Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  As for the converts themselves—1,761 ghetto inhabitants were registered as such, on January 1, 1941172—whether belonging to the prewar Christian community, the elite, or to the newly converted Jews usually less educated and of lower social background—most wished to distance themselves as much as possibly from the Jewish population.173 Each of the two groups of converts congregated around its own church, led by its own priest (All Saints’ Church and Father Godlewski for the old converts, Birth of the Holy Virgin Mary Church and Father Poplawski for the newly converted). Both Godlewski and Poplawski were themselves converted Jews and both were long-standing anti-Semites. The converts garnered a few advantages from their special situation (better organized and more systematic welfare assistance, some respite, during services and Christian holidays, from the pressure of everyday ghetto life, their own support group, and the right to be buried in a Christian cemetery outside the ghetto walls). But they could not escape the basic fact that for the Germans, they were full-fledged Jews and treated as such.174 As one of the ghetto underground newspapers put it: “As a foreign entity, they were thrust into a dual exile in the ghetto. A decisive majority of the Jewish population maintains no contact with these ‘Jews.’ Foreign to the Jewish masses in their culture, hopes and yearnings, they share the Jews’ suffering as uninvited partners in misfortune.”175

  The anti-Semitism displayed by some of the baptized Jews was virulent and unabashed: “I returned a visit to Reverend Poplawski who called on me at one time on the subject of assistance to the Christians of Jewish origins,” Czerniaków recorded on July 24, 1941. He proceeded to tell me that he sees God’s hand in being placed in the ghetto, that after the war he would leave as much of an anti-Semite as he was when he arrived there, and that the Jewish beggars (children) have considerable acting talents, even playing dead in the streets.”176

  For some of the Jewish children, the detestation was not reciprocal, and if it existed at all, it didn’t preclude the wish to enjoy the peace and quiet of the All Saints’ gardens. Thus a few children from Dr. Janusz Korczak’s orphanage addressed a letter to Father Godlewski.

  “To the Reverend Father, the Vicar of All Saints’:

  We kindly request the Rev. Father to grant us permission to come a few times to the church garden on Saturday, in the morning hours, early if possibly (6:30–10:00).

  We long for a little air and greenery. It is stuffy and crowded where we are. We want to become acquainted and make friends with nature. We shall not damage the plants. Please don’t refuse us. Signed: Zygmus, Sami, Hanka, Aronek.”

  The reply—if any—is not known.177

  On June 6, 1941, Himmler had visited the Lodz ghetto. Accompanied by Rumkowski, the Reichsführer inspected the large tailoring workshop on Jakuba Street and was apparently satisfied with the work done there for the Wehrmacht. The following day the administration promised to raise the food supply for the inhabitants, but the promise was not kept.178 On August 4 the Lodz chroniclers recorded “an extremely characteristic” court case. The “culprits” admitted having cut off part of a dead horse’s hindquarters, as the carcass was already on a rubbish heap and doused with chloride before being buried.179

  Since Lodz was part of the Reich, euthanasia in its old or new guise applied to the mental institution of the ghetto. In March 1940 some forty inmates had already been removed and murdered in a nearby forest.180 In May 1941 a German medical commission made the rounds again, and on July 29 another removal took place. A German doctor was on hand for a last check. According to the chroniclers, Rumkowski was also present and pleaded that the twelve patients out of seventy considered as cured be released. The German physician, however, had decided that one of these patients [about to be evacuated] a Mr. Ilsberg, clearly an acquaintance of Rumkowski’s, should be kept among those destined for death. No entreaties helped. “In spite of their mental confusion,” the chroniclers recorded, “the patients realized what fate was in store for them. They understood, for example, why they had been injected with tranquilizers during the night…. They resisted in many cases…. A covered pick-up with a squad of five uniformed escorts came for the patients. Thanks to the selfless work done by the hospital staff, the loading of the tragic transport took place with exemplary order.”181

