Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (8 page)

‘The night is foreboding, there’s death lurking round us … the ghetto is restless, and Gestapo threatens our Commander
in-Chief. Then Itzik spoke to us. His words were like lightning – “don’t take any risks for my sake. Your lives are too precious to give away lightly.” And proudly he goes to his death!’

–
a very different example than Joseph Gens’s, the head of the
Judenrat
, who, in spite of his extensive cooperation with the enemy, was murdered by the Germans when he outlived his usefulness.
⁵⁹

In September 1942, Gens, spearheading the ghetto administration, issued a proclamation regarding the kind of punishment (torture, execution, execution of one’s family) ghetto inhabitants who tried to escape to the forests should expect from the Germans. It read:

‘Six Jews ran away from the Bialewaker Concentration Camp. The German command decreed to shoot ten Jews in the same Camp for each runaway; that is, 60 adults (not counting children). The punishment was meted out. Sixty adults and seven children were shot in the above prison camp.’

The example had not been lost on Gens: ‘A similar punishment awaits the population of the Vilna ghetto should a similar thing occur here.’
⁶⁰

Not to be psychically broken by such ‘examples’ of discipline required a deep reservoir of faith in action. Sympathizers of the Vilna underground grew in number throughout 1943. The ‘average’ Jew who joined the underground began to steal – not from each other, but from the Germans and Lithuanians, ‘everything from
food to military goods, shoes, clothes, paint, buttons, tin or whatever else was handy.’
⁶¹
Weapons remained in short supply as it was almost impossible to steal them, and the price for weapons, in whatever condition, was exorbitant. Yet, ‘when the hope of being saved from death in the ghetto grew dimmer, when the Jews began to realize that they had nothing to lose, the number of individuals who began to risk their lives by stealing even weapons began to grow.’
⁶²
Yet it remained difficult for the underground to recruit support.

As early as January 1942, the Vilna underground warned the ghetto of German intent: ‘Of eighty thousand Jews in the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” [Vilna], only twenty thousand survive. Before our eyes have been torn from us our parents, our brothers and our sisters… . Hitler aims to destroy
all
the Jews of Europe. It is the lot of the Jews of Lithuania to be the first in line.’
⁶³
Leaders of the Vilna underground, Joseph Glazman (Revisionist), Itzik Wittenberg (communist), Abba Kovner (
Hashomer Hatzair
), Abrasha Chwojnik (
Bund
), Nisr Resnik (General Zionist), Major Isidor Frucht (non-aligned) and Chiena Borowski (communist) found themselves blocked, at every step, by
Judenrat
fear and the mass’s desolation and emotional isolation.

As early as December 1941, a month before the underground agreed on a course of action, Aba Kovner articulated the mood of the ghetto and attacked the delusional belief that the genocide might stop. The ghetto masses, he argued, ‘believed that while they would face a life studded with vicissitude, the slaughter of millions was outside the realm of possibility.’
⁶⁴
But this belief, which the
Judenrat
fostered, kept news of the executions at Ponary from being a catalyst for revolt. At a meeting of the Pioneer Youth in the ghetto on January 1, 1942 – and this is before the Warsaw deportations to Treblinka and Sobibor – speaker after speaker emphasized that those taken from the ghetto ended up not in a work camp but at the exe
cution site. Yitzhak Arad repeatedly stressed in his analysis of the political reality of Vilna how ‘large sections in the ghetto identified with the
Judenrat
’s course of action,’ insistent on following German orders and not subverting German policy. In addition, many Jews believed that it was only communists who would be killed by the Germans; and if killing communists preserved the remnant, then it was a cost the populace was willing to bear. Ordinary,
non-ideological people would be spared – a delusion desperately clung to even in the face of the facts.

The underground in Vilna set out its goals in January 1942 – to engage in sabotage, to resist if the ghetto were invaded and to estab
lish links with partisan groups and undergrounds in other ghettos. For the underground it was moral and just to collect arms, even though the Germans made it clear that the discovery of weapons would result in mass reprisal. Kovner writes: ‘Had we the right to endanger the lives of the thousands of remaining Jews in the event of the discovery of arms in our possession? With full realization of the responsibility we bore, our reply was: Yes. We are entitled, we are bound to do so.’
⁶⁵
As late as August 1943, Gens published the following – and this after the Warsaw ghetto uprising: ‘May the blood that has been spilled be a last warning to us all, that we have but one way – the way of labor.’
⁶⁶

Gens’s policy of collaboration influenced the ghetto to the point where ghetto fighters found themselves on some occasions betrayed by fellow Jews. For example, in September 1943, a brigade of 100 fighters of the United Partisan Organization was surrounded and killed as a result of treachery by the Jewish police and a Jewish informant. Yet, Arad, active in the underground, paints in my inter
view with him a somewhat more nuanced moral picture: ‘You had to have some sympathy for Gens; what else could he do?’

The UPO leadership in Vilna constantly wrestled with potential traitors and with their moral responsibility to the Jewish masses. Kovner:

‘“As regards revolt, we cogitated more than anything else over the moral aspect.” Was revolt legitimate in view of the fact that the majority of the ghetto would not support armed resistance? “Were we entitled to [fight] and when? Were we entitled to offer people up in flames?”’

The underground realized that few Jews had weapons or even a desire to engage in physical resistance. ‘Most of them were unarmed – what would happen to all of them?’ And what if the fighters were wrong; what if the roundups did not mean ‘liquidation’? ‘We were terribly perplexed as to what right we had to determine [the mass’s] fate.’
⁶⁷
This moral quandary, always at the
heart of negotiations between the UPO and the
Judenrate
, inhib
ited their ability to act and to plan even with their knowledge of mass executions. Eventually the UPO leadership came to the realization that any hope of mass defense was an impossibility: ‘There is no longer any hope that the battle, which a handful of fighters, limited in number, would initiate, could turn into a mass defense… . The rebellion, should it break out, would be nothing but an act of individuals alone, of no wide-national value and would not open the door to mass rescue.’
⁶⁸
With few exceptions, such as Warsaw, the Jewish population had been effectively silenced by fear of mass retaliation.

To understand the state of mind of the Jewish ghettos, it is essential not to underestimate the power of the German assault on the Jewish body – beginning long before the construction of gas chambers at Auschwitz. In Warsaw, food distribution early in the occupation assured a slow death. In January 1941, the weekly ration of sugar was: for Aryans 16 oz, Jews 4/5th oz; fruit juice: Aryans only; soap, Aryans only. After the first week in January, Jews received no sugar ration; during the first six months of 1941, Jews received 3 oz of bread daily. Sugar, butter, eggs, fat, vegetables, milk had to be smug
gled in and bought on the black market. Even the 3 oz of bread Jews were to receive daily ‘means nothing in reality, for we are never able to obtain it.’
⁶⁹

Poles were proscribed by the Germans from selling merchandise or food to the Jews; if a Pole were caught engaging in such transac
tions, the Germans could impose a fine of 1,000 zloty.

In 1941 in Warsaw, 80 Jewish soup kitchens dispensed 120,000 meals every day; the children’s soup kitchen run by the Jewish Self-Help organization served 35,000 meals daily to starving children, many of whom had been orphaned. The soup kitchen meal con
sisted of a thin soup with a small piece of bread. The bread adminis
tered by the Germans contained 33 percent sawdust. By 1942, the number of soup kitchens had increased to 145, and children’s kitchens to 45; Jewish Self-Help dispensed 60,000 bowls of soup to the elderly, the sick and children unable to walk to the soup kitchen.
⁷⁰

The
London News Chronicle
of May 1942 published the account of a woman who had fled Warsaw and escaped to Palestine.
⁷¹
It was her estimate that 10,000 Jews were dying every month.
⁷²

Between February and April 1941, over 44,000 refugees arrived in Warsaw; of the thousands of children in shelters, more than 42 percent were infested with lice. In the summer of 1941, the health of the refugee children was deplorable: just 13 percent were in good physical condition, 35 percent were ‘tolerably healthy,’ and 52 percent were in poor to bad health. By early 1942, their health status had worsened considerably; now only 30 percent were in good health and 65 percent were in very poor health; 54 percent of the children examined were ‘filthy and full of lice.’
⁷³
By late 1941, the death rate amongst all children in the ghetto was between 25 percent and 35 percent, depending on whether the children were in hospital, shelters or living with parents or relatives in rooms or cellars, and with a great many on the streets. A year later, more than 95 percent of all children in the ghetto had been murdered – either through starvation, disease or extermination in the death camps.

To give some sense of the magnitude of these death rates, compare the following: in 1941 the yearly death rate of patients in hospitals in the USA was 3.9 percent. In the Jewish Central Hospital in Warsaw it was 20.3 percent; in the Jewish children’s hospital, 24 percent. In 1941, 47,428 Jews died in Warsaw.
⁷⁴

What was required was a political vision, and there was plenty of that in the partisan units in the forests and in resistance organiza
tions inside the ghettos. Indeed, it was the failure of political vision, and the reliance on historical practices of accommodation, that con
tributed to the doom of the Jewish population of Europe. Given the acquiescent character of the historical and religious traditions of ‘resistance’ in dealing with the enemy, the political vision of the secularist found itself swamped by the hopelessness of starvation and death and the annihilation of children.

It is, of course, true that massive resistance, given the circumstances, would have been extremely difficult; the illusion of saving the remnant which the Germans fostered, the historical tradition of non-violence in the Diaspora community, the lack of any significant assistance from the surrounding Polish population, made resistance appear to be hopeless. Ringelblum persistently heard criticism of Jewish inaction from his contacts with the Polish resistance; yet, the
Polish resistance had no first-hand contact with the ghetto starvation, demoralization and dislocation following resettlement. To have expected anything like mass resistance was itself an illusion.

Yet, other political and psychological factors need to be accounted for in the politics of ghetto administration. The
Judenrat
discouraged the Zionists and communists from organizing and gave little money for active self-defense; indeed, well into the massive deportations in spring and summer of 1942 in Warsaw, the
Judenrat
operated on the remnant mentality. It would be wrong, however, to argue that inaction derived only from causes within the ghetto. The German war on Jewish children and infants, the vast relocation of rural populations to urban ghettos, the despair caused by daily, random deaths, corpses lying unburied in the streets, the insidious German manipulation of the
Judenrat
, the killing and brutalizing of the rabbis, contributed enormously to a collective state of mind in which the masses were convinced that no matter what they did, they were doomed.

Those who worked with various resistance organizations within the ghetto managed to purchase some weapons, but they were of inferior quality, very expensive and, by 1942, very difficult to come by. In Warsaw, Ringelblum writes: ‘After long, very long efforts, arms were received but in such a small quantity and of such bad quality that there was no possibility of undertaking any [collective] defensive action.’
⁷⁵

The situation was made worse by what appeared to be an increase of Polish anti-Semitism during the war. A Polish resistance fighter, Aurealia Wylezynska, active in aiding Jews, wrote in her diary: ‘A wave of anti-Semitism has engulfed the Polish people … . We are surrounded by a nest of vipers, characters from the underworld of crime… . For every hundred evil men, it is hard to find even one noble soul.’ Another Polish resistance fighter, Adam Polewka, wrote shortly after the war: ‘The Germans will throw stones at Hitler dead, because he brought about the downfall of the German people, but the Poles will bring flowers to his grave as a token of gratitude for his freeing Poland from the Jews.’ With sentiments like this amongst the Polish population, the necessary relations between a broad-based supportive popular movement, willing to give aid to a Jewish mass resistance, could not have existed.
⁷⁶
It should also be noted that many individual Poles gave assistance to Jews;
Ringelblum’s diaries, for example, refer time and again to courageous Poles who offered assistance, support and shelter from the Germans. But he also, and as frequently, expressed bitterness at the indifference, or worse, the support of the vast majority of the population for the Germans’ war against the Jews.

Inevitably, Ringelblum’s scorn returns to the
Judenrat
:

‘The fairy tale about the “resettlement” in the East supported by the
Judenrat
and by the band of Gestapo agents brought in from Lublin [informers supplying the Germans with information and spreading false rumors], was so widely accepted by the Jews that thousands of people who were starving as a result of the constant cordons and the complete stoppage of smuggling presented themselves at the
Umschlagplatz
[the train depot in the ghetto transporting Jews to Treblinka and Sobibor]
voluntarily
in order to be sent to work in the east.’
⁷⁷