“Good” and “Bad” Performance in the Warsaw Ghetto

• In Event: Performance, Resistance, Writing: Responses to the Holocaust

Abstract

In January 1942, a Bundist leaflet in the Vilna Ghetto declared: “You don’t play theater in a cemetery.” But about the same time in the Warsaw Ghetto , the director and theater activist Jonas Turkow wrote: “Who could imagine that in such a situation and under such conditions a time could come for cultural work, entertainment […]. But Jewish stubbornness this time too remained unbroken, and within the narrow frames, with bridles on their mouths, after every blow – or better said, in the pause between one blow and the next – [the people] rushed towards life.”
I propose to use Yiddish and Polish materials created in the Warsaw Ghetto by Turkow and the writer Stanisław Różycki – today part of the Ringelblum Archives – supplemented by the postwar memoirs of Turkow and a history of the ghetto by Ruta Sakowska, to investigate the problematic function of “entertainment” under the conditions of Nazi terror. For the contested meaning of theater suggested above was further complicated by its historical configuration. Popular performance in the ghetto was a terrain on which both the most corrupt segments of ghetto society and its most exalted representatives confronted each other directly and fought for influence. Focusing on this struggle offers relatively unexplored access into issues of “resistance” amidst the inconceivable conditions of the ghetto.

author

• Michael C. Steinlauf, Gratz College