Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Read online

  A little boy, disheveled, ‘wearing a large pair of shoes on his thin feet … dawdling and talking loudly to himself’ catches a little girl’s attention. He is playing a game in which in one hand he clutches a bunch of small stones; with his other he scratches his head. He rushes after Ettie and tells her about the stones, ‘nine brothers like these stones we were once, all close together. Then came the first deportation and three of the brothers didn’t return, two were shot at the barbed wire fences, and three died of hunger. Can you guess how many brother-stones are still left in my hand?’47 Ettie, terrified, ran away; but the boy, brought up in a universe and vocabulary of deportation, coupons, ghettos, shots, hunger, workshops, found nothing unusual in this presentation.

  During an action in Kovno, in which they entered the ghetto in buses with white-washed windows, full of soldiers, the Germans played nursery rhymes and offered candy to lure youngsters out of their hiding places. Rabbi Oshry recalls:

  ‘Mothers who grabbed hold of the bus were driven off by bayonets. Dogs tore at the women’s clothing and flesh. One mother, who held on to a bus firmly and refused to be frightened off, was shot through the heart. Her wailing child witnessed his mother’s murder. Every bus had the radio inside turned up loud in order to drown out the children’s screams. Full buses were driven off, and empty ones replaced them to take on new loads. A number of buses pulled up in front of the ghetto hospital and took away the children there.’

  The next morning the Germans returned with bloodhounds and pickaxes to search for children who had been missed during the first action. ‘Soon they were smashing walls and cracking floors.’ The Germans threw grenades inside anything that resembled a hiding place. The Kinderaktion was a commonplace of German policy; ‘wild screeching and cries could be heard. And wild laughter, too; a mother had gone insane.’48 Children had been hidden in cellars, closets, pits, in baskets and bags, pillowcases. ‘One of the mothers begged the killers, “Take me along too, I want to go with my child!” The murderers roughly pushed her away and remarked sadistically, “Your turn will come!”’49

  Terror and fear, the drive for self-preservation, corrupted the ghetto’s moral order. The disintegration of moral limits appeared almost daily in the life of the ghetto, with grave consequences for the underground’s ability to recruit. In Warsaw the Germans employed Jewish agents to inform about the location of hideouts, the identity of smugglers and black marketeers, the location of valuables. Shop owners sometimes cooperated with the SS or helped in the roundup of those who had no work permits. The Jewish police extorted bribes. The head of the Jewish police, later assassinated by the Jewish Fighting Organization, tore the badges off policemen who tried to save Jews from deportation. In the words of Lewin:

  ‘We live in a prison. We have been degraded to the level of homeless and uncared-for animals. When we look at the swollen, half-naked bodies of Jews lying in the streets, we feel as if we found ourselves at some sub-human level. The half-dead skeletal faces of Jews, especially those of dying little children, frighten us and recall pictures of India or of the isolation-colonies for lepers which we used to see in films. Reality surpasses any fantasy.’50

  Lewin notes the pervading madness, an insanity that threatens to engulf all life: ‘The burden on our souls and on our thoughts has become so heavy, oppressive, that it is almost unbearable. I am keenly aware that if our nightmare does not end soon, then many of us, the more sensitive and empathetic natures, will break down.’51

  Given this debilitated universe, what hope could the undergrounds or partisans expect from the Jewish ghettos? After the deportations of summer and fall 1942, the Warsaw ghetto had the air of a ghost town, and its inhabitants, specters in a cramped and gloomy universe of dying bodies.

  Underground action: self and its restoration

  Initially, ghetto undergrounds were a politicized network made up of various ideological movements with continually shifting alliances. Some of the groups in the Warsaw underground included the Achdut Haavoda, the socialist-labor section of the Zionist movement; Akiba, a Zionist youth organization; Beitar, the youth movement of the Zionist-revisionists, followers of Vladimir Jabotinski who advocated militant resistance to the British Mandate in Palestine; the Bund, the major Jewish labor union in Poland, centrist party socialist, anti-Zionist and anti-communist; D’ror, a Zionist Youth Organization affiliated to Hechalutz, the Zionist pioneer youth movement, advocating agricultural settlements in Palestine; Gordonia, a Zionist youth group affiliated with Poalei Zion, the labor section of the Zionist movement; Irgun Tzvai Leumi, the military arm of the Zionist-revisionists (Menachem Begin was a member of Irgun); Hanoar Hatzioni, a Zionist youth group affiliated to Hechalutz; Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist youth group with sports clubs and training farms; and Hitachdut, a Zionist youth group.

