by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
It was the Jewish youth movements that managed best to pull themselves together. They concentrated their meager forces in underground cells in the main cities, while limiting themselves to cultural and educational activities in apartments, courtyards, and the soup kitchens. Though few were able to face up to so painful a reality, the youth movements in effect acknowledged that there was little they could do for the hundreds of thousands of Jews now packed into Warsaw. They could hope only to salvage a “saving remnant” of the young.
What held these movements together was not merely, or even mainly, their Zionist and socialist convictions: it was the systematic cultivation of fraternal ties. Friendship sustained morale and enabled these young people to take extraordinary risks. During the first year or so of the occupation, the Nazis seemed relatively indifferent to what was happening within the Jewish streets, perhaps because they dismissed the possibility of Jewish resistance. At least until word came of “the Final Solution,” what the Nazi occupiers cared about was to steal Jewish property, to grab Jews off the streets for forced labor, and to indulge themselves in acts of random humiliation and violence against the Jews.
The Jewish youth groups set up a formal structure early in the occupation. They established committees, cells and leadership cadres. Now, from the distance of time, some of these organizational formalities may seem pathetic—and still more so their ideological discussions and debates that had lost all relevance. Mordecai Anielewicz, the future commander of the Warsaw uprising, would say that all the cultural activities—such as the more than ninety seminars in Warsaw that discussed the work of the Yiddish writer Mendele Mokher Sforim—were a waste of time. But they were not a waste of time. Anielewicz failed to understand, in his despairing impatience, that retaining some of the traditional interests was a way of preserving the humanity of the Jews. And he failed to consider the extent to which such seemingly innocuous activities, apart from their value as intellectual refreshment, could provide a basis in morale for the revolt that he was later to lead.
Similarly, Yitzhak Zuckerman, speaking in Israel after the war, would say that the Jews should have begun their revolt almost immediately after the Nazis entered Warsaw. He, too, was probably wrong—though who can be certain about such matters? In the early months of the occupation, the majority of Jews hoped to scrape through the war years; they would almost certainly have seen a call to armed revolt as a provocation. In fact, when the Jewish Fighting Organization, the unified youth structure, put up posters in early 1943 calling for armed revolt, Jews tore the posters down, and in a few instances even beat up the young people who had put them up. For the idea of armed revolt seemed not only impractical, it seemed suicidal.
Zuckerman has left a poignant description of his state of mind in the early months of the occupation, when he found himself for a brief time in the Soviet-occupied segment of Poland:
I had a great desire for life. I loved nothing more than life. I was 24 years old, in the prime of life. But I had no illusions. I was almost sure that they [the Soviet police] would catch me one day. . . . Sober consideration said we could go to Siberia. . . . But in comparison to the information we got from Warsaw we were really living in paradise! . . . I could move around. In this period, anyway. Whereas Warsaw under the Nazis scared me to death.
In order to join his comrades in Dror (“Freedom” in Hebrew), a Zionist-socialist youth movement, Zuckerman left the Soviet-occupied zone and tramped to Warsaw in early 1940. Anielewicz, a leader of Hashomer Ha’tsa’ir (“The Young Guardians” in Hebrew), another Zionist-socialist youth group but somewhat to the left of Dror, also came to Warsaw. These youth movements, together with one or two others and the youth of the Bund, the Jewish socialist party of Poland, cooperated in the limited day-to-day activities that were still possible (providing meager relief for starving friends, issuing underground papers, holding educational seminars), all with the aim, as Zuckerman puts it, of “preserving the ember.”
A dark realism, not easily distinguished from a dark pessimism, came to underlie the work of Zuckerman and his friends in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. They came to realize, after a time, that “we are on a one-way road to Treblinka [the death camp near Warsaw], and there was no way back.” Yet precisely this growing awareness steeled the ranks of the Jewish youth, enabling them to take the extraordinary risks that were necessary even for the modest tasks they set themselves. Sometimes even crossing a street could mean risking one’s life.
