The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos during World War II by Helene J. Sinnreich (review)

Reviewed by: The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos during World War II by Helene J. Sinnreich Joanna Sliwa Helene J. Sinnreich. The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos during World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 294 pp. Access to food defined Jews' lives during the Holocaust. Scholarship on the Holocaust has included the subjects of food acquisition, the impact of hunger, and coping strategies within the context of German-instigated persecution of Jews and Jews' responses to it. Historian Helene J. Sinnreich drills down on those issues through a focused, nuanced, comprehensive, and comparative approach in her book, The Atrocity of Hunger. The distinctiveness of the book rests on Sinnreich's End Page 249 victim-centered lens. She tells the history of everyday life in the ghetto through the voices of Jews who experienced the reality: of the few who survived and of those who only left a record of their life during that time. A close reading of those sources led Sinnreich to develop the titular notion of "atrocity of hunger." She defines it as a crime that takes place during genocidal famine that results from intentional starvation through denying access to food, which, in turn, triggers physical and mental suffering and the transformation and destruction of individuals, families, and communities. The book examines Jews' daily lives in three well-documented ghettos located in different areas of German-controlled Poland—in Łódź, Warsaw, and Kraków. This sweeping study allows her to assess how the geographic location of a ghetto, its type, size, administration, population, longevity, and the prewar situation of the Jews affected Jews' opportunities for procuring food, shaped individual, familial, and communal responses to food scarcity, and enabled or hindered Jews' survival. The book consists of ten chapters, arranged chronologically and thematically, as well as an introduction and conclusion. The chapters focus on such topics as the Jews' economic impoverishment, the choices that Jewish leaders had and the decisions they made to address the food crisis, the connection between food and labor, and the intricacies of food supply and distribution. Woven through the chapters is a discussion of the consequences of starvation, the strategies of coping with hunger, and the role of gender and religion in food acquisition. An appendix contains a list of kitchens and food distribution sites in the Warsaw ghetto. It is unclear why the author decided not to include similar lists for the two other ghettos. The Atrocity of Hunger contains important conclusions about Jews' lives in extremis. Sinnreich draws attention to the role of timing. For example, the outbreak of the war, on the eve of the Sabbath, affected observant Jews' abilities to obtain food, especially when confronted with the ensuing food shortage. By the time the Jews were forced into the ghettos, they had been stripped of their assets. These would have become precious commodities for barter. Then, too, the timing of the establishment of ghettos mattered. With the ghetto in Łódź established and sealed the earliest among the three ghettos discussed in the book, Jews' opportunities for even forging connections with prospective food suppliers were impeded. Faced with fluctuating and dwindling resources, Jewish leaders weighed their options carefully and proceeded with decisions and actions that were often contentious and disastrous for the ghetto society. Sinnreich takes the discussion further and illuminates aspects of Jews' daily life in the ghetto that are generally known, but rarely dealt with analytically. For example, she writes of the abuse that some Jewish food sellers engaged in by swapping ingredients and siphoning off the more nutritious products. Privilege played a role in access to food. While food may have been bountiful for the small Jewish ghetto elite, the majority went hungry, died of starvation, and a very small number in the Warsaw ghetto even resorted to cannibalism. The weakest Jews, those with little to no access to food, were sacrificed in the hope of saving the remaining Jews. And the poorest and most starving Jews were lured first for deportations. The situation existed, as Sinnreich emphasizes, because of German policies. Food End Page 250 was used as a weapon against...