Ibid.
Ibid., p. 201.
Ibid., p. 198.
Ibid., p. 128.
Ibid., p. 123.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 82.
Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust. Jerusalem: Yad vaShem, Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1980, p. 178.
Ibid., p. 254.
Ibid., p. 400.
Ibid., p. 417.
Ibid., p. 418.
Newsletter, ‘Poland Fights’. August 15, 1951, in Black Book, p. 46.
Black Book, pp. 46–9.
Ibid., p. 59. Tosia Bialer writes in Collier’s (February 20, 1943): ‘There were tens of thousands of families who could not afford black-market prices and had to depend on the rationed goods for subsistence. Slow victims of undernourishment, these. Their teeth decayed and fell out, hair and nails refused to grow, their eyes became great sunken hollows in fleshless faces, and their stomachs were repulsively bloated. These miserable travesties of human beings picked up what they could find in the streets and in garbage piles, consuming the rest of their strength in the awful fight against real starvation’ (p. 55).
Ibid., p. 59. She saw undertakers’ vans scour the city all day collecting emaciated bodies from which all clothing had been stripped, and transporting them to cemeteries where they were buried three-deep in mass graves. ‘Orphaned children with spindly legs and famine-bloated bodies roamed the ghetto streets begging for food, but nobody had much to give them. It had become almost commonplace, she said, to see children and adults drop dead from starvation in the streets. Scores of people committed suicide every day… . The grave is a ditch 30 yards by 20 yards containing naked bodies of men, women and children’ (p. 59).
Ibid., p. 64.
Ibid., pp. 198, 199.
Ringelblum, Polish Jewish Relations during the Second World War, p. 157.
Ibid., p. xxvii.
Ibid., pp. 159–60. A helpful discussion and analysis of Jewish leadership during the Holocaust is Raul Hilberg, Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe, 1933–1945. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1995.
3 The Moral Position of Violence: Bielski Survivors
1. Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 147; see also Lester Samuel Eckman and Chaim Lazar, The Jewish Resistance: The History of the Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and White Russia during the Nazi Occupation, 1940–1945. New York: Shengold, 1977. For detailed histories of the partisans and their activities, see Allan Levin, Fugitives of the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival during the Second World War. New York: Stoddart, 1998. For an analysis of the complex and often tense relationship between the Jewish and Soviet partisans, see Hersh Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans against the Nazis. New York: Holocaust Library, 1989; Jack Kagan, Surviving the Holocaust with Russian Jewish Partisans. New York: Vallentine Mitchell and Co., 1998. Kagan gives a harrowing account of the tunnel escape from Novogrudek; for another compelling narrative, see Liza Ettinger, From the Lida Ghetto to the Bielski Partisans. Memoir in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, archives RG-02.133, 1984.
Tec, op. cit. See also Shalom Cholawski, The Jews of Belorussia during World War II. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998.
Ibid., p. 151. For a graphic account of the kind of punishment meted out by the partisans, see John A. Armstrong, ed., Soviet Partisans in World War II. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.
Ibid., p. 45.
Ibid., p. 47. For an excellent account of the Soviet partisan movement, see Kenneth Slepyan, ‘The Soviet Partisan Movement and the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 2000.
Ibid., p. 83.
Ibid., p. 129.
Ibid., p. 136.
Ibid., p. 139.
Also helpful in explaining the harsh conditions of the Nazi Occupation of Novogrudek was a taped interview with survivor Rae Kushner (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, RG 50.002*0015). Killings throughout the region are described in chilling detail in Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Inside Germany persecution and roundups of Jews by the Gestapo elicited little reaction. Eric A. Johnson (in Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans. New York: Basic Books, 1999) writes: ‘Most of the ordinary German population supported the Nazi regime, did not perceive the Gestapo as all-powerful or even as terribly threatening to them personally, and enjoyed considerable room to express frustration and disapproval arising out of minor disagreements with the Nazi state and its leadership’ (p. 262).
4 The Moral Goodness of Violence: Necessity in the Forests
1. Shalom Cholawski, Soldiers from the Ghetto. San Diego: A.S. Barnes and Company, Inc., 1980, p. 95. See also Shalom Yoram, The Defiant: A True Story. Trans. by Varda Yoram. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, p. 131. Cf. Zvi Gitelman, ed., Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997; Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Eastern Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Not widely understood was the extent of the Reichsbahn [German railway] contributions to the machinery and process facilitating mass murder, not only in the camps but in the conquered territories of the East. For a recent exploration of their role, see Alfred C. Mierzejewski, ‘A Public Enterprise in the Service of Mass Murder: the Deutsche Reichsbahn and the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, Spring 2001.
Cholawski, Soldiers from the Ghetto, p. 114. See also Jack Nusan, ed., Jewish Partisans: A Documentary of Jewish Resistance in the Soviet Union during World War II. Trans. from Hebrew by the Magal Translation Institute, Ltd., based on Russian, Polish and Yiddish sources. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove-Atlantic, 1988. For a provocative analysis of the negative side of this proposition and the genocidal consequences of violence, see James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Waller is looking at the reasons behind genocide, not at the violence that meets or faces the genocidal killer. Fanon does not explore the extent to which redemptive violence (as opposed to the annihilatory violence of the indiscriminate mass murderer) might degenerate into genocidal violence, although his final chapter on mental disorders suggests that wherever violence touches, injury follows. This last chapter, an extraordinary psychiatric investigation of the psychological consequences of violence, shows ambivalence in Fanon’s argument not present in the earlier discussion.
Faye Schulman, A Partisan’s Memoir: Women of the Holocaust. Toronto: Second Story Books, 1995, p. 175. See also Lester Samuel Eckman and Chaim Lazar, The Jewish Resistance: The History of the Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and White Russia during the Nazi Occupation, 1940–1945. New York: Shengold, 1977; and Dov Cohen and Jack Kagan, Surviving the Holocaust with the Russian Jewish Partisans. Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998.
Sutin and Sutin, Jack and Rochelle, pp. 143, 142. See also Zoe Szner, ed., Extermination and Resistance: Historical Records and Source Material. Haifa: Ghetto Fighters House, 1958. ‘Fighting back’ often had as much to do with the enthusiasm of local leaders and militias for killing as with the Germans. See Wendy Lower’s interesting study (‘“Anticipatory Obedience” and the Implementation of the Holocaust in the Ukraine: A Case Study of Central and Peripheral Forces in the Generalbezirk Zhytomyr, 1941–1944’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 8–22). Lower speaks of the extent of willed participation
amongst collaborators and indigenous populations. ‘as of early 1942 even verbal orders were deemed unnecessary for authorizing the murderous “mopping-up” actions against Jews in hiding. Thus more local leaders learned
what was expected of them, and fewer needed explicit orders to do it. The commissars and regional police forces did not carry out the Nazi goal of genocide in a banal fashion …often encouraging sadistic methods that exceeded the expectations of their superiors’ (p. 8).
Isaiah Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collection on Individual Behavior in Extremis. New York: Stein and Day, 1979, p. 250. For a comprehensive review of the statistics, see Levin, Fighting Back, pp. 179–203.
Trunk, Jewish Responses, pp. 246, 250.
Ibid., p. 303. For an account written shortly after the war, see Marie Syrkin, Blessed is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 37.
Ibid., p. 69.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid. To understand this notion in the context of Jewish resistance, see John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge against Germans. New York: Basic Books, 1993.
Ibid., p. 72.
Ibid. For an idea of this sense of self in the Jewish resistor, see Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. The recognition of Jewish resistance and its significance appeared even before the war’s end. See Mac Davis, Jews Fight Too. New York: Jordon Publishing Co., 1945.
Ibid., p. 46.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 45.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 37.
Ibid., p. 63.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., p. 111.
