Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust

by James M. Glass

  Survivors rarely speak of the intense feelings generated by the terror; although in my interviews with resistance survivors there appeared to be a willingness, even a need, to recapture those feelings in their narratives. But in Langer’s transcripts of the Yale Fortunoff Library’s collection of survivor testimony, it is almost the exact opposite, as if all feelings including faith had been suspended by the daily demands of survival:

  ‘It is difficult to … talk about feelings … we were reduced to such an animal level that actually now that I remember those things, I feel more horrible than I felt at the time. We were in such a state that all that mattered is to remain alive. Even about your own brother or the closest, one did not think.’9

  Here Vernon describes his exhaustion: ‘You ask me if we talked about faith; we were too tired at the end of the day even to talk.’

  Yet, a simple act like lighting a candle on Yom Kippur became a significant even venerable event in the camps or in the forests. The only reality that possessed day-to-day emotive content was remaining alive. Alex H. remarks that ‘fraternal caring is a major measure of civilized conduct,’10 but caring as a communal act could be sporadic and haphazard during the Holocaust. ‘Sure, I cared for other people’s emotions, but not very often,’ Vernon observed, ‘the governing law was “every man for himself.”’

  Responses that in any kind of normal environment would be considered natural, in the Holocaust environment possess lethal potential. In a factory, an SS officer came up behind Luna K. and cocked his revolver. Her mother was sitting opposite her. Both women remained completely silent, no words, no protest (although the mother’s face turns chalk-white), even though each was convinced he would pull the trigger. Luna K. heard a click; in fact, it was the gun trigger striking an empty chamber. The officer had literally run out of ammunition. ‘So nobody says anything … it wasn’t worth taking my life, so he just walked out. So now you can understand why people were quiet. If my mother said a word, I wouldn’t be here today.’11 Yet, in the recollections of resistance fighters, it is not muteness that defines forest life, but constant action and noise. The more noise, the safer they were. Sonia Bielski: ‘If we could speak loudly amongst each other, we were safe.’

  Martin L. describes a state of mind pervasive throughout the ghettos and camps, an immediacy or actuality that literally flattens consciousness. ‘When you see a lot of deaths, your mind gets numb, you can do nothing … . Your humanity is gone. You’re speechless.’12 The deadly potency of muteness recurs throughout the diaries and recollections, the sense of will-lessness, the ineffectiveness of speech and volition. Contrast this to Rabbi Shapira’s faith in the power of the word; speech as the key to divine revelation. But Shapira understands the situation all too well and allows that there may be moments of silence or muteness between God and the self; and between God and the community. That does not, however, mean that faith or God has disappeared. But apparently this was a matter of some debate and concern in Warsaw, since Shapira returned to this theme throughout his sermons.

  For many survivors, the Germans took away will and civilization. Langer’s analysis is grim: civilization, will, energy fall apart; ‘gradually, gradually, you become a different person. And you do things that you would never think you’d do – and you do it.’13 What Langer calls the ‘disintegration of basic life’ extends to the psyche; George

  S. describes one woman whose child was discovered and taken by the Germans; her despair appears as a compulsion to reveal to the German authorities the hiding places of other children. The very human premises of what Rabbi Shapira called goodness disappear against the force of reality, which, distorted by the presence of evil, defines all value and power. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that many Warsaw Jews believed evil had destroyed God.

  Many survivors, of course, stayed with their families and tried to save them; but eventually reality collapsed hope and expectation. Leon H. witnessed the death of each member of his family; he believed that by staying near them, he might serve as a protective shield. But each died; finally, he tried to defend his brother, the last surviving member of his family, but his brother died in his arms in a camp. He feels morally responsible for events he could not control: ‘We envied the dead ones.’14 A mother hid the decaying corpse of her five-year-old child under the bed for several weeks in order to keep claiming the child’s food rations. Moses S. describes a concentration camp as a place where they take you ‘to die and die and die.’15 Langer sees the dissociative psychological process as a mode of survival: the ‘paradoxical killing of the self by the self in order to keep the self alive.’16 Yet, to kill the ‘self’ means to kill the affective or emotional self, what Winnicott calls the core self: the self of feeling and identity.17 It is to adopt a ‘false self’ system (a phrase borrowed from Winnicott); but the surviving false self is more like a mask disguising a dead inner reality, so thoroughly terrorized, that to allow feeling inside would jeopardize the very survival of consciousness and being. One can admire Shapira’s desperate attempts, through words, to fight this deadly feeling of dissociation and detachment. But Langer’s survivors stress time and again how they were driven into muteness.

  Survivor testimony consistently returns to this theme: killing the self not only to defend against an intolerable reality but to assure the possibility of physical survival. Also selves engage in actions that never would have been imagined prior to the Holocaust: stealing, handing over children, indifference to death, discarding of traditional moral values. The consequence, in Langer’s view, psychological indifference, testifies not to the endurance of faith or the redemptive power of God, but, in the words of one survivor, ‘These people come back, and you realize, they’re all broken, they’re all broken. Broken. Broken.’18 For these survivors, Rabbi Shapira’s homilies take on the status of dysfunctional fantasies. But it is a complicated story; survivors in their new lives retained belief in their Jewishness. They joined synagogues, celebrated Bar and Bat Mitzvah, lit candles on Friday night. Yet, these actions seemed to be separate from the knowledge of who or what had saved them. It was not God, but in the case of resistance survivors, guns and action. It would be wrong, then, to argue that faith had been killed by the Germans; it would also be wrong to see Rabbi Shapira’s faith celebrated in what survivors describe as the continuing assault on spirit. Faith had not been killed by the Germans; it had been challenged and dealt with brutally. But for the resistance survivors – and their testimony is of course quite different from those found in Langer’s book – the sense of membership in an historical community, the emotional and religious core of a Jewish identity, and pride in that membership, appeared in religious and theological observance after liberation, and during the Holocaust, in the resistance communities themselves. Women expressed a more profound belief in God than the men; and much of that belief had to do with the association of God’s will with natality, the biological link between generations.

  Survivor testimony, however – and this includes much in the partisans’ narratives – resonates with the memory of selves being broken in the ghetto, of faith in God being nowhere present in day-to-day efforts to evade capture, in the disintegration of moral limits, and the unrelenting self-absorption of individuals desperately attempting to stay alive. A survivor of the Lodz ghetto: ‘When you’re hungry, it gets to a point where you don’t mind stealing from your own sister, from your own father … . I would get up in the middle of the night … and slice a piece of bread off my sister’s ration. Now I – you would never picture me, and I can’t even imagine myself doing that now. But it happened.’19 Another victim of the Lodz ghetto told me during an interview in Warsaw that he saw families fighting each other to pick up a scrap of bread from the street. Given this breakdown of ethics and morals, Rabbi Shapira’s sermons appear as a profound invocation of God to contain or transmute the natural or biological conditions of survival, to overlook this very real Hobbesean decline into incivility. A survivor of the Plazow labor camp told me
in an interview in Warsaw that after one month in the camp, the word ‘God’ never entered his mind.

  For Langer, the victims embody a ‘monument to ruin,’ a striking contrast to Holocaust theology attempting to find meaning or redemption in the destruction. For these survivors, there can indeed be no God after Auschwitz. Langer looks at survivors not as a testimonial to God or a harbinger of the state of Israel, but as victims broken beyond imagination by the German project of mass slaughter. He also, unjustly I believe, criticizes the term ‘spiritual resistance,’ a concept he finds absent in the survivor testimonies. But for many survivors, particularly resistance survivors, survival itself testifies to a spiritual endurance protecting the self from madness and absence of will.

