by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Here, for once, Zuckerman loses his temper—and why not? The Bund statement could almost have been made in 1935; it ignored the fact that what was now at stake was not politics within the Jewish community, but the very survival of the Jews as a people. Still, even in his irritation with Bundist sectarianism, Zuckerman retains an understanding of why so many adult Jewish leaders clung to their old views: it seemed the one thing they could hang on to in a moment of despair. The position of the Bund, writes Zuckerman,
was one of the contributing factors to our mood of great depression. It was also one of our delusions. Just as we believed that when the world learned of what was going on, something would happen, so I believed that when we found a common language with the Poles, with the help of the Bund, our salvation would come. But one day we did find a common language with the Poles, and it didn’t change the Jewish fate. . . . Of course, this is said a long time later, in hindsight. But in those days I was ready to kill my Bundist comrades for their blindness.
Overcoming its ideological rigidity, the Bund soon changed its attitude and joined in creating the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB, Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, in Polish) on July 28, 1942. Marek Edelman, then a young Bundist who would leave memoirs of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as remarkable in their way as those of Zuckerman, soon became one of the leaders among the fighters. The ZOB cadres consisted of young people, mostly in their 20s, some still younger, and a few at the advanced age of 32 or 33, treated as old-timers. There was also another, smaller Jewish fighting organization, sponsored by the Revisionists, which, after failed negotiations with the ZOB, went its own way.
The remaining Jews of Warsaw—by September 1942, somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000—mostly demoralized and burrowing for places to hide, knew little or nothing about the formation of the ZOB; but the few remaining leaders of the Jewish parties did know, and they mostly approved or acquiesced. Zuckerman records a touching incident in which Rabbi Alexander-Zysza Friedman, a figure in the religious party Agudas Israel, explained why he could not go along with the formation of a fighting force. Rabbi Friedman “was weeping as he said words of love and respect to me: My son, the Lord gives and the Lord takes.” (And where was God? Edelman, in his sardonic despair, had an answer: “God was on the side of the persecutors.”) Perhaps, remarks Zuckerman, since the fighters couldn’t really save anyone, Rabbi Friedman’s attitude should also have been the attitude of the young militants; but at that time they still clung to the hope that a few might be saved.
Operating in conspiratorial fashion, the ZOB directed its initial efforts within the ghetto itself. It set fire to the houses from which Jews had been driven so as to prevent the Nazis from seizing Jewish property. It sent a trusted comrade to execute Josef Szerynski, head of the hated Jewish police, but the bullet merely grazed his cheek. Szerynski then went into hiding—a symbolic victory for the ZOB. His successor, Yaakov Lejkin, whose record was even worse—he took open delight in beating Jews—was executed by the ZOB in October 1942.
The ZOB set up an improvised prison in the ghetto, where it held a few informers. Zuckerman remarks that the Gestapo, by now keenly interested in what was happening within the ghetto, had succeeded in infiltrating several of the Jewish institutions, so that before any act of armed resistance could be undertaken it was necessary to remove the Jewish spies and informers. The ZOB also proclaimed penalties against “economic collaborators” within the ghetto, those who had grown wealthy by exploiting Jewish labor on behalf of the Germans. These penalties were for the most part financial, to provide funds with which to buy guns. All of these actions have an unpleasant ring, of the kind one associates with “vanguard” movements, but Zuckerman pleads necessity in desperate circumstances—and who is to gainsay him?
In one of the round-ups in September 1942 the much-loved Hashomer leader Yosef Kaplan was taken by the Nazis and murdered on a street near the Umschlagplatz. When his friend Shmuel Braslaw went out to see if Kaplan might be rescued, he too was captured and immediately killed because he had a knife in his possession. A few nights later the leading group of ZOB sat together mourning the loss of their comrades, and Kaplan’s girlfriend, the courier Miriam Heinsdorf, sang a song in Russian, dry-eyed, “in a trembling voice”:
The road leads far away,
Lead me, my beloved,
I will part from you at the door,
Perhaps—forever.
