We Must Not Think of Ourselves

by Lauren Grodstein

perhaps after the war, we can tell the world the truth about what happened.”

When I wanted wisdom, I found Dickinson; sorrow, Yeats; company in my grief, Wordsworth.

After a chaotic few days, the gates were locked, on November 16, 1940, at two in the afternoon. They were locked, but we did not believe they were locked. Even after they had taken our jobs, our money, our schools. Even after they had taken our homes. Locked in, guarded, put under curfew, our movements proscribed, our daily calories proscribed. “They cannot do this to us!” shrieked a woman standing on the street below my window. “We are not animals!”

(But, truly, what would be the point of killing all of us? And how on earth could they pull such a thing off? And would the world really . . . let them?)

“They say the soul of Jew who hasn’t received a proper burial will never be at rest,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly true for those of us the dead Jew leaves behind.”

After all this—after being forced to relinquish my home, my goods, after saying goodbye

to my job and my cat and my life—I don’t know why anything else should have been a horrid surprise. But it was. I had assumed I could at least walk back to Mokotów sometimes. See my cat.

There’s a poem by Wordsworth I often teach called “Surprised by Joy.”

when a person who has been deep in grief feels unexpected joy.

There should be another word for this feeling—a sort of sorrowful happiness, or a happiness that only deepens someone’s sorrow. The closest I can come to it is the Portuguese word saudade, which nears this feeling but tempers it with nostalgia, a wish for something that was and can never be again. A grieving person lives in a permanent state of saudade, but saudade does not incorporate joy. And grief might be simpler if joy never tried to intrude.

Every day, we gathered around radios and newspapers, waiting for our deliverers to start delivering. Where were the Americans? The British? How did nobody in the world know what we were going through except for a committee of politely concerned Jews in New York? And why on earth was corralling some kilos of flour the best they could do for us?

Didn’t they know how desperate we were to go home?

There were other ghetto nihilists, but I tried to avoid them—the ones who thought we all were doomed, or that there was no point in charity or kindness, since in the end it would keep the suffering alive only to continue suffering. These people were exhausting to be around, and confused their own darkness for wisdom.

“Is that you have no will. You just accept things as they are. You don’t stand up and fight. You don’t believe in the power to change. You’re a realist, which isn’t a bad thing, but if the world were only made of realists the world would never change.”

my project is to talk to different people in the ghetto and find out their stories, what their daily lives are like. So that we have a record of what it was really like after the war, before we start to lose our memories.