Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (20 page)

For Langer, the victims embody a ‘monument to ruin,’ a striking contrast to Holocaust theology attempting to find meaning or redemp
tion in the destruction. For these survivors, there can indeed be no God after Auschwitz. Langer looks at survivors not as a testimonial to God or a harbinger of the state of Israel, but as victims broken beyond imagination by the German project of mass slaughter. He also, unjustly I believe, criticizes the term ‘spiritual resistance,’ a concept he finds absent in the survivor testimonies. But for many survivors, par
ticularly resistance survivors, survival itself testifies to a spiritual endurance protecting the self from madness and absence of will.

All survivors I interviewed emphasized the connection between their identity as a Jew and the rescue of the self from madness. It is in this context that I find the concept of spiritual resistance to be most persuasive, although I should add that my approach to what spiritual resistance means has been influenced by the partisans’ narratives. Langer, however, maintains that survivors ‘demur virtually unanimously [about spiritual resistance] when it is raised by an interviewer.’
²⁰
He argues that the concept of spiritual resistance does not ‘require any control over one’s
physical
destiny.’
²¹
Yet, in my interviews survivors repeatedly expressed how connected their spiritual wellbeing – by which I understood them to mean maintaining their sanity – was with the violence of their partisan units, although that sense of spirit had nothing to do, they insisted, with faith in God or in the belief that God had directed their actions. Langer interprets spiritual resistance far too narrowly. To postulate resis
tance on the level of spirit may be seen in the sheer act of survival itself, spirit maintaining focus amidst the very real possibility of madness and
will
not being crushed by the physical harshness of the surroundings. It required will, discipline and spirit to survive, yes, but it also required luck. However, the stories themselves testify that luck and food were not the only factors. Langer underestimates the power of even remembering in the midst of such suffering the
Bar Mitzvah
of one’s child, standing under the
huppah
with one’s bride; Sabbath meals, the fantasy of revenge. Surely in this sense, spirit never succumbed completely. Langer: ‘perhaps that explains why we retreat to spiritual resistance – to reestablish a veneer of
respectability for situations in which harsh necessity deprives the individual of the familiar dignity of moral control.’
²²

But ‘harsh necessity’ and ‘moral control’ may have nothing to do with spiritual resistance: both phenomena defined the conditions of the camps, although resistance fighters certainly possessed more ‘moral control’ than camp inmates. The capacity of the self to retain its memory, its sense of identity, its power to distinguish between good and evil; its wish for the practice of ritual, even if it is reciting a silent prayer – are these not evidence of spiritual resistance and not a ‘veneer of respectability’?

Langer quotes Emmanuel Ringelblum, who refers to the ‘complete spiritual breakdown and disintegration caused by unheard of terror … the enemy does to us whatever he pleases.’
²³
Yet, Langer refuses to accept Ringelblum’s assessment of such Jewish action as ‘quiet passive heroism’
²⁴
and sees nothing heroic about passivity. In his view oral testimonies conclusively demonstrate how desperate individuals, brutalized by Nazi terror, lost all perspective on the maintenance of moral boundaries and spiritual dignity. He quotes Sol R., recalling a friend killed during an air raid over a concentration camp. His friend ‘was always loaded with bread, and here he was lying dead, and I grabbed his bread and I gorged myself … I’ve been choking on that bread ever since.’
²⁵
Yet, does this mean that Sol R. had suffered spiritual collapse? Or are the destruction of moral limits and the annihilation of spirit two discrete phenomena? Langer refuses the possibility that psychological survival, the endurance of the soul’s connection to its Jewish identity, even in the face of the breakdown of ‘moral limits,’ signifies acts of spiritual resistance. Are not Rabbi Shapira’s faith and courage, the commitment of hundreds of rabbis and their congregations to protect sacred Torah scrolls, significant as acts of spiritual resistance? Langer is not making moral judgments about behavior. Quite the contrary: he wants to elicit from the testimony a view of surviving without the moral perspective of retrospective embellishment. In Eva K.’s words: ‘My fate pushed me, you know. I [could] not help myself.’
²⁶
Or Chaim E.: ‘On the other side, you didn’t have any choices. You just were driven to do whatever you did… . You do whatever you have to do, from
other
people.’
²⁷
Yet Langer fails to appreciate the psychological moments of spiritual resistance or even to consider that uttering
Kiddush haShem
might suggest transcen
dence over the facts of barbarism, even though prayer had no efficacy in preventing murder.

For Chaim E., the Germans drained agency and morality from action: ‘[W]e were not individuals, we were not human beings, we were just robots where we happened to eat and we happened to do things. And they kept us as long as we have any function … . Now if the function was not good, we don’t need you, [we] destroy you.’
²⁸
In a universe where ‘today was already better than tomorrow,’
²⁹
moral rules, pre-Holocaust traditions, suffered drastic revision. Chaim E. had been interned in Sobibor and participated in the escape attempt in which 75 prisoners succeeded and survived the war. Many hundreds more, however, were killed during the attempt and in the aftermath. Chaim E.’s motives, Langer points out, were practical not spiritual, and certainly not spiritual in Rabbi Shapira’s sense. For Chaim E., ‘only the survival for your skin, that’s what counted.’
³⁰
But why discount the possibility that at the moment of liberation and even during the period of planning, there may have been a sense amongst the escapees that even though death might be imminent, their action constituted an example; that Jews locked in death camps need not die without action and resistance. What their action meant, what it signified as an act of resistance and affirmation, must have been a consideration – not only in the midst of those planning the Sobibor escape, but with small bands of fighters in large and small ghettos. Is this not ‘spirit’? Did not these groups think collectively and at times with a common spirit which moved them away from despair and apathy?

In Langer’s analysis of testimony, it was not spiritual resistance that kept survivors alive but chance, luck, moral transgression and a supreme grasp of the practicality of life. But the very act of survival meant that spirit itself had survived; that it had resisted the German efforts to crush it. Langer’s judgment, then, might be too harsh. Although Rabbi Shapira’s homilies might not be appropriate to understanding the state of mind of those who survived, they possess significance in suggesting that a vision of the world was present that provided comfort and meaning to thousands for whom death was an absolute certainty. Langer discredits such a vision as lacking any effect; but his judgment may in this instance be too quick, too abrupt. Spiritual resistance was ineffective against the bullet, gas chamber, death pit. But it did provide a space for spiritual identity, something the Germans could not touch.

Rabbi Shapira’s theology and, it would be fair to say, the un
recorded utterances of rabbis who perished, moved on two levels: to give hope to those not yet killed and to provide spiritual help for those waiting for transport or dying in ghetto streets – consolation in the midst of the horror. Those who died possess no voice; but if Rabbi Shapira’s teachings and his presence in the lives of those thousands who knew him, or knew of him, provided an affirmation, a justification of faith, then the very reality of disintegration and moral collapse that survivors describe may have had an opposing presence; maybe – and who can ever know – at least a few of those who suffered a miserable death in the gas chambers, mass burial pits or isolated forests, received the bullet, gas or fire with the knowledge that the enemy could not take away from them their belief in God, that while God had failed to protect them from death, they knew that redemption lay on the other side.

