Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (18 page)

Shapira struggles with his torment regarding the constancy of God’s presence: ‘There are times,’ he writes, when God might ‘smite us,’ thereby creating a ‘distance’ between ‘us’ and ‘Him.’ But even in approaching the threshold of doubt, Shapira turns away and affirms God’s truth. It is not for the individual to ‘say if something is a plague or calamity,’ he might say it ‘seems’ to be a calamity. ‘The truth’ is that whatever God intends, no matter how disastrous, ‘is a good for Israel; God will bestow good upon us.’
¹⁶

Even as the German assault pushes the ghetto further from religious consciousness, Shapira develops theological explanation:
‘when the Jew is so broken and crushed that he has nothing to say, then he does not feel … this is not silence [
harishah
] but rather muteness [
ilmut
] like the mute who has no power of speech.’
¹⁷
Muteness reflects spiritual weakening, a sign of psychological breakdown; but this radical withdrawal from engagement with the world is the personal responsibility of being an individual Jew. It is different from faith. He writes of ‘broken and crushed’ individuals, but Rabbi Shapira also believes God has the power to lift the community out of its muteness: God brings solace, refuge from the horror, even though refuge lies in faith, thoroughly expressed within the self. In September 1940, shortly after the murder of his family, he speaks of how the ‘inner strengthening of will’ turns ‘evil into good,’ in a Warsaw where evil appears to be the cause ‘of such great troubles.’
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Shapira uses words like ‘downcast, broken, bent to the ground full of sadness,’ but refuses to allow those moods to negate his faith, to take the observation ‘my whole life is gloomy and dark’
¹⁹
as a cause to turn away from God. Unlike Nadia S., Shapira never wavers in his profound faith in God’s presence.

To the very end Rabbi Shapira believes that only God ‘can rebuild what has been destroyed’; and bring ‘Redemption and Resurrec
tion.’
²⁰
His position has nothing in common with the partisans’ strong belief in the group’s political power to fight German vio
lence. To preserve faith, Shapira argues, one must transfer fear of the world to fear of God, to His divine power, the ‘revelation of His kingdom … His sovereignty.’ During such moments of faith, a kind of inspired introspection, the self ‘feels elevated and joyful.’ To be in awe of the majesty of God, to fear the power of God as the divine creator of the universe, as the holder of supreme justice, ‘is indeed pure … a supernal fear, which elevates the person.’
²¹
To live in fear of the world, however, is to lower oneself, to be without moorings, deaf to the word of this divine power. Shapira refers to the alien
ation of the self, to its being lost in the ‘scriptural sense,’ discon
nected from faith and God; but ‘God will search for us and find us. He will … rescue our bodies and our souls with great mercy and beneficent acts.’
²²

God, then, has the power to heal what Shapira describes as a mass schizoid universe – disconnection, numbness, absence of empathy – trampling down any traditional selfhood and annihilating the will to live. He talks about the prevailing ‘turmoil and confusion … . No
day, no night … the whole world lies upon us, pressing down and crushing, to the breaking point.’
²³
But despair is not finality; in being God’s ‘beloved,’ the suffering Jews possess within themselves, as a community, as Israel, a divine significance impervious to German power and destructiveness. ‘[S]ince God’s yearning for me is in a measure larger than my self, then I grow to become a greater human being; I now overshadow my essence.’
²⁴
By refracting my presence in God’s, I become more than I am; God creates me in His ‘divine hands’; therefore, my corporeality is holy and sanctified by ‘divine speech,’ the Word or Torah. My very soul, in the hands of God, cannot be touched by the corporeal or secular world.

Shapira recognizes the broken spirits, despair, but insists that the Jew’s responsibility lies in maintaining self-control while con
fronting
din
[judgment], the terrifying power of severity, and holding fast to faith. The more rigor the self exerts in overcoming this terror, the greater the likelihood of divine salvation. God may even receive one’s suffering as a gift, and the self that offers up to God pain and affliction demonstrates an act of devotion, love, a calling, even if the gift of suffering were not freely chosen. Further, the body’s wasting away can be understood as sacrificial suffering, a signifier of faith, ‘the diminishing of [our] body’s substance, energy and mental capacity’ is to be experienced as sacrificial ‘and a revela
tion of His light, holiness and salvation.’
²⁵
As can be imagined, resis
tance survivors had no sympathy for this position.

Sacrifice during the Holocaust takes on terrifying properties. Rabbi Shimon Efrati responds to a petitioner seeking absolution for inadvertently smothering an infant to avoid detection. (In underground shelters or other hideouts, infants’ cries often endangered the lives of those trying to escape roundups, including parents, friends, and relatives. Efforts to prevent them crying, for example, holding a hand tightly over an infant’s mouth, on occasion resulted in the death of the infant.) Rabbi Efrati responds: ‘The man who did this should not have a bad conscience, for he acted lawfully to save Jewish lives.’
²⁶
At the time, however, such situations placed an enormous burden on sanity, on maintaining any sense of oneself as a human being, still alive in a human world; smothering one’s child or the child of a friend or relative to save one’s own life would raise terrifying moral dilemmas, in addition to the unimaginable grief of the parent. Where does the self place the guilt and sorrow? How to
explain it? Such questions preoccupied Rabbi Shapira and Jewish law during this period and posed daily tests of faith. Situations where one might cause the death of another whether intentionally or not faced ghetto inhabitants every minute of every day: smuggling, participation in resistance, hiding from the Germans, stealing food, avoiding selections. Rabbi Shapira, in his elaboration of the conditions of faith, adapted theology to these murderous environments. Post-war absolution is one thing; but grief and guilt at the moment required a rabbinical response too.

After January 1942, the ghettos turned into vast collection centers for eventual transport to the death camps. In the Warsaw ghetto, by the winter of 1942, more than half a million had been herded into an area originally intended to house scarcely more than 20,000. It was no part of human experience or the human spirit to believe that an entire culture wishes to destroy you and your children solely on the basis of your biological existence. As early as spring and summer 1942, rumors were circulating about the death camps and extermi
nation centers; but psychological and physical dislocation brought on by transport, the strangeness of unfamiliar circumstances, differ
ences in culture and belief amongst the Jews themselves, made it impossible to sort out truth from rumor, much less organize a sus
tained resistance to terror.

The practices of domination in the ghetto (brought on by German policy) often turned Jew against Jew; the rich against the poor; the Jewish police against the indigent and unemployed; adults against children; smugglers against official administrators; the
Judenrate
against Zionists and communists; those with influence against those with no connections; crooks and thieves against families and indi
viduals trying to survive.

But where was one to turn? Leaving the ghetto, except in a work brigade or with rare, official permission, constituted a capital crime. Poles, more often than not, turned over Jews found outside the ghetto to the German authorities. Jews in work brigades found themselves subjected to indignities and exploitation; laborers, organized into brigades and taken outside the ghetto, were treated like vermin. Mortality rates soared in the labor groups; random
shooting, accidents and illness killed many in and around the work sites. One observer writes during the period of transports to Sobibor and Treblinka:

‘The streets contained pitiful sights in these ghastly days of July, August and September 1942. Just before the
Aktion
ended, five tiny children, two- and three-year-olds, had been sitting on a camp bed in the open for 24 hours; presumably their mothers had already been taken to the
Umschlagplatz
[deportation site]. The children cried piteously, screaming for food – doomed.’
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The immediacy and prevalence of death placed extraordinary demands on theology. Shapira addresses individual cases of sacrifice; but his theology never embraces the human status of infants and children. Nor can it be expected to. Infants do not experience the ‘powerful yearning to surrender life for the sake of the sanctity of His blessed name’; the five-year-old child screaming for his mother is incapable of raising ‘up all his sense[s] for the greater glory of God.’ Nor does the fifteen-year-old girl feel the ecstasy of the tran
scendence of the body, where ‘sensory awareness disappears [while] feeling and corporeality are stripped away so that [consciousness] feels nothing but pleasure.’ Nor does the eleven-year-old boy, yet to be
bar-mitzvah
, believe that, because of his suffering and the lice covering his head, and his body so weak he can hardly walk, faith will purge ‘his sins and purify him, so that he might’ attain a state of salvation.
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It would not be fair, however, to condemn theology for refusing to take into account the inability of the young to under
stand faith or to reach the level of transcendence that Shapira demands.

