by Geert Mak
Tens of thousands of European families took Jews into hiding, hundreds of thousands of families were involved in channelling rations, countless larger and smaller resistance groups fought for and alongside runaway Jews. The risks were enormous, the sanctions were grave, yet still it went on.
In Belgium, some 35,000 of the country's 60,000 Jews were saved in this fashion: 60 per cent. In France, 270,000 of the 350,000 Jews survived: more than 75 per cent. In Norway, 1,000 of the 1,800 Jews survived: approximately 60 per cent. Of the 7,500 Danish Jews, more than 100 died: 98 per cent were saved. In other parts of the continent, the percentage of survivors was much lower: in the Netherlands, only 40,000 of the country's 140,000 Jews made it through the war: less than 30 per cent. Of the 2.7 million Polish Jews, barely 75,000 survived: 2 per cent. At the same time, for their singular courage in the war, it has been helpers from these latter two countries who have most often received the honorary title of ‘Righteous among Nations’ from the Israeli Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum: 5,373 and 4,289, respectively.
It would be simple enough to equate such figures, as is sometimes done, with values like ‘courage’ or ‘humanity’, or conversely with the degree of ‘anti-Semitism’ in a given country. Anyone providing shelter for a Jewish family in Germany ran an infinitely greater risk of being informed on than someone in Belgium. In Poland, hiding Jews was a capital offence, in Vichy France the penalty was only a short prison term. There were in Warsaw's ghetto alone more Jews than in all of France. Where were they to go? In oft-praised Denmark, the actions – without wishing to detract from the courage of the Danish resistance – involved only a very small number of Jews, who could be helped to escape with relative ease. Consider, by comparison, the problems faced by the resistance in the Netherlands, where tens of thousands of families had to be hidden in a densely populated country under strict SS and SD supervision, with no single direct route of escape to non-occupied territories.
Of the 7.5 million Jews in the parts of Europe occupied by Germany, only 20 per cent were still alive in 1945. Only one out of every five Jewish men, women and children survived the Holocaust.
Could the sole driving force behind this petty, middle-class, vindictive anti-Semitism really have been the old Jew-baiting of Paris, Vienna and Berlin, the hatred that encompassed Raphaël Viau and Karl Lueger, as well as Georg Ritter von Schönerer? There are authors who advance this claim with conviction, and who are paid particular heed in Germany. Despite the painful accusation it contains, it is also an attractive idea, because it is simple and comforting. The theory implies, after all, that mass murders of this kind will never repeat themselves once the folly of anti-Semitism has been abandoned. In other words: the Holocaust was a gruesome but one-time-only excess on the part of a generation past. Nothing like that will ever happen to us again.
The background to the Holocaust, however, was more complicated than that. Anti-Semitism played a role, of course, even a major role, but the Holocaust probably had many more causes, most of which had little or nothing to do with a hatred for Jews. The survivors of Krefeld interviewed by Eric Johnson reported almost no anti-Semitic incidents, and in only a quarter of the cases of Jews being reported to the Gestapo did motives such as ‘political belief’ play a role. Jews were informed against much more often because of conflicts between neighbours, love gone sour, or for financial gain.
This last factor in particular, the matter of material interests, should not be underestimated, and the Nazis put it to most effective use. The contents of the 72,000 vacant Jewish homes were distributed around the country and sold at auctions for a pittance. The historian Frank Bajohr, who studied the deportations from Hamburg, speaks of ‘one of the greatest exchanges of property in modern history, a massive robbery in which an increasingly large portion of the German population took part.’
Another important factor was the total absence of a mentality of resistance. In Denmark, Bulgaria, Italy and on the Côte d'Azur, the persecution of Jews failed largely because the local authorities and police considered it beneath their moral dignity. Liberal and tolerant Amsterdam, on the other hand, scarcely had an anti-Semitic tradition. Yet all of the German agents and officers charged with deporting that city's 80,000 Jews could easily fit in a single group portrait. The vast majority of Jewish families were deported, almost without a hitch, by citizens of Amsterdam: Dutch policemen, tram drivers and railway engineers. The Dutch identification card was almost impossible to forge: the proud, humdrum work of a perfectionist Dutch civil servant. Amsterdam's registrar's office helped the Germans with such pinpoint accuracy that the resistance finally had to blow it up.
A similar situation applied in Paris and other French cities. In mid-1942, there were no more than 3,000 Gestapo agents in all of France. Approximately three quarters of the Jews arrested were detained by French policemen. Yet most of those policemen and civil servants were not Nazis, and in no way anti-Semitic. It is with good reason that Adam Lebor and Roger Boyes, in their study of the European resistance movements, speak of ‘a massive collapse of moral and civic virtues’.
The problem was not only the mass murders themselves, it was also, as Daniel Goldhagen puts it, ‘the ease, the incredible ease with which the razzias could take place, the punctuality of the trains, the efficiency with which executions were carried out, the unthinkability of the number of victims: not dozens or even hundreds, but millions. The Holocaust was a very different phenomenon from those other, all too frequent antiSemitic atrocities in European history. It was, in addition to all the rest, a bureaucratic excess in which hundreds of thousands of Europeans calmly took part, simply because they attached greater importance to the order and regularity of their section, service, army unit or business department than to their individual conscience.
