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So let the witness be our writing
On Sunday A Besere Velt sang at the Garde Arts Centre in New London, otherwise known as an authentic movie palace of the 1920's that miraculously no one managed to wreck in the second half of the twentieth century. We were part of the gala opening of the Jewish Federation of Eastern Connecticut's 25th Annual International Film Festival; it was dedicated to the theme of "Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto in Song and Film." I stayed for the movies because I was curious about both of them and because there wasn't much point in getting a free pass to the first night of a film festival if I didn't. Regarding the recent theme of historical memory and the fragility thereof, both the short and the feature were extremely on point.
Marshall Curry's A Night at the Garden (2017) can be viewed in total online if you have a few minutes free and the stomach for history; it consists of six minutes of black-and-white archival footage, simply framed by a few title cards, some extra-diegetic music, and a little slow motion. What it records is another of those terrible half-steps into alternate history that's no such thing. The German American Bund really did hold a pro-Hitler rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. It really was attended by 20,000 Nazi-sympathizing New Yorkers. A Jewish man really was beaten up onstage in front of the whistling, clapping, Heil-throwing lot of them. And it was captured, at least in part, on film. As a documentary, the short is curiously fragmentary. Unless you've done your reading in advance, you won't know that the speaker with the slicked-back hair and the glasses that glint thinly in the spotlight and the slight, distinct accent that twinges like an old war movie or last week's news on phrases like "the Jewish-controlled press" was Fritz Julius Kuhn, the Munich-born leader of the German American Bund which succeeded the less nativist-compatible Friends of New Germany, or that the dark-haired young man who rushed the stage and was almost literally torn to pieces by the rally's brownshirt security—as police officers haul him out from under their feet, we see his anguished face and his undershorts; he has suffered the world's least comedic de-pantsing—was Isadore Greenbaum, a Brooklyn plumber's helper whose impulsive act of protest gave the crowd a real live Jew-bashing to cheer on. But as a cold, clear memento of it happened here, the footage is invaluable. All those straight-armed salutes in the heart of New York, a city popularly synonymous with American Jewishness. "To Night," the illuminated marquee of the Garden announces, "Pro American Rally," followed by the rest of the week's bill—Tuesday hockey, Wednesday basketball—as if American Nazis are interchangeable with sports fans, as if the police-corralled protesters cramming the sidewalks outside are just an unusually rowdy ticket line. Inside the arena, the precision blocks of paramilitary choreography are shocking mostly because we have them mentally filed under Nuremberg, but the decorative mix of Nazi iconography with American legendry fascinates me because I last saw its like in Gabriel Over the White House (1933), whose script claimed American democracy for the fascist cause by invoking the Holy Trinity of Founding Fathers as the original dictators. The Pledge of Allegiance is recited over a sea of Hitler salutes. Swastika banners of the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund share the stage with American flags both contemporary and Revolutionary. An enormous portrait of George Washington glows like a saint behind the speaker and his declaration that "We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it." You begin to see even the nationalist links that aren't being called out. Those khaki-shirted, wedge-capped kids with neckerchiefs and insignia could be Boy Scouts. One of them is doing a gleeful little mime of Greenbaum's beating for his friends. I wish the film identified its cinematographers; I understand they may be unknown, but it would make a difference to me if they were a local news crew vs. the AV's own documentary unit. The last shot feels like one of history's shadows, so perfectly symbolic you can't imagine it wasn't staged: over the darkened panorama of the crowded arena, illuminated by the baleful glow of the stage, the stiff, outstretched arm of a Nazi salute rises into shot. Kander and Ebb wouldn't write "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" for another quarter-century, but the gesture says the same confident thing.
