Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (13 page)

Underground leaders, at the time, were acutely aware of the failure of traditional leadership. The unwillingness, then, of the
Judenrate
to admit the undergrounds to their governing councils was indeed a failure of leadership and a failure of authority. This is not a question of the benefit of hindsight; it was an issue apparent to what the undergrounds consistently wanted, what they publicized in their leaflets, in their incessant pleas to the
Judenrate
to listen to their arguments, to allow them to publicize German atrocities. That the vast majority of the
Judenrate
chose to collaborate rather than to listen to their own people, to the most courageous leaders in their communities, undoubtedly had a considerable impact on why mil
lions met their deaths worn out from the very struggle with life.

For Frantz Fanon the oppressed calls his world into question through the use of ‘absolute violence.’ It is the human and psychological condition for the recovery of identity. ‘For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settlers, his glance no longer shrivels me nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence.’
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Much the same can be said for resistance and partisan groups of Jews during the Holocaust. In looking at Fanon’s theory of violence, his concept of the colonized
becomes, in the context of the Holocaust, the ‘being-ness’ of the Jew, the oppressed, the exploited, the ‘wretched of the earth,’ which the Jew was for the German.

In an extraordinary passage from Aimé Césaire’s
Les Armes Miraculeuses
, Fanon locates a moral story in the oppressed’s redemp
tion through violence: ‘There is not anywhere in the world a poor creature who’s been lynched or tortured in whom I am not mur
dered and humiliated.’ In the next passage, the rebel enters the master’s house: ‘The master was there, very calm … and our people stopped dead… . it was the master… . I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm.’ But the rebel saw fear in the master’s eyes and he ‘struck … and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today.’
¹⁰
Analogous accounts appear in underground and partisan memoirs; the Jew, striking, killing a collaborator, and the sense of exhilaration and rebirth such action provoked.

Violence is reciprocal; it feeds off itself; when the oppressed find their voice, their violence matches that of the oppressor. It is messy, but what distinguishes the oppressed in their violent phase is their sense of purpose, what Fanon calls the ‘point of no-return,’ when the first act of killing marks off the rebel as actor from the oppressed as passive recipient of violence. At that point, ‘violence, because it consti
tutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and cre
ative qualities’; violence adheres with identity, recovers selfhood, while ‘the practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain.’
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The Jewish underground fighter initiated into the group, the relationship between the fighter and his weapon, the Bielski band’s sense of great victory at the successful expedition of its fighting units, the accounts of partisan fighters filled with pride after having engaged in a violent action against a German or collaborator; all this evidence suggests a positive correlation between the practice of violence and the recovery of a vitalized community. This certainly was Fanon’s belief in relation to the Algerian peasants’ subservience and victimization at the hands of the French. ‘Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.’
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And it was a recurrent theme in my interviews with partisan survivors.

The eleven-year-old Jewish boy who kills his first German feels a sense of victory and vindication at the very act of destruction. No
guilt or remorse appears in partisan accounts, although survivors like Sonia O. continue to struggle with the moral implications of group murder and execution. In a videotape of surviving members of the Bielski Brigade, one man says quite matter-of-factly that they had to kill, that it was a part of their life, but in his eyes and his wife’s you witness a sense of vindication and pride at having encountered the German oppressor on the ground of violence. For Fanon, ‘life [for the colonized] can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler,’
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for the Jew, out of the rotting corpse of the German. The oppressor divides the world into the good and the evil; ‘the Manicheanism of the settler produces a Manicheanism of the native.’ But this is all to the good, because it incites resolve with singularity of purpose; it dissolves the sense of limiting action and replaces a cautious model of action with a radical one. In Fanon’s words, ‘To the theory of the “absolute evil of the native,” the theory of the “absolute evil of the settler” replies.’
¹⁴
To the absolute evil of the Jew, the Jew replies with the absolute evil of the German, Nazi collaborator, turncoat; action as violence realizes in practice this Manicheanism carved into the spirit. Rather than degrading the self, this purposeful violence fulfils the self.

The Germans, to use Fanon’s words, had taken away ‘the warming, light-giving centre where man and citizen develop and enrich their experience in wider and still wider fields’; for Jewish resistance fighters, violence brought that experience back, enabling the community to exist and survive. When the masses, Fanon argues, give ‘free rein to their bloodthirsty instincts,’ action, rather than ruining character, restores it and gives it purpose and a sense of place in a tormented history and potentially redemptive future.

Oppression kills the self, maims human motive and distorts the natural aggressiveness necessary to engage in violent action. However, the stunted self, the self shorn of its human properties, the dissociated, alienated self, literally reverses itself through violence; and in the process of coming together as a revolutionary community, the oppressed discharge ‘the hampered aggressivity’ and destroy oppression ‘as in a volcanic eruption.’
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The result is catharsis, rebirth, a psychic moving outwards in a burst of energy and rage that brings back to the group its human and political identity. In violent action, ‘the evil humours are undammed and flow away with a din as of molten lava.’
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But in captivity, in oppression, ‘the native’s back is to
the wall, the knife is at his throat (or more precisely, the electrode at his genitals).’
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But when these fears dissolve in action, ‘a people becomes unhinged, reorganizes itself, and in blood and tears gives birth to very real and immediate action.’
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In conditions of oppression, ‘the psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and finds outlet’ in behaviors which work in the interest of the oppressor (group infighting, the use of drugs, theft, black markets, intra-group exploitation).

