Freedom Written in Blood and Scripture: Three Thousand Years of Human Rights
Description
The resistance of memory began before the trains. In the Warsaw Ghetto the historian Emanuel Ringelblum organised a secret archive called Oneg Shabbat, the joy of the Sabbath, gathering diaries, children's essays, decrees, and the first reports of the gassings. In the summer of 1942, as some 265,000 of the ghetto's Jews were sent to Treblinka, its members sealed the papers in tin boxes and milk cans and buried them. A nineteen-yearold named David Graber left a last note: what they could not cry out to the world, he wrote, they had buried in the ground, and he prayed the treasure would live to see better times. Ringelblum was shot with his wife and son in March 1944. Two parts of the archive were dug out after the war. The third has never been found. In that same August of 1942 the physician and educator Janusz Korczak walked with the children of his orphanage, some two hundred of them, to the loading square and onto the train for Treblinka, refusing every offer to save himself. Years earlier, in The Child's Right to Respect, he had demanded that children be treated as persons now and not as persons in waiting, and he had scorned declarations that begged for kindness where they should have insisted on rights. His ghetto diary survived him. When Poland put forward the first draft of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1978, its advocates named him as the convention's spiritual ancestor. The man who walked children to their deaths gave the world the charter that protects children still. The cry grew louder as the ghetto died. The poet Itzhak Katzenelson, whose wife and two younger sons were taken to Treblinka, escaped to an internment camp at Vittel in France and there wrote The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, a lament in fifteen cantos that calls on the heavens to witness what men had done. He buried the manuscript in bottles beneath a tree and sewed a copy into the handle of a suitcase. He was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in 1944; the bottles were dug up after liberation. On 23 April 1943, from the burning ghetto, Mordecai Anielewicz, twenty-four years old and commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization, wrote to a comrade outside that the dream of his life had come true: Jewish self-defence in the ghetto had become a fact. He died at the bunker on Mila Street two weeks later. In London, Szmul Zygielbojm, a Jewish member of the Polish National Council in exile, had spent months begging Allied governments to act on the reports reaching him. When word came that the ghetto had fallen, he took his own life on 12 May 1943 and left a letter saying that he could not remain silent or live while the remnant of his people was being destroyed, and that he hoped his death might break the indifference of the world. Three men, three forms of the same cry: the song buried in the earth, the rifle raised in the ruins, the life laid down as a last protest before the conscience of nations.