Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0114/01144.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob01144}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter IX: The Resistance - Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Various}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{resistance
ghetto
german
jews
warsaw
even
germans
jewish
underground
country}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter IX: The Resistance - Part II

Benjamin Meed

     I am a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.  I was a member of the underground
in the Warsaw Ghetto since 1940.  I have been living here in the United States
for the past 35 years.  A year after the liberation by the Russian army I
arrived in the United States, and here, together with my wife, Vladka, we
established our home and raised our family with deep roots in this new
homeland.

     Thirty-six years have gone by since the liberation - of tension,
uncertainty, constant crises, and distress and years of rebuilding our life
here after the Holocaust.  Nothing however, can erase from our minds the
impact and the significance of our survival from the Nazi era, especially our
life in the Warsaw Ghetto, our involvement in the underground activities, and
the witnessing of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto uprising - the symbol of Jewish
resistance during the Nazi occupation.

     But I choose to speak today not about the uprising, which will be
tomorrow's topic, but about the people of the Warsaw Ghetto.  For many years,
historians have seemed to focus on the nature of Jewish resistance. How many
fought and why and when, and why did they wait so long?  These questions are
for us survivors the height of disrespect for our martyrs.

     I find it difficult to separate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising from all other
events that preceded it.  We must first understand that the dramatic climax of
the organized Jewish resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto was not the only such
occurrence and it certainly was not an act of sudden impulse. Neither were any
of the uprisings in other ghettos and camps of the partisans.  They should not
be seen as isolated acts of glory with which to ransom the honor of those who
perished.

     Yes, in those times, under the constant threat of death in the Warsaw
Ghetto, a network of illegal schools was organized - Yeshivas, libraries,
lectures.  In addition there was a clandestine net of political activities,
although under different circumstances than in the countries like Denmark,
Holland, and France.

     I doubt that there were ever other circumstances in Jewish history in
which the ordinary Jew had been so involved and enveloped in communal
experience as he was during the ghetto period.

     There were over half-a-million people in the Warsaw Ghetto.  If the
Ghetto did not commit acts of violence against the Germans in those days, it
was not because of lack of courage or organized leadership, but because the
Jews felt that their purpose would not be served.

     The underground movement was hampered by the murderous German practice of
applying collective responsibility which we understand so well today. For
every one German killed, hundreds of Jews were killed.  The aim and the goal
of the Ghetto and the people of the Ghetto was to survive, to remain with
human dignity or to outwit the enemy and to live for the day to be the witness
of his destruction.  Every effort which lent strength to this purpose was an
act of resistance.

     But then the Final Solution started.  The final deportations, the sudden
German round-ups, and the continued shootings stunned and immobilized the
entire Ghetto population and kept even the most courageous from direct
counteraction.  And this was in every ghetto in Poland.

     Very little has been written about the moral dilemmas, which were so
important, facing the ordinary Jew in the ghetto during those days of
deportations.  For instance, when Jews were being rounded up, some factories
issued permits to workers allowing them for the time being to remain with
their families - up to four people in the family was the limit.  A worker who
was employed in such a factory who had three children had to decide which two
to keep and which one to send away - to death, he knew or whether the whole
family should allow themselves to be taken away.  What about a mother?  Should
an unmarried worker claim her as his wife or would it be more safe for him to
abandon her?  Should one stay with his family, risking deportation, or escape
to try to join the partisans in the forest?

     An abyss of temptation to live, of self-preservation, yawned before each,
but only a tiny, tiny minority sank into it.  Only a few betrayed their
families or bought their lives at the price of another's.  The majority of the
Jews maintained their humanity and their integrity and their Jewish
consciences.

     I can still remember thousands of us forced to line up in the narrow
streets of the Warsaw Ghetto and the German officer at the head of the line
pointing with a stick, "Left, right, left, right."  I can still feel the dread
as we stood in that line.  Left to the death camps.  Right - a few more days
of survival in the Ghetto.  And the world let it happen.

     I can still feel the dread today because I fear that it could happen
again.

     Do not forget, the Germans were the masters of technology.  They used
their scientific and psychological knowledge to murder innocent men, women,
and children.  Their engineers designed the crematoria.  Their psychologists
devised the techniques of mass murder.

     And we were chosen as the people to be completely destroyed - the Jews.

     Jewish struggle in the Warsaw Ghetto and other cities assumed various
forms throughout the occupation years, and they all were intertwined and
related with each other.  The form which the resistance took always depended
on the particular time and circumstances.

     One of the great failures of the research and the literature of our
destruction is that it has not produced a clear picture of the day - today
life of the ordinary Jew in the ghetto in that time.

     Each individual was a universe unto himself, making his way from hour to
hour, from day to day, seeking to survive with his self-respect.  He was
abandoned and forgotten as an individual within the turmoil around him.  He
was concealed and overshadowed by the dramatic happenings of that time.

