Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Page 7
As early as December 1941, a month before the underground agreed on a course of action, Aba Kovner articulated the mood of the ghetto and attacked the delusional belief that the genocide might stop. The ghetto masses, he argued, ‘believed that while they would face a life studded with vicissitude, the slaughter of millions was outside the realm of possibility.’64 But this belief, which the Judenrat fostered, kept news of the executions at Ponary from being a catalyst for revolt. At a meeting of the Pioneer Youth in the ghetto on January 1, 1942 – and this is before the Warsaw deportations to Treblinka and Sobibor – speaker after speaker emphasized that those taken from the ghetto ended up not in a work camp but at the execution site. Yitzhak Arad repeatedly stressed in his analysis of the political reality of Vilna how ‘large sections in the ghetto identified with the Judenrat’s course of action,’ insistent on following German orders and not subverting German policy. In addition, many Jews believed that it was only communists who would be killed by the Germans; and if killing communists preserved the remnant, then it was a cost the populace was willing to bear. Ordinary, non-ideological people would be spared – a delusion desperately clung to even in the face of the facts.
The underground in Vilna set out its goals in January 1942 – to engage in sabotage, to resist if the ghetto were invaded and to establish links with partisan groups and undergrounds in other ghettos. For the underground it was moral and just to collect arms, even though the Germans made it clear that the discovery of weapons would result in mass reprisal. Kovner writes: ‘Had we the right to endanger the lives of the thousands of remaining Jews in the event of the discovery of arms in our possession? With full realization of the responsibility we bore, our reply was: Yes. We are entitled, we are bound to do so.’65 As late as August 1943, Gens published the following – and this after the Warsaw ghetto uprising: ‘May the blood that has been spilled be a last warning to us all, that we have but one way – the way of labor.’66
Gens’s policy of collaboration influenced the ghetto to the point where ghetto fighters found themselves on some occasions betrayed by fellow Jews. For example, in September 1943, a brigade of 100 fighters of the United Partisan Organization was surrounded and killed as a result of treachery by the Jewish police and a Jewish informant. Yet, Arad, active in the underground, paints in my interview with him a somewhat more nuanced moral picture: ‘You had to have some sympathy for Gens; what else could he do?’
The UPO leadership in Vilna constantly wrestled with potential traitors and with their moral responsibility to the Jewish masses. Kovner:
‘“As regards revolt, we cogitated more than anything else over the moral aspect.” Was revolt legitimate in view of the fact that the majority of the ghetto would not support armed resistance? “Were we entitled to [fight] and when? Were we entitled to offer people up in flames?”’
The underground realized that few Jews had weapons or even a desire to engage in physical resistance. ‘Most of them were unarmed – what would happen to all of them?’ And what if the fighters were wrong; what if the roundups did not mean ‘liquidation’? ‘We were terribly perplexed as to what right we had to determine [the mass’s] fate.’67 This moral quandary, always at the heart of negotiations between the UPO and the Judenrate, inhibited their ability to act and to plan even with their knowledge of mass executions. Eventually the UPO leadership came to the realization that any hope of mass defense was an impossibility: ‘There is no longer any hope that the battle, which a handful of fighters, limited in number, would initiate, could turn into a mass defense… . The rebellion, should it break out, would be nothing but an act of individuals alone, of no wide-national value and would not open the door to mass rescue.’68 With few exceptions, such as Warsaw, the Jewish population had been effectively silenced by fear of mass retaliation.
The Jewish community and depletion of will
To understand the state of mind of the Jewish ghettos, it is essential not to underestimate the power of the German assault on the Jewish body – beginning long before the construction of gas chambers at Auschwitz. In Warsaw, food distribution early in the occupation assured a slow death. In January 1941, the weekly ration of sugar was: for Aryans 16 oz, Jews 4/5th oz; fruit juice: Aryans only; soap, Aryans only. After the first week in January, Jews received no sugar ration; during the first six months of 1941, Jews received 3 oz of bread daily. Sugar, butter, eggs, fat, vegetables, milk had to be smuggled in and bought on the black market. Even the 3 oz of bread Jews were to receive daily ‘means nothing in reality, for we are never able to obtain it.’69
Poles were proscribed by the Germans from selling merchandise or food to the Jews; if a Pole were caught engaging in such transactions, the Germans could impose a fine of 1,000 zloty.
