“Chronicle of a Single Day.” is a text from the volume Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto (written in the Warsaw Ghetto in August 1941 and here read in the English translation) whose reoccurring themes are hunger and confinement. The text in question is undoubtedly the most literary in this volume; it refers openly to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and nods to many other literary texts; the ramblings and wanderings of both the body and the mind of the protagonist make one think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, where the main protagonist Leopold Bloom is not starving, but all the same in Episode Four of the book obsessed with items of food, with kidneys and other intestinal, and carries them around with him; much in the same way as this text’s protagonist figuratively speaking carries with him, and during his walks confronts with, those who are already dead and those who are not yet dead (which seems, despite some alluding to former and present societal divides, like the mentioning of the ricksha-carried chair of the Judenrat, to be the only two categories of people still left); to the flesh that already is or soon shall become grass (Isaiah 40:6).
At the same time, not only the hunger that permeates everything in this chronicle but also the rambler and the wanderer, that is to say, the protagonist himself, leads one’s thoughts to the first-person protagonist of Hamsun’s novel Hunger. That person is also a nameless vagrant in his late twenties with intellectual leanings who, overwhelmed by hunger, wanders the streets of another confined area, in this case, Norway’s capital, then named Kristiania, stumbling upon a handful of more or less mysterious or real persons, much the same way as the protagonist of this text, though mostly in his mind, encounters and speaks with a selection of people from his present and past.
The ”Chronicle of a Single Day” takes the form of an inner dialogue between one for four months starving, in the Warsaw Ghetto confined, man and his empty stomach, and ends exactly as it begins, with the sound of the news from the outside world and the events that are taking place there in form of typewriter clapper and news dispatches as well as with the hunger that happens in and makes up the world of the Ghetto and that is embodied in the last words of the text, which themselves are both repetitive and echo the repetitiveness of both the text about the Ghetto and the life in the Ghetto, “And I–I am hungry, hungry. I am Hungry”. Thus, the text ends as all days in the text and in the Ghetto end: there they begin – with hunger and despair, with a preoccupation with what is missing the most in this precarious situation – food.
Just as anything and everything circles around food if you are starving, before it circles back to the beginning, the content of the chronicle circles around and is divided according to the daily meal of soup, which the protagonist might or might not be served twenty to one. As stated, it ends where it began because that is the only way the story can go. After all, that is the only way the Ghetto-confined, or for that matter, any confined person can go, around and around, with nowhere to go but to return to the initial starting point, not even the final exit in the form of committing suicide is any longer an option.
The consequences of this confinement also become visible through how time slows down as the physical and mental spaces the protagonist inhabits are shrinking, as it tends to do when nothing is happening. One is simultaneously waiting for and dreading that something will happen because one cannot stand the present and does not dare to imagine, or maybe know all too well, what the future might hold. The gates to the ghetto are almost hermetically closed; nothing comes in except for the workers who might or might not get fed and might or might not return.
The protagonist and his compatriots have already been denied and deprived of everything – not only their freedom, hope, life, and afterlife in the form of offspring but also of their most basic needs (food, shelter, security, and so on) – and now they are even denied and deprived of the only exit that remains. They are doomed to death but still kept alive, provided with rations not enough to live but to keep existing to be tormented by their losses and deprivations. This is a fact illuminated by the way the protagonist almost has to urge on and force his ailing body, which he no longer can stand looking at, obey his commands, function correctly, or do what it is supposed to do.
The text that all this results in is – just like a traditional three-course meal – divided into three parts – before the eating of the soup, during the eating of the soup, and after the eating of the soup. The meal may be the soup, but every meal might be the last supper for oneself or others; the conversations around the table circulate not around hunger but around the final consequence of hunger unfilled, the ultimate consequence of life – death. They talk about those who have left this world and those who are still left in it, and it is sometimes hard to tell which of those conditions is the preferable one.
But despite on a superficial level being foremost and only about hunger, the text is, in reality, not about hunger or being hungry at all but about the human being and the act of being human. The locked-in Ghetto inhabitants may, viewed from the outside world as well as from their own inner worlds, resemble animals confined to a zoo or stray dogs that beg for mercy and roam the streets in search of scraps of food and protection (which they also dream and fantasize about), but they are not all; instead, they insist on being human, on keeping their humanity alive. It “may be pointless or even criminal,” but they “still operate on infants,” even if they question why they are doing it and for what reason, and to which world the child is brought back to life, spare to die.
Öyvind Vågen
PS For those who want to learn more about the discussed text ”Chronicle of a Single Day” is the following eminent podcast higly recommended: Leyb Goldin’s race against starvation in the Ghetto: a Yad Vashem Podcast.