In the fall of 1940, the German authorities of occupied Poland created a sealed district for the Jewish population in the capital of the so-called General Government.1 The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe; by April 1941, some 450,000 Jews were forced to live behind its walls. As a result of the Grosse Aktion, a ghetto-clearing operation carried out from July 22 to September 21, 1942, about 75 percent of the ghetto's inhabitants were deported and murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp.
On April 19, 1943—eighty years ago now—an uprising broke out in the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the most important literary testimonies to the uprising is Hanna Krall's Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem [Shielding the flame].2 There are three main thematic threads in this book, written in the form of an extended interview with Marek Edelman, the deputy commander of the uprising. The first...