That question of belonging—of inheritance, of control—concerns even the title of Roberta Grossman's Who Will Write Our History (2018). It is not a rhetorical question. We have two major sources of information on the Warsaw Ghetto. One is the documentation of the Nazis who imprisoned over 400,000 Polish Jews within the wire-topped walls of an artificial prison-slum and over the next three years both systematically and casually murdered, through deportation to the extermination camps, through bullets, through starvation, through disease, more than 390,000 of them. They took photographs. They made newsreels. We have their images of corpses in the streets, of children begging on sidewalks, of atrocities whose perpetrators are smiling for the camera, some of them, unlike their victims totally unashamed. Starved and maltreated, expressionless faces, indistinguishable from the thousand-yard stares of camp inmates even before the trains took them off to Treblinka. Smoke-stained resistance fighters and their day-blinking families herded through the streets after the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. We have their numbers, their reports, their terminology. We have the imprint of their eye on everything it touched. And then we have our other source: the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto themselves. Specifically, we have what is now known as the Oyneg Shabes Archive or the Ringelblum Archive after the clandestine association of—they were many things, but let's call them archivists for now—formally organized in 1940 by Emanuel Ringelblum, historian, relief worker, and Warsaw resident turned resident of the Warsaw Ghetto. Their code name meant the joy of Shabbes: it sounded innocuous and they met on Saturday afternoons. The project began as a passionately intellectual one, but its members were not only scholars, schoolteachers, and journalists but economists, activists, artisans, businessmen, writers of all qualifications and all kinds. One was a mailman. Another was a rabbi. Some were Bundists, some were Communists, some were Zionists, some were not. Most wrote in Yiddish, some in Polish and some in Hebrew. Above all they were what the groundbreaking historian Simon Dubnow had in 1891 defined as zamlers—collectors of Jewish history and heritage. They kept journals, contributed and commissioned essays, conducted research in the form of interviews and surveys. They observed fashions, economics, gender roles. Initially their goal was to document the lives and experiences of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto for use after the war, so that historians of the period would not be forced to rely on Nazi sources which showed Jews only as monsters of abjection, degraded, humiliated, dehumanized. As conditions worsened, as the deportations continued, as awareness of the mass murder of European Jewry entered the Ghetto through the grapevines of youth movements and the eyewitness accounts of refugees, it became inescapably believable to the members of the Oyneg Shabes that their archive might be all that survived them. Their field-collecting became feverish, comprehensive, reaching far beyond diaries and testimonies to encompass the material culture of the Ghetto; they preserved ration cards, theater posters, and candy wrappers as carefully as the texts of poems, the transcriptions of street songs, or the secretly printed pages of underground newspapers. Nothing was too good or too bad to exclude. Statistics of sex work and expressions of rage against Jewish collaborators were given equal space with anthologies of jokes and the nuanced difficulties of religious observance. Recipes, photographs, postcards, letters, flyers, drawings, maps, scripts, lists, proclamations, and orders all went into the metal boxes and milk cans of the archive's physical repository along with the necessary metadata of the archive, the collective that had compiled it, and the Ghetto itself. When there was nothing else left to record, they recorded the names of the dead and what they had done. And they buried it all in three caches. Even incompletely recovered, there is nothing else like it in the history of the Holocaust. We have other archives from other ghettos, other first-person accounts, other defiant art, other accusations from beyond the grave. We do not have another such record of a community documenting its own destruction in real time, so many different voices blending, contradicting, analyzing. The Oyneg Shabes was not Isherwood's camera, recording mindlessly; they were always thinking, even at the last. Their studies of the Nazis correctly concluded that their tormentors' Jew-hatred outstripped any efficient productivity they might have gotten from their captive populations. Their self-assessments could be clinical, proud, or sickened, but they were not hagiography. They did not merely tell the world that they were human and lived. They showed the world exactly how they did it.
Directed, produced, and adapted by Grossman from Samuel D. Kassow's nonfiction book of the same name, Who Will Write Our History takes an ambitious, hybrid approach to dramatizing this transfixing but dense material. It begins with a train. Not that kind of train; this one puffing through the forests of Poland has wooden benches, glass-paned windows, passengers playing cards or writing at tables. The year is 1946 and the dark-haired, steady-faced woman returning to a Warsaw she can hardly recognize is Rachel Auerbach (Jowita Budnik, Joan Allen), one of the literary lights of the city before the war and one of only three members of the Oyneg Shabes to survive it. She will serve as our Vergil through this Inferno, though not its sole narrator; in keeping with the polyphony of its founding principles, the film will be narrated by multiple contributors to the Oyneg Shabes Archive, from diary-keeping members of the executive committee to one-shot chroniclers whose sketches or testimonials constitute the sole, meager traces of their existence. Their voices overlay historical footage and photographs, images of the written pages and typescripts that preserved the now-spoken words, and dramatic scenes that weave—deliberately never seamlessly—in and out of these archival materials. We follow lean Leyb Goldin (Bartłomiej Kotschedoff, Jess Kellner) on his daily rounds of the streets and the soup kitchen, a blackly self-aware portrait of a hunger-maddened intellectual reduced to counting the seconds till he can fill his stomach. We understand that the politically committed Hersh Wasser (Piotr Jankowski, Peter Cambor) is risking his life each night he carries, smuggled under his shirt, slid into the lining of his coat, rolled under