Hitler and the Holocaust (12 page)

The German invasion of Poland immediately resulted in the sadistic humiliation of Polish Jewry (Orthodox Jews often had their beards and sidelocks ripped off) and the murder of some seven thousand Jews in the first three months of the campaign. On 21 September 1939, Heydrich set out the guidelines of SS policy in his instructions to the Einsatzgruppen. He distinguished between the “final aim” and the stages leading toward it, beginning with “the concentration of the Jews from the countryside into the larger cities.” The points of concentration were to be cities with rail junctions “or at least located on railroad lines.” He also ordered each Jewish community to set up a Council of Jewish Elders, an administrative body consisting of authoritative personalities and rabbis who would be responsible “for the exact and prompt implementation of directives already issued or to be issued in the future.”
³¹

The councils (
Judenräte
) would also be held responsible for the evacuation of Jews from the countryside, for housing, transport, tax collection, labor allocation, hospitals, schools, orphanages, sewage disposal, and other community functions. The councils were to become a kind of horrible caricature of Jewish government, mediating between the fearfully oppressed Jewish population (who often resented their power) and the Nazi authorities to whom they were
wholly subordinate. The council leaders were under constant and tremendous stress, having to face daily pressures of Nazi extortion, reprisals, exactions, and levies, as well as the desperate anguish of the starving Jewish population.
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Knowingly or unknowingly, they presided over doomed communities. The composition of the councils was usually middle class, selected from merchants, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who had usually been active in Jewish public life before the war. Sometimes they were selected on Nazi orders by prominent persons in the community; at other times the selection was quite arbitrary. Refusal to serve more often than not meant death. For the Nazis, a
Judenrat
was an instrument for dominating and ruling the ghetto, a valuable executor of their policies, saving them the tasks of policing and enforcing their own decrees.

By making the councils responsible for life-and-death decisions, such as who would be handed over to the Germans for deportation to the death camps—the first of which had been established at the end of 1941—the Nazi rulers managed to implicate the Jewish leadership in the bureaucratic process of destruction. In effect, according to Raul Hilberg’s highly critical view of their role, Jews ended up providing the Germans with administrative personnel that enabled the machinery of annihilation to function more smoothly. In his view, the Jewish response pattern, fashioned by two thousand years of ghetto history, was one of alleviation, evasion, paralysis, and compliance.
³³
Prior to the Holocaust, Jews “could avert or survive destruction by placating or appeasing their enemies.”
³⁴
Confronted by Nazi terror, they could not adapt. Under such degrading conditions, some Jews even collaborated with the enemy. For example, the much-hated Jewish police force was directly responsible for physically rounding up deportees and pushing them onto trains, which made them accessories to the extermination of fellow Jews. They were part of a privileged power structure, which was bound to lead to corruption, as well as severely undermine Jewish solidarity.
But they, too, were coerced, often by means of the cruelest blackmail. Finally, Hilberg has argued that the councils induced a fatally illusory feeling of “normality” and submissive Jewish behavior that greatly facilitated the work of the Nazis.

Hannah Arendt went even further and regarded such collaboration as a symptom of the “moral collapse” that Nazism caused throughout respectable European society, among persecutors, bystanders, and victims alike. “The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had been disorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of dead would hardly have been six million.”
³⁵
This highly simplistic verdict ignores not only the circumstances and context but also the wide range of responses among Jewish council leaders. Some were no doubt guilty of complicity or corrupted by their power, while others tried to protect Jewish interests as best they could. The head of the Warsaw
Judenrat
, industrial engineer Adam Czerniakow, who committed suicide in 1942 when the Nazis began to demand ten thousand “nonproductive” Jews per day for “resettlement,” which invariably meant liquidation, was a good example of a council leader who desperately sought salvation for Jews. A courageous man, constantly intervening with the Germans to alleviate their inhuman regulations, Czerniakow in his diary conveys an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and failure.
³⁶
By July 1942, more than one hundred thousand Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had perished as a result of starvation and disease, especially typhoid and dysentery.

Czerniakow despised his counterpart in Lódz, the “king” of the local
Judenrat
, Mordechai Rumkowski, as “self-important,” arrogant, and stupid. Rumkowski, who flamboyantly rode in a horse-drawn carriage and issued banknotes with his portrait on them, had clearly developed megalomaniac tendencies. Yet Rumkowski pursued an identical strategy of “rescue through work” in the hope that economic rationality might win out over Nazi ideological fanaticism. Increased productivity became a goal in itself despite the starvation.
Rumkowski organized the 180,000 ghetto inhabitants efficiently and tyrannically, deciding who was to live and who to die. His reasoning illustrated the horror of the Jewish predicament: “I must cut off the limbs to save the body itself. I must take the children because if not, others will be taken, as well.”
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Like the chairman of the Vilna
Judenrat
, Jacob Gens, Rumkowski believed in the bargaining process, providing the Germans with all the Jews they demanded in the vain hope of thereby protecting and saving those who remained. Gens was no less authoritarian in his leadership style than Rumkowski and equally convinced that only his methods offered any hope for the constantly squabbling and fractious Jewish community. Opinions about his role remain divided, but the charge of collaboration is hard to refute. Gens was shot by the Gestapo a few days before the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, while Rumkowski went to the gas chambers in 1944, along with most of the inhabitants of the Lódz ghetto after the deportations began in the middle of 1942.

Ghettos had been established throughout Poland from the end of 1939. The largest of them all was the Warsaw ghetto, which suffered from obscene overcrowding, holding as many as half a million Jews at its peak. Sealed off in November 1940 by barbed wire from the rest of the city (though there was an active smuggling route), the population was packed into 1.3 square miles, compared to the area of 53.3 square miles inhabited by fewer than one million Polish Christians. The gates to the ghetto were guarded by German, Polish, and Jewish police. Inside this living hell, Jews were forbidden to keep cash or merchandise. They lived in complete economic isolation from the outside world. When pressed into forced labor, the Jews were paid nothing or else a tiny sum, usually insufficient to buy even a loaf of stale bread. In the largest ghettos, Warsaw and Lódz, about one quarter of the Jews died from disease, starvation, and the inhumanly harsh conditions. The Nazis spuriously claimed that they had created the ghettos to prevent the spread of epidemics, but their insidious propaganda
goal was to mark off the Jews as people who were not only different but physically degenerate. By starving them, they could ensure that reality resembled the stereotype, even as they decimated them. A contemporary chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, Chaim Kaplan, who wrote poignantly about “the gigantic catastrophe” that had descended upon Polish Jewry, commented in his diary on 10 March 1940 that the depth of Nazi anti-Semitic hatred went far beyond political ideology.
³⁸

It is a hatred of emotion, whose source is some psychopathic disease. In its outward manifestation it appears as physiological hatred, which sees the object of its hatred as tainted in body, as lepers who have no place in society.… But the founders of Nazism and the party leaders created a theoretical ideology with deeper foundations. They have a complete doctrine which represents the Jewish spirit inside out. Judaism and Nazism are two attitudes to the world that are incompatible, and for this reason they cannot co-exist side by side. For 2,000 years Judaism has left its imprint, culturally and spiritually, on the nations of the world. It stood fast, blocking the spread of German paganism.… Two kings cannot wear one crown. Either humanity would be Judaic or it would be pagan-German. Up until now it was Judaic. Even Catholicism is a child of Judaism, and the fruit of its spirit.… The new world which Nazism would fashion, would be pagan, primordial, in all its attitudes. It is therefore ready to fight Judaism to the finish.
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Kaplan had grasped something of the violently pagan essence of Nazism while insisting on the extraordinary vitality of Judaism even in the midst of the inferno.

Though Polish Jewry outwardly lay crushed and broken amid the terrible suffering inflicted upon it by its Nazi conquerors, most Jews had not lost their vibrant will to live, love of life, or indomitable spirit. Kaplan records the extraordinary atmosphere a few months after the Warsaw ghetto was sealed: “In the daytime, when the sun is shining, the ghetto
groans. But at night everyone is dancing even though his stomach is empty. Quiet, discreet evening music accompanies the dancing. It is almost a
mitzvah
to dance. The more one dances, the more it is a sign of his belief in the ‘eternity of Israel’. Every dance is a protest against our oppressors.”
⁴⁰

Despite their desperate situation, Jews managed to set up study groups, lending libraries, and underground schools in the ghettos. There were committees that provided child care and charity for the needy as well as a wide variety of cultural activities. Ghetto dwellers sought, despite the tragic circumstances, to preserve (as best they could) their fidelity to tradition and Jewish religious values. Torah scrolls were salvaged, and Talmud study, prayer, bar-mitzvah celebrations, and Hebrew-language classes continued. Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary on 2 October 1940, on the eve of the High Holy Days: “Again: everything is forbidden to us; and yet we do everything! We make our ‘living’ in ways that are forbidden.…It is the same with community prayers: secret
minyanim
in their hundreds all over Warsaw hold prayers together and do not leave out even the most difficult hymns. Neither preachers nor sermons are missing; everything is in accordance with the ancient traditions of Israel.”
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This was a spiritual self-affirmation no less significant than more obviously political and military forms of resistance. Despite the gnawing hunger and recurring outbreaks of typhus, the tenacity with which the intelligentsia in the Warsaw ghetto fought to keep alive the cultural heritage of such a highly diverse community was truly remarkable.
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Concerts, seminars, literary evenings, and discussions were held regularly at the Judaic Library. There were festivals of Jewish culture and music. Poets and prose writers recited from their works, chamber music was played, plays were performed. The classics and more recent works of world literature were avidly read. Orphanages, too—like that of Janusz Korczak—ran cultural programs for the general public, reaching members
of the Jewish community who had never previously attended such events.
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There were so-called children’s corners, where, apart from food, children were offered some form of education and entertainment.

Such intense cultural activities eloquently testify to the refusal of Polish Jewry to accept their degradation to the level of beasts, which the Germans tried by every conceivable means to impose upon them. Notwithstanding their awareness of impending catastrophe, they were determined to fight for their individual and collective Jewish identity, for their human dignity and some form of national survival, however remote the prospects might seem.
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The common cliché that Jews did not resist their persecutors and simply went “like sheep to the slaughter” is neither an accurate nor a fair description, though in its original context the phrase was intended by the Jewish Resistance more as a call to arms. When presented as a blanket criticism, it overlooks the extraordinary lengths to which the Nazis went in disguising the genocidal intent of their policy toward the Jews. The perpetrators deliberately encouraged false hopes and the illusion that compliance and work might be the salvation of Jewry.

The slogan of “sheep to the slaughter” also overlooks the fact that the notion of total physical extermination was not only unprecedented but must have seemed to most Jews (and Gentiles) like the product of a diseased imagination. It underestimates the state of sheer exhaustion and demoralization in which the ghettoized Jews found themselves and the degree to which they were isolated and cut off from the outside world. It ignores the intimidating effects of collective punishment as practiced by the Nazis whenever they were faced with even the most trivial and minor acts of defiance. The knowledge that the Germans would exact terrible reprisals was a serious disincentive all over Europe to any armed resistance. There were relatively few efforts at revolt, for example, by the many well-trained Allied soldiers and the hundreds of
thousands of Russian prisoners of war in German camps, though they were watched over by a fairly small number of guards. Charges of passivity have rarely been made against them. Yet Western prisoners were not subjected to the unrelenting dehumanization that was the common fate of the Jews in the ghettos and the Nazi camps.