handed over to the Polish police or to the Gestapo. You can count neither on justice, nor on courts, nor on the “order service” to actually keep order, nor on the public organs’ protection of private property. What can one do? Where ransom or bribe will not do, there the sad, macabre, bloody act of lynching takes place to provide satisfaction from vengeance and to satisfy people’s sense of justice. Our police walk indifferently past such scenes as they will not extort anything from a beggar. So why would they trouble themselves to take him to the police station?
But Frania S. is unaware that she lives in the times of the lynching law. She does not link these two things in which she participates as a witness and an actor. No, the only important thing is that Josek, her Josek, is poor, hungry, and miserable. Cringing in the corner of the street, she cries quietly and curses the horrible and unjust order in the world . . .
ARG I 456 (Ring. I/429).
Description: original, handwritten, notebooks, ink, Polish, 150x197 mm, 31 sheets, 31 pages.
The moral decay, the amorality, and the radical blunting of people’s moral sense are—aside from hunger, poverty, and death—the most elemental plagues in the ghetto. Even though there are some mitigating circumstances, such as the war with its ethics, the methods of the occupier, and the “[bad] example from above,” [. . .] we cannot do anything about it. This total disregard for moral principles, even the most basic ones, manifests itself in both private and public life, in family and professional life, as well as among one’s
