Resistance (2 page)

Topography also affected the emergence and success of resistance efforts. Mountains and/or forests increased the opportunities for opposition; flat lands diminished the odds of success. By and large Eastern Europe had much more terrain suitable for this purpose than Western Europe. In part, the relative inaccessibility of woodlands and mountains made them alternatively useful as sustaining ground for rebellion and as havens for some of the persecuted.

No matter how favorable the conditions, resistance required time to mature, for it took time for cooperation and setting to result in the establishment of a strategic base of operation. Such a base, by providing adequate space, promotes mobility. Guerrillas need to vanish and blend into the local population. Making that possible, a strategic base helps compensate for the relatively small numbers of rebels and for their inadequate supply of arms. Few, if any, Jewish resisters were so situated. Confinement in ghettos automatically deprived them of the ability to cooperate. Only underground couriers, most of whom were women, maintained exchanges of information between these ghettos. And these couriers, like other Jewish resisters, could count on the supportive attitudes of local populations. Apart from a handful of Christians who risked their lives to save Jews, local collaborators undermined the chances of success.

In addition to established bases of operation, effective leadership and a steady supply of arms were two additional preconditions for success. Several national underground organizations maintained direct contact with their political leaders who had left the country and established governments in exile. These leaders supplied their undergrounds with both tactical advice and arms. In some cases, arms reached a national underground through the Allies.

Here again, Eastern European Jews were at a huge disadvantage. Jewish leaders who left Eastern Europe in 1939 failed to organize a unified front. Moreover, many Jewish leaders had already been murdered during the first stage of the German occupation. Of the remaining prewar leaders, some were recruited by the occupation authorities into the German-mandated Jewish Councils, the Judenrat. With continuously changing Council membership, powerless and often ambiguous toward resistance, only a few of these Judenrat leaders wholeheartedly supported the Jewish underground. The existing leadership gap was filled in part by the young heads of the local branches of the various youth organizations. Most of these underground commanders were idealistic and eager to
protect and fight for the Jewish people. However, they were also inexperienced.

Interest in resistance under the German occupation during World War II continues to grow. To gather evidence about the subject, researchers have been exploring the complexities imbedded in the very idea of what it means to resist.

As I mentioned earlier, I was drawn to the issue by unexamined assertions about Jewish passivity and concurrent assumptions about Jewish responsibility. A closer view at the origin and history of why Jews supposedly did not resist promises a better understanding of this mythology.

The phrase “like sheep to the slaughter” first appeared in a 1942 New Year's Manifesto published in the Vilna ghetto. It was an official proclamation, collectively created by the leadership of several ghetto youth movements. This document boldly stated that the Germans were engaged in the systematic annihilation of European Jewry. It further emphasized that in view of this murderous goal, the only option open to the Jews was resistance. In short, the New Year's Manifesto contained two interdependent parts. First, it flatly stated that it could no longer be ignored that the Germans aimed at the total destruction of European Jewry. In this regard, it was the first unequivocal statement of what was happening. Second, in light of this understanding, it urged Jews not to follow German orders. Specifically, the Vilna ghetto inmates were implored not to assemble for deportations.
²
The writer of this final version of the document, Aba Kovner, a 23-year-old poet and one of the Hashomer Hatzair leaders, was calling for resistance. The original document was a plea for Jews to unite in opposition and therefore in resistance.

In fact, three weeks after the issuing of this proclamation, several of the Vilna youth movements united in establishing the Vilna Partisan Organization (FPO).
³
In various Jewish quarters, the assertion that the Germans were engaged in exterminating Jews met with some disbelief. Even certain members of the Jewish underground movement in Vilna and in other ghettos had a hard time accepting that this in fact was happening. Kovner himself assessed the collectively created proclamation, “as a battle cry to people confronted with death.” The historian Dina Porat, now Chief Historian at Yad Vashem, who has researched these issues, concluded that at the time Kovner had relied “on intuition.” The moment had called for a strong statement and he had opted for “an uncompromising formulation, daring to speak about the destruction of all European
Jews.”
⁴
Yet this anguished call to stand up to their enemy turned into an accusation against the Jewish people. When and how did this happen?

It took years for this January 1942 proclamation to morph into a general statement of Jews' complicity in their own destruction. Bruno Bettelheim was an early promoter of such views. Bettelheim's connection to the Third Reich originated in his 1938 arrest in Vienna. Charged with political transgressions, Bettelheim, who was Jewish, was incarcerated in two concentration camps, Dachau and Buchenwald. In 1939, a year later, an American benefactor sent him a US immigration visa. In short order, his release from the concentration camp and a trip to America followed. In the United States, Bettelheim became a well-established psychoanalyst. His wartime experiences and professional work became closely intertwined.

In 1943, in a long article, Bettelheim allegedly documents his life in the German concentration camps. Claiming for himself the role of an objective observer, he emphasized the slavelike docility of concentration camp inmates. His article does not differentiate the prisoners by country of origin or religion. During the period of his incarceration, 1938–39, all concentration camp inmates were held on charges stemming from alleged political and/or criminal transgressions.
⁵
Only from 1942 on were Jews brought to the expanding concentration camps solely because they were Jews and with the goal of extermination.

In the early 1960s, two more Bettelheim publications appeared, featuring extensive discussions of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust. Figuring prominently in these works are assertions that Jews' passivity had contributed significantly to their doom. In making his case, Bettelheim points to the case of Anne Frank, her family, and the Jews who had shared their hiding place in Holland. He argues that “the Franks could have provided themselves with a gun or two, had they wished. They could have shot down at least one or two of the ‘green police' who came for them. There was no surplus of such police. The loss of an SS with every Jew arrested would have noticeably hindered the functioning of the police state. The fate of the Franks would not have been any different because they all died anyway except for Anne's father, (but) . . . they could have sold their lives dearly instead of walking to their death.”
⁶

Bettelheim continues in a similar vein, disapproving of the Franks' selection of their hiding place, referring to it as “a trap without an outlet.” In effect, he blames the hidden Jews for failing
to build an emergency escape passage, through which at least some of them could “have tried to escape while one or two of the men blocked and defended one of the small entrances with a homemade barricade.”
⁷

Such objections underscore how little Bettelheim understood about the insurmountable obstacles Jews had to overcome when trying to find shelter in the Christian world. Guns were unattainable. Virtually every Jew who attempted to purchase weapons failed, and many who tried were murdered in the attempt. Moreover, Jews who wanted to hide among Christians could not find shelter. The Franks and those who joined them were a select minority. Suggestions about their finding more suitable hiding places assume there were options, which there were not. Actually, finding any hiding place was virtually a miracle. But, despite these serious misconceptions, as a former victim of the Nazis, as a successful psychoanalyst, as a talented writer, as someone who had presented himself as a Holocaust survivor, Bettelheim was listened to.
⁸

Support for Bettelheim's interpretations came from Hannah Arendt's 1963 book,
Eichmann in Jerusalem
. Concentrating on the wartime Jewish Councils, Arendt concludes that the Germans “created Jewish Councils who almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another with the Nazis.”
⁹
She continues that “to a Jew, this role of Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story [the Holocaust]. It had been known about before, but it has now been exposed, for the first time, in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raoul Hilberg [in
The Destruction of the European Jews
].” Without citing specific page references, Arendt offers vivid descriptions of a wide range of humiliating, extremely cruel anti-Jewish measures, which culminated in Jewish deportations to various concentration camps. She goes on, focusing upon the complicity of the Jewish Councils, claiming that, “In the matter of cooperation, [with the Germans] there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of central and western Europe and the Yiddish speaking masses of the East. . . . In the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated manifestoes they issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new power.”
¹⁰

Hilberg's manuscript, the above-mentioned
The Destruction of the European Jews
, served as a source for her interpretation of the wartime activities of the wartime Jewish Councils. Hilberg himself objected to Arendt's interpretation of his research. As a co-editor of the Czerniakow wartime diary, the head of the Judenrat in Warsaw,
Hilberg's views about the Jewish Councils, at times critical, were far more nuanced and complex.
¹¹

But Arendt was persistent. For additional “confirmation” of her views, Arendt turned to the prominent Jewish Dutch historian, Louis de Jong. Supposedly, from her exposure to de Jong, she had concluded that the Judenrat in wartime Holland, “quickly became an instrument of the Nazis.” We as readers, however, are never told where this statement came from. Nor did my familiarity with quite a number of de Jong's publications direct me to any of these sources. Arendt continues writing that out of the 103,000 Dutch Jews who were deported to Auschwitz, with the cooperation of the Jewish Council, only 519 returned. Next, still presumably relying on de Jong, she notes that of the Dutch Jews who lived illegally in the forbidden Aryan world, 40 to 50 percent of them managed to survive the war. Finally, in a strange twist of logic, she blames the Jewish Council of Holland—for both the death of the Dutch Jews in Auschwitz and for the fact that not more of them had escaped into the Aryan world, where more could have eluded being murdered.
¹²

Hilberg's seminal contribution to the Holocaust literature, published first in 1961, retains its prominent position to this day. The author has revised his book twice, most recently in 2003. Each new edition has benefited from the infusion of additional historical evidence. Hilberg has consistently emphasized that his work concentrates on the perpetrators, the structures, and processes they employed as they pursued the annihilation of European Jewry. In the recently revised version, as in the two earlier ones, Hilberg states that “[p]reventive attacks, armed resistance and revenge were most completely absent from Jewish exilic history . . . for the Diaspora Jews; acts of armed opposition had become isolated and episodic. Force was not to be a Jewish strategy again until Jewish life was reconstituted in a Jewish state . . . during the catastrophe of 1933–45; the instances of opposition were small and few. Above all, whenever and whichever they occurred, they were actions of last (never first) resort.”
¹³

Hilberg assumes an absence of Jewish resistance and attributes it to the long tradition of Jewish passivity. Introducing himself as an expert researcher on the perpetrators of the Holocaust, he nevertheless frequently returns to the topic of Jewish resistance. But Hilberg's descriptions of Jewish uprisings are consistently brief. Critical facts are missing from these accounts. It must be a daunting
task to describe events which had required months of preparations and fit them into a single paragraph of a sentence or two. Such brief treatments of complex topics cannot do justice to their historical significance. In fact, Hilberg's comments about Jewish resistance show consistent patterns of omissions about central facts and circumstances.

No matter how complex or perilous Jewish resistance efforts were, Hilberg never discusses the obstacles which Jews had to overcome, nor the great sacrifices they were ready to make and made. Similarly, he never bothers to describe the ingenious strategies that were continuously devised by the Jews in order to survive. Hilberg's special emphasis is illustrated by his statement that, “[m]easured in German casualties, Jewish armed opposition shrinks into insignificance.”
¹⁴
Hilberg's concluding remarks about Jewish underground operations consistently repeat how inconsequential Jewish resistance was because so few Germans were killed. In a variety of ways, over and over again, he stresses that Jewish resistance failed to diminish Germany's overall military power.

He is right. The Jews were never in a position to undermine or diminish the effectiveness of the German Army. Still, those Jews who stood up to their oppressors were realistic both about their limited aims and the expected consequences of their opposition. They were aware of German superior power just as they were aware of their own powerlessness. Through their opposition, nonetheless, these resisters tried to achieve a certain measure of autonomy, such as by choosing their ways of dying. What they wanted was to die fighting. Through disobedience, they resisted the Germans' brutality.