his socks, a fresh batch of pages to the archive's cache under the floorboards of the Borochov school at Nowolipki 68. Indefatigable and terrified, Abraham Lewin (Wojciech Zieliński, Charlie Hofheimer) records poetically and unsparingly his love for his wife and child, his daily fear for all their lives. In his own words as well as his co-conspirators', Emanuel Ringelblum (Piotr Głowacki, Adrien Brody) emerges not as a plaster tzadik but something much more interesting: a man who could easily live inside his own head dedicating himself instead not just to recording but living in the world, stubborn and scholarly, a community organizer who decided that his responsibility extended not just to the Jews of Warsaw but the memory of the entire Jewish people if it came to it. You may note that I have credited two actors for each character. The reason takes longer to describe than to grasp from watching: the film's main cast are each played in person by an actor who can code-switch as needed between Yiddish and Polish and in voiceover by an actor whose English sounds native. We see and hear the first kind; we only hear the second. I like the effect; it is a lightly Brechtian reminder of the distance between reality and even a very good record of it and since the dialogue in the dramatic scenes is still adapted from the record, it permits us to hear the Oyneg Shabes in their own words, not just translation. The Yiddishists with whom I was sitting occasionally felt the subtitles were too tersely rendered where the Yiddish itself was richly expressive, but especially approaching a subject with such an emphasis on literal #ownvoices, I'll cope with middling subtitles to have the right language in my ears. I like as well that these scenes are shot in color, but it's a little flat and bright-dusted, as in a hand-tinted photograph, so that you come to expect somehow that the original film stock must be as monochrome as the photographs being carefully laid away by Israel Lichtenstein (Andrew Bering, IMDb is incomplete). Sometimes color is used to play a trick with time, stealing into the edge of an archival scene; sometimes a present-day actor walks digitally down a street that hasn't existed in seventy-five years. It does not feel like a cheap trick, juicing up a subject overanxiously presumed to be dry. In a documentary so acutely aware that most of its contemporary footage comes from German propaganda, these not-quite-invented scenes feel like a necessary counterweight, filling in the intimacy and ordinariness of Jewish life that the Nazi record denied. Here are the Jews of the Ghetto as the Oyneg Shabes recorded them, working, praying, reading, bartering, cooking, loitering, starving, kissing, arguing, hoping, despairing, wrestling with their world wrenched constantly away from them. Witnessing. Writing. There are gaps in their record, of course: information they died without knowing, information they could never have known in their lives. For that we have present-day historians like David Roskies, Jan Grabowski, Karolina Szymaniak, Kassow himself. They stand outside the fragile circle of time that is bounded by Auerbach's return to Warsaw; they know—not more than the dead, maybe, but different things. Some things no one knows anymore, the things that happen after the pen is dropped, the paper left behind. There are some things you can't archive.
None of the main characters of Who Will Write Our History are still living, but that doesn't mean its events are dead memory. I started this month by meeting a woman who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. Last week my mother met a woman who survived the firebombing of Dresden. There are still people on the other end of history, telling their stories, holding on. And then there are the ways that the past isn't dead because it's on a zombie rampage: synagogue shootings, reflexive anti-Semitism from all political directions; the recent incidents of arson at Jewish community centers in Arlington and Needham are very close to home. There is a devastating shock of a moment in the later part of the film when a radio operator for the Oyneg Shabes catches a 1942 BBC broadcast reporting the very figures of methodical extermination—now exceeding 700,000 Polish Jews—the group had carefully collected and smuggled via the Polish underground to the UK. Ringelblum is jubilant: they are not suffering in secrecy. They have blown the whistle on Hitler. "And if England keeps its word, perhaps we will be saved." No onscreen historian needs to append that England did not save the Jews of Poland except in the sense that not quite all of them had been murdered by VE-Day. Not a naive man and certainly not starry-eyed about his own survival, Ringelblum still believed that the world, once it knew the truth rather than the rumor of the Holocaust, could be horrified into action. Then and now, it seems that the world can absorb any amount of horror so long as it isn't affecting them personally. And yet it's hard for me to say that the broadcast was meaningless, any more than the archive itself. It stated for the historical record that the Jews of Poland were not going stupidly, unsuspectingly to their deaths. (When Auerbach and Wasser began their post-war efforts to recover the archive, they had to use pre-war aerial maps just to hazard the location of its burial site in the current sea of rubble: the Germans had approached the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as a mopping-up operation, but its conclusion after four hard-fought weeks had required the total destruction of the Ghetto by explosives and fire.) There is something a little mystical in this devotion to the work of recording regardless of reception or result; it makes me think of the traditional well-wishes of inscription and sealing on Rosh Hashanah, the prohibition on destroying the written name of God that sees worn-out holy books first stored in genizot, then buried like people rather than thrown out like trash. The Oyneg Shabes were at once writing their own memorial book and inscribing themselves into the more-than-mortal archive of history. There is also something incredibly hard-headed about it. After all, it worked. In 1946, Hersh Wasser was the last person left alive who knew the location of the first cache of the archive and it was still there waiting, water-damaged but not destroyed by either vindictive Nazis or indifferent time. In 1950, the second cache buried by Lichtenstein—unknown to either Auerbach, Wasser, or his wife Bluma—came to light during construction on the same site. In 2007, Kassow published his book. In 2014, Grossman began production on her movie. In 2019, I tell this story to you.
If you would like to see it for yourself, the film is currently available on a variety of streaming platforms and still has some screenings coming up. I would have enjoyed an entirely fictionalized treatment with the same cast, but it feels truer to the nature of the archive to include as much of the real material as possible. I was reminded more of the photographs of Henryk Ross and Jeannelle M. Ferreira's A Verse from Babylon (2005) than I was of even other Holocaust movies. As for the concert, it was well received and I had a wonderful time as both singer and narrator, although the fact that I had failed to sleep at all the night before meant that by the time I got to bed on Sunday night I hadn't slept in thirty-seven hours, which is why I am just writing this review now. It was worth the sleep deficit. This memory brought to you by my historical backers at Patreon.
Marshall Curry's A Night at the Garden (2017) can be viewed in total online if you have a few minutes free and the stomach for history; it consists of six minutes of black-and-white archival footage, simply framed by a few title cards, some extra-diegetic music, and a little slow motion. What it records is another of those terrible half-steps into alternate history that's no such thing. The German American Bund really did hold a pro-Hitler rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. It really was attended by 20,000 Nazi-sympathizing New Yorkers. A Jewish man really was beaten up onstage in front of the whistling, clapping, Heil-throwing lot of them. And it was captured, at least in part, on film. As a documentary, the short is curiously fragmentary. Unless you've done your reading in advance, you won't know that the speaker with the slicked-back hair and the glasses that glint thinly in the spotlight and the slight, distinct accent that twinges like an old war movie or last week's news on phrases like "the Jewish-controlled press" was Fritz Julius Kuhn, the Munich-born leader of the German American Bund which succeeded the less nativist-compatible Friends of New Germany, or that the dark-haired young man who rushed the stage and was almost literally torn to pieces by the rally's brownshirt security—as police officers haul him out from under their feet, we see his anguished face and his undershorts; he has suffered the world's least comedic de-pantsing—was Isadore Greenbaum, a Brooklyn plumber's helper whose impulsive act of protest gave the crowd a real live Jew-bashing to cheer on. But as a cold, clear memento of it happened here, the footage is invaluable. All those straight-armed salutes in the heart of New York, a city popularly synonymous with American Jewishness. "To Night," the illuminated marquee of the Garden announces, "Pro American Rally," followed by the rest of the week's bill—Tuesday hockey, Wednesday basketball—as if American Nazis are interchangeable with sports fans, as if the police-corralled protesters cramming the sidewalks outside are just an unusually rowdy ticket line. Inside the arena, the precision blocks of paramilitary choreography are shocking mostly because we have them mentally filed under Nuremberg, but the decorative mix of Nazi iconography with American legendry fascinates me because I last saw its like in Gabriel Over the White House (1933), whose script claimed American democracy for the fascist cause by invoking the Holy Trinity of Founding Fathers as the original dictators. The Pledge of Allegiance is recited over a sea of Hitler salutes. Swastika banners of the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund share the stage with American flags both contemporary and Revolutionary. An enormous portrait of George Washington glows like a saint behind the speaker and his declaration that "We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it." You begin to see even the nationalist links that aren't being called out. Those khaki-shirted, wedge-capped kids with neckerchiefs and insignia could be Boy Scouts. One of them is doing a gleeful little mime of Greenbaum's beating for his friends. I wish the film identified its cinematographers; I understand they may be unknown, but it would make a difference to me if they were a local news crew vs. the AV's own documentary unit. The last shot feels like one of history's shadows, so perfectly symbolic you can't imagine it wasn't staged: over the darkened panorama of the crowded arena, illuminated by the baleful glow of the stage, the stiff, outstretched arm of a Nazi salute rises into shot. Kander and Ebb wouldn't write "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" for another quarter-century, but the gesture says the same confident thing.