  Membership in the political-underground groups consisted primarily of urban, middle- and lower-middle-class Jews, although a sufficient minority of these groups comprised young people who had emigrated from the shtetls (small towns) into the cities. Even with such a heterogeneous group of political-ideological youth groups, these organizations made up a tiny minority of the Jewish population, even amongst the young.

  As isolated and desolate as life was in the ghettos, the almost exact opposite prevailed in the undergrounds. Where the ghettos increasingly disintegrated into a Hobbesean panic, with individual families at war with each other, the undergrounds became more and more dependent on one another. The more inward-looking and despairing were individuals in the ghettos, the more outward-looking and connected with one another were the underground fighters. The more passive were the refugees, the more active were they when in contact with an underground group. The more the ghetto sank into fatal resignation, the more the undergrounds came to believe in the efficacy of armed revolt. The more death seemed imminent to inhabitants of the ghetto, the more the undergrounds disdained death in favor of the possibility of revenge. As shattering, then, to selfhood as was life in the ghetto, the more resilient selfhood became within the underground organization. Community, in the resistance, sustained life, courage and cooperation – not individualism. Tolerance, open-mindedness, skepticism, suspension of belief, the absence of fanaticism and rage became, in the context of underground life, life-threatening. The more closely integrated were the resistance communities, the greater the probability of survival; the more individuals found themselves advocating action in a secular faith, the more likely were they to seek out and to join a resistance group. Those values we admire in liberal democratic societies – restraint, humanism, reason, limitation, boundaries, the rule of law and respect for the rules of the game – became sources of self-and political destruction in the ghettos. The harder the ideological sheathing of the self, the greater the possibility of life, at least in the early days of the underground. The instruction in the use of weapons, the knowledge of smuggling, the self-understanding of one’s role as an active resistor, the use of barter with non-Jews to obtain ammunition and food – all these created a self-understanding that began, paradoxically, to restore moral order to the universe. Resistance created an alternative moral environment for the resistors, in which evil did not consume life. As one resistance fighter put it to me: ‘the only way I could be a Jew was to kill Germans; the very idea that I could pull a trigger in avenging the death of my family, gave me hope.’

  Underground fighters saw themselves engaged in a common struggle. Political organization came to function as moral authority and thus for the participants slowly restored some sense of an ethical and human connectivity with others. Individuals in underground units came to understand themselves not as victims but as avengers in a long tradition of biblical Jewish resistance, for example, Masada – which again opened the possibility for a radically different view of self than was common in the ghetto. The diaries of resistance fighters are filled with the imagery of transformation, confrontation and transcendence; the diaries of ghetto inmates reflect a despair even at the po
ssibility of action and a preoccupation with death and moral decay.

  Two psychological facts became increasingly clear in what Jewish resistance movements refused to accept: first, being drawn into an emotional black hole that would immobilize action; and second, dissociation – a complete affective removal not only from the body of the community but also from the body of the self. Emotional and physical existence in a prolonged numb state, characteristic of ghetto life, never defined resistance attitudes. While a preoccupation with death, which was constantly at the center of ghetto thinking, does not disappear in the underground and partisan units, it is, however, not in the foreground of consciousness. What is in the foreground is revenge and to some extent the imagery of rescue, emotions that pull the self together, give it resilience and enable the body to assimilate its suffering and endure the deprivation and uncertainty of resistance life. The group too stands in the foreground: early in underground movements, ideology played a preeminent role in holding the group together, gave the group purpose and constituted the impetus behind group membership. In fighting the Germans one could achieve socialism, further Zionist ideas, train future fighters for Palestine, and so on.

