Armageddon: Twenty Years After The Warsaw Uprising
Donat, Alexander
To Dr. Isaac Schipper, the Polish-Jewish historian who was my closest neighbor in the potato-peeling brigade at the Maidanek concentration camp, I owe an insight which has haunted me ever...
...Heroism carried one step too far can be irresponsibility...
...Anticipatory compliance" with the murderers' orders was the only weapon in the Jewish arsenal...
...The heroism of the handful of Warsaw youths shook the imagination of our generation, though we have become blase toward acts of daring...
...The man with the gun was very anxious to make the Nazis pay dearly for our lives...
...Just consider the quantities involved: one, ten, fifty...
...Such a spectacle could only come about as the result of the shameful American-Soviet race for the favors of their yesterday's enemy...
...Resettlements and relocations of one kind or another had been commonplace since the beginning of the war, and no one for a moment imagined that this one would be different...
...What was done...
...the moral aspects are my concern...
...These experts said that not only did the Jews not defend themselves but that by their attitude, due to a centuries-long tradition of passivity and servility, "they went like sheep to the slaughter...
...Let's bury the past...
...The small Nazis carried out the orders of the bigger ones, and the bigger ones the orders of the Fuhrer himself...
...Bettelheim is fully aware that "One could easily arrive at erroneous opinions if findings made in the psychoanalytic setting were applied outside the context of that particular environment...
...There was a handful of noble Poles, of course, but nobody listened to them...
...Not because we "did not believe in business as usual" and they did...
...they could not believe the news about mass killings, mass robbery and brutal oppression...
...But that heroism at the same time concealed the much more profound and shattering sacrifice of 50,000 defenseless men, women and children, who in a magnificent gesture of unarmed resistance defeated the Nazi bestial violence...
...From paper protests, of course, they never shirked...
...Jews but as nationals, but in addition they fought as a branded community pushed to a uniquely "extreme situation...
...In the climax of our history martyrdom reached its most sublime expression, and in the unprecedented revolutionary tension there appeared a heroism that was the turning point of Jewish history and created a new type of Jew...
...The shame and horror of our century have to do with the conduct of the European powers, the Gentile world...
...And, on the other side of the spectrum: how long can responsibility (individual and collective) be stretched before it becomes courage, and at what point does an idea greater than fear transform courage into heroism...
...The reasons and excuses for this passivity can all be reduced to two: genuine indifference, and fear lest the Western powers be suspected of waging a "Jewish war...
...He does not even realize the moral degradation unavoidably involved in such "heroism...
...but how many Shmul Zygelboims were there, and how many were aroused by his act among the millions of Jews spared by the conflagration...
...I am by no means sure about the conduct under such circumstances of the majority of Americans nor of the reaction of our vociferous "heroes," had they had the misfortune to belong to that doomed minority...
...A few basic facts, and I commend them particularly to Trevor-Roper, Hilberg, Bettelheim and all the other retrospective heroes: at the start of the big "Resettlement" action in Warsaw (July 22, 1942) a clandestine meeting of representatives of all organizations active in the Ghetto (except the Revisionists) was urgently summoned...
...Is Bettelheim naive enough to suppose that by serving the SS these Hungarian Jews didn't become participants in and accessories to the crimes of the SS...
...And to those of us who cannot so swiftly change our hearts a bitter reproach is thrown: "We read memoirs, you still live them...
...Trevor-Roper...
...Bettelheim has written about "extreme situations," but he does not know—and perhaps no one can who did not live through it—what an extreme situation really is...
...Bettelheim and Hilberg, our resistance began with one revolver...
...The late Dr...
...Stalin didn't even try to resist...
...Let the Germans do this dirty job for us.') And there were far too many cases of willing, active, enthusiastic Polish assistance to the Nazi murderers...
...But the temptation to do just that is too strong for him, and so he commits this gross error...
...the German people were not present, they "didn't know...
...New York, 1957...
...There is a sense in which nothing anyone writes or does can redeem the tragedy of our century...
...tation: "The European Jewry left the historical stage without dignity," declared Itzhak Greenbaum, one of the leaders of Polish Jewry in the twenties and early thirties, who emigrated to Palestine before World War II.* There came also to light a purely pragmatic attitude of "nationbuilding realism...
...Item: How can Christianity regain its face...
...From the safety of America, Bettelheim chose to start a war against—Anne Frank...
...Bettelheim's comfort: Our shelter did have an emergency exit...
