readiness to make sacrifices and on the durability of family ties in the face of the Holocaust, and not on their dissolution and destruction. Several of the heroines even decide to have children in the ghetto, thus gaining new motivation to act.
Similarly, other collaborators of Oyneg Shabes, even while discussing the most difficult spheres of the ghetto reality, try to present its entire complexity objectively. The texts about the Jewish Order Service (Żydowska Służba Porządkowa), colloquially called the Jewish police, included in this volume, are an example of such an approach.16 Established to maintain order in the ghetto, the police soon became a synonym for complete moral degradation. The texts herein confirm the ghetto’s rumours about the Jewish police’s cronyism and bribery at admission into the service, their contacts with Gestapo agents, and their departure from the ideals of public service. Several texts describe executions in the prison on Gęsia Street, during which members of the Jewish Order Service had to participate in the killing of the Jews sentenced to death for leaving the ghetto illegally.17 But at the same time, the authors of the texts steer clear of generalisation and stress how diverse that group was, emphasising that the Service founders had praiseworthy intentions and that many eminent lawyers and people of impeccable moral fibre were involved in its establishment. Though condemned, even bribery is presented as the only way for the policemen devoid of other sources of income to provide for their families. A clear distinction is made between Jewish police functionaries on the one hand and overt Gestapo agents and members of the Office to Combat Profiteering and Speculation (the “Thirteen”) on the other. The latter are portrayed in separate, highly critical texts.18
The issue of steamings (parówki) — compulsory disinfection of flats introduced as a means to counter typhus — is described in a similar way. Steamings were performed almost exclusively in the tenements whose
Introduction XXVII
