Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Page 3
Participation in these units transcended class and ideological barriers: ‘We become one people, one class.’ But there was also the conviction that what they did required a personal commitment to revenge. ‘What I’m doing, I’m doing for myself, and that meant retaliation for the death of family and loved ones.’ Again, like Zush Bielski, Frank set out a clearly defined moral universe for himself, without any gray areas: ‘We were good to good people and bad to bad people; we created the respect necessary to make people into good people. So Polish and Russian partisans did not mess with our unit; they knew we would cut off their heads if they did.’
With Frank, as with the Bielskis, spiritual resistance played little or no role. ‘With religious Jews it was “with God’s help we will overcome this; and if God wants it another way, who are we to argue with him?” Religious Jews were locked into their beliefs; they had nowhere to go except faith.’ Yet, like all accounts of the Holocaust, the practices of faith present complex moral issues bearing on survival; the going inwards, the power of belief, made a difference, not in the way that violent resistance saved lives, but as a psychological fortress that maintained identity for Jews not as abject slaves but as human beings who faced death with a part of the self untainted by German brutality. Yet, with few exceptions, Frank’s attitude, unlike Simon’s, mirrors resistance fighters’ view of faith. ‘Time did not permit us to be religious … many lost faith; holy Jews got murdered. Our Jewish identity during that period was to try to save as many Jews as possible and to kill as many Germans and collaborators as possible. That did not permit us to be religious.’ But for the Jews who never made it to the forests, who were murdered or starved to death in the ghettos, what did spiritual resistance mean? It is that question that needs to be examined with considerable sensitivity and awareness that for the vast majority of Jews during the Holocaust, the possibility of exit was foreclosed almost immediately after the German occupation.
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 partisans 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 experiences. 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 witnessed 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 feelings 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 survivors 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 remembrance 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 li
stening 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 dangerous 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?’
The ghetto: demoralization and breakdown
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 surprised 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 generated 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 possessed 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 starvation. 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 murdered 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 communities 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 suddenness 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 comfortable 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 countless 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 population 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.