Lilli herself did not seem aware of what her new status implied. Hadn’t her eldest child, her son Gerhardt, become an enthusiastic auxiliary in an antiaircraft unit based near Kassel? Of course she could not know what had happened to other Jewish women in her situation—to a Hertha Feiner for example. Was Lilli trying to taunt fate? The business card she put on the door of the Kassel apartment merely indicated: “Dr. Med. Lilli Jahn.” She had forgotten—or maybe not?—that Jewish physicians were forbidden to use their professional title, that she had to add “Sara” to her name, and, in any case, was not allowed to cater to Aryan patients. Somebody denounced her; she was summoned to the Gestapo and, on August 30, 1943, she was arrested.165
By mid-1943 the remnants of German Jewry, bereft of any institutional framework, had become a scattering of individuals, defined on Gestapo lists as so many specific “cases”; in the logic of the system, they would have to disappear. The Klemperers, although they were a childless mixed marriage, had not yet received a summons. But how long could they hope to remain in limbo? Their daily existence was becoming harder. At the end of 1943 they were ordered to move again, to yet another “Jews’ house,” even more overcrowded than the previous one. “The worst thing here,” Victor Klemperer noted on December 14, “is the promiscuity. The doors of three households open into a single hallway [on the third floor]: the Cohns, the Stühlers, and ourselves. Shared bathroom and lavatory. Kitchen shared with the Stühlers, only partly separated—one source of water for all three—a small adjoining kitchen space for the Cohns.”166 The fear of informers had grown with time, even in conversations with Jews whom one did not know well; Klemperer heard rumors about one of the inhabitants in his own house, and he noted a telling joke: “A star-wearing Jew is abused on the street, a small crowd gathers, some people take the Jew’s side. After a while, the Jew shows the Gestapo badge on the reverse of his jacket lapel, and the names of his supporters are noted.”167 In one form or another, this was part of everyday reality in the Reich, in the remaining ghettos, in every occupied country.
To Klemperer the attitudes of the population appeared as contradictory as ever, even in this last phase of the war. Frequently he encountered expressions of sympathy and encouragement (“it can’t last much longer”) or just unremarked acts of kindness; nonetheless anti-Semitism was never far away. “On my way to Katz,” he noted on February 7, 1944, “an elderly man in passing: ‘Judas!’ In the corridor of the health insurance office. The only wearer of the star, I walk back and forth in front of an occupied bench. I hear a worker talking: ‘They should give them an injection. Then that would be the end of them!’ Does he mean me? Wearers of the star? The man is called a few minutes later. I sit down in his place. An elderly woman beside me, whispering: “That was nasty! Perhaps one day what he wished upon you will happen to him. One can never know. God judges!”168
The reader may remember young Cordelia, the Jewish girl who grew up as a Catholic and, in September 1941, was expelled from the Berlin Catholic Girls Association by her headmistress who didn’t want to keep “girls carrying a Jewish star.” Cordelia’s mother, Elisabeth Langgässer, a convert herself and already a well-known writer, was half Jewish, but the girl’s father, who did not live with Langgässer anymore, was a full Jew. Thus, Cordelia, who turned fourteen in 1943, was a “three-quarter Jewess.”
Sometime in late 1942 or early 1943, Langgässer succeeded in getting a Spanish passport for her daughter and even an entry visa to Spain. Cordelia Langgässer became Cordelia Garcia-Scouvart and stopped wearing the star. Before long both daughter and mother were summoned to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. In the presence of her mother, who remained silent throughout, Cordelia was given the choice of signing a declaration that she agreed to keep her German citizenship and was ready to submit to all laws and decrees applying to her status as a Jew, or to have her mother prosecuted for getting the Spanish passport under false pretenses and thus committing a treasonable act. Cordelia signed. “And now,” the Gestapo official volunteered, “you may go to the office across the hall and purchase a new Jewish star; it costs 50 Pfennig.”169
In Berlin in 1943 the Gestapo used Mischlinge to arrest any remaining Jews slated for deportation. Two such half-Jewish auxiliaries took Cordelia to the Jewish hospital that had become an assembly and administrative center for all Jews, after the disbanding of the Reichsvereinigung. The hospital (first using its buildings on Iranischestrasse, then on Schulstrasse), was of course under complete Gestapo control; Eichmann had dispatched SS Hauptsturmführer Fritz Woehrn to supervise it, while an obscure Jewish physician, albeit a very able and energetic one, Dr. Walter Lustig, a “one-man Reichsvereinigung,” was in charge of everyday matters. A number of Jewish patients continued to stay on the premises, mostly protected by some special status; Jews rounded up in other German cities temporarily landed there, as did Jews caught in hiding. At the end of the war some 370 patients and around one thousand inmates in all still lived at the hospital; this number included ninety-three children and seventy-six Gestapo prisoners.170
At the hospital any male with some power could share any woman’s bed; Lustig had an array of eager nurses at his disposal, as he promised to one or another an exemption from deportation. Cordelia, the young newcomer, was shared by two Mischling twins from Cologne, Hans and Heinz, although, at fourteen, she had not even menstruated.171 But Hans and Heinz could not protect her in any way: Toward the end of 1943, she was transferred from the children’s section to that of the mentally ill, all gathered for deportation. Before the end of the year she boarded the train for Theresienstadt.172
Cordelia’s mother had come to visit once, just before her daughter’s departure. She conveyed her impressions in a letter to a friend: “We [Elisabeth Langgässer and her Aryan husband] found her entirely calm, even cheerful and confident, as first, it was really only Theresienstadt and not Poland and, second, because she traveled as accompanying nursing personnel. She had to take care of two children and of an infant and wore a nurse’s uniform; she even had a small bonnet and that, I think, filled her with pride.”173
After a brief stay in Theresienstadt, Cordelia Maria Sara was shipped to Auschwitz.
VIII
Following the failed attempts to establish a unified resistance group in the spring of 1942, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacia Bojowa, or ZOB) was created in Warsaw on July 28, 1942, a few days after the beginning of the Aktion. The initial group of some two hundred members mostly succeeded in dodging the deportations, but beyond that there was little the ZOB could do. In August some pistols and hand grenades were purchased from the Polish communist underground. A first and minor operation—an attempt to kill the chief of the Jewish police, Józef Szerynski—failed. Much worse occurred a few days later: The Germans arrested a group of ZOB members on their way from Warsaw to Hrubieszow and tortured and killed them; soon afterward, on September 3, the Gestapo caught some leading members of the organization in Warsaw and murdered them as well: The weapons were discovered and seized. This catastrophic series of events seemed, at first, to put an end to a courageous venture that had hardly begun.174
An eerie period of apparent respite and complete uncertainty descended on the surviving inhabitants of the ghetto after mid-September. The approximately 40,000 Jews left in an area of drastically reduced size either worked in the remaining workshops or in sorting the mounds of belongings abandoned by the victims. The German administrators had been replaced by Gestapo officials, mainly of low rank.175
None of the remaining Jews knew when the next German move would take place. By then much had transpired about Treblinka: “The women go naked into the bath house to their death,” Abraham Lewin quoted the report of an escapee on September 27: “The condition of the dead bodies. What are they killing them with? With simple vapour (steam). Death comes after seven or eight minutes. On their arrival they take away the shoes of the unfortunates. The proclamation in the square: ‘Emigrants from Warsaw.’”176 On October 5
he noted: “No one knows what tomorrow will bring and we live in perpetual fear and terror.”177 News seeped in from the outside world. On November 10 the diarist recorded news of the Anglo-American landings in North Africa and the British offensive in Egypt; he also reported about Hitler’s speech to the “Old Fighters” on the previous day: “As yet we have not received a copy of this speech in print, but the Jews already know that it is steeped in venomous hatred and full of terrible threats against the Jews, that he talked of the total annihilation of the Jews of Europe, from the youngest to the very old.”178 On November 17 Lewin mentioned the final liquidation of all the Jews of Lublin.179 News reports about mass exterminations in the Polish provinces soon replaced a spate of reports about protests in England and in the United States regarding the murder of the Jews: “Departing this life is a matter of 10 or 15 minutes in Treblinka or in Oswiecim (Auschwitz).”180 On January 15, 1943, Lewin wrote of renewed anxiety as the ghetto expected a forthcoming Aktion.181 The following day he recorded his last entry.182
In the meantime the ZOB had overcome the crisis triggered by the events of September 1942. Yet, even under the dire new circumstances, unification of all political forces in support of armed resistance occurred only stagewise and not in full. The lengthy negotiations proved once more how deeply divisive ideological issues remained even among the younger generation of ghetto Jews. A Jewish National Committee was first established in October 1942, uniting all left-wing and centrist Zionist youth movements with the communists. The Bund, however, again refused to join, and only after further—and lengthy—discussions did it agree to “coordinate” its activities with the national committee. A Jewish Coordinating Committee was set up.183 As for the right-wing Zionists (the Revisionists and their youth movement, Betar), they had already established an independent armed organization, the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowski, or ZZW), prior to (and without any link with) the Jewish Coordinating Committee.184 Whether the Revisionists did not want to cooperate with the “leftists” of the ZOB or whether the ZOB kept them at arm’s length remains unclear. Ideological divisiveness persisted to the end.
On January 18, 1943, following a brief visit by Himmler, the Germans launched a new Aktion (albeit a limited one at this stage); their plan was partly foiled. Resistance members—Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the ZOB, among them—attacked the German escort of the front column and the Jews dispersed. Some 5,000 to 6,000 Jews were ultimately caught during the January operation. Lewin and his daughter were among them; they were deported to Treblinka and murdered.185 This first sign of armed resistance probably led Himmler to issue an order to Krüger on February 16 to liquidate the ghetto entirely, “for security reasons.”186
The January events considerably bolstered the authority of the fighting organization among the ghetto population and garnered praise from various Polish circles. During the weeks that followed, the ZOB executed a few Jewish traitors (Jacob Lejkin, the second-in-command of the Jewish police; Alfred Nossig, a shady eccentric who apparently worked for the Gestapo; and some others); it collected—at times “extorted”—money from some wealthy ghetto inhabitants, acquired a few weapons from the communist Gwardia Ludowa and also from private dealers, and mainly organized its “combat groups” in expectation of the forthcoming German operation. In the meantime the inhabitants, increasingly ready to face an armed struggle in the ghetto, were hoarding whatever food they could get and preparing underground shelters for a lengthy standoff. The council, now chaired by a nonentity, Marc Lichtenbaum, and reduced to utter passivity, nonetheless contacted Polish resistance groups, mainly the Home Army (Armeia Krajowa, or AK), to denounce the ZOB as a group of reckless adventurers without any backing in the ghetto.187
The council’s denunciations were not the source of the AK’s reticence to provide help for the ZOB, although after the January events it accepted to sell some weapons. Gen. Stefan Rowecki, the commander in chief of the Home Army remained evasive when asked for stronger support. The traditional anti-Semitism of nationalist conservative Poles may have played a role but there was more to this basically negative stand. The Armeia Krajowa was suspicious of the leftist and pro-Soviet leanings of part of the ZOB (while it was ready to supply some weapons to the Revisionists); furthermore, and mainly so it seems, the Polish command was worried that fighting could spread from the ghetto to the city while its own plans for an uprising and its own forces were not yet ready. As a result AK even offered its help to transfer the Jewish fighters from the ghetto to partisan groups in the forests. The offer was turned down.188
The Germans did not expect major difficulties in the final “evacuation” of the ghetto, notwithstanding the January events and other signs indicating that some ghetto Jews throughout the General Government were opting for armed action (such as the attack, on December 22, 1942, by a Jewish group in Kraków on a coffeehouse popular with Wehrmacht personnel, the Cyganeria).189 Nor were the Germans attaching any significance to the failure of the campaign organized by their largest entrepreneurs in the ghetto, Toebbens and Schultz, to transfer Jewish workers to workshops in the Lublin area.
As for the leaders and members of the ZOB, they had no illusions about the outcome of the approaching struggle. “I remember a conversation I had with Mordechai Anielewicz,” Ringelblum wrote. “He gave an accurate appraisal of the uneven struggle, he foresaw the destruction of the ghetto and he was sure that neither he nor his combatants would survive the liquidation of the ghetto. He was sure that they would die like stray dogs and no one would even know their last resting place.”190
When the final liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto started on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, the Jews were not caught by surprise: The streets were empty, and as soon as German units entered the area, firing started. The early street battles took place mainly in three distinct and unconnected areas: parts of what had been the Central Ghetto, the Brushmakers Workshop surroundings, and the Toebbers-Schultz Workshop surroundings.191 The ideological opposition that precluded some arrangement between the Revisionists and ZOB before the uprising apparently persisted during the fighting and in the later historiography. According to Moshe Arens’s painstaking reconstruction of the combat, the role of the ZZW in the bitter street battle around Muranowski Square and their hoisting of a Polish and a Zionist flag on the tallest building in the area are generally left unmentioned in later renditions of the uprising. And the names of the ZZW commanders, Pawel Frenkel, Leon Rodal, and David Apfelbaum, are rarely mentioned; all three fell in battle.192
Fighting in the open lasted for several days (mainly from April 19 to April 28) until the Jewish combattants were compelled to retreat into the underground bunkers. Each bunker became a small fortress, and only the systematic burning down of the buildings and the massive use of flame throwers, tear gas, and hand grenades finally drove the remaining fighters and inhabitants into the streets. On May 8 Anielewicz was killed in the command bunker at Mila Street 18. Combat continued sporadically while some groups of fighters succeeded in reaching the Aryan side of the city by way of the sewers. Days later some of the fighters, “Kazik” for example, took again to the sewers and returned to the ghetto ruins to try and save some remnants: They found nobody alive.
On May 16 SS general Jürgen Stroop proclaimed the end of the Grossaktion: “The Jewish quarter in Warsaw exists no more.” Symbolically the Germans concluded the operations by blowing up the Warsaw [Great] Synagogue at 20:15 hours.193 According to Stroop, fifteen Germans and auxiliaries had been killed and some ninety wounded during the fighting. “Of the total of 56,065 Jews caught,” the SS general reported further, “about 7,000 were exterminated within the former Ghetto in the course of the action, and 6,929 by transporting them to T.II [Treblinka], which means 14,000 Jews were exterminated altogether. Beyond the number of 56,065 Jews, an estimated number of 5,000 to 6,000 were killed by explosions or in fires.”194
Posters informed the Polish population that anybody hiding a Jew would be execute
d. Moreover, according to Stroop, “permission was granted to the Polish police to pay one-third of the cash seized, to any of its men who arrested a Jew in the Aryan part of Warsaw. This measure already produced results,” he wrote. Finally the SS general reported, “for the most part the Polish population approved the measures taken against the Jews. Shortly before the end of the large-scale operation, the governor issued a special proclamation…to the Polish population; in it he informed them of the reasons for destroying the former Jewish Ghetto by mentioning the assassinations carried out lately in the Warsaw area and the mass graves found in Catyn [Katyn]; at the same time they were asked to assist us in our fight against Communist agents and Jews.”195
On May 1 the uprising found its first echo in Goebbels’s diary: “Reports from the occupied territories do not bring anything sensationally new. Noteworthy though is the exceptionally sharp fighting in Warsaw between our police and even Wehrmacht units and the rebelling Jews. The Jews have managed to organize the defense of the ghetto. The fighting there is very hard; it goes so far that the Jewish command issues daily military reports. This whole fun will probably not last long. One sees though what one may expect from the Jews when they manage to set their hands on weapons. Unfortunately they have in part also good German weapons, mainly machine guns. God knows how they got them.”196
During the following days and weeks the minister regularly mentioned the ghetto uprising. According to him the Jews had bought their weapons from Germany’s allies returning home via Warsaw; the Jews fought with such desperation because they knew what was awaiting them and so on. On May 22 he noted: “The fighting for the Warsaw ghetto continues. The Jews are still resisting. But, all in all, it can be considered as not dangerous and overcome.”197
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