Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (53 page)

In early 1942 the Union of Armed Struggle was transformed into a Home Army. The Home Army was meant to be the counterpart of the Polish Army fighting abroad with allies on the western front. Like the Polish government, by now in exile in London, the Home Army was to represent all political and social forces in the country. It was to fight for the restoration of Poland within its prewar boundaries, as a democratic republic with equal rights for all citizens. Most Poles who chose resistance did find their way to the Home Army, although the extreme communist left and the extreme nationalist right founded their own partisan forces. The communists organized a People’s Guard, later known as the People’s Army, which was closely connected to the Soviet Union and the NKVD. The nationalists, who regarded the communists and the Soviets as a greater enemy than the Germans, fought within the ranks of the National Armed Forces.
⁶

Jewish resistance in Warsaw followed a different path, even though this was not clear at first. In the early months of the German occupation of Poland, in 1939, Jewish resistance as such seemed to make little sense. It was not evident, at first, that the fate of Polish Jews was to be much different from that of non-Jews. Many of the Warsaw Jews who felt most threatened by the German invasion fled to the Soviet occupation zone of Poland, whence many of them were deported to Kazakhstan. The establishment of the ghettos in 1940 did not necessarily convey to Polish Jews that their fate was worse than that of non-Jewish Poles, who were at the time being shot and sent to concentration camps in large numbers. In 1940 Poles from beyond the ghetto were sent to Auschwitz, whereas Jews were generally not. But the ghettos did mean that any Jewish resistance would have to be a response to particularly Jewish predicaments. When the Germans forcibly separated Jews from non-Jewish Poles in Warsaw in October 1940, they were creating a new social reality, creating categories that would define different fates.
⁷

The ghetto did not, however, bring agreement to Jews about how and whether to take action against the Germans. Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had prior political commitments, arising from the vibrant intra-Jewish political life of interwar Poland. Jews had taken part in local and national elections in Poland, as well as in their own communal elections. Parties were legion and party loyalties ran deep. At the far right of the spectrum were the Revisionist Zionists, who had been preparing themselves before the war for armed resistance against the British in Palestine. They were among the first to believe that armed struggle against the Germans was necessary and possible in the conditions of the ghetto. Revisionists and members of their youth organization Betar learned from party comrades as early as summer 1941 of the killings of Jews in Vilnius. They also heard, more or less as it happened, about the liquidation of the ghetto in Lublin in spring 1942. They had some sense of the spread of the Final Solution, from east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line to west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, from bullets to gas.
⁸

It took the Large Action in Warsaw of July-September 1942 to prompt the Revisionists to form a Jewish Military Union. Its military commander was Paweł Frenkel; the members of its political committee were Michał Strykowski, Leon Rodal, and Dawid Wdowiński. It was anchored in prewar traditions of cooperation with the Polish state, which might explain why it was well armed. In the late 1930s, the Polish regime had hoped to export much of its Jewish population to the Near East. Polish leaders thus developed close relationships with the Revisionist Zionists, who hoped to lead much of the Polish-Jewish population to Palestine. The Revisionists were willing to use violence to create a Jewish state, an approach with which Polish authorities sympathized. Before the war, the Revisionist Zionist youths of Betar had been preparing themselves in prewar Poland to fight for Palestine. Like the young men of Irgun, the resistance organization in Palestine that some of them joined, they were sometimes trained by the Polish Army. Inside the ghetto in 1942, the Revisionists also collected money, and robbed rich Jews, to purchase arms from outside the ghetto.
⁹

Whereas the history of the Jewish Military Union is one of a militarist right-wing political party adapting itself to conditions even harsher than those it had ever anticipated, the history of the other resistance group in the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish Combat Organization, is one of multiple centrist and left-wing political parties deciding that only military action could serve Jews.

