Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (23 page)

1
.
Nechama Tec,
Defiance: The Bielski Partisans.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 147; see also Lester Samuel Eckman and Chaim Lazar,
The
Jewish Resistance: The History of the Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and White Russia during the Nazi Occupation, 1940–1945
. New York: Shengold, 1977. For detailed histories of the partisans and their activities, see Allan Levin,
Fugitives
o
f the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival during the Second World War
. New York: Stoddart, 1998. For an analysis of the complex and often tense relationship between the Jewish and Soviet parti
sans, see Hersh Smolar,
The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans against the Nazis.
New York: Holocaust Library, 1989; Jack Kagan,
Surviving the Holocaust with Russian Jewish Partisans
. New York: Vallentine Mitchell and Co., 1998. Kagan gives a harrowing account of the tunnel escape from Novogrudek; for another compelling narrative, see Liza Ettinger,
From the Lida Ghetto to the Bielski Partisans
. Memoir in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, archives RG-02.133, 1984.

1. Tec, op. cit. See also Shalom Cholawski,
   The Jews of Belorussia during World War II
   . New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998.
   
2. Ibid., p. 151. For a graphic account of the kind of punishment meted out by the partisans, see John A. Armstrong, ed.,
   Soviet Partisans in World War II
   . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.
   
3. Ibid., p. 45.
   
4. Ibid., p. 47. For an excellent account of the Soviet partisan movement, see Kenneth Slepyan, ‘The Soviet Partisan Movement and the Holocaust’,
   Holocaust and Genocide Studies
   , vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 2000.
   
5. Ibid., p. 83.
   
6. Ibid., p. 129.
   
7. Ibid., p. 136.
   
8. Ibid., p. 139.
   
9. Also helpful in explaining the harsh conditions of the Nazi Occupation of Novogrudek was a taped interview with survivor Rae Kushner (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, RG 50.002*0015). Killings throughout the region are described in chilling detail in Martin Dean,
   Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44
   . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Inside Germany persecution and roundups of Jews by the Gestapo elicited little reaction. Eric A. Johnson (in
   Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans
   . New York: Basic Books, 1999) writes: ‘Most of the ordinary German population supported the Nazi regime, did not per
   ceive the Gestapo as all-powerful or even as terribly threatening to them personally, and enjoyed considerable room to express frustration and disapproval arising out of minor disagreements with the Nazi state and its leadership’ (p. 262).
   

1
.
Shalom Cholawski,
Soldiers from the Ghetto
. San Diego: A.S. Barnes and Company, Inc., 1980, p. 95. See also Shalom Yoram,
The Defiant: A True
Story.
Trans. by Varda Yoram. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, p. 131. Cf. Zvi Gitelman, ed.,
Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR
. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997; Jan T. Gross
, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Eastern Ukraine and Western Belorussia
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Not widely understood was the extent of the
Reichsbahn
[German railway] con
tributions to the machinery and process facilitating mass murder, not only in the camps but in the conquered territories of the East. For a recent exploration of their role, see Alfred C. Mierzejewski, ‘A Public Enterprise in the Service of Mass Murder: the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the Holocaust’,
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
, vol. 15, no. 1, Spring 2001.

1. Cholawski,
   Soldiers from the Ghetto
   , p. 114. See also Jack Nusan, ed.,
   Jewish Partisans: A Documentary of Jewish Resistance in the Soviet Union during World War II.
   Trans. from Hebrew by the Magal Translation Institute, Ltd., based on Russian, Polish and Yiddish sources. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982.
   
2. Frantz Fanon,
   The Wretched of the Earth.
   Trans. by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove-Atlantic, 1988. For a provocative analysis of the negative side of this proposition and the genocidal consequences of violence, see James Waller,
   Becoming Evil
   :
   How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing.
   New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Waller is looking at the reasons behind genocide, not at the vio
   lence that meets or faces the genocidal killer. Fanon does not explore the extent to which redemptive violence (as opposed to the annihila
   tory violence of the indiscriminate mass murderer) might degenerate into genocidal violence, although his final chapter on mental disorders suggests that wherever violence touches, injury follows. This last chapter, an extraordinary psychiatric investigation of the psychological consequences of violence, shows ambivalence in Fanon’s argument not present in the earlier discussion.
   
3. Faye Schulman,
   A Partisan’s Memoir: Women of the Holocaust.
   Toronto: Second Story Books, 1995, p. 175. See also Lester Samuel Eckman and Chaim Lazar,
   The Jewish Resistance: The History of the Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and White Russia during the Nazi Occupation, 1940–1945.
   New York: Shengold, 1977; and Dov Cohen and Jack Kagan,
   Surviving the Holocaust with the Russian Jewish Partisans
   . Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998.
   
4. Sutin and Sutin,
   Jack and Rochelle
   , pp. 143, 142. See also Zoe Szner, ed.,
   Extermination and Resistance: Historical Records and Source Material
   . Haifa: Ghetto Fighters House, 1958. ‘Fighting back’ often had as much to do with the enthusiasm of local leaders and militias for killing as with the Germans. See Wendy Lower’s interesting study (‘“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Implementation of the Holocaust in the Ukraine: A Case Study of Central and Peripheral Forces in the Generalbezirk Zhytomyr, 1941–1944’,
   Holocaust and Genocide Studies
   , vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 8–22). Lower speaks of the extent of willed participation
   

amongst collaborators and indigenous populations. ‘as of early 1942 even verbal orders were deemed unnecessary for authorizing the murderous “mopping-up” actions against Jews in hiding. Thus more local leaders learned what was expected of them, and fewer needed explicit orders to do it. The commissars and regional police forces did not carry out the Nazi goal of genocide in a banal fashion …often encouraging sadistic methods that exceeded the expectations of their superiors’ (p. 8).

