by Tec, Nechama
Self-preservation, autonomy, and actual survival are intricately connected in ways that are often unclear. I have asked many survivors what they thought was responsible for their survival. Almost without exception their initial answers were luck, chance, and fate. They wished to convey the idea that their survival was not contingent on their talent or intelligence.
When I continued to probe, however, they offered additional reasons. Most agreed that central among these secondary reasons was cooperation with others. Most of these prisoners were at one time or other part of a group—whether formal or informal—that involved mutual support. For most of them, being a part of these groups translated into being alive.1
The final liquidation of the Vilna ghetto began on September 23, 1943. What happened on that day followed an established pattern. First, the population was divided by age and sex. Older men were thrown into a group with older women and women with children. Dina Abramovicz, a teenager at the time, watched from afar as her elderly mother struggled with her oversized bundles. Then Dina spotted a teacher whom she and her mother knew. He was crippled from the waist down and walking on crutches. Because he was an invalid, the Nazis pushed him into the group of older women and children. Dina realized that he would be expected to climb a hill along with the crowd. He looked around imploringly, as if asking for help. Dina tells what happened next:
Someone responded to his pleading and it was my mother. She put down all her bundles and took the arm of the crippled man, who leaned heavily on her. As they moved toward the steep hill together, the tall, crippled man, and the elderly, frail woman, their faces glowed with a sublime light—the light of compassion and humanity that overcame the horror of their destiny. This is the light in which I remember my mother and which will not disappear from my memory as long as I live.
On the way to the concentration camp, Dina and a group of young people jumped off the moving freight train that was transporting them. Miraculously, they landed near a forest and survived the war as partisans.2 After the war Dina became a respected librarian at YIVO, now the Institute for Jewish Research in New York. She helped me and many others with finding materials for research.
Arieh Eitani was a teenager in wartime Poland brought to the Kaufering work camp. Like most other victims, he was preoccupied with finding food. Here and there he came upon some additional food, which he occasionally shared with others. Although resourceful and self-reliant, one day he was overcome by circumstances that were stronger than his ability to deal with them. He recalls:
I had diarrhea and couldn’t stop running to the bathroom. My clothes would not dry from the previous night. I had no shoes. . . . I knew of a shoemaker in the camp that had extra shoes, but he would not give me any. . . . It was raining, it was cold. I had enough. I thought that I was finished. I wanted to die and stopped working . . . just stood there. A kapo saw this and started beating me. Blood was streaming down my head.
A German guard, a soldier, came over, and asked the kapo, “Why are you hitting him? What’s going on?”
The kapo said, “He doesn’t want to live; he wants to give up. He doesn’t want to work or do anything. He wants to die.”
The German ordered, “Release him to me.”
I thought to myself, “Well, at least the end will come soon.”
The soldier took me to his place. He put me next to the stove so my clothes would dry. He gave me his sandwich and he asked, “Tell me, what is the problem?” I told him. I told him everything, everything, explaining that I just didn’t want to live any more. He said, “All this will be over soon.” [This was the winter of 1944.] Then he talked about himself. “Look, when I was in Russia at the Front, it was also very difficult. I also had diarrhea, and we as soldiers would cut our pants in the back and wore them like this.” I can’t remember all he said . . . he talked about himself a lot . . . what was important to me was the heat, the sandwich, the fact that I wasn’t working . . . Who knows? . . . all this did something to me. Next day, after work, this German came over, took me to his barrack. He gave me food and let me sit near the stove. But then, after the second day, I never saw him again. I don’t know what happened. I looked for him, hoping for a sandwich and some warmth but never saw him.
This German offered help and a glimmer of compassion in a chain of humiliations and depravations that had pushed Arieh to the brink of suicide.3 Perhaps the rarity of these incidents increased their effectiveness.
Tonia Rotkopf tells about a similar experience. After the 1944 liquidation of the Lodz ghetto, she was first transferred to Auschwitz and from there with a group of Jewish women to a work camp in Freiburg. In this place food was distributed once a day; bread and soup. The portions of the bread kept shrinking.
Tonia worked in a plane factory. She thought of her job as “horrible.” She remembers:
We had to cut aluminum and I didn’t know how. They laughed at me. . . . All the supervisors were German men or German women. We were not allowed to go to the toilet alone; we always had to go in a group of fives. The main supervisor, a Nazi, was a terror. A typical brute. . . . Then, from cutting aluminum they assigned me to work with a German, not a Nazi; this German was some kind of a prisoner and was not allowed to talk to me. I would bring the nails and hold them out. He used my hands for the job. I worked with the end part of the airplane. He and I were a team; we had to work together. I had to complete the job because my hands were small. Whenever he wanted to say something to me, he would look in a different direction and mumble under his breath.
