Showcase 5

Benjamin Rozenfeld, Funeral Fund, drawing, and description of the incident pictured, 1941

1.

“On a December morning in 1941, the owner of a shop on Mita Street found a dead child on the threshold of his closed establishment. The small, stiff, emaciated body was tightly pressed into the shop threshold, so that it was impossible to open the door without removing the corpse. On the street, the traffic is getting livelier and livelier some trade could already be done, and here, such a misfortune it was on this very threshold that this child chose to die.

But soon rescue arrives, the representative of the funeral parlour appears and, with professional routine, starts collecting the ‘funeral fund’. The only legacy of the dead child a pot of clay, which sometimes filled up with donated soup or a few coins, is now set up by the enterprising agent in the middle of the pavement.

He covers the child with a sheet of paper and, assuming the pose of a preacher, calls in flowery Hebrew quotations upon passers-by to fulfil their last duty to the deceased. It is not long before he achieves the desired effect those who yesterday passed the dying child so indifferently, today, moved by the pathos-filled words of the preacher, throw grosz after grosz into the pot. A little more and the fund will be collected, the child will be buried, the funeral parlour will make a profit, the passers-by will perform one of the many mitzvot [good deeds], the shop will start to trade, and life will go on on Mita Street.”

Commentary on tho drawing ‘Funeral Fund”m by Benjamin Rozenfeld, presumably by himself, Warsaw Ghetto, after December 16, 1940

2.

“I cross Sliska Street early in the morning. At the mouth of Komitetowa Street, I am struck by an everyday, sadly commonplace image: the corpse of a little girl is lying on the sidewalk. Hence, I am not struck by that fact itself, but by the fact that the corpse is naked. Have the beggars already managed to rob the corpse of the last of its rags? Meanwhile, before I reach the spot, some ‘merciful’ people perform a macabre Ghetto ceremonial, already consecrated by tradition-that is, they cover the corpse with a newspaper, which they weigh down with stones on the sides. I come closer, I take a closer look: a sick girl no older than 10, an emaciated, skinny body deformed by diseases but still very fresh. I am thinking about the mystery of the nakedness of this unknown and unidentified child and despite the commonness of such images, I cannot explain it to myself.”

Benjamin Rozenfeld, Street Scenes of the Ghetto, March 1942