Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Page 11
Violence, then, in the administration of these political bonds took on a powerful valence of goodness. It possessed an ethical component: killing was a requirement for membership in all partisan units. No member of a partisan unit, whether the family units or the fighter-only brigades, whether Jew or Soviet, regarded violence as morally inappropriate action. Informer Jews were ruthlessly executed. If killing an informant could save a Jewish child, then violence became a holy duty, an act of moral goodness.
In the family bands, children for the most part collected berries or mushrooms and performed odd jobs around the camp, but some did fight. Children grew up quickly in the forests. An eleven-year-old partisan fighter reports the following: ‘Once, Kolodko, the village chieftain of Zaczepice, informed on us. We found out about it. We went to him, supposedly on a “courtesy call,” and shot him dead. We avenged ourselves like this against five peasants who informed on us.’8
The more the partisan units harnessed violence to the rescue aims of the group, the more the group succeeded in its protective functions. The more vicious the band towards informers and collaborators, the easier it was to enlist support from the peasants for supplies. The more violence was used against German patrols, the less likely it was that the patrols would undertake search-anddestroy missions. The more ruthless the fighters were towards those who killed and tortured Jews, the less likely were others to engage in similar behavior. Partisan violence never produced indiscriminate consequences; it focused on specific ends. It had a limited aim, very much unlike German violence, which destroyed anyone in its way, including the innocent.
Partisan political organization had as its fundamental guiding project the pursuit of violence; but a discriminate violence, to be exercised against those who had transgressed the line between barbarity and civility. In the case of the Bielski Brigade, violence was pursued concurrently with the rescue of anyone in need of shelter from the brutalization of the German assault. In the ghettos, it had been a totally different story. The Judenrate, for the most part, encouraged withdrawal from violent engagement; they preached a disdain for action and a belief that ‘reason’ and self-interest would eventually triumph; that if one sat down with German officials, certain arrangements could be made. Strong arguments in the ghetto opposing this view rarely were accorded a public forum. Partisan and underground leaders understood, if not explicitly then certainly intuitively, that in the world the Germans inhabited, it was not reason that defined moral order and law, but a psychology of domination intent on expunging all impurity – and that meant the Jews – from the universe.
It is not that violence was redemptive in any religious sense; rather, violence reclaimed the self from a shattered psychological universe. To crave violence, to pursue violent reprisal, meant the self restored to itself faith in human possibility, in the value of community. Killing Germans and collaborators simultaneously affirmed community and what community signified politically and socially: a home (even if it was no more than a hut); crude workshops, meager but adequate food supplies; herbal medicine (root and animal extracts); some faith in the future and trust in the present. The social activity characteristic of partisan life, supported by a politics of violence, depended on human beings demonstrating a faith in life itself – a faith that had been seriously damaged in the ghetto by German brutality. Not to live in fear of imminent starvation; not to live in fear of being discovered in a cramped, filthy, hiding place; not to live as abject, as downtrodden, but to live as a sentient, active, emotion-filled self, producing moral recognitions in which killing Germans meant not transgression but an affirmation of history, tradition, culture and, most importantly, the future of the children – this is what the forests brought to Jews. In the Bielski camp children were taught about the world, not with books but with teachers telling stories, singing songs, going on excursions into the forests, and encouraging children to be children once again instead of beggars, thieves and orphans reduced to despair, madness and hopelessness.
The family camps accepted children but discouraged pregnancies; harsh living conditions, severe weather, the uncertainty of German and collaborator raiding parties, made an environment hostile for infants. Abortions were common in all the family camps, although a few infants were born there. As one Bielski survivor said to me: ‘Our yishuv? We built the book of survival through the barrel of a gun … but we also performed many abortions. We gave life and took life.’
It was not that inspiring, charismatic leadership had no presence in the ghettos. It was there, but hidden, in the undergrounds, away from the community, disguised in proclamations and leaflets but rarely encountered in face-to-face relationships. The covertness of this kind of leadership, its inability to collectively motivate the ghetto, can be traced directly to the Judenrate and their principles of survival. If the underground had been permitted to address the ghetto collectively, if their arguments had been debated publicly in ghetto town meetings, if the Judenrat ‘rationality’ of saving the remnant had been subjected to critical, public inspection, then the undergrounds might have had audiences of more than a few hundred; they might have been able to work with the traditional leaders on techniques to resist the Germans; they might have placed the philosophy of saving the remnant before the community, even though most Jews were predisposed to inaction. But with very few exceptions, Judenrate and undergrounds and partisans worked at cross-purposes, a point consistently argued in underground pamphlets and publications.
Underground leaders, at the time, were acutely aware of the failure of traditional leadership. The unwillingness, then, of the Judenrate to admit the undergrounds to their governing councils was indeed a failure of leadership and a failure of authority. This is not a question of the benefit of hindsight; it was an issue apparent to what the undergrounds consistently wanted, what they publicized in their leaflets, in their incessant pleas to the Judenrate to listen to their arguments, to allow them to publicize German atrocities. That the vast majority of the Judenrate chose to collaborate rather than to listen to their own people, to the most courageous leaders in their communities, undoubtedly had a considerable impact on why millions met their deaths worn out from the very struggle with life.
