Resistance (17 page)

The
Einsatzgruppen
consisted of elements of various police forces that had been employed during the annexation of Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in March 1939, as welt as in the attack on Poland. Their role was to "purify" the area politically and to pinpoint potential and active opposition in the occupied territory. In 1939 the
Einsatzgruppen
had been under the authority of the army, which attempted to restrain its operations. By the time of the anti-Soviet campaign in 1941 however, the
Einsatzgruppen
were placed under the SS, and were thus independent of the army. Nevertheless, the army provided the
Einsatzgruppen
with all necessary services but did not interfere with their methods. The army reportedly took no direct responsibility for the mass killings undertaken by these murderous squads.

According to evidence from unit commanders, the
Einsatzgruppen
received verbal orders to annihilate all Jews in the territories occupied by the army from Reinhard Heydrich and Bruno Streckenbach (formerly commander of the Security Police in the General Government and later a department head in the central security office of the Reich). The written order issued by Heydrich in July 1941 specified that "Jews in the administration of the party and the state" were to be executed.

Within less than two years, by the spring of 1943, the
Einsatzgruppen
had murdered some 1,250,000 Jewish men, women and children. They were murdered in towns and villages, in cities and hamlets, one, by one, by one. In this homicidal campaign, hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union also fell victim to the
Einsatzgruppen,
especially Soviet prisoners of war and officials of the Communist party.

However, if the killing of non-Jews was supposedly punishment meted out for their political and party affiliations, the methodical annihilation of Jews was carried out simply because they were Jews. Four
Einsatzgruppen,
numbering some six hundred to one thousand men, assisted by local forces and police in the Ukraine and the Baltic states, helped assemble Jews for their mass murder. The executions took place alongside pits in the ground. Families were ordered to remove their clothing, then were shot, falling or being thrown into the pit awaiting them.

Among the commanders of the
Eirtsatzgruppen
were well-educated men, including Otto Ohlendorf, who had finished his studies in law and economy and had begun a promising academic career. The mobile killing squad he commanded consisted of "ordinary men," a cross section of the German population. After the war, Ohlendorf was sentenced to death by the American court of justice that tried the
Einsatzgruppen.
He was convicted of the murder of some ninety thousand individuals, the majority of whom were Jews. In testimony before the international tribunal in the trial of the major war criminals in Nuremberg, Ohlendorf admitted that the instructions given him and his colleagues in the
Einsatzgruppen
stated that they were to "wipe out" all the Jews and other unwanted elements. When asked at the trial why it was necessary to kill children as well, he replied that the children would eventually grow up and then become dangerous as avengers of their parents' deaths.

Scholars' opinions differ as to when the order was given for the "final solution," who gave the order, and
whether
such an all-encompassing command had actually been issued. It is clear that the most senior leaders of the Nazi state and party were responsible for the employment of the killing units of the
Einsatzgruppen.
Hitler himself laid down their hierarchical responsibilities and received copies of their unit commanders' reports. The killing process began in the summer of 1941. Within six months, the Wannsee Conference took place in Berlin, and the "final solution of the Jewish problem," the murder of all Jews, became a coordinated plan operational on a European scale. Within less than a year, six killing centers complete with their gas chambers were in place and the deportations from the ghettos of Poland to the death camps had begun. One must view the first stage of the destruction of the Jews of Europe by the
Einsatzgruppen
as the transition from the system of terror, persecution, and severe oppression that preceded it to the indiscriminate all-inclusive murder from which only those who were needed for work in the concentration camps were exempted. The killing process was soon further refined by a natural evolution from mobile killing units, in which the killers were sent after the victims, to death camps, in which the victim was sent to the killer.

While full-scale systematic murder was proceeding in the Soviet Union, the unrestrained repression in Poland was taking a far more limited toll. The number of Jewish victims did not reach more than 6–8 percent until the spring of 1942, when the death camps became operational.

The city of Vilna was one of the places to suffer most from the
Einsatzgruppen.
Part of interwar Poland, Vilna was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, together with Lithuania. Today, it is the capital of the independent state of Lithuania. When the Germans conquered Vilna on June 24, 1941, they found some fifty-seven thousand Jews living in the city, composing a third of the local population. Six months later, only twenty thousand Jews survived; the remainder had been murdered, most in the woods of Ponar, some twelve kilometers from Vilna.

Information concerning the executions seeped into the sealed ghetto of Vilna when a few wounded survivors managed to escape and return to the ghetto. In a feverish discussion, members of the youth movement debated the need for an immediate reaction to the situation. Activists of Hashomer Hatzaír found temporary refuge in a Dominican nunnery in Vilna where they evaluated what could be done. On New Year's Eve, 1941, considered a safe time for holding such an assembly, a group of people from the youth movement gathered to hear a proclamation written by Abba Kovner, who later became a partisan fighter and then a well-known poet in Israel. Kovner wrote:

 

Jewish youth, do not believe those that are trying to deceive you.... Before our eyes they took away our parents, our brothers and sisters. Where are the hundreds of men who were conscripted for labor? Where are the naked women and the children who were taken away from us on that dreadful night? Where are the Jews who were deported on Yom Kippur?

And where are our own brethren from other ghettos?

Of those taken through the gates of the ghetto not a single one has returned. All the Gestapo roads lead to Ponar, and Ponar means death.

Ponar is not a concentration camp. They have all been shot there. Hitler plans to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and the Jews of Lithuania have been chosen as the first in line.

We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter. True, we are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murderer is revolt!

Brothers! it is better to die fighting like free men than to live at the mercy of the murderers. Arise! Arise with your last breath!

 

There were several striking parallels between what happened in Vilna and what was to happen in Warsaw. The call to arms in Vilna came after three-quarters of the city's pre-war Jewish population had been deported and murdered in Ponar. The call for armed resistance was made on January 1, 1941. It went unheeded until the ghetto was on the verge of extinction. Vilna was typical in that armed resistance gained mass support only when people understood that the Nazis planned to kill all Jews and that there was no way out of the ghetto: Ponar, where all the Gestapo roads led, was more than a metaphor for death.

But the decision to fight did not come easily to most ghetto inhabitants. Resistance meant rejecting the traditional authority of the leaders of the Jewish community: Kovner and other young fighters challenged the Judenrat when they urged that "it is better to die fighting like free men than to live at the mercy of the murderers."

Kovner was directly critical of the older generations who had submitted without a struggle: "We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter." Those who fought were clear eyed. Resistance was, at its essence, a choice between forms of death. Whatever Jews did, they would be killed. But one could die with honor by choosing "to defend oneself to the last breath."

Vilna was the first call to armed resistance by Jews in the occupied territories. While there had been proponents of resistance to the Nazis and their aspirations of territorial domination, this was the first Jewish call that acknowledged the impossibility of overcoming the Nazis or even contributing to their downfall, but demanded that Jews join a struggle to the death.

It was not surprising that this entreaty came from Vilna, one of the first sites of mass murder. What was surprising was the declaration's assertion at the end of 1941 before the killing centers were in place that the tragedy in Vilna was not a local wartime phenomenon but the first step in a comprehensive campaign to murder all the Jews of Europe. In this dreadfully precise forecast, Kovner and his friends had decoded the German plan. They understood the full implications of what was happening. With no obvious source of information, one can only assume that this knowledge was intuitive.

It was not happenstance that this public call to a final confrontation should come from the youth movements. The idea of resistance was adopted by the youth of Vilna representing different political persuasions. In January 1942 a Jewish resistance organization was established—the first of its kind in Nazi-occupied Europe—called the United Partisan Organization, commonly known as the FPO. Within a short time, Communists, Bundists, and Zionists of various factions of the left and the right, such as Betar, the Zionist Youth, and Hashomer Hatzaír, all worked within the FPO. The willingness of many divergent organizations to work together indicated their awareness of the common danger.

Accord was not universal, however, and in various places, including Warsaw, rival organizations were set up. Differences of opinion in Vilna, though, had little to do with politics or ideology but related to where and how fighting would take place. Members of the Dror movement, headed by Mordecai Tennenbaum-Tamarof, a colorful, energetic, audacious young man, did not support the fighting organization in Vilna and moved to Bialystok. Tennenbaum's motivation is unknown. He may have considered Bialystok safer after the first murderous two weeks of German occupation, or he may have viewed Bialystok as more suitable for building the organization to meet the challenge to come. At any rate, Tennenbaum emerged as a leader of the struggle and commander of the Jewish fighting organization in Bialystok. He fell during the campaign of August 1943.

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was a double blow to those Polish Jews who fled east to Soviet territory from Warsaw and other cities in central Poland. In cities such as Vilna, Kovno, and Bialystok Jews who had once escaped Nazi rule in 1939 were again under German domination. Yet the absence of a border permitted many to try to unite with their families and friends on the other side. As Jews were forbidden to move, others, especially the Poles, offered to help reunite families, or at least to do so for payment. There were also Poles who had different motivations.

In Warsaw before the war, a strong friendship had been formed between groups of Catholics and the Zionist-pioneering youth movement, Hashomer Hatzaír, based partly on the emphasis they both placed on the tradition of scouting. There were, however, basic differences between these two bodies. Polish Catholic scouts were very religious, the Jews were secular, radical socialist Zionists. Though some Catholic scouts were also liberal in their outlook, the dominant religious inclination led many toward a conservative non-Communist and nonsocialist position, while many of the Jewish youth movements were socialist. Still, the Catholic scouts who remained close to the Jewish youth movement were impressed by the strong comradeship that existed in the Jewish movement, by their free and frank expression in conversations and discussion, and in their songfests, hikes, and evening gatherings, even as their youthful joie de vivre was tempered by their unknown future.

The life of one young Catholic scout, Irena Adamowicz, was transformed by Jews. Throughout the existence of the ghetto, Adamowicz was a runner for the Jewish underground. She met with groups from Hashomer Hatzaír in the provinces and the sealed ghettos to pass on instructions and material. At these meetings, she also described to eager listeners the actions, decisions, and intelligence she picked up in her travels. She clearly felt a close affinity for the Jews and the underground. During the course of the war, Adamowicz widened her contacts with Jewish groups in thé ghetto.

Another Catholic scout who remained loyal to his Jewish friends was Alexander Kaminski, a prominent figure in the Polish underground during the war and editor of the
Biuletyn Informacyjny
(Bulletin of Information), the central publication in occupied Poland of the AK, the military arm of the Polish government-in-exile. Under Kaminski's influence, the paper extensively covered the distress and fate of the Jews. On a number of occasions, Kaminski interceded with the Polish underground on behalf of the Jews. Later, he established ongoing contact between representatives of the Jewish Fighting Organization on the Polish side of Warsaw and the command of the AK.

Among the Catholic scouts who were friends of the Jews was a German youth who enlisted as a doctor in the German army during the war. This career move did not affect his warm relationship with both Poles and Jews. According to Ringelblum, Mordecai Anielewicz, who was later to lead the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, reported that this German doctor used the army mailbag to pass greetings to the underground groups of Hashomer Hatzaír in Warsaw. When on leave, he would slip into the ghetto of Warsaw and spend days and nights in the company of his Jewish friends of the youth movement. Hashomer Hatzaír youth found refuge at the nunnery in Vilna due to intervention by Polish Catholic scouts, which Ringelblum considered a rare example of a Polish organization consistently helping a Jewish organization.