To have faith against the backdrop of the Holocaust meant that the self could resist the German assault, at least spiritually. Theological or secular faith, it did not matter; as long as belief could resist the German definition of Jewish identity, one could act. Faith also protected consciousness against the deadly muteness and numbness of dissociation. Intensely strong belief structures sustained identity and a sense of selfhood, if not survival; and political faith, at least in the early days, energized armed resistance. Theological faith strengthened the self against degradation, forged an internality capable of withstanding physical abuse, and situated
consciousness in a universe of meaning that was rapidly being destroyed by the Germans.

A young man ready to submit himself to the gas chambers to save his friend, a noted Torah scholar in his village, asks a rabbi, also in Auschwitz, for guidance
and
religious sanction. The rabbi wonders why he wants to do this and the boy responds that the world needs his friend’s learning and erudition. He saw himself as ignorant and foolish with no potential to be a great scholar. He had witnessed the death of his parents and sisters; now, alone in Auschwitz, he had no desire to live. By substituting himself for his friend, even though it is a suicide, he will be performing a good act, a
mitzvah,
worthy of God’s praise. Even though the boy pleaded, Rabbi Meisels refused to religiously sanction the substitution. He found nothing in his recol
lection of Talmudic law that would justify such a suicide.
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But repeatedly rabbis faced moral contradictions that stretched very thin the interpretation of Talmudic law. Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, relates:

‘And when the baby was born, the doctor handed it to the nurse, and the nurse laid it on one pillow and smothered it with another one. The baby whimpered for a while and then grew silent. This woman [the nurse] was nineteen years old. The doctor didn’t say a thing to her. Not a word. And this woman knew herself what she was supposed to do.’
³⁰

This happened while Germans were murdering elderly patients on the first floor of the hospital.

No matter what the cost in economic self-interest, the German policy was to kill all Jews. Daniel Goldhagen argues, ‘the only groups of currently employed workers whom the Germans killed
en masse,
necessitating the closing down of manufacturing installa
tions, were Jews.
Operation Erntefest
[Operation Harvest Festival], just one example of such a self-inflicted German economic wound, took the lives of 43,000 Jewish workers for whom they had no sub
stitutes.’
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The number of Jews in Poland working in German installations fell from 700,000 in 1940 to 500,000 in 1942. By June 1943, the number stood at around 100,000. Factories employing non-Jewish workers, slave and otherwise, never closed; non-Jewish workers, while exploited and abused, escaped systematic
annihilation. Goldhagen draws the conclusion that the Germans’ lack of economic rationality towards the Jews reinforced ‘the already considerable evidence that they viewed and treated the Jews as beings apart, as beings – whatever else was to be done with and to them – ultimately fit only to suffer and die.’
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Rabbinical authority responded to the German genocidal policy by shifting the ground and context of theological interpretation; what guided much in their thinking had to do with compassion in the face of assault and tragedy. Yet, the theology, particularly Rabbi Shapira’s belief that faith residing in mind and soul was untouchable, possessed a sense of unreality. For example, Shapira’s sermons argued that the soul constituted a space of freedom impervious to brutalization. The resistance, of course, took a very different position;
³³
and given the rapidly disintegrating conditions inside the ghetto, it is understandable why resistance fighters paid very little attention to arguments about the interiority of faith.

The following leaflet, circulated by a clandestine labor group in the Lodz ghetto, demonstrates how the principles of genocide dom
inated work and living places six months before the bureaucratic plan for the Final Solution emerged at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, how defining German biological hatred of the Jew was even in the early days of the occupation of Poland.

