On the Saturday podcast of The Writer's Almanac [you can read the transcript here--just scroll down to April 19], Garrison Keillor told the story of the Warsaw Ghetto--the 20-block area in Poland that the Nazis forced the Jews to move into, while forcing everybody else out. The Warsaw Ghetto became a place of poverty, disease, and death...and that was before the Nazis began Operation Reinhard--the deportation of the Jews who were in the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka and other concentration camps.
Pockets of resistance formed within the Ghetto. They ambushed Nazi officials, took their weapons, and dug tunnels to hide people in. The resistance grew so big that they were able to make a stand against German troops in January of 1943. On April 19, 1943, German tanks stormed the resistance, but the resistance held. When the resistance ran out of grenades, the fought with kitchen knives and chair legs. They held out for a full month before losing the battling on May 19, 1943 when the Nazis burned down their buildings, shot most of those who remained, and forced those who were left alive into concentration camps.
At the end of Keillor's broadcast, he quoted Irene Klepfisz, a survivor, who said this on the 45th anniversary of the uprising, "What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.…Ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life."
In the end, that's all most of us really want, isn't it?
What an awful thing it is to know that so many people were denied the chance to live ordinary lives.
