Title

Receipt for Undelivered Package from Zolynia/Lancut to Dzika Street in Warsaw Ghetto

Authors

Object ID

2019.2.85

Object Name

Postcard

Date

6-14-1941

Files

Description

Front includes one gray and three green postage stamps of architecture. Back includes two gray postage stamps of architecture, and "Zolynia" stamped three times in purple ink.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: The package in question arrived in the Warsaw Ghetto but was not delivered. Emanuel Ringelblum’s journal of life in the Warsaw Ghetto records that at the time this package was sent, the Ghetto post office was forbidden to handle foreign mail as well as food packages. Eventually, according to Ringelblum, all mail from outside of the Warsaw Ghetto was forbidden under the pretext of the danger of epidemics. The Nazis believed that Jews were especially susceptible to typhus, which presumably justified confining them to ghettos. Jews, in other words, were not only criminals in the eyes of the Nazis, but they were diseased as well. What commences for the Nazis as an ideology becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the conditions created by ghettoizing Jews – typhus, tuberculosis, and starvation (the official daily calorie count for Jews in 1941 was 184) – justify the need to continue to contain the Jews in ghettos. Of course, the ghettos were always a temporary measure, a place to quarter Jews until they could be transported to concentration and forced labor camps.

Dimensions

4 x 6"

Keywords

Warsaw ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum

Subcollection

Ghettos

Recommended Citation

"Receipt for Undelivered Package from Zolynia/Lancut to Dzika Street in Warsaw Ghetto" (1941). Bulmash Family Holocaust Collection. 2019.2.85.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/bulmash/1461