Resistance (23 page)

 

Moshe Lewite or Levitas, of 40 Twarda Street, went to look for his wife three weeks ago [who was taken] to the
Umschlag[platz].
He was also caught and sent to Kosow. Two days ago, he returned, for the Germans had released him because he was a carpenter. He says that Kosow has been emptied and all its Jews expelled. People with money buy food from the farmers and share it with those who have no money. At any rate, this must be investigated. This was a sign that not all the expelled were slaughtered.

 

Even a sophisticated person like Abraham Levin, who had heard firsthand reports of Treblinka, could not withstand the suggestive power of the rumors and their illusory contents.

The truth of the death camp was not conveyed in a vacuum. There were also rumors of greetings, letters, and people who allegedly returned from the deportation. The Germans and their agents deliberately spread these false stories in order to create confusion and disinformation. Poles in the underworld promised that in exchange for large sums of money they would look for and find loved ones who had been deported. Every sign of hope was welcomed. People repressed knowledge of their doom. They desperately, even self-destructively, clung to illusions.

Historians have struggled to understand how this knowledge could be supressed by the victims, who, after all, had everything at stake in understanding what was happening to them. The answer may be found in the psychology of people who subconsciously refuse to believe the worst; the woman who ignores the lump in her breast or the person who dismisses chest pains as indigestion, the spouse who represses compelling evidence of infidelity.

The Polish underground was well aware of what was happening to the Jews of Warsaw, for in the very first days of the expulsion, they had already passed on to their contacts news of the awful secret of the railway station branching out from the out-of-the-way village of Treblinka. The Bund sent one of its Polish-looking members to follow the path taken by the expelled Jews and investigate the place to which they were taken. The emissary, Zalman Friedrich, contacted a Polish socialist railway worker. With his help, Friedrich managed to reach the railway route taken by the evacuees to Sokolow and discovered the branch line leading to Treblinka. From people in the vicinity, he learned details about the place that endlessly swallowed up trainloads of living people.

An issue of the Bundist underground paper
On the Watch,
which appeared September 20, a few days after the end of the expulsion, described the route of the shipments that left Warsaw and the deceitful methods used by the Nazis even at death's door, even at Treblinka. Arriving Jews were addressed on the subject of work and the anticipated future. They were directed to a building marked
BATHHOUSE,
and until the very last minute it was not clear to the victims that beyond these buildings with their innocent signs, death awaited them.

The Jewish Police took an active part in all the phases of the expulsion. During the initial phases, the Jewish Police directed the seizures. Later on, they played secondary but supportive roles. The Jewish police were perceived as hostile, and after the expulsion ended, they were the target of anger and revulsion—traitors to their people. The writers of the diaries condemn the Jewish police in the sharpest terms. The poet Itzhak Katznelson viewed them as "the scum of the earth," "filthy souls," and "the so-called 'Jewish' policeman, who has nothing of the Jew and nothing of the human-being."

Emanuel Ringelblum wrote a note under the heading "Hatred Towards the Police," stating that when the expulsion ended, frustration and guilt were directed toward the police. Earlier in his chronicles, he had been more supportive of the police. Ringelblum commented that the newly established police displayed a positive approach to the people of the ghetto. In his notes on the involvement of the police at the height of the expulsion, however, Ringelblum does not hesitate to discuss the "cruelty of the Jewish Police, which at times was greater than that of the Germans, the Ukrainians and the Latvians."

At the beginning of the deportations the police adopted the attitude taken again and again throughout the Holocaust. It was preferable, they argued, for representatives of the victims to do the work of rooting out people because they would show more consideration for their own kind and might reduce the number of victims and save the people who could be saved. Yet as the expulsions continued, police commanders ignored moral discipline and evaded responsibility for what was happening. Some of them aproached their role during the expulsion as a task that exhausted almost all their energy and capacities. Some rank-and-file police avoided participating in the actual expulsion or left the force and gave up their uniform and the protection it generally afforded them. The Jewish Police brutally executed their destructive and sickening tasks. After the expulsion, there was an overall loathing for the Jewish Police, who then tried to hide their identity or deny their actions. While the anger is understandable, the role of the Jewish Police must be kept in context. They were following orders, not initiating them. Their role was considerably exaggerated by ghetto chroniclers who reflect the outrage of ghetto residents. The police became an immediate target for rage. The accusations against them evade the issue of who activated the system and who was its driving force.

Even before the expulsion, the Germans succeeded in investing the Jewish police with a sense of imperiousness and power. They felt aloof, a notch above the rest of the Jews in the ghetto. The Jewish Police force was composed mainly of assimilated Jews and Christians who were the descendants of three Jewish grandparents and were defined as Jews by the race categories. Ringelblum and Katznelson maintained that the estrangement felt by these people toward the Jewish public and its masses was one of the reasons for the alienation and distance that as a rule existed between the police and the ghetto Jew, a situation that reached its peak during the expulsion. Several police officers were highly educated. There was a marked percentage of lawyers among them. As a rule, they were not ordinary inhabitants of the ghetto.

When, with the passing of time, filling the daily quota became problematic, the SS personnel blamed the police and intensified the pressure on them. They used threats and demanded that each policeman supply them with five "heads" per day. They warned that if the police did not fulfill this obligation, their relatives would be taken to make up the missing number. At this critical stage, the policemen themselves became hostages.

