Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Read online

  Vengeance for most partisan fighters took on the status of a faith; it forged the group’s ends and purposes, and the purpose of life itself. This, however, was not the case with the Bielski partisans, at least not Tuvia Bielski’s primary purpose. Rescue, as political organization and partisan cooperation, molded values, and forest life proceeded around the reality, not fantasy, of rescue. Vengeance always was there; but it did not constitute the day-to-day policy. This is not to say the fighters never went on expeditionary or reprisal raids. Bielski’s group killed when it had to, whether the victims were Germans, collaborators or peasants who had tortured and killed Jews. The Bielski partisans, as skilled guerrilla fighters as any partisan band, pursued vengeance enthusiastically. However, from the very beginning, Bielski formulated his detachment’s ‘general will’ as that of saving Jews; and rescue took precedence over all other factors – including vengeance.

  Bielski’s Rousseauian community42 demonstrates how fragile traditional values in dealing with the ‘outsider’ are in an environment where the political and cultural rules of the game have been shattered. What today we take for granted – individuality, tolerance, skepticism, suspension of belief, respect for the rules of the game, and so on – in the ghettos and forests became serious dangers to life. Intellectuals, humanists, nonconformists, were despised in partisan units; and practices associated with civil society, for example, voting, had no place or context for practice. Those navigating the difficult ghetto escapes were young Jews capable of enduring physical hardship, finding weaponry, and surviving in harsh and minimalist conditions. The partisan units preferred strong leadership to consensus decision-making. In the forests, bickering could result in fatal delays. What Jews for centuries regarded as an uncivil way of life – the use of violence, extortion and murder, the submersion of individuality for group cohesion – transformed in the forests into the critical moral and political instruments of survival.

  If one refused to adapt to the fighter’s moral universe, to the concept of a hierarchy based on military prowess, then the likelihood of survival in the forest was greatly diminished. If one adapted to and accepted that reality, then survival was greatly enhanced. In the ghettos, suspicion of the underground, a refusal to accept its programs, repeated efforts to placate the Germans, the withdrawal into individualistic forms of adaptation, all these classic features of Jewish cultural life haunted the community until it was too late; until starvation, executions, mass reprisal and psychological desolation stifled any hope of collective resistance.

  In The Future of an Illusion,43 Freud argued that religion cripples and debilitates the self by making it dependent on illusions and not reality. But conditions in the forests proved Freud wrong. In the forest, the religion of vengeance, the communal values of group identity, so central to religious consciousness, were the major dynamic behind survival. Freud’s scientific imagination, his rationalist bent, his skepticism, had little efficacy in the harsh life that faced those fortunate enough to escape the ghetto. The religion of the oppressed – vengeance – and the ideology of violence and retribution played a crucial role in cementing a generative relation between self and group and in assuring some chance of survival.

  Human and constitutional protections of dignity and life which we take so much for granted were quickly annihilated by German violence, and German barbarity succeeded in destroying political resistance in the ghettos. Those partisans who survived were resourceful enough and, in their words, ‘lucky enough’ to figure out ways to confront barbarism on its own terms, by the use of violence to cripple the enemy and break its will to dominate. But in my conversations with survivors, including those who were not part of any partisan or underground resistance, what appears with striking clarity is a theme returned to time and again: the belief that by killing Germans and collaborators, partisans were acting for all Jews.

  Spiritual Resistance: Understanding its Meaning

  Recording and witnessing: what is being seen

  Diaries and survivor accounts are united by one overriding fact: the power of the German assault, its suddenness, its attack not only on body but also on mind and reason. Ghetto diaries describe human life slowly withering away; orphaned children, the elderly dying in the streets; food supplies diminishing; wealthy Jews turning in a matter of weeks into beggars; black markets and smuggling; families torn apart; people sinking into madness; random attacks from Germans and locals; and moral disintegration under the pressure of survival and the German policy of reprisals. Everywhere Jews looked, not only did brutality define the landscape but a community appeared whose leadership had fallen prey to German lies and whose spiritual leadership struggled with impossible human, moral and psychological demands.

  Beaten, killed, starved, degraded, stripped of all possessions and dignity, the individual Jewish self undergoes trauma, madness, unimaginable from the vantage of normal day-to-day life. Madness comes to define much of daily life in the ghetto, and much in the rabbinical response to the Holocaust, including the writing and adapting of Jewish law, is an effort to contain, or at least provide some comfort to, a community facing madness and annihilation.

  No area of Jewish life is more subject to ambiguity in understanding resistance, particularly regarding defenses against madness, than the role of spiritual and religious leaders and the place of theology during the Holocaust. Evidence appears in anecdotal form: rabbinical stories,

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  first-person accounts, Jewish law or Halakhah written during the Holocaust, classical texts (Talmud, Midrash, Kabbalah); rabbinical recollections and reflection.1 The evidence paints a picture of a theologically unshakeable and courageous rabbinate who, with few exceptions, opposed violent resistance.2 Very little in the secular accounts (Zionist, communist, Bundist) questions rabbinical dignity.3 Even partisan diaries are for the most part silent on the role of the rabbis. Some of the literature speaks of rabbis who supported underground activities, although such support was rare. The underground and partisan rage focuses on the Germans, the Judenrate and the Jewish police. These were the truly hated presence; but the resistance was focused. What Emmanuel Ringelblum calls the Jewish ‘masses’ were not. It is in this universe of rapidly declining moral expectations, the loss of hope and the rise of dissociated and mute selves, that theology and faith may have had some impact, or at least that’s the argument I want to make.