...In Bialystok and Vilna the Jewish fighters received nothing...
...Torture of Jews not only sowed demoralization among the vanquished nations...
...When will we obtain the fully documented answer: did the Vatican play the part of Pilate, or did it side with the crucified martyrs...
...The murdered millions cannot be restored to life anyway, and sound geopolitical realism suggests that "our sacred scriptures teach that sons cannot be held responsible for their fathers' sins...
...In 1962, from the comfort of Chicago, Bettelheim presumes to award patents of heroism and/or cowardice to Hitler's martyrs...
...Each of the political parties participating in the revolt of the Warsaw ghetto and the Jewish resistance has tried its best to appropriate the biggest slice of posthumous glory: the Zionists, the Bund, the Communists...
...In this campaign desecrating the memory of our martyrs, the lead belongs to a professor of history at the University of Vermont, Dr...
...But, what did they really do...
...True, history did not make us into a trigger-happy nation, but we are by no means exceptions in this respect...
...Lord Moran, who spent three years as army physician in Flanders during World War I, and a year with the RAF in World War II, observes how soldiers' morale cracks under the strain of tension, shock, and monotony in the trenches, and how their resistance to fear is lowered by sickness, fatigue, loss of sleep and other hardships...
...Before such a display of bad faith and outrageous stupidity, language is helpless...
...and when in war it is used up, he is finished...
...it must be doctored, and of doctors there is no lack: the Germans, the Poles, the Vatican, the capitals of the world, and, worst, the Jews themselves...
...Imagine McCarthy with his cohorts determined to physically exterminate and plunder a minority segment of the nation, all "for the glory of America...
...Soapmaking," the cold-blooded machinery to exploit all the advantages of the murder—financial, economic, political, propagandistic— was by no means a by-product of the extermination of the Jews, but a basic ingredient of this action...
...Mr...
...the war, told me more than once, with tears in his eyes, how it really looked—and inside Poland it was even worse...
...They were utterly unmoved in our hour of need...
...Bettelheim also disapproves of "the Franks' selection [!] of a hiding place that was basically a trap without an outlet...
...Let us remember too the anything but heroic performance of the American people, including the intellectuals, in the McCarthy era...
...What did the free Jews in America and Europe do when the abyss of biological destruction opened in front of one-third of their people, the crux and the reservoir of their national existence...
...What moral right of protest had this very same Warsaw less than a year and a half later when it begged for help from the Red Army across the river, obtaining in answer a similarly "political" silence...
...much toil and suffering, but no glamor...
...According to Raul Hilberg,** about two million Germans were connected with the Nazi genocide organization...
...The SS General Stroop, responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, ordered his troops to set fire to every building in the ghetto...
...As Stalin had told Emil Ludwig in a famous interview, "The Germans were a solid, reliable, sober people who could be trusted...
...Certainly they talked a great deal, and even wept and passed resolutions...
...From all sides obliging pseudo...
...New York, 1947...
...Less and less is it a political, financial, demographic problem...
...In order to alleviate their fate, the leadership of our Underground did everything within the limits of our then very modest means...
...New York, 1955...
...At some point Hitler and the SS would have stopped...
...The others momentarily escaped, only to be captured and killed eventually, one way or another...
...et al, Dialog polsko-zydowski...
...Bettelheim says: "Anne Frank died because her parents could not get themselves to believe in Auschwitz...
...The situation of the Jews was different in every respect...
...they transported them to Katyn by telling them that this was a change from a worse camp to a better one...
...scientists, historians and psychoanalysts started amassing "learned" proofs that the victims were actually co-guilty...
...And these people, mind you, were brought up on the principle that "violence will be met with violence" and "when our hour to die will come—it will be in combat...
...Courage is will-power, whereof no man has an unlimited stock...
...European Jewry was an object and not a subject in this struggle, and as the death sentence came from the outside so too could salvation come only from the outside, through the counter-action of the Great Powers, and the Gentile population...
...Even more appalling are the pseudo-scientific utterances of the Chicago psychologist Bruno Bettelheim...
...Because of his work in the Viennese Social Democratic party, he spent a year in 1938 in Dachau and Buchenwald...
...It makes the East European governments dismally surrender to Hitler's heritage, helpless to cope with the scourge of anti-Semitism...
...G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution of the Jewish Question...
...Other millions profiteered from the loot...
...Even if not one Jew had resisted, there would be no justification either to condemn the victims or to divert attention from the crimes of the murderers...
...He is doling out just enough to disarm the victims morally and to buy Germany's respectability in the eyes of the world...
...New York, 1958...
...And Robert Ley, the leader of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, stated in May 1944: "Anti-Semitism is our second secret weapon...
...About half of the occupants preferred potassium cyanide to surrender...
...The anti-Jewish policy of the Nazis was a worked-out calculation...
...The question of the clergy and its role in our tragedy is a very delicate one, but of extreme importance...
...years the Warsaw Ghetto had been systematically bled: by savage Nazi repression and discrimination, by famine and disease, by the Gestapo, by traitors among us, by the misgovernment of the Judenrat.* The toll of deaths was 100,000 human beings, 25 per cent of its entire population...
...When flames and smoke reached our shelter, the man with the gun ordered its evacuation...
...a mouse in a trap, an animal at bay...
...To begin with, we have to expose the fallacy which equates the Jewish resistance with the general resistance movements in Europe...
...The Vatican and Treblinka, the Vatican and Auschwitz—when will the Vatican archives be opened...
...heroes who now assault the victims of Nazism that after years in the ghetto and camps, after endless "conditioning," after the loss of their dearest ones, a point comes when it no longer matters whether one dies with a piece of iron in his hand—the so-called "hero's death"—or dies passively in a gas chamber...
...With each passing day the tragedy of European Jewry, the greatest crime in the annals of mankind, recedes into the storehouse of history...
...And France in 1940...
...The Vatican's archives are locked, and the true story of the Church's role in our holocaust has not been revealed to the world...
...They could have sold their lives dearly instead of walking to their deaths...
...That it wasn't a matter of choice—we could not advertise in the New York Times—but of grasping whatever we could...
...Konrad Adenauer is perhaps an enlightened representative of the German conscience—or perhaps he is simply smarter...
...Never before has a people gone so unsuspectingly to its disaster...
...was determined, for reasons which were totally irrational, expensive, and contrary to the interests of the state, to liquidate the Jews...
...Will tomorrow's genocide be stopped by the technicality that the next victim will not be Jewish any more but German, Russian, or American...
...A too-resourceful defense of the Jews just "didn't pay," politically and diplomatically.* The sympathies of world Jewry were taken for granted (what alternative did they have...
...But it will never cease to be a moral problem...
...Even Roosevelt and Churchill did not dare to wage an open war on this front...
...And, in purely practical terms and not just for the glorious record, did Poland with her romantic adventurism fare better than Czechoslovakia with her pragmatism...
...Doesn't the man know that hundreds of thousands of Jews perished because they had no place to hide, with or without an outlet...
...Bettelheim freely applies his experiences of the "extreme situations" in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938 to the "extreme situations" in the Warsaw ghetto, Maidanek and Auschwitz in 1943...
...After the initial shock, the truth proved too horrible to live with...
...Hamburg, 1953...
...In our crucial moment in two nominally Christian nations there were to be found only a handful of true Christians...
...In the end it was ruse, deception and cunning beyond anything the world has ever seen, which accomplished what hunger and disease could not achieve...
...the Bishop of Montauban, Monsignor Pierre-Marie Theas...
...and many Superiors of monasteries, convents and Catholic orphanages, will forever remain in the grateful hearts of the persecuted...
...there are ample instances of their capacity for fighting back...
...A particularly coarse example: In their best-selling novel Fail-Safe, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, without any logical context within the narrative, treat us to the following tirade: "Anne Frank and her family acted like imbeciles...
...It was stripped of its political and intellectual leaders who were abroad as a result of the 1939 exodus...
...And when, finally, we saw how we had been deceived, and we resorted to the weapons for which we were least well prepared—historically, philosophically, psychologically—when we finally took up arms, we inscribed in the annals of history the unforgettable epic of the Warsaw ghetto uprising...
...A Christian who witnesses inactively a crime becomes its accomplice...
...or two had they wished...
...Not even twenty years have passed since Schipper spoke these words, and reality has already proved darker than his forebodings...
...its sources are at best ignorance and misinformation—at worst, vested interest...
...I purposely leave aside the wide range of problems that border on psychology, philosophy, and ethics: where does the natural self-preservative instinct stop and fear and anxiety begin...
...Six days later (July 28, 1942) the nucleus of what was later to become the Jewish Fighters' Organization was born...
...Any unbiased person can see the tragedy of the Jews' ignorance...
...But practically they did nothing to relieve the plight of six million innocent Jews...