In the Observer of 9 April, 1944, Sebastian Haffner published a lucid, nigh-prophetic portrait of Albert Speer. According to Haffner, Speer was the ‘embodiment of the revolution of managers’: not corrupt, gaudy or garish like the Nazis, but intelligent and courteous. He was the prototype of the kind of man who became increasingly important in this war: ‘the pure technocrat, the classless, brilliant sort with no background, whose only goal is to make a career for himself.’ Precisely that lightness, that lack of reflection, allowed all young men of his ilk to continue operating ‘the horrifying machinery of our age’, right up until the end.
In a certain sense the Holocaust can be seen as an expression of an almost religious fanaticism, and at the same time as a wilful blindness, a deep, collective moral lapse. This is not a popular explanation. It is, after all, much more disturbing than all the theories that grasp at antiSemitism and the evil of the German Nazi elite. It implies that a similar mass persecution, using the current technology, bureaucracies and systems of repression and manipulation, could take place again tomorrow in a different place and against a different group. The technocrats will remain. In Haffner's words: ‘This is their age. We shall be rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but the Speers, whatever happens to them as individuals, shall be with us for a long time.’
Chapter THIRTY-THREE
Warsaw
IN 1941, A VISITOR WROTE OF THE WARSAW GHETTO:
The streets are so crowded that one can barely move ahead. Everyone walks about in rags and tatters. People often possess nothing but a shirt. There is noise and shouting everywhere. High, plaintive children's voices cut through it all. From the ‘Aryan’ side, curiosity seekers peer at the pitiful spectacle of the tattered crowd. The children are the ghetto's true breadwinners. When a German looks the other way for only a second, they slip handily to the Aryan side. The things they buy there, bread, potatoes and such, are hidden skilfully under their rags. The challenge then is to slip back in the same fashion.
Thousands of shabby beggars elicit memories of famines in India. A half-starved mother tries to feed her child from a desiccated breast. An older child lies beside her, presumably dead. You see dying people lying spreadeagled in the middle of the str
eet. Their legs are swollen, often frozen, their faces twisted in agony.
Sometimes the sentries will stop a group of Jews and order them to undress and roll in the muck. They are often forced to dance as well. The sentries stand and watch, bent double with laughter.
A few rather ramshackle houses, a section of tram rails, an ornament in a hallway, a potholed street a few hundred metres long is all that is left of the neighbourhood where this once happened. A grey neighbourhood of apartment buildings has been built where the old ghetto once stood. I find one section of the infamous wall with which the ghetto was sealed off: behind a stinking courtyard, along a little street where dubious men use a gentle form of extortion to horn in on the municipal parking revenues, behind Elektroland, the Holiday Inn and a branch of the Nationale Nederlanden insurance company.
Little children are playing between the apartment blocks, it is a warm day, the leaves of poplars sway above the children's heads, making dancing spots of sunlight. I ask directions from a young woman walking along with a little girl; they say they are each other's favourite niece and favourite aunt. They walk along with me for a while, then go skipping off, it looks as if they are floating with pleasure.
The young woman turns and points around her.
Yes, here was the Jewish ghetto.
On 19 April, 1943, when most of the ghetto's residents had already been taken away, a final, desperate uprising took place. The Jewish organisation – there were even kibbutzim in the ghetto – had gradually found out exactly what was happening in the camps, and no one harboured any more illusions. Starting in spring 1942, dozens of young Jewish people had started setting up a military organisation, weapons were smuggled in and, finally, about 30 combat groups were formed, comprising 750 partisans.
In the eyes of those who took part in it, the uprising was above all a confirmation of the value of human life, nothing less than that. They knew it was hopeless, but they wanted to ‘die honourably’. ‘Life belongs to us!’ they wrote in a pamphlet. ‘We, too, have a right to that! We must only understand that we must fight for it … Let every mother be a lioness defending her young! No father calmly watches his children die any more! The shame of the first act of our destruction must not repeat itself!’
Historians have succeeded in digging up the names and histories of 235 of those who participated in the revolt. What is remarkable is their youth: most of them were between the ages of eighteen and twenty. The oldest was the forty-three-year-old Abram Diamant. He died during the fighting in the streets of the ghetto. The youngest was Lusiek Blones. This thirteen-year-old was killed in the final hours of the uprising, while trying to escape through the ghetto's sewers. The commander of the revolt, Mordechai Anielewicz, was twenty-four. He committed suicide along with the other leaders on 8 May, when their commando post at Milastraat 18 was surrounded and pumped full of poison gas. An impressive number of women took part: approximately a third of the membership of the resistance groups consisted of girls and young women. Almost all of them were in love.
At first, the Germans were taken by surprise. Fighting went on everywhere in the ghetto during the first few days, and both sides suffered heavy losses. But soon entire streets had been set alight by tank and artillery fire, the partisans fought back from underground bunkers, air strikes followed, and finally the resistance strongholds were taken one by one, houses and entire streets were wiped off the map.
