81st Anniversary in 2024 of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (geto fayerung) 19th April - 16th May 1943
And what shall we wake up to tomorrow ?
The circles of irrational human brutality resume their merciless course…..
Will humanity never change its self-destructive, murderous, imperial urges ?
Collective narcissism of the most ruthless, paranoid and evil kind prevails
Surely the grimmest of ironies today, as the pendulum of destiny swings, is that both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Benjamin Netanyahu are Jewish …..
Achieving a true moral perspective during the present fraught time is not without heavy conflicting demands on the conscience …..
Just now I cannot help reflecting on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, living as I do where these tragic events occurred not so very long ago. I decided once again to read what I had written in my Polish book years ago about this particularly valiant and frantic moment in the tumultuous history of this miracle of a city, Warsaw.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is often confused by travellers to this country, understandably unfamiliar with Polish history, with the equally tragic Warsaw Uprising that began on 1 August 1944. In fact the parallels with the present merciless situation in Ukraine, Gaza and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 are even clearer.
As an Australian author with no Jewish or Polish roots or affiliations, I too initially suffered from a lamentable ignorance of matters almost beyond comprehension for one raised in 'The Lucky Country' - until I began to read. And then read some more.
In this I consider myself privileged to have a rather more objective, what one might even term, an outsider's view of such historical events. I count myself lucky never to have absorbed the cruel prejudices against Jews, Poles and Poland that are still inherited by those born into the collective unconscious of Europe and the United States.
Doubt hovers over a thought-provoking remark Stalin is reported to have once made. At the Teheran Conference quoted in David McCullough Truman (New York 1992)
“Churchill had been arguing that a premature opening of a second front in France would result in an unjustified loss of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers.
Stalin responded: 'when one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics'".
This is so true of the mounting casualties in the Ukrainian war, the horrors in Gaza and millions of displaced refugees and deaths from hunger in Sudan.
Accurately sourced quotation or not, the remark points up the danger of becoming all too familiar with historic events and the relatively increasing magnitude of deaths and resultant dehumanization. This is surely happening by irresistible during these terrifying wars.
This particular past uprising in Warsaw, the Ukrainian war and the Gaza conflict illustrates at once the most bestial in human nature, yet at one and the same time, its most noble qualities of resistance, courage even poetry of the darkest hue. We are in danger, not of forgetting the event itself, but of forgetting the detail of it, which when once recalled or first encountered, profoundly moves the soul to pity.
We are lost in a welter of information concerning the perpetration of the current appalling world atrocities, obliterating or quietly leaching away the intensity of memory. Dictators again have been given windows of narcissistic opportunity.
The metaphor changes but the bestiality remains. We are encouraged to remember past events to avoid them happening again. Oh really? The acts will continue but not repeated in the exactly same way by the human chameleon. They are too clever for that.
Rather we need to constantly remind ourselves that in human nature a brutish creature of terrifying proportions lies perilously close, a monster resident just beneath the thin, seductive surface veneer of charitable ideological belief, charm, moral goodness and virtuous intentions.
Please read this remarkable poem by the great Polish poet and writer Czesław Miłosz and reflect
Campo dei Fiori
TRANSLATED BY DAVID BROOKS AND LOUIS IRIBARNE
In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.
On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors' shoulders.
I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.
At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.
Already they were back at their wine
or peddled their white starfish,
baskets of olives and lemons
they had shouldered to the fair,
and he already distanced
as if centuries had passed
while they paused just a moment
for his flying in the fire.
Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet's word.
Warsaw, 1943
"Campo dei Fiori" from The Collected Poems 1931-1987 by Czeslaw Milosz.
Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: The Collected Poems: 1931-1987 (The Ecco Press, 1988)
In a history increasingly bleached by time, Warsaw suffered gross physical destruction by the Nazis, murderous repressions without parallel in revenge for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from 19th April - 16th May 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944.