...Was the Warsaw uprising in 1944 an act of heroism or suicidal folly...
...The Germans were careful enough never to approach us within shooting (let alone stabbing) distance...
...Their voices never carried above the continual screams of hatred...
...and there was no need, as in World War I, to win them over with a Balfour declaration...
...And what about Czechoslovakia in 1938...
...Nor is it true that greater, or more persistent, or better organized efforts of resistance would have staved off the catastrophe...
...For generations, the Jews of eastern Europe had looked to Berlin as to the very symbol of lawfulness, enlightenment and culture...
...Metropolitan Andreas Szeptycki, Archbishop of Lvov, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church in Galicia...
...Ironically, the man with the gun did not survive...
...Martyrdom was the mainstream of Jewish history for millennia...
...Sholokhov, in his The Science of Hatred, has described the shock experienced by Soviet citizens when they realized that the behavior of the Germans in the occupied territories was very far indeed from their traditional image of the civilized and orderly German...
...Handlin thinks that "Hitler...
...In the second half of August one revolver was smuggled into the Ghetto as a gift from the Polish Workers Party...
...Conditioned by 2000 years of submission and passivity they displayed an exceptional capacity for self-delusion...
...The political wisdom of this race is, for my purpose, irrelevant...
...But what can one expect from a man who could bring himself to write so calloused, so ignorant a sentence as: "Most Jews in Poland who did not believe in business as usual survived the Second World War...
...We paid a terrible price for our hope, which turned out to be a delusion: the delusion that the nation of Kant, Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven cannot be a nation of murderers...
...If I was present at the murder of others without risking my life to prevent it, I feel guilty...
...There is abundant evidence that Jews took at face value German assurances that it was a bona fide resettlement...
...Hundreds of thousands came to Auschwitz, loaded with food and clothes and their life's savings...
...It was just a succession of miracles...
...Auschwitz is modern civilization's declaration of bankruptcy...
...Balance: only two survived (my wife and I...
...Says Walter Z. Laqueur (Survey, October 1962): In more than one sense the Russians were unprepared for the German onslaught in June 1941...
...The participants in the meeting did not know at that time that deportation meant death...
...This legend, carefully fomented by the official propaganda, is so well-rooted that the young Polish generation, Jews as well as Gentiles, believe in it entirely...
...What defeated us, ultimately, was Jewry's indestructible optimism, our eternal faith in the goodness of man—or rather, in the limits of his degradation...
...They are both equally tragic and equally sublime...
...and neither could save us...
...And, finally, the worst loser of all is Christianity itself, whose two thousand years turned out to be an historical mirage...
...Did they dynamite the diplomatic outposts of the Nazis...
...Frankfort, 1961...
...Only the great capitals of the world might have stopped the eradication of the Jews: by a simple threat of retaliation...
...What does it have to offer post-war man, horrified by the specter of atomic war...
...It depends on who writes the history of our time...
...The difference consists not only in the two-front situation of the Jews, so penetratingly pointed out by Handlin: Jews fought as members of the general resistance of a given nation, not as * The most important weapon in our propaganda arsenal...
...After the first anti-Jewish actions of the Germans, they thought now the wave was over and so they walked back to their undoing...
...By a sad irony, all the escapist, revisionistic, and distorting versions of the martyrdom, some arising from guilty consciences, others from shame and still others from "the anti-Semitism of guilt," were helped by some voices coming from Israel...
...Helpless hatred of the murderers turned into shame and hatred toward the victims—"Why did they let themselves be murdered...
...And as a moral problem, paradoxical as this may sound, it is less and less a Jewish problem, and more and more a universal one...
...One thing is sure: he made the better deal with his "Reparations" and "Restitutions" to the victims and to Israel, than the claimants...
...Isaac Schipper, the Polish-Jewish historian who was my closest neighbor in the potato-peeling brigade at the Maidanek concentration camp, I owe an insight which has haunted me ever since my stay there...
...And still our record stands the toughest scrutiny when compared to the French Huguenots, to the massacred Armenians, not to mention Andersonville, Eupen-Malmedy, or Soviet prisoners-of-war...
...This problem warrants a special research work in itself...
...believe that Nazi Germany would have retreated before a strong worldwide reaction to its atrocities, and that they took world passivity as a green light to go ahead with their genocide...
...It is a miracle that in spite of these appalling conditions the Jews often did fight, and heroically...