  While spiritual resistance may not have saved lives, it may have instilled a psychological refuge inside the self and within the community, where the self’s identity as a person and a Jew could not be touched or degraded by German barbarism. This argument suggests that spiritual resistance and violent resistance reached for the same end: the preservation of self, or sanity, in a moral universe of rapid disintegration and loss of will. Spiritual resistance sought to save the soul, or psyche, from madness through silence in relation to the oppressor, but not silence in relation to God or to the Jewish community itself.

  One of the strangest stories I heard concerning spiritual resistance was that of a Jewish partisan fighter, Sol, forced to masquerade as a Catholic. He did this, he told me, by ‘always remembering that in my soul I was a Jew.’ But the deception saved his life and his will: ‘You ask me why it saved me? Because I got to kill Germans, blow up trains. Every time I shot a German, it felt good. That made it all worthwhile; their death meant nothing to me.’ And throughout this time, all his outward religious practices were Catholic. ‘I had to go to Mass. I had to do confession; but I’d do it all over again. Survive, survive, survive: that was what mattered. I had only one thing on my mind: survival. Sure I became religious during the war; religious like a Catholic. But inside, deep inside, I never forgot I was a Jew.’

  However, for the vast majority of Jews, unlike Ben and the partisans, spiritual resistance possessed a singularly non-violent and silent component in the individual self’s encounter with the aggressor. Many partisan survivors questioned the ‘strategy’ of silence; it did not save lives. But spiritu
al resistance took on political meaning and significance through the symbolism and action of refusal: refusal to succumb to the German assault on religious identity; refusal to allow the genocidal violence to kill the soul, and refusal to spiritually acquiesce to a system of values meant to annihilate the Jewish body and the Jewish faith. As an unknown diarist in the Lodz ghetto put it: ‘Humanity is not dormant … in its own manner your soul bears witness to the eternal, never-to-be vanquished victor who is called “human being”.’4

  Spiritual resistance politically confronted a lynchpin of German strategy: the demoralization of the Jewish community and their leadership, and the effort to destroy will, spirit and faith. Retaining faith in the historical community of the Jews, in the Talmud and cultural practice, was an important spiritual and psychological factor in efforts to counter the rising tide of despair that gripped the ghettos. It may be important here to distinguish between faith in God, a theological injunction, and faith in the community and its identity creating and sustaining functions. Partisan survivors continually made this distinction: to paraphrase, ‘God, where was He?’ as opposed to ‘I never lost my faith in my Jewish identity, history, in the sacredness of practices, and my connections to the community itself … God was somewhere, I guess, but I didn’t know where.’ Yet, given the increasing isolation of the ghettos and the muteness of the population, it is unclear whether faith mattered in preserving sanity, although I think sufficient evidence exists to suggest that it made some difference.

  The example of the rabbis’ courage, for example in attempting to protect Torah scrolls and objects of worship, or conducting religious services under trying circumstances, demonstrates a recognizable form of political resistance. The theological components of Judaism created a spiritual universe where acceptance of death with faith for many came to be regarded as a heroic response to German brutality. This acceptance was called Sanctification of the Name of the Lord. Martyrdom – Kiddush haShem – became for the rabbis, and for those retaining their faith until the end, the pivotal form of communal spiritual resistance. Theology had a profound effect on what the Jewish masses understood of fate and destiny. But it is not clear how strong a hold the theological explanation of the Holocaust had on the Jewish community or whether it provided a safe psychological harbor from German brutality. Certainly, many continued to believe in God, even in the undressing rooms of the gas chambers. But it is also true that psychological brutalization induced by the Germans had a profound impact on theological explanation. Religious faith and practice declined in the ghetto, partly because religious practices were banned by the Germans, but also because theology becomes progressively absent in daily life as conditions worsened. Religious faith amongst spiritual leaders becomes more intense, until death itself comes to be seen as a glorious sacrifice, Kiddush haShem.5 For some, even in the grimmest moments of life in the ghetto, lighting a Sabbath candle provided relief from the horror of the outside. By the time individual Jews finally grasped the enormity of their condition, facing the entrance to the death chambers or standing beside the death pits, or watching friends and family die from disease, starvation or cold, the only spiritual universe remaining lay in the faith of martyrdom. How much that counted and for how many we will never know. The concept of spiritual resistance assumes that it may have counted for some.

