Read Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Online
Authors: James M. Glass
The difficulty of exit for young Jews who wanted to fight cannot be overemphasized. As Simon describes it: ‘There was no escape on the outside; on the outside we faced the Lithuanians and the Germans; all wanted to kill us.’ The
Judenrat
(Jewish Council set up by the German occupiers) in most ghettos gave little assistance to those wanting to leave. The Germans sealed off the ghettos and made it clear that anyone trying to leave would be killed and the ghetto would be subject to mass reprisals and the murder of family and friends. The
Judenrat
were rightly terrified of mass reprisals and with few exceptions would have little to do with the underground units or partisans. Simon: ‘We were fenced in like cattle in the Chicago stockyards. The
Judenrat
of course wanted us to stay because of the policy of mass reprisals. Germans if they caught par
tisans would kill their relatives, anyone they could get their hands
on. But I believed that every honest man’s place is to go into the woods.’ But, he cautioned, that was ‘easier said than done.’ Simon was fortunate; he made it out with his brother: ‘I was lucky.’
Contingency played an enormously important role in surviving. Although it would be wrong to attribute survival to chance alone, resistance fighters needed plenty of luck to survive the unexpected. Simon tells a story about an incident that occurred a few nights after he left the Vilna ghetto. He and a friend went to sleep; but Simon kept his boots on because they were serving as a pillow for his comrade and he didn’t want to wake him. Suddenly, he awoke to gunshots. Immediately, he leapt to his feet and ran as fast as he could to cover. His friend, who slept with his boots off, never made cover because those who took the time to pull on their boots were killed. Simon escaped to the swamps with the help of Markov Brigade partisans.
Frank’s and Simon’s recollections convey extraordinary accounts of endurance and strength. But it was the look in their eyes that seemed to convey a memory that was absent from their words. Perhaps it was their sadness in knowing how important this history was to them, what a critical part of their lives it had been, and wanting it to be heard. Perhaps it was their unstated but very real sentiment that soon they would not be able to recount these experi
ences. Or perhaps they felt no one would understand fully what they had been through, what they had created and what they had endured to survive. Yet these same men seemed at home in their Manhattan world, content and satisfied with lives well lived. But maybe that contentment concealed a terrible pain, because always in their eyes lay that other home, the one that had vanished, the one that spoke of death and tragedy.
Simon remembers his mother, her bravery in trying to protect her family.
‘We knew as early as the winter of 1941 what the Germans were up to; I was only seventeen years old when we found ourselves relocated to the Vilna ghetto. My mother at the time was only
39.
When she could, she left the ghetto to find food; she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders to hide her Jewish star. She wit
nessed beating, executions by the roadside; everywhere she went she saw Jews being killed. No one was in the dark regarding German intentions.’
I listened to stories of victory, transcendence, violence and loss; but another story lay underneath these narratives, the truncated feel
ings of children losing parents, sisters, brothers, grandparents, and the security of a childhood thrown into chaos. It is that story that never leaves the eyes, even as Frank looks at me, silently for a minute or two, while I wait for the elevator. It is a silent communication – of fury and of immense sadness at a part of his life he knows was lost forever in those forests. One imagines that by the time we reach old age, certain compromises have been made with life. But with sur
vivors like Frank and Simon, firm in their support of Israel and George W. Bush’s position on Iraq, whatever peace or compromise lies in this life offers utterly no compensation for the peace lost then; for the criminal ripping of children from their parents and the unbearable grief of knowing your parents and those you love are dead but not knowing where, of not being able to find a grave on which to place a stone. Perhaps home, in the unvoiced message of their eyes, had to do with the past and present absorbing each other, emotions as alive now as they were then, the past never leaving, being here and there, an immediacy conveyed through silences and staring through the window of an elegant living room to spaces far beyond the winter cold of a Fifth Avenue park.
In their recounting, memories possessed immanence, stories full of dilemma, guilt and regret. It was most strongly put to me by Simon at the very beginning of our interview: ‘Whenever I go to a funeral now I feel envious; I never had the privilege of burying my own parents, of saying
Kaddish
at their graves.’ Being there, with their memories, wanting to tell their stories, remembering the pain and isolation, moving into it without embarrassment, and the sadness in not being able to bring back the ones they loved – this is the irretrievable part of their histories. Perhaps it is this remem
brance that lay deep in their eyes, knowing that their parents had not been buried but had been murdered in a dreary village, forest or camp, with no opportunity for these men to say
Kaddish
. Or perhaps a nagging doubt or a moral lapse lies close to the surface. Simon:
‘It’s hard for me to tell you this story. It’s as real now as it was then. We had been chased by the Germans and their collaborators into the swamps. We found a small island with a few huts
on it; we hid there for several days. In the hut next to us, we heard the cries of a baby, really a kind of whimpering because it was so weak. The Jewish “wife” of a Soviet commander had given birth to their kid in that hut but her husband insisted she leave the baby. A baby’s crying couldn’t be controlled, so infants presented real dangers to all of us. If the enemy heard the baby, he could find us. We listened to the whimpering for eight days; the baby died on the ninth day. His mother visited him once. Life was not only cheap, it was incidental; the mother moved only a kilometer or two from her child. But she refused to take the baby with her. I imagine she couldn’t bring herself to kill it; so she just let it wither away … and we did the same thing: we refused to save the baby, because we knew the danger. But, we suffered that baby’s death: it was not easy listening all those days to the cries of a dying infant. You see, it was the spirit of the times; life had become so cheap; you could lose it anytime … the priority was survival.’
Simon seems to be looking far beyond the walls of his apartment as he tells me this: ‘We had no place to go, what were we to do? Take the baby with us? You couldn’t do anything: neighbors who lived next to you for years would hand you over to the Gestapo for a loaf of bread; human sensitivity disappeared. I couldn’t afford to feel anything for that baby; the baby threatened me; in the end I had to choose my own life and those of my comrades.’
Yet, these are not unhappy men. Frank and Simon seemed to me to be full of life and enthusiasm; sharp and incisive in their observations, engaged with the contemporary world, healthy, and with humor and endless tolerance for my questions. They were proud of their successes in the United States, their children’s accomplishments; and they brought out snapshots of their families back then and now, of groups of fighters in the forests. In their survival they seemed to say ‘we were lucky,’ because they all spoke of luck. But I also sensed another message; ‘maybe we were not so lucky – we lost our entire families and we can never bring them back. We had to make terrible choices. And when we speak to you, we remember all these choices, and the tears are as fresh now as they were then.’ Maybe that’s the sadness I felt leaving these interviews, the sense that the past is not over; that these political resistors carry inside
them a set of moral perspectives for the present, for us who were not there. And in recounting these numerous acts of courage and tough choices, they ask the audience to listen and not to judge. They want us to know something of what it meant to be there in those barren fields, prison camps and dense forests. What these men and women accomplished is political in the most profound sense of the word: the undergrounds and partisans preserved the political space of identity and freedom, creating communities of friendship in primitive forests and enduring the most unimaginable hardships. The public life of these fighters and resistance groups and underground organizations is not the public space of institutions, but these fighters and survivors created public spaces carved out of desperate times, and whose very existence contributed to the survival of thousands who would otherwise have died.
No moral ambivalence framed the narrative of Miles Lerman; the German assault rendered traditional moralities obsolete and danger
ous to survival.
‘The peasants eventually took us seriously; we had no hesitation
–
we would kill whom we had to. If we had to burn a peasant village to protect ourselves or punish an informer, we would do it. The Germans looked at us like we were mice or rats; they would trade sugar or vodka for Jews. Some peasants gave up Jews for a bottle of vodka. This happened in our area; a peasant had trapped a couple of Jews by offering them some food, and then turned them over to the Germans. One night we showed up at the house of the peasant and hanged him and put a sign on him that said, “this will happen to peasants who betray Jews”. If we had to, we would kill an entire family; there was no other way to protect ourselves. If the peasants would hand in Jews for a glass of vodka, now, how do you handle that?’
Critics of Jewish inaction, like Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg, capture an important reason for the absence of a more violent mass resistance:
2
the role of the
Judenrate
in collaborating with the Germans. Yet, even that story should be treated very carefully, since members of the many
Judenrate
in both the large and small ghettos
believed that cooperation would assure the survival at least of a remnant of the Jewish community. A physician whom I interviewed in Warsaw, who had been in the Lodz ghetto, told me that after the war he would have been first in line to kill Chaim Rumkowski, the notorious head of the Lodz
Judenrat
who continually bartered away Jews for selection. ‘But now I regard him as a great man.’ I was sur
prised by this since Rumkowski facilitated the infamous exchange of children under the age of ten and the elderly over 65 for several thousand Jews who were capable of work. ‘You ask me why I think he is now a great man? Because he kept Jews alive in the ghetto longer than any other ghetto leader.’ In the spring of 1944 some 60,000 Jews remained in Lodz, until they were all transported and murdered in Auschwitz later that summer and fall.
While in retrospect that strategy was fatal, Rumkowski appears at least to this survivor to have engineered strategies that prolonged survival – of at least a remnant. The point Dr. M. was making was that moral culpability is difficult to assign, and we should be very careful how we evaluate terrible decisions imposed on the Jewish community, although in
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
Arendt expressed moral outrage at
Judenrat
collaborators.
