Staging Holocaust Resistance 978-1-349-35055-1, 978-1-137-00061-3

Table of contents :
Front Matter....Pages i-viii
Introduction....Pages 1-23
German Resistance: Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General ....Pages 25-43
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising....Pages 45-61
Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe: Lois Lowry’s/Douglas W. Larche’s Number the Stars and Julian Garner’s The Flight into Egypt ....Pages 63-87
Resistance in the Extermination Camps: Susan B. Katz’s Courage Untold....Pages 89-102
Resistance from the Clergy....Pages 103-134
Staging America’s Response to the Holocaust: Susan Lieberman and Stephen J. Morewitz’s Steamship Quanza ....Pages 135-154
Aharon Megged’s Hanna Senesh ....Pages 155-164
The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg: Nicholas Wenckheim’s Image and Likeness ....Pages 165-186
The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak....Pages 187-206
Conclusion....Pages 207-210
Back Matter....Pages 211-268

Citation preview

Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History is a series devoted to the best of theatre/performance scholarship currently available, accessible, and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more traditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study, but utilized as important underpinning or as a historiographical or analytical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other types of less traditional performance texts are also germane to the series if placed in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no geographical focus for this series and works of excellence of a diverse and international nature, including comparative studies, are sought. The editor of the series is Don B. Wilmeth (EMERITUS, Brown University), Ph.D., University of Illinois, who brings to the series over a dozen years as editor of a book series on American theatre and drama, in addition to his own extensive experience as an editor of books and journals. He is the author of several awardwinning books and has received numerous career achievement awards, including one for sustained excellence in editing from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Also in the series: Undressed for Success by Brenda Foley Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-garde by Günter Berghaus Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Sally Charnow Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain by Mark Pizzato Moscow Theatres for Young People by Manon van de Water Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre by Odai Johnson Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers by Arthur Frank Wertheim Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women’s Writing by Wendy Arons Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific by Daphne P. Lei Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns by Leigh Woods Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance edited by William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 by Susan Harris Smith Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject by Alan Sikes Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s by Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen

Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish-American Drama and Jewish-American Experience by Julius Novick American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance by John Bell On the Uses of the Fantastic in Modern Theatre: Cocteau, Oedipus, and the Monster by Irene Eynat-Confino Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show by Michael M. Chemers, foreword by Jim Ferris Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth-Century to the Present edited by Francesca Coppa, Larry Hass, and James Peck, foreword by Eugene Burger Memory in Play: From Aeschylus to Sam Shepard by Attilio Favorini Danjūrō’s Girls: Women on the Kabuki Stage by Loren Edelson Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama by Tamsen Wolff Theatre and Religion on Krishna’s Stage: Performing in Vrindavan by David V. Mason Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture by Peter P. Reed Broadway and Corporate Capitalism: The Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class, 1900–1920 by Michael Schwartz Lady Macbeth in America: From the Stage to the White House by Gay Smith Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists by Marla Carlson Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western Experience in Performing Arts by Richard Wattenberg Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project by Elizabeth A. Osborne Russian Culture and Theatrical Performance in America, 1891–1933 by Valleri J. Hohman Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition by Andrew Davis Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical by Stuart J. Hecht The Drama of Marriage: Gay Playwrights/Straight Unions from Oscar Wilde to the Present by John M. Clum Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced by Min Tian Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits by Bruce Baird Staging Holocaust Resistance by Gene A. Plunka

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Gene A. Plunka

STAGING HOLOCAUST RESISTANCE

Copyright © Gene A. Plunka, 2012. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-36956-6 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-35055-1

ISBN 978-1-137-00061-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9781137000613 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Plunka, Gene A., 1949– Staging Holocaust resistance / Gene A. Plunka. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. 2. Underground movements in literature. 3. Drama—20th century—History and criticism. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Literature and the war. I. Title. PN1650.H64P58 2012 809.2⬘9358405318—dc23

2011044510

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

1. Introduction

1

2. German Resistance: Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General

25

3. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

45

4. Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe: Lois Lowry’s/ Douglas W. Larche’s Number the Stars and Julian Garner’s The Flight into Egypt

63

5. Resistance in the Extermination Camps: Susan B. Katz’s Courage Untold

89

6. Resistance from the Clergy

103

7. Staging America’s Response to the Holocaust: Susan Lieberman and Stephen J. Morewitz’s Steamship Quanza

135

8. Aharon Megged’s Hanna Senesh

155

9. The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg: Nicholas Wenckheim’s Image and Likeness

165

10. The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

187

11. Conclusion

207

Notes

211

Bibliography

243

Index

255

Acknowledgments

I

would like to thank Dr. Eric Link, chair of the Department of English at the University of Memphis, for granting me a reduced teaching load, which expedited my completion of the manuscript. A University of Memphis Faculty Research Grant and a Professional Development Award (PDA) allowed me to finish the writing and edit the manuscript. I am indebted to Wayne Key of the University of Memphis Interlibrary Loan Office for his valuable assistance in ordering difficult-to-obtain journals and books. I also want to acknowledge Caroline Waddell, photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for providing the cover photo and permission for its use. In addition, I want to thank referee Dr. Eric Sterling for the valuable editorial suggestions that he made, which certainly strengthened the quality of the manuscript. Moreover, I appreciate the research conducted by Vincent Slatt, librarian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who provided information about the locksmith Zalcberg in Treblinka and Dimo Kazasov of Bulgaria. Furthermore, I very much appreciate the diligent work of Samantha Hasey, theater and performing arts editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for securing referees and moving the manuscript forward in the early stages of production. This book could not have been written without the help of novelist Lois Lowry and playwrights Douglas W. Larche, Susan B. Katz, Arthur Giron, David Gooderson, Susan Lieberman, Stephen Morewitz, Nicholas Wenckheim, Michael Brady, and Gabriel Emanuel. Through telephone conversations or email messages, these writers provided vital information that greatly enhanced the quality of the book. I particularly want to thank both Mr. Wenckheim for his insightful comments about my chapter on Image and Likeness and David Morewitz (Stephen’s uncle) for his meticulous fact checking of detailed historical information in the chapter on Steamship Quanza.

viii

Acknowledgments

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Dr. Stephen Tabachnick, Dr. Jackson R. Bryer, Dr. Brad McAdon, Dr. Cynthia Tucker, Mark Lapidus, Stanley Plunka and his wife Rhona, Harry R. Plunka, and Lillian Siegel for their encouragement and support. By constantly inquiring about the status of my research, my friends, relatives, and colleagues made the book much easier for me to complete.

1. Introduction

T

he Nazi reign from 1933 to 1945 resulted in the genocide of Germans with disabilities, Gypsies (Sinti and Roma), homosexuals, Seventh Day Adventists, political dissenters, and other “threats” to the Volk, including the deaths of approximately six million European Jews. The total number of noncombat deaths during the Holocaust, including murder through massacres, bombings, and killing squads; starvation and disease in the ghettoes; and assembly-line execution in the extermination camps ranges as high as twenty million.1 The Holocaust has been viewed as the seminal event of the twentieth century that changed the way we view humanity: if the Germans, with arguably one of the best university systems in the world (and hence an educated population) and certainly one of the most cultured societies in the twentieth century, could commit sanctioned mass murder and persecution based upon the notion of racial purity, then humans cannot be good at heart. Assuredly, the Holocaust, dominated by the systematic suffering, degradation, humiliation, and finally the murder of Jews, implies that if humans were good at heart, the Shoah, a product of National Socialism that could not have had such devastating results without the help of thousands of willing non-German accomplices throughout Europe, would never have occurred. The Holocaust, the total destruction of Jews and their culture, can be viewed only as barbaric. As Alvin H. Rosenfeld notes, “Moreover, ‘Holocaust’ suggests not only a brutally imposed death but an even more brutally imposed life of humiliation, deprivation, and degradation before the time of dying.”2 Theodor W. Adorno stated that to write a poem after Auschwitz was itself a barbaric act since art was incapable of conveying a humanistic perspective after the horrors of the Holocaust. Adorno acknowledged that the human mind is incapable of objectifying what is incomprehensible about man’s brutality: “The somatic, unmeaningful stratum of life is the stage of suffering, of the suffering which in the camps, without any consolation, burned every soothing feature out of the mind, and out of culture, the

2

Staging Holocaust Resistance

mind’s objectification.”3 Elie Wiesel concurs, admitting, “At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man.”4 Most Holocaust scholars and artists have tempered Adorno’s dictum with the need to remember this unique historical event in writing so as to pay homage to the victims. Geoffrey H. Hartman asserts that the Holocaust must not be allowed to fade from consciousness “because of its magnitude, its blatant criminality, its coordinated exploitation of all modern resources, cultural and technological, and the signal it sends how quickly racist feelings can be mobilized.”5 The brutality of the Shoah suggests that Holocaust writing must be recognized, as Lawrence L. Langer argued, as literature of atrocity.6 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi then wonders whether the response to Adorno is to find “a literature that is commensurately degenerate” to the cultural and social debasement that culminated in Auschwitz.7 Is the Holocaust all doom and destruction, or was there a spirit of heroism and moral defiance amid the suffering and eventual genocide? Langer comments that for the victims of the ghettoes, concentration camps, labor camps, and extermination camps, “the human spirit faltered, and the human body, bereft of support, succumbed to an annihilation it no longer had the power to prevent.”8 Relying primarily on German sources, historian Raul Hilberg depicts the Holocaust as widespread devastation with very slight Jewish resistance.9 Hilberg writes, “On a Europeanwide scale the Jews had no resistance organization, no blueprint for armed action, no plan even for psychological warfare.”10 Hilberg argues that the Jews were not oriented toward resistance and instead resorted to activities that were designed to alleviate danger, including preparing petitions and various oral or written forms of appeal, making protection payments or ransom arrangements, organizing relief and rescue operations, and complying with Nazi orders. Jews saw themselves as persecuted throughout history, with the Third Reich representing merely another phase in the degradation; provoking the Nazis would only lead inevitably to more Jewish deaths, and so Jews were thus seen as trying to placate, and thus tame, the savage beasts by complying with decrees.11 Writing after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem during 1961 and thus relying on Israeli and German documents, Hannah Arendt corroborates Hilberg’s assessment of Jewish complicity with Nazi orders. Arendt characterizes Jewish behavior during the Holocaust as submissive rather than heroic: Jews arrived on time at the transportation depots, undressed and made neat piles of their clothing while awaiting execution, and even dug their own graves.12 Moreover, Arendt asserts that the Jewish police and Judenräte (Jewish Councils) assisting the Nazis distributed the Yellow Star badges, compiled lists of persons for deportation,

Introduction

3

secured money from the deportees to defray deportation expenses, and handed over Jewish assets for the Nazis to confiscate.13 Arendt and Hilberg do not concede widespread resistance to the Nazis but instead focus on the dearth of Jewish resistance. However, much new information about resistance to the Nazis in the form of courageous attempts to oppose laws or pogroms directed against Jews during the Holocaust has surfaced since Hilberg’s and Arendt’s writings in the early 1960s. Although one may agree with Langer that “the language of heroism is incommensurate with the experience of annihilation,”14 the Holocaust is now viewed as multifaceted; such heroism, once subsumed by the enormous despair that permeated Holocaust literature, can now invite new avenues for exploration. This book will focus on Jews and gentiles who defied the Nazis by resisting decrees and orders, protesting Nazi policies, rescuing Jews, or revolting against genocide. During the Third Reich, German resistance was minimal because defiance of the Nazis was synonymous with treason. Unlike the resistance movements throughout Europe in which the Nazis were obviously seen as unlawfully occupying native soil and oppressing its citizens, the view in Germany was different. Klemens von Klemperer reminds us, “There was terror, of course, but also something even more bedeviling than terror, namely, the Nazi regime’s semblance of legality, respectability, and cleanliness.”15 Even after the war, in 1952, a poll taken indicated that 34 percent of West Germans believed that resisters should have waited until after the defeat of the Reich; moreover, many German citizens in the early 1950s still considered the July 20, 1944, attempted assassination of Hitler to be a treasonous act.16 Furthermore, the suppression of all opposing political parties, including the social democrats and communists, and the removal of dissenters to German concentration camps by the late 1930s made resistance quite difficult. Despite the risks of being accused of treason, resisters in Germany protested National Socialist policies. In particular, the Catholic Church opposed the Nazi euthanasia program. The Bishop of Münster, Count Clemens August von Galen, preached three sermons in July and August 1941 about the sadistic cruelties of the Gestapo, the need to obey God’s law and moral conscience rather than a corrupt regime, and the right to oppose a euthanasia program that preyed on incurable consumptives, the senile, and the mentally deranged.17 Following von Galen’s sermons, other bishops and members of Christian communities denounced the euthanasia policy (e.g., Pastor P. Braune of Hoffnungsthal, of the Lutheran Church); the only reason that von Galen was not executed was that Joseph

4

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Goebbels argued that if anything happened to von Galen, his minions from Westphalia would be lost for the duration of the war.18 Dompropst Bernard Lichtenberg of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin, who declared in August 1941 that he prayed for the Jews and argued that deportation was against Christian moral law, was not as lucky as Bishop von Galen. The Nazis arrested him for “subversive activities,” and, after serving his sentence, he died on November 3, 1943, en route to Dachau. Protestant pastors of the Confessional Church, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, as well as Bishop Theophil Wurm, protested Nazi policies and condemned Nazi atrocities aimed at Jews; Bonhoeffer even prayed for the defeat of his country, labeling Hitler a “Verführer” (a seducer), and participated in the underground resistance. The Nazis initially arrested Wurm, sent Niemöller to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau, and hanged Bonhoeffer in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The majority of the resistance in Germany during the Holocaust was largely sporadic. Approximately three hundred individuals hid Jews or provided them with false identity papers. The Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Friede und Freiheit (Union for Peace and Liberty), led by Werner Scharff, distributed propaganda leaflets and attempted to find hiding places for Jews; even several Gestapo agents cooperated with this resistance organization, largely due to Scharff’s personal charm.19 The Herbert Baum Group, operating from 1937 to 1942, distributed political literature/ leaflets, painted anti-Nazi slogans on Berlin walls, attempted to organize workers at the Siemens Electrical Works, and, most notably, sabotaged an anti-Soviet exhibit sponsored by Goebbels in Berlin during May 1942.20 Austrian citizen Julius Madritsch, once a member of the Wehrmacht who later operated two textile plants for the Nazis in Cracow, kept many Jews alive, well fed, and suitably clothed by employing them in his workshops, thus defying Nazi plans for their genocide.21 The White Rose, a nonviolent resistance group consisting of University of Munich students, also opposed the Nazis by passing out leaflets during June and July 1942, thus appealing to Christian morality and the defeat of a corrupt regime; most of the group’s members were decapitated in 1943.22 During February and March 1943, nearly six thousand Aryan women married to Jews in Berlin protested the arrest of their husbands, who were ostensibly about to be deported. The Rosenstrasse protest, as these gatherings later became designated, resulted in approximately eighteen hundred intermarried German Jews and their children being released by Joseph Goebbels, who tried to quash negative publicity about the Reich on the heels of the German defeat at Stalingrad. Certainly the most noteworthy individual who resisted the

Introduction

5

Nazis in Germany was Kurt Gerstein, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933. After being dismissed from service in 1936 and sent to a concentration camp, Gerstein, determined to learn more about a euthanasia program that had killed his sister-in-law, volunteered for the Waffen SS. In his capacity as chief disinfection officer, he transported hydrogen cyanide to Belzec, where he witnessed Zyklon B gas being used during the gassing of Polish Jews. Gerstein then pleaded with the Vatican, the Confessing Church, and the Dutch underground to believe his tale of horror about Nazi genocide. In France, the first public protest against the Holocaust was the ridiculing of the mandatory Jewish wearing of the Yellow Star (May 29, 1942).23 After the major deportation of French Jews in July and August 1942, the clergy’s involvement turned French public opinion from apathy to support of the Jews. Monsignor Jules-Gérard Saliège, the archbishop of Toulouse, drafted a letter of protest on the persecution of Jews that was read in all of the parishes of his diocese and was subsequently supported by the bishops in Montauban, Nice, Albi, and Marseilles. The Catholic clergy, led by Cardinal Gerlier and Père Pierre Chaillet, both of Lyon, defied the Nazis by dispersing Jewish children in shelters throughout France; dozens of nuns, priests, and monks were arrested in their attempts to rescue Jews.24 Capuchin Father Marie-Benoit transformed his monastery in Marseilles into a rescue agency for Jews that distributed hundreds of identity cards, forged passports, and certificates of baptism so Jews could be smuggled to Spain, Switzerland, or the Italian Zone. Pastor Marc Boegner of the Protestant Federation of France attempted to halt the deportations and publicly excoriated the Vichy government for its cooperation in the roundup of Jews. Jesuit Father Pierre Chaillet, a member of the French Resistance, hid Jewish children in monasteries and in Christian homes throughout France; Abbé Alexander Glasberg rescued two thousand Jews from French concentration camps.25 Cardinal Gerlier also formed L’Amitié Chretienne (Christian Friendship), which was dedicated to saving Jews and placing Jewish children in Christian institutions. On August 28, 1942, as a result of the efforts of the clergy to defy the Nazis, the Germans ordered all priests who sheltered Jews to be arrested; Chaillet was among those jailed. Jews were active in the underground network and constituted 15–20 percent of the French Resistance (the Maquis).26 Jews formed their own military unit, the FFI (French Forces of the Interior), led by poet David Knout; the unit’s most significant contributions were the destruction of a heavily armed German train and the capture of a German garrison near Castres on August 19, 1944. Jews were also represented in the Yiddish Detachment (MOI—Main d’Oeuvre Immigré) of the Francs-tireurs

6

Staging Holocaust Resistance

et partisans (a resistance group that attacked German soldiers and participated in approximately fifty acts of sabotage between May 1942 and May 1943) and in the communist group Les Bataillons de la Jeunesse, which circulated propaganda leaflets and led attacks against the Nazis in Paris. The Jewish Partisan Unit of Paris, which consisted of immigrant Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, participated in German train derailments and sabotage against the Nazis.27 Jewish organizations, such as Entraide temporaire, the Zionist youth group MJS (Mouvement de la Jeunesse Sioniste), Les Éclaireurs Israélites de France (The Jewish Boy Scout Organization of France), and the George Garel network, rescued approximately ten thousand Jewish children from the Nazis.28 The Zionist underground in France managed to transport approximately six hundred children and young adults into the safe haven of Spain29 ; nearly thirteen hundred children were sent to Switzerland.30 The Fédération des Sociétés juives de France, led by David Rappaport and operating under the name Comité de la rue Amelot, supplied false identity papers that allowed many Jews to escape deportation.31 The Organisation Juive de Combat (OJC—Jewish Fighting Organization) also smuggled hundred of children to safety, and, in 1944, claimed credit for hundreds of acts of sabotage against Nazi factories and railways, as well as punishment of traitors and assistance to needy families. Yehuda Bauer estimates that as a result of the efforts of these Jewish resistance and underground organizations, approximately two-thirds of the French Jews were saved32 ; Marie Syrkin asserts that fifteen thousand of those rescued were children.33 Belgium had one of the best-organized resistance movements, largely due to the Committee for the Defense of Jews (CDJ), which consisted of communists, Zionists, Belgian Jews, and Belgian Christians. Formed in 1942, the CDJ was responsible for hiding Jews, particularly children, in schools, convents, and private homes; convincing Jews, through a vast propaganda campaign, not to volunteer for deportation; furnishing Jews with false identity papers and ration cards; providing financial assistance; and conducting an armed attack on a deportation train, which resulted in the rescue of two hundred Jews during April 1943. Jacques Semelin estimates that fifteen thousand Jews, including three thousand children, were spared thanks to the efforts of the CDJ.34 Defying the Nazis, Belgians provided overt support to the Jews and to the underground CDJ. Belgians turned the wearing of the Yellow Star into an honor, with teachers telling students that it was a mark of distinction and shopkeepers selling the star in Belgian national colors, and, after the decree was initially authorized, streets were filled with Christians wearing the badge out of

Introduction

7

respect for their fellow citizens. Nora Levin reports, “The Belgian police were deftly noncooperative, losing and misplacing files on Jews and forging and manufacturing documents for them.”35 Belgian clergymen, led by Joseph-Ernest Cardinal van Roey, the primate of Belgium, denounced the Occupation and did their best to hide Jewish children in shelters and safe houses. One Catholic group, Our Lady of Zion, managed to save two hundred children from deportation by hiding them in several Belgian convents.36 The Belgian Red Cross, welfare societies, and even banks aided in the rescue operation. In Italy, more than one thousand Jews joined two underground resistance groups (“Garibaldi” and “Freedom of Justice”) that coordinated military activities against the Nazis in Tuscany, Rome, Naples, and Abruzzi.37 However, the most viable attempts to save Jews in defiance of Nazi orders were made by the Italian clergy. Although Pope Pius XII never spoke publicly against the deportations, thus idly watching thousands of Jews go to their deaths (an argument made in Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy ), the Vatican hid thousands of Jews in Roman schools, in more than 100 convents, in 50 churches, and in 115 monasteries38 ; agreed to pay a ransom in gold to save Jews from deportation; and spent the equivalent of 16,700,000 marks in assisting, hiding, and emigrating Jews.39 In Assisi alone, between September 1943 and June 1944, a strong underground network, led by Bishop Nicolini, Padre Rufino Niccacci, and Don Brunacci, hid more than three hundred Jews and supplied false identity papers to Jews in many cities and villages throughout Italy.40 These rescue efforts were very fruitful—more than thirty-two thousand Jewish lives were spared in Italy, which represented 80 percent of the Jewish population.41 Resistance efforts were also underway in Holland. During October 1940, the Protestant and Catholic Churches officially protested the Germans’ anti-Jewish decrees, and on January 26, 1941, the Catholic Church of the Netherlands published a pastoral letter that stated that Dutch Nazis should not be allowed to partake in the Holy Sacrament.42 Meetings of students and faculty were held at the universities of Delft and Leyden to decry the dismissal of Jewish professors. The threat of sending Dutch laborers to the Reich coupled with the deportation of four hundred Jews and riotous outbursts by Dutch Nazis against the Jews resulted in strikes that began in Amsterdam on February 25, 1941, and then spread nationwide. Approximately eighty to ninety thousand laborers paralyzed the transportation industry in North Holland and Utrecht.43 Another eighteen thousand and three hundred workers walked out of the armaments factories.44

8

Staging Holocaust Resistance

The Dutch underground and Dutch citizens hid Jews and protested Nazi persecution. Many Dutch Christians wore the Yellow Star publicly, with “Netherlander” emblazoned across the badge to demonstrate solidarity with their fellow Jewish citizens; others wore yellow flowers on their coat lapels. Once the deportations began, Dutch Christians sheltered thousands of Jews in their homes, cloisters, and orphanages; they even went shopping for them.45 Several individuals must be recognized for their heroic efforts to save Dutch Jews. Walter Süsskind, a German Jewish refugee who worked on the card index listing of the Jews in Amsterdam, managed to slip Jews away from assembly depots before their transit to Westerbork.46 Johan Gerard Westerweel, principal of the Montessori school in Rotterdam, cooperating with leaders of the Halutz resistance movement, smuggled children to safety in Spain. His efforts resulted in arrest and then execution on August 11, 1944, but under torture for months by the Gestapo, he never revealed the identity of his comrades.47 In Amsterdam, Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer smuggled hundreds of Jews, including many children, to Spain, Switzerland, and England.48 Approximately 3,000 Jews escaped from Holland while another 16,000 were hidden; thus, the Dutch were able to save 15 percent of the original 126,000 that constituted the Jewish population in Holland.49 Undoubtedly, the most heroic acts of resistance against the tenets of National Socialism took place in Denmark. When the Nazis tried to enforce anti-Jewish legislation in October 1942, Danish prime minister Erik Scavenius and his entire cabinet threatened to resign, claiming that the Danish government guaranteed equal rights for all citizens. Although the Yellow Star was never introduced in Denmark, King Christian X threatened to wear it proudly, along with the rest of his family, if the Jews were required to do so.50 During July and August 1943, more than three hundred acts of sabotage were committed against the Nazi occupying army; strikes that began in the shipyards of Copenhagen and Odense spread nationwide, thus hurting the Third Reich, which was dependent upon Denmark for food, much-needed marine diesel engines, and parts for airplanes and armored vehicles.51 Moreover, protesting the Occupation, Danish shipyard workers refused to repair German ships. As a result of Danish opposition to Nazi policies against Jews before the deportations were scheduled in 1943, no anti-Jewish legislation was enacted, no Jews were discharged from government positions, and no Jewish property was confiscated. The Nazis planned the deportations of the Danish Jews for Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year), which fell on September 30 and October 1,

Introduction

9

1943.52 Several days before the planned roundup of Jews, Georg-Ferdinand Duckwitz, an attaché from the German embassy, informed Danish resistance leaders about the deportations. The rabbi of the Copenhagen synagogue, Marcus Melchior, spread the news among the Jewish congregation while Danish citizens mobilized to hide Jews. Nora Levin sums up the Danish reaction to the planned deportations: “A deluge of protests poured in to the German authorities from students, clergy, political parties and officials. Street fighting broke out between Nazis and Danish civilians. Danes sabotaged German vessels, power stations, barracks and war factories.”53 Rescue groups from all over the country sprang up to ferry Jews from cities, towns, and villages to neutral Sweden. Danish citizens financed the transportation costs and preserved Jewish property; members of the Danish Underground secured valuable religious possessions, including sacred scrolls and prayer books from the synagogue in Copenhagen; pastors passed out to Jews blank baptismal certificates; and pharmacists supplied free medicine. Within a three-month exodus, 7,220 Jews and 686 non-Jews married to Jews were safely ferreted to exile in Sweden.54 The Nazis caught 474 Jews, most of them elderly, who were sent to Theresienstadt; however, the Danish government supplied those interned Jews with food parcels and medical supplies while insisting on Red Cross inspections, thus keeping the majority of them alive. Therefore, approximately only 2.3 percent of the Danish Jewish population perished.55 Every Danish Jew who survived the Holocaust received 4,505 kroner in government funding to resume daily life.56 The other Scandinavian countries, Norway and Finland, did their best to rebuff Nazi efforts to exterminate their Jewish populations. In Norway, despite Vidkun Quisling’s cooperation with the Nazi invaders, the Norwegian underground managed to smuggle more than nine hundred Jews to Sweden.57 After the arrest of Jews and the confiscation of their property, members of the Lutheran Church of Norway (the largest religious group in the country) in cooperation with several other Protestant sects, circulated an official protest to Quisling that was read on radio stations in Norway and Sweden. When anti-Jewish legislation was decreed in Nazioccupied Finland during April 1942, a wave of protests led by the Social Democratic Party stymied the Nazis. After a series of delaying tactics, the Finnish government refused to grant Himmler permission to deport Finnish Jews. Finnish newspapers excoriated Nazi anti-Semitic policies, and Finnish police were recalcitrant in rounding up Jews for deportation. Himmler, realizing the need for Finnish raw materials and for Finland’s cooperation in providing strategic military attack sites for the German war

10

Staging Holocaust Resistance

on the Russian front, relented in his efforts to exterminate Finland’s relatively small minority of Jews. Although the Danish effort to rescue Jews was nonpareil among European nations, the heroic efforts of the Bulgarians to oppose anti-Jewish Nazi decrees was also admirable. When the Bulgarian Legislative Assembly debated the National Defense Act of 1940, relieving Jews of national rights, citizens protested. For example, Dimo Kazasov, president of the Union of Bulgarian Journalists, wrote a public letter that criticized Prime Minister Bogdan Filov for conceding to Nazi demands; Kazasov’s outcry aroused the support of writers, clergymen, and intellectuals to write letters and telegrams addressed to social and political leaders.58 The Bulgarians, who had grown up living among Turks, Armenians, Greeks, and Gypsies, saw no reason to single out Jews for persecution. To prevent unnecessary hounding of Jews, Bulgarian priests engaged in “mercy baptisms” and arranged approximately ten thousand mixed marriages of Jews and Christians between 1938 and 1941.59 When the Bulgarian Jews were forced to wear the Yellow Star in September 1942, a civil disobedience movement against the decree was begun, led by the bishop of Sofia, Monsignor Stephan; the result was that in October, the administration asked the press to stop its vitriolic attack on the Jews and disallowed the production of Yellow Stars. In January 1943, when the Nazis sent Theodor Dannecker to Sofia to accelerate activities, more than forty-two hundred Bulgarian Jews were soon arrested. Public outcry was led by parliamentary opposition begun by the vice president of the Subrania, Dimitur Peshev, and by Bishop Kiril of Plovdiv, who threatened to lie down on the railroad tracks to protest deportations.60 On May 24, 1943, thousands of Bulgarian citizens demonstrated against the deportation orders; official protests were lodged with the Germans by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and by King Boris. Moreover, Bulgarian politicians, who had now heard about the fate of the Polish Jews and were well aware of the German defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa, were less hesitant to cooperate with the Nazis. Furthermore, there were more than twenty thousand partisans, including many Bulgarian Jews, who inflicted major losses on the German army and kept the Bulgarian government preoccupied with internal strife.61 Many underground fighters distributed leaflets that urged the partisans to punish Bulgarian guards who mistreated Jews while these sycophants were abetting the Nazis. The result of Bulgarian opposition, which was particularly defiant in 1943 to the Nazi occupation, was that some Jews were interned in labor camps; however, Bulgaria’s fifty thousand Jews survived without being deported.

