The amazing video (below) offers us brief glimpse of life in the Warsaw Jewish quarter before the German invasion.
Did they know what was coming?
Did they have any idea?
And if they did, what could they done? How soon would be soon enough?
In a blink of an eye it would all be over:
the shops, the sounds of the street, the children playing,
the yeshivot, and chedars,
the thousands of homes and shtiblach where
Shabbos likht and davening opened
the gates of heaven each week, would soon be no more.
Who could imagine that the hundreds of thousands of sacred books
that nourished this community for centuries
would, in a matter of weeks, be nothing more than ashes.
And those renown cafes where great minds engaged in great debates
and remarkable literature was created, soon would be relegated
to remembrances not yet written.
Did the largest Jewish community in the world in 1939 have
any sense of the long dark night that was approaching them?
“Though armies encamp before me, my heart shall not fear.” (Psalm 27)
Uploaded on Mar 24, 2010
16mm kodachrome camera original, author: Benjamin Gasul
source: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Tent of Abraham 