Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (14 page)

‘Several Jews managed to escape a transport to Maidanek; they had some money on them; and my commander killed all sixteen of them. Just like that without warning before we could react; shot them for the money, the gold. We couldn’t believe it, right before our eyes, my friend who was Jewish and myself, we just stood there for a moment, looking at each other. We pulled out our guns and killed him; must have pumped ten shells into his body. I knew what my mission was: to kill all those who killed the Jews, even partisans. I hated that guy.’

Ben, in a story unusual for its absence of anti-Semitic harassment from his comrades, fled eastward and joined a Soviet partisan unit.

‘They were big, and you know what? They didn’t mind I was Jewish; no one in that unit hounded me. All they cared about was that I killed Germans. I know you find this hard to believe, but the Russians never called me Jew or anything like that. I was treated like any other fighter. And I did fight; I killed many Germans and blew up a lot of trains.’

Ben’s unit operated with the support and assistance of the Soviet government; weapons were airdropped, and they encountered no problem in intimidating local peasants into supplying food. ‘If the peasants didn’t fork over food, we beat them; sometimes we had to kill them. But it didn’t matter; we had to have food; the peasants were scared of us. If they betrayed us, we would kill the collabora
tors. They learned quickly.’

Life in the forests possessed no routine.

‘Every day there was something different; you couldn’t dwell on yesterday; you never knew when a local collaborator would take a shot at you or a German unit on a sweep would ambush the unit.

We had to survive; six guys had one large pail they ate from; we threw whatever we had into the pail; if there wasn’t enough we would try to find a peasant; if the peasant refused us food, we threatened to kill him; that was usually enough. During the Christian holidays, the peasants baked: cakes, bread, cookies; we took whatever they baked! And they never knew when we were coming; we ate good during those days. What really bothered us was the lice; we couldn’t bathe or wash; we wore the same clothes for months; all of us were full of lice; little bugs, every
where, our hair, clothes, body.’

Ben’s unit had the specific assignment of destroying rail lines that carried armaments from Germany to the Eastern Front. He remem
bered how successful they had been, and the pleasure it gave him to blow up a train and

‘kill everyone on it and steal what they had … that was a terrific feeling, to see the bastards blown up, and to shoot the stinking Germans. I had no regrets about killing them; I regret not having killed more Germans. We especially liked to rob the trains at Christmas time with all the gifts going to the front … anyone who tried to hurt us. I hated them. After the war, Poles would hurt us; I never helped them; I gave them poison [a colloquialism for wanting to hurt those who hurt you]. Some Russians helped me but I didn’t look Jewish to them and they never asked. The Poles, they would ask.’

In postwar Poland, the Soviets appointed Ben chief of police in a small town in eastern Poland; he sent forty Poles to jail for crimes against Jews. ‘The Poles didn’t have an order to kill the Jews; they did it on their own. So in a way the Poles were more vicious than the Germans; they chose to kill.’ His bitterness towards the Poles appeared consistently throughout his narrative:

‘Sometimes during the war I had to hide my Jewish identity; what else could you do? Even after the war, when the Poles found out I was Jewish, they screamed that a Jew should not be chief of police and send Poles to jail. Even in that small town I lost two friends who were killed on the street by Poles. After that
happened, I said, “To hell with it; I don’t want to stay here.” And I left and came to America with five dollars in my pocket.’

In the ghetto 100 percent of deaths came from disease, starvation and killing by the Germans and their sympathizers; in the forests approximately 72 percent of all partisan deaths came from combat; 3 percent were caused by disease and the rest at the hands of hostile, anti-Semitic partisan bands. Men composed 80 percent of partisan units, women 20 percent, although some family brigades had a greater proportion of women, children and elderly in their popula
tions. The vast majority of participants in the ghetto underground were under 30 years of age, with the majority of non-command fighters being 20 years and younger. While it is difficult to assess with any precision, the ages of those in the forests were generally higher, command fighters and leaders being 40 and under; non-command fighters, anyone who had the strength to endure combat conditions and who possessed a weapon, were for the most part under 30.

Dov Levin
²⁵
counts 5 percent of the Jewish population in the eastern areas of Lithuania and Byelorussia involved in political and active resistance; and in Lithuania as a whole, Levin estimates that 2,000 Jews served in the underground or with partisan units. Yehuda Bauer argues that in eastern Poland ‘during the time Jews were organizing to fight, that was in 1942–43, they accounted for one half of all partisans in the Polish forests, or about 1.5 percent of the Jewish population in the region.’
²⁶
As a proportion of the
entire
Jewish population, this figure is higher than equivalent numbers of Polish and Lithuanian resistors. Because captured Jewish partisans were tortured and killed most tried to commit suicide or kill their enemies. One young woman blew up herself and a German officer with a hand grenade. On occasion wounded comrades were put to death before capture by the Germans.

