Tagore’s Dak Ghar In The Warsaw Ghetto: The Art of Living In The Art of Dying

Section of an 8-foot high concrete wall encircling a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. Inset: Janusz Korczak and the cover of Dak Ghar (The Post Office) by Rabindranath Tagore.

Source : Getty & Niyogi Books

Something remarkable happened exactly this time of the year, perhaps to the day, in 1942. A play by Rabindranath Tagore, Dak Ghar, would be performed, of all places, in the Warsaw Ghetto. Some days later, the Nazis started to empty out the ghetto with the transportation of its residents to Treblinka, among the most notorious of the extermination camps in the vast, almost incomprehensible, labour and death camp universe created by the Nazi regime. The children who acted in the play, and its