Monday, August 11, 2014

The right to go on living an ordinary life

The largest ghetto uprising of World War II took place on April 19, 1943.

Hitler’s army had invaded Poland in the fall of 1939 and, after three weeks of resistance, Warsaw surrendered. There were about 300,000 Jews in Warsaw to begin with, but thousands more Jewish refugees soon came in from smaller towns. In October of 1940, the Nazis announced the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto.

A wall was built around a section of the city, twenty blocks by six blocks. All Jews in the city were given a month to move into the ghetto, while all non-Jews were ordered to leave. Conditions were horrible. The elderly and the children died first.

Eventually, small resistance groups began to pop up in the ghetto. In the summer of 1942, the Nazis began deporting Jews from the ghetto to the concentration camp in Treblinka. From July to September, more that 300,000 Jews were deported, leaving about 50,000 people in the ghetto. When news leaked back to the ghetto of the mass murders, the resistance groups became better organized, making grenades, bombs, and mines, and creating a chain of tunnels and bunkers for the people to hide in.

In January of 1943, ghetto fighters opened fire on German troops as they tried to round up more people for deportation. The Nazis were forced to retreat. Then on April 19, 1943, the first day of Passover, hundreds of German soldiers entered the ghetto in rows of tanks, planning to destroy the ghetto in three days. The resistance held on for almost a month, but the revolt ended on May 16 and the remaining Jews were either shot or sent off to concentration camps.

Irena Klepfisz (1941- ), author and teacher, was two years old during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Her father was killed on the second day. On the forty-fifth anniversary of the uprising, Irena Klepfisz said, “What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, . . . the right to go on living . . . an ordinary life.”

To live an ordinary life is all that most people ask. There are the tyrants and the bullies, the narcissists and the greedy who must be denied, but most of God’s children ask only the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and self-worth. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God. To have some understanding of how it works and how it feels, hold a baby in your arms.



Gary

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