  But after the spring of 1942, ideology as a dynamic, a motivating force, falls well into the background. Revenge, anger and rescue, surviving as a group identity, take its place. Ghetto anger, however, often found itself deflected into a bizarre form of gift-giving. So bribes and goods demanded, or even gifts proffered, such as Abraham Tory’s offering to the German commander at Kovno a silver cigarette case, were thought to have some effect in sparing (rescuing) life.52

  The undergrounds and partisans operated from radically different psychological, moral and political assumptions: no gifts, no bribes, no entreaties, no exchanging thousands to save hundreds. It was not only moral to kill, but it was also essential to psychological wellbeing and to participate in a group whose objective lay in surviving the German plan to kill. What underground and partisan groups understood better than the Judenrate was that resistance was not only a route to killing but also a route to rescue of the self and the group, to save Jewish identity from German violence and the intolerable psychological despair induced by German brutality and occupation.

  Undergrounds initiated action when Germans advanced on the ghetto; rarely did they undertake actions independently. The Warsaw uprising is the most famous resistance action; but undergrounds also operated in smaller ghettos like Kovno, Vilna, Bialystok and Mir, to name just a few. Undergrounds understood clearly the intent of German policy; they knew what the Germans had in store for them; couriers (primarily young Jews with ‘Aryan’ features) had brought them first-hand reports of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Ponary and the Ninth Fort (outside Kovno). They understood the German belief system. For example, in Vilna, the underground had publicized the German vocabulary of killing. Murdered victims were called ‘figures’; the workers who dug out the graves at Ponary were called ‘uncoverers’; those who had to throw iron-hooks into the graves and pull bodies to the surface were called ‘figure-pullers’; those who extracted gold fillings from teeth were called ‘dentists.’ Thirteen-year-old children who picked up scattered bones were called ‘bone-gatherers’; those charged with carrying away corpses on stretchers to the burning field were ‘carriers’; the prisoners who had to place corpses in a pile, ‘burning-masters’; those pouring oil on the corpses were called ‘fire-masters’; those constructing pyres, ‘pyre builders’; and those who gathered up whatever did not burn, ‘gold-diggers.’53

  Faced with this universe which reduced the Jews to a bureaucratic problem in sanitation management, the Vilna underground pleaded with the populace, exhorting them to fight. An article in the April 14, 1944 edition of the New York Times, under the heading ‘Poetpartisan from Vilna ghetto says Nazis slew 77,000 of 80,000,’ describes how Germans treated resistance leaders:

  ‘A partisan detachment was formed in the ghetto in January 1942. It was headed by a 41-year-old Vilna shoemaker named Wittenberg. The Germans announced that if Wittenberg [a communist leader] did not give himself up, all the Jews [in Vilna] would be killed immediately. The leaders met for the last time in a cellar and drank together. Then Wittenberg went to the Germans. The next morning his mutilated body was found at the ghetto gate.’54

  Wittenberg gave himself up because he received no support from the ghetto inhabitants or from the Judenrat, who insisted he turn himself in and who initially aided the Germans in capturing him. One can only admire the courage and inner strength of this man who gave himself up in the full knowledge that he would be tortured and executed. One can only wonder at the blindness of the Judenrat in failing to support Wittenberg when it was clear what the Germans had in store for the Jews.

  One underground leaflet read:

  ‘The enemy in his fear of rebellion, wants to wipe you out first. He is shooting your best sons, taking them to Germany by the hundreds and the thousands. In Warsaw, Kalisch Vilna, Lwow, the Hitler terror has already seized the masses. Do not let yourself be led like sheep to slaughter… . Thousands of you fall as passive victims. But freedom is bought only by active sacrifice.’55

  But the underground was powerless to overcome the fear and uncertainty created in the Jewish populace by Judenrat caution. For example, in August 1943, the Vilna Judenrat warned the ghetto, once again, of the German tactic of collective responsibility and mass reprisal: ‘We want to remind the ghetto of the words and warnings of the Ghetto Representative, that as of the latest order received from the German Authorities, all Jews are collectively responsible. It is your duty to yourself and to the ghetto to inform on any activity which might endanger the existence of the ghetto.’56

  One month after this pronouncement appeared in the official bulletin of the Jewish ghetto administration, the United Partisan Organization (underground in Vilna) distributed the following leaflet:

