The Warsaw Ghetto

Before actually going to Warsaw, my strongest imprssions of the Warsaw Ghetto were not from reality, but rather from film. It is Adrien Brody, gaunt, scared, and starving in the then empty streets of the ghetto, desperately seeking something to eat. Shoe leather. Paper. It didn't matter, so long as he could chew it. Such a powerful image. Then, against this backdrop of of unimaginable cruelty, the music that this man so close to starving to death plays evokes a shred of decency in a Nazi officer, who saves his life. Of course, this was not even filmed in the Warsaw Ghetto, but that is what I imagine.

The real experience of being in the Warsaw ghetto is nothing like that. In some places of atrocities I can almost feel the echoes of the people who have died there. I can't quite explain it, because I felt it strongly at Dachau and at Terezin, but not in Auschwitz, where so many many people were murdered. Some places just make me shudder, and I did not get that in Warsaw (again, should have--it turns out, i really don't have a sixth sense. I have something else). The ghetto here is bleak still. There are many buildings, not so nice even today, that have large posters, pictures of people who walked the streets when Warsaw had the most thriving of Jewish communities in all of Europe. It is an interesting way to remember.