In German-occupied Poland, the constellation of political and cultural organizations that had existed before the outbreak of World War II continued to function within the world of the ghetto. Because of the draconian measures imposed on ghettoized communities, many of these associations were driven underground, where they worked assiduously to counteract the effects of Nazi oppression. In the Warsaw ghetto, political parties and organizations were particularly active, and the clandestine publications they generated “multiplied like mushrooms in the rain,” noted Emmanuel Ringelblum, chief archivist of the Oneg Shabbat archive.19 The numerous youth organizations, a significant force in ghetto resistance activity, played an active part in these endeavors.
19. Joseph Kermish, “On the Underground Press in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Yad Vashem Studies 1 (1957): 85.
Those clandestine newspapers20 produced in the ghetto certainly did not match the standards of their organizations’ prewar publications. With printing materials in short supply, most news sheets were printed on carbon paper or lightweight flimsy paper.21 Many associations produced hectographed22 or typewritten editions, while others circulated handwritten copies. Few of the newspapers were very large. The majority was limited to a handful of pages—a dozen at most. Despite a perennial shortage of resources, these underground publications played an important role in the politics and civic life of the Warsaw ghetto. Their most essential task was to lift the flagging spirits of their readers and to strengthen their morale and will to resist Nazi oppression. Another unequivocal mission of the illegal press was to keep residents informed of events inside and outside the ghetto. Appearing in Polish, Yiddish, or Hebrew, underground newspapers and periodicals kept their readers abreast of wartime developments and the unparalleled atrocities leveled against Europe’s Jewish communities. In 1941 and 1942, many columns were devoted to speculation concerning the evolution of Nazi policy and to the acts of terror perpetrated by German officials against Warsaw’s incarcerated Jews. The clandestine press also focused on various aspects of ghetto life: economic conditions, employment issues, the activities of cultural and welfare institutions, and the policies of the Judenrat, about which most editors of the illegal press had little good to say. Largely socialist in orientation, underground newspapers were also sharply critical of the genuine social and class disparities that existed in the ghetto and railed against the measures of the Judenrat and other agencies that unfairly burdened the most impoverished sectors of the community.23
20. See Kermish, “On the Underground Press,” 85–123; Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 685–94.
21. This refers to an inferior-grade paper traditionally used for making multiple copies.
22. Hectography is a low-technology printing process involving the transfer of an original, prepared with special aniline inks, to a pan of gelatin or a gelatin pad pulled over a frame. Virtually obsolete in modern printing, the process is still used to produce temporary tattoos on human skin.
23. Kermish, “On the Underground Press,” 116ff.
Among the underground publishing organizations in the Warsaw ghetto, the clandestine youth press fulfilled a special need, encouraging young people to hold fast to their ideals in the face of Nazi persecution and offering spiritual and intellectual direction. The struggle against apathy, despair, and spiritual degeneracy proved a common goal among these newspapers and periodicals. Appropriate to their readers’ age and outlook, the underground youth press urged opposition to Nazi oppression and preparation for a Jewish future. Thus, publications such as the Polish-language El Al (Upwards) encouraged young audiences to take an active part in their community and to “look ahead to what the future may bring,”24 while others, such as Yunge Gwardie (Young Guard), a Yiddish news sheet, reminded youth active in resistance activities not to neglect their education and self-improvement. Dozens of underground newspapers were produced by young people for young people in the years 1941 and 1942, including Jungtruf (The Call of Youth), Di Yugent Stimme (The Voice of Youth), Avangarda Młodzieży (Youth Avant-Garde), and Płomienie (The Flame), the latter a publication of the Jewish defense organization Ha-Shomer Ha-Za’ir.
24. El Al, quoted in Kermish, “Underground Press,” 86.
The Gordonia youth organization sponsored three clandestine papers in the Warsaw ghetto: Oisdoier (Endurance), Z Problematyki ruchu w chwili obecnej (On the Present Problems of the Movement), and Słowo Młodych (Young People’s Voice). Before November 1941, when editor Eliezer Geller25 began to focus his attentions on older audiences, the latter publication targeted primarily youths in their middle and late teens. A Polish-language biweekly, Słowo Młodych was Gordonia’s mouthpiece, espousing the sentiments of that pioneering youth movement founded in Poland in 1925. Named for Aaron David Gordon (1856–1922), a proponent of Labor Zionism, Gordonia became an international movement in the late 1930s, promoting the creation of a Jewish homeland, the revival of Hebrew culture, and the preparation of youth for Aliyah to Palestine through education and vocational training. In the Warsaw ghetto, the Gordonia movement gained many adherents by promoting underground educational activities for its young members, comprising several age groups. Słowo Młodych spoke to the heart of its young readers, urging them to courageous action and to hopes for a brighter future. In an undated edition from the fall of 1941, Słowo Młodych urged its readers to ensure that they would not be the last generation of Jewish youth but rather “the first generation reborn to the Jewish nation.” The newspaper’s publishers invoked the Bible’s Eighty-third Psalm, “Keep Not Thou Silence, O God,” a lament for the nation of Israel traditionally interpreted as a prayer for the destruction of its enemies. As the Jewish people faced a new and terrible oppressor, the paper exhorted its young audience to courage.
25. Eliezer Geller (b. 1918) was a Gordonia activist and member of the ŻOB underground resistance in Warsaw. Geller led a unit of armed resistors during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; on April 29, 1943, he succeeded in fleeing through the sewer system to the “Aryan side” of Warsaw. Taking refuge at the Hotel Polski, where German authorities interned Jews with foreign passports, Geller was discovered and ultimately transferred to Auschwitz, where he perished.
Document 9-5. “Let the Jewish Youth Remember,” Słowo Młodych (Young People’s Voice), Warsaw ghetto, spring, 1942, USHMMA, RG-15.070M, Zespół podziemie–prasa konspiracyjna [Clandestine Publications], 230/13/1.
Young People’s Voice
Let the Jewish youth remember that it is either the last generation of the dying wanderers of the desert, or the first generation of the Reborn Jewish Nation in Eretz Israel.
Psalm 83
Keep not Thou silence, O God: hold not Thy peace, and be not still, O God.
For, lo, Thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate Thee have lifted up their heads.
They have taken crafty counsel against Thy people, and consulted against Thy hidden ones.
They have said, “Come and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.”
O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the wind.
As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire;
So persecute them with Thy tempest, and make them afraid with Thy storm.
Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek Thy name, O Lord.
Let them be confounded and troubled forever; yea, let them be put to shame, and perish:
That men may know that Thou, whose name alone is Jehovah, art the most high over all the earth.
Involvement in the clandestine youth press required a certain set of intellectual skills and abilities and remained the sphere of young people in their late teens and early twenties. Young children, by contrast, were of course limited in the kinds of resistance in which they could engage. In the ghettos of German-occupied Europe, however, there remai
ned one kind of resistance activity for which their size and agility particularly suited them. The smuggling of foodstuffs and other essentials from the “Aryan side” was an illegal, but indispensable, component of ghetto life. It represented a vital source of food and supplies for the captive community, and many families lived on the resources that their members brought into the ghetto illicitly or the proceeds generated from selling smuggled goods. Very young children were especially well adapted for this perilous enterprise. Their diminutive forms enabled them to slip through small gaps and holes in the ghetto walls and to escape to municipal districts from which Jews had been proscribed. Once outside the ghetto, their youth often shielded them from the suspicion of German officials and local citizens so that they might safely beg, steal, barter, or purchase provisions for consumption in their incarcerated communities. Enterprising young smugglers often wore clothing with concealed inner pockets in order to return laden with half their weight in potatoes, bread, and other commodities.
Smuggling provided the sole means of survival for many families, and discouraging ghetto youngsters from such endeavors proved a difficult challenge, despite the best effort of child-welfare organizations. In his 1943 essay “Jewish Children on the Aryan Side,”26 Oneg Shabbat’s chief archivist, Emmanuel Ringelblum, recalled the case of a CENTOS administrator who tried to intercede on behalf of a group of orphaned smugglers who lodged together in the Warsaw ghetto. The youths earned up to fifty złoty per day through their exploits and had sufficient reserves of cash to set up in an apartment in the ghetto’s Mila Street. “When the CENTOS worker proposed that they move into a boarding school,” Ringelblum reported, “the children refused, declaring that they were managing very well by themselves. They said that the CENTOS should put starving children in the boarding schools.”27
26. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, ed. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1974), 140–51.
27. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, 149.
Ringelblum noted that the child smugglers he had seen possessed “the most extraordinary and fantastic courage.”28 The work was manifestly dangerous. Returning to the ghetto weighted down with contraband, the youths had little chance to escape potential captors, and many young “entrepreneurs” were intercepted with their heavy loads at ghetto exits or checkpoints. At the very least German officials or Jewish Order Police beat the youngsters mercilessly and seized their hard-won provisions. Many young smugglers paid with their lives for their efforts to bring food and necessities back to their starving community.
28. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, 147.
Document 9-6. Arrested at a checkpoint, a Jewish boy holds a bag of smuggled goods, Warsaw ghetto, c. 1941, USHMMPA WS# 60611B, courtesy of the YIVO Institute.
One of Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbat colleagues, Henryka Łazowertówna, helped to immortalize these everyday heroes who risked life and limb to convey food and supplies to the Warsaw ghetto. During the “Great Deportation” action of July 1942, Łazowertówna voluntarily joined her mother at the Umschlagplatz and was deported to her death at Treblinka.29 In the preceding year, however, her poem “The Little Smuggler” had already been set to music and become a popular ballad among ghetto inhabitants.
29. Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emmanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 182.
Document 9-7. Henryka Łazowertówna (Lazowert), “The Little Smuggler,” Warsaw ghetto, c. 1941, in Michał Borwicz, ed., Pie´s´n ujdzie cało: Antologia wierszy o z·ydach pod okupacja˛ niemiecka˛ (Warsaw: Centralna Z·ydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1947), 115–16 (translated from the Polish).
The Little Smuggler (a Song)
Through walls, through holes, though sentry points,
Through wires, through rubble, through fences:
Hungry, daring, stubborn
I flee, dart like a cat.
At noon, at night, in dawning hours,
In blizzards, in the heat,
A hundred times I risk my life,
I risk my childish neck.
Under my arm a burlap sack,
On my back a tattered rag;
Running on my swift, young legs
With fear ever in my heart.
Yet everything must be suffered;
And all must be endured,
So that tomorrow you can all
Eat your fill of bread.
Through walls, through holes, through brickwork,
At night, at dawn, at day,
Hungry, daring, cunning,
Quiet as a shadow I move.
And if the hand of sudden fate
Seizes me at some point in this game,
It’s only the common snare of life.
Mama, don’t wait for me.
I won’t return to you,
Your far-off voice won’t reach.
The dust of the street will bury
The lost youngster’s fate.
And only one grim thought,
A grimace on your lips:
Who, my dear Mama, who
Will bring you bread tomorrow?
The following photographs (Documents 9-8 and 9-9) are wrenching and arrest the eye instantly. Well known to students of World War II, the images portray one of the first public executions of resistance members by Wehrmacht soldiers following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. On October 26, 1941, members of the German 707th Infantry Division hanged twelve members of the communist underground near or on the grounds of a yeast factory in Minsk, Belorussia. The condemned were executed in groups of three. The Lithuanian collaborator tasked with recording these events presumably photographed only one of the proceedings in its entirety, near the gates of the old factory works. The first in the series of images he captured that day shows German and Lithuanian troops of the 707th parading three of the captive resistance figures through the streets of Minsk to the execution site. One of the prisoners, a young woman, commands attention. Around her neck she wears a placard reading in German and Russian, “We are partisans and have shot at German soldiers.”
Document 9-8. Historians believe the girl in the center of the photograph to be teenage resistance member Masha Bruskina, being marched with her comrades Kiril Trus and Volodya Shcherbatsevich to their place of execution by German soldiers, Minsk, October 26, 1941, USHMMPA WS# 14101, courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1972-026-43.
The young girl is believed to be seventeen-year-old Masha Bruskina,30 born in Minsk in 1924 to a Jewish family. Shortly after the German occupation of the Belorussian capital in late June 1941, she moved with her mother into the Minsk ghetto. The teenage Masha was, however, a communist and soon escaped to the city’s “Aryan side,” lightened her hair, and took on her mother’s maiden name, Bugakova, to avoid detection. The young woman volunteered as a nurse at the hospital attached to the city’s polytechnical institute, which occupying German forces had requisitioned as an infirmary for wounded Soviet prisoners of war. Perhaps at this juncture Masha joined a local resistance cell organized by Kiril Trus and Olga Shcherbatsevicha. The teenager used her post at the hospital to smuggle to the Soviet underground medical supplies and photographic equipment, the latter instrumental in creating false identity papers and other forged documentation. With her aid, other resistance members were able to remove Soviet prisoners of war to safety and to redeploy captured Soviet officers with significant combat experience to the ranks of the growing partisan movement. Despite the inscription on the placard she wore on the day of her death, Masha was not involved in armed resistance. At this time, such efforts were almost wholly the province of male members of the fledgling Belorussian resistance, while females functioned principally as couriers of supplies and information.
30. See Necham
a Tec and Daniel Weiss, “A Historical Injustice: The Case of Masha Bruskina,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 11, no. 3 (winter 1997): 366–77.
In early October 1941, a Soviet prisoner-patient denounced the resistance group to German authorities. Masha and several members of her cell, including leaders Kiril Trus and Olga Shcherbatsevicha, as well as the latter’s sixteen-year-old son, Volodya Shcherbatsevich, were arrested. All, including Masha, were brutally beaten and tortured, but none would give the names of fellow resistance members.
On October 26, 1941, Masha, with Kiril and Volodya, walked together with their German and Lithuanian captors to the gates of the yeast factory near Karl Marx Street, the chosen place of execution. Those citizens who observed her that day remarked upon the calmness of the three condemned and the quiet courage and self-possession of the teenage girl.31 Masha was chosen as the first victim. With her hands tightly bound, the young girl stepped onto a chair, aided by one of the soldiers, while a German officer adjusted the noose about her neck. In one of the extant photographs of the event, the teenager turned her back to the crowd. “When they put her on the stool,” recalled eyewitnesses Petr Pavlovich Borisenko, “the girl turned her face towards the fence. The executioners wanted her to stand with her face to the crowd, but she turned away and that was that. No matter how much they pushed her and tried to turn her, she remained standing with her back to the crowd. Only then did they kick away the stool from under her.”32
Children during the Holocaust Page 47