Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (17 page)

Genocide requires of the executioner psychological factors that destroy empathy, allowing the killers to proceed with no moral
qualms. Dissociation radically distorts perception and may have a tremendous impact on how a person or object is
experienced
. The dissociative response acts as a barrier or shield to the sensibility, presence and suffering of the Other. I recall a patient, Julia [a pseu
donym], during my research at the Shepard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, who told me she once tried to win her mother’s attention by carving into her thigh, with a sharp kitchen knife, the words ‘I love you, Mom.’ Dripping with blood, she walked into her mother’s dressing room where her mother was sitting in front of a large mirror applying make-up. In the mirror’s reflection she could clearly saw her daughter; but did not acknowledge her daughter’s bleeding leg. Julia’s mother literally had dis
sociated her daughter’s suffering from her own perceptual range; she experienced Julia as interrupting her make-up ritual, interfering with her application of mascara. It is only after she noticed blood on the rug that she finally
saw
her daughter’s wound. But by then too much psychological damage had been done; weeping, Julia had run out of the room.

What does it take for anyone
not
to see or feel the suffering or presence of others? That becomes a particularly compelling question in the context of suffering and brutalization in the ghettos. Ben sug
gested that the Germans and God might have had something in common: neither could really feel, much less empathize with, the suffering of the Jews. Many Germans saw the suffering; many knew what was going on, if not those who had business in the ghettos, then employers who used slave labor or German workers employed in the same factories, or German housewives buying Jewish cloth
ing, goods and artifacts at auctions held throughout the country, or in any of the hundreds of slave labor camps inside Germany which required periodic logistical contact with local populations. The evi
dence was everywhere: emaciated bodies, tattered uniforms, vacant eyes, constantly appeared in ordinary life in Germany. During the death marches thousands of starved and dying bodies dragged themselves through German towns, only to be met with jeers, derision, brutality and sadistic jests. Why? What forges barriers to acknowledging and experiencing the Other’s psychological suffering?

The German executioners had transformed the Jewish body into a feared and hated object.
Not
to see the suffering imposed by
starvation,
not
to see pain in children’s faces as they were torn from their mothers,
not
to see anything wrong in organizing kinder
gartens in ghettos for the purpose of concentrating Jewish children for seizure and transport to death camps,
not
to feel remorse for exe
cuting entire families in open pits – all this suggests a moral environment legitimating and encouraging the disposal of what is perceived as diseased flesh. Not to see a five-year-old child pleading for his life, but to see an enemy to one’s biological existence accounts for the moral ease that accompanied the killing process in and around the ghettos. With those psychological processes conditioning perception in the oppressor, Rabbi Shapira’s faith operated in an emotional vacuum; it defined only an internal psychological space in the victim and it allowed the self literally to curl up within itself and turn away from reality. One can admire his conversations with God. But resistance survivors expressed little, if any, compassion for his theological stance.

Dissociation of the Other facilitates radical transformations in how environments are perceived. Christopher Browning, Daniel Goldhagen, Gotz Aly and Benno Muller Hill
²⁷
have all documented the ease with which individuals moved in and out of killing envi
ronments without moral qualms or guilt. On rare occasions when individual Germans assigned to killing squads protested the slaugh
ter or found it intolerable to participate, reassignment to another job or unit quickly followed. No German was executed because he or she refused to murder Jews.

To see the Other not as a victim, not as a sufferer, but as threat to the boundaries of self and culture placed the executioner in a unique relationship with the victim. Rabbi Shapira’s theology possessed no moral category to account for this. The Germans’ psychological and biological fear of the Jews had no role in the dialogue with God, because God and Rabbi Shapira’s interpretation of God could not comprehend how the German vision of biological health defined ‘victimhood’ as toxic waste, infected Jewish bodies to be burned. As Simon put it: ‘If God could have known how frightened the Germans were of Jewish bodies, would He have hidden His tears?’ For the Germans, what was being killed were not people, but fears and hatreds displaced onto innocent bodies. In killing Jews, the Germans were maintaining not only the highest standard of what they regarded as effective and willing citizenship, but also the
‘noble’ purposes of a moral order assuring, forever, blood purity and racial integrity. It was in the name of these biological ideals and the fear of being tainted by diseased flesh that a moral environment was legitimated which had as its singular purpose the annihilation of Jewish bodies.

