Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Read online

  Everyone seemed to be dying slowly; the resistance leaders would come into the ghetto and speak to us, but no one wanted to do anything; just getting up in the morning took an enormous effort; no one had enough to eat; we didn’t want to hear about resistance, we wanted to hear about getting more food; our rabbis had been tortured and killed; my mother and sister had been taken away [to be executed in mass graves outside the ghetto]. We had no will to do anything; I wanted to go with Yellin [the Kovno underground leader], but my father forbade it. It was my impression that Yellin had not much success with the Jews of Kovno. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that we did not appreciate the resistance, although many feared it would bring reprisals. Very few wanted or even had the strength to get involved.15

  Apart from the courage of the rabbis, faith and theology stood in the way of the underground’s effort to recruit. The underground had little patience for prayer and spiritual sacrifice as substitutes for action. Rabbi Mendel of Pabianice:

  ‘Hear, O brethren. Do you know where we are going? We are setting out in the holy road of Kiddush a-Shem. Our father Abraham led one of his seed to the sacrifice, and the two of them went joyously and enthusiastically. It is written: “And they went yahat [together]” – that is, they went with hedva [joy]. And as we all of us go together to the sacrifice – fathers with their sons, grandfathers with their grandsons, mothers and grandmothers with their grandchildren – What a great moment this is! Consider for a moment, dear Jews, holy and pure ones: Why are we being led to the sacrifice? Satan himself has openly and expressly said that he had found only one fault with us – the name Israel. Why, we are all going to sanctify the Name. But not too hastily, Jews. Rest a moment. These are our last moments.’16

  While spiritual resistance was certainly heartbreaking in its dedication and faith, the majority of reports on the state of mind of Jews heading for the gas chambers or burial pits outside the ghettos describe human beings broken in spirit and will. Resistance fighters could not resurrect will where there was utter desolation. Resistance diaries, while critical of theological quiescence, demonstrate a strong Jewish identity; and while many political resistors practiced Jewish rituals, most rejected religious sentiments that relied on God’s will for salvation.

  Chaika Grossman, a resistance survivor of Bialystok, writes: ‘We did not develop any ideology of dying.’17 Grossman describes the state of mind underground fighters faced in their effort to generate ghetto support. After a ghetto action in Bialystok:

  All the victims had not yet been found; they were still looking in the cellars and attics, still finding children who had been strangled when they cried in the hiding places, their mothers’ own hands stopping their cries in their throats. People were running through the hiding places … families had been butchered… . [Many] had gone out of their minds. [There were] cases of hysteria and madness, of shouting despair.18

  For Grossman, antidotes against despair consisted of holding fast ‘against depression and the feeling of impotence against a victorious [German] enemy.’ Resist the Germans’ attack on ‘the limits of reality’, and ‘maintain action, discipline and the yoke of patience.’19 Yet, the enemy had the power to alter reality, to destroy discipline and shatter patience. ‘Perhaps [the members of the resistance] had not fully understood the agony of parents looking at their famished children. What use was there in living such a life?’20 Ghetto conditions, the suddenness of the actions, the increasing, pervasive sense of desolation, made it impossible for underground fighters to convince the Jews that resistance indeed held out hope. ‘We had no masses behind us.’21

  Grossman blames the Judenrat in Bialystok. She argues that they knew the truth about the mass executions and that Judenrat members had heard reports about Ponary (the execution site outside Vilna) and the death camp at Treblinka as early as December 1941: ‘Barash [the head of the Judenrat] heard the truth from me. He knew about Treblinka, and he himself testified in his speech of October 11, 1942… . everybody knows what happened in Warsaw, in Slonin … [It is] better to go to Volkovysk [a nearby ghetto] than to Treblinka … . It is not a lack of information we have here but a policy that was the direct opposite of that adopted by the underground.’22

