Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Read online

  It is that story – the progressive and unrelenting German assault in the ghettos – that needs to be examined side-by-side with Jewish violent resistance and partisan action. The one cannot be understood without the other, since out of the psychological environment of despair came the ghetto undergrounds and partisans, the fighting units. The resistance faced tremendous odds from the Germans and the despair in the ghettos, although many fighters found moral comfort in the violence of resistance. Lerman:

  ‘We weren’t heroes; I’ll tell you about a hero, a little girl with us, about twelve years old. She had blond hair and blue eyes and looked very Polish. So we would send her on courier missions, to get supplies, send messages, things like that. For medicine we were always in need of iodine; this was before penicillin and iodine was effective in treating a number of different infections. We sent her into a village for a couple of liters of iodine, but she was caught. Someone told us the Germans offered to send her back to her mother if she would talk; if she would tell where our camp was. But she never talked. They tortured her horribly; but she died never having revealed our position. That child, she is the hero. They never intended to return her to her mother; by then her mother probably was dead.’

  The most dramatic underground action – the Warsaw Uprising of spring 1943, when only 50,000 people remained in the ghetto – gathered support from at the most a few hundred fighters.7

  The devastation produced by the massive transports of the previous spring and summer had depleted the community of the sense of itself as a world with a future; life in the ghetto had been reduced to a monumental effort simply to survive physically, with many pacing the empty streets wondering when their turn would come.8 The survivors of previous roundups watched as family members disappeared and died. Diaries of the mass roundups in the summer of 1942 describe children and infants killed or taken to the central train station, forced to wait for days without food or water; parents returning home to find their children missing; children coming home to find their parents victims of roundups. The descriptions of death and dying on the streets, so graphically represented by Roman Polanski’s film, The Pianist, the epidemics that ravaged the ghettos claiming thousands of lives; the absence of food and sanitation, and the processions of death wagons daily, hauled often by children, through the ghetto streets: to read these diary accounts is to witness a physical universe in the process of disintegration.

  The 50,000 left in Warsaw each suffered personally, if not the loss of a child, then the murder of a father, mother or grandparent. No one remained who had not been emotionally devastated by the effects of the transports. When the Germans attacked the ghetto in March 1943, in the final phase of their plan to kill every Jew remaining in Warsaw, the community had little or no resources to support the few hundred fighters. These people could barely survive themselves, and the killing by the Germans that accompanied the uprising decimated the remaining 50,000.

  But underground resistance occurred in a physical and psychological universe where Jews fought back. Lerman: ‘Many understood the power of starvation and many who starved fought back.’ Even in Vilna, Warsaw, Kovno and Bialystok,9 where the underground distributed thousands of leaflets and posters describing the Germans’ intent, the recruitment of fighters faced tremendous obstacles, not the least of which was the fear of the breakup of the family. The attack on family bonds, the war on children, inequality within the ghettos, hierarchies based on proximity to the German command, the possession of labor cards as opposed to their absence, access to food coupons as opposed to little or no access, all were significant factors contributing to German efforts to immobilize the possibility of resistance. Yet, even with the terrible moral choices the resistance had to make, survival hinged on consciousness liberating itself from ghetto mentality and from traditional moral understandings. Lerman again:

  ‘When any of our women had babies, it was an unspoken law the baby would be strangled and killed at the moment of birth. It would have been impossible to have had a baby in those circumstances; they could not be allowed to live. No one talked about it, but it was painful. Perhaps we shouldn’t have killed them; but who knows: even one cry could have given away our positions.

  We were in the forests from 1942 until June 1944 when we were liberated by the Russian army. Perhaps 70–80 percent of our unit survived; if our group hadn’t been in the forest, 90 percent would have perished. Were we lucky? Of course; there was good luck and bad luck; we had good luck. But being partisans we were more likely to have good luck; we could fight, unlike those in the ghetto who all perished. But I could have been one who died; the Germans would burn buildings, round up people randomly and kill them. We all shared the same bitterness, and I have no apologies for my hatred.’

  Morality in the forests had to be drastically revised; survival depended on discarding old moral beliefs. Liberation of self meant, as well, creating military vengeance and rewriting the laws of community.

  What, then, I want to do in the following chapters is to describe and interpret significant moral and ethical positions guiding this effort at resistance. But I will look at the dilemmas and conflicts in resistance as they affected both violent and spiritual resistance. Neither path was an easy one to take; each involved significant moral demands and faith in choices which ultimately meant the difference between life and death and the choice about how one died. The violent resistor had to literally relearn moral positions, creating an ethics adaptive to the demands of survival; the spiritual resistor fought against the ever-present reality of madness and the sinking into apathy. For both, resistance preserved sanity and protected the self’s integrity from the implosive power of genocidal action.