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest and most infamous of the Nazi ghettos where a total of almost 480,000 Jews[1] died from either disease, malnutrition, execution or simply murdered at Treblinka. In the ghetto it was said that everyone had ‘death in his eyes’ or ‘a skull instead of a face’.[2] The creation of it necessitated the displacement of over two hundred thousand Poles and Jews from their homes and businesses. A popular saying among Germans at the time was ‘The Poles we hate instinctively; the Jews we hate in accordance with orders.’[3] The displaced lost everything. [See footnotes below]
The Germans divided the ghetto into three main sections. In the ‘Little Ghetto’ wealthy Jews and the intelligentsia lived well.
The pianist Władisław Szpilman (known under the witty pseudonym Al Legro and the hero of Polanski’s film The Pianist) wrote of the Café Nowoczesna where he played Chopin and more popular fare to earn money ‘This was the meeting place of the rich; dripping with gold and glittering with diamonds; this was where painted harlots, at tables bedecked with delicacies, seduced the wartime noveaux riches, to the accompaniment of popping champagne corks.’ [4]
He went on to describe the hunger and illness of the poor in the ‘Big Ghetto’, dead children lying uncollected in the streets. The third section was the industrial ghetto where the Jewish workers and their families were worked to death as slave labour.
The pianist Władisław Szpilman (known under the witty pseudonym Al Legro and the hero of Polanski’s film The Pianist) wrote of the Café Nowoczesna where he played Chopin and more popular fare to earn money ‘This was the meeting place of the rich; dripping with gold and glittering with diamonds; this was where painted harlots, at tables bedecked with delicacies, seduced the wartime noveaux riches, to the accompaniment of popping champagne corks.’ [4]
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The ghetto witnessed the departure of the packed cattle trucks from the Umschlagplatz (Shipment Square), the transport hub for the extermination camp of Treblinka and the Lublin labour camps. Words are inadequate to convey the horror of this place, a circle of Dante’s Inferno masquerading as a railway siding. The Jewish police ‘delivered’ up to twelve thousand souls per day to the Nazis in the Umschlagplatz to die or work as slaves. Desperate parents drugged their infants and concealed them in knapsacks and suitcases which were often lost on the carts, babies waking in the terrifying dark, buried alive, never to be seen again. Jews were driven to the overcrowded holding areas of the wickedly named ‘Hospital for Infectious Diseases’, a building swimming in faeces, urine and blood ‘as if designed by a satanic architect’. Cattle cars were packed with a hundred and twenty people in a space designed for twenty horses and then the gas.
After a tiring day at the ‘Umschlag’ one sadistic SS officer habitually drove around the ghetto streets in a Mercedes sports car picking off strays with his revolver. Another asked a woman carrying a baby on her shoulder if she had had a difficult day’s work. She responded positively to his gesture of concern. He then asked her if she would like a loaf of bread. She thanked him profusely for his generosity. As she walked away with optimism in her heart he took careful aim and shot her baby through the head.
An unparalleled expression in Western music of this suffering is the seven agonizing minutes Ein Überlebender aus Warschau Op. 46 (A Survivor from Warsaw) (1947) for orchestra and narrator by Arnold Schoenberg. In a text written by Schoenberg himself in English (a narrator living in the sewers of Warsaw), German (a violent Nazi sergeant barking orders to the gas chambers) and Hebrew (the prayer Shem’a Yisroel) he expresses how consolation in extreme adversity can come from song and prayer. A work of shattering intensity.
The uprising in April 1943 led by Mordechai Anielewicz was an act of inconceivable courage that has achieved formidable symbolic and moral stature. Yet after ninety percent of the Jews had been murdered and the ghetto destroyed and replaced by the concentration camp KL Warschau (where tens of thousands of Gentile Poles died) there remained in Warsaw ‘the largest clandestine community of Jews anywhere in Europe, in fact probably the largest community of people that has lived in hiding in any city, ever.’[5] Some ten percent of Poles in Warsaw assisted Jews to hide, and many more provided food, clothes and money for their Jewish friends. Few were betrayed to the common enemy. Some 28,000 Jews hid on the Aryan side while so-called ‘wild’ Jews returned to the burned-out ruins of the ‘wild’ ghetto and lived like rats.
