A Warrior Burdened by the Past
MARRUS, MICHAEL R.
A Warrior Burdened by the Past A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising By Yitzhak Zuckerman ("Antek") Translated and edited by Barbara Harshav California. 702 pp....
...Mordechai Anielewicz, the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza'ir leader and commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, spoke Yiddish at home and Polish with his colleagues...
...Jews, apparently, were being killed by poison gas...
...Thereafter, Zuckerman and his colleagues worked to shatter the illusions in the Warsaw Ghetto, particularly about the roundups and deportations...
...It is a wonder, one might think, that they managed to communicate with each other at all...
...Later, in Krakow, he was shot in the leg by the Germans and miraculously escaped...
...I don't know...
...Twenty-three years old when the Nazis began World War II, Zuckerman shared the passion of a generation of young Jewish men and women for modem programs of Jewish national rebirth...
...It doesn't get easier or weaker with the years...
...As one might expect, Zuckerman provides an ideological framework for this sympathetic assessment, relating it to the disputes within his movement over the importance, for Jews, of "Polish patriotism...
...When Warsaw's Jews were being sent to Treblinka and the underground was virtually powerless, Zuckerman and his friends made lists of "who we're going to hang in Eretz Israel, and in what order...
...Following the failure of a Communist-inspired effort in the spring of 1942 to bring Jewish underground organizations together, a handful of Zionist youth leaders set up the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB...
...For we could have done everything a little sooner, a little different...
...But far more arresting, indeed at the very core of his memoir, is the struggle against a cruel fate of a proud, indomitable culture of young Polish-Jewish men and women—and a brave, humane, dedicated, truly exceptional human being...
...They say maybe that's no accident...
...One of several Zionist movements that ranged from the extreme Right to extreme Left, Dror joined an enthusiasm for a kibbutz life in Palestine with a particular brand of socialism...
...Hewas58 and lived only seven more years...
...A basic conception, Zuckerman notes, was "giving the comrade the best soup...
...From the start of the War, Zuckerman was a He-Halutz organizer—first in eastern Poland under Soviet occupation, then in Warsaw where he was sent by his movement to launch a clandestine press and build an underground organization...
...At the beginning, the Jews were robbed and humiliated...
...Objectives focused as the idea of armed resistance took hold and the leaders pondered their pitifully few options...
...The essential job was to spread the alarm, and for Zuckerman warning his fellow Jews took precedence over what some others proposed—a desperate, hopeless assault on the Germans with sticks and stones...
...Zuckerman asks at the conclusion, taking up the recurrent theme of A Surplus of Memory...
...I can't blame anybody but myself—that I'm allowed...
...Zuckerman used Yiddish with Anielewicz at meetings, but they would break into Hebrew when they didn't want some participants to understand...
...It was very difficult...
...About 20,000 Jews went into hiding on the Aryan side of the city, he reports, and were aided by at least 40,000 Poles...
...In part because of his travels, he grasped more quickly than most the pattern of Jewish victimization throughout occu-piedPoland...
...Some Poles risked their lives smuggling weapons for Jews through Aryan Warsaw...
...Within a few weeks, he and his comrades heard a story told by a gravedigger who escaped from the death camp of Chelmno...
...Zuckerman's comrades in Dror were Hebraists, even though they felt positively about Yiddish, the language of the Jewish masses...
...That the world was silent, he and his colleagues seem to have taken for granted...
...I'm not the one who determines the timing and it bursts out of me and is part of me...
...At that time there was a lot of sympathy and admiration for the Jews, because everyone understood that the struggle was against the Germans...
...In his case, he devoted himself to the Zionist youth movement known as He-Halutz Ha Tza'ir ("Young Pioneer"), later referred to as Dror ("Freedom...
...What should we have done that we didn't do...
...At the urging of friends, Zuckerman recorded these memoirs on tape begin-ningin January 1974...
...its eloquence does not lie in organization or carefully crafted language...
...He offers additional pronouncements to justify his decision to fight side by side with Poles against the Germans when Warsaw rose up against them in the summer of 1944, and also explains why it was correct, after the War, to salvage the remnant of Polish Jewry for migration to Palestine...
...The news that Ponar was death sliced through me like a razor...
...In those days, [illusions] meant that, when things were happening in Lublin, people said: 'That won't happen in Warsaw.' When it did happen in Warsaw, they said: 'That happened on Nalewski, but it won't happen on Gesia.' When it did happen on Gesia, they said it happened at number 32, but it won't happen in my house, number 28...
...The decisive judgment is historical judgment...
...35.00...
...Decisions were reached by consensus, rather than by vote...
...As the ghetto was burning," he recalls, "I would mix with the crowd assembled to watch the ghetto walls...
...If you could lick my heart, you would be poisoned," he replied...
...Yet they had much in common even as their disputation raged...
...The tiny pro-Communist underground did what it could to help, together with a small group of idealistic Polish youth...
...The youthful ideologues argued over strategy and reached agreement with difficulty...
...In these stunning memoirs, which Zuckerman stipulated could only be published after his death, the aged warrior reconstitutes his terrible past—a past, he notes, that kept coming up, like the lava of an extinguished volcano...
...As one expects with such traumatic recollections, Zuckerman is occasionally repetitious, imprecise and emotional...
...Another time he was on his way to the Umschlagplatz in the Warsaw Ghetto, the embarkation point for Treblinka, and managed to slip away at the last moment...
...While unsparing on the subject of Polish anti-Semitism, Zuckerman is at pains to point out popular pro-Jewish sentiment...
