Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Read online

  These survivor-fighters, who killed without remorse, arrived in New York or Los Angeles or Montreal with five dollars in their pocket, and, using the rage that sustained them during their resistance, transformed that energy into building new lives for themselves. As I sat in these well-ordered living rooms, houses of immaculate cleanliness, I saw not only persons who had attained every measure of worldly success, but also proud parents and despairing memories, both simultaneously expressed, but each filled with pride at having preserved their Jewish identity, and pride in knowing this identity had taken root in the next generation. I saw a respect for the country that gave them a new life, a memory for the loved ones not returning, and a rock-solid commitment to give their children a security denied their own youth. I heard then not age, but passions, traveling across time; even with the force of memory and the outrage as fresh as it was in 1945, these ex-partisans revealed an indestructible humanity and dignity.

  Both the resistance fighters who did survive and the spiritual fighters who did not, such as Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Warsaw, acted in the world of faith, with great willfulness. There were many examples of partisans and spiritual leaders who refused to be destroyed by barbarism. Each fought in special venues to preserve a religious and cultural identity; each refused to accept the oppressor’s concept of how they should be and act. Each claimed sovereignty over a psychological space they fought ferociously to protect. What is clear is that they refused the German objective of breaking down and annihilating the spirit. It is then not enough to admire the violent resistors or to acknowledge resistance only from those who fought in the forests and the underground. In the company of men and women like Miles Lerman, Sonia Bielski, Vernon Rasheen, Sonya Oshmam, Frank Blaichman, Schlomo Berger and Ben Kamm stand spiritual leaders like Rabbi Shapira and Rabbi Oshry of Vilna, who fought for the very core of the Jewish faith: the words of the Torah and the presence of God. Even in the face of his tremendous loss, the death of his family outside a Warsaw hospital, Rabbi Shapira’s sermons bear living testimony to the endurance of faith, to the capacity of the spirit to withstand oppression. It is faith that emerges victorious in these stories of violent and spiritual resistance, men and women refusing to relinquish faith in surviving horror.

  It would be a mistake to dismiss the faith of men like Rabbi Shapira, to see it as a futile gesture at retaining a theological position, to relegate that voice to the silence of time. Rabbi Shapira’s voice resonates through time. It was resilient and strong in Warsaw, and even though he never counseled violent resistance, he refused to bow before the German authorities. While not using the language of political power, Rabbi Shapira refused to be silenced, and his story in its own way is as compelling as those of the partisan and underground fighters. In his refusal to stop writing, to stop arguing with God, his refusal to stop delivering sermons, Rabbi Shapira, like the violent resistors, affirmed a community’s place in time and history, while simultaneously denying German power over his mind and ethics. He writes in a book of instruction for his Yeshiva students: ‘As long as my soul remains within me, I will not part with it.’1 He could not be broken, and the unshakeable presence of his faith provided an example of endurance until his death in November 1943. Even though the Jewish community faced annihilation, these resistors survived the attack on spirit and never relinquished an emotional and psychological attachment to an identity sustained by ancient texts and nurtured by cultural practices. That alone, the survival of faith embedded in words and practice, and the sustaining of a tradition in time, demonstrated the power of violent and spiritual resistance, and the courage of the men and women who fought with body, spirit and will.

  Yet the stories also bring with them uncomfortable moral positions and ethical interpretations. As one survivor put it to me: ‘We made up our own ethics in the forests, since the old ethics only meant death.’ Much in partisan action involved revenge and retaliation against the murder of defenseless Jewish men, women and children. Partisans had to kill; make decisions over whether to let infants live or die; whether to admit unarmed escapees from local ghettos into their partisan units. Much of the compassion exhibited by the writing of Jewish law during that period concerned impossible moral dilemmas in a community facing annihilation. One rabbi, for example, was asked by a young Jewish woman whether Jewish law would allow her to become the mistress of a Polish man because, by doing so, she could save her life. And there were the women who inadvertently smothered their infants while hiding from roundups who asked rabbis whether God would forgive them for such a tragedy.