That question of belonging—of inheritance, of control—concerns even the title of Roberta Grossman's Who Will Write Our History (2018). It is not a rhetorical question. We have two major sources of information on the Warsaw Ghetto. One is the documentation of the Nazis who imprisoned over 400,000 Polish Jews within the wire-topped walls of an artificial prison-slum and over the next three years both systematically and casually murdered, through deportation to the extermination camps, through bullets, through starvation, through disease, more than 390,000 of them. They took photographs. They made newsreels. We have their images of corpses in the streets, of children begging on sidewalks, of atrocities whose perpetrators are smiling for the camera, some of them, unlike their victims totally unashamed. Starved and maltreated, expressionless faces, indistinguishable from the thousand-yard stares of camp inmates even before the trains took them off to Treblinka. Smoke-stained resistance fighters and their day-blinking families herded through the streets after the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. We have their numbers, their reports, their terminology. We have the imprint of their eye on everything it touched. And then we have our other source: the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto themselves. Specifically, we have what is now known as the Oyneg Shabes Archive or the Ringelblum Archive after the clandestine association of—they were many things, but let's call them archivists for now—formally organized in 1940 by Emanuel Ringelblum, historian, relief worker, and Warsaw resident turned resident of the Warsaw Ghetto. Their code name meant the joy of Shabbes: it sounded innocuous and they met on Saturday afternoons. The project began as a passionately intellectual one, but its members were not only scholars, schoolteachers, and journalists but economists, activists, artisans, businessmen, writers of all qualifications and all kinds. One was a mailman. Another was a rabbi. Some were Bundists, some were Communists, some were Zionists, some were not. Most wrote in Yiddish, some in Polish and some in Hebrew. Above all they were what the groundbreaking historian Simon Dubnow had in 1891 defined as zamlers—collectors of Jewish history and heritage. They kept journals, contributed and commissioned essays, conducted research in the form of interviews and surveys. They observed fashions, economics, gender roles. Initially their goal was to document the lives and experiences of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto for use after the war, so that historians of the period would not be forced to rely on Nazi sources which showed Jews only as monsters of abjection, degraded, humiliated, dehumanized. As conditions worsened, as the deportations continued, as awareness of the mass murder of European Jewry entered the Ghetto through the grapevines of youth movements and the eyewitness accounts of refugees, it became inescapably believable to the members of the Oyneg Shabes that their archive might be all that survived them. Their field-collecting became feverish, comprehensive, reaching far beyond diaries and testimonies to encompass the material culture of the Ghetto; they preserved ration cards, theater posters, and candy wrappers as carefully as the texts of poems, the transcriptions of street songs, or the secretly printed pages of underground newspapers. Nothing was too good or too bad to exclude. Statistics of sex work and expressions of rage against Jewish collaborators were given equal space with anthologies of jokes and the nuanced difficulties of religious observance. Recipes, photographs, postcards, letters, flyers, drawings, maps, scripts, lists, proclamations, and orders all went into the metal boxes and milk cans of the archive's physical repository along with the necessary metadata of the archive, the collective that had compiled it, and the Ghetto itself. When there was nothing else left to record, they recorded the names of the dead and what they had done. And they buried it all in three caches. Even incompletely recovered, there is nothing else like it in the history of the Holocaust. We have other archives from other ghettos, other first-person accounts, other defiant art, other accusations from beyond the grave. We do not have another such record of a community documenting its own destruction in real time, so many different voices blending, contradicting, analyzing. The Oyneg Shabes was not Isherwood's camera, recording mindlessly; they were always thinking, even at the last. Their studies of the Nazis correctly concluded that their tormentors' Jew-hatred outstripped any efficient productivity they might have gotten from their captive populations. Their self-assessments could be clinical, proud, or sickened, but they were not hagiography. They did not merely tell the world that they were human and lived. They showed the world exactly how they did it.
