Words to outlive us

the long version

"In the history of the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto stands as the enduring symbol of Jewish suffering and heroism. This collective memoir - a mosaic of individual diaries, journals, and reports - follows the fate of the Warsaw Jews from the first bombardments of the Polish capital to the razing of the Jewish district. The life of the ghetto appears here in striking detail: the frantic exchange of apartments as the walls first go up; the daily battle against starvation and disease; the moral ambiguities confronting Jewish bureaucracies under Nazi rule; the ingenuity of smugglers; the acts of resistance.". "Written inside the ghetto or in hiding outside its walls, these testimonies preserve voices otherwise consigned to oblivion: a woman doctor whose four-year-old son is deemed a threat to the hideout; a painter determined to complete a mural of Job and his trials; an eleven-year-old girl barely eluding blackmailers on the Aryan side of the city. The range of witnesses reflects the diversity of the ghetto itself, from engineers to shopkeepers, from smugglers to members of the Jewish police."--BOOK JACKET.