  Rabbinical preaching develops against a backdrop of increasing psychological and physical breakdown in the ghettos. How are we to understand Rabbi Shapira’s insistence on the absolute character of faith in an environment where children die on the streets; where starvation, illness and madness claim hundreds of lives each day; where entire families are transported to Treblinka and Sobibor?2 What is the ethical and practical meaning of ‘faith’ in a world where corpses seem to be more numerous than the living?3 It is questions like these and their understanding in the context of spiritual and violent resistance that constitute the focus of this book. I want to look at the partisan point of view; but to interpret it through choices they found difficult to make; and the kinds of demands which a murderous environment placed on the partisans’ evolving, new moral positions.4 Similarly with the spiritual resistor: what psychological and moral space was created by spiritual resistance and how might we see that space, in historical retrospect, as an act of negation, in effect saying to the enemy, ‘You may massacre my body, but I give you nothing of my soul’? Or as it was put by a Hasidic Jew in a small Polish ghetto: ‘They can take my body – but not my soul! Over my soul they have no dominion!’5 Was spiritual resistance to be admired or was it, as many partisan survivors described it, ‘futile gestures, with not even the hope of saving lives’? Lastly, and very simply, what I wish to convey in this book is that during the Holocaust, the Jews, in a number of different venues, mounted significant resistance; and that knowledge of such resistance should put an end to the all too common belief that the Jews did nothing to resist their own fate.

  The Moral Justification for Killing

  He sits across from me, in a nondescript Manhattan hotel coffee shop, but his enthusiasm fills the room. What a likeable guy is Zvi Bielski, the son of a leader of one of the most successful Jewish resistance groups. The Bielski Unit, operating in the Byelorussian forests, composed of 1,200 Jews, 300 of them fighters and the rest a support community, survived virtually intact at the end of the war. The unit suffered just five percent casualties over a three-year period, an extraordinary achievement considering that most resistance units suffered over fifty percent casualties. Listening to Zvi describe his father, I find myself fascinated by Zush [Zeisal] Bielski, his courage and – from his son’s perspective – his ferocity. It is almost as if Zush is sitting there. His son’s admiration for his father is infectious; I am drawn to this courageous fighter, even though Zvi’s narrative depicts him as a fearsome and often implacable man. Yet, as Zvi reminds me, ‘Survival was at stake; you had to be merciless.’ Zush and his fighters were merciless; they killed without guilt, without hesitation. They killed Germans, collaborators and, in a few instances, families of collaborators, to drive home the point that Jews were not to be handed over or betrayed.

  Zush died in 1995; his brother, Tuvia, passed away in 1988. Tuvia, in Zvi’s account, comes across as a stirring, determined leader, a political and organizational genius, able to hold in check his impetuous brother and to negotiate with Soviet generals the status and supply of his unit. Yet, Zvi insisted in pointing out to me that Tuvia’s political success, in the complex world of Soviet partisan politics and Russian anti-Semitism, depended on awareness on the

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  part of the Russians that the Bielski Unit would kill to protect itself and its integrity. And if the Russians tried to disband the exclusively Jewish Bielski group, that would be met wit
h violent resistance. Generally, the Soviets discouraged and did actively dismantle Jewish partisan units. In part this had to do with the Soviets’ belief that no unit should have a ‘religious’ or ‘nationalistic’ identity; but much stemmed from the Soviet partisans’ anti-Semitism and an unsympathetic and often hostile reaction to Jewish units.

  Zvi Bielski minces no words about his father’s position, and while he consistently pointed out to me that there are many interpretations of how the Bielskis operated, there is no doubt about the reason for their success: their willingness to use violence to defend the group, and to make the point that collaboration and betrayal would not be tolerated. ‘My Dad often said that if he had fired more bullets, he might have saved more people.’ Zush’s first wife and baby had been killed by the Germans; they never made it to the forests. His bitterness transformed into a mission with a dual purpose: to kill the enemy and to save as many Jews as possible.

  ‘People were afraid of my father. The Bielskis, if they had to, would wipe out an entire village as an example not to kill Jews. Zush went into ghettos to recruit and told young people if they came with him they might have a chance at survival … make no mistake about it; these guys were vicious killers when they had to be … Bandits, but their violence was not indiscriminate; they killed only to protect themselves.’

  Zush never operated in a gray area. No middle ground defined his behavior; it was either kill or be killed; the objective was to survive for the day, the week, the month. Zush and his fighters intimidated and threatened peasants for food, but never killed for food; their victims were those who gave away Jewish positions, spies sent by the Germans and any German unit that managed to penetrate the dense Byelorussian forests where the unit survived. Ferocity kept this band of Jews alive. ‘My Dad said to me a million different ways, we needed to survive, but if they fucked with us, we would kill them… . I would kill at a moment’s notice.’

  When I asked Zvi about his father’s attitude to spiritual resistance, which is also a subject of this book, he summed it up in a terse comment of his father’s concerning religious Jews. ‘Davening [praying] for what? God is not going to show up here; what we need is guns; if there is a God, what the hell is he doing to us?’ Zush’s reaction expresses little ambivalence; it was, however, not the case that spiritual resistance in partisan and underground units disappeared altogether. As I will argue, it was there in subtle forms, but spiritual resistance possessed little meaning and significance for most resistance fighters.

  Simon Trakinski, active in the Vilna underground and later with partisans in the forest, tells an interesting story about spiritual resistance. He had been in a labor group periodically taken outside the ghetto to work. A young Talmudic scholar worked beside him.

  ‘Someone in the group asked this devout Jew, “Whom would you prefer, Stalin or Hitler?” He thought for a while and then said Stalin would be worse than Hitler. We were of course quite surprised by this; Hitler and the Germans murdered Jews every minute and every day, and Stalin and the Soviets fought. “How can you say that; look at what’s happening,” we said. But his response surprised me. “Look at what’s really going on. Hitler will not succeed; those Jews who survive will come to life again and restore the Jewish community and be more Jewish, more devout than before. But under Stalin Jews will disappear; they will be assimilated; their religious artifacts will disappear; and if the Jews don’t end up in Siberia, they will disappear into Russian culture and lose their sense of Jewish identity. Stalin wants to do away with Jewish cultural institutions and practices; he is therefore more dangerous. With Stalin’s aim of breaking down Jewish identity, before long there will be no Jews at all; no culture, memory, remembrance and no prayer. Shuls and artifacts will be lost; bodies might remain, but their historical sense of Jewishness and their religious theology will be lost to time. Stalin therefore is more of a threat than Hitler, because with Stalin there will be no Jews left at all; the Jewish future is dead.” For this guy, only identity mattered; Jewish identity had to be maintained at all costs. He even refused to shave off his beard and hid it in his jacket whenever Germans or locals were around. What a fanatic; but I admired him.’

  Unlike Zush, Simon strongly believed in preserving Jewish customs and rituals, no matter how dangerous. Observance in the forests not only focused his Jewish identity, but emotionally kept him connected to his past.

  ‘We tried to keep up practices; my mother baked matzoth from dark flour; in 1943 when we were fighting in the woods, we fasted on Yom Kippur. We were already very hungry, but we refused to eat and fasted the entire day. You see, we tried to live a normal life; and being an observant Jew meant being a normal Jew. We had to keep up “normality” even in the woods. Religious practice and theological study for most of us had been our normal daily life, particularly during the holidays. We weren’t theologically correct Jews, but the culture of observance had been very much part of our normal life.’

  Zvi, however, forcefully reiterated his father’s position regarding prayer and theology: what saved lives was violent, armed action. It is true, faith could not save Jews from death. But the significance of spiritual resistance should not be ignored. Like the role of prayer and faith in the ghettos and for Jews heading for the gas chambers or the forest, killing needs to be understood as a form of psychological defense, a last-ditch effort to preserve the dignity of the spirit and the integrity of the self. It is a position, I will argue, to be admired and placed in the context of the brutality of German oppression and the genocidal policies of German institutions, including the SS, the army, industry and the professions, especially medicine and science.

