THE ROAD TO GAZA - I

The World After Gaza by Pankkaj Mishra (Fern Press, London) 2025

- JAYANTHA SOMASUNDARAM

Pankkaj Mishra FRSL has authored Age of Anger and From the Ruins of Empire and writes political and literary essays in The Guardian, the London Review of Books and The New Yorker.

“We too are so dazzled by power and money that we forget the fragility of our existence; we forget that we are all in the Ghetto, that the Ghetto is fenced in, that outside the fence are the Lords of Death, and a little way off the train is waiting,” Primo Levi Jewish Italian partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer.

The prologue to this book deals with the death of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. The Ghetto was progressively depleted as the inhabitants were being shipped to extermination camps. Finally in April 1943 a couple of hundred young Polish Jews grabbed whatever arms and weapons they could lay their hands on and took on the Nazis.

“After a few desperate weeks” explains Pankkaj Mishra, “the resisters were overwhelmed. Most of them killed. Some still alive on the last day committed suicide in the command bunker. As the Nazis pumped gas into it a few managed to escape through sewer pipes.

German soldiers then burnt the Ghetto, block by block, using flame throwers to smoke out the survivors. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz recalls hearing screams from the Ghetto: They were the screams of people being murdered.

“Living in Berkley California while the US military bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, an atrocity he compared to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, Milosz again knew shameful complicity in extreme barbarity: ‘If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless,’ he wrote, ‘then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.”