Broken Bread, Broken Community: Hunger During the Holocaust
In Holocaust narratives, food and starvation emphatically repeat, differing in their context, but consistently representing a fight against death of spirit or body. Hunger could take over and control a person’s body and mind, and starvation’s effects became a singular focus inside the ghetto or the concentration camps. Bread had the power to break apart families and connections to other people, further dehumanizing the individual’s spirit. Within Rozalia Berke’s oral testimony and the Anonymous Girl’s Loz ghetto diary, food and hunger embody the Nazi efforts to dehumanize and breakdown community values.
Ghettos were intended to isolate the Jewish population before their deportation …show more content…
It is presumed that she was the youngest family member. She had a mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom did factory work within the ghetto. No further details are known about her or her family’s identity, and they are assumed to have been killed in a death camp. Her diary opens in February 1942 with frustration and despairing comments on the state of life in the ghetto,“And this hunger. A struggle against death from starvation. Life is terrible, living conditions are abominable, and there is no food” (“Salvaged Pages” 230). To her, hunger represented a “struggle against death” that required strategy for survival. There is no semblance of a past life, only life inside the ghetto and the exhausting efforts to stay alive. In her entries, she focuses mainly on the death and destruction starvation brought to her surroundings. Unlike Rozalia, the Anonymous Girl’s entries begin after being moved to Lodz and are documented in those destructive moments. Frustration, despair, suffering, and questioning appear more readily in its pages than in Rozalia’s testimony. The Anonymous Girl’s outlook is more desperate, marked by her emotional descriptions concerning ravaging hunger and hopelessness. While Rozalia may have had a similar outlook, her testimony is told years after the war, altering the story’s tone and
In Holocaust narratives, food and starvation emphatically repeat, differing in their context, but consistently representing a fight against death of spirit or body. Hunger could take over and control a person’s body and mind, and starvation’s effects became a singular focus inside the ghetto or the concentration camps. Bread had the power to break apart families and connections to other people, further dehumanizing the individual’s spirit. Within Rozalia Berke’s oral testimony and the Anonymous Girl’s Loz ghetto diary, food and hunger embody the Nazi efforts to dehumanize and breakdown community values.
Ghettos were intended to isolate the Jewish population before their deportation …show more content…
It is presumed that she was the youngest family member. She had a mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom did factory work within the ghetto. No further details are known about her or her family’s identity, and they are assumed to have been killed in a death camp. Her diary opens in February 1942 with frustration and despairing comments on the state of life in the ghetto,“And this hunger. A struggle against death from starvation. Life is terrible, living conditions are abominable, and there is no food” (“Salvaged Pages” 230). To her, hunger represented a “struggle against death” that required strategy for survival. There is no semblance of a past life, only life inside the ghetto and the exhausting efforts to stay alive. In her entries, she focuses mainly on the death and destruction starvation brought to her surroundings. Unlike Rozalia, the Anonymous Girl’s entries begin after being moved to Lodz and are documented in those destructive moments. Frustration, despair, suffering, and questioning appear more readily in its pages than in Rozalia’s testimony. The Anonymous Girl’s outlook is more desperate, marked by her emotional descriptions concerning ravaging hunger and hopelessness. While Rozalia may have had a similar outlook, her testimony is told years after the war, altering the story’s tone and