Read Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Online
Authors: James M. Glass
Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (19 page)
Theological argument, however, placed the Word of God on a higher level than the world of action. Even though the Germans might assault Jews, if God through his signs and infinite wisdom revealed the word ‘salvation,’ salvation as a concrete historical fact may have arrived. But until that time, salvation remains on the purely spiritual plane. Presumably the ‘Word’ is revealed through the rabbis and their universe of holy utterance; but the arrival of sal
vation in the temporal world may be ‘delayed.’ To speak the Word of God, to pray, is a
mitzvah
, a form of action and of protest. To believe in eventual salvation and to continue believing in the face of devastation becomes a theological proposition
and
a psychologi
cal act providing solace and hope for the soul. Speaking prayers, holy observance, brings salvation closer, hence the emphasis on prayer, the repetitive uttering of holy words in Hasidic theology.
The critical
theological
question for the believer, Shapira main
tained, should not be affected by the secular quest of how to deal politically with the real, immediate world, with the organization of workshops, work brigades, death camps, since performance of ritual, observance of prayer and dietary law constitute forms of action – the only route to realizing the Word of God, of Torah. Reason, understanding, explanation, the empirical reality of oppression, have no bearing on faith. What is required, then, of the Jewish com
munity is a ‘radical surrender to the divine will,’ not to politics or the real. In Shapira’s view it is a terrible mistake to think that reason can act as a protection against slaughter. Since all secular thought is sullied and twisted by experience, thought, if it is to be at all pure, unaffected by evil, needs to begin from a foundation in faith and God. It is not the individual who thinks alone, but faith that thinks through the self.
The technology and bureaucracy of annihilation enforced a psychological fragmentation so vicious that ghetto inhabitants accepted the sight of dead and dying bodies in the gutters, streets, on sidewalks, as part of daily normality. Often children as young as five or six would haul the wagons carrying the nightly toll of dead bodies
to mass graves, or excrement from makeshift privies to trenches dug in the ghetto. How is one to interpret Shapira’s faith in the midst of all this? Spirit struggled in an infinite variety of sadistic contexts. Because of the omnipresence of death, parents, on occasion, deserted their children or gave them over to German guards or Jewish police making selections. In the Lodz ghetto during the infamous selection where the Germans demanded 10,000 children under ten, elderly over 60 and the sick as the price for sparing 20,000 adults, this twisted mélange of German efficiency, death and sadistic enthusiasm destroyed will. One father left his infant daughter for the Germans:
‘When I came to the hospital … I deserted her. I, her father, did not protect her. I deserted her because I feared for my own life – I killed … I can’t write – I deserve to be punished – I am the one who killed her. What punishment awaits me for killing my own daughter …? I killed the child with my own hands.’
The Germans effectively killed this man
and
his faith without directly assaulting his body. By 1944, if he had not died from hunger, disease or cold, the gas chambers of Auschwitz or the gas vans of Chelmno would have destroyed him. Mooka’s father psychi
cally sustained ‘life,’ but it was living death, not sustained by faith:
‘I walked off with Anya [his elder daughter] but I left Mooka behind. Instead of hiding with her in the cellar or in the toilet, I put her in a clothes basket, and she gave herself away with crying. Naked, barefoot, miserable – my dear child, it’s me, your father, who betrayed you, it’s me, driven by selfishness, who did nothing for your salvation, it’s me who spilled your blood.’
41
In Lodz, Oskar Rosenfeld describes a scene of resistance to the
Kinder
selection:
‘[A] child is torn away from a young woman by a
Feldgrau
[a German soldier so described by the field-gray of his uniform]. “Let me have my child or shoot me.”
Feldgrau
pulls out [his] revolver. “I will ask you three times if I should shoot.” He asks three times. The reply is always
yes,
and he shoots the woman down.’
42
But examples like this are rare; ghetto inhabitants sink into cata
tonia, numbness. Shapira condemned this as a ‘rebellion against God’; but that was not the case. Numbness or dissociation defined the ghetto’s psychological reality. It was the consequence of the German brutalization – all too successful in inducing spiritual death. Even at a time when God’s presence is hidden, Shapira argues, the self must continue to believe in Him: ‘Everything that comes from Him … is good … just. Suffering embodies, in His hidden purposes, God’s love for Israel.’
43
Shapira refuses to countenance as legitimate any questioning of God’s intent: ‘Faith is the foundation of every
thing.’ No one can expect to know God’s intent. ‘How can we expect, with our minds, to understand what He, may He be blessed and exalted, knows and understands?’
44
After all, suffering is not unique to the Holocaust, since ‘at the time of the destruction of the Temple, and at the fall of Beitar … there were [sufferings] such as these.’
45
When one surrenders ‘his soul,’ when the self merges with God through faith, the consciousness of suffering is transcended; ‘he will believe with perfect faith that everything is [transpiring] with justice and with the love of God for Israel.’
46
Oppression should turn consciousness towards the ‘holiness’ within, since holi
ness is more powerful than mind or reason. Oppression should glorify faith.
Even the Jew who strays from faith retains the possibility of returning to God’s devotion, of submitting once again to the holy presence within. And in an observation clearly directed at the dete
riorating spiritual conditions in the ghetto, Shapira writes, even if the self lies ‘prostrate, like a stone, with mind and heart arrested’ by savagery, even if ‘improper thoughts assail’ consciousness, it is essential to find one’s way back to faith.
47
The constant reference in sermons to the turning away from faith is powerful evidence suggesting how fragile the hold of religion had become in the community. Shapira time and again in his homilies of 1942 returns to the contrast between the theme of abnegation and purification. He speaks of having to ‘nullify ourselves,’ an extraordinary spiritual demand in Warsaw at that time. To consider oneself ‘a separate being with his own mind’ is to be ‘outside’ of God; but to be devoted to Him is to realize ‘our minds are naught’ and that if ‘God made things happen this way, that’s how it should be.’
48
German barbarity may push the self into a place where
consciousness does not ‘feel [its] faith’; but even though the Jew may be incapable of experiencing God’s ‘joyous state,’
49
faith as a fundamental relation to God never disappears. It is there, like one’s ‘stomach, heart or lungs’; the self may not be aware of the existence of faith, just as we take for granted the operation of the lungs or heart.
50
We carry within us as a given of the soul ‘the allotment of love and faith … as our forefathers’ legacy.’ And just as we cannot add more lungs to our body, we cannot possibly add more love and faith.
Faith for Rabbi Shapira, then, possesses an involuntary presence; it is there, whether we are in touch with it or not. It is outside of us but it is also inside, although it may be deeply buried and ‘outside of our field of awareness.’ When the self reaches for it, when con
sciousness during ‘a state of slackness and weakness’ transcends itself, even though a person may not ‘perceive’ faith, he is neverthe
less a ‘believer.’
51
Shapira acknowledges that disbelief may arise, it is inevitable; but questioning God should not be taken as a sign that faith has disappeared altogether. There may be momentary lapses, but return to faith always exists even in the face of strong evidence opposing faith. What will assure the community’s salvation is not action in the world, not politics, but the binding power of faith and God’s covenant with His people.
One can admire Rabbi Shapira, but in the force of the German assault, psyches were crushed; and psychological collapse and with it the disintegration of spirit often, but not always, preceded physi
cal death. Terror might erode the boundary between inside and outside, the world of the soul and that of the body. Yet, as some diaries and Jewish law written during this time describe it, in this struggle to survive, the individual could say to himself, ‘Over my soul they have no dominion.’ But equally powerful was the impres
sion of souls dying.
A survivor described to me ghetto life in Warsaw:
‘You have no idea what it was like, the filth, hunger, dead bodies all over the streets, thousands of children, many covered head to foot with lice, begging or wandering aimlessly. I remember one woman, walking down a street, stumbling over bodies, murmur
ing something like, “Mendel, Mendel,” her arms stretched out in front of her, her eyes crazed; she had no shoes, her clothes hung off her body in tatters.’
In the camps and ghettos, ‘the only thing that you can think of is that you’re hungry.’
1
A survivor in Krakow told me that his father had been fortunate enough to be placed on Oscar Schindler’s list, thereby assuring protection against the Germans. But this man, a respected doctor in the Krakow Jewish community, left behind in the Plazow labor camp his wife, son and two daughters. It would have been insensitive of me to ask what he thought of his father for
141
doing this; but evidence of his bitterness appeared in the fact that he changed his name to a Polish name, married a Polish Catholic woman and refused to bring his children up as Jews, thoroughly rejecting his father’s name and religion. Yet, he visits Auschwitz every year and goes out of his way to take foreign visitors to Auschwitz where he, as a survivor, has the dubious privilege of being able to drive his car onto Auschwitz-Birkenau grounds. One can only imagine what this ten-year-old boy felt when he watched his father leave him in the labor camp, to find safety in Schindler’s factory.
Surviving was brutal for the person lucky enough to survive, but the process of survival could mean abandoning entire families. Miraculously, Dr. B.’s entire family survived the war. Dr. B.’s parents emigrated to Israel; Dr. B. stayed in Poland. I asked him if he had visited his parents: ‘Once or twice I went to Israel.’ One wonders how the terrified child would respond to Rabbi Shapira’s concept of faith and devotion, and the eternal presence of God’s care and concern.
