Each survivor faces the past, and confronts the future, with a burden which those who did not go through the torment cannot measure. ‘I may bear indelible scars in body and soul,’ Cordelia Edvardson has written, ‘but I don’t intend to reveal them to the world—least of all to the Germans. That is the pride of the survivor. Hitler is dead—but I am alive.’37
***
Between 1939 and 1945 the Germans killed many millions of non-Jewish civilians in Germany itself, and in every occupied country, often in massive reprisal actions or after prolonged torture. The shooting down in cold blood of unarmed, defenceless Greeks, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Russians, and men, women and children of a dozen other nationalities, all of them civilians who had taken no part in military action, was a feature of Nazi rule throughout Europe. Among those murdered were as many as a quarter of a million Gypsies, tens of thousands of homosexuals, and tens of thousands of ‘mental defectives’. Also murdered, often after the cruelties of tortures, were several million Soviet prisoners-of-war, shot or starved to death long after they had been captured and disarmed.
As well as the six million Jews who were murdered, more than ten million other non-combatants were killed by the Nazis. Under the Nazi scheme, Poles, Czechs, Serbs and Russians were to become subject peoples; slaves, the workers of the New Order. The Jews were to disappear altogether. It was the Jews alone who were marked out to be destroyed in their entirety: every Jewish man, woman and child, so that there would be no future Jewish life in Europe. Against the eight million Jews who lived in Europe in 1939, the Nazi bureaucracy assembled all the concerted skills and mechanics of a modern state: the police, the railways, the civil service, the industrial power of the Reich; poison gas, soldiers, mercenaries, criminals, machine guns, artillery; and over all, a massive apparatus of deception.
In the concentration camps, Jews were not people, but figuren, ‘numbers’ or ‘figures’. But these ‘figures’, these ‘men’ who had become ‘dogs’, did not intend to die without there being a record of what had been done to them. The Jewish desire that the evidence of mass murder and inhuman torture should survive was an overwhelming one. Dr Aharon Beilin has recorded how, at Birkenau, he once saw a boy working, who told him that he had been castrated in a medical experiment in the camp. This boy asked Dr Beilin to examine him. ‘I said I could not help him, but the boy said, “No, I want you to see what they are doing to us.”’38
As soon after liberation as Yehuda Bakon was strong enough to ‘hold a pencil in my hand’, he made a series of drawings of everything he could remember of the gas-chambers, the undressing rooms and the crematoria at Birkenau: the things he had seen, and the things he had asked the Jews of the Sonderkommando to describe to him, so that if he survived, he could record it. ‘I asked the Sonderkommando men to tell me,’ he later explained, ‘so that if one day I will come out, I will tell the world.’39
To see, and to record: this had been the self-imposed task of Emanuel Ringelblum and his ‘Joy of Sabbath’ circle in the Warsaw ghetto, from the ghetto’s first days. It had been Simon Dubnov’s last instruction as he was shot down in Riga in December 1941. In the concentration camps there had been a slogan, ‘I am the victim! I am the witness!’ Vitka Kempner, in hiding in the Vilna ghetto, and later in action with a group of partisans in the forests outside Vilna, later recalled how ‘everyone in the ghetto thought that he was the last Jew in the world. People wanted us to leave one person outside the ghetto so that they can tell the world the story. We thought no one else was left in any other ghetto.’40
To survive was to give witness: a historic imperative. The Warsaw poet, Yitzhak Katznelson, in his last days at Vittel, before being deported to Auschwitz and his death, had also stressed the need to recall the acts of resistance: ‘Sing a hymn to the hero of the remote hamlet! Sing loud his praise, see his radiant figure!’41
There was also a moral imperative: Zdenek Lederer, a survivor of the Theresienstadt ghetto and of Auschwitz, later reflected that, throughout the ages, ‘it has been the lot of the Jews to deliver to men a warning’. This warning, seen so starkly in the years of the Holocaust, was a clear one: ‘that violence is in the end self-destructive, power futile, and the human spirit unconquerable’.42 The stories told in these pages can convey only a fragment of the Jewish suffering, and courage, of those terrible years. With the Allied victory in 1945, the Holocaust became history, increasingly distant, remote, forgotten; a chapter, reduced to a page, shortened to a paragraph, relegated to a footnote. Yet it must still be remembered in each generation for what it was: an unprecedented explosion of evil over good. At Auschwitz, as Hugo Gryn, a survivor, has said, the ethical code which was part of his own Jewish tradition, and also ‘part and parcel’ of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, was ‘denied and reversed’:
If you take the Ten Commandments, from the very first which starts: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt’; here you had people who set themselves up to be Gods, to be masters of life and death, and who took you into Egypt: into an Egypt of the most bizarre and most obnoxious kind, and all the way to creating their own set of idols, to taking God’s name in vain, to setting generations at each other so that children dishonoured parents.