Events in the area known as the "cauldron" were not the last acts of the deportation. In typical Nazi fashion, the Jewish Police received their reward for a job well done: they were the last to be expelled. On September 12, the last selection was conducted in the apartment block of the Jewish Police.

By fall, only 35,000 Jews, or 10 percent of the 350,000 Jews who had inhabited the ghetto on the eve of the expulsion, received permission from the authorities to remain as essential workers. The people with special rights passed through a process of careful selection and were placed in dwellings allotted to the enterprises and workplaces, where they were forced to live in work camplike conditions. Some 20,000—25,000 of those who remained in the ghetto after the expulsion could be termed "illegal." They had succeeded in hiding or evading the searches that continued throughout the entire period of the deportations, and they remained in the limited area of the ghetto and were included in the estimate of the ghetto workers.

Both legal residents and those who had hidden lived with the knowledge that their days were numbered. There was no future to Jewish life in Warsaw—or in occupied Poland.

A
S THE EXPULSIONS ENDED,
Jews were exhausted, shocked, astounded, and angry. There was a time of reckoning and inner revulsion. Tough questions were asked and remained unanswered: Why had Jews made no effort to defend themselves? Why had there been no organized or spontaneous Jewish opposition on a serious scale? Why didn't Jews retaliate against the hated Jewish Police, especially since the police were not armed with deadly weapons?

The chroniclers' complaints were a form of moral stock-taking
after
the deportation; these charges were not made during the events themselves. Emanuel Ringelblum was especially harsh. In his article entitled "Why?" he asks again and again, "Why did they not resist when 300,000 Jews were being evacuated from Warsaw?...Why was it made so simple and easy for this enemy?...Why was there not a single victim among the hangmen?"

How could fifty SS men, assisted by two hundred Ukrainians and a similar number of Latvians, deport so many without encountering obstacles ? Ringelblum raises disturbing questions without offering a compelling answer.

He understands some of the elements that led to so passive a response. Ringelblum details "the German strategies in preparation for the expulsion," and the element of surprise contained in the onset of the evacuation. In addition, he stresses the impermeability of the ghetto during the expulsion and the impossibility of getting even a small amount of food into the area. The use of the Jews themselves as accessories was a deterrent factor to resistance. The employment of a gradual but ever intensifying selection process masked the full intent of the near total expulsion. It led to the breakdown of community and the war of all against all for survival.

These factors all had their effect. However, two other causes lay behind the victims' lack of reaction. First, the ghetto disintegrated from within. One could compare the days of the expulsion to a closed-off and well-guarded hunting field, with excited hunters shooting and killing indiscriminately, pursuing their unarmed and unprotected victims. Furthermore, there is a pattern to the Jewish response to the expulsion order. Under totalitarian regimes, a persecuted person, who has no chance or likelihood of being saved or of saving himself by fighting back, is also isolated even if he or she is among many who share the same fate. Such a person can offer no self-defense. Only two responses are possible: attempts to escape, or self-deception by grasping at illusions. For the ghetto's inhabitants, the entire world was reduced to Nazis and their helpers on the one hand, and their seemingly isolated Jewish prey on the other. The outside world neither reacted nor helped. No encouragement or assistance in any form was forthcoming from the Polish side or from the free world.

There were instances of individual rebellion. Thousands were murdered in the ghetto when they tried to escape or hide from the convoys, or when they failed to obey the snatchers' orders. The fact that some 20,000–25,000 people remained in the ghetto by illegal means—hiding despite the determined searches—can be seen as the primary form of opposition under the circumstances.

The Poles denounced the Jewish passivity, and not without some justification, according to Ringelblum. But, he adds, the Poles ignored their own responsibility for the Jewish failure to respond. In his essay "Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War," Ringelblum wrote:

 

The evacuation campaign lasted forty-four days, and there was no reaction from the Aryan side [the Polish side of Warsaw]. On the Aryan side, there was utter silence while this drama was being enacted in view of hundreds of thousands of Poles. There was no outcry from the government [meaning the Polish government in exile], not a single word of encouragement, no promise of help, or even moral support.

 

Only on the seventeenth of September, after the expulsion ended, did the "leaders of the Civilian Struggle," the civilian arm of the political underground subordinate to the London-based government-in-exile, address the expulsion. In a proclamation to the Polish population, they stated:

 

Without being able to actively oppose what is being done, the leadership of the Civilian Struggle in the name of the entire Polish people protests against the crimes which are being committed against the Jews. All the political and social organizations in Poland are united in this protest.

 

There was nothing in this declaration of protest regarding the adoption of any action or the Polish underground's stated intention of taking such steps. Moreover, there was no call to the Polish public in the declaration to render help to Jews fleeing from the ghetto, and not a word of encouragement to the Jews to abandon the ghetto and seek shelter among the Poles.

Plans for active Jewish resistance during the expulsion fell apart. The reasons why reveal the complete powerlessness of the Jews. On July 23, the second day of the expulsion, the activists of the underground in the ghetto called an emergency meeting to discuss what was happening and to decide on the steps to be taken. Representatives of the pioneering Zionist youth movements and others from political parties favored taking an active stand. The outcome of the meeting, however, was determined by two well-known and respected personalities: the historian Yitzhak Schiper and Alexander Zisha Friedman, one of the leaders of the Orthodox Agudath Israel. A young Zionist leader summarized the debate: