The Holocaust (123 page)

As soon after liberation as Yehuda Bakon was strong enough to ‘hold a pencil in my hand’, he made a series of drawings of everything he could remember of the gas-chambers, the undressing rooms and the crematoria at Birkenau: the things he had seen, and the things he had asked the Jews of the Sonderkommando to describe to him, so that if he survived, he could record it. ‘I asked the Sonderkommando men to tell me,’ he later explained, ‘so that if one day I will come out, I will tell the world.’
³⁹

To see, and to record: this had been the self-imposed task of Emanuel Ringelblum and his ‘Joy of Sabbath’ circle in the Warsaw ghetto, from the ghetto’s first days. It had been Simon Dubnov’s last instruction as he was shot down in Riga in December 1941. In the concentration camps there had been a slogan, ‘I am the victim! I am the witness!’ Vitka Kempner, in hiding in the Vilna ghetto, and later in action with a group of partisans in the forests outside Vilna, later recalled how ‘everyone in the ghetto thought that he was the last Jew in the world. People wanted us to leave one person outside the ghetto so that they can tell the world the story. We thought no one else was left in any other ghetto.’
⁴⁰

To survive was to give witness: a historic imperative. The Warsaw poet, Yitzhak Katznelson, in his last days at Vittel, before being deported to Auschwitz and his death, had also stressed the need to recall the acts of resistance: ‘Sing a hymn to the hero of the remote hamlet! Sing loud his praise, see his radiant figure!’
⁴¹

There was also a moral imperative: Zdenek Lederer, a survivor of the Theresienstadt ghetto and of Auschwitz, later reflected that, throughout the ages, ‘it has been the lot of the Jews to deliver to men a warning’. This warning, seen so starkly in the years of the Holocaust, was a clear one: ‘that violence is in the end self-destructive, power futile, and the human spirit unconquerable’.
⁴²
The stories told in these pages can convey only a fragment of the Jewish suffering, and courage, of those terrible years. With the Allied victory in 1945, the Holocaust became history, increasingly distant, remote, forgotten; a chapter, reduced to a page, shortened to a paragraph, relegated to a footnote. Yet it must still be remembered in each generation for what it was: an unprecedented explosion of evil over good. At Auschwitz, as Hugo Gryn, a survivor, has said, the ethical code which was part of his own Jewish tradition, and also ‘part and parcel’ of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, was ‘denied and reversed’:

‘It was a denial of God,’ Hugo Gryn added. ‘It was a denial of man. It was the destruction of the world in miniature form.’
⁴³

In the face of so violent an upsurge of evil, the Jewish resistance that took place during the war years possessed a heroic dimension. Hardly a day passed without some act of defiance, as seen even in those records which have survived; records which are only a fragment of the whole story.

At every stage of the war, the Germans used insuperable deterrents: military superiority, a crushed and terrorized local population, sadistic helpers, and above all the threat and reality of massive reprisals. Hundreds were shot for the resistance of a single person. In Lvov, on 16 March 1943, when a Jew had killed a German policeman noted for his cruelty, the Germans murdered twelve hundred Jews as a reprisal: a far higher reprisal ratio than that used against the Czechs in Lidice in 1942, or against the French in Oradour in 1944. Yet despite the grotesque savagery of reprisals,
Jewish resistance was never crushed in its entirety, even in the death camps.

This was resistance not of people gathered together in a single town or region, but scattered in ten thousand different localities, divided by distance and frontier controls and language. It was resistance by those surrounded by captive populations which frequently collaborated with what should have been the common enemy, and often betrayed by those who were in essence their fellow victims. It was resistance by people for whom the possession even of an inadequate weapon was punishable by death. It was resistance by an army without arms, by an army of the old and sick, and the frail and the young, and by women for whom all forms of fighting were abhorrent. It was resistance above all by an army which did not have the right to surrender, which did not possess that basic right of the soldier to save his life by becoming a prisoner of war, by showing the white flag.

A Jew who sought safety in surrender was killed without mercy. A Jewish woman who ran away with her child and was caught was likewise murdered. For the Jews, resistance was almost invariably useless and helpless. It was carried out, as Rudolf Reder, a survivor of one of the death camps, has written, by ‘the defenceless remnants of life and youth’;
⁴⁴
by Jews who had no strength or resources left, only the desire to remain human beings, yet even that desire could be, and was, sapped and destroyed by the deliberate intent of the conqueror.

The end was to be death: that was the German aim and plan. Yet there were many Jews who, sensing the plan, and having the ability to run away, to find at least a temporary haven in swamp or forest, decided not to run away, but, as Zivia Lubetkin had written, ‘to share the same fate’ as those who had no means of escape. ‘It is our duty’, she wrote amid the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, ‘to stay with our people until the very end.’
⁴⁵

A twenty-four-year-old Jewish girl in Cracow, Matilda Bandet, was approached one morning by her friends with news that the ‘action’ was imminent, that the time had come to try to escape from the ghetto and make for the woods. The girl hesitated. ‘My place is with my parents,’ she said. ‘They need me. They are old. They have no means of defending themselves. If I leave them, they will be alone. I will stay here, with them.’

The girl’s friends hurried off, to the cellars, the tunnels and the woods. Matilda Bandet remained, to be deported with her parents to Belzec, and to perish with them.
⁴⁶
In her decision not to leave the ghetto, not to try to save herself, but to stay with her parents, Matilda Bandet showed that very human dignity which it was the German wish totally to destroy.