Certainly they murdered. Certainly they committed robbery. Certainly there was a great deal of coveting, of envy, involved in it. In other words, you had here an outbreak of the very opposite of everything that civilization was building towards.
‘It was a denial of God,’ Hugo Gryn added. ‘It was a denial of man. It was the destruction of the world in miniature form.’43
In the face of so violent an upsurge of evil, the Jewish resistance that took place during the war years possessed a heroic dimension. Hardly a day passed without some act of defiance, as seen even in those records which have survived; records which are only a fragment of the whole story.
At every stage of the war, the Germans used insuperable deterrents: military superiority, a crushed and terrorized local population, sadistic helpers, and above all the threat and reality of massive reprisals. Hundreds were shot for the resistance of a single person. In Lvov, on 16 March 1943, when a Jew had killed a German policeman noted for his cruelty, the Germans murdered twelve hundred Jews as a reprisal: a far higher reprisal ratio than that used against the Czechs in Lidice in 1942, or against the French in Oradour in 1944. Yet despite the grotesque savagery of reprisals, Jewish resistance was never crushed in its entirety, even in the death camps.
This was resistance not of people gathered together in a single town or region, but scattered in ten thousand different localities, divided by distance and frontier controls and language. It was resistance by those surrounded by captive populations which frequently collaborated with what should have been the common enemy, and often betrayed by those who were in essence their fellow victims. It was resistance by people for whom the possession even of an inadequate weapon was punishable by death. It was resistance by an army without arms, by an army of the old and sick, and the frail and the young, and by women for whom all forms of fighting were abhorrent. It was resistance above all by an army which did not have the right to surrender, which did not possess that basic right of the soldier to save his life by becoming a prisoner of war, by showing the white flag.
A Jew who sought safety in surrender was killed without mercy. A Jewish woman who ran away with her child and was caught was likewise murdered. For the Jews, resistance was almost invariably useless and helpless. It was carried out, as Rudolf Reder, a survivor of one of the death camps, has written, by ‘the defenceless remnants of life and youth’;44 by Jews who had no strength or resources left, only the desire to remain human beings, yet even that desire could be, and was, sapped and destroyed by the deliberate intent of the conqueror.
The end was to be death: that was the German aim and plan. Yet there were many Jews who, sensing the plan, and having the ability to run away, to find at least a temporary haven in swamp or forest, decided not to run away, but, as Zivia Lubet
kin had written, ‘to share the same fate’ as those who had no means of escape. ‘It is our duty’, she wrote amid the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, ‘to stay with our people until the very end.’45
A twenty-four-year-old Jewish girl in Cracow, Matilda Bandet, was approached one morning by her friends with news that the ‘action’ was imminent, that the time had come to try to escape from the ghetto and make for the woods. The girl hesitated. ‘My place is with my parents,’ she said. ‘They need me. They are old. They have no means of defending themselves. If I leave them, they will be alone. I will stay here, with them.’
The girl’s friends hurried off, to the cellars, the tunnels and the woods. Matilda Bandet remained, to be deported with her parents to Belzec, and to perish with them.46 In her decision not to leave the ghetto, not to try to save herself, but to stay with her parents, Matilda Bandet showed that very human dignity which it was the German wish totally to destroy.
In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labour camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms: fighting with those few weapons that could be found, fighting with sticks and knives, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food under the threat of death, the nobility of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity was a form of courage. ‘Not to act,’ Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in the aftermath of one particularly savage reprisal, ‘not to lift a hand against the Germans, has become the quiet passive heroism of the common Jew.’47 To die with dignity was in itself courageous. To resist the dehumanizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be abased to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were courageous. Merely to give witness by one’s own testimony was, in the end, to contribute to a moral victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.
