Ep. 11: Hunger and Starvation in Ghettos with Helene Sinnreich

The Nazis pursued a variety of strategies in their attempts to murder all the Jews of Europe.  One of these was starvation, particularly within ghettos where they could control the flow of food to captive populations.

In this episode, I talk with Professor Helene Sinnreich about the experience of hunger in the Warsaw, Łodz, and Krakow ghettos.  She tells us about the ways in which the Nazis used hunger as a weapon, the effects it had on ghetto populations, and the diverse ways in which different Jewish communities confronted this assault.

Helene J. Sinnreich is a professor and head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennesse-Knoxville.

Sinnreich, Helene J. The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II (2023)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Helene Sinnreich (00:00.236)
you

Waitman (00:01.08)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we're going to talk about ghetto life and death and starvation. And I think it's a really important topic because while we rightly often talk about sort of the more direct ways in which Jews were murdered by the Nazis in gas chambers and by shooting, et cetera, et cetera, it's also really important, I think, to recognize that

Helene Sinnreich (00:10.508)
you

Helene Sinnreich (00:16.552)
you

Waitman (00:30.532)
a longer term, longer duration attempt to murder Jews, particularly in the ghettos through starvation. And so I'm really happy to have with me Professor Helene Sinreich, who is an expert in this and is going to talk to us about this particular topic. So Helene, thanks so much for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about the topic?

Helene Sinnreich (00:43.552)
Thank you. Sure. My name is Helene Sinrich and I am

Waitman (00:58.34)
Give us an introduction really quickly. Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into this particular topic.

Helene Sinnreich (01:08.012)
Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I am currently the department head and I also serve as director of the Ferdinand Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies. And I co -edit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's journal Holocaust and Genocide.

I'm busy at all. I have like all the free time in the -

Waitman (01:34.18)
So not busy at all.

Helene Sinnreich (01:41.036)
And I came to the topic of Holocaust studies through probably having survivor grandparents and learning their stories very early on. They were in Transnistria and I kind of started my journey.

Transnistria and ghettos in Transnistria, so I was interested in ghettos specifically. And then at one point while I was doing research at the Holocaust Museum as a graduate student, I stumbled across or I didn't as someone at the museum very helpfully showed me my grandfather's deportation list and I decided that maybe I didn't want to stick with something quite so.

close to home and I turned my attention instead to Polish ghettos. And I focused for a long time on the Łódź ghetto and then began doing research on the Krakow ghetto and eventually came to doing this comparative work that we're talking about today that looks at the Łódź ghetto, the Krakow ghetto, and the Warsaw ghetto.

Waitman (02:51.568)
Yeah, and one of the things that I think is really interesting and every day is a school day for me. And one of the things that you bring up in the beginning is this idea that you're drawing on a whole body of work in sort of the starvation studies, right? And of course, you know, obviously it makes sense that there would be a field of study this, but I hadn't really thought about that. How does that?

Or does that inform your work differently?

Helene Sinnreich (03:37.58)
I think so because when I began looking at the topic of starvation, I wanted to look for some models in order to help me think more about starvation. And what I discovered was that at the time that I started working on this project, other than things like the Irish famine and the Ukrainian famine,

The people who were really doing work on famine and starvation, not including the early modern period, were largely people who were interested in famine studies as a method of looking at ways to end famine. And a lot of them were anthropologists who were dealing with contemporary case studies.

And I found that this observational kind of study was really important for informing my work, which also relies heavily on things like survivor testimony, which isn't quite the same thing as an anthropologist's informants, so to speak. But this idea of looking inside a society,

as a window. And also, famine studies had done a lot of work on looking at things like ways in which societies and family units are transformed by starvation. And these were kinds of questions that I really wanted to explore at the time that I...

And I'm really going to date myself now in this moment when I started really working on famine study and the Holocaust. I was working at a time where a lot of the questions that were important to Holocaust scholars had to do with.

Helene Sinnreich (05:44.33)
perpetrators and the role of perpetrators in making decisions. And so I was really interested in looking at victim history and the experience of Holocaust victims. And within Holocaust studies, outside of sort of some work that had been happening in Israel, largely around things like resistance and things like that, the focus hadn't been so much on

Waitman (06:07.588)
you

Helene Sinnreich (06:13.036)
victims as much as it was on what the perpetrators were doing. And I was really interested in what were the experiences of Holocaust victims. And in many ways, famine studies, which is focused quite a bit on what are the experiences of people during famine, was a better model for me than some of the work going on in Holocaust studies at the time, which really was interested in.

why were German perpetrators starving Jews as opposed to what was that experience like?

Waitman (06:45.092)
you

Waitman (06:51.748)
And one of the things that I think comes through really strongly for me is sort of the grinding day to day nature of the experience for the victims and the survivors in a way that you brightly bring up sort of that there was this moment right where a lot of the victim focus work was on resistance. And of course, resistance is an important part of this, right? We'll talk about that.

Helene Sinnreich (07:20.684)
Yes, absolutely.

Waitman (07:21.86)
I mean, not starving, whatever you can do to not starve is a form of resistance. But also I think one of the things that your book does a really good job is it just, it shows how sort of relentless this is in a way that is slightly different for other kinds of resistance where other kinds of resistance sometimes seem to be like an act, like an uprising or a revolt or an escape. That's sort of a discreet.

a discreet moment or something in your day or week is a form of resistance, right? Whether it's religious practice or cultural expression or something. But that you, this is, starvation is all the time. I mean, it's just a relentless thing that almost occupies your mind because you can't get away from it.

Helene Sinnreich (08:13.92)
Yeah, so I was really interested in hunger and starvation as a way of looking at how Jews on a daily basis experienced the Holocaust. What were they thinking about on a day -to -day basis? My analysis basically says they were thinking a lot about food and the absence of food.

Waitman (08:21.668)
you

Waitman (08:36.578)
Yeah.

Helene Sinnreich (08:37.836)
But the other thing that I was really interested in, and when we talk about sort of, I mean, my book obviously talks about like Jewish agency in trying to obtain food and food distribution and theft and all sorts of ways in which Jews try to get more food. But the other piece that my book talks about is, you know, what happens when you are not successful.

in finding food and that, you know, the overwhelming majority of people that I'm writing about, you know, they failed to survive. So as much as I'm relying on these survivor testimonies to tell us about this experience of hunger and diaries, the starvation is also sort of a story of the people who perished.

