

Irving Milchberg

Irving (Ignac) Milchberg, survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, died on January 26th, aged 86

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Readers' comments




Dear Irving,
Thank you for teaching us about being a hero.
In the face of constant attack from tormenting thugs you sacrificed and prevailed victorious. Your road was ridiculously difficult.
May you Rest in Peace, and your family be comforted from Heaven.


Who's the genius writer who came up with the pronouncement that Irving Milchberg's "English was never too good, though"?
I'm the daughter of Irving Milchberg, of blessed memory. I can assure you that his spoken English - and its poetic and expressive nature - far exceeded the writing quality of this obituary.

Ohio in reply to great uncle clive

What are you implying? That Jews should all be kept in one place? Sort of like a ghetto?

Many refugees came to the US or Canada. As someone from the Toronto/Niagara Falls area, I'm happy he found peace there. People should be able to go wherever they want to go. Even you.


'...what he keenly remembered was running across the courtyard to his mother’s call. From the downstairs of the building all the way up, life was in bloom: couples courting, Zionists and socialists arguing, parcels being delivered, rugelach cooking. All the doors stood open to let the lives and the smells mingle.'

For a foreigner living in Warsaw, with a penchant for romanticism , this passage is beautifully evocative of a bygone Warsaw.

The tradtional kamienice (plural or kamienica - a stone tenament building) still survive in Warsaw, even after the near total destruction of the city in 1944-5. Some are well restored and occupied, while others remain neglected or derelict, or further still ear-marked for demolition.

Nonetheless it is easy to imagine the children running between lines of washing, while voices reverberate round the courtyard and life in all its vibrancy takes place in every corner of the kamienica.

Unfortunately, modern day Warsaw does not really reflect that charming past, supposedly due to the oppresive influence of the socialist state and its norms. Poeple are far more subdued in tenament buildings now; it would be rare to see a door left ajar, let alone left wide open, and so people tend to live their lives out behind reinforced doors.

Of course in some tenaments there may still be an atmosphere of community, but it is very rare from what I hear and see, so an even great sense of loss can be felt at the world of Irving Milchberg's childhood having been lost.

Though had Poland and Warsaw not suffered its brutal history, and the ghetto and mass extermination not taken place, I would most likely not have found my way here.

Yet, I think given the power of omniscient and omnipotent choice, I would much rather those grave acts not have happened, and the ethnic diversity were still at the heart of Warsaw life, and Polish people were still able to delight and be proud of their Paris of the East.


re: neowarszawiak's last comment: My dad's primary recollections from his youth were of people, activities, emotions, sounds and fragrances inhabiting and animating and spaces. Buildings were stage sets for vibrant life, not ends in themselves.
With the loss of an entire people, the few existing buildings and recognizable spaces from his Warsaw childhood became empty, hollow vessels in my dad's eyes. As we wandered around the two market halls at Plac Mirowska, he was uncharacteristically silent and sad.

AMtoronto in reply to neowarszawiak

Your comments are very much appreciated. My dad and his family lived at Krochmalna 12, and he told me that their apartment window on the 5th floor faced directly onto the south-east corner of the western building of Hala Mirowska. When we visited Warsaw in 1993, Krochmalna 12 was a grassy open space; the site had never been rebuilt since the destruction of the Ghetto.

To show us comparable courtyard apartment blocks so we could visualize his life pre-war, my dad took us to some surviving tenement buildings on the periphery of Three Crosses Square, and to others in Praga, across the river.

neowarszawiak in reply to AMtoronto

Some may call it sentimental but I find that very sad; your dad must have been quite moved to revisit Warsaw and see a bare patch of grass. I know it's something very raw still even for many Polish people, since there's not a day when I don't get into a conversation about how Warsaw once was and its insane destruction.

I now live virtually a stone's throw away from where you describe, and indeed that part of Krochmalna no longer survives. It is now simply Hala Mirowska park. But thankfully, Hala Mirowska is once again a vibrant market, though even that had to be completely rebuilt.

I try to spend my spare time tracing Warsaw's intricate history: the roads that no longer exist, the buildings that have left no trace...it's extremely interesting and sad all at once.

But yes, luckily there are some nice examples of such tenaments still surviving, and if I were a rich man I would rescue the many more that still survive and are neglected.

Some are centrally located and are so dilapidated they are occupied by a handful or even one elderly resident. Developers on the otherhand are keen to get there hands on such plots, demolish the tenament, and milk the profits available from building office space or monotonous modern flats.

It's real sad, and I don't see any concerted fight back to really preserve this kind of heritage in Warsaw.

But thankfully due to the lingering bureacracy and slow legal process, it's not so easy for developers to get their dirty mittens on such properties, and many cases rage on.

guest-sewmils in reply to PaulGrajnert

guest-llljejl - You appear to be the only reader conflating Poles with Nazis, for your own mysterious reasons. The obit makes no such error. The Aryan side was called the Aryan side in the obit and in 70 years worth of history books because the area outside the Ghetto was dominated by occupying Germans and their collaborators.

One hopes that your misdirected, poorly-informed anger is a one-off. As another poster so aptly said, feel free to educate yourself.

Devorah in reply to PaulGrajnert

Disgusting that you feel fit to throw all those the offensive words at the author, how mean and unfeeling. Can't see what you are complaining about, that was a way it was called then- there was a getto, and everything beyound the getto walls, was called Aryan side.
Germans classified Jews as non Aryans, and Poles were Aryans, but not the first class Aryan(sarcasm).


A beautifully-written reflection on a hard life, vivid and evocative of terrible times. I think that the reference to "Aryan" in describing the surrounding non-ghetto population was intended to be ironic, not insulting.

guest-sewmils in reply to PaulGrajnert




Your use of the word Aryan to refer to Poles in this obituary to Mr. Milchberg is offensive to the Polish people. The Polish people fought totalitarianism on two fronts for centuries. For Poles the occupation that began in September, 1939 did not really end until the 1990s. For individual Poles, resistance to such totalitarianism meant decades of imprisonment, exile or death, sometimes of entire families. And yet, such resistance to totalitarianism was the norm, indeed, a characteristic of being Polish. The writer of this article is either willfully ignoring historical realities or willfully misusing the term Aryan to refer to the terrorized population of Poland during the worst period of occupation by the forces of totalitarianism. What a tragedy that such an insulting and ignorant lie is ensconced in a truly moving tribute to a beautiful life in terrible times.
Paul Grajnert

PaulGrajnert in reply to hmacfie

That is not the case.
The use of this word has no irony in this context for a Polish reader. Unless the writer is an imbecile, this is a deliberate misrepresentation of history for some reason known only to the author.
If the author is an imbecile than The Economist has deeper problems than the one I am pointing out.
Paul Grajnert


"Polish policeman"? "Polish policeman" during the II world war under German occupation? wtf? Who wrote that?
How dare you guys?

PaulGrajnert in reply to Devorah

Is the entire comment satirical or just the end?
(Just to make sure we are on the same page. In no way were Poles considered Aryan by the Nazis. Please refer to Mein Kampf for a full explanation of what lay in store for Poles under the totalitarian regime of the Nazis.)
Conflation of Poles with Nazis is unconscionable and historically inaccurate - and, one has to wonder deliberate by the author of this obituary?
Paul Grajnert


The use of the word "Aryan" in this obituary seems to be ironic in that the author is knowingly misapplying this word (which originally referred primarily to the family of Indo-European languages more than peoples) in the same way that the Nazis used to misapply it. I can be sure that the author is no imbecile.


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