"Don't Give Up Your Ration Card": Beggars, Noise, and the Purpose of Music in the Warsaw Ghetto

Abstract:

From its 1940 establishment to the Great Deportation of 1942, accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto testify to the misery of beggars within its walls, who drew attention to their plight using songs, cries, shouts, and other sounds. Diaries, reports, and song texts from the ghetto, alongside memoirs and testimonies, reveal beggars’ struggles—as well as non-beggars’ often hostile reactions to their songs and other sounds. Drawing on scholarship in sensory history and cultural histories of the Holocaust, this article reveals that these reactions perpetuated established critiques of shund (artistic “trash”) and tapped into longstanding anxieties about the Jewish community’s status as modern, civilized, and European. However, certain beggars’ songs overcame listeners’ hostility by directly confronting inequality and ghetto authorities’ abuses of power. Beggars and their music were intrinsic to the Warsaw Ghetto’s soundscape, and the debates they engendered reveal how Polish Jews imagined their community’s future, even amid its destruction.