  Collective Trauma: The Disintegration of Ethics

  In Budapest 1944, during the massive German project spearheaded by Adolf Eichmann to exterminate all Hungarian Jews, a group of young Zionists rescued thousands of Jews from the prospect of transport to Auschwitz. Issuing fake identity papers, impersonating German officers and Hungarian Iron Cross troops, finding and establishing safe houses, these young people never relented in their efforts to thwart German plans.1

  In Nesvizh, Poland, a group of Zionist youths formed an underground and began acquiring arms. What stood between this group and their objectives was the Judenrat. One of the underground leaders writes:

  ‘In addition to reorganizing the resistance to strengthen the ghetto community for revolution, it was vital to undermine Maghalief’s position as chairman of the Judenrat. His methods were unscrupulous. He believed that bribery alone would ward off calamity, and since he was our only representative to the German command, he had to be stripped of his power.’2

  In Nesvizh, the sentiment of resistance countered the Judenrat’s approach to appeasing the Germans and selecting Jews for transport. Several ghetto inhabitants inspired by the resistance armed themselves and launched a putative attack against German troops. The German army, with the help of local police, quickly subdued the insurrection. With the ghetto in chaos, many escaped into the surrounding forests. The isolated, but free ghetto inhabitants sought out partisan units.

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  Resistors in the ghetto faced enormous odds.

  ‘So, during the winter of 1942–43, we basically lived like squirrels, hiding in a hole. As you can imagine, the air in the bunker stank like hell. On nights when it was snowing or otherwise very dark, we would lift open the cover of the bunker a bit. Otherwise, we would sit in our hole … no one in our group expected to come out alive from that hell. The main thing was not to be taken alive by the Germans, not to submit to their questions, their torture, and a passive death at their hands. We were always armed and had an understanding that if we were ambushed, we would fight until we were killed. If need be, we would shoot one another rather than be captured. It was inevitable that we would die – but death would come on our terms.

  Once I became used to that idea, I became extremely brave.’3

  Nowhere could the desperate condition
of the ghetto be better witnessed than in the ghetto hospitals. Adina Blady Szwajger, a survivor and a doctor who worked in ghetto children’s hospitals in Warsaw, describes conditions in what can only loosely be described as ‘hospitals’: ‘A not uncommon sight: children appearing at the hospital with their heads and bodies covered with lice’. One child’s head ‘“looked grey”. It was only when you came up close that you could see that the grey mop of hair was moving.’ Ghetto desolation and a loss of will permeate another child’s description of his family’s fate: ‘When my sister died, Papa said it didn’t matter where they buried her because we wouldn’t live to visit her grave anyway. And Papa wrapped her up in paper and took her out into the street.’4 What it feels like to wrap the corpse of your child in paper and deposit her on the street is unimaginable, an act existing in a universe far away from the present. Yet, no huge imaginative leap is required to surmise that such daily occurrences had an enormously depressing impact on the ghetto populations. Homeless, lice-ridden children running through the streets snatching pieces of bread, begging, knocking at doors and dying in the gutter, brought to the ghetto a paralyzing hopelessness. During one German action, Dr. Szwajger administered lethal doses of morphine to infants to keep them out of German hands. Never enough food to satisfy the hunger of sick and dying children, any scraps that became available were viciously fought over.

  ‘One day, on the older children’s ward, the famished skeletons threw themselves at the soup pot, overturned it as they pushed the nurse away, then lapped up the spilt slops from the floor, tearing bits of rotten swede [from the floor] away from each other.’5

  Vomit and human waste fouled the hospital wards. The children barely resembled human beings.

  ‘On the bunks lay skeletons of children or swollen lumps. Only their eyes were alive. Until you’ve seen such eyes, the face of a starving child with its gaping black hole for a mouth and its wrinkled, parchment-like skin, you don’t know what life can be like… . There weren’t enough mattresses for the bunks and their number was diminishing because the bloody diarrhea reduced them to pulp.’6

  Dr. Szwajger describes a child ‘who, in the frost, had stripped naked on the street in order to be taken in by the hospital because children came to us for that one last thing we could offer – the mercy of a quiet death.’7 Scenes like the following were commonplace:

  ‘When my sister died and Mamma carried her out, she didn’t have any strength left to go and beg, so she just lay there and cried a bit. But I didn’t have any strength to go out either, so Mamma died too, and I wanted to live so terribly much and I prayed like Papa did before, before they killed him.’8

  A little boy, shot in the liver while running from a German policeman, hid a small coin in his hand (the equivalent of a nickel or a few pence) and said to the doctor before he died that she should give it to his mother. A six-year-old girl, who had witnessed the death of her brother, sister and mother, had the shuffle of an ‘old woman.’ She pleaded with Dr. Szwajger to let her remain in the hospital; with her parents dead, she had nowhere to go. The doctor speaks of one little girl who kept apologizing for the smell from her gangrenous legs. Children who were forced to hide day and night in small ramped holes or bunkers, or behind walls and in attics and cellars, developed rickets; they lost the ability to walk and, in some instances, how to talk because silence was essential to avoid giving themselves away to Germans, local police or informants. Births brought not joy but despair and fear.9

  To escape from the ghetto meant hiding or trying to find sympathizers in the local population; but the Germans made it clear that the punishment for concealing Jews was death for anyone caught in such ‘subversive’ actions. Women who escaped to the forests faced the prospect of being raped by non-Jewish partisans or local peasants. Children had little chance of surviving the harsh conditions of life outside the ghetto; and while many in the ghetto knew of partisan bands and units where they might receive protection, most ghetto inhabitants chose to stay in the ghetto – not out of a death wish or apathy, but because they knew what it was like ‘out there’; to survive in the forests required skills, endurance and logistics unavailable to the mass of the Jewish population.

  Hiding outside the ghetto brought enormous risks. One survivor recalls: ‘We couldn’t relieve ourselves outside, because any farmers passing through the woods would have noticed the human waste.’10 At any moment, those fortunate enough to build a bunker outside the ghetto could be discovered by German units, hostile locals or terrified farmers in fear that if Germans found Jews on their property, they too would be killed. Those escaping the ghetto faced the problem of food and supplies; of protecting against the cold, disease and injury. It was therefore terrifying to leave the ghetto; at least in the ghetto one had one’s family – or what remained of the family – and friends after periodic selections. It took enormous courage to leave.

  Despair inevitably preceded rage. ‘Nothing mattered to me. I felt depressed and full of grief …’11 – this from a partisan who learned that her entire family had been executed.

  Youth with a strong political belief, whether it was communism, Zionism or revisionist-Zionism, initially joined the undergrounds and promoted the complex and difficult process of trying to enlist ghetto support for underground actions. While there were notable exceptions (for example, Kovno), it was generally the case that the Judenrate feared the possibility of armed action within the ghetto, and this for a very good reason. The Germans made clear that reprisals would result in the execution not only of the underground fighter, but of the family of the underground fighter and whomever else the Germans chose to kill – friends, relatives, people at random. Mass reprisal for underground and partisan activity was an integral part of German policy, and it worked. The Germans had no compunction about killing scores of individuals to avenge the death of one German soldier. And even a show of force by the underground provoked mass reprisals. Yet the Judenrate on occasion would split about whether or not to aid resistance fighters; some members might smuggle supplies, money or weapons to the underground, while other Judenrate and administration members violently argued against offering support.

  Death had as much presence in the ghetto as life. One Polish observer writes: ‘People walking on the street are so used to seeing corpses on the sidewalks that they pass by without any emotion’ (October 27, 1942). Another entry, of October 28, 1942: ‘I saw an old Jewish woman unable to walk anymore. A Gestapo man shot her once, but she was still alive; so he shot her again, then left. People see this now as a daily event and rarely react.… It is a common occurrence that Jews come on their own to the gendarme post and ask to be shot.’12 In dealing with efforts to mobilize the ghetto, the underground continually faced this ever-present desolation – the disintegration of spirit and will, particularly amongst refugees. Underground leaders like Mordechai Tannenbaum (Bialystok), Abba Kovner (Vilna), Chaim Yellin (Kovno), Mordechai Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zukerman (Warsaw) distributed leaflets and entreaties to a population shattered by starvation and the death of children. And in the days and weeks following large-scale Aktionen (roundups, deportations, mass executions), many believed that this disaster had to be the last; nothing more could touch the ghetto. Normality in the ghetto ‘meant having just enough food to exist … it meant the survival of the community while individuals were shot. It meant life behind barbed wires, like criminals, like slave laborers, without rest or relaxation.’13

  Underground organizations generally were a loose association of various political groups; for example, in Warsaw, after the deportations of the summer of 1942, the Jewish Fighting Organization (JFO) was composed of Zionists, socialists, the Zionist youth, the Bund and the communists. Militant, anti-socialist, pro-violence Zionist revisionists, on their own, formed the Jewish Military Association. Both underground groups maintained contact with each other, and after the 1942 deportations, ideological and political distinctions made utterly no difference. Emmanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw historian who organi
zed extensive efforts at describing the social, cultural and political life in the ghetto, offers an explanation for Jewish inaction. It is worth quoting at length because his perception has received wide currency as describing the Jewish group state of mind:

  The Jews did not rise up against the slaughter anywhere; they went to their deaths without resisting. They did this in order that the others might live, for every Jew knew that lifting a hand against a German meant endangering Jews in another city or possibly another country … to be passive, not to raise a hand against the Germans, was the quiet heroism for the plain, average Jew. It would seem that this was the silent instinct to survive of the masses, and it dictated to everyone, as though through a consensus, to behave in a certain way. And it appears to me that no explanation or exhortation would have helped – one cannot fight an instinct of the masses, one can only bow to it.14

  As much as we can admire Ringelblum’s work and the massive effort of the Oneg Shabbath in chronicling the decline of the Warsaw ghetto and Poland’s Jews, these observations must be tempered by looking at some powerful psychological facts. Very little has been written on that amorphous Jewish ‘mass’ that Ringelblum and other diarists and chroniclers of life in the ghetto call ‘the Jews.’ By ‘the Jews’ is meant the vast majority of the Jewish population who never participated in organized individual political resistance, and for whom there is little record of ‘spiritual resistance’ in most of the six million who died, including the 1,200,000 children. The great majority of those murdered were not members of a political organization or Zionist youth movement like Hechalutz, Hashomer Hatzair, and D’ror; yet the psychological damage to the individual and the collective pushed the community into a numbed passivity. One survivor, Masha S., of the Kovno ghetto, remembers: