This article is about the declining morals and mores of the Jewish inhabitants in the wartime Warsaw Ghetto that was presumably written on 4th July 1942. It is derived from the “Street” section of Volume One of The Ringelblum Archive Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Published by Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma; Warsaw). The text is attributed to Stanisław Różycki, and its complete title in translation reads as follows: “4th July. Warsaw, ghetto. A study [of] ‘Ulica’ [The Street]. The appearance and the social life of the street in the ghetto” (hereafter referred to as the Morality of the Street). The original text is written in Polish and on the archive’s website, described as: ”handwritten, notebooks, ink, Polish, 150×197 mm, 31 sheets, 31 pages”. In the transcribed and translated (to English) form I am analyzing and quoting here [insert link to the full source text]), the text consists of around 8.800 words, including footnotes, spread over 19 A4 pages.
In this article, I will first describe the outline and content of the “Morality of the Street” and try to put it into perspective and context along with some other contemporary texts from the archives of the ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw and then compare and contrast it with Leyb Goldin’s piece “Chronicle of a Single Day” that I analyzed in one of my previous articles in this issue [insert link]. After that, I will focus on the text’s use of an inversion of the Ten Commandments in the form of the Ten Plagues that Haunt the Ghetto as a tool to highlight the toll the confinement to the Ghetto, the German occupation and oppression, and the steadily worsening living conditions took on the Jewish population of the Ghetto and their morals and mores, and how all that, as I shall return later to, resulted in a “Dantean image, which even the most vivid imagination […] did not dare to present.” Finally, I will dwell on how the latter can contribute to our understanding of the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective.
The Morality of the Street is divided into two parts regarding content and structure. The former and more extensive section can be described as a “book of lamentations,” primarily complaining over, mourning, and in vivid detail depicting the worsening morals and mores of the Jewish inhabitants of the wartime Warsaw Ghetto as the living conditions and oppressive measures enacted by the Nazi-German occupiers harden and as the lack of “the rule of law” inevitably leads to that the “law of the street” deteriorates to the “law of the jungle” and ends up being the only law that is upheld at all, as this quote illustrates:
“Lawlessness has spread in every sphere of life, without the least exception. Most people unscrupulously make avail of its benefits. Sure of impunity, they commit crimes. The state of captivity, lawlessness, and impunity puts people’s lives, property, health, freedom, dignity, etc. in jeopardy every day.”
This first part is structurally bound together by the inversion of the Ten Commandments in the form of the Ten Plagues That Haunt the Ghetto mentioned above.
The latter, and less extensive, section starts with:
“Before we thoroughly and exhaustively analyze the entire contents of the life of the street let us first examine the street from the outside. Let us look at it through the eyes of a spectator who has been asleep since 1 September 1939. External Appearance. Before we thoroughly and exhaustively analyze the entire contents of the life of the street, let us first examine the street from the outside. Let us look at it through the eyes of a spectator […] He suddenly wakes up and goes for a walk in the Small and Large ghettos. No doubt he would feel confused, his jaw would drop, and he would not believe his senses telling him he is awake [..]”
and resembles a more contemporary take on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters paired with a few scopes of Dante’s Inferno(that, as previously noted, is referred to in the text) as the writer (and narrator) of the text accompanies and guides an unknowing visitor – who has been asleep since the day the war broke out – through the Ghetto as a way to highlight the absurd and nightmarish living conditions that prevail, and have been prevailing for so long, in the hellish purgatory the Ghetto has become, that the people living there have started to take them for granted and consequently also act and behave themselves accordingly, in a manner that, of course, worsens the situation and deteriorates the conditions even more. Until it, as said earlier, becomes a nightmarish hell that sets back the living conditions hundreds of years (but without the romantic allure of “chivalry”),
“Medieval ghetto walls. The yellow armbands indicate a state of proscription, he gathers. Slavish duties towards the lord, persecution of the Jews, treating them like dogs, disrespecting them, and undervaluing their life. Hunger, plagues, dirt, no electricity. Stage coaches, rickshaws, beggars’ bizarre clothes, street trade, and no signs of cultural life. Terror, limitation on freedom of thought, speech, and action.”
and that “even the most vivid imagination […] did not dare present”, a fact that, in a way, the remaining bulk of the text serves to highlight and underscore in a multitude of ways, and a fact that can be interpreted as embodying Sartre’s sentiment “Hell is other people,” with the addition: “even one’s own (people is),” or maybe broaden it to sometimes one’s own people is one’s own worst enemy. In this article, I will focus mainly on that former part.
