Read Online Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust by James M. Glass - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: James M. Glass
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boy, disheveled, ‘wearing a large pair of shoes on his thin feet … dawdling and talking loudly to himself’ catches a little girl’s attention. He is playing a game in which in one hand he clutches a bunch of small stones; with his other he scratches his head. He rushes after Ettie and tells her about the stones, ‘nine brothers like these stones we were once, all close together. Then came the first deportation and three of the brothers didn’t return, two were shot at the barbed wire fences, and three died of hunger. Can you guess how many brother-stones are still left in my hand?’ 47 Ettie, terrified, ran away; but the boy, brought up in a universe and vocabulary of deportation, coupons, ghettos, shots, hunger, workshops, found nothing unusual in this presentation.
During an action in Kovno, in which they entered the ghetto in buses with white-washed windows, full of soldiers, the Germans played nursery rhymes and offered candy to lure youngsters out of their hiding places. Rabbi Oshry recalls:
‘Mothers who grabbed hold of the bus were driven off by bay onets. Dogs tore at the women’s clothing and flesh. One mother, who held on to a bus firmly and refused to be frightened off, was shot through the heart. Her wailing child witnessed his mother’s murder. Every bus had the radio inside turned up loud in order to drown out the children’s screams. Full buses were driven off, and empty ones replaced them to take on new loads. A number of buses pulled up in front of the ghetto hospital and took away the children there.’
The next morning the Germans returned with bloodhounds and pickaxes to search for children who had been missed during the first action. ‘Soon they were smashing walls and cracking floors.’ The Germans threw grenades inside anything that resembled a hiding place. The Kinderaktion was a commonplace of German policy; ‘wild screeching and cries could be heard. And wild laughter, too; a mother had gone insane.’ 48 Children had been hidden in cellars, closets, pits, in baskets and bags, pillowcases. ‘One of the mothers begged the killers, “Take me along too, I want to go with my child!” The murderers roughly pushed her away and remarked sadistically, “Your turn will come!”’ 49
Terror and fear, the drive for self-preservation, corrupted the ghetto’s moral order. The disintegration of moral limits appeared almost daily in the life of the ghetto, with grave consequences for the underground’s ability to recruit. In Warsaw the Germans employed Jewish agents to inform about the location of hideouts, the identity of smugglers and black marketeers, the location of valuables. Shop owners sometimes cooperated with the SS or helped in the roundup of those who had no work permits. The Jewish police extorted bribes. The head of the Jewish police, later assassinated by the Jewish Fighting Organization, tore the badges off policemen who tried to save Jews from deportation. In the words of Lewin:
‘We live in a prison. We have been degraded to the level of homeless and uncared-for animals. When we look at the swollen, half-naked bodies of Jews lying in the streets, we feel as if we found ourselves at some sub-human level. The half-dead skeletal faces of Jews, especially those of dying little children, frighten us and recall pictures of India or of the isolation-colonies for lepers which we used to see in films. Reality surpasses any fantasy.’ 50
Lewin notes the pervading madness, an insanity that threatens to engulf all life: ‘The burden on our souls and on our thoughts has become so heavy, oppressive, that it is almost unbearable. I am keenly aware that if our nightmare does not end soon, then many of us, the more sensitive and empathetic natures, will break down.’ 51
Given this debilitated universe, what hope could the under grounds or partisans expect from the Jewish ghettos? After the deportations of summer and fall 1942, the Warsaw ghetto had the air of a ghost town, and its
During an action in Kovno, in which they entered the ghetto in buses with white-washed windows, full of soldiers, the Germans played nursery rhymes and offered candy to lure youngsters out of their hiding places. Rabbi Oshry recalls:
‘Mothers who grabbed hold of the bus were driven off by bay onets. Dogs tore at the women’s clothing and flesh. One mother, who held on to a bus firmly and refused to be frightened off, was shot through the heart. Her wailing child witnessed his mother’s murder. Every bus had the radio inside turned up loud in order to drown out the children’s screams. Full buses were driven off, and empty ones replaced them to take on new loads. A number of buses pulled up in front of the ghetto hospital and took away the children there.’
The next morning the Germans returned with bloodhounds and pickaxes to search for children who had been missed during the first action. ‘Soon they were smashing walls and cracking floors.’ The Germans threw grenades inside anything that resembled a hiding place. The Kinderaktion was a commonplace of German policy; ‘wild screeching and cries could be heard. And wild laughter, too; a mother had gone insane.’ 48 Children had been hidden in cellars, closets, pits, in baskets and bags, pillowcases. ‘One of the mothers begged the killers, “Take me along too, I want to go with my child!” The murderers roughly pushed her away and remarked sadistically, “Your turn will come!”’ 49
Terror and fear, the drive for self-preservation, corrupted the ghetto’s moral order. The disintegration of moral limits appeared almost daily in the life of the ghetto, with grave consequences for the underground’s ability to recruit. In Warsaw the Germans employed Jewish agents to inform about the location of hideouts, the identity of smugglers and black marketeers, the location of valuables. Shop owners sometimes cooperated with the SS or helped in the roundup of those who had no work permits. The Jewish police extorted bribes. The head of the Jewish police, later assassinated by the Jewish Fighting Organization, tore the badges off policemen who tried to save Jews from deportation. In the words of Lewin:
‘We live in a prison. We have been degraded to the level of homeless and uncared-for animals. When we look at the swollen, half-naked bodies of Jews lying in the streets, we feel as if we found ourselves at some sub-human level. The half-dead skeletal faces of Jews, especially those of dying little children, frighten us and recall pictures of India or of the isolation-colonies for lepers which we used to see in films. Reality surpasses any fantasy.’ 50
Lewin notes the pervading madness, an insanity that threatens to engulf all life: ‘The burden on our souls and on our thoughts has become so heavy, oppressive, that it is almost unbearable. I am keenly aware that if our nightmare does not end soon, then many of us, the more sensitive and empathetic natures, will break down.’ 51
Given this debilitated universe, what hope could the under grounds or partisans expect from the Jewish ghettos? After the deportations of summer and fall 1942, the Warsaw ghetto had the air of a ghost town, and its
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