...Out of the blood of the ghettoes and gas chambers came the realization of the 2000-year-old dream, the State of Israel:— and now practically the sole beneficiary of the billion-dollar reparations, and one of the few friends of West Germany...
...The anti-Jewish war was a coldly premeditated political action carried out with the most monstrous precision...
...In his masterly and unfortunately too short article, "Jewish Resistance to the Nazis" (Commentary, November 1962) Professor Oscar Handlin disposes of these charges: "It is simply not true that the Jews did not resist...
...There is little doubt," he writes, "that the Franks could have provided themselves with a gun * The very same people from the ghettoes and camps were to become the most devoted soldiers of the Israel underground and Liberation War...
...Did they besiege the Congress, and the White House...
...No one can tell whether and when the two ingredients will cross again...
...One never knows: perhaps twenty years from now a future Bettelheim will blame the present one for not fleeing to Patagonia but conducting his "business as usual" instead, and going to his atomic holocaust "like a sheep to slaughter" when it was unmistakably obvious from all the signs on earth and heaven that a catastrophe was inevitable...
...I do not believe in metaphysical historical justice...
...It explodes as the anti-Semitism of guilty conscience: one hates the innocent victim whom one wronged...
...Thus the litmus test "What did you do then...
...In view of the unequal forces, it was a labor of Sisyphus...
...While we bled and died, their attitude was at best indifference, and all too often it was 'friendly neutrality' toward the Germans...
...This revolver was used by the Shomer Israel Kanal in his attempt on the chief of the Ghetto police, Szerynski, on August 25, 1942, the date that is considered the beginning of the armed Ghetto resistance...
...They forget that Israel owes to the sherit hapleta, the survivors, at least what they owe her, that Israel is the bone and flesh of the Jewish people all over the world and that it cannot sever the umbilical cord with two thousand years of Jewish history...
...By the end of December 1942 (when the massacre was practically completed) the Home Army turned over to the Jewish fighters in Warsaw ten pistols, and then fifty grenades and revolvers in February 1943...
...If one can with impunity murder six millions, why not six hundred million...
...Hilberg knew about it...
...the depraved spectacle of the Faust-Volk periodically selling its soul to the devil, turning into a nation of barbarians, and then being promoted to the role of defender of civilization...
...Thousands of young people in the Warsaw ghetto with knapsacks and bags volunteered at the Umschlagplatz to "join their families previously resettled...
...They were forsaken by God and man, surrounded by the hatred or indifference of the Gentile population...
...In 1962, armed with a knowledge which the Jews and everyone else lacked in 1942, Bettelheim lectures them on how they should have behaved...
...Bettelheim nor Mr...
...And the Jews, last and most painful of all...
...neither can be taken from us...
...Our tragedy has not yet had time to become history, its witnesses and survivors still live, their memories remain vivid...
...Whether the Jews resisted or were able to resist, whether they should or could have behaved other than they did—such questions reveal, as a rule, an incapacity even to imagine the extremity of our situation under Nazi totalitarianism...
...Irrational hatred sometimes results in murder, but a passionate murderer does not manufacture soap out of the fat of his victim...
...As never before in mankind's history, heroism and martyrdom flashed in the lightning of doom...
...The myth is both open and covert...
...But not Bettelheim and Hilberg: to them the Jews "collaborated in self-destruction...
...Did they stone the parliaments, ministries and embassies...
...Perhaps the calculation did turn out to be erroneous and, as Handlin wrote, "contrary to the interests of the [German] state," but nobody can deny that for years it was a powerful weapon...
...That they have murdered without belief, without hatred, without conviction, without any sense...
...To insist upon making the world uncomfortable with the memory of its guilt, is a necessity for that moral reconstruction which may alone prevent a repetition of our holocaust...
...To say things like this is not merely to mock the victims, but to reveal a total failure to imagine what life was like under the Nazis...
...That anti-Semitism was a powerful weapon in the Nazi aggression is shown by a host of shameful instances...
...Item: What moral right of protest do we all have against atomic holocaust...
...The Jews fought back against their enemies to a degree no other community anywhere in the world would have been capable of doing were it to find itself similarly beleaguered...
...Thus, in 1943, the Ghetto was a famished, broken city of women and children...
...anti-Semitism was the link uniting the scum of the world with the Nazi masterminds...
...Such were the experiences in Denmark, Finland, Bulgaria, and Italy...
...is amazingly efficient...