Introduction

11

In Slovakia, Gisi Fleischman, an active member of the Women’s International Zionist Organization, risked her life to organize the smuggling of Polish children via coal carts and hay wagons across the border to relative safety in the Balkans. In 1942, when the deportations from Slovakia to Poland were beginning, Gisi and Rabbi Michael Beer Dov Weissmandel began negotiations to bribe SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny in an effort to save Jews. The result was that during the two years of negotiations with Wisliceny, the deportations were halted, and Slovakia even became a sanctuary for the Jews who had escaped from Polish ghettoes and camps. With help from the Hungarian Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee and the Zionist youth organization Hechalutz, Gisi managed to establish an underground railway to smuggle threatened Slovakian Jews to Hungary. Although deportations resumed in 1944 after the Allies reasoned that paying bribe money to the enemy was not prudent, thousands of Slovakian Jews were saved.62 For their heroic efforts, Gisi was arrested twice before being shot upon her arrival in Auschwitz; Rabbi Weissmandel was luckier, having jumped from a deportation train, allowing him to escape to Switzerland. Meanwhile, when the deportations resumed in Slovakia, Czech leaders in exile, realizing the imminent German defeat in the war, rallied the communists, soldiers of the Slovakian army, members of the Zionist youth movements, and partisan units in a national revolt. The national uprising began on August 29, 1944; resistance groups were formed in the Jewish labor camps of Novaki and Sered. A Jewish unit of 161 men who fled from Novaki fought SS troops, allowing rebel units to flee to the mountains.63 Approximately 1,566 Jews among the 20,000 Jews living in Slovakia at the time joined 57,000 Slovak soldiers and partisans to participate in the revolt.64 When the revolt was quashed in October 1944, the rebels fled to the Tatra Mountains, where they continued to engage the Nazis in battle. In neighboring Yugoslavia, Josip Broz, better known as Tito, instigated a national revolt against the Nazis that began in July 1941. Although Tito’s partisans fought primarily in the forests and mountains, the Yugoslavian Jews, who resided mainly in the cities, found a way to reach these remote outposts to participate in the national insurrection. Josip Engel, a Jewish engineer who built the first radio transmitter, broadcast the call to arms nationwide. Charles W. Steckel has reported that 4,572 Jews were in the ranks of Tito’s partisans; 1,318 of them were killed in battle.65 In particular, young Jews from the Belgrade group of Hashomer Hatzair and from the communist Matatja association of Sarajevo joined Tito’s partisans, and

12 Staging Holocaust Resistance many were designated at the conclusion of the war as national heroes for their bravery.66 The Greeks also vigorously resisted the German Occupation and Nazi attempts to deport Jews. Although Archbishop Theophilos Damaskinos protested deportation orders and was supported by the country’s journalists, professors, artists, lawyers, industrialists, surgeons, dentists, and politicians who signed a petition to allow the Jews to remain in Greece, the Nazis rejected their pleas. The Nazis successfully deported the majority of the Jewish population, which lived in Salonika; however, many Greek citizens, working with the underground movement and with the Greek police, heroically risked their lives to save most of the Athenian Jews and provided six thousand of them with new identity papers.67 The Greek Orthodox Church and partisan units furnished Jews with safe-conduct passes while various assistance groups supplied the escapees with funds and shelter in order to survive the Holocaust. By the end of 1941, there were fifty-four Greek underground resistance organizations whose primary activity was sabotage against German communications installations and ships carrying munitions.68 By early 1943, there were also all-Jewish or predominantly Jewish resistance groups in Thessaly, Athens, and Salonika; most notable was the resistance group in Salonika, led by journalist Elie Veissi, who provided the British in Cairo with valuable war information. In Eastern Europe, where the Shoah was much more devastating than in Western or Central Europe because of the Nazi attitude that Poles and Slavs were Untermenschen, there was still a surprisingly large amount of resistance against the Final Solution. Whereas in Western and Central Europe where detention centers acted as launching sites for deported Jews destined for “resettlement” in the exterminations camps of the East, ghettoes were created for that purpose in the Eastern occupied territories. Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski note that resistance organizations were created in five major city ghettoes (Warsaw, Vilna, Bialystok, Cracow, and Czestochowa), as well as in forty-five other smaller towns and villages.69 Yehuda Bauer’s research indicates that there were 63 armed underground groups in 110 ghettoes in northeastern Poland alone.70 Members of these various underground networks disseminated information through an illegal press and operated a clandestine educational network. After the formation of the United Partisan Organization in Vilna, Abba Kovner, in a nowfamous manifesto dated January 1, 1942, exhorted Jews not to be fooled by Nazi propaganda and warned of Hitler’s plan to annihilate the Jews of Europe: “Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter! It is true we are weak and alone. But the only answer worth giving to our enemy is Resistance!”71

Introduction

13

The call for resistance was answered in many of the ghettoes of Eastern Europe during 1942. On July 22, armed with hammers, axes, pitchforks, knives, and relatively few guns, the Jews of Nesvizh and Kletsk set their houses on fire and stormed the barricades in defiance of Nazi orders to report for work in a labor camp. In early September, when the Nazis were about to liquidate the four thousand Jews in the Lachwa Ghetto, hundreds of Jews set their houses on fire and then attacked Nazi officers before fleeing to join the partisans in the Chobot forest.72 When the Jews of Tuczyn were ordered by the Gestapo to assemble on September 23, they instead rallied in the synagogue; after deciding to torch the ghetto and storm the gates, approximately two thousand resisters fled to safety in the forest. In Minsk, the ghetto underground smuggled arms out of German armaments factories, sabotaged alcoholic beverages slated for the Eastern front, worked with tailors and shoemakers to make German shoes and clothing unwearable, forged identity papers for Jews, and assisted ten thousand Jews in escaping from the city (hundreds, however, died in the forests or were recaptured by the SS); moreover, with the partisans, the ghetto underground killed sixteen hundred Germans, the most notable of which was General Kommissar Kube.73 When the Jews of the Marcinkonis Ghetto were about to be deported on November 2, Nazi plans were thwarted as the Jews stormed the ghetto fence and fled in pandemonium after 105 of their brethren had been shot down. In Cracow during September 1942, Zionist youth groups, Jewish communists, and left-wing Polish underground fighters sabotaged railroad lines and destroyed storage buildings. During November and December, a few dozen Zionists from Cracow who realized their doom at the hands of the Nazis took the offensive when they began murdering German soldiers who frequented the most elegant cafes in the city. By 1943, Jews in the Polish and Lithuanian ghettoes who had heard reports of terror inflicted through shooting of Jews in the streets, mass murders at places such as Ponary, and deportations to the extermination camps were less hesitant to revolt than they would have been in 1942. In Bialystok, armed resistance was begun by the communists, the left-wing Bundists, and the Marxist Hasohmer Hatzair; these groups merged as the United Defense Organization under the command of Daniel Moszkowicz and Mordecai Tennenbaum in May 1943. In a public appeal to the ghetto fighters, Tennenbaum reminded them that their destiny was Treblinka and then evoked Kovner’s warning not to go like lambs to the slaughter. Ill equipped with only 125 rifles and pistols, several hand grenades and tommy guns, one machine gun, and a few sticks of dynamite, the

14 Staging Holocaust Resistance determined 350 fighters engaged Major General Odilo Globocnik’s regiment of three thousand men, which consisted of one German and two Ukrainian battalions, on August 16. In a fierce battle that lasted for four days, the Nazis finally had to employ aircraft and heavy artillery to overpower the Jewish resistance.74 However, the Jews burnt all of the SS industrial and workshop equipment and killed approximately one hundred Nazis and Ukrainians while wounding several hundred more.75 Other revolts also occurred in 1943 as the Russians were advancing and concomitantly the Nazis were trying to complete the Final Solution. In Lvov, Poland’s third largest city before the war, liquidation of the ghetto on June 1 was met with armed resistance; three thousand Jews were killed or committed suicide rather than face extermination in Belzec.76 Later in the month, on June 25 in Czestochowa, the Jewish Fighting Organization, led by Mordechai Zylberberg and Lutek Glickstein, with their meager weapons, held off the Nazis before the ghetto was liquidated. On September 1, when the remaining Jews in Vilna were threatened with transport to labor factories in Veivara and Riga, armed resistance, led by Abba Kovner and Yehiel Sheinbaum, broke out. In a bloody battle, the Germans were repulsed several times before calling in reinforcements to dynamite each building in which partisans fought. Without a doubt, the most significant and historically renowned act of civilian collective resistance in the Nazi-occupied ghettoes of Eastern Europe was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. After the murder of the Vilna Jews at Ponary became fact rather than fantasy and after the first major deportation of Warsaw Jews ran from July 22, 1942, to September 12, culminating in over 287,000 persons murdered in the ghetto, sent to labor camps, or deported to Treblinka, resistance became the preferred option.77 When the Nazis began the second Aktion on January 18, 1943, the Jews provided armed and unarmed resistance. Members of the Jewish Fighting Organization (known also by the Polish initials ZOB—Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa), which had been formed on July 28, 1942, attacked and killed twenty Nazis while wounding fifty.78 Nevertheless, the Jews, with very few arms, were routed in four days when German reinforcements arrived. There were approximately sixty thousand inhabitants left when the Nazis entered the Warsaw Ghetto on the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943. They were met with resistance from the 500 members of Jewish Fighting Organization and approximately 250 members of the Jewish Military Organization (ZZW—according to Polish initials) who were divided into twenty-two groups; both forces were led by Mordechai Anielewicz

Introduction

15

of Hashomer Hatzair.79 After the Nazis initially retreated, General Jürgen Stroop was brought in to command the German troops. The Jews, armed with revolvers, two or three light machine guns, eight automatic guns, fourteen rifles, three hundred grenades, and limited ammunition, faced a German arsenal of over two thousand men with access to heavy artillery and tanks.80 Tens of thousands of Jews who did not actively fight with weapons resisted the April 1943 deportation by barricading themselves in more than six hundred bunkers. On April 20, the Nazis ordered the Jews to lay down their arms or face liquidation of the ghetto; the warning was ignored by the fighters. Over several weeks, after the Nazis had been rebuffed twice, they set fire to the ghetto, forcing Jews out of the bunkers they were defending; in turn, the combatants set fire to everything that could possibly be of value to the perpetrators. Jews hiding in the sewers were incapacitated by gas grenades tossed in by Stroop’s soldiers. By May 16, the exhaustion of the Jews in battle, the lack of ammunition, thirst, hunger, and increasing casualties all took their toll on the Jewish fighters; after the Nazis had obliterated 631 bunkers, they declared that the Warsaw Ghetto had officially been liquidated.81 Most of the resisters had died in battle, hundreds committed suicide rather than surrender, and a few dozen survived by maneuvering through sewers to the Aryan side of the city or to the nearby Puscza Kampinoscza forest, where they joined partisan detachments. Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski sum up the significance of the revolt: The Warsaw Ghetto held out against the German army for longer than had many countries in Europe during the war; and the uprising taught the world that a population, though practically unarmed and unaided, could light the fires of rebellion if it was unified in its will to resist, even to the point of death.82

During the summer of 1942, to avoid being shipped as slave laborers to work camps, many young Belorussian men joined Polish Jews in the ghettoes who feared deportation and fled with them to the forests.83 In the areas of western Beloruss (White Russia), western Ukraine, Volhynia, and eastern Poland, family camps, consisting at times of hundreds of men, women, and children, were formed in the forests. Although nearly fifty thousand Jews escaped to the forests, Yitzhad Arad estimates that the family camps saved no more than ten thousand Jews84 ; many of the nonsurvivors were killed in German manhunts for the escapees. These family units were mainly trying to endure the harsh winters and find enough food to

16

Staging Holocaust Resistance

survive; many of these camps splintered into fighting units that engaged the Germans in guerrilla activities, such as sabotaging rail lines, attacking police stations, and ambushing Nazi sentries. Approximately thirty autonomous Jewish partisan units were established from those fleeing the Polish ghettoes in the spring and summer of 194285 ; many others joined the much more disciplined Soviet partisan movement, which, with more than two hundred thousand men and women, represented the largest organized force of resistance in Europe. By the summer of 1943, approximately twenty thousand Jews were members of the Soviet partisans.86 Even those family camps that were not associated with Soviet partisans did their share of the fighting. In 1943, refugees in the Parczew forest near Warsaw, led by Yekhiel Grynszpan, successfully attacked German, Ukrainian, and Polish police units, as well as set fire to the German police headquarters in Parczew. In the Rudniki forest near Vilna, Abba Kovner led a Jewish brigade consisting of four battalions that derailed German troop trains, blew up bridges, and destroyed a German garrison; in the same forest, nearly three hundred Jews who had fled from Kovno united in battle with the Lithuanian Brigade. In the Naliboki forest of Beloruss, Shlomo Zorin found shelter for eight hundred Jews for two years, and Zorin’s meager fighting force of fifty–sixty men engaged columns of Wehrmacht who were dispersed to the forests to look for saboteurs. Without a doubt, the most famous family camp in Eastern Europe was the Bielski otriad, immortalized in Edward Zwick’s 2008 film Defiance, which starred Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, and Jamie Bell. The Bielski group, led by brothers Tuvia, Asael, and Zus Bielski, originally included only thirty Jews when they entered the Naliboki forest in Western Beloruss in the summer of 1942 after the Nazis had ransacked the Bielskis’ hometown of Stankiewicze, near Lida, and murdered their parents and two brothers.87 Tuvia insisted from the start that all Jewish fugitives, regardless of age, sex, or infirmity, were worthy of saving and thus would be welcomed into the otriad; the Bielski partisans even sent runners into the ghettoes to assist Jews willing to escape. By the winter of 1943, the group numbered over two hundred war refugees.88 When the Nazis began a manhunt to hunt down the Bielski group in August 1943, they miraculously evaded the troops, retreating to an island in the middle of a swamp in the forest. They eventually created workshops for tailors, shoemakers, and carpenters; a stable for horses and a shed for cattle; a food warehouse; a slaughterhouse; a barbershop; a team of metalworkers who repaired broken pistols and rifles; a school for the children; a smokehouse to make sausage; a small mill that ground wheat for their bakery; a musical and dramatic

Introduction

17

theater; a modest clinic to treat the sick; a quarantine hut for those suffering from typhus; a forge for blacksmiths; a tannery that was converted to a synagogue; a bathhouse, originally created for delousing, with soap manufactured in the camp; and even a Turkish bath/sauna that proved so popular that there was a waiting list to enter. Their first act of sabotage was on September 1, 1942, in which the Bielski clan destroyed tons of wheat destined for German troops on the front lines. Aligning itself with Soviet partisans led by Victor Panchenko, the Bielski fighting unit, known as the Ordzhonikidze, focused on derailing German trains and disconnecting telephone lines in the areas to the west and northwest of Novogrudek. In particular, Zus led groups of men into ambushes against enemy fighters, as well as against Polish families that collaborated with the Nazis. Tuvia estimated that the Bielski fighting unit destroyed 18 bridges, 8 farm-supply warehouses, and 34 train cars, while killing 261 enemy fighters.89 When the group left the forest in July 1944 after two years of nomadic existence, they numbered 1,230; this turned out to be the largest rescue of Jews during the Holocaust and certainly consisted of the largest Jewish partisan unit in the Soviet Union. In the labor camps, concentration camps, and extermination camps of Eastern Europe, resistance and rebellion, which meant an automatic death sentence, were less likely to occur than in the ghettoes. Nevertheless, Gutman and Krakowski report that armed resistance occurred in the Jewish prisoner-of-war camp in Lublin, in the concentration camps of Plaszow and Lwow-Janowska, in eighteen forced labor camps, and in three of the extermination camps.90 For example, in the labor camp at Kruszyna, near Radom, a revolt broke out on December 17, 1942, as Jews in the camp learned of deportation orders; the rebellion continued on the following day when more than one hundred inmates were shot when refusing to board trucks. Three weeks later, in the Kopernik camp at Minsk Mazowiecki, Jews barricaded themselves in a building and fought with sticks, stones, and bricks; the SS set fire to the compound, killing four hundred Jews. On March 22, 1944, ninety-three Jews escaped from the Koldyczewo camp and managed to mine the doors with dynamite upon fleeing; the next morning, when the Nazi guards roused the Jews for the Appells (roll calls), ten Germans were killed.91 The first revolt in the extermination camps was at Treblinka, on August 2, 1943. The Jewish prisoners broke into the armory (a locksmith named Zalcberg had amazingly managed to make a duplicate key to the arsenal) and obtained weapons to distribute to the conspirators. Several of the camp installations were set on fire, including the crematoria, barracks,

18

Staging Holocaust Resistance

warehouses, and garages; SS Quartermaster Sergeant Kittner was shot dead; and fifteen other SS and Ukrainian soldiers were killed.92 Between five hundred and six hundred of the seven hundred laborers in Camps I and II escaped to the forests; the Nazis, who mobilized all available units to track down the escapees, managed to murder all but fifty of them. Two and a half months after the uprising, Treblinka was demolished.93 Two months after the revolt in Treblinka, on October 14, 1943, six hundred inmates armed with a few grenades, some pistols, knives, and hatchets and led by Alexander Pechersky, a Jewish officer of the Red Army, revolted in Sobibor.94 Approximately four hundred inmates actually escaped from the grounds, but half of them were killed when they fell victim to the land mines surrounding the camp; others were murdered during the ensuing pursuit by the SS and Nazi troops, yet nearly sixty found their way to the partisans or were hidden by Polish peasants. During the revolt, the prisoners managed to kill ten SS men, while wounding or murdering thirty-eight Ukrainian guards.95 Two days after the devastation, Himmler shut down the camp, which had been the scene of an average of fifteen thousand gassings per day and had claimed the lives of more than six hundred thousand Jews. Certainly the most notorious of the extermination camp revolts occurred in Auschwitz, where escape was virtually impossible. The Sonderkommando, who were responsible for cremating the gassed bodies of the Hungarian Jews during fall 1944, knew that the Nazis wanted to keep no witnesses alive, and with the Russians bearing down on Poland, the Nazis were getting restless about covering up their crimes; thus, the Sonderkommando knew that their time to live was limited. In close contact with the camp underground and also with the women who worked in the ammunition factory within the camp, the Sonderkommando tried to acquire explosives. Roza Robota, who worked in the Clothing Comander, and twenty of her cohorts in the Pulverpavillon (powder shop), managed to smuggle out explosives that munitions experts in the camp converted to grenades and bombs. On October 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando blew up Crematorium 3 at Birkenau, killed a sadistic Kapo and four SS guards while wounding several others, and then 667 inmates broke through the fence. However, the revolt was soon quashed as hundreds of SS men rounded up all but a few of the escapees. At least two hundred and fifty members of the Sonderkommando died during the uprising. Four of the Polish Jewesses supplying the explosives were tortured for weeks without revealing any information and then were publicly hanged on January 6, 1945. Besides the collective resistance to the tenets of National Socialism, we must also acknowledge the heroism of those Jews who individually

Introduction

19

defied the Nazis. Not only were these acts that were committed by Jewish resisters courageous, but also we must remember they were essentially suicidal, for anyone who defied the perpetrators was typically shot or hanged. Obviously, this group would include resistance fighters such as Mordecai Tennenbaum, the leader of the Bialystok revolt; Adam Czerniakow, head of the Jewish Council in the Warsaw Ghetto, who became a martyr when he committed suicide on July 23, 1942, rather than provide a list of Jews for deportation; Mira Glimovska, a twenty-year-old member of the Sovietskaia Bielorus brigade who derailed twelve German trains and was awarded the Red Star for her heroism; Zenia Eichenbaum, recommended for the honor of “Hero of the Soviet Union” for her vital participation in the partisan operations of the Shchors Detachment96 ; Esther Ovadia, who despite her noncombatant status, fought with the Seventh Macedonian Partisan Brigade and was posthumously honored as the National Hero of the Peoples of Yugoslavia; Hanna Senesh, from Palestine, who, in 1943, volunteered for a dangerous mission to parachute into Yugoslavia to join Tito’s partisan movement but was executed by the Germans on November 6, 1944, after she entered her native Hungary to rescue Jews there; Niuta Teitelboim, alias “Wanda,” a notorious assassin and saboteur who was on the most-wanted list by the Gestapo for shooting German officers in cold blood; Esther Belin, trained as a Red Army sniper who was acclaimed as a Soviet heroine for killing twenty-eight Austrian and German marksmen in northern Russia; Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Jewish forces who died in combat during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the legendary Zivia Lubetkin, one of the founders of the Antifascist Bloc and a major activist of the Jewish Fighting Organization that participated in the armed resistance in Warsaw; Roza Robota, who, despite being tortured, went calmly to her death without betraying any of her comrades who revolted in Birkenau; and Yitzhak Witenberg, commander of the United Partisan Organization in Vilna, who surrendered to the Nazis to avoid liquidation of the ghetto. Obviously, there are dozens of heroic Jewish combatants, spies, couriers, and saboteurs who may not be as noteworthy as those mentioned here but whose accomplishments could easily be lauded as well. We must also acknowledge Jews who were noncombatants yet who also defied the Nazis by hiding, saving, aiding, or abetting victims of the Holocaust. This illustrious group would include such diverse individuals as physician Janusz Korczak, who was offered asylum in the Aryan sector of Warsaw but instead refused to abandon the two hundred children of his Warsaw orphanage and remained steadfast with them as he accompanied

20

Staging Holocaust Resistance

his minions to their deaths in Treblinka; French activist Marianne Cohen, executed for smuggling Jews trying to escape from France to Switzerland, many of them children; Jacob L. Morewitz, a lawyer from Newport News, Virginia, who filed a libel against the steamship Quanza to prevent its return to Nazi-occupied Europe, thus saving eighty-one refugees, most of them Jews; Otto Komoly, chairman of the Zionist organization in Hungary, who, in conjunction with the International Red Cross, created centers that sheltered nearly eight thousand Jewish children; and Dr. Rudolf Kastner, vice chairman of the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest, who negotiated with SS officer Kurt Becher to acquire visas for 1,684 Jews to immigrate to Switzerland. In 1953, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, was established by the Knesset in Israel. One of its tasks was to commemorate non-Jews who risked their lives, without financial gain expected in return, to save Jews during the Holocaust. As of January 1, 2009, this group of gentiles, known as the Righteous Among the Nations, has grown to 22,765 men and women who have been honored from 45 countries.97 These illustrious individuals include German ceramics manufacturer Oskar Schindler, who saved approximately twelve hundred Jews, including five hundred by giving them safe harbor in his Cracow factory and another seven hundred prisoners from the Plaszow labor camp by transferring them to safety in his Sudetenland armaments plant, while also miraculously rescuing three hundred women by extricating them from Auschwitz; Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who prevented deportation by placing nearly fifty-five thousand Hungarian Jews under “extended protection” of the Swedish government and furnishing seven thousand others with identity papers, while saving another two thousand Jews from almost certain death during the forced marches from Budapest to Austria in late 1944; Belgian teacher Jeanne Daman, who worked with an underground unit to hide hundreds of Jewish children in convents and Christian households; Sister Bernes, the first non-Jew to be made an honorary citizen of Jerusalem for saving many Italian Jews in her convent in Rome; Otto Buse, the director of a German factory in Bialystok, who hid Jews, gave them money, and smuggled food to the ghetto residents; Paul Grueninger, a Swiss police officer who allowed a large number of Jews to cross illegally into Switzerland; Sempo Sugihara, the Japanese consul at Kovno who issued thirty-five hundred transit visas to Japan; Father Marie-Benoit, the French Capuchin monk whose printing press turned out thousands of forged passports and phony certificates of baptism that helped hundreds of Jews escape the clutches of the Gestapo stationed in

Introduction

21

Rome; Hungarian Colonel Imre Revicky, who, as labor camp commandant, had a reputation for humane and decent treatment of Jews under his charge and who, in the middle of 1942, refused to deport twenty-five hundred Jews to the gas chambers; and Dr. Trian Popovici, who, as mayor of Cernauti in Rumania, pleaded tirelessly with German orders of expulsion until he obtained reprieves for approximately twenty thousand Jewish professionals. Finally, we must understand that tales of bravery during the Holocaust are still unfolding and thus have yet to be recognized by Yad Vashem. For example, one such relatively unknown hero was Ernst Leitz II, the designer of the Leica 35-mm camera. To smuggle Jews out of Germany, Leitz assigned them to his sales offices in France, Great Britain, Hong Kong, and New York. The “Leica Freedom Train” saved the lives of hundreds of Jews, yet the Leitz family, who wanted no publicity for their heroic efforts, kept a low profile despite receiving numerous honors for their humanitarian efforts.98 Also worthy of heroic status during the Holocaust are those Christians who have been acknowledged as saints or martyrs by the Catholic Church but have not been formally admitted to Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations. This category would include Father Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who sacrificed himself in Auschwitz by taking the place of a Polish Jew who was selected for gassing; in 1971, the Vatican proclaimed Father Kolbe’s beatification, and he was canonized as a saint in October 1982. Angelo Roncalli, who eventually became Pope John XXIII, fits into this special category as well. During the summer of 1944, Monsignor Roncalli arranged a large-scale baptism of Jews by issuing baptismal certificates, which saved the lives of many. In 2000, thirty-seven years after his death, Roncalli was beatified by Pope John Paul II. Even the controversial Edith Stein, who converted to Catholicism in 1922, fits into the category. She was sent to Auschwitz from her Netherlands convent in 1942; however, when given the opportunity to flee, she refused to leave without her sister. En route to the extermination camp, she comforted her fellow Jews and did much to relieve their suffering. She was beatified as a martyr on May 1, 1987, and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 11, 1998. These collective and individual acts of resistance need to be recognized through memory. Those who defied the Nazis were certainly courageous, often were profound believers in justice, and typically were humanitarians. Civilization owes them a debt of gratitude for sacrificing their own lives; we should never allow these brave souls to fade from our consciousness. Obviously, monuments have been established, primarily in Eastern Europe, to remember the heroes of the Holocaust. As time passes, memorials elide

22

Staging Holocaust Resistance

their own history, becoming little more than sacred spaces. More alarming is the notion that monuments suggest closure from the obligation to remember—a means to divest ourselves from a genocide that elicits nothing but painful memories. Art, however, is enduring and is a much better way of remembering the Holocaust than through statues, museums, or memorials that tend to merge private grief into communally prescribed forms of memory. Theodor Adorno’s controversial dictum—that writing a poem after Auschwitz was a barbaric act since art was unable to convey an appropriate humanistic perspective after the Shoah—has been proven false by the many successful examples of Holocaust literature. Geoffrey H. Hartman argues that art is a more viable way of representing the Shoah than through monuments, which can also be too commercialized. Hartman writes, “Art constructs, in brief, a cultural memory of its own, in which the struggle of the individual with (and often for) experience—including the collective memory itself—never ceases.”99 Monuments affect only a select few individuals since it takes an effort, and often a strong personal interest and commitment, to visit these sites. Moreover, whereas monuments can be visited on-site and then forgotten by a small minority, art can be read or performed over and over, thus enabling a wider audience to experience collective Holocaust memory. Drama seems to be the ideal art form to revitalize the collective memory of nations and individuals who defied the Nazi plan to exterminate a cultural heritage. Drama, like poetry, short stories, and novels, can be read ad infinitum, typically by a captive audience; however, plays have a life of their own beyond the printed page. Holocaust drama can be staged worldwide, thereby introducing the Shoah to an audience that may not be conducive to reading texts. Audiences that are more visually oriented may prefer to see a play rather than merely read for information. Thus, Holocaust drama has a dual life, like any play, and thus has the advantage of disseminating historical information, and therefore enhancing collective memory, to diverse groups of people worldwide. Moreover, theater affects us emotionally, subliminally, or intellectually (sometimes simultaneously) in a direct way (between actor and audience) that other art forms cannot match. Those who defied the Nazis risked their lives for moral and ethical convictions. Many of these stories of resistance will forever remain lost because they have never been witnessed and thus defy documentation. However, there are many accounts that only historians and scholars of the Holocaust know anything about. Playwrights have been trying to change

Introduction

23

that by writing drama that portrays collective or individual resistance to the anti-Semitic tenets of National Socialism. This comparative drama study will examine a variety of international plays (some that are obscure) that focus on collective (chapters two through seven) or individual (chapters eight through ten) defiance of the Nazis with the expressed hope that by discussing such literature, I will keep the collective memories of these resisters alive for future generations.

2. German Resistance: Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General

A

s we have seen in chapter one, much of the German resistance to the Nazis came in the form of protests from the Catholic clergy, such as Count Clemens August von Galen’s sermons against the euthanasia policy and Bernard Lichtenberg’s public support of the Jews. Protestant pastors, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theophil Wurm, and Martin Niemöller, also challenged the Nazi policies of genocide. The clergy’s resistance to the tenets of National Socialism (and this category would tangentially include the deeply religious Kurt Gerstein with ties to the Confessional Church) will be examined in more detail in chapter six. Aside from the isolated examples of individual resisters in Germany, such as Werner Scharff, Julius Madritsch, and members of the White Rose or the Herbert Baum Group, most of the serious resisters were highranking German officers. This chapter will focus on resistance of the German military both to Hitler’s rule and to the abyss into which he led the German nation. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 and through much of the 1930s, Hitler was quite popular among German citizens. He had provided the Germans with a sense of pride and patriotism after the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, reestablished political stability, and restored economic prosperity after the high inflation rates of the Depression. Hitler was also viewed as a master statesman who rearmed the German military and created a new balance of power in Europe, allowing the modern Germany to rise from the ashes after its descent following World War I. Even the Nuremberg Laws were accepted by the majority of anti-Semitic German citizens who believed that the Jews could never assimilate into German society and certainly were overrepresented in politics, finance, commerce, and culture during the overtly liberal Weimar Republic. Most Germans agreed that the conservatism of the Nazis allowed for a balance that would

26

Staging Holocaust Resistance

control the excesses of the Weimar Republic, including the increased presence that Jews had in all spheres of German life. Hitler’s foreign policies in the late 1930s, which initially created resistance from the military, were proven to be calculated gambles that eventually made the Fuehrer more powerful among German citizens. Many military officers became resisters when Hitler announced plans to invade Czechoslovakia; they feared that Hitler’s actions would draw Germany into a new war, at least with France, Czechoslovakia’s ostensible supporter. These men, such as director of counterintelligence Wilhelm Canaris and chief of staff Ludwig Beck, saw visions of World War I again, with the same ensuing results due to a military that seemed unprepared for war. However, the Sudeten crisis appeared to be benign, as Hitler’s Wehrmacht swept through Austria and Czechoslovakia, mostly to crowds cheering their arrival. When resisters such as Beck and General Franz Halder protested the invasion of Poland and then the 1940 invasion of Denmark, Norway, France, and the Low Countries, claiming that these nations had not provoked Germany or threatened its security, Hitler’s popularity proved them to be in the minority. He knew that the United States was not ready militarily to enter into a war, and the other major power that he feared, the Soviet Union, was kept at bay by signing a nonaggression pact with Germany. The German citizenry was awed at Hitler’s military successes, and thus high-ranking officers who protested were viewed as whiners or defeatists. Even the invasion of Russia in June 1941 was regarded as a necessary action—a justification of the fundamental values of the Reich against worldwide Bolshevism. Furthermore, opposition to Hitler’s policies was not only considered to be outside the mainstream of German public opinion, but was also viewed as treason. Despite the widespread support of National Socialism during the 1930s, there were a few dissenters. General Beck, chief of the general staff of the Army, considered Hitler to be reckless and perfidious, arguing that annexation of Czechoslovakia would lead to a war with France.1 Beck resigned his position on August 27, 1938, after his initial attempts at both submitting memoranda of protests and applying international pressure failed. Beck’s successor, Franz Halder, viewed Hitler as a bloodsucker and a criminal because of his efforts to instigate war. Hoping to murder Hitler and establish a coup d’etat, Halder’s plans were aborted after Hitler successfully managed to invade Czechoslovakia without the danger of war. As historian Peter Hoffman explains, by 1939, “Halder was busy with the war against Poland and the other generals involved lacked either the opportunity, the time or the will to do anything.”2 In truth, Halder’s allegiance to military

German Resistance

27

authority prevented him from taking direct action to have Hitler assassinated or removed through direct revolt. However, the most vocal resister was Dr. Carl Goerdeler, who, as mayor of Leipzig, refused to hoist the swastika flag at city hall and adamantly opposed the removal of a statue of Felix Mendelssohn at the city orchestral hall. Goerdeler complained that the Nazis rejected German history, insisted on blind obedience, and relied on brute force in their quest for totalitarian power. On April 1, 1937, Goerdeler resigned his post as mayor of Leipzig. The widespread negative view of the Reich substantially increased among German citizenry after Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938), thus fueling the resistance movement in Germany. Kristallnacht resulted in the murder of 91 Jews, the arrest and subsequent deportation of between 25,000 and 30,000 Jews to concentration camps, the arson of 267 synagogues, and the ransacking of thousands of homes and businesses. This night of terror precipitated the penultimate phase of National Socialism’s racial program, the Final Solution, which meant genocide. From this moment on, resistance became more prevalent because the citizenry began to realize that the Nazis failed to live up to the principles they had originally established. The corrupt nature of the ruthless regime, with its totalitarian abuse of power and its display of mass brutality, conflicted with the notion of an ethical society, a pure Christian and spiritual Germany in which individuals could prosper bereft of the elements that had originally tainted the materialistic Weimar Republic. Historian Theodore S. Hamerow notes the strife present in military quarters after Kristallnacht: “Even some members of the officer corps who had appeared indifferent to Hitler’s assumption of direct command over the armed forces expressed shock, at least in their private conversations, letters, and diaries, at the brutality of the antiSemitic riots.”3 Germans who championed justice, decency, and morality now condemned the actions of their brethren that they believed superseded the Nuremberg Laws. Decent, honorable Germans who envisioned National Socialism as the embodiment of patriotism were now forced to question their allegiance to a regime that had become fanatical, tyrannical, cruel, and immoral. Others were concerned that the German nation had lost its credibility abroad. The resistance movement accelerated by December 1941, when the United States was on the brink of entering the war and when the Russians successfully defended Moscow against the advances of the Wehrmacht. Once the Russians forced the Germans to retreat, the balance of power clearly shifted in the war. During this time, news of the atrocities committed by the Germans in the Nazi-occupied Eastern territories was becoming

28 Staging Holocaust Resistance notorious and further shocked the German public. Meanwhile, the Reich attempted to Nazify all authority, purging all uncooperative officers from the ranks and relieving the diplomatic corps of its autonomy. In short, resisters who favored the overthrow of the German government realized that Hitler’s disastrous foreign policies spelled the defeat of the empire— another repeat of World War I and perhaps another Treaty of Versailles lurking in the future. Thus, the welfare of the Fatherland was clearly at stake; the Nazis had compromised the security of the nation, and so opposition to the government became a patriotic gesture and less a treasonable one. The basic goal of resistance became more a defense of the national interest rather than a fear of the consequences of military defeat. Hamerow asserts, “Clearly, although the Allies would never agree to negotiate with Hitler, they might be willing to consider a compromise settlement with an anti-Nazi government in Germany.”4 One such resister was Claus von Stauffenberg, the mastermind of the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt on Hitler. A devoted follower of National Socialism in the early part of his military career, Stauffenberg, who consistently championed justice and decency, became distraught with Nazi policies after Kristallnacht, complaining that the atrocities went far beyond the intent of the Nuremberg Laws. After beginning his army career as a lieutenant in 1930, Stauffenberg was part of the First Light Division that invaded the Sudetenland and later attacked Poland in 1939. As part of the Sixth Panzer Division that occupied France in 1940, Stauffenberg was rewarded with the Iron Cross. After witnessing the mass murder of Jews during his tour of duty in the Soviet campaign during 1942, he became disenchanted with Nazi policies. During late 1942, when the Nazi defeat seemed imminent, Stauffenberg, advocating not only for the sake of the Fatherland but also for the moral spirit of Germany, joined the resistance. Newly promoted to lieutenant colonel of the general staff, Stauffenberg had access to Hitler’s briefing meetings. Young and impetuous, Stauffenberg was willing to do what more seasoned officials such as Goerdeler, Beck, and Halder might discuss but would not act upon. Stauffenberg realized the suicidal mission of an assassination attempt on the Fuehrer but was now willing to martyr himself in a symbolic act that would oppose the moral evil endemic to the Third Reich. As we are all aware, the bomb that Stauffenberg planted in the briefing room at Hitler’s retreat at Wolfschanze, near the East Prussian town of Rastenburg, did not kill the Fuehrer.5 After the investigation by the Gestapo, Stauffenberg was tried along with his coconspirators and then shot; during the trial, he assumed full responsibility for the coup. His last words, “Long live holy Germany,” indicated his

German Resistance

29

patriotism and his commitment to purging the Fatherland of an insidious evil that had tainted the nation’s morality. When Carl Zuckmayer was writing Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General ) while living in Vermont in exile from the Nazis, the July 20 assassination attempt gave him incentive to finish the third act of this play about resistance to the Nazis. Zuckmayer was born in 1896 in Nackenheim on the Rhine and spent much of his middle-class childhood in Mainz. His grandfather on his mother’s side was a Jew who later converted to Catholicism, a religion that Zuckmayer was born into and embraced throughout his life. When World War I broke out in 1914, the patriotic seventeen-year-old enlisted; subsequently, he achieved the rank of lieutenant. After his war stint, he enrolled briefly from 1918 to 1919 at the University of Frankfurt and then studied at the University of Heidelberg in 1919.6 Zuckmayer abandoned his studies to turn to writing. In 1925, Zuckmayer went to Berlin to work in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. In Berlin, he began a prosperous career and won the Kleist Prize, awarded typically to encourage talented novice playwrights; he married that year, had his enormously successful comedy, Der fröliche Weinberg, staged at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, and in 1929, won the Georg Büchner Prize and the Heidelberg Festival Performance Prize. Der fröliche Weinberg, replete with cliches that parodied all walks of German life, was so successful (except among the “moral” National Socialists) that Zuckmayer’s realistic style, deemed to be in the tradition of Gerhart Hauptmann, was believed to bring an end to expressionism in Germany. His 1931 satire on the military, Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, perhaps his most critically acclaimed play, brought on Nazi wrath that implicated Zuckmayer as a pacifist. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, Zuckmayer’s plays were banned, so Zuckmayer, who never joined the Nazi Party, took his family to live in his country home near Salzburg, Austria; while in Austria, he wrote several novels, two plays, some poetry, and a few screenplays. After the Anschluss, Zuckmayer fled to Switzerland in 1938, and to the United States one year later. He labored briefly as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers in Hollywood and then leased a dilapidated farmhouse in a rural area of Vermont that reminded him of his former home in the Rhineland. After the war, Zuckmayer worked as a civilian employee of the American government assigned to writing reports on the postwar cultural situation in Germany and Austria. In postwar Europe, Zuckmayer, aside from Brecht, was the most widely performed playwright in West Germany. He continued to write plays and won major awards for his efforts: the Gutenberg Plaque (1948), the Goethe Prize (1952), the Vienna Culture Prize (1955),

30

Staging Holocaust Resistance

the Literature Prize of the Rhenish Palatinate (1957), and the Insignia of the Order Pour le mérite for Science and Art (1967). He was also awarded honorary doctorates from Dartmouth College (1956), the University of Bonn (1976), and the University of Vermont (1976). He passed away on January 18, 1977, in Visp, Switzerland. In December 1941, while in Vermont, Zuckmayer read an American newspaper article about the death of his old wartime friend, pilot Ernst Udet, a World War I ace and winner of the Iron Cross who had years later become chief of the Air Force Supply Service of the German Army.7 The newspaper reported that Udet (who actually committed suicide) suffered a fatal flying accident while in service to the Reich and was given a state funeral. In his autobiography, A Part of Myself, Zuckmayer recalled that when he last saw Udet, in 1936, his comrade, already a high-ranking officer in the Luftwaffe, lamented, “Shake the dust of this country from your shoes. Clear out of here and don’t come back. There is no more decency here.”8 Udet would have left, too, except for the fact that he was so enamored with flying that he could not abandon it and therefore resigned himself to serving a corrupt regime. Upon learning that his friend was given a state funeral, Zuckmayer conceived the idea for Der Teufels General, with the notion that “state funeral” would be the last words of the play. During a three-week period in January 1943, he had developed an outline for the play and wrote its first act without ever having to change a word of it afterward. Zuckmayer got distracted with farm work, but after hearing of the July 20, 1944, attempted assassination of Hitler on the radio, he became motivated to finish the play. After he had written the play, Zuckmayer realized that it had minimal chances for production in West Germany, where collective amnesia about the war permeated the society and where the Allies were skeptical of his nostalgic glorification of German militarism that could conceivably arouse new nationalistic sentiments and a venting of frustration against the occupied forces. Siegfried Mews recalls, “It is understandable that the allied occupation forces did not look favorably upon a play that seemed to offer too sympathetic a portrayal of a Nazi general.”9 Thus, Des Teufels General had its debut in Zurich at the Schauspielhaus, on December 14, 1946, in a production directed by Zuckmayer’s longtime confidant Heinz Hilpert.10 The play was so popular that it remained in production in Zurich for sixty performances. Hilpert, who cast the great German actor Gustav Knuth as Harras, went on to direct the West German premiere of the play in Frankfurt at the Stock Exchange in late November 1947. The running time of the original play was five and a half hours; Hilpert cut one-third

German Resistance

31

of the dialogue, which made for a more manageable production. From 1947 to 1950, Des Teufels General was given 3,238 performances throughout West Germany (the East Germans adamantly refused its production, claiming that the play glorified the fascist military hierarchy), making the play the most frequently performed and most debated drama written by any German playwright during the postwar period.11 From 1947 until he collapsed from a heart attack in late January 1948, Zuckmayer went on tour throughout Germany, discussing the controversial play at student meetings, youth group sessions, and union halls; the text was adopted as standard reading in many of the German secondary schools. Moreover, the play was hotly debated by German critics, many of whom found Oderbruch’s sabotage of German airplanes to be repulsive.12 In 1963, because of its controversial subject matter, Zuckmayer withdrew the play from the stage; three years later, he revised the final act to develop Oderbruch’s character in more detail, toning down his single-mindedness, allowing him to have more of a troubled conscience and feel guilt about the death of Eilers, and permitting Harras to give his friend valuable moral instruction. In 1955, German director Helmut Käutner made a black-and-white film version of Des Teufels General, which starred Curt Jürgens as Harras and Marianne Koch as Diddo; the film’s screenplay, penned by Georg Hurdalek and Käutner, was faithful to Zuckmayer’s original text, although cuts had to be made to shorten the film to less than two hours of playing time.13 While the play has been mainly popular in Germany (e.g., director Frank Castorf staged a revival at the Volksbühne in Berlin during 1996), there have been a few notable productions elsewhere. In London, during fall 1953, Trevor Howard gave one of the more memorable performances as Harras at the Savoy Theatre. Alan Scarfe can also be commended for his portrayal of Harras at the Dallas Theater Center in January 1979 in a production staged by Harry Buckwitz, who had earlier directed the play’s first run in Munich.14 In 1936, when Zuckmayer had asked his friend Udet why he did not abandon his career as a high-ranking officer in the Luftwaffe, the latter responded, “I’m completely sold on flying. I can’t disentangle any more. But one of these days the devil will fetch us all.”15 Zuckmayer’s protagonist, General Harras, modeled after Udet, working for Hitler, the devil, became the protagonist for the title of the play: The Devil’s General. The apocalyptic subtitles of the three acts—“The Time Bomb,” “Stay of Execution or The Hand,” and “Damnation”—suggest that trouble is brewing, that time has been allocated for resolution, but hell awaits. The notion of the German

32 Staging Holocaust Resistance people selling their souls to the devil, Faustlike, is palpable throughout the play. Alan Robertshaw astutely realizes, “The answer given by the play is presumably that Hitler, as the devil, is beyond redemption, whereas Harras, as his servant, can perhaps, like Faust, ultimately be saved.”16 The conflict, then, revolves around the notion of what aviators such as Udet and Harras could do to resist the temptations provided by the devil; in the larger context, the play focuses on what individual resisters could do to oppose a diabolical force that had enslaved their nation. Thus, Zuckmayer initially dedicated the play to “dem Unbekannten Kämpfer” (the unknown combatants) who died with Stauffenberg in the aftermath of the sacrifice of their lives made during the virtually suicidal July 20 assassination attempt.17 These resisters accepted the guilt and took action to free their beloved Germany from a devil who was leading the country to its ruin. I will argue that Harras’s suicide is a gesture in accord with the grand defiance of those Germans who sacrificed their lives in the resistance movement, thus leading a guilty man who has aligned himself with the Nazis to place his fate in God’s hands. To make the play appeal to a diverse postwar German audience, Zuckmayer’s dilemma was twofold: he needed to find a suitable form for the play, and he had to refrain from stereotyping German society during the Third Reich. To solve the dilemma of the most suitable form for the play, Zuckmayer relied on his talents as a realist playwright. The play has a traditional three-act structure with which audiences were familiar, and the form is firmly embedded in the objective realist tradition that ostensibly sought Truth through an exploration of everyday characters, modern settings, and conventional dialogue; the only hint of abstraction is the five-fanned beams of light that, in act 2, morph into fingers representing the tight grip that Hitler has on the nation and concomitantly the fingers of God that exacerbate Harras’s feelings of guilt. Zuckmayer’s forte was that he could represent a diverse cross-section of German life during the Nazi reign. As Roy C. Cowen has observed, every geographical area of Germany is represented in the play: Pfundmayer is from Bavaria, the pilot Hastenteuffel lives in Westphalia, Writzky hails from Berlin, Hansen represents northern Germany, Mohrungen and Hartmann are Rhinelanders like Zuckmayer himself, Baron Pflungk is referred to as an “old Saxon,” and Oderbruch has his roots in Silesia.18 Zuckmayer, the master of working with German dialects, knew that his audiences would be enamored with their understanding of the subtle differences in the language spoken throughout Germany. Moreover, Zuckmayer created a cross-section of German society by portraying characters from all classes and all walks

German Resistance

33

of life—from waiters (Detlev) to generals (Harras), from the working class (Oderbruch) to wealthy industrialists (von Mohrungen). Furthermore, Zuckmayer was determined to show that National Socialism affected persons from all ages, from the young (Hartmann, Anne Eilers, Pootsie, and Diddo) to the middle-aged (Harras, Olivia Geiss, and Oderbruch), to the older generation (Korrianke). In fact, Zuckmayer has much in common with Anton Chekhov, whose plays carried widespread appeal because he wrote about people from all classes and all ages.19 Aside from the firmly committed National Socialists (Hartmann, Pootsie, and Schmidt-Lausitz), the minor characters in the play fully represent the diverse opinions of the general German populace toward National Socialism during late 1941, when the drama takes place. As a matter of fact, German audiences were amazed that a playwright who had been living abroad during the war could so readily and accurately capture the sentiments of the German personae; spectators could easily identify with at least one, and sometimes several, of the characters portrayed on stage. Mohrungen, the opportunistic upper-class industrialist who is president of the procurement office for raw materials, believes in surrendering his honor and will to Germany in order to help the Fuehrer save the world from Bolshevism; he is typical of the German entrepreneurs of the 1930s who succumbed to the Nazi allure. Colonel Friedrich Eilers, the young, idealistic war hero and leader of a fighter squadron, realizes that killing is wrong yet submits, as a good soldier typically did in Nazi Germany, blindly and obediently to the will of the Reich, which, he rationalizes, will result in peace once the war is won. His wife Anne is a well-respected, quiet, elegant mother of two children, not atypical of most German women who were subordinate to their husbands during the Nazi regime. Herr Detlev, the waiter, spies for the Nazis out of self-preservation: like many obedient Nazis, he has a family to support. Olivia Geiss, whose passion for acting equates with Harras’s love of flying, agrees to capitulate to Goering’s demands to perform primarily Wagner’s operas, and although her artistic freedom has been compromised, she is willing to submit to the Nazis in order to remain on stage with her dreams. Finally, there is Baron Pflungk, a diplomat of the Foreign Ministry who despises the “plebeian” agenda of the National Socialists yet realizes that his service to the Reich means advancement, which he very much cherishes. This selection of diverse characters demonstrates how effective the Nazis were in subjugating all types of people into accepting the Party mentality. If the demonic had been running rampant in Germany, then it had infected people from all stratifications.

34

Staging Holocaust Resistance

One must understand that since all other political parties except for the Nazi Party were outlawed during the Reich, every German character in the play is a Nazi; however, only Schmidt-Lausitz, Pootsie, and Hartmann are stalwarts of National Socialism. Doctor Schmidt-Lausitz, minister of culture, is reminiscent of Zuckmayer’s nemesis, Dr. Goebbels, who was largely responsible for banning Zuckmayer’s plays after 1936. Schmidt-Lausitz says to Harras, “In me you see a mortal enemy. You are quite correct. There isn’t room enough under the sun for us both.”20 Schmidt-Lausitz, with his ties to the Gestapo, understands that Harras is not fully supportive of the regime. Schmidt-Lausitz teases Harras by comparing him to Erich Maria Remarque, the pacifist writer who so irritated the Nazis, and then calling Remarque a Jew. When Harras reminds Schmidt-Lausitz that Remarque was not Jewish, Schmidt-Lausitz attacks Harras personally: “Remarque of Ullstein. Whoever associates with Jews is himself a Jew” (927). SchmidtLausitz knows that Harras has been trying to smuggle Jews out of the country; the comment about Ullstein, the publishing company that in 1933 stopped serializing Zuckmayer’s novella Eine Liebesgeschichte due to the Nazi protest against Zuckmayer’s pacifism, is particularly pertinent to the comparison of Zuckmayer and Remarque. Dr. Schmidt-Lausitz was a poorly paid writer before the war, much like Goebbels who majored in the humanities before fully immersing himself into National Socialism. Margot Finke writes, “Zuckmayer considered such unimportant, intellectually mediocre people with a great need for recognition to be the best executors of National Socialist policies because the system offered them the desired upward mobility for their dirty work.”21 By including an academic as an ardent Nazi, Zuckmayer depicts how National Socialist ideology had influenced even the most intelligent German citizens.22 Schmidt-Lausitz, the mediocre academic, has been enlightened by the Nazis, who can provide ordinary citizens with power and glory; even Schmidt-Lausitz’s double name suggests a preference for aristocratic nomenclature. SchmidtLausitz becomes the personification of Nazi terror (the German Laus, the equivalent of louse)—the small bureaucrat who glorifies in terrifying others under the auspices of the powerful Gestapo. He turns Harras over to the Gestapo for questioning, and then following the interrogation, gives the general ten days to find the saboteur in Oderbruch’s unit. To downplay the idea that Nazis consisted only of ambitious males, Zuckmayer attempted to show how the tenets of National Socialism penetrated all walks of life by creating the ideal female Nazi as a counterpart to the evil of Schmidt-Lausitz. Pootsie von Mohrungen (Anne Eilers’s sister), having lost her mother at an early age, has been raised by her father and by

German Resistance

35

the Party, thus becoming a fanatical Nazi. Trained in the Hitler Youth and now ready to enter the League of German Girls (Bund deutsches Mädel), Pootsie has been fully indoctrinated into National Socialist ideology and is planning to accept a leadership position in the Party after she completes her course that includes a lecture series on Nietzsche’s philosophy: the value of suffering in the Life of the Nation; Pootsie is thus trained to sacrifice her will for the sake of the nation. She is empowered to become a mother for the Fatherland and stoically admits, “When I have a baby there won’t be any anesthesia. It’s going to be a matter of suffering wide awake and screaming till the seams burst” (942–943). Consistently wearing her tight Hitler Youth uniform that reinforces how her conformity has dehumanized her, Pootsie, devoid of scruples, mouths Party cliches as an automaton without the ability to think for herself. Ausma Balinkin remarks that Pootsie’s given Germanic name, Waltraut, identifies her with the Germanic notion of strength and power, the Blood and Guts cult of National Socialism.23 To Zuckmayer, she is a sad indictment of Nazis without a will of their own, who have become dehumanized victims of a demented ideology. Pootsie is not only indoctrinated and thus lacks empathy for others, but is also a threat to others. Acting as the biblical Lilith, she demonically tempts the moral Harras into accepting his calling as a Nazi. Pootsie admires Harras as a brave pilot but shuns him when his morality allows him to tear down the facade of National Socialism. When Harras does so in front of Pootsie, she can only respond in the way she was trained: “You talk like a Jew” (943). Rocking back and forth on Harras’s war memorabilia in his Berlin apartment, Pootsie is essentially fetishizing Nazi iconography that represents her ideal notion of the warrior mentality that she so dearly covets. She tempts Harras to regain his warrior mentality and join the Nazi Party, noting that power is freedom: “You’re no Jew and no Communist. You know you can’t fight it. Don’t be a fool! You have blood, race, spirit. You were born to rule, to grasp, to possess” (948). When Harras defers, refusing to be tempted by satanic forces, Pootsie reveals that when she was hiding in the closet, she overheard Harras’s plans to smuggle Jews to safety and thus threatens to destroy him. Harras expels her from his apartment by chasing her with a whip. One might imagine that through the portrayals of hardcore fascists such as Schmidt-Lausitz and Pootsie, Zuckmayer has stereotyped all such dedicated Nazis during the Third Reich. Audiences viewing the activities of Schmidt-Lausitz and Pootsie would recognize that they inhabit an unflattering, vicious world of spying on their neighbors, hiding in closets to overhear conversations, and informing on one’s brethren; they

36 Staging Holocaust Resistance reflect the appalling reality of life under the Nazis. However, the inclusion of Lieutenant Hartmann in this group breaks the stereotypical mold. Hartmann has the soul of the resisters who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944; he, like so many Nazis loyal to Germany, had doubts about the efficacy of National Socialism after Kristallnacht and even more so in December 1941, when the play takes place and the Nazis had committed atrocities in Eastern Europe. Zuckmayer seemed to have tapped into the national malaise, for after the postwar productions of Des Teufels General throughout West Germany, he admitted, “I received several hundred letters that began: ‘I am your Lieutenant Hartmann . . . ’”24 Hartmann seems to have been the idealistic pure-bred that the Nazis love to recruit. He turns out to be a daredevil pilot who volunteers for missions, has boundless energy, is intelligent, respects his superiors, and is athletic. Feeling abandoned after his father died in World War I, Hartmann found a new home among comrades in the Hitler Youth and then in the officers’ training school; from there, he went on to become a pilot in the Eilers Squadron. He was told that his duty was to be a crusader for the nation. However, as Lutz Weltmann infers, Hartmann became disenchanted after discovering that war was not a chivalrous adventure but was instead more like the slaughter of the innocents.25 He is plagued by doubts about the purity of his Nazi mission in the East, and he feels that the ideals that he learned as a member of the Hitler Youth have been compromised, perhaps even destroyed. Hartmann tells Harras that in Lodz, “[t]hey shot at defenseless people as a joke, they laughed when the victims whimpered with fear—they—I can’t say it, General. That isn’t part of war or goals or ideals. There is no justification for what they did” (953). Like so many good Germans who believed in the original intentions of the Nazis (stressing racial purity but not murder of undesirables), Hartmann becomes disillusioned with the Reich once it abandoned those principles. Hartmann is conflicted that he once thought of himself as a crusader for the new Reich and admits his dilemma to Harras: “But how can a new thing become strong and good if it begins by unleashing the lowest and meanest in human beings? How can anyone stand life in this new age if it begins with straight murder?” (953). Pootsie comments that Hartmann cannot dance; in other words, he has lost the ability to be happy, which is anathema to Zuckmayer. After being convinced by Harras that there is divine justice, Hartmann becomes the perfect candidate to turn to the resistance, work with Oderbruch, and thus carry on the activities abandoned by his role model Harras after he martyrs himself. As Anthony Waine has noticed, his surname suggests “hard man” (Zuckmayer, writing

German Resistance

37

in Vermont, would have understood the English meaning), yet, after his conversion, he becomes one whose heart now rules his former warrior’s head.26 At the end of the play, we suspect that his conversion is complete when he joins Oderbruch in reciting the Lord’s Prayer after witnessing Harras’s fatal accident. After having created a microcosm of German society during the Third Reich, visibly represented in the lengthy act 1 set in a high-class restaurant, Zuckmayer’s second dilemma was to endear his protagonist, General Harras, to German audiences. Using his friend Udet as the model for Harras, Zuckmayer created a larger-than-life charismatic figure who is loyal, honest, witty, intelligent, charming, humorous, considerate, moral, boisterous, and experienced; moreover, he is masculine enough so that he is admired by the men yet enough of a bon vivant and raconteur so that women are immediately attracted to him. Harras also shares kinship with Zuckmayer himself (Zuckmayer and Udet, both born in 1896, had so many personality traits in common, as well as similar interests and histories, that they remained close friends). Moreover, both had a zest for living, which, as Ian C. Loram has pointed out, stems from “an unshakable belief in the dignity and worth of the human being . . . ”27 Finally, both Harras and Zuckmayer were essentially humanists who believed in the secular piety of mankind that was disrupted by the Nazis. No matter how diabolical the political regime may be, Zuckmayer, and his alter ego Harras, ultimately believe that change can be accomplished only through the goodwill of individuals. Throughout the play, Harras, despite being the devil’s general, possesses many virtues.28 Although he never joined the Nazi Party, Harras admits his fraudulence in serving the Nazis, thus surrendering his soul because of his love for flying. Edward M. V. Plater notes, “When Zuckmayer’s hero shows in this way how much he has thought about the moral bankruptcy of Nazism and the moral untenableness of his position, one is reminded how reprehensible his role has been and continues to be.”29 As a hedonist, Harras appears to be above the political fray. While reproaching industrialists such as von Mohrungen for profiting from their alliances with the Nazis, Harras seems to excuse his own complicity with the regime by falling back on his love of aviation. Yet Harras does have good intentions, often helping the victims of Nazi persecution. He has smuggled Jews to safety across the border. Harras befriends the painter Schlick, who is ostracized in Germany because of his now-divorced Jewish wife. Disallowed from exhibiting his paintings in the Reich, Schlick has become a degenerate alcoholic. Harras also shelters the American journalist Buddy Lawrence,

38

Staging Holocaust Resistance

who has been ordered to leave Germany and has been under surveillance by the Gestapo; this aid to an American is a gesture that Hitler would find repulsive on the eve of his arch enemy Roosevelt’s entry into the war.30 Harras also has a deep antipathy toward the Nazis and their racist ideology, refusing to give the Hitler salute to match Schmidt-Lausitz’s gesture, thus defying the Gestapo: “Those boys don’t fool me. And if I can step on their toes, I do it with pleasure” (920). The play primarily focuses on the various epiphanies that Harras goes through to move from his self-indulgent machismo of being the devil’s general who lives for his passions to a more humane understanding of the importance of assuming responsibility for resisting the crimes of the Reich. The first major change in Harras’s outlook on life comes when he fails to extricate Bergmann from Germany to avoid Nazi persecution. Bergmann, the Jewish surgeon who is a friend of opera singer Olivia Geiss, was already sent once to Buchenwald. After being brutalized for six months in the concentration camp, Bergmann ended up in a hospital. Harras agrees to fly Bergmann and his wife to safety in neutral Switzerland. The plan never comes to fruition because the Bergmanns decide to commit suicide by consuming poison rather than cause difficulties for Harras. The double suicide is a gesture that deeply affects Harras, who has been merely condescending toward the Nazis but has not actually taken responsibility for their crimes against the Jews. Harras begins to realize his pitiful lack of responsibility when he hears the fate of the Bergmanns, explaining to Olivia, “We’re guilty for what’s happening to thousands of people we don’t know and can never help. Guilty and damned for all eternity. Permitting viciousness is worse than doing it” (940). The second epiphany, one that leads Harras to a spiritual awakening, occurs during his conversation with Hartmann in act 3. After recounting the horrors of war that he has witnessed in the Eastern territories, Hartmann asks Harras if God exists. Harras begins by stating, “I don’t know Him but I have looked the devil in the eye. That’s how I know that there must be a God” (954). Hartmann is losing faith, but Harras bolsters him by saying, “Believe, Hartmann—go ahead and believe confidently in divine justice! It will not betray you” (954). If Harras believes what he says to Hartmann, then he must accept damnation for his guilt and for lack of responsibility for the war crimes of which he is now aware. As Henry Glade perceptively notes, Harras has indeed previously forfeited his soul to the devil.31 Harras now calls into question his self-indulgent behavior and even his sarcastic remarks against the regime, which, up until this point, have seemed harmless until Hartmann sheds light on the

German Resistance

39

atrocities being committed by the Germans. Plater comments, “The lesson the Hartmann story contains—that it is morally indefensible to let evil happen without doing all that one can to stop it—is essentially the same as that demonstrated by the story of General Harras.”32 Thus, this sense of moral idealism that ultimately shapes the resistance is equated, at least in Harras’s mind, with a spiritual sensibility. The third epiphany occurs in act 3 when Anne, the wife of Colonel Eilers, confronts Harras and blames him for the death of her husband. Anne argues that Eilers, who died in a plane accident, sacrificed himself for a just cause. She contends that history led her husband to believe idealistically that the horrors of war typify what one must endure to rebuild a more prosperous society for the future, explaining to Harras, “We thought that everything new had to be born in pain and blood” (955). Anne accuses Harras of refusing to take responsibility for an unjust war and allowing others to die for a cause that he understood was corrupt, reprimanding him by stating, “You put on a great show of courage with your sarcasm and lukewarm doubt. What good is that to anybody? You are a part of the rottenness. You are guilty of every murder committed in the name of Germany. You stink of death!” (955). Harras, who earlier admitted that “permitting viciousness is worse than doing it,” tries to defend himself, but his argument with Anne’s logic, the justification for his Weltanschauung, serves to awaken his dormant conscience. When he says to Anne, “Can you stand before the Divine Judge yourself—and say: ‘I believed in the good, I didn’t know about the bad?’ How could you ever have believed in a cause whose stinking rottenness burned your nose every day?” (955), he is echoing the spiritual awareness that he tried to instill in young Hartmann instead of exonerating himself. Harras, whose love for aviation and for the masculine virtues of the hedonist warrior cum technocrat is perpetuated by service to the Nazis, now begins to see his life as a sham. As Anthony Waine comments, “The destruction of Harras’ male ego goes hand in hand with the unmasking of a society which is destructive and self-destructive.”33 This obsession with technology, flying, and the aesthetics of warfare have become an ersatz religion to Harras, unfortunately blinding him to meaningful spiritual insight and the assumption of constructive responsibility for the actions of his superiors. In this scene with Anne, Harras begins to move further away from his nostalgic role playing in a macho career as warrior of the state and to assume the vestiges of individual responsibility. The last conversation that creates the impetus for Harras’s assumption of responsibility is with Oderbruch, his chief engineer and close friend.

40 Staging Holocaust Resistance Harras, Oderbruch’s superior, is responsible for aircraft security, but it is Oderbruch who supervises the aircraft parts used in the manufacturing of the planes. By not reporting a fault in the planes’ steering construction and thus inevitably sabotaging the aircraft, Oderbruch’s actions have led to the death of Harras’s friend Eilers. Oderbruch defends his stance, arguing that resistance is the only means to defeat Germany, for if Hitler wins the war, the nation is lost: “There is no other way. We need the defeat—We must help it with our own hands. Only then can we rise up again, cleansed” (956). Realizing that resistance is not only suicidal, but also equivalent to martyrdom, Harras questions Oderbruch’s motives. Oderbruch pauses and then responds, “Gregory the Great said: ‘The martyr alone is nothing, but he who knows why he suffers, his testimony is stronger than death.’ We know why” (957). Oderbruch becomes the catalyst that tempts Harras spiritually by telling him that his soul is at stake: “Justice is the uncompromising ruling law in which spirit, nature and life are subservient. When it is fulfilled—it is called freedom” (957). Henry Glade extrapolates the meaning of Oderbruch’s philosophy to Harras: “Justice, to Oderbruch, is a natural eros-type of inexorable law in all creation, and its ultimate manifestation is man’s fulfillment of the natural impulses which are here imbued with moral significance.”34 Herbert Lederer astutely remarks about Harras, “In the final analysis, it is his feeling of personal responsibility for the death of his friend and comrade Eilers which brings him to the full realization of his guilt, his knowing and willing participation in the evil around him.”35 This final encounter with Oderbruch thus leads Harras to a more moral acceptance of the divine justice that will liberate the conflicted general. Schmidt-Lausitz has given Harras a ten-day deadline to discover the saboteur. At the start of act 3, when Harras is in his last day to choose, he has several options. He could turn Oderbruch over to the Gestapo, engage in the resistance with his friend and possibly join their base in Switzerland, or flee with young Diddo Geiss, who is starry-eyed over the mature war hero. Harras sympathizes with Oderbruch’s goals to resist the Nazis, but sabotaging airplanes will result in the murder of more innocent pilots like Eilers. Besides, Harras admires the war mentality and bravery of pilots (the dinner party at the fancy restaurant in act 1 celebrates Eilers’s military success), so it would make no sense for him to murder them. Anthony Waine’s claim that Harras is a lone wolf whose individualistic style and machismo temperament thus prevent him from allying with the resisters seems far-fetched.36 Harras is not enslaved to the cult of masculinity; instead, he demythologizes himself as he recognizes that as an integral

German Resistance

41

part of being a successful aviator, he was abused by a corrupt nation. His humanitarian nature has surfaced through the various epiphanies, and so he categorically rejects turning in Oderbruch to the Gestapo or evading responsibility if he were to reinforce his ego by fleeing with Diddo. Oderbruch does not represent the true spirit of German resistance to the Nazis. Oderbruch became a resister because he was ashamed of being German. Moreover, his acts of sabotage resulting in the deaths of innocent aviators, essentially substituting one type of fanaticism for another, were considered to be treason, especially by West German audiences viewing the play after the war.37 Others argued that Oderbruch personified an abrogated war effort because of the way the Nazis were stabbed in the back by their own soldiers; this view only reinforces nostalgia for the purity of a corrupt Nazi regime.38 Oderbruch’s rationale for resistance— the notion that the death of Eilers is an unavoidable loss that must be faced in the larger scheme of liberating his country from tyrants—was too hardened and cynical for most audiences. Henry Glade sums up the problem that West German audiences had with Oderbruch’s philosophy: “To Oderbruch, the end justifies the means, making him the very epitome of a totalitarian spirit.”39 Thus, Oderbruch’s idealism appeared to be misguided to most postwar audiences. In contrast to Oderbruch, Harras seems to personify the mentality shared by the resisters of the 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. With Stauffenberg’s last words in mind, “Long live holy Germany,” we can appreciate Harras’s persona as a resister. Like the 1944 resisters who were proud patriots, Harras, as a loyal Luftwaffe general, loves his country. Harras gravitates to individuals who profess their love for Germany, such as Buddy Lawrence and Lieutenant Hartmann. When Hartmann admits that his genealogy from the Rhineland may be tainted with the possibility of Jewish ancestry, Harras, reflecting Zuckmayer’s own love of the German heartland, tells the lieutenant to take pride in a region of Germany that produced such great talents as Goethe, Beethoven, and Gutenberg. Harras, the moral Christian, the champion of justice and decency, is much like the 1944 resisters who saw hope in the original tenets of National Socialism but became disenchanted with the Party when those goals were subverted after Kristallnacht. When Lawrence says to Harras that he loves the Germans, Harras responds, “Me too. To the point of hate. Just like an actor who loves and hates the character he plays, the role to which he has been sentenced—love and hate” (946). Zuckmayer, forced into exile by the Nazis who banned his plays, shares Harras’s love-hate relationship with Germany and identifies with the 1944 resisters who loved their country

42

Staging Holocaust Resistance

yet saw it in decline and felt obligated to act. Staying in contact with his few friends when he was in exile, Zuckmayer writes of his fellow Germans: “Many of them looked askance at me because of my obstinate faith in a different Germany, in a true German spirit which, I insisted, must not be equated with the Nazi filth.”40 Zuckmayer takes responsibility for Hitler’s rise to power. In his autobiography, Zuckmayer laments that German intellectuals contented themselves with laughing at Hitler, the housepainter and paperhanger who looked like a barber, spoke poor German, and, with his bombastic style and meager education, could not be taken seriously as a potential leader.41 Zuckmayer writes, “Hardly anyone thought that the threats against the Jews were meant seriously. Even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the Nazis merely a propaganda device, a line the Nazis would drop as soon as they won governmental power and were entrusted with public responsibilities.”42 Zuckmayer understands that at the time when the play occurs, during December 1941, after the ravages of Kristallnacht have taken place, after reports about the genocide in the East were documented by soldiers such as Hartmann, and on the eve of America’s entry into the War (911), soldiers such as Harras were morally obligated to resist such a corrupt regime. Harras’s flight in the defective M41-1304, and thus his self-imposed suicide/martyrdom, serves several purposes. First, just as Zuckmayer himself felt guilty about the intellectuals whose lack of responsibility toward the Nazis allowed them to flourish, Harras’s suicide serves to expiate his own guilt for being the devil’s general. Jennifer Taylor suggests that by identifying Hitler with the devil, Zuckmayer virtually exonerates Harras from personal responsibility.43 On the contrary, resisters who viewed Hitler as the devil did not assume that the evil was merely a temporary phase in the history of German society; instead, they acted to destroy the evil. Second, Zuckmayer’s play stays true to the historical framework that precipitated the writing of the play: Udet’s own tale of suicide that was essentially a protest of a corrupt Reich. Third, Harras’s suicide is consistent with his role as a Christlike redeemer who sacrifices himself to divine justice in order to reestablish mercy for his beloved country. Murray B. Peppard notes, “In this play it is a subordinate who betrays his superior for the sake of a higher principle than that of personal loyalty.”44 Moreover, as one who is responsible for the safety of the aircraft and therefore SchmidtLausitz’s chief suspect for the sabotage, Harras, through his sacrificial suicide, shields his friend Oderbruch of any liability, at least temporarily. Fourth, the humanitarian Zuckmayer embodies his protagonist with

German Resistance

43

a suicide that coincides with his own humanistic perspective. Rather than murder his fellow pilots through sabotage, which is the path Oderbruch takes, Harras’s suicide is another form of resistance from a humanist who listens to his own conscience. Finally, Zuckmayer’s portrayal of Harras taking responsibility for his own actions in the form of suicide as a statement against a totalitarian regime vindicates the resisters who, sacrificing themselves in the suicidal assassination attempt, latently remind us of a better Germany in which heroic, decent citizens were capable of dying for a noble cause. Surely, Zuckmayer considers Harras’s suicide to be a means of reclaiming his dignity and self-respect after prostituting himself to Hitler. Zuckmayer and Udet, both World War I pilots, would agree that losing one’s life in a combat aircraft is a fitting way for a soldier to die with honor. As Mariatte C. Denman has observed, “Harras’s final air stunt is reminiscent of those heroic acts performed in WWI with a sense of pride, self-reliance, and independence.”45 The last words of The Devil’s General, “State funeral, with full military honors” (958), spoken in honor of Udet, were the starting points that led Zuckmayer to write the play. The funeral also refers to the death of the state—a regime that has lost those qualities of honor, decency, humanism, and spirituality that Zuckmayer can only nostalgically remember as having once existed in his beloved country. The Devil’s General becomes a paean to those resisters who, like General Harras, took responsibility for their actions instead of making excuses for widespread ruthlessness and depravity that corrupted a nation.

3. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

A

fter the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Warsaw, without any chance of receiving outside aid, surrendered to the Nazis later that month. In 1939, the Polish Jewish community was the largest in Europe. Many Polish Jews who remembered the rather civil German occupation during World War I had no idea of the persecution that awaited them. The Nazis began to seize Warsaw Jews for forced labor, plunder Jewish shops, confiscate Jewish possessions, assault religious Jews, and relieve Jewish craftsmen, teachers, journalists, and other professionals of their jobs without compensation. In January 1940, Jews were forbidden to congregate for worship or to engage in the ritual slaughter of animals. The Warsaw Ghetto was officially created when a wall, sixteen kilometers long and three meters high, topped by broken glass and barbed wire, effectively sequestered the Jewish population; by that time, the first antiJewish decrees were being enforced. Jews were required to wear a blue Star of David armband, turn over radios, clearly mark their shops, and refrain from travel. The Germans permitted only vocational school training, and education was confined to the elementary schools but not beyond. Sports events for Jews were prohibited, and cultural activities were restricted; Jews, however, met clandestinely to partake in musical and theater events. Jews were also required to hand in a list of their assets; the Germans then confiscated all Jewish enterprises and businesses. Ration cards were mandatory for the meager amount of bread (2 kilograms) and sugar (250 grams) allocated to each person monthly.1 Jews thus became destitute (most Polish Jews were already indigent before the Holocaust) and began starving as food became a scarce commodity in the ghetto. When nearly ninety thousand Jews from other Polish cities and towns began being sequestered in Warsaw, the ghetto soon became overcrowded with more than five hundred thousand inhabitants (the density was thirteen people to a room), and disease, particularly typhoid and typhus, began to spread among the residents due to lack of sanitary conditions.2 Citizens attempting to leave the ghetto without permission were condemned to death. The Nazis also

46 Staging Holocaust Resistance set up a Judenrat (Jewish Council), headed by Adam Czerniaków, to maintain some semblance of order in the ghetto. Beginning on April 18, 1942, the Nazis conducted night raids in which Jews were seized and then shot at a nearby location. The purpose of these raids was to dispose of any resistance leaders and instill terror in the population. Conditions became so deplorable that by June 1942, one hundred thousand ghetto dwellers, mostly refugees, had already perished.3 The first major Aktion began on July 22, 1942, and officially ended on September 12. On July 23, Czerniaków committed suicide rather than provide a daily quota of Jews, including children, to be deported. The Jewish Police, a force of over two thousand men, and later the auxiliary police (Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians) took Jews, as many as twelve thousand daily, to the Umschlagplatz, the place of departure, where the deportees were packed into freight trains.4 Jews suffering from hunger to the point of starvation willingly turned up for departure on the trains, tempted by the lure of three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of jam per volunteer. Many Jews, persuaded by the Nazi propagandists that their destination was a labor camp in Russia, believed that their new home would be preferable to starving in the ghetto. Their unknown destination turned out to be Treblinka. A few who had escaped during the journey came back to the ghetto to report on the fate of the Jews at Treblinka; the stories were so incredible that they were not believed at first. The argument was that if the Nazis wanted to exterminate Jews, they would not have gone to all the trouble of establishing a ghetto. Religious groups claimed that resistance would lead to total annihilation since arms were not readily available and military training was negligible; for example, Rabbi Zishe Friedman pleaded with resistance groups to refrain from provoking the Nazis, assuring them that God would not allow the extermination of the People of Israel.5 Besides, others professed that it was unrealistic to believe that the largest Jewish population in Europe could be destroyed. Moreover, the dissenters agreed that the Jews constituted the German labor force, which, in time of war, would be indispensable. Others argued that the Nazis could exterminate Jews in the less-civilized Soviet territories but certainly not in Warsaw, one of Europe’s major cities. However, the facts were indisputable: once the deportations ended, of the three hundred and fifty thousand Jews originally sequestered in the ghetto, only sixty thousand remained.6 Most of the ill and disabled, as well as the elderly and the children, were removed from the ghetto during this large-scale Aktion. After the first wave of deportations ended, Jews began to reassess the situation and wondered why a few SS officers with the help of perhaps

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 47 two hundred Ukrainian guards had carried out the Aktion with minimal resistance. Many Jews were incensed that the Judenrat and Jewish Police cooperated so willingly with the Nazis, making their murderous plans so much easier. After Jewish youth groups tried in vain to establish ties with the Polish underground movement, they were forced to set up a resistance movement of their own. On July 28, 1942, during the Aktion, the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) was formed and soon afterward tried to make contact with the resistance forces in the Aryan sector of Warsaw in order to obtain weapons. The ZOB was led by twentyfour-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz of Hashomer Hatzair, whose work primarily consisted of raising money for the purchase of arms and equipment.7 The ZOB first struck at Jewish collaborators in the Judenrat, killing Jewish police chief Jozef Szerynski and then his successor Jakub Lejkin, as well as other informers, in August 1942. Jews also began to build dugout shelters and initiated a propaganda campaign to convince the ghetto dwellers not to report for “resettlement,” which meant death. On October 20, 1942, twenty-two fighting forces, consisting of between six hundred and eight hundred men and women, including Bundists (anticommunist and anti-Zionist unionists), Hashomer Hatzair, the left-wing Zionist groups such as Dror and Akiva, and the communists, united under Anielewicz’s command of the ZOB.8 Other important leaders included Yitzhak Zuckerman, Anielewicz’s deputy; Marek Edelman of the Bund; Zivia Lubetkin (Zuckerman’s wife) 9 ; and Arie Wilner, who negotiated for arms on the Aryan side of the city. Despite being starved, confused, and lacking munitions, these resisters knew that deportation meant death and thus decided to retaliate rather than face imminent extermination. On January 14, 1943, Himmler visited Warsaw to assess the situation firsthand; he ordered that the remaining Jewish workforce in the ghetto be transported to Lublin. On the morning of January 18, the SS und Polizeifuehrer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg guided a force of two hundred German police and eight hundred Latvian and Lithuanian auxiliaries, as well as several detachments of Polish police, into the ghetto. As the Jews were ordered to assemble, Mordechai Anielewicz led a group who were on their way to the Umschlagplatz in hand-to-hand fighting with the Nazis. Estimating that this round of deportations would be the final one, another group of resisters, commanded by Yitzhak Zuckerman, pulled out firearms and attacked the SS and militia. Most of the Jews ordered for deportation in January went into hiding. For three days, the Germans did a house-to-house roundup but were met with armed resistance. Thus, at

48 Staging Holocaust Resistance the end of the second Aktion, only approximately 5,000 more Jews, or 10 percent of the ghetto population, were deported.10 Raul Hilberg estimates that 1,171 Jews were shot during the deportation.11 At least fifty Germans were killed or wounded, and their weapons were confiscated. However, the armed resistance of the Jews forced the Germans to reassess their plans after von Sammern called off the Aktion ; they were more hesitant to clash with the Jews in their apartments, and searching cellars and attics now became a risky venture. During February and March, the Polish Home Army, now convinced that the Jews would make good use of any weapons supplied, delivered pistols, rifles, machine guns, hand grenades, and explosives to the ZOB. The Warsaw Jews, who had defied the Germans in January, now had renewed confidence. With German defeats in North Africa and Russia, the Jews, sensing that the end of the war was near and that the next Aktion would liquidate the ghetto, began defensive posturing. On March 20, when Walter Toebbens, the German manufacturer who employed many Warsaw Jews in slave labor in his factories, issued a plea for Jews in hiding to report for work in “labor camps,” he was ignored. ZOB members began to levy taxes on the upper echelon of the community while executing Jews collaborating with the Gestapo and setting fire to SS warehouses. The Bund sent radio appeals to London, Geneva, New York, and Jerusalem warning of the annihilation of the European Jews. An intricate network of underground cellars and bunkers was designed to link the various resisters, who were organized into twenty-two groups, each with its own military commander. During the morning of April 19, on the eve of Passover, von Sammern sent 2,100 men, which included 363 Polish policemen, 335 Lithuanians, 228 German security policemen, and 166 Polish firemen, all of whom supplemented SS forces, to liquidate the 65,000 ghetto survivors.12 The Nazis had 13 heavy machine guns, 69 handheld machine guns, 135 submachine guns, 1,358 rifles, several howitzers, and access to heavy artillery and tanks.13 The Jews, numbering no more than 750 combatants divided into 22 groups, had 500 pistols, only 17 rifles, 300 grenades, 8 automatic guns, incendiary bottles, and a meager supply of ammunition. The pistols were virtually useless; there was approximately 1 rifle for every 50 men and 1 machine gun for about every 150 combatants.14 The Jews understood that the resistance was a suicide mission, but they were determined to die with dignity. During the first armed contact, twenty men and women threw homemade grenades and bombs, killing six SS and six Ukrainian auxiliaries; the Nazis retreated in panic and disarray.15 Police General Friedrich

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 49 Kruger and Himmler himself called Jürgen Stroop, admitting that the retreat disgraced the honor of the SS and thus relieved von Sammern of his command and gave the more battle-tested Stroop the authority to liquidate the ghetto. Later in the day, thousands of Jews hiding in the cellars, bunkers, and sewers joined in the battle when Stroop’s troops entered the ghetto again. The leaders of the ZOB then ordered that all warehouses and factories be burned so as not to leave anything valuable, such as machinery or raw materials, for the Germans to salvage. By the evening of the first day of fighting, the Jews claimed a moral victory. On the second day of battle, wherever the German forces went, they were showered with bullets. As the day wore on and the Nazis found it increasingly difficult to rout the Jews from the buildings, Stroop gave the order for the plant managers to produce five thousand workers for deportation. During the next day, when no one reported for deportation, Stroop ordered flame throwers and heavy armor to destroy the buildings. Nearly seventy bunkers were uncovered while several blocks of buildings were set on fire. The heat, smoke, and flames forced many Jews out, while others either committed suicide or escaped through the sewers. In the brushmakers’ section, German tanks led the charge, but several Germans were wounded in a volley of gunfire and about one hundred were killed when a carefully planted electric mine was detonated.16 Irate over the resistance they had encountered, the Germans broke into the Czyste hospital and murdered sick patients along with the staff; they smashed infants’ heads against the walls, burned many in the fire, and used bayonets to rip open the flesh of pregnant women. Later in the day, when German corpses were piling up in the streets, the Nazis brought in tanks and artillery and exhorted the ZOB to lay down its arms; the Jews responded with gunfire. From the third day of the uprising, when Stroop realized that his forces were suffering heavier losses than expected, the German battle plans changed. Stroop decided to avoid direct confrontations with the combatants and chose instead to set the ghetto on fire with flamethrowers. Stroop’s orders were to raze the ghetto to the ground by destroying it building by building. As the fires blazed, thousands of Jews were burned alive. Hundreds committed suicide by jumping out of the burning four- or five-story buildings, having first thrown mattresses, quilts, or pillows out of the windows to cushion the fall. Chaos reigned as the Nazis dynamited buildings and airplanes dropped incendiary bombs; light, water, and gas were essentially cut off from the combatants. Bunkers became infernos, food was spoiled by the blazing heat, and the stench of charred bodies became unbearable. At night, the Jews reconnoitered for weapons and

50 Staging Holocaust Resistance food, employed tactics of guerrilla warfare to ambush their foes, and sent out, albeit unsuccessfully, reconnaissance groups to reach the Aryan side of the city to explore possible rescue action. On April 28, forty members of the ZOB managed to escape through the sewers to the Aryan side, where they joined the partisans. When the Nazis learned of the successful maneuver, they planned for the next exodus and on April 29 were waiting for the escapees; after a brief battle, all the Jews were murdered. During the next several weeks, the Jews, running out of ammunition, had to stage their attacks carefully to make every shot count. They were also being debilitated physically from hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and heat from the fires, the latter making breathing difficult. In these final days, many Jews chose suicide rather than surrender to the Nazis. However, by April 25, at least 25,500 Jews had been captured.17 At this time, Stroop ordered gas grenades that were lowered into 183 manholes to stymie Jews who had notions of escaping through the sewers to the Aryan sector.18 On May 8, the last group of ZOB holdouts, 120 men and women in the bunker at 18 Mila Street, were routed when the Germans sent gas into the hideout during a fierce two-hour battle. Mordechai Anielewicz, who decided to heed Arie Wilner’s Masadalike call for suicide rather than suffocate, was one of the fighters who perished in this battle; however, twenty-one denizens of the bunker made it to safety through a previously undiscovered exit. By the end of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Stroop had reported that 631 bunkers had been destroyed.19 By May 15, after nearly one month of warfare, the ghetto fighting had virtually disintegrated. On May 16, Stroop blew up the Tlomacki Synagogue in the Aryan sector, designating that demolition as a sign that the uprising had officially ended. Thousands of Jews were buried in the rubble. Of the 56,065 Jews that had surrendered, 7,000 were deported to Treblinka, 15,000 were sent to the death camp at Lublin, another 7,000 were shot immediately, and the remainder were transported to labor camps.20 Polish gangs helped the Nazis round up the thousands of Jews who had escaped from the ghetto or were still hiding under the debris.21 In his official report, Stroop underestimated the number of Reich soldiers who died in battle. However, on May 15, 1943, the Polish Directorate of Civil Resistance more objectively reported that three hundred Germans had been killed and nearly one thousand had been wounded.22 All physical evidence of the ghetto, including any remaining structures, was demolished. During the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, a total of 685,000 residents lost their lives.23 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which a handful of poorly armed, untrained, and vastly outnumbered Jews defended themselves against an

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 51 efficient and well-supplied military force, became a legendary event rarely seen throughout history. The revolt, the first urban uprising in occupied territories, was unique because the combatants knew that their resistance was suicidal. The indomitable fighting spirit of the Jews impressed, but also embarrassed, senior German officers, who had to bring in tanks, artillery, and planes to suppress the insurgents; Himmler was so incensed that he ordered the liquidation of all of the remaining Jewish camps and ghettoes. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became a symbol of hope for resistance forces throughout Europe, who now saw the Germans knocked off their pedestal of omnipotence. Moreover, Jews in the occupied territories were now provided with some hope that an intensified resistance effort could produce victory over the Nazis. There are three plays about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, each representing a different generation of playwrights: Morton Wishengrad’s The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto (1943), Millard Lampell’s The Wall (1960), and Hanna Krall’s To Steal a March on God (1996). Born in 1913, Morton Wishengrad was raised in New York City’s Lower East Side and in Brooklyn by Jewish immigrants from Russia. After attending New York University and Brooklyn College, he became the educational director of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union from 1935 to 1941. In 1942, he wrote a script for the Textile Workers Union and then began broadcasting about unions on shortwave radio to organized labor organizations throughout Europe. From 1943 to 1944, he was a writer for the NBC University of the Air series, Lands of the Free. From there, he went on to write over 150 scripts for the Jewish Theological Seminary’s The Eternal Light radio program and later for Cavalcade of America. During summer 1943, Milton Krents of the American Jewish Committee asked Wishengrad to prepare a script for a Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) program that NBC was preparing. Wishengrad, deeply moved by the events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that had recently been in the news, suggested it as the subject of the Yom Kippur broadcast. After Wishengrad completed the script in ten days, The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto premiered on NBC on the Day of Atonement in 1943. The production was directed by Frank Papp and featured Arnold Moss as Isaac Davidson, the Narrator. Two other performances, directed by Anton M. Leader with Raymond Massey in the lead role, were subsequently given. Wishengrad was inundated with thousands of letters after troops overseas heard the radio performances. The play became so popular that it was performed hundreds of times by high-school and college theater groups, as well as in Sunday schools.24

52

Staging Holocaust Resistance

The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, written in 1943 before the Holocaust ended, thus became the first Holocaust drama ever to be performed. Compiling the events of the play from American Jewish Committee files that Krents asked him to peruse, Wishengrad, in a radio play that runs approximately one-half hour, presented a compelling depiction of the Warsaw Ghetto from its inception to its liquidation. A few statements in the play are erroneous since the statistics with regard to the Ghetto Uprising, many of which are still debatable, were not fully corroborated until Stroop’s postwar testimony; later, Polish historians refuted the accuracy of Stroop’s statements. Thus, Wishengrad’s estimate that 35,000 combatants battled the army of the Reich is erroneous since the ghetto itself contained approximately 65,000 at the time of the revolt, and only about 650 were actively engaged in the actual fighting. Also, Wishengrad’s claim that the entire detachment of storm troopers who entered the ghetto during their first strike on April 19 was wiped out is false; the Germans were shocked and surprised by the level of resistance, but their regiment was not demolished. Furthermore, the notion that eight hundred factories producing matériel for the Germans were dynamited by Jewish engineers is definitely on the high side and cannot be substantiated. Finally, when the Narrator states that a thousand and perhaps twelve hundred Germans were killed during the Uprising, we now know that Wishengrad’s figures are at least seven hundred on the high side. A cantor’s chant of the “El Mole Rachamin,” a prayer for the dead, begins and ends the radio drama. Wishengrad wanted the play to portray the indomitable spirit of the Jewish will to survive persecution throughout history. Wishengrad writes, “In The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto I wanted to present the tragedy of the people who gave the world its monotheism, its morality, and its concept of the sacredness of human life.”25 Between the “El Mole Rachamin” prayer that begins and ends the play, the audience hears the harrowing tale of the horrid living conditions of the Warsaw Ghetto through the voice of the Narrator, Isaac Davidson. By tracing the personal tragedy of Davidson’s family through the Holocaust, which ended for them in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Wishengrad astutely makes the horror emotional for audiences while at the same time preserving the largescale historical vision through myriad statistics. When Poland fell to the Nazis, Davidson, his wife Dvora, and his son Samuel were transported in freight cars from Lublin to the purgatory known as the Warsaw Ghetto. They were each immediately given three blue cards for their allotment of a pound of bread per week. In a city crammed with half a million other sequestered inhabitants, the Davidson family was

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 53 confined to a corner of a tenement room. Demonstrating the resilience of the Jewish spirit in strife, the Narrator mentions that Dvora cleaned the house without soap, made a cloth for the table without needles, and made a garden out of some dirt and a few blades of grass. Davidson asserts, “There in this place of death, shut off, walled in, foredoomed, there were things of the spirit done by men and women like Dvora” (36). Davidson notes that in the ghetto, Jews still tried to maintain some semblance of dignity and culture by creating classes for the children, trade schools for the craftsmen, and four theaters and a symphony orchestra for entertainment. Jewish physicians continued to practice medicine despite the drastic shortage of drugs, instruments, and anesthesia. However, the Master Race decided that the Jews were to suffer, and so, as the Narrator explains, the Germans confiscated any devices for establishing pleasure, such as musical instruments, and reduced the population to starving masses. Davidson describes the next phase of the Warsaw Ghetto internment: “We were left with hunger. And where there is hunger, the plague always follows. The plague came and 17,800 persons died of spotted typhus in Warsaw. And of these 15,758 were Jews” (39). One of those who succumbed to the plague was Davidson’s wife. In an emotional moment in the play, Isaac explains to his young son that they must let Dvora’s dead body decompose in the street, for giving her a proper burial would reveal her identity, and therefore the family would have to relinquish Dvora’s vital ration card. When Samuel pleads with his father not to let his mother rot in the street, Isaac insists that Samuel take his mother’s ration card: “You must, Samuel. Once you took her milk; now you must take her bread. She leaves you nothing else” (40). In short, Wishengrad demonstrates how easily one’s dignity was lost in the ghetto. Then Wishengrad switches to the beginning of the Aktion on July 22, 1942, which led to the deportations to Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Belzec; afterward, the Narrator states, there were “275,954 fewer bread cards in the Ghetto” (41). Appeals were made to England, Russia, and the United States, first for food, medicine, and soap, and later for weapons; nothing was supplied. Finally, the Narrator takes the audience through the first day of the Uprising, April 19, 1943, in which a handful of Jews without adequate ammunition compelled the mighty German forces to retreat. After Nazi appeals to surrender were ignored, the perpetrators planted land mines under the tenements, shut off the water supply, and dropped incendiary bombs. When the resisters ran out of ammunition, we are told, they used broken furniture as clubs and hurled rocks. The battle lasted thirtyseven days, after which the Jews were burned to death or were shot. The

54 Staging Holocaust Resistance Narrator, Davidson, representing “David’s son,” the epitome of that same Jewish spirit that once slew Goliath, mentions that the tale of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a battle for dignity despite overwhelming odds. The Narrator concludes with the idea that the Uprising personifies the Jewish will to survive despite a history of bondage, a denouement that provides a message well suited for the Day of Atonement: For on the page of their agony they wrote a sentence that shall be an atonement, and it is this: Give me grace and give me dignity and teach me to die; and let my prison be a fortress and my wailing wall a stockade, for I have been to Egypt and I am not departed. (45)

American playwright Millard Lampell’s The Wall premiered on Broadway under direction by Morton Da Costa at the Billy Rose Theatre on October 11, 1960, and then was performed as part of Arena Stage’s 1963–1964 season in a production directed by Edwin Sherin. Lampell’s intent in writing the play was to depict a cross-section of the Warsaw community, including resistance fighters, victims of the Holocaust who went willingly to their deaths, Jewish police who aided the perpetrators, and religious leaders in the community who refused to face the imposing threat of National Socialism. The play, based on John Hersey’s 1950 novel with the same title, was concerned with presenting daily life in Warsaw from September 1939 to the liquidation of the ghetto in May 1943; thus, the focus of the drama was not necessarily on the uprising per se. Moreover, since I discussed The Wall in depth in my book Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity, there is no need for repetition here.26 Hanna Krall was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Warsaw on May 20, 1937. The Nazis sent her family to the Majdanek extermination camp, where her parents and relatives were murdered. Hanna survived by the graces of Aryan Poles, who hid the six-year-old from the Nazis by passing her from family to family. After the war, she was placed in an orphanage for Jewish children. Upon graduating from the University of Warsaw, she began her career as a journalist. From 1955 to 1966, she wrote for the Warsaw daily newspaper Zycie Warszawy, and then, from 1966 until 1981, for the relatively liberal weekly Polityka. As the foreign press correspondent for Polityka, she lived in the Soviet Union from 1966 to 1969, where she wrote a novel about life in Moscow during the 1960s. Since 1982, when martial law was introduced in Poland, she has worked as a freelance journalist and nonfiction short story writer in which she combines interviews with Holocaust survivors, their rescuers, informers, and indifferent witnesses and intersperses these accounts with descriptions of Jewish life

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 55 in Poland before and during the Shoah. Krall is particularly interested in how Jews and gentiles coexisted in Eastern Europe before the Nazis destroyed the Jewish cultural heritage. Her most well-known full-length novel, the semiautobiographical Sublokatorka (Subtenant ), published in 1985, contrasts the fates of Poles and Jews during the German occupation and presents a dichotomy of responses to the Shoah that range from heroism to passivity. Krall, whose work has been well received in Poland, has won many awards for her prose, including the Polish PEN Club Prize and the Award of the Culture Foundation (1998). Her writings have been translated into several languages and have been particularly well received in Germany and Sweden. She is married to journalist Jerzy Szperkowicz and focuses her writing primarily on creative nonfiction. In 1976, Krall conducted a series of interviews with Marek Edelman, the only remaining survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and published the transcripts in Odra, a Polish literary journal based in Wroclaw. The interviews were compiled as a book titled Zdazyc przed Panem Bogiem (Shielding the Flame ) in 1977, which went out of print after selling over ten thousand copies; a second edition was printed and sold over thirty thousand additional copies.27 In 1978, Krall wrote the play To Steal a March on God, which was based both on her interviews with Edelman and on his 1945 memoir, The Ghetto Fights. The play debuted in May 1980 at the Popular Theater in Warsaw in a production directed by Kazimierz Dejmek. To Steal a March on God is structured in what Krall calls five pictures that “frame” the play within a running time of one hour. The first and fifth pictures occur at the site of an offstage ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The second, third, and fourth pictures are based on the 1977 interviews with fifty-five-year-old Edelman, a successful cardiologist then living in Lodz, who, through flashbacks, takes us back to his participation in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising when he was twenty-four. Edelman broke a thirty-year silence about the Holocaust when he consented to the interviews he conducted with Krall. Marek Edelman was born into a Jewish family in Homel (now Belorussia) in 1919. When he was only a few years old, he lost his father. Soon afterward, his family moved to Warsaw. At age twelve, his mother passed away, and he was forced to support himself. When the Nazis occupied Warsaw, Edelman, in his role as a messenger for the ghetto hospital, was allowed to pull ill Jews from the deportation trains (the Nazis, adhering to the fiction that the Jews were being transported to labor camps for “resettlement,” made a show of holding back the sick who were unable to work); in this capacity, he stood by while over four hundred thousand

56

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Jews were deported. During the Occupation, Edelman became one of the founders of the ZOB and subsequent to Mordechai Anielewicz’s suicide, garnered the role of deputy commander of the uprising. In his role at the Umschlagplatz, Edelman had to make extremely difficult life-and-death choices about which Jews to save; he often refused to spare even sick or elderly Jews but instead pulled those Jews out of the line who might be valuable to the resistance, such as potential ghetto fighters or couriers. After escaping through the sewers to the Aryan side of the city on May 9, 1943, Edelman hid for over a year. When the Russian Army approached Warsaw in August 1944, the Polish Armia Krajowa (Home Army) rose up to resist the Nazis; Edelman joined the revolt and fought for two months to free his country from the Nazi yoke. After the war, he emigrated to Israel but failed to adjust to life there and soon returned to Poland; he then moved to Lodz, studied medicine, became one of Poland’s leading cardiologists, married, and had children. When martial law was declared in 1968, a wave of anti-Semitism that spread throughout the country cost him his job in a military hospital. Encouraged to leave Poland, Edelman, strongwilled and stubborn, refused, although his wife and children did so, fleeing to France to escape the persecution. As a long-time Bundist and later a member of the Solidarity movement who was anti-Zionist and anticommunist, Edelman was often ostracized in his own country, especially during the communist regime. However, after the fall of communism, he was showered with honors for his war efforts, not only in his native country, but also from abroad. In his introduction to the transcription of interviews that Krall conducted with Edelman, titled Shielding the Flame, Timothy Garton Ash notes, “Marek Edelman is probably the first Jewish leader ever to become a Polish hero.”28 Edelman passed away on October 2, 2009, at age ninety. By intermingling comments from the more mature Edelman, the cardiologist, with the young, idealistic Edelman of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Krall was able to create a play that, in retrospect, allows audiences to explore the philosophical implications of the resistance. Jadwiga Kosicka, who translated the play into English and wrote introductory comments to accompany the text, stated that To Steal a March on God “offers the double portrait of a truly heroic twentieth-century anti-hero interrogating himself.”29 Moreover, Krall allows the older Edelman to not only interact with his younger self, but also confront former colleagues who participated in the revolt, as well as their descendants. These young ghetto fighters from beyond the grave stimulate Edelman’s memory, allowing the cardiologist to come to terms with the moral and ethical decisions he was forced to make

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 57 thirty-four years earlier. Krall’s “memory play” thus has the advantage of allowing philosophical introspection about the issues concerning moral decisions made during the Holocaust; however, as theater reviewer Paul Backer has indicated, because the play is not a literal presentation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, its static action and the need for informed spectators often make it somewhat problematic for modern audiences.30 To put the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in context for audiences unfamiliar with the Holocaust, Krall has Edelman recall the events for us. Edelman begins by discussing the first day of the liquidation, April 19, 1943, when the Nazis entered the ghetto at 7 a.m. and were met with gunfire at the intersection of Zamenhof and Mila Streets. Young Marek remembers, “By 2 A.M. not a single German soldier could be found in the Ghetto! They didn’t drag off anyone to the Umschlagplatz that day.”31 He boasts of the mine that the resisters planted, killing more than one hundred enemy soldiers. After the explosion, the Germans began attacking the Jews more cautiously and even tried to negotiate a truce. Dr. Edelman describes the twenty days of the revolt, reminiscing that the Germans were better trained and had better equipment than the resisters. In the third picture, Dr. Edelman recalls the terror that accrued once the Germans set the ghetto on fire, which confused the Jews about what to do next. Mordechai Anielewicz was among the many who shot themselves rather than fall into the hands of the Nazis. Young Marek also reveals how a few dark, dirty, and fully armed Jews miraculously managed to escape through the sewers to freedom on the Aryan side of the city. These horrendous tales, told by a survivor who witnessed the horror firsthand, reveal the need for Edelman’s testimony to reinforce collective memory. Edelman describes a monument of the fallen warriors in which a typical resister is depicted with a rifle in one hand, a grenade in the other, a bag with maps at his side, a cartridge pouch around his waist, and a belt across his chest. Edelman comments, “None of them had ever looked like this: they didn’t have rifles, cartridge pouches, or maps; besides, they were dark and dirty. But in the monument they look the way they were ideally supposed to. On the monument, everything is bright and beautiful.”32 Edelman, silent for over thirty years, strives to set the record straight without embellishing historical details like monuments and ceremonies can do. To Edelman, the reasons for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were twofold: first, it was a means of preserving one’s dignity in an absurd universe; second, the revolt sent a signal to the Western world that an entire ethnic group was facing extermination. Edelman professes that none of the resisters believed that their cause would be successful; all of them knew that the

58 Staging Holocaust Resistance revolt was suicidal. With regard to maintaining a sense of dignity in the face of death, Dr. Edelman says to Young Marek, “Because people have always thought that dying with a gun in one’s hands is nobler than dying unarmed, and that shooting is the highest form of heroism. That’s why we kept shooting” (11). Dr. Edelman explains to Young Marek that some Jews had the chance to leave the ghetto but refused for one reason: “Maybe it’s because if one goes to one’s death voluntarily, if one makes a choice for oneself, the last chance of retaining one’s dignity is preserved . . . ” (20). Moreover, the insurgents discussed how to die so that the world would take notice. Thus, during the 1976 interviews, Edelman explained to Krall, “We were convinced that it was necessary to die publicly, under the world’s eyes.”33 Dr. Edelman admits that at the beginning of the revolt, the resisters were afraid that the outside world would never hear the shots, no news would ever get through the wall, and the dead would go unnoticed. However, gradually, the world began to recognize the significance of the struggle, which gave renewed energy to the uprising. Dr. Edelman states, “The news from London quieted our fears. They had heard us. They knew that we were shooting. That was all that really mattered. To choose one’s own way to die” (11). Dr. Edelman’s quest for Truth is constantly being sidetracked by moral and ethical issues concerning the resistance that he cannot resolve. In the second picture, Joachim’s Daughter accuses Dr. Edelman of killing her father. Dr. Edelman explains that the wealthy Joachim was executed because he refused to provide the resisters with money so they could buy weapons that were vital for the revolt. Joachim’s Daughter defends her father’s actions by stating that he sent her into hiding on the Aryan side of the city, which cost a considerable amount of money; the result is that he saved her life. Dr. Edelman counters with the fact that the insurgents needed the revolvers very badly. In short, saving one life was not nearly as important as making decisions that would affect the lives of many. Dr. Edelman points out that many in the ghetto possessed a vial of cyanide for personal use and then relates a parable: when the Germans came to deport the children in the hospital, a female doctor in residence there gave the children her poison to swallow. Dr. Edelman tries to make the point of sacrifice clear to Joachim’s Daughter: “Do you understand what I’m saying? In those days if someone had any poison, he kept it for himself and for his immediate family, but that woman doctor gave her cyanide to OTHER people’s children. In those days we considered giving away one’s own cyanide as the height of unselfishness” (15). When Joachim’s Daughter asks Dr. Edelman, “Who gave you the right to choose his [her father’s] death?” the latter responds, “It wasn’t for him alone we chose death. We chose it

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 59 for ourselves and for forty thousand Jews. His death was only the result of that choice” (18). Joachim’s Daughter pleads that her father died in vain since all of the Jews were killed anyway, and a few revolvers would not have made any difference. Dr. Edelman begs to differ, arguing that after Joachim’s death, no one refused to give the resisters money for weapons, which meant that there were more dignified deaths since resisters fell with guns in their hands. In short, Dr. Edelman explains that resisters had to murder their fellow Jews who worked for the Jewish Police, were informers, or, like Joachim, refused to spread the wealth to ease the suffering of many. Dr. Edelman insists, “Dying is undignified only when one attempts to survive at someone else’s expense, then and only then” (18). Resistance fighters believed in this harsh ethical code that seems bizarre under normal conditions but was justified during the extreme circumstances of the Holocaust. Krall’s play, then, focuses on the role of morality under the most drastic and unique exigencies ever faced by mankind. The play consistently evokes arguments about the value of life during the severely extenuating circumstances for Jews in the ghetto. Young Marek made life-and-death choices daily at the Umschlagplatz, which meant that certain individuals who he could have deemed sick were not saved and instead went to their deaths at Treblinka. Dr. Edelman recalls how nurses in the hospital would break the arms or legs of those who were pulled out of line at the deportation center so that the “patients” would appear disabled. Even suicide was considered a noble, and worthy, act for those who could not join the revolt. Dr. Edelman states that when the Germans gave out tags that allowed certain individuals to remain in the ghetto without fear of deportation, a nurse named Mrs. Tenenbaum gave her tag to her daughter. The nurse then swallowed a vial of Luminol, attempting suicide so her daughter could retain possession of the tag. They found her alive the next day. Dr. Edelman asks Joaquim’s Daughter, and the audience as well, “Should we have tried to save her, what do you think?” (17). In another incident, Dr. Edelman recalls a child who led the Nazis to a shelter housing his parents; the Germans blew it up with several hundred people inside. The fate of this child, now without parents, would have been a horrible travesty. Young Marek contends that the child should have been shot immediately upon leaving the shelter. Edelman, in his interview with Krall, related a similar incident in which a female doctor poisoned all of the children in the hospital before the Germans liquidated it; in doing so, she saved these children from a horrible train ride and then terror before being gassed. Edelman recalls how the nurse was perceived by the ghetto inmates: “People thought she was a hero.”34

60

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Confused by the signals that suggested that morality had to be abandoned during the extenuating conditions of life in the Warsaw ghetto, Edelman became a cardiologist and thus decided to devote his career to saving lives. Realizing that he was one of the few survivors out of a half million who died in Warsaw, Edelman, like many survivors who feel guilty about living when their comrades lost their lies for no apparent reason, has a new lease on life and devotes it to combating death. At the Umschlagplatz, Marek was forced to make life-and-death decisions, but he could only save a few; when he looked the other way, that was a death sentence. Now, as a cardiologist, he tries to save every life that he can and assumes responsibility for such a role. Edelman told Krall, “It’s just that when one knows death so well, one has more responsibility for life. Any, even the smallest chance for life becomes extremely important.”35 Moreover, choosing to become a resistance fighter in Warsaw ultimately led Edelman to accept the absurdity of a life that was determined largely by chance during the Holocaust. Many survivors believed that they were alive after the Holocaust merely by chance while others died inexplicably. Dr. Edelman recalls an incident in which an SS soldier fired dozens of shots at him but missed him by half a yard; the physician attributes his fate to the Nazi’s astigmatism. If the soldier had had proper glasses, Marek certainly would have been dead. He recalls another episode in which he was being carted off to the Umschlagplatz, but his friend Mietek Dab, a member of the Jewish Police who was returning home at the right time, saved him from deportation; if Marek had been in line one minute later and had missed seeing Mietek in the street, he would have gone to his death. Dr. Edelman laments, “I know I shouldn’t be among the living either, but listen, it isn’t my fault” (29). To be the only surviving member of the uprising out of nearly a half million Jews of Warsaw before the liquidation could not possibly be something left to chance. However, Dr. Edelman dispenses with the notion that God was responsible for his survival since he believed that God was on the side of the perpetrators. Thus, Dr. Edelman decided to work as a cardiologist to settle a score with this malicious God, or as the title of the play indicates, to steal a march on God. Dr. Edelman discusses his role as a cardiologist, a savior of life, in contrast to a God who took the lives of many for no apparent justification: “The Lord is just about to snuff out the candle and you try to steal a march on Him, and quickly guard the flame before He’s aware of what you’re doing . . . You know, that’s important. The Lord is not excessively just” (27). Whereas Young Marek seemed to be doing God’s work of sending people to their deaths at the Umschlagplatz

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 61 without egress, now, as a cardiologist, he can make amends. Dr. Edelman laments, “If you had to see four hundred thousand people off to the trains, you might have a few things to settle with HIM afterwards” (27). In short, God blows out the candle while Dr. Edelman tries to shield the flame. Dr. Edelman is put to the test when he is asked to perform life-threatening surgery on a heart patient who is in critical condition and will probably die without the operation. This dangerous experimental procedure, rarely performed, involves having the blood flow backward by means of allowing the veins to take over the function of the arteries. Dr. Edelman agrees to perform the life-threatening operation, stating, “once you know death first hand, even the slightest chance of survival becomes extremely important” (26). Dr. Edelman readily admits that the patient’s chance of having successful surgery is minimal, and even if the patient survives, he will live only a few years. Celina, alias Zivia Lubetkin,36 one of the founders of the ZOB who fought with Edelman during the uprising and who made it through the sewers to survive along with her comrade, becomes his voice of conscience when she reminds him, “You know, every life for the one who lives it amounts to a full hundred percent . . . ” (30). The audience understands that Dr. Edelman, the resister whose hands were often tied at the Umschlagplatz, will now make up for lost time in his bid to save even one life. As the lone survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dr. Edelman is responsible to his fallen comrades who now live only through his memory. Dr. Edelman represents the spirit of the resistance, even if it now means continuing the struggle against death in a Polish hospital. Fully realizing that his survival was based upon chance or was at the expense of someone else who died during the Shoah, Dr. Edelman’s struggle is to come to terms with the past. The Holocaust has redefined morality, and Dr. Edelman wants to be assured that life is worth living. Jadwiga Kosicka sums up Dr. Edelman’s raison d’être: “Throughout To Steal a March on God Dr. Edelman must strive to justify and expiate the desperate moral choices made by his younger counterpart under the conditions of unrelieved horror that prevailed in the Ghetto in 1943.”37 Dr. Edelman’s dilemma is whether he can live his life with dignity, thus commemorating those who fought in the resistance yet died with dignity despite having to make tough moral and ethical decisions. Krall amazingly concludes the play the same way that Wishengrad did, except that in her play an old man, rather than a cantor, sings the “El Mole Rachamin.” Both Wishengrad and Krall mourn for the dead while only Krall wonders if there can be salvation for the emotionally scarred resisters who were “lucky” enough to survive.

4. Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe: Lois Lowry’s/ Douglas W. Larche’s Number the Stars and Julian Garner’s The Flight into Egypt

B

efore the Holocaust, 8.3 million Jews inhabited Europe; approximately 6 million of them became victims of the Nazi extermination plans and were either shot, died of starvation or disease in the ghettoes, or perished in concentration/extermination camps. Another million Jews emigrated from their native countries before the Shoah began, thus leaving more than 1 million who survived in Nazi-occupied territories.1 The Jews who remained in Europe survived largely because of the courage of humanitarian gentiles who defied the Nazis by risking their lives to hide Jews in homes, attics, cellars, stables, office buildings, pigsties, cowsheds, convents, and monasteries. The risks varied considerably from country to country. This chapter focuses on two countries that represent the extreme circumstances of rescuing Jews during the Holocaust: Denmark, where anti-Semitism, when it surfaced in small extremist groups, was benign; and Poland, where anti-Semitism was virulent. Two plays that demonstrate the plights of Jews in hiding during the Shoah in Denmark and Poland, respectively, are Douglas W. Larche’s Number the Stars, adapted from Lois Lowry’s novel with the same title, and Julian Garner’s The Flight into Egypt. On April 9, 1940, Germany, without declaring war, invaded Denmark. The Danes had virtually no choice except to acquiesce to German occupation. Cecil von Renthe-Fink, the German minister in Copenhagen, assured the Danes that the Nazis had no intention of encroaching on the political integrity of the country. King Christian X was allowed to remain

64

Staging Holocaust Resistance

on the throne, the democratic parliamentary government was maintained, and in June 1940, Erik Scavenius, known for his pro-German sympathies, was appointed foreign minister. Thus, Denmark became Germany’s “model protectorate.” At this time, the nearly eight thousand Jews living in Denmark represented 0.2 percent of the population.2 The Nazis, preoccupied with applying the Final Solution to millions of Jews in Poland and Russia, were not imminently concerned with exterminating the relatively few Jews that inhabited Denmark. Despite the fact that the Nazis considered neighboring Denmark to be a pure Nordic nation, and, as such, blood brothers who were sympathetic to Nazi ideology, the Germans could not persuade the Danes that the Jews, with their supposedly communist affiliations, were enemies of the Volk. Moreover, because Germany needed Denmark’s foodstuffs and also partially relied on its factories to produce airplane parts and marine diesel engines, the Nazis did not relentlessly apply any similar version of the Nuremberg Laws to Denmark.3 Thus, for nearly three and a half years, the Jews, who were highly assimilated in Denmark, escaped persecution, kept any government positions they had secured, did not have to wear the Yellow Star, did not have their shops earmarked as Jewish stores, and saw no anti-Jewish legislation adopted. However, collaborationist periodicals financed by the Nazis infected the nation with a steady stream of anti-Semitic propaganda. By 1942, Himmler was pressuring the occupied countries to begin applying the Nuremberg Laws. At this point, King Christian X, arguing that the Jews were part of the Danish nation, threatened to wear the Yellow Star as a badge of honor if the Jews were forced to pin it to their clothing and, in an official protest, warned the Germans that he would abdicate his authority if such laws were imposed on Denmark’s Jews. Of course, the Nazis, planning to minimize confrontation in their neighboring country, were hoping that the popular king would not relinquish his sovereignty. In November 1942, the Germans replaced the diplomat Renthe-Fink with Dr. Werner Best, former administrative chief of the Gestapo, who now became Reich Plenipotentiary. Gestapo Colonel Rudolph Mildner, who had devised many of the torture devices used in Auschwitz, was sent to keep tabs on Best and exacerbate anti-Semitism within Denmark. However, soon Best and Mildner were trying to convince German authorities, particularly diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop, that the Danes would not tolerate persecution of the Jews.4 In a report that Best sent to Ribbentrop on January 28, 1943, he reiterated the strong opposition to anti-Jewish legislation among the Danes and the threat by Prime Minister Scavenius and his cabinet to resign if the Nuremberg Laws were applied to the citizens of

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

65

Denmark.5 Despite Best’s intervention, the Nazis proceeded with plans to persecute the Jews and even had the notion of establishing a Jewish ghetto. An attempt to burn down the Copenhagen Synagogue was thwarted by Danish police late in 1942. Jews remained relatively unscathed in Denmark until the summer of 1943, when the Nazis, faced with the prospect of losing the war, renewed their efforts to annihilate all of European Jewry. Sensing that the Germans were retreating on all of the war fronts, Danish dock workers in Copenhagen and Odense went on strike, refusing to repair German ships. There were 93 acts of sabotage in July and 220 in August, which contributed to open revolt by late August.6 Best’s pleas to Scavenius to maintain order went unheeded. Best, instructed to report in Berlin on August 24, 1943, was rebuked by Hitler, who then ordered a state of martial law imposed in Denmark. General der Infanterie Hermann von Hannecken assumed control of the military situation. Upon returning to Denmark, Best soon found the government in disarray. The Danes refused to abide by newly imposed German decrees that prohibited strikes, disallowed public gatherings, banned weapons, censored the press, and imposed required curfews on citizens. To protest Nazi decrees, the Danes dissolved the Army, scuttled their Navy ships, declared the king a prisoner of war, allowed the Scavenius government to resign, and turned the ministries over to civil servants. Best, obligated to act while the country was in a state of emergency, sent a telegram to Hitler on September 8, 1943, arguing for the immediate deportation of the Danish Jews. On August 31, the Germans confiscated files that provided addresses for the Jews in Copenhagen, where most of the Danish Jews resided. Best, following Hitler’s orders as a loyal Nazi, was planning to deport the Jews but also tipped off the authorities, including the German maritime attaché Georg-Ferdinand Duckwitz, when the files were raided. Duckwitz, who tried in vain to have Best abandon the deportations, informed the Social Democrats and the Danish resistance leaders about the upcoming Aktion against the Jews. Hans Hedtoft, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, spread the warning throughout the Jewish community of Copenhagen. On September 29, which was the day before Rosh Hashana, Marcus Melchior, the rabbi of the Copenhagen Synagogue, advised the Jews who came to worship in the synagogue to go into hiding at once and pass the word along to their fellow Jews. On the eve of October 1, Christian policemen, postal workers, physicians, taxi drivers, teachers, students, and shopkeepers alerted the Jews of the deportations. Meanwhile, on October 1, the Swedish government officially agreed to shelter the Jews who were about to be deported.7

66 Staging Holocaust Resistance Jews were hidden in churches, convents, hotels, warehouses, hospitals, farms, and homes. Harold Flender notes that hiding a single person or a couple was not problematic, yet hiding families became difficult because more space was needed, and the possibility of a raid meant that the whole family would be captured.8 Therefore, family members were frequently dispersed among Christian households, which increased anxiety because mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers who were separated wondered whether they would ever see their loved ones again. Furthermore, in families that were separated, children often were immediately estranged from their new surroundings and had to adjust quickly to surrogate protectors. Hiding Jews was also an immense risk for the Danish families that provided such shelter, for the Nazis promised reprisals for anyone assisting Jews. In short, the Danish population demonstrated great integrity and courage in hiding Jews before their departure to Sweden. During the roundup, which began on September 30, when almost all of the Jews were being hidden by Danish citizens, a meeting of the Protestant higher clergy was convened for the purpose of rescuing Jews. Money needed for the passage to Sweden was immediately raised by citizens who went door to door taking up collections of funds. Attempts were made to salvage sacred scrolls from the Copenhagen Synagogue; records were kept of all Jewish assets so that they could be returned to their rightful owners after the war. Danish citizens protested the deportations and even sabotaged German ships and factories.9 Meanwhile, the roundup itself was a failure, for the majority of the Jews were in hiding; thus, the Nazis managed to capture only 472 Jews, most of whom were seized because they were too elderly or ill to have fled.10 These Jews were shipped to Theresienstadt, and most of them survived the Holocaust. Since fishing boats were the only means of transportation from Denmark to Sweden, citizens from all walks of life helped escort Jews from towns and cities to embarkation points, where resistance leaders and the DanishSwedish Refugee Service led them to the boats that were mobilized for the fifteen-mile crossing. Smuggling Jews out to the shoreline was an arduous task since Gestapo and German patrols were on high alert to track down the Jews in hiding. Moreover, the fishermen had to be paid for their efforts (some made the journey for no fee), which meant that they often acted on trust that Danish citizens could raise the money for future payment. Clergymen created blank baptismal certificates for many Jews during the journey while pharmacists supplied free stimulants to keep the weary awake and sleeping pills to keep the babies from crying. Although the crossing was fraught with danger since the Germans had mined the

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

67

waters and monitored escapes with their own patrol vessels, some fisherman made the trip three times a day. Once the Germans learned of the escape plans to Sweden, they beefed up their patrols, using police dogs to sniff out the human cargo. The fishermen, who often hid the Jews below the floorboards of their vessels, spread dead fish on top of the boat decks so as to throw off the scent of the dogs. A Danish scientist in Malmo concocted a powdered mixture of cocaine and human blood that deadened the dogs’ sense of smell. When the Nazis came on board to search for the Jews, seamen pretended to blow their noses into a handkerchief that contained the powdered mixture. As the gray powder fell to the deck, the highly trained police dogs lost their trace of smell upon sniffing the mixture. On October 3, Adolf Eichmann was dispatched to Denmark to rectify the situation. Eichmann berated Best, screamed at Mildner, and insisted that the Jews could remain in hiding for only a few days before they were captured. Nevertheless, Danish citizens continued to risk their lives to thwart the efforts of the Nazis to deport the Jews. Between September 26 and October 12, 6,000 full Jews and 1,376 half Jews were smuggled into Sweden.11 Of the 472 Jews shipped to Theresienstadt, a few died en route; most were saved because the Danish government supplied them with food parcels and medical supplies while interned in the concentration camp. Only 120 Danish Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis.12 Moreover, Danish authorities protected the abandoned Jewish homes and apartments while the police prevented looting of the former dwellings. Social workers took inventories of abandoned assets; furniture and other possessions were placed in secure storerooms. Upon their return to Denmark after the war, Jews were welcomed back warmly and were granted 4,505 kroner to start renewing their lives.13 At his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann confessed that Denmark frustrated the Nazis more so than any other country in its attempt to thwart the Reich’s plans for the Final Solution. What made Danish citizens risk their lives during the Holocaust to save 98 percent of their fellow Jews, most of whom were strangers? The Danes considered the rights of Jews to be a constitutional issue involving fair and equitable treatment for all citizens of the state. When Best first assumed office in Denmark, he even wrote a report to Berlin arguing that discrimination against Jews would be a constitutional issue for the Danes.14 Second, resistance to Nazi brutality became a type of catharsis for the Danes, who felt frustrated by years of being occupied by a foreign power that had imposed severe food rationing upon the population. Specifically, hiding Jews allowed the average citizen who could not engage

68

Staging Holocaust Resistance

in sabotage to demonstrate resistance to the tenets of National Socialism. Third, the Danes considered the persecution of Jews to be a disregard of the country’s sense of national pride, as well as defiance of Danish religious and political convictions. Yehuda Bauer writes, “The Jews were Danish citizens or lived under Danish protection and their persecution was understood by the Danes as an attack on their national integrity.”15 Moreover, democratic Danish society was based on a humanitarian sense of decency and therefore an appreciation of responsibility for the dignity of all Danish citizens. For the Danes, the Holocaust meant a complete negation of their heritage and historical tradition of fairness and decency accorded to all citizens of the state. Lois Lowry, the American author of Number the Stars, is a very popular award-winning writer of children’s books who began her career as a child photographer. In the mid-1970s, she began writing short stories for children and then, in 1977, penned her first novel, A Summer to Die. In 1979, Anastasia Krupnik, Lowry’s third novel, was named as an American Library Association Notable Book and was so well received by teachers and children that it spawned a series of eight other books that were published between 1981 and 1995 about the young girl Anastasia and her family. Lowry has written twenty-three novels for children and young adults. Her most well-known novel, The Giver (1993), concerned with the power of memory, was based upon stories that her parents told her about their own childhoods while they were each dying in a nursing home. The Giver won the Newbery Award, the Regina Medal, and was cited as best book by the American Library Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the International Reading Association. Lowry became fascinated with Denmark’s attempts to save the Jews through her Danish friend Annelise Platt, who conveyed to Lowry stories about what it was like as a child surviving the German occupation of Copenhagen.16 After Lowry and Platt vacationed together in Bermuda in spring 1988 and discussed Platt’s traumatic childhood spent in Europe, Lowry began doing research on the subject.17 At the Atheneum Library in Boston, Lowry discovered a photograph of Kim Malthe-Brunn, a resistance leader who was executed by the Nazis when he was only twenty-one years old. Remembering that photograph, Lowry later wrote, “Seeing him there, so terribly young, broke my heart. But seeing the quiet determination in his boyish eyes made me determined, too, to tell his story, and that of all the Danish people who shared his dreams.”18 Lowry, feeling that she needed to visit Denmark, spent a few days there in 1988; several of the places she visited, including the site where resistance leaders were executed

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

69

and the vantage points Jews had while looking across the sea to potential liberation in Sweden, became fixtures in the novel she was to write. While in Copenhagen, Lowry also visited the Resistance Museum and met Kristin Krough, who, along with her husband, worked for the Resistance during the war and gave Lowry details about the occupation and Danish culture. Krough admitted to Lowry that the most demeaning element of the German occupation was the powerlessness most citizens felt.19 Number the Stars, in seventeen chapters, was completed in 1989 and won the prestigious Newbery Gold Medal, designating the American Library Association Book of the Year Award, the Sydney Taylor Book Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries, the National Jewish Book Award, and Parenting ’s Reading Magic Award. The novel also won individual state’s children’s book awards in Arkansas, New York, Vermont, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Illinois. In 1996, Douglas W. Larche, who was chair and artistic director of the Grand View College Theatre in Des Moines, Iowa, was encouraged by his wife, Susan Elliott, to adapt Lowry’s novel for the stage. As a teacher for many years, Susan was aware that Lowry’s novel was fascinating for young adults and thus was always checked out of the library. She understood that her husband, with his background in playwriting and children’s literature (he had written several plays for children), had exactly the right credentials to do justice to Lowry’s novel. Larche’s adaptation, which stretches twentyone scenes over two acts, follows the same chronological order of the novel; in fact, except for changing the ages of Annemarie and Ellen from ten in the original to fourteen in the play and that of Kirstie from five in the novel (a difficult role to cast) to now ten in the play, Larche was faithful to the original text. Number the Stars premiered under Larche’s direction in September 1996 as part of the centennial celebration at Grand View College, a Danish Lutheran university. In response to my query about the success of the play, Douglas Larche noted that Number the Stars has had nearly 170 separate productions in Canada, South America, Europe, Australia, and throughout the United States in such cities as Pittsburgh, Dallas, Louisville, Houston, Atlanta, Albuquerque, St. Louis, Providence, Juneau, and Cleveland.20 The play has remained popular in recent years; for example, in January 2006, Number the Stars was produced at the Des Moines Playhouse, in Des Moines, Iowa; later that year, in March, it was staged by the New York State Theatre Institute at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York. Bill Gordon directed the play at Michigan State University’s Summer Circle Theatre in June 2008. Number the Stars ran at Woodstock Library’s Reader’s Theatre

70

Staging Holocaust Resistance

in West Shokan, New York, from April to May 2009 and then was staged by the Magical Theatre Company in Barberton, Ohio, in October 2009. Number the Stars has been the subject of discussion in book clubs nationwide and has fostered lesson plans for teachers attempting to introduce their students to the Holocaust. Finally, Sean Hartley wrote a musical version of the play, which premiered at the Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center in New York City in 1998 in a production directed by Christopher Boyd. Number the Stars demonstrates the heroic efforts of the Danish people both to resist National Socialism, despite being occupied by the Nazis, and to rescue its Jews from extermination. In the preface to the play, Larche dedicates Number the Stars to “the Danes of every stripe whose courage saved a people and made a nation proud.”21 The novel and play are written as children’s tales that teach a moral and ethical lesson to adolescents, focusing on what it means to be a “Righteous Gentile.” David L. Russell has noted that the dialectic of the play concerns whether a nation should choose relative security and thereby turn its back on tyranny or fight on behalf of their Jewish brethren, which means jeopardizing their individual lives.22 Lowry and Larche have created a suspenseful tale for children that includes characters with whom they could empathize, thus setting the stage for a poignant learning experience about the Holocaust. Lowry confirmed to me that her goal of writing the novel was to educate audiences about the significance of the Danish collective resistance: I knew that Holocaust Education is required, as it should be, in most school systems in this country. But I was not aware that the story of what happened in Denmark was being told at that time. It seemed important to me to inform and remind young people that there was a place where in an amazing act of collective integrity, a populace rose up and resisted.23

Number the Stars is a fictional tale based upon fact about a Lutheran family in Copenhagen, whose members risk their lives to save their Jewish friends during the Holocaust. Fourteen-year-old Annemarie Johansen’s best friend is her Jewish classmate Ellen Rosen; their friendship is impeded by the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Although Larche does not provide dates in the play, Annemarie makes a comment that the Nazis have been in the country for three years and have not yet learned the language, which would clearly set the time as 1943. The first few scenes indicate that the idyllic and seemingly contented world of childhood is drastically curtailed by the Nazi occupation of Denmark. As Ellen and Annemarie play together as the best of friends, their camaraderie is threatened when a

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

71

German soldier interrupts their activities. The German gendarme is named Giraffe, a fitting designation since his height and perceived authority is frightening to the small children. When Annemarie and Ellen report the incident to their mothers, we realize the toll the occupation has taken on the Danish population. The rationing of food has meant shortages of butter and sugar, but Mrs. Johansen, angry at the price that the Danish have had to pay at the expense of the Germans, promises that the depravity will end once the war is won by the Allies. In the eyes of ten-year-old Kirstie, as Joel D. Chaston has mentioned, “the war merely means that children ride bicycles with wooden wheels, wear shoes made out of fish scales, and forgo pink-frosted cupcakes.”24 We learn that the Johansen family, like many Danish citizens during the occupation, oppose the Nazis on moral and ethical grounds. Mrs. Johansen reads De Frie Danske, an underground newspaper that reports on the efforts of the Danish Resistance to sabotage the German war effort. Lise, Annemarie’s older sister, had been run down by a Nazi military car for being an active member of the Resistance; Mrs. Johansen has kept the story secret from her daughters Annemarie and Kirstie, explaining to them only that their sister died in an auto accident. Annemarie and Kirstie shield themselves from the horrible reality around them by immersing themselves in the childhood illusory world of fairy tales, staging mock plays where good wins out over evil. Tales of good versus evil elicit the subject of Denmark’s occupation by the Nazis and King Christian’s defiance of German rule. Almost daily, the beloved king rode his horse through the streets of Copenhagen to greet his people, acting as a visible reminder to the Nazis of the free spirit of the Danes. Annemarie’s father tells his daughters not to fear for their safety, for the king will protect the citizens, and “All of Denmark is his bodyguard” (12). This spirit of a unified brotherhood of citizens who would die for their king becomes the impetus for the Lutheran family to save the Rosens, their Jewish neighbors. The situation begins to deteriorate for the Jews of Denmark. Mrs. Hirsch’s button shop is closed when the Nazis designate it as a Jewish store. Annemarie, fearing that the Rosens will be persecuted as well, comments, with regard to Denmark serving as the king’s bodyguard, “Well, now I think that all Denmark must be bodyguards for the Jews, as well” (18). We also hear about acts of sabotage in which the Danish Navy, in August 1943, blew up their own ships to prevent the Nazis from using them in the war effort. The events change drastically for the Rosen family once the Nazis begin their roundup of Jews during Rosh Hashana. Since it would have

72

Staging Holocaust Resistance

been difficult to hide whole families together in one residence, the Rosen family is separated, with Ellen being forced to live with Annemarie and her parents while Peter Neilsen, a member of the Resistance who was engaged to Lise, attempts to find shelter for Ellen’s mother and father. The separation of parent and child must have been traumatic for Jewish children at the time, and the play demonstrates this alienation as Ellen, weeping quietly at times, must make the best of a bad situation. However, Papa Johansen, representing a strong sense of Danish gemeinschaft, welcomes Ellen into the household and accepts her as his own daughter, despite the fact that Annemarie and Kirstie are blond and Ellen is dark-haired. When Papa Johansen hugs his daughters and Ellen does not know how to react, it becomes clear that Ellen’s confusion represents the odd circumstances that hidden Jewish children were forced to live with while they were separated from their loved ones. When Nazi soldiers raid the Johansen home looking for Jews in the middle of the night, the terror of the Holocaust becomes apparent. This scene represents the will of the Danish people to stand up for the principles of integrity and dignity that defined their democratic society. Suspecting that the Johansens may be harboring the Rosens’ daughter, the Nazi soldier asks the Johansen family to explain how they could have two blond-haired daughters and a dark-haired one as well. Risking his life, Mr. Johansen, thinking quickly, pulls out a picture of his three daughters when they were babies; he had remembered that Lise had dark hair, which turned blond only later. The Nazi soldier, temporarily placated that Ellen is the Johansens’s third daughter, Lise, tears up the photo and retreats with his colleagues. Meanwhile, in the bedroom, Ellen, unable to get the Star of David necklace off her neck, has it torn off by Annemarie. By grabbing the necklace too tightly, Annemarie has the Star of David imprinted in the palm of her hand.25 Don Latham notes, “The imprint symbolizes Annemarie’s intimate connection with Ellen, for in that moment she has become one with her friend.”26 The Star of David has made its imprint on Ellen and her “sibling” counterpart, suggesting that the union of Christian and Jew was symbiotic during the Holocaust in Denmark. As the Nazis begin searching for Jewish children, Papa Johansen decides spontaneously to send Ellen and his daughters to Uncle Henrik, who is a fisherman in Gilleleje. Lois Lowry described to me the amazing reaction of the Danes, who had little time to rationalize why they rallied to save Jewish lives: “There were individuals everywhere, during that period, who at great risk saved Jews. But as far as I know, Denmark was the only place where it happened almost spontaneously, on short notice,

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

73

without question, and en masse.”27 En route to Uncle Henrik’s house, Mrs. Johansen, Annemarie, Ellen, and Kirstie are stopped by a Nazi soldier, who, after learning that they are going to the seaside village of Gilleleje to visit Mrs. Johansen’s brother, tries to trick Mrs. Johansen into revealing that she is Jewish by asking, “Are you visiting your brother for the New Year?” (34). Again, quick wit prevails, as Mrs. Johansen responds, “New Year? It is only October” (34). At Uncle Henrik’s residence, Ellen is made to feel comfortable in her strange surroundings, but in the back of her mind she wonders about the whereabouts and safety of her parents. Most Jewish children hiding during the Holocaust were frequently moved from place to place, thus increasing their sense of estrangement. Ellen is no different and obviously cannot relate to Uncle Henrik in the same way that his relatives can. Act 2 opens with Henrik’s family preparing funeral arrangements for their great-aunt Birtie. The funeral is actually a subterfuge for the gathering of friends and family, including Ellen’s parents, in order to transport them to Sweden. The coffin contains warm clothing and blankets for the journey. When Annemarie questions her uncle about Birtie’s death, Henrik explains to her that it is easier to be brave when one does not know the full truth. Suddenly, the Germans enter, as the stage directions indicate, “there is the familiar staccato of boots on the driveway then an insistent pounding on the door ” (44). Using the image of high, spit-shined black boots, Lowry consistently portrayed the Nazis as menacing in the novel, although the image is more muted in the play. Lowry had met a woman in Brisbane, Australia, who, as a child in Holland during the Holocaust, remembered how those shiny boots trampled on so many human lives. Lowry understood that frightened children in Denmark could not stand at eye level with the Nazis but at their height would remember the terrifying image of the black boots. Lowry’s editor asked her to reduce the number of references to the glossy black boots in the novel to minimize redundancy, but she adamantly refused. Responding to the editor’s query about whether anyone would object to the overuse of the image, Lowry stated, “I would simply tell them that those high shiny boots had trampled on several million childhoods and I was sorry I hadn’t had several million more pages on which to mention that.”28 The scene in which the Nazis invade the Johansen household to demand why an unusual number of people have gathered there represents the courage and resourcefulness of the Danish during the occupation. The German soldier questions why the coffin is closed and is therefore at odds with the Danish custom of having an open viewing of the corpse. When

74 Staging Holocaust Resistance Mrs. Johansen claims that Aunt Birtie died of typhus and the sealed coffin prevents the spread of the disease, the German officer accepts the excuse, but not before slapping her in the face. After the soldiers have left, Peter Neilsen reads a passage from Psalm 147 of the Bible that concludes with these words: “It is He who heals the broken in spirit / And binds up their wounds, / He who numbers the stars one by one” (46). The verse, which reflects the title of the play, refers to the sacred deed of saving the Stars of David, the Jewish people. Whether the stars can be saved collectively or one by one is insignificant; saving even one life is significant. As Peter makes plans to ferry the Jews to Sweden, the Johansen children begin to understand the psalm’s message about shared community. During the sea passage, Kirstie even surrenders her cherished pink sweater to keep a baby, about to be drugged to reduce her crying during the journey, warm. Annemarie also seems to understand the message conveyed by the psalm and tells Peter, “Lise would have been proud” (47). As David L. Russell astutely remarks, “Not to act would invalidate Lisa’s selfless sacrifice.”29 Uncle Henrik has shuffled the Rosens to the boat waiting to take them to Sweden, but a package vital to the Resistance was left behind. With Mrs. Johansen suffering from a broken ankle, Annemarie volunteers to deliver the package to her uncle. Her mother hides the contents of the package in a basket filled with cheese, bread, and an apple, which ostensibly are to serve as the lunch that Henrik supposedly has forgotten should Annemarie be stopped by soldiers questioning her intentions. Annemarie has seen how her parents and uncle have acted to defy the Nazis in the spirit of King Christian leading the Danes toward defending the rights of all Danish citizens; Annemarie, without hesitation, emulates her relatives who took responsibility to help the persecuted and undertakes this dangerous mission, claiming, “I am a soldier for the king” (51). Frightened to death by undertaking such a perilous assignment on her own, Annemarie frantically runs through the forest, hoping to deliver the unknown contents of the basket to her uncle. Her bravery and integrity are tested when she is stopped by the German soldiers, who question her motives. Using the same type of ingenuity imbued in her by her relatives, Annemarie outwits the Nazis. For years, Annemarie has been role-playing with her sister Kirstie, acting out fairy tales about kings and queens. As Virginia A. Walter has noted, Annemarie places herself psychically in a harmless fairy tale that she expects to have a happy ending, thus making it possible for her to react to the Nazi interrogation.30 Immersing herself in the fairy tale of Little Red Riding-Hood, where the heroine carries a basket through the woods and outwits the cunning and dangerous Big Bad Wolf

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

75

(the Nazi soldiers) en route to the safe haven of her relative, Annemarie develops the courage to get through the ordeal.31 Listening to her mother’s advice to assume the role of an innocuous little girl delivering lunch to her uncle, Annemarie, by adopting the persona of Little Red Riding-Hood, believes that escape from the wolves is possible. The encounter with the Nazis becomes play acting, which is what most Danish citizens had to do to survive the occupation of their country during the war. The result of her ordeal in the forest is that the Nazi soldiers fall for the ruse of a benign young girl delivering lunch to her fisherman uncle. The Nazis inspect the basket of food and then toss its contents, including a carefully planted handkerchief, to their dogs. In surrendering the contents to the Germans, Annemarie, who risked her life, also unwittingly allows the Rosens to escape to Sweden. Henrik later explains that the Rosens were hidden beneath the boards of his boat. As the Germans came on board to inspect the cargo, their dogs were distracted by the scent of the dead fish spread on the deck. The handkerchief that Annemarie dropped contained a mixture of cocaine and rabbit blood developed by Swedish scientists, which, when sniffed by the dogs attracted to the rabbit blood, temporarily numbed their sense of smell and thus threw off their scent. Annemarie has moved from a childhood world of telling fairy tales to her young sister to maturity as an adult; the tale becomes an archetypal rite of passage from childhood to the adult world of responsibility made possible by assuming a heroic stance during the occupation of her country. Don Latham notes, “As many Danes did in World War II, Annemarie achieves a quiet heroism in undermining the Nazi regime by conquering her fear and taking action to help the Jews escape to Sweden.”32 Annemarie admits that although she risked her life, she did not think about doing so and thus does not consider her actions to be heroic. Henrik explains that heroism derives from ordinary citizens in times of crises: “That’s all that brave means— not thinking about the dangers. Just thinking about what you must do, and doing it” (58). The play’s denouement occurs one year after the successful escape to Sweden and during Kirstie’s birthday, an obviously festive occasion. Lowry demonstrates good judgment by tempering the Danish celebration of victory, which makes the play less sanguine than most children’s literature. Papa Johansen reveals to his daughters that their sibling Lise died heroically during a Nazi raid on a Resistance hideout. Although Ellen is reunited with the Danish family that saved her life, the Johansens concomitantly mourn Peter’s death at the hands of the Nazis. The tragedy lies in the fact that Lise and Peter, with most of their lives ahead of them, died for a noble

76 Staging Holocaust Resistance cause. Mrs. Johansen states, “They were all so young. So very, very young. With so much hope” (61). The play ends with a salute to the Danish citizens, gentiles who became one with their Jewish brethren to defy evil; to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship, Ellen gives her cherished Star of David to Annemarie, saying to her, “God has numbered the stars. And he gave me one. You are my Star of David” (62). On the one hand, Number the Stars, taken strictly as children’s literature, functions as a learning tool that teaches adolescents that saving Jews during the Holocaust was an act of human decency that could surface even in an environment permeated by evil. The play thus provides the Holocaust lesson that making moral choices is essential to resisting evil, for without doing so, justice will never prevail. Moreover, teaching students about the heroism of the Danes helps us to remember the past so as not to repeat its failures. As Laura M. Zaidman has indicated, the play “prepares children for a world filed with wolves,” which can be counteracted by a defense of human rights.33 However, Number the Stars is not just effective as children’s literature. Adults can recognize the tale as demonstrating that the Danes fought and died not merely for national pride and freedom from tyranny, but also for the preservation of human dignity. Bravery is depicted in the play as believing in what you understand to be morally right without thinking of the risks involved. In Denmark, individual courage coincided with the valor of a nation. In Poland, the situation for the Jews was much more extreme than it had been in Denmark. Unlike the Danes, whom the Nazis regarded as a civilized Nordic people who were the cultural neighbors of Germany, Poland was considered an enemy of the Volk inhabited by citizens who were viewed by the Germans as Untermenschen and thereby subject to annihilation. Soon after the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, persecution of Jews began. Jews were immediately stripped of their property rights, herded into ghettoes, and forced to work slavishly in labor camps. After the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 initiated the Final Solution, Polish Jews were shipped off to the half dozen Polish extermination camps created to eradicate the nearly three and a half million Jews living in the country. Unlike in Denmark where aiding Jews was not a fatal crime, hiding Jews in Poland was absolutely forbidden and was punishable by death. On October 15, 1941, the Nazis passed a law that confined Jews to their quarters and made public the news that any Christians who observed Jews breaking the law were obligated to report the transgression to the German authorities. Another 1941 decree noted that any Polish citizens

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

77

assisting Jews to move to the Aryan sector of Warsaw would be executed. In Debica, on November 19, 1942, a public announcement stated that any Pole helping to lodge, feed, or hide a Jew would be murdered.34 In the Radom district, one such poster stated that any Pole taking in a Jew would be guilty of a crime, and even feeding Jews, without offering them shelter, would be punishable by death.35 The Nazis not only punished the individual who aided a Jew, but also frequently executed his or her family as well, including children. Making these executions a public event was a strong deterrent that dissuaded many Poles from harboring or aiding Jews. Moreover, the Nazis even burned whole villages as reprisals; for example, the village of Huta Pienacka went up in flames in the winter of 1944 when it offered shelter to approximately one hundred Jews.36 In addition, the Nazis often buried the bodies of those Poles aiding Jews in unconsecrated ground, such as in the woods or in Jewish cemeteries, which typically frightened any deeply religious citizens, particularly Catholics.37 Meanwhile, the Nazi propaganda machine reminded Poles that Jews were considered vermin and that helping them was not only dangerous, but also reprehensible. Finally, there were incentives, such as promises of wheat and brandy, for Poles who turned Jews over to the Nazis; although the prices varied at different locations in Poland, the typical bounty paid by the Gestapo was a quart of liquor, four pounds of sugar, a carton of cigarettes, and a small sum of money for anyone surrendering a Jew.38 Unlike in Denmark, where the Jews were fully assimilated into a society in which anti-Semitism was negligent, in Poland, Jews refused to assimilate, which exacerbated anti-Semitism throughout Poland’s history. The fact that Polish Jews dressed differently than most gentiles in that country made for easy identification and for discrimination for failing to conform to norms and values. Most Polish Jews spoke Yiddish at home and considered it to be their primary language, further distinguishing themselves from the rest of the population. Also, Polish Jews tended to send their children to Jewish schools, excluding them from the normal acculturation process. Thus, many Poles considered Jews to be too clannish, which contributed to their ostracism. Finally, middle-class gentiles contributed to much of this anti-Semitism since they were the aspiring merchants who could move up the class hierarchy only with the elimination of the largely Jewish bankers and creditors who owned many of the commercial and industrial enterprises in Poland.39 Despite the long history of anti-Semitism in Poland and the decrees promising death to any Pole who aided or abetted Jews, thousands of Polish

78 Staging Holocaust Resistance gentiles risked their lives to save Jews. Yad Vashem has honored more Poles in the Righteous Among the Nations than people of any other nationality. Many Holocaust survivors have recognized the courage of Polish citizens to save them and their fellow Jews. These Poles acted on their own initiative without help from any resistance groups or underground forces.40 Many of the Righteous Gentiles accepted no payment, while others were paid if the money was available, or they were promised payment later. Of the Polish Jews who did not emigrate or were not murdered or starved to death by the Nazis, between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand were saved largely because of the assistance from Polish gentiles.41 Most of the Polish citizens who sheltered Jews or alerted them to pending Nazi activities were ordinary citizens from all professions and all classes; even poor Poles shared their meager sustenance with the Jews they hoped to save. Some of the saviors were intellectuals, and although they may have been anti-Semitic, they recognized the Germans as a greater threat to Poland’s security than were the Jews. Others acted out of compassion for the Jews, who were formerly viewed by Poles as threatening, aggressive people but were now reduced by the Nazis to helpless sufferers in need of protection. Many Poles were devout Catholics who now questioned the supposed “humanism” associated with genocide. Nechama Tec’s research reveals that 55 percent of the Polish rescuers viewed their efforts as a protest against the Nazi occupation.42 The majority of the Righteous Gentiles also claimed that they saved Jews because they felt a need to help the needy. Most of the rescuers were individualists, who, being on the periphery of their communities, adhered more to their own moral and ethical values and felt less social pressure to conform to decrees. Surprisingly, only approximately 8 percent of those who sheltered Jews were members of the clergy, who hid mainly Jewish children in convents, monasteries, and orphanages.43 The Poles who hid Jews risked their lives doing so. Lithuanian, Polish, or Ukrainian informers, known as the Kriminalpolizei, turned in Good Samaritans for monetary awards. There were also blackmailers who demanded money from Jews who were being hidden and from their protectors; these extortionists were often criminals themselves or those who lived on the fringes of society and had no problem collaborating with the Nazis for monetary rewards. Anti-Semitic terror organizations threatened the protectors, and many of these groups actually took reprisals after the war on their Polish brethren who sheltered Jews.44 The act of concealing a Jew was even unpopular with the general Polish population, so most of these protectors kept their activities secret.

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

79

Jews obviously could not survive in the Aryan sectors of Poland without the help of these Righteous Gentiles, yet rescuing Jews was a task that required much diligent planning. Hiding Jews typically meant transporting them from one shelter to another, thus requiring the cooperation of fellow Christians. Certainly, when more people knew about the sheltering, the risks of betrayal increased. Single individuals could be hidden within one family, but larger groups had to be sheltered in monasteries, convents, or the forests. Hideouts had to be camouflaged, and often, new structures, such as double walls or hanging ceilings, were built to accommodate those being sheltered; food, which was scarce except on the black market, needed to be supplied; toilet facilities had to be provided; and medicine was necessary when Jews in hiding became ill. If children were being hidden, they had to be kept quiet for fear of having their presence exposed. Civil servants or priests frequently had to be paid to supply false identity papers or work papers that prevented Jews from being deported to forced labor camps. At times, Polish physicians even had to perform cosmetic surgery on Jews to reduce Semitic features in order to create a more Aryan appearance or to camouflage circumcision. If the sheltered Jew died, the Christian protector was typically obligated to bury the body without revealing to the authorities that such a person ever existed. Polish Jews who were hidden by gentiles often had to bribe guards, arrange to have false identity papers secured, and pay their benefactors. These activities had to be accomplished after they had typically been starved for months in the ghetto, traumatized by the Nazis, and more likely had to watch as their friends and relatives were deported to their deaths. Thus, those in hiding were essentially reduced to terrified individuals who, without chance of egress, depended on the benevolence of righteous Christians to risk their lives to save them. After the war, 85 percent of the survivors described their saviors as courageous.45 The Council for Aid to Jews (code named Zegota) was established in December 1942 by representatives of the Polish underground, including socialists, democrats, Catholics, and representatives of the Jewish Coordinating Committee. Zegota’s main goals were providing financial aid (two hundred to five hundred zlotys) to Jews hiding in the Aryan quarters, arranging shelter for Jews who had escaped from the ghettoes, and falsifying baptismal certificates and identity cards essential for Jewish survival. Zegota also disseminated twenty-five thousand leaflets in May, August, and September 1943, appealing to gentiles to save Jews from the “Nazi beasts” and reminding the population that blackmailing Jews or denouncing them to the authorities would be offenses punishable by the

80 Staging Holocaust Resistance underground Resistance.46 Zegota operated initially on very meager support and did not expand the scope of its activities until the Jewish National Committee and the Bund received funds from abroad in July 1943.47 By that time, Zegota expanded its functions to include placing orphaned or abandoned children with families or institutions and providing Jews in hiding with clothing, food, and milk vouchers. However noble Zegota’s intentions may have been, the organization’s overall value was questionable. By the time Zegota was fully operational, most of the Polish Jews had already been murdered. Besides, Zegota, mainly active in Warsaw, yet also making contact with Jews in Cracow, Lublin, Kielce, Radom, and Bialystok, was not operative in all areas of Poland. In the twenty-two months of its activity, Zegota’s major accomplishment was providing aid for nearly four thousand Warsaw Jews hiding in the Aryan sector, which was approximately one-fifth of those in exile in the city.48 Julian Garner, the author of The Flight into Egypt, is a British dramatist who has written fourteen full-length plays, three plays for children, six one-act plays, and five plays for puppets since he began his playwriting career in 1978. Born in London, he received his training in theater at the Darlington College of Arts. From 1981 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 1998, he was based in Norway, where his plays were produced in the major theaters in Trondheim, Oslo, Bergen, and Stavanger. While he was living in Trondheim in 1982, he was commissioned by the city’s municipal theater director to write a play about the fate of Trondheim’s Jews during the Holocaust. Garner wrote his first Holocaust play, Yesterday Now, in 1982, which concerned Jewish women in hiding in Trondheim during the Nazi occupation of Norway. Yesterday Now was staged at the Trondelaag Teater in Trondheim in 1982 and subsequently at the Rogaland Theater in Stavanger. In 1989, Garner was awarded the Ibsen Prize for Svarte Okser, which was later staged as The Awakening at the Hampstead Theatre in London followed by other productions in Germany (Heidelberg and Hindelsheim) and in the Czech Republic. In 2002, as writer on attachment at the Royal National Theatre Studio in London, his play The Silent Engine, which premiered at Pentabus Theatre at the 2002 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, received a Fringe First critics’ award. In 2004, Garner founded CulturaMobila, a community arts program focusing on cultural projects in small communities in Scandinavia. Garner has also directed several plays, translated others, and has run a residential youth theater near Helsinki. His plays have been produced not only in Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, and the Czech Republic, but also in Hungary, Canada, and the United States.

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

81

Pursuing his interests in the Holocaust years later (Garner’s ex-wife was Jewish), Garner interviewed survivors of the concentration camps, as well as Norwegians who fled the Nazis by escaping to Sweden, Great Britain, or Canada. He was also haunted by Ida Fink’s tales in A Scrap of Time, by the images of Eastern European Jews in the ghettoes and shtetls caught by photographer Roman Vishniac, and by Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah. Garner remembered the story of a young Jewish woman from Trondheim who was hidden throughout the occupation by the caretaker of an apartment building. This woman was unwilling to see her experience dramatized in the public domain, but after she passed away, Garner realized that he could adapt the narrative for his own purposes. He decided to change the venue of his earlier Holocaust drama, set in Norway, to Poland. Garner explained to me, I also now knew something of the Polish boycott of Jewish businesses, and it seemed to me useful to show how exhausted and beleaguered the community already was at the point of the Nazis’ invasion. This, by way of partial answer to the hoary old “why didn’t the Jews fight back?” question.49

The result was his Holocaust drama, The Flight into Egypt, which took seven years to complete. The play, structured in twelve scenes that span two acts, premiered at the Hampstead Theatre in London on September 10, 1995, under direction by John Dove. This production featured Paloma Baeza, who, in her first professional stage experience, was lauded for playing Beile with an extraordinary quality of “stillness” in her suffering. The Flight into Egypt begins before the war during Passover 1939 in the small village of Lacznic in the southern province of Opole, Poland. A poor peasant family consisting of fourteen-year-old Beile, her fifteenyear-old brother Ya’acov, and their parents Friedel and Yoineh are preparing for the Passover feast. Friedel reminds us of the Jewish matron who keeps the family together at all costs; Yoineh is reminiscent of Tevye, the archetypally prudent Eastern European Jewish father of Fiddler on the Roof. Garner’s purpose in act 1 seems to be to depict a typically penniless yet content family in prewar Poland that is about to have their lives drastically altered by the Shoah. Although indigent, the younger family members have dreams and aspirations about a better life in the future. Ya’acov writes stories and poems, some of which have been published; Beile is a talented artist. As they prepare for the festive occasion, church bells ring in the distance, reminding them that they are minorities in a distinctly Christian culture.

82 Staging Holocaust Resistance The plans for the Seder are interrupted when Ryszard Pankiewicz, a professor of fine arts from the University of Cracow, asks to borrow some eggs. Apparently, he is restoring a medieval painting at the local church and needs the eggs to make tempura. Although Ryszard pays handsomely for the eggs, Yoineh, as was typical of most Polish Jews who always suspected trouble from anti-Semitic Poles, vows to his family once Ryszard departs, “You’ll see, they’ll be here, tonight perhaps, saying how we tricked him, how we fooled him, robbed him!”50 As a religious Jewish family, they are constantly alert to trouble from the predominantly Aryan community surrounding them; pogroms seem to be regarded as typical catastrophes that must be tolerated. However, there is always the dream and desire to escape from Poland, although that requires money. Friedel’s brother Smuel did manage to emigrate to New York, where he is now earning a good income by working in a shipyard. Garner’s first act sets up the premise that Poland is fertile anti-Semitic territory for the Nazis to enact their genocidal policies against Jews. In scene 3, Yoineh enters the household covered in blood—the victim of the latest Polish pogrom more than likely initiated during a boycott of Jewish businesses. Friedel tells Ya’acov and Beile to hide in the forest until the hostilities toward the Jews have abated. Ryszard corroborates the latent antiSemitism by revealing that he is actually a Jew named Joshua Koved who was originally from Budapest but sought employment in Poland. In 1919, he interviewed for a position at the Academy of Art in Warsaw, but his Jewish background precluded any chance of obtaining the job. Thus, he changed his name to Ryszard Pankiewicz, admitting, “In which guise I have enjoyed considerable success, ultimately in my current post. Not that mine is an original solution: Polish academia is awash with secret jews” (26). Ryszard discusses the most recent pogrom and its effects on Jews throughout Poland. Jewish businesses have been boycotted, the only work allowed Jews in Cracow is portering, and many Jews have tried to sell old clothes, bagels, or apples, to no avail. Ryszard reveals why this Polish environment is ripe for Nazi plans for extermination and why the Jews, having endured a history of persecution in Poland, were unaware of the extent of the Nazi devastation: “People live in basements, with no light, or heat, their children starving. It’s a giant pogrom, a slow pogrom, perpetrated by the government, condoned by the church; Jewish leaders are powerless to prevent it” (26). Ryszard, the artist whose responsibility it is to restore culture, functions as a seer for Ya’acov and Beile. He recounts his work on the restoration of The Flight into Egypt, a painting originally commissioned by the Bishop of Cracow in 1440. The painting depicts Mary and Joseph

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

83

taking their son Jesus to safety in Egypt after King Herod ordered every male child under the age of two to be put to the sword. God, appearing in a dream to Mary, warned her to go into exile. The painting indicates soldiers slashing with their swords, mothers wailing, and the city’s river flowing red with blood. Christ survives the slaughter of the innocents but feels guilty at having done so while the other children perish. Ryszard understands the moral of the tale of the painting and plans to flee the terror by taking a teaching position in New York City. He prophesizes about the recent pogrom: “But the worst thing is that this is surely just the beginning. The beginning” (26). Ryszard has set the stage, so to speak, for the harrowing narrative of Nazi extermination, with Beile as the only survivor and thus forever plagued with guilt feelings about why she was fated to live while her other family members perished for no apparent reason. Beile, in hiding during the pogrom, asks Ryszard to take her with him to New York, but the painter, arguing that his guise as a distinguished Polish academic allows only him to have the freedom to leave, cannot do so. Act 2 begins in Cracow during 1942, when the Nazi plans to exterminate the Polish Jews were fully operative, as Beile, moving from one hiding place to another, seeks refuge with a janitor named Krasinski. As was typical of Jews who survived the Holocaust, Beile was passed from family to family, explaining to the caretaker, “I was in Mrs. Matusiak’s cellar, until she got scared. Her friend, Mr. Lutowski sent me to her—he hid me for three months in his shed, it was freezing, I got ill. Before that, I was in a barn for four months; before that, a hen house for three months. Before that . . . ” (30). Beile, with money that Smuel has sent and with the family’s jewelry in tow, offers her valuables to pay for confinement. Krasinski, understanding the peril involved in rescuing Jews in Poland, at first refuses to help Beile; but after hearing pleas of utter desperation coming from a young girl who is at her wit’s end, the janitor assumes his role as caretaker and agrees to save Beile’s life. As was true of most Righteous Gentiles who hid Jews during the Holocaust, Krasinski makes great efforts to shelter and care for Beile. Krasinski has created a makeshift hideout, which is a section of paneling within one of the walls. Beile sits in the cavity in silence all day. When she emerges from her hiding place, she is stiff and in great discomfort from spending all day in such cramped quarters. Moreover, her fear of being discovered during these short episodes of freedom from her cubby hole is palpable. Krasinski, unable to find suitable attire for the fourteenyear-old girl, has provided her with men’s clothing several sizes too large. Most Righteous Gentiles had trouble providing sanitation facilities for

84 Staging Holocaust Resistance their wards; Krasinski solves the problem by using a bucket as a makeshift toilet for Beile. The janitor washes Beile’s clothes and provides food by catching fish in the streams. During the play’s production in the West End of London, Krasinski removed Beile’s slop bucket, walked her around to relieve her cramps, gave her a wash basin, lay on his bed while she washed and changed clothes, fed her, and then helped her back into her hideout—a scene played completely in silence. In essence, The Flight into Egypt becomes a paean to the Righteous Gentiles such as Krasinski who courageously risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust in Poland. A year after the end of the war, Mrs. Kober, a tenant of the building in which Krasinski serves as caretaker, asks the janitor why Beile refuses to leave. Mrs. Kober acknowledges to Krasinski, “You risked your life for that girl” (39), but wonders why Beile cannot now go back to her birthplace. Beile, who was initially so traumatized by the terror that she lost her artistic ability, now slowly begins to draw. She is at first only willing to draw a portrait of Krasinski, her savior. Haunted by the trauma of the Holocaust, she turns to representing the genocide through her paintings. When Krasinski expresses shock at the drawings, Beile describes how her family, accustomed to Polish anti-Semitism that resulted in pogroms, was taken by surprise at the extent of the Nazi brutality. When the Nazis burst into the household, Friedel was assaulted. As Ya’acov and Yoineh tried to defend the matriarch of the family, screaming at the Nazis to leave, the Germans turned on them as well. Beile, hiding behind the bedroom door, recalls witnessing the atrocity: “I couldn’t move. I tried to, but I couldn’t move. They had hammers, I think, or bars. They hit them with hammers, smashed their heads, my mother’s first, then Ya’acov’s, lastly my father’s, where he lay in bed, shouting at them. I couldn’t . . . ” (40). The marauders then demolished the yard, laughing while doing so. Beile sums up the extent of her trauma: “I don’t know how long it lasted. I don’t know how long I stayed there, holding onto the door handle. Holding it, not moving. I couldn’t move. I just stood there, holding onto the handle, the door against my face . . . ” (40). After the war, Ryszard visits Beile in Cracow to persuade her to leave her horrible memories of the Shoah behind and live with him in New York City. Ryszard tempts Beile, telling her that she will have her own quiet, sun-lit apartment near the university with an extraordinary view. Moreover, she will have easy access to the synagogue, beautiful parks, Jewish restaurants, grocery stores, libraries, bookstores, art galleries, and Broadway theaters. Besides, in the United States, she can prosper as an artist, paint in her own studio, and further her education. In his pleas, it

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

85

becomes evident that Ryszard, not Beile, is the one who feels guilty about surviving the Holocaust while others perished. Beile, however, having been traumatized by the Holocaust, cannot merely slough off the terror nor can she forget that Ryszard abandoned her while Krasinski saved her life. The Holocaust has become firmly imprinted into her consciousness to the point where it is reflected in her paintings as her raison d’être. Ryszard comments about Beile’s artwork: “The colour schemes, the compositions, are indicative of a determination to arrest time. To hold it, forever. These events are not seen as remembrances, but as experiences, occurring now, directly onto the canvas” (43). Ryszard is concerned that Beile’s art is alarmingly precise, specific, and direct, almost as if its sense of literal realism has made the paintings artless. Ryszard laments about Beile’s art, “There is no distance. They are offered to us as evidence might be offered to a tribunal. What they represent is a refusal to let go of experience, to let it be swept aside” (43). Krasinski explains to Ryszard, and concomitantly to the audience, what it meant to be a Righteous Gentile. He shows Ryszard Beile’s hiding space, noting that it took months to build, and the construction had to be done in complete secrecy. In the meantime, Beile hid under Krasinski’s bed. Krasinski recalls, “At night, I lay awake listening to her, underneath me. She was scared, I could hear it, the way she breathed. I was scared! Do you know what happened to people caught helping Jews? She was safe, here! I protected her!” (44). The emphatic tone of Ryszard’s voice underscores the gravity of the situation for these Righteous Gentiles who hid Jews in Poland during the Holocaust. Krasinski takes pride in not only having kept Beile alive, but also having kept her artistic spirit intact, however gruesome it may have become. Krasinski tries to tell Ryszard why Beile will never leave her benefactor for New York City: “I fed her, clothed her, I kept her clean! I found pencils and paper so she could work! All through the war, she worked! She produced all these wonderful pictures. Isn’t that good enough? Isn’t that safe enough?!” (44). In the last scene of the play, as Beile is packing to leave for New York, Krasinski explains the motivating factors that governed his conscience as a Righteous Gentile. Krasinski tells Beile that he was from Sokol, a small town in Poland. As a youth, he had taken piano lessons from an incredibly talented concert pianist named Mrs. Smiley. Coming from a poor family, he was never able to own a piano but instead had to practice on an old accordion. Like many aspiring youngsters, Krasinski did not want to live all of his life in a parochial village, so he went to make his living in Cracow. Although he tried to earn money by playing in cafes and on the

86

Staging Holocaust Resistance

street, after a few months, his savings had dwindled. As he was ready to pawn his accordion and return to Sokol, he thought of Mrs. Smiley playing the piano beautifully, flawlessly: “And it struck me then just how much work, how much sweat and pain it must have taken Miss Smiley to become what she was. And I was filled with new hope and determination” (46). Krasinski then decided to work all day in a factory and practice playing the accordion at night so as to perfect his craft. He eventually gave up the factory job and devoted his full attention to his art. Although Krasinski never achieved greatness, he understands that his perseverance allowed him to have a fruitful life, explaining to Beile, “I practised until my whole body ached. I played on the street for passing strangers and, though, it wasn’t a living, I had enough to feed and clothe myself; I knew God was smiling on me!” (47). His spirit of perseverance must have touched his conscience when he saw Beile, who, years earlier, begged for salvation at his door. Moreover, Krasinski the musician can relate to Beile the artist as he intuitively understands that when a person is given the opportunity to live, one’s art, however mediocre, can flourish. When Beile asks Krasinski why he did not return home after realizing that he did not have the talent for greatness, he replies, “Pride? Hope? Fate. Someone had to be here when you knocked on the door” (47). Upon hearing these words, Beile unpacks her suitcase, and her decision to stay with her savior becomes unequivocal. Garner explained to me why Beile had eventually understood the importance of Krasinski’s noble effort: “Krasinski doesn’t start out as a righteous person, but each step of his story with Beile presses them ever closer, in ways, I think, which feel believable to an audience.”51 Despite the temptations to have her own art studio, an education in an American university, a career, and the opportunity to teach and travel, Beile’s decision to remain with Krasinski is obvious. Ryszard offers her a chance for the future, but his refusal to help her escape from Poland when her life was threatened during the Nazi genocide weighs more heavily on Beile’s decision to stay with her benefactor than any other factors. Krasinski was willing to give up his life for her, which means more to Beile than the mere promises that Ryszard can offer. In short, the play evolves into a testimonial of the significant role that Righteous Gentiles had in Jewish survival during the Shoah. Although one could argue that Polish anti-Semitism exacerbated the Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews in the East, Garner’s play also presents viable reasons why many Poles contributed to the salvation of Jewish lives. Lowry’s Number the Stars, originally written for a young audience, became a means of teaching children about the Holocaust without directly

Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe

87

focusing on its overt violence. Unlike the stage adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, which has been described as sugar coating the Holocaust, both Lowry’s novel and Larche’s play imbue a children’s audience with the horrible consequences of Jewish genocide without embellishing its excessive violence. In The Flight into Egypt, Garner, in similar fashion, relegates the horrors of the Holocaust to third-person narration and first-person memory. The Nazis are unseen and unmentioned,52 yet the play fully engages the audience in an emotional account of the devastating effects that hiding among the Righteous Gentiles had for the traumatized Jews of Poland. Number the Stars and The Flight into Egypt are sophisticated, yet appropriately tempered, accounts of Nazi genocide in countries that reflect the two extremes of the Final Solution in Europe yet demonstrate how resistance by Righteous Gentiles in diametrically opposed situations saved the lives of thousands of Jews.

5. Resistance in the Extermination Camps: Susan B. Katz’s Courage Untold

R

esistance was virtually impossible in the labor-intensive concentration camps throughout Germany and in the extermination camps of Poland. In the concentration camps, the Häftlinge (prisoners) had their bodies eroded as they were worked to death as Untermenschen.1 The manual labor, often consisting of ten- to twelve-hour work days, took its toll on the prisoners. The inmates also suffered from hunger, thirst, fatigue, and physical beatings. Diseases spread among the camp members, who constantly suffered from typhus, dysentery, and diarrhea. Charlotte Delbo, a survivor of Auschwitz, recalled that a body eroded with disease was predominantly concerned with survival (and certainly not resistance): “One can turn a human being into a skeleton gurgling with diarrhea, without time or energy to think.”2 Inmates were also weakened by being forced to stand outside for hours during roll calls, exposing their bodies to brutally cold temperatures, snow, or rain. Prisoners were always covered with mud, grease, blood, and excrement without having access to proper sanitary facilities. Those who lost the ability to bathe and cleanse themselves soon lost their dignity as well. Häftlinge in the extermination camps were even more inert and thus less prone to resistance. After waiting for hours in hot or cold weather to depart from the collection points, Jews were herded into freight cars and traveled sometimes for days without water or sanitation facilities. Once their possessions were confiscated, the deportees had their heads shaved and were tattooed with numbers, thus making their identities impersonal. As they were deprived of family, friends, fortunes, and occupations, they lost their cultural matrices. Inmates were left only with their bodies; their experience in the lager then became a continuous assault by the Nazis to weaken their bodies and destroy their psyches. Bodies were eroded by the

90 Staging Holocaust Resistance physical labor that was exhausting; the number of calories consumed was insufficient for the labor exerted. Beatings were often administered for minor offenses or even for no apparent reason except to inflict suffering. With the daily toil taking its toll and sleep almost always deprived because of stressful conditions, prisoners were constantly fatigued. Under the ever-present threat of “selection” for gassing, the inmates were always in a nervous state of existence. Being systematically subjected to filth, disease, and excrement, Häftlinge became psychologically debilitated and spiritually defeated. Thus, the ability to think and reason—conditions that were vital to organized resistance—was negligible. As Charlotte Delbo realized, “People did not dream in Auschwitz, they were in a state of delirium.”3 The result of this intense physical and psychological debasement in the concentration camps was anomie and apathy, which do not correspond to an inspired state of resistance. With a heart reduced to ashes and a body in deeply rooted angoisse, prisoners lost their sense of dignity that typically was at the core of those who resisted. Moreover, while the world failed to act as the exterminations continued, Häftlinge wondered if someone, somewhere valued them as human beings. Bruno Bettelheim, himself a survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald, expressed the loss of will power among the concentration camp inmates: “What happened to them impressed on them that nobody cared whether they lived or died, and that the rest of the world, including foreign countries, had no concern for their fate. One cannot meet catastrophic events and survive when deprived of the feeling that somebody cares.”4 Yet these prisoners, ravaged and mutilated, reduced to beasts without souls, found that the need to bear witness, to survive in order to tell the story, was paramount. These prisoners defied the odds of surviving and revolted against their persecutors for the purpose of bearing witness to Nazi atrocities so as to tell the world that others did not die in vain. Through revolt, they were also able to gain a new sense of their own human dignity that had been taken from them. In addition to bearing witness, the collective revolts in the extermination camps discredited the notion of Jews going to the slaughter like sheep and provided valuable insight about the ability of the human spirit to endure. Resisters were faced with the threat of collective reprisals, which meant that attempts at resistance would often result in lethal group punishment; in such circumstances, resisters understood that their efforts could involve the deaths of innocent, unassuming victims. The inmates had to work together collectively, which meant trusting each other; in short, resistance could not be achieved in the extermination camps by any single individual’s heroism. This collective struggle transcended any particular

Resistance in the Extermination Camps

91

individual’s hope of escape. Emaciated, without weapons, such individuals rarely escaped the well-fortified death camps. Although there were revolts in 18 forced labor camps, including one at Babi Yar in which 325 Jews and Soviet prisoners escaped,5 and in the less-populated concentration camps of Plaszow, Lwow-Janowska, and Mauthausen,6 the only uprising in any of the major concentration camps, excluding the extermination camps, occurred at Sachsenhausen. At the Sachsenhausen evening roll call on October 21, 1942, Jews were told that they were not to report to work the following morning; when the leaders of several blockhouses were arrested in the camp prison, panic spread. At roll call the next morning, the Jews were relieved of their possessions and were informed that they would forego rations. The following day, a group of eighteen Jews, determined not to go to their deaths quietly, smashed the windows of Block 39 and pushed aside the SS who tried to quash the revolt. When the Lagerführer attempted to determine why the Jews resisted, he discerned that each feared imminent execution. Instead, the Kommandant told them that they were merely being transferred to another camp, calmed the prisoners down, restored their meal privileges, and returned their possessions to them. When these prisoners were sent to Auschwitz, they were spared the gas chambers and given less arduous tasks that allowed most of them to survive.7 Thus, the revolt in Sachsenhausen definitely had positive repercussions. Treblinka, sixty miles northeast of Warsaw, was the death camp that began in May 1942, where SS guards murdered the Jews of central Poland, although prisoners from Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, and Germany were exterminated there as well. Two Czechoslovakians, Zelo Bloch and Rudolf Massarek, formed a resistance group inside the camp that consisted primarily of Czech Jews whose mutual friendship earned their trust; they were led by a Polish civil engineer named Galewski, who was the camp’s Lageraestester (senior prisoner), and by Dr. Leichert, who was formerly a medical officer in the Polish Army.8 At this time, there were approximately twelve hundred Jews interned within the square-mile enclosure.9 The garrison was defended by a regiment that consisted of seven hundred SS and Ukrainian guards.10 The inspiration to revolt had been the news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which had been disseminated throughout the camp by the Jews on the transports from Warsaw. After Zalcberg (first name unknown), the camp locksmith, made a duplicate key to the armory, the revolt was planned. During the planning phase, resistance leaders executed several inmates whom they believed to be potential informers. The revolt was scheduled for 4 p.m. on August 2,

92

Staging Holocaust Resistance

1943—the hour when hundreds of laborers working outside the lager would return from their work routines.11 The rebels had approximately twenty rifles, slightly more revolvers, and a few hand grenades. In Treblinka, lone wolves were destined to die. Egoism and selfishness meant death, so groups were formed to enforce solidarity—a prerequisite for survival. Prisoners bonded to take advantage of those inmates who had military prowess; more importantly, they united because they shared the common goal of defying the Germans who had so degraded them. Richard Glazer, a Jewish youth from Czechoslovakia who survived Treblinka, recalled, “Given these horrible, degrading, slavelike conditions, we had to get together with somebody else. What kept us going was the idea that we could do something. We always tried to do something to counteract this tremendous helplessness and dependence and our participation in this terrible crime.”12 This solidarity, which created a renewed spirit for the inmates so they could rediscover their humanity, was the first step toward the insurrection. The rebellion was to function as a means for the prisoners to regain their sense of pride despite the daily degradations. The revolt also was to serve as a mechanism for the Häftlinge to maintain their dignity and have some degree of illusion about controlling their fates. On the morning of August 2, the revolt began when weapons and ammunition were removed from the armory. At 3:45 p.m., Hauptscharführer (sergeant-major) Kittner, who was escorting two of the resistance leaders, was killed upon fear that an informer had betrayed the plot. During this premature outbreak, the resisters opened fire on the SS and Ukrainians, seized the armory, and then set the barracks, crematoria, railway station, and guard room on fire. To escape, the three hundred combatants had to cut through two barbed wire fences, negotiate an antitank ditch, and run through barbed wire entanglements; another three hundred or so prisoners who were mostly members of the Sonderkommando fled from Camp Two after killing the ten SS soldiers and approximately forty or fifty Ukrainians that guarded them.13 Nearly one hundred of those involved in the revolt perished during the uprising as victims of machine gun fire. The Germans mobilized all available units and tracked down most of the six hundred escapees in the forests.14 No more than seventy members of the revolt survived until the end of the war. The gas chambers remained operational for two weeks after the revolt; two months later, the camp was demolished under Himmler’s orders to hide the evidence from the Allies. In assessing the significance of the Treblinka uprising, Yuri Suhl commented, “it is clear that the Treblinka revolt—considering the conditions under which

Resistance in the Extermination Camps

93

it was organized and carried through—belongs to the most heroic feats of Jewish resistance to Nazism.”15 Sobibor, located 114 miles east of Warsaw, received daily transports of fifteen hundred to two thousand Jews from Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland during the second half of 1942; in 1943, the camp processed as many as fifteen thousand persons daily. The camp was surrounded by antitank ditches, three rows of barbed wire, an electrified fence, and a minefield that Odilo Globocnik created to deter the partisans who were active in the region. A Jewish Russian soldier named Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, who was interned in Sobibor, planned the revolt. While the other resistance leaders in the camp were hoping for help from the partisans, Pechersky advised them that the partisans would never try to liberate them and that the inmates had to fend for themselves; upon listening to his logical advice, the prisoners were convinced that the Russian had the acumen to be their leader. The SS vowed that any escape attempts would be reciprocated by the killing of all the prisoners. Pechersky, who knew of the successful revolt at Treblinka, decided to proceed with the revolt but, aware of potential informers, advised only a few of the Häftlinge of his plans. Acknowledging that any single individual who escaped would bring reprisals on the remainder of the prisoners, Pechersky planned for a mass exodus from the camp. A committee was formed to prepare the revolt. The committee members settled on the date of October 14; the inmates knew that the SS followed a punctual regimen, which meant that the commandant of the camp Wolfgang Thomalla and his dreaded Hauptscharführer Gustav Wagner, as well as the officer in charge of the gas chambers Hubert Gomerski, would be off the premises that day during their weekly pursuit of supplies for the camp. Pechersky’s plan was to murder the twelve to fourteen SS guards who were in the camp, and he reasoned that without proper leadership, the nearly one hundred Ukrainians, who assumed the major responsibility for the camp’s supervision, would abandon their posts. The telephone lines were to be cut so that the Nazis could not call for additional troop support. Then the prisoners were to line up for afternoon roll call, at which time they would storm the watchtowers, seize the armory, cut through the barbed wire fences with wire cutters, and make a mass exodus. Weapons were to be supplied by the camp blacksmiths, who ultimately did manage to craft approximately seventy knives, some axes, and a few hatchets to arm the resisters. On October 14, the revolt went well in its initial stages, as ten, perhaps twelve, SS officers were murdered one by one with axes or clubs until not

94

Staging Holocaust Resistance

a single German soldier was alive in Compound II.16 The telephone wires were cut, the power generator was sabotaged, and the camp vehicles were rendered inoperable. The men and women were lined up for roll call with the Russian soldiers at the head of the column. Most of the prisoners, who had been unaware of what was happening, realized the gravity of the situation and began milling in an unorganized fashion. Pechersky gave the order to advance, but their attempt to rush the main gate failed when two SS men who had been out of the camp appeared and ordered the Ukrainians to open fire. Nearly seventy prisoners cut through the barbed wire; others gained access to the armory and then, while running through the main gate, several fired on the machine-gunners in the watch towers. The number of escapees ranged from three hundred to four hundred; however, at least one hundred and fifty and perhaps as many as two hundred were gunned down or perished in the minefields.17 The inmates killed or wounded thirty-eight guards, while thirty Ukrainians deserted their posts. Since there were now several hundred witnesses to the atrocities, Himmler, two days after the rebellion, decided to raze Sobibor to the ground to cover up any residual evidence. Many of the resisters were gunned down by the SS pursuing them; others were murdered by Polish Fascists of the National Armed Forces or by the Home Army. A few survivors fell victim to typhus. Several, such as Pechersky himself, managed to come under the protection of the Soviet partisans. Pechersky took revenge on his former captors by assisting the Red Army in derailing German troop trains and by mining bridges and roads frequented by the Nazis; others who had joined the partisans or the Red Army died fighting with them. Approximately thirty of the escapees survived by the end of the war.18 Before the October 1944 revolt in Auschwitz, the inmates had few heroes to admire and only a handful of escapees to emulate.19 One such escapee from the extermination camp was Siegfried Lederer, whose daring venture was described in detail in Erich Kulka’s Escape from Auschwitz.20 On April 5, 1944, Lederer escaped to Czechoslovakia, his native country, where he warned the Elders of the Council at Theresienstadt and the Red Cross in Switzerland about the Auschwitz atrocities. On April 7, Rudolf Vrba managed to flee from the camp and submitted a report of the Nazi methodology in Auschwitz to the Papal Nuncio in Slovakia; the information was then forwarded to the Vatican. Lederer’s and Vrba’s reports, which reached the Allies before the end of June 1944, provided the impetus for the Allies to warn Germany that all incidents of genocide would be punishable after the war ended. Perhaps the most courageous of the escapees from

Resistance in the Extermination Camps

95

Auschwitz was Mala Zimetbaum, a Jewish girl from Belgium who, because of her ability to speak several languages, became a courier (“runner”) in the lager. Mala was known to have left off names from selection lists, which was regarded as an incredible act of courage; she also carried messages and medicines to assist the members of the underground. On June 24, 1944, Mala and Edek Galinski stole two SS uniforms containing identity documents that allowed the pair to walk out of the camp unmolested. Their goal was to tell the world about Auschwitz—to bear witness for the inmates who were helpless. After two weeks, Mala and Edek were captured and returned to Auschwitz. Mala was tortured and then sentenced to hang in public as a lesson to the other prisoners that escape from Auschwitz would not be tolerated. However, during the roll call on August 22, Mala was able to slit her wrists with a razor blade. Before she died, she staggered to her feet and shouted to the SS, “I know I’m dying, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are dying, too, and your gangster Reich with you. Your hours are numbered and pretty soon you’ll be paying for your crimes!”21 The SS then shot her, but the image of the fallen heroine instilled a sense of pride and courage into the souls of the women who had witnessed her bravery. Before the revolt in Auschwitz, armed resistance in the camp involved a few isolated episodes, most of which were spontaneous rather than planned activities. For example, on October 23, 1943, a group of Polish women deported to Auschwitz from Bergen-Belsen was ordered to undress while the SS relieved them of their personal belongings. In protest, a former Warsaw dancer named Horowitz seized the revolver of SS Sergeant Major Josef Schillinger and shot him in the stomach while also wounding another SS officer. The other women took the shooting as a signal to revolt and thereby attacked the SS officers at the entrance to the gas chambers. Camp commandant Rudolf Hoess then ordered the women to be taken out and shot. During fall 1944, the Jews of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, having learned that the Nazis were losing the war on all fronts, planned to revolt by destroying the crematoria. Realizing that the Nazis would soon try to eradicate all evidence, especially after the large-scale destruction of half a million Hungarian Jews had just taken place, the Sonderkommando knew that their days were numbered. Moreover, the deportation transits were slowing to a halt since most of the European Jewish population had already been decimated; thus, the Sonderkommando were becoming expendable. These Jews were also motivated to take revenge on the Nazis who had murdered their own family members.

96 Staging Holocaust Resistance The Sonderkommando attempted to acquire explosives from Jewish women who worked in the German Union ammunition factory (Pulperpavillon) inside the camp. Roza Robota, a young Jewish woman from Ciechanow who was active in the underground, agreed to supervise the smuggling of explosives to the resistance leaders in the central camp and to the Sonderkommando in Birkenau.22 Roza worked in the Clothing Commando and had organized a resistance group that disseminated information gleaned from radio broadcasts. Twenty girls from the Pulperpavillon smuggled out the dynamite through mess tins that were equipped with double bottoms. Once the explosives were obtained, a munitions expert in the camp used the dynamite to prepare grenades and bombs. In Zelman Lewenthal’s 1944 diary of the revolt, discovered buried on the grounds of Auschwitz in 1961, he had written that when the revolt was being planned, the resisters understood that their courage would result in death: “None of us had any illusions that he could save himself by doing this. On the contrary, we all realised that it meant certain death, but we were nevertheless all satisfied.”23 On October 7, three hundred men from Crematoria III and IV were to be selected for transfer to another camp. Resistance leaders understood that this was a death sentence. While formulating the revolt on the morning of October 7, the Sonderkommando members were interrupted by a kapo who overheard their plans and threatened to report them to the SS. Realizing that denunciation would mean extermination, members of the Sonderkommando tossed the kapo alive into the furnace, an event that marked the start of the revolt. Prisoners in Crematorium IV refused to draw up a list for the three hundred who were to be deported. At a special noon roll call, instead of stepping forward when their names were called for the detachment, inmates attacked the guards with hammers, picks, crowbars, and axes while pelting them with stones. When SS reinforcements arrived, the prisoners set wooden bunks on fire and then proceeded to burn Crematorium IV. The SS gunned down all of these resisters. However, the Sonderkommando of Crematorium II, seeing the flames, assumed that the revolt had begun. They killed three SS corporals, wounded several other officers, cut the barbed wire fence, and fled to the countryside. Approximately 250 of the escapees were shot outside the camp’s perimeter, and later in the day, another 200 were killed in Birkenau.24 A total of twenty-seven men eluded capture and fled to German Silesia. The resisters who were captured were tortured by the Gestapo but failed to provide them with any information about how the revolt was organized.

Resistance in the Extermination Camps

97

Realizing that the only opportunity to seize dynamite must have come from the workers in the munitions factory, the Gestapo arrested Roza Robota and three of her comrades (Ala Gertner, Estusia Wajcblum, and Regina Sapir). The four women were taken to the notorious Block 11, where they were sadistically brutalized for weeks without revealing the names of the conspirators. After days of torture, Roza had written a Hebrew message on her wall for her underground comrades: Hazak v’amatz (“Be strong and brave”). On January 6, 1945, a few weeks before the Russians liberated the camp, the four women were publicly hanged. Roza’s last words were “vengeance would come.” Susan B. Katz, a Philadelphia-based social worker, honors Roza’s heroism in Courage Untold. Katz received a master of arts degree in social policy and administration in 1979 from the University of Chicago. Since then, she has been assisting low-income people through social and educational programs, grassroots advocacy ventures, and legislative initiatives. Inspired by her experiences as a social worker, she has been writing plays, children’s stories, and screenplays for the past twenty years. Her first novel, Tyler’s Hill, which is a coming-of-age story that focuses on a twelve-year-old Jewish girl, was published in 2009. Katz grew up with children whose parents were Holocaust survivors. In a telephone interview that I conducted with her, Katz told me that she had always been curious to discover why the Jews did not do more to resist the Nazis.25 In 1985, when she was visiting friends on a farm in Wisconsin, she became intrigued by one of the books in their library titled The Auschwitz Album. Perusing the book, she noticed one paragraph about Roza Robota. At that time, Katz was living in Chicago, where, in nearby Skokie, there were many survivors. Fascinated with Robota’s spirit of resistance, Katz began to do research on the subject, hoping to turn the information into a play. Katz assumed that if she did not know anything about the resistance movement, then there were many others like her who would be intrigued by the relatively unknown subject. She talked to Joe Neumann, an Auschwitz survivor and member of the Holocaust Foundation in Chicago, who directed her to Erich Kulka, the Israeli Holocaust historian. Katz read his book Escape from Auschwitz and went to Israel for a month in March 1985 to talk with him about his research.26 While in Israel, other survivors told her that the last surviving member of the revolt, Hanka Wajcblum, lived in Canada. Katz told me that she spent one week interviewing Hanka at her home in Montreal, who supplied Katz with vital information about the details of the revolt in the extermination camp.27 She also met with Noah Zabladowicz, a former member of the underground in Auschwitz,

98 Staging Holocaust Resistance who provided information about the informer in the camp, most of which does not appear in any historical account of the revolt. Katz then took a three-month leave of absence from her day job in 1986 in order to write Courage Untold. Katz’s initial draft of the play was rejected by theater producers nationwide before it was accepted for development by the Playwrights’ Center in Chicago. Following staged readings by the Playwrights’ Center in September 1989 and subsequently by the Jewish Community Center in Skokie the following month, the cast was pared from forty-six to nineteen characters. Courage Untold, directed by Douglas Binkley, premiered at the Avenue Theater in Chicago on January 13, 1990, and ran for six weeks. The play was also performed from April 14, 1991, until May 12, in a production directed by Darwin Apel at the Avenue Theater. Courage Untold occurs in Auschwitz during a one-year period from January 1944 until January 6, 1945, three weeks before the liberation of the camp. A few of the characters are fictional, such as Manfred, Ethyl, Lucia, and Sarah (none of whom have last names), but Noah Zabladowicz, Roza Robota, Ala Gertner, Hanka Wajcblum, Estusia Wajcblum, Kaminsky, Joseph, and Yakov are drawn from their real-life counterparts. The play is structured in eleven scenes spaced over three acts; the dialogue is reminiscent of the brutalities of naturalism, with virtually no vestiges of figurative language present. Courage Untold is a drama that epitomizes the robust spirit of defiance of the tenets of a doctrine that produced extermination camps that were designed to stifle protest. Katz’s play pays homage to the incredibly brave women who risked their lives despite tremendous odds against their possible successful revolt. Knowing that escape from Auschwitz was no better than a pipe dream, these women revolted with the sole intention of maintaining a sense of dignity in an environment that did the utmost to relieve them of their humanity. Faced with a deeply rooted feeling of angoisse after having seen their loved ones perish upon arrival in the camp, the women who revolted did so not only out of revenge and hate for their captors, but also to send a message to the rest of the world that they were not about to die in vain. Realizing all too well that a failed revolt would lead to torture and then death, the women who resisted believed that there were values more important than living a life of degradation. Katz wrote the play as a monument to their courage, believing that such stoical defiance of Nazism should not be forgotten. The play begins with Noah Zabladowicz, an active member of the Auschwitz underground, enlisting the aid of Kaminsky, a Jewish member of

Resistance in the Extermination Camps

99

the Sonderkommando. Kaminsky, in his role of cremating bodies, is deeply afflicted by pain associated with the daily atrocities he has witnessed and is thus committed to destroying the crematoria. However, only the women who work in the Gunpowder Room have access to any dynamite. Noah and Kaminsky enlist the aid of Roza Robota, who formerly was a member of the Zionist underground in her Polish village of Ciechanow before she was deported to Auschwitz with her family. Since Noah and Kaminsky have no access to the women in the Gunpowder Room, they plan to have Roza, who works in the Clothing Supply Section, secure the dynamite from her female comrades and then turn it over to the underground members. Although what Noah is asking Roza to do verges on a suicidal mission, he convinces her that some ideals are worth dying for since “through the uprising we can gain back some of our dignity.”28 Roza is motivated to help the members of the underground because she wants revenge on the Nazis for selecting her mother for gassing. Roza feels helpless in not having been able to save her mother and views the insurrection as a means of redemption. Roza tells Noah, “My mother was selected this morning . . . I could do nothing for her . . . nothing! I hate these bastards. I wish I could kill them” (8). Roza recalls that her mother provided inspiration for her as a young girl who needed direction. Whenever Roza was frightened, her mother would calm her with the words, “Be without fear/ Because . . . what is fear?/ Except the lack of understanding of the unknown” (11). Roza’s mother’s words have instilled pride in her daughter’s faith in doing what is morally right despite the fear of the consequences. Roza successfully recruits sisters Hanka and Estusia to her cause. Both sisters lament the deaths of their parents in the camp and now depend on each other in the hope of surviving together. When Estusia asks Roza why they should risk their lives, Roza responds, “We’ve lost so much . . . our loved ones . . . homes . . . But we can’t let them take our souls!” (15). Hanka, who is only sixteen and has the majority of her years ahead of her, tells her older sister that they must advocate for a cause; otherwise their lives will be meaningless. Hanka, who worked in orphanages and taught Polish to children who knew only Yiddish, believes that life must have a purpose—a concept that negates the meaninglessness of Germans killing Jews in extermination camps for no apparent reason. Hanka, like Roza, believes that dignity is paramount and explains to Estusia her reason for the suicide mission: “Because if we get involved with the Underground it will give us hope . . . more of a reason to live through this hell!” (16). Sarah and Regina, although they admit to being scared for their lives, also understand the importance of dying with dignity instead of merely being reduced to emaciated bodies.

100

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Hanka and her cohorts smuggle the gunpowder out of the munitions factory by using false bottoms in black metal boxes. The plan is then to give the gunpowder to Roza, who will turn it over to Kaminsky when he drops off the clothes in Roza’s department. As the women pass close inspections from the SS guards, their fear is palpable. After the first inspection goes well, Ala Gertner reveals that she hopes to escape Auschwitz to be reunited with her husband. Ala is insecure and despises the victimization that she endures at the expense of the Nazis; her participation in the revolt makes her more sanguine that she is doing something positive, which brings her a step closer to her intense desire for the intimate contact that she so cherishes. For Kaminsky, the revolt is not as personal as it is for some of these women. Kaminsky states that the larger purpose is to bear witness to Auschwitz, as he reminds the women, “The world must know! The gunpowder you are smuggling is vital to destroy . . . ” (37). The smuggling becomes progressively riskier as the Sonderkommando members plead for additional gunpowder to make more bombs. There are time constraints as well since the revolt is moved to June 7, which gives the women one month to finalize their plans. Although thousands of Hungarian Jews are being incinerated daily, the women’s spirits are buoyed by the fact that the Nazis are losing the war. Once the watchtowers are destroyed, the women plan to cut the barbed wires and escape into the forest, where they will be met by the partisans. Roza has volunteered to use benzene to set the barracks on fire. In act 2, scene 3, as the women discuss plans for the revolt, Sarah pulls out a Shabbos candle that her father, working in “Kanada,” was able to pilfer from the personal items that the Nazis stole from the deportees. Sarah explains that her father was quite pious, so the candle has religious sentiments for her. Although the women acknowledge that it is their day off, they pretend it is the Sabbath, using the candle to rekindle their fond memories of childhood when they felt safe and at peace during that special day of the week. Estusia, rejecting God, who has done nothing to rectify the pathetic condition of the Jews under Nazi rule, refuses to participate in the Sabbath rituals. Ala, Sarah, Regina, Hanka, and Roza recite the Sabbath blessing and wonder whether to keep the candle lit for long on a day that is not the Sabbath. Sarah assures them, “He’ll understand” (46). For a brief moment, the audience is asked to assess God’s role in the Holocaust. Estusia, however, relinquishes her role as devil’s advocate, realizing that God did not create the hell of Auschwitz but “[i]t was men, simply men. Men who want power and will stop at nothing until they get it” (48). The Sabbath rituals end in an uplifting sense of change that is about

Resistance in the Extermination Camps

101

to occur, and even the depressed Estusia begins to feel emboldened by the bravery of her comrades, telling them, “I know what we’re doing is very important. (Pause ) At first I was so frightened that we would be caught and killed. But now I see how important our struggle is. The outcome far outweighs any of the risks” (48). Meanwhile, Ala, starved for love and companionship, has been courted by Joseph, who gives her gifts that he claims he received by bribing the Block Seniors and the guards. Preying on her gullibility, as well as on her insecurity, Joseph is able to establish a rapport with Ala. Besides, Ala, constantly starving, cannot pass up Joseph’s food offers, such as a whole salami, which he claims to have obtained through his friends in “Kanada.” Ala wonders why Joseph, supposedly in Auschwitz for more than a year, can look so well fed and healthy. The women resisters soon learn that the revolt has been delayed and that one of Roza’s contacts has been murdered by the SS. Without warning, the Sonderkommando unexpectedly use the explosives to set the crematoria on fire, which becomes the signal for the women to get the tools to cut the barbed wire fence. At the start of act 3, we learn that the revolt has been quashed, the damage has been reported to Berlin, and the Commandant has ordered his adjutants to discover how the plot was organized. The members of the Sonderkommando have all been killed as a reprisal for their part in the revolt. The Nazis soon realize that the source of the gunpowder could have derived only from the munitions factory. Estusia is the first to be tortured, but she reveals nothing despite the beatings. Ala confides to her lover Joseph that she, too, smuggled gunpowder and fears the brutal interrogation techniques used on the women in Block XI. She makes the mistake of explaining that the revolt went awry because the Central Underground and the Polish Resistance in the camp failed to come to the aid of the Sonderkommando once the uprising began, thus implicating her brethren in the conspiracy. After confessing to taking part in the revolt, Estusia and Regina are returned to the barracks after having been badly beaten for having refused to identify the names of their cohorts. The commandant enters the women’s barracks to reveal that Joseph, Ala’s presumed lover, is actually an SS spy. The commandant mocks Ala: “Imagine, to think you could find romance in Auschwitz!” (71). Thus, the irony is that the identity of the conspirators was compromised by one lovestarved female whose “love” will remain unrequited. Roza’s brutal interrogation yields no information for the Nazis. She implicates only Kaminsky, who has already been killed for his part in

102

Staging Holocaust Resistance

the uprising. Noah admires Roza’s courage but wonders whether her suffering has been worth the effort. Roza, who has drawn inspiration from the comforting words she heard from her mother when she was a child, responds, “I’m not afraid. I’m proud of what I’ve done. (Pause ) But it’ll be easier to die knowing you and the others will go on. (Long pause) Without faith . . . there is NO HOPE!” (80). Noah, speaking for Katz, tells Roza, “Our people will know about you. And the others” (80). The last scene of the play is the spectacle of the January 6, 1945, hanging of the four female conspirators who smuggled gunpowder to the Sonderkommando. The other women of the barracks are forced to watch as Roza, Ala, Estusia, and Regina are hanged for their acts of resistance. Before they are executed, the commandant barks out the reason for the punishment, noting that the inmates were given the chance to “prosper” in the camp yet rejected this wonderful opportunity: We’ve given you shelter, food and work and you’ve taken advantage of us. You JEWS . . . YOU STUPID VERMIN . . . thinking you could get away with these crimes. (Long pause ) We were giving you the opportunity to help build the most powerful nation in the world . . . and this is how we’ve been repaid . . . with sabotage! (82)

As she is about to be hanged, Roza screams to the audience, “We will SURVIVE!” (82) to the accompaniment of the singing of the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. Roza’s last words, “Chazak V’Hamatz” (“Be strong and courageous”), which form the denouement, set the proper tone for a play that is, in essence, a paean to the courage of those who gave their lives for the noble cause of defying totalitarianism. The tale of the women of Auschwitz who managed to revolt in the most horrible conditions imaginable where humans were reduced to skeletons barely able to function is perhaps the most amazing event of the Holocaust. Several of the women were motivated by the notion of dying with dignity, despite being mired in conditions that forced them daily to lose their sense of humanity. Others shared the minuscule hope of surviving to bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Nazis, thus revealing to the world to what extent the innocent truly suffered. Finally, some of these women became resisters to protest the brutal, dehumanizing forces of evil and to refuse to be subjected to the abasement of the level of animals. Courage Untold is a testament to their courage and a memorial to audiences to remind us that many of the victims of Nazism did not go to the slaughter like sheep.

6. Resistance from the Clergy

T

he resistance to the Holocaust from the clergy came in myriad forms. There was sporadic resistance from German clergymen, who protested against the Nazi euthanasia policies and the atrocities aimed at Jews. In other European countries, clergymen defied Nazi deportation orders by hiding Jews in monasteries and convents. The clergy distributed forged identity cards and certificates of baptism to shelter Jews or to make it easier to smuggle them to safety into neutral territories. In particular, the clergy played a major role in saving many Jewish children from death. Pastors, priests, and bishops also protested official Nazi decrees, arguing that they violated basic humanitarian principles. A few clergy willingly gave up their lives, thus becoming martyrs for refusing to be judged by Nazi law, surrendering instead to divine justice. This chapter focuses on stage representations of the sacrifices the clergy made during the Holocaust as reflected in Celeste R. Raspanti’s No Fading Star, Arthur Giron’s Edith Stein, and David Gooderson’s Kolbe’s Gift. As early as 1933, Hitler tried to manipulate the Protestant churches to support his agenda. Many members of the Protestant Church viewed Christianity as compatible with the right-wing sentiments of the National Socialist Party; dissenters of the Lutheran and Reformed faiths, which included approximately one-third of all Protestant clergymen in Germany, formed the Confessional Church primarily to oppose efforts to Nazify the Protestant churches. Their dissent was related more to theological reasons rather than to any opposition to Nazi ideology. Catholics were united under the strictures of the Concordat, an agreement that the Vatican signed with Hitler in 1933, which allowed the Nazis to set limits on the Church’s activities. German Catholics were thus less likely to deviate from German policies, although the Catholic Church regarded National Socialism with fear and suspicion.1 Several Catholics in the upper echelon of the Nazi hierarchy, particularly Josef Goebbels, did not want to tangle with the Catholic Church and assured Hitler that in refusing to persecute Catholic clergymen who deviated from Nazi doctrine, the Church could help to

104

Staging Holocaust Resistance

maintain morale.2 On March 14, 1937, Pope Pius XII’s encyclical, “Mit Brennender Sorge” (“With Burning Concern”), denounced the German breach with the provisions of the Concordat and criticized Nazi ideology but, since the statement did not mention Jews per se, it became a benign document even though it was read in German Catholic pulpits. The pope never denounced the Nazis for the extermination of the Jews but instead maintained the Vatican’s position of neutrality, refusing even to side with the Allied nations that castigated the Nazis for their war crimes.3 In Germany, Pastor Paul-Gerhard Braune, a leader in the Lutheran Church, sent a memorandum to the Reich Chancellery on July 9, 1940, questioning the efficacy of the euthanasia program. Pastor Braune wondered how the Nazis would decide who were the asocials, the abnormal, or the hopelessly sick who had to be exterminated.4 The Nazis charged him with government sabotage and arrested him for protesting. Theophil Wurm, the Protestant bishop of Württemberg, sent letters to the minister of justice to protest the euthanasia program as a violation of Christian faith. On August 1, 1940, Konrad Grober, the Archbishop of Freiburg, also complained of the policy to the minister of the interior, which became the impetus for the pope to condemn euthanasia. The pope exhorted the German bishops to protest, but no open declaration was forthcoming.5 Although many church leaders reacted passively toward the Reich and obeyed the Nuremberg Laws, a few German priests, nuns, bishops, and ministers challenged Nazi anti-Semitism. Pastor Martin Niemöller of the Confessional Church in Dahlem was sent to prison and to concentration camps Sachsenhausen and Dachau from 1937 until 1945 because of his dissenting views about Germany’s religious policies. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant theologian who had spoken in the church against the persecution of the Jews ever since Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, increased his political resistance after Kristallnacht.6 Bonhoeffer was a pacifist who desired Germany’s defeat in the war. Resisting National Socialism on genuinely Christian grounds, Bonhoeffer claimed that he refused to submit to what he considered to be a pagan totalitarian state. He joined the underground resistance movement and called for the removal of the Fuehrer. In April 1943, he was sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he was hanged. Bishop Wurm, who earlier supported the Reich as a bulwark against communism, later protested the murder of the Jews in a letter he wrote to the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior on January 28, 1943. On March 14, 1943, he sent a letter to the Reich minister of the interior, complaining that no one should be deprived of their home or possessions without civil or military judicial adjudication. Finally, on July 16, 1943,

Resistance from the Clergy

105

the Lutheran bishop wrote to Hitler, arguing that extermination of nonAryans stood in contrast to the Commandments of God and undermined the foundation of all Western thought and life.7 Of the Catholic clergy in Germany, Dompropst Bernard Lichtenberg of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin was the most outspoken against Nazi policies. On the morning after Kristallnacht, he prayed for the persecuted Jews.8 Despite being threatened by Gestapo agents in his church, Father Lichtenberg continued to recite daily prayers for the Jews. He declared that deportation of Jews was irreconcilable with Christian moral law. While searching his apartment, the police found evidence of an undelivered sermon that was to argue that the Jews were not the enemy of the Volk that Nazi propagandists had led the population to believe. After serving two years in prison for abuse of the pulpit, he was sentenced to Dachau in October 1943. Too weak to survive the journey, he died en route to the concentration camp. Also demonstrating great courage among the Catholic hierarchy was Archbishop Joseph Frings of Cologne. On December 12, 1942, he issued a pastoral letter, to be read in all parishes of his diocese, arguing that every person has a right to life despite the will of the state. Archbishop Frings noted that a denial of these rights, even in times of war, is an injustice not only to foreigners, but also to the German people. Frings’s boldness resulted in a pastoral letter of August 8, 1943, in which other Catholic bishops condemned genocide and evoked the Ten Commandments as the law of nations.9 Thus, they stressed that murder was against God’s law, which meant that even prisoners of war, victims of the euthanasia program, Jews, and foreigners who are innocent but not of German blood had a right to life. The sharpest attacks on Nazi policies by the German clergy came from Clemens August von Galen, the Bishop of Münster. His sermon on July 13, 1941, condemned the Gestapo both for imprisoning its victims without the opportunity to defend themselves and for overstepping divinely imposed limits; he predicted that if justice is not restored, Germany would perish from inner corruption and rottenness.10 The bishop also sent telegrams of protest about the tactics of the Gestapo to the Reich minister of the interior, the Reich minister of justice, Reich Marshal Göring, and the Reich Chancellery. In a speech from the pulpit on July 20, 1941, von Galen complained of the Gestapo’s raids on monasteries in Münster and urged his minions to obey their consciences even if they have to disregard orders from the state. He stated, “It may be that obedience to God and conscience will cost us our lives, our freedom and our homes. But let us die rather

106 Staging Holocaust Resistance than sin.”11 Bishop von Galen’s sermon of August 3, 1941, noted that the Lord commanded that humans should not kill except in instance of war or legitimate defense. He thus reasoned that the Nazi euthanasia program, which he equated with murder, blasphemed against the Catholic faith, provoked the wrath of God, and should not be enforced by moral citizens. Since von Galen was the spiritual leader of over two million German Catholics, his sermons were widely disseminated and even circulated to Nazi soldiers on the Russian front. Martin Bormann suggested that von Galen be executed, but Goebbels intervened, claiming that the death of such a distinguished clergymen would divide the country at a time when the nation needed unity.12 Nevertheless, the Nazis, having met their quotas of deaths for the mentally disabled, abandoned the euthanasia program on August 24, 1941, perhaps partly due to the protests of the clergy led by the courageous Bishop von Galen.13 In France, when Jews were rounded up for deportation in July 1942, Cardinal Suhard appealed to Marshal Pétain to maintain “the exigencies of justice and the rights of charity.”14 Feeling that this protest was not strong enough, other clergymen got involved. Cardinal Gerlier wrote to Pétain on August 19, and Pastor Boegner drafted an appeal the following day. Jules-Gérard Saliège, the archbishop of Toulouse, in a pastoral letter read in all parishes of his diocese on August 23, 1942, disparaged the Nazis for abusing the Jews and separating their families during deportation; this pastoral epistle was published in Franc-Tireur, Combat, Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien, La Verité, Libération, Le Populaire, and L’Insurgé. On August 30, Monsignor Pierre-Marie Théas, bishop of Montauban, read a statement in his diocese proclaiming all men as brothers while denouncing the Nazis’ inhumane treatment of non-Aryans. The bishops of Marseilles, Nice, and Albi, as well as Cardinal Gerlier of Lyons, also lodged official protests; Gerlier urged the clergy of his diocese to protest from their pulpits against the deportations. The French clergy concealed Jews in monasteries and convents, assisted Jews to escape to Switzerland, prepared forged documents, and alerted Jews to scheduled deportations; many of them were arrested for their efforts, and some even paid for their humanism with their lives. Archbishop Gerlier and the Jesuit Father Pierre Chaillet of Lyon sponsored the anti-Nazi L’Amitié Chrétienne, which focused on rescuing Jewish children from the clutches of the Nazis. One of Cardinal Gerlier’s clergymen, Abbé Alexander Glasberg, concealed Jews in the mountains and rescued two thousand of them from French concentration camps.15 Father Superior Charles Devaux and Pastor Vergera managed to save hundreds of

Resistance from the Clergy

107

Jews, sending them to live with gentile families while providing all of the necessary expenses. Father Marie-Benoit, the Capuchin priest, converted his monastery into a rescue agency that forged passports, distributed hundreds of identity cards, falsified certificates of baptism, and smuggled Jews into Spain and Switzerland. In Nice, Father Benoit won the support of Italian officials and therefore was able to transport thousands of Jews to the Italian Zone. Throughout Western Europe, clergymen protested against the Nazis and rescued Jews. In Belgium, Abbé Joseph André of Namur, supported by the bishop of Namur, Monsignor Charue, provided food and necessities for Jewish children that he was hiding from the Nazis. The Catholic group Notre Dame de Sion hid two hundred Jewish children in Belgian convents. Father Edouard Froidure rescued three hundred children and provided them with new names and birth certificates; for his generosity, the Germans sent him to five prisons and three concentration camps.16 Cardinal Joseph-Ernest van Roey, the primate of Belgium, in a meeting of Catholics in Belgium, stressed that Catholics were obligated to work against an oppressive Nazi regime. In Norway, on November 11, 1942, the Lutheran bishops and several other Protestant sects sent a letter of protest to Quisling, noting that the arrests of Jews violated national laws that protected basic human rights. The proclamation was circulated in Norway and Sweden while being read on the British Broadcasting Company’s radio programs. In the Netherlands, Nazi policies were strongly condemned by the Catholic and the Calvinist Churches. As early as October 1940, the churches protested both the dismissal of Jewish officials from government posts and anti-Jewish measures imposed by the Nazis. On July 11, 1942, Protestant and Roman Catholic clergymen sent an official protest to the commissioner of the Reich about the deportations followed by a reading of the statement in the churches.17 Although the deportations continued in Norway, these proclamations by the clergy stirred the consciences of moral citizens who became committed to helping Jews to survive. Despite the Vatican’s neutrality, Italian clerics hid Jews in schools, convents, churches, and 115 monasteries. The Vatican did offer to pay whatever amount of gold toward the fifty kilograms that the Nazis wanted for ransom; in addition, once the deportations of the Roman Jews were underway in October 1943, the Vatican provided sanctuary to thousands of Jews. At his Capuchin convent, Father Benoit saved many Jews by providing them with false identity papers. The underground movement, led by Bishop Nicolini, Padre Rufino Niccacci, and Don Brunacci, hid many Jews in convents and monasteries throughout Italy. Although many priests

108 Staging Holocaust Resistance in Italy were arrested and several executed, the clergy, with help from the largely Catholic population, rescued nearly forty thousand Jews from death.18 In Hungary, Nuncio Angelo Rotta repeatedly intervened with Admiral Horthy on behalf of the Jews in Budapest. When the deportations began on May 15, 1944, Rotta wrote to the Hungarian Foreign Office, pleading with the Hungarian government to cease collaborating with a Nazi regime that violated the conscience of a Christian society.19 On June 6, the nuncio also issued an official protest, announced by the British Broadcasting Company, against the deportation of the aged and the infirm. Realizing that his pleas fell mostly on deaf ears, the nuncio decided to take matters into his own hands, When another series of deportations instigated by the fascist Arrow Cross began in late 1944, Rotta, with the help of courageous young priests, monks, and nuns, sheltered Jews in Jesuit colleges and in foreign missions, issued safe conduct passes, and forged identity papers to save as many Jews as possible. In Southern Europe, the deportations frequently galvanized the church to act on behalf of the Jews. In Greece, the Orthodox Church used its considerable influence to oppose anti-Jewish legislation and to help rescue Jews. Nuncio Andreia Cassulo of Bucharest pleaded with the Rumanian authorities to defy the Nazis and made a visit to the deportees in Transnistria to offer his support. In Bulgaria, when the government began excluding Jews as citizens of the state in November 1940, the Orthodox Church protested. When the Nazis forced Jews to wear the Yellow Star in September 1942, the bishop of Sofia, Monsignor Stephan, delivered a sermon against the decree, which began a civil disobedience movement that forced the Bulgarian government to reconsider its anti-Jewish ordinances. When the deportations began in early 1943, Bishop Monsignor Kiril, in the province of Plovdiv, threatened to lie down on the railway lines if the planned operations continued. In Eastern Europe, the clergy’s defiance of Nazism was an even more courageous act, since the Nazis did not hesitate to execute individuals who supported the Jews there. In fact, several priests were murdered or arrested by the Nazis for their efforts to aid Jews. The Polish Catholic clergy were invaluable in providing Jews with certificates of baptism, which saved many lives, and with Aryan papers.20 Nuns concealed Jewish children in convents and orphanages throughout Poland. In August 1942, during the deportations from Warsaw, the Catholic organization FOP issued a declaration of protest against the governments and institutions worldwide that remained silent during the Shoah. The proclamation called upon Polish

Resistance from the Clergy

109

Catholics to denounce the crimes being committed by the Nazis.21 In nearby western Russia, Andreas Szeptycki, the archbishop of Lwow, threatened Ukrainians with divine punishment for assisting the Nazis, prohibited religious services to those who embraced Nazi genocide, and wrote a letter to Himmler protesting the use of Ukrainian police as auxiliary forces for the SS.22 On Szeptycki’s orders, 150 Jews, most of them children, were hidden in convents and monasteries in Eastern Galicia; he also stored hundreds of Torah scrolls that were sacred to the Jewish community. Celeste R. Raspanti is an American playwright who was a former nun and college professor. During her theater career, she produced and directed plays, as well as performed in many of them. She has written several full and one-act dramas, including the book and lyrics for an operetta, children’s plays, and chamber theater pieces. Raspanti’s interest in the Holocaust began with her 1971 play I Never Saw Another Butterfly, based on the saga of Holocaust survivor Raja Englanderova and oral history testimonies from survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. A few years later, Raspanti wrote The Terezin Promise, a one-act play for young audiences that examines how the drawings of the children of Theresienstadt were preserved. No Fading Star, Raspanti’s 1979 forty-five-minute one-act Holocaust drama about nuns in Germany who resisted the Nazis, was directed by Stephen Phillips for its premiere at Centre Stage in Minneapolis. No Fading Star takes place in the Maria Morgenstern convent near Baden, Germany, in an unspecified year during the Holocaust. In the “Introductory Note” to the play, Raspanti dedicates No Fading Star to those Jews who provided testimony to being saved when they were children by the nuns in the convents of Germany.23 The play depicts the conflicts the nuns endured in making choices between loyalty to the German state and adherence to the humanitarian laws of God. Mother Franziska has been operating an active underground network in her convent, where Jewish children are being hidden from the Nazis until they can be transported to the border to safety. The nuns have also been creating false birth certificates and Aryan passports for the sequestered children. The Gestapo is aware of the nuns’ subversive activities and thus has conducted unannounced searches of the convent with plans of shutting it down. Two new children, thirteen-year-old David Sachs and his eight-year-old sister Miriam, have just been admitted to the convent, even though having a young male join the nunnery was not only unusual, but also a threat to security. Mother Franziska is friends with David and Miriam’s mother, Gerda, having gone to the university with her, where