If theology gave one person a meaning, an explanation, the hope of vengeance and redemption, then while the body may have gone to its death abjectly, the spirit may have remained untouched. In this sense, one can, unlike Langer, speak of and admire spiritual resis
tance; it is not a vapid phrase, an idealization of memory, a retreat to the fantasy of heroic action. It is action understood through the utterance of words; it is a form of resistance that appears over time in the Talmud. Prayer affirms the belief that while Amalek, the incarna
tion of evil, may take away the body, he cannot take away the soul. Few witnesses record what this belief meant at the time of death; but what is clear is that the theological vision did not fail. True, it never formed the basis for any mass political resistance, and given survivor and diary accounts of psychological and spiritual collapse, any impact the theology might have had in saving lives was minimal. But it would be wrong to impugn the concept of spiritual resistance only on the basis of survivor accounts; while the breakdown between inner and outer may explain the mass apathy and silence, the few accounts we do have of
Kiddush haShem –
sanctification of the name of God – at the moment of annihilation would suggest a faith not dead or dysfunctional, but a set of beliefs held by many and undoubtedly taken to their deaths by many. That, I would argue, constitutes spiritual resistance – the only kind of resistance available to millions of religious and devout Jews for whom partisan warfare possessed no realistic possibility.

Political alternatives existed, but one had to be able to understand and conceptualize their possibility, to think politically, to organize escape and resistance. The spiritual universe of East European Jews was incapable of making that kind of leap. Orthodox theological strategy in dealing with oppressors historically had involved accom
modation, bribery, waiting it out, aligning with political factions sympathetic to the Jews. In Poland, where over half the Jewish pop
ulation
practiced
Hasidic Judaism, theological explanations possessed meaning, context
and
authority – acting as a refuge or a psychologi
cal ‘safe’ zone in the emotionally and physically battered self. Thus, a rabbi tells his congregation: ‘We will march straight to that place where rest the righteous for whose sake God has permitted the world to endure.’
³¹
Or, ‘the sanctity of the
Shoah
martyrs pierced the heavens, and the Almighty redirected the course of Jewish history. The process of Redemption began to unfold.’
³²
This is spiritual resis
tance. Emmanuel Ringelblum in a diary entry dated February 27, 1941, notes that the rabbis of Krakow had been sent to Auschwitz because they had attempted to intervene with the Germans to stop a mass deportation. Should not this be considered resistance of both the body and the spirit? For the vast majority of East European Jews, secular political ideologies had been shunned.

The following declaration typifies the power of faith as a position in this world.

‘Listen to me, brothers and sisters … . We are the children of the people of God. We must not rebel against the ways of the Lord. These, our sufferings are meant to precede the coming of the Messiah. If it was decreed that we should be the victims of the Messianic throes, that we should go up in flames to herald the redemption, then we should consider ourselves fortunate to have this privilege. Our ashes will serve to cleanse the people of Israel who will remain, and our death will hasten the day when the Messiah will appear. Therefore, brothers and sisters, let not your spirit falter. As you walk into the gas chambers, do not weep but rejoice.’
³³

It would not be unreasonable to assume that such imagery might have had a positive effect in the general human environment of sunken, dull eyes, the disintegration of communication, withdrawal
into the self, apathy in the face of assault and deadness in emotional reactivity. It is not unusual, for example, in clinical literature to find descriptions of abused children whose psychological uni
verses resemble those of the inmates of the ghettos and camps. If we see such examples as carrying Torah scrolls, singing religious songs, rabbinical utterance, as
action
responding to despair (uttering sacred words in the Talmud is considered a form of action), then these forms of spiritual protest, rather than being ineffective, appear as a last, desperate effort to lift a psychically disoriented community out of radical emotional withdrawal and catatonic displacement.

Kiddush haShem
was not a response that posed real, political con
sequences, like, for example, Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance, sitting down in front of armed troops; but not even underground fighters or partisans could transform the political environment of genocide and the violence of the Final Solution. To have done that would have required a Jewish political organization, across Europe, far stronger and with far more political authority and access to weapons than existed among the splinter groups of Jewish theologi
cal and secular factionalism. The spiritual reliance on sanctified words as a response to brutalization evolved as an active effort to utter what amounts to a silent ‘no,’ a passive resistance taking place entirely within an oppressed community and invisible to the ag
gressor. And in analyzing the Jewish response to the Germans, it is essential to keep in mind the relentless assault against men, women, children and infants, who possessed no political language or resistance.