Resistance (20 page)

A
JEWISH UNDERGROUND
was established in Warsaw at the very onset of the occupation and was active until the end of the Jewish community's existence in the city. The existence of such an underground was unknown to the Poles, at least at the beginning. In his book
He Who Saves His Life,
Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki dealt with Polish assistance to the Jews during World War II. He wrote:

 

During the early years of the occupation, no official link existed between the Polish underground and the Jews, because the Jews at that time had still not evolved an underground organization of their own and the Polish underground authorities had to contact Jews unofficially.

 

The fact that the Polish underground, which supposedly represented all Polish citizens, did not include Jewish representatives or establish contact with the Jewish underground is further evidence of the estrangement between the Poles and the Jews.

Youth movements and political parties struggled to define their roles during the Nazi occupation. One activist group argued that political activity should be abandoned in order to work for social welfare and mutual assistance for party members and the Jewish community. Others claimed that a political party should confine itself to political action and leave social welfare to experienced groups. Eventually, a consensus was reached that the parties must include both political activities and social services.

Given ghetto conditions, parties could not advance their political aims as in the past, but they continued to provide information and political interpretation of unfolding events for their members. Such issues as the Ribbentrop-Molotov nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany in 1939, which divided Poland into German and Soviet sectors, and the plot that led to the fourth division of Poland, fomented sharp dissension among the parties and their subgroups.

Political parties were engaged in public activities, and they sought to attract many members. Underground work was by its very nature limited to small cadres. While groups still gathered to sing hymns and renew their faith on days dedicated to the memory of certain leaders, national holidays, and celebrations marking past political events, such occasions were more ceremonies of comradeship than political events.

Party meetings were generally held in soup kitchens, which concretely symbolized the link between politics and the reality of daily assistance represented by the kitchens. The parries lacked the opportunity for large public demonstrations, so their activities were only a shadow of their former presence. Fear and anxiety over Hitler's regime also caused many ghetto inhabitants to abandon political action.

Of all underground parties, the socialist Bund displayed the greatest vitality, both in its organization and in its activities. As the only party to maintain contact with a faction of the Polish socialist movement—and thus a part of the Polish underground—the Bund succeeded in 1941 in passing through Polish underground channels news of the mass murders of Polish Jews to representatives in London.

Among the Zionist parties, the Po'alei Zion, which had not had much influence in the period between the wars, displayed an ability to unite the rank and file and preserve friendships. Other Zionist parties invested a great deal of effort in creating contacts with countries outside Poland, and especially with the Jewish Agency, the World Jewish Congress, and the Hehalutz movement, all of which were able to continue their work thanks to dedicated activists in neutral Switzerland.

A modest stream of food packages and money from Switzerland, Portugal, and other points managed to reach the ghetto prior to the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in 1941. The packages from neutral European countries were an important source of help—and encouragement—for starving Jews. Such items as coffee, cocoa, or tins of meat were rare and in great demand within a smaller group in the ghetto and, thus, could be used to barter for large quantities of basic foods. The packages, however, were usually addressed to the same people; therefore only a small number of individuals could enjoy this nourishment, and they were not necessarily most in need of help.

Youth movements flourished alongside the political parties as a kind of preparation for adult activism. Some organizations, primarily the Zionist youth movements, promoted emigration to Palestine and helped prepare young people for life in kibbutzim and other communal groups. The younger generation adapted more easily to the underground than did the political parties. Enthusiastic, daring, and rebellious, these young people were not weighed down by responsibility for families or children. As in the past, they constituted an intimate and united group.