Throughout the Holocaust years and into the immediate postwar period, Zuckerman held to a single idea, simple but powerful. He argued that the standard ideological divisions within the Jewish community of Poland—and there had been many of these!—should be put on hold. They had lost their relevance, though at some point they might regain it. In the face of unprecedented catastrophe, Zuckerman kept saying, it was necessary for Jews to hold, or to huddle, together, sometimes in doing what little could be done to alleviate their misery, sometimes in recognizing that their condition had become hopeless. This was not an “inspiring” idea, nor did it lend itself to exalted rhetoric. It was, at best, a last-ditch defense.
Within the politically conscious segments of the Warsaw Jewish youth, as well as among some adults, there were discussions as to whether to remain in the cities with the mass of terrorized Jews or try to join the Polish partisans in the woods. The Dror leadership, which often meant Zuckerman and his girlfriend, the indomitable Zivia Lubetkin, held to the view that they must remain in Warsaw with the other Jews, sharing their fate and perhaps being able to ease it a little. Only after the collapse of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, when the Nazis burned the Jewish quarter to the ground, did Zuckerman and a few friends establish contact with the partisans.
On New Year’s Eve 1939 in Lwow, Dror held what Zuckerman calls “a historic conference” that consolidated relations between the Warsaw center and the isolated groups in outlying areas. This was not easy to do, since the Nazis forbade Jews to ride on trains and summarily shot any who were caught. The youth groups adopted a policy of using female comrades to serve as couriers, since some could pass for gentiles. (One of them, Lonka Kozibrodska, described by a friend as “a tall girl who didn’t look at all Jewish,” was especially fearless; she was finally caught by the Nazis and died of typhus in Auschwitz at the age of 26.)
The youth movements, soon a single community, coiled themselves into a tight circle. Zuckerman speaks of his friends as “Puritans” who strictly subordinated personal interests to the needs of their cause. Still, it is good to learn that the young activists paired off rapidly into couples, as if to reach out for a little pleasure before encountering death.
One of the problems for Dror, Hashomer Ha’tsa’ir, and the smaller groups was the recurrent clash of opinion and feeling between them and their friends abroad, with whom, for a time, it was still possible to communicate. Zuckerman tells the story of Yosef Kaplan, a Hashomer activist, who received a solemn message from friends in Switzerland: “We are with you!” To which Kaplan, who must have been a delightful fellow, replied: “Better I should be with you!”
Kaplan’s tone was jocular, but it pointed to a deeply troubled feeling among the young Warsaw activists that they had been virtually abandoned by the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. As Zuckerman, in his graver voice, puts it:
We sent regular letters to Eretz Israel . . . we sent letters complaining bitterly that they weren’t writing to us. . . . During the aktsia [the round-up of more than 250,000 Warsaw Jews in the summer of 1942] we sat with Yosef Kaplan making lists of who we’re going to hang in Eretz Israel . . . we even talked about “gallows”; this was black humor, but it wasn’t only joking: these things were very painful.
For some years now there has been a discussion among Israelis, with a self-lacerating edge, as to whether the Yishuv did all it could to help the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. Zuckerman’s comment touches upon this discussion, though probably without a full awareness of how complex were the p
roblems facing the Yishuv during the war years and how sadly limited were its capacities to do much on behalf of the European Jews. There is now an authoritative study of the question by the Israeli scholar Dina Porat—an abridged translation called The Blue and Yellow Star of David was recently published by Harvard University Press—which argues that most leaders of the Yishuv, a community but not a state, were genuinely concerned about the fate of Europe’s Jews, and undertook a range of projects to help and perhaps rescue them; that a lack of resources and still more, the indifference of the European states and the United States and especially the British mandatory power, crippled the efforts of the Yishuv; that the Palestinian Jews had their own severe anxieties regarding the possibility of a Nazi invasion through Syria that would destroy the future Jewish homeland. While there were numerous failures and some instances of ideological disdain for the European Jews, Porat argues, “the Yishuv in fact did more than it was ever given credit for—either then or now.”
