Fighting on all Fronts, page 15
The best known Zegota activist is Irene Sendler, head of the children’s division. A social worker and a socialist, she grew up with close links to the Jewish community and could speak Yiddish. Sendler had protested against anti-Semitism in the 1930s: she deliberately sat with Jews in segregated university lecture halls and nearly got expelled. Irene Sendler saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children’s homes outside the ghetto.121
Zegota was not the only support group. What Gunnar Paulsson called a “secret city” operated in Warsaw as between 70,000 and 90,000 people helped an estimated 28,000 Jews to live outside the ghetto.122
The divided stand on anti-Semitism of pre-war political currents continued during the war. So while the right wing press contained anti-Semitic diatribes, the Polish Socialist Party and other left wing newspapers published information about atrocities and death camps, as did the organ of the Peasant Movement and those of the Catholic underground groups.123 Importantly, the Polish Underground State took a stand against anti-Semitism. They proclaimed laws against anti-Semitism and executed perpetrators, with details published in their underground newspapers. In early 1943 the Underground State’s official publication wrote that they viewed the murder of Jews with shock and horror and stated that Poles had a duty to help Jews, despite the death penalty awaiting any caught doing so.124 One major contribution of the Polish underground was its pivotal role in conveying news of Nazi extermination policy to the West.125
Should the Poles have done more?
We often hear people say that the Poles or other non-Jewish nationalities should have or could have done more to help the Jews. For instance, historian Barbara Epstein:
If non-Jewish organisations with substantial influence and resources had done what they could to help the Jews, more Jews would have escaped and survived.126
But Epstein herself points out that most Jews in Eastern Europe died when “the Germans were at the height of their power and when they were engaged in killing not only Jews but also Poles, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and others”.127
On this topic Stewart Steven concludes: “Maybe Poland could have done more for its Jewish population, but then so could every country of occupied Europe. The record shows that the Poles did more than most”.128
Gunnar S Paulsson reviewed a large range of available material, and concluded that despite the much harsher conditions, Warsaw’s Polish residents managed to support and conceal a similar percentage of Jews as residents of cities in safer, supposedly less anti-Semitic countries of Western Europe.129 The official count of Polish Righteous (people recorded at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Centre in Israel as having helped Jews) is 6,266. This is the highest count for any country. Everyone acknowledges that the list is incomplete and no one doubts more should be officially recognised. Any estimate is fraught with difficulties.130 But as Martin Gilbert says: “Poles who risked their own lives to save the Jews were indeed the exception. But they could be found throughout Poland, in every town and village”.131
Paulsson suggests the following:
How many people in Poland rescued Jews? Of those that meet Yad Vashem’s criteria—perhaps 100,000. Of those that offered minor forms of help—perhaps two or three times as many. Of those who were passively protective—undoubtedly the majority of the population.132
Indisputably, anti-Semitism was rife in Poland and throughout the Nazi occupied areas and many non-Jews thought only to save themselves, or denounced and betrayed Jews. This is an undeniable feature of the Second World War. But there were anti-Semites and betrayals in all countries and populations. Jews were even victims of denunciations and betrayal from within their own community. The Poles should not be singled out as an inherently anti-Semitic nationality.
On the contrary. The Jews who created underground organisations, who carried out uprisings, who escaped from the ghettos and concentration camps or who survived the war in hiding did so overwhelmingly with the help of non-Jews. Jewish survival and resistance went hand in glove with resistance and help from non-Jews.
“Let this song go like a signal through the years”133
We have seen that before and during the war the Allies showed little concern about the fate of the Jews. This continued in the aftermath. At the Nuremberg Trials Jews were not even accorded the status of a distinct category.134
Arnold Paucker, historian of Jewish resistance in Germany, comments on the fact that the historiography of the resistance in general, and Jews in particular, was a neglected subject prior to 1970.135 He traces this to the influence of the Cold War environment:
The communist influence on the resistance was simply hard for many to stomach. Indeed, on this point we encounter a whole range of taboos and considerable self-censorship on the part of historians.136
In the Eastern Bloc, on the other hand, Soviet policy (and subsequently the policy of the post-war Polish regime) was to emphasise the role of their own citizens without mentioning the specific experiences of Jews. A prime example is the report on the massacre of nearly 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar in the Ukraine in 1941. In the draft report of 25 December 1943 we see this text:
The Hitlerist bandits committed mass murder of the Jewish population. They announced that on September 29, 1941, all the Jews were required to arrive to the corner of Melnikov and Dokterev streets and bring their documents, money and valuables. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them.
