Word: jewish
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...Warsaw ghetto, German evil learned to manipulate Jewish hope and turn it into a Nazi tool of management. It was hope--the faintest, most tantalizing, vanishing glimmers of it--that led the victims on from day to day. Surely the worst is over now, they repeatedly told themselves, against the mounting evidence. They won't take me. They need me at the Tobbens factory. This new identification card will keep me safe. Day by day, hope deflected the full, unillusioned despair that, when it came later--too late--roused the ghetto to armed resistance...
...more than a year after Hitler's invasion of Poland--when the Nazis decreed the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto; 400,000 Jews would be confined in 1.3 sq. mi., roughly the size of New York City's Central Park. The story has been told before--a once thriving Jewish community, the largest outside New York, squeezed incrementally by humiliation, poverty, hunger, cold, starvation, epidemics of typhus and tuberculosis, marauding Nazis who murdered on a free-lance basis, and at last, mass systematic deportations, the hopeless trudge to Umschlagplatz (the transshipment station) at the end of Zamenhof Street...
Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, edited by Michal Grynberg (Metropolitan Books; 493 pages), tells the story in a new way, with riveting immediacy, through a collection of 29 personal records assembled in Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute and now available for the first time outside Poland, in English translation. Most of the writers of these accounts are unknown. Many of their records, scribbled in Yiddish or, more often, Polish, were found in attics and basements of the ruined city after the war. Some of the stories are unbearable to read. The Diary of Anne Frank...
Themes, sometimes of immense moral complexity, thread through the scraps and diaries. There are more than enough glimpses of what might be called the sporting beast--for example, an SS officer's satanically playful execution of a young Jewish mother with a baby on her shoulder, to whom the officer had, a moment before, given a loaf of bread. Or this, recorded by an anonymous woman: "One day a small Jewish boy was killed on Biala Street as he attempted to pull a carrot lying in the gutter on the Aryan side through a hole in the fence. A German...
...Dershowitz writes: “The divestment petition, which singles out Israel for criticism in the face of the reality that its human rights record is far better than that of any other nation in the region, is anti-Semitic in effect because it demonizes and delegitimizes the only Jewish nation for sins committed far more frequently and grievously by others...