Showcase 2

Supply department – Ration for 60 days, from the “Satirical Album” by Teofila Langnas (Reich-Ranicki), 1941

1.

‘”I’m dying of hunger, I’m dying of hunger, I’m dying of hunger .’ he shouts to the passersby right in their face, echoed with impetus, and his fierce eyes move quickly towards the sun-soaked balconies: ‘I’m starving’, He says nothing else but ‘I’m starving’, His body is getting weaker and weaker – week by week, day by day. His voice is becoming quieter, somewhat hoarser. But his words are still mad and desperate; these will be his last words, He’s standing there screaming with the deeply emotional voice: ‘I’m starving’, He’s croaking like a flock of crows, and his cry can be barely heard, only some short, broken, hoarse sounds are peeking through: ‘I’m starving, I’m dying of hunger, I’m dying of hunger’. The words are accompanied by a wild look in his eyes and a skinny, begging hand. The ravenous sounds and the fierce look will disappear soon, the same way as the body which emits them. But the protest of the starving will not be muted so easily, it will resonate from the hungry lips of others.”

lcchak Berensztein, Poem in Prose, Warsaw 1941

2.

“Somebody is sitting up against the wall on the street, A grey figure, it sometimes sits silently, sometimes begs, sometimes just watches the passers-by. Yet hunger never leaves its eyes. Mortal hunger. Its legs are getting thicker and thicker, These are not legs, but enormous blocks of flesh swollen due to starvation. They are swollen logs, It is a macabre, living example of elephantiasis pedis, And this enormous mass of flesh is one festering, swollen wound, Swarms of flies fly around it. They land and drink the trickling blood and pus. An unaccustomed person automatically averts his gaze from this sight. But it cannot be done, The head becomes motionless, The muscles grow taut, The eyelids become too short to cover the eyes. The wound remains. The whole street is a wound. The ghetto is a stinking, festering wound.”

Wojdyslawski (first name unknown), summer or 1941

3.

“The Erenberg family lived in Warsaw. They were four people: a father, a mother, one son, and one daughter. [ … ]Right at the beginning of the war, they started to starve. The father left Warsaw in 1940. He died of hunger and some disease somewhere in a random village. Then the mother perished in Warsaw, also of hunger. The son and the daughter, already graduates, joined the ranks of beggars. I met them by accident yesterday. The girl is on the verge of death. Her days are numbered. Her brother is also on the lowest level of existence. He will not survive, even if the war were to finish soon.”

Abraham Lewin, Journal entry from May 31, 1941