Resistance (24 page)

 

LEGEND

— Ghetto Boundary, November 15, 1940; Wall with Barbed Wire on Top

•• Entrances, Gates to Ghetto

• Selected Ghetto Factories

• Selected Features (Ghetto Public Institutions)

1. Jewish Council (Judenrat)
   
2. Jewish Police
   
3. Gesiowka (Jewish Prison)
   
4. Pawiak Prison
   
5. Umschlagplatz
   (Assembly Point and Transfer Office)
   
6. Hiding Place of Ringelblum Archives
   
7. Hospitals
   
8. The Great Synagogue
   
9. Nozjik Synagogue
   
10. Moriah Synagogue
    
11. ZTOS (Jewish Mutual Aid Society)
    
12. CENTOS (Association for the Care of Jewish Orphans)
    
13. Office for Combatting Usury and Profiteering
    
14. ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training)
    
15. Post Office
    
16. Center for Vocational Training
    
17. Labor Bureau (
    Arbeitsamt)
    
18. Korczak Orphanage
    
19. Courthouse (Tribunals)
    

 

The conference was impressed by the remarks of Zisha Friedman and Schiper. Fridman put his trust in God: "I believe in the Almighty and a miracle. He will not allow his people to be destroyed. We must be patient and a miracle will occur. Fighting against the enemy makes no sense...." Schiper does not hold with self-defense. "Defense means the utter destruction of the Warsaw ghetto! I believe we can hold together the core of the Warsaw ghetto. We are in the midst of a war. Every nation sacrifices victims. We are also paying with victims in order to save the core of the people. If I were convinced that we could not manage to save the core, I would arrive at a different conclusion."

 

Schiper's reasoning seemed compelling. Active resistance would trigger collective retaliation, and while there was some hope for a majority or a part of the ghetto to survive, such actions were tantamount to collective suicide and would not garner widespread support.
Only when all hope for survival was abandoned did armed resistance begin within the ghetto. Only then could resistance enjoy widespread support.

The assembly dispersed without making any decisions but with the intention of meeting again. But the course of the events put an end to any further gathering. There was another attempt to set up a committee of representatives from those underground bodies that had agreed to undertake armed resistance. But this group also failed to organize and could by no means take any active steps. According to Yitzhak Zuckerman, the frequent snatchings in the streets prevented the members of this committee from moving about freely. Hence, the deportations that placed every individual in danger also prevented the organization of an opposition.

At a meeting of a few activists during the first days of the expulsion, the leader of the Left Po'alei Zion, Shachna Zagan, took on the task of formulating a manifesto. But before he had time to finish it, he was caught and taken to the
Umschlagplatz;
every attempt to extricate him was unsuccessful.

From the onset of the expulsion, the youth movements were faced with two contradictory challenges: ensuring the security of their members and preparing for active resistance. Each of them required initiative and constant unfamiliar activities. Members of the Dror movement had a group working on a farm in Czerniakow, not far from Warsaw. A trusting relationship had grown up between the group of Jewish workers and the owners of the farm, and for some time, it had been used as a meeting place and refuge for runners en route. Because of the expulsion, Dror established a larger unit of its members on the farm. It was situated outside the ghetto and therefore outside the area where there was the danger of being liquidated.

Members of the Gordonia movement, mostly refugees from towns and villages throughout the country, decided to leave the ghetto several days before the expulsion. They transferred their members in small groups to ghettos in such towns as Opoczno and Czestochowa, which were still not experiencing deportations. Heads of Hashomer Hatzaír instructed their members on the first or second day of the expulsion to leave their parents' homes and take temporary refuge in a hostel in Nalewki Street. Youngsters were required to abandon their families at the height of the deportations, at the very moment when the threat of being uprooted and separated was affecting everyone around them.

Members of this movement subsequently found a haven in a Jewish-owned carpentry workshop that came under German management on the eve of the expulsion. The Jewish owners were still permitted to run the place, and as experts supervising the production they were afforded preferential treatment. The owners were two brothers named Landau. One of them, Alexander, was involved with the underground in the ghetto, and from the beginning of the expulsion he opened the doors of his enterprise to many of the activists of the political underground.

At this workshop, known as OBW (or the
Ostdeutsche Bau-werkstätte),
a number of people from the underground archives and the Left Po'alei Zion were also to be found, as well as the Communist leader Joseph Lewartowski-Finklestein. Eighteen-year-old Margalit Landau, the only daughter of Alexander Landau, was a dedicated member of Hashomer Hatzaír, and through her good offices a singularly close relationship developed between her father and the heads of the movement. The group of buildings allotted to house the workers of the OBW was the hub of activity of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

In addition to this workshop, the Halmann carpentry factory on Nowolipki Street was also one of the focal centers of the underground members and a place where they found refuge as supposed artisans. One of the former owners of this enterprise, named Arbuz, was also connected with underground circles through his son, who was a member of a youth movement. Emanuel Ringelblum stayed for a time in the Halmann carpentry shop. The cover offered by these workshops to those who were involved in secret activities became known to the regular workers, and they complained that people who were not professional carpenters were taken into these workshops and could endanger the enterprise's existence and the security of its employees. As we shall see, the OBW suffered quite considerably from the underground members who were taken into the workshop.

On July 28, a week after the start of the deportations, representatives of the pioneering youth movements, Hashomer Hatzaír, Dror, and Akiva, met at the Dror hostel on Dzielna Street and decided to create the Jewish Fighting Organization (
Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa,
or ZOB). This step was an indication that the youth movements had given up the idea that there was any likelihood of establishing a wider framework of fighting organizations that would include a variety of different parties. They were determined, therefore, to set up such an organization independently, within the limited framework of the youth movements.

Important figures from the underground participated in the founding session, including Yitzhak Zuckerman (who was known as "Antek"), Joseph Kaplan, and Mordecai Tennenbaum-Tamarof (who was later moved to Bialystok). But Mordecai Anielewicz was not present. He was on a mission to the Zaglembie area on the eve of the deportation. At this meeting, an executive committee of the new organization was chosen, and it was decided to send Arieh Wilner (Jurek) to the Polish side of the city in order to contact the underground there and obtain urgent assistance, arms, and guidance.

Once created, the organization had no weapons, no plan of action, and no contact with the outside world—neither with the Allies fighting on the war fronts, nor with the Polish underground beyond the ghetto walls.

The first activities of the new organization did not augur well for the future. A manifesto was prepared in which the true intentions of the Germans were described and the fate of Jews after deportation was outlined. Jews were called on to oppose and evade their pursuers. This manifesto was received by ghetto inhabitants with distrust if not actual antagonism. Readers of the manifesto feared that the publication itself was an act of provocation, and that any attempt at opposition might serve the Germans as a pretext to expel all the Jews from the ghetto. Again, despair, not hope, was a prerequisite for resistance.

Without firearms, the fighting organization explored the possibilities of using small arms and poisonous acids. The latter were obtained from factories that produced honey substitutes, but experiments with this liquid demonstrated that it appeared to have no effect on the human body. Its impotence became a source of bitter humor among the rank and file of the organization. Zuckerman wrote in his memoirs:

 

It was the Jewish police who caught and expelled masses of Jews. They were armed with sticks; we could also use sticks and knives against them ... talk or threats would not do. One had to become cruel and use violent methods. Unfortunately, we did not adopt these ways although they were morally justified.

 

In his memoirs, Zuckerman repeatedly asked "what if": "If we had done," and "If we had decided in good time, things would have been different." In most cases, it seems unlikely that anything could have been done to change the course of events. There is a note of regret and hesitation in the words of this man who was responsible for the direction taken by the underground and who, after the event, tried in his depressing and revealing criticism to examine the insoluble dilemmas of that time.

Opposition to the police was a possibility. If this option had been acted on, it might have deterred the Germans by forcing them to employ more of their forces. We do not have any details relating to the strength and size of the ZOB in its early days, but one can assume that it was composed of some two hundred members. In one area, at least, their directives proved effective to a large extent. Members of the organization generally managed to evade the selection process and also did not rely on the permits to save themselves. Many members of the youth movement were caught and sent to Treblinka, but the percentage of organization members was comparatively small.

If deported, members were instructed to jump off the moving train. Some of these escapes succeeded, and there were those who jumped from a train in motion more than once. Organization members were equipped with tools for cutting the barbed wire stretched across the hatches of the freight trains. Those who left the trains in this manner and succeeded in landing without incident turned to those units or groups beyond the cemetery in Powazki, which bordered the Jewish cemetery.

Workers from the OBW workshop grew vegetables on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery, and a notable portion of these workers were also members of the organization. The escapees had to cross the fence at a suitable time and hide among the gravestones. With the end of the working day, or on the following day, they frequently succeeded in returning to the ghetto with a group of workers. During the deportations, small groups also managed to leave the ghetto for the forests, where partisan units had been organized. They sent members or groups to various localities, such as Tarnow, places where they could strengthen the nucleus of a fighting organization in the making.

As Zuckerman pointed out, when the organization was first established in Warsaw it was not merely a local structure but an organization that hoped to multiply and create cells and groups in ghettos throughout the occupied lands. One may assume that was the case during the different stages of development of the political underground. Warsaw was also the center that activated and guided branches in the provinces as the Jewish fighting force was being organized. For some time prior to the force's creation, the leadership of the youth movement in Warsaw tried to propagate the idea of a militant opposition and assist in creating fighting forces in many ghettos.

In the first week of August, the first shipment of weapons reached the ghetto from the Polish side. It included five pistols and six hand grenades, which were obtained via the Gwardia Ludowa (formerly Armia Ludowa), the fighting unit of the Polish Communist underground. During the same week, the organization executed its first operation—carrying out a sentence against the Jewish Police commander in the ghetto, Jozef Szerynski. The man responsible was Israel Kanal, a member of the small group of Akiva members which was then concentrated in the OBW on Mila Street. Kanal had been a policeman in the ghetto for some time and served together with other members as an arm of the underground within the police force. With the onset of the expulsion, he refused to continue serving with the police. On the day he had to attack Szerynski, however, he once again donned his policeman's cap and insignia. Szerynski was wounded in the neck but did not die.

Nonetheless, the sound of the shot echoed throughout the ghetto. Many thought that the Poles were behind the operation. Abraham Levin wrote as much in his diary, despite the fact that he worked in Oneg Shabbos, the underground archives, which was located in the OBW area and was close to the underground. The Jews could not imagine that an organization that had adopted methods of armed opposition had arisen within their midst and was responsible for the assault. Moreover, the fighting organization was highly secretive, and even members of the political underground were not aware of its existence.

Even after its operations increased and notices of these operations were posted on the walls of the ghetto, only a few conspirators knew the names of the members of the organization, its commanders, and methods. Familiarity between members of the organization was also constrained, and even the commanders were only acquainted with those members who came from their own movements and did not know the names and features of many others.

Although the organization had been rather restrained in the early stages of its existence, its actions had included demolishing construction materials and burning finished products of some workshops. These operations made a serious impression on the ghetto. Nevertheless, the debacle experienced by the organization on September 3 cast its shadow over everything and caused profound frustration.