by Tec, Nechama
Alexander Pieczorski, a Jewish Soviet officer, was welcomed by the underground leader, Leon Feldhendler, who as a simple shoemaker felt insecure about his ability to be the commander of the underground. Feldhendler was realistic, modest, and determined. For some time he had kept an eye out for someone more qualified than he. In Pieczorski, Feldhendler felt he had found him. At Feldhendler’s insistence Pieczorski was appointed head of the underground. Feldhendler demoted himself to second in command.
As the preparations for the revolt progressed, the organizers realized that their ideal goal to save all prisoners could not be fulfilled. Instead, they moved to an examination of more realistic options. Among other things this raised the basic question of whether or not to rely on the Ukrainian guards’ cooperation. In the end the leaders agreed not to trust these guards. They also had to decide how many inmates should be made privy to the preparations. To communicate the resistance plans broadly had its advantages but was dangerous. It was generally assumed that at most forty individuals knew about the underground’s plans.
The prisoners were immersed in the preparations of the revolt from September to November 14, 1943. Some issues were resolved by themselves. For example, prisoners had to give up building a tunnel because the ventilation was poor and they did not know how to fix the problem. Also the date for the start of the revolt had to be adjusted because the organizers wanted to make sure that two SS men in particular—Gustav Wagner and Hubert Gomerski—were absent. Both were known to be ruthless murderers. The plan to eliminate as many of the camp’s SS as possible was plausible because of the fact that some Jews had close contacts with these men.
Amid the difficulties and obstacles were also some successes. Some of these prisoners were accomplished at tailoring, shoemaking, and the manufacture of leather goods, and prisoners managed to prepare extra clothes, medication, and a supply of poison for all sorts of eventualities. They learned how to cut the electricity to cover their escapes. Some Jewish women succeeded in stealing arms from the SS men for whom they worked. Some were assigned to cover the departures of prisoners who were scheduled to escape to the forest. Arrangements were sometimes made for them to later join special partisan groups.
At one point, Pieczorski and one of his assistants were supposed to collect ammunition from a so-called safe source. Upon arrival, they discovered that the ammunition was not there and had to change plans. They ended up buying ammunition from Ukrainian guards. Such changes prolonged the preparations. On the other hand, the underground managed to find a collection of unconventional “arms” such as knives, hammers, axes, shovels, and a range of primitive objects, which could serve as weapons. The resisters finished their preparations by swearing to fight and to defend each other.
November 14th turned out to be a sunny day. The precise plans were not known even to some of those who were directly involved. The plan was that the SS men would be invited to come to various workshops, to try on clothes, shoes, and the various items, which Jewish laborers were preparing for them. And so, as an SS man was trying on a coat, the tailor cut off his head with an ax. This tailor took the man’s gun and whatever things would be useful. Then, all traces of the dead man had to disappear with him.
Soon some unanticipated developments occurred. Most dangerous was the sudden reappearance of the two SS officers, Wagner and Gomerski. Gunshots were heard, signaling danger. At the main entrance to the camp the guards refused to admit a group of inmates returning from work outside the camp and had fired at them instead.
The underground responded with sporadic shootings. The inmates succeeded in killing the head of the Ukrainian guards, which intensified the fight on all sides. A small group of inmates detached themselves from the rest and entered the blacksmith’s shop, where they found special scissors with which to cut the wires that blocked the inmates’ escape from the camp.
At five in the afternoon, as scheduled, Pieczorski67 arrived. He was confronted by a tense situation: the main gate was locked. Without hesitation, Pieczorski screamed, “Comrades, move forward and attack! Exit the gate!” Automatically the prisoners threw themselves at the gate. Screams and orders to hurry continued.
Confusion reigned. As noted earlier, only a minority of inmates knew about the resistance plans. Pieczorski’s order to run to safety was the first they learned of it, though it was never part of the original plan. But the inmates took advantage of the opportunity and it was effective; as the inmates reached the gate they threw stones at the guards, and sand into their eyes. In another place, another group led by Pieczorski was busy cutting wires that were adjacent to the SS quarters. Eight of them were killed by gunfire and mine explosions.
It is estimated that 150 prisoners were killed in the course of this uprising and that 300 escaped. Leon Feldhendler reached the forest, and in the years that followed fought as a partisan along with other escapees. In April 1945, he was murdered in Lublin by members of the NSZ (the Polish fascist organization).68 Pieczorski, the man who made this uprising happen, had concentrated on reaching the Soviet Union with his group of Soviet prisoners. He did, and later fought first with partisans and then as part of a penal battalion. He died in 1990. Another 150 prisoners have not been accounted for. We are uncertain as to the number of the inmates who lost their lives who had actively participated in this revolt.69
No one can say whether greater awareness about the forthcoming revolt would have saved—or cost—more lives. What we do know is that extreme situations preclude predictability and judgment. All we can do is celebrate resistance in the form that it took.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Couriers
Emanuel Ringelblum described Jews who served as couriers as “heroic young women who deserve the pen of a great writer. . . . Day in and day out they face grave dangers. For protection they rely totally on their Aryan features and the kerchiefs that cover their heads, they undertake the most threatening missions without any objections, without a moment’s hesitation. . . . They recognize no obstacles.” Ringelblum praised the conduct of all Jewish women, but he felt that the couriers stood out for their selfless dedication to the Jewish people.1
As discussed, the enforced isolation of the Jews had automatically made women more strategic to Jewish underground movements. Jewish males, because of circumcision, were in much greater danger on the Aryan side. Women’s readiness to take on a variety of resistance jobs stemmed from their awareness that these risks were even greater for Jewish men. This in part accounts for the higher proportion of Jewish female couriers in both the East and the West. In general, women were less likely to be suspected of political transgressions than men. When asked to compare the threats faced by women and men, Thea Epstein, a Jewish courier in southern France, replied, “It was harder for men. A man had no right to be in the city, to move around; he was supposed to be employed in work that exempted him from military service. Or he had to study or to be in the army.”2 Another young woman, a Jewish courier who had been in a communist resistance group in France, admitted that being a girl helped her. “I took advantage of this fact.”
“What were these advantages?” I asked.
“Well, for instance, when there was a control of the baggage in a bus the Germans had a tendency to pass a smiling young girl; perhaps a pretty girl could use her seductiveness. . . . It was simply difficult to imagine that I was doing what I was doing with the way I looked. I didn’t look like a scout. It’s a good question, but I never before thought about it.”3
Jewish female couriers functioned as the glue that held an underground together. Born in Poland, Leah Silverstein’s life experiences illustrate these functions (figure 5.1). When Leah was five, her mother died in 1928 in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw. She had two older brothers, her father, and two sets of grandparents. Four years after Leah’s mother died, her father remarried, which led to a string of painful experiences. As the youngest member of her family, Leah was particularly vulnerable. She recalls that, as in the fairy tales, her stepmother was wicke
d. “She was truly wicked. At one point she tore up all my schoolbooks, which I treasured. I liked to study. I loved school. We ended up fighting each other physically.”
Her father’s passivity and her stepmother’s behavior threatened Leah’s safety. Help came from her maternal grandmother, an intelligent and deeply religious woman. She invited Leah to share her modest apartment. Despite their poverty, the old woman and the young girl felt comfortable with the life they shared. Leah continued to study diligently. She completed elementary school and dreamt about attending high school, though in Poland at the time enrollment into high school cost money and no one in the family had the necessary resources. Leah heard about a contest in which young girls could compete for two free places in one of the local high schools. She entered this contest and won one of the prizes. For the next two years, she attended, free of charge, the Zydowskie Gymnasium. For Leah, this was a dream come true.
She continued to live happily with her grandmother. Most of their neighbors and friends were poor, yet poverty in no way interfered with their extensive participation in a wide range of political and cultural pastimes. A large proportion of these local youths belonged to the Jewish Scout association, and a variety of Zionist organizations, especially Hashomer Hatzair. Many of these local groups had close ties to the liberal Polish Christian Scouts Association. Leah’s Orthodox grandmother encouraged her granddaughter’s participation in all these diverse activities. Leah would often express her gratitude for the many things she had learned from her membership in these groups. She was convinced that these contacts had given her something to believe in. She also felt that through these organizations she became more intellectually active, able to form new and vibrant friendships. As a member of the Jewish Scout organization, Leah appreciated the ties she had made with some Polish Scouts and continued to cherish her memories of these friends. Before and during World War II, some Polish Scouts were supportive of their Jewish counterparts, often under most trying circumstances.
Among those who returned to their homes after the German invasion in 1939, which, as we have seen, created a mass exodus, many were Jewish youths, members of various Zionist organizations. Leah’s grandmother, remembering World War I, comforted whoever would listen that they had nothing to fear from the German occupation. Reality, of course, proved otherwise.
Singled out for early and vigorous assaults were members of the Polish elites, which was part of Hitler’s plan, as Ian Kershaw has put it, to deprive the Polish intelligentsia of any chance “to develop into a ruling class.”4 For example, in Krakow, the entire faculty of Jagiellonian University was invited to come to a large assembly hall. All faculty members were asked to appear on November 6, 1939, to discuss issues related to the start of the new academic year. After the distinguished faculty reached the designated place of assembly, the German police invaded the hall. Without any explanations, the police pushed the waiting faculty, 106 in all, out of the hall and into vehicles and disappeared with them. When information reached students and family—the rumor was that they had been taken to Sachsenhausen and Dachau—seventeen were already dead.5
The Central Welfare Council (Rada Glówna Opiekuńcza, or RGO) headed by Jerzy Roniker, worked incessantly to help. Roniker knew that the Germans defined Polish officers, some of whom were returning home, as elites and ordered them to register with the authorities. As mentioned earlier, the newly created Polish underground warned these officers what this meant and told them to conceal their identities. By not revealing their military past, many Polish officers survived; these underground warnings saved lives.6
The focus of oppression, of course, soon became the Jews, who early on were targeted for progressive degradation that led to the construction of ghettos. By October 1940, the Germans completed the construction of the Warsaw ghetto, and by November 15th, it was sealed, meaning that its Jewish inhabitants could not enter or leave the area unless they had special permits.7 Officially, the death sentence applied to any Jew who left or entered the ghetto in an unauthorized way. The death sentence also applied to Gentiles caught helping Jews.
