Resistance (21 page)

Occasionally I would come to visit this place and heard that this German soldier was adjusting well by becoming an active partisan. I also heard that he and the young Jewish girl were in love. At one of my visits I asked to see Fritz. When they called him in, the first thing I wanted to know was how his love affair with the young girl was progressing. He reacted swiftly: “ . . . Ach shit, she is a Jewess!” That was all he would say. With time this former German soldier gained a reputation of a good fighter, practically a war hero. After the war I shared the story, about his love affair, with a group of people. Some of them were members of the clergy. Surprisingly my listeners responded only with total silence!
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As mistreatments of Jews expanded, some of it affected not only the Jews but also Russian partisans who were attached to Jewish women. This happened to Jozef Marchwinski, a Polish communist who was second-in-command of a Soviet detachment. Married to a Jewish woman, Marchwinski received a letter, signed by the head of his brigade and co-signed by General Platon, stating that his wife and one other Jewish woman, married to a partisan officer, should be transferred to the Bielski detachment. When Marchwinski's strong objections failed to stop this order, all those mentioned in this letter joined the Bielski partisan detachment.
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More morally devastating was the case of Fiodor Markow, the head of a brigade, who sent his partisans to the Vilna ghetto, urging Jewish underground members to come to the forest with their guns to fight the enemy. Markow argued that resistance within the ghetto would lead to the destruction of the entire ghetto population. He wanted the underground youths to move to his brigade, so that they could fight the Germans together. Markow insisted that Jewish resistance in the forest would reduce German power and prevent Jewish destruction. However, the ghetto fighters needed to bring their own guns.

After considerable soul-searching and heated discussions, a substantial number of Jewish resisters decided to join the Markow
brigade.
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On the way, some of them were killed by Germans, others by partisan groups. Those who had reached the Markow brigade faced bitter disappointments. Their prospective “comrades” turned out to be ruthless manipulators who tricked the Jews into parting with their arms.
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In addition, these so-called “friendly” partisans insisted that the Jews must give up all valuables, including money, watches, and jewelry. These they were told had to be converted into money for the purchase of arms and ammunitions. Markow threatened that whoever would not part with their possessions would be searched and severely punished. This additional move to deprive the Jewish underground of their valuables turned out to be a hoax.
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Many of these young people paid not only with their possessions but also with their lives.

These developments led to the emergence of different forms of resistance: resistance to save the oppressed and resistance that involved avenging Jewish murders. Outstanding among these avengers was Dr. Icheskel Atlas, who, after witnessing the murder of his family—his parents and sister—by the Germans, dedicated himself to avenging them.

For a while the Lipiczanska forest became the temporary shelter for small family clusters of unattached fugitives. Disorganized and unprotected, many of these groups lived in primitive bunkers. Unaccustomed to life in the forest, they were often attacked by partisan bands who robbed them of their meager belongings. Some Jews were murdered in the process. Occasionally, Atlas tried to help these people by warning them about impending dangers and by providing them with some food supplies and with moral support. According to one report, Atlas became depressed during his visit to one of these half-starved, defenseless family camps. He told them that he could not take them with him unless they were fit for combat. Atlas explained that all his partisans were fighters who were taking revenge for the victims of German oppression. “We are lost, but we must fight.”
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He inspired his fighters by “treating them as equals, never shouting but trying to explain and to convince. He set an example for all to follow and they did.”
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In his dedication to punish as many Germans as possible, Atlas had the support of both the Jewish and Polish local population, who sometimes told him where there were stashes of arms left by the retreating Soviet Army.
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He devoted all his energies to devising ingenious ways for the collection and use of these weapons.