Lawrence Langer recounts Anna G.’s description of an event on the ramp at Auschwitz. A ten-year-old girl refused to go to the ‘left’ (which meant death) after the initial selections. The child, seized by three guards who held her down, screamed to her mother to help her, to stop the guards from killing her. One of the guards approached the mother and asked if she wanted to go with her daughter; the mother said no. The eye-witness describing this scene said to the interviewer: ‘Who am I to blame her? What would be my decision in a case like this?’
2
Sidney L. witnessed the death of his parents and several siblings. Against this kind of assault, to maintain an inner world of faith impervious to the outer world of body or event would be psychologically impossible. The power of the assault and the attack on his will and faith appear in Sidney L.’s description of how he survived: ‘In all these things that happened – I played a very small part in everything that happened. There were very few things that I initiated, or planned out on this. This is how it hap
pened; it took me from here and put me there … . It was not my plan, it was not my doing.’
3
For many survivors, chance takes the place of God. A 17-year-old boy, with working papers, believes that the Germans will let his brother accompany him to a labor camp. But instead, the SS insist
his brother go to the ‘left.’ ‘I know it’s not my fault, but my conscience is bothering me. I have nightmares, and I think all the time that the young man, maybe he wouldn’t go with me, maybe he would survive. It’s a terrible thing; it’s almost forty years, and it’s still bothering me.’
4
Or Sally H.: ‘I’m thinking of it now … how I split myself. That it wasn’t
me
there. It just wasn’t me. I was some
body else.’
5
The impact of such a psychological assault transformed the self, emptied it out. For example, Bessie K., a young wife in the Kovno ghetto in 1942, tried to smuggle her baby into a work camp; the Germans seized the infant. ‘And this was the last time I had the bundle with me.’ Part of ‘her,’ her self, identity and being, died. ‘I wasn’t even alive; I wasn’t even alive. I don’t know if it was by my own doing, or it was done, or how, but I wasn’t there. But yet I sur
vived.’ To survive, she says, she had to kill feeling inside herself; part of her had to die. In the boxcar to Auschwitz: ‘I was
born
on that train and I
died
on that train … but in order to survive, I think I had to die first.’
6
In Irene H.’s words, ‘The truth is harsh and impos
sible to really accept, and yet you have to go on and function.’ What life showed was ‘a complete lack of faith in human beings.’
7
Another survivor even rejects luck as the agent for her survival: ‘I had determined already to survive – and you know what? It wasn’t luck, it was stupidity.’
8
Survivors rarely speak of the intense feelings generated by the terror; although in my interviews with resistance survivors there appeared to be a willingness, even a need, to recapture those feel
ings in their narratives. But in Langer’s transcripts of the Yale Fortunoff Library’s collection of survivor testimony, it is almost the exact opposite, as if all feelings including faith had been suspended by the daily demands of survival:
‘It is difficult to … talk about feelings … we were reduced to such an animal level that actually now that I remember those things, I feel more horrible than I felt at the time. We were in such a state that all that mattered is to remain alive. Even about your own brother or the closest, one did not think.’
9
Here Vernon describes his exhaustion: ‘You ask me if we talked about faith; we were too tired at the end of the day even to talk.’
Yet, a simple act like lighting a candle on Yom Kippur became a significant even venerable event in the camps or in the forests. The only reality that possessed day-to-day emotive content was remain
ing alive. Alex H. remarks that ‘fraternal caring is a major measure of civilized conduct,’
10
but caring as a communal act could be sporadic and haphazard during the Holocaust. ‘Sure, I cared for other people’s emotions, but not very often,’ Vernon observed, ‘the governing law was “every man for himself.”’
Responses that in any kind of normal environment would be con
sidered natural, in the Holocaust environment possess lethal poten
tial. In a factory, an SS officer came up behind Luna K. and cocked his revolver. Her mother was sitting opposite her. Both women remained completely silent, no words, no protest (although the mother’s face turns chalk-white), even though each was convinced he would pull the trigger. Luna K. heard a click; in fact, it was the gun trigger striking an empty chamber. The officer had literally run out of ammunition. ‘So nobody says anything … it wasn’t worth taking my life, so he just walked out. So now you can understand why people were quiet. If my mother said a word, I wouldn’t be here today.’
11
Yet, in the recollections of resistance fighters, it is not muteness that defines forest life, but constant action and noise. The more noise, the safer they were. Sonia Bielski: ‘If we could speak loudly amongst each other, we were safe.’
Martin L. describes a state of mind pervasive throughout the ghettos and camps, an immediacy or actuality that literally flattens consciousness. ‘When you see a lot of deaths, your mind gets numb, you can do nothing … . Your humanity is gone. You’re speech
less.’