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Extremely rare colour photograph (not colourized) of the burning ghetto seen from the tenement house at ul. Jasna 16 (1943) [ Photographer: Zbigniew Borowczyk from the corner tenement house at pl. Dąbrowskiego at the intersection of Jasna and Kredytowa Streets (Jasna 16 / Kredytowa 9). Color slide 25 x 35 mm.] [POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews] The photograph could be a television report film of 2024 from Ukraine |
An iconic moment of German-Polish reconciliation occurred in December 1970 when the then Federal Chancellor of Germany, Willy Brandt, spontaneously fell to his knees (the Kniefall in Warschau) in a silent apology at the memorial to Jews murdered by the SS in the ghetto. ‘On the abyss of German history and carrying the burden of the millions who were murdered, I did what people do when words fail them.’ he commented later. This kneeling figure became a symbolic image of the way forward for a mercilessly divided Europe.
(Text from A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland
Michael Moran)
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| Willy Brandt, spontaneously fell to his knees (the Kniefall in Warschau) in a silent apology at the memorial to Jews murdered by the SS in the ghetto. |
Footnotes:
[1] Statistic from Secret City : The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945 Gunnar S. Paulsson (New Haven 2002) 1 An extraordinary account of Jews in hiding with carefully researched statistics and many astounding individual stories of courageous Jewish resistance. See also Words Outlive Us : Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto ed. Michał Grynberg trans. Philip Boehm (New York 2002) 1 This is a heartbreaking collection of first-hand testimonies of life in the ghetto. These eyewitness accounts were written by a remarkable range of people from all walks of life either in the ghetto or clandestinely outside, discovered in the rubble of Warsaw or passed through the hands of survivors. The grimmest of truths lies in the details that speak from pages that ‘challenge us to imagine the unimaginable’. This is individual suffering by real people and not the sanitized, meaningless generalizations trotted out as contemporary ‘history’. Indispensable if you have the courage not to turn away.
[2] Ibid., Words Outlive Us pp. 145
[3] Quoted in Secret City : The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945 Gunnar S. Paulsson (New Haven 2002) 240
[4] Śmierć miasta (Death of a City) Władisław Szpilman, compiled by Jerzy Waldorff (Warsaw 1946). This is the original unedited text of The Pianist trans. Anthea Bell (London 1999).
[5] Ibid., Paulsson 2
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| Ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto For vastly more detail and External references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising |
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You may also like to read this detailed and fascinating link
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This was an immortal and moving concert
Martha Argerich and Friends - POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews - Warsaw - 17th February 2018
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| Lt. to Rt. Michael Guttman, Martha Argerich, Annie Dutoit, Jing Zhao, Akane Sakai |
This desperately moving and emotionally committed concert was enough to impel the very stones to pity. As a demonstration of the healing power of music and an unflinching confrontation of historical memory, it was unsurpassed. The performances will remain in my mind as one of the more profound musical experiences of my life.
Although short in duration and modest in scope, this inspiring first POLIN Music Festival entitled Roots'n'Fruits ran from 16-18 February in Warsaw at the Museum for Polish Jews. The festival is hopefully the bud of a beautiful flower of historical regeneration and reconciliation in Poland. The opening concert of the festival was dedicated to the great philanthropist Zygmunt Rolat who has always cultivated the deepest respect and understanding between cultures.
This chamber concert opened with the Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1941) for two pianos by Witold Lutosławski. This work set the retrospective moral tone of the evening. The premiere of the piece was performed in the same year as its composition by Lutosławski himself together with Andrzej Panufnik at the Aria Cafe in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Lutosławski earned his living and supported his mother through piano playing at cafes such as Art and Fashion and Aria. Many concerts were held in secret in private homes.
