Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust

by James M. Glass

  Nadia S., in a phone interview, recalls this period: ‘You can’t imagine how bad it was; Germans, Poles, they spat on us; we had a nice apartment in Krakow but we were moved into one room with three other families. Germans would shoot us, often like a game. It was hard to think of God in that ghetto. Sure, I had faith as a Jew, but prayer? There was too much suffering even to think about praying.’

  The effects of the race laws could be seen where food was distributed (spoiled rations, insufficient supplies, outrageous prices); workshops (terrible working conditions); soup kitchens (woefully inadequate nourishment); orphanages (thousands of homeless, abandoned children); shelter (terrible sanitation, little or no bedding, almost no fuel to protect against the harsh winters); medical treatment deficiencies; understaffed and filthy hospitals; four or more families living in one room; holes in the ground serving as toilets. At every social, cultural, economic, political and moral site, Jews not only experienced brutality in food distribution, medical services and wages, administrative functions and priorities, and the elemental decency that makes life possible, but constantly faced the annihilatory logic and terror of genocide. In the German-sponsored Warsaw daily newspaper, reports periodically appeared noting ‘de-Jewed’ industries, which meant that the Jewish proprietors had been murdered outright, transported to a ghetto or shipped to a death camp. Rabbis advocating ‘faith’ lived in the midst of these atrocities and the ideology, authorized by German science, that Jews possessed innate biological and genetic dangers to Germans. Theology simply had no way of comprehending how absolute this vision was and how determined scientific authority was in eradicating this biological/blood threat.

  Janusz Korczak captures something of the confusion brought on by radical dislocation and the Germans’ utter disregard for the fate of Jewish bodies. ‘What matters is that all this did happen … the destitute beggars suspended between prison and hospital. The slave work … debased faith, family, motherhood.’14 Korczak, an old man by this time, walked to the Umschlagplatz [collection point for transport to Sobibor and Treblinka] with the two hundred children in his Orphanage, even though the Germans offered to spare his life. Leading that slow walk to the place of deportation, children clinging to him, calmed by his attention and care, Korczak embodied a spiritual presence not even the Germans could destroy. Korczak’s action said: ‘You will not destroy my dignity, my humanity.’ Korczak was immensely popular not only with assimilated, urban Jews but with the Polish population; he had been the equivalent of Dr. Benjamin Spock before the war; his radio program on pediatric care reached the entire Polish population. By rejecting the offer to spare his life, Korczak escaped a central element of German policy towards the Jewish population: debasing the spirit and destroying the will even before killing the body.

  The ghetto site embodied the extreme horror of the attack on Poland’s Jews. For example, Korczak on Warsaw:

  ‘The look of this district is changing from day to day. 1. A prison.

  2. A plague-stricken area. 3. A mating ground. 4. A lunatic asylum. 5. A casino, Monaco. The stake – your head … . A young boy, still alive or perhaps dead already, is lying across the sidewalk. Right there three boys are playing horses and drivers; their reins have gotten entangled. They try every which way to disentangle them, they grow impatient, stumble over the boy lying on the ground. Finally one of them says, “Let’s move on, he gets in the way.” They move a few steps away and continue to struggle with the reins.’15

  Rabbi Shapira was writing in this insane Warsaw universe from 1939 to 1942; he called his sermons Hiddushei Torah auf Sedros [New Torah Insights]. The last entry is dated July 18, 1942, less than a week before mass deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka. Shapira never questions his faith, even in the midst of intense personal suffering; and his theological writings are filled with references from the Talmud and Midrash. He refuses to utter the word German or Nazi; nor does he address the politics of his times or the desperate plight of refugees streaming into Warsaw or the collaborationist policies of the Judenrat. Even facing his own suffering after the loss of his family, Rabbi Shapira stays within the boundaries of the theological text. He sermonizes on spiritual malaise, and the Esh Kodesh [Holy Fire] involves an ongoing spiritual dialogue between God and himself. Shapira responds to the weakening of religious observance, the turning away from faith and the lack of enthusiasm for religious explanation, with the only ‘weapon’ he knows: the power of theological text.

