APRIL NINETEENTH
BELL, DANIEL
April Nineteenth In Memory of the Fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto By DANIEL BELL THE BULLFIGHTERS call it the hora de verdad, the moment of truth. It is that crucial instant when the last charge...
...Zygelboim s comrades were on the flaming pyre, and he was alive only because he had been their messenger...
...Such is the subtle nature of modern terror that the Subject cannot be allowed to signal the end of his own torment...
...Like Thermopylae or Betar, it would have bee", sung as an act of heroism, the willingness of the few to fight on against overwhelming odds, in the great tradition of the ItutUe gesture...
...This was the remnants...
...Perhaps my death will accomplish what I was not able to achieve in my life—that concrete action be started to save at least the less than 300,000 stitt alive in Poland out of the 3 Mi million who were there before...
...THE FUNDAMENTAL MEANING of totalitarianism is that in its demonic lust for self-aggrandizement, what Plato called the perverted eras, it strives for total destruction of personality...
...The Ghetto's decision to fight, to invite deatr...
...Slowly, systematically, the fighters were isolated and cut down...
...Of the remnant, only some tattered threads sur vived...
...At a time when terror, like iin indelible dye, stains all life, the act becomes a singular affirmation of the basic condition of being human, the ability to niake a free choice—even if the choice be death...
...Against this "unreality" the Jews of Warsaw chose death...
...What kind of people are these who would destroy man...
...He was a family man who lived quietly with his wife and eleven-year-old son and never engaged in extravagant carousels that some other Nazis did...
...The message undelivered, the human torch Burning withou light, he would make the only possible "sensible" gesture On May 12, 943, Shmuel Zygelboim committed suicide...
...Their lives had been spent, it seemed, senselessly, as wastefully as the endless turning of Ixion's wheel in Hell...
...Comments one psychiatrist: "The greater part of the war criminals were drawn from among so-called 'normal' people...
...a remnant shall return...
...Inot by any complicated fiendish device, but by the simple mockery of having to teeter interminably in unsteady balance, Shipkov decides finally to submit...
...But none was forthcoming...
...It had spread throughout the world...
...Natives have been recklessly exterminated in African colonies, Europe has been plundered by Huns, slavery reaches far back to the beginnings of civilization...
...But modern totalitarianism has a different meaning...
...These were the first notices the world received...
...He had a trade...
...But the function of terror is to destroy the self, to break and atomize the individual...
...And he had survived...
...On killed or captured Germans we found touching letters full of tenderness, love letters—and photographs showing atrocities carried out...
...One must stand ground, take the charge head-on, step between the horns and quickly plunge the knife...
...The Jews of Warsaw fought on...
...The appalling fact is they are not...
...But against the lengthening shadows of our own day, it takes on different light...
...IN LONDON, in 1943, one man took stock of the world's apathy and decided his course...
...he ran one of another kind...
...If the world is dulled by horror and can no longer be shocked, could it be at least roused by the awareness of the fact that itn conscience has been dulled...
...He had beat on all the doors of London and Washington, but no one listened...
...Reluctantly, leaving his wife and family behind, Zygelboim had gone...
...As Hannah "Arendt cogently summarizes that difference: "Even Himmler knew that in a time of critical shortage of labor, he was eliminating a large number of workers who at least could have been worked to death instead of being killed without any productive purpose...
...Tortured incessantly...
...Mass murder and fiendishness run like a carmine streak through history...
...Some men ran cattle slaughter chouses...
...The process is terrifying described in the "Shipkov confession" released several months ago by the State Department...
...In this extreme condition, to be able to choose is the meature of some degree of freedom...
...But it doesn't...
...A report at a medical conference at Liege describes some brutal modes of murder during the war...
...Cut off from all help, from the jeering Poles, even in the underground, who regarded their extermination as less than a misfortune, from the impersonal, ponderous military bureaucracy which refused to supply arms lest it upset weightier strategical calculations, with the barest of weapons, they decided to die In other times such an act would have beer, applauded as a romantic gesture...
...Confession is not the end...
...in fact, they shocked him...
...The extraordinary difficulty which we have in attempting to understand the institution of the concentration camp and to fit it into the record of human history is precisely the absence of such utilitarian criteria, an absence which is more than anything else respon sible for the curious air of unreality that surrounds this institution and everything connected with it...
...In his last note he wrote: "I take my life as a demonstration of protest against the democratic nations and governments who have done absolutely nothing to prevent the complete extermination of the Jewish population of Poland...
...This is the last moment for such action...
...His name was Shmuel Zygelboim An active leader of the Jewish Socialist movement of Poland (the Bund), he had written/eloquently to the outside world of the tragic events within Poland during 1940 and 1941...
...The pain, therefore will stop on the command of the executioner, not the victim...
...To do so, would give him some control, some partial dominance, of the situation...
...If the one "moment of truth" had not brought a response, could its echo stir us into selfconsciousness...
...The caption read: "This is how trees blossom in Serbia...
...It would be a comforting thought to feel that these people, through some mysterious alchemy of character or some sort of "national differences," are somehow different from us...
...on its own terms, was in this instance the affirmation of being human against the anti-human...
...after several years of systematic decimation, only a few thousand Jews jammed together in concentrically smaller space, remained...
...In that quivering moment, facing death, one finds the insight into one's courage and will, one achieves the avatar, the consciousness of self, i April 19, the anniversary of the rising of ' the Warsaw Ghetto, marks in man's consciousness a "moment of truth...
...Franz Ziereis was the director of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where hundreds of thousands were slaughtered...
...On the orders of the Bund, Zygelboim went to London to represent the Jewish Socialists on the Polish National Council and to rouse help for the Ghetto...
...Now, nearly all of the Ghetto were dead, in eluding his wife...
...For example: public hanging from the "coat rack gallows," allowing 30 executions at the same time...
...Ar.d they decided to fight...
...And the office of Himmler issued one order after another [beginning in 1941] warning the military commanders as well as the officials of the Nazi hierarchy that no economic or military considerations were to interfere with the extermination program...
...I will confess," he says, feelin now that the torture will stop...
...They hoped for, they expected from the rest of the world one slight sign of recognition, one small gesture of solidarity in the common affirmation of human will, some consciousness of kind...
...These scenes were photographed, published as postcards and issued to German soldiers...
...But they were to be the "saving remnant" the few of whom Isaiah had written: "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the remnant of Israel, and they that are escaped of the House of Jacob, shall no more again stay upon him that smote them...
...But he was no sadist...
...But the~"unreality" was no longer contained within the death camps...
...It is that crucial instant when the last charge is made and one can no longer swerve, sidestep or flinch...
...Yet in all these instances, the purposes are clear, to benefit the victors through the process of extortion...
...By springy 1943...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 16
