Everyday Life in The Warsaw Ghetto Part 6/7 - The - Badge of shame - And cultural life

The next picture shows a typical ghetto sight: a woman is selling armbands in a street in the ghetto. There are differences between the armbands but we see that they are all white with a blue Star of David in the center, and that comes from the fact that the Germans ordered all Jews over the age of twelve in the "General Government", the area of Poland that was not annexed to Germany, to wear these blue and white armbands. The question is - Why? These armbands were like a badge of shame and they were one of the ways that the Germans humiliated the Jews. The order to wear the armbands came before the ghettos were even established, so the armbands were a way of isolating the Jews and separating them from the local Polish population, humiliating them and marking them, so that everybody could see them. One question we ask students is why they think the Nazis forced the Jews in the ghetto to wear armbands, when everyone in the ghetto was Jewish? And this raises the issue of being marked and being humiliated. The armbands, for the Jews, were like another wall that separated them from everyone else. The experience of wearing the armband was as much an emotional trauma as it was a physical one, as we can see in the piece written by the underground press. - "The armband! How can one wear it? I felt it burned my arm; it was as if I had to put a collar around my neck. I was gripped by anxiety. I couldn't sleep at night. I smelled danger everywhere. Whenever I ventured outdoors I looked in all directions. My nerves were always taut...." Behind the woman we see a wall of posters. If you look carefully in the left corner, you can make out the words "Koncert Symfoniczny" - in English: Symphony Concert. On the other side of the woman we can make out the word "teatr" also in Polish, meaning "Theater". We understand from these posters that there was a wealth of cultural activity in the Warsaw Ghetto, which is really amazing if you consider that people were dying and starving and collapsing in the streets of hunger, disease, overcrowding, cold. The fact that in the Warsaw Ghetto there were libraries, there were concerts, there were theaters that were putting on performances, really shows how the people in the Warsaw Ghetto were struggling to hold on to life as best they could. Note the philosophy implicit in this attitude: if we continue to read, if we continue to go to the theater, if we continue to listen to the symphony, then we can look towards the future instead of being stuck in the present. We can also escape our surroundings, if not physically, then at least spiritually. We can use this photo to ask the students: why would people on the verge of death care so much about cultural activity?