...Item: When the fighting Warsaw ghetto begged for arms from the alert and combat-ready "Aryan" Warsaw, icy silence was the answer...
...Under these circumstances it would not have been surprising had the Jews really given up all resistance...
...Jewish resistance was the resistance of a fish caught in a net, * Amazingly soon Bettelheim found willing disciples and imitators...
...Lord Moran, The Anatomy of Courage...
...In his 800-page work, The Destruction of the European Jews, he concludes with the following verdict: "The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance...
...Ours was not a romantic war...
...Should they write the story of this war, our destruction will be presented as one of the most glorious exploits in world history...
...The majority was against an immediate resistance, arguing that it would serve as an excuse for a total massacre...
...And then—it was but one more step—the defendants' bench was marked by a new addition: the victims...
...Shmul Zygelboim ("Artur"), representative of the Bund in the Polish National Council in London, committed suicide when his efforts to stir world opinion against the Nazi murders proved futile, in the hope that his sacrifice would arouse the world...
...Says the Polish journalist Wanda Pelczynska in her review of Hilberg's book: HiIberg, educated and living in a free world, doesn't understand how people locked-up in jail, in camp, in the ghetto, people not protected by any law, exposed to enemy violence—save themselves by an illusion of hope...
...Of course, it is common knowledge that some Catholic priests, both at the very top and the bottom of the hierarchy, assumed a courageous attitude in a true Christian spirit.* But the over-all picture, it must in candor be said, is most depressing...
...Abundant factual material proves beyond a doubt that allegations of the Bettelheim-Hilberg kind are false...
...The central issue must not be forgotten: it is a moral issue, the issue of what the world has done and permitted to be done...
...Thus the NKVD doublecrossed thousands of Polish officers [presumably not contaminated by the Jewish ethos of passivity...
...So let bygones be bygones...
...Let's be realistic...
...As for Poland, it now seems there is hardly a man in that country who somehow hadn't "participated" in rescuing Jews from the Nazi murderers...
...Neither used its influence to change the climate of indifference toward the martyred Jews...
...Not only were the Germans "ignorant of the crimes," but the measly flicker of German resistance— late in the day (1944) and actually an ultranationalist response to the possibility of Hitler's losing—has now been inflated by some historians into a "soundless rebellion" in which almost the whole German nation ("soundlessly") took part.* Everything becomes simple...
...Since Hitler is dead, the guilt and responsibility are heaped on a small group of Nazi villains—most of them now conveniently dead—so that the German conscience is left free and clear...
...Then, so much the worse for the truth...
...These voices, by no means general, were conceived in a desperate negation of the galuth, in a determined dissociation from the tragic yesterday of the ghetto...
...Since the Nazis apply the principle of collective responsibility, it will bring disaster...
...If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty...
...Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart...
...The same applies also to the majority of its young men who were either in USSR or in other countries...
...How relevant and realistic Bettelheim's advices are, is best illustrated by my own experience: In our shelter in the Warsaw ghetto there was one revolver among the forty persons present...
...crimes were committed by a handful of Nazi criminals...
...Raul Hilberg...
...At the same time his countrymen—the murderers, their spouses, their families—are comfortably immersed in the prosperity of the Wirschaftswunder, pump-primed by U. S. dollars...
...In my already mentioned memoirs I find the following paragraphs about the Warsaw ghetto: "There was a stubborn, unending, continuous battle to survive...
...but what would our corn bative professors and psychoanalysts have done if they had been confronted, day by day, with the agony of such choices...
...In the name of what principle...
...If every Jew who was arrested had walked to the door with a pistol in his hand and started shooting at the local heroes, how long would the Nazis have kept it up...
...But we have daily evidence that crime has in it the seeds of forthcoming punishment, and that unpunished crime boomerangs on the criminals...
...Two forces only were in a position to influence the Polish masses: the London-led underground, and the pulpit...
...only upon order...
...We fought back on every front where the enemy attacked—the biological front, the economic front, the propaganda front—with every weapon we possessed...
...After his release he went to the USA where he became an "expert" on concentration camps and published several books, the latest of which, The Informed Heart,** analyzes the behavior of individuals and groups in concentration camps...
...In hating the murderers of their people, in painfully reflecting upon the world gone forever, they were the first to coin the self-flagellating indictment-lamen • Cf...
...There is reason to * [ he names of the Archbishop of Toulouse, later elevated to Cardinal Monsignor Jules Gerard Saliege...
...There is just interpretation," he said...