Waitman (09:16.548)
you

Waitman (09:35.588)
Yeah. I mean, and I think again, that comes through where you sort of, you know, a diary will sort of stop, you know, because the person writing the diary, you know, no longer has the strength to sort of keep going. And that has its own sort of, as you sort of mentioned already, kind of a poignancy to it. Before we get, before we move on to sort of the, those discussions, how did you choose? So the, the, the three ghettos that you've picked are Warsaw, Krakow and Łódź.

Helene Sinnreich (09:42.124)
Yes.

Helene Sinnreich (10:05.034)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (10:05.38)
How did you pick those out of all the other possible get as you could have chosen?

Helene Sinnreich (10:11.852)
So I started really writing about the Wu 'i Ghetto. And I honestly chose it because it is the ghetto with the most surviving documentation. I was interested in victim experience. And this had the most surviving documentation from survivors. And also there were a tremendous amount of records about food and food distribution and hunger.

And in some ways, that made it an obvious choice to... I was interested in the question of survival overall during the Holocaust, and I was originally wanting to write about deportations. I couldn't get enough material, sort of reread the documents and asked, like, what are they saying? And the overwhelming documents were saying to me, hunger is one of the most important things sort of going on.

So I started with Woodch. I became interested after Woodch in writing about Krakow, and I began writing a social history of Krakow ghetto. And I sort of started writing that, a separate book on Krakow that wasn't necessarily about hunger and food distribution. And in fact, in Krakow, one of the things that comes out in my book is you don't have.

the extreme hunger that you see in Wuj. And so I was starting to really look at this kind of juxtaposition of ghetto experience, of starvation and a place where there's hunger, but not the same level of sort of decimation of the population from lack of food. I, at the same time,

I went back to this earlier work that I was working on, the ghettos in Transnistria. And when I had been working on the ghettos in Transnistria, I'd really become focused on this idea of the open ghetto, the closed ghetto, and how much sort of porousness existed between ghettos. And I looked to Krakow, which had been, it went through these kinds of stages of being a more open ghetto, and then...

Helene Sinnreich (12:35.02)
becoming more restricted until at the very end it's kind of closed off. And obviously there's a correlation there between access to food and how much access you have to the outside world. And scholars have long talked about woodchaving a high mortality rate in part because of its not being as porous as any of the other ghettos having been closed really early on.

And so once I started sort of looking at these two ghettos, I wanted to sort of write something comparative about this.

Waitman (13:08.246)
you

Helene Sinnreich (13:20.426)
And Warsaw presented sort of an opportunity to talk about a ghetto that was sort of closed, but yet there was a lot of sort of movement between the walls to give me sort of a third piece to sort of round it out. I mean, if I had all the time in the world and there was a moment where I was working towards that, I would have added a lot of smaller ghettos. But there came a point at which...

Waitman (13:45.442)
Mm -hmm.

Helene Sinnreich (13:50.316)
I gave a paper on my work and at that time I was really looking at a lot of ghettos and she was like, well, I look forward to you finishing this book in your retirement. And I was like, okay, well, I would like to finish this book in my lifetime. And it is a work of 25 years already. So it needed to be finished. So I guess the question isn't why just these?

Waitman (14:02.596)
You

Helene Sinnreich (14:18.22)
why these three it might be that I had to stop.

Waitman (14:23.908)
Right. Well, I mean, one of the things that comes through really well that I think is interesting, I would like to hear you talk more about that I hadn't really I hadn't really conceptualized in the same way that even the

the Jewish populations in these ghettos. And we're stereotyping a little bit, but for example, you pointed out that Wood is kind of a working class population. Krakow, because of the nature of Nazi policy, actually ends up being sort of an elite in some ways, like an elite ghetto. And then Warsaw is kind of a mixture. Can you talk a little about how...

Helene Sinnreich (14:47.884)
Yes.

Helene Sinnreich (14:57.484)
Yes.

Helene Sinnreich (15:01.164)
mix.

Waitman (15:05.412)
how and why that is, and then how these differences impact sort of the ghetto governance. I think that's where you start to see the influence into food distribution, because food distribution ultimately is a function of the ghetto governance, right?

Helene Sinnreich (15:20.844)
Yes, or at least in the early stage. Later on, it really becomes dictated by German policy, but that's part of the argument of the book. So yes, I saw that in the very ways in which these different communities were making decisions about how to set up the food distribution, that they seem to be very heavily influenced by the ethos of the

Waitman (15:27.008)
Yep.

Helene Sinnreich (15:50.476)
Jewish leadership. And with Woodch, it was a socialist city, long had been a socialist city. And particularly, if you look at the work of Robert Moses Shapiro, who worked on the interwar Woodch Jewish

Helene Sinnreich (16:14.156)
communal leadership in 1931, they elected a socialist ticket. And so we see that, by socialist, I'm also referring to the Bund as well as part of that grouping was predominantly Bund. We see that when the Wich Ghetto sets up their food distribution,

They do start out a little bit like Warsaw in the beginning with having food stores, but they very quickly sort of turn to this idea of having rations and a distribution that goes out fairly equally to all of the inhabitants. They do end up giving more for workers and things like that. Over time, it gets tweaked. But there is a general sort of sensibility in the creation of

the food distribution policy in the wood ghetto that everyone should get food and we see this kind of distribution system and then when it becomes apparent that people can't pay for these rations, they invent this kind of welfare system in order to enable people to buy food and that is all done centrally from the Udin Rad.

By contrast, in Warsaw, you have, you know, a more, for lack of a better word, capitalist kind of perspective on this, which is that there are poor people, but the way in which the poor are receiving their food is through pressure exerted from the Jewish communal leadership, but also through all of these kinds of organizations.

that then pressure Jews who are better off in the ghetto to provide funds in order to subsidize the poor. And we see sort of mirrors of the pre -war period of, oh, you know, if you're well off and you want to, as a matter of status, demonstrate your status, you might provide a great deal of food for the poor as an act of sort of charity. And we see that in the Warsaw ghetto that people are

Waitman (18:15.972)
you

Helene Sinnreich (18:38.432)
you know, benefactors essentially. What ends up happening in all of these ghettos is that people who had initially maybe been more at the top of the social hierarchy begin to have their status and ability to continue to buy food eroded over time, such that there are people who maybe in the beginning were, you know, benefactors who themselves find themselves in a position where they are.

looking for ways to get food subsidized themselves. So we see this kind of dichotomy that the leadership in part and the sort of ethos of the city from before the war has an imprint on how did they do social services before the war and that is going to imprint in part on how they attempt to do it during the war period.

Waitman (19:36.164)
And ultimately, and I know this isn't, you know, this and I think it's a, it's it's a important corrective, you know, that, that your work is about the victims, right. But ultimately they're reacting to what the Nazis are doing. And so I think one of the questions that is interesting to think about or hear more about is what are the, what are the Nazis, what are their goals here? You know, in terms of.

Helene Sinnreich (19:50.08)
Yes.

Waitman (20:06.148)
Are they intentionally? Starving Jews to death. And of course, this probably changes over time as well, right? Because one argument for what the ghettos are is a sort of a temporary kind of holding area while they figure out what they're going to do. But what is and again, this may be a place where Nazi policy differs between who's in charge of the various ghettos. But maybe you can talk a little about what is.

Helene Sinnreich (20:23.532)
you

Waitman (20:34.404)
What is Nazi food policy as it relates to particularly these large urban ghettos, which is what you're seeing.

Helene Sinnreich (20:44.012)
So there is an awareness even as the Germans are closing these ghettos off or placing Jews into ghettos, there is an awareness that the creation of the ghetto is going to create many of these problems. Not only starvation, but there is a full awareness that we're going to see upticks in disease spread.

and all sorts of other what we would consider kind of public health crises. You were manufacturing that problem. So they don't go into this without an awareness of what is going to be created in the creation of ghettos. And one of the things that we see is that

as the food scarcity is created, this creates an opportunity for German authorities to then use food as a way to, one, extract valuables, goods, et cetera, from the Jews.

Waitman (21:43.19)
you

Helene Sinnreich (21:59.468)
It also serves as a motivator for Jews to provide labor for the Germans. This becomes more important, for example, in places like Łódź when they really transform into a concentration camp that is producing goods for the military effort. And so we do see and.

Over time, there is also a transformation from the Germans really allowing the Jewish authorities to be in charge of their own food policy internally to a point where we see the Germans.

Helene Sinnreich (22:46.476)
placing a strong control over who precisely is going to receive food, including favoring those who are providing labor for the Reich and particularly for the war effort. So.

Helene Sinnreich (23:07.596)
That would be my answer.

Waitman (23:09.284)
I mean, is there a, I guess I'm wondering, is there a distinction and maybe there does there become a distinction over time between sort of a passive policy of, you know, we're not going to make things easy if people starve, they starve and a more active policy of let's try in particular to, for example, use incarceration in the ghettos.

to get rid of certain elements of population, maybe young people, old people, or does that become subsumed by the actual deportations to the, to the killing centers? Cause one of the things that I've always found paradoxical and you've, you've tended about this already is that the Nazis are always complaining about things like disease and public health and sanitation and ghettos when they're obviously the ones that are creating those conditions. Um,

in the first place. And so one of the things that I think is interesting in this paradox, right, is this idea of the ideological sort of truth for the Nazis, which is that we're going to get rid of Jews and every Jew that dies is great. And that's, that's furthering our goals, but then also the practical matter of. We can't necessarily just have, you know, 400 ,000 people in Warsaw dropping dead in the middle of the city.

in this ghetto. And so that there has to be, there has to be some kind of, like, they're not, they're not, they don't really care, but they are trying to, they do facilitate some amounts of food to come in, right? It's not just completely, you know, starved out. Does that make sense? Like it's like this weird sort of like self -fulfilling prophecy, you know, where they, but they also have to, in some ways recognize that.

We can't literally just cut off all food to the ghetto.

Helene Sinnreich (25:10.156)
in many ways they do actually quite early on. So in which they, the first summer they just completely cut off food supply because they don't believe that the Jews don't still have valuables to give over. And so they do stop deliveries of food to the ghetto. And it gets to the point where nearly 50 % of the population can't buy food at all. You have...

Waitman (25:11.684)
Or do they?

Waitman (25:26.7)
Okay.

Helene Sinnreich (25:39.724)
horrific mortality rates in connection with that. And really, it's only once it becomes clear that there really is no more money to be extracted, at least from a significant portion of the population, that they resume food supply. And also with Warsaw, there was a complete and utter awareness by the Germans that...

that smuggling was necessary in order to provide sufficient calories for survival. So the amount of food that's coming into the Warsaw Ghetto is so low, it definitely cannot sustain life without smuggling. And then the Germans create a death penalty for smuggling, which has a huge impact on the amount of food being.

smuggled in. So I think there was a willingness quite early on to actually significantly cut food supply even before we have deportations out of the ghetto to extermination camps. So we do see a rather early indulgence. What we do see also is a sort of

Yes, they're aware that they are causing disease when they create these conditions, but it becomes more of an issue when the disease spreads outside of the ghetto area. And then getting it under control becomes important. But I think if we look to things like, for example, in the Wych Ghetto, you have the Roma camp that had 5 ,000 Roma.

Waitman (27:21.316)
Right.

Helene Sinnreich (27:36.044)
who were interned there. And I mean, this was sort of my first experience. I don't even remember if I don't think it's in the book. But when I first started working on the Woodch Ghetto, I decided to start first with the account books from the Roma camp, thinking, OK, account books is a great way to get at like food and what's coming in and what's going out and so forth. And I started looking at the the account books for food.

And I see that.

Helene Sinnreich (28:10.988)
And also we know that very early on when the Roma come into the ghetto at that initial point, they have a horrific typhus outbreak. And there is this work done to try and combat it. Jewish doctors are brought from the Jewish side of the ghetto into the Roma camp to try and fight the disease. But then...

Nazi officials start and guards start dying from having caught the disease. And the reaction of the Germans based on the account books, by the way, the account books reflect that they were buying like stakes and alcohol and things like that, presumably for themselves, presumably not to feed the Roma camp. The

Waitman (29:04.996)
Right. Yeah.

Helene Sinnreich (29:09.836)
The result was that instead of them saying, okay, let's just buy all this bread and vegetables and try and give people the food that they need in order to recover from this disease. Instead, they really just start buying lime for disinfection of dead bodies. And then they deport them all to Hamlo.

Helene Sinnreich (29:39.564)
So, I mean, that's, you know, those are the first deportations in December of 1941. It's to get rid of this spread of disease. And the solution is not to find a way in which to combat the disease. And it always strikes me when I...

off this recording, you and I were talking a little bit about physicality. I always think about like the wood ghetto and the fact that it's it's a wire fence so people can see what's happening on the other side. You know, Warsaw had these and Krakow had these solid fences or walls that you couldn't see through. But there you have a fence and you can see.

Waitman (30:14.852)
Mm -hmm.

Helene Sinnreich (30:29.578)
you know, people starving and dying on the other side of the fence. And this always sort of strikes me. Sorry, that was a little bit of a tangent.

Waitman (30:36.58)
Yeah, I mean, I had the same experience with the last time I was in Warsaw. I think it was in the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which is its own kind of interesting space, but there was a special exhibit on...

Helene Sinnreich (30:48.084)
you

Waitman (31:01.348)
I think it was the ghetto uprising, but it was photographs that were taken by, by non -Jew, essentially non -Jewish Poles of who were like, you know, like walking down the street and on the other side, you know, like 20 meters away was like a battle raging inside the Warsaw ghetto, you know, where Jews are being murdered. And it's, it's that same kind of proximity. But also.

Helene Sinnreich (31:08.81)
Mm -hmm.

Helene Sinnreich (31:13.258)
Yeah.

Waitman (31:28.92)
in some ways sort of indifference of like this is not affecting me.

Helene Sinnreich (31:33.964)
Well, you know, we have all these diary entries of people traveling through the ghetto on the tram and they can, you know, sort of see what's happening.

Waitman (31:46.212)
Yeah, I mean, I want to get, I want to get to that. So this is my last, my last Nazi focused sort of question, you know, which is sort of how, how do we put this Nazi ghetto policy in dialogue with or can we put it in dialogue with larger Nazi hunger policy, right? Because we know with the general plan, Ost, right, which is the, this, which

Helene Sinnreich (32:14.366)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (32:15.556)
for the for the for the right listeners, you know, there was a plan that had the Nazis been in power longer and been more successful. They were planning on starving between 30 and 40 million Slavs, non -Jewish Slavs in Eastern Europe as sort of useless eaters and as you know, in order to make space for this imagined kind of colonial occupation, I suppose. Was there?

from an ideological or from a sort of philosophical perspective, was there kind of a conversation amongst decision makers about the use of hunger as a weapon in both the ghettos or in this larger sort of planned example in many urban areas in Eastern Europe as well? Or were these two sort of separate veins of attack on civilians?

Helene Sinnreich (33:14.508)
So there's definitely a sort of hierarchy of calories tied to how people were perceived racially within the system. And obviously the ghettos have a very low level of calories sort of assigned to them. And I guess.

What I would say is that in many ways, the ghettos are often experiments in what's possible. And so we see all sorts of experiments with what can be done in terms of starvation and what can be done in terms of decimation. But ultimately, right, with...

ghettos, as many people as died in the ghettos from starvation and as much as hunger is a extraordinarily important part of Jewish experience during the war, ultimately the mass deaths come through deportation or for these particular Jews in these ghettos come through mass deportation to

concentration camps or to extermination camps actually. So really the mass death is with the extermination camps.

Waitman (34:52.164)
And of course, as you point out, right, in the book, even there, it's hard to say within the ghettos exactly what someone dies from because, you know, what the sort of, well, A, you have the Nazis themselves falsifying stuff, but also, you know, hunger is sort of that underlying condition that makes one vulnerable to all kinds of other things, you know, and so.

Helene Sinnreich (35:16.204)
So heart disease and all sorts of things are listed as cause of death, which we know from ghetto diarists, from doctors who'd been in the ghetto, that was often, they gave the immediate cause, even though the overarching cause may have been hunger.

Waitman (35:25.412)
you

Waitman (35:38.5)
So moving on now away from the Nazis, let's forget about them. I mean, not really, but I mean, you know, yeah, they're not, they're always there, right? I mean, they, they have, they have created these conditions, right? And again, I think this is, I mean, to be serious for a second, I mean, the, the, the important element of the resistance that we were talking about at the beginning of this, you know, is that, and this gets to this larger question, which we don't have to get into sort of the,

Helene Sinnreich (35:42.38)
Not really. It's very hard to keep them completely out of the story. They're always there. Yes.

Yes.

Waitman (36:08.364)
You know, the, the resistance purists who say that, that resistance Holocaust only counts if it's, you armed fighting it's a Nazis. Um, and then, you know, I think at the more, the end that I would put myself at, you know, whereas if the Nazis are trying to kill you all, then anything that you do to prevent them from being successful is a form of resistance. Right. Um, and I think when we think about starvation in the ghettos, I mean, obviously.

Helene Sinnreich (36:25.708)
you

Waitman (36:38.468)
Lots of energy was expended in trying to keep people alive and not just, you know, able -bodied people, but extra effort to keep vulnerable populations alive as well. You know, those that are in some ways most vulnerable to, to starvation. So if we, if we're transitioning a little bit to thinking about what is the experience of victims and survivors, how do, how do people in the ghetto, what are the, some of the ways in which people in the ghetto confront this?

situation, which I'm guessing for many of them, you know, is not something most of us don't know, have any experience with really being hungry in our normal day to day lives.

Helene Sinnreich (37:21.804)
Yeah, so one of the things that is different from, say, us and them is that they are coming out of the Great Depression, or they're coming directly from the Great Depression into this war period. And so a lot of people in the ghettos do have experience with hunger because there are different kinds of hunger, right? There's this food insecurity,

in which one doesn't have sufficient food or one doesn't know where their food is coming from or they don't have the kind of food that they would desire to eat. And then there is differing levels of starvation eventually leading to starvation to death. So there was quite a bit of communal knowledge on things like how to stretch food, how to...

Waitman (37:52.388)
you

Helene Sinnreich (38:21.27)
deal with not having sufficient food resources. There were people who understood, war is coming, we need to stockpile food. There were people who understood, okay, we have all of these ways of sort of stretching meat by adding vegetables or different things in order to be able to not experience starvation level hunger.

Waitman (38:45.796)
you

Helene Sinnreich (38:50.284)
And so in that respect, we do have something very different in terms of experience. It would be kind of like in our current contemporary day, right? Even if we went back five years ago, we didn't really know a whole lot about how to survive a pandemic. And now most of us, if another pandemic came, we would have a lot of information and ability to sort of pivot and find coping mechanisms. So.

Waitman (38:52.886)
you

Helene Sinnreich (39:19.692)
One of the important things is to know that there were coping mechanisms that were known. They were not completely absent from this community. The other thing I would say is that one of the things I really tried to put into the book is this idea that, and I agree, you Yehuda Bauer sort of coined this phrase, amuna, this idea of.

Sorry, Amida, of rising up against all sorts of things through engaging in all of these kinds of everyday activities, which are testaments to life. But there is this other piece, which is that not everyone chose to fight and survive. And I'm not always sure that they are not resistors also.

Waitman (40:01.924)
you

Helene Sinnreich (40:18.092)
So we have plenty of documentation of people poisoning themselves, committing suicide, refusing to accept living under those conditions. And the other thing that I tried to write about, the title of my book is The Atrocity of Hunger. And I tried to explain that the title of the book isn't just about this kind of feeling of emptiness in our time.

or this sort of movement towards starvation, but that the atrocity part of the hunger is also about the transformation of individuals, families, and communities, and that sometimes this hunger places us in a position where we have to go against what our pre -hungry

Waitman (41:01.316)
you

Helene Sinnreich (41:02.664)
hunger places us in a position where we have to go against what our pre -hungry selves would consider acceptable in order to survive. And there were people who felt that those decisions were not acceptable to them. So,

There were people who struggled with not being able to access kosher food and having to eat non -kosher food in order to survive as a coping mechanism. Obviously Jewish law says you have to, so there were rabbinical treatise put out saying you have to eat non -kosher food even if in order to survive.

Waitman (41:53.412)
you

Helene Sinnreich (42:00.776)
But there were also all sorts of transformations of family life and societal life in which people took measures they would never do in the pre -war period in order to survive. And a lot of these included theft. A lot of them included things that involved things that in normal society we would consider extraordinarily

problematic, but in this situation of hunger, we can completely understand the survival is only possible when taking some of these actions that, you know, might otherwise be reprehensible. And so.

Waitman (42:31.012)
I mean, this is kind of the Primo Levi's destruction of a man idea that, you one of the things that the Nazis do.

by creating these conditions is they essentially create these degrading environments that force people in a certain way, right? I mean, to go with Lawrence Langer's, right? The choiceless choices, you know, that people are forced to do things that we would otherwise consider to be whatever, unethical or...

Helene Sinnreich (43:01.)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (43:24.996)
you know, degrading or whatnot, but because of the conditions that the Nazis have, have put them in. I mean, I remember one of the things that really stands out. One of the examples from your book, um, was, and I'm probably going to get it wrong in the details, but essentially it was a, the, the background was that, that this, this boy, um, you know, received a certain, received his week's allotment of food, um, at the front, at the front end, you know, and on, on day one of the week.

and he ate it all too quickly because he's hungry. And then he stole his sister's, I think was the example. Or he stole another family member's. And then of course he feels bad about it, but he's also now, everyone's hungry. And it was a really poignant example, I think, of exactly what you're talking about, of just how horrendous and almost in some ways difficult to help yourself.

Helene Sinnreich (44:01.864)
you

Helene Sinnreich (44:09.416)
you

Waitman (44:24.708)
when you have the opportunity to do these things.

Helene Sinnreich (44:26.636)
Yeah, so that was the piece that I used both. I used that story of the boy stealing his sister's bread as the opening of the book precisely to illustrate this idea of the atrocity of hunger, that you have someone who clearly loves their sister and is so hungry that they are driven to first steal the bread and then lie about it and pretend that someone else had done it.

And I also end the book with the same diarist and his eventual probable deportation to Auschwitz. And so, yeah, I mean, there are a number of examples in the book that are extraordinarily difficult about families stealing from each other, people...

Waitman (45:21.092)
you

Helene Sinnreich (45:25.32)
being put in really impossible situations where their own survival really require them to engage in food theft or other kinds of deceptions.

Waitman (45:36.612)
And what what impact does the ghetto leadership actually have? I mean, because what you know, you've you've you've chosen at least with Warsaw and would sort of two of the sort of archetypal examples of ghetto leadership with Adam Tchenyakov and with Heim Runkowski, right? That that sort of anyone who's taken a Holocaust history class in in in college, you know, may have may have heard about sort of these two examples of.

of we'll say differing paths, differing choices. How much impact could those leaders have in terms of trying to alleviate the situation? Because on the one hand, it seems like because of the conditions the Nazis created that there is little that one could do. But within those very constricted realm of agency, there were choices that could be made, right?

Helene Sinnreich (46:16.116)
So I think, well, I have two answers for that question. One is to say that.

Waitman (46:37.828)
Yeah.

Helene Sinnreich (46:41.972)
I brought in the Krakow example in part as a juxtaposition because very famously in the case of the Wu -ch Ghetto, Mordechai Chaim Rukowsky, you know, he does have some power on food distribution and food access. And he does opt for this sort of spread it around to everyone evenly method, which...

Waitman (46:51.35)
you

Waitman (47:04.196)
you

Helene Sinnreich (47:08.788)
and then to try and get people to work as much as possible. And, you know, he starts out with 150 ,000 people in the ghetto. And really almost to the very end, 60 ,000 do survive, right? So until really the late summer, early fall of 1944. So there is this...

issue, but he also loses control of food distribution. I think one of the things that we always have to address with Runkowski is sort of this.

mythos around him as this all -powerful leader, and he really was not this all -powerful leader. He is regularly beaten by the Nazi leader of the ghetto. He loses really all authority over the ghetto and becomes really just a figurehead. There's a point at which he gets so...

Waitman (48:02.66)
you

Waitman (48:19.652)
you

Helene Sinnreich (48:22.932)
put in such a bad shape during the deportations that we really don't hear from him for quite a long time. In the same situation, we know that when Adam Chernakoff is asked to deport Jews from the ghetto, he kills himself. But what is, and Wormkowski famously gives the speech, give me your children, you know, give me your children and elderly.

Waitman (48:23.492)
. . .

