Resistance (21 page)

 

Tama Schneiderman was one of many young men and women who, according to Tennenbaum, did "everything." Dozens were caught and fell in the course of their missions, but none betrayed their connections. Among the few who miraculously survived were Haike Grossman, who later became a member of the Israeli Knesset, Vladka Peltel Meed, who lives in the United States and is active in survivors' and cultural organizations, and Hela Schip-per-Rufeisen, who lives on an agricultural settlement in Israel. Unlike Jewish men, whose identity could be revealed by forcing them to drop their pants, no physical examination could reveal a girl's Jewish identity. Yet their blonde hair, natural or dyed, could not conceal the sad expression in their eyes and their restless movements.

Maria Hochberg-Marianska Peleg, who was active in the rescue of people in Cracow, wrote in her memoirs that almost no one in the Polish underground in which she was active knew that she was Jewish. On one occasion, when she visited a church with an underground group, the pastor preached a sermon about the suffering of innocent people. Peleg, like many of the congregation, could not hold back the tears. When they were leaving the church, a friend said to her, "You have to be careful, you cry like a Jewess."

Runners undertook different activities. At first, they delivered information, published material, and letters to the branches and cells of youth movements throughout occupied Poland. Later, the runners passed on information, money, and personal regards as well as warnings to the Judenrat and the public. On their return, they brought accounts of the places they had visited and were thus an important source of information. Their most significant role began during the period of mass murders and the wholesale annihilation of the Jews, when they would race from one center of tragedy in order to warn another likely to be visited by disaster and to gather information about what was happening. They served as the living links connecting the cells of the youth movements and communes during the last months of the ghetto's existence. They acted as the lifesavers and couriers of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

The second area of prominent activity by the youth movements was in the underground press in Warsaw. We tend to imagine an underground press as made up of conspirators illegally expressing their opinions and disseminating propaganda, or trying to recruit supporters and allies. But the underground newspapers in the Warsaw ghetto played quite a different role. These publications contained the opinions and political attitudes of various factions, and dealt critically with the Judenrat's responsibilities in the ghetto and the likely fate of the Jews in the occupied territory, in Palestine, and in the rest of the world. Some fifty titles in many different languages appeared, mostly in Yiddish and Polish. Printed on thick, crude paper and folded by worn-out machines, the newspapers included illustrations that emphasized their particular fashion, political doctrines, and ideologies. Many of these newsheets and journals were preserved in Ringelblum's archives and were buried beneath the ghetto rubble to be dug up after the war.

Of paramount importance, these publications served as a window to the world, which somewhat diminished the isolation and loneliness of the Jews while providing reliable political and war information. Cut off and thirsty for information, ghetto residents found in the underground press encouragement, information, and their only contact with the world at large. The youth movement was the most decisive factor in publishing these papers. At first, the publications were intended only for members of the movement, written in a typical slang and concentrated on the internal life of the movement. With time, the journals addressed the wider public, providing information and spiritual nourishment. Their importance grew as ghetto conditions deteriorated. During the final stage of the ghetto, the underground press became the clarion call of opposition and prepared the ground for the struggle to come.

The youth movements, and to a lesser extent the remnants of political organizations, attempted to preserve the image of the Jew as open to and involved in what was occurring in the world. The youth movements aspired to mold and prepare the young people for their postwar future, when they assumed it would fall to them to lead their people.

The youth movements worked in comparatively comfortable circumstances. Until the spring of 1942, Nazi authorities did not aim their cruelty against the Jewish underground in the ghetto. Until the implementation of the final solution began, the Nazi goal was to isolate Jews, plunder their property, force them into slave labor, and actually starve them gradually to death. They did not concern themselves with the internal life of those they deemed to be subhuman. Politically, the Nazis directed their wrath against the Poles. Ringelblum summed up the Jewish conspiratorial activities during the first stage of the ghetto as follows:

 

Justified conspiracy can be the term applied to the period leading up to the infamous 18th of April [1942]. All the political parties carried on more or less legal activities. Publications appeared on the scene like mushrooms after the rain. When one appeared once a month, another would appear twice a month. A certain political movement brought out a paper twice a month, then another would appear once a week, until it reached the point in which the bulletin appearing on behalf of a certain stream, would appear twice a week. These papers were commonly read in offices, workshops, etc.