Once Tonia went for a drink of water without asking permission. Her absence was noticed. “When I came back, the Nazi supervisor was there, and he screamed at me: ‘How the hell can you drink water? You will get sick from it!’ then he slapped me across my face four times. I could see his ring with the Nazi emblem on it. The German prisoner with whom I worked and other co-workers were there. I was ashamed to be hit in the face, in front of everybody . . . but then hoped that possibly no one had noticed . . . with the noise and all.”
Tonia was convinced that such a public humiliation would push her toward suicide. She just looked at those present. “When the German master turned around, I saw one tear drop flow from his eye. One tear, from one eye. This is how I realized that only one of his eyes was real. I also realized that he was my friend. . . . Later on he asked me, ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you wanted water?’” From then on, Tonia’s friendship with this German made hunger, hard work, and humiliations more bearable.
For both Arieh and Tonia, a crisis was followed by compassion, which reestablished a balance and gave each of them some strength to continue. It gave them a sense of community and the realization that they were not alone.4
The fate of the children in the Bernson and Bauman Hospital in the Warsaw ghetto was different. I recount this story in my book Resilience and Courage, but it bears repeating here. Dr. Anna Brande-Heller was the hospital chief. Among the women physicians who played a special role during the deportations was Dr. Anna Margolis, a pediatrician in charge of the children’s TB ward, and her young assistant—she was barely out of medical school—Dr. Adina Szwajger.
At the height of the deportations each head doctor received a ticket that entitled him or her to an exemption. Supposedly holders of these tickets were shielded from deportation. Each head of a hospital received a few additional tickets with an order to distribute them among members of their staff. Such tickets were scarce, covering only a small portion of hospital employees. This in turn meant that a head doctor was burdened with the decision of whom to select for an exemption from deportation, which everyone knew meant death.
At first, Dr. Heller refused to take on this responsibility. But her staff urged her to distribute the tickets, for if she didn’t, the tickets would go to other heads of hospitals. In the end, Dr. Heller distributed the tickets to her people.
When Dr. Szwajger reached the building on that fateful September day, deportations were in full swing. Except for the very y
oung children and patients who could not walk, everyone seemed to have disappeared. Soon, however, from different directions, from nooks and corners, older children patients reemerged. They surrounded Dr. Szwajger. One of these youngsters stepped out. “Doctor, we all know that we have no mamas and no papas anymore. And that we are not going to live through it either. But will you stay with us to the end?” Szwajger assured them that she would.
That morning Dr. Heller decided to give the five tickets to the younger people on the staff. Among them was Dr. Margolis and her daughter Ala, who worked as a nurse; Marek Edelman, a hospital employee and an underground leader; and Dr. Szwajger. After Szwajger received the news, she sat on the ward and watched a young nurse trying and failing to administer an injection. This nurse turned to Szwajger and begged the doctor to do it. The patient was the nurse’s mother. “I beg you, please. I don’t want them to shoot her in the bed and she can’t walk.” Szwajger agreed. The old woman smiled and offered her arm.
Once this was done, Szwajger asked the nurse whether they had a big supply of morphine. They had enough, the nurse replied. There was no need to say more. They understood. Szwajger told Dr. Margolis of her plan to give morphine to the children. Margolis agreed. Working together, the two doctors moved among the youngest children and babies, injecting them with the morphine solution. Next, they turned to the older children and told them that the medicine they had for them would make all the pain disappear. The children drank from the glasses. When they were told to undress and go to bed, they did so quietly.
Outside the door came a commotion. People were shoving and pushing. The noise was coming closer. In a daze, with the ticket pinned to her white coat, Szwajger left. She does not know if she had glanced at the children or not. From total silence she moved into a nervous chaos. There Szwajger bumped into a teacher she knew. The older woman asked in a hard voice if Szwajger had a ticket. The doctor kept silent and moved on. Later, those who were spared tried to send their tickets back to the hospital for others.
Szwajger was active in the ghetto resistance and subsequently, on the Aryan side, she worked as a courier. After the war she stayed in Warsaw and became a pediatrician. For decades she never told anyone the story of the children whom she had helped to die. What was critical in her memory was the way in which they had worked together—she, the nurse, Dr. Margolis, and her daughter, Ala Margolis. Their complicity was a compassionate response. They had been pushed to making life-or-death decisions, and their resistance was to choose the most humane path they could.5
In the end, there was no more extreme place than the concentration camps, where life hung by a thread. There, friendships were particularly valuable, and indeed invaluable. For many they were family. It was common for young Jewish women in the concentration camps to form powerful attachments. Two such young girls in Auschwitz became closely attached to each other. One of them developed a violent cough, which was observed by a kapo. He insisted that the sick girl be moved to the Auschwitz medical ward. The healthy friend would come to visit her every day after work, risking being herself interned in the medical ward. Occasionally she would bring her water or a little slice of bread.
