
Dr. Karen Shawn
Associate Professor of Jewish Education and Administration; Founding Editor, PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators

From Hoza and Wspolna and Marszalkowska Streets cartloads . . . Jewish cartloads on the move . . . furniture, tables, and stools, small valises and bundles, trunks, boxes, and featherbeds, suits, portraits, bedding, pots, rugs, and draperies. Cherry wine, big jars, little jars, glasses, silverware, teapots, books, toys, knickknacks moved from Hoza Street to Street Sliska. In the pocket, a bottle of vodka . . . . In carts, rickshaws, and wagons the motley mob rides . . .
When the Germans condensed the ghetto and removed Sliska Street from its borders, then “from Sliska to Niska / again everything moved.” Now the Jews bring fewer things:Bedding, pots—yessirree— but already without rugs. No sign of silverware, no more cherry wine, no suits, no featherbeds, no little jars, no portraits. All these trifles left on Sliska . . . .
After deportations, again the Germans compress the Jews’ living space, now to “blocks”: “Factories where only those with work permits could live” (Aaron, 1990, p. 47). The poet continues:No more furniture, no stools, no pots, no bundles. Lost are the teapots, books, featherbeds, little jars. To the devil went the suits and knickknacks. Dumped together in a rickshaw . . . a valise and a coat, a bottle of tea, a bite of caramel. On foot without wagons . . . .
The deportations continue; the Jews walk to Ostrowska Street, “an area of seven blocks into which the Jews were forced on September 6, 1942” (p. 47),without big or small bundles, without furniture or stools, without rugs and teapots, without silverware and little jars, a valise in the hand, a warm scarf . . . that’s it, still a bottle of water, a chunk of bread tied to suspenders, things trampled underfoot—. . . (pp. 43–49).
This literature, through its recitation of Jewish “things” left behind, describes the ever-desperate plight of the ghetto Jews, whose chronicled loss of possessions “symbolized the loss of life’s anchors and ultimately life itself” (p. 47) more poignantly and intimately than could any paragraph in a history book. Our past captured contemporaneously in literature will become an ever-stronger part of our future study. The world will be bereft when the eyewitnesses to this grim history are no longer with us. We may, though, take some small comfort in the knowledge that when survivors themselves can no longer speak, their literature will speak for them. To give voice to the lost ones, to grant us the means to hear and to learn from them: This is the present of Holocaust literature, and surely its future as well. References- Aaron, F. W. (1990). Bearing the unbearable: Yiddish and Polish poetry in the ghettos and concentration camps. Albany: State University of New York Press.
- Kassow, S. D. (2009). Who will write our history?: Rediscovering a hidden archive from the Warsaw Ghetto. New York: Vintage Books.