A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (47 page)

Events in the Warsaw ghetto, the largest in German-occupied Europe, reveal how antisemitism increased the risks of both resistance and rescue. Soon after the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Germans isolated Jews from their neighbors and initiated a propaganda campaign aimed at Poles. As part of that campaign, Jewish residential areas were routinely referred to as “plague-infected.” In 1940, the Germans ordered Jews to build a wall around the “Jewish area.” In June, they posted signs warning Poles of an “epidemic.”

By November, every Jew in Warsaw was confined to a locked ghetto. There, one-third of the city’s population was crammed into 2.4 percent
of the land. Michael Mazor, a ghetto resident, disagreed with those who compared the Warsaw ghetto to those of the 1500s (see
Chapter 7
). He pointed out that in earlier times, ghettos “were not completely cut off from the world: Jews could leave them by day.”
²⁶

A German photographer took this picture during the final days of the revolt in the Warsaw ghetto. Notice that the fires are still burning, even as German soldiers march newly captured Jews to trains headed for Treblinka, a death camp in Poland.

It was only in the twentieth century, Mazor wrote, “especially in Warsaw,” that the ghetto became “an organized form of death.”
²⁷
In January 1941, the Germans recorded 898 deaths in the Warsaw ghetto; in January 1942, the number of deaths was 5,123. The causes included starvation, disease, and exposure as well as punishment for “defying” the Nazis.

Then, on July 23, 1942, the Germans began to empty the ghetto by deporting 300,000 Jews to Treblinka, a death camp. Two days after the deportations began, the young members of the ZOB (the initials in Polish stand for Jewish Fighting Organization) called for armed resistance. They were joined at the last minute by a second organization known as the Jewish Military Organization. The two worked together under the leadership of Mordecai Anielewicz. When the Nazis began a new round of deportations in January 1943, the two groups attacked with handmade bombs and a few smuggled guns. They were heartened when, soon after, the deportations stopped for a time. What they did not know was that the Germans were preparing for a final assault on the ghetto.

On April 19, 1943, the eve of Hitler’s birthday and the first day of Passover, General Jürgen Stroop arrived in Warsaw with 2,100 soldiers. He planned to present Hitler with a “Jew-free” city for his birthday. Once again, Warsaw Jews fought back. Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the ZOB, said of their efforts:

This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army, and no one doubted how it would turn out. This isn’t a subject for study in a military school. Not the weapons, not the operations, not the tactics. If there’s a school to study the
human spirit,
there it should be a major subject. The really important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youth, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising. I don’t know if there’s a standard to measure
that.
²⁸

Jews in the Warsaw ghetto held out against the Germans for nearly a month. On May 16, after the Germans blew up the Great Synagogue in Warsaw, General Stroop proclaimed the end of “the Jewish Residential Quarter of Warsaw.” Only a few Jews managed to escape. Among them was Krystyna Budnicka, the youngest of the eight children in her family. By the age of 11, she had lost two brothers, along with their wives and children. They were among the thousands shipped to Treblinka.

Aware that more deportations were to come, Krystyna’s remaining brothers worked with neighbors to build a hiding place beneath their apartment building. They dug a tunnel connecting the hideout to the city’s sewers and gathered whatever provisions they could find in a starving ghetto. The family and a dozen neighbors hid in the bunker shortly before the uprising. Krystyna recalled:

Many people in our bunker couldn’t stand [being confined] and went out from the sewers straight into the bullets of Germans waiting by the manhole. Finally, convinced that they had killed the last Jew in the ghetto, the Germans calmed down a bit and stopped sniffing around and tracking so much…
.

Thus we survived several months, but even our starvation food rations came to an end at last…. Plans were made for gradually leaving the bunker.
²⁹

The plans fell through, however, when the Germans discovered their hideout. Krystyna and her family managed to take shelter in the sewers. By the time they were rescued by Poles, it was September 1943 and Krystyna, her sister-in-law Anka, and her brothers Rafal and Itdl were all that remained of the family; all four were “living corpses” too weak to walk. Itdl died a short time later, at the age of 13. Then Rafal was betrayed by Poles who spotted him. He was then taken to Gestapo headquarters, where he was murdered.

Poles willing to resist the Nazis cared for Krystyna and Anka until August 1944, when the two had to flee Warsaw, which was in flames. As they left the city, they met a few nuns who were traveling with a group of orphans. Anka decided that Krystyna would be safer with them. The nuns accepted her, “although not even for a moment did they have any doubts about my origins.”
³⁰

Krystyna’s story highlights the complex relationship between Jews and non-Jews in war-torn Europe. The story was much the same in other places, where individuals like Oscar Schindler or groups like the Protestants in Le Chambon, France, tried to rescue Jews despite the risks. Even with their aid, however, the losses were staggering.

