THE WAR THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS
Bauer, Yehuda
THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS i !gg wm Yehuda Bauer THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS 1933-1945 BY LUCY S. DAWI-DOWICZ, New York, Holt, Rine-hart & Winston, Inc., 1975. 460 pp., $15. Ever since Raul Hilberg...
...Brilliantly argued, and amply documented, Prof...
...Has the very question, "to allow themselves," any meaning...
...Even more surprising is the fact that she seems to be unaware of the fact that about one half of the so-called "Polish" partisans in the forests up to late 1943 were actually Jews, mostly in Jewish or mixed units...
...Her statement (p...
...At any rate, Prof...
...The very posing of at least the last two of these questions may be open to some doubt...
...The enormity of the task, the multiplicity of sources, of languages needed to read them, the vast scope of the problem — all these militated against displacing Hilberg's work, which was based almost solely on German materials and avowedly dealt with the destruction process itself rather than with a history of victims, murderers and bystanders alike...
...One can take exception to Prof...
...In a few brief pages she describes the vast popular networks of education, religious life and instruction, cultural and self-aid activities organized by groups and sub-groups independently of the German-controlled Councils...
...The very important ghetto rebellion of Tuczyn is described on the basis of a single testimony which appeared in 1948, relations between the Bialystok resisters and the Judenrat head Barash are described as "warm and trustful," the Cracow resisters' group is described as dominated by the communists, and so on...
...The appendices then deal very briefly with the fate of Jewish communities in different countries...
...Essentially, the various stages of Nazi policy develop as the plan which is fairly clear in Hitler's own mind is slowly realized...
...She describes their morale-building activities and their involvement in supplying slave labor.to the Germans...
...ern Europe — comprising a pre-war population of at least 2,250,000 Jews — are dealt with only in a very brief and understandably inadequate appendix in the form of lexi-graphical entries...
...Fortunately the bias does not mar a brilliant presentation, which however again leaves her main thesis open to doubt: Was the starvation policy the result of a clear-cut decision of German power-organs, or the result.of a consensus resulting from an anti-Semitic background...
...Prof...
...She does not mention that there were ghettoes such as Czesto-chowa, for instance, where hunger was unknown, though of course there was no plenty either...
...she does not allow for the vast differences among the Judenrate...
...The English-language reader will have here, for the first time, an accurate description of the network of the Jewish political underground...
...Dawidowicz emerges as an advocate of what Arthur Koestler once called "the diabolical interpretation" of history...
...True to her underlying assumption of a clearly conceived extermination policy antedating the war, the author describes what to her are the unfolding German steps of a master-plan: the establishment of Jewish Councils, of ghettoes, and of a policy of killing the Jews by starvation and disease...
...Prof...
...Prof...
...Every historian must be allowed his bias...
...The uncommon importance of the book, which is a selection of four different book clubs, led us to ask Yehuda Bauer to add his comments as well...
...Within these limitations, her lucid, occasionally brilliant, though sometimes one-sided analysis assures her book a central place on any bookshelf dealing with the Holocaust...
...Dawidowicz's describing all ghettoes as existing on the same level — following Isaiah Trunk's "Judenrat" — because this does not enable her to face the difference between "old" ghettoes established in pre-1941 Nazi Poland and the "new" ghettoes after the mass murder actions in formerly Soviet-held areas after June, 1941...
...how was it possible for the world to stand by idly...
...Dawidowicz asks the three cardinal questions: how was it possible for a modern state to carry out the murder of a people only because they were Jews...
...Dawidowicz's bias is clearly evident both in the selection of her source material and in her presentation: the socialist anti-Zionist Bund comes out best, the Zionists worst...
...dissertations written on the subject were unavailable to her, nor does she list the leading Hebrew periodical on Holocaust, Yalkut Moreshet, in her bibliography...
...Within that context, Prof...
...The second part of the volume, "The Holocaust," deals with the policies pursued by the Germans towards the Jews, and with the Jewish response...
...Dawidowicz undertook a tremendous task...
...Prof...
...She traces their struggle to reconcile the irreconcilable opposition between their commitment to represent their communities and their serving as instruments to transmit German orders...
...316) in lieu of Arie Yurek Vilner, etc...
...how was it possible for the Jews to allow themselves to be destroyed...
...Dawidowicz just barely mentions alternative interpretations, but chooses not to enter into an argument...
...Her book therefore is not a history or a textbook of the Holocaust, but of some of its central problems...
...She comes up with a perfectly clear and consistent answer: there was a background of traditional anti-Semitism in Germany, from the days of Luther on, and it snowballed into racial anti-Semitism in the latter half of the 19th century...
...Result: a magnificent piece of historical writing, with a totally unconvincing conclusion...
...It is surprising and gratifying to see how — relatively — few errors there are in her volume, and how solid the scholarship is...
...Thus Lodz, Warsaw and Lublin are treated in the same breath as Vilna, Kovno, Minsk and Lwow, though one could point to a quite different set of problems in the latter places...