Between the two world wars, such youth organizations as Dror, Hashomer Hatzaír, Gordonia, and Akiva prepared for life in Palestine. Some organizations forbade their members to participate in "current affairs" in the Diaspora, preferring them to concentrate their efforts exclusively on the aim of
aliyah
(emigration to Palestine) and the life there. They did not want their members to get involved in Jewish life in Poland for fear that they would be reluctant to leave. Still, the process of emigration was slow. Entry into Palestine was restricted because of Britain's policy of limiting Jewish immigration. With the onset of war and the indefinite postponement of emigration possibilities, Zionist youth adapted to the new reality. They began training Jewish young people for the physical and spiritual difficulties that loomed.

Another difference between the parties and the youth movements was, in the long run, very significant. With the German occupation, leading figures of the political parties fled Poland and Polish territory, and were replaced by a secondary tier of leadership whose inexperience or limited abilities made them unable to decide on a course of action at the critical moment. The absence of well-known leaders deepened the divisions between the Poles and the Jews, and without a doubt weakened the Jewish community in Warsaw.

Leaders of the youth movements who moved east to Soviet-held territories were the oldest of the members, the guides and teachers. There is no way to know what might have happened if the younger members had been left without any leadership. At the beginning of 1940 some twenty outstanding activists from Hashomer Hatzaír and Dror returned from Soviet-occupied territory to the area under German rule in order to rehabilitate and stabilize the movements. One of these returned leaders, Mordecai Anielewicz, became commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization and led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising three years later. Other returned activists included Yitzhak Zuckerman, Zivia Lubetkin, and Joseph Kaplan, who became architects of an important element in the underground of the Warsaw ghetto.

The youth movements created strong bonds of comradeship among their members. Literary and philosophical discussions provided a momentary respite from the stresses of life in the ghetto. Moral and ideological opposition to Nazi racism and evil became their motivating credo.

In an otherwise bitter and angry farewell to life,
A Surplus of Memory,
Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the founders of Kibbutz Lochamei Hagetaot and Beit Lochamei Hagetaot (the House of Ghetto Fighters), a museum of the Holocaust and a memorial to its fighters in Israel, looked back warmly on the ghetto years in the movement:

 

And if I am questioned about the state of our movement—I can say that there was never a movement so lovely as it was before its demise. Even from the human aspect, it flourished later on, when everyone in the ghetto was seeking somewhere to hide and or simply manage, while between ourselves, we awaited orders and initiative. There was a common responsibility, not concern for ourselves ... the possibility that one of us would abandon the other and get along somehow—something that sometimes even happened within families—did not exist within our circles.

 

During the Nazi occupation and the existence of the ghetto, the world of the Jewish youngster obviously became constricted. School, family, home, and the company of adults disappeared or lost their authority. The trust and logic of the adult world was undermined. Fears, frustration, and helplessness affected adults more profoundly than it did the adolescents and placed the head of the family in a humiliating and vulnerable situation. Fathers could not protect their children. Mothers could not feed their young. Hence, the youth movement with its friendly alliances frequently provided important moral and material support. Of necessity and by choice, young people turned to each other.

As a consequence of ghetto conditions, youth movements were kept intact, relationships were nurtured. Matters that were not their concern in ordinary times, such as the family's economic situation, became subjects for discussion. Groups functioned in many ways like communes. All members contributed what they had, whether money or food, to a common coffer, and everyone was allotted the minimum needed to survive.

Kitchens in the urban clubs and communes also served the public under the supervision of the Self-Help organization. They were actually run by women living in the movement's hostels. The hostels of Dror in Dzielna Street and Hashomer Hatzaír in Nalewki Street "were open to any hungry person." While youth members did die from starvation or illness, such deaths were relatively rare given the hunger and typhoid rampant in the ghetto.

Amid the tumult of life focused on daily needs, the movements continued to pursue literature and culture, as well as ideological and political thought. Hidden behind a wall in one youth hostel in a bare room furnished with simple tables and benches were shelves of books in various languages, including hundreds of volumes of belles-lettres and theoretical works, among them the forbidden literature of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, as well as the writings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Herzl, Ben Borochov, Max Nordau, and others.

In the twilight hours, the dining tables would be moved, the benches arranged to form a square, and the room turned into a forum for discussions on fascism, capitalism, the Soviet Union, or questions of evil and human nature. Members spoke of antisemitism and racism, of a world that had lost its sense of direction. They returned again and again to the problem of educating young people as to the reality of the ghetto: Should those once considered too young to be included in the movement now be accepted? Would it be possible to impart to these young people the spiritual dedication that had been characteristic of the movement?

Despite the horrors of the ghetto, the force of youth could not be contained: teenagers concealed their first poetic expressions of love, and young girls wrote their intimate secrets in diaries. In the hostels one heard the hushed singing of beloved tunes and words calling for daring action, hours of merrymaking, laughter, and boisterousness.

In one underground publication, a young girl described her peers walking merrily arm-in-arm in a ghetto street, only to be severely criticized by an older person who asks whether they are not ashamed to be cheerful and full of laughter in the ghetto. The girl pondered the question and wondered whether it was permissible for youngsters to experience the rustles of spring and express their natural joy amid the darkness and mourning veiling the ghetto.

Young people tried to evade or oppose edicts imposed by the Nazis. For instance, when Jews were asked to doff their hats before a German in uniform, Mordecai Anielewicz decided to go bare-headed in the freezing cold of winter. Even though their bodies were enfeebled by lack of food and acutely sensitive to cold, many imitated Mordecai's hatlessness and manner of dress, which became emblematic of the movement.

In the world of the underground, the Zionist and Bund youth movements differed from the structure of pre-war organizations. Two channels of activity granted young people positions of power. The first was their work on a comprehensive national level. The political movements in Warsaw maintained connections with countries abroad but almost entirely neglected the network of contacts with Jewish communities and organizations throughout the occupied area. In effect, they acquiesced to the Nazi ruling that divided the Jewish public into separate communities and denied the sealed ghettos a common leadership.

The youth movements, however, adopted a countrywide scope. Conferences and seminars were held in the Warsaw ghetto with representatives from the provinces who arrived in secret to participate in discussions, plans, and the lines of actions. Messengers, particularly female messengers, or "runners" (
mekashroth
), set out from Warsaw, regularly visiting towns and villages of the General Government and districts occupied by the German Reich. These young women carried false identity papers, an act that endangered their lives. They traveled the railways and crossed borders without permission, acts that were dangerous for ordinary Poles and fatal to Jews if they were caught. Ringelblum described them as "girl-heroines" who undertook dangerous missions under the threat of death. As a result, they were better informed than their adult counterparts and could piece together fragments of information into a more cohesive picture.

Mordecai Tennenbaum-Tamarof, commander of the Jewish fighting organization in Bialystok, described, in a final letter that he left for his sister in Palestine in July 1943, the conduct of his girlfriend, Tama Schneiderman, who was caught and disappeared during one of her missions:

 

After contact between Warsaw and the movement was severed ... it was again renewed and remained intact without interruptions since then. She crossed the border into Ostland—formerly Lithuania—a number of times, into White Russia, and into the Reich in Bendzin, to the Ukraine (Kowel and Luck), the district of Bialystok (more than a dozen times!). She was familiar with every ghetto in Poland (wall and barbed wire), every Judenrat. She was the real center of the Joint, of all the Zionist and public federations. She absorbed all the scenes of tragedy, sorrow, and suffering. Whenever she came our way, on every occasion, she would bring with her enough material for our publications [the underground press] to last for months and for our archives as well. She was a living encyclopedia of the catastrophe and martyrdom of the Jews of Poland. Wherever there was an "action" [expulsion of the Jews to the death camps], she had to be there at once. Whenever someone was caught in the camps—they had to be rescued! At the station, when a railway carriage is being suspiciously prepared, it was necessary to find out why, and where it was headed, and warn others to be careful. A fire in a village—money was needed there. Seek out partisans in the forest. Buy arms. Everything.