...The moral level of this advice is best illustrated by the story he admiringly tells of his Hungarian-Jewish relatives who, looking typically "Aryan," joined the Hungarian SS and so enabled themselves and some few other Jews to survive...
...William Shirer defines our catastrophe as "the shattering cost of [Hitler's] aberration...
...Says Professor Golo Mann, the son of Thomas Mann: "The German nation in its overwhelming majority was not at all passionately anti-Semitic, no more so than other peoples are...
...Millions of the Jews of Europe who did not or could not escape in time or go underground as many thousands did, could at least have marched as free men against the SS, rather than to first grovel, then wait to be rounded up for their own extermi...
...We dearly paid for this delusion about the nature of Germans, and we should not feel ashamed of it...
...We did not believe that the enlightened Germans could be transformed into a nation of soapmakers, but in 1942 neither Mr...
...Of course, the war on the Jews eventually became a gathering point for the wicked and the sadistic, a mobilization of scum and degeneration, a university of cruelty and crime...
...There are too many participants and onlookers who don't care to remember the details of the spectacle, let alone to be reminded of it...
...They fought against the German murderers and against the traitors within their own ranks, and they were utterly alone in their fight...
...It takes a Tolstoy or a Gandhi to appreciate the grandeur of the spectacle...
...It is a disaster of humanity...
...Chicago, 1961...
...But if we write the story we will have the thankless task of proving to a disbelieving world that we really are Abel, the murdered brother...
...Today it is easy to sneer at such pathetic delusions and wax morally superior...
...Painful as it is," they argued, "it is better to sacrifice 70,000 Jews destined for deportation than to endanger the lives of half a million...
...B. Mark, Walka i zagiada warszawskiego getta...
...A new generation arises that "knew not Joseph...
...London, 1945...
...But the one thing that those of us who have survived can do, is to keep clean the memory of the victims...
...Isaac Schwarzbart, deputy in the Polish National Council in London during s Gunther Weisenborn, Der lautlose Au/stand...
...Was Czechoslovakia's surrender after Munich an act of cowardice or tragic realism...
...Maybe this makes it even more appalling...
...We are blessed and burdened with the memory of both...
...They seem to forget that the new Jew-as-warrior was cast in the crucible of a profound moral revolution that the People of the Book went through in the flames of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt...
...Warsaw, 1959...
...Bonn, 1958...
...It is clear that from the moment the decision for their extermination was taken, their destiny was sealed and the diapason of Jewish resistance could not influence the result...
...Hermann Rauschning (Gesprdche mit Hitler, Zurich 1940) quotes Hitler that anti-Semitism is "die wichtigste Waffe in unserem Propaganda-Arsenal...
...yet a malicious myth about our ex perience keeps rising before our eyes...
...If each Jew in Germany had been prepared to take one SS trooper with him before he was sent to the camps and the gas ovens, precious few Jews would have been arrested...
...For Mr...
...They had always held the Germans in special esteem...
...For three...
...They did not even let political good sense guide them—after all, objectively, we were allies in a struggle against a common enemy...
...Viewed in this light the Jewish resistance against the Nazis must be thoroughly reappraised...
...nation, and finally walk themselves to the gas chambers...
...Meanwhile, a few concluding remarks may be useful...
...See also H. G. Adler, Der Kampf gegen die "Endlosung der Judenfrage...
...But the first Jews who shuffled quietly off to death camps or hid like mice in attics were instruments of destruction of the rest...
...Survival at any price—is this Bettelheim's notion of heroism...
...The resistance and partisan movements of other nations had the support of their governments (whether in exile or at home), commanding centers, supplies of arms and funds, not to mention a base among the majority of the populace...
...t But the historical facts are not exactly thus...
...And in this last capacity they were in most cases left to their own fate...
...They did not even express ordinary human compassion at the spectacle of our ordeal—let alone some manifestation of Christian charity...
...There is no such thing as historical truth," he would say with his sad smile when we dreamed about how after the war the survivors of the camps would tell the world the whole truth...
...New York, 1961...
...He was not even given the chance...
...But to Bruno Bettelheim it seems that the Franks (and of course all the remaining million Jewish families in Europe) could "easily" get "one or two" guns—which would have amounted to I or 2 million guns...
...But the truth is, Mr...
...the Primate of France and Archbishop of Lyons, Cardinal Gerlier...
...Thus the author condemns the Jews for their "role in their own destruction...
...Philip Friedman, Their Brothers' Keepers...
