Resistance (25 page)

Kielar had often discussed the possibilities of escaping from Auschwitz. Now, one of his close friends approached him with an urgent request to act. Kielar refused. He had serious doubts that the partisans on the outside would offer them help. Hope had somehow abandoned him, leaving him with no strength to fight. What Kielar had feared and tried to avoid before the Kommando revolt was about to happen. The following day Kielar was put on a transfer group that left Auschwitz for Germany. He seemed not to care. Just as he had anticipated, this transfer was nightmarish—overcrowding, beatings, thirst, and hunger. On the verge of collapse, pushed by his cruel handlers, Kielar's will to live seemed to be evaporating. But, somewhere in Germany, he found it again, because of an encounter with American soldiers.
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Another assessment of the Kommando revolt comes from Israel Gutman. He also notes that after the outbreak of the revolt, the help that the SS men received was swift and extensive. According to Gutman's estimates, two thousand well-armed German soldiers arrived at Auschwitz/Birkenau. Nevertheless, this did not prevent
Gutman from observing that during the initial stages of the uprising he saw the Germans “run around like rats during a storm.”

But no one came to help the Sonnderkommandos, whose fate was sealed in advance.
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And yet, despite the terrible Jewish losses . . . the day of the uprising of the Sonderkommando became a symbol of revenge and was an inspiration to the prisoners. In the place that had served for years as a field of slaughter for millions of victims, there fell the first Nazis in Auschwitz. And it was Jews who had done the fighting. In this gigantic camp where tens of thousands of prisoners were confined, a handful of Jews broke free of the pervasive spirit of submission and passive resignation to their cruel fate. The uprising of the Sonderkommando proved to the prisoners of diverse European nationalities that Jews knew how to fight for their lives.
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Inevitably, Jewish and non-Jewish undergrounds had different motivations and operated under vastly diverse circumstances. But despite these differences, they engaged in a number of similar resistance activities: the collection and dissemination of information; the forgery of a variety of documents; and the collection of arms. Up to a point they also cooperated in various planning stages of armed revolts. Auschwitz/Birkenau offers a setting in which their shared efforts were demonstrated. This is a particularly instructive case because it allows for a “controlled” comparison, one in which the setting is constant and specifically defined while a range of other variables can apply.

Within the universe of the Nazi occupation, the death camp was the ultimate means of human degradation and subjugation. In Poland, the Treblinka death camp was completed by July 1942. Early in 1943 a core of Jewish prisoners began to organize a rebellion that aimed at the destruction of the camp and at giving prisoners a chance to escape. Although precise figures elude us, of the estimated 600 to 700 Jewish inmates who took part, between 100 and 150 are known to have escaped. About seventy of them survived the war.
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In the summer of 1995, in Basel, my Swiss friends Martina and Vincent Frank introduced me to a number of Holocaust survivors. I was particularly eager to meet Richard Glazar, a Jewish Czech economist who lived in Switzerland. I wanted to meet him because he had participated in the uprising in Treblinka and was one of the
handful who had managed to save themselves. The Franks invited the Glazars with the understanding that before dinner, in a separate part of their house, I would interview him. When we met, Richard impressed me as thoughtful and distant. He hastened to tell me that he had been interviewed by a writer for a book about Franz Stangl, the German commandant of Treblinka, and that for him this had been a thoroughly disappointing experience. Glazar felt that Gitta Sereny, the author, had distorted his account. In fact, he was still angry as he talked to me about it. He made it clear that he had not been looking forward to our interview. I listened silently as Glazar went on, suggesting that my questioning him was superfluous because his memoir,
The Trap with a Green Fence,
was about to be published in the United States. However, he continued, since he had already agreed to meet me, he would grant me a brief interview. He hoped that I would not distort his story. This was not a very promising start. But experience had taught me not to predict the outcome of such meetings.

The interview was conducted in German. I began by asking about the start of the war. He outlined his past and then quickly turned to his experiences in Treblinka, experiences which had the greatest impact upon his life. This is when I began to probe. But each time I asked a question, he countered by telling me that I would find the answer in his book. I repeated the questions by rephrasing each time. For his part, Glazer again reiterated that the book said everything I needed to know. After about three or four similar exchanges, I began prefacing my questions by saying that even though he might have dealt with the issue in his book, I would still appreciate hearing answers to what I was about to ask him. I assured him that I found it useful to listen to the same events several times. He did not argue and tried, reluctantly, to accommodate me. His answers were curt.

Gradually, however, his comments that the answers could be found in his book began to wane. Somewhere in the middle, Glazar volunteered that he regretted that before delivering the book to his American publisher he had not thought about some of the issues we were tackling. In the end, the interview was filled with thoughtful comments.

At the time unfamiliar with his book, I felt uneasy that I might have made him repeat things that he was reluctant to say. However, as he relaxed and even complimented me on some specific questions, I became conscious about the value of this interview. His comments
contained important historical information, and reflections on the need for cooperation in extremis, and especially in situations that at best promise only very temporary survival. He emphasized again and again that one could not exist in Treblinka without bonding in some way. Woven into his remarks were observations about slavery, autonomy, and opposition to conditions of ruthless domination.

My subsequent reading of Glazar's memoir, valuable though it is, only reconfirmed to me how right I was to probe patiently, yet stubbornly. The interview had lasted for about two hours, but it gave me much more than I had expected. Glazer's memoir is a historically valuable and important document. Still, it does not offer some of the broader insights and implications that emerged during our conversation. He told me:

My friend Karl Unger and I were always together. We were like twins. In this camp you could not survive an hour without someone supporting you and vice versa. We knew that we were destined to die. . . . No individual could make it alone. Treblinka was a death camp, where people were brought to die. Here, one had to be very cautious, very alert. One had to be always sensitive to signs of danger. We tried to know which direction death might come from. We had to have a sense of how to use someone's weaknesses and how to manipulate. My friend Karl and I survived because we supported each other constantly. We divided absolutely everything, even a small piece of bread.
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I asked Glazar why this mutual help was so basic.

