Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us

Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us traces how Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto wrestled with questions that had troubled them since the occupation began: when will the war end, and what will become of us?

In examining the production and spread of knowledge in the Warsaw Ghetto, Maria Ferenc returns the point of view of the victims to its rightful place. She reveals illusions, imagination, and the social reception of a constructed image of events taking place on the other side of the Ghetto walls.

Individually and together, ghetto inhabitants created a picture of the outside world shaped by access to information and meanings attributed to news from different places. Yet the true fate of those deported "to the East" defied comprehension for most ghetto inhabitants as they desperately navigated the space between information and rumors. In Everyone Asks What Will Happen to Us, Ferenc illuminates the victims' painstaking efforts to uncover the truth, as well as, paradoxically, their own resistance to the growing body of knowledge about the Holocaust.