     It is only when one sees all the circumstances of Jewish behavior leading
up to the epic act of physical defiance that one can better understand what
took place behind the blood-stained Ghetto walls.  It was an existence burning
with determination to thwart the enemy s design, which was to break and
destroy the race both physically and spiritually, and to do this even before
we were brought to the gas chambers.

     Let me for a moment recall the Warsaw Ghetto where I lived as a young
man, where in 1941 half-a-million people lived:  the crowded street that I hid
on behind the high Ghetto walls, the starvation, the corpses lying unclaimed
on the sidewalks, the typhoid epidemic.  Death pursued us at every side.
Merely to stay alive amidst all this - every day, every hour - was in itself a
real struggle.

     But survival was not the one dominating impulse of the Ghetto.  I
remember seeing the streets of the Ghetto and the little display carts laden
with books yes, books, emaciated Jews hovering over them, looking for a
bargain, even starving for a bargain, in literature, and literature not only
about Jews but of the whole world.  I can still see my neighbors standing in
the doorway of our house, watching for the approaching Germans or policeman
while in our basement, teachers - I was one of them - held secret classes for
young children.  I recall the seminars of the young people, held in the hidden
places.

     We cannot simply console ourselves by saying it cannot happen again, for
if our tragic past teaches us anything, it teaches us that the impossible is
indeed possible, that the unbelievable can indeed, God forbid, happen once
more.

     Yes, we the survivors - and there are many in this room now - remember,
and we will remember.

     We will try to teach the next generation also to remember, for our task
of reminding the world will never be finished, and we must be sure that there
are others like you people here to carry on the message that another Holocaust
should and must never be permitted again.

Discussion

Frank Lautenberg:  Professor Yehuda Bauer, whom you've either met or heard at
this conference or whose material you have read, defines resistance as any
group action taken in opposition to known or surmised laws, actions, or
intentions directed against the Jews by the Germans and their collaborators.

     Mr. Jakobsen said that the thing that seemed to unite the Danish people
more than anything else was the German action against the Jews. That's a
particularly important statement.  The fact that General Eisenhower, the
Supreme Allied Commander, said that resistance was worth six divisions is
quite a statement.  Helen Fein, in her work accounting for Genocide argues
that there is a direct relationship between the degree to which a country
resisted Nazism and the murder of Jews.

     I would like to pose this to you as a question in the few minutes
remaining to see how it corresponds to your own views.  Was that, in fact, the
case?  Was the resistance to the murder of Jews something that enabled the
countries that you represent - that you lived in - to struggle harder against
the Nazis and to keep them from achieving their objectives?

Frode Jakobsen:  I said that the Danish people were united when the Germans
made this distinction between Danish Jews and other Danish people, but that
did not mean that resistance did not exist before.  Resistance existed at
once, but we had a government which was more interested in having good
economic conditions in the country.  It was really two fights a fight against
what we call the wrong policy, and a fight against the Germans.

     And this resistance grew so strong that, even before the persecution of
the Jews, the government was overthrown.  The turning point for us was the
decree that the death sentences to saboteurs were to be executed by the Danes
themselves.  Nobody could accept that.  But this difference between what we
called "old politicians" and resistance fighters diminished completely when
the persecution of the Jews started because even those very wise politicians
could not accept that.  Then we were united.

     It was not the element of resistance but it was the uniting of the people
who were for resistance and the people who until then were against resistance.

Frank Lautenberg:  We have a question from the floor:  Did any members of this
panel have any links with German resistance?  What are those links?  What was
the extent of the German underground?  Is anybody aware of that?

Frode Jakobsen:  Yes.  I think I said I have been in this for 50 years.  In
1933 I went on a bicycle as a courier between emigre groups in Copenhagen and
underground resistance groups in Hamburg and Berlin.  I was a young student,
and when all the emigres came to Denmark, their greatest problem was to know
what was happening in Germany.  You could never know what was true and what
were lies in German newspapers.  And in the same way, the emigres who wanted
to cooperate with the resistance couldn't know anything of what happened in
Germany.

     But when we speak of German resistance, that has nothing to do with what
happened during the war.  We are speaking of the revolt of the officers - the
Social Democratic opposition, the Communist opposition, etc. - which had
already been crushed by 1933.

Louis de Jong:  German resistance had to be carried out under circumstances
even more difficult than the resistance on the part of other people.  It is
hard to fight for the liberation of your country.  It is even harder to fight
for the defeat of your country, and that's what inevitably the members of the
German resistance had to do.

     There have been various forms of German resistance organized by political
parties, the Communist Party in the first place and the Socialist Party, too.
Later on, in the 1941-1943 period, we have the attempts on Hitler's life,
which unfortunately failed, by certain German officers who also had important
links from the end of 1943 with the Dutch underground and who were completely
trusted.  These links, of course, were broken off after the Stauffenberg
attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944.

