This three-part book focuses on the lives of Chaim Rumkowski (Rumkovsky) of the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto, Adam Czerniakow of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Jacob Gens of the Vilna (Wilno, Vilnius) Ghetto. Tushnet consistently brings up examples of behaviors in these men that were variously harmful and at other times helpful towards fellow Jews facing the unfolding Holocaust. He also cites a selection of Jewish opinions on the character of these Judenrat leaders. For example, Czerniakow's suicide has been interpreted as a heroic refusal to have any part in the shipping of Warsaw's Jews to their deaths at Treblinka, and as a cowardly act of abandoning the Jewish community without so much as a warning about their impending fate. (pp. 130-133).
The Nazis had put Jews into ghettos ostensibly to protect them from the Poles (p. 93) as well as to protect Poles from "Jewish diseases." (p. 110). "The Jewish Ordnungsdienst, the O.D., imitated the corrupt Polish police they were so familiar with." (p. 97). Tushnet adds that the Jewish Ghetto Police was generally crueler to Jews than the Polish police (Policja Granatowa). (p. 97). He refers to western European Jews as ones with "...their traditional denigration of the Polish Jews..." (p. 38).
The Poles had helped smuggle food into the ghettos. (e. g., p. 28). They also helped warn Warsaw's Jews about the unfolding German mass murders of Jews, which began further east: "The Polish scout, Henyek, and various Zionist messengers came from Vilna with the dreadful news of the massacre of 30,000 Jews. Some believed the tales of mass executions; some did not. Czerniakow was one of those who did not." (p. 109).
Still, we hear perennial complaints about Poles having been generally indifferent to the fate of the Jews. Perhaps it is human nature to be primarily interested in the fate of one's own group. As a matter of fact, the Jews were indifferent to the fate of the Sinti and Roma. Tushnet writes: "The Jews shut their eyes to the fate of the Gypsies. Rumkowski was ordered to set up special barracks for the, to provide food and medical services, and to see that the dead were buried in the Jewish cemetery. A typhus epidemic, in which several Jewish doctors lost their lives, broke out in the Gypsies' quarters. They were strictly quarantined during their short-lived existence in the ghetto. In December, 1941, they were deported. The Jews neither knew where nor cared. The Gypsies ended at the death camp of Chelmno. [Kulm]. (p. 44).
Now consider the beginning of the end of the Warsaw Ghetto: "The German mechanism for `the final solution of the Jewish problem' went into full gear. Starting on July 15 [1942], Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians reinforced and gradually replaced the Polish guards around the ghetto walls." (p. 125).
In Vilna, the Karaites, a Jewish sect, were declared non-Jews by the Nazis and spared. (p. 148-149). The Nazis said they had no objection to Jewish religion per se.
Before WWII, Jacob Gens had been a member of Jabotinsky's Revisionists. This Zionism-in-a-hurry called for immediate Jewish settlement of Palestine regardless of British opposition, including the shipment of 1.5 million Polish Jews to Palestine. Such "distractions" as religion, socialism, and labor-union membership should not divide Jews in their prioritized pursuit of a Jewish state. (pp. 152-153).
While elaborating on Gens, Tushnet candidly touches on Jewish conduct that had provoked Lithuanian (and Polish) anti-Semitism. He comments: "Jacob Gens...had always been a man with noble ideals--ideals of a free and independent Lithuania, ideals of a Palestine conquered by the Jews to be their national homeland. He saw no contradiction between the two. While the Jews were in the Diaspora they should be strong supporters of the nations that sheltered them, not separatists demanding special privileges nor cosmopolitans denying patriotic bonds." (p. 198).
No comments:
Post a Comment