The “Morality of the Street” is, in a way, and as far as any text depicting such atypical conditions and events can be, typical for many of the writings from the Warsaw Ghetto that were collected and preserved by the Ringelblum Archive in the sense that it is a very candid or rather crude description of the life and inhabitants of the Ghetto. Since the archives of the Warsaw Ghetto were written in secrecy, in hiding, and out of sight from as well as unsupervised by both the Judenratthat administered the Ghetto and the German authorities that occupied and tormented it, the resulting writings to a much larger extent (compared with the ones from the corresponding archives of the Lodz Ghetto that were compiled in collaboration with the Judenrat) contain descriptions and depictions of not only the victims and their sufferings but also of the perpetrators whose atrocities created the victims and caused their sufferings. It is as if all the secrecy making and risks the writers had to do and take dared and empowered them to write, in a way, “the truth and nothing but the truth,” as they write with an urgency fueled by not only despair but also a wish to preserve and rescue a world that is bordering on extinction and to collect evidence to be used against the ones causing that extinction (both for a future and hopefully fairer world that will come).
With the above said, this specific text also exhibits many characteristics that set it apart from other texts collected in the same archives; the first and foremost one has to do with the lamentations that comprise the bulk of the text and the act of accusation accompanying them. Of course, neither the lamentations nor the act of accusation per se is what makes the text stand out (both are, for obvious reasons, reoccurring features of many, if not most, of the archived texts), but the fact that lamentations are more about what the Jewish inhabitants subject themselves and each other to than about what their German oppressors and tormenters and the prevailing conditions subject them to, and the fact that the act of accusations hence in a way is targeting the Jewish victims rather than the German oppressors and their Polish collaborators, even if the latter two’s atrocities are mentioned frequently, but only in passing. Compare, for example, the following quote:
“Another aspect: ruthless exploitation of the pauper’s labor. The parasitic monopolist dictates the price of food products, supported by the Jewish Council’s economic policy. The price is solely a lure for the rich man, and they profit from the exploitation of workers and ridiculously cheap labor. Such a shark fears neither a strike nor trade unions because these things are forbidden. He is not afraid of losing a worker because there are literally a thousand others to replace him […] Bribery, cynicism, favoritism, and ruthlessness towards an unprofitable client are all common characteristics of relations in public institutions. The street notices this and experiences it directly in its contacts with the Order Service. These representatives of law and order, these regulators of street economy, communication, and the inner life of the street [. . .] are a real plague because they gained all their insignia for every power at once. Vulgar behavior, incivility, clubbing, pushing, kicking, and beating, along with cynicism and ruthlessness towards a helpless client unable to offer a bribe. Taking advantage of one’s power to do business. Sending those unable to afford a bribe to death or to prison without any qualms. Extortion […]”
This last sentiment could be because the writer (and narrator) still, despite everything, has higher expectations of his peers and compatriots than of their German and Polish counterparts.
Suppose we narrow down and concentrate on comparing and contrasting the above-discussed text with Leyb Goldin’s “Chronicle of a Single Day,” written almost a year earlier, in August 1941. In that case, we find both similarities and differences. The main similarities are that both texts appear to depict a single day that is made to represent all the days in the Ghetto (where the days because of the shrinking possibilities more and more were becoming the same) and that they both deal with how the external living conditions of the as the times go more and more confined and restricted Warsaw Ghetto impacted and impaired the internal lives of its inhabitants. Another similarity is that both highlight how the inhabitants’ steadily shrinking physical space and decreasing agency to act also shrunk their mental worlds and hampered their ability to imagine that things could be or become different, thus causing the time to slow down and everything to turn into an, at the same time omnipresent and Groundhog Day-like reoccurring now. A third similarity is that both texts dwell on and extensively explore what happens with human beings who are deprived of everything – not only of their freedom, hope, life, and afterlife in the form of their offspring but also of their most basic needs (food, shelter, security, and so on) – and on how that deprivation impacts their humanity. A fourth similarity is how both texts center around the prolonged lack of food to highlight how the deprivation or unfulfillment of all basic needs affects and forms the protagonists of the respective text and their fellow inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto. Compare, for example, the following quote from “Morality in the Street”:
“Consequently, the only human element left in the beggar is a simple animal craving for food. Everything else has died in him [..] He is focused solely on food. He remains indifferent to any other aspects of life around him.”