Directed, produced, and adapted by Grossman from Samuel D. Kassow's nonfiction book of the same name, Who Will Write Our History takes an ambitious, hybrid approach to dramatizing this transfixing but dense material. It begins with a train. Not that kind of train; this one puffing through the forests of Poland has wooden benches, glass-paned windows, passengers playing cards or writing at tables. The year is 1946 and the dark-haired, steady-faced woman returning to a Warsaw she can hardly recognize is Rachel Auerbach (Jowita Budnik, Joan Allen), one of the literary lights of the city before the war and one of only three members of the Oyneg Shabes to survive it. She will serve as our Vergil through this Inferno, though not its sole narrator; in keeping with the polyphony of its founding principles, the film will be narrated by multiple contributors to the Oyneg Shabes Archive, from diary-keeping members of the executive committee to one-shot chroniclers whose sketches or testimonials constitute the sole, meager traces of their existence. Their voices overlay historical footage and photographs, images of the written pages and typescripts that preserved the now-spoken words, and dramatic scenes that weave—deliberately never seamlessly—in and out of these archival materials. We follow lean Leyb Goldin (Bartłomiej Kotschedoff, Jess Kellner) on his daily rounds of the streets and the soup kitchen, a blackly self-aware portrait of a hunger-maddened intellectual reduced to counting the seconds till he can fill his stomach. We understand that the politically committed Hersh Wasser (Piotr Jankowski, Peter Cambor) is risking his life each night he carries, smuggled under his shirt, slid into the lining of his coat, rolled under his socks, a fresh batch of pages to the archive's cache under the floorboards of the Borochov school at Nowolipki 68. Indefatigable and terrified, Abraham Lewin (Wojciech Zieliński, Charlie Hofheimer) records poetically and unsparingly his love for his wife and child, his daily fear for all their lives. In his own words as well as his co-conspirators', Emanuel Ringelblum (Piotr Głowacki, Adrien Brody) emerges not as a plaster tzadik but something much more interesting: a man who could easily live inside his own head dedicating himself instead not just to recording but living in the world, stubborn and scholarly, a community organizer who decided that his responsibility extended not just to the Jews of Warsaw but the memory of the entire Jewish people if it came to it. You may note that I have credited two actors for each character. The reason takes longer to describe than to grasp from watching: the film's main cast are each played in person by an actor who can code-switch as needed between Yiddish and Polish and in voiceover by an actor whose English sounds native. We see and hear the first kind; we only hear the second. I like the effect; it is a lightly Brechtian reminder of the distance between reality and even a very good record of it and since the dialogue in the dramatic scenes is still adapted from the record, it permits us to hear the Oyneg Shabes in their own words, not just translation. The Yiddishists with whom I was sitting occasionally felt the subtitles were too tersely rendered where the Yiddish itself was richly expressive, but especially approaching a subject with such an emphasis on literal #ownvoices, I'll cope with middling subtitles to have the right language in my ears. I like as well that these scenes are shot in color, but it's a little flat and bright-dusted, as in a hand-tinted photograph, so that you come to expect somehow that the original film stock must be as monochrome as the photographs being carefully laid away by Israel Lichtenstein (Andrew Bering, IMDb is incomplete). Sometimes color is used to play a trick with time, stealing into the edge of an archival scene; sometimes a present-day actor walks digitally down a street that hasn't existed in seventy-five years. It does not feel like a cheap trick, juicing up a subject overanxiously presumed to be dry. In a documentary so acutely aware that most of its contemporary footage comes from German propaganda, these not-quite-invented scenes feel like a necessary counterweight, filling in the intimacy and ordinariness of Jewish life that the Nazi record denied. Here are the Jews of the Ghetto as the Oyneg Shabes recorded them, working, praying, reading, bartering, cooking, loitering, starving, kissing, arguing, hoping, despairing, wrestling with their world wrenched constantly away from them. Witnessing. Writing. There are gaps in their record, of course: information they died without knowing, information they could never have known in their lives. For that we have present-day historians like David Roskies, Jan Grabowski, Karolina Szymaniak, Kassow himself. They stand outside the fragile circle of time that is bounded by Auerbach's return to Warsaw; they know—not more than the dead, maybe, but different things. Some things no one knows anymore, the things that happen after the pen is dropped, the paper left behind. There are some things you can't archive.
None of the main characters of Who Will Write Our History are still living, but that doesn't mean its events are dead memory. I started this month by meeting a woman who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. Last week my mother met a woman who survived the firebombing of Dresden. There are still people on the other end of history, telling their stories, holding on. And then there are the ways that the past isn't dead because it's on a zombie rampage: synagogue shootings, reflexive anti-Semitism from all political directions; the recent incidents of arson at Jewish community centers in Arlington and Needham are very close to home. There is a devastating shock of a moment in the later part of the film when a radio operator for the Oyneg Shabes catches a 1942 BBC broadcast reporting the very figures of methodical extermination—now exceeding 700,000 Polish Jews—the group had carefully collected and smuggled via the Polish underground to the UK. Ringelblum is jubilant: they are not suffering in secrecy. They have blown the whistle on Hitler. "And if England keeps its word, perhaps we will be saved." No onscreen historian needs to append that England did not save the Jews of Poland except in the sense that not quite all of them had been murdered by VE-Day. Not a naive man and certainly not starry-eyed about his own survival, Ringelblum still believed that the world, once it knew the truth rather than the rumor of the Holocaust, could be horrified into action. Then and now, it seems that the world can absorb any amount of horror so long as it isn't affecting them personally. And yet it's hard for me to say that the broadcast was meaningless, any more than the archive itself. It stated for the historical record that the Jews of Poland were not going stupidly, unsuspectingly to their deaths. (When Auerbach and Wasser began their post-war efforts to recover the archive, they had to use pre-war aerial maps just to hazard the location of its burial site in the current sea of rubble: the Germans had approached the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as a mopping-up operation, but its conclusion after four hard-fought weeks had required the total destruction of the Ghetto by explosives and fire.) There is something a little mystical in this devotion to the work of recording regardless of reception or result; it makes me think of the traditional well-wishes of inscription and sealing on Rosh Hashanah, the prohibition on destroying the written name of God that sees worn-out holy books first stored in genizot, then buried like people rather than thrown out like trash. The Oyneg Shabes were at once writing their own memorial book and inscribing themselves into the more-than-mortal archive of history. There is also something incredibly hard-headed about it. After all, it worked. In 1946, Hersh Wasser was the last person left alive who knew the location of the first cache of the archive and it was still there waiting, water-damaged but not destroyed by either vindictive Nazis or indifferent time. In 1950, the second cache buried by Lichtenstein—unknown to either Auerbach, Wasser, or his wife Bluma—came to light during construction on the same site. In 2007, Kassow published his book. In 2014, Grossman began production on her movie. In 2019, I tell this story to you.