See Cohen and Kagan, Surviving the Holocaust with Russian Jewish Partisans, p. 91. Also Forests of Valor: Following in the Footsteps of Jewish Partisans, U.S.S.R. (video), April, 1989. Producer, Issy Avron; written and directed by Zvi Godel. Israel Educational Television. Teaneck, NJ: Ergo Media, 1996; Issac Kowalski, ed., Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, 4 vols. Brooklyn: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986. Levin, Fighting Back: ‘the total number of people [in Lithuania] who participated in the active fight against the Nazis comes to over 2,000, that is approximately 5 percent of the 40,000 Jews who remained in Lithuania at the beginning of 1942 after the previous mass liquidation’
(p. 175). For an extraordinary video of survivors of the Vilna underground, see Partisans of Vilna. Ciesia Foundation: directed and edited by Josh Waletzky; produced by Aviva Kempner. Washington, D.C.: Euro-American Home Video, 1987. See also Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944. Ed. and intro. by Benjamin Harshaw. Trans. by Barbara Harshaw. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2002.
Yehuda Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979, p. 28. See also Leon Kahn, No Time to Mourn: A True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter. Vancouver: Laurelton Press, 1978. See also Yehude Yaar [Forest Jews], Narratives of Jewish Partisans of White Russia, Tuvia and Zus Bielski, Lilka and Sonia Bielski and Abraham Viner, as told to Ben Dor (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1946). This extraordinary set of interviews has been translated into English in a private publication by R. Goodman. It is not available to the general public.
Yitzhak Arad, The Partisan: From the Valley of Death to Mount Zion. New York: Holocaust Library, 1979, p. 81.
See Adina Blady Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance. Trans. by Tasja Darowska and Danusia Stok. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990, p. 80. See also Philip Friedman, ‘Jewish Resistance to Nazism’. In Ada J. Friedman, ed., Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust. Philadelphia: the Jewish Publication Society, 1980, pp. 387–408.
Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews of Vilna in the Holocaust. Jerusalem: Yad vaShem, 1980, pp. 411–12.
Shalom Yoram, The Defiant: A True Story. Trans. by Varda Yoram. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, p. 108. See also Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944. Trans. by Orah Blaustein. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984.
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid., pp. 172–3.
Ibid., p. 183.
Arad, The Partisan, pp. 119–20.
Ibid., p. 95.
Nahum Kohn and Howard Roiter, A Voice from the Forest. New York: Holocaust Library, 1980, p. 15.
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., pp. 33, 37.
Ibid., p. 95.
Ibid., p. 246; see the extraordinary interview of survivors, including the Bielski brothers, of this unit. The Bielski Brothers: the Unknown Partisans. SOMA Productions; directed by Arun Kumar; written and produced by David Herman. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1996.
See Kowalski, Anthology on Armed Jewish Resistance; ‘Partisans’. In Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. London: Macmillan, 1990, vol. 4; Yisrael
Gutman, Fighting Among the Ruins: the Story of Jewish Heroism During World War II. Washington, D.C.: B’nai B’rith Books, 1988; Gilles Lambert, Operation Hazalah: How Young Zionists Rescued Thousands of Hungarian Jews in the Nazi Occupation. Trans. by Robert Bullen and Rosette Letellier. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974.
42. I use Rousseauian in the sense of the strong community Rousseau describes in his Social Contract, particularly the unifying and adhesive concept of the General Will. For Rousseau what is common to the community precedes all other special interests; also what is ‘common’ possesses an exclusivity in terms of allegiance and commitment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. by
G.D.H. Cole. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1951.
43. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion. Trans. by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1975.
5 Spiritual Resistance: Understanding its Meaning
Gertrude Hirshler and Shimon Zucker, eds., The Unconquerable Spirit: Vignettes of the Religious Spirit the Nazis Could Not Destroy. Trans. by Gertrude Hirshler. New York: Mensora Publications, 1981; cf. Y. Gottfarstein, ‘Kiddush ha Shem in the Holocaust Period’. In Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust; Peter Haas, Responsa: Literary History of a Rabbinic Genre. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996.
See Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, Chapter 3. The emotional and psychological demands placed on rabbis were enormous. See Saul Esh, ‘The Dignity of the Destroyed; Towards a Definition of the Period of the Holocaust’. Jewish Magazine, vol. XI, no. 2, Spring 1962.
Underground literature, with rare exceptions, never targets rabbinical inaction. Similarly in diaries like David Rudashevski’s or Morris Berg’s Warsaw Ghetto Diary (New York: L.B. Fischer Co., 1945) there is an absence of critical comments on rabbis. Cf. Zelig Kalmanovitch, A Diary of the Nazi Ghetto in Vilna. YIVO. Annual of Jewish Social Studies. Vol. III. New York: Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1953.
Joseph Rudavsky, To Live with Hope: To Die with Dignity. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987, p. 157.
Cf. Shimon Huberband, Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust. Trans. by David E. Fishman. New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1987. This is an extraordinary, contemporaneous account of brutalization and endeavor by Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation. Yet, with all its seriousness and tragedy, Huberband includes a section on ‘Wartime Folklore,’ what we would call jokes. An example of this kind of gallows humor is the following: ‘A teacher asks his pupil, “Tell me Moishe, what would you like to be if you were Hitler’s son?” “An orphan,” the pupil answers’ (p. 113).
Cf. Robert Kirschner, trans., Rabbinic Responsa of the Holocaust Era. New York: Schocken Books, 1985; David Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
See Pesach Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought. Hoboken, N.J., 1990. Kiddush haShem ‘was the opportunity to counter the Satanic and the impure with the elements
that were the most difficult to destroy – the spiritual and divine in human existence’ (p. 117).
But spiritual resistance did have tremendous efficacy in the following sense: spiritual resistance meant having the choice to go ‘to one’s death degraded and dejected as opposed to confronting [death] with an inner peace, nobility, upright stance, without lament and cringing to the enemy.’ Meir Dvorzeski, quoted in Schindler, Hasidic Responses, p. 61.
See Menashe Unger, Sefer Kedoshim: Rebeim of Kiddush Hashem [the Book of Martyrs: Hasidic Rabbis as Martyrs During the Holocaust]. New York: Shul Singer, 1967; see also Rehilat Haharedim Collection. Files on the activities of the Habad movement (Lubaviticher Hasidim) during the Nazi Occupation of France. In YIVO archives. New York.
Cf. Max Kaddushim, The Rabbinic Mind. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1952.
Cf. Jacob Robinson and Philip Friedman, Guide to Jewish History under Nazi Impact: Joint Documentary Projects, Bibliographical Series, No. 1. New York: YadVashem and YIVO, 1960.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Random House, 1989. Shalom Cholawski, Soldiers from the Ghetto. San Diego: A.S. Barnes & Co., Inc., 1980, p. 120. See also Hermann Wygoda, ed., In the Shadow of the Swastika. Foreword by Michael Berenbaum. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998; (video), Resistance. Produced and directed by
C.J. Pressma. New York: Cinema Guild, 1982.
Cf. Joseph Gar, Bibliography of Articles on the Catastrophe and Heroism in Yiddish Periodicals. Joint Documentary Projects, No. 9. New York: Yadvashem and YIVO, 1966; Bibliography of Articles on the Catastrophe and Heroism in North American Yiddish Periodicals. Joint Documentary Projects, No. 10. New York: YadVashem and YIVO, 1969.
Isaac C. Avigdor, From Prison to Pulpit: Sermons and Stories. Hartford, CT: Hanav Publishers, 1975, p. 215; cf. Menahem Brayer, ‘The Hasidic Rebbes of Romania, Hungary and their Relationship to Eretz Yisrael’. In Hasidut Verzion [Hasidism and Zion]. Ed. by Simon Federbush. New York: Moriah, 1963.
Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Page 22