Read Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Online
Authors: James M. Glass
A thirteen-year-old boy is whipped mercilessly by a guard in Auschwitz. Suffering scores of lashes, the boy utters nothing; no sound, no cries, just silence. The theology sees such resilience to pain as deriving from the child’s faith in Torah. For the rabbi, ‘they can take my body but not my soul. They have no authority over the soul.’ But it might not have been faith that allowed the boy to be whipped and left bleeding; it may have been a dead self produced by a deadly reality. Another explanation might argue that the numbness and dissociation literally annihilate the child’s emotional universe, making him impervious to pain. A survivor writes:
‘I knew that I had to act soon because once malnutrition set in, I would lose the will to fight. Next would come the indifference to my surroundings, vacant eyes, swelling at the ankles, and the slow descent into oblivion. I had seen the pattern thousands of times in the ghetto and was seeing it again in people around me.’
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Massive assault and abuse do tremendous damage to the psyche; Joseph Horn: ‘I was in shambles. I felt less worthy than an animal. A stray dog could walk the streets unmolested, but the whole might of the Third Reich would be enlisted to hunt down me or any other Jew who didn’t cooperate in our own destruction. I began to realize that we are all destined to die.’
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This is not to diminish the effects of rabbinical compassion or adaptive law; but to idealize suffering as a testament to God, as well as to criticize Jews for not resisting more, misses the profound psychological reality of death that consumed the Jews long before they ever reached Auschwitz. For the orthodox, the issue was not questioning the action itself or even attempting to understand genocide and mass death. Whatever questions were addressed to God were directed to effects and His tactics. It violated faith to question God’s intent. Rabbis quoted the Bible: ‘It is a time of agony unto Jacob,
but out of it he shall be saved’ (Jeremiah 30:7). Orthodox Jews never asked, ‘But at what cost?’ In the Maidanek memorial, in a barracks to the side of the camp, lie over 800,000 pairs of shoes taken from Jews; in a corner, piled high, one finds tens of thousands of children’s shoes. The mound of bones and ashes containing the remains of almost a million Jews standing at the top of Maidanek in a gigantic stone urn may represent not a martyrdom for Israel but a meaningless sinking into nothingness, not to be remembered as a sacred victory of the Lord, but a concrete reminder of what happened to six million. ‘A man must pronounce a blessing over evil just as he pronounces a blessing over good’ (Berakhot 9: 5); but the ashes and bones of Maidanek represent for many survivors a victory of evil – pure and simple. Was it ‘the rock, His work is perfect; all his ways are justice’ (Deuteronomy 32: 4)? Or was it, in the words of a survivor: ‘I cursed God when I watched my little girl die; I have yet to set foot in a synagogue again.’ Joseph Horn recounts the following conversation with a friend in the ghetto: ‘“This is a terrible time to be a parent,” Mrs. Psherover said. “When you can’t protect your child from such depravities, perhaps it is best to put an end to it.”’
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When Jews cried
zaddik-ve-re-lo
(why should the innocent suffer), did God send consolation to the soul or did the self’s inner being remain empty, uncomforted? I asked Abraham X, a survivor of Mauthausen:
‘Since liberation, life for me has been a waking death; all my family were killed. What I have done since then is to just walk through life. God means nothing to me. I can’t understand those who speak of having faith after Auschwitz; there is no God; where is God for my murdered sons and daughters; for my wife, my parents?’
And those who speak about the righteousness of suffering, or how it is ordained for Jews to suffer?
‘That means nothing to me; for years, after the war, I walked around thinking about how to kill and murder as many Germans as I could find. That hatred kept me going. There was no place for God inside my soul. Who was it, I don’t remember now, the survivor of the Warsaw uprising, who said, “If you lick my heart, it
would poison you?” That’s how I felt and probably still do. I remember the line in
Psalms
[91: 15]; “I will be with you in dis
tress.” I don’t believe in God. While we were in distress, God was somewhere else, maybe helping the Germans kill my children.’
Not all survivors believe in the sanctity of suffering and many would disagree with the ideas expressed in the following theological text:
‘They said to his wife: “It has been decreed on your husband that he is to be burned, and upon you to be killed.” She recited this scripture, “A faithful God, never false.”
They said to his daughter: “It has been decreed upon your father to be burned and upon your mother to be killed and upon you to perform labor.” She recited this scripture: “Wondrous in purpose and mighty indeed, whose eyes observe” [
Jeremiah
32:19].’