Helene Sinnreich (48:52.532)
will deport them, turn into a working concentration camp. And what often I think people need to remember is that...

Runkowski is making that decision after Chernakov kills himself and with the knowledge that after Chernakov kills himself that the deportations go forward.

at a very fast pace and in a very brutal fashion. So although... Right.

Waitman (49:22.756)
Well, and it bears mentioning, of course, too, that that, you know, even within the popular opinion at the time in the ghetto of Warsaw, not everybody thinks that he made the right choice. You know, there are people who are like, I wish you hadn't killed yourself and it continued to, you know, lead us and that sort of killing yourself was the easy way out and that kind of thing. So in terms of problematizing the the sort of mythic symbolism, I think that it's a good point.

Helene Sinnreich (49:51.184)
But I also present the situation in Krakow where we do have a leader who tries to stand up to the Germans and he's deported. And then another leader, in fact, they go through four leaders during this period. And so we see that if you say no,

and you or you decide to kill yourself, there will simply be someone else and a complete replacement until there is someone who is following German instructions. So there are limits to what Jewish leadership is able to do to sort of avert what's happening with the Nazis.

I think instead what you're really seeing is that the Jewish leadership is able to sort of make some very small decisions and has some very small power in order to help people. And that different leaders made different decisions.

Waitman (50:45.22)
you

Waitman (50:56.772)
And.

Waitman (51:00.964)
And in that sense.

Waitman (51:07.428)
the food getting into the ghetto in the same way?

Helene Sinnreich (51:07.636)
this at different effects.

Waitman (51:12.75)
Is it being purchased?

Waitman (51:19.178)
directly from the ghetto inhabitants or do they have to give the money?

then purchase it for them and obviously would skim.

Helene Sinnreich (51:37.556)
So it does go through a German ghetto administration. So there's a German ghetto administration, and they are the purchasers of foods that then they take a tax basically on top of the actual cost of food in order to then purchase it and then enters the ghetto and then is distributed in various ways. So sometimes it's distributed through direct purchase in stores.

or through restaurants. And sometimes it is distributed through a ration card system. And it really varies over time and place how that internal distribution happens. But in general, that the initial food purchase is made with the Germans as an intermediary. The exception to that is smuggling. And also in the case of Krakow, where they could get day pass, well, in Warsaw, also they could get day passes for quite a long time.

So those who are able to enter and exit the ghetto are able to get food directly from the producers, so to speak, or from the sellers. And we definitely see one of the things I show in the book is the difference in cost of food from inside the ghetto and outside of the ghetto to see that there is a sort of upcharge for.

Waitman (53:03.012)
And presumably this is also something that the local non -Jewish population is taking advantage of as well, knowing that they can sell food directly.

Helene Sinnreich (53:05.436)
food costs and yeah.

Waitman (53:16.452)
exorbitant prices.

Helene Sinnreich (53:24.7)
It is something that the local population is aware that they can sell it and upcharge, but very often there are non -Jews who are smuggling themselves into the ghetto in order to sell food. And so they are charging and upcharge also because they are taking a risk. And they are also engaging in a form of smuggling because this

sale of products directly to the consumer in many cases was not listened or not legal so to speak and so they are also engaging in risk and also all Food really bought and sold on the black market tends to have a kind of markup precisely because there is the risk of confiscation of jail of in some cases, right? We have Polish smugglers who come into the Warsaw ghetto who are killed and in the which ghetto were killed so I?

We do see that there is upcharge, but I would also at least say that in some cases it's because there is risk involved.

Waitman (54:24.9)
I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. It's just, yeah. You are, you are, you're, you're paying for a service, I suppose, in some sense.

Helene Sinnreich (54:39.796)
There's also the situation that there's food shortage amongst the Polish population as well, not as extreme as in the ghetto. And so if you are choosing to smuggle into the Jewish ghetto, it's a lot easier to sell in the black market to those in the Polish population than it is to smuggle over a barrier.

Waitman (54:59.32)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it's an additional sort of level of difficulty. One of the things that I want to definitely highlight that we haven't talked about yet is the gender impact and the ways in which hunger both impacts people differently based on gender, but also in some ways upends

Helene Sinnreich (55:22.61)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (55:28.996)
the traditional order of things from a gender perspective. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Helene Sinnreich (55:43.96)
Yeah, so one of the things that my book looks at is obviously whenever you're talking about food, you're talking about all sorts of gender roles in terms of who's cooking and who's preparing food. And when you're talking about family dynamics, you're often talking about gender. And so...

One of the things that I wanted to look at in the book is that a lot of studies of famine typically take place of looking at famines where women are taking on this role of standing in line to get food, engaged in preparing food, and all sorts of activities that

got associated with women's roles during famine. And I wanted to challenge that a little bit because a lot of those famines that were looked at where these things are tagged as feminine are because men between adult men are largely missing. So in cases like

you know, Stalingrad is one of the classic examples. You have military age men are absent. It's a home front. And so a lot of these activities are taking place by women in Perp because they are the able bodied adults. We also see in a lot of famines that happen where men will leave the area that is affected by famine to seek work elsewhere in order to bring food and in

Waitman (57:24.784)
Okay.

Helene Sinnreich (57:39.444)
come back to their families. And so women are sort of left again as the able -bodied adults engaged in caretaking. So one of the things that I did see by looking at a population where it's the whole population and not just a population minus the able -bodied adult men was that a lot of these things that often get tagged as specifically

female were being done by both men and by women. However, food cooking was largely still a feminine role. Even, for example, in households where the woman had no experience cooking because there had been a housekeeper or some other thing before the war, the person was a child.

and never really learned how to cook prior to the war, you often see women as being the ones who cook. But on the flip side of that, one of the things that exists in a lot of the ghettos are places where you could obtain food without cooking, meaning prepared meals instead of raw food products. And so...

That also kind of changes some of the gender dynamic when women don't necessarily have to cook the food, but instead you could go to a communal kitchen and get already prepared food stuff. Instead, a lot of what we see with gender, and of course I just want to caveat and say that when we're talking about gender, right, socioeconomic status, religious observation, all of these things are sort of.

things that intersect with gender as a category. What we do see with gender is questions really about power. So very few positions of power in the ghetto are occupied by women and power is often an important factor in having access to food. So a lot of women are in these positions where there are access to adequate food.

Helene Sinnreich (59:59.252)
is reliant on their relationship with men. I don't know that that's a complete disruption from a lot of what was going on before the war because women were often in a similar kind of dynamic power -wise. But we also see breakdowns in families. And we see, for example, men taking mistresses who have access to food and things like that that allow for...

all of these kinds of dynamics. There were cases though also where men are injured and women become the sole breadwinners where we do see a lot of changes in the ways in which households are constructed and the ways in which power exists in households. And there's also caretaking of children, which is another.

Waitman (01:00:29.558)
you

Helene Sinnreich (01:00:57.78)
sort of complicated piece, but we do see both mothers and fathers really sacrificing for their children.

Waitman (01:01:00.676)
Well, I would imagine that in some ways.

for a large number, a large portion of the men, right, who traditionally held this sort of head of household, breadwinner, sort of patriarchal position, right? But then they lose their ability to work in whatever job or industry they had worked in before the war. And so in that way, not only are they not sort of doing meaningful work as they would define it,

but they're literally not winning bread because they're not, they're not, you know, they're not able to, to, to bring in the income. And then with that, the food and that must have, I would imagine for some of them made them feel very sort of out of place and upset.

Helene Sinnreich (01:02:04.564)
Yeah, I mean, we have a tremendous number of testimonies of people talking about their fathers losing businesses or losing their positions or being unable to work. And for a lot of those men, according to their children's testimonies, they're really broken and never recover from this situation because their positionality has changed so dramatically.

In other instances, they are able to find some kind of work that does help support their family. And in many ways, social networks and, you know, more often than skills actually play a role in people being able to find adequate work.

in order to support their families, whether that be men or women or whomever. And in a lot of cases, families become reliant on children who become smugglers, who become the major breadwinners, literally and figuratively.

Waitman (01:03:08.42)
Does this change the fundamental ways in which families interact with each other? Because one of the things I would imagine that is almost universal across cultures is that people get together for a meal. And that's a time of sort of enjoying one's company, taking enjoyment in food and the meal that's been prepared.

Um, and, and, you know, it's something that we probably don't, we probably take for granted quite a bit that that moment of sort of communal, you know, interaction. Um, does that change when, when literally there's not enough food or the food is not palatable or, or do people find a way to, to still have that kind of a communal relationship and, and, and meeting with each other.

Helene Sinnreich (01:04:13.396)
We still see for quite a long while people really trying to find ways to stretch food and engage in communal celebrations and communal meals. We see things like birthday parties celebrated with a birthday cake, but the birthday cake is made from the ersatz coffee, which is actually chicory. And so they'll take the chicory, grind it, use it as a kind of flour replacement.

Waitman (01:04:28.548)
Mm -hmm.

Helene Sinnreich (01:04:42.356)
mix it with saccharin and water and create this kind of like briquette essentially that they called a cake and then everyone would partake in this kind of, you know, sweetened chicory briquette that was, you know, used to celebrate a birthday or these kinds of things. So even though the meals may not have been as luxurious as they were prior to the war,

There is definitely still communal eating. There's a lot of adding more water to the soup in order to make sure there's enough portions for everyone to be able to have something. At the same place as families really get destitute, we do see fighting and arguing over food and fights over food at.

food theft within immediate families and things like that. But for quite a long time, we do see some form of communal eating as part of the experience.

Waitman (01:05:48.516)
And of course, one of things that you mentioned, which bears highlighting as well, is that religious observance plays a role as well. And of course, for those listeners that may not be as familiar, there are quite a lot of Jewish religious traditions that revolve around food, whether it's sort of the Seder or the Passover meals, or even just what constitutes a Shabbat dinner versus a regular dinner. Are there...

Does this also provide or represent an arena where people are sort of trying to make the best of a difficult situation or is it something that sort of gets put by the wayside in the interest of survival?

Helene Sinnreich (01:06:45.14)
I mean, holiday meals continue. They certainly get less abundant. So maybe in the pre -war period, you know, everybody would have taken out a bottle of alcohol and foods and shared whatever they had. And eventually what we begin to see is that, you know, there's no longer the alcohol present. There's no longer as much sharing. People have a lot less.

in order to share as a meal. But we do see a very long -term dedication to having some form of haluchi and celebratory meals. So weddings become a really important place where we still see sort of little mini feasts. And we see things like even...

until very, very late, we have matzah being consumed in the ghetto for Passover. In the wood ghetto, they convert some of the bread factories over to matzah making factories. Some people choose not to get matzah because it's not as filling as bread, but it is produced and made available.

There's the importation of matzah in some of the other ghettos from Hungary, which was not under Nazi occupation at the time and was still producing, you know, matzah. We have very elaborate things, like there was a whole operation initially of smuggling.

cows into the ghetto and chickens into the ghetto so they could be kosherly slaughtered. Later on in Warsaw, they discovered it was harder to bring a live cow in and so they found a secret place to kosher butcher the cow and then smuggle the pieces in. This turned out to be easier than getting a whole cow in. But certainly live chickens are traded in all of the ghettos in which I researched in.

Waitman (01:08:43.524)
you

Helene Sinnreich (01:08:53.236)
chickens for holiday meals and things like that. Now, these are really the elites who are getting kosher meat. For the most part, many, many people are going to become vegetarians. We're also going to see, as I mentioned, food security is partially about being able to get the food access you want. But in times of food insecurity, we see really not only does the ability to obtain kosher food really go.

over time, we also see the introduction of all sorts of foods that Jews didn't normally eat before the war. One that gets introduced very early on is horse, and we see horse meatballs being consumed in the ghetto very early on. This is one of the first non -kosher foods that people are urged to eat if they're sick and things like that.

Waitman (01:09:50.244)
you

Helene Sinnreich (01:09:53.104)
really later on in the war, we see canned seafood, like canned oysters and things like that, going into circulation in the ghettos. And people at first are like, what is this? How can this be consumed? And then people are like, oh, I quite like this source of protein. So we really see a variety of proteins coming into the ghetto.

would not have been able to be consumed prior to the war. And we certainly have the smuggling of pork products in from the Polish side into the ghettos. And people are obviously consuming it, which would definitely go against Jewish religious dietary practices.

Waitman (01:10:39.14)
And I'm assuming that there are rabbinical dispensations for all of this, you know, that, you know, or is there, is there debate, is there debate between different rabbis about whether or not this constitutes a time in which you can have an exception to the rule?

Helene Sinnreich (01:10:52.676)
In the beginning there are...

Helene Sinnreich (01:11:03.796)
So in the beginning, we do see dispensations first for the sick and pregnant and things like that. And then over time, we see dispensations for those who, rather than starve to death. Eventually, in most of the ghettos, the rabbis are deported and we're not really getting very many rabbinical authorities giving pronouncements.

Waitman (01:11:30.116)
you

Helene Sinnreich (01:11:33.78)
in the same kind of way. In Krakow, you have rabbinical authorities for quite a long time. There is this also complication in talking about some of these things in that there are rabbinical authorities who lay claim that there are those who never broke kosher law during the entirety of the Holocaust. This seems...

Waitman (01:11:50.5)
you

Waitman (01:12:05.188)
and also kind of a veiled criticism of everyone else.

Helene Sinnreich (01:12:05.972)
unlikely given what was available for survival. But this.

Helene Sinnreich (01:12:19.604)
I mean, it's often sort of placed in this context of, well, we gave a dispensation for these people who were sick or in trouble, but this one holy rabbi never partook in non -kosher food and survived the entire war just because of their elevated status.

Waitman (01:12:26.276)
Mm.

Helene Sinnreich (01:12:44.98)
And so they're trying not to knock other people for having done it. In very many cases, they gave permission for others to partake. Probably there's another piece to be written about this question.

Waitman (01:12:59.94)
And one of the things I think, just to make sure we also touch before we close, in terms of, because you'd mentioned deportations out of the ghetto, but some of the listeners may not be aware that there are deportations into the ghetto, and particularly, Wood is a good example, right, of German Jews who are dropped into a Polish...

You know, maybe even for them a shock to be in a working class Polish, you know, Jewish environment. And that brings with it its own, its own challenges, um, both in general, but also with regards to food, right?

Helene Sinnreich (01:13:47.304)
Yeah, so all of the ghettos have deportations into them and a number of them. Yeah, in which there is a particular juxtaposition of sort of more elite or intellectual Austrians, Germans and Czech Jews who find themselves in the ghetto.

One of the first hurdles that those coming into the ghetto really had to contend with was quarantine. So they would come into the ghetto and they would very often be quarantined. And these quarantine centers did not necessarily have adequate food available. And people began starving already in these quarantine centers.

And very often people would bribe themselves out of quarantine so that they could get into the main ghetto so that they could get access to food. Or if they were lucky, they brought a lot of food with them in order to be able to survive this quarantine period. One of the real challenges that a lot of these Jews had who were coming in from

places outside of Poland was not only say a language barrier, but also the fact that they did not have these social networks that enabled them to really plug in and get jobs the way that maybe Jews coming from the countryside might have relatives who lived in the city and whom they could rely on to help them.

you know, find a place or a position within the ghetto. For those coming from really outside the ghetto, from outside of Poland, they faced a lot of these kinds of challenges. And ultimately, there was a period, for example, in Łódź where about six months after their arrival, the Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czech lands,

Helene Sinnreich (01:16:07.572)
begin to be deported out of the ghetto unless they had a job or they had a position in the ghetto. And for many, many of them, they had never, you know, found a job in the ghetto or position. They were reliant on this very minimal rationing for those on welfare. And they were also in very uncomfortable positions.

basically there wasn't adequate housing for them. And so they turned, for example, schools and things like that into these dormitories for people coming from outside. And so they lived in really not great conditions. A lot of them were older people who came in and there was quite a bit.

Waitman (01:17:03.19)
you

Helene Sinnreich (01:17:03.902)
suffering. There are some famous examples from the Woodch ghetto like Kafka's sisters were in the Woodch ghetto.

So we have this kind of...

Helene Sinnreich (01:17:22.292)
very sad situation for the Western Jews. And there was songs and things written about their destitute position. These are a horrible example of people who came in with resources, sometimes with money, sometimes with food, who very quickly had to sell off their possessions and ended up in a very bad situation in the ghetto.

Waitman (01:17:38.348)
Yeah, I mean, I think if there's been one sort of theme that runs through all of this, it's what you mentioned towards the beginning, which is the way in which hunger tears apart sort of the sinews of community and forces people into these, you know, these...

these choiceless choices situations, these terrible situations where, you know, there, there's no good, there's no good route out. Um, so I, I highly, I, I don't want to keep, keep you too long. And I highly recommend folks, um, do, do check out the, the show notes, um, because it's, it's a, I mean, it's a difficult read, but it's, it's difficult in the sense of the, the subject material is difficult, but I think it's really important because one of the things that.

um, Professor Sinrich does really well is do comparisons as well as to show both structures and humans, um, at the same time, which I think is, is always a challenge, um, when you're writing. Um, and so it, it, yeah, go ahead. No, sorry.

Helene Sinnreich (01:18:57.458)
It does.

I'd also like to make the plug that my book is open access, so you can also just read it for free. I assume the link will be in the...

Waitman (01:19:00.886)
Yes.

Yes, the link will be there. And that is an added bonus. Speaking of books, I always ask our guests, what is one book on the Holocaust that is particularly meaningful or influential, has been influential for you? Of course, this is kind of like, what is your favorite band? I mean, it could change any day of the week. But today, what would you recommend?

people to read.

Helene Sinnreich (01:19:41.748)
I mean, the book that probably influenced me the most was Elie Wiesel's Night. I read it quite young and it really inspired me to become a Holocaust scholar. But the book I'd sort of recommend to people that I think is really one of the most important books on ghettos that really changes the way in which people can...

about and conceptualize ghettos is Tim Cole's Holocaust City. I think it really did something really new and changed a lot of how one can think about ghettos and brings us into a different kind of era or a new sort of moment of thinking about ghettos and ghettoization.

Waitman (01:20:29.348)
Well, great. And I will definitely put that, I'll put that in the, in the show notes as well. Everyone else. Thank you so much for listening. As always, please do like and subscribe in iTunes or podcasts, Apple podcasts or Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Do leave a comment and a rating if you can. That's always helpful. And Helene, thank you so much for taking the time out of.

what is clearly a very busy academic life, let alone regular life to be with us today. Thank you so much.

Helene Sinnreich (01:21:12.66)
Thank you.