Yet, even though Rabbi Shapira’s dialogue took place in a moral vacuum, without political content, it needs to be stressed that his homilies contained affirmations desperately attempting to maintain contact with a shattered historical and cultural reality. His reaction, then, to the oppressor’s dissociative actions took on essentially two forms: an assertion of the sovereignty of God’s Word and pleas not to forsake God; and an argument for an emotional or irrational fusion with faith, an unquestioning acceptance of God’s presence. But whether it was faith in God, faith in Jewish identity and culture, or faith in the power of witnessing and remembrance, it would be wrong to discount this form of psychological positioning towards the oppressor. We can never know how many retained spiritual protest in their consciousness; but it may have been significant. No indication appears in the
d’rashot
[the theological teachings] of whether Rabbi Shapira sanctioned or condemned armed resistance. But his silence on the resistance in Warsaw indicates at least a passive acceptance of its utility. What we do know is that Rabbi Shapira’s own resistance took place entirely within a theological belief system, an absolute trust in God, and an unquestioning accep
tance of God’s will. Rabbi Shapira urged his congregants to respond to the sufferings of the community, not to close off their hearts, to remain in contact with God and with communal efforts to alleviate the suffering.
Emunah,
or faith, indicates the presence of an active Jewish self, communicating, always aware of the boundaries of its identity; the self stays alive only if it affirms devotion to God. Even in spite of its political powerlessness, this faith may have made some difference to those who suffered.

In his treatise on resurrection, Moses Maimonides writes: ‘the resur
rection of the dead is one of the cornerstones of the Torah … there is no portion for him that denies that it is part of the Torah of Moses our Teacher.’
¹
Having established the theological legitimacy of resurrection, Maimonides goes on to argue that while resurrec
tion is critical as a theological component of Judaism, it is not the ‘ultimate goal’ of religious faith. For the believer there is no higher hope than the world to come; nothing in faith achieves the ‘bliss beyond which there is none more blissful’ than in the world to come. ‘Corporeal existence’ disappears since God is ‘not corporeal nor a power within a body and, therefore, the level of His existence is the firmest of all.’
²

Belief in a higher world of non-corporeal bodies became a central tenet of faith during the Holocaust – a faith that acted as a protest against the German vision of wiping out ‘life unworthy of life’ from all existence. What faith, as protest, meant in this context lay in the vision of moving not only to another level or place of ‘existence,’ but the possibility of redemption beyond the suffering of this world. Rabbis taught through this period that death could be understood not as nothingness, but as a moment of the supreme testing of faith. These beliefs were being articulated by rabbis in the ghettos of the East, to make sense of the utter confusion inflicted by the German assault.

For Maimonides, Moses’ injunction was absolute: ‘
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.
’
³
Rabbi Shapira took this literally:

121

obedience and faith to the God of Israel could not be questioned; to doubt faith meant giving a victory to the Germans. While abuse could be relentless, faith constituted an untouchable place within the self. God defined all destiny: the body might suffer brutality, but faith would endure. An ancient Biblical prediction that the Messiah would come in the year 5700 (1940) kept many Jews within the orbit of faith through 1940–41. Signs and their interpretation of the impending coming of the Messiah turned into heated arguments. One Hasidic rabbi preached: ‘When we begin to blow the
shofar
[ram’s horn], the enemy will be blown away.’
⁴
A number of signs were found in religious texts, in phrases or placement of letters, pag
ination. People searched desperately for any textual or experiential event out of the ordinary for clues as to where and when the Messiah would come.

Early in the occupation of Poland, a few rabbis responded vio
lently to Jewish collaboration in the German occupation; a rabbi ordered an informer’s tongue to be cut out. In the Lublin area Jews believed to be informers were drowned in
mikvah
baths.
⁵
Ritual practice would take on the form of resistance; for example, walking to the
mikvah
bath or the ritual slaughterhouses would be a cause for arrest, torture and execution.
⁶
Warnings had been posted throughout the ghetto: ‘Opening the
mikveh
or employing it will be punished as sabotage and will be subject to between ten years in prison and death.’
⁷
Religious practice, then, could be understood as resistance; whether one fired a gun or immersed the body in a sacred bath, the consequences could be the same.

Children participated in ritual resistance by smuggling kosher-slaughtered meat into the ghettos; they found breaches in ghetto walls, sneaked through entry points or arranged with confederates to receive merchandise. On occasion, children as young as five or six would hide contraband on their bodies, taking great risks at the ghetto gates. Ritual slaughterers themselves incurred risk, since all kosher practices had been banned by the Germans. To be caught in these acts meant certain death. Kosher meat early in the occupation found its way into the ghetto through a variety of conveyances – in trucks belonging to the utilities companies, medical resources, services, and municipal sanitation vehicles. Any driver, Pole or Jew, caught with kosher meat was immediately arrested.
⁸

Rabbi Shapira’s call to faith occurs in a universe filled with death and random executions. An underground Warsaw newspaper has an article entitled, ‘A Dance amidst Corpses’; the author writes:

‘The situation in the Jewish ghetto is fatal. On every street corner lies the corpse of a Jew who has died of hunger and cold. Nearly 7,000 funerals take place each month. And at the very same time, the Jewish cabarets and nightclubs conduct dancing contests with enormous prizes. In these nightclubs, tens of thousands of zlotys are wasted each night. This is truly a dance in the midst of corpses.’
⁹

By the spring of 1942, class distinctions no longer existed in the ghetto; all Jewish life had been reduced to poverty, starvation and death. The rich, at least initially, turned a blind eye to suffering; but the evidence suggests that money made a difference for a few months at most. More common, however, than accounts of the indifference of rich Jews are witness recollections of protests taking the form of protection of sacred texts. In a small village called Sierpe, the Germans ordered the Jewish population to watch the burning down of a synagogue. Shortly after the
shul
was set ablaze, a young man dashed into the burning building; then reappeared with the Torah scrolls in his arms. The Germans shot him and his body, still clutching the scrolls, was engulfed by flames. It was problematic if one could retain sanity and psychic balance amidst such horror. Consider the matter of funerals, a practice or rite we take for granted. Not for the ghettoized Jews; one could not even be sure a body would be delivered to the cemetery:

‘Today is already my second day of waiting here at the cemetery. I wait and wait, and my daughter hasn’t even been brought to the cemetery yet. I don’t know where to look for her. They told me in the office that a wagon of corpses should be arriving soon from Warsaw. Maybe my child will finally be on that transport. I don’t know what has become of my dear child. Such a precious child – so clever – so beautiful – so many wonderful traits. My poor baby fell ill because of the contaminated water we drank. She was sick for a few months and then – woe is me – she was gone.’
¹⁰

Rabbis faced unprecedented moral and ethical dilemmas unique in the life of a culture whose very existence was being eradicated. The head of a distinguished family in Kovno asked a rabbi if it would be religiously permissible for him to commit suicide. Rabbi Oshry writes:

‘Is it permissible to hasten his end, to set his own hand against himself, even though it not be lawful? This, so that his own eyes do not see the destruction of his family. And so that he himself does not die a violent death after unspeakable tortures by the “cursed murderers, may their name be blotted out”; and so that he might have the merit of being given a proper Jewish burial in the Jewish cemetery of the Kovno ghetto.’
¹¹

While suicide is prohibited, and in the
Midrash
is considered a ‘grave sin,’ when suicide is committed for the ‘sanctification of the Lord,’ it is not an act to be morally condemned. Suicides, which occurred on a daily basis in many ghettos, Rabbi Oshry concludes, under the kind of duress imposed on the Jews by the Germans, cannot be con
sidered to preclude customary mourning practices by relatives.
¹²

A Hasidic Jew in a small Polish ghetto describes German atrocities:

‘What can they do to me? They can take my body – but not my soul! Over my soul they have no dominion! Their dominion is only in this world. Here they are the mighty ones. All right. But in the world to come their strength is no more.’
¹³

Again, for many Jews this protection of the inner space of faith, an unwillingness to let it be broken, became the only form of resistance.

Starvation, exposure, beating; rounding up for transport to unfamiliar ghettos; dislocation provoked by transport itself; the disappearance of friends and relatives, confiscation of property and money; relocation of families from villages and towns to ghettos established specifically for the purpose of concentrating Jewish populations – all were German strategies for debilitating the will and resistance. In
Krakow, for example, Jews who had lived in Kazimierz for centuries were moved to Podgoreze, a run-down district on the outskirts of the city. Several families had to share one room; 20,000 people occupied a walled-in area of around 320 buildings, whose length could be walked, at a normal pace, in seven to ten minutes. The dislocation following uprooting made control easier for the Germans; in segregating the Jewish population, German administrators enforced dependency on the victimizer, severed the connection of the self to day-to-day productivity and habit and weakened the self’s ability to navigate unfamiliar environments. Adaptation to debilitating, unfamiliar physical conditions, to the habits of strangers, to extensive food shortages, to poor sanitation, burdened individuals with the sheer minute-to-minute demands of survival. Yet many believed that if they could sustain and demonstrate their faith, God might intervene. The other side of it was put to me by Aaron (Bielski) Bell: ‘Sure, you could have faith; but by the time God came, you’d be dead. And what’s the use of faith if you’re dead.’

In the Krakow city archives, German health documents describe health practices during this period. These extraordinary letters, memos and lists demonstrate how insistent the Germans were in strictly segre
gating the Jewish and Aryan populations because of the fear of infec
tion, particularly the belief that Jews, because of their biology and blood type, were innate carriers of typhus. But Jews had little under
standing of how powerful this phobia was in determining German intent and practices regarding ‘infected’ bodies. In a memo prepared by the German ‘Disinfection’ Chief, Dr. Kroll, a justification for the establishment of the Krakow ghetto was the belief that it would prevent the spread of disease between Jewish and Polish populations; streetcars or trams passing through the ghetto strictly enforced the policy of no contact between Pole and Jew. In Warsaw, trams travers
ing the ghetto had their windows boarded up.

Onerous demands were placed on Jewish doctors, dentists and professionals during the early days of the Polish occupation. Jews paid higher taxes and license fees than Poles, while the practices of Jewish professionals were progressively restricted. Jewish doctors could not participate in the Polish health insurance system. Detailed racial inventories were kept of health practitioners, especially doctors and dentists. Jews filled out complex forms describing racial history, paid additional taxes on everything from supplies to
income to living and workplaces. Jewish doctors were not allowed to treat non-Jewish patients; they could be put to death for touching non-Jews – and all this as early as winter 1940. Thousands of petitions written by Jewish professionals protesting the financial burdens and practice restrictions were registered and denied. Polish physicians, however, were allowed to practice, as long as they treated only Polish patients. The Germans believed the Poles would be the workers, the muscles of the coming Reich millennium; Polish workers needed food and required medical supplies and treatment. Many Polish intellectuals, however, especially those in universities in Krakow and Warsaw, perished in Auschwitz.

The Krakow health administration archives present a striking picture of how obsessed German public health officials were with Jewish diseases and bodies and the extent of bureaucratic participa
tion in maintaining strict segregation and inequality. For example, prescriptions filled by Jewish pharmacists had to be stamped with the Star of David. Rerouted trolley lines avoided contact with Jewish ghettos. In a memo to the head of the Polish Chamber of Physi
cians, the chief German Sanitation Inspector, Dr. Kroll, argued one of the benefits of establishing the Krakow ghetto in Podgoreze lay in improving traffic patterns and isolating disease. All aspects of public health administration – which meant isolating, containing and killing Jews – fell under the auspices of German administrators. Doctors brought in from the Ukraine supervised Polish physicians in hospitals, since the Germans believed Polish doctors might treat wounded resistance fighters. German doctors from the Reich tended Germans in occupied Poland.