If you would like to see it for yourself, the film is currently available on a variety of streaming platforms and still has some screenings coming up. I would have enjoyed an entirely fictionalized treatment with the same cast, but it feels truer to the nature of the archive to include as much of the real material as possible. I was reminded more of the photographs of Henryk Ross and Jeannelle M. Ferreira's A Verse from Babylon (2005) than I was of even other Holocaust movies. As for the concert, it was well received and I had a wonderful time as both singer and narrator, although the fact that I had failed to sleep at all the night before meant that by the time I got to bed on Sunday night I hadn't slept in thirty-seven hours, which is why I am just writing this review now. It was worth the sleep deficit. This memory brought to you by my historical backers at Patreon.
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The German American Bund, on the other hand, scares the living heck out of me along with the knowledge that after America entered the war and declared opposition to the Nazis, these guys didn't just go "oh well we learned our lesson, no more for us, good bye". The fact that their direct descendants are active and harmful today is chilling.
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I think the candy wrapper is my favorite artifact because it is so ephemeral. Like, even for sentimental reasons you're not supposed to save those. And yet there it is, because it was there in the Ghetto; it was part of that strange, terrible world in which people were alive.
The German American Bund, on the other hand, scares the living heck out of me along with the knowledge that after America entered the war and declared opposition to the Nazis, these guys didn't just go "oh well we learned our lesson, no more for us, good bye". The fact that their direct descendants are active and harmful today is chilling.
Agreed: I find all the pre-war American fascist groups scary both because they existed in the first place and because you're right, it's impossible to imagine their members just one-eightied their ideologies as soon as the organizations were forcibly dissolved after Pearl Harbor. Not to mention all the other Americans who might not have wanted to shell out the membership dues for a brown or a silver shirt or who thought that all the marching around and saluting was a little silly, but did not necessarily disagree with their general ideas. Someone must be doing the scholarly work now on the genealogy of our current neo-Klan, neo-Nazi, nativist alt-right white supremacists. I would not find it pleasant reading, but I would want someone to have found the connections, because I cannot imagine the wheel was really reinvented when it came out looking like a swastika both times.
candy wrapper; associations
(you may not have seen this - I know that some people won't see anything associated with Roman Polanski).
I spent so much time immersed in Harry Turtledove's alternate history WWII in which aliens arrived (thousands of pages, many volumes) that I can't think of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising without sort of waiting for the space ships to show up. In that version, more of the famous fighters in the uprising survived than actually did in our historical timeline.
Re: candy wrapper; associations
It certainly existed. And it was pricey stuff.
(you may not have seen this - I know that some people won't see anything associated with Roman Polanski).
I haven't seen The Pianist, but not because of Polanski—I still didn't watch a lot of movies in 2002. I remember when it came out. I was very struck by Adrien Brody's face.
In that version, more of the famous fighters in the uprising survived than actually did in our historical timeline.
I am glad that a side effect of the aliens is greater survival.
Re: candy wrapper; associations
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And these people we worry about have their Canadian fellow-travellers. I can never doubt that, thanks in part to the documenting work of people like Warren Kinsella and Bernie Farber.
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I am glad to know that they (and their Canadian counterparts) are doing the work and I hate that the work needs to be done. I'll read the material sometime when I'm feeling sturdier.
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A Besre Velt sang gloriously. I could hear your voice always: not louder than the others, but distinctive in its timbre, like the top note in a perfume, evocative, elusive. It has power of scent to stir emotion.
