Fighting on all Fronts (17 page)

Concentrating the Jews in ghettos served the Nazis strategically but there was also an ideological function. In order to commit atrocities it is necessary to first dehumanise the victims, and the ghetto environment facilitated this process. After a visit to the Warsaw Ghetto the Nazi governor of Krakow commented: “A German would not be able to live under such conditions”, because they were a civilised people with a high culture and the state of the children of the ghetto was due to Jews being a diseased race.
³⁵
As Chaim Kaplan put it: “We are segregated and separated from the world…driven out of the society of the human race”.
³⁶

In all ghettos the Nazis created a special body, the
Judenrat
(Jewish Council), to act as an intermediary.
³⁷
The members were selected by the Nazis and naturally they chose people who would cooperate. The members of the
Judenräte
often saw their function as primarily welfare, running soup kitchens and so on.
³⁸
But to the Nazis these activities were irrelevant. The Nazis used the
Judenrat
to control the population, to provide manpower for the slave labour factories and finally, and chillingly, to process deportations to death camps. More Zionists were chosen for this role than all other political groups combined.
³⁹
The remainder were mostly the traditional conservative community leadership—rabbis and elders.

Jewish leaders who served in the
Judenräte
clearly did not cause the Holocaust; the brutality of the Nazis was beyond the control of anyone subject to it. But the one thing that Jews could take responsibility for was their own response. Would they submit or would they resist?

The responses of the
Judenräte
varied greatly. Many argued that compliance would limit the damage the Nazis did or that by making themselves economically useful at least some Jews would survive. They argued that resistance could not be successful so it was futile.

This is a much disputed field. Yehuda Bauer discusses the research of Aharon Weiss into the behaviour of the
Judenräte
. Weiss drew a “red line”—active collaboration “meant handing over Jews to the Germans at the latters’ request”.
⁴⁰
An extreme example of this occurred in the Lodz Ghetto, where the head of the
Judenrat
Mordechai Rumkowski was, in Bauer’s words, “without any doubt a brutal dictator”,
⁴¹
who handed the children of the ghetto over to the Nazis and turned the ghetto into a slave labour camp. An example of a different kind is the notorious case of politically based collaboration known as the Kastner affair.
⁴²

Active collaboration is one thing. More significant for my general argument are the
Judenräte
who were not active collaborators but who failed to support the underground groupings and opposed active resistance to the Nazis. This was the case in several large and important ghettos such as Vilna, Bialystok and Warsaw. Their attitude affected the populations in the ghettos; it exacerbated the feeling of hopelessness and made the building of resistance organisations even more difficult.

Feelings of hopelessness are understandable. Militarily the situation
was
hopeless. Nehama Tec argues that there are five conditions upon which the possibility of successful armed resistance is predicated: time to prepare, a strategic base of operations, leadership, arms and allies.
⁴³
Overwhelmingly these conditions were lacking. As Lucjan Dobroszycki put it: “Has anyone seen an army without arms; an army scattered over 200 isolated ghettos; an army of infants, old people, the sick; an army whose soldiers are denied the right even to surrender?”
⁴⁴

Yet there was resistance—and on a scale that has somehow disappeared from historical awareness. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is not the only case; Jewish resistance occurred right across Nazi occupied Eastern Europe.
⁴⁵

Definitions of resistance tend to divide into two groups. The first group focuses on an active ideological component.

[Resistance] could develop only from an active ideology which presented its holders in opposition to the existing circumstances and believed in the possibility of changing the cultural and political ecology. Therefore the resisters usually had a previous history as members of anti-establishment groups.
⁴⁶

This type of definition applies readily enough to members of formally structured resistance organisations. The political parties, and above all their youth groups, formed the core of the underground. Overwhelmingly it was young people who were able to recognise the true intentions of the Nazis and to organise against them, particularly Labour Zionists, the socialist Zionists Hashomer Hazair, the Bund youth group
Tsukunft
and communist youth groups.
⁴⁷

However, the Jewish population as a whole faced a situation where almost all normal activities were banned by an enemy determined to exterminate them. In such circumstances even staying alive is at least defiance and even efforts to hide or flee must be regarded as opposition. In this broader context the definition offered by Nehama Tec sits better:
“Activities motivated by the desire to thwart, limit, undermine, or end the exercise of oppression over the oppressed”.
⁴⁸

Consider the case of the Jews in the small eastern Polish town of Biala Podlaska who gave bread to Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) marching through the town under guard in June 1941. Sent to Auschwitz they were among the first Jewish victims to perish there.
⁴⁹
Ideology does not enter into such acts of courageous defiant humanity which occurred in everyday activities. Even simple survival activities such as soup kitchens required a defiant attitude. As one Vilna Ghetto inmate said: “the resistance of the anonymous masses must be affirmed in terms of how they held on to their humanity, of their manifestation of solidarity, of mutual help and self-sacrifice”.
⁵⁰

Defiance can also be seen in the extraordinary range of cultural activities that occurred including music, theatre and art. I have used lines from songs as section headings to give an indication of their power. In addition “people kept their sense of humour, albeit grotesque, amidst the most appalling and unspeakable atrocities. We were always singing and telling vulgar jokes about our predicament.” A song in one concentration camp sung every evening contained the lyrics: “It’s already nine o’clock, All the camp is going to sleep, The latrines are locked up now, You’re no longer allowed to shit.”
⁵¹

A very Jewish joke:

A Jewish teacher asks his pupil, ‘Tell me Moshe, what would you like to be if you were Hitler’s son?’ ‘An orphan’, answers the pupil.
⁵²

The remainder of this chapter focuses on collective and organised active resistance within this wider context.
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The most famous example of resistance by Jews is the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
⁵⁴

Nearly 400,000 people were sealed into the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. The
Judenrat
and much of the population tended to rationalise what was happening. But some of the Zionist youth groups recognised the Nazis’ intentions as early as March 1942 and called for the creation of a self-defence organisation but without success.
⁵⁵
The Nazis started mass deportations to Treblinka in July 1942 in the so-called
Gross-Aktion Warschau
. By then over 100,000 had already died due to starvation, disease or random killings. With another 250,000 to 300,000 people
transported, the political groups finally faced up to the need for a united armed response.