Like so many other Jewish leaders who fought the Germans, Atlas identified with the plight of his people. Yet the help he offered was sporadic, not organized, and hence ineffective. His commitment to wage war interfered with the imperative to curtail Jewish destruction. His preoccupation with fighting the enemy made no room for saving lives. The last battle he fought was in November 1942, when he was severely wounded. His last order to his fighters was, “Pay no attention to me, go on fighting to avenge our tormented people.”
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His life as a fighter had lasted less than half a year.
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In contrast, Tuvia Bielski embodied an ethos of resisting by saving. Although he and his detachment took part in anti-German battles and cooperated with Russian partisans, destroying bridges and military installations, for him fighting the enemy and killing was not a priority. Resistance meant survival. By the summer of 1944, when the war was coming to an end, Tuvia's detachment had grown to over 1,200 individuals. According to Smolar, “Tuvia Bielski's wartime presence was like a glow in Jewish history, a truly exceptional phenomenon.”
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Smolar told me, “I always see the two in front of me. On the one hand Atlas, on the other Bielski. Together they represent the complexities of Jewish resistance. . . . Both are the two most important symbols of Jewish opposition: the fight for its existence and the fight for revenge. Atlas stood for revenge and Bielski for the preservation of life.”
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B
ela Chazan Yaari was born in 1922 into a Jewish Orthodox family in the small Polish town of Rizyszczyce. Her father died when Bela was five years old, leaving her mother to take care of her eight children. An independent woman, she opened a grocery store, which gave the family an adequate income. She insisted that her children not feel sorry for themselves nor refer to themselves as orphans. Bela's mother was a broad-minded woman, encouraging her children to become familiar with a wide range of political principles. Not surprisingly, as a young teenager, Bela joined the leftist Hehalutz organization, hoping to eventually settle in Palestine. After Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Bela and a large contingent of Zionist comrades attempted to immigrate to the Soviet Union. When they were refused entry, they returned to their home in German-occupied Poland.

After the Germans formed Jewish ghettos, Bela's Hehalutz comrades reacted by creating an underground. When she lived in the ghetto, Bela was employed as an assistant nurse, but she worked as a courier in the Hehalutz underground. This meant that she moved illegally in and out of the ghetto. Bela's Aryan looks made it easy for her to pass for a Christian. However, her somewhat limited knowledge of Polish was a problem. With time, as her underground responsibilities grew, Bela learned how to better hide her Jewish identity. She traveled extensively to cities such as Vilna, Warsaw, Bialystok, as well as to many smaller communities. Her successes gave her courage, making her feel invulnerable.

At one point her underground duties took her to the city of Grodno, where she rented a room from a Polish family. Occasionally, Bela would sneak underground comrades in need of temporary shelter into her rooms. One such man was the underground leader, Mordechai Tennenbaum. When he left, she overheard the young son of her landlady say to his mother: “Mama, Jews are coming here.” Such a comment spelled danger. Unobtrusively, Bela gave up her room and relocated to the Bialystok ghetto.

Soon news reached her that one of the Hehalutz underground's most courageous and daring couriers, Lonka Kozibrodzka, had failed to return from a mission. For weeks her comrades waited for her return. Eventually someone discovered that Lonka was being held in the Pawiak prison, in Warsaw. Bela set out to find out how she might help. At a train station on the outskirts of Warsaw, two Gestapo men stopped her. They showed Bela a photograph of her in the company of Lonka and one other woman courier, whom the authorities could not identify. Bela admitted that she knew this photo and that it had been taken by the three friends as a souvenir. She told them that she had lost touch with Lonka and the third girlfriend. She was arrested. Over the course of the interrogation that followed, Bela slowly realized that the authorities were unaware that the women were Jews.

The Gestapo placed Bela in a cell in Pawiak prison. From time to time they would take her out for further interrogations. She soon learned that Lonka had befriended two imprisoned Polish underground figures. These prisoners thought that Lonka and Bela were members of the Polish underground. Lonka and Bela never revealed their secrets and were transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp as Poles rather than Jews. They were transported together with two Polish physicians, Dr. Katarzyna Laniewska and Dr. Anna Czuperska, with whom they became friends. In Auschwitz, Lonka was employed as a German/Polish translator. Bela worked as a nurse.

Among her Jewish underground comrades, Lonka was admired for her courage and strength. She was willing to face up to all kinds of danger, relying on her outgoing and friendly personality. However, the move to Auschwitz had broken Lonka's spirit. Soon she contracted typhus. Too weak to fight the illness, Lonka gave up on life and died. Dr. Czuperska, a gentle and good-natured person, also succumbed to typhus and died.