...Consequently, he was a spectator during much of the battle, filled with rage, grief and frustration...
...With my own eyes I saw Poles crying, just standing and crying...
...Zuckerman and his fellow activists condemned to death a few Jewish policemen, and carried out the sentences...
...Zuckerman was one of the original architects, together with his close companion from Dror, Zivia Lu-betkin...
...A few days before SS General Jurgen Stroop's attack on the ghetto precipitated the Jewish uprising, Zuckerman slipped across to the Aryan side to make contact with the Home Army...
...His mother (who sold fish)," Zuckerman observes, "certainly didn't speak Polish...
...At one point he was sent to a labor camp, where he was tortured and marked for execution before he was inexplicably released...
...Full of youthful enthusiasm, they were devoted to Jewish culture that validated their respective points of view, preferring highbrow or popular, Yiddish or Hebrew, literary, scholarly or theatrical...
...Zuckerman's political vision illuminates practically every page and underscores a remarkable feature of Jewish public life in prewar East Central Europe—its extraordinary ideological sophistication...
...But that their own movement's counterparts in Switzerland, Turkey and even in Palestine appeared to have done so little to help was intolerable...
...tens of thousands of Jews, he learned, were shot in the nearby woods of Ponar where in his boyhood his family had a summer cottage...
...The prose, sometimes angry, sometimes ironic, sometimes argumentative, conveys a wide register of wartime preoccupations...
...Then came the task of resistance everywhere—to prepare for armed struggle...
...In all these groups, the intensity of the ideological debate reflected how seriously they took abstract theorizing as a framework for political action...
...I never knew if the violinist or the beggar, the newspaper vendor or the cigarette seller, standing innocently, strolling, was really a violinist or a cigarette seller—or a Gestapo agent...
...Unlike other examples of resistance under the Nazis, the Jews had no doubt about the final outcome...
...To spread the alarm also meant communicating with the outside, and here too Zuckerman is bitter...
...Dror activists formed a commune in one of the apartments on Dzielna Street and for a time ran two agricultural training collectives outside the city, supposedly preparing members to migrate to Palestine...
...Reviewed by Michael R. Marrus Professor of history, University of Toronto...
...Before long the Jews were deliberately starved, and the ghettos were raided to mobilize slave laborers...
...Bund-ists like Marek Edelman refused as anti-Zionists to have anything to do with Hebrew, insisting on Yiddish...
...Day after day, through the ordeals of starvation, torture and murder in the ghetto of Warsaw, they fought over what kind of socialism they favored, under what terms Jewish political formations should work together, the role of the Soviet Union, and so forth...
...Even when the Germans sealed Jews in their Warsaw prison, Zuckerman traveled secretly to other ghettos, often at terrible risk, for the cause...
...Zuckerman recounts how he stopped wearing a hat so that he would not have to take it off, as Jews were required to do, in the presence of Germans...
...author, "The Holocaust in History" Near the end of his nine-hour film, Shoah, Claude Lanzmann asks Yitzhak Zuckerman, once the deputy commander of the Jewish underground in the Warsaw Ghetto, to reflect on his experience...
...Some of the earliest indications came from his home town of Vilna...
...To the end, the memory of the Holocaust held him in its grip...
...Their rivals in the Marxist Zionist Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza'ir ("Young Guard") favored Hebrew as well, but after that preferred Polish, being mainly intellectuals who had graduated from Polish schools...
...Zuckerman developed the art of surviving underground—moving from one apartment to another, using false papers, aware that at any moment he could be denounced, caught in some roundup, or betrayed by some stupid mistake...
...The result is a torrent of images, events, impressions, character sketches, and reflections—an unforgettable account that stands with the most important of our century's personal testimonies of struggle against oppression and cruelty...
...And if she did, the Poles would have had a hard time understanding her...
...Constant fear jostles together with tension, sorrow, rage, hunger, frustration, and commitment to an exalted ideal...
...Language was one of the sharpest fields of disagreement...
...Groups forming the ZOB coalesced during the massive German deportations of Jews from Warsaw in July, August and September—roundups that reduced the ghetto population in a few months from 335,000 to 60,000...
...His book is a painful, urgent exercise in remembering...
...Bundists refused to participate under the same political umbrella as the Zionists...
...Zuckerman describes how the woefully small arsenal of weapons was assembled—a few pistols, rifles, grenades, and homemade bombs...
...Zuckerman says he began to realize in November 1941 that the Jews were destined for total destruction, rather than random, periodic murder...
...If I were chosen to stand before such a judgment I would say that I was late, I was late in everything...
...on the contrary, it gets sharper...
...They admired the Jews' courage and strength...
...We saw our job as fighting the Germans, which was to end by our being killed in battle...
...To be sure, ideology deserves a hearing...
...the nationalist Right, or Revisionists, could not work with the others and in the end formed their own independent fighting outfit...
...Working without documents, he relied solely on the "surplus of memory," as he put it, that he carried with him...
...Leaders like Zuckerman emerged through the force of personality and their own persistent claims—all involving endless, exhausting debate that took place, one must remember, in circumstances of constant privation and terror...
...The first task was to disrupt the deportation plans, urge Jews not to go to the Umschlagplatz, and shatter the authority of the Jewish police who were urging them to do so...
...In the ghetto, comradeship was at the core of social life and became a natural vehicle for underground organization...
...The anti-Communist Polish Home Army offered little assistance, the predominant view being, in the first place, that the Jews were incapable of fighting, and in the second, that they were likely acting in concert with the Soviets...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 7
