Resistance (40 page)

a really grotesque situation had arisen in Warsaw ... notably hard battles between our police, including also parts of the army, and the rebelling Jews. Indeed, the Jews had managed to fortify the ghetto in order to defend it ... it has even reached the point where the Jewish senior command issues daily military bulletins [referring to the reports and proclamations published during the uprising by the ZOB representatives on the Aryan side]...This emphasizes only too well what one can expect from these Jews when they have weapons in their hands. Unfortunately they also have good German weapons and particularly machine guns. Only God knows how they obtained them.

 

On May 7, Goebbels noted in his diary that the situation in the General Government had deteriorated to such an extent that "there is no point in keeping Dr. Frank on." He wrote that the Uprising was the straw that broke the camel's back and questioned the status of the governor. So, while Frank was trying to shift responsibility for events in the ghetto to Himmler, Goebbels was attempting to place the blame on Frank.

The governor of the Warsaw district, Dr. Ludwig Fischer, worried particularly about the Polish reaction. On May 13, Fischer published a declaration, addressed to the Polish population of Warsaw:

 

Lately there have been a series of murderous attacks in the city of Warsaw. The same force stands behind these attacks as those who hope one day to bring to this country the bloody rule of Bolsheviks. Everyone's task now is to frustrate the provocation of the Communist and Jewish agents. Every Jew and Bolshevik who is still alive and free is the most dangerous enemy of the population ... Whoever informs the authorities where such a Jewish or Communist agent moves about freely, is thereby fulfilling his obvious duty to himself and to his neighbor.

 

In an internal report of events in the Warsaw district in April and May 1943, Fischer wrote, "In Warsaw, 126 attacks were carried out in April, while in May, there were 163 attacks in which many Germans were killed." The report stated:

 

During the annihilation of the ghetto, more than 1000 buildings were destroyed. Thus the possibility of erecting industrial enterprises here has gone forever together with the storing of materials in the area. To a marked extent, Warsaw's ability to absorb industrial enterprises is limited by the Reich with increasing insistence. Despite the battles in the ghetto which continued for many weeks, economic life in Warsaw has gone on undisturbed. There was no sabotage at work places because the Polish workers and employees have displayed admirable discipline.

 

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising resolved one of the persistent questions raised by the Holocaust: Was the annihilation of the Jews made possible by the passivity of its victims? The Germans accomplished their goals all too easily. Serious challenges in other ghettos, towns, and villages, or even in the Warsaw ghetto when it was the home of more than 350,000 Jews, might have forced them to act with fateful results. Yet, faced with an organized armed opposition, German authorities did not cancel their plans for the complete evacuation of the ghetto. Instead, their rage intensified and their savagery grew. The Uprising confirmed that Nazi ideology and definitive plans for the destruction of the J^ws fueled the "final solution," not Jewish passivity.

The Uprising in Warsaw undoubtedly influenced German authorities but it did not reverse their attitude toward the Jews and the process of extinction. The lesson learned by the Germans was to anticipate the possibility of armed opposition by Jews.

Among the pragmatists in the General Government and army officers, the destruction of the ghetto was frequently associated with the loss of a sizable Jewish work force that they had previously had at their disposal. At a conference attended by many General Government officials in Cracow on May 31, 1943, at which SS Obergruppenführer Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was a guest, the expulsion and struggle in the ghetto came up for discussion during a session on security. It was said that many Jews fled to the forests during the expulsion and joined the partisans. SS General Krüger claimed that the "ethnic purification" had undoubtedly helped calm the situation. It was one of the most difficult and unpleasant tasks for the police forces.

 

The Führer's instruction had to be carried out and the matter was essential to Europe's well-being ... In the factories, the Jews employed there, called Maccabees [this usage does not appear anywhere else, as far as we know], were in a better state and were excellent workers; in addition to which there were also women who proved to be physically stronger than the men. Incidentally, the same experience was encountered during the evacuation of the Warsaw ghetto. This task was indeed more difficult. The losses in the police force reached 15 dead and 88 wounded. Armed Jewish women were also fighting against men of the SS and the police.

Continuing our preoccupation with the purging of Jews appears to be undesirable. For some time now, the foreign press and propaganda abroad has been making much of this issue. Unrelated to this, we should try to catch the Jews who evaded the expulsion and who now wander about everywhere in disguise. As one can see from security police reports, the Jews in Warsaw continue to carry out attacks and murder.

 

Some news of the Uprising spread despite the wall of silence erected by the Germans. The story of the rebellion in Warsaw and the heroic people who led it became legendary. As the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising moved from history to legend, it took its place alongside the stories of Leonidas and his army who refused to retreat at the siege of Thermopylae. In Jewish legend the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising often recalled Eleazar ben Yair and the men and women at Masada who fought the Romans on the heights in the year 73
C.E
. They refused to surrender. "Only a free life is worth living" is how Josephus retells the final speech of the Zealot leader.

In Warsaw, the few had stood against the many, the pure of heart against the wicked power. They were armed by their courage. They were emboldened because they had no choice. And if victory eluded them, honor and dignity did not. One thousand years of Jewish history had come to an end in Poland not with a whimper or with the cries of cowering masses, but with the courageous acts of young fighters who stood to defend their honor—who resisted despite the overwhelming power of the foe.

Rumors and half-truths about the Uprising reached survivors in other Polish ghettos, in work camps, and in concentration camps throughout the occupied areas, as well as the fronts in Eastern and Western Europe, the Jewish population in Palestine, and the free world. Many identified with the fight in the ghetto and were moved to join in the struggle. At Treblinka, where the Jews of Warsaw had been murdered by the hundreds of thousands, planning for the uprising began only after news of Warsaw's last stand penetrated the death camp. The underground began to acquire weapons and plan a strategy for taking over the camp. The Uprising reverberated even in Treblinka.

