The Resistance of Polish Jewry
A Tower from the Enemy. Contributions to a History of Jewish Resistance in Poland.
By Albert Nirenstein.
The Orion Press. 372 pp. $5.00.

 

In the last twenty-five years, a prolific literature has sprung up on the tragedy of the Jews under Nazism: more than 6,000 books and scores of thousands of articles, pamphlets, etc. In the presentation of this documentary material, two distinct historical attitudes are apparent. One school of writers is chiefly concerned with martyrdom—the atrocities committed by the Nazis and the suffering of their victims. The other tendency, which emphasizes Jewish resistance to the Nazis, comprises several sub-tendencies. The various Zionist groups and the Jewish Socialist Bund stress the unity of the Jewish organizations and the Jewish people in the struggle against the Nazis. Communists and their sympathizers, on the other hand, concentrate on the class conflicts within the Jewish community. In their view, the ghetto bourgeoisie, as represented in the Nazi-appointed Judenrat, betrayed the Jewish masses and collaborated in their extermination, while Jewish resistance was part of the broad anti-fascist uprising of the European proletariat, initiated and led by the Communists.

Mr. Nirenstein’s collection of documents reflects this latter viewpoint. First published in Italian in 1958 under the title Ricorda cosa ti ha fatto Amalek, it is an unsatisfactory and tendentious selection. The book is supposed to depict the fate of all of Polish Jewry, but more than two-thirds of it is devoted to the Warsaw Jewish community—the largest, but by no means a typical one. A true picture of Jewish suffering and resistance in Poland cannot so largely ignore, as this selection does, the extensive documentation on Lodz, Lublin, Vilna, Cracow, Sosnowiec, Czestochowa, Lwow, and the many small-town ghettos.

The presentation of Warsaw is itself lopsided. Fifty pages are devoted to a single anonymous report which is attributed to the Yiddish writer Joshua Perle. (Nirenstein contends that Perle’s authorship “has been proven,” but the question remains open.) In any case, the anonymous author was a bitter man who had lost his balance under the strain of the first forty days of the extermination; his diary, written in a mood of utter despair, is full of contradictions, and of outbursts of hatred and invective against his fellow Jews. To present this warped view as a basic text on the behavior of the ghetto population is to do Polish Jewry a grave injustice. Later on, indeed, Mr. Nirenstein offers another document, the secret report of the Jewish underground of November 15, 1942, which gives a more balanced account—though he fails to inform the reader that his text represents a drastic abridgement of the original (eleven pages out of sixty).

A great many other important accounts, among them the diary of Emanuel Ringelblum, have simply been ignored. By excluding so much material depicting the real life of the ghetto in its many dimensions, and by concentrating instead on distorted pictures like the “Perle” report, the editor makes it impossible for anyone to understand the transition from endurance and apparent submission in the early months of Nazi rule to resistance later on. He tries to bridge the gap with meaningless phraseology: “The collaboration of the Judenrat and the treason of the Jewish police at the services of the Germans do not in any way involve the people or the ghetto as such. Elsewhere, these people of the ghetto have shown us examples of the greatest heroism and spirit of sacrifice.” Yet right after this statement, Nirenstein presents the “Perle” report, which in savage language accuses all the Jews of the ghetto of “shameful and disgraceful” behavior. Mr. Nirenstein thus promotes a slander much favored by anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi publications: namely, that the Nazis were not as responsible for the extermination of the Jews as were the various Jewish groups and institutions which engaged in fratricidal conflict.

In his notes throughout the book, Nirenstein sounds the familiar Communist clichés: “Bourgeois parties . . . in the ghetto, Zionist and non-Zionist, were to a large extent opportunists and pusillanimous. Certain circles . . . provided the elements which formed the Judenrat . . . and other institutions which could objectively [?] be considered servants of the enemy. They aided them sincerely, even zealously, in the drive to exterminate their own people.” The resistance movement started, according to Nirenstein, only after the Communist party took the initiative in creating an anti-fascist front in the ghetto, and “the Communists were among the principal organizers of the revolt.” In his review of prewar politics among Polish Jews, Nirenstein’s characterizations of the Jewish Socialist Bund are along Communist lines, as are such unqualified descriptions as: “there were also Jewish fascists who unsheathed their swords to conquer Palestine.” In contrast, there is this piece of enigmatic nonsense about international Communism: “In the twenty years which separated the two World Wars the policy of the Third International was translated into terms of specific interest for the Jews.”

The selection of documents is arbitrary, not only in relation to Warsaw, but also in the part devoted to “resistance in the major Jewish centers.” Such events as the uprisings of the Sonder-Kommando in Auschwitz and in the concentration camp at Janowska Street in Lwow, the activities of the Jewish resistance organization of Brody, are not even mentioned. The vast literature on partisan warfare is represented by one personal narrative.

Finally, the English translation of this work is often inaccurate and in some instances distorted to the point of falsification. It is inexcusable to translate Himmler’s infamous phrase about half-a-million “Untermenschen” in the Warsaw ghetto by “fifty thousand [sic] people of low degree,” or to give the fine of one million zloty imposed by the Nazis as “one thousand zloty.” In Mordecai Anielewicz’s last letter to his deputy commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization, the phrase “Remember how they have betrayed us,” is here transformed to: “We ask you to remember how you [sic] have betrayed us.” An excerpt from the diary of the late commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Bialystok, Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, reads as follows: “Now I am left the only survivor of the Soviet Central Committee.” The meaning of this puzzling phrase is that Tenenbaum was the last survivor of the Labor Zionist underground which operated in the Soviet-occupied Polish provinces between 1939 and 1941. The Yidisher Arbeter Bund has been transformed here into a “Hebrew Social Democratic Party known as the Bund,” the Polish “Council to Aid the Jews” into a “Jewish Aid Organization,” the German Major Schultz into Meyer Schultz, and the ghetto wall into a “fortification.” Misspellings of names are likewise numerous (e.g.: “Sigelblum” for Shmul Zygelboym, SS General “Dürgen” for Jürgen Stroop, camp “Westenburg” for Westerbork, and “General Ceruk” for a well known Soviet partisan leader, Chernish).

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