One day as the girl was returning from work she noticed a raspberry bush next to the road. She approached the bush to confirm that it was real. Verifying this fact, she was filled with a desire to bring the fruit to her sick friend, but knew that if the Germans found out it would be confiscated and she would be punished. So she gently placed the fruit into her closed palm in a leaf. As soon as she arrived at the camp, she rushed to her friend with the news that she had a surprise. The raspberries, however, clutched tightly in her hand, had become a paste. Nevertheless, when the sick young girl saw what was in her friend’s open palm, her face lit up with happiness. Such an individual gesture of kindness, an act of resistance in its own way, proved to each girl that she was not alone and rekindled hope for life.
Acknowledgments
My involvement with resistance grew out of my personal interest in questions touching on wartime resistance. In a sense, this book developed from a prolonged journey marked by a range of expected and unexpected detours and revelations. Some of the obstacles and road bumps I encountered during this process were smoothed by a range of generous aid from a variety of sources. Inevitably, I welcome this opportunity to thank the multitude of individuals whose care and involvement improved the quality of this book.
A special and important role in my endeavor to complete this book was played by Timothy Bent, my editor at Oxford University Press, who so generously supported the production of this book with the help of his assistant Keely Latcham. Moreover, the publication of this book has greatly benefited from the continual support of Niko Pfund, president of Oxford University Press (USA).
My research efforts in this project relied on the help of a number of research institutions that invited me to participate in their various projects, broadening and facilitating my involvement in Holocaust research. Initially, both my position as a Fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and my research positions held at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., paved the way for my exploration of Jewish and non-Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
I am fortunate to have had my family’s unwavering support. Indeed, I am indebted to my family, my husband Leon Tec and my children Leora and Roland Tec, for their support of my research. I have particularly benefited from my son’s eager contributions to my Holocaust research and have often relied on his insightful and creative comments.
I deeply admire those individuals who, during different stages of my research, so generously shared with me the stories of their painful pasts. Many of these stories became integral parts of my different publications. Others still await personal recognition.
N.T.
Notes
Introduction
1. For some discussion of collaboration, see Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 144–149. Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
2. Dina Porat, “The Vilna Proclamation of January 1, 1942 in Historical Perspective,” Yad Vashem Studies 25 (1996): 99–136.
3. Ibid., 116.
4. Ibid., 113.
5. Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behaviors in Extreme Situations,” Abnormal and Social Psychology 38 (1943): 417–452.
6. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informal Heart (New York: Avon, 1960), 248–249.
7. Ibid., 251.
8. For a discussion of life in the forbidden Christian world, see Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 25–69.
9. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1963), 125.
10. Ibid., 118. John Lukacs, in his book The Hitler of History (New York: Random House, 1997), refers to H. Arendt’s, The Origin of Totalitarianism—as a flawed and dishonest book (113).
11. Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), 168–174.
12. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 125.
13. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), 1:20–21.
14. Ibid., 3:1005.
15. Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 79.
16. For a different and interesting comment about Arendt’s participation in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, see Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial (New York: Schocken, 2011), 148–187.
17. For an additional perspective, see Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, 169. She discusses Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil and notes that in the Eichmann case, Arendt’s analysis is strangely out of touch with the reality of his historical record.
18. Primo Levi, The Drowned and The Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 48–49.
19. Nathan Eck sees Hilberg’s assessment of Jewish passivity as an insult to the dead and as an act
of “Jewish self-hatred” (“Historical Research or Slander,” Yad Vashem Studies 6 [1967]: 385–430).
20. For a slightly different perspective, see David Engel’s review of a book related by Steven E. Aschheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem. Engel’s review appeared in Jewish Quarterly Review 95.4 (2005): 685–693.
21. See a most recent publication by Norman Davies, Rising ’44 (New York: Viking, 2004).
22. Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada J. Freidman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980).
23. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York: Stein and Day, 1977).
24. Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974).
25. Yuri Suhl, ed., They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe (New York: Schocken Books, 1975). A very recent addition of this kind of an approach is Adam Rayski, The Choice of the Jews under Vichy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).
26. What follows is just a brief illustration of their work: Yizhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (New York: Holocaust Library, 1982); Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust; Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985); Dov Levin, Fighting Back: Lithuanian Jewry’s Armed Resistance to the Nazis, 1941-1945 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985).
27. Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994).
28. Lucjan Dobroszycki, “Polish Historiography on the Annihilation of the Jews of Poland in WW II: A Critical Evaluation,” East European Jewish Affairs 23.2 (1993): 47.