‘July 20, 1941 All of us remember the terrible epidemic of last summer – dysen
tery, typhus, other diseases from which thousands died. We had no way of saving them. Then during the last three months, 3,000 Jews died of hunger and cold. Now we are threatened by a new epidemic. This one could be even more terrible than the last one, for people are weakened. They don’t have the energy left to with
stand its ravages. Our yards and streets are filled with refuse and garbage; the toilets overflow with excrement, and most of them are broken.’
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Genocide had one purpose: to kill. Primo Levi writes:

‘Nothing obliged German industrialists to hire famished slaves… . No one forced the Topf Company (flourishing today in Wiesbaden) to build the enormous multiple crematoria in the
Lagers; that perhaps the SS did receive orders to kill the Jews, but enrollment in the SS was voluntary; that I myself found in Katowitz, after the liberation, innumerable packages of forms by which the heads of German families were authorized to draw clothes and shoes
for adults and for children
from the Auschwitz warehouses; did no one ask himself where so many children’s shoes were coming from?’
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In the Maidanek and Auschwitz memorials, there are entire rooms filled with children’s shoes.

But faith promised deliverance; holding out hope even for the body since deliverance might occur before death. Shapira: ‘Who knows how long this will go on? Who knows if we’ll be able to endure it… . The person is overwhelmed with terror, the body is weakened, one’s resolve flags. Therefore, the most basic task is to strengthen one’s faith, to banish probing questions and thoughts, trusting in God that He will be good to us, saving us and delivering us.’
³⁶
But what does this ‘choice,’ this surrender to faith, the injunc
tion against ‘probing questions’ of God, mean in the context of imminent peril, in the fetid workshops of Lodz, the tenement build
ings housing starving and sick workers? Lawrence Langer writes: ‘The Germans buried people twice, once before their death, and once after, and this is perhaps the most vicious of their many crimes. How is it possible to bury a man while he is still alive? How is it possible to make innocent Jews feel that they are murderers too? The Germans managed to find a way.’
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The teenager in the Lodz ghetto who wrote the following lived not in faith but in despair:

‘May 15, 1944 I have been saying lately that the inhuman state of mind we are in may be best proved by the sad fact that a Ghettoman, when deprived of half a loaf of bread, suffers more terribly than if his own parents had died. Was ever a human being reduced to such tragic callowness, to such a state of mere beastly craving for food? … it is only German artistry in sadism which enables this, which makes it possible… . We are exasperated, despairing, dejected and losing hope. Our hunger grows stronger continually; our suffering is unimaginable, indescribable; to describe what we pass
through is a task equal to that of drinking up the ocean or embracing the universe.’
³⁸

Disabling will through apathy, confusion, inaction – literal psycho
logical collapse – began, Langer argues, long before physical death. Undressing in a gas chamber signified a final step in a process that had debilitated the will and annihilated the spirit. Parents watched their children die; children witnessed the death of their parents. By the time the victim reached the gas chamber, the Germans had transformed death into an integral part of life.

But even in the midst of this living death, which Shapira wit
nessed, the meaning of the Jewish commandments appears to the self as revealed truth; it is not necessary, Shapira argued, that such commandments be experienced or ‘explained,’ since no meditation or rational cognition stands between truth and justice. Tragedy, the unexpected, the uncanny, the thousands of dead bodies in the streets of Warsaw are ‘without reason; but faith too is above reason, so that when we bind ourselves with a perfect faith to God [Who is] above reason, then even the
hukkah-
type calamities are transformed into sweetness.’
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While murder of Jews is incomprehensible, beyond reason, faith guiding the self through suffering and calamity brings consciousness closer to the divine. For Shapira, this provided consolation. More problematic, however, and unknowable, is how much consolation faith provided to the Jewish families waiting for deportation to Treblinka and Sobibor.

Shapira’s strenuous pleas that faith not be shaken; that it is the highest goal of consciousness, indicates that possibly just the opposite was happening in the ghetto. Diaries suggest religious belief declined not because of secular or theological debate; it was not an argument about God and Jewish identity between secularists and rabbis that provoked the decline in faith. The primary physical and psychological attack on religion came from oppression and starvation, causing an emotional collapse that left the self without affective content. Consciousness for many wandered in a numb no-man’s land, outside the orbit of faith and reason. To retain faith in an environment of horror required a super-human leap of faith; an extraordinary act of will. In the face of tragedy the leap drained much of the human will. Shimon Huberband recites the words of a 22-year-old Jewish woman: the devastation in Warsaw ‘was not,
regrettably, an empty dream, nor a mad fantasy, or an evil tale, but naked and bitter reality.’
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