Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust by James M. Glass Read Free Book Online Page A

pushed the nurse away, then lapped up the spilt slops from the floor, tearing bits of rotten swede [from the floor] away from each other.’ 5
    Vomit and human waste fouled the hospital wards. The children barely resembled human beings.
    ‘On the bunks lay skeletons of children or swollen lumps. Only their eyes were alive. Until you’ve seen such eyes, the face of a starving child with its gaping black hole for a mouth and its wrinkled, parchment-like skin, you don’t know what life can be like… . There weren’t enough mattresses for the bunks and their number was diminishing because the bloody diarrhea reduced them to pulp.’ 6
    Dr. Szwajger describes a child ‘who, in the frost, had stripped naked on the street in order to be taken in by the hospital because children came to us for that one last thing we could offer – the mercy of a quiet death.’ 7 Scenes like the following were commonplace:
    ‘When my sister died and Mamma carried her out, she didn’t have any strength left to go and beg, so she just lay there and cried a bit. But I didn’t have any strength to go out either, so Mamma died too, and I wanted to live so terribly much and I prayed like Papa did before, before they killed him.’ 8
    A little boy, shot in the liver while running from a German policeman, hid a small coin in his hand (the equivalent of a nickel or a few pence) and said to the doctor before he died that she should give it to his mother. A six-year-old girl, who had witnessed the death of her brother, sister and mother, had the shuffle of an ‘old woman.’ She pleaded with Dr. Szwajger to let her remain in the hospital; with her parents dead, she had nowhere to go. The doctor speaks of one little girl who kept apologizing for the smell from her gangrenous legs. Children who were forced to hide day and night in small ramped holes or bunkers, or behind walls and in attics and cellars, developed rickets; they lost the ability to walk and, in some instances, how to talk because silence was essential to avoid giving themselves away to Germans, local police or informants. Births brought not joy but despair and fear. 9
    To escape from the ghetto meant hiding or trying to find sym pathizers in the local population; but the Germans made it clear that the punishment for concealing Jews was death for anyone caught in such ‘subversive’ actions. Women who escaped to the forests faced the prospect of being raped by non-Jewish partisans or local peasants. Children had little chance of surviving the harsh conditions of life outside the ghetto; and while many in the ghetto knew of partisan bands and units where they might receive protec tion, most ghetto inhabitants chose to stay in the ghetto – not out of a death wish or apathy, but because they knew what it was like ‘out there’; to survive in the forests required skills, endurance and logistics unavailable to the mass of the Jewish population.
    Hiding outside the ghetto brought enormous risks. One survivor recalls: ‘We couldn’t relieve ourselves outside, because any farmers passing through the woods would have noticed the human waste.’ 10 At any moment, those fortunate enough to build a bunker outside the ghetto could be discovered by German units, hostile locals or terrified farmers in fear that if Germans found Jews on their property, they too would be killed. Those escaping the ghetto faced the problem of food and supplies; of protecting against the cold, disease and injury. It was therefore terrifying to leave the ghetto; at least in the ghetto one had one’s family – or what remained of the family – and friends after periodic selections. It took enormous courage to leave.
    Despair inevitably preceded rage. ‘Nothing mattered to me. I felt depressed and full of grief …’ 11 – this from a partisan who learned that her entire family had been executed.
    Youth with a strong political belief, whether it was communism, Zionism or revisionist-Zionism, initially joined the