One felt it. One knew it. This is how it was. It gave us a certain feeling of solidarity. I think this was particularly important because it was a death camp. Selfishness had no place in this camp, perhaps in different kinds of camps, but not here. Mostly, these little groups [bonding groups] were based on the country of origin. Most of us came from the same country, but not always. Because we were so close to death, we felt very down, we felt very humiliated. We knew we were in a death factory. We were so degraded because we were participating in the creation of death. We were used by the Germans as a part of their death machine. . . . Given these horrible, degrading conditions, we had to get together with somebody else. What kept us going was the idea that we could do something. We always tried to do something to counteract this tremendous
helplessness and dependence as well as our participation in this terrible crime. While I was there, we tried to smuggle out two people, to tell the world what was happening. We wanted them to get in touch with the Polish underground.
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When talking about the Treblinka uprising, Glazar repeatedly emphasized the prisoners' ties and their solidarity.

There was a group of rebels, resisters, about ten people, which in time became organized. These were the ten most important people; all of them had some kind of military skills. My friend Karl and I did not have any military training at all. Because my friend and I were not military men, we were not real members of the resistance group.

However, two other Czech men, Zelo Bloch and Rudi Masarek, were an integral part of this resistance. They would inform us about a lot of things. They would also use us to do all kinds of jobs for the underground. Not as a members of the group, but as marginal members.

Many people knew something, but we were very careful not to have much contact with the Germans. It was difficult not to accidentally give something away. The plan was to start the uprising in August, 1943. All the horrors that happened, that we felt were somehow a part of each of us, somehow were cancelled out by our uprising. This is a very interesting thing. Through this desperate rebellion, we regained our pride. We regained some autonomy, some independence. . . . And even though there were very few people who participated in planning this revolt, those who knew about it gained relief from it. It had a wonderful impact upon the rest of us just knowing about it. All of us knew something about it, and all of us somehow felt a part of it, even though many of us were not specifically involved with it. . . . It gave us the illusion of having some control over our destiny.

There were many helpers associated with this opposition. They were not told precisely what was happening, because it would have been dangerous for them. But they had a feeling that they were a part of something. Of course, everybody, in a sense, in some way, contributed to this uprising. You cannot do this without having full cooperation.
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I asked Glazar if he ever worried that an inmate might denounce him. “I told you before,” he replied, “that there were about three of those whom we did not really trust. Actually, even about these three, it wasn't that we thought that they would denounce us, but we thought that they might not be strong enough if they were caught not to talk. There were no explicit denouncers of whom we might have been afraid.”

“Are you telling me that there was an overall solidarity among you all?” I asked.

“In a sense, yes. I am telling you that among those living there, among those slaves, yes. There was such solidarity. I think that solidarity was much stronger than in other camps because this was a death camp. But I only became aware of this distinction when I read about other camps.”

“I want to see if I understand what you are telling me. Are you saying that the solidarity which existed among the prisoners made you feel or gave you the possibility of feeling like a human being?”

“Definitely. Definitely. This was a way of telling them [the Germans] that they could not fully dehumanize us, that we shared this solidarity. This realization only occurred to me later on, as I looked back and discussed and read and thought about it.”
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I understood that Treblinka made bonding indispensable. In effect, on his own, Glazar emphasized that the more degraded life became in a camp, the greater became the need for mutual cooperation. In my research I have been finding the same thing again and again: the more dire the conditions under which one was forced to live, the greater the need for solidarity and compassion among those sharing them.

Although in some ways life-promoting, such supportive groups in and of themselves could not help people entirely to avert death. Most leaders of the Treblinka uprising did perish. Many others who died belonged to a variety of groups. Moreover, organized and armed Jewish resistance happened in at least five major concentration camps and in eighteen work camps.
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However, most were not as dramatic as the armed resistance that occurred in Treblinka. And yet, they all had shared some similar characteristics.

With the German occupation, Glazar's parents had been convinced that their son's transfer to a remote farm where he was engaged in heavy work would protect him from scrutiny. Contrary
to this expectation, by 1942 the Germans traced Glazar to the farm on which he worked.

The Nazis sent him to Teresianstadt, where he stayed one month. “After the one month, I was notified that I was being moved to another ghetto. After a few days, about a thousand people were sent to Treblinka.” I asked him what he thought may have been responsible for his survival. He replied:

This question bothers me still. There are certain factors that are inherent, basic. Some are internal, some are external. Some of the external factors you have no influence over. The internal thing required us never to give up. At one point in Treblinka I had typhoid fever, and I was ready to give up. But in the end my friend and I, we ran away together, we never gave up the idea that somehow we would make it. . . . in Treblinka a person could not make it unless he or she belonged to a group—at least a group of two.

There was an underground, but it was not easy to understand it. Sereny wrote a book about it, but I doubt she understood it at all.

Glazar wanted me to understand the culture that emerged in Treblinka.

You must understand, those who came to the camp had probably brought some valuables with them . . . which the Germans were aware of, and they were determined to get to these valuables. Around [these circumstances] sprang up Mafia organizations. There was a possibility of terrific profiteering from these things. This created some special situations . . . the poor Jews who arrived; they would have some jewelry into which they had converted all of their savings. They always had with them some kind of valuables. They had sewn into the clothes dollars, and so on, perhaps for a passage to America or Palestine, which they had saved for all their lives.