  The undergrounds continually fought to maintain violent resistance. But others in the ghetto fought to sustain spiritual resistance. For example, in the Kovno ghetto following the selection on October 28, 1941 when 10,000 of the Jewish population were taken to the execution site at the Ninth Fort just outside the city, a workman asks Rabbi Oshry, one of the few rabbis still alive in Kovno: ‘Is there no obligation to study Torah before one dies? All along we have been studying, and now – no more?’ Rabbi Oshry responds: ‘I assured him that we would continue our studies.’23 While this sentiment is admirable, it provided little comfort to underground fighters desperately trying to rally the ghetto into more forceful action and a sense of urgency about its fate. One wonders about the accuracy, much less the content, of Rabbi Oshry’s observation that after the mass execution, ‘Jews put even more effort into strengthening their trust in G–d Who would not forsake Jewry. Their prayers were recited with increased intensity and they studied Torah ever more seriously.’24

  Increased study of Torah as a fitting response to mass murder had great currency in the Kovno ghetto. Rabbi Oshry writes: ‘Extraordinary is the power of the holy Jewish Book. It has a soul of its own and encompasses the illumination of generations – a blinding light for those who would harm it.’25 Children, he notes, hid their own Chumash [volume of Torah] or a gemorah [prayer or study book] and in doing so, took a great risk. ‘I told them how dangerous it was to hide Jewish books. To this they responded, “Rebbi, if they shoot us together with our gemoros, at least we’ll be sanctifying G–d.”’26

  Here is a clear instance of German ineffectiveness in breaking spirit, but even with these stories circulating in the ghetto, they did little to encourage violent resistance. A resistance fighter, who heard similar stories about children sustaining faith and continuing to pray, told me, ‘I could only weep for those kids.’

  Even such proscribed acts as the baking of matzoh for Passover did not constitute effective action in the underground’s universe; while as Jews the underground respected such acts, what mattered more were weapons, people willing to shoot Germans and collaborators, and those willing to hide and support underground participants. From August 15, 1941 through the liberation of Kovno, Rabbi Oshry studied Torah with children. Masha S. again:

  In the ghetto we had to face rising prices, goods in short supply, work hours from dawn to dusk; no heat, or electricity; water that made us sick; our limits were the limits of our bodies. We felt so terrible, physically and emotionally: and then a resistance fighter would hand us a paper; do you think we had time for that? It was all my parents could do to try to save the family; then my mother died, then my sister. All I had left was my father; we vowed never to leave each other.27

  Nor could the undergrounds trust the local populations. While many Poles and Lithuanians expressed sympathy for the Jews’ plight, when it came to concrete actions, the vast majority were intimidated by German orders or concurred with German anti-Semitic theories, or had been bred in local superstitions regarding Jewish evil. Here is just one example of this ‘turning a blind eye’.

  The German administration in a district outside Warsaw orders all hospitals not to give aid to Jews. Kowalski, who heads a local hospital, is concerned about this order; he calls the local police and is told to mind his own business. He posts guards at his hospital entrance and turns Jews away. ‘There is no way I would have been able to save Jews, and certainly I would have been arrested and executed.’28 In the next few paragraphs he describes how Jews are being randomly killed, how sorry he is, but how constrained his actions are by German orders. ‘With my eyes I can still see the wagons filled with the dead, one Jewish woman walking along with her dead child in her arms, and many wounded lying on the sidewalks across from my hospital.’ He describes
Polish brutality against Jews and is particularly struck by the German order for the local Judenrate to pay ‘2,000 zloty and 3 pounds of coffee for the ammunition used to kill Jews.’29

  Kowalski describes a situation where brutality had become so commonplace that bystanders were no longer affected by the pain the Jews suffered. ‘Now when people meet on the streets the normal way of greeting is, “Who was arrested? How many Jews were killed last night? Who was robbed?” These events are so common that, really, no one seems to care. Slowly you become accustomed to everything.’30 Death for the Jews evolved into the normal way of life; to see a dead Jew on the street was nothing out of the ordinary.