  God’s presence in the self

  Shapira struggles with his torment regarding the constancy of God’s presence: ‘There are times,’ he writes, when God might ‘smite us,’ thereby creating a ‘distance’ between ‘us’ and ‘Him.’ But even in approaching the threshold of doubt, Shapira turns away and affirms God’s truth. It is not for the individual to ‘say if something is a plague or calamity,’ he might say it ‘seems’ to be a calamity. ‘The truth’ is that whatever God intends, no matter how disastrous, ‘is a good for Israel; God will bestow good upon us.’16

  Even as the German assault pushes the ghetto further from religious consciousness, Shapira develops theological explanation: ‘when the Jew is so broken and crushed that he has nothing to say, then he does not feel … this is not silence [harishah] but rather muteness [ilmut] like the mute who has no power of speech.’17 Muteness reflects spiritual weakening, a sign of psychological breakdown; but this radical withdrawal from engagement with the world is the personal responsibility of being an individual Jew. It is different from faith. He writes of ‘broken and crushed’ individuals, but Rabbi Shapira also believes God has the power to lift the community out of its muteness: God brings solace, refuge from the horror, even though refuge lies in faith, thoroughly expressed within the self. In September 1940, shortly after the murder of his family, he speaks of how the ‘inner strengthening of will’ turns ‘evil into good,’ in a Warsaw where evil appears to be the cause ‘of such great troubles.’18 Shapira uses words like ‘downcast, broken, bent to the ground full of sadness,’ but refuses to allow those moods to negate his faith, to take the observation ‘my whole life is gloomy and dark’19 as a cause to turn away from God. Unlike Nadia S., Shapira never wavers in his profound faith in God’s presence.

  To the very end Rabbi Shapira believes that only God ‘can rebuild what has been destroyed’; and bring ‘Redemption and Resurrection.’20 His position has nothing in common with the partisans’ strong belief in the group’s political power to fight German violence. To preserve faith, Shapira argues, one must transfer fear of the world to fear of God, to His divine power, the ‘revelation of His kingdom … His sovereignty.’ During such moments of faith, a kind of inspired introspection, the self ‘feels elevated and joyful.’ To be in awe of the majesty of God, to fear the power of God as the divine creator of the universe, as the holder of supreme justice, ‘is indeed pure … a supernal fear, which elevates the person.’21 To live in fear of the world, however, is to lower oneself, to be without moorings, deaf to the word of this divine power. Shapira refers to the alienation of the self, to its being lost in the ‘scriptural sense,’ disconnected from faith and God; but ‘God will search for us and find us. He will … rescue our bodies and our souls with great mercy and beneficent acts.’22

  God, then, has the power to heal what Shapira describes as a mass schizoid universe – disconnection, numbness, absence of empathy – trampling down any traditional selfhood and annihilating the will to live. He talks about the prevailing ‘turmoil and confusion … . No day, no night … the whole world lies upon us, pressing down and crushing, to the breaking point.’23 But despair is not finality; in being God’s ‘beloved,’ the suffering Jews possess within themselves, as a community, as Israel, a divine significance impervious to German power and destructiveness. ‘[S]ince God’s yearning for me is in a measure larger than my self, then I grow to become a greater human being; I now overshadow my essence.’24 By refracting my presence in God’s, I become more than I am; God creates me in His ‘divine
hands’; therefore, my corporeality is holy and sanctified by ‘divine speech,’ the Word or Torah. My very soul, in the hands of God, cannot be touched by the corporeal or secular world.