Finally at the end of October 1942 three political groupings—the Bund, the Labour Zionists and the communists—formed the Jewish Fighting Organisation (
Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa
, ZOB) under the command of the Labour Zionist Mordechai Anielewicz.

When a second wave of deportations commenced on 18 January 1943, ZOB members fought back. The subsequent four days saw the first street fighting in occupied Poland. Despite the almost complete lack of arms and resources, the ghetto fighters were able to force the Nazis to retreat and to limit the number of deportations.

Marek Edelman, a member of the Bund and the five-person command group of the ZOB, wrote:

For the first time German plans were frustrated. For the first time the halo of omnipotence and invincibility was torn from the Germans’ heads. For the first time the Jew in the street realized that it was possible to do something against the Germans’ will and power… [It was] a psychological turning point.
⁵⁶

The ZOB then took effective control of the ghetto. With a very different approach to the typical
Judenrat
, they executed Jewish police, Nazi agents and spies and prepared for military resistance. They also oversaw all aspects of ghetto life including the publication of newspapers and taxing wealthy residents.

On 19 April the German forces tried to resume deportations with a view to finally liquidating the ghetto. At this point the ZOB had some 220 fighters armed with some handguns (many barely functional), grenades and molotov cocktails, a few rifles, two land mines and a submachine gun. Also part of the uprising, but not operating under the direction of the ZOB, was the Jewish Military Union (
Żydowski Związek Wojskowy
, ZZW) with approximately 500 fighters consisting of former Jewish officers of the Polish army plus right wing Zionists.
⁵⁷
The ZZW had somewhat better weapons due to their links with the Polish Home Army (
Armia Krajowa
). Together both groups could gather only 750 fighters.
⁵⁸

The German side consisted of more than 2,000 soldiers with heavy weapons including artillery, mine throwers and machine guns. With their overwhelming military superiority they anticipated an action of only three days. But the Nazi commander General Stroop was forced to report after a week: “The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could be broken only by relentlessly using all our force and energy by day and night”.
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The stories of personal bravery are inspiring and heartbreaking. Edelman describes a young boy, Dawid Hochberg, blocking a narrow passageway. Once killed by the Germans his wedged in body took some time to remove, allowing the escape of fighters and civilians.
⁶⁰
A number of captured fighters—especially the women—threw hidden grenades or fired concealed handguns after surrendering, killing themselves with their captors. Some Polish resistance members fought with the Jews inside the ghetto. Polish resistance groups also engaged the Nazis at six different locations outside the ghetto walls to help divert the German forces.

The Nazis had to fight from building to building. Defeating the uprising took six weeks and necessitated setting fire to the ghetto. As Edelman says, the insurgents “were beaten by the flames, not the Germans”.
⁶¹
Organised resistance was over by the end of April but localised resistance continued until June. Many people hid in bunkers and were only forced out by smoke bombs.

Anielewicz noted in his last letter: “What took place exceeded all expectations. In our opposition to the Germans we did more than our strength allowed”.
⁶²
Even Goebbels (unintentionally) paid the resistance tribute: “The Jews have actually succeeded in making a defensive position of the ghetto… It shows what is to be expected of Jews when they are in possession of arms. Unfortunately some of their weapons were good German ones”.
⁶³

The ghetto uprising was a military failure. But as Yitzhak Zuckerman, second in command of the ZOB, said:

I don’t think there is any need to analyse the uprising in military terms… [N]o one doubted how it was likely to turn out… The really important things were…in the force shown by Jewish youths…to rise up against their destroyers and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising
⁶⁴

The uprising had an enormous impact on the Polish population as well as the Jews and intensified resistance throughout the country. Many of the other uprisings were directly or indirectly inspired by the ghetto insurgents.

When the Nazis set up the Warsaw
Judenrat
in August 1939 it was argued that at least one Bund member should participate and Shmuel Zygelboym reluctantly joined. However, the demands of the position soon came into
conflict with his politics. When the Nazis attempted to set up the ghetto in Warsaw in October of that year, Zygelboym refused to help. Instead he addressed Jews gathered outside the organisation’s headquarters, and told them not to cooperate but to remain in their houses and make the Nazis take them by force. This single call for resistance succeeded in having the order to establish the ghetto cancelled for several months.
⁶⁵

The leader of the Warsaw
Judenrat
, Adam Czerniaków (a general Zionist), behaved differently. He carried out Nazi instructions, including providing lists of people to be deported, even though he knew their fate. In this he was supported by the Jewish police. Marek Edelman comments about a
Judenrat
meeting in July 1942 in response to the German demand that all “non-productive” Jews be deported in the
Gross-Aktion Warschau
:

Not a single councilman stopped to consider the basic question—whether the Jewish Council should undertake to carry out the order at all… There was no debate on the implications of the order, only on the… procedure for its execution… Thus the Germans made the Jewish Council itself condemn over 300,000 ghetto inhabitants to death.
⁶⁶

The role of the youth in the creation of a fighting organisation was central. Immediately following the Nazi invasion of Poland most of the top leaders of the Zionist organisations left the country to go into exile, leaving secondary leaders and the youth groups to lead their response. Similarly the Bund leadership largely departed, leaving their youth group
Tsukunft
to play a leading role in the party’s underground activities.
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