In 1941 in Warsaw, 80 Jewish soup kitchens dispensed 120,000 meals every day; the children’s soup kitchen run by the Jewish Self-Help organization served 35,000 meals daily to starving children, many of whom had been orphaned. The soup kitchen meal consisted of a thin soup with a small piece of bread. The bread administered by the Germans contained 33 percent sawdust. By 1942, the number of soup kitchens had increased to 145, and children’s kitchens to 45; Jewish Self-Help dispensed 60,000 bowls of soup to the elderly, the sick and children unable to walk to the soup kitchen.70
The London News Chronicle of May 1942 published the account of a woman who had fled Warsaw and escaped to Palestine.71 It was her estimate that 10,000 Jews were dying every month.72
Between February and April 1941, over 44,000 refugees arrived in Warsaw; of the thousands of children in shelters, more than 42 percent were infested with lice. In the summer of 1941, the health of the refugee children was deplorable: just 13 percent were in good physical condition, 35 percent were ‘tolerably healthy,’ and 52 percent were in poor to bad health. By early 1942, their health status had worsened considerably; now only 30 percent were in good health and 65 percent were in very poor health; 54 percent of the children examined were ‘filthy and full of lice.’73 By late 1941, the death rate amongst all children in the ghetto was between 25 percent and 35 percent, depending on whether the children were in hospital, shelters or living with parents or relatives in rooms or cellars, and with a great many on the streets. A year later, more than 95 percent of all children in the ghetto had been murdered – either through starvation, disease or extermination in the death camps.
To give some sense of the magnitude of these death rates, compare the following: in 1941 the yearly death rate of patients in hospitals in the USA was 3.9 percent. In the Jewish Central Hospital in Warsaw it was 20.3 percent; in the Jewish children’s hospital, 24 percent. In 1941, 47,428 Jews died in Warsaw.74
What was required was a political vision, and there was plenty of that in the partisan units in the forests and in resistance organizations inside the ghettos. Indeed, it was the failure of political vision, and the reliance on historical practices of accommodation, that contributed to the doom of the Jewish population of Europe. Given the acquiescent character of the historical and religious traditions of ‘resistance’ in dealing with the enemy, the political vision of the secularist found itself swamped by the hopelessness of starvation and death and the annihilation of children.
It is, of course, true that massive resistance, given the circumstances, would have been extremely difficult; the illusion of saving the remnant which the Germans fostered, the historical tradition of non-violence in the Diaspora community, the lack of any significant assistance from the surrounding Polish population, made resistance appear to be hopeless. Ringelblum persistently heard criticism of Jewish inaction from his contacts with the Polish resistance; yet, the Polish resistance had no first-hand contact with the ghetto starvation, demoralization and dislocation following resettlement. To have expected anything like mass resistance was itself an illusion.
Yet, other political and psychological factors need to be accounted for in the politics of ghetto administration. The Judenrat discouraged the Zionists and communists from
organizing and gave little money for active self-defense; indeed, well into the massive deportations in spring and summer of 1942 in Warsaw, the Judenrat operated on the remnant mentality. It would be wrong, however, to argue that inaction derived only from causes within the ghetto. The German war on Jewish children and infants, the vast relocation of rural populations to urban ghettos, the despair caused by daily, random deaths, corpses lying unburied in the streets, the insidious German manipulation of the Judenrat, the killing and brutalizing of the rabbis, contributed enormously to a collective state of mind in which the masses were convinced that no matter what they did, they were doomed.
Those who worked with various resistance organizations within the ghetto managed to purchase some weapons, but they were of inferior quality, very expensive and, by 1942, very difficult to come by. In Warsaw, Ringelblum writes: ‘After long, very long efforts, arms were received but in such a small quantity and of such bad quality that there was no possibility of undertaking any [collective] defensive action.’75
The situation was made worse by what appeared to be an increase of Polish anti-Semitism during the war. A Polish resistance fighter, Aurealia Wylezynska, active in aiding Jews, wrote in her diary: ‘A wave of anti-Semitism has engulfed the Polish people … . We are surrounded by a nest of vipers, characters from the underworld of crime… . For every hundred evil men, it is hard to find even one noble soul.’ Another Polish resistance fighter, Adam Polewka, wrote shortly after the war: ‘The Germans will throw stones at Hitler dead, because he brought about the downfall of the German people, but the Poles will bring flowers to his grave as a token of gratitude for his freeing Poland from the Jews.’ With sentiments like this amongst the Polish population, the necessary relations between a broad-based supportive popular movement, willing to give aid to a Jewish mass resistance, could not have existed.76 It should also be noted that many individual Poles gave assistance to Jews; Ringelblum’s diaries, for example, refer time and again to courageous Poles who offered assistance, support and shelter from the Germans. But he also, and as frequently, expressed bitterness at the indifference, or worse, the support of the vast majority of the population for the Germans’ war against the Jews.
Inevitably, Ringelblum’s scorn returns to the Judenrat:
‘The fairy tale about the “resettlement” in the East supported by the Judenrat and by the band of Gestapo agents brought in from Lublin [informers supplying the Germans with information and spreading false rumors], was so widely accepted by the Jews that thousands of people who were starving as a result of the constant cordons and the complete stoppage of smuggling presented themselves at the Umschlagplatz [the train depot in the ghetto transporting Jews to Treblinka and Sobibor] voluntarily in order to be sent to work in the east.’77
The Moral Position of Violence: Bielski Survivors
By the beginning of 1944, the Bielski Brigade consisted of 1,200 survivors. It was led by Asael, Tuvia and Zush Bielski, gathered in a family camp, in the middle of a dense Byelorussian forest and organized as a self-sustaining community. Eight hundred and fifty people functioned in supportive roles, with around 300 or so active resistance fighters armed primarily with rifles and revolvers. Unarmed refugees, mostly women, old people, children, the sick and wounded, lived side-by-side with the armed fighters. The Bielski Brigade demonstrates the success of resistance groups outside the ghetto for whom rescue was as important as vengeance. For the two and a half years of its existence, the Bielski partisans lost only fifty members, a phenomenal fact given that mortality rates amongst resistance groups were well over 60 percent. A casualty rate of less than 5 percent can be attributed to the work of the support community and Tuvia Bielski’s philosophy of ‘rescue,’ as well as ‘clever politics’ in dealing with the Russians and the prowess of the fighters. This shtetl in the forest exacted vengeance on the Germans, while encouraging caring and cooperation as the primary objective of a civilized and human existence. Rescue and community for the Bielski group were as important as killing.
In looking at the Bielskis, I am concerned with the moral position of resistance. The history has been adequately covered by Peter Duffy’s The Bielski Brothers and Nechama Tec’s more scholarly, sociological analysis, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans. For a complete study of how the Bielskis operated and an account of the structure of their community, both Duffy’s and Tec’s books are essential reading in
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understanding partisan resistance. What I focused on in my interviews with Bielski survivors were the moral gray zones, problematic intersections of violence and surviving, what Zvi Bielski called the brothers’ ‘mayhem,’ in addition to the impact of memory, particularly memory involving spiritual and theological states of mind, and how survivors explained their luck in having lived to establish families and build new lives.
The Bielski group initially started with a few relatives and friends who had survived the massacres in Novogrudek, a small village in Byelorussia; by 1943 it had swelled to well over 1,000 partisans. Yet, unlike almost every other partisan group, both Jewish and non-Jewish, the Bielskis insisted on accepting any Jew who sought refuge with them. Tuvia Bielski refused to turn away any refugee – no matter what their age or physical condition. But even more important, all found a role in the group, and these support roles – what one would find in any village or town, from food preparation to laundry, to maintenance and supplies, and tool-making and tannery – rather than draining energy from the fighters, contributed to the community’s overall welfare. Cooperation, not desolation, informed the group’s psychological environment.
Tuvia Bielski’s leadership consistently emphasized the welfare of the group. While conflicts arose over specific issues – such as who kept ‘luxury’ goods (for example, meat) taken during food expeditions – the group obeyed few fixed rules: all basic foodstuffs had to be handed over to the communal kitchen. Fighters, often led by Zush and Asael, who had been on food-gathering expeditions, might divide up choice commodities (such as a cow) before returning to camp, and support people would complain about this, but no one went hungry. Sonia O.: ‘Even if it were only a piece of bread, it was something; a little bread and water went a long way in the forests.’ Everyone received at least two meals a day: breakfast, consisting of boiled chicory and potatoes or bread; and a fairly substantial main meal, though the quality varied, depending on conditions and availability. In addition, there were those with access to better quality food: fighters, communal leaders, those in a position to occasionally supplement their allotment by preparing food in their own quarters.
A social hierarchy prevailed in the detachment, with commanders at the top; next came fighters; then people with special skills. At the very bottom were those without any forest survival skills. A young girl describes her father’s position at the bottom of the hierarchy, who before the war had been a well-paid administrator of a large brewery: ‘In the otraid [detachment], he became a “malbush” [someone who did not fight, and who offered the group no special skills]; he did nothing … . He was intelligent, educated, but not at all resourceful.’ But non-combatants and those who did not work were never left to die; nor were they left to starve. Nonetheless, a great deal of social opprobrium was attached to them. Max: ‘We had little use for the malbush … so many people eating and drinking and having a good time; we fighters resented them.’ Max appeared to be much closer to Zush’s attitude to rescue than to Tuvia’s.
Yet, the story is more complex than that. Zvi Bielski tells me about his Dad’s rescue of some malbush when the unit had had to hastily retreat deep into the forests in the face of a huge German mobilization in search of the partisans. Zush told one of the group to keep an eye on a woman and her daughter, and to make sure both escaped the encampment. Zush found out that the man had gone with the group but had left both the mother and daughter behind. When he asked him why, the man responded that they were not his concern; why should he try to save them? Enraged, Zush screamed that they deserved to live as much
as anyone in the group, pulled out a gun and shot him. Then, at great risk to his own life, he went back, found the mother and daughter and they rejoined the unit.
Malbush could improve their position through various means; for example, by guard duty or working in the tannery. Where one came from, and how much time had been spent in the forest, also affected social standing. The clothes one wore, for example, the fighting unit’s dress, and ownership of weapons, distinguished them from others of the otraid. But carpenters, bakers, tailors, gunsmiths and tanners, though on a level below the fighters, were highly respected for their skills and contributions to group survival.
In the fall of 1943, a permanent base was established in the Nalibocka forest. Workshops were housed in buildings dug out of the ground, and the base took on the properties of an organized community. Services, provided free of charge, kept the group functioning as a community; and all were entitled to have personal effects, including weapons, clothes and tools, repaired. Transactions involving other partisan groups had to be arranged through the leadership, and these involved payments of some kind: food, supplies, weapons, and so on. One survivor recalls: ‘Most workshops were situated in a very large hut. The din emanating from this hut could be heard from afar, banging of sledgehammers, sawing of wood, clatter of sewing machines, laughter, lively conversations rich in partisan slang.’1 In the ghettos workshops like these helped the Germans; in the forests the workshops benefited the partisans: