lose, but our honor will be saved. He says we’ll die but we’ll die alive.
Everyone feels it and everyone knows: our struggle is hopeless.
But when Mordechai speaks, he kills despair.
2“It Is Impossible to Describe the Conditions”It is impossible to describe the conditions in the ghetto. Very few will be able to endure them. All others are destined to perish, sooner or later.
And yet, our situation is so desperate! We’ve been living (or hanging on to life) locked up in this ghetto prison for two and a half years, since the autumn of 1940.
A year before that, the Germans invaded Poland and persecuted us a little more each day. And then they decided to lock up all the Jews of Warsaw and the surrounding areas, four hundred thousand poor human beings herded like animals into a too-small walled, overcrowded, and unsanitary neighborhood. Forbidden to leave, with almost nothing to eat, exposed to the cold, diseases, and the Nazis who kill. Corpses in the streets, ashen-faced children, weeping, wailing, fear that never ends. Surrounded by walls and the Germans’ weapons. Cornered, trapped, doomed. Perishing by the thousands. And yet hoping to not die, to get out, to be saved, hoping for freedom.
But when? Freed by whom? How?
“To revolt is dangerous, they’ll take our children. It’s better to obey, wait, lie low, not turn against those who are so powerful. They can’t kill us all, impossible! If they deport us, it’s probably to work. Don’t listen to those young hotheads who talk about resistance and armed struggle, they’re putting us in danger, they’ll get us all killed!”
That’s what people say, while all around us the cold, hunger, and typhus kill so many, so many. That’s what people think, all this time refusing to see and believe what’s going to happen.
Until the summer and the great Aktion that is meant to eliminate us. Because for the Germans, we don’t die enough or fast enough. They want more of us dead, they want us all dead.
They closed the streets, arrested everyone, forced us to walk to the Umschlagplatz and put us on trains, crammed into cattle cars. They had so many weapons and we only our bare hands! How were we supposed to resist? And what about little children?
And besides, maybe when we arrived, who knows, we might have a few more days, a little more life…
But they deported us to black death camps where they gassed us, burned us, murdered us.
Slaughtered us by the millions.
Everyone knows, everyone has seen. This is what Mordechai says.
That there, the ovens burn, gas asphyxiates, and Jews, all the Jews, are disappearing, vanishing into the air.
That’s what they’re doing to us, that’s how we’re going to go. Up in flames, in smoke, denied, annihilated. As if we’d never existed.
Copyright © 2022 by Rachel Hausfater. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
