Cité engloutie

About this book

Written between 1952 and 1954, and largely neglected since, The Vanished City is a key work documenting the Warsaw ghetto from its inception to its final days. Half a century has gone by, but the importance of fully understanding those tragic events is undiminished. How did life continue in the Warsaw ghetto? What organizations took - or should have taken - care of its inhabitants' material and moral needs? How did so many survive in such systematic isolation? In answering these questions, Michel Mazor lucidly details the "vanishing" of a city. Among other notable accounts of the Holocaust, which tend to meld personal poignancy with a broader conciliatory humanism, Mazor's testimony stands apart as an unsparing and careful examination of the social and political structure of the ghetto. Learned enough to perceive an affinity between Heidegger's thought and Nazism, yet methodical by dint of his legal training, Mazor proves a remarkably keen observer of the institutions that operated in the ghetto, a firsthand chronicler of the subtle relations between material conditions, social pressures, and individual ethics. Readers of The Vanished City will find in it neither the philosophical observation of a Primo Levi, nor the gripping heroism of so many Holocaust books, but rather a dispassionate effort to provide a faithful exposition much in the spirit of Raul Hilberg's monumental study, The Destruction of the European Jews. Remarkably foreshadowing Hannah Arendt's unflinching reports on the Eichmann trials, Mazor's survey finally affords no rationalization to those of his contemporaries who, in a unique moment of human existence, turned on their own people and became instruments of Hitler's Final Solution.