Distraught, Bela tried to keep up her strength by concentrating on helping those who needed her help the most. Occasionally she was assigned to the job of serving soup to the starving Jewish prisoners. She overheard them commenting in Yiddish how surprised and grateful they were that this Christian prisoner (meaning Bela) served them the most nourishing soup from the bottom of the pot. Bela had witnessed several visits by Dr. Josef Mengele. During one of these, she heard him order Dr. Laniewska to prepare for him a list of names of the weakest women. Mengele's request was obvious. He wanted to send these women to the crematoria. Dr. Laniewska refused to prepare such a list. Furious, Mengele kicked her with such ferocity that she never recovered from the injuries she sustained and died.

Bela managed not to lose hope and overcame the horrors of Auschwitz. None of her Polish coworkers ever discovered her Jewishness. She recalls that when the other Polish prisoners learned after the war that she was Jewish, they were furious. “They resented me and left me all to myself. I had no one. Earlier, in Auschwitz before they knew that I was Jewish, when I offered to them help and attention, they had no trouble welcoming me. But clearly in their eyes my Jewishness made me completely unacceptable. How different these anti-Semitic Polish riff-raff were when I compared them with the noble and gentle physicians, Czuperska and Laniewska!”
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The concentration camps were an outgrowth of the German occupation of Poland. The idea to erect one in the Polish town of Oswiencin was endorsed by the SS, who argued that existing prisons could not accommodate the growing number of Poles who would intensify their opposition to the Third Reich. By June 1940 Auschwitz—the German term for Oswiencin—had become a reality. Initially, its entire prisoner population consisted of members of the Polish elite (intellectuals, literary figures, professionals, clergy, and army officers), but it expanded steadily, eventually including inmates from all of occupied Europe, including some satellite countries. The continuous flow of prisoners led to an expansion into three major parts: Auschwitz I, the main concentration camp, Birkenau, which became Auschwitz II, and Auschwitz III, also referred to as Monowitz.
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With time, the entire Auschwitz complex included an estimated fifty subcamps.

Considering the horrors Auschwitz inmates had to endure, it is amazing that any of them had the strength even to contemplate
resistance. Some have, indeed, argued that the only kind of opposition the Auschwitz/Birkenau inmates could be expected to have engaged in were efforts to save the lives, and/or improve the fate of, their fellow prisoners.
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Specifically, too, it has been argued by some that chronic hunger, in itself, eroded most of the prisoners' ability to care for others. Others have pointed out that the ability to participate in any kind of underground activity was dependent on chance encounters with like-minded individuals. Still others have thought that by overcoming nightmarish circumstances some individuals would become more receptive to the needs and deprivations of others.
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Anyone who became involved in concentration camp resistance would naturally be exposed to increased risk. And yet, the evidence suggests that by becoming resisters, some prisoners helped others overcome “the paralyzing feeling of being helplessly at the mercy of all-powerful abysmally evil forces.”
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As mentioned, at the start of the Auschwitz/Birkenau history, the Polish political prisoners made up the vast majority of its population. Their large numbers and cultural familiarity with the camps' surroundings conferred special advantages. Unlike the subsequent groups of inmates, Poles could more easily establish lines of communication with the local population. Significantly, too, local Poles were willing to extend help to these Polish prisoners: food, information, and a range of other services.

From the beginning, one of the central figures among the Polish Auschwitz/Birkenau resisters was Witold Pilecki. A captain in the Polish Army, he had eluded capture and ignored the German order for Polish officers to come forward and register with the authorities. Pilecki was one of an estimated 20,000 Polish officers who successfully hid their prewar military rank from the Germans. As most former Polish military men, he automatically became a member of the AK. With the approval of the AK superiors, Pilecki attached himself to a street roundup of Polish men in Krakow. As a part of this group, he was transferred to Auschwitz and registered under the assumed name of Tomasz Serafinski.
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