In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labour camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms: fighting with those few weapons that could be found, fighting with sticks and knives, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food under the threat of death, the nobility of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair. Even passivity was a form of courage. ‘Not to act,’ Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in the aftermath of one particularly savage reprisal, ‘not to lift a hand against the Germans, has become the quiet passive heroism of the common Jew.’
⁴⁷
To die with dignity was in itself courageous. To resist the dehumanizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be abased to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were courageous. Merely to give witness by one’s own testimony was, in the end, to contribute to a moral victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.

Preface

1
Hugo Gryn, in conversation with the author, London.

1. FIRST STEPS TO INIQUITY

1
Martin Luther,
Von den Juden und ihren Lugen
(‘On the Jews and their Lies’), Wittenburg 1543.

2
Die Judischen Gefallenen des Deutschen Heeres, Der Deutschen Marine und der Deutschen Shutztruppen, 1914–1918
(The Jewish War Dead of the German Army, Navy and Defence Forces, 1914–1918), Berlin 1932.

3
For an eye-witness account of some of this violence, see Israel Cohen,
My Mission to Poland, 1918–1919
, London 1951.

4
Jehuda Reinharz (editor),
The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann
, Jerusalem 1977, volume IX, series A, October 1918—July 1920, letter 44, page 48.

5
Report of 18 December 1919 from P. Wright to the Foreign Office, London: Rumbold papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

6
The Times
, 14 August 1919.

7
For the full text of the Twenty-five points, as published shortly after Hitler came to power, see Konrad Heiden,
A History of National Socialism
, London 1934, pages 10–14.

8
Speech of 13 August 1920, quoted in Reginald H. Phelps, ‘Hitler’s “Grundlegende” Rede über den Antisemitismus’,
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
, volume 16, Stuttgart 1968, pages 400–20.

9
Heiden,
A History of National Socialism, op. cit.
, pages 73–4.

10
Norman H. Baynes (editor),
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922—August 1939
, London 1942, volume 1, page 26.

11
Ruppin diary, 30 October 1923, quoted in Alex Bein (editor),
Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs, Diaries, Letters
, London 1971.

12
The edition cited here is the first English-language unexpurgated edition, two volumes in one, Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, London 1939, volume 1 ‘A Retrospect’, volume 2 ‘The National Socialist Movement’. This edition was printed in February 1939.

13
Franz Jetzinger,
Hitler’s Youth
, London 1958.

14
Hitler,
op. cit.
, page 31.

15
Ibid.
, pages 61–2.

16
Ibid.
, page 64.

17
Ibid.
, page 273.

18
Ibid.
, page 60.

19
Ibid.
, page 176.

20
Ibid.
, page 178.

21
Ibid.
, page 66.

22
The full text of the Locarno Agreement is published in Lord D’Abernon,
An Ambassador of Peace
, London 1930, volume 3, appendix v.

23
Quoted in Ben-Zion Surdut, ‘Sholem Schwartzbard’ (Shalom Schwarzbard):
Board’s-Eye View
, Bulletin of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies’ Cape Council, Cape Town, December 1983. Acquitted at his trial in Paris, Schwarzbard later lived in South Africa, where he died in 1938, at the age of fifty-one.

24
Hitler,
op. cit.
, page 553.

25
Marvin Lowenthal,
The Jews of Germany: a History of Sixteen Centuries
, London 1939, page 375.

26
Voting figures were: Social Democratic Party, 8,575,343; National Socialist (Nazi) Party, 6,404,397; Communist Party, 4,590,178; Catholic Centre Party, 4,322,039.

27
‘Guide and Instructional Letter for Functionaries’, 15 March 1931, in Lord Marley,
The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag
, London 1933, page 234.

28
Quoted in Lowenthal,
op. cit.
, page 380.

29
Idem.

30
Leslie Frankel, in conversation with the author, Johannesburg.

2. 1933: THE SHADOW OF THE SWASTIKA

1
Lord Marley,
The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag, op. cit.
, page 196.

2
Manchester Guardian
, 27 March 1933.

3
Shlomo Aronson,
The Beginnings of the Gestapo System: the Bavarian Model in 1933
, Jerusalem 1969, page 20.

4
Manchester Guardian
, 27 March 1933.

5
Testimony of Benno Cohn: Eichmann Trial, 25 April 1961, session 14, verbatim transcript.

6
Lord Marley,
op. cit.
, page 238.

7
There were further mass protests at the Trocadero, Paris, on 20 May 1933, and at the Queen’s Hall, London, on 27 June 1933.

8
Lord Marley,
op. cit.
, pages 262–3.

9
Lady Rumbold, letters of 2 April and 5 April 1933, Rumbold papers, quoted in Martin Gilbert,
Sir Horace Rumbold: Portrait of a Diplomat, 1869–1941
, London 1973, page 375.

10
Dr Joseph Goebbels, manuscript: ‘From the Imperial House to the Reich Chancellary’, International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, document PS-2409.

11
Monday, 3 April 1933.

12
Speech reported in the
Völkischer Beobachter
, 7 April 1933, quoted in Baynes (editor),
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922—August 1939, op. cit.
, page 729. The word used by Hitler was
gekrummpt
.

13
Testimony of Benno Cohn: Eichmann Trial, 25 April 1961, session 14.

14
Judische Rundschau
, 4 April 1933: editorial reprinted in Ludwig Lewisohn,
Rebirth
, New York 1935, Pages 336–41.

15
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, 7 April 1933: text in full in Lucy S. Dawidowicz (editor),
A Holocaust Reader
, New York 1976, pages 38–40.

16
Speech reported in
Völkischer Beobachter
, 7 April 1933, quoted in Baynes,
op. cit.
, pages 728–9.

17
Letter of 11 April 1933, Rumbold papers, published in Martin Gilbert,
Britain and Germany Between the Wars
, London 1964, page 74.