...The Communists tend to grossly overstate their part in the Ghetto resistance and in the aid they rendered to the Ghetto.** The Polish non-Communist underground, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) states through one of its leaders, Andrzej Pomian, that "we Poles are not burdened by the sin of indifference to the Jews' sufferings...
...In our catastrophe martyrdom and heroism became inseparable ingredients...
...The tragic truth is, and this is to a great extent our fault as survivors, that twenty years after it occurred, the catastrophe of European Jewry and the epic of the Warsaw ghetto uprising is little known and even less understood...
...These people are easily told lies and by lies are brought without resistance to the execution trench...
...I cite from my yet unpublished memoirs: "In vain did we implore help from our Polish brothers, with whom we had shared good and bad fortune alike for seven centuries...
...Plundering Jewish property, exploitation of the Jewish labor force, filling all the Jewish economic and cultural positions with Germans, bribing the native mob with shreds of Jewish "wealth," and, finally, the bestial machinery of destruction and exploitation even of human fat and hair—all these stages of soapmaking were by no means accidental...
...There is a widespread belief that the Jewish tragedy is a result of Hitler's psychopathic hatred of the Jews, that it was conceived in the obsession of a maniac...
...Where is the line between controlled fear and cowardice...
...Emanuel Ringelblum, the archivist of the Ghetto, testifies: "To normally thinking people it was difficult to accept the idea that a Government pretending to the name of European can be found on the globe which would murder millions of innocent people...
...They fought against hunger and starvation, against epidemic disease, against the deadly Nazi economic blockade...
...The more-militant Left-Zionist youth groups disagreed with the majority and decided to act on their own...
...Where a government and a people fought Nazi encroachments," states Philip Friedman (Their Brothers' Keepers), "many Jews were saved from extermination...
...We just could not believe that a German, even disguised as a Nazi, would so far renounce his own humanity as to murder women and children—coldly and systematically...
...Special engineer brigades poured gasoline on the ground floors and wooden staircases, then threw grenades and gas bombs into cellar bunkers...
...Witnesses Higher SS and Police Chief Erich von dem Bach Zelewsky: The mass of the Jewish people were taken completely by surprise...
...Der Antisemitismus...
...To reduce the origins of genocide to Hitler's psychopathic hatred is both historically and politically naive...
...The Jewish victims, caught in the strait jacket of their history, plunged themselves physically and psychologically into catastrophe...
...Try to imagine McCarthy in war time, endowed with total power, with limitless facilities for terror and destruction, with no legal opposition and with full control of press, radio and television...
...Today, it seems that all the * Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt...
...Many a murderer became a captive of the ideology, and intoxicated by hatred...
...f Zygmunt Nagdrski, Sr...
...How can an honest man believe, after Auschwitz...
...and "collaborated in their own destruction...
...Heroically, they managed to save individuals, but they could not bring about the slightest mitigation of Nazi ferocity...
...Is discipline cowardice or courage, collaboration or responsibility...
...Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews...
...Morals know neither arithmetic nor geography...
...Although there was much heroism, there was little beauty...
...It is pure myth that the Jews were merely 'passive,' that they did not resist the Nazis who had decided on their destruction...
...Has it ever occurred to our retrospective • Judenrats in most cases began with subjectively honest intentions only to end as tragically helpless collaborators and, in some instances, traitors...
...Father Marie-Benoit (Padre Benedetti, "Father of the Jews...
...He forgets that by comparison to the later camps, the camps in 1938 were like summer resorts...
...Germany from wall to wall—this certainly has its irony...
...For some reasons, the male mortality in the Ghetto was twice that of females...
...They followed the letter of the gospel: they were silent...
...The stages of extermination were precisely calculated, with proverbial German thoroughness...
...Item: What moral right of protest do the Germans have against the Berlin wall, they who invented this disgrace...
...Full credit must be given to the Nazi stage-managers that the deceiving appearances, camouflage, psychological warfare and the torture of hope were maintained to the very last moment...
...Hilberg himself admits that "one of the most giant hoaxes in world history was perpetrated on five million people noted for their intellect...
...Note this well, Messrs...
...This was the help received from the Polish underground...
...We are now far from the time when Karl Jaspers could blame every German for "crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge...
...Thousands of Jews perished in flames and smoke without a physical chance to fight, even if they had had the weapons...
...Bettelheim, that nobody could, not you nor I nor anyone else at the time...
Vol. 10 • April 1963 • No. 2
