Leyb Goldin
Note on the text by Dr. Miriam Chorley-Schulz:
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What goes on inside a starving person? What happens to their psyche, their individual body parts, their sense of bodily integrity, their sense of time? And what does a man-made famine do to a society that’s trapped and completely at the mercy of an occupying power?
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Leyb Goldin, a socialist Yiddish writer, translator, and active member of the General Jewish Labor Bund in Warsaw, sheds light onto 24 hours in the starving Warsaw ghetto. As a 35-year-old member of the Bundist underground press, he composed the short story “Khronik fun a mes-les” (Chronicle of a Single Day) in the summer of 1941, the time when the Nazis’ carefully planned and bureaucratically administered starvation of the Warsaw ghetto was claiming its highest number of victims (in sum, an estimated 80,000 Jews would die of hunger). In the summer of 1942, mass deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp accelerated the Nazi’s policy of extermination. Leyb Goldin was one of approximately 250,000 Jewish victims from the Warsaw ghetto murdered there.
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Deliberate starvation was one of the most effective weapons of mass murder used by the Nazis during the Second World War. It was central not only to Goldin’s experiences, but also to Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944).
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This year, we are witnessing four famines caused by multiple “crises,” including the brutal civil wars in Sudan and South Sudan, Mali, and Haiti. But none of them, according to Adam Tooze, is comparable to the starvation campaign in sealed-off Gaza. Only in this case, it is the deliberate result of the total control and complete blockade put into effect by an occupying power and aided and abetted by its international accomplices: Israeli forces systematically bulldoze agricultural land, destroy basic infrastructure of clean water and sanitation, block the delivery of aid supplies, make adequate medical care impossible, and turn food distribution centers into death traps while bombing the population from above. “Never in post-war history,” UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri put it, “had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.”
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What purpose does literature serve in the face of such horrors? Goldin helps us understand the underlying structures of the violence of man-made starvation we are dealing with so that we may resist them, without losing sight of the scope of the catastrophe for those affected, nor the significance of their resistance and will to survive.
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- Dr. Miriam Chorley-Schulz
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How differently my song would sound
If I could let it all resound.
— paraphrase of Monish, by I.L. Peretz
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TIRED, PALE FINGERS ARE setting type somewhere in Krakow: “Tik-tak-tak, tik-tak-tak-tak-tak. Rome: The Duce has announced… Tokyo: the newspaper Asahi Shimbun… Tik-tik-tik-tak…Stockholm… Tik-tik… Washington: Secretary Knox has announced… Tik-tik-tik-tak… And I am hungry.
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