  Three days later the chroniclers added a postscript of sorts to this episode, which in many ways was a telling comment: “In spite of being aware of the sad fate which might be in store for mental patients, the families of people qualified for the hospital for the mentally ill are demanding that they be accepted. Since space is at such a painful premium and conditions are so deplorable in the ghetto, it is a form of deliverance for the families to have their mentally ill relatives in the hospital. Apparently the first patient since the most recent purge has already been admitted.”182

  In the larger ghettos the councils assumed that productivity was the only path to survival; if at all possible the ghetto should work for the Wehrmacht. Several council leaders, Ephraïm Barash in Bialystok for example (or later Jacob Gens in Vilna), succeeded for a time to steer their ghetto along the work strategy, as Rumkowski did in Lodz. The acquisition of raw materials was one of the major hurdles. In Bialystok the problem was solved by local ingenuity: Teams of organized ghetto ragpickers and scrap collectors filled part of the needs; rags were also smuggled in from the surrounding areas. Mostly, however, the Germans themselves were ready to supply the bulk of the materials to the factories working for the army. According to one of the speakers at a Bialystok council meeting on August 28, 1941, “All that is necessary for industrial output is gladly furnished by the authorities.”183

  In the Bialystok facilities working for the Wehrmacht, employment grew from 1,730 workers in March 1942 to 8,600 in July of that year. After the deportations of April 1943 to Treblinka, “productivization” was pushed to extremes, and approximately 43 percent of the total remaining ghetto population of 28,000 was employed in local industries.184

  The German onslaught caught the forty-nine-year-old Jewish Polish novelist Bruno Schulz in Drohobycz in eastern Galicia, the town in which he was born and where he had spent his life.184 Schulz, whose international fame spread only belatedly (after World War II), had been recognized on the Polish literary scene in the mid-1930s following the publication of two volumes of short stories, Cinnamon Shops, and soon thereafter, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. The deeply unsettling dreamlike world of this pathologically shy and modest high school teacher found further expression in his drawings and paintings; there fairy tales mixed with representations of grotesque and distorted male figures groveling at the feet of splendid women who showed only sexual superiority, domination, and contempt for their “suitors.”

  It was Schulz the painter who, soon after the German occupation, caught the attention of SS Hauptscharführer Felix Landau, “coordinator of Jewish affairs” in Drohobycz.186 Landau was the father of a young child who lived with him and with his mother, Landau’s girlfriend. The SS Scharführer was a man of taste and apart from his well-known hobby—taking aim at Jewish workers from his window and, according to witnesses, rarely missing—he wanted Schulz to cover his walls with fairy-tale paintings for the child, and the walls of Gestapo offices with “frescoes.” Schulz was paid in food and so it went, “peacefully,” from July 1941 to the beginning of 1942.

  Farther north, in Riga, it was one of the most eminent Jewish historians of his day, Simon Dubnow, who fell into German hands.187 When the Germans occupied Latvia, in early July 1941, Dubnow was turning eighty-one. His multivolume History of the Jews and his History of the Jews in Russia and Poland had brought him worldwide fame and admiration. Dubnow had been a steady proponent of Jewish cultural autonomy in the Diaspora and thus was close to the Bund in many ways. Yet in the 1930s, in the face of the mounting dangers, he became increasingly critical of the radical anti-Zionist stance of the Bund. An article published in Zukunft, in June 1938, is indicative of Dubnow’s position and mirrors the internal squabbling in s
o-called Jewish politics, despite the increasingly threatening world situation: “The Bund’s greatest sin is its tendency toward isolation…. The indisputable failings of Zionism…should not prevent some joint actions. We have seen ‘popular fronts,’ coalitions of all progressive forces in a society, emerge in several European countries. Jewry also needs a ‘popular front’ to fight growing anti-Semitism and worldwide reaction.”188

  Soon after German occupation, the Jews of Riga were moved into a ghetto. The well-known Dubnow was tracked by the Gestapo: He tried to hide but was caught and jailed, released, and jailed again. Finally, physically broken, he was also moved to the ghetto.189 In 1934 Dubnow had written a short article for the bulletin of the World Jewish Congress about the growing tragedy of European Jewry. The Völkischer Beobachter quoted Dubnow’s words: “The house of Israel is in flames,” adding: “That is just what we wanted!”190