...300) that "many" Warsaw Jews had encountered escapees from death camps is a more serious mistake...
...She describes in detail the order of the SS chief Heydrich of September 21, 1939, decreeing ghettoization and concentration of Jews from smaller to larger centers, but passes by the fact that this was not executed all over Nazi-controlled Poland until a year and a half later...
...Essentially, therefore, she deals with Germany and Eastern Europe, within the framework of a discussion of overall Nazi policies toward Jews...
...Prof...
...The major problem of Jewish Councils is of course dealt with thoroughly...
...Yet she seems to have proved that the Holocaust, one of the central events in the history of the present century, simply cannot be treated by one author, and in 353 pages...
...If so, one may ask, where did the 56,000 come from that Nazi hangman Stroop claims he killed in the big uprising...
...Nor does she discuss the fact that there are amazing discrepancies between orders and their execution by the Nazis...
...Her final chapter on Jewish behavior in the terrible crisis is a moving and convincing summary of some of the best material in the book...
...This does not mean they are avoided...
...These minor lapses point to the fact that the author did not have access to much of the material on resistance...
...The author's thesis is that Hitler wanted to "remove" the Jews as early as 1919, that this in fact presaged a policy of murder, and that Hitler convinced the Nazi party and then Germany to adopt this solution...
...The chapter on resistance ("For Your Freedom and Ours") is probably the weakest in the book...
...Dawidowicz's description of the mass murder inevitably follows previous authors...
...A brief but excellent summary of the persecution of and the reaction of German Jews between 1933 and 1939 is followed by the description of death and life in the East European ghettoes...
...Perhaps inadvertently, she does not differentiate between resistant Judenrate such as Minsk or Tuczyn, those that actively cooperated with resistance groups or practiced quite effective passive resistance for some time at least such as Kovno, Siauliai or Piotrkow, those that tried the "rescue through labor" policy such as Lodz, Bialystok or Vilna and those that, completely demoralized, became passive tools of the Germans, such as the Judenrat of Lublin...
...There is no doubting the fact that the discussion of the Councils (Judenrate) is a great improvement on any of the previous textbook treatments...
...Dawidowicz has now tried to do the near-impossible...
...Bauer is an Israeli historian, now Director of the Department of Holocaust Studies and the Scientific Director of Oral Studies at the Institute of Contemporary Judaism...
...The pitfalls of assigning the whole development of Nazi policies to Hitler's mind are consciously faced...
...They are very brief, not always accurate, but may serve as first guidance for undergraduate students studying the subject...
...Why did the Jewish population follow their leadership in Vilna, Kovno, Bialystok and Minsk, despite their diametrically opposite policies, and why was there disaffection in Lodz and Lublin...
...Names are misspelled — "Israel Chaim" Vilner (p...
...Given the political situation and the established mores of international politics, has the third question any validity in the form in which it is asked...
...Yet one has the feeling that she is still imprisoned in the world prescribed by Trunk and Hilberg...
...On page 309 she claims that 45,000 Jews remained in Warsaw after the great deportation in the summer of 1942...
...Ph.D...
...Prof...
...It is a tremendous effort, and an extremely worthwhile one, though it would be too much to expect a full success...
...Dawidowicz in Part One of her book tries to analyze the theoretical and practical background of the "Final Solution...
...The question arises whether this really is convincing, hinging as it does on one word in Hitler's writing — "removal," "'Entfernung" in German...
...289...
...Ever since Raul Hilberg published his monumental "The Destruction of European Jews" in 1961, the attempts at writing comprehensive histories of the Holocaust — the mass murder of European Jews — have been dismal failures...
...However, inaccuracies creep in...
...Dawidowicz describes the genesis from officials or public figures of the pre-war Jewish world...
...Could it be that while the predisposition to murder had been created in the last century, the practical policies were not actually determined until 1941, as other historians agree...
...Dawidowicz seems to think that disaffection was the rule, which of course is simply wrong...
...How many battalions — military, economic, political — did the Jews have...
...Her use of the term "guns" implies rifles, but of course what is meant is handguns, pistols, because the rebels in Warsaw had only some 14 rifles all told...
...A magnificent chapter is devoted to what the author strikingly — and accurately — refers to as "the alternative community...
...Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy and western and northReaders may recall that this book was reviewed in the last issue of MOMENT by Professor Irving Halperin...
...The treatment of the vastly complicated political underground is on the whole accurate and penetrating — a few secondary lapses notwithstanding...
...Vilna did not have 12,500 Jews after December 1941, but more than 20,000 (p...
...This rather unexplained change envelops most of German society and forms the backdrop to Hitler's own development which is very carefully traced...
...His books in English include they chose life and flight and rescue, published by Random House...
...Her major success is also her major failing: the title is misleading, and she deals with the war against the Jews in Germany, Austria, Poland, the Baltic countries and, to a very limited degree, in the Western USSR...
...Prof...
Vol. 1 • October 1975 • No. 4