  All survivors I interviewed emphasized the connection between their identity as a Jew and the rescue of the self from madness. It is in this context that I find the concept of spiritual resistance to be most persuasive, although I should add that my approach to what spiritual resistance means has been influenced by the partisans’ narratives. Langer, however, maintains that survivors ‘demur virtually unanimously [about spiritual resistance] when it is raised by an interviewer.’20 He argues that the concept of spiritual resistance does not ‘require any control over one’s physical destiny.’21 Yet, in my interviews survivors repeatedly expressed how connected their spiritual wellbeing – by which I understood them to mean maintaining their sanity – was with the violence of their partisan units, although that sense of spirit had nothing to do, they insisted, with faith in God or in the belief that God had directed their actions. Langer interprets spiritual resistance far too narrowly. To postulate resistance on the level of spirit may be seen in the sheer act of survival itself, spirit maintaining focus amidst the very real possibility of madness and will not being crushed by the physical harshness of the surroundings. It required will, discipline and spirit to survive, yes, but it also required luck. However, the stories themselves testify that luck and food were not the only factors. Langer underestimates the power of even remembering in the midst of such suffering the Bar Mitzvah of one’s child, standing under the huppah with one’s bride; Sabbath meals, the fantasy of revenge. Surely in this sense, spirit never succumbed completely. Langer: ‘perhaps that explains why we retreat to spiritual resistance – to reestablish a veneer of respectability for situations in which harsh necessity deprives the individual of the familiar dignity of moral control.’22

  But ‘harsh necessity’ and ‘moral control’ may have nothing to do with spiritual resistance: both phenomena defined the conditions of the camps, although resistance fighters certainly possessed more ‘moral control’ than camp inmates. The capacity of the self to retain its memory, its sense of identity, its power to distinguish between good and evil; its wish for the practice of ritual, even if it is reciting a silent prayer – are these not evidence of spiritual resistance and not a ‘veneer of respectability’?

  Langer quotes Emmanuel Ringelblum, who refers to the ‘complete spiritual breakdown and disintegration caused by unheard of terror … the enemy does to us whatever he pleases.’23 Yet, Langer refuses to accept Ringelblum’s assessment of such Jewish action as ‘quiet passive heroism’24 and sees nothing heroic about passivity. In his view oral testimonies conclusively demonstrate how desperate individuals, brutalized by Nazi terror, lost all perspective on the maintenance of moral boundaries and spiritual dignity. He quotes Sol R., recalling a friend killed during an air raid over a concentration camp. His friend ‘was always loaded with bread, and here he was lying dead, and I grabbed his bread and I gorged myself … I’ve been choking on that bread ever since.’25 Yet, does this mean that Sol R. had suffered spiritual collapse? Or are the destruction of moral limits and the annihilation of spirit two discrete phenomena? Langer refuses the possibility that psychological survival, the endurance of the soul’s connection to its Jewish identity, even in the face of the breakdown of ‘moral limits,’ signifies acts of spiritual resistance. Are not Rabbi Shapira’s faith and courage, the commitment of hundreds of rabbis and their congregations to protect sacred Torah scrolls, significant as acts of spiritual resistance? Langer is not making moral judgments about behavior. Quite the contrary: he wants to elicit from the testimony a view of surviving without the moral perspective of retrospective embellishment. In Eva K.’s words: ‘My fate pushed me, you know. I [could] not help myself.’26 Or Chaim E.: ‘On the other side, you didn’t have any choices. You just were driven to do whatever you did… . You do whatever you have to do, from other people.’27 Yet Langer fails to appreciate the psychological moments of spiritual resistance or even to consider that uttering Kiddush haShem might suggest transcendence over the facts of barbarism, even though prayer had no efficacy in preventing murder.

  For Chaim E., the Germans drained agency and morality from action: ‘[W]e were not individuals, we were not human beings, we were just robots where we happened to eat and we happened to do things. And they kept us as long as we have any function … . Now if the function was not good, we don’t need you, [we] destroy you.’28 In a universe where ‘today was already better than tomorrow,’29 moral rules, pre-Holocaust traditions, suffered drastic revision. Chaim E. had been interned in Sobibor and participated in the escape attempt in which 75 prisoners succeeded and survived the war. Many hundreds more, however, were killed during the attempt and in the aftermath. Chaim E.’s motives, Langer points out, were practical not spiritual, and certainly not spiritual in Rabbi Shapira’s sense. For Chaim E., ‘only the survival for your skin, that’s what counted.’30 But why discount the possibility that at the moment of liberation and even during the period of planning, there may have been a sense amongst the escapees that even though death might be imminent, their action constituted an example; that Jews locked in death camps need not die without action and resistance. What their action meant, what it signified as an act of resistance and affirmation, must have been a consideration – not only in the midst of those planning the Sobibor escape, but with small bands of fighters in large and small ghettos. Is this not ‘spirit’? Did not these groups think collectively and at times with a common spirit which moved them away from despair and apathy?