Martha Argerich came onto the stage with her customary self-effacing demeanor to become the medium, the conduit for the spirit of the composer she happened to be engaged with at the time. This virtuoso work was performed in spectacular style with great élan and panache together with Akane Sakai. I felt an element of competition, a rivalry emerging between this work and the original that even surpassed on occasion dear Nicolò Paganini's original violinistic conception. A superbly wrought and glittering ornate counterpoint was cultivated by these two artists between the two pianos.
Akane Sakai then performed a selection of Szymanowski's 20 Mazurkas from his Op. 50 (1924-26). From 1922 Szymanowski began to spend a great deal of his time living in picturesque Zakopane, a remote but superbly photogenic Polish town (now a ski resort) in the High Tatra mountains. 'A bird of paradise in the back-blocks' as the music critic Dorota Szwarcman once perceptively referred to him. He was exposed at this time to the wild and uninhibited, sometimes mournful and melancholic, nearly always raucous, even crude on occasion, improvised music of the Górale highlanders which imbues these late works. Adrian Corleonis referred to the mazurkas as expressing a type of 'sophisticated primitivism'. Surely they are the most musical and evolved response in modern times to the mazurkas of Chopin. Although finely articulated by Arkane in their dense complexity, I felt the embedded mazurka rhythm did not communicate itself or move me in any organic or deep manner.
She then played the two mazurkas which comprise op.62 (1933-34) which are not particularly redolent of Polish folk elements. In a letter to Zofia Kochańska in February 1933, Szymanowski wrote of the first: 'I have written a very pleasant and cheerful mazurka, and I enjoy playing it very much. It’s funny but as I get old the music I write gets more and more cheerful!!' He may well have been inspired by memories of Chopin rather than any attempt to recreate the spirit of the mazurka. The second mazurka was commissioned by a London melomane, Sir Victor Cazalet, when the composer was resident in England in 1934. In fact the premiere of both took place in London played by the composer at a private concert on 4 November 1934. Sakai communicated the more abstract musical fabric, dense texture and timbre of these mazurkas with virtuosity.
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A backwater of the Vistula River near Młociny in Warsaw |
Szymon Laks (1901-1983) from a family of assimilated Jews, was a composer, conductor, author and translator. He was a prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp for over two years and was appointed the conductor of the orchestra of the camp. One of the first things that he noticed upon arrival at the camp was the huge collection of the finest musical instruments and the band setting up their music stands. As an introduction to his Cello Sonata one of Martha Argerich's daughters, Annie Dutoit, came onto the stage and read a gruelling and shatteringly emotional account of his arrival and period of incarceration in Auschwitz as a musician from his memoirs entitled Music of Another World.
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| Szymon Laks with his wife and son (from the family archive/ Culture pl) |
The book was controversial as he was strongly in opposition to those who feel that music must have provided a 'self-defense' for the suffering prisoners. On one occasion Christmas carols merely gave further pain to those suffering in the women's infirmary. The history of the horrors and development of the camp are described in minute detail in numerous sources but certain activities seemed to me particularly obscene. The playing of classical music in Auschwitz is shocking if one believes that art has any humanizing function. On misty mornings like that of my visit, squads of prisoners would stagger to work in the fog and return through the gate dragging their murdered, dead and emaciated companions back through the slush and slime.
One of the six camp orchestras (one contained over a hundred musicians), perhaps directed by the conductor of the former Warsaw Radio Orchestra, might strike up Schubert’s festive Marche Militaire. In Auschwitz it became a hellish danse macabre, utilized to maintain the prisoners’ marching step. The orchestra played during the monstrous Selectionen when the healthy were separated from children, the sick or infirm, who were immediately dispatched to the gas chambers. Amid the suffering one clearly saw
‘...the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness... When this music plays, we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills . . .’
