![]() Taken together, the three books uncover something of the variety of Jewish experiences of living in Nazi occupied Warsaw, over the course of six years of changing Nazi actions and Jewish responses. In Michal Grynberg’s edited collection of diary and memoir accounts, newly translated into English by Philip Boehm, the breadth of Jewish experiences, ranging from collaboration through resistance, are revealed. In Janusz Korczak’s Ghetto Diary – published in paperback for the first time – the reflections of the paediatrician are on his own personal past and future, as well as the present day-to-day concerns of running an orphanage relocated into the ghetto. In Paulsson’s ground-breaking study Secret City, it is evasion rather than resistance that takes centre-stage. However, as the three books under review suggest, the historical complexity of Jewish experiences of the Warsaw ghetto is not easily reducible to resistance alone. In contrast, the latter has emerged as both the definitive ghetto and site of heroic resistance, which in Israeli narratives of the Holocaust in particular, offers a degree of redemption from this terrible past. ![]() The death camp sited in the former has emerged as not only the definitive death camp and representative of the state-sponsored factory-like mass killings of the Holocaust, but also as a synonym for evil. In the popular imagination, the geographical complexity of the Holocaust has been reduced to two Polish towns, Oswiecim and Warsaw. ![]()
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