The ZOB leadership, now including Zuckerman, Lubetkin, Anielewicz, and Edelman, decided that whenever the Nazis would begin their next aktsia, they would rise up, ready or not. (What, after all, did “ready” mean in these circumstances?) The immediate task was to accumulate weapons, of which they had, literally, a handful. Emanuel Ringelblum, the archivist of the ghetto, would recall an incident in which two leaders of the Hashomer Ha’tsa’ir took him to a secret room to show him their arsenal—two revolvers.
One of the best Hashomer people, Aryeh Wilner—“he looked like a Polish Sheygetz [gentile man], spoke good, popular Polish [unlike Zuckerman, who had a Vilna accent] and sometimes wore a hat with a feather like a well-to-do farmer”—was sent to the “Aryan” side of the city to acquire arms. At first Wilner met with a frigid response from the Home Army (A.K. in Polish), which possessed a considerable store of arms but refused to give any to the ZOB because the Poles did not believe the Jews would ever put up an armed resistance. Only after January 1943, when there was sporadic armed struggle in the ghetto during another aktsia—an ill-coordinated struggle, with only a few ZOB units able to mobilize themselves, yet still unnerving to the Germans—did the Home Army grant a small quantity of arms to the Jewish fighters. There were sharply varying attitudes within the Home Army to the very idea of Jewish resistance, with some leaders seeing it as a Communist-inspired maneuver that might lead to a bloodbath of the Polish population and other leaders responding warmly to Wilner’s appeals.
Until January 1943, according to Gutman, “the Home Army provided the ZOB with a total of ten revolvers, while . . . an authorized representative of the Polish government [in exile reported that] in the spring of 1943 the Home Army had in its possession 25,000 rifles, 6,000 revolvers, 30,000 grenades and other types of heavier weapons.” The Home Army did not try even once to commit an act of sabotage against the trains taking Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka.
After the Jewish resistance to the aktsia of January 1943, the ZOB heard from the Home Army that they “saluted us,” and the Poles sent fifty pistols, some grenades, and a few kilograms of explosives. “Since we also got the recipe for Molotov cocktails,” writes Zuckerman, “we started collecting bottles. . . . There were also the weapons our comrades bought on the Aryan side, as well as those we bought from Jews [a few unscrupulous smugglers] in the ghetto.” Once the uprising began in April, there were about 500 organized fighters in the ranks of the ZOB equipped with a motley collection of weapons, some of which, especially the revolvers, proved to be of limited or no use; but at no time were there enough weapons for all the fighters. The armed forces of the Revisionists, numbering some 250, seem to have been somewhat better equipped; they fought well during the first day of the uprising, but then, for unknown reasons, they left the ghetto, making their way through a tunnel to the other side of the city and from there to the countryside, where they were surprised by the Nazis and largely wiped out.
In March, Aryeh Wilner fell into a Gestapo trap. Since he was a central figure in negotiations with the ZOB and the two Polish forces, the Home Army and the Communist-led guerrillas, there was a great fear that he might break under torture and reveal crucial facts. He was severely tortured (“they hung him up and put white hot iron on the soles of his feet”), but he kept silent. Later, in a bold operation, he was rescued; he had to be carried, since he could not walk.
Meanwhile—we are now into early April—the ZOB had to find a replacement for Wilner. It was decided to send Zuckerman. In some of the most graphic pages of his memoirs, he tells how he slipped across to the “Aryan” side, w
as met by a young Jewish girl named Frania Beatus, “maybe 16 or 17 years old, blond, pretty,” who “walked around in high-heeled shoes so she’d look taller and carried a woman’s handbag, which she thought added maturity. So I had to smile when I saw her.” (In May, Frania committed suicide upon learning the outcome of the uprising.)
Zuckerman now tramped through the streets of “Aryan” Warsaw, fearing that if he stayed during the daytime in the apartments that friends had provided, he might endanger their owners. He tried desperately to find more arms, seeking to persuade leaders of the Home Army to help the Jewish fighters, but had little success. He made contact with the Communist-led guerrilla force, from whom he got a little help. It is to Zuckerman’s credit, I believe, that he does not allow later political arguments to keep him from saying that in these crucial weeks he found the underground Communists to be “fine people, aware, firm in their opinions. . . . They helped us with whatever little bit they could.”
