Hope Expired Life Persists

Hope Expired, Life Persists, published by Lodz University Press in July 2014 (available on Amazon), is the story of Jacob Stupay, the author’s uncle. It deals with his life and times in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. Poland became increasingly difficult for all citizens with a troubled economy and dysfunctional political alignment, but Jews and Poles could not leave without substantial financial consequences. Toward the end of the 1930s, it became unlivable for Jews, with laws aimed at impoverishing them. But yet there were a cadre of professionals like Jacob Stupay, who were in sufficient demand to live a comfortable life.

The war was thrust on an unprepared Poland on September 1, 1939, and within 6 months many Jews were forced into ghettos throughout Poland. Jacob fled with his family to Warsaw, but soon Jews there were required to live in the Quarantine Zone, the German euphemism for the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto was a complicated place, with some existing phone service, night clubs, fancy restaurants, existing together with starvation, disease and cruel death on every block. Also, Jews in the ghetto had contact with Aryan Warsaw and many amazingly escaped and found safety outside the ghetto walls. The curtain began closing on July 22, 1942, when the Nazis began to implement the Final Solution plan.

The story documents the horrors of the last days in Warsaw and how the Nazi and their collaborators conducted their roundups. It raises questions about the controversial behavior of the Jewish leadership, including role of Jewish Police, antagonisms between German and Polish Jews, between Hungarians and their co-religionists. The book also considers questions about what kind of Jewish responses were possible in the impossible conditions of wartime Poland.

It ends with conditions in Poland at the end of war, in January 1945, with physical destruction and the death of nearly 20 percent of the Polish population. How did these life experiences impact the survivors like Jacob Stupay? Could they function normally?