An Immediate Shortage of Bread

The Fellowship  |  November 19, 2019

Around this time of year in 1940, the Jews of Warsaw, Poland, were adjusting to a life of torment and suffering. The occupying Nazis had just placed the city’s Jewish community inside the Warsaw Ghetto, where they would remain, forced to live in the small and unsanitary space, until they would be “liquidated” and sent off to the death camps. A diary entry from 79 years ago today written by a Jewish man named Emanuel Ringelblum tells how awful life had already become:

The Saturday the Ghetto was introduced was terrible. People in the street didn’t know it was to be a closed Ghetto, so it came like a thunderbolt. There was an immediate shortage of bread and other produce…

In an effort to help feed the starving Jews in the Ghetto, Christians began throwing bread over its walls. Sadly, on November 19, 1940, the Nazis shot and killed on Christian man for trying to feed his Jewish neighbors. It is in the spirit of those who risked everything for their brothers and sisters of faith that today we still work to help those who are starving, who are suffering, and who are all alone in this world, all because of how they worship.