One evening Zuckerman was directed to the apartment of an “Armenian” woman where he would be safe. That night he woke to the sensation of a hand stroking his face. In his sleep he had been crying and shouting in Yiddish, and here was the “Armenian” woman sitting at his bedside, weeping and stroking him. “I had a vague memory of some nightmare, but I couldn’t reconstruct anything. . . . I asked myself if the ‘Armenian’ woman was really Armenian, since she cried like a Yiddishe mama. I didn’t ask because there was no need to ask.”
About the uprising itself Zuckerman cannot provide a direct account, since he was stuck on the other side of Warsaw. Gutman, in his splendid book, has a classically restrained account, from which I borrow a few bits.
On April 19, 1943, as part of an aktsia that was to complete the Final Solution, a German military column came swaggering down the middle of Nalewki Street, a main thoroughfare in the ghetto. The Germans were singing loudly. This time, the ZOB was prepared. Chaim Frimmer, a ZOB fighter, describes their preparations:
The windows were fortified with sandbags. People were assigned to their various positions [and] . . . received an order from Berl Braudo [the unit commander] to check the weapons and pass out ammunition to the men. We filled baskets with Molotov cocktails. . . . Mordecai Anielewicz arrived and went into Yisrael [Kanal’s] room. After consultation they came out and walked through the rooms and apartments, selecting appropriate spots for positions. . . . “Cjank” (doses of cyanide) was passed out to certain people, especially those whose tasks required them to be mobile and heightened their chances of being caught by the Germans and tortured.
The Germans, to their surprise, were attacked by ZOB units stationed in the upper stories of adjacent buildings, from which they threw grenades. The Germans panicked, retreating in disorder and leaving casualties in the street. A short while later the Germans returned, this time hugging the sides of the buildings for safety, but in order to fire they had to expose themselves. Again, a German retreat and no Jewish casualties.
Organized military resistance by the ZOB continued for several days. General Rowecki, head of the Home Army, reported to the Polish government in London: “The resistance of groups of Jewish fighters was far beyond all expectations.” And once the ZOB units showed they could hold out, even destroying a few German tanks with Molotov cocktails, an unexpected reinforcement appeared. Ordinary Jews who had been hiding in elaborate bunkers that had been put up over the last few months now joined in the fighting with the ZOB units.
Zuckerman had shrewdly predicted that if Jewish resistance proved strong, the Nazis would resort to one measure the Jews would be unable to counter: they would set the entire ghetto on fire, forcing Jews out of the bunkers and exposing them to capture and death. General Stroop, the German expert in street fighting who had been rushed to Warsaw, reported that “scores of burning Jews—whole families—jumped from windows or tried to slide down sheets that had been tied together. We took pains to ensure that those Jews . . . were wiped out immediately.” A few days later Stroop wrote in his report to Berlin: “Despite the terror of the raging fire, the Jews and the hooligans [Stroop’s name for the ZOB] preferred to turn back into the flames rather than fall into our hands.”
Organized combat could not be long sustained, since the Germans outnumbered the Jewish fighters and had far superior weapons. But sporadic resistance continued for at least a month. On April 23 Anielewicz, who would soon be killed in the fighting, sent a note to Zuckerman: “Things have surpassed our boldest dreams . . . the dream of my life has come true. I’ve lived to see a Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory.” Edelman, by nature disinclined to boast, would later recall the struggle of a ZOB unit that fought until May 3: “It is difficult to speak of victory when people are fighting for their lives and so many are lost, but one thing can be said of this battle. We did not allow the Germans to execute their plans.”
Once the resistance collapsed, one group of ZOB fighters led by Wilner committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Nazis. Another ZOB fighter, Lolek Rotblat, shot his mother and then himself. A small number of ZOB fighters escaped through the sewers to the “Aryan” side of the city, among them Lubetkin, who reunited with Zuckerman.
The remaining chapters of Zuckerman’s memoirs deal with his efforts to help place survivors of the uprising in the safe places. About eighty of the ZOB people were rescued; many of them were later killed in clashes with German forces, and many, reports Gutman, were “murdered by Polish partisans.” Only about a dozen lived to see the liberation. Zuckerman and Lubetkin fought in the Polish uprising of 1944, and again survived. From a military point of view, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was of slight significance. From what I venture to call a human point of view, its significance is beyond calculation.