At what point should the
Judenrate
have realized the enormity of German intent? The ordinary, compliant men chosen by the Germans for these leadership positions could not be expected to transcend their view of survival and the lies continually fed them by the Germans. Spiritual and political leaders that might have gener
ated resistance had been executed soon after the Germans occupied Jewish villages and towns. Many radical political leaders escaped to the Soviet Union after the German invasion of Poland; some returned to participate in and organize armed resistance. Leaders of stature in the traditional communities were quickly murdered, including many rabbis, long before the German authority appointed the
Judenrate
. It is also the case that the instinct for survival, although understood as collusion, molded
Judenrat
policy.
Many joined
Judenrat
administration and the Jewish police to assure their own survival and that of their families. Many believed that to be a member of a Jewish police unit would be a shield against German roundups, or that work in a
Judenrat
office would make it less likely that they would be placed on a selection list. The human self when faced with terror reacts with terror. The
Judenrate
operated in an environment of terror, and those that worked for the
Judenrate
acted in ways they believed would save them and the remnant. One can fault their tactics, but given the realities of human nature, could they have been expected to act in any other way? While their policy of collaboration failed miserably, it pos
sessed both a strategic and a moral logic.
To violently resist the Germans, to take an active stance against
Judenrat
policy, meant the resistor self had to transcend its own terror, fear and uncertainty, to see the possibility in alternative forms of political and social organization. To their credit, the
Judenrate
in most ghettos, with the cooperation of social service groups, sponsored and supported hundreds of soup kitchens and fed thousands of homeless children and refugees, the sick and elderly.
3
In an environment where hopelessness defined everyday life for hundreds of thousands, the establishment of the soup kitchens, at least in the short term, inhibited the German policy of mass star
vation. By the time, however, that individual
Judenrat
members realized the full extent of German policy, it was too late; in Warsaw in the summer of 1942, hundreds of thousands of Jews were mur
dered in the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, in addition to the tens of thousands dying between 1939 and 1942 from disease and starvation.
4
But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the
Judenrate
were headed by resistance leaders; that each ghetto
Judenrat
had been the center of underground activity. Would the outcome have been any different? Probably not, and for one very good reason. Family, in addition to religious practice and its organization, had been central to the cultural and public life of the Jewish commu
nities in Europe. The Germans understood that. A centerpiece of their policy lay in an assault on the family – in particular through the killing of children – and on rabbis and Jewish sacred objects. Demoralization of family life, the desecration of religious artifacts and the despair provoked by the selection and killing of children are critical to understanding why so many Jews were murdered. With some exceptions – for example, the Jews of Budapest, who were transported directly from Budapest to Auschwitz in 1944 – most East European Jews had been driven from their villages and home towns into ghettos, if they had not already been slaughtered in the process.
The route to the death camps for Jews from France, Belgium and the Netherlands was equally defined by rapid confusion. Jews in the Netherlands, for example, had to endure Westerbork, a massive holding camp, before being transported to Auschwitz.
5
The sudden
ness of the German assault on the primarily middle-class West European Jewish community meant that families had to face the Auschwitz journey alone, confused, hungry, sick, without any chance for political organization, wondering where they were going. Some Jews from the West were transported to Auschwitz in comfort
able railway carriages, having been told by the Germans that at their destination they would be housed in hotels and the men assigned jobs. Some ended up in the ghettos of the East. Children often were separated from their parents and taken away to special blocks and demarcation points. Some families, like the Franks, hid in cellars, attics or specially constructed rooms. Families fought with each other; strangers often were forced to live in the same room. The inability to protect or rescue children and infants had a devastating impact on consciousness and will, as it would on anyone unable to protect their family from violence.
Demoralization produced by ghettoization is recorded in count
less diaries describing life in Vilna, Lvov, Bialystok, Theresienstadt, Kovno, Lodz and Warsaw.
6
What emerges from these diaries – many written by teenagers with a painfully clear grasp of family life – is a picture of a community devastated by barbarism, never embracing underground movements, partisan fighters or strategies based on violence that might bring mass reprisal. Diary entries critical to an understanding of the Jewish community’s despair describe a popula
tion increasingly suffering physical weakness and debilitation, and forced to confront the terror of not being able to protect children. By the time these victims reached the gas chambers – if they had not been killed by disease, brutality and mass starvation – they had been depleted by hunger and the war waged by the Germans on physical survival.