     But I think that, although it is accepted by everyone here present, and
there is no official German delegation present here, we should all understand
that the first people who entered the Nazi concentration camps were Germans.

     Secondly, we must realize that in Germany there were not hundreds but
thousands of people who were willing to risk their lives in order to give help
to their German co-citizens.

     I am sorry that I, as a Dutchman, have to produce these facts, but I am
profoundly convinced that a wrong impression would be left on this meeting -
particularly on those who are not historians - if these simple facts were not
brought to the fore.

Unidentified Speaker:  You are right, and what you are saying is that there
could be German resistance against the government or one taking over the
government.  But here we are just interested in the genocide of the Jewish
people and other peoples, and I have never, in the 40 years since the war
ended, come across any document or any notion of German resistance against the
Nazi atrocities.  Today I even heard another speaker say that five days after
Hitler was already dead the gas chambers were active in the death camps.

     I never heard of a revolt to do something about stopping the killing of
the Jews.  I have heard the revolt about taking over the German government,
but I never heard from any underground of the German people about their coming
out against the killing.

Frode Jakobsen: I am not saying that, and everything you have said I can agree
with, but it does not invalidate the factual statements I have made.

Renee Aubry:  I wanted to say that where France is concerned, the relations
with Hitler's Germany were extremely difficult, and in spite of everything,
there were some German underground agents who came into France.  In our own
underground units, we had a few Germans who either left very early or
succeeded in fleeing Germany.  It's a very special area relative to what you
have been talking about.

     May I come back to your first question?  When you asked if the atrocities
against the Jewish race were a decisive factor for resistance, that's not
quite the way it happened, but we were struggling also against our own
domestic government of Marshal Petain.

     When the Jews were gathered by the thousands in Paris, the French nation
arose in anger, and people who did not feel involved began at that point to
understand what this could mean in real terms.  That is the witness I wish to
present on behalf of France.

Samuel Gruber:  We had at least five or six German officers in the partisans
who had run away from the Army and who came to us and fought with us.  For
example, one was from the SS in Czechoslovakia and one was from Stuttgart.

     They fought with us until the end, but this wasn't organized.  They just
felt that the Germans had perhaps lost the war or something.  They came to us,
and they fought with us.

Unidentified Speaker:  There are people like that, we know, and from those
people they organized a special German unit.  They fought together with us.

Frank Lautenberg:  I have a last question from the floor.  It's addressed to
the Polish resistance fighters, two of whom are represented here.

     The question asks for comment on the safety of Jewish fugitives and
resistance fighters who fled to the woods in Poland.  They often found that
circumstances could be as dangerous for them from some of the population
surrounding that area, even as bad as those they already faced, and that Jews
were killed as they fell into local hands.

Samuel Gruber:  It is true, and we can talk about this a lot, but we have to
underline that many Polish people had helped us.  Otherwise, we would not have
lived.  A partisan in any place had to have a backer.  He had to have some
people helping him or he could not exist.  We came to the population. They had
to give us food.  They had to give us help and they gave us information on how
to work against the Germans.

     But there were a lot of Polish people who surrendered the Jews and even
the partisans when they caught them; they killed them, themselves, without the
Germans.  This was true, but I cannot say the whole population was against us.
There is a story in my book about a man who kept us, a group of about 20
people, and everybody was wounded.  I, myself, was wounded twice.  He gave us
food and he kept about 20 people at one time, but there were also a lot of
people against us.

Benjamin Meed:  I must say that it is difficult for you to comprehend.  Our
situation was much different.  You are coming from a country, Denmark, where
90 percent of the Jewish population survived.  You are coming from Holland
where 50 or 60 percent - I don't know exactly the numbers.  I'm coming and my
colleague is coming from a country where the majority of our people perished.
Ninety percent of our people.  We lost the majority of our people. I don't
want to get into numbers, but it is important.

     Without good people, without even the Poles I would not be sitting here.
Without good people in any country, we wouldn't be here, but when I think
about Denmark and I compare it to Poland, I feel terrible.  I feel terrible
that I had to be born in Poland and somebody else had to be born in Denmark or
vice versa.

     I think there is a tremendous lesson to be learned from this.  I was also
in the Polish uprising as a Gentile.  I went through 1943, and a year later I
was in the Polish uprising.  I cannot forget the time during the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising when people did not have any interest in helping us. They just kept
looking at the burning Ghetto and performing their daily life like this was
just a routine day in the street.

     When I was in the Polish uprising, I could not forget what happened to us
there together that day.  I was not happy at what happened, but I was just
sorry for not having enough understanding for each other to realize that what
happened to Jews at that time could happen tomorrow to Frenchmen or to
Dutchmen, or Poles, or anybody else.

     The Holocaust - which was directed against us - is not only for us, and
if we don't learn the lesson, there could be a holocaust of other people
tomorrow.  That's why it's so important that we should teach and go on
remembering and not let the world forget.