NOTES AND SOURCES
Preface
1 Hugo Gryn, in conversation with the author, London.
1. FIRST STEPS TO INIQUITY
1 Martin Luther, Von den Juden und ihren Lugen (‘On the Jews and their Lies’), Wittenburg 1543.
2 Die Judischen Gefallenen des Deutschen Heeres, Der Deutschen Marine und der Deutschen Shutztruppen, 1914–1918 (The Jewish War Dead of the German Army, Navy and Defence Forces, 1914–1918), Berlin 1932.
3 For an eye-witness account of some of this violence, see Israel Cohen, My Mission to Poland, 1918–1919, London 1951.
4 Jehuda Reinharz (editor), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Jerusalem 1977, volume IX, series A, October 1918—July 1920, letter 44, page 48.
5 Report of 18 December 1919 from P. Wright to the Foreign Office, London: Rumbold papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
6 The Times, 14 August 1919.
7 For the full text of the Twenty-five points, as published shortly after Hitler came to power, see Konrad Heiden, A History of National Socialism, London 1934, pages 10–14.
8 Speech of 13 August 1920, quoted in Reginald H. Phelps, ‘Hitler’s “Grundlegende” Rede über den Antisemitismus’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, volume 16, Stuttgart 1968, pages 400–20.
9 Heiden, A History of National Socialism, op. cit., pages 73–4.
10 Norman H. Baynes (editor), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922—August 1939, London 1942, volume 1, page 26.
11 Ruppin diary, 30 October 1923, quoted in Alex Bein (editor), Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, London 1971.
12 The edition cited here is the first English-language unexpurgated edition, two volumes in one, Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, London 1939, volume 1 ‘A Retrospect’, volume 2 ‘The National Socialist Movement’. This edition was printed in February 1939.
13 Franz Jetzinger, Hitler’s Youth, London 1958.
14 Hitler, op. cit., page 31.
15 Ibid., pages 61–2.
16 Ibid., page 64.
17 Ibid., page 273.
18 Ibid., page 60.
19 Ibid., page 176.
20 Ibid., page 178.
21 Ibid., page 66.
22 The full text of the Locarno Agreement is published in Lord D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace, London 1930, volume 3, appendix v.
23 Quoted in Ben-Zion Surdut, ‘Sholem Schwartzbard’ (Shalom Schwarzbard): Board’s-Eye View, Bulletin of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies’ Cape Council, Cape Town, December 1983. Acquitted at his trial in Paris, Schwarzbard later lived in South Africa, where he died in 1938, at the age of fifty-one.
24 Hitler, op. cit., page 553.
25 Marvin Lowenthal, The Jews of Germany: a History of Sixteen Centuries, London 1939, page 375.
26 Voting figures were: Social Democratic Party, 8,575,343; National Socialist (Nazi) Party, 6,404,397; Communist Party, 4,590,178; Catholic Centre Party, 4,322,039.
27 ‘Guide and Instructional Letter for Functionaries’, 15 March 1931, in Lord Marley, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag, London 1933, page 234.
28 Quoted in Lowenthal, op. cit., page 380.
29 Idem.
30 Leslie Frankel, in conversation with the author, Johannesburg.
2. 1933: THE SHADOW OF THE SWASTIKA
1 Lord Marley, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag, op. cit., page 196.
2 Manchester Guardian, 27 March 1933.
3 Shlomo Aronson, The Beginnings of the Gestapo System: the Bavarian Model in 1933, Jerusalem 1969, page 20.
4 Manchester Guardian, 27 March 1933.
5 Testimony of Benno Cohn: Eichmann Trial, 25 April 1961, session 14, verbatim transcript.
6 Lord Marley, op. cit., page 238.
7 There were further mass protests at the Trocadero, Paris, on 20 May 1933, and at the Queen’s Hall, London, on 27 June 1933.
8 Lord Marley, op. cit., pages 262–3.
9 Lady Rumbold, letters of 2 April and 5 April 1933, Rumbold papers, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold: Portrait of a Diplomat, 1869–1941, London 1973, page 375.