  X

  The Jewish population of the USSR was quite well informed about the anti-Jewish persecutions in the Reich and, after September 1939, in German-occupied Poland. Before the Hitler-Stalin pact the Soviet press reported abundantly about the Nazi anti-Semitic policies and atrocities. Then, from the end of August 1939 to June 22, 1941, official reporting stopped, but the stream of Jewish refugees who reached eastern Poland or the Baltic countries spread information about German behavior wherever they went.191

  Within days following the German attack, the Soviet media resumed their description of the aggressors’ anti-Jewish drive. Leaflets dropped by the Luftwaffe, and German broadcasts beamed at the Soviet Union, left no doubt, as we saw, about the centrality of the Jewish enemy within the Bolshevik system as the Germans perceived it, which, in their own words, they were intent on destroying. Yet it seems that not a few Jews, mainly “the little Jewish people,” did not believe that their life under German occupation would be worse than before. Some allegedly even hoped that their existence would improve. Many stayed because family members were unable to join them in their flight or because they were loath to abandon a house and property usually acquired at great and lengthy effort.192 When the Wehrmacht marched in, all such hopes and hesitations quickly disappeared; by then, however, it was too late.

  Soon all Jews of the Soviet Union understood that their own survival now depended on the survival of their country. For many, identification with the Soviet regime was natural, unquestioned, often enthusiastic. From the outset the regime born from the 1917 revolution had appeared as a liberating force that freed the Jewish population from czarist oppression and territorial segregation in the Pale of Settlement, banned anti-Semitism, and offered equal opportunity to all. While the initial Soviet plans to foster the administrative autonomy and cultural identity of the country’s national groups—and, within that framework, to encourage Yiddish culture and Jewish autonomy in Birobidzan—petered out in the early thirties, the country’s stupendous modernization drive opened vast possibilities for the comparatively well educated Jewish citizens. By 1939 the Jews, who had become an increasingly urban population, although accounting for less than 2.0 percent of the general population, numbered around 7.5 percent of the middle-class professionals (engineers, accountants, physicians) and 13 percent of the student body, mainly in scientific fields. On the eve of World War II, Soviet Jews “constituted the best-educated ethnic group of the roughly 100 nationalities in the USSR.”193 Simultaneously many Jews, mostly of the younger generation, abandoned their religious ties and enthusiastically embraced a system that allowed for complete assimilation and considerable social improvement.

  Undoubtedly the percentage of Jews among the social and cultural elites of the Soviet Union was many times higher than their share of the country’s population. This predominance was no less striking in the most sensitive areas of the state apparatus. According to historian Yuri Slezkine, “By 1934, when OGPU was transformed into the NKVD, Jews ‘by nationality’ constituted the largest single group among the ‘leading cadres’ of the Soviet secret police (37 Jews, 30 Russians, 7 Latvians, 5 Ukrainians, 4 Poles, 3 Georgians, 3 Belorussians, 2 Germans, and 5 assorted others).”194 As for the high number of Bolshevik leaders of Jewish background (mainly among the first generation), it constituted an obvious fact that of course fueled anti-Semitic propaganda not only in the Reich but throughout the West. Even Lenin—and this was kept a state secret on Stalin’s orders—had a Jewish grandfather.195 The crucial point that anti-Semites missed, however, was the simple fact that Soviet Jews, at all levels of the system, were first and foremost Soviet citizens, devoted to the ideas and goals of the Soviet Union and oblivious of their own origins—until the German invasion. June 22, 1941, transformed many of these “non-Jewish Jews” (according to Isaac Deutscher’s notorious formulation) into Soviet Jews suddenly aware of their origins—and proud of being Jewish:

  “I grew up in a Russian city,” the writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg proclaimed in a speech in August 1941: “My native language is Russian. I am a Russian writer. Now, like all Russians, I am defending my homeland. But the Nazis have reminded me of something else: my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this with pride. Hitler hates us more than anyone else. And that does us credit.”196

