Resistance (18 page)

 

 

 

Another Polish scout, Henryk Grabowski, was sent from Warsaw to Vilna to renew contact with members of the movement centered there. Grabowski returned with a description of the horrors in Vilna. In 1947 Yitzhak Zuckerman wrote that

 

because of that autumn day in 1941, when Heniek [an endearment for
Henryk],
the Polish scout, returned from his mission in Vilna and brought with him the dire news of the annihiliation of the Jews, serious things began to happen in the movement ... all educational work intended to preserve the human aspect of the younger generation and arouse their fighting spirit, would have had no meaning in those days, unless it was attended by the strength to create an armed Jewish defensive force.

 

Soon after Grabowski's departure, contacts from the youth movement arrived in Vilna, with Tosia Altman among them. Thus, the depressing news of the destruction in Vilna arrived in Warsaw along with a call to battle and insurgence. Yet the situation in Warsaw differed from that in Vilna. Vilna was introduced to the German invasion through the indiscriminate snatching of people, mass murder, and
selektsia
(selection of people for killing). While Warsaw had undergone considerable oppression and unruly behavior, it had not experienced the outright killing of tens of thousands of Jews. The Jews of Warsaw, including officials in the underground, considered Vilna unique because of its location near the Soviet front. They mistakenly reasoned that the chaos of Vilna did not foreshadow the beginning of a cataclysm for Jews throughout Europe.

The youth movements of Warsaw, however, correctly assessed the implications in the murder of Vilna's Jews. They began to prepare for the struggle to come. The news from Vilna signaled a change in the movement. The time had come to keep a watchful eye on events. Feelers were put out about joining with the Polish military underground, but for various reasons these efforts were not successful. Certainly the Jews locked in the ghetto could not prepare for military action without some assistance from the Polish underground. Intelligence, arms, military training, and contact with other countries were available to the Polish forces and could not be duplicated in the ghetto. Ringelblum wrote that in January 1941, while lecturing at a seminar for youth movement leaders at the Hashomer Hatzaír hostel at Nalewki 23, Anielewicz called him into one of the rooms and showed him two pistols. This is the first intimation we have of weapons in the ghetto.

At the instigation of the pioneering movement, a conference of all Jewish political underground bodies in Warsaw was called in March 1942. Yitzhak Zuckerman attended as a representative of Hehalutz. He described his proposal to set up a general fighting organization; to establish Jewish political representation in the underground; to conduct negotiations with Polish factions; and to appoint a delegation authorized to act on behalf of the fighting organization and the Polish Jewish underground on the Polish side of the city.

The conference reached no decisions and established no framework for active opposition. According to Zuckerman and others present at the meeting, mainly representatives of the Bund prevented the creation of a fighting unit. Consistent with their ideology, the Bund opposed a separate Jewish fighting force, arguing that the plight of the Jews was an integral concern to all of Poland. The Bund may have been reluctant to collaborate with Zionist and bourgeois elements. The pioneering youth movements favored including the Bund in any organization to be established. They needed the Bund because they rightly believed that it was the only faction in the Jewish camp with direct access to the Polish military underground.

Actually, in the early stages of the consultations, the Bund expressed ambivalence about cooperating with other Jewish youth groups. One veteran Bund leader was sharply opposed, while the representative of the younger generation indicated an inclination to collaborate with the Zionist youth. In addition to the significant objections of the Bund, various factions of the political underground were insufficiently prepared to act on the proposals of the pioneering youth movements. In view of the Bund's objections and the approaching danger and urgency of the situation, the Jewish bodies approached another element—the Communists.

Between the wars and during most of the independent Polish Republic's regime, the Communists were not a legal political party. Many veteran members had been imprisoned. The Polish Communist party, destroyed by the Soviet Comintern in 1938, was accused by the Communist International of straying from the party line and of being infiltrated by foreign agents. The "purification" begun by Stalin and his administration finished off party members or sent them into exile deep in the heart of the Soviet Union. The elite among the Party leadership were "called" to Moscow where they were judged and condemned at staged trials, and then disappeared. The surviving Polish Communists were left without power or significance while the Soviet Union signed a pact with the Nazis and contributed to the division of Poland among its major enemies.

At the height of the war against the Nazis, the Soviet Union enlisted the patriotism of the Poles and other peoples in their fateful struggle. In an agreement with the Polish government in exile in London, commanded by General Wladyslaw Sikorski, refugees and members of the Polish army imprisoned in Soviet camps were released and a Polish army was organized as a fighting unit in the Allied camp, subordinate in many respects to the Soviets. This army, known as "Anders' army" after its commander, General Wladyslaw Anders, had pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish factions. Owing to friction between this military force and the Soviets, Anders's army was evacuated from the Soviet Union to the Middle East and the western fronts. The army had only a small proportion of Jews despite the fact that many enlisted during the mobilization stage.

At the beginning of 1943, after Anders's army had left the Soviet Union, the Soviets initiated another Polish fighting force among Poles remaining in the Soviet Union. Modeled after the Red Army, it was integrated into the Red Army's structure. Jews composed a comparatively large portion of this army.