A partisan attack killing two German officers provoked the follow
ing proclamation by the German command in Vilna:

‘Men and Women of the Vilna District! 400 saboteurs and terrorists [were] shot in reprisal… . We call upon the population of the Vilna District to rise against the Bolsheviks and terrorists. Report the presence of strangers in the
area at once. Anyone aiding the Bolsheviks and terrorist gangs, or

failing to report, will be severely punished and liable to the death

penalty… . All those imparting correct information will be highly

rewarded with money or a gift of food.

Gebietskommissar of the Vilna Region WOLF’
²⁷

For ghettoized Jews, ‘escape’ had limited meaning: one could attempt to obtain a labor pass, forge a fictitious marriage or marry someone already in possession of a labor pass; one could hide in a bunker or a hole or what was called a
maline
in the ghetto; one could hide with a Christian family outside the ghetto; or attempt to flee to a neutral country (almost impossible after 1940), or more likely to the Soviet Union or for a brief period in Byelorussia, where Jews lived in relative safety until the German invasion. If a Jew had the right papers and physical characteristics, he might pass for an Aryan.

Trapped, without resources, starving, the majority of the Jewish population dealt with the German threat by hiding and waiting. Families were desperate to stay together. Those Jews young, strong and fit enough to escape to the forests found themselves in an envi
ronment where choice reappeared, where control over one’s life took on political significance through the exercise of violence. Jews inside the ghetto who were fortunate to possess the infamous yellow or white passes exempting them from selections were required to carry the certificates with them at all times; to accept the work offered by Germans without question; never to change their place of employment without permission; to obey the orders and instruc
tions of the ghetto’s labor department; and to notify the labor department of a change of address or change in place of work.

Every aspect of life was governed by the ghetto and German authorities. No one could act without some form of permission, in addition to the obvious fact of being encircled by barbed wire and armed guards.

A German poster read:

‘The Jew is the enemy of Germany and responsible for the war. He is a forced laborer and is forbidden to be in contact with his employers except on matters referring to work. Anyone maintain
ing contact with Jews shall be treated as if he were a Jew.’
²⁸

On September 1, 1943, German units entered the Vilna ghetto intent on what was believed to be a ‘labor’ expedition. Joseph Gens, the head of the
Judenrat
, had worked out an agreement: if German forces withdrew immediately, if they postponed their search for ‘laborers,’ he would supply the needed ‘labor’ to fulfill the quota. For the next two days ghetto and auxiliary police rounded up workers for ‘transport’ to Estonia. It was in effect a death sentence. The underground bitterly fought this collaborationist policy and lost. The underground organization FPO issued a manifesto:

‘German and Lithuanian hangmen have arrived at the gates of the ghetto. They have come to murder us! … Do not cower in the hideouts and
malines
. Your end will be to die like rats in the grips of the murderers. Jewish masses! Go out into the street! Whoever has no weapons, take up a hatchet; and whoever has no hatchet, take steel and cudgel and stick! For our fathers. For our murdered children! To revenge Ponar, hit the murderers!’
²⁹

It had been almost six months since the Warsaw uprising; a few hundred Jewish fighters held off the German Army for three weeks. The Vilna ghetto knew what the underground had accomplished in Warsaw; yet very few ghetto inhabitants, a few youngsters, joined in fighting off the German attack.

Shortly after this
Aktion
, the Vilna underground began to disperse and leave for the forests. Locating a partisan unit in the forest involved skill as well as luck: skill at surviving the early days of forest life; luck in evading anti-Semitic peasants and partisan units, and finding one’s way to a partisan group willing to accept Jews. With the exception of some Jewish partisan bands, non-Jewish par
tisan units, usually headed by Russians and escaped Russian prisoners of war, if they accepted Jews at all, required that the Jew have a weapon. No Jew would be accepted into a non-Jewish partisan band without a pistol or rifle. If a Jew were fortunate and lucky enough to find his way to a partisan unit, survival required acclimation to an extraordinarily difficult life: harassment by German units and anti-Semitic police and para-military units; the need to find and extort supplies from unwilling peasants; harsh winter conditions;
shortages of medicines and bandages, and the anti-Semitic diatribes and rages of non-Jewish partisan fighters.

Partisans had to be inventive; for example, a group of young men having a few weeks earlier escaped from a ghetto, built a bunker in the forest and faced the task of finding supplies for sur
vival. For days they begged for food but the peasants refused them.

‘Sitting by the bonfire one night, a new idea occurred to Musio and me. I cut off the tops of my boots and sewed them into a holster. It took me a whole day to do it. Shaping a piece of wood to look like a Soviet Nagan revolver, which had a wooden hand grip, I stuffed it into the holster. It looked like an authentic revolver when I attached it to my belt… . We would no longer beg for food. We would demand it!’
³⁰

His comrades made rifles out of sticks; the peasants, frightened by what they mistook for weapons, gave the group what they needed. Yet the deception was not easy: ‘The negotiations were full of tension. Confident on the surface, I quivered inside. I worked out a system of acquiring as much as I could without overstretching the limits and causing rage.’
³¹
But eventually the peasants figured out what they were doing.

Partisan groups constantly changed composition, particularly those commanded by Russians; separation generally followed the lines of whether the members had a weapon. Those with rifles sepa
rated themselves from the unarmed, the elderly and women. The composition of groups was fluid; as soon as one had been organized, it was dismantled. Jewish refugees often banded together and formed units of their own and then joined other units. Eventually, in 1944, the Soviets insisted that all Jewish partisan units merge with Soviet groups and accept Russian leadership. Hundreds of Jews, fleeing burning ghettos or escaping certain death at the hands of Germans, roamed the forests, trying to survive in bunkers, begging. Ben: ‘We found Jews hiding in the forests; our units took them in, gave them food. By the end of 1944, we had over two thousand Jews in our unit that we were protecting.’

Anti-Semitism was a force to be reckoned with: ‘So here we were, fighting against a common enemy – the Germans, whose aim it was
to totally annihilate the Jewish people and to take over the Soviet Union – side-by-side with fellow fighters whose own hatred of Jews was notorious.’
³²
In addition, partisans in the Polish national army (AK) would often attack Jews and Russian partisan groups with more fervor than their fight against the Germans. As resistance survivors told me over and over, ‘The Poles hate the Jews as much as the Germans do.’

If it were not the Germans, the local police, the anti-Semitic parti
sans or treacherous peasants who killed Jews, it was disease or wounds. ‘I had an abscess in my throat and a raging fever. Lying on my bunk, I was unable to move or eat… . I couldn’t swallow or talk, and even drinking milk was painful. I had difficulty breathing and felt the swelling in my throat was choking me.’
³³

Jews in Russian units felt isolated. Yitzhak Arad writes of his experience:

‘How could a Russian kolhoznik possibly understand the Jewish fate, the loneliness, misery, and ruin on all sides, the importance of saving every Jewish child in the face of the mass annihilation of our people? Both of us were partisans in the same unit, fighting a common enemy, but a deep abyss separated my war aims from his.’
³⁴

Even though he might die, he realized his death would be on his own terms and not the Germans’: ‘From this moment on my com
rades and I were not humiliated Jews under Nazi rule, sentenced to annihilation, but free fighters who had joined the millions fighting the Nazi beasts on all fronts. I touched the revolver hanging at my belt and the grenade in my pocket. I felt great confidence. The ghetto was behind us, the forest and the unknown before us.’
³⁵
In our interview, Arad constantly stressed how critical psychologically was the feeling that he could kill Germans.

Nahum Kohn, a resistance fighter in Byelorussia, describes what violence meant to the partisan:

‘I will tell you about a world that went crazy, a world where humans became beasts, turned worthless, and the forest became “home.” And I will also tell you about people who refused to surrender to bestiality, people who resisted the descent into
darkness. Most of them are gone, but I see them still, in their tattered rags, city boys darting from tree to tree in the forest, repaying death with death. I, too, was a city boy, and although I survived, I have never really left those forests.’
³⁶

What brought hope to these desperate fighters was the impulse to kill: ‘Only one thing mattered: force, might’;
³⁷
to kill Germans, to take revenge on collaborators.

‘We pledged that we would not sit on our hands in the forest; we would not steal food and hide; we would
take revenge
specifically against murderers and butchers. We would go after those people who had our brothers’ blood on their hands … [I] couldn’t control my boys; one jumped on him [collaborator] with a stick, and another beat him with a piece of iron.’
³⁸

Possession of weapons meant everything; and the possibility of being able to exercise violence was transformed into a central part of one’s humanity and survival. ‘A revolver was gold, diamonds,
everything
– without it you were regarded as a cockroach. With it you became a respected person.’
³⁹

After Soviet control had been consolidated, Kohn returned to his birthplace, his hometown, where he learnt that all his rela
tives and family had been killed. ‘I was like a lost sheep. The flock had gone in one direction and I had gone off in another direc
tion, and I was lost. I used to cry like a lost sheep that bleats in its panic and solitude, all alone.’
⁴⁰
If the self’s civility had been restored in the forest, it faced terrifying challenges in the after
math of the Holocaust. Discovering death, destruction, houses burned to the ground, parents, sisters, children, husbands and wives missing with no record of their death, survivors faced yet another set of challenges in addition to an anti-Semitism that plagued them even after the Germans had been defeated. In the words of Ben: ‘I returned home; but my family all had been killed. I had nothing. I saw a bunch of Poles coming towards me, muttering, “Jew, Jew, Jew.” I knew at that moment I couldn’t stay. I had two feet to run away from that town. I will never go back.’ Many resistance survivors found ways to emigrate illegally to Palestine.