The colonist tries to break down community and enforce a regime where individuals find themselves locked into their own fear, their ‘own subjectivity.’ This produces isolation, makes it difficult to tran
scend or break through domination. Action obliterates this paraly
sis, ‘where even in its own universe, amongst its own people, each self is enemy to everyone else.’ Instead, what revolutionary violence accomplishes is a reinforcing of the consciousness of community, ‘brother, sister, friend – these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie.’
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Through violence, the political meaning of these words is rediscovered, and all in the community come to see them
selves as common participants – not isolated units trying to survive at all costs, a state of mind typical in Holocaust diaries describing the horrifying conditions of ghetto life: ‘So when I as a settler [Jew] say, “My life is worth as much as the settler’s [German’s],” his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone’
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– for example, the difference between the deliberations of the Vilna
Judenrat
and the Bielski partisans, the former reinforcing the power of the German to turn the Jew into stone, the latter, confronting the German presence with a massive negative of the effort at petrification. Fanon’s natives ‘live in the atmosphere of doomsday’;
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so do the resistance fighters, a sense of imminence defined by the implacable hostility of one group against the other, except that, for the colonized, ‘doomsday’ means not doom for themselves but for the colonialist. The native’s work is to imagine all possible means of destroying the settler. So too for the resistance fighter; no compromise is possible. And in an observation that could have come from Tuvia Bielski, Fanon observes:

‘The practice of violence binds [the community] together as a whole since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning.’
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Fanon refuses to leave the argument at the level of violence alone; he realizes the critical importance of the formation of community accompanying the practice of violence. This is where, for example, Tuvia Bielski’s theory of the absolute necessity of a Jewish commu
nity as the backdrop for the fighters bears a fascinating resemblance to Fanon’s arguments. Violence by itself may be cathartic, but it lacks political force and focus; community gives violence its struc
turing properties, while containing its effects. The practices of com
munal exchange and rebuilding that follow on violence guarantee the community’s future as a political entity. Violence creates the possibility for a regeneration of community; it is not a substitute for it. Bielski constantly made this argument not only with his own people, but with the Russians, their commanders and with other partisan units. In Fanon’s words, ‘The leader realizes, day in and day out, that hatred alone cannot draw up a programme: You will only risk the defeat of your own ends if you depend on the enemy (who of course will always manage to commit as many crimes as possible) to widen the gap and to throw the whole people on the side of the rebellion.’
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Hatred requires a process of
structuring in community
; of harnessing action/violence components and transforming those components into a community that lives for today and tomorrow. This is what imparts to violence its political meaning and practice. What was remarkable about the partisans was how political they could be when necessary, when the metamorphosis of violence into politics – for example, Bielski dealing with the Russian commanders

–
meant saving the integrity of the community itself. Uncontained, cathartic violence for Fanon could not sustain revolution; it had to be transmuted into structure and communal practice; and that transformation is what gave the rebels strength in their political confrontation with the French. Similarly with the partisans: what enabled the resistors to survive in the loose collective of Soviet-sponsored bands was not only the strength of these fighting units, but the demonstrative power of whom they represented as commu
nity, a fighting entity surviving in the midst of German annihila
tory violence.

Perhaps the violence of the oppressed blurs the line between reason and madness, or perhaps the madness of what happened to the Jews, as incomprehensible as it is, allowed them to forge out of the forest and undergrounds a psychological space of action
allowing for the interpenetration of reason and madness, providing moments of lucidity in a human condition where it was all too easy to be driven insane by genocide. It was certainly the case that many Jews were driven mad by German barbarism. And the ability to maintain one’s sanity, to avoid falling into the stupor of catatonic withdrawal or the passivity of psychological dissociation, required containment by action offering to the alienated hope and possibility through violence.

There is an account in the diaries of the Lodz ghetto of a woman released from a mental hospital (or a hospital ward housing the insane) who went to a guard post and asked the sentry to shoot her. He obliged, but not before he insisted she dance for him. Madness, lunacy, appears in many different forms in Holocaust ghetto life: in the blank stares of lice-ridden children, sitting in gutters filled with human refuse; in the empty faces of those starving to death, those who had lost entire families to the Germans; in the wailing of orphans desperately looking for their parents; in the catatonic with
drawal of adults who lost the will to live. Possibly the violence of the resistance movements served as moments of lucidity or reawak
ening to one’s humanity and willfulness, in the midst of a universe thoroughly turned inside-out, dedicated to destroying the will. Violence kept resistance fighters from falling over the edge into incoherence or madness; the undergrounds, the partisan groups in the forest, were composed of human beings who had been driven to distraction by loss, suffering and pain, but who nonetheless managed to transcend the indignities imposed on their bodies, fam
ilies and minds by the Germans. Violence did bring lucidity, a kind of reasoning born of circumstances certainly not normal in our understanding of ‘normal.’ We do not regard it as healthy to engage in acts of murderous violence, but in the madness created by the Germans, maybe the resistance unit constructed lucid intervals filled with clarity over one’s meaning as a human being and the obliga
tion one had to support the community, a lucidity that paradoxi
cally allowed individuals to regain their humanity, will and sense of a common purpose. It would be wrong to speak of this kind of vio
lence as normal, but in the context of that time, it did work, it did bring lucidity and hope, and for many, it enabled them to survive: ‘the partisans were hunting down the Germans. Our spirits were high. We were enthusiastic and vengeful, glad to batter the enemy.

Every evening, when we returned to the base, we spoke excitedly and joyfully of the day’s events.’
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The clarity of the need for violence appears in the narrative of Ben, who escaped the Warsaw ghetto when he was seventeen and joined a loosely organized partisan group outside Lublin. The head of this unit had no use for Jews, and made this clear to Ben: