Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (2 page)

I speak with resistance survivors, in their late seventies and early eighties, in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, listening to their extraordinary stories and the trajectories of their lives. When they bring back the past, the setting changes and the words take the ‘Then’ into the ‘Now.’ Their stories move through the reach of the past and the pull of the present without boundary; their narratives possess the sense of literally being there.

They show me snapshots, fading black-and-white images of treasur
ed memories, pictures of young men in uniform, groups of soldiers, men and women barely out of their teens, holding rifles; two friends smiling, their arms round each other’s shoulders; the lovely girlfriend looking with affection towards the camera, leaning against a tree; a set of train tracks blown to pieces, and the commentary behind the pic
tures. Ben: ‘You know that girl. Was she pretty; she liked me and we were very close. But after the fighting stopped, she disappeared; I think she went back to Russia. I never heard from her; I don’t even think she knew my real name.’ The memories speak of smuggling people out of and goods into the ghetto, enduring imprisonment in stinking jails; witnessing friends and family shot and beaten; and in turn being beaten and threatened; evading Germans; trying to deal with local populations; narrow escapes; finding homes destroyed and parents missing; killing Germans and collaborators. As these stories evolve, the age in their faces disappears and the voice of the fighter emerges, a smoldering rage, then dejection as the recollection of despair and loss consumes their consciousness. I see enormous pride and dignity and an uncompromising attitude towards the Germans and their Polish,

1

Ukrainian and Lithuanian sympathizers. These ex-partisans speak of having killed without guilt; what they most regret is not having killed more Germans. And always the remembrance of despair and outrage. ‘What do you mean a God? How can you believe in God after you’ve seen a German soldier split a baby in two with rifle fire?’

These stories often rattle my composure. I stop taking notes and sit there, stone cold and terrified, watching these partisan survivors going back in time, bringing into the present images of brutality, survival, atrocity and revenge. These ex-fighters and those who had been with them, tough, now old, relive their witnessing. Why be so intimate with me, a stranger? They want me to know the scene, the struggle, the impossibility of their circumstances. Not just the facts, but more – the despair. The deeper we move into the interview, the more it seems they want me to understand what it felt like to be there. There’s no apology for their rage. It needed to be affirmed, and they would not let go until I acknowledged its justice and the absolute conviction that what they did was right. It’s not that they asked this of me or put it quite this way; but I could see it in their eyes and the way their bodies moved through these narratives. My own reaction to their actions had nothing to do with politeness or emotional coercion. The facts were so brutal, how could anyone lis
tening to this past not be drawn to a conviction of the justness of their actions, of the righteousness of revenge? I felt reverence and inadequacy in their presence, but always refracting the silent ques
tion to myself: would I have been as courageous? These men and women brought to their eighties two lives: one truncated by an unimaginable violence; the other a series of struggles and blessings embodied in a discourse of sheer pride over the accomplishments of their lives in America.

How proud they were of being Jewish, not in any theological sense, but having saved an identity and, in some instances, having rescued other Jews from certain death. It was a pride in having passed on an identity without being crushed in the process. It is not the idea of being the ‘chosen people’; that has no meaning for them, in the sense of possessing a special place or mandate from God. It seemed to be more like having endured and survived an outrage and preserved a history, a set of remembrances for another generation, thereby assuring the survival of that identity and its sacred words, artifacts and texts into the future. That is what they as
survivors are so proud of – having acted as instruments of the Torah’s enduring strength through time.

Each attributed survival, in part, to luck; and indeed luck was very much an aspect of their story. But luck figures as only a piece of the story; there is also their rage, tears, comradeship with others. The durability of resistance communities too requires acknowledgement. For these resistors, as their stories remind us time and again, community never disappeared; even if it was fighting alongside Russians or sharing meals with anti-Semites, community saved them

–
community as witnessing, as a band enacting revenge, as a unit undertaking combat missions. No one, they insisted, could have sur
vived alone. Even in Auschwitz, the underground community of the resistance saved many, not each fighting for himself, which the sur
vivors maintain defined ‘ethics’ in the camps. But there was more to it, more than the focus on one’s own survival. In Auschwitz the underground community saved those it chose to save or believed it had to save. It ceased to matter to the Jews in the forests and the undergrounds whether they might be killed. None believed they would survive the war. Each they told me, over and over again, had moved beyond physical survival as an end in itself. What mattered more lay in retribution, killing and, for some, rescue, satisfaction in knowing they had sent the enemy to his grave or had frustrated his ability to fight, whether by sabotaging train tracks, arms depots or fuses manufactured at Auschwitz-Buna.

No guilt is expressed at having killed sympathizers; no guilt about taking whatever food they needed. These men and women became the surviving remnant for whom revenge meant saving identity and doing whatever it took to resist the oppressor’s efforts to take it away. Schlomo Berger lost his outward identity as a Jew for three years; in order to fight the Germans he joined a Polish resistance group and passed himself as a Catholic, learning the religious prac
tice and theology from a priest while imprisoned for six months by the Germans. ‘I couldn’t be a Jew; they would have killed me.’ But the German assault on spirit never penetrated to the inner core of a self that knew who he was, what he called his ‘steel fence’ of faith which protected his identity and will. It was a resolve still visible in his eyes, as if he were speaking directly in the present; it is there, in his living room now and in those Polish forests that are still very much in the forefront of his consciousness.

‘Then’ and ‘now’ lose boundaries; the resistance survivors are back there, and in these interviews they want me to see what they are seeing. ‘Then’ breaks into the presence of the space we occupy; the violence of their memories, the unsatisfied desire for revenge, the hatred of those who collaborated and killed Jews, give their words a heavy weight that belies the tranquility of where we sit. Now, they have their children; and they want their children to see, to under
stand. For years, they refused to return to those anguished places in their memories; now, their pride lies in their being thankful to watch their children grow, succeed, marry, establish families, to become grandparents and great-grandparents. This is a profound delight, and in their voices is taken as a sign of victory, as if they were triumphant, saying to the Germans across the divide of time: ‘You could take away so much; my childhood, my parents, my family; but here is
my
family, my world, and look at the wonder of it; look at how it has blossomed; that is certainly enough. You did not succeed, you did not win. We won, because look at what we have accomplished!’ These survivors from Hell gave their children a religious education; and while for so many years they remained silent about their experience, their silence never demonstrated a loss of spirit, but was rather a survival of spirit. In the
Bar
and
Bat Mitzvah,
the Hebrew lessons and schools, what was being celebrated for these survivors was not only the triumph of their children and the mastery of difficult texts and rituals, but a cultural identity in time that could not be crushed, a special pleading for words that go back centuries and form a living presence in the rituals of Jewish rites of passage and observance. Lighting candles in Los Angeles or New York or New Jersey affirmed the practice and meaning of that history and its survival in the children of those who fought for just these very moments.

The pride in their children’s accomplishments was a pride denied to their own parents; deprived of the pride of their own parents’ joy, these survivors replicate that pride in what they feel towards their own children’s accomplishments. It is a tribute to their lost parents, and the lost moments and times of children thrown into a universe where every imaginable security had been blasted into nothingness. Not to have a grave to mark where your parents lie; not to know how or when they died; not being able to say goodbye – none of us today knows that horror or that emptiness, the absence of being.

None of us can imagine what it is like to live with those memories, those uncertainties, and the abject feeling of not having been able to save your family. Nothing replaces that kind of severed and trun
cated experience of loss. Being there for their own children; having the pleasure of knowing they can witness what their parents never witnessed, to listen to the sheer joy of Ben as he describes to me his grandson’s rock concert in Spain – reflections like these, which we take so much for granted, become symbols of a spiritual tran
scendence and a
Kaddish
, or prayer for the dead, for the survivors’ own parents and lost families.

These survivor-fighters, who killed without remorse, arrived in New York or Los Angeles or Montreal with five dollars in their pocket, and, using the rage that sustained them during their res
istance, transformed that energy into building new lives for them
selves. As I sat in these well-ordered living rooms, houses of immaculate cleanliness, I saw not only persons who had attained every measure of worldly success, but also proud parents and despairing memories, both simultaneously expressed, but each filled with pride at having preserved their Jewish identity, and pride in knowing this identity had taken root in the next generation. I saw a respect for the country that gave them a new life, a memory for the loved ones not returning, and a rock-solid commitment to give their children a security denied their own youth. I heard then not age, but passions, traveling across time; even with the force of memory and the outrage as fresh as it was in 1945, these ex-partisans revealed an indestructible humanity and dignity.

Both the resistance fighters who did survive and the spiritual fighters who did not, such as Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Warsaw, acted in the world of faith, with great willfulness. There were many examples of partisans and spiritual leaders who refused to be destroyed by barbarism. Each fought in special venues to preserve a religious and cultural identity; each refused to accept the oppressor’s concept of how they should be and act. Each claimed sovereignty over a psychological space they fought ferociously to protect. What is clear is that they refused the German objective of breaking down and annihilating the spirit. It is then not enough to admire the violent resistors or to acknowledge resistance only from those who fought in the forests and the underground. In the company of men and women like Miles Lerman, Sonia Bielski,
Vernon Rasheen, Sonya Oshmam, Frank Blaichman, Schlomo Berger and Ben Kamm stand spiritual leaders like Rabbi Shapira and Rabbi Oshry of Vilna, who fought for the very core of the Jewish faith: the words of the Torah and the presence of God. Even in the face of his tremendous loss, the death of his family outside a Warsaw hospital, Rabbi Shapira’s sermons bear living testimony to the endurance of faith, to the capacity of the spirit to withstand oppression. It is faith that emerges victorious in these stories of violent and spiritual resistance, men and women refusing to relinquish faith in surviving horror.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the faith of men like Rabbi Shapira, to see it as a futile gesture at retaining a theological posi
tion, to relegate that voice to the silence of time. Rabbi Shapira’s voice resonates through time. It was resilient and strong in Warsaw, and even though he never counseled violent resistance, he refused to bow before the German authorities. While not using the language of political power, Rabbi Shapira refused to be silenced, and his story in its own way is as compelling as those of the partisan and underground fighters. In his refusal to stop writing, to stop arguing with God, his refusal to stop delivering sermons, Rabbi Shapira, like the violent resistors, affirmed a community’s place in time and history, while simultaneously denying German power over his mind and ethics. He writes in a book of instruction for his Yeshiva students: ‘As long as my soul remains within me, I will not part with it.’
¹
He could not be broken, and the unshakeable presence of his faith provided an example of endurance until his death in November 1943. Even though the Jewish community faced annihi
lation, these resistors survived the attack on spirit and never relin
quished an emotional and psychological attachment to an identity sustained by ancient texts and nurtured by cultural practices. That alone, the survival of faith embedded in words and practice, and the sustaining of a tradition in time, demonstrated the power of violent
and
spiritual resistance, and the courage of the men and women who fought with body, spirit and will.