  The underground had little success in mobilizing sympathizers on the outside. Underground fighters were constantly in danger of being turned in by locals who in return would receive a bounty from the Germans. A Polish academic I interviewed in Warsaw recalls the atmosphere of anti-Semitism: ‘I was young, but I remember my parents and their friends saying things like “Well, at least we don’t have to see the Jews anymore, or how the Germans are doing God’s work”.’ In a recent letter he remarks about Jan Gross’s book Neighbors, the story of Polish complicity in the murder of hundreds of Jews in one village. ‘Gross was right; if anything, he understated the hostility.’

  Devastation to body and mind: ghetto isolation

  The general public’s knowledge about the Holocaust is confined primarily to the death camps. Millions know about Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec. This is not the case with the ghettos; place-names like Vilna, Kovno, Bialystok, Mir are unknown, much less the history of the partisan movement in the forests of Lithuania and Byelorussia. The so-called ‘passivity’ of the Jews in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maidanek needs to be understood from the perspective of ghettoization and the devastation to body and mind inflicted by unrestrained violence.

  Naomi’s mother (a nurse at a hospital in a small town near Lodz where the Germans were rounding up patients and children for transport) hid her in the hospital mortuary, in a room bordering a street where Jews were being loaded in a waiting truck. Naomi could hear the screams and the gunfire; but she also heard her sister scream: ‘Mother, help me, you saved Naomi, why don’t you save me? Mother, you don’t love me …’31 The next thing Naomi heard was a gunshot and then her sister fell silent. She waited several hours; and during this time German guards threw corpses into the room where she was hiding. Then she saw the body of her sister, tossed onto a pile of corpses. When her mother came to tell her that the Germans had left, she found her dead child lying next to an unconscious Naomi. It was not until they got outside into the light that she noticed her daughter’s hair had turned gray. Eventually Naomi and her mother were transported to the Lodz ghetto; within a few weeks Naomi’s mother had died. No record is left of her daughter.

  Children in the ghetto played games like ‘deportation,’ ‘Führer,’ ‘Gestapo,’ ‘shoot the Jew,’ and so on. They beg and come home to find that their parents have been victims of the day’s roundup and deportations. Husbands and wives are powerless to save each other. After he witnesses his wife being picked up during a roundup, Abraham Lewin records in his diary, ‘I have no words to describe my desolation. I ought to go after her, to die. But I have no strength to take such a step … total chaos … terror and blackness.’32

  Weakening of the body, weakening of the spirit, happened simultaneously. Calorie intake in Warsaw, for example, was around 184 a day. Between January 1941 and July 1942, nearly 61,000 people died from malnutrition. Eighty percent of the food entering the ghetto came from smuggling. German soldiers look at this devastated humanity and witness the embodiment of their racial theories. In the town of Komarno, Sergeant Gaststeiger of the 67th mountain rifle section sees ‘a city of Jews [whose denizens were] similar to the creatures often pictured in Der Sturmer.’ Another German soldier describes Poland as the ‘land of the Jews, in which whoever travels will be visited by lice… a land, this Poland, that any pioneer will remember, stating, “Ah Poland, it reeks.”’ Corporal Mathias Strehn notes that on pushing deeper into Poland, ‘the stench of the Jews and their beastliness became oppressive.’33

  Germans saw what they wanted to see; however, ghetto conditions reinforced racial stereotypes. Refugees in the ghettos, whether transported by the Germans or fleeing from action in the countryside, rarely survived more than a few weeks. In the first year and a half of ghettoization, refugees suffered a higher mortality rate than Jews indigenous to the areas surrounding the ghettos. Wealthy German Jews transported to the Lodz ghetto found themselves reduced to begging within three months of their arrival. Away from home, unfamiliar with the new surroundings, refugees suffered not only the brutalization of the Germans, but the indifference of the ghetto itself. Refugees received the worst jobs; the Judenrate discriminated against refugee Jews. Most had no family in the ghetto. Often bands of Jews wandering from village to village would find their ways into the ghettos to escape the beatings, killings, extortion and forced labor.

