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would love to live to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and shriek to the world proclaiming the truth . . . But no, we shall certainly never live to see it, and therefore do I write my last will. May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened and was played out in the twentieth century . . . We may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us. —Dawid Graber, August 1942, Warsaw, Poland
“It is up to us to write our own history,” he said. “Deny the Germans the last word.”
“Our group is called Oneg Shabbat,” he said. “‘The joy of the Sabbath.’”
“‘Man was made for Joy and Woe And when this we rightly know Thro the World we safely go.’”
When I wanted wisdom, I found Dickinson; sorrow, Yeats; company in my grief, Wordsworth.
(The only other language, in my humble opinion, that used poetry to rise above its station was German. My German was far worse than my English, but I knew a little bit, and I was a fan, like many Poles, of Goethe and Rilke. Still, I was unsure that a language that could order children to be mowed down by gunfire was still a sane one to use for poetry, and anyway, when comparing the two, I found English more pleasing to the ear.)
“Hitler knows better than to start something with us. Britain and France are our allies. We’ve signed treaties.” He ground out a cigar. “That’s a risk that even Herr Hitler cannot take.”
But what Kasia’s father hadn’t taken into account was that Britain had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler, and therefore, it turned out, its agreement with distant impoverished Poland wasn’t worth the ink used to sign it. As for the French, they decided that coming to our aid really wasn’t, in the end, an efficient use of their money or manpower. Therefore, while the British and French made their excuses, the Germans mowed us over.
They called Poles “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the Reich.
“They cannot do this to us!” shrieked a woman standing on the street below my window. “We are not animals!” But, ma’am . . . , I wanted to shout down to her, although I’m not much for shouting. Ma’am, people are merely another species of animal. We just don’t like to be reminded of it.
funny. (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
“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.”
suppose I’ll just go hungry—I don’t have any more zloty on me and will have to sell another one of Kasia’s pillowcases tomorrow to have money for the week.)
