Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (16 page)

Rabbinical authority, with a few exceptions, never called for violent, armed resistance; rabbis rarely came into conflict with the
Judenrate
.
Judenrat
leaders requested guidance from rabbinical coun
cils on how to handle German demands. Talmudic law and texts would be consulted and then interpretations given: Should the
Judenrat
hand out labor cards exempting some but not all from selec
tion? Should the
Judenrat
comply with German demands to assemble 20,000 people in the town square, enabling the SS to make selections for the death camps? Political questions, requiring theological inter
pretation, involved how far to comply with German demands in deciding who was to live and die, how food should be distributed, where and how apartments and labor tasks should be allocated. As
the terror and starvation increased in the ghettos and the random actions of brutality intensified, the rabbis focused increasingly on theological justifications for unprecedented suffering.
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Little communication, particularly in most of the larger ghettos, was established between rabbinical councils and resistance groups. Rabbis themselves saw their role in the resistance as fundamentally spiritual, behaving with dignity in the face of German assaults, pro
tecting religious objects and Torah scrolls, comforting congregants and easing the spiritual path to death. The question is not whether more could have been done, but how the Germans were able to con
struct a universe of terror which assured the impossibility of doing more. Rabbinical authority sought to counter the power of the German psychological and physical advance; ultimately, though, the onslaught devoured resistance and made it impossible, with a few notable exceptions, to organize resistance in the ghettos them
selves. For the rabbis, consulting the Talmud and protecting the Torah became the primary form of
action
, but against the
Einsatzgruppen,
Zyklon B gas, the slave labor camps, medical experi
ments, mass slaughter in the forest, starvation and disease, Talmudic law and God’s Word could not be transformed into action. In Lerman’s words: ‘We knew we were Jews; we observed sacred days like Yom Kippur and Passover as much as we could. But we had no time to think about theology.’

The Jewish community invested enormously in the moral author
ity of the rabbis, and rabbinical judgment stood guard over the com
munity’s belief structures, its identity in times of peril, and the foundation of its ethical systems. The spiritual authority of the rabbis literally directed the community’s moral inventory.
Judenrat
leaders during the Holocaust carried out administrative and political functions; the moral imperatives and justifications underlying the community’s spiritual welfare and action lay in the hands of theo
logical authority. But as Lerman puts it, ‘God couldn’t pull a trigger.’ For resistance survivors protecting the soul before God should not be considered resistance, but a moral reckoning at the moment of death.

By spring 1943, when it appeared that God’s rescue was not imminent, the moral authority of the rabbis increasingly turned to justifying theology, taking on greater urgency as the community found itself unable to temper the German assault. A question asked by a
young man of his rabbi suggests how desperate people had become in the search for explanation and meaning: ‘Rabbi, why doesn’t the Messiah come? These are such terrible times. How much worse do things have to become before the promise of Redemption is fulfilled? If there is not the End of Days, then there is no End! Rabbi, I demand a hearing with the Messiah.’
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Compelling evidence, particularly in contemporaneous diary accounts, however, suggests that psychological processes far graver than a belief in martyrdom had surfaced in the lives of those in the ghetto. At the same time, the community appeared to be looking for explanations for the horror of its situation. Hasidic belief in the Messiah is a real and vital part of theology. In the absence of the Messiah’s coming, however, martyrdom offered theological hope, but also reinforced quiescence in the community regarding the organization of violent action.
Realpolitik
had no presence in theol
ogy.
¹⁶
One resistance survivor told me: ‘My parents, I remember, refused to protect themselves, trusting that God would save them. I pleaded with them to escape, to run to the forests, anything. But they just stayed.’

