Fighting on all Fronts (23 page)

117
  Cited in Richard C Lukas,
Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust
(University Press of Kentucky, 1989), p13.

118
  Lukas, 1989, p13.

119
  Neal Ascherson,
The Struggles for Poland
(Channel 4 Books, 1987), pp96-100, cited in Rose, 2009, p20, and Gluckstein, 2012, p57.

120
  Unless otherwise indicated, information on Zegota is from Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski. Zegota (Price-Patterson, 1994), accessed online at Warsaw Uprising website,
www.warsawuprising.com/zegota.htm
.

121
  Marjorie Wall Bingham, “Women and the Warsaw Ghetto: A Moment to Decide”, World History Connected website,
worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/6.2/bingham.html
.

122
  Gunnar S Paulsson,
Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945
(Yale University Press, c2002), pp123, 231.

123
  Daniel Blatman and Renee Poznanski, “Jews and their social environment. Perspectives from the underground press in Poland and France”, in Beate Kosmala and Georgi Verbeeck,
Facing the Catastrophe: Jews and Non-Jews in Europe During World War II
(Berg, 2001), pp182-183.

124
  “Directorate for civil action. Response to acts of treason”. Polish Greatness website.
www.polishgreatness.com/directorateforcivilaction.html
.

125
  Laqueur, 1982, p200.

126
  
Epstein, 2008, p13.

127
  Epstein, 2008, p13.

128
  Stewart Steven,
The Poles
(Collins/Harvill, 1982), cited in Andrzej Slawinski, “Those who helped Jews during WWII”, Polish Resistance in World War II website
www.polishresistance-ak.org/10%20Article.htm

129
  Paulsson, 2002, p230.

130
  Depending on which author is consulted, estimates of the number of Jews rescued by Poles vary from around 100,000 up to 450,000 with the number of Poles involved in rescue as many as 3 million—Lukas, p13; Norman Davies,
Rising ’44: the Battle for Warsaw
(Viking, 2003), p200.

131
  Martin Gilbert,
The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust
(Holt Paperbacks, 2004), p103.

132
  Gunnar S Paulsson, “The Rescue of Jews by Non-Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland”,
The Journal of Holocaust Education
, vol 7, nos 1 & 2 (summer/autumn 1998), pp19-44, cited in Mark Paul (ed),
Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy: The Testimony of Survivors
(Polish Educational Foundation in North America, 2007), p287;
www.savingjews.org/docs/clergy_rescue.pdf

133
  See note 1.

134
  Tec, 2003, p13.

135
  Henri Michel, for instance, in 1972, devotes four out of 360 pages to Jewish resistance (which he suggests involved only “a few thousand”) and one sentence to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising—Michel, pp177-180.

136
  Arnold Paucker,
German Jews in the Resistance 1933-1945: The Facts and the Problems
(Gedenkstaette Deutsche Widerstand, 2012), p8.

137
  Draft report by the Commission for Crimes Committed by the Nazis in Kiev from February 1944. Page 14 shows changes made by G F Aleksandrov, head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department, Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, cited at
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Russia#cite_note-54
.

138
  “Zapluty karzeł reakcji, czyli lekcja nienawiści” at the Wayback Machine (archived February 22, 2012) (The spittly dwarf of the Reaction, or the lesson in hate). Leksykon PRL, Telewizja Polska SA (Internet Archive), retrieved 30 August 2013, cited in
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_Jews_by_Poles_during_the_Holocaust#cite_note-www-3
.

139
  Paucker, 2012, p67.

140
  Raphael Patai (ed),
The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl
, vol i (Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), p6.

141
  Jacob Klatzkin,
Tehumim
(Spheres, 1925), cited in Jacob Agus,
The Meaning of Jewish History
, vol ii (Abelard-Schuman, 1963), p425.

142
  Lennie Brenner, interview with Shmuel Merlin, 16 September 1980, cited in Brenner, p225.

143
  Chaim Weizmann,
The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann: Series b, Papers, vol ii December 1931 to April 1952
(Transaction Books, 1983), p286, accessed online at books.
google.com.au/books?id=PsabNtx33VMC&pg=PA286&dq=%22the+old+ones+will+pass%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=DWa_VMCXNqW_mwXgoIHQDA&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22the%20old%20ones%20will%20pass%22&f=false

144
  Referring in this instance to the situation in Germany—Paucker, 2012, p40.

145
  Nahum Goldmann,
Memories: The Autobiography of Nahum Goldmann
(Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970), p149.

146
  Epstein, 2008, p268.

147
  Brenner, 2014, p239.

148
  Brenner, 2014, p232.

149
  Epstein, 2008, p284.

150
  Epstein, 2008, p285.

151
  Epstein, 2008, p291.

152
  This is a comment by Yad Vashem historian Israel Gutman, cited in Marci Shore, “The
Jewish hero history forgot”,
The New York Times
, 18 April 2013, on-line version mobile.
nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/the-jewish-hero-history-forgot.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
.

153
  Rose, 2009. Other ghetto and Holocaust survivors have also opposed Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Chavka Fulman-Raban, a ghetto survivor, recently denounced the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Amira Hass, daughter of two Holocaust survivors, is world famous for her stand including calling Palestinian stone-throwing, “the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule”, Richard Silverstein, “Last of Warsaw Ghetto Survivors Calls for Rebellion Against Israeli Occupation”, Tikun Olam website
www.richardsilverstein.com/2013/04/09/last-of-warsaw-ghetto-survivors-calls-for-rebellion-against-israeli-occupation
/. Amira Hass, “The inner syntax of Palestinian stone-throwing”,
Haaretz
, 3 April 2013,
www.haaretz.com/opinion/the-inner-syntax-of-palestinian-stone-throwing.premium-1.513131.

154
  See “Poland’s Warsaw Rising”, in Gluckstein, pp55-69, for more information about the underground state apparatus set up during the Nazi occupation.

155
  Vladka Meed,
On Both Sides of the Wall
(New York, Holocaust Library, 1979), cited in Tec, 2001, p10.

156
  See note 1.

Mark Kilian

The predominant view of the Allied Forces’ liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945 heralds it as a triumph. The advantages of post-war democracy compared to Nazi terror can hardly be doubted, but the return of pre-war “business as usual” was not what the majority wanted.

After the war business and political leaders realised they and their state were thoroughly discredited. Although the state administration, police, monarchy and big business were subject to criticism, they were restored to power and their crimes were whitewashed. Post-war trials of Nazi sympathisers and collaborators were conducted on an individual basis, trying individuals for their crimes and opportunism (and failed even at that). And for the vast majority “liberation” meant continued oppression, or even, in the case of Indonesia, new war.

Sending thousands of Dutch soldiers to the front by bicycle to confront modern German tanks and warplanes, as happened in May 1940, may, in hindsight, seem ridiculous if not perfectly useless.
¹
Yet it was an expression of the level of Dutch development. The Dutch navy had been definitively defeated by its British competitor in the 17th and 18th centuries and the country was occupied by France until 1813. With its economy focused on trade with the colonies, the Netherlands had been slow to industrialise.
²
Generations of bosses and politicians learned to be realistic about the position of the Netherlands in the world pecking order. By the 20th century it was a second-rate colonial power, stripped of much of its military muscle, though still extracting fortunes from Indonesia and the West Indies. While maintaining the empire depended upon British support, many of its exports went to Germany.
³
Being trapped between two great powers economically and geopolitically demanded policies that would allow the Netherlands to balance between them.

The Netherlands remained formally neutral in the First World War, though businesses and its state profited from the conflict. Simultaneously, “by the end of the war the condition of the workers, badly clothed, underfed, miserably housed, was desperate”.
⁴
When, in November 1918, a revolution in Germany brought about the armistice, the Dutch ruling class—including Queen Wilhelmina of the House of Orange—felt there was a real possibility of social upheaval. While reforms such as the eight-hour day and the vote for women successfully prevented full-scale unrest, the period became known as the time of “the trembling bourgeoisie” (
Bibberbourgeoisie
) and was not quickly forgotten by the government or elite.

The labour movement suffered from a structural weakness as it was divided into so-called “pillars” (
zuilen
). Catholics, Protestants, humanists, social democrats and others organised their own schools, youth clubs, unions and a host of other social and cultural organisations.
⁵
The problems these divisions created would persist throughout the inter-war period.

The most significant workers’ party was the social democratic SDAP (
Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiders Partij
) whose first alderman was elected in 1907. It grew consistently going from 83 aldermen in 1919 to 179 in 1939.
⁶
On the far left the Communist Party (CPN) remained small, being marginalised by the social divisions within the labour movement. However, it expanded in the inter-war crisis years from 1,089 members in 1918 to around 11,000 in October 1937. The print run of its paper
De Tribune
increased from 5,000 in 1931 to 20,000 in 1933.
⁷
Despite stifling political consensus, the CPN’s principled combination of anti-racism and anti-imperialism in relation to Indonesian struggles inspired protests throughout the Dutch empire—enough even to frighten the authorities. But the rise of Stalinism in its ranks led to a breakaway in 1927 led by Henk Sneevliet, who, siding with Trotsky on many issues, founded the sizeable Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP).

Despite these divisions and its failure to take the revolutionary road that had been seen in Russia, Austria and Germany, the Netherlands experienced growing unrest:

In the years just after the First World War, the war between employers and workers flamed up in all fierceness. While the number of strike days in the period 1914-1918 did not amount to much more than 400,000 a year, this increased quickly afterwards and between 1919 and 1925 amounted to 1-1.5 million a year. The high water mark was 1920 with 2,334,000 strike days.
⁸

However, in 1920 the employers’ attitude hardened and they began attacking wages and extending working hours, provoking a defensive metal workers’ strike in 1921 that involved 18,000 workers. The dispute became a drawn out conflict involving unions that could not agree on common demands. The divisions within the workers’ movement plagued the dispute. A referendum taken at one point on continuing the strike showed two thirds of the secular metal workers’ union (the ANMB) in favour of continuation, Catholics less than a third and Protestants just 8.3 percent. When the metal bosses threatened a lockout, the united front crumbled. On 9 January 1922 work was finally resumed—empty-handed.
⁹
The balance of class forces had shifted.

1929 saw the biggest land labourers’ strike in Dutch history. The strike started on 1 May and involved 5,000 men and women demanding a 10 percent wage rise. Farmers hired strike breakers on an unprecedented scale, and they were assisted by the Christian press and their land labourers’ unions. A “mini state of emergency” arose in which one bystander was shot.
¹⁰

Then the 1930s world crisis hit. In 1931 the value of sterling fell, adding severely to the crisis in Dutch shipping and trade. A wave of bankruptcies took place. “In the course of 1931 more than one-third of the Dutch merchant fleet tonnage was laid up. In all branches of industry unemployment grew, from 18,000 in the middle of 1929 to over 100,000 at the end of 1930 and 480,000 in 1936”.
¹¹
Stability was history.

Five months after the accession of Hitler as German chancellor on 26 May 1933 Hendrikus Colijn, leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP), became prime minister, a post he remained in under varying cabinets until 10 August 1939. Colijn served as an officer in Indonesia until 1909, working directly under the notorious General Van Heutsz. On returning to the Netherlands in 1914 he became director of the petroleum company
Bataafse Petroleummaatschappij
, and a multimillionaire. If any single politician ever did, he personified the Dutch military-industrial complex. Little surprise, therefore, that he had a “blind spot on his retina for the social question”.
¹²
Colijn slashed public spending.

When he cut unemployment support by 16 percent in the summer of 1934, a national revolt swept through the country, starting in Amsterdam’s Jordaan neighbourhood. On 3 July unemployed port workers collecting their lowered payments protested. The communist
De Tribune
agitated: “Onto the streets! For the struggle against support theft! Make clear to the possessing classes that the workers won’t have themselves starved!”
¹³

In Amsterdam 500 dockers walked out, and riots occurred in Enschede, Groningen, Haarlem, IJmuiden, Rotterdam, Utrecht and in smaller towns
(Alphen aan de Rijn, Hilversum). Police and army repression saw at least six citizens killed and 200 wounded in Amsterdam. The Communist
De Tribune
was outlawed and demonstrations and meetings were forbidden. Communists and those arguing after the repression that “the struggle has not ended” were arrested.
¹⁴