(If This is a Man Primo Levi)
Thomas Mann, agonizing over the relationship of ethics and aesthetics in his novel Doctor Faustus, perceptively refers to music as ‘that curiously cabbalistic craft’. The composer Adrian Leverkühn makes a Faustian pact with Satan, a dalliance with the ‘poisoned butterfly’ of music. For the Nazis, German music became the emotional confirmation of their rightness in exterminating the disgusting ‘vermin’ in their midst. All musical genres were performed in the camp, from the symphonies of Beethoven to the blackly humorous song The Best Times of My Life.
'A Hungarian at the piano, a virtuoso . . . He played Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bach. And then he suddenly played a funeral march by Chopin. And when he stopped, he sat without moving, hands on the keys. We all understood; we understood him and he understood us.’
Music on the occasion of an execution made the anguish particularly acute. The fine women’s orchestra at Birkenau (directed by the famous violinist Alma Rosé, whose mother was Gustav Mahler’s sister) was particularly sought after by the musical connoisseurs of the SS after a demanding day on the selection ramp dispatching women and children to the gas chamber. Dr Mengele liked to relax to the unresolved chords of Tristan und Isolde after a tiring day carrying out comparative autopsies on murdered twins. This psychopath once asked Anita to play Schumann’s deeply affecting Träumerie (Dreaming). Later she was to ask with savage irony ‘What was he dreaming about?’
Laks wrote equally grimly and with black humour:
'...when an SS-man listened to music, especially of the kind he really liked, he somehow became strangely similar to a human being … at such moments the hope stirred in us that maybe everything was not lost after all. Could people who love music to this extent, people who can cry when they hear it, be at the same time capable of committing so many atrocities on the rest of humanity? There are realities in which one cannot believe.'
The suicide rate of musicians was among the highest in the camps as they were occasionally forced to play their entire family into the jaws of death.
The suicide rate of musicians was among the highest in the camps as they were occasionally forced to play their entire family into the jaws of death.
We then heard the Cello Sonata (1932). The fine Chinese cellist Jing Zhao joined Akane at the piano. This spirited neo-classical prewar work was unknown to me (as is too much of his music). Given the context portrayed in the reading of the destiny of this composer that followed its composition, one could not help but be uplifted and profoundly moved by the triumph of the human spirit over direst adversity.
Following this our mood was wrenched out of the 'slough of despond' into carefree joy and bliss by Martha Argerich joining Jing Zhao in the Introduction and Polonaise brillante in C major Op.3 by Chopin. A brilliant performance in true style brillant manner
'But there is also bravura, verve and a Slavic, typically polonaise vigour, as well as an undeniable feel for the spirit of the dance. That is just how it was danced at grand balls in Poland.' (Mieczysław Tomaszewski)
All this was present in one of the best performances I have ever heard of this 'light' work.
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| Młociny Park in Warsaw on the morning of the concert |
After the interval, Michael Guttman and Akane Sakai performed two parts of Baal Shem, Three Pictures from Hassidic Life written in 1923. Bloch writes of his music 'It is neither my purpose nor desire to attempt a reconstruction of Jewish music, nor to base my work on more or less authentic melodies...I am not an archaeologist; for me the most important thing is to write good and sincere music [...] What interests me is the Jewish soul, the enigmatic, ardent, turbulent soul that I feel vibrating throughout the Bible...it is all this that I endeavour to hear in myself and to transcribe into my music; the venerable emotion of the race that slumbers way down in our souls.
We heard the rarely performed I. 'Vidui' (Contrition) Un poco lento and III. 'Simchas Torah' (Rejoicing) Allegro giocoso. Michael and Akane gave a fine sense of nobility to the more introverted 'Vidui', a haunting cantilena of redemption. Simchas Torah, inspired when Moses handed the torch to the children of Israel, is deservedly popular in its exhilarating mood. This was brought off wonderfully well to these rather untutored ears.
Finally the Piano Trio No.2 in E Minor Op. 67 (1944) by Dimitry Shostakovitch. This is arguably the greatest of Russian piano trios performed by Guttman, Argerich and Zhao. Ivan Sollertinsky, a Professor at the Leningrad Conservatoire, was one of the composer's closest Jewish friends. He died suddenly in February 1944 and Shostakovitch dedicated the trio to his memory.
