Lost Words

When half a million souls live in one small space, there will be many of everything, including poets, and in the Warsaw Ghetto there were presumably many of them. But none was as famous as Szlengel, whose poems both chronicled the annihilation of a people and buoyed them as it took place.

“The poems of Władysław Szlengel were read in the houses of the Ghetto and out of it, in the evenings, and were passed from hand to hand and mouth to mouth,” a survivor named Halina Birenbaum wrote in 1983. “The poems were written in burning passion, while the events, which seemed to last for centuries, occurred. They were a living reflection of our feelings, thoughts, needs, pain and merciless fight for every moment of life.”

Birenbaum first heard Szlengel’s poems as a 12-year-old in the ghetto, when her sister-in-law brought copies of them home from the factory in which she worked. By then, Warsaw’s Jews pretty much knew what lay in store for them: Before long, unless they died of disease or starvation beforehand, they would be rousted out of their apartments and cellars, crammed onto train cars at the Umschlagplatz, and sent to Treblinka, where they would be killed. There was little mystery about it. Szlengel’s words, she recalled, gave her hope: “That someone could write poems like this in the Ghetto meant that not everything was death.” Never did she set eyes on the man, nor, as far as I can tell, is there anyone still around who did. But she memorized his poetry, and later, in Majdanek and Auschwitz and after liberation, she carried it with her.

Among many other things, the Germans robbed the Jews of their biographies, and information about Szlengel is scant. The son of an artist, he was 24 years old and already relatively well-known around Warsaw when he wrote about Louis and Schmeling, having composed a variety of poems and songs, many of them satirical, for local cabarets. Unlike the majority of Warsaw Jews, who spoke Yiddish, he lived and wrote in Polish, an act of love for his native land and one that, as for most of Poland’s Jews, was rarely reciprocated.

“Szlengel reflected the sensibilities of the acculturated but unassimilated Polish-Jewish intelligentsia, caught between genuine Jewish pride and love of a Poland that would never extend true acceptance,” the writer Samuel Kassow stated in 2007 in his book, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, which contains the most comprehensive examination of Szlengel to date.

Szlengel’s poetry first appeared in Nasz Przeglad in 1937. While Louis’ victory over Schmeling the following year encouraged him momentarily, his other poems from that time, when Hitler threatened Europe with war, were filled with foreboding. In “Do Not Buy New Calendars,” written in January 1938, he wrote of his reluctance to tear off any pages, for fear of what might lie underneath.

I stare at the pages like at the blind fates.
Fear and dread are weighing me down.
This calendar is hiding thousands of cables,
Alarms from near and far.

A year later, in “The Frightened Generation,” those alarms had only intensified.

Will there grow a generation of frightened people
Whom every rustle would wake at night,
A clatter on the stairs, sound of a stranger’s voice
Would throw them into swells of panic and chaos,
People who lock their doors, ready to jump
When they hear someone is touching the door handle?

In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and in November 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed. Szlengel was among the nearly 400,000 Jews inside. Later, still more Jews from other communities joined them. He continued to write, now for the ghetto’s largest nightclub—even the doomed need distractions—known as “Café Sztuka,” or “Art Café.” It was a bizarre version of New York’s café society, catering to intellectuals in search of sophisticated fun, where various actors and musicians performed songs and sketches. The hero of the film The Pianist, Władysław Szpilman, sometimes played there. Szlengel’s entertainments, called “A Living Newspaper,” were the ghetto’s equivalent of the Daily Show: Topical takeoffs on the Nazis, on Jewish machers, and other risible realities behind the walls.

The satire was, of course, short-lived. In July 1942, the ghetto was thrown into panic as the Germans began shoving Jews by the tens of thousands on trains bound for Treblinka, 60 miles to the northeast. For a time, until it became morally unacceptable to him, Szlengel had belonged to the ghetto’s Jewish police force. Then, assigned to work in a brush factory, he continued to be spared the fate of so many of the others. But it took time to liquidate the ghetto, and for thousands of others, life went on. Szlengel kept writing his poems, first by hand, then typing them on carbon paper, so that they could circulate more easily. Often, he read them aloud to groups of Jewish factory workers. Others would copy and then recopy them: The grammatically incorrect Polish on some versions, Kassow notes, indicates that for some of those circulating them, Polish was not their native tongue. As conditions became more desperate, the impact of the poems grew. Emanuel Ringelblum, the historian who led the massive effort to chronicle ghetto life by stashing away documents in cans he hoped would be unearthed after the war, called Szlengel “the poet of the Ghetto.”

Possibly because of his ties to the ghetto police, Szlengel never participated in, nor presumably even knew about, Oyneg Shabes, Ringelblum’s highly clandestine operation. Ringelblum evinced a certain disdain toward Szlengel’s poems, describing them as “artistically mediocre.” But Szlengel was among the luminaries Ringelblum profiled, and his poems were among the documents he and his 60 associates took pains to preserve. Ringelblum explained why: They “moved those who heard them to tears because they were topical, on problems that the Jews lived with and felt,” he wrote. Though theirs were very different tools, Szlengel and Ringelblum were in fact engaged in precisely the same work: creating a contemporaneous account of Warsaw Jewry’s final days, one that would stand up against the revisionists who would inevitably arise one day to say that their catastrophe was simply too fantastic to be believed. Their works are wonderfully complementary, for it is at their respective ends of the written spectrum—the one broad and detailed and hyper-literal, the other personalized and idiosyncratic and distilled—that the most irrefutable evidence may be found.

Continue reading: 1942, other fantasies, and “A Window to the Other Side.” Or view as a single page.