The image of the Jew as a submissive, passive, pious man was transformed into that of the young warrior. The transformation of the image of the Jew continued in the emergent State of Israel. Some Israeli leaders looked back on the Holocaust with fear and sometimes with shame. The only usable past, the only history of that period that they adopted for the image of the future was the heroic chapter of resistance. Thus, eventually, the law for Yom Hashoah, Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day, was called Yom Hashoah V'hagevurah, Holocaust and Resistance Day, as if the two were synonymous, equivalent.

Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the notable leader of Polish Jewry between the wars and of the Jewish community in the early days of the state, also criticized the Diaspora Jews for failing to behave with dignity and not knowing how to defend themselves. Moreover, Gruenbaum, who headed the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency, which was formed to rally help for Jews in the occupied countries, claimed that their lack of opposition cost the Jews the support of the rest of the world. In July 1943, in an article entitled "From Destruction to Destruction," Gruenbaum said:

 

It is said that the martyrdom of the first Christians who were tortured by the Romans and thrown to the beasts in their circuses, was what brought the emptied hearts of the intelligentsia and the masses nearer to Christianity ... while the torture and martyrdom of generations of Jews in the Diaspora and its influence on the spirituality and hearts of the Christian nations was less than nil ... Does the self-defense, the effort to sell their lives dearly, to stand up for the people's honor—isolated and tortured—does all this not merit the sympathy of the world? We have not yet been tried in this manner, we have not yet trod the path of heroism, except during the last days of Warsaw, in the last hours of the surviving remnant in the Polish ghettos. And now our hearts are beginning to beat on hearing of the splendid heroism and the terrible depression is beginning to vanish.

For two thousand years, we have lived on the legend of the war against the Romans ... and now again a wondrous and glorious legend is being enacted which sheds a glowing light on the Diaspora in Poland, on its great day, and ours.

 

David Ben Gurion said in mid-February 1943, on the day when Palestinian Jews honored the defenders of Tel Hai, the Jewish settlement in the Galilee that fought to the last man rather than surrender:

 

However, for this tortured exile as well, the death of the defenders of Tel Hai was not in vain. Six days ago news reached us that our comrades in Warsaw—the tiny remnant of Jews still there, decided to fight for their lives and organized small groups to rise up and defend themselves. They could not obtain weapons from the Polish underground, and only a few had them, but they still decided to fight, and yesterday the first report reached us that the Jews of Warsaw have rebelled [referring to the opposition in the ghetto in January 1943] and dozens of the Nazi hangmen have been killed by our comrades. Although hundreds and perhaps thousands—who knows how many—paid for it with their lives, they have learned the new lesson of death which the defenders of Tel Hai and Sedgera have bequeathed to us—the heroic death.

 

The Uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, the rebellion of other ghettos, and the role of the Jewish partisan movement erased the stereotype of the passive Jews of the Diaspora. The stereotype was widely held and false. It no longer reflected the attitude of modern society in Europe on the eve of the Holocaust.

Though we expect an innocent man who is attacked by a mob to fight in his own defense, the extreme violence of the twentieth century has shown such expectations to be naive. Within totalitarian regimes, human society abandoned the principles and values of Judeo-Christian civilization, triggering a moral breakdown that undoubtedly influenced both the murderer and his victim. The victims of extreme Nazi violence and murder—prisoners in concentration camps, prisoners of war, and forced laborers—the people with the greatest motivation to rebel, did not generally resist or fight. The same phenomenon occurred under the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. During both regimes, the passivity of even veteran revolutionaries, daring activists of the underground, and experienced fighters shows that human beings are able and ready to resist and revolt when their struggle and death has some chance or could influence many others. Under circumstances established by totalitarian regimes, abandoned and without any hope or chance, victims as a rule did not resist or rebel.

Thus, the Uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was a rare exception. It demonstrates the depths to which humanity can sink and the heights to which it can soar.

On May
6,
1944, a year after the struggle and destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, the following appeared in a publication of the Polish underground:

 

On April 19, 1944, the British Broadcasting Company's World Service broadcast to Europe a special program in a number of languages in commemoration of a year from the day of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. This memorial day was marked throughout the world. It significance in our country is stressed by the fact that the Polish National Council in London included the fighting of the Jews of Poland as part of Poland's struggle for freedom and independence and the high command of the Polish armed forces have bestowed the military cross (Virtuti Militari) on the late commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

 

A biography of Mordecai Anielewicz, which was published in Israel, ends with these words:

 

The war ended in May 1945. Millions of people returned from every part of Germany, from the countries in which they had been held as prisoners, from the camps and the fronts. In the Red Square in Moscow, the joy mounted and lessened the sorrow of the victims. The flags of victory were borne on high and the abominable flags of the Nazis were thrown to the ground. London, Paris, and Amsterdam celebrated. On the lanes and highways, on every possible roadway, there was an endless stream of people. An army of returners. Homeward, to their homeland, city, and their people awaiting them with trembling and joy. The bells of liberation rang out. The Jews are also on the move. They come from the Aryan side, from the city, the camps. Shamed and awkward shreds of existence, strangers to themselves and their city ... those who came to Warsaw did not find a city or a house, or a relative. They climbed onto the heaps of ruins. Nothing was recognizable. One could not tell where a certain street had been or where a house had stood. However, they discovered the spot, the hole where the house on Mila 18 had stood. They took a great black stone, a mass of dull rock, and placed it there. In simple lettering, in three languages, the following was etched on the stone:
Here on the 8th day of May 1943, Mordecai Anielewicz, the commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising together with the staff of the Jewish Fighting Organization and dozens of fighters, fell in the campaign against the Nazi enemy.