  But Zush Bielski, a genuinely brave and fierce man, would have none of the ‘spiritual’: to save lives meant engaging in acts that had nothing to do with spirit or observance. Killing required arms and a willingness to resort to violence that showed no mercy to the enemy.

  ‘Both my Dad and Tuvia knew they were in the toilet bowl of the earth; and they had to get out of it. They were willing to kill, whoever got in their way… . it was both Tuvia’s politics in holding the unit together and in dealing with the Soviets, and my Dad’s hatred and toughness that allowed the unit to survive.

  But the Bielskis were not just about killing; they were also about saving people.’

  Listening to Zvi describing his father, it was hard not to be drawn to Zush Bielski and to think that if more Jews had been as fierce, maybe the slaughter would not have been as vicious or as genocidal. Yet, the story is much more complex; and it would be wrong to condemn Jews for not resisting more or to have expected more resistance than there was. I shall look at factors that blocked the possibilities for resistance. Much Jewish behavior had been conditioned by history and the culture of getting by and negotiating differences. But the suddenness of the German advance and the unremitting war the Germans waged against Jewish children and Jewish families through ghettoization and the policy of mass reprisals severely restricted the Jewish response. Yet, it is impossible, now, not to admire the courage of the fighters and the charisma of men like Zush Bielski.1

  Zvi left me with a story of his father and Tuvia, both in their sixties, living in Brooklyn, and an image of determination that reflects where they came from:

  ‘I had just bought a new Harley Davidson bike; I was a teenager really excited about riding this magnificent machine. I’m standing in front of my house about ready to start it up; my Dad and Tuvia are outside watching me. Suddenly my Dad says, “Get off that damn bike; I’m going to ride it.” Tuvia is standing there laughing, saying to me, “That fucking guy, he can do anything.” I don’t know if either of them had ever ridden a bike before. So, Zush grabs the bike; Tuvia climbs on the back, and they both roar off down the street. Tuvia and Zush Bielski, heroes of the Holocaust, saviors of 1,200 Jews, careening down the street on the back of a Harley in Brooklyn. What a sight!’

  Decisiveness, guts and courage appear in the narratives of resistance survivors. It is not that they
are saying ‘we were stronger than the others who died’; but through luck, and the bitter conviction they were doomed, they would rather die fighting. That desperation, what was required no matter the cost, the awareness that the Germans were imposing a universe full of death with no way out, forged an urgency that emerges in the power of their words.

  After the initial German occupation of his village, not far from Lublin, Frank Blaichman wanders in the forest, lost, confused, as are all those he meets who managed to escape the German roundup. He is afraid: ‘My insides are crying because I knew my parents, my family had been put on transports.’ He speaks of Poles raping Jewish women, random killing of children and old people by both Poles and Germans; he organizes a unit who arm themselves initially with pitchforks and sticks. He extorts his first weapon by disguising his pitchfork as a rifle and intimidating a local peasant into turning over his guns.

  Frank tells me he became a new man when he overcame his fear of being killed, when death no longer mattered, when the bitterness of his family’s murder turned into hate. At that moment, he said he could act; his ‘destiny was in our [fellow resistance fighters’] hands.’ If refugee campsites had not been protected by resistance fighters, the Germans and local collaborators would have murdered everyone in them. ‘If you had fear, you couldn’t survive; so we did all we could to instill fear of us in the villagers; they knew we would execute collaborators.’ When Frank’s unit captured collaborators, they interrogated them, found out who had sent them to spy or had paid them for betraying positions and then killed them. ‘Some of these guys begged for mercy; but we said to them, “What mercy did you give to our people?” After executing collaborators, the unit felt great … they could no longer hurt us; it gave us a feeling of pride and satisfaction at knowing we could protect our people.’ His unit even managed to hide a group of children in a bunker near the house of a farmer whom they threatened to kill if he gave away the children’s position. ‘We never sought big battles with the Germans; we did what we had to do, to protect our people. The villagers were afraid of both us and the Germans.’