Poland was not the only place where antisemitism complicated resistance and rescue. Soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the first rumors of mass murders in German-occupied Europe began to circulate, and reactions were varied.

Pope Pius XII knew about the mass killings as early as the fall of 1941. On Christmas in 1942, he gave a speech in which he referred to the “hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction.”
³¹
Although he was clearly referring to Jews, he never mentioned them by name. Some historians believe that the pope, like many other Europeans during the war, guarded his words because he feared German retaliation.

Journalists were also reluctant to publish stories of mass murders that seemed too incredible to be true. So even when such stories were published, they were often buried in the back of the newspaper or labeled as rumors. Then, on December 13, 1942, Edward R. Murrow, a radio reporter, told listeners, “Millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are
being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered…. The phrase ‘concentration camps’ is obsolete…. It is now possible only to speak of extermination camps.”
³²
Four days later, the Allies confirmed a memo that documented the murders. It was issued by the Polish government-in-exile.

Although the Allies acknowledged the mass murders, they insisted that the best way to end them was by winning the war. A number of people, fearing that victory would come too late, organized protests and marches. Some placed ads in newspapers highlighting not only failures to help Jews but also successes. The biggest stumbling block turned out to be the U.S. State Department.

In January 1944, 13 months after the Allies had confirmed the genocide, Josiah DuBois, a lawyer in the U.S. Treasury Department, prepared a memo with the help of his colleagues John Pehle and Randolph Paul. It was sent to their boss, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., then secretary of the treasury. It stated, in part:

One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated…
.

I am convinced on the basis of the information which is available to me that certain officials in our State Department, which is charged with carrying out [programs for saving European Jews], have been guilty not only of gross procrastination and wilful failure to act, but even of wilful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler
.

I fully recognize the graveness of this statement and I make it only after having most carefully weighed the shocking facts which have come to my attention over the last several months
.

Unless remedial steps of a drastic nature are taken, and taken immediately, I am certain that no effective action will be taken by this government to prevent the complete extermination of the Jews in German controlled Europe, and this Government will have to share for all time the responsibility for this extermination.
³³

After reviewing the evidence, Morgenthau—one of the first Jews to hold a cabinet position in the United States—condensed the report and presented it to Roosevelt. The president responded by setting up the War Refugee Board, under Morgenthau’s supervision. John Pehle, who headed
the board later, described its efforts as “too little, too late.” Nevertheless, it had some success.

In 1944, Hungarian Jews were the only large group of Jews still alive in German-occupied Europe. Earlier, Hungary, although an ally of Germany, had refused to send Jews to death camps. Now, with the Axis powers’ defeat all but certain, the Germans (with the help of the Arrow Cross, a pro-Nazi group in Hungary) took over the Hungarian government with the intention of shipping all of that nation’s Jews to Auschwitz. When two Jews from Slovakia—Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler—overheard guards in Auschwitz discussing the plan, they decided to alert the world.

With the help of other prisoners, the two men managed to escape from Auschwitz and eventually reach Slovakia, where they found an underground group willing to help them. Working with local Jewish leaders, they prepared a detailed description of Auschwitz, complete with diagrams locating the gas chambers and crematoria. They also spelled out everything they had learned about German plans to exterminate Hungarian Jews. In late April, their report reached the Jewish underground in Hungary. Copies were also sent to the Vatican and to officials in the United States and Britain, and excerpts from the document appeared in Swiss and American newspapers. The two men joined the resistance and waited for the world to respond.

In early June, two more prisoners escaped from Auschwitz and also found their way to Slovakia. They announced that despite the Vrba-Wetzler report, tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews had been murdered and that more were on their way to Auschwitz. They combined their account of recent activities at the camp with the earlier report, and the resistance movement used the new report to pressure Hungarian officials, who were now fearful of retribution after the war. As a result, the deportations ended in July of 1944.

As part of the American effort to save Hungarian Jews, the War Refugee Board, with the help of the Swedish government, sent Raoul Wallenberg to Hungary as a special agent. When the 32-year-old businessman arrived in July, more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews had already been sent to Auschwitz. Just 250,000 remained. Wallenberg presented himself as a Swedish passport officer and began issuing passports to Jews, much as diplomats like Charles Lutz of the Swiss embassy and the papal
nuncio
had done earlier on a smaller scale. Wallenberg issued 4,500 passports and honored thousands of others forged by Jewish youth groups in Hungary.

The Germans, however, would not let Jews use the passports to leave the country. So with money provided by the War Refugee Board, Wallenberg bought or rented 32 buildings to house 20,000 Jews awaiting “emigration” to Sweden. Despite his efforts to save Jews, he was taken prisoner when the Soviet army liberated Budapest in January 1945. No one in the West knows why or exactly what happened to him, although documents that the Russians finally made public in 1991 reveal that he died while in their custody.

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