  Did individual Jews go to their death with the Lord’s Name etched on their consciousness or in sheer bitterness and resignation or even already psychically dead? Evidence points to the fact that Kiddush haShem at the moment of death may have provided spiritual refuge and connection and helped individuals counter the panic accompanying imminent terror. While many survivor accounts reflect great disillusionment with theology and the religious establishment, it is wrong to impugn rabbinical commitment and the rabbinical struggle with theological interpretation. Rabbis demonstrated strong connection with their congregations. Even rabbis separated from their congregations performed religious ceremonies and led in prayer up to the very moment of death. Rabbinical action in protecting sacred objects constituted political resistance; it was public; it involved retaliation by the Germans; and the behavior itself symbolized limits that, if transgressed, would unleash retaliation from the enemy.6 Not even the Polish army in the early days could halt the German advance, much less unarmed, provincial and politically unprepared Jewish spiritual leaders rushing into burning synagogues to save Torah scrolls.

  Spiritual resistance provided an explanation and therefore a meaning for death.7 Entering the gas chamber or standing at the edge of a pit waiting to be shot may not, then, have taken place in a spiritual and psychological void. With the presence and blessing of a rabbi, those waiting for death may have experienced refuge from the horror. No one can know what went through the minds of the millions who died. What we do know is that rabbis in the face of intolerable assault acted with great courage and spiritual resilience, and this alone may have been of critical importance in the bitter recognition of knowing that death was unavoidable. Spiritual resistance, by its very nature, whether in the ghettos or at the doors of the gas chambers, could not be expected to have had the same effect or consequence as violent resistance in rebuilding selves torn down by assault.8

  Once in the forest or underground, the resistance fighter had freedom to act, to be, to define the world in terms unthinkable in the ghetto, where selves had been shattered by the trauma of assault. Yet, almost universally, survivors discounted spiritual resistance. It was a moral lapse in their view, a luxury without empirical consequence, with no impact on saving lives. Ben: ‘That’s absurd, to think that spiritual resistance could have been effective. Tell me, how do you transform spirit into bullets?’ Or, as Miles Lerman put it: ‘Where is spiritual resistance when you hang a collaborator and put a sign on his body saying “This is what happens to collaborators.” We killed and refused to kneel. We were prepared to die… . I remember Moishe, a cheder boy; but was he fierce! In a shoot-out he choked a guy to death, grabbed his machine gun and mowed down some four or five guys. It wasn’t prayer that did that.’

  It is true that in the ghettos religious practice declined, given the demands of basic day-to-day survival and German proscription of religious practice. But religious identity never disappeared. The Jews remained acutely aware of their identity as Jews, not as a negative projection, but as a culture singled out for terrible punishment.9 The rabbis and the theology attempted to counter the negative German projection by clinging to biblical and Talmudic interpretation to reinforce Jewish cultural identity, to resist German assault on beliefs central to the meaning of being a Jew. The rabbis provided a vision of the Jewish self in which suffering possessed a divine significance.10 While from a contemporary perspective this may not be satisfactory as resistance, it would be wrong to take away from the theology this critically important spiritual function in a time of frightening uncertainty.11

  Rabbinical writings and sermons address the issue of theological identity, sometimes with reference to the Holocaust, but often as a commentary on scholarly and Talmudic analysis reflecting on evil, the destruction of the Jewish people and the assault on Jewish identity, practice and property. While religious expression of faith in God diminished in the ghettos, religious affirmation continued as text and exegesis in rabbinical writings, judgments and law for guidance in morally problematic, human dilemmas. For example, a Polish man offered a Jewish girl safety and protection in exchange for sleeping with him. She asks for the rabbi’s guidance. The rabbi formulated a ‘law’ which allowed her to retain her self-respect, yet at the same time take advantage of an opportunity to escape near-certain death. He granted her what amounted to a Talmudic dispensation, acknowledging that strict moral interpretation of law must be balanced against the severity of the times and the sanctity of human life.

  Every day, rabbis had to deal with such dilemmas, what Primo Levi calls the ‘gray zone’ in human and spiritual behavior.12 But underlying these moral quandaries lay a deep despair, a recognition o
f the power of the German death machine. Shalom Cholawski recalls: ‘I will always remember the sight of the mother as she watched her children being dragged away by the Germans. She was hitting her head against the wall, as if to punish herself for remaining silent, for wanting to live.’13

  Rabbinical authority, with a few exceptions, never called for violent, armed resistance; rabbis rarely came into conflict with the Judenrate. Judenrat leaders requested guidance from rabbinical councils on how to handle German demands. Talmudic law and texts would be consulted and then interpretations given: Should the Judenrat hand out labor cards exempting some but not all from selection? Should the Judenrat comply with German demands to assemble 20,000 people in the town square, enabling the SS to make selections for the death camps? Political questions, requiring theological interpretation, involved how far to comply with German demands in deciding who was to live and die, how food should be distributed, where and how apartments and labor tasks should be allocated. As the terror and starvation increased in the ghettos and the random actions of brutality intensified, the rabbis focused increasingly on theological justifications for unprecedented suffering.14