But these two last similarities are also the main difference between the two texts: the fork in the road where they depart from each other and turn in opposite directions (though the chosen roads, in a way, mirror and reflect each other the same way as they are two sides of the same coin; the same way as they can be read as two chapters or versions of the same story of despair and deprivation). There, the “Chronicle of a Single Day” embodies the very human impulse not to succumb and give up one’s humanity when being subjected to dehumanization, to urge to refuse to be reduced to an animal, and refuse to give up all higher aspirations to try to fulfill one’s most basic needs, to insist on keeping “operating on infants” even if it “may be pointless or even criminal,” if nothing else as a way to try to humanize the dehumanizing conditions rather than letting them erode one’s humanity because that is precisely what humans do because that is precisely what makes humans human; the “Morality of the Street” takes the opposite route and explores the as human impulse to do whatever it takes to survive (something that all our predecessors have done in the extent needed for them to be able to survive and procreate and live long enough to protect their offspring so that they can repeat that cycle on and on again). Also, that impulse can, in a way, be described as doing what humans do because that is precisely what makes (it possible for) humans (to procreate and keep being) human. This difference in viewpoint or perspective becomes, perhaps, most evident in how the persons depicted in the two texts treat and relate to the appearances of food – that scarce resource made to symbolize the scarcity of all physical as well as spiritual gods in both texts: in the former, the protagonist and his compatriots orderly and somewhat patiently queue and wait for their turns to be served or denied the watery soup and the stale bread that consist the meal the whole text revolves around; in the latter, there is an abundance of people who try to steal or secure for themselves by trickery the same (but now, perhaps due the worsening conditions, more literal than symbolic) bread: “The whole street steals and cheats, [. . .]. This means that all frequenters [. . .], the unemployed aimlessly roaming about the streets, the merchants, and the salesmen are all bent on fraud and theft”. Again, the two stories are two sides of the same coin; they depict two opposite but just as reasonable or, for that matter, unreasonable ways to react to the same unjustified circumstances.
So maybe the best, or even the only way, to read and make sense of these two texts is to read them not apart as separate tales but by juxtaposing and overlapping them to create a broader, more full-bodied picture. Together, the two texts become a tale that is larger than the sum of its parts; together, they paint a very human (in the sense of being as self-contradictive and conflicted as human nature is) picture of how different humans react when faced with inhuman and impossible conditions; of how some people sometimes rise to the occasion and others (or rather the same ones but at other times) sink to it; and of what it takes to both spiritually and physically survive the toll that the almost un-survivable circumstances take. This may be why the two texts appear to be two sides of the same coin, that they look like two chapters of the same story; maybe the former perspective is as essential to ensure spiritual survival as the latter perspective is to provide physical survival.
Suppose we narrow down further and concentrate on the first part of the “Morality of the Street,” on the “book of lamentations”. In that case, we find that the first sentences of the text serve as a form of motto or, rather, a condensed summary of both the content and the point of the text (the inhumanity mentioned above, which is an expression of the inhuman conditions the humans are living under) –
“The moral decay, the amorality, and the radical blunting of people’s moral senses are – aside from hunger, poverty, and death – the most elemental plagues in the ghetto, the methods of the occupier, and the ‘[bad] example from above’[. . .] we cannot do anything about it. This total disregard for moral principles, even the most basic ones, manifests itself in both private and public life, in family and professional life, as well as among one’s friends and among people in general. The street displays all these phenomena in a stark and graphic way. It is not necessary to delve into the matter. It is enough to observe the life of the ghetto street for a few days,”
– and outlines the inversed version of the Ten Commandments in the form of the Ten Plagues that Haunt the Ghetto that constitutes the bulk of the text. If we read further on, we find that those richly exemplified plagues (or, in a way, according to the author, sins of both venial and mortal art, even if the author seems to condemn both arts of sin as hard) are in a way explained but never excused by hunger and other harsh conditions:
“Such a skeleton of a man has nothing to lose when his body is swollen out of hunger. He simply does not care, [. . .] he does not have them, because the hunger [. . .] but the emptiness in the stomach is not the most painful. [. . .] no inhibitions whatsoever.”