Vernon describes how he survived Auschwitz: ‘I was not going to let the Germans steal my soul; I decided that from the first day. It was not a matter of belief in God. For me that question had no meaning; and it was useless to talk about it. Sometimes guys would cry out against God; others would just be silent. But I knew that if I was going to survive, I had to hold to God because that was the only way I could hold on to my soul.’ At this point in our conversation, after about two hours, Vernon leans over and taps my knee and, in an almost conspiratorial voice, says: ‘Listen, you really want to know about spiritual resistance; I’ll tell you. I’ve never told anyone this, not even my wife; but I kept my soul from the Germans by praying.’ God becomes a living presence, not as an actor or non-actor in the camp, but as a presence in time and memory. That was enough for Vernon.

‘I understood that God could not control every human being; that he had no power to choose who was to live and who to die.

Once I decided that, it was no longer “Is God there or not?” But “Where can I find God?” And I found Him in thinking about who I was, where I had been before Auschwitz. God had no power over the Germans and their brutality. But if I could have a place inside myself that the Germans couldn’t touch, maybe that’s where God could be in a place like Auschwitz. That was my thinking: the Germans had no godliness, so how could God have anything to do with what the Germans were doing?’

Vernon works this out as an operative theology to protect the boundaries of his soul; these thoughts wrap his ‘soul’ in what he calls ‘a steel fence keeping the Germans out.’ To maintain that fence, he had to think about God, keep God in his consciousness day in and day out:

‘So I said to myself – I never had the strength to talk about this with any of the other prisoners – God is there but in a different shape, a form you can’t see, but He lives inside of us and outside of us. He surrounds and whispers to those heading for the gas chambers. And no matter what happened I refused to give up that belief.’

Vernon accepted the fact that God could not control Auschwitz or the murder; but refused to give up his belief that God was ‘out there.’ It wasn’t that God was hiding, but that in the spheres of responsibility that prevail in the world of spirit and secular power God could act only in the world of spirit. ‘I convinced myself that God had given each of us a responsibility, our own godliness. And what we had to do was maintain that godliness. I did it through prayer.’ Prayers, daily thought and uttered, changed and trans
formed, reinforced the steel fence surrounding his soul; prayer kept the Germans out.

‘Every day I prayed to God, not to save me, but to have a presence that I knew was there, so I could do things that would make me worthy of godliness – godliness in God’s eyes. Not in the eyes of those I knew in the camp or the Germans, but only in my eyes and God’s. I could be worthy, I decided, by remaining alive; that would be the sign of my godliness. So I made up prayers; I would
add to the prayers, add a phrase in Hebrew, change it. Praying helped me to see myself not as some ruined human being, some Mussulman wretch, but as someone who partakes of godliness even in a place as horrible as Auschwitz. Each day I survived, I knew it had been because of my prayer and that God by making me godly had not disappeared. The sign of my godliness was in my surviving each day.’

He used this belief to distance himself psychologically from the Germans. ‘I got strength from knowing that our German tormentors had no godliness; so if they had no godliness, it was impossible for them to be part of what is good. God could only be with those who have godliness, so I could not blame Him for what the Germans did to us.’ He admits this connection with faith came not from study but from his own psychological inventiveness; he is convinced that without this inner space of freedom, he would have died.

‘I don’t know if what I thought was consistent with Torah or not, but it kept my spirit up; it kept me alive. You see the question for all of us was to deal with this horrible place: how do you keep the Germans from trampling your own soul? You needed to figure something out; and prayer was one way I did it. It gave me a sense of who I was, apart from being someone being degraded, beaten and starved. By praying I knew I was a Jew; because I could speak the prayer, to myself silently, the very utterance of the words meant I was alive and surviving; if I could pray, I was alive; if I couldn’t pray, I would be dead. Prayer didn’t take me out of misery; don’t misunderstand me; I suffered there. But prayer kept me from sinking into apathy and letting the camp kill me.’

