the poorest, hopeless, and most resigned people dying in refugee centres, but also of the newly arrived and relatively well-to-do refugees from Germany, who had just begun to comprehend the true meaning of what was happening in the Warsaw ghetto.23 The stories of the social activists engaged in efforts to help them sound as dramatic as the voices of the refugees. In their reports, diaries, and interviews the former describe their heroic, yet doomed, struggle against the abject indigence, starvation, and diseases in the shelters and quarantines. The dry columns of figures and surnames that they quote paint a picture of the doomed society in a manner equally dramatic to that used in the emotional reports.
The topic of the Polish–Jewish relations played a vital role in the Ringelblum Archive, and that importance is reflected in the selection of texts included in this volume. It contains two general texts on the topic, written from totally different angles. The first was written by Stanisław Różycki,24 while the other is a transcript of a conversation with Irena Adamowicz — a Polish scouting activist who was awarded the Righteous among the Nations medal after the war.25 Both texts stress that Polish–Jewish relations during the occupation had two sides. The first, positive one is usually based on personal, pre-war ties. The other, which they both regard as undoubtedly more visible on the streets of Warsaw, assumed the form of indifference or hostility. That dualism is highlighted in other texts included in this volume. On the one hand, a woman living in the Żoliborz quarter of Warsaw writes that the Polish and Jewish leftist intellectuals who had lived there before the war continued their close cooperation even after the closure of the ghetto. On the other hand, others write about anti-Jewish violence on the streets of Warsaw. Consequently, the texts talk about both “Good Christians” helping Jewish refugees and a mob throwing stones over the ghetto wall at the windows of Jewish hospitals.
But most texts describing the situation after the establishment of the ghetto talk not so much about hostility as about indifference. In the eyes of many Archive coworkers, Polish–Jewish relations were reduced almost exclusively to economic interrelations. That was the case when the Germans issued
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