Like the right-wing Jewish Military Union, the Jewish Combat Organization arose as a result of the Large Action. The very old and the very young were almost all deported and dead. It seems likely that the deportations, although they touched all groups, eliminated what had been the conservative center of Jewish politics: the religiously Orthodox and politically accommodationist Agudas Israel. Its platform before the war had been cooperation with the Polish government in exchange for communal and religious autonomy. This compromising approach had been tested by anti-Semitic violence and anti-Semitic legislation in Poland in the late 1930s, but it had remained popular among the older generations of Warsaw Jewish believers—who by now were almost all dead at Treblinka. Nothing in Poland had prepared Agudas for the Nazis, who repaid compromises with murder.
¹⁰

After September 1942, the Warsaw ghetto was essentially a Jewish labor camp inhabited predominantly by young men. Fathers who might earlier have feared to endanger their families no longer had that reason for restraint. Left-wing politics came to the fore. The Jewish Left in prewar Poland had been divided over a number of fundamental issues: whether to leave for Palestine or stay in Poland, whether to trust or distrust the Soviet Union, whether to agitate in Yiddish or Polish or Hebrew, and so on. The most radical form of left-wing politics, communism, reappeared among Warsaw Jews at this time. Stalin, who had dissolved the Communist Party of Poland in 1938, permitted its reconstitution as the Polish Workers’ Party in January 1942. Some of its Polish-Jewish activists then smuggled themselves
into
the Warsaw ghetto, where they urged armed resistance. The largest Jewish socialist party, the Bund, was much less inclined to use violence. In general, these organizations continued their work as distinct entities. In the three months after the Large Action, general accord about the need for armed resistance was reached. The Jewish Combat Organization was established in December 1942. As a group of politicians with little or no military background and no weapons to speak of, its first need was arms. Its first action was to ask for them, from the Home Army.
¹¹

Beyond the ghetto, the Large Action forced the Home Army to undertake a Jewish policy. The Polish resistance had already taken some clear stands in 1941, condemning for instance guard duty at concentration camps as “national treason.” But the Home Army, before summer 1942, tended to treat the plight of Poland and that of Poles as one and the same. Prompted by the mass shootings of Polish Jews in the east, the Home Army created a Jewish section in February 1942. It collected evidence of the killings that was transmitted to the Allies and the BBC in April 1942. The deportations of summer 1942 prompted Catholic Poles to organize a rescue organization, which by December was sponsored by the Polish government under the cryptonym Żegota. (Poles were subject to the death penalty for assisting Jews.) Some Home Army officers took part. Home Army intelligence officers supplied identification documents for Jews in hiding beyond ghetto walls. When the Jewish Combat Organization requested weapons in December 1942, the Home Army offered to help Jews escape from the ghetto, perhaps to fight later on. This offer was declined by the Jewish Combat Organization. Its leaders wanted to fight, and so denied themselves an exit strategy.
¹²

Warsaw Home Army commanders had strategic concerns that militated against giving the Jews any weapons at all. Although the Home Army was moving in the direction of partisan action, it feared that a rebellion in the ghetto would provoke a general uprising in the city, which the Germans would crush. The Home Army was not ready for such a fight in late 1942. Home Army commanders saw a premature uprising as a communist temptation to be avoided. They knew that the Soviets, and thus the Polish communists, were urging the local population to take up arms immediately against the Germans. The Soviets wanted to provoke partisan warfare in Poland in order to weaken the Germans—but also to hinder any future Polish resistance to their own rule when it came. The Red Army’s task would be easier if German troops were killed by partisan warfare, as would the NKVD’s if Polish elites were killed for resisting Germans. The Jewish Combat Organization included the communists, who were following the Soviet line, and believed that Poland should be subordinated to the Soviet Union. As the Home Army command could not forget, the Second World War had begun when
both
the Germans
and
the Soviets had invaded Poland. Half of Poland had spent half of the war inside the Soviet Union. The Soviets wanted eastern Poland back, and perhaps even more. From the perspective of the Home Army, rule by the Soviets was little better than rule by the Nazis. Its goal was independence. There were hardly any circumstances that would seem to justify a Polish independence organization arming communists inside Poland.
¹³

Despite these reservations, the Home Army did give the Jewish Combat Organization a few pistols in December 1942. The Jewish Combat Organization used these to win authority and power in the ghetto. To resist the Judenrat and a Jewish police force armed only with clubs, pistols and audacity were enough. By killing (or trying to kill) Jewish policemen and Gestapo informers in late 1942 and early 1943, the Jewish Combat Organization created the sense that a new moral order was arising in the ghetto. Józef Szerzyński, the Jewish police chief, was shot in the neck, although he failed to die. The Jewish Combat Organization did assassinate Jakub Lejkin, who led the police during the major deportation action, and later Mieczysław Brzeziński, who had driven his fellow Jews onto the trains at Umschlagplatz. The Jewish Combat Organization printed leaflets, explaining that collaboration with the enemy was a crime punishable by death. The Jewish Combat Organization thus supplanted the Judenrat, whose head was forced to admit that he no longer had “authority in the ghetto, here there is another authority.” Without an effective Jewish administrative and coercive apparatus, the Germans could no longer do as they pleased in the ghetto.
¹⁴

German decisions about the fate of the ghetto and its remaining inhabitants were influenced by considerations that Jews could not possibly have understood. For the Germans, the Warsaw ghetto had first been a transit point for envisioned deportations to the Lublin district, Madagascar, or the Soviet Union; then a temporary labor camp; and then a transit point for deportations to Treblinka. In late 1942 and early 1943 it was again a labor camp, provisional and reduced in size, whose workers were those who had been selected for labor during the Large Action. Though Himmler never wavered in his determination to kill the Jews under German rule, other authorities wished, at this point at least, to keep some Jewish laborers alive. Hans Frank was worried about labor shortages in his General Government. Many Poles were working in Germany, so Jewish labor had become more important in occupied Poland. The Jews were working for the German war economy, so the Wehrmacht, too, had an interest in their remaining alive.
¹⁵

Himmler was capable of making compromises. In early 1943 he meant to allow most of the surviving Jews of the Warsaw ghetto to live a bit longer, but also to eliminate the ghetto itself, which he saw as a center of political resistance, disorder, and disease. Himmler intended to kill the Jews who were living illegally in the ghetto without labor documents. Then he wanted to deport the remaining Jews as laborers to other concentration camps, where they would continue to work. Visiting Warsaw, Himmler ordered on 9 January 1943 that the ghetto be dissolved. The eight thousand or so Jews who were there illegally were to be shipped to Treblinka and gassed, and the rest, about fifty thousand, were to be sent to concentration camps. But when the Germans entered the ghetto nine days later to carry out Himmler’s orders, Jews hid or resisted. A few Jews fired on the first Germans to enter the ghetto, surprising them and leading to panic. The Germans killed some 1,170 Jews on the streets and deported perhaps five thousand. After four days the Germans had to withdraw and reconsider. Home Army commanders in Warsaw were impressed. The arms that they had given the Jewish Combat Organization had been put to good use.
¹⁶

This was not the first instance of Jews resisting Germans in Poland. There were a large number of people of Jewish origin within the Home Army itself. Although this was a fact known to Home Army commanders, it was almost never discussed. Many of the people of Jewish origin in the Home Army regarded themselves as Poles rather than as Jews. Others kept their Jewish identities secret, on the grounds that it was best in wartime Warsaw not to spread the news of one’s Jewishness. Although anti-Semites in the Home Army were a minority, just one betrayal could mean death. What was new in January 1943 was that Jews had used arms against the Germans as Jews, in an open act of
Jewish
resistance. This worked powerfully against the anti-Semitic stereotype, present in the Home Army and in Polish society, that Jews would not fight. Now the Warsaw command of the Home Army gave the Jewish Combat Organization a substantial proportion of its own modest arms cache: guns, ammunition, explosives.
¹⁷