Spirit as a form of prayer became a critical means of Vernon’s psychological survival; yet, this sentiment rarely appeared in partisan survivor accounts. More typical of partisan survivors are the bitter words of Ben, who fought with a Soviet unit. I asked him about spiritual resistance and whether belief or faith in God mattered. His response: ‘When you are stinking and weak from hunger, with lice crawling all over your body, spiritual things disappear; you only think about, look at, what’s in front of your face. I was too busy to
think about God.’ When I asked him if there were any particular instances that he could remember which directly affected his faith in God’s presence, he looked at me, with tears streaming down his face. ‘When you see a Polish man cut off the breast of a Jewish woman, you ask, where is God? … The life we had to go through, religion had no place in it. It was gone, for a long time.’ But then he acknowledged: ‘Many Jews prayed in the forest; I couldn’t even though I was brought up in an orthodox home. What kept the Germans out was a bullet, not prayers.’

Where survivors like Vernon and Ben share common ground is in the spiritual sustenance of customary practice and the knowledge that no German could take away Jewish identity and history. For Ben lighting a
shabbes
candle had as much significance as prayer did for Vernon. In this sense spirit mattered, but a spirit rooted in Jewish memory and the words of the law, in the pride of surviving the German assault against that identity.

It is unrealistic to demand violent resistance from a spiritual uni
verse that draws its explanatory propositions from the world of ancient theological texts. Perhaps this explains some of the absence of underground and partisan criticism of rabbinical authority.

A rabbi is being humiliated by the Germans before his congrega
tion; he speaks to them while being beaten: ‘Jews, you were mis
taken about me all these years. I was never a righteous man, I wasn’t even really pious. I have been a sinner all my life. God is right in bringing this terrible punishment.’
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Now, one can admire the rabbi’s faith; but it is also the case that for many Jews belief in God lost all meaning. I showed this passage to one survivor, who remarked, ‘That rabbi was a fool.’

For resistance survivors, the group or politics replaced theology; group consciousness became the container and the spiritual point of reference. Indeed, the group in Rousseauian terms possesses a general will: defined as the political ethics of revenge and rescue. Lerman puts it this way:

‘The relationships with the group were very close; there was much love, but discipline too. Everyone had to do their part; there were women and some older children, around twelve or thirteen. We sent the girls into town, but not the boys. Pull down a boy’s pants and you immediately know he is a Jew. The group
made us feel human; it helped our despair and the hopelessness of knowing everyone you had loved was dead. Each of us felt we made some difference; that life had purpose and meaning – and that purpose had to do with saving ourselves and with taking revenge. In those forests, we were a force to be reckoned with; we were not passive like dogs. We killed, and that made us strong. It is just not possible to imagine what the Germans did to us; to kill was not just revenge; it was coming back into the world of the living …’

For Lerman to be alive meant to kill, not as an isolated murderer or soldier, but as a political extension of a group will defining itself in the new, forest-based terms of Jewish identity:

‘For me to have any psychological health I had to know, had to see, the enemy
dead
. We bothered the Germans so much they put posters on the trees to warn the local populations against the bandits. So, we put our own posters on the trees. They said: “The bandits were here.” … I remember one night, it was after a fight with the Ukrainians; we lost a few.’

A very different and non-political approach to spiritual resistance appears in the homilies and sermons of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the leader of a small congregation in Warsaw. Shapira’s homilies, written between 1939 and 1942, constitute a remarkable exegesis of textual matters pertaining to faith. Rabbi Shapira died in November 1943 in a labor camp near Lublin, but his writings, col
lected in a volume of reflections called
The Holy Fire
, testify to the spiritual resilience of faith and courage in view of his terrible per
sonal tragedy. Shapira’s entire family – his wife and other family members – were waiting outside a Warsaw hospital for news of his seriously ill son when they were killed by a bomb blast.

Shapira’s sermons demonstrate the rigors of spiritual resistance and reveal the psychological and spiritual struggle Jews faced when the Germans dismantled the ghetto and transported hundreds of thousands of Jews to Sobibor and Treblinka. He articulates a spiritual/theological position which has nothing in common with the
undergrounds or partisans, but his words constitute a profound negation of spiritual quietism, coupled with an absolute unwillingness to question God’s intent. Even more important, at least for our purposes, the homilies give us an insight into how fragile spiritual values and resistance became in the final days of the Warsaw ghetto.