  In Langer’s analysis of testimony, it was not spiritual resistance that kept survivors alive but chance, luck, moral transgression and a supreme grasp of the practicality of life. But the very act of survival meant that spirit itself had survived; that it had resisted the German efforts to crush it. Langer’s judgment, then, might be too harsh. Although Rabbi Shapira’s homilies might not be appropriate to understanding the state of mind of those who survived, they possess significance in suggesting that a vision of the world was present that provided comfort and meaning to thousands for whom death was an absolute certainty. Langer discredits such a vision as lacking any effect; but his judgment may in this instance be too quick, too abrupt. Spiritual resistance was ineffective against the bullet, gas chamber, death pit. But it did provide a space for spiritual identity, something the Germans could not touch.

  Rabbi Shapira’s theology and, it would be fair to say, the unrecorded utterances of rabbis who perished, moved on two levels: to give hope to those not yet killed and to provide spiritual help for those waiting for transport or dying in ghetto streets – consolation in the midst of the horror. Those who died possess no voice; but if Rabbi Shapira’s teachings and his presence in the lives of those thousands who knew him, or knew of him, provided an affirmation, a justification of faith, then the very reality of disintegration and moral collapse that survivors describe may have had an opposing presence; maybe – and who can ever know – at least a few of those who suffered a miserable death in the gas chambers, mass burial pits or isolated forests, received the bullet, gas or fire with the knowledge that the enemy could not take away from them their belief in God, that while God had failed to protect them from death, they knew that redemption lay on the other side.

  If theology gave one person a meaning, an explanation, the hope of vengea
nce and redemption, then while the body may have gone to its death abjectly, the spirit may have remained untouched. In this sense, one can, unlike Langer, speak of and admire spiritual resistance; it is not a vapid phrase, an idealization of memory, a retreat to the fantasy of heroic action. It is action understood through the utterance of words; it is a form of resistance that appears over time in the Talmud. Prayer affirms the belief that while Amalek, the incarnation of evil, may take away the body, he cannot take away the soul. Few witnesses record what this belief meant at the time of death; but what is clear is that the theological vision did not fail. True, it never formed the basis for any mass political resistance, and given survivor and diary accounts of psychological and spiritual collapse, any impact the theology might have had in saving lives was minimal. But it would be wrong to impugn the concept of spiritual resistance only on the basis of survivor accounts; while the breakdown between inner and outer may explain the mass apathy and silence, the few accounts we do have of Kiddush haShem – sanctification of the name of God – at the moment of annihilation would suggest a faith not dead or dysfunctional, but a set of beliefs held by many and undoubtedly taken to their deaths by many. That, I would argue, constitutes spiritual resistance – the only kind of resistance available to millions of religious and devout Jews for whom partisan warfare possessed no realistic possibility.

  Political alternatives existed, but one had to be able to understand and conceptualize their possibility, to think politically, to organize escape and resistance. The spiritual universe of East European Jews was incapable of making that kind of leap. Orthodox theological strategy in dealing with oppressors historically had involved accommodation, bribery, waiting it out, aligning with political factions sympathetic to the Jews. In Poland, where over half the Jewish population practiced Hasidic Judaism, theological explanations possessed meaning, context and authority – acting as a refuge or a psychological ‘safe’ zone in the emotionally and physically battered self. Thus, a rabbi tells his congregation: ‘We will march straight to that place where rest the righteous for whose sake God has permitted the world to endure.’31 Or, ‘the sanctity of the Shoah martyrs pierced the heavens, and the Almighty redirected the course of Jewish history. The process of Redemption began to unfold.’32 This is spiritual resistance. Emmanuel Ringelblum in a diary entry dated February 27, 1941, notes that the rabbis of Krakow had been sent to Auschwitz because they had attempted to intervene with the Germans to stop a mass deportation. Should not this be considered resistance of both the body and the spirit? For the vast majority of East European Jews, secular political ideologies had been shunned.