Nine
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You're welcome. I wanted to; it's not the kind of story that should be told badly, and I thought the film told it very well. The book is more complete, but that's always true. I didn't think they shortchanged anything.
A Besre Velt sang gloriously. I could hear your voice always: not louder than the others, but distinctive in its timbre, like the top note in a perfume, evocative, elusive. It has power of scent to stir emotion.
Thank you! The songs are important to me. I really am glad you and
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A Night at the Garden sounds deeply disturbing - I learned a great deal about the German American Bund when I was writing an RPG project about the "Golden Age" of SF, and also learned more about the various efforts by US SF authors of the day to push back against Nazis local and abroad. Many didn't, but more than a few did. Including, surprisingly, E. E. Smith, where even in Galactic Patrol (1937), his villains were clearly space-Nazis (although of a far more thug-like sort than later depictions of Nazis and space-Nazis). I'm also reminded of Warner Brothers making Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and how they made it despite the warning from the HUAC "against slurring a 'friendly country'"
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I would have preferred it to be a pure tribute to the past, yes. But I'm not sure anything ever really is.
(That said, I continue to feel that nobody asked for this remix of the twentieth century and the fact that I sort of called it doesn't make me feel better at all.)
I learned a great deal about the German American Bund when I was writing an RPG project about the "Golden Age" of SF, and also learned more about the various efforts by US SF authors of the day to push back against Nazis local and abroad.
What was the RPG?
Including, surprisingly, E. E. Smith, where even in Galactic Patrol (1937), his villains were clearly space-Nazis (although of a far more thug-like sort than later depictions of Nazis and space-Nazis).
I don't think I knew that! I haven't read any of the Lensman books in ages. This does make me want to pick them back up again.
I'm also reminded of Warner Brothers making Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and how they made it despite the warning from the HUAC "against slurring a 'friendly country'"
The degree to which the Production Code constrained the movies from engaging on the most basic levels with the world as it was never ceases to amaze me, although that amazement is mostly rage. If you want to see a total failure to bring anti-fascism to the screen, watch Out of the Fog (1941) and then seriously chase it with Edward G. Robinson or at least that YouTube clip where Richard Spencer gets punched in the face.
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I'd not heard of Out of the Fog before, but it indeed sounds infuriating. I'm reminded strongly of the equally infuriating history of queer characters in film.
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I have some difficulty with Heinlein or Pohl, but I can totally see Leiber and Sturgeon hanging out with werewolves. I would be actively surprised if Bradbury didn't.
I'm reminded strongly of the equally infuriating history of queer characters in film.
I try to write whenever I find antidotes. We're still living with the damage of the PCA.
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I have since seen (and read) it! I recommend Richard Barrios' Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2003), too, if you haven't read it. But I never heard Russo speak, and I'm glad you did.
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And I'm certainly under the impression that there's a line between past fascists and modern ones, and that it picks up the KKK and neo-Nazi groups.
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Me, too. It feels correct.
And I'm certainly under the impression that there's a line between past fascists and modern ones, and that it picks up the KKK and neo-Nazi groups.
Yes. Like a sort of katamari of racism.
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20195779 helped me sit with these hard, hard things.I imagine you and the others of A Besere Velt did the same for the people at the film festival. You do a lot of important work in song and writing. Thank you for it.
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That was definitely the right song. I hadn't run across the anthology and I appreciate the link, both the sentiment and the songs: "Just for a little while / I know there's a world we're fighting for."
I imagine you and the others of A Besere Velt did the same for the people at the film festival. You do a lot of important work in song and writing. Thank you for it.
You are welcome. Thank you for hearing. (And singing yourself.)
*hugs*
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You're welcome.
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Your choir moved that audience--and I know most of the members, they can be a tough crowd to enchant. As one woman said "the voices of angels." The angels of memory.
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Thank you.
Your choir moved that audience--and I know most of the members, they can be a tough crowd to enchant. As one woman said "the voices of angels." The angels of memory.
I'm glad we were true to them, then. It's important.
Thank you for
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Given the constant (and ultimately unanswerable) question of utility of any given action, I somehow feel very comforted to know that whatever else people were doing to survive the ghetto, they were also doing this: recording life. And it **has** proved worthwhile.
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It's all right if you do. It is also the way I feel.
*hugs*
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I think that's wonderful. And it still counts.
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That documentary short is chilling. That kid miming the adults beating Greenbaum :(
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You're welcome! I'm glad to make them more known.
That documentary short is chilling.
It is useful to have as evidence of something that should not have happened.
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*hugs*