  In all areas of Soviet society, the Jews mobilized to the utmost to participate in the anti-Nazi struggle. Whatever one may think of Ehrenburg’s twisted path in Stalin’s Russia, his stream of articles, mainly in the Red Army’s newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, galvanized the soldiers and the population.197 One hundred sixty thousand Jewish members of the Red Army were decorated for bravery (half a million Jewish soldiers fought in the Soviet forces and two hundred thousand were killed or reported missing); fifty Jewish officers were elevated to the rank of general, and 123 received the highest military distinction: “Hero of the Soviet Union.”198 And yet Stalin dismissively told the Polish general Wladyslaw Anders: “Jews are poor warriors.”199

  Soon, in the ghettos and forests of occupied Soviet territory, the first Jewish resistance groups would be organized. A few months later (mainly in the summer of 1942), some of these units, such as the group led by the Bielski brothers, acquired legendary fame.200 And, in Minsk, on October 26, 1941, possibly one of the earliest and certainly one of the most famous Soviet resistance fighters, eighteen-year-old Masha Bruskina, was publicly hanged with two comrades; her Jewish origins, however, were unknown to the Germans and never mentioned in Soviet publications, either during the war or later.201

  Stalin—whose postwar anti-Semitism had possibly started to show in the late thirties, and who, after 1945, launched his own massive anti-Jewish campaign—considered the Soviet Jews as useful intermediaries to the West, particularly to the United States, as long as the German threat was real. In his own mythic world the Soviet leader (like Hitler) vastly overrated the influence of American Jews. However, he did not overrate the tireless energy Jewish personalities called to meet in August 1941 (and who subsequently established the Jewish Antifascist Committee) would devote to mobilizing Western public support for the USSR from the second half of 1941 onward.202 More than anything else, however, this political effort demonstrated, as did several other initiatives during these years, that the Jews as Jews, East and West, were essentially defenseless instruments, even in the hands of leaders belonging to the anti-Nazi coalition. The Erlich-Alter case was typical.

  In the fall of 1939 the NKVD had arrested the two most prominent leaders of the Bund, Henryk Erlich [Dubnow’s son-in-law] and Wiktor Alter, who had fled to the Soviet-occupied area of Poland. They were dragged from cell to cell, from interrogation to interrogation, and both were condemned to death shortly after the German attack of June 1941. In mid-September, however, they were released from prison. The Soviet change of attitude probably had several aims: to use both Bundist leaders in the anti-Nazi propaganda campaign; to impress the West, mainly British and American trade unionists, with Soviet liberalization; to reinforce the socialist wing of the Polish government-in-exile, which showed some readiness to come to an agreeme
nt with the USSR, notwithstanding continuing Soviet claims to the territories of eastern Poland.

  Erlich and Alter remained in the Soviet Union but rapidly became involved in what could appear in Stalinist eyes as independent, Jewish-socialist political activity on an international scale. Thus, as the Soviet military situation improved, the two Bundist leaders were arrested again in December 1941. The British, obviously unwilling to put any strain on their relations with Moscow, declared the issue to be an internal Soviet matter. The Polish government-in-exile made only feeble attempts to intervene, as it hoped to use the anger of American Jewish labor organizations to bolster its own position in the territorial controversy with Stalin. And the American entry into the war overshadowed any “divisive” issues that could have been raised on the U.S. public scene. Erlich committed suicide in his Soviet jail in May 1942; Alter was executed in February 1943.203

  XI

  A few days after Goebbels received Hitler’s authorization, the marking of the Reich’s Jews with a “distinctive and clearly visible sign” was launched. A decree of September 1, 1941, issued by the Ministry of the Interior, ordered that from the nineteenth of that month all Jews of the Greater Reich and the Protectorate aged six and above should wear a yellow six-pointed star with the word Jude inscribed on it in (twisted) black letters. The palm-size star had to be sewed to the clothes, on the left side of the breast, at the height of the heart, so as to be fully visible when a Jew was in a public place (defined as any place where people not belonging to the family circle could be encountered).204 From the same date (September 19), it was forbidden to Jews to leave their area or residence without police authorization, as well as to carry medals, honorary decorations, and any other kind of badge.205