Of the 235 Jewish partisans we know about, 72 survived the revolt and 28 died in the ghetto's sewers. Forty-four of them succeeded in escaping, but most of those died soon afterwards in fighting between Germans and partisans. Others were betrayed and sent to Majdanek or Auschwitz. Three were killed in the great uprising in August and September 1944. By 1945, only 12 of the 750 insurgents were still alive.
The ZIH-INB, Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute, tries to document as many of the memories as possible. Local historians Jan Jagielski and Tomasz Lec have carefully located the spots from which the most famous photographs of the starving ghetto were made, and published their findings in book form. Following their lead, I now walk through the neigh-bourhood and see it through other eyes.
It is hard, as it turns out, to find surviving remnants of the former ghetto. Most of the locations can only be identified on the basis of kerbs, posts and other topographical details. A photograph of an emaciated corpse lying in the street, for example, turns out to have been taken from the portico of Waliców Street 6.10. The only thing marking the spot is an oval-shaped post in the foreground. The kerb against which another corpse was photographed is still there too, in front of the Church of the Holy Virgin's Birth at what is today Solidarnosći Boulevard 80. The set of stairs turns out to be much smaller than it looks in the photograph, the body must not have been very big either, probably a child.
Here, a photograph of a stone bench in front of the courthouse, where two Jewish men and a woman are trying to sell a few wares: the same bench, against the same wall, now stands vacant in sunlight, the wall behind it covered in graffiti. A picture taken in 1941: the burial of an emaciated man beside a wall. It turns out to be the wall of a cemetery, the stones are still clearly recognisable, a tiled path now runs straight over the grave.
When I stopped to take a picture of my own, in the portico on Waliców Street, an old lady came to take a look. She spoke a little German, and I explained what I was doing. Yes, she knew the photograph, that's the way it was here, she had seen it herself. Did I happen to have two zlotys for her, she whispered. She was hungry.
I try to find the gate that once led to the ghetto, the place where Jews had once been forced to dance naked. In the background of the photograph taken in 1940, the city rolls on, big and modern. Today there is a Pizza Hut on the corner. The only surviving point of reference is an old stone wall to one side. The gate, of course, has disappeared, but the most amazing thing is what has happened to that background: where Nalewki Street once stood, a busy shopping street with cars, trams and department stores, is today a quiet park. Only the rusty tram rails, which come to a stop somewhere under the grass, show that once this really was a busy urban neighbourhood, that the whole history is not a hallucination.
I leaf through other books of photographs. The earliest pictures of Warsaw show a city of well-to-do citizens, broad streets full of pedestrians, horse-drawn trams, churches and palaces in the familiar eclectic and pseudo-styles. Around the turn of the twentieth century the city was experiencing the same rapid growth as other European metropolises: industrialisation, prosperity in the city and poverty in the countryside, farmers who came pouring in by the tens of thousands, expansion after expansion, a growth from 261,000 inhabitants in 1874 to 797,000 in 1911.
Then came the start of the Polish Republic, the panic of the Russian Revolution – the Soviets advanced to just outside the city – and then the photographs show the cheerful, elegant Warsaw of the 1920s and 1930s, with coffee houses, theatres, universities, boulevards, newspaper boys and clanging trams. Then the war.
Pictures of Warsaw in 1945 resemble pictures of Hiroshima. Only a quarter of the city was still standing. Ninety per cent of all the large buildings had been reduced to rubble. Of the 1.3 million people who lived in Warsaw in 1940, only 378,000 were still there. Almost two thirds of the city's population was either dead or missing.
Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the city has something artificial about it, as though the old city centre has been reconstructed by expert stage designers. Every crack seems to have been put there for effect, many of the houses actually look older and more authentic than they ever were. And that impression is correct: almost every stone here was first blown away, then returned to its place. In the Rynek, the central square of the Old City, a melancholy organ-grinder is turning the crank on a fake antique barrel organ, handsome men are selling ugly paintings, the beggars have crutches and infants, the American ladies are just asking to be swindled. Polish vendors lurk around the ghetto, selling souvenir dolls, funny Jewish figurines,
laughing and dancing rabbis; the folklore lives on, but the dancers have died.
This is a city full of memorial plaques, probably because nothing else is left. Every street corner has its monument, every house saw the birth of a poet or the death of a hero, and new plaques are being put up all the time. Just outside the centre of town I pass a brand-new monument for an entire army corps. A little group of old ladies is standing there in the twilight, looking at the gleaming pillar. A woman in a black suit dress walks up to it, searches among the many, many names, brushes one of them lightly with a gloved finger.
Warsaw's parks are the most pleasant place to be on long summer evenings like this. They lie in a circle around the Old City, often behind the gardens of the homes themselves. Neighbours are talking across the hedges, children are running around, little boys are playing soccer, babies and prams are out on parade, the girls are the most beautiful in all Europe.
I take a walk around one of the ponds with Wladyslaw Matwin. Matwin is a historian and former politician, he was born in 1916 and has himself gradually become a living chronicle of history. ‘My life was a time full of violence,’ he says. ‘There were always huge forces at work that kept turning it all upside down.’