Still, between the Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and those who lived through the war in Palestine there were often acrid recriminations, perhaps best understood as a common helplessness in the most terrible moment of human history. Years later, in Israel, Zuckerman was asked by Chaim Guri, a well-known Israeli poet of the generation of the 1940s, “whether fighters from the Yishuv could have been of any help had they flown to Poland.” (I take this from Porat’s book.) Zuckerman replied:
If 500 fighters had taken off, anti-aircraft fire would have brought 490 of them down on the way. And if you had been among the remaining ten, we would have had a problem hiding you—because of your native Hebrew accent, your Mediterranean eyes, the fact that you don’t speak Yiddish or Polish. You could not have saved us. . . . Only a superpower could have saved us. A major power. But why didn’t even one of you come? One! . . . It wouldn’t have been a political or military question. It was only a question of ritual, of gesture, a sign, a hand extended, as a token of sharing our fate. Why didn’t a single person come to Poland?
“Only a superpower could have saved us”—those are the decisive words. But the superpowers did not lift a finger.
A turning point in the Warsaw experience came with the establishment of a closed ghetto within the city; the Nazis did this through a series of steps that concluded in late 1940. Gutman writes that “according to German figures, 113,000 Poles and 138,000 Jews [would have to be] relocated” in order to shape the ghetto according to the Nazis’ specifications. “The area of the ghetto was about 425 acres, of which 375 acres were residential space. This meant that 30 percent of the population of Warsaw was cramped into only 2.4 percent of the city.” Zuckerman translates these figures into direct experience:
The establishment of the ghetto meant a revolution in our life. Suddenly you saw poverty in a concentrated and harsh form. Every single day, the situation grew worse. Dead bodies rolled in the streets. Your senses did grow blunt in time. You got used to it, you moved a little and passed by. I was used to passing one family: two young people carrying a little girl. I recall the nobility in their stance and their silence. Every time I passed them, I would give them something. One day they disappeared and I knew they were no longer alive.
Now came the dark days. Zuckerman was arrested and sent to a labor camp. Dror had Lonka Kozibrodska nose about the camp to see if she could get some useful information. Meanwhile
they started torturing me. Two of them stood and beat me, first on my head, with rubber clubs. When I felt blood flow, I tried to cover my head with my hands, and then they beat my hands and ears. . . . They went on like that, mercilessly, incessantly. At that stage, I didn’t weep or whine. I took the blows in silence. And the more I got, the less pain I felt. . . . They wanted me to admit that [Lonka] was a Jew, but they didn’t get that. . . . In time, I learned that if you want to endure an interrogation, choose what is important to you and don’t retreat from that. I ordered myself to maintain [Lonka] was a Pole. I was wounded and very sick, but I kept my composure.
After a grueling week Zuckerman managed to get out of the labor camp, and for a while he became “the pampered child” of the Dror community. “They even gave me milk. . . . For the first time I had seen with my own eyes what a labor camp was. Before that, we used to distinguish between ‘labor camps’ and ‘concentration camps,’ but now I knew it was all the same.”
Reports kept reaching Warsaw of mass deportations and slaughters, no longer a scattered few but hundreds, even thousands, across all of Poland. “The youth . . . accepted the interpretation that this was the beginning of the end. . . . A total death sentence for the Jews.” Zuckerman fell into “a deep depression” that “went on all day and night.” About his own state of mind during his years in the underground he is entirely candid: he has no use for the rhetoric of “heroism” that would later fill orations about the Holocaust. He reveals his vulnerability and several times admits that he—and no doubt the others—lived in constant fear. Several times he suffered a sort of breakdown accompanied by heavy drinking. Somehow—he was obviously a man of tremendous will—he recovered himself and went back to his tasks.
The largest of all the Warsaw aktsias, begun on July 22, 1942, lasted until September 12, 1942. During those seven weeks more than 250,000 Jews from Warsaw were shipped, or as the Nazis put it, “relocated,” to Treblinka, where most were destroyed in the gas chambers. Two days after the aktsia began, Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Warsaw Jüdenrat, committed suicide. He had been feared and despised by the Jews of Warsaw, but in retrospect at least, Zuckerman is remarkably tolerant, seeing Czerniakow as a weak man, utterly unqualified for the post he had been forced to assume. At first he meant to shield some Jews by arranging their submission to the Nazis, and then, as their pressures on him steadily increased, he came to serve as their adjutant in the ghetto.
Only toward open traitors—some high in the Jüdenrat, many within the Jewish police and a number who spied for the Gestapo—does Zuckerman show hatred. It’s as if he felt that all the Jews had been put into a situation of complete helplessness, and that it would be pointless and inhumane to condemn those who displayed weakness. For there are situations in which the passing of moral judgment becomes itself morally irrelevant, even morally cruel—or is to be undertaken, at least, only with the greatest reluctance.
Still, it cannot be denied that in these months, while there were some incidents of individual resistance by “wildcats” who tried to escape from the streets leading to the Umschlagplatz, the square from which they would be sent to Treblinka, most of the Jews went passively to their death. This remains one of the agonizing problems of the Holocaust. It is a problem that will never be solved to anyone’s complete satisfaction.
Let us note, first of all, that there were Jewish revolts, in and out of the concentration camps—revolts that were suppressed at a high cost in blood. But these were mostly the desperate acts of militant minorities within the Jewish ranks. By the summer of 1942, the Warsaw Jews were worn down with hunger, suffering, and disease. They saw no possibility of resistance, or even survival. Perhaps there had come to many of them that numbness that follows a failed struggle to survive, a numbness by which the body signals its readiness for the end.
During the weeks of the aktsia the Nazi terror intensified enormously. It was reported by the Jüdenrat that 6,687 Jews were shot in the streets and houses of the ghetto between July and September 1942. The faintest sign of disobedience met with large-scale punishment, so that any Jew thinking of personal resistance had to be aware that he was endangering many other Jews. Nor was there yet an organized force capable of preparing even a token resistance. The Jews had no arms, nor any tradition of military action, with which to encounter the vastly superior forces of the German Nazis.
Gutman offers still another explanation for Jewish passivity:
A profound faith in the Divine Will and a long-standing tradition of fatalism and submission prevented the Jews from resisting and made for a situation in which peopl
e being slaughtered by the thousands not only failed to respond but did not think to take revenge on their murderers.
This may explain the behavior of some Orthodox Jews, but it fails to explain the behavior of the many secular Jews who had, they often said, broken with the tradition of passivity. Perhaps that break did not cut as deeply into their consciousness as they liked to suppose; perhaps the abandoned old traditions lingered in the hearts of the Jewish socialists and Zionists.
And also, adds Gutman, the truth “simply could not be fully apprehended. Logic, emotion and the deep-seated convictions about man’s basic humanity all dictated that what was going on at Treblinka was simply not possible.” Genocide is, quite literally, incredible; and for that reason, I would add, passivity before genocide was hardly a uniquely Jewish trait. How, too, explain the passivity of the Cambodians slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge? Or the thousands of Africans slaughtered by their dictators? We had better acknowledge that there are things about this terrible century that resist explanation.
In March 1942 the Jewish secular parties and youth groups held an initial meeting to discuss forming an armed resistance. In his opening report Zuckerman urged that “a joint Jewish political representation” establish contact with “the civilian and military Polish underground” and “establish a general Jewish fighting force.” At this point the representative of the Bund, Maurycy Orzech, argued vehemently that not only Jews were being killed by the Nazis, but also Poles; that the Bund rejected the idea of “Jewish unity” since major class divisions remained within the Jewish community; and that the Jews should wait for the Polish proletariat to rise up and then lend support to its rebellion.