In January 1942 the Communist party in the Polish underground was rehabilitated and renamed the Party of Polish Workers (Polska Partia Robotnicza, or the PPR). However, it was not accepted into the broad political coalition. A military unit with Communist inclinations known as the Popular Army (Armia Ludowa, the AL) was set up alongside the PPR.

The Red Army and the anti-Nazi struggle of the Soviet people attracted much sympathetic support among the Jews in occupied Poland, as this force appeared to wage a decisive battle against the Nazis, and subsequently the advance of the Red Army opened the visible chance for liberation and rescue for Polish Jews. The pre-war Communist party had actually been the only political body composed of both Poles and Jews. In the Jewish youth movements, especially Hashomer Hatzaír, but also to a certain extent within the Dror and a part of the political Jewish underground, admiration for the Soviets and their struggle was unbounded. But in 1943 not all factions sought to link the leftist Jewish organizations with the Communists.

The Communists' basic strategic principles and the naivete of the Jewish factions proved decisive. The AK, the Polish military underground, was content with sporadic attacks against the Nazis. Their major aim was to gather strength and train their fighters for a strong attack during the last stages of the war when there was an opportunity to self-liberate Poland. The Jews could not wait. Their end, sadly, would come well before the conclusion of the war.

In contrast, the Communists sought to direct an immediate guerrilla war against the Nazis. They saw their task as providing constant support and assistance to the Soviet military campaign. Jewish interests, or rather the Jewish need, paralleled the Communist concept at the time. They could not wait, particularly in view of the fact that the AK did not show any active involvement on behalf of the Jews.

In December 1941 the first death camp was established at Chelmno, seventy kilometers west of Lodz, in the area annexed by the German Reich and far from the military arena on the Russian front. On December 8, the day the United States declared war on Germany, the gassing began. Jews from the neighboring villages of Kolo, Klodawa, Izbica Kujawska, Dombie, and others, were brought to Chelmno. The victims were taken to an abandoned castle, then murdered in sealed gas chambers. Their corpses were placed in massive pits in a nearby forest.

The next month, in January 1942, two Jews who were forced to work burying the corpses managed to escape and reach Warsaw. The evidence of one man, Jacob Grojanowski, was taken by the people of "Ringelblum's archives" in the Warsaw underground and passed on to London via secret channels of the Polish underground. Thus in 1942 details of the camp became known in London as well as in Warsaw.

In the autumn of 1941, the Germans had begun their planned extermination of the Jews in the area of the General Government. The instructions to set up extermination squads and death camps were evidently passed by word of mouth from Himmler to Odilo Globocnik, a Nazi leader and one of the heads of the SS in Austria, who had commanded the SS and the police in the eastern district of Lublin since November 1939. Known for his extremism and close connections to Himmler, Globocnik was chosen to establish death camps in the area under his supervision. In order to exploit the Jewish work force, he also set up forced labor camps to be run by the SS.

The extermination campaign was known as
Aktion Reinhard,
after Reinhard Heydrich, who had been head of the Reich Security's main office (the RSHA), and also the acting governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where he was assassinated by the Czech underground in May 1942. Hans Hófle, a major in the SS, was responsible for the operative unit of the "Reinhard Campaign." He headed a force of 450 SS members and police, among them dozens of functionaries who participated in the early "Euthanasia" campaign, the systematic murder of mentally retarded and physically handicapped Germans initiated in 1939. These SS men became experienced, hardened murderers; they had learned to deal with their guilt. Their strength was enhanced by supplementary forces from Ukraine and the Baltic states.

The first camp to be set up within the context of the Reinhard Campaign was Belzec. Situated in the district of Lublin, on the railway line from Lublin to Lwow, it began functioning in 1942. Two other camps were established in 1942: Sobibor, east of Lublin, and Treblinka, west of Lublin, where exterminations began in July 1942 with the arrival of victims from the Warsaw ghetto.

The evacuation of the Jews of Lublin began in March 1942, and within two months thirty thousand Jews were sent to Belzec. Only four thousand Jews remained in Lublin, where they lived in camplike conditions. News of the evacuation of the Jews of Lublin reached Warsaw both via individuals who had managed to escape during the evacuation and through letters asking the Warsaw Jews if they knew where the Lublin Jews had been taken. The deportation was one more indication that the dreadful circle was closing around Warsaw. The Jewish underground press of Warsaw repeatedly warned readers that the "Jewish population is fated to physical extermination."

In March and April 1942, representatives of the Communist party branch in the Warsaw ghetto had talks with the Left Po'alei Zion, and also approached Hashomer Hatzaír and Dror. The negotiations led to the establishment of the "anti-fascist bloc" as a military fighting unit. As a result, members of the youth movements were motivated to join this body initiated by the Communists. Two Jewish Communists, Joseph Lewartowski-Finklestein and Pinkus Kartin, who had arrived in the Warsaw ghetto by the most dangerous channels, played key roles in the creation of the bloc and in organizing the fighting unit.