There were even festive public gatherings. In one such assembly, the speaker addressed a public of some 150 people on the subject of active opposition. I was present at a festivity of 500 young people of one movement. As the authors of the articles published in the underground press were known, things came to a head in polemics between the various sides and finally to mutual recriminations, like in the best of times before the war.

Everyone imagined that everything was permissible. Even illegal Polish journals, such as
Barykada Wolnosci
[The Barricades of Freedom] (so I heard but could not verify its authenticity), were printed and appeared in the ghetto. The public believed that the Germans were only remotely concerned with Jewish opinion. They were convinced that they were only interested in uncovering stores of Jewish goods, money, or foreign currency held by the Jews. But apparently this was an error. Friday, the bloody day [referring to April 18, 1942], when the publishers and distributors of various papers were shot, gave evidence that they were not indifferent to their image as depicted by the Jews, especially their political image.

 

Characteristically, Ringelblum was correct in this analysis. The Germans were not interested in the beliefs and opinions of the Jews on political and social matters. This contrasted with their attitude toward the Poles, whose patriotism and national aspirations they attempted to ascertain in order to reach those who were prepared to accept German superiority and domination. As to the Jews, they were all condemned to a common fate regardless of their opinions or behavior. Many Poles, perhaps hundreds of thousands, signed, voluntarily or not, the
Volkslisten,
declaring themselves Germans in order to be received into the bosom of the German people. For the Jews, this was not a possibility.

The Germans dealt a cruel blow to the Jews when they thought that the Jews were working with the Poles in their underground activities. For instance, in 1940 a young man of Jewish origin, Andrezej Kazimierz Kot, an organizer of an underground political cell, escaped from prison and was subsequently caught. Kot, who had converted to Christianity years ago, had no connection with the Jews and the Jews had no part in his organization, but the Germans directed most of their anger and punishment at the Jewish public. In an instance of collective responsibility, 255 Jews, mostly members of the intelligentsia, paid for this incident with their lives.

Another affair involved the distribution of underground publications and proved a calamity for branches of the Bund in the General Government. All the movements and political factions sought to reach members in the provinces, yet the papers were bulky and not easy to hide inside runners' clothing. The Hashomer Hatzaír movement prepared a special volume with selected articles from a number of papers and gave the volume a fictitious name,
Przeglad Rolniczy
(The Agricultural Review), and a fake cover, with 1930 indicated as its publication date. Thus disguised, the material reached the provinces. This trick succeeded as long as runners were only superficially searched and the book was not opened.

The Bund had two advantages over other parties in the ghetto underground: it maintained branches in villages and ghettos outside Warsaw, and it had connections with the Polish socialist underground and therefore could ask for their assistance. Hence the Polish socialists responded to the Bund's request to loan a runner to deliver their publications, on the assumption that a true Pole, having no need to hide his or her identity, had a greater likelihood of success.

According to a Polish source, after some hesitation, the socialists decided to lend the services of Jadwiga Wyszinska, an actress whose days were numbered because of a critical illness. Wyszinska left Warsaw with a heavy load of papers as her first mission. In the course of a search, the names and addresses of those for whom the papers were intended were discovered. As a result, eleven leading members of the Bund in the town of Piotrkow Trybunalski were arrested in September 1941 and sent to Auschwitz, where they were killed. To an extent, this catastrophe led to the decline of the Bund's underground power in this town.

In other cities, such as Cracow, Czestochowa, or Tomaszow Mazowiecki, prominent figures in the Bund were arrested and some lost their lives. This blow to the Bund brought about the almost complete erosion of communication between the Bund in Warsaw and its branches in the provinces. Wyszinska, it was said, was sent to a concentration camp, and her stay there worked miraculously in her favor, for her disease was arrested and she returned home after the war.

In the early days, both the youth movements and the political parties had reservations about taking militant action. They directed their efforts instead toward preserving the essence of Jewish life in the ghetto. However, the two had differences. While political parties focused on current affairs rather than on the future, the youth movements tensely anticipated the future. They felt that the war would force the Jews to change tactics.

T
HE MASS DEPORTATION
of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto began on July 22, 1942, the eve of the ninth of Av, according to the Hebrew calendar—the day on which Jews mourn the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem and the end of their political independence in ancient times. The expulsion continued with only short interruptions for fifty-two days, until September 12. During the seven weeks of the great deportation, some 300,000 Jews were expelled or murdered; 265,000 of them were taken from the assembly point
(Umschlagplatz
) and sent in sealed and overcrowded freight trains to the Treblinka death camp, some sixty kilometers (forty miles) away. Another 11,580 Jews were sent to forced-labor camps. It is estimated that approximately 8,000 others managed to reach the Polish side of the city at the height of the deportations. More than 10,000 Jews were murdered in the streets of the ghetto during the forced evacuation. Perhaps as many as 55,000–60,000 Jews remained in the ghetto. Within a short time, the large Jewish community of Warsaw no longer existed.

The arrival of Warsaw's Jews in the summer of 1942 inaugurated the gas chambers of Treblinka. Like Belzec and Sobibor, the other
Aktion Reinhard
death camps, Treblinka was designed for one purpose alone, mass murder. The deportations from Warsaw and other ghettos of Poland could not have taken place until the infrastructure for mass murder was in place—death camps, gas chambers, and the railway transports.

On July 22, members of the Judenrat were taken as hostages. Adam Czerniakow commented in his diary on July 22:

 

We were informed that apart from certain exceptions, the Jews, regardless of age or sex, would have to be evacuated eastward. Today, until 4
P.M.,
6,000 people will have to be supplied. And this will be the case at the minimum every day ... Sturmbann-führer Major Höfle [the officer in charge of the evacuation] invited me to his office and informed me that my wife is free for the time being, but if the evacuation should fail, she will be the first to be shot as a hostage.

 

On the same day, large posters relating to the deportation appeared on the walls of the ghetto. Unlike other public announcements for which the Judenrat was responsible, these orders did not appear with the signature of Adam Czerniakow. They began with these words: "The Judenrat has been informed of the following: All Jewish persons living in Warsaw, regardless of age and sex, will be resettled in the East." The poster was unsigned.

The ghetto's inhabitants crowded round the posters, reading them again and again. The text of the posters also contained a long list of the categories of people exempt from the evacuation order. Those who were seemingly safe for the moment included employees and officers of private German enterprises; persons working for the Judenrat; all those who were fit for work and still not involved in essential work; police, hospital, and sanitary workers; the families of all those in exempt categories; and hospital patients not well enough to be released. Jews tried to figure out who was not included in the lists and arrived at the conclusion that some 60,000—70,000 were condemned to expulsion, most of them refugees, the elderly, and those unable to work. Many interpreted this Nazi move as an attempt to turn the ghetto into a slave-labor camp/working ghetto, similar to the one in Lodz, and to do away with the relative freedom enjoyed by the Jews of Warsaw.

The response was immediate. People streamed to the factories, especially the "workshops" owned by Germans, and these managed to employ some tens of thousands in the course of a few days. The would-be employees brought with them their own sewing machines and the equipment needed to work in these enterprises, and this ensured their acceptance for work. Others dug out their last savings to purchase employment in the German factories, which were considered preferable and a means of protection against the dreaded decree. Workers of every kind were given working permits. A permit with the SS stamp was considered the best safeguard against deportation. The Germans were "generous" in their distribution of these permits to workers and their families.