  Early in the occupation of Poland, German commanders had complete authority over what to do with Jews. Nothing prevented the commanders from killing them according to personal whim or giving soldiers the authority to kill. No country offered Jews asylum (although Jews could find some safety in the Soviet Union). A few were admitted to Switzerland, but many more were refused by the Swiss government; those managing the difficult escape to Spain were not returned. Roads were heavily patrolled; help could not be expected from the peasants. Judenrate were overburdened with caring for the Jews indigenous to their own territories. Villages that had existed for hundreds of years were overrun in a single day.

  Yitzhok Rudashevski, a fifteen-year-old boy, describes in his diary the deteriorating psychological conditions within the Vilna ghetto. It is a vivid account of the sapping of will and the destruction of spirit. Referring to the yellow work permits the Judenrate distributed, which assured a greater chance of survival and larger food rations, he writes: ‘The people, helpless creatures, stagger around in little streets. Like animals sensing the storm, everyone is looking for a place to hide, to save his life.’ People lie in the streets ‘like rags in the dirt’; how easy, he observes, it is to break the human spirit: ‘I think: into what kind of helpless, broken creature can man be transformed? I am at my wits’ end. I begin to feel very nauseated.’34 Referring to the struggle for life, Rudashevski despairs of ever again seeing real human empathy. ‘To save one’s own life at any price, even at the price of our brothers who are leaving us. To save one’s own life and not attempt to defend it … The point of view of our dying passively like sheep … our tragic fragmentation, our helplessness.’35 Ponary, the execution site outside the ghetto, is ‘soaked in Jewish blood,’ but the ‘mass … goes blindly.’36

  He refers to the ‘blind mass of Jews’;37 everyone is exhausted. ‘From the hideouts people emerge like corpses, pale, dirty, with black rings under their eyes.’38 There are recurring images of little children stealing, their fingers turning blue in the cold, families fighting for scraps of bread. ‘Brother was forced to beat brother and to take away from him the morsel of bread which he brings weary with toil to his family.’39 Theology brings no relief; but religious custom does:

  ‘I am as far from religion now [on the eve of Yom Kippur] as before the ghetto. Nevertheless, this holiday drenched in blood and sorrow which is solemnized in the ghetto, now penetrates my heart… . The hearts which have turned to stone in the grip of ghetto woes did not have time to weep their fill … poured out all their bitterness.’40

  The ghetto demonstrates not heroism but sickness, death and numbness. Child vendors: ‘frozen, carrying the little stands on their backs, they push toward the tiny corner that is lit up. They stand there [for hours] … and then they disappear with their trays into the black little ghetto streets.’41 But they return: and the ‘next day you see them again at the sad light, how they knock one foot against the other and breathe into their frozen hands … frost-bitte
n blue little fingers … hands tremble, her whole little body shakes … ragged urchins with burning little eyes.’42

  When workshops are closed, creating ‘panting and desperate workers … disheveled and distracted,’43 or people laid off, panic grips the ghetto. ‘People run, people beg not to be discharged; they try using “pull”, they cheat, they intrigue. And this commotion is carried over into the house. You keep hearing only about layoffs and certificates and the same thing all over again. People have lost the knack of thinking about anything else.’44 The loss of livelihood and the possibility of starvation ravages family life in the ghetto, ‘a large swamp in which we lose our days and selves,’ and pulls people away from engagement.

  Dr. Szwajger describes the consequences of this continual assault on the self. ‘Deep in our souls, we were all changing, not as children grow to youth with its awakening dreams of romance, nor as men and women pass from the busy activity of maturity to the calm wisdom of age.’ Individuals were forced to suffer ‘too many shocks, too many horrors, too many changes of the kind that age one even in youth.’45 The self withers: ‘After a while one can no longer weep, no longer love, no longer grieve. Sensibility is numbed, emotions dry up.’46