Like most ghetto inhabitants, Leah Silverstein’s family had settled in dilapidated apartments. One was assigned for her father and his family, and the other was allotted to Leah and her grandmother. Asked to describe the Warsaw ghetto, Leah’s unhesitating assessment was that it was “hell on earth.” Over 300,000 Jews were crowded into a small neighborhood: “Eventually, these rundown spaces had to accommodate about half a million Jews. Similarly, the amount of food allotted to the ghetto inmates was way below the subsistence level. All ghetto inmates were exposed to dirt, hunger and a range of debilitating conditions, including the spread of deadly diseases. . . . Occasionally, Jewish inmates were driven from their dwellings to the public baths, for the so-called de-lousing.”8
FIGURE 5.1 Leah Silverstein poses holding a bicycle at the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist collective in Zarki. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Leah Hammerstein Silverstein)
Like others, Leah tried to renew her past associations. She elaborates: “In the ghetto, former members of the Hashomer Hatzair tried to contact each other. Earlier these organizations had been divided by age groups. So I tried to find friends who were my age. We started meeting in groups. When some of our former leaders returned from their failed attempts to escape to the East, they began to reorganize our youth groups. Each time, we would meet in some other home.”
Leah joined a group of Hashomer Hatzair members who referred to themselves as a kibbutz. Compared to ghetto life in general, she saw her situation in this group in a positive light. “Life in our kibbutz was good, compared to what was going on in other family groups. We kept ourselves clean, even though the premises were overcrowded. We also engaged in extra work.” In the evenings and on Shabbat, Leah and the other members of the kibbutz would gather for discussions. “We benefited from all kinds of presentations by various literary figures who visited our kibbutz. And so, we were politically and intellectually active, in spite of the terrible conditions that surrounded us.” She continues:
Every Jew had a right to a certain amount of food allotments. We didn’t go to the store individually. One person collected food coupons and through certain channels we were supplied with food. This person saw to it that we should be provided with the food. There was a system, according to which each youth organization was getting a certain amount of food. Some former members of our organization used to come to visit our group, although they lived with their respective families. Many of them were already starving. With some of them we tried to share our food.
Officially, our members would get in the morning two slices of bread, with some substitute marmalade and a bowl of soup. In the middle of the day there was another bowl of soup, usually the same kind of soup, and in the evening again, a piece of bread and soup. The soup was usually made out of grouts, Kasha. Occasionally it came with potatoes, very seldom with a piece of fat. Very rarely was there butter or some other kind of fat . . . I remember that the grouts were of a special kind. They were coarsely ground so that the husks were swimming in the soup, to eat the soup you had to separate the husks from the grains so you had a wreath around the plate of the husks. Our group had no place to grow vegetables. Only occasionally were we allotted a few vegetables.
Leah’s kibbutz had up to twenty members. They all worked hard; the young men were authorized to engage in heavy work on the roads, in factories, and in airports. For some of these jobs, the Judenrat paid them limited amounts of money.
The young women in our kibbutz took on domestic jobs inside the ghetto. In the ghetto, a small minority could still afford maids. There were differences among people. Some would buy food, which was smuggled into the ghetto. People who in the ghetto became immediately pauperized were usually cut off from their professions. Many of them were forced into the ghetto from the surrounding, smaller communities. They were definite candidates for death by starvation. In Poland, even before the war, a large proportion
of Jews had been poor. Many of them lived in poor communities. To be sure, the Judenrat and various ghetto organizations tried to help the poor and the starving. However their needs were much greater than the resources necessary for the elimination of death by starvation.
Leah saw her life in the ghetto kibbutz as “an oasis in that horrible . . . cesspool of humanity.” She felt fortunate because she was a part of a fine group of people, whom she valued and looked up to. Her kibbutz comrades gave her a sense of family. Among the leaders of the ghetto underground—the ŻOB—were Mordechai Anielewicz, Joseph Kaplan, and Shmuel Breslaw. Among the women leaders in the ghetto, she most vividly remembers Tosia Altman, Miriam Heinsolor, and Civia Lubetkim. Most of these women worked as underground couriers.
Although most couriers were women, one exception was Jan Karski, a Polish courier and an international emissary. He was aware of the precariousness of the women. “The average life of a woman courier did not exceed a few months. . . . It can be assumed that their lot was the most severe, their sacrifices the greatest, and their contributions the least recognized. They were overlooked and doomed. They neither held high ranks nor received any great honors for their heroism.”9 And yet, it was the contributions of couriers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, that enabled the underground movements to coordinate and integrate their efforts. Their efforts contributed greatly to keeping various underground movements alive.
Kibbutz members made concerted efforts to keep order by adhering to a consistent division of labor. In line with established traditions, the young women were assigned to the kitchen. In addition to their internal work, these women had domestic jobs outside their kibbutz. Members of the kibbutz cooperated fully, making their lack of food less demoralizing. They listened to music, sang, and discussed the issues that were of special interest to them.