Violence and the recovery of self
For Frantz Fanon the oppressed calls his world into question through the use of ‘absolute violence.’ It is the human and psychological condition for the recovery of identity. ‘For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settlers, his glance no longer shrivels me nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence.’9 Much the same can be said for resistance and partisan groups of Jews during the Holocaust. In looking at Fanon’s theory of violence, his concept of the colonized becomes, in the context of the Holocaust, the ‘being-ness’ of the Jew, the oppressed, the exploited, the ‘wretched of the earth,’ which the Jew was for the German.
In an extraordinary passage from Aimé Césaire’s Les Armes Miraculeuses, Fanon locates a moral story in the oppressed’s redemption through violence: ‘There is not anywhere in the world a poor creature who’s been lynched or tortured in whom I am not murdered and humiliated.’ In the next passage, the rebel enters the master’s house: ‘The master was there, very calm … and our people stopped dead… . it was the master… . I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm.’ But the rebel saw fear in the master’s eyes and he ‘struck … and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today.’10 Analogous accounts appear in underground and partisan memoirs; the Jew, striking, killing a collaborator, and the sense of exhilaration and rebirth such action provoked.
Violence is reciprocal; it feeds off itself; when the oppressed find their voice, their violence matches that of the oppressor. It is messy, but what distinguishes the oppressed in their violent phase is their sense of purpose, what Fanon calls the ‘point of no-return,’ when the first act of killing marks off the rebel as actor from the oppressed as passive recipient of violence. At that
point, ‘violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities’; violence adheres with identity, recovers selfhood, while ‘the practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain.’11 The Jewish underground fighter initiated into the group, the relationship between the fighter and his weapon, the Bielski band’s sense of great victory at the successful expedition of its fighting units, the accounts of partisan fighters filled with pride after having engaged in a violent action against a German or collaborator; all this evidence suggests a positive correlation between the practice of violence and the recovery of a vitalized community. This certainly was Fanon’s belief in relation to the Algerian peasants’ subservience and victimization at the hands of the French. ‘Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.’12 And it was a recurrent theme in my interviews with partisan survivors.
The eleven-year-old Jewish boy who kills his first German feels a sense of victory and vindication at the very act of destruction. No guilt or remorse appears in partisan accounts, although survivors like Sonia O. continue to struggle with the moral implications of group murder and execution. In a videotape of surviving members of the Bielski Brigade, one man says quite matter-of-factly that they had to kill, that it was a part of their life, but in his eyes and his wife’s you witness a sense of vindication and pride at having encountered the German oppressor on the ground of violence. For Fanon, ‘life [for the colonized] can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler,’13 for the Jew, out of the rotting corpse of the German. The oppressor divides the world into the good and the evil; ‘the Manicheanism of the settler produces a Manicheanism of the native.’ But this is all to the good, because it incites resolve with singularity of purpose; it dissolves the sense of limiting action and replaces a cautious model of action with a radical one. In Fanon’s words, ‘To the theory of the “absolute evil of the native,” the theory of the “absolute evil of the settler” replies.’14 To the absolute evil of the Jew, the Jew replies with the absolute evil of the German, Nazi collaborator, turncoat; action as violence realizes in practice this Manicheanism carved into the spirit. Rather than degrading the self, this purposeful violence fulfils the self.
The Germans, to use Fanon’s words, had taken away ‘the warming, light-giving centre where man and citizen develop and enrich their experience in wider and still wider fields’; for Jewish resistance fighters, violence brought that experience back, enabling the community to exist and survive. When the masses, Fanon argues, give ‘free rein to their bloodthirsty instincts,’ action, rather than ruining character, restores it and gives it purpose and a sense of place in a tormented history and potentially redemptive future.
Oppression kills the self, maims human motive and distorts the natural aggressiveness necessary to engage in violent action. However, the stunted self, the self shorn of its human properties, the dissociated, alienated self, literally reverses itself through violence; and in the process of coming together as a revolutionary community, the oppressed discharge ‘the hampered aggressivity’ and destroy oppression ‘as in a volcanic eruption.’15 The result is catharsis, rebirth, a psychic moving outwards in a burst of energy and rage that brings back to the group its human and political identity. In violent action, ‘the evil humours are undammed and flow away with a din as of molten lava.’16 But in captivity, in oppression, ‘the native’s back is to the wall, the knife is at his throat (or more precisely, the electrode at his genitals).’17 But when these fears dissolve in action, ‘a people becomes unhinged, reorganizes itself, and in blood and tears gives birth to very real and immediate action.’18 In conditions of oppression, ‘the psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and finds outlet’ in behaviors which work in the interest of the oppressor (group infighting, the use of drugs, theft, black markets, intra-group exploitation).
The colonist tries to break down community and enforce a regime where individuals find themselves locked into their own fear, their ‘own subjectivity.’ This produces isolation, makes it difficult to transcend or break through domination. Action obliterates this paralysis, ‘where even in its own universe, amongst its own people, each self is enemy to everyone else.’ Instead, what revolutionary violence accomplishes is a reinforcing of the consciousness of community, ‘brother, sister, friend – these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie.’19 Through violence, the political meaning of these words is rediscovered, and all in the community come to see themselves as common participants – not isolated units trying to survive at all costs, a state of mind typical in Holocaust diaries describing the horrifying conditions of ghetto life: ‘So when I as a settler [Jew] say, “My life is worth as much as the settler’s [German’s],” his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone’20 – for example, the difference between the deliberations of the Vilna Judenrat and the Bielski partisans, the former reinforcing the power of the German to turn the Jew into stone, the latter, confronting the German presence with a massive negative of the effort at petrification. Fanon’s natives ‘live in the atmosphere of doomsday’;21 so do the resistance fighters, a sense of imminence defined by the implacable hostility of one group against the other, except that, for the colonized, ‘doomsday’ means not doom for themselves but for the colonialist. The native’s work is to imagine all possible means of destroying the settler. So too for the resistance fighter; no compromise is possible. And in an observation that could have come from Tuvia Bielski, Fanon observes:
‘The practice of violence binds [the community] together as a whole since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning.’22
Fanon refuses to leave the argument at the level of violence alone; he realizes the critical importance of the formation of community accompanying the practice of violence. This is where, for example, Tuvia Bielski’s theory of the absolute necessity of a Jewish community as the backdrop for the fighters bears a fascinating resemblance to Fanon’s arguments. Violence by itself may be cathartic, but it lacks political force and focus; community gives violence its structuring properties, while containing its effects. The practices of communal exchange and rebuilding that follow on violence guarantee the community’s future as a political entity. Violence creates the possibility for a regeneration of community; it is not a substitute for it. Bielski constantly made this argument not only with his own people, but with the Russians, their commanders and with other partisan units. In Fanon’s words, ‘The leader realizes, day in and day out, that hatred alone cannot draw up a programme: You will only risk the defeat of your own ends if you depend on the enemy (who of course will always manage to commit as many crimes as possible) to widen the gap and to throw the whole people on the side of the rebellion.’23 Hatred requires a process of structuring in community; of harnessing action/violence components and transforming those components into a community that lives for today and tomorrow. This is what imparts to violence its political meaning and practice. What was remarkable about the partisans was how political they could be when necessary, when the metamorphosis of violence into politics – for example, Bielski dealing with the Russian commanders
– meant saving the integrity of the community itself. Uncontained, cathartic violence for Fanon could not sustain revolution; it had to be transmuted into structure and communal practice; and that transformation is what gave the rebels strength in their political confrontation with the French. Similarly with the partisans: what enabled the resistors to survive in the loose collective of Soviet-sponsored bands was not only the strength of these fighting units, but the demonstrative power of whom they represented as community, a fighting entity surviving in the midst of German annihilatory violence.
There is an account in the diaries of the Lodz ghetto of a woman released from a mental hospital (or a hospital ward housing the insane) who went to a guard post and asked the sentry to shoot her. He obliged, but not before he insisted she dance for him. Madness, lunacy, appears in many different forms in Holocaust ghetto life: in the blank stares of lice-ridden children, sitting in gutters filled with human refuse; in the empty faces of those starving to death, those who had lost entire families to the Germans; in the wailing of orphans desperately looking for their parents; in the catatonic withdrawal of adults who lost the will to live. Possibly the violence of the resistance movements served as moments of lucidity or reawakening to one’s humanity and willfulness, in the midst of a universe thoroughly turned inside-out, dedicated to destroying the will. Violence kept resistance fighters from falling over the edge into incoherence or madness; the undergrounds, the partisan groups in the forest, were composed of human beings who had been driven to distraction by loss, suffering and pain, but who nonetheless managed to transcend the indignities imposed on their bodies, families and minds by the Germans. Violence did bring lucidity, a kind of reasoning born of circumstances certainly not normal in our understanding of ‘normal.’ We do not regard it as healthy to engage in acts of murderous violence, but in the madness created by the Germans, maybe the resistance unit constructed lucid intervals filled with clarity over one’s meaning as a human being and the obligation one had to support the community, a lucidity that paradoxically allowed individuals to regain their humanity, will and sense of a common purpose. It would be wrong to speak of this kind of violence as normal, but in the context of that time, it did work, it did bring lucidity and hope, and for many, it enabled them to survive: ‘the partisans were hunting down the Germans. Our spirits were high. We were enthusiastic and vengeful, glad to batter the enemy.