  Shapira recognizes the broken spirits, despair, but insists that the Jew’s responsibility lies in maintaining self-control while confronting din [judgment], the terrifying power of severity, and holding fast to faith. The more rigor the self exerts in overcoming this terror, the greater the likelihood of divine salvation. God may even receive one’s suffering as a gift, and the self that offers up to God pain and affliction demonstrates an act of devotion, love, a calling, even if the gift of suffering were not freely chosen. Further, the body’s wasting away can be understood as sacrificial suffering, a signifier of faith, ‘the diminishing of [our] body’s substance, energy and mental capacity’ is to be experienced as sacrificial ‘and a revelation of His light, holiness and salvation.’25 As can be imagined, resistance survivors had no sympathy for this position.

  Sacrifice during the Holocaust takes on terrifying properties. Rabbi Shimon Efrati responds to a petitioner seeking absolution for inadvertently smothering an infant to avoid detection. (In underground shelters or other hideouts, infants’ cries often endangered the lives of those trying to escape roundups, including parents, friends, and relatives. Efforts to prevent them crying, for example, holding a hand tightly over an infant’s mouth, on occasion resulted in the death of the infant.) Rabbi Efrati responds: ‘The man who did this should not have a bad conscience, for he acted lawfully to save Jewish lives.’26 At the time, however, such situations placed an enormous burden on sanity, on maintaining any sense of oneself as a human being, still alive in a human world; smothering one’s child or the child of a friend or relative to save one’s own life would raise terrifying moral dilemmas, in addition to the unimaginable grief of the parent. Where does the self place the guilt and sorrow? How to explain it? Such questions preoccupied Rabbi Shapira and Jewish law during this period and posed daily tests of faith. Situations where one might cause the death of another whether intentionally or not faced ghetto inhabitants every minute of every day: smuggling, participation in resistance, hiding from the Germans, stealing food, avoiding selections. Rabbi Shapira, in his elaboration of the conditions of faith, adapted theology to these murderous environments. Post-war absolution is one thing; but grief and guilt at the moment required a rabbinical response too.

  Domination: patterns of injustice

  After January 1942, the ghettos turned into vast collection centers for eventual transport to the death camps. In the Warsaw ghetto, by the winter of 1942, more than half a million had been herded into an area originally intended to house scarcely more than 20,000. It was no part of human experience or the human spirit to believe that an entire culture wishes to destroy you and your children solely on the basis of your biological existence. As early as spring and summer 1942, rumors were circulating about the death camps and extermination centers; but psychological and physical dislocation brought on by transport, the strangeness of unfamiliar circumstances, differences in culture and belief amongst the Jews themselves, made it impossible to sort out truth from rumor, much less organize a sustained resistance to terror.

  The practices of domination in the ghetto (brought on by German policy) often turned Jew against Jew; the rich against the poor; the Jewish police against the indigent and unemployed; adults against children; smugglers against official administrators; the Judenrate against Zionists and communists; those with influence against those with no connections; crooks and thieves against families and individuals trying to survive.

  But where was one to turn? Leaving the ghetto, except in a work brigade or with rare, official permission, constituted a capital crime. Poles, more often than not, turned over Jews found outside the ghetto to the German authorities. Jews in work brigades found themselves subjected to indignities and exploitation; laborers, organized into brigades and taken outside the ghetto, were treated like vermin. Mortality rates soared in the labor groups; random shooting, accidents and illness killed many in and around the work sites. One observer writes during the period of transports to Sobibor and Treblinka:

  ‘The streets contained pitiful sights in these ghastly days of July, August and September 1942. Just before the Aktion ended, five tiny children, two- and three-year-olds, had been sitting on a camp bed in the open for 24 hours; presumably their mothers had already been taken to the Umschlagplatz [deportation site]. The children cried piteously, screaming for food – doomed.’27

  The immediacy and prevalence of death placed extraordinary demands on theology. Shapira addresses individual cases of sacrifice; but his theology never embraces the human status of infants and children. Nor can it be expected to. Infants do not experience the ‘powerful yearning to surrender life for the sake of the sanctity of His blessed name’; the five-year-old child screaming for his mother is incapable of raising ‘up all his sense[s] for the greater glory of God.’ Nor does the fifteen-year-old girl feel the ecstasy of the transcendence of the body, where ‘sensory awareness disappears [while] feeling and corporeality are stripped away so that [consciousness] feels nothing but pleasure.’ Nor does the eleven-year-old boy, yet to be bar-mitzvah, believe that, because of his suffering and the lice covering his head, and his body so weak he can hardly walk, faith will purge ‘his sins and purify him, so that he might’ attain a state of salvation.28 It would not be fair, however, to condemn theology for refusing to take into account the inability of the young to understand faith or to reach the level of transcendence that Shapira demands.