The work begins with ethereal, unsettling, scarcely physical high harmonics on the cello - surely the most extraordinary beginning of any chamber work in the western canon. The bleakness and austerity were perfectly captured here by the players, especially the profound understanding and familiarity with the work displayed by Martha Argerich. The tense rhythmical urgency of the second movement scherzo was superbly conveyed especially by that so characteristic 'Marthaesque' high voltage electrical charge irresistibly investing power to its forward momentum.
The Largo was a profoundly moving and introspective period of unfathomable grief, plumbing the depths of the suffering human soul. The pain of attrition and the sudden mindless violence of war. The heart rending Jewish melodies Shostakovitch offers or possibly invents in the hellishly ironical danse macabre within the final movement were terrifying - in turn seductive, secretive, furtive, almost hysterical with anguish, wailing, the climactic piano part a lava flow of thunderous notes which only Argerich can command so awesomely with her genius. As the work closes the almost celestial harp arabesques on the piano laid over a world of suffering expressed in the violin and cello. Oh that desperate Jewish dance that sobbingly leads us back along a path of bleak yet infinitely courageous resignation to a blighted destiny...
The Largo was a profoundly moving and introspective period of unfathomable grief, plumbing the depths of the suffering human soul. The pain of attrition and the sudden mindless violence of war. The heart rending Jewish melodies Shostakovitch offers or possibly invents in the hellishly ironical danse macabre within the final movement were terrifying - in turn seductive, secretive, furtive, almost hysterical with anguish, wailing, the climactic piano part a lava flow of thunderous notes which only Argerich can command so awesomely with her genius. As the work closes the almost celestial harp arabesques on the piano laid over a world of suffering expressed in the violin and cello. Oh that desperate Jewish dance that sobbingly leads us back along a path of bleak yet infinitely courageous resignation to a blighted destiny...
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A perfectly judged encore of warmth and soft embrace - the second movement of the untroubled and loving Mendelssohn Piano Trio in D minor. Civilization, that welcome reverse of the human coin.
A musical and humanist experience I shall treasure forever among the few that have deeply moved me in my life.
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And the Vistula flows heedlessly on to the sea.... |
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| Detail within the Childrens' Memorial in the Jewish Cemetery, Warsaw |
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| Detail from the Children's' Memorial in the Jewish Cemetery, Warsaw A visit to the Jewish Cemetery adjacent to Powązki in Okopowa Street is a powerful and melancholic reminder of the tremendous historical presence of Jews in Warsaw and the central contribution they made to the life of the city. From 1527 to 1795 Jews were not permitted to live in Warsaw. The cemetery was founded in 1806, at that time outside the walls, and covered a massive eighty acres. Up to 1939 it contained the bodies of some 200,000 Jews in marked graves. Much of it is a sad and neglected place, finely carved grave-stones overgrown and awry, decorative wrought iron rusting in piles, doors to mausoleums gaping as if the soul has fled. Despite this, clearance and dedication by volunteers has improved sections immeasurably over the years. Most moving are the common mass graves to the Ghetto Insurgents (overgrown grassy depressions surrounded by a circle of white marble standing stones with a simple black band) and memorial graves erected by Jewish families living abroad to honour family members murdered but never met. An inscription reads ‘In memory of one million Jewish children murdered by Nazi German barbarians 1939–1945.’  This statue near the entrance to the Jewish cemetery is of the renowned and selfless Janusz Korczak ‘The King of Children’. He gently accompanies a few of his charges from his orphanage to their joint annihilation. Of the numberless descriptions I have read of the horrors of the Holocaust, this passage, describing the final journey of 200 children to the Treblinka extermination camp, is the most heart-rending of all. It comes from Władysław Szpilman’s The Pianist. Hold this eloquent, poignant image in your heart and allow your thoughts to travel a dimension deeper than modern culture permits us to do... |
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