Nadia S., in a phone interview, recalls this period: ‘You can’t imagine how bad it was; Germans, Poles, they spat on us; we had a nice apartment in Krakow but we were moved into one room with three other families. Germans would shoot us, often like a game. It was hard to think of God in that ghetto. Sure, I had faith as a Jew, but prayer? There was too much suffering even to think about praying.’

The effects of the race laws could be seen where food was distributed (spoiled rations, insufficient supplies, outrageous prices); workshops (terrible working conditions); soup kitchens (woefully inadequate nourishment); orphanages (thousands of homeless, abandoned children); shelter (terrible sanitation, little or no bedding, almost no fuel to protect against the harsh winters); medical treatment deficiencies;
understaffed and filthy hospitals; four or more families living in one room; holes in the ground serving as toilets. At every social, cultural, economic, political and moral site, Jews not only experienced brutality in food distribution, medical services and wages, administrative functions and priorities, and the elemental decency that makes life possible, but constantly faced the annihilatory logic and terror of genocide. In the German-sponsored Warsaw daily newspaper, reports periodically appeared noting ‘de-Jewed’ industries, which meant that the Jewish proprietors had been murdered outright, transported to a ghetto or shipped to a death camp. Rabbis advocating ‘faith’ lived in the midst of these atrocities and the ideology, authorized by German science, that Jews possessed innate biological and genetic dangers to Germans. Theology simply had no way of comprehending how absolute this vision was and how determined scientific authority was in eradicating this biological/blood threat.

Janusz Korczak captures something of the confusion brought on by radical dislocation and the Germans’ utter disregard for the fate of Jewish bodies. ‘What matters is that all this did happen … the destitute beggars suspended between prison and hospital. The slave work … debased faith, family, motherhood.’
¹⁴
Korczak, an old man by this time, walked to the
Umschlagplatz
[collection point for trans
port to Sobibor and Treblinka] with the two hundred children in his Orphanage, even though the Germans offered to spare his life. Leading that slow walk to the place of deportation, children cling
ing to him, calmed by his attention and care, Korczak embodied a spiritual presence not even the Germans could destroy. Korczak’s action said: ‘You will not destroy my dignity, my humanity.’ Korczak was immensely popular not only with assimilated, urban Jews but with the Polish population; he had been the equivalent of Dr. Benjamin Spock before the war; his radio program on pediatric care reached the entire Polish population. By rejecting the offer to spare his life, Korczak escaped a central element of German policy towards the Jewish population: debasing the spirit and destroying the will even before killing the body.

The ghetto site embodied the extreme horror of the attack on Poland’s Jews. For example, Korczak on Warsaw:

‘The look of this district is changing from day to day. 1. A prison.

2. A plague-stricken area. 3. A mating ground. 4. A lunatic
asylum. 5. A casino, Monaco. The stake – your head … . A young boy, still alive or perhaps dead already, is lying across the sidewalk. Right there three boys are playing horses and drivers; their reins have gotten entangled. They try every which way to disentangle them, they grow impatient, stumble over the boy lying on the ground. Finally one of them says, “Let’s move on, he gets in the way.” They move a few steps away and continue to struggle with the reins.’
¹⁵

Rabbi Shapira was writing in this insane Warsaw universe from 1939 to 1942; he called his sermons
Hiddushei Torah auf Sedros
[New Torah Insights]. The last entry is dated July 18, 1942, less than a week before mass deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka. Shapira never questions his faith, even in the midst of intense personal suf
fering; and his theological writings are filled with references from the Talmud and
Midrash
. He refuses to utter the word German or Nazi; nor does he address the politics of his times or the desperate plight of refugees streaming into Warsaw or the collaborationist policies of the
Judenrat
. Even facing his own suffering after the loss of his family, Rabbi Shapira stays within the boundaries of the theo
logical text. He sermonizes on spiritual malaise, and the
Esh Kodesh
[Holy Fire] involves an ongoing spiritual dialogue between God and himself. Shapira responds to the weakening of religious observance, the turning away from faith and the lack of enthusiasm for religious explanation, with the only ‘weapon’ he knows: the power of theo
logical text.