  To have faith against the backdrop of the Holocaust meant that the self could resist the German assault, at least spiritually. Theological or secular faith, it did not matter; as long as belief could resist the German definition of Jewish identity, one could act. Faith also protected consciousness against the deadly muteness and numbness of dissociation. Intensely strong belief structures sustained identity and a sense of selfhood, if not survival; and political faith, at least in the early days, energized armed resistance. Theological faith strengthened the self against degradation, forged an internality capable of withstanding physical abuse, and situated consciousness in a universe of meaning that was rapidly being destroyed by the Germans.

  A young man ready to submit himself to the gas chambers to save his friend, a noted Torah scholar in his village, asks a rabbi, also in Auschwitz, for guidance and religious sanction. The rabbi wonders why he wants to do this and the boy responds that the world needs his friend’s learning and erudition. He saw himself as ignorant and foolish with no potential to be a great scholar. He had witnessed the death of his parents and sisters; now, alone in Auschwitz, he had no desire to live. By substituting himself for his friend, even though it is a suicide, he will be performing a good act, a mitzvah, worthy of God’s praise. Even though the boy pleaded, Rabbi Meisels refused to religiously sanction the substitution. He found nothing in his recollection of Talmudic law that would justify such a suicide.29 But repeatedly rabbis faced moral contradictions that stretched very thin the interpretation of Talmudic law. Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, relates:

  ‘And when the baby was born, the doctor handed it to the nurse, and the nurse laid it on one pillow and smothered it with another one. The baby whimpered for a while and then grew silent. This woman [the nurse] was nineteen years old. The doctor didn’t say a thing to her. Not a word. And this woman knew herself what she was supposed to do.’30

  This happened while Germans were murdering elderly patients on the first floor of the hospital.

  No matter what the cost in economic self-interest, the German policy was to kill all Jews. Daniel Goldhagen argues, ‘the only groups of currently employed workers whom the Germans killed en masse, necessitating the closing down of manufacturing installations, were Jews. Operation Erntefest [Operation Harvest Festival], just one example of such a self-inflicted German economic wound, took the lives of 43,000 Jewish workers for who
m they had no substitutes.’31 The number of Jews in Poland working in German installations fell from 700,000 in 1940 to 500,000 in 1942. By June 1943, the number stood at around 100,000. Factories employing non-Jewish workers, slave and otherwise, never closed; non-Jewish workers, while exploited and abused, escaped systematic annihilation. Goldhagen draws the conclusion that the Germans’ lack of economic rationality towards the Jews reinforced ‘the already considerable evidence that they viewed and treated the Jews as beings apart, as beings – whatever else was to be done with and to them – ultimately fit only to suffer and die.’32 Rabbinical authority responded to the German genocidal policy by shifting the ground and context of theological interpretation; what guided much in their thinking had to do with compassion in the face of assault and tragedy. Yet, the theology, particularly Rabbi Shapira’s belief that faith residing in mind and soul was untouchable, possessed a sense of unreality. For example, Shapira’s sermons argued that the soul constituted a space of freedom impervious to brutalization. The resistance, of course, took a very different position;33 and given the rapidly disintegrating conditions inside the ghetto, it is understandable why resistance fighters paid very little attention to arguments about the interiority of faith.

  The following leaflet, circulated by a clandestine labor group in the Lodz ghetto, demonstrates how the principles of genocide dominated work and living places six months before the bureaucratic plan for the Final Solution emerged at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, how defining German biological hatred of the Jew was even in the early days of the occupation of Poland.