1. Isaiah Trunk,
   Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collection on Individual Behavior in Extremis
   . New York: Stein and Day, 1979, p. 250. For a com
   prehensive review of the statistics, see Levin,
   Fighting Back,
   pp. 179–203.
   
2. Trunk,
   Jewish Responses
   , pp. 246, 250.
   
3. Ibid., p. 303. For an account written shortly after the war, see Marie Syrkin,
   Blessed is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance
   . Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948.
   
4. Fanon,
   The Wretched of the Earth
   , p. 37.
   
5. Ibid., p. 69.
   
6. Ibid., p. 73.
   
7. Ibid. To understand this notion in the context of Jewish resistance, see John Sack,
   An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge against Germans
   . New York: Basic Books, 1993.
   
8. Ibid., p. 72.
   
9. Ibid. For an idea of this sense of self in the Jewish resistor, see Hanna Krall,
   Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Surviving Leader of the Wars
   aw
   Ghetto Uprising
   . New York: Henry Holt, 1986. The recognition of Jewish resistance and its significance appeared even before the war’s end. See Mac Davis
   , Jews Fight Too
   . New York: Jordon Publishing Co., 1945.
   
10. Ibid., p. 46.
    
11. Ibid.
    
12. Ibid.
    
13. Ibid., p. 45.
    
14. Ibid., p. 38.
    
15. Ibid., p. 37.
    
16. Ibid., p. 63.
    
17. Ibid., p. 73.
    
18. Ibid., p. 111.
    
19. See Cohen and Kagan,
    Surviving the Holocaust with Russian Jewish Partisans
    , p. 91. Also
    Forests of Valor: Following in the Footsteps of Jewish Partisans, U.S.S.R.
    (video), April, 1989. Producer, Issy Avron; written and directed by Zvi Godel. Israel Educational Television. Teaneck, NJ: Ergo Media, 1996; Issac Kowalski, ed.,
    Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945
    , 4 vols. Brooklyn: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986.
    
    1. Levin,
       Fighting Back
       : ‘the total number of people [in Lithuania] who par
       ticipated in the active fight against the Nazis comes to over 2,000, that is approximately 5 percent of the 40,000 Jews who remained in Lithuania at the beginning of 1942 after the previous mass liquidation’
       
    2. (p.
       175). For an extraordinary video of survivors of the Vilna under
       ground, see
       Partisans of Vilna
       . Ciesia Foundation: directed and edited by Josh Waletzky; produced by Aviva Kempner. Washington, D.C.: Euro-American Home Video, 1987. See also Herman Kruk,
       The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944.
       Ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshaw. Trans. by Barbara Harshaw. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2002.
       
20. Yehuda Bauer,
    The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness
    . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979, p. 28. See also Leon Kahn,
    No Time to Mourn: A True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter.
    Vancouver: Laurelton Press, 1978. See also
    Yehude Yaar
    [Forest Jews],
    Narratives of Jewish Partisans of White Russia, Tuvia and Zus Bielski, Lilka and Sonia Bielski and Abraham Viner
    , as told to Ben Dor (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1946). This extraordinary set of interviews has been translated into English in a private publication by R. Goodman. It is not available to the general public.
    
21. Yitzhak Arad,
    The Partisan: From the Valley of Death to Mount Zion
    . New York: Holocaust Library, 1979, p. 81.
    
22. See Adina Blady Szwajger,
    I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance
    . Trans. by Tasja Darowska and Danusia Stok. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990, p. 80. See also Philip Friedman, ‘Jewish Resistance to Nazism’. In Ada J. Friedman, ed.,
    Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust
    . Philadelphia: the Jewish Publication Society, 1980, pp. 387–408.
    
23. Yitzhak Arad,
    Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews of Vilna in the Holocaust
    . Jerusalem: Yad vaShem, 1980, pp. 411–12.
    
24. Shalom Yoram,
    The Defiant: A True Story
    . Trans. by Varda Yoram. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, p. 108. See also Shmuel Krakowski,
    The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944.
    Trans. by Orah Blaustein. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984.
    
25. Ibid., p. 109.
    
26. Ibid., pp. 172–3.
    
27. Ibid., p. 183.
    
28. Arad,
    The Partisan
    , pp. 119–20.
    
29. Ibid., p. 95.
    
30. Nahum Kohn and Howard Roiter,
    A Voice from the Forest
    . New York: Holocaust Library, 1980, p. 15.
    
31. Ibid., p. 32.
    
32. Ibid., pp. 33, 37.
    
33. Ibid., p. 95.
    
34. Ibid., p. 246; see the extraordinary interview of survivors, including the Bielski brothers, of this unit.
    The Bielski Brothers: the Unknown Partisans
    . SOMA Productions; directed by Arun Kumar; written and produced by David Herman. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1996.
    
35. See Kowalski,
    Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance
    ; ‘Partisans’. In
    Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
    . London: Macmillan, 1990, vol. 4; Yisrael
    

Gutman,
Fighting Among the Ruins: the Story of Jewish Heroism During World War II
. Washington, D.C.: B’nai B’rith Books, 1988; Gilles Lambert,
Operation Hazalah: How Young Zionists Rescued Thousands of Hungarian Jews in the Nazi Occupation
. Trans. by Robert Bullen and Rosette Letellier. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974.

42
.
I use Rousseauian in the sense of the strong community Rousseau describes in his
Social Contract
, particularly the unifying and adhesive concept of the General Will. For Rousseau what is common to the community precedes all other special interests; also what is ‘common’ possesses an exclusivity in terms of allegiance and commitment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Social Contract and Discourses
. Trans. by

G.D.H.
Cole. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1951.

43
.
Sigmund Freud,
The Future of an Illusion
. Trans. by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1975.