10 Dr Joseph Goebbels, manuscript: ‘From the Imperial House to the Reich Chancellary’, International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, document PS-2409.
11 Monday, 3 April 1933.
12 Speech reported in the Völkischer Beobachter, 7 April 1933, quoted in Baynes (editor), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922—August 1939, op. cit., page 729. The word used by Hitler was gekrummpt.
13 Testimony of Benno Cohn: Eichmann Trial, 25 April 1961, session 14.
14 Judische Rundschau, 4 April 1933: editorial reprinted in Ludwig Lewisohn, Rebirth, New York 1935, Pages 336–41.
15 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, 7 April 1933: text in full in Lucy S. Dawidowicz (editor), A Holocaust Reader, New York 1976, pages 38–40.
16 Speech reported in Völkischer Beobachter, 7 April 1933, quoted in Baynes, op. cit., pages 728–9.
17 Letter of 11 April 1933, Rumbold papers, published in Martin Gilbert, Britain and Germany Between the Wars, London 1964, page 74.
18 Lord Marley, op. cit., pages 309–10.
19 Ibid., pages 189–90.
20 Law of 25 April 1933: text in full in Dawidowicz, op. cit., pages 42–3.
21 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 April 1933.
22 Henry R. Huttenbach, The Destruction of the Jewish Community of Worms, 1933–1945, New York 1981, page 138.
23 The Times, 4 May 1933.
24 Lokal Anzeiger, 7 May 1933.
25 Judische Rundschau, 19 May 1933.
26 Lord Marley, op. cit., page 347.
27 List, compiled from eye-witness and German newspaper reports, published in the Manchester Guardian on 27 September 1935.
28 Nathan Feinberg, ‘Political Activities Against the Nazis’, in Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference on Manifestations of Jewish Resistance, Jerusalem 7–11 April 1968, Jerusalem 1971, page 78.
29 Völkischer Beobachter, 26 June 1933.
&nb
sp; 30 Letter of 2 June 1933: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, archive.
31 Neier Morgen, 14 July 1933.
32 Nachman Blumenthal, ‘Sources for the Study of Jewish Resistance’, in Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, op. cit., page 57.
33 Heil! A Picture Book Compiled from Authentic Material, London 1934, page 112.
34 Frankfurter Zeitung, 2 August 1933.
35 Ostjüdische Zeitung, 20 August 1933.
36 Code of discipline, Dachau, 1 October 1933: International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, document PS-778.
37 List of prisoners ‘known to have been killed in Dachau’: Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1935.
38 List enclosed by A. L. Easterman in a note to the Foreign Office, London, 12 April 1946: Foreign Office papers, 371/57545.
39 In 1932 only 353 German Jews had emigrated to Palestine; in 1931, only 122. The largest group of immigrants to Palestine in 1933 were Polish Jews, more than thirteen thousand of whom received Palestine certificates in that single year.
3. TOWARDS DISINHERITANCE
1 Report in the Daily Express, 25 May 1934.
2 Report in the Manchester Guardian, 3 April 1934.
3 Heil! A Picture Book Compiled from Authentic Material, op. cit.
4 Frankische Tageszeitung, 26 May 1934.
5 Huttenbach, The Destruction of the Jewish Community of Worms, 1933–1945, op. cit., page 16.
6 The Yellow Spot. The Outlawing of Half a Million Human Beings: a Collection of Facts and Documents, London 1936, page 85.
7 Ibid., page 91.
8 Michel Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy, Paris 1983, page 18.
9 Memorandum on the Development of the Jewish National Home, 1934, Geneva, June 1935, page 6. The number of Polish Jews admitted to Palestine in 1934 was 18,028. The third largest immigration, 2,031, was from Rumania, and the fourth largest, 1,964, was Jews from an Arab and Muslim land, the Yemen.
10 Arieh Tartakower and Kurt R. Grossman, The Jewish Refugee, New York 1944, page 29. On 29 September 1944, shortly before the publication of this book, Tartakower’s son Jochanan, himself a refugee from Lodz in Poland, was killed in action in France while serving in the United States army.
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