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

undergrounds and promoted the complex and difficult process of trying to enlist ghetto support for underground actions. While there were notable exceptions (for example, Kovno), it was generally the case that the Judenrate feared the possibility of armed action within the ghetto, and this for a very good reason. The Germans made clear that reprisals would result in the execution not only of the underground fighter, but of the family of the underground fighter and whomever else the Germans chose to kill – friends, relatives, people at random. Mass reprisal for underground and partisan activity was an integral part of German policy, and it worked. The Germans had no com punction about killing scores of individuals to avenge the death of one German soldier. And even a show of force by the underground provoked mass reprisals. Yet the Judenrate on occasion would split about whether or not to aid resistance fighters; some members might smuggle supplies, money or weapons to the underground, while other Judenrate and administration members violently argued against offering support.
    Death had as much presence in the ghetto as life. One Polish observer writes: ‘People walking on the street are so used to seeing corpses on the sidewalks that they pass by without any emotion’ (October 27, 1942). Another entry, of October 28, 1942: ‘I saw an old Jewish woman unable to walk anymore. A Gestapo man shot her once, but she was still alive; so he shot her again, then left. People see this now as a daily event and rarely react.… It is a common occur rence that Jews come on their own to the gendarme post and ask to be shot.’ 12 In dealing with efforts to mobilize the ghetto, the under ground continually faced this ever-present desolation – the disintegra tion of spirit and will, particularly amongst refugees. Underground leaders like Mordechai Tannenbaum (Bialystok), Abba Kovner (Vilna), Chaim Yellin (Kovno), Mordechai Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zukerman (Warsaw) distributed leaflets and entreaties to a population shattered by starvation and the death of children. And in the days and weeks following large-scale Aktionen (roundups, deportations, mass execu tions), many believed that this disaster had to be the last; nothing more could touch the ghetto. Normality in the ghetto ‘meant having just enough food to exist … it meant the survival of the community while individuals were shot. It meant life behind barbed wires, like criminals, like slave laborers, without rest or relaxation.’ 13
    Underground organizations generally were a loose association of various political groups; for example, in Warsaw, after the deportations of the summer of 1942, the Jewish Fighting Organization (JFO) was composed of Zionists, socialists, the Zionist youth, the Bund and the communists. Militant, anti-socialist, pro-violence Zionist revi sionists, on their own, formed the Jewish Military Association. Both underground groups maintained contact with each other, and after the 1942 deportations, ideological and political distinctions made utterly no difference. Emmanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw historian who organized extensive efforts at describing the social, cultural and political life in the ghetto, offers an explanation for Jewish inaction. It is worth quoting at length because his perception has received wide currency as describing the Jewish group state of mind:
    The Jews did not rise up against the slaughter anywhere; they went to their deaths without resisting. They did this in order that the others might live, for every Jew knew that lifting a hand against a German meant endangering Jews in another city or possibly another country … to be passive, not to raise a hand against the Germans, was the quiet heroism for the plain, average Jew. It would seem that this was the silent instinct to survive of the masses, and it dictated to everyone, as though through a con sensus, to behave in a certain way. And it appears to me that no explanation or