Emanuel Ringelblum's handwriting in Polish.
It's a different kind of reading.
For several years, I've been reading all the original documents relating to Janusz Korczak and the Orphanage. These aren't just texts by Korczak himself, but also by his colleagues and students. In my case, the original documents are manuscripts. I've become accustomed to and easily read the engraved and digitized texts. This was helped by my father's ease in reading his handwriting, which is reminiscent of Korczak's. I read Emanuel Ringelblum's manuscripts in the same way.
What's remarkable about this is that reading original manuscripts provides me with much more insight than reading the same text in books. When reading manuscripts, I also remember deletions and changes in word order. The above also applies to surviving documents written on thin, so-called "copy" paper.
I can't precisely describe my own feelings when reading these kinds of documents, but they reach me much deeper. Among the descriptions of other people that I remember most vividly is the description of the "Umschlagplatz" and the school classrooms where some Jews spent the night waiting for the train to the death camp.
Emanuel Ringelblum wrote: I remember a conversation I had with Mordechai Anielewicz (pseudonym: "Marian-Mordechai"), the commander of the Security Service (OB), a member of the Supreme Council of Hashomer Hatzair, who died during the April Operation.
"He assessed the odds of an unequal fight well, predicted the destruction of the ghetto and the shops, and was certain that neither he nor his fighters would survive the liquidation of the ghetto, that they would perish like stray dogs, and no one would even know their final resting place. After a series of heroic deeds in January and April 1943, he died a few weeks after the April Operation began in a bunker with five entrances, suffocated by gases the Germans introduced before entering the bunker from five sides."
Another document I read, and I think I can say this here with great respect, is Marian Berland's document describing September 1942, the last days of the Grossaktion in the Warsaw Ghetto. The school on Stawki Street (Umszlag) was overcrowded. Everyone already knew these were the last hours of life. The walls of the school classrooms were filled with obituaries. They say they didn't survive. Unfortunately, after the war, all the plaster with thousands of names was scraped off.
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| Two fragments of Janusz Korczak´s Diary, the last from August 4, 1942, the day before the deportation to Treblinka. |
Two fragments of Janusz Korczak´s Diary, the last from August 4, 1942, the day before the deportation to Treblinka. The highlighted fragments are visible on thin, copy-pasted paper.
Our Father, who art in heaven...
This prayer was carved by hunger and misery. Our bread.
Bread.
****
He stands and watches. His legs are spread wide.
Efforts to have Esterka returned are in vain. – I wasn't sure if I would be of use to her or harm her if I succeeded.
– Where did she fall into? – someone asks.
– Maybe not her, but we fell into it /that we're staying/
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| Oneg Shabbat Archives. The letter describes the atmosphere in his orphanage at the time he was imprisoned at Pawiak in 1940. |
