Word: warsaw
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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...
...story began on Oct. 12, 1940--on Yom Kippur, a little 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...
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...
...unusual labors - recording the inscriptions on ancient Jewish tombstones (see accompanying story). And in Poland, plans are afoot to build a new museum that will recreate homes, streets and whole villages representing 800 years of Jewish life. The museum will be constructed on the site of the infamous Warsaw ghetto. Discussions are under way with American architect Frank Gehry, the son of Polish Jews. "We want Poland to be seen as more than the world's largest Jewish graveyard," says project director Jerzy Halbersztadt. These efforts have one thing in common: their focus is not on how Jews died...
Instead, Beamer added "Let's roll" to the patriotic lexicon when he and his fellow passengers attacked the hijackers, who intended to crash the jet in Washington. As they struggled, the plane went down in a Pennsylvania field, killing all on board. Flight 93 became the Warsaw Uprising of 9/11, a national blueprint for resistance and a tonic against helplessness...