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  • A Personal Reflection on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
  • Hasia Diner (bio)

Inherently subjective, even narcissistic, personal reminiscences are in many ways contradictory to the kind of scholarly enterprise that an academic journal represents. Nevertheless, short personal excursions into history might now and then work in order to put some otherwise unavailable perspective on important issues which do concern historians and other scholars. In that spirit, I offer this brief statement about how I learned about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, how I performed it, and how it did in fact come to be an element in my scholarship, an enterprise that I hope has always conformed to the highest dictates of the profession.

I present this as an introduction to some excellent articles on the long life of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an event of April 1943 which has continued to resonate in Jewish history and memory. The articles could easily stand on their own and do not need my excursions into my personal past. But I do hope that these personal words will enrich the deep scholarship which undergirds these pieces of historical writing and that it will somehow be of benefit to the theme at hand, namely how the events of Warsaw in 1943 galvanized the Jewish world at the time, became a matter of disagreement and conflict despite its emerging iconic status, and how American Jews, including women and men who had survived the Holocaust, played an early role in ensuring its centrality in the ways Jews and other Americans remembered the “catastrophe,” a term American Jews often used to refer to the Holocaust in the late 1940s and 1950s.

As typically happens in memory retrieval, I cannot remember not knowing these three words—Warsaw, ghetto, and uprising—particularly as articulated in Yiddish, my first language, the one that shaped the domestic space of my post-World War II American childhood. Those three words—varshe, getto, and oyfshtand—went together in a seemingly organic way, and essentially hovered in the air with no need to explain. They existed as a spoken and heard verbal triumvirate that resonated in the spaces of our apartment and in the Jewish world around me. No doubt, I had no idea what they meant and never asked. But I did know they had something to do with back there, with Europe, with Hitler, with the place and events that my stepmother had just endured and which had shaped her, frankly, into a terrifying and terrified presence. [End Page 115]

But the three words and the solemn, sacred meaning of the event became manifest sometime in the early 1950s, a time before which I do not think I can remember, when my father introduced a new tradition to our family seder, a reading about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which I would come to know very well, and which many decades later started my thinking as a scholar about how American Jews in the postwar era wove the Holocaust into their communal culture.

First, let me say a bit about the text, as I knew it then and as it has taken a place in my scholarly understanding of American Jewry in the years immediately following the war and into the 1950s and 1960s. Three paragraphs, Hebrew and English on opposite sides of a folded piece of paper, it began with an invocation, “On this Seder night we remember with reverence and love the six million of our brothers who died at the hands of a tyrant, more wicked than the Pharaoh who enslaved our fathers in the land of Egypt.” That paragraph went on to mention poison, gas, and fire, as well as the murder of men, women and children by Hitler’s “minions,” a word I probably did not understand for years. The second paragraph focused on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the deeds of the few which redeemed Jewish honor, just as Judah Maccabee—whom I knew from the Hanukkah narrative—had done “in days of old.” By their omission, I understood that those who did not join in this or the other uprisings, mentioned but not named, did not bring glory to the people. Finally, a third paragraph which ended with...

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