The first line of Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not a rifle.

It was a seven-year-old slipping through a gap in the wall.

She was seven the first time she went through.

Not over it. Over it was for the desperate and the doomed, the ones who tried ladders in daylight and were shot off the brick like birds. Edna went through. There was a gap at the base where the mortar had failed, a seam between two worlds no wider than a loaf of bread, and a seven-year-old body is a small and miraculous machine.

She folded herself into it.

On one side: the sealed quarter where her family was slowly starving by design. On the other: Warsaw, still moving through its ordinary business — shops, streets, bread.

This is not the image most people summon when they think of Jewish resistance in Warsaw. They picture the rifle. They picture April 1943, burning rooftops, homemade grenades, young fighters of the Jewish Fighting Organization holding off the German army far longer than anyone thought possible.

That came later. It was extraordinary. It deserves every monument it has.

But resistance did not begin with the gun. It began with the potato.

But resistance did not begin with the gun.

It began with the potato.

The arithmetic of starvation

Here is what the Germans had decided, written down, and administered: Jews in occupied Poland were assigned starvation rations. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the official daily allotment was roughly 180 to 200 calories. Germans received many times that amount. Poles received more than Jews, but still far below adequacy.

The policy was not neglect.

The policy was death, calculated to the calorie and distributed by ration card.

By that arithmetic, the people........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)