  ‘For our forefathers. For our children who have been murdered! In repayment for Ponary. Hit the murderers! In every street, every yard, every room. In the Ghetto and out of it, Hit the dogs! Jews! We have nothing to lose! We shall save our lives only if we destroy our murderers. Long Live Freedom! Long Live the armed revolt! Death to the murderers!’57

  The United Partisan Organization fought against tremendous odds. In the German offensive against the ghetto in September 1943, underground units engaged in defensive actions against the Germans and inflicted casualties; and when defense of the ghetto itself became impossible, many of the units fled to the forests and joined partisan groups. Posters plastered on walls throughout the ghetto declared calls to action:

  ‘Do not believe the false promises of the murderers. Do not believe the words of traitors. Whoever leaves the ghetto gate has one path – to Ponary. And Ponary is death! Jews, we have nothing to lose, because death will come anyway. And who can still think that he will remain alive while the murderer exterminates us systematically? The hand of the hangman will reach each and every one. Neither experience nor cowardice will save your life! Do not hide in secret places and the malinas [hiding places, bunkers]. Your destiny will be to fall like rats at the hands of the murderers. Only armed defense can save our life and honor. Jewish masses! Go out on the streets! Whoever lacks weapons, let him take an ax, and if there is no ax, grab some iron, or a pole or a stick!’58

  But in the ghetto itself, with the exception of a very few fighters, no one listened to such proclamations; and the desolate self could not make the leap from internal dread to effective action. For most ghetto inhabitants, Itzik Wittenberg and what he represented meant suffering, not liberation; and it was impossible to find amongst the Jewish masses sympathy for Wittenberg as expressed in a song popular with the underground:

  ‘The night is foreboding, there’s death lurking round us … the ghetto is restless, and Gestapo threatens our Commanderin-Chief. Then Itzik spoke to us. His words were like lightning – “don’t take any risks for my sake. Your lives are too precious to give away lightly.” And proudly he goes
to his death!’

  – a very different example than Joseph Gens’s, the head of the Judenrat, who, in spite of his extensive cooperation with the enemy, was murdered by the Germans when he outlived his usefulness.59

  Ghetto authority and underground action

  In September 1942, Gens, spearheading the ghetto administration, issued a proclamation regarding the kind of punishment (torture, execution, execution of one’s family) ghetto inhabitants who tried to escape to the forests should expect from the Germans. It read:

  ‘Six Jews ran away from the Bialewaker Concentration Camp. The German command decreed to shoot ten Jews in the same Camp for each runaway; that is, 60 adults (not counting children). The punishment was meted out. Sixty adults and seven children were shot in the above prison camp.’

  The example had not been lost on Gens: ‘A similar punishment awaits the population of the Vilna ghetto should a similar thing occur here.’60

  Not to be psychically broken by such ‘examples’ of discipline required a deep reservoir of faith in action. Sympathizers of the Vilna underground grew in number throughout 1943. The ‘average’ Jew who joined the underground began to steal – not from each other, but from the Germans and Lithuanians, ‘everything from food to military goods, shoes, clothes, paint, buttons, tin or whatever else was handy.’61 Weapons remained in short supply as it was almost impossible to steal them, and the price for weapons, in whatever condition, was exorbitant. Yet, ‘when the hope of being saved from death in the ghetto grew dimmer, when the Jews began to realize that they had nothing to lose, the number of individuals who began to risk their lives by stealing even weapons began to grow.’62 Yet it remained difficult for the underground to recruit support.

  As early as January 1942, the Vilna underground warned the ghetto of German intent: ‘Of eighty thousand Jews in the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” [Vilna], only twenty thousand survive. Before our eyes have been torn from us our parents, our brothers and our sisters… . Hitler aims to destroy all the Jews of Europe. It is the lot of the Jews of Lithuania to be the first in line.’63 Leaders of the Vilna underground, Joseph Glazman (Revisionist), Itzik Wittenberg (communist), Abba Kovner (Hashomer Hatzair), Abrasha Chwojnik (Bund), Nisr Resnik (General Zionist), Major Isidor Frucht (non-aligned) and Chiena Borowski (communist) found themselves blocked, at every step, by Judenrat fear and the mass’s desolation and emotional isolation.