The censored version, which appeared in February 1944, simply stated:
The Hitlerist bandits brought thousands of civilians to the corner of Melnikov and Dokterev streets. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them.137
One reason why the role of the Poles in helping Jews is little known is because much of the information was suppressed by the post-war Soviet-backed regime.138
Jewish historians also participated in the neglect of the subject of resistance and perpetuated the myth of “going like a sheep to the slaughter”. According to Arnold Paucker, Bruno Bettelheim “wrote on a number of occasions that German Jews had no backbone and persisted in a passive ghetto mentality”. And Raul Hilberg, a major historian of the Holocaust, “constantly emphasised that, in the face of mass extermination, resistance [was] so minimal as to be practically insignificant”.139
This type of argument serves Zionism very well. Zionism argues that Jews are always outsiders and anti-Semitism can never be defeated. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote in 1895 that he “recognised the emptiness and futility of efforts to ‘combat anti-Semitism’.”140 In 1925 Jacob Klatzkin, the co-editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica, wrote:
If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism, we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism… Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites, who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends who desire to defend our rights.141
This kind of attitude underlay their failure to play any significant role in the fight against anti-Semitism in Poland in the 1930s. “Revisionist” (right wing) Zionists were planning a military invasion of Palestine and actually trained their youth group in the use of weapons. But they did not use their skills to join in the self-defence actions led by the Bund against attacks by anti-Semites. As one Revisionist leader put it:
It is absolutely correct to say that only the Bund waged an organised fight against the anti-Semites. We did not consider we had to fight in Poland. We believed the way to ease the situation was to take the Jews out of Poland.142
But there is no way that Palestine could ever have been a solution for the poverty, oppression and anti-Semitism faced by the millions of European Jews. The Zionists themselves knew this and knew that their focus on Palestine meant leaving the bulk of the population to their fate. In fact they deemed the bulk of the European Jewish population as too tainted and not worth saving. Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Organisation in the inter-war years, said in 1937:
The old ones will pass; they will bear their fate, or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust, in a cruel world… Two millions, and perhaps less…only a remnant shall survive. We have to accept it.143
Many Zionist functionaries who survived persisted in later years in their stand against underground activities, condemning them as “a series of childish and irresponsible antics that had achieved nothing other than to harm and further imperil the lives of…a community of hostages”.144 However, one leading Zionist, Nahum Goldman, did change his mind after the war:
But in this context success was irrelevant. What matters in a situation of this sort is a people’s moral stance, its readiness to fight back instead of helplessly allowing itself to be massacred. We did not stand the test.145
In Bialystok and many other ghettos Zionist youth did join and even provide leadership in the underground. Their actions are to be praised. But their actions were undertaken in spite of Zionist ideology and their underground struggle had to be conducted mostly in opposition to the position taken by leading Zionists and the Judenräte. The Zionist youth groups in the ghettos separated themselves from adult organisations because of their unwillingness to follow their “cautious and conciliatory approach”.146
Lenni Brenner makes a critical point about Mordechai Anielewicz, the Zionist leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising:
Mordechai Anielewicz’s apotheosis to historical immortality is entirely justified, and no criticism of his strategy should be construed as attempting to detract from the lustre of his name… However, the martyrdom of the 24-year-old Anielewicz can never absolve the Zionist movement of its pre-war failure to fight anti-Semitism—in Germany or in Poland—when there was still time.147
The real argument of the Zionists is not that resistance in this case was futile. Resistance was never part of their political agenda. As Brenner puts it:
Those Jews who had resisted pre-war Polish anti-Semitism were the first to resist the Nazis. Those who had done nothing continued to do nothing.148
It also suits Zionist ideology to emphasise that the Jews were on their own. Many historians, Jewish and others, place great weight on how isolated and without help the Jews were. And no doubt this is how it must have felt to many. But the fact is that, aside from the small number who were able to pass themselves off as non-Jewish, almost all who did survive in Eastern Europe did so because they received help.
Barbara Epstein suggests the reason the Minsk experience has received little recognition may be due to fact that the Warsaw Ghetto story, which emphasises Jews fighting virtually alone, suits Zionist myth making. The cooperation between Jews and non-Jews in Minsk is less suited to this:
The forest/partisan model of resistance was predicated on the view that Jews and non-Jews had a common interest in fighting the Nazis, and it involved fostering such alliances.149
The problem is not that this form of resistance [military uprisings] has been so extensively examined, but that a memory of the Holocaust has been constructed in which other forms of resistance barely exist.150
Epstein comments that: “Every political current…regarded armed struggle…as more important than saving lives” and concludes that had more underground organisation placed a higher value on escape, more Jews would have been saved.151 Saving lives depended more on external help than did a heroic but doomed uprising.
Zionists in general and Israel in particular have sought to appropriate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to their own political purposes to the extent of casting the establishment of the Jewish state as an extension of the uprising.152 Marek Edelman, the only surviving member of the ZOB leadership, repudiated this. In a 2002 letter of solidarity to the Palestinians he insisted they were the real modern inheritors of the heroic Warsaw struggle.153
Not only were the Jews supposedly completely alone—they were also supposedly surrounded by an immense sea of anti-Jewish hostility. There is no dispute that anti-Semitism was a significant and major trend in Poland and the region already before the war and that groups from the local populations joined with the Nazis in committing atrocities. We have seen, however, the class nature of pre-war anti-Semitism. Furthermore in the conditions of war personal anti-Semitism was not necessarily determinant. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, who was one of the instigators of Zegota, had anti-Semitic views which she never repudiated. She nonetheless worked untiringly to assist Jews. The leader of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, General Bor-Komorowski, also had anti-Semitic tendencies. Nonetheless, the uprising released Jewish prisoners from Gesiowska concentration camp. The Polish Home Army and Underground State included people of all political persuasions including anti-Semites.154 But their formal position leaves no doubt. Operating underground, they enacted laws against anti-Semitism and executed perpetrators.
There remains the question of why the Warsaw Ghetto was the only large ghetto in which not only unity of the political factions was achieved but also the support of the bulk of the population. This may be partly due to the fact that the ZOB ran the ghetto for three months before the uprising and therefore had a little time in which to win over the population. Furthermore, by this time, most of the children and older people had gone from the ghetto. Another pointer comes from Vladka Meed, a participant in the uprising:
Jewish armed resistance…when it came, did not spring from a sudden impulse; it was not an act of personal courage on the part of a few individuals or organised groups: it was the culmination of Jewish defiance, defiance that had existed from the advent of the ghetto.155
In fact, defiance pre-dated the advent of the ghetto. We saw how during the 1930s the fight against the rising tide of anti-Semitism had involved Jews and non-Jews in mass struggle. This occurred in many cities and towns throughout Poland but was centred in Warsaw. The alliances that were forged at that time continued through the Nazi occupation and underlay much of the network of help and support that the ghetto inhabitants received. The population who rose up in April 1943 had been mobilising on the streets only a few years earlier in 1938. The memory must still have been there.
Jews did not go simply as sheep to the slaughter. They fought back against overwhelming odds and in the face of mass extermination. And they did not do this alone.
Let Hersh Glik’s song, with which I began, continue to be an inspiration to all of us.
We’ll have the morning sun to set our day aglow,
And all our yesterdays shall vanish with the foe,
And if the time is long before the sun appears,
Then let this song go like a signal through the years.156
NOTES
1 Hersh Glik, the Jewish folk poet and resistance fighter from Vilna, was a Labour Zionist. Inspired by a partisan battle and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, this song has been widely sung ever since. The phrase “We are here!” (“Mir zaynen do!”) also appears in the work of Shmerke Kaczerginski (see note 93) and stresses the idea of Jewish endurance often in a spirit of rebelliousness and defiance. Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Clarendon, 2005), p73, ht. Below is the most popular English version. I accessed it at Australian Memories of the Holocaust website www.holocaust.com.au/mm/j_song.htm
Zog nit keynmol (Never Say):
Never say there is only death for you.
Leaden skies may be concealing days of blue—
Because the hour we have hungered for is near;
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: We are here!
From land of palm-tree to the far-off land of snow,
We shall be coming with our torment and our woe.
And everywhere our blood has sunk into the earth.
Shall our bravery, our vigour blossom forth!
We’ll have the morning sun to set our day aglow,
And all our yesterdays shall vanish with the foe,
And if the time is long before the sun appears,
Then let this song go like a signal through the years.
This song was written with our blood and not with lead;
It’s not a song that birds sing overhead
It was a people, among toppling barricades,
That sang this song of ours with pistols and grenades.
So never say that there is only death for you.
Leaden skies may be concealing days of blue—
Yet the hour we have hungered for is near;
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: We are here!
2 A summary of this myth and its development can be found in Richard Middleton-Kaplan, “The myth of Jewish passivity” in Patrick Henry, Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis (Catholic University of America, 2014), p3.
3 Henri Michel, The Shadow War: Resistance in Europe 1939-45 (Andre Deutsch, 1972), p177.
4 Most Jews of the Russian Empire were restricted to an area of about 20 percent of the territory of European Russia that included much of present day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland and Ukraine. Known and the Pale of Settlement; this ended only with the Russian Revolution in 1917.
5 This was partly because the Jewish workers did not work on Saturdays (the Jewish Sabbath) but also because they were more trade union orientated. Celia Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars (Wayne State University Press, 1980), p262. Adam Teller, “Economic Life”, YIVO Encyclopaedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Economic_Life.
6 Although membership figures for Poland are not available, electorally they were second to the Zionists. Gershon Bacon, “Agudas Yisroel”, YIVO Encyclopaedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Agudas_Yisroel.
