Jewish Victims of the Holocaust

German Jewry: the first to suffer

Stats when Nazis came to power:

520,000 German Jews (.87% of the population)

1914: pop. had been 600,000 Jews

-- With the way the Nazis used their propaganda, you would have thought the Jews were a huge percentage of the German population!! They were less than 1%! -- Right – and like you said, the propaganda portrayed them as vermin like rats or cockroaches. What is the biggest problem with roaches or rats or mice? -- They multiply quickly. -- Yes – but we can see that was not the case, as the Jewish population had actually declined over the past 20 years before the Nazis took power.

Approximately ¹/₆ of Germany’s Jews served her in WWI, with 100,000 casualties

1932: of 37 Cabinet positions, only 3 were Jews and another 4 could claim Jewish descent

Jews controlled no major companies nor industries, and not one of Germany’s wealthiest families were Jewish

High intermarriage rate (40+%) in 1920’s

500 conversions a year to Christianity

That seems like a lot given the population…

¹/₃ of Jews lived in Berlin

¹/₃ lived in other major cities

¹/₃ scattered among thousands of villages

Many Jewish organizations operated to strengthen Jewish culture and resolve through education and social functions

Some wanted to prepare young Jews to emigrate

Zionists proposed the creation of Israel as a homeland for Jews

The majority (325,000) of German Jews survived

Reasons for staying –

“How long can Hitler last?”

-- How could they ask this?? -- Why couldn’t they? They were on the front line, and saw what a bad deal he was for Germany. The thought-process would be, “Why can’t everyone else see what a bad guy this Hitler is??” Instead, they got Chamberlain and Daladier and the “peace in our time” speech, and FDR and Pius XII looking the other way.

“Nazism is just traditional antisemitism.”

Veterans felt their service, medals would protect them

This was huge for Jewish veterans, sometimes very late into the Holocaust. They continued to think that the Nazis would value the loyalty they had shown to the monarchy, which of course had now been gone some 25 years.

“How can I protect my business?”

“How can I learn a new language and culture?”

A fear for any of us who might have to move to, not just visit, another place. I think even moving to another geographic region in the United States would bring with it some culture shock, let alone having to learn a new language and an entirely new way of doing things. – Even for those in here who’ve done mission trips or traveled for some other reason, you think you have knowledge of a language from high school French or Spanish, but to actually go there is a whole new deal.

“How can I leave my relatives behind?”

Remember our exercise about what was required to immigrate to the United States. You might be able to make it, but there was practically no way you could get family out, too.

Bourgeois Jews would have become welfare recipients

Kristallnacht: November 9-10, 1938

Traumatized Jewish community

At the time of 1938, Shanghai was the only place in the world that required no visa

Took in more Jews (around 25,000) than Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa combined

What do these nations have in common? -- They are all British colonies or former colonies.

May, 1939: British closed the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration except for 15,000 per year (for five years – maximum of 75,000)

Arab pressure to close

Some might view this as a reflection or even starting point for current events. In reality, this is just a continuation of ancient troubles. Last year at the close of the second semester, students in Social Injustices were assigned a term paper where they had to pick a side in the Arab/Israeli conflict and support their position. For most, I recommended they begin their research with a visit to the Bible and the book of Genesis, with God’s covenant to Abraham. They found the line from Abraham through Isaac and Jacob; then they found the Muslim belief that goes back through Ishmael to Abraham and the problem is set for the next four millennia.

October, 1941: another 150,000 Jews fled Germany

Jews were betrayed in Poland, where they’d enjoyed a rich history for 800 years

Remember, they’d been kicked out of all western nations.

Life in the ghetto –

Nazis reinstituted slavery, barbarism, and the ghetto

In the 1800’s, shortly before the American civil war, many European nations criticized the U.S. for still maintaining the institution of slavery. Barbarism had faded away with the Christianization of the Germanic tribes after the decline of Rome. The ghetto had long-since faded after the 19^th Century emancipation of the Jews. As we’ve said, the Nazis were many things, but original was not one of them.

Several hundred ghettos

1^st was in Nov. 1939 in Piatrkow, Poland

Lasted to summer, 1944 (became known as the Lodz ghetto)

Basic characteristics:

Form of concentration camp

Conditions of maximum deprivation

Let’s get a list on the board of what you feel would some of these conditions –

1. Lack of food

2. Lack of adequate housing – too crowded

3. Lack of medicines

4. Exposure to the elements

5. Lack of fuel (gas, electricity)

6. Dehumanization (not living a normal lifestyle or what you were accustomed to)

Slum parts of a city

IF the part of the city to which Jews were assigned was not already dilapidated, it soon became so…

Inadequate housing, food supply, hygiene

Some were open; most became closed

Governed by Judenrat (Jewish Council)

In 1960’s, condemned as collaborators

I remember talking about this when we began weeks ago. One of the myths of the Holocaust was that the Judenrat collaborated in the killing of Jews. But what choices did they have? We also talked about collective responsibility. – Right. Often Holocaust scholars and students speak of “choiceless choices”… I would say that the heads of the various Jewish Councils faced these. Daily.

Judenrat of Lodz collaborated with Nazis most

Headed by Mordecai Rumkowski

“salvation through work” – make yourselves useful to stay alive

Lodz became an efficient ghetto for making German army uniforms

Much like in Schindler’s List, Jews often were forced to make items that would assist in their own destruction. In that film, Schindler had converted his enamelware factory over to making bombs. – Yes, but if you’ll recall, wasn’t there a scene in the film where Schindler tells someone that he’d be surprised if a bomb from his factory ever detonated? -- I do recall that, yes.

We viewed the History Channel’s “Ghetto” installment in the Hitler’s Holocaust” series. I asked their impressions of the video. Many students remarked that it was “sad” – I asked why? -- Because of the conditions they had to live in. –Because of the scenes with the children begging. – Because of how they disposed of the bodies of the dead, in mass graves. They just pushed the bodies into the pile with no dignity or sense that that life had meant something. – I thought that was a very mature observation, and I expressed that to those students in that class.

1942: deportation order

70,000 Jews still in Lodz in 1944

Nazis liquidated ghetto, because the advancing Red Army stopped 100 miles outside Lodz

Rumor that Stalin wanted a Polish army that was organizing to fight the Nazis defeated so that after the Red Army eventually defeated Germany and wanted to take over Poland it would meet no resistance

Only 800 (about 1%) Jews survived liquidation

Rumkowski and rest of Council were gassed at Auschwitz

Warsaw the largest ghetto

450,000 “inmates”

Judenrat led by Adam Czernizkow

This would be pronounced Chair-nee-a-koff. I’m not sure how that second z would make an “a” sound…

He was in over his head in trying to balance saving Jews with supplying the Nazis with slave labor

July 22, 1942: order to deport

In the film Uprising, which we watch when time permits, there are two scenes that truly show the duties of and choiceless choices that Judenrat chairs had to make. In the first, Czernizkow is ordered to raise a ransom of quite a large sum (maybe in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) to free about 30 children. If I recall, those kids were held as a “collective responsibility” for some Jewish misstep. Anyway, Czernizkow is forced to scramble about the ghetto attempting to raise the funds. After calling in a huge favor from one particular benefactor, he makes the amount. He rushes to the SS office to turn in the money. He is forced to wait and wait. Finally the secretary is willing to talk to him. He says what he’s there for and is told that the officer with whom he is to meet is out. Czernizkow presses the girl with the importance of his mission, stating that the children are in danger if the money is not turned in. That jogs a memory with the secretary and she unearths a memorandum from her desk. She reads it, partially aloud, and tells Czernizkow that the children were gassed that morning, long before the deadline he had been given. [Many students just shook their heads; some had their heads bowed as I related the story. Almost all hung on every word I said.]

In another scene, he is told that the SS will begin deportations within the next day or so. It is his job to fill the trains. [Again, much head shaking. I was somewhat surprised that no one asked any questions during these two stories; perhaps the stories themselves left the kids with no questions – all had been said.] Now he must go to the community and virtually hand pick those who will ride the trains to certain death. He must tell parents that their children must go, or families that their elderly must go. Truly a horrible ordeal, and Czernizkow took his own life over what he had to endure.

Minsk: capital of White Russia

Conquered June 30, 1941

Elia Mishkin head of Judenrat

Engaged in resistance from beginning

Helped organize resistance in and out of the ghetto

Eventually was betrayed and murdered

Replaced by Moshe Yaffe, who continued to resist

10,000 Jews made their way out to join the resistance troops in the forests

I related the lecture that Dr. Henry Friedlander had given at the Mandel Institute in 2002, and how he had argued with another survivor who was in the audience that evening about there not having been any resistance at all during the Holocaust. In his opinion, only full-scale armed resistance would have been worth mentioning, and that never happened. He even discounted the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a waste of time, what with the limited arms the rebels had versus the resources of the Wehrmacht. Students began to see that perhaps Dr. Friedlander’s views were offensive to all those who had smuggled, fought in any resistance movement, continued Jewish rituals, and educated their children in Jewish ways.

Negatives of ghettos –

Mortality rate

20% died of natural causes (typhus, hunger, etc.)

One could certainly debate these causes as “natural”… -- Sure, if you weren’t in the ghetto or camps, your chances of contracting typhus wouldn’t be as great. And hunger – most people wouldn’t have faced that until the effects of the war took over. -- The deprivation the Jews were under caused these deaths, not nature.

Jan ’41-May ’42: more than 66,000 perished in Warsaw ghetto

Society in the ghetto:

What do you think is the difference between the smugglers near the top and those in the middle of this hierarchy? -- I would say near the top you have the “ringleaders” and at the bottom are the people who actually go out and risk their lives to do the smuggling.

Difficult to maintain morale

“we will survive”, “we will outlast them”

Morale in Warsaw remained surprisingly high, at least for a time

Underground schools, prayer meetings, welfare agencies helped

These schools and meetings could be considered forms of resistance, as could what follows. –

Positives of ghettos –

Smuggling

Underground newspapers, schools for Hebrew

Diaries, journals that made it through the war

Underground Zionist meetings

Graffiti, artwork that survived

Intellectual and spiritual life was never fully stifled

Inside the camps: the Kingdom of Death

Auschwitz: “a different planet”

Time irrelevant

“each day was a year”

Vocabulary doesn’t apply

Hunger, cold, fear don’t have the same definitions

When are you hungry? -- Right before lunch, sometimes in the morning when I wake up. – You’re going to tell us that we haven’t been hungry… -- You bet I am. Or cold, or hot, or scared. Stand outside naked in the snow for two hours every morning and you’ll know what cold is. We can’t even conceive of the conditions these people, Jews and non-Jews alike, were put through…

In terms of scared, how many of you have read Maus? Do you remember the scene where Art Spiegelman meets with his therapist over his confusion and lack of self-confidence at trying to accurately portray his father’s experiences as an inmate of Auschwitz? The therapist is asked just what it was like. Out of the clear blue, he lunges forward and shouts “BOO!” at the downcast Art, nearly dropping him to the floor. His response: “It felt a little like that, but always! From the moment you got to the gate until the very end” (Spiegelman II 46). You know that hot rush we get when afraid? That is what it was like – hot, you can see your heart beating…

Standards of society did not apply

I related the story told by Primo Levi of his time in Auschwitz. One day, while particularly thirsty, he spied an icicle hanging from the roof and sought to break it off so that he could slake his thirst. As he stuck his hand through the window, a passing guard beat it with the butt of his gun. Recoiling, the Levi asked why the guard had done that; the reply came, “Here, there is no why.”

musselman = the walking dead

“choiceless choices”

Story of woman who dug under the fence to the “good side”

Someone was gassed in her place

Other stories tell of doctors who performed abortions in the camps to keep at least the mother alive. Abortion is a prohibition in Judaism when used for convenience; it is permissible when the life of the mother is at stake (Donin 140-41). However, that can never be easy.

Reasons people were able to survive:

Age: children and the aged didn’t

In most cases, these people went straight to the gas chambers.

Climate of origin: harsh Polish winters

Huge difference between the winters in Greece and those in Poland…

Knowledge of German: to untangle instructions

One of the prisoners in a tape we viewed said it was non-stop screaming as soon as the train stopped. To stay alive longer, one would have to know at least the general intent of the screaming.

Skills: what were you worth to the Nazis?

In Maus again, if you’ll recall, Vladek learned many things he’d never known before. He had a tremendous survival instinct. He learned to be a tinsmith, a cobbler. What was his trade before the Holocaust? -- He was a textile salesman.

Typhus: if you had had it before and had developed immunity, you had a better chance to survive the epidemics

Physical stamina: more the better

Initial work detail: level of sadism of kapo or overseer important here

We’ve talked about kapos who could be kind one minute, but if an SS man walked around the corner could beat you within an inch of your life the next. Some were just nasty all the time.

Relationships: did you come in with someone you knew?

LUCK WAS THE NUMBER 1 FACTOR IN SURVIVAL

This is a statement many soldiers who survived make as well.

At the conclusion of this information we began viewing the tape of Mass Murder in the History Channel’s Holocaust series. Students were gripped by the opening scene of a train rolling through the main gate at Auschwitz. The camera was mounted on the front of the train, so it gave the viewer a chilling perspective. Several survivors were interviewed, as were SS doctors and other soldiers.

Mental, attitudinal changes to aid survival:

The power to refuse our consent

-- So this is the idea that even with the physical torment, if I don’t let them do it voluntarily, I am resisting? -- Yes, you could say that it’s kind of like they could take your body, but not your mind. That would be the one thing you could control.

Wash in dirty water with no soap, just to do the act of cleaning

What have we talked about all semester that this is somewhat of a cure for? -- Dehumanization. People wanted to be able to still feel like they had some control over themselves.

Forget the past

Learn the SS games

Role play

Develop quick reaction time

Become adaptable

The need to help was as important as the need for help

The adage “It’s better to give than to receive” probably fits in here. Maybe from the standpoint that we give to others to feel better about ourselves? -- There has been sociological and psychological research on rescuers in terms of altruistic, or just generally nice, behavior in the face of terrible odds. People will sometimes just give of themselves without concern for their own well-being. They do this without request for reward, as a way towards self-actualization, perhaps?

Prayer, clandestine religious observances

Victor Frankel: “the only thing they couldn’t take was your attitude

Nietsche: he who knows the “why” can always put up with the “how”

Jewish resistance –

Many have criticized the Jewish resistance as minimal and inconsequential

Critics will ask the same questions we have asked, namely, on a train platform with a thousand Jews and only a handful of soldiers, why was there no revolt? We’ve looked at ideas such as, who will be the first to charge? What about collective responsibility? What if there is a chance that compliance will actually not be bad? These are questions that need to be asked. Remember, too, Wiesel’s quote: In the face of all they went through, how could so many find the strength to resist?

Definition of resistance: any individual or group action consciously taken in opposition to known or surmised laws, actions, or intentions directed against the Jews by the German and their supporters

Is prayer an individual action? Is the running of an underground Hebrew school a group action? And, if these are in the face of what the Nazis are trying to do, are they not resistance? Dr. Friedlander said no last August. He said that given the fact that armed resistance is the only effective resistance, and given the state of the German war machine such armed resistance as the Jews could muster would be inconsequential at best, there truly was no resistance. – But then you’re to the “sheep to the slaughter” attitude, and that’s hard to stomach. How could 12 million people leap willingly to the grave? -- That’s where we need to refute the theories of the “no resistance” camp, so we can try to make some sense of the tragedy. We simply cannot believe that the Jews would willingly cooperate in their own destruction.

Obstacles to resistance:

Ignorance

There is a certain window of time after which I would think this could no longer be an excuse.

Unimaginability

This might be more applicable for Jews or perhaps even for FDR, than it would be for, say, Pius XII who was much more local to the goings-on.

Family solidarity

Some chose to do something to ensure their own deaths in proximity to the deaths of loved ones so as not to separate the family. There are stories of people who snuck from the “good side” of the selection to the “bad side” so they could die with loved ones. Hard choices…

Religious faith

Deceit, deception by Nazis – constant

How could the very young or very old resist?

Collective responsibility

1 SS man was killed in Lvov; 1000 Jews were rounded up at random and murdered in retaliation

There are numerous examples here.

Isolation from outside world in ghettos and camps

To escape – where would one escape to?

Emigration aside, where could you go in the immediate future? There were tons of people who would turn you in if not kill you themselves.

Judenrat: key was to make the ghetto as useful as possible; hope to outlast the Nazis

Resistance in the camps

Just surviving was an act of resistance

Henry Friedlander himself is a survivor.

Escape

Est. 600 attempts to escape from Auschwitz (400 successful)

So you would have a 2/3 chance of surviving if you attempted escape? Why wouldn’t you?? -- Well first of all, that’s only 600 attempts out of how many million deaths? The second thing is, where would you escape to, as we just discussed? And, you had to be in one of the slave camps, I’d think, to have any strength at all to muster the break. Anyone who’d been in the camp for a while was probably in no shape to try. Plus, we can only say that 67% success rate as we look back on it – people alive then wouldn’t have known that.

1944: escape of Jew and Gentile couple

Remained free for 2 weeks; caught, tortured but revealed nothing of underground resistance

Record everything

Sonderkommando: Jews who worked in the crematoria

Wrote diaries and buried them in the ashes around the crematoria

There is a book entitled The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando that details the life and camp experiences of a Greek Jew who was forced to be a sonderkommando. I’ve not read it, but I’ve seen favorable reviews; it might be worth looking into if this is an area that has interest for you. How many of you, in your reading or research for the term paper assignment, came across this term and what they did? -- I did – it was disgusting how they had to pry the dead apart and put them on the transports to go to the second level to the crematoria. There is no way I would do that; I’d have chosen death instead… --And that’s an argument at an entirely different level: why did some do things that society would find reprehensible, while others seemed to “give in”? -- But you said the rules of society didn’t apply. Maybe after seeing the treatment others received, and maybe knowing what kind of death awaited them, some just chose life, no matter what form it came in.

Physical, armed resistance

Treblinka (8/43)

Sobibor (10/43) organized by Sonderkommando

Auschwitz (10/44)

Crematorium IV put out of commission

Polish-led underground in Auschwitz, while helpful, never really affected the uprising

Gunpowder supplied by 4 young Jewish women who worked in the factories

They were found out, tortured (but revealed nothing), and hanged

Another example of heroism, like the Jew/Gentile couple above.

Resistance in the forests: partisan movements

20,000-40,000 Jewish partisans in the forests around Eastern Europe

Although Jews made up only 1% of French population, they comprised 15-20% of French Resistance

Many Jews resisted as part of nationalist movements

Jewish servicemen (-women) who fought in WWII

Americans: ½ million fought, 11,000 died

Soviets: ½ million fought, 120,000 died

Sept. 1939: 150,000 Polish Jews fought in Polish army; 33,000 were killed in battle

Jewish parachutists from Israel organized resistance in the Balkans

Worked with the British RAF

We watched the video “Mass Murder” in the Hitler’s Holocaust series. We saw several shots of the Auschwitz camp system, which I think really put a face on this aspect of the Holocaust for students who did not choose a camp for their term paper assignment. Students were very interested to see a section on “ordinary men” after having read the Browning chapter. They were also interested in the filmed testimony of Rudolph Hoess at Nuremberg.