Resistance in Hell
WIESEL, ELIE
Resistance in Hell THE FIGHTING GHETTOS Edited by Meyer Barkai Lippincott. 407 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by ELIE WIESEL Author, "The Night," "The Dawn" It has become a kind of intellectual fad...
...One finds this, virtually without rhyme or reason, even in fiction whose theme has nothing to do with the Nazi holocaust...
...Indeed, people talk less today about the cruelty of the hangmen than about the passiveness of their victims...
...The Resistance fighters in France, Belgium, Norway and Poland never had to worry about a shortage of weapons or money...
...One rifle with 25 bullets—to fight the victorious Germany Army...
...There was such an "elite" in Warsaw, Bialystok, Grodno and (God knows how) in Treblinka and in Birkenau...
...When the Russian Army was arrayed on the other side of the Vistula...
...Why didn't they revolt...
...For example, in Fail Safe, the best seller about an atomic accident that destroys Moscow and New York, a minor character is outraged at the European Jews, insisting that they should have murdered the SS men who came to arrest them...
...The world refused to look...
...When the Jews were being murdered, the world was indifferent...
...Four Jewish girls from the women's camp supplied them with weapons and dynamite...
...They showed not a trace of fear...
...They have disciples and followers...
...This sentence mirrors the true tragedy of those days: the abandonment of the Jew, inside and outside the camp...
...It is unfortunate that Barkai leaves out the heroic uprising of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau...
...And—"Now I stood in the forest . . . alone...
...As The Fighting Ghettos demonstrates, it simply is not true that all Jews blindly allowed themselves to be led to their death...
...When the army of liberation stood at the gates...
...There were Jewish men and women, Jewish boys and girls, and small Jewish children who did fight, weapon in hand...
...The girls were arrested, tortured and killed...
...Shlomo Goll's report tells of a group that escaped through an underground tunnel and reached the partisans...
...American and English airplanes parachuted whatever they wanted...
...The only fighters organization abandoned was the Jewish one...
...One rifle...
...And yet, uprisings took place in Treblinka, in Sobibor, in Birkenau...
...All four had been brought to Auschwitz from the Warsaw Ghetto...
...This is unfortunate, for such a book deserves to be reproduced in full...
...Jews broke out of the camps in Sobibor, Konin, and Ponary...
...Each time an all-knowing professor gets up and poses the philosophical question, Why no resistance?, someone should read him a chapter from The Fighting Ghettos...
...To all these post facto "experts" I recommend The Fighting Ghettos, edited and translated into English by Meyer Barkai...
...In every society, resisters are an "elite...
...Psychologists, like Bruno Bettelheim, and sociologists, like Hannah Arendt, are not the only ones who have been complaining...
...The English version includes only part of the material Yitzchak (Antek) Zuckerman and Moshe Basak collected for the powerful original...
...So, too, his escape from the death camp, his death struggle with a guard—the German armed and Wiernik with only a steel bar...
...When did Paris revolt...
...Why didn't they fulfill the Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye...
...Tormented, beaten, starved, where did they find the strength—spiritual and physical— to resist...
...Reviewed by ELIE WIESEL Author, "The Night," "The Dawn" It has become a kind of intellectual fad to upbraid the Jews murdered in World War II for allowing themselves to be killed: Why did they go off to the slaughter like sheep...
...A commissar from Moscow, when he heard the inmates' story refused at first to believe it...
...Still, it fulfilled its historical role...
...This book, a collection of documents, eyewitness accounts, letters, and poems—all related to the heroic Jewish uprisings —first appeared in Israel several years ago...
...History must eventually conclude that Jewish resisters outdid every other group...
...Wiernik finally fled to freedom, breathless...
...Now it asks why the Jews did not fight...
...Isaiah Trunk's essay on conditions in the concentration camps shows how impossible it was to organize an uprising there, in the innermost circle of hell...
...It is underlined, too, by Mordecai Tenenbaum's diary when he records his joy at finally receiving a rifle for the fighting organization he headed in Bialystok...
...One hears no complaints against the thousands of Russians and Poles who went to their deaths unresisting—only complaints against the Jews, the slaughtered Jews, whom the supposedly civilized world betrayed and abandoned...
...When did the Polish underground movement in Warsaw decide to give open battle...
...At the end of September 1944, these young men destroyed the crematory and fought their way out of the camp...
...The Russian partisans were supplied by the Soviet Army...
...Yankel Wicrnik's description of the uprising in Treblinka is shattering...
...Nevertheless, Barkai's selections are replete with instances of Jewish bravery, sacred devotion, passionate inspiration...
...The youngest was 12 years old, the oldest 16...
...The question is not why all the Jews did not fight, but how so many of them did...
...They fought not only as free partisans in the forests, but inside the very horror itself between the dark ghetto walls, even in the flickering flames of the gas ovens in Auschwitz...
...But the Jewish uprising in the ghettos and camps took place earlier, when all Europe was enveloped in German darkness and it appeared that the sun would never again rise over the eastern horizon...
...This is pointed up by Zuckerman's lamenting account of the almost insuperable obstacles in the way of acquiring weapons...
...In London during the war there were military staffs that did nothing but supply arms for the underground movements in occupied countries...
Vol. 46 • August 1963 • No. 16