The Ten Plagues that Haunt the Ghetto are as follows (and are exemplified as follows, not seldom in the form of the more traditional seven deadly sins or cardinal sins):
- Theft – “From a stall, from a basket, from a suitcase, from a shop window, from a cart, from a wagon, or from a box whose contents are the merchant’s entire property. Those careless enough not to hold on tightly to their briefcases, bags, or baskets full of food products are bound to lose them—an adolescent beggar will rush past them, snatch the handle out of their grip using a practiced “method,” and run away. If he fails, he does not run away, unless the owner is an overzealous advocate of lynching. Clearly unashamed, the attacker stops and looks into the eyes of his [would-be] victim without any embarrassment, as if there were nothing out of the ordinary. The people around have learned to ignore this everyday sight. Unresponsive, they remain passive. Sometimes somebody kicks such an adolescent thief, settling the whole matter.”
- Fraud – “Even before the war in Jewish Warsaw there were too many, far too many, swindlers, frauds, quacks, con men, and crooks. But nowadays having such a flair is an asset that generates a fixed income. Frauds cheat in various ways. They double-deal, take advantage of people’s ignorance, spread panic (‘Watch out, a car from Pawiak is coming!’ or ‘Der Ziander geyt’), or spread rumours (‘Hundred zloty bills are invalid from today on,’ ‘The price of coupon bread has gone up,’ ‘Registration of knitwear’).”
- Denunciation and spying – “There are legions of professional snoops in every milieu. Among the young and women. [. . .] Among intellectuals and the proletariat. Among German, Polish, Warsaw, Łódź, and provincial Jews. Among religious Jews and the meches. This plague has penetrated all milieux [. . .] This plague is so widespread that people distrust these poorest [. . .] there are also amateur denunciators who denounce out of [. . .] out of envy, of rivalry, of anger, or out of zealousness.”
- Blackmail – “Blackmailers roam about along the ghetto walls and blackmail policemen, [. . .]. The latter offer them bribes without a word because they know that it is better not to mess with professional blackmailers, for they never fail to carry out their threats. Blackmailers blackmail corrupted clerks, speculators, former officers, repatriates from Russia, and anybody whom the authorities could detain for any reason whatsoever.”
- Corruption – “A bribe will reduce your fee, tribute, or contribution. It will get you released from prison or jail. It will discontinue an investigation. It will guarantee that you do not end up in a camp as a result of a round-up. It will guarantee that they neither requisition your flat, nor delouse it, nor close the gate, nor detain you due to an unpaid contribution, tribute, or fee. This plague has mostly hit the poor—just like everything in the ghetto, for that matter.”
- Moral shamelessness – “Beggars and paupers relieve themselves on the street: if not on Leszno Street, then on Orla Street, if not on Karmelicka Street, then in the alleys. You often see women, young or old, spread their legs, lift their skirt, and relieve themselves, shamelessly looking into the eyes of embarrassed pedestrians. Children do it very often and in a cynical way, provided that children can be cynical at all. The sight of the naked intimate body parts of beggars is commonplace too. And this exhibitionism is not accidental, because they take delight in displaying all their wounds, ulcerations, and swollen body parts. The fierce struggle for survival, the impertinence, and the general deadening have extinguished all sense of intimacy, subtlety, or natural shame.”
- Taking the law into one’s own hand– “The state of captivity, lawlessness, and impunity puts people’s lives, property, health, freedom, dignity, etc. in jeopardy every day. Hence, the depressed and numbed masses try to compensate for these losses by taking advantage of the other side of the coin—[they use] the impunity in the spheres which the occupier does not meddle in (for now . . .). This explains the phenomenon common in times of turmoil and lawlessness: the lynch law.”
- Social or caste conceit – “You walk indifferently past the corpse of a baby, of an old man, or of a youth because it is none of your business. But when ‘one of your people’ is caught in a round-up and is about to be sent to a camp, then ‘your people’ immediately do everything to get him out. But nobody cares about strangers. You meet a beggar from your “caste” on the street. ‘Oh, it is him. He’s one of ‘ours,’ former this and that. He needs help’.”
- Beggary – “Consequently, the only human element left in the beggar is a simple animal craving for food. Everything else has died in him. He is ‘beyond good and evil.’ He is morally, emotionally, culturally, and socially blind. He cannot even afford a gesture of gratefulness towards the occasional hand that feeds him. He grabs the food without glancing at his benefactor. He does not say thank you. He does not calm down. Instead, he just greedily swallows the scrap into his stomach and keeps on searching. He is focused solely on food. He remains indifferent to any other aspects of life around him.”
- Disappearance of good morals – “There has been a decline of good manners in the sphere of private, social, family, public, and professional life. We are attacked by natural disasters: theft, fraud, denunciation, blackmail, shamelessness, social conceit, taking the law into one’s own hands, beggary, and corruption. And even if you break free from these problems and you can chase away these macabre spectres for a moment, you still have to contend with the unruliness, numbness, brutality, egoism, unkindness, disobligingness, hooliganism, and ruthlessness—all the time, every minute, and at every step”
To summarize, the lives, morals, and mores of the Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto are in a way described according to the well-known theorem that states the lower one falls in the social pecking order, the more critical it becomes to elevate oneself, if only slightly above the ones that have dropped even lower, but with the one example: it is not an individual as much as a group of individuals, a collective, that is falling in the very much literary pecking order; the destiny that looms at the bottom end is not social alienation, but physical and literal annihilation. Compare for example the following quote,
“A “singing” beggar hates and scorns a beggar who just howls and begs. The former regards the latter as somebody having a lower position on an imaginary social ladder. The former resents the latter over the fact that he dares stand next to him and compete with him. The former would like to remove the latter from the sidewalk they share.”
If we finally direct our attention to the last questionnamely, how this text ( and some of the other texts in this issue) contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust, I think the key to answering that question lies in the following excerpt from the very last paragraph of the text:
“There are no suits of armor, weapons, uniforms, or courageous faces. Not only is the nation not militant or chivalrous, but it also has no opportunity to prove itself in this field. You do not experience the war directly, except for when you see German soldiers, who rarely show up, [. . .]. Perhaps the air-raid alerts and [. . .] in this confinement you lose touch with reality, the fact of whose existence is corroborated only by newspapers, gossip, and the existing [. . .] economic situation. Jews have not been permitted direct participation in the war. They have not had the honor […].”
This a quote that can be read as the Jewish inhabitants in the ghetto – in addition to being deprived of and denied everything else and much in the same way as the protagonist of “Chronicle of a Single Day” and his compatriots are deprived of and denied even the last resort, the last way out of the ghetto, i.e., the death – are deprived of and denied the opportunity to fight honorable, or rather to fight back at all against their enemies and oppressors, and as if that might, in a way, be an explanation to the declining morals and mores that are exemplified and highlighted through the text: if you are treated like caged animals, you will sooner or later become or at least start to behave like caged animals that turn against each other, not everyone and not always (as “Chronicle of a Single Day” as noted illustrates and exemplifies), but someone and sometimes.
Thus, maybe the ”Morals of the Street’s” main contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust is just this candid, not by a mile sugarcoated description from within of how sometimes the worse conditions bring forward not only the best but also the worst in humans, how they sometimes make people not only rise but also sink to the occasion (as alluded to above), and of how easy it is sometimes to start internalizing the way one is viewed and, in lack of other viable alternatives, become what one is expected, or in this case, remember the Dante allegory, doomed, to be; as well as its vivid description of the spiritual burden that comes with, the prize we are forced to pay and force ourselves and others to pay for, trying to safeguard our future physical existence.
And maybe that contribution can help clarify the discussion of and deepen and broaden understanding of what creates and constitutes survival guilt and what people had or felt they had to do to survive (compare, for example, the quote: “The fierce struggle for survival, the impertinence, and the general deadening have extinguished all sense of intimacy, subtlety, or natural shame”). Maybe this deepened and expanded understanding can help us understand that the third destruction did not only target and destroy the outer, external physical, and cultural worlds of, in this example, the Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto but also their private and inner worlds. (Something that in the text is highlighted by the fact that the (Jewish part of) the city of Warsaw has been reduced to a “small, barnyard, dirty, ugly, overpopulated” settlement that has been “deprived of the achievements of 20th-century civilization” and that way forcing its whole world, and the whole world of its inhabitants, to be “moved on the street,” thus destroying the inhabitants’ ability even to have private and inner sphere (and life) to protect and safeguard.)
And that the text “Morality of the Street,” if only just a little, thus has the potential to contribute to our understanding of, and ability to start comprehending, a “Dantean image” which hitherto “even the most vivid imagination […] did not dare to present.” But as mentioned earlier, this contribution is enlarged when the text is read together with other texts from the archives, as not the only humanly possible way but as one of many humanly possible ways to react to the inhuman living conditions of the ghetto.
Öyvind Vågen