One of the many distinctions of Zuckerman’s memoirs is that in two or three sentences he can bring to vivid life his comrades of the Jewish underground. One needs constantly to remind oneself that these were youngsters, what we would call “kids.” For me, they have become an abiding part of consciousness, these boys and girls, these young men and women. Let me put down the names of a few of them: Mordecai Anielewicz, Zivia Lubetkin, Yitzhak Zuckerman, Frumka Plotnitska, Yosef Kaplan, Tosia Altman, Marek Edelman, Lonka Kozibrodska, Kazik (Simha Rotem). There were many others.
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf
{1994}
LITERARY POLEMICS COME AND GO, sparking a season of anger and gossip, and then turning to dust. A handful survive their moment: Dr. Johnson’s demolition of Soame Jenyns, Hazlitt’s attack on Coleridge. But few literary polemics can have been so damaging, or so lasting in consequences, as Virginia Woolf’s 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” about the once widely read English novelists Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy.
For several literary generations now, Woolf’s essay has been taken as the definitive word finishing off an old-fashioned school of fiction and thereby clearing the way for literary modernism. Writing with her glistening charm, and casting herself as the voice of the new (always a shrewd strategy in literary debate), Woolf quickly seized the high ground in her battle with Bennett. Against her needling thrusts, the old fellow never had a chance.
The debate has been nicely laid out by Samuel Hynes in his Edwardian Occasions, and I owe to him some of the following details. It all began in 1917 with Woolf’s review of a collection of Bennett’s literary pieces, a rather favorable review marred by the stylish snobbism that was becoming a trademark of the Bloomsbury circle. Bennett, wrote Woolf, had a materialistic view of the world; “he has been worrying himself to achieve infantile realisms.” A catchy phrase, though exactly what “infantile realisms” meant Woolf did not trouble to say. During the next few years she kept returning to the attack, as if to prepare for “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” More than personal sensibilities or rivalries of status was involved here, though both were visible; Woolf was intent upon discrediting, if not simply dismissing, a group of literary predecessors who enjoyed a large r
eadership.
In 1923 Bennett reviewed Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room, praising its “originality” and “exquisite” prose, but concluding that “the characters do not vitally survive in the mind.” For Bennett, this was a fatal flaw. And for his readers too—though not for the advanced literary public which by now was learning to suspect this kind of talk about “characters surviving” as a lazy apology for the shapeless and perhaps even mindless Victorian novel.
A year later Woolf published her famous essay, brilliantly sketching an imaginary old lady named Mrs. Brown whom she supplied with anecdotes and reflections as tokens of inner being. These released the sort of insights, suggested Woolf, that would not occur to someone like Bennett, a writer obsessed with dull particulars of setting (weather, town, clothing, furniture, etc.). Were Bennett to write about a Mrs. Brown, he would describe her house in conscientious detail but never penetrate her essential life, for—what a keen polemicist!—“he is trying to hypnotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there.”1* In a quiet put-down of Bennett’s novel Hilda Lessways (not one of his best), Woolf gave a turn of the knife: “One line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description. . . .”
From the suave but deadly attack of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Bennett’s literary reputation would never quite recover. He remained popular with the general public, but among literary readers, the sort that would become the public for the emerging modernists, the standard view has long been that he was a middling, plodding sort of Edwardian novelist whose work has been pushed aside by the revolutionary achievements of Lawrence, Joyce, and, to a smaller extent, Woolf herself. When Bennett died in 1930, Woolf noted in her diary that “he had some real understanding power, as well as a gigantic absorbing power [and] direct contact with life”—all attributes, you might suppose, handy for a novelist but, for her, evidently not sufficient. In saying this, remarks Hynes, Woolf gave Bennett, “perhaps, the ‘reality gift’ that [she] doubted in herself, the gift that she despised and envied.” Yes; in much of her fiction Woolf resembles Stevens’ man with the blue guitar who “cannot bring a world quite round, / Although I patch it as I can.”
