Between five and six million Jews had been killed; among them almost a million and a half were under the age of fourteen.205 They comprised the immense mass of silent victims and also most of the diarists and authors of letters whose voices we heard in these pages. Etty Hillesum, Anne Frank, Ben Wessels, and Philip Mechanicus, from Amsterdam;206 Raymond-Raoul Lambert, Jacques Biélinky, and Louise Jacobson, from Paris; Moshe Flinker, from The Hague and Brussels; Jochen Klepper and Hertha Feiner, from Berlin; Lilli Jahn, from Cologne; Ernst Krombach from Essen; Gonda Redlich and Oskar Rosenfeld, from Prague; Dawid Sierakowiak, Josef Zelkowicz, the other “chroniclers,” and at least three anonymous young diarists, from Lodz; Elisheva (Elsa Binder) and her unknown “guest diarist” from Stanislawów; Adam Czerniaków, Emanuel Ringelblum, Shimon Huberband, Chaim Kaplan, Abraham Lewin, and Janusz Korczak, from Warsaw; Calel Perechodnik, from Ottwock; Dawid Rubinowicz, from Kielce; Aryeh and Malwina Klonicki, from Kovel and Buczacz; Herman Kruk, Itzhok Rudashevski, and Zelig Kalmanovitch, from Vilna; and the diarist of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, Zalman Gradowski. Many more diarists, of course, were murdered, and another handful remained alive.207
From among the few hundreds of thousands of Jews who had stayed in occupied Europe and survived, most struck roots in new surroundings, either by necessity or by choice; they built their lives, resolutely hid their scars, and experienced the common share of joys and sorrows dealt by everyday existence. For several decades, many evoked the past mainly among themselves, behind closed doors, so to speak; some became occasional witnesses, others opted for silence. Yet, whatever the path they chose, for all of them those years remained the most significant period of their lives. They were entrapped in it: Recurrently, it pulled them back into overwhelming terror and, throughout, notwithstanding the passage of time, it carried along with it the indelible memory of the dead.
Notes
Introduction
1. This photograph is reproduced on the cover of “Photography and the Holocaust,” ed. Sybil Milton and Genya Markon, special issue, History of Photography 23, no. 4 (Winter 1999). All details about the individuals depicted are from the caption of the photograph.
2. Ibid.
3. For some reviews (particularly the devastating assessment of Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1989), see Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, 2001), particularly pp. 70ff.
4. For one of the best examples of this approach see the essays collected in Ulrich Herbert, National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York, 2000).
5. Regarding this approach see in particular Götz Aly, Belinda Cooper, and Allison Brown, “Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London and New York, 1999); Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat (Munich, 2005).
6. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997).
7. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996).
8. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992).
9. Quoted in Ute Deichmann, Biologen unter Hitler: Porträt einer Wissenschaft im NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), p. 372.
10. For a very thorough analysis of the Jewish historiography of the Holocaust, see Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective (London and Portland, OR, 2003).
11. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963).
12. I do not share Raul Hilberg’s skepticism about diaries as valid sources for our understanding of the events. See Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis (Chicago, 2001), mainly pp. 141–42, 155–59, and 161–62. The problems with some of the diaries are easily recognizable when the case arises.
13. Walter Laqueur, “Three Witnesses: The Legacy of Viktor Klemperer, Willy Cohn and Richard Koch,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 10, no. 3 (1996), p. 266.
14. For a very close position, see Tom Laqueur, “The Sound of Voices Intoning Names,” London Review of Books (1997), pp. 3ff.
Chapter 1: September 1939–May 1940
1. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41 (New York, 1998), p. 306.
2. Ibid.
3. Chaim Aron Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. Abraham I. Katsh (Bloomington, 1999), p. 19.
4. Ibid., p. 20.
5. Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of David Sierakowiak, ed. Alan Adelson (New York, 1996), p. 36.
6. Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz (New York, 1979), p. 74.
7. Ibid., p. 76.
8. Sierakowiak, Diary, p. 93. For details on Sierakowiak’s background, see Adelson’s “Introduction” to the Diary.
9. There were some Jewish members of several European fascist parties—of course not in the Nazi Party—but it seems that in Italy at least one-fifth of the native population of 47,000 Jews was at one stage or another affiliated with Mussolini’s party.
10. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York, 1989), pp. 646–47.
11. For an excellent overview of the political scene, see Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington, 1983).
12. Ibid., p. 255.
13. For this analysis see, among many publications, Shmuel Ettinger, “Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern and Central Europe between the World Wars: An Outline,” in Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe, 1918–1945, ed. Bela Vago and George L. Mosse (New York, 1974), pp. 1ff.
14. William W. Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland,” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2, (1996), pp. 351ff.
15. For the idealizing trend see Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison, 1982).
16. For the fate of German Jewry see Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1.
17. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York, 1958; reprint, 1996), p. 13.
18. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York, 1978), p. 84.
19. Norman Rose, Chaim Weizmann: A Biography (New York, 1986), p. 354.
20. Alfred Rosenberg, Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs, 1934/35 und 1939/40, ed. Hans Günther Seraphim (Munich, 1964), p. 81. (For the translation see Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism, 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 3, Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (Exeter, UK: 1997), p. 319.
21. For an analysis of Stalin’s policy at this point see Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, 1999), pp. 5ff.
22. Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945: Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, ed. Max Domarus, vol. 2, part 1 (Munich, 1965), pp. 1377ff, particularly 1391.
23. First called Reichsgau Posen, the area became the Warthegau in January 1940. The region of Lodz, inhabited by some 500,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews, was annexed to the Reichsgau Posen in November 1939, on the assumption that the Poles and the Jews would be transferred to the General Government and that ethnic Germans would occupy the vacated urban area. Cf. Götz Aly, Endlösung: Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), p. 59.
24. See mainly Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch: Tägliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres, 1939–1942, ed. Hans Adolf Jacobsen (Stuttgart, 1962–64) vol. 1, p. 107.
25. For an excellent presentation of the Volkstumskampf as applied to Poland, see Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology and Atrocity (Lawrence, KS, 2003), pp. 1ff.
26. For the preparatio
n of the operation see ibid., pp. 14ff.
27. For the various significations of this code name see Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York, 1991), p. 68.
28. For Heydrich’s letter to Daluege, see Helmut Krausnick, “Hitler und die Morde in Polen,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 11 (1963), pp. 206–9.
29. Martin Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik 1939–1945 (Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg, 1965), p. 20.
30. Kurt Pätzold, ed., Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Vernichtung: Dokumente des faschistischen Antisemitismus 1933 bis 1942 (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), p. 234.
31. Ibid., p. 239.
32. Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, p. 42. The double Dr. indicates, according to German academic custom, that Rasch had more than one doctoral degree (he had doctorates in law and in political science).
33. Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK, 1988). For a more detailed discussion of the German terror measures in Krakow see Czeslaw Madajczyk, Die Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Polen (1939–45) (Wiesbaden, 1967), pp. 13ff. According to Bogdan Musial, the number of victims was 39,500 Poles and 7,000 Jews; see Bogdan Musial, “Das Schlachtfeld zweier totalitären Systems. Polen unter deutscher und sowjetischer Herrschaft 1939–1941,” in Genesis des Genozids: Polen 1939–1941, ed. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Bogdan Musial (Darmstadt, 2004), pp. 13ff, particularly 15. Although I disagree with many of Musial’s interpretations and with those of some contributors to this volume, the factual details contained in several of the essays are useful.
34. Aly estimates the number of these victims at 10,000 to 15,000. Götz Aly, “Judenumsiedlung,” in Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen, ed. Ulrich Herbert (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), p. 85.
35. Aly, “Judenumsiedlung,” pp. 85–87.
36. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900–1945 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 131–32. See also an excerpt of the verdict against Kurt Eimann in Ernst Klee, ed., Dokumente zur Euthanasie. (Frankfurt: 1985).
37. Klee, ed., Dokumente zur Euthanasie. p. 112.
38. Ibid. pp. 117ff.
39. Henry Friedlander, Der Weg zum NS-Genozid: Von der Euthanasie zur Endlösung (Berlin, 1997), pp. 431ff.
40. See Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), pp. 260ff; see also Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (New York, 1990), p. 310.
41. Otto Dietrich, Auf den Strassen des Sieges: Erlebnisse mit dem Führer in Polen: Ein Gemeinschaftsbuch (Munich, 1939), quoted in Breitman, The Architect of Genocide, p. 73.
42. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, part 1, vol. 7, (Munich, 1998), p. 141.
43. Ibid., p. 180.
44. Ibid., p. 186.
45. Ibid., p. 250.
46. Hitler, Reden, vol. 2, part 1, p. 1340.
47. Ibid., p. 1342.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 1442 and 1443.
50. Ibid., pp. 1465 and 1468.
51. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, ed. Elke Fröhlich, part 1, vol. 7, (Munich, 1987), p. 180.
52. Felix Moeller, Der Filmminister: Goebbels und der Film im Dritten Reich (Berlin, 1998), p. 240.
53. For indications about the early films and the “coincidence” between the choice of the latter topics with that of the prior ones see Susan Tegel, “The Politics of Censorship: Britain’s ‘Jew Süss’, (1934) in London, New York and Vienna,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15, no. 2 (1995), pp. 219ff.
54. Ibid., p. 221ff.
55. Ibid., p. 230ff.
56. Ibid., p. 227.
57. Goebbels, Tagebücher part 1, vol. 7, p. 140. Also Moeller, Der Filmminister, p. 239.
58. For the connection between both films see Evelyn Hampicke and Hanno Loewy, “Juden ohne Maske: Vorlüfige Bemerkungen zur Geschichte eines Kompilationsfilms,” in “Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses—”: Antisemitische Forschung, Eliten und Karrieren im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Fritz Bauer Institut, Jahrbuch 1998/99 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust (Frankfurt, 1999), pp. 259–60.
59. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 7, p. 140.
60. For a summary of the literature about Der Ewige Jude and the main aspects of its production and distribution, see Yizhak Ahren, Stig Hornshøj-Møller, and Christoph B. Melchers, Der ewige Jude: Wie Goebbels hetzte: Untersuchungen zum nationalsozialistischen Propagandafilm (Aachen, 1990).
61. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 7, p. 157.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., p. 166.
64. Ibid., p. 172.
65. Ibid., p. 177.
66. Ibid., p. 202.
67. Shimon Huberband, “The Destruction of the Synagogues in Lodz,” in Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege, ed. Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (New York, 1983), p. 70.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 70–71.
70. Daniel Uziel, “Wehrmacht Propaganda Troops and the Jews,” Yad Vashem Studies 29 (2001), p. 33.
71. Ibid., p. 34.
72. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, vol. 13, U.S. v. von Weizsäcker: The Ministries Case, (Washington, DC: US GPO., 1952), Nuremberg doc. NG-4699, p. 143. (When quoting original translations from documents presented at the Nuremberg trials, I mostly kept the text as is, despite the poor quality of some of the translations.)
73. Quoted in Josef Wulf, ed., Presse und Funk im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation, vol. 5, Kunst und Kultur im Dritten Reich (Gütersloh, 1964), p. 102.
74. Quoted in Ronald M. Smelser, Robert Ley: Hitler’s Labor Front Leader (Oxford and New York, 1988), p. 261.
75. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 1, vol. 7, p. 337.
76. Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder, Juden, Christen, Deutsche, 1933–1945 vol. 3, part 2 (Stuttgart, 1990—), p. 67.
77. David Vital, A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789–1939 (Oxford, 2001), p. 776.
78. Ibid., pp. 776–77.
79. Mendelsohn, The Jews, p. 74.
80. One of the most significant indicators of the cultural autonomy of the Jews of Poland can be found in educational statistics. At the primary-school level, a vast number of Jewish children still attended the traditional religious heder. Moreover, almost 20 percent of Jewish pupils at that level went to either Yiddish or Hebrew schools; about 50 percent of all Jewish pupils at the secondary-school level went to either Yiddish or Hebrew schools, and so did around 60 percent of the pupils in the vocational schools. For these statistics see Salo Baron’s testimony at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Cf. Adolf Eichmann, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1992–) pp. 176ff.
81. The contrary interpretations of Polish anti-Semitism before and during the Holocaust on the one hand and of Jewish anti-Polish attitudes on the other by Jewish and Polish historians respectively have not lost their pugnacity with the passage of time. On the overall issue see, among others, Michael R. Marries, The Holocaust in History (New York, 1987), pp. 96ff. On a typically mythical rendition of Jewish attitudes see David Engel, “Lwów, 1918: The Transmutation of a Symbol and its Legacy in the Holocaust,” in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (New Brunswick, 2003), pp. 32ff.
82. Anna Landau-Czajka, “The Jewish Question in Poland: Views Expressed in the Catholic Press between the Two World Wars,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 11 (1998), p. 263.
83. Ibid., p. 265.
84. Quoted in Brian Porter, “Making a Space for Antisemitism: The Catholic Hierarchy and the Jews in the Early Twentieth Century,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 16 (2003), p. 420. For Hlond’s pastoral letter and other such texts, see also
Viktoria Pollmann, Untermieter im Christlichen Haus: Die Kirche und die “jüdische Frage” anhand der Bistumspredigte der Metropolie Krakau 1926–1935 (Wiesbaden, 2001).
85. Porter, “Making a Space for Antisemitism,” p. 420.
86. See in particular Yisrael Gutman, “Polish Antisemitism Between the Wars: An Overview,” in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman et al. (Hanover, NH, 1989), pp. 97ff. See also the somewhat apologetic article by Roman Wapinski, “The Endecja and the Jewish Question,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 12 (1999), pp. 271ff.
87. See for example the energetic intervention of the Polish government against anti-Semitic rabble-rousing in Lwow, in 1929, in part incited by church authorities and triggered by fictitious Jewish profanation of Catholic rituals. Antony Polonsky, “A Failed Pogrom: The Demonstrations in Lwow, June 1929,” in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman et al. (Hanover, NH, 1989), pp. 109ff.
88. For a generally much milder view of Polish policies toward its Jewish population and thus a far more positive assessment of the situation of Polish Jewry on the eve of the war, see Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 2 (New York, 1984), pp. 259ff and 407ff.
89. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, pp. 90ff. See also Mallmann and Musial, Genesis des Genozids, and Jochen Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg: Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939 (Frankfurt, 2006).
90. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, p. 92.
91. Ibid., p. 99.
92. Ibid., pp. 99–100.
93. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 1, p. 67.
94. Ibid.
95. Quoted in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, 1991), p. 64.
96. Alexander B. Rossino, “Destructive Impulses: German Soldiers and the Conquest of Poland,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7, no. 3 (1997), p. 356.
97. Walter Manoschek, ed., “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum-Vernichtung”: Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939–1944. (Hamburg, 1997), p. 9.
98. Ibid., p. 12.
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