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I read these selections to Abraham X; he was furious. ‘Tell that to me while I say
Kaddish
for my dead children, or while I think of the possibilities they might have had, the grandchildren that never were. Everything I am in my old age, everything that I was, lies inside my head, a photograph album as real as the very days when I had them, when all of us were alive.’ ‘God’s justice – His deeds are perfect … a faithful God … there is no perversity’ (Deuteronomy 32: 4) is not Abraham X’s justice.
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Abraham X’s bitterness moves against the most powerful strains of
Midrashim
thought: ‘Precious are sufferings [for] just as the covenant is established by virtue of the land, so too is the covenant established by virtue of suffering.’
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Precious, however, might not be the right word to describe those psychologically and physically decimated by German power. Joseph Horn: ‘Now, I could hardly bear to look at him [a former friend]. His cheekbones were sunken, and the suit he wore was dirty and crumpled. His eyes were bloodshot. He was incoherent as to the whereabouts of his family – I think he still believed the canard about tilling the land in the Ukraine.’
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Death quickly follows the loss of faith. ‘When [inmates in the camps] gave up hope, their eyes became vacant. Some would go on the electrified wire for a quick death. Most would lie down on
the bunk for the night and expire without a whimper’ – a common occurrence, not only in the camps but in the ghettos.
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In Jewish theology, to study the commandments, the law, or its interpretations becomes, in a religious sense, equivalent to carrying out the practice of devotion, righteousness. The Jew by
studying
acts for God. It is a religious dialectic; self speaking with Other/God, where doing lies literally in the speaking (prayer and meditation). And while, for example, Aaron Bell admires this now, at the time the only action that mattered was the violence of retribution. For him and the other resistors I interviewed, the violence of their resis
tance communities constituted the only trustworthy form of prayer. But for those like Rabbis Shapira and Oshry study brought the self closer to God, to contact and intimacy with the Divine Will, a mys
tical joining, a coming together and coming apart, in the Law. Praxis is the actual study of the written and oral law. To act means to be ‘with’ God, to render respect to God and to be and become worthy as a Jew, a student of Torah. It is a state of ‘being’ and a way of life that places political ideology and political action not only in a secondary position but in a place that possesses no emotive or evaluative significance. Political action in this theology has no role in improving or demonstrating the worthiness of the self or one’s ethical place in the world. Worthiness and, therefore, value depend on how close study takes one to God. Perhaps this explains some of the political and ideological quietism of orthodox and Hasidic Jewry.
In the Torah divine justice is higher than compassion and cer
tainly lies considerably higher than political action. Compassion signifies preference for one being over the other; it requires that God make a choice, discriminating between sufferings, granting compassion to some, but not to others. But in the theology, God makes no such discriminations amongst people. Divine justice affirms
only
God’s majesty; all are equal in God’s eyes; no one can claim preference, not even those who suffer, because compassion discriminates between ‘pains’ and judges some pain to be worthier than others. What matters to God are His Laws – nothing else; and His justice lies in the inviolability of His Laws. To be in a relation of faith to God is not to demand compassion but to obey, without question, His Laws, a
fear
of Heaven, to accept what is a manifesta
tion of God’s justice. To demand compassion of God means that
one asks God to explain; but the revelatory power of God lies not in explanation or rationalization but in the immanence of His Laws. If the believer knows the Law and accepts it, God’s justice is also immanent. God need not show compassion or explain its absence; nothing is required of God, since God’s authority and eternal righteousness guide the children of Israel.
What the partisan survivors consistently returned to was the notion that the Holocaust demanded a set of actions taking even more seriously than God himself the suffering of the human body and especially the suffering of children. But to have asked for such sustained violent resistance from the Jewish community, they also argue, misses the point. It is not that more could be done. All that could be done was done. In the face of the German onslaught and the ruthless efficiency of starvation and extermination, to have retained any kind of faith was itself a victory and transcendence. To have sustained any kind of violent resistance took extraordinary courage and luck, and a willingness to construct an ethics that would facilitate survival itself.
Yet, essential to the existence of both violent and spiritual resis
tance was the capacity of the resistors to withstand the radical inver
sion of meaning and value imposed by the German occupation and German racist policies. Resistance occurred against a backdrop of madness. Group madness and individual madness are quite differ
ent, but there is one very frightening similarity: the power of perception to literally transform reality to conform with the projec
tions of the subject. For the Jews, German brutality was mad, incomprehensible; but for the Germans, extermination possessed a logic, a significance, in protecting the nation’s public and biological health.