It is that story – the progressive and unrelenting German assault in the ghettos – that needs to be examined
side-by-side
with Jewish violent resistance and partisan action. The one cannot be under
stood without the other, since out of the psychological environment of despair came the ghetto undergrounds and partisans, the fighting units. The resistance faced tremendous odds from the
Germans and the despair in the ghettos, although many fighters found moral comfort in the violence of resistance. Lerman:
‘We weren’t heroes; I’ll tell you about a hero, a little girl with us, about twelve years old. She had blond hair and blue eyes and looked very Polish. So we would send her on courier missions, to get supplies, send messages, things like that. For medicine we were always in need of iodine; this was before penicillin and iodine was effective in treating a number of different infections. We sent her into a village for a couple of liters of iodine, but she was caught. Someone told us the Germans offered to send her back to her mother if she would talk; if she would tell where our camp was. But she never talked. They tortured her horribly; but she died never having revealed our position. That child, she is the hero. They never intended to return her to her mother; by then her mother probably was dead.’
The most dramatic underground action – the Warsaw Uprising of spring 1943, when only 50,000 people remained in the ghetto – gathered support from at the most a few hundred fighters.
7
The devastation produced by the massive transports of the previ
ous spring and summer had depleted the community of the sense of itself as a world with a future; life in the ghetto had been reduced to a monumental effort simply to survive physically, with many pacing the empty streets wondering when their turn would come.
8
The sur
vivors of previous roundups watched as family members disappeared and died. Diaries of the mass roundups in the summer of 1942 describe children and infants killed or taken to the central train station, forced to wait for days without food or water; parents return
ing home to find their children missing; children coming home to find their parents victims of roundups. The descriptions of death and dying on the streets, so graphically represented by Roman Polanski’s film,
The Pianist
, the epidemics that ravaged the ghettos claiming thousands of lives; the absence of food and sanitation, and the pro
cessions of death wagons daily, hauled often by children, through the ghetto streets: to read these diary accounts is to witness a
physical
universe in the process of disintegration.
The 50,000 left in Warsaw each suffered personally, if not the loss of a child, then the murder of a father, mother or grandparent. No
one remained who had not been emotionally devastated by the effects of the transports. When the Germans attacked the ghetto in March 1943, in the final phase of their plan to kill every Jew remaining in Warsaw, the community had little or no resources to support the few hundred fighters. These people could barely survive themselves, and the killing by the Germans that accompanied the uprising decimated the remaining 50,000.
But underground resistance occurred in a physical and psycholog
ical universe where Jews fought back. Lerman: ‘Many understood the power of starvation and many who starved fought back.’ Even in Vilna, Warsaw, Kovno and Bialystok,
9
where the under
ground distributed thousands of leaflets and posters describing the Germans’ intent, the recruitment of fighters faced tremendous obstacles, not the least of which was the fear of the breakup of the family. The attack on family bonds, the war on children, inequality within the ghettos, hierarchies based on proximity to the German command, the possession of labor cards as opposed to their absence, access to food coupons as opposed to little or no access, all were significant factors contributing to German efforts to immobilize the possibility of resistance. Yet, even with the terrible moral choices the resistance had to make, survival hinged on conscious
ness liberating itself from ghetto mentality and from traditional moral understandings. Lerman again:
‘When any of our women had babies, it was an unspoken law the baby would be strangled and killed at the moment of birth. It would have been impossible to have had a baby in those cir
cumstances; they could not be allowed to live. No one talked about it, but it was painful. Perhaps we shouldn’t have killed them; but who knows: even one cry could have given away our positions.
We were in the forests from 1942 until June 1944 when we were liberated by the Russian army. Perhaps 70–80 percent of our unit survived; if our group hadn’t been in the forest, 90 percent would have perished. Were we lucky? Of course; there was good luck and bad luck; we had good luck. But being partisans we were more likely to have good luck; we could fight, unlike those in the ghetto who all perished. But I could have been one who died; the Germans would burn buildings, round up people randomly and
kill them. We all shared the same bitterness, and I have no apologies for my hatred.’
Morality in the forests had to be drastically revised; survival depended on discarding old moral beliefs. Liberation of self meant, as well, creating military vengeance and rewriting the laws of community.
What, then, I want to do in the following chapters is to describe and interpret significant moral and ethical positions guiding this effort at resistance. But I will look at the dilemmas and conflicts in resistance as they affected both violent and spiritual resistance. Neither path was an easy one to take; each involved significant moral demands and faith in choices which ultimately meant the dif
ference between life and death and the choice about how one died. The violent resistor had to literally relearn moral positions, creating an ethics adaptive to the demands of survival; the spiritual resistor fought against the ever-present reality of madness and the sinking into apathy. For both, resistance preserved sanity and protected the self’s integrity from the implosive power of genocidal action.