THE
Nazis succeeded in
exterminating millions of Jews. But they did not succeed in
extinguishing their
history. That is the story told by Samuel Kassow, an American
historian, in a
poignant and detailed account of the secret archive of the Warsaw ghetto.
In the
autumn of 1940, Warsaw’s
Jewish
population, swollen by forced immigration, amounted to nearly 450,000
people,
all of them walled into an area covering less than four square
kilometres. By
early 1942 about 83,000 had died from hunger. That summer 300,000 were
sent
away to death camps, mostly to Treblinka. In April and May 1943 the
remaining
60,000 were killed, or captured and deported, in the Warsaw ghetto
uprising, during which the
Germans levelled that part of the city.
Mr Kassow starts his story amid the passionate
arguments among Jews in the declining days of the three great empires:
the
German, the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian. Was the great dream to be
integration? Was it in identification with the surging national
consciousness
of countries such as Poland,
at that stage still partitioned? Was it emigration to a Jewish state in
Palestine?
Or in the hope
of a socialist paradise based on a brotherhood of man rather than
ethnic,
religious or national affiliation? Or some mixture of the above? Was
Hebrew the
real language of Jews, or a snooty, artificial distraction? Was Yiddish
a
degenerate linguistic compromise, or the essential literary and
political
medium?
After
the first world war,
those arguments became more pressing. A Jewish state was taking
embryonic form
in Palestine.
The Soviet authorities launched a rival Yiddish-speaking Jewish
homeland,
Birobidzhan, in a desolate corner of the Russian far east. The newly
reborn
Polish republic offered the chance of partnership with gentile Poles in
a
common homeland, albeit one marred by prejudice and discrimination.
The
task for Jewish
historians in those years was finding an account of their past that
would help
make sense of the arguments about the present. What role, for example,
had Jews
played in the Polish monarchy before its dismemberment in 1795? Was the
Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth
really a paradise of
tolerance, or was that just another myth among so many others? Gentile
historians’ accounts were inevitably partial. The Jewish collective
memory,
with its colourful, folkloristic stereotypes of poor beggars, rich
merchants
and pious rabbis, was a help, but not an answer. Documents were scanty
or
missing altogether.
That
effort gathered pace
after Poland
regained its independence in 1918. A pioneer was the young Emanuel
Ringelblum,
a passionate activist in the left-wing Poale Zion movement. Starting as
a
student in 1920, he was to become one of his country’s best historians,
up to
his death in the ruins of the Warsaw
ghetto in 1944. Ringelblum is the central character in this book;
although it
is not a formal biography, the author does an excellent job of
accumulating the
scraps of information and recollection that have survived the human and
archival destruction of the war.
With
fine Yiddishist
instinct, Mr Kassow does an excellent job too of evoking the atmosphere
of
those years, particularly the YIVO institute in Wilno (now Vilnius), which
was founded in 1925 to give
class and clout to Jewish scholarly efforts. The early chapters of the
book,
full of hope and productive energy, make the final ones all the more
effective.
The hugely subtle, interesting and complicated world of Jewish thought
and
culture boiled down to a bitter fight over bread or over scrappy
permits;
either might hold off death for another few days.
The
Jews of the Warsaw
ghetto could not
prevent their own murder. But thanks to the Oyneg Shabes, the secret
archive
organised by Ringelblum and other historians, at colossal personal
risk, they
were at least able to record what they thought, felt and saw. The
archive
ranged from raw eyewitness accounts to scholarly histories, such as
Ringelblum’s own lengthy analysis of Polish-Jewish relations. About
35,000
pages (only a fraction of the whole) survived the war, buried in milk
churns
and tin boxes. Some were carefully soldered shut; others had leaked,
leaving an
illegible soggy lump requiring painstaking conservation work. That the
documents came to light at all is thanks to the persistence of Rachel
Auerbach,
one of only three survivors of hundreds of people involved in the
project. It
was she who went to Warsaw
in 1946 and demanded that the cold and hungry survivors of the city’s
destruction make the effort to dig out the caches from the ruins.
Locked
up for years in the
Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw,
the documents have only recently been substantially restored. A full
catalogue
has yet to be made, but the papers about Ringelblum that Mr Kassow has
studied
give a vivid, sometimes unbearable, picture of the ghetto’s destruction
at the
hands of the Nazis, and of the efforts made to preserve a semblance of
civilised life that had succumbed to the elemental desire for survival.
The
archive also illustrates
the tension that exists between the Jewish and gentile experience of
the war in
Poland.
The summer of 1939 had aroused a remarkable sense of solidarity between
both
peoples; that soon gave way to harsher feelings. Some Polish gentiles
outside
the ghetto taunted its inmates for their passivity (while at the same
time grudging
them supplies of arms and ammunition). Nazi anti-semitic propaganda
about
“Judeo-Communism” had some effect. So did self-interest; dead Jews were
unlikely to want their pre-war property back. A poignant short piece by
a
Jewish poet, Wladyslaw Szlengel, an ardent Polish patriot, sums it up.
With no
gentile Polish friends left to talk to, he takes comfort in telephoning
the
speaking clock.
How
great it is to talk to
you
No
quarrels, no words
You are
nicer, my little time
clock
Than
all my former friends.
It is a
pity that the author
does not give a little space to the view of the ghetto from the
outside. And
the use of “Pole” as the antonym for “Jew” may jar with some. Many of
the
people he writes about would have said they were both. But the book
remains an
informative and moving reminder of what was lost in the Holocaust and
the
ingenuity and heroism of those who tried to frustrate its perpetrators.
The Economist