12
The deadly potency of muteness recurs throughout the diaries and recollections, the sense of will-lessness, the ineffectiveness of speech and volition. Contrast this to Rabbi Shapira’s faith in the power of the word; speech as the key to divine revelation. But Shapira understands the situation all too well and allows that there may be moments of silence or muteness between God and the self; and between God and the community. That does not, however, mean that faith or God has disappeared. But apparently this was a matter of some debate and concern in Warsaw, since Shapira returned to this theme throughout his sermons.
For many survivors, the Germans took away will and civilization. Langer’s analysis is grim: civilization, will, energy fall apart; ‘gradu
ally, gradually, you become a different person. And you do things that you would
never
think you’d do – and you do it.’
13
What Langer calls the ‘disintegration of basic life’ extends to the psyche; George
S.
describes one woman whose child was discovered and taken by the Germans; her despair appears as a compulsion to reveal to the German authorities the hiding places of other children. The very human premises of what Rabbi Shapira called goodness disappear against the force of reality, which, distorted by the presence of evil, defines all value and power. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that many Warsaw Jews believed evil had destroyed God.
Many survivors, of course, stayed with their families and tried to save them; but eventually reality collapsed hope and expectation. Leon H. witnessed the death of each member of his family; he believed that by staying near them, he might serve as a protective shield. But each died; finally, he tried to defend his brother, the last surviving member of his family, but his brother died in his arms in a camp. He feels morally responsible for events he could not control: ‘We envied the dead ones.’
14
A mother hid the decaying corpse of her five-year-old child under the bed for several weeks in order to keep claiming the child’s food rations. Moses S. describes a concen
tration camp as a place where they take you ‘to die and die and die.’
15
Langer sees the dissociative psychological process as a mode of survival: the ‘paradoxical killing of the self by the self in order to keep the self alive.’
16
Yet, to kill the ‘self’ means to kill the affective or emotional self, what Winnicott calls the core self: the self of feeling and identity.
17
It is to adopt a ‘false self’ system (a phrase borrowed from Winnicott); but the surviving false self is more like a mask disguising a dead inner reality, so thoroughly terrorized, that to allow feeling inside would jeopardize the very survival of con
sciousness and being. One can admire Shapira’s desperate attempts, through words, to fight this deadly feeling of dissociation and detachment. But Langer’s survivors stress time and again how they were driven into muteness.
Survivor testimony consistently returns to this theme: killing the self not only to defend against an intolerable reality but to assure the possibility of physical survival. Also selves engage in actions that never would have been imagined prior to the Holocaust: stealing, handing over children, indifference to death, discarding of traditional moral values. The consequence, in Langer’s view,
psychological indifference, testifies not to the endurance of faith or the redemptive power of God, but, in the words of one survivor, ‘These people come back, and you realize, they’re all broken, they’re all broken. Broken. Broken.’
18
For these survivors, Rabbi Shapira’s homilies take on the status of dysfunctional fantasies. But it is a complicated story; survivors in their new lives retained belief in their Jewishness. They joined synagogues, celebrated
Bar
and
Bat Mitzvah,
lit candles on Friday night. Yet, these actions seemed to be separate from the knowledge of who or what had saved them. It was not God, but in the case of resistance survivors, guns and action. It would be wrong, then, to argue that faith had been killed by the Germans; it would also be wrong to see Rabbi Shapira’s faith cele
brated in what survivors describe as the continuing assault on spirit. Faith had not been killed by the Germans; it had been challenged and dealt with brutally. But for the resistance survivors – and their testimony is of course quite different from those found in Langer’s book – the sense of membership in an historical community, the emotional and religious core of a Jewish identity, and pride in that membership, appeared in religious and theological observance after liberation, and during the Holocaust, in the resistance communities themselves. Women expressed a more profound belief in God than the men; and much of that belief had to do with the association of God’s will with natality, the biological link between generations.
Survivor testimony, however – and this includes much in the partisans’ narratives – resonates with the memory of selves being broken in the ghetto, of faith in God being nowhere present in day-to-day efforts to evade capture, in the disintegration of moral limits, and the unrelenting self-absorption of individuals desperately attempting to stay alive. A survivor of the Lodz ghetto: ‘When you’re hungry, it gets to a point where you don’t mind stealing from your own sister, from your own father … . I would get up in the middle of the night … and slice a piece of bread off my sister’s ration. Now I – you would never picture me, and I can’t even imagine myself doing that now. But it happened.’
19
Another victim of the Lodz ghetto told me during an interview in Warsaw that he saw families fighting each other to pick up a scrap of bread from the street. Given this breakdown of ethics and morals, Rabbi Shapira’s sermons appear as a profound invocation of God to contain or transmute the natural or biological conditions of survival, to over
look this very real Hobbesean decline into incivility. A survivor of the Plazow labor camp told me in an interview in Warsaw that after one month in the camp, the word ‘God’ never entered his mind.