The resistor represents and affirms an historical sanity, a value embedded in history and the history of ethics, and in the case of the Jews, the word of the Torah; the resistor, whether the action be violent or spiritual, refuses the premises of mass murder and the murder of an identified and marked group simply because this group exists. That assumption – the Other must die because the Other exists – has no standing in an ethical history that grants dignity to human life. When the resistor denied either violently or spiritually the Germans’ view of reality, that refusal embraced an affirmation and sanity that German rage could not touch or destroy.
Jewish corpses were referred to as
Figuren
by the Germans. A whole vocabulary was constructed round the killing: disinfection, special treatment, national therapy, and so on. To see the Other as refuse for sanitation, burning, cleansing, and to transform this into national action and policy is as insane as the individual schizo
phrenic conducting a delusional war in the privacy of a fantastic imagination. It is infinitely more dangerous because the fantastic
ideology
provokes the group into externalizing the madness, into making madness appear to be ‘normal’ and ‘rational.’
Indeed, resistors, whether Jewish or Gentile, sought not only to save lives, but to preserve the vocabularies of the sane, the
human
text and spirit which German action destroyed. The lack of protest in Germany and the rest of Europe to the genocide of the Jews testifies
not
to indifference or lack of participation; plenty of evidence suggests otherwise. What little resistance to mass murder by non-Jews says is that the ground of sanity and insanity had rad
ically shifted; that what a decade or so earlier would have been regarded as mad became, in the environment of the Third Reich, sane, rational sanitation policy with the objective of protecting the physiological and psychological boundaries of the Third Reich. When madness comes to be taken for the norm, when evil is seen to be rational state policy, not only has history been violated, but the very premises of human thought itself and the use of reason in the service of generative, creative and productive ends, have been blown away. What Jewish resistance, both violent and spiritual, accom
plished was to remind the world and posterity that sanity and courage had not been completely annihilated.
A.G.
Blunden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
1.
For a comprehensive review of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, see Yehuda Bauer,
The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness
. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. For a detailed account of the largest and most successful partisan unit, in the sense that over 90 percent of the members survived the Holocaust, see Peter Duffy’s history
The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest
. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. See also Reuben Ainsztein,
Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe; with a Historical Survey of the Jew as Fighter and Soldier in the Diaspora
. London: Elek, 1974; Yehuda Bauer,
They Chose Life: Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust
. New York: American Jewish Committee, Institute of Human Relations, 1973; Ronald J. Berger,
Constructing a Collective Memory of the Holocaust: A Life History of Two Brothers’ Survival
. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1995. Michael Elkins,
Forged in Fury.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1971; Charles Gelman,
Do Not Go Gentle: A Memoir of
169
Jewish Resistance in Poland, 1941–1945
. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1989; Meir Grubsztein, ed.,
Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust.
Proceedings of the Conference on Manifestations of Jewish Resistance, Jerusalem, April 7–11, 1968. Trans. from the Hebrew by Varda Esther Bar-on et al. Jerusalem: Yad vaShem, 1971; Israel Gutman,
Resistance: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994; Isaac Kowalski, ed.,
Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945
. Introduction by Yitzhak Arad. Brooklyn, NY: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1984; Vera Laska,
Nazism, Resistance and Holocaust in World War II: A Bibliography.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985; Michael R. Marrus, ed.,
Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust: Selected Articles
. Westport, CT: Meckler, 1989; Yuri Suhl, ed. and trans.,
They Fought Back: The Story of Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe.
New York: Schocken Books, 1975;
Flames in the Ashes.
A film by Haim Gouri, Jacquot Ehrlich; produced by Monia Avrahami. Teaneck, NJ: Ergo Media, Inc., 1987; Harold Werner,
Fighting Back: A Memoir of Jewish Resistance in World War II
. Ed. by Mark Werner. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992; Yad vaShem,
Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance.
Jerusalem: Yad vaShem, 1963–74. See also Simha Rotem,
Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter: The Past within Me.
Trans. from the Hebrew and ed. by Barbara Harshav. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994; Isaac Schwarzbart,
The Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Its Meaning and Message.
New York: World Jewish Congress, Organization Department, 1953;
The Lonely Struggle; Marek Edelman, Last Hero of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Video produced and directed by Willy Lindwer. Audio-Visual Arts and Productions. Teaneck, NJ: Ergo Media, 1995;
Not Like Sheep to the Slaughter: The Story of the Bialystok Ghetto
. Video. Manor Prod. Ltd.; producer, Yigal Ephrati; written and directed by Adah Ushpiz. Teaneck, NJ: Ergo Media, Inc., 1991.
Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives, O.S. (Oneg Shabbath),
Jerusalem: Yad vaShem, 1986, p. 302.