Rabbi Shapira argued with God about German desecration. ‘How can you tolerate the humiliation of the Torah, and Israel’s anguish? They [those in the ghetto] are being tormented and tortured just because they fulfill the Torah.’
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This bitter, private conversation is consistent with the rabbinical tradition of arguing with God. When questions arise outside a relationship to God, then dispute with God is impermissible and constitutes a violation of faith. The legitimacy of questioning God depends on where the ‘self’ stands. Rabbi Shapira shares his anguish with God: ‘When we hear the voices of young and old crying out under torture, “
Ratevet! Ratevet!
” [Help! Help!], we know that this is their souls’ cry, and the cry of all our souls to God, the compassionate Father – Help! Help!, while the breath of life is still within us.’
¹⁹
Why does God not listen? ‘But now innocent children, pure angels, as well as adults, the saintly of Israel, are killed and slaughtered just because they are Jews, who are greater than angels. They fill the entire space of the universe with these cries, and the world does not turn back to water, but remains in place.’
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God, however, suffers for Israel. He weeps, but not in the outer world; his weeping is invisible.

When I quoted this passage to Ben, he said: ‘What use are invisi
ble tears? So what if God is crying privately? It certainly didn’t help anyone.’ Shapira: ‘In His inner chambers [God] grieves and weeps for the sufferings of Israel … one who pushes in and comes close to Him by means of studying Torah weeps together with God, and studies Torah with Him.’
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God’s concealment derives not from His indifference to Israel but because He is hidden in His chambers, weeping for Israel. God suffers too because in attacking Israel and the Jewish people, the Germans also attack God; their hatred ‘is basically for the Torah, and as a consequence they torment us as well.’
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But arguing with God meant little in the context of German poli
cies. As one survivor put it to me: ‘What could God do to destroy the gas chambers … “arguing with God” – that was crazy. The Germans wanted us dead. It was as simple as that.’

Yet, in the midst of evidence demonstrating conclusively genocidal action, Rabbi Shapira insisted that God could see the torment Jews suffer. (The resistance fighter’s response to this position was ‘If God could see, why did he act so blindly?’) He is witness to the evil. However, the evil of
Din
[a force of great severity and destructiveness], its murderousness and ferocity, its presence in the world as a ‘torturing and tormenting … serpent … a carnivorous, devouring beast’ is to be vanquished by ‘a supernatural effort.’ Ben laughed at this passage: ‘Supernatural effort? That was us; we did supernatural efforts in fighting the Germans.’ But Shapira believed that at some point in the future evil would be transformed into good; that even in the midst of a horrifying reality lies an inner ‘light,’ which, although hidden, requires the right condition for it to be ‘revealed so that everything will be transmuted, or sweetened into
Rachamin
[pity, compassion].’
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One can only speculate on what was required of the imagination to accept these teachings in 1942, for the congregants to believe that when one listens to the voice of the Torah, one hears it in ‘the chirping of the birds, the mooing of the cows, the voices and tumult of human beings.’
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Or that through the action of prayer ‘all evil is sublimated into good; all evil utterance, all evil discourse which Israel’s enemies utter against her, is all transformed into the voice of Torah.’ Those ‘conditions’ denying evil will be transmuted into ‘sweetness.’
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But nothing of that ‘sweetness’ is found in the boxcars destined for Treblinka and Sobibor or in the screams of children watching their parents beaten and killed. Ben: ‘Sweetness? Is this guy crazy or what? … sweetness when you watch your children die? I could never accept an argument like that!’

We have no quantifiable, objective criteria for assessing how Rabbi Shapira’s theology was received in the Warsaw of spring/ summer 1942, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were being transported to the death camps, but from the diaries and eyewitness reports, it is likely that the thousands of Jews herded into the central plaza of the ghetto to await transport experienced numbness and disbelief rather than the consolations of faith.
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