110

Staging Holocaust Resistance

they bonded playing together in the school band. After watching the Nazis burn the Hebrew school and the synagogue and after learning that all of their friends had been deported, Gerda and Martin Sachs, aware of their fate, attempted to save their children from the flames by sending them to Mother Franziska. Upon meeting Mother Franziska, David, about to be bar mitzvahed, takes offense that he has to hide in the convent like a little boy. David, assuming an adult role, argues that he must return to Baden and help his family, even though he understands that Miriam must remain behind. Moreover, David asserts that he needs to return for his Bar Mitzvah and wants to share responsibilities with his father, explaining to Mother Franziska, “I promised him I would stand and say to anyone—I am a Jew. I will not hide I am a Jew, and I will stand like a man” (21). Mother Franziska, on the spur of the moment, makes plans to Bar Mitzvah David in the convent, despite the dangers of doing so. Mother Franziska clearly has risked her life to save the Jewish children victimized during the Shoah. She has violated German laws by hiding Jewish children from the Nazis and by creating false documents for them, such as identity papers and birth certificates. Moreover, as convent worker Klaas Shoeffler admits, given the meager living conditions for the nuns, he has to bargain and connive to get clothing, food, and medicine for the children—all supplied at the expense of the nuns. Furthermore, the nuns live in constant fear of being betrayed by friends and relatives who would not hesitate to turn traitors to the state over to the Gestapo. This very real fear of betrayal is demonstrated in the play by the relationship between Mother Franziska and her younger sister Lisl. Lisl is a Nazi sympathizer married to the recently promoted Captain Moeller. Torn between her love for her sibling and her hatred of Lisl’s despicable allegiance to Nazi ideology, Mother Franziska tells Klaas, “I despise what she stands for—and yet, I still grieve for what she is” (15). During their têteà-tête, Lisl explains that she has come to the convent to discover whether her sister is willing to serve the Fatherland. Lisl accuses her sister of hiding Jews in the convent and warns her that the penalty for doing so is death. She notes that when Maria and Karl Greiner were discovered hiding Jews in their storage room, they were beaten, forced to wear the Yellow Star, and then relocated to Dachau. Lisl urges Mother Franziska to be loyal to the Party, to which the latter responds, “I don’t recognize loyalty to any party that assumes the power to brand and destroy people—I don’t recognize that as any kind of German loyalty I know” (34). Lisl argues that her sister’s defiance is for naught, for the Third Reich will never be stymied

Resistance from the Clergy

111

by one person’s scruples. Mother Franziska defends the idea of following God’s law rather than Nazi ideology and tells Lisl, “I’m not responsible for this war—but I am responsible for myself, my conscience” (34). Lisl, exasperated at losing a battle of wills with her more rational sister, resorts to an appeal for sympathy, claiming that as the wife of an army officer ready to climb higher ranks, she is scrutinized more carefully, and any hint of disloyalty to the regime would be disastrous. Mother Franziska astutely responds, “So you think I don’t know about fear. You’re wrong. I’m afraid because every day I take my life into my own hands, into my hands, freely, because, Lisl, I am afraid not to” (37). Mother Franziska realizes that there are certain values worth dying for, and she chooses to do what she considers to be God’s will: keeping the convent, the House of God, open to everyone. She concludes her discussion with Lisl by stating, “It’s the only courage I know, the only strength, to do what I do because I’m afraid not to do it. I am afraid of what I would become if I were not to care, not to dare to love enough—to risk . . . ” (37). Mother Franziska thus chooses to die with dignity rather than succumb to the values of a corrupt Reich. Mother Franziska is accosted by the Nazis twice in the play, and each encounter demonstrates her courage and her will to prevail against a totalitarian regime that is destroying her country. During the first encounter, Sergeant Heimlich explains that he has been promoted because, as a native of Baden, he knows how to keep the Jews “under control.” Sergeant Heimlich tells Mother Franziska that the Gestapo suspects she has been harboring Jews, so he has orders to search the premises. Calling him by his first name, Mother Franziska appeals to his emotions, to any trace of conscience that is still viable for an indoctrinated Nazi: “Manny Heimlich! You are talking to the woman who treated your acne three years ago—and sent you off with a scolding—and an apple when you climbed our orchard walls” (24). Sergeant Heimlich promises to return later and report the incident to Colonel Lauber if he is not allowed to search the premises, but Mother Franziska dismisses him with “Premises! This is the House of God, not public premises to be violated” (24–25). Mother Franziska realizes the danger and plans to release David and Miriam to the Friebergs’ farm, where they can hide before the Gestapo return to the convent. Mother Franziska makes preparations for the forging of fake birth and baptismal certificates for both children. However, as promised, before David and Miriam depart, David is going to be bar mitzvahed that night as the evening star fades. When Sister Monika’s mention of the fading star evokes the spirit of the Holocaust, Mother Franziska, insisting that the Jews should not vanish, says, “No! No fading star, but

112

Staging Holocaust Resistance

David’s star” (28–29). This reference to the obliteration of the Star of David pays homage to the Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives as a humanitarian gesture to their fellow human beings. When Colonel Lauber enters with his men, he explains to Mother Franziska that she can avoid a search of the convent if she surrenders the Jews he suspects are hidden there. Mother Franziska tells Colonel Lauber that his threats do not frighten her, and as the sole authority of the monastery, she cannot take orders from the Gestapo. She then reminds him that he is on holy grounds and is treading on the will of God. Nevertheless, the Nazis search the convent except for the chapel where the nuns are ostensibly praying. The tension is palpable as the search threatens the serenity of the Christian rituals. However, in the chapel, David has been reading the Torah for his Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Colonel Lauber learns that his men discover nothing, but at his disappointment in not finding Jews, he threatens to carry out his orders and cleanse the country of “the Jewish pestilence” (46), even if that means burning down the convent at a future date. Mother Franziska challenges the brute force of the Nazis: “So history repeats itself, destruction by fire, conquest by holocaust” (46). The scene demonstrates how members of the clergy risked their lives during the Holocaust to defend humanitarian values and provides audiences with the notion that the results of the Shoah may have been different if more individuals had defied the Nazis. The denouement of the play is uplifting. After Colonel Lauber accuses the nuns of being deceptive, Mother Franziska counters with “No, I think not. The truth is very simple—we are what we are . . . ” (47) and then proudly asserts, “And more important, we do what we must do” (47). As Colonel Lauber departs, Mother Franziska notes, “The evening star seems especially bright tonight” (47). We are presented with the final image of Klaas accompanying Miriam and David to the safety of the border as Mother Franziska proudly rings her old school bell to match the joyful chiming of the Vesper bells. Momentarily, the evening star is not fading for the Jews thanks to the humanitarian spirit of nuns who defied the odds of military force so that justice could prevail in a country they so cherished. New York–based playwright Arthur Giron comes from a Roman Catholic household in which his mother’s family descended from Bavarian Jews. He was the founding member of the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York, which is dedicated to the development of new plays. Of the fifteen plays that Giron has written, Edith Stein has been his most noteworthy effort; however, he won the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Logue Award for Outstanding Achievement for his play Becoming Memories, a

Resistance from the Clergy

113

portrayal of small-town American life from 1911 to the present. From 1983 until 1996, he taught at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was head of the Graduate Playwriting Program. He left Carnegie Mellon in 1996 when his only son passed away. In an email message that Giron sent to me, he explained why he left the university: My wife, Mariluz, whose career was in Hispanic television, was asked by HBO to do creative campaigns and marketing when that cable network expanded to include Hispanic subscribers in the U.S. I returned to be with her in New York so she wouldn’t have to give up her work. It was important for her to be working during such a terrible mourning period.24

Giron became interested in Edith Stein in the 1950s, when, as a theater major at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), he began doing research on her after seeing her photograph in a Catholic magazine. Giron began writing Edith Stein in 1969 while taking a playwriting class at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he was going to night school to get his master’s degree. Giron later admitted, “My model was Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which structurally depicts a passionate war between two worlds, Egypt and Rome. In my play, these became the Convent with its women versus the Third Reich with its legions of warriors.”25 The play opened at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage during October 1969 in a three-act production directed by Zelda Fichandler. In 1979, Lee Sankowich, best known for his highly successful production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, staged a revised draft of Edith Stein at the Zephyr Theater in Los Angeles; this version pared the play of many of its characters and subplots yet deepened the dramatic encounters between Edith and Karl-Heinz. In 1987, during the controversy over the maintenance of a Carmelite convent named for Edith on the grounds of Auschwitz, Giron revised the play once more. In January 1988, the play was produced at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, again directed by Sankowich with a cast featuring Helena Ruoti as Edith and Jim Abele as Karl-Heinz; this production was the most financially successful in the Pittsburgh Public Theater’s thirteen-year history. This version, now consisting of a prologue followed by twenty-one scenes in two acts that extend for two hours, also had a limited run at the Zephyr Theater in San Francisco in July 1989. Another major production, albeit not as successful, debuted in January 1994, when the Jewish Repertory Theater in New York City staged the play. In 1998, the play, staged by the Actors Co-Op, ran for almost two months at the Crossley Theatre in Hollywood, California.

114

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Edith Stein has been widely discussed in schools, churches, synagogues, and community groups throughout the United States. The play is in the Vatican library; Arthur and his wife Mariluz were even invited to the Vatican, where they were received warmly by Pope John Paul II. Edith Stein was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Breslau, Germany, on October 12, 1891—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in which Jews traditionally take stock of the sins they committed that year.26 She was raised by her mother after her father, only forty-eight years old, died suddenly when Edith was only two. Edith, like her religious mother, spent long hours praying in the synagogue and observed the Sabbath and all of the Holy Holidays. However, as a teenager, having received no formal Jewish education (unlike her brothers), she began to consider herself an atheist. As a gifted student, Edith entered the University of Breslau in 1911 to study psychology but soon became intrigued by Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenologist movement was aimed at the study of knowledge free from preconceived perceptions, especially those adopted by the disciples of empiricism, skepticism, and relativism. Stein, convinced that the study of psychology was an errant way to explain life’s mysteries, abandoned the University of Breslau in 1913 to study with Husserl at Göttingen University. Husserl preached that philosophy practiced with the rigor of science could lead to Truth and thus trained his students to view all phenomena objectively. At this time, Stein also became aware that Jewish professors at the university were becoming Christians in order to advance their careers. At Göttingen, Stein was introduced to phenomenologist Max Scheler, whose lectures imbued her with the spiritual beauty of Catholicism, the notion of empathy breaking through all systems to reveal the fullness of “self,” and the need to surrender one’s will to God. When World War I began, Edith volunteered for duty; she served in a military hospital, caring for Austrian soldiers suffering from dysentery, cholera, and typhus. She treated the sick so dutifully that she was awarded a medal of valor for her selfless service. In 1916, while continuing her studies with Husserl, who had a professorship at the University of Freiburg, Edith completed her doctoral dissertation on “The Problem of Empathy” and graduated summa cum laude, the only doctoral student so honored in Germany that year.27 In 1921, Stein read the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, the founder of the Carmelite Order. Edith found in Teresa’s autobiography the confirmation of her own belief that God is not a deity of the intellect but reveals Himself only when one surrenders to Him; this notion coincided with Stein’s study of empathy, which she now understood to be “truth.” Making a decision

Resistance from the Clergy

115

that was difficult for her Jewish mother to accept, Edith was baptized on January 1, 1922, and assumed “Teresa” as her baptismal name. For the next ten years, Stein taught German at the Dominican sisters’ school in Speyer and spent considerable time translating Thomas Aquinas’s De Veritate into German. During a brief stint teaching at the Educational Institute in Münster in 1932, she began feeling the effects of anti-Semitism. Her application for a professorship at the University of Freiburg was denied, largely because Martin Heidegger, one of Husserl’s former students now at Freiburg, was a confirmed Nazi supporter. In her book on Stein, Waltraud Herbstrith astutely noted that during this period, “[a]nti-Semitic persecution was pushing Edith Stein closer to the realization of her unique vocation, the merging of Judaism and Christianity into a single redemptive unity.”28 Stein even requested that Pope Pius XI prepare an encyclical that would counteract the rising anti-Semitism in Germany; however, the pope refused to grant her an audience. After losing her position at Münster due to anti-Semitism, Stein, who had been rejected for jobs throughout Germany and had been condescendingly referred to as “the philosopher lady,” was accepted into the Carmelite convent in Cologne on October 14, 1933, under the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. At the convent, she was given released time from her duties to write a book, Endliches und ewiges Sein, that focused on the fusion of the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl. She took her vows on Easter Sunday in April 1935. Modeling her behavior on Teresa of Avila, Stein prospered for five years in the convent. She considered herself to be akin to Queen Esther pleading before King Ahasuerus, and thus, as conditions worsened for Jews in Germany, Stein believed that she was separated from her people in order to intercede for them before the fascist “kings,” as well as before the heavenly “king.” Stein remained loyal to her Jewish origins and never denied being a Jew even when she was in the convent.29 She displayed her Jewish identity publicly and certainly did not try to evade persecution as a Jew by hiding in a convent. Realizing that the Nazis were more ruthless than any of the biblical kings, the prioress of the convent had Stein transferred to the Dutch convent of Echt. on December 31, 1938, shortly after the destruction of Kristallnacht. In 1940, when the Nazis occupied Holland, Stein applied for a visa to emigrate. Stein’s sister Rosa was also in the convent at Echt. Although the Carmel of Le Pacquier in Switzerland accepted her application, Edith refused to leave without her sister, who was not able to find accommodation. After the bishop of Utrecht prepared a pastoral letter that was read in all of the Dutch parishes exhorting the Nazis not to deport Jews who had converted to Christianity, the Nazis took revenge.

116

Staging Holocaust Resistance

On August 2, 1942, they began arresting all Jewish Catholics in Holland, which included Edith and her sister. When Rosa appeared disoriented during the arrest, Edith comforted her, saying, “Come, Rosa. We go for our people.” After Edith’s arrest, the nuns found a card she had written in her cell with the words that she had offered herself, Christlike, as a sacrificial expiation for the terror committed by the Antichrist so that a new order may be established.30 Stein identified with Jesus’s Jewish origins and viewed her own persecution by the Nazis as akin to the meaning of the cross. Edith and Rosa were taken to a detention center in Amersfoort and then sent to Westerbork to await deportation to Auschwitz. At Amersfoort and Westerbork, survivors recall that Edith cared for the hungry, comforted and consoled the prisoners, including the children, who were paralyzed with fear, and did whatever she could to relieve the women, separated from their husbands, of their severe depression.31 Edith Stein and her sister perished in the gas chamber at Auschwitz along with 766 Jews from Drancy on August 9, 1942.32 On August 9, 1982, the fortieth anniversary of Edith Stein’s death was marked by memorial services and honorary tributes on radio, television, and in books, journals, and newspapers. In Germany, she has been perceived as the model for the spirit of unity among Jews and Christians; as such, Germany issued a commemorative stamp in her honor in January 1983. There are schools, institutes, libraries, streets, public squares, and community centers that take her name. Stein, who offered to sacrifice herself, Christlike, for the sake of others, was beatified as a martyr by Pope John Paul II on May 1, 1987, and was canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross by the pope on October 11, 1998. In his introductory remarks during the beatification, Cardinal Hoeffner drew a parallel between Stein and Maximilian Kolbe whose martyrdoms at Auschwitz he hoped would help to “reconcile Germans and Jews.” Since Jews of the early centuries were also proclaimed martyrs by the Catholic Church (although the trend has ceased in recent history), the pope did not create a precedent in canonizing the Jewish Stein and felt that doing so would honor the Jewish victims of the Shoah and improve relations between Catholics and Jews. Moreover, the Catholic Church maintains that martyrdom is a result of odium fidei (hatred of the faith) and thus argues that the Dutch bishops that protested against the deportations in 1942 exacerbated the roundup of Jewish converts to Catholicism; true martyrdom, which cannot be willed, means dying for one’s faith when challenged to denounce it or act contrary to Christian values. Edith Stein, arguably, died to uphold the moral position of the Church and as one who was persecuted for doing so. Some

Resistance from the Clergy

117

Jewish critics, however, have argued that Stein, who aided and comforted other Jewish victims during the deportation process, certainly acted empathetically but falls short of martyrdom. For example, critic Edward R. Isser asserts, “Stein was clearly a heroic figure; she had refused to desert her sister to save herself. Her sacrifice—her refusal to escape to Switzerland— however, was not a case of religious martyrdom.”33 The argument for martyrdom centers on the idea that Stein’s death unites Christians and Jews since she, as a Jew, epitomized those who went to their deaths at the hands of the persecutors, and as a Christian, imitated Christ whose suffering represents that of Jews and gentiles. There are many highly religious Jews who would even argue that the Holocaust was a God-driven expiation for humanity’s sins; this adds fuel to the argument that Stein’s immolation was part of the price to be paid. Stein therefore becomes the icon for crucified humanity and thus deserved redemption like Christ. Finally, Stein counteracts the Nazi ideology of the supremacy of one race, and by offering herself as a sacrificial symbol of Judeo-Christian values, she became the perfect symbol that breaks down the barriers between all races and religions. In other words, as a saint, she is by definition a model for the salvation of society and represents Catholic and Jewish reconciliation as well. Edith Stein is set in Auschwitz during 1987 when the Jewish leaders worldwide were protesting against the nuns who had established a Carmelite convent there. Critics claimed that by revising the text to set the play in Auschwitz during the controversy, Giron was pandering to public opinion, thus purposefully making the play contentious to garner more appeal. Moreover, Giron is extremely selective about the background information provided to the audience. Thus, Dr. Saul Weismann, a fictional character representing the International Holocaust Committee, seems to understate the issue when he demands that the prioress close the convent, especially when the audience is not provided with the history of the Auschwitz controversy. He attempts to explain to her that Jews share ownership of Auschwitz: “Jews are Jews because we share the anguish suffered here. It is part of our collective experience. Don’t displace us. Your convent must be closed.”34 Furthermore, the convent bears the beatified Edith Stein’s name, which, to Weismann, suggests that naming a community of nuns after a Jew who converted to Catholicism venerates the idea of religious conversion. Understanding the history of the establishment of the Auschwitz convent will help to discern the intricacies of the controversy. On August 1, 1984, approximately one dozen Carmelite nuns from Poznan in central Poland

118

Staging Holocaust Resistance

moved into the Old Theater building outside the grounds of Auschwitz I, formerly used by the Nazis to store the Zyklon B gas and located close to the notorious Block 11. The following year, a Belgian Catholic group launched a fund-raising campaign to expand the convent. Jewish groups protested in 1985 in an article written for Le Soir, a Belgian daily, and were later joined by prominent French and Belgian Catholics.35 On January 30, 1986, the World Jewish Congress passed a resolution pleading with the nuns to leave their Auschwitz convent. On April 15, 1986, five prominent rabbis from Europe urged Pope John Paul II to abandon the convent project. In a meeting between international Jewish and Catholic leaders held on February 22, 1987, both sides agreed that an interfaith center should supplant any Catholic place of worship at Auschwitz, and plans were made for its erection within twelve months. A few months after Stein’s beatification in May 1987, a large cross appeared atop the Auschwitz convent building. These historical events had already taken place during the time when the play occurs in 1987. Obviously, Giron cannot be held responsible for reporting events that occurred during the Auschwitz controversy after 1987. Yet the play has taken on even more controversy since it was last revised in 1987. On July 14, 1989, Rabbi Avraham Weiss, from New York City, led a group of rabbinical students in a protest of the convent at Auschwitz. Before the rabbi and his minions were ejected from the grounds, they caused quite a disturbance; the widely reported incident aroused arguments on both sides of the issue. On August 26, 1989, Polish primate cardinal Jozef Glemp, addressing a religious gathering, proclaimed that Jewish protests against the Carmelite nuns at Auschwitz offend all Poles and claimed that Jews had the power of swaying public opinion because they controlled the mass media. In a widely publicized statement the following month, Sister Maria Teresa, the mother superior of the Auschwitz convent, reported that the nuns “are not moving a single inch.” In February 1990, new ground was broken for the interfaith center; unfortunately, the plans never came to fruition. On April 13, 1993, Pope John Paul II, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, ordered the nuns to remove the convent from Auschwitz.36 The rationale for the expulsion was that the pope apparently did not want to stir anti-Semitic feelings before the ceremonies were to take place in remembrance of the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto. The controversy over the creation of a convent at Auschwitz primarily revolves around the differences between Christians and Jews concerning how the Holocaust should be represented; each side must understand that the two religions fundamentally differ on the subject, and compromise

Resistance from the Clergy

119

is difficult. Before the middle of 1942, most of those who perished at Auschwitz were Poles, so Polish Catholics argue that they have a right to memorialize their dead since it is part of their religious doctrine—and something that Jews might not understand. Although more Jews died on the site of Auschwitz, Catholics assert that it seems petty to link the memory of suffering to numbers. In addition, Carol Rittner and John K. Roth note that most Catholics believe that prayer and penance are “required to make reparation to God” for the sins of the perpetrators.37 In short, Christians often view Auschwitz as a holy place of redemptive love and therefore stress that placing a convent there reinforces the religious dimension of Auschwitz.38 To Christians, then, the establishment of the cross at Auschwitz indicates redemption, which, like the image of Christ, provides meaning in a world of suffering and death. Catholics argue that they must share in Christ’s suffering on the cross; for them, Auschwitz is associated with Calvary. The Poles also maintain that Jews should not single out Catholic Poland for its silence during the Shoah (making penance a disgrace) but instead remind us that Western society, including the Americans and the British, practiced nonintervention as well. Besides, although there were numerous Polish blackmailers and informers that conspired with the Nazis, the Poles reiterate that they have more Righteous Gentiles represented at Yad Vashem than does any other country. Finally, the Poles argue that Auschwitz is on Polish soil, so the state has the ultimate right to determine how the extermination camp should be memorialized. During a panel discussion that coincided with the staging of Edith Stein at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1988, an audience member asked why Jews would object to the convent at Auschwitz. Giron responded, “The official position is that asserting the triumph of the Church at Auschwitz drains off the meaning of the Holocaust in terms of the Jewish experience and the uniqueness of that experience. It confuses the issue.”39 After spring 1942, the majority of those exterminated in Auschwitz were Jews; nearly 90 percent of the 1.1 million deaths in the camp were Jewish.40 Thus, as Elie Wiesel has stated, Auschwitz may not be a holy place,41 but it is unique for Jews.42 Instead, in memorials at Holocaust sites, Jews are often lumped together with people from as many as twenty different countries. Jews fear that the Holocaust may be appropriated by a Christian interpretation of the event and the memory of the vast numbers of Jewish deaths obliterated. In the play, Weismann, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, expresses these sentiments to the prioress, saying, “Yes, yes non-Jews suffered here, but a convent in this place clouds over the magnitude of our catastrophe” (51). This notion of tainted Holocaust memory has become much more

120 Staging Holocaust Resistance prevalent with the increase of Holocaust denial. Particularly in postwar communist Poland, there was an anti-Semitic fervor while the Holocaust remained largely unacknowledged until the 1980s. Moreover, Jews view the symbol of the cross differently than do Christians. To Jews, the cross of the convent reminds them that a long history of anti-Semitism provided the seeds for the Holocaust, and as Ronald Modras has inferred, “More than any other country in this century, Poland represents the longstanding antisemitism of the Roman Catholic church.”43 Jews understand that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were Christians and that many Poles aided and abetted the Nazis or provided latent support for their extermination plans.44 Furthermore, Jews did not understand what the nuns were supposed to be praying for at Auschwitz. Jews question the notion that the nuns were praying to make reparations for Christian sinners who practiced genocide when visible evidence indicates that Poles did little to actually punish the Polish perpetrators after the war. Others might argue that Jews did a lot of praying at Auschwitz before they died—all to no avail. Why would anyone believe that praying there today would make any difference? Thus, they argue, silence is a more appropriate response. Albert H. Friedlander has remarked that many Christians feel as if they must share Christ’s suffering on the cross, but “Jews cannot do this. Auschwitz cannot be explained to them by Calvary.”45 Calvary is the resurrection; Jews associate Auschwitz with death and suffering, not resurrection. Jews do not believe that Auschwitz can be prayed away by a group of nuns. Instead, they wish that there were more Bonhoeffors, Niemöllers, Kolbes, von Galens, Wurms, and Lichtenbergs. As Yizhak Arad, chair of Yad Vashem and himself a survivor, noted, “Where were these churches when we really needed them?”46 Jews thus wondered whether it was appropriate for a church that was relatively silent during the Holocaust to establish such a convent. Even if we understand the controversy surrounding the idea of setting the play in the Carmelite convent outside the gates of Auschwitz, Edith Stein remains problematic. Giron states in the preface to the play that Edith Stein “is not a documentary depiction of her life, but an attempt to dramatize the conflicts she faced” (6). Susanne M. Batzdorff, Edith Stein’s niece, admitting that Giron is allowed poetic license, noted that after reading the play, she found it difficult to recognize her aunt in the way she was depicted theatrically.47 Critics of the play believe that Giron selectively decided what he wanted to stage, omitted certain facts about the Auschwitz convent controversy, and freed himself from historical accuracy, thus manipulating Edith Stein for his own purposes.48

Resistance from the Clergy

121

After the opening scene at Auschwitz, we flash back to Edith’s prior life as we get glimpses of how she developed her philosophy toward empathy. We hear about how Stein was deeply affected by nursing the troops during World War I and received a medal from the Kaiser for dedicated service. We see her at home in Breslau writing a Purim play for children to remember when Haman persecuted the Jews of Persia. In the Purim play, Queen Esther, fasting and praying, becomes a noble figure asking the king to spare the Jewish people, obviously a precursor to Stein’s own intervention during the Holocaust, writing to the pope to plead for an encyclical. Edith’s mother remarks that her daughter, looking for answers, rejected the study of psychology and turned instead to philosophy. Stein’s empathy is again evoked in her relationship with her former childhood friend Hannah Reinach, who confides to Edith, “I am not alone in the world! Edith, you are the only person who has come to visit me since my husband was killed” (21–22). Edith, rejected by a German society that is paternalistic and anti-Semitic to the extent that she is unable to find a teaching position because of those prejudices, decides to emulate Queen Esther, who went to live with the king in his castle to get his ear. Edith tells Clara, her niece, “See, that’s what I want to do. Get God’s ear. Implore Him to save our people from destruction. I’m going to be praying for your well being day and night” (30). Understanding that her entrance into the convent will revolt her pious mother, Edith contends, “I have the will to reverse history. The Cross falls on my people—please, I want to bear their pains in my body” (31). Once Giron has given us glimpses of Edith’s past and her personality, he begins to focus on the serious issues of the play, reflected in the dialectic that results from the interaction between Edith and the committed Nazi Karl-Heinz. When Giron studied drama with Edwin Wilson, who later became the theater critic for the Wall Street Journal, Wilson told him that a play is as great as the pressure put on the main character. This notion became the impetus for the way Giron portrayed Edith in the play. Giron wrote, “I can not think of a greater pressure than what Edith must have endured being in the convent while her Jewish people were suffering outside.”49 Edith had been questioned several times by the Gestapo, who suspected subversive activity within the convent. KarlHeinz, who represents the Nazis’ Ministry of Church Affairs, becomes Edith’s spiritual nemesis. In their confrontations, Giron puts Edith under enormous pressure. Giron explained to me, “Edith was being tested and had to respond. She was also faced with the great question, ‘Can you love your enemy?’”50

122 Staging Holocaust Resistance Karl-Heinz is first seen confined to a Nazi prison chapel for having a sexual affair with a Jew. Hitler and the SS believed that they could control history through spiritual powers that were based in Nordic mythology. Like Edith, Karl-Heinz is a spiritual person (he is first seen dressed as Christ), but his preferred choice of religion is the Nazi regime. Karl-Heinz longs to make amends for his minor transgression and believes that immersion into National Socialism is the means for doing so. In contrast, Edith enters the convent to atone for the sins of the Nazis. She explains the reason for taking her vows as a bride of Christ: “I offer my whole being so that the reign of the anti-Christ will end. And so that justice will be restored and fascism destroyed!” (34). Born on Yom Kippur, Edith now plans to spend the rest of her life seeking atonement. Edith also identifies with Teresa of Avila, who descended from Jews, and with Christ, who was also a Jew. Giron makes it clear that Edith entered the convent not to escape Nazi persecution, but to surrender herself to God. She explains to the prioress, “I am not here to flee from the world. But to bear the Cross for those who are in the world” (36). Giron thus sets up the confrontation between two deeply religious individuals whose sense of spirituality stems from totally different sources that defy compromise. In scene 8, Giron creates a visible differentiation contrasting the spirituality of the Nazis and Edith’s commitment to Christ. Edith wears a wedding gown to enter into holy communion with the Church. KarlHeinz wears a Nazi uniform for the ceremony in which he vows loyalty to Hitler and the German Reich. Edith repeats the refrain, “In order to arrive at everything, desire to be nothing. Desire to be nothing.” Karl-Heinz’s spirituality involves changing life on earth by possessing everything. His refrain becomes “Superhuman destiny. Destiny” (48). During their first encounter, Edith and Karl-Heinz recognize how different they are. Karl-Heinz is a man of he world; Edith is sequestered in the convent and can speak with outsiders only at the grille and only if they are supplicants. Karl-Heinz reeks of alcohol, which he describes as “the only scent worthy of a man” (55); of course, Edith is a teetotaler. Karl-Heinz yearns for spirituality; Edith is the personification of it. Karl-Heinz works for the dark side and believes that he is doing God’s work by cleansing the nation “of the Jewish evil” (56); Edith works for the bright side, and in imitation of Christ, is a paragon for the unification of religions. The next time they meet, Karl-Heinz and Edith engage in a duel to challenge each other’s spirituality. Of course, Karl-Heinz has the upper hand since he is actually a spy for the Nazis and seeks to find Jews in the convent; Edith has to be careful lest she be discovered as a Jew and then

Resistance from the Clergy

123

deported. Nevertheless, Edith accuses Karl-Heinz of being a role player as a soldier: “Now, he is just a slave chained by an oath to render unconditional obedience to a false messiah. A German soldier is less than a man” (60). Karl-Heinz accuses Edith also of being a slave but in the service of a false messiah; Edith, quick to react to the Nazi evil that she views is endemic to all soldiers of the Reich, states that she is a slave to “the service of love” (60). Karl-Heinz teases Edith, preying on her sexuality. He has a glorified image of himself and believes that all women find him attractive. He says to Edith, “I’ll redeem you. I’ll make you forget about original sin and all those pictures of hell they’ve put in your mind” (62); Edith, however, as intelligent as she is, has the perfect rejoinder: “You make me remember them” (62). Karl-Heinz then becomes the sly tempter of a morality play as he tells Edith that the Carmelites should unite with the Nazis to forge the highest form of human existence. Karl-Heinz views himself as a ruler, a god, and sees Edith as the perfect woman to deliver the god a son. In an email message that he sent to me, Giron stated that, in this context, following his vision for the play that began with Antony and Cleopatra, “Karl-Heinz represents the Roman legions and Edith represents Cleopatra and her women.”51 Karl-Heinz urges Edith to think about abandoning the convent instead of imprisoning herself behind walls. Edith rejects the temptations but continues to work with the Nazi in the hope of saving him from evil. Although Karl-Heinz comes to the convent every day to debate with Edith, as a Jew, she naturally has mixed feelings about him. Karl-Heinz is enamored with Edith’s sense of commitment, but Edith can only view him as a wild beast and refuses to pray for him. The prioress convinces Edith that Karl-Heinz needs her prayers and reminds her that Christ loved his enemies. Sister Ruth agrees with the prioress, explaining to Edith, “We fight sin with all our strength, but love the sinner; intercede for those who murder Christ—even as they are murdering him [sic]” (72). The prioress mentions that even though Karl-Heinz may support a false ideology, no one is without hope since all individuals are capable of redemption. Edith, preferring not to violate the norms of the Order of the Carmelites before she is about to take her final vows, agrees to show love toward her potential executioner. During Karl-Heinz’s last visit to the convent, he wears a long black cape and black gloves, which to Sister Ruth suggests a comparison with evil and death. Karl-Heinz corroborates her perceptions, stating, “My great, black wings are spread over the entire convent, waiting to carry Sister Teresa away, far away to an open grave, where I will lay her down,

124 Staging Holocaust Resistance gently . . . where I can sleep with her for an eternity” (74). When Edith enters, she wonders why she has vowed to love someone who threatens the nuns, paralyzing them with fear and acting like an angel of putrefaction and death. Karl-Heinz then delivers the message that the pope has refused to write an encyclical on the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Instead of blaming the pope, Edith assumes that the Holy Father has recognized that she has become “unchristian” in her attempt to vilify the Nazis. Upon seeing Edith sinking to the floor in tears, Karl-Heinz confesses to her that she represents the perfect woman with whom he can conceive a child: “No, you’re the woman for me. Strong, a proud bearing, and guaranteed. Otherwise, they would never have allowed you to live here” (78). As Karl-Heinz pulls back Edith’s veil, he notices that she is trembling with fear. She reveals that she cannot love anyone who has imposed suffering on thousands of lives. When Karl-Heinz defends himself by stating that he has persecuted only Jews, the dialectic between Nazism and Catholicism comes full circle. Edith’s purity and sense of commitment to Christian values has forced Karl-Heinz to question his allegiance to National Socialism. He admits, “I’ve never been more alive than at this moment. You see, I’m drunk and shaking suddenly. You make me drunk and foolish and happy” (79). Their relationship leads both of them to confusion. Karl-Heinz’s evil and hatred are converted to love in the presence of Edith; concomitantly, Edith, the epitome of eternal love, turns to hatred when faced with the reality of a Nazi persecutor. In a blur of passion, as Karl-Heinz assures Edith that he only imposes suffering on Jews but not on Christians, Edith blurts out, “I AM A JEW. A Jew” (80). Despite the reality that opposites attract, this relationship can never be consummated. Edith revolts and refuses to surrender to the lure of Nazism; to do so would mean denying her identity as a Jew and negating her history and culture. Her sense of commitment to her faith is reminiscent of the clergymen who protested against National Socialism despite the overwhelming odds against them. In the last scene of the play, Edith is shown comforting her fellow female deportees in the bathhouse at Auschwitz. As Karl-Heinz orders the soldiers to collect all of the valuables from the deportees, he takes Edith’s wedding ring as well; this gesture does not weaken her resolve to be one with God. After learning that he can spare Edith from dying with the others, she instead chooses to go to her death with her fellow Jews. Her final words in the play suggest that she remains comfortable in her faith: “I rather like standing before my God this way . . . Let Him see me in all my imperfections. Let Him see me as I am” (83).

Resistance from the Clergy

125

Edith Stein was martyred for several reasons. First, she sacrificed her life for the sake of her sister Rosa, who was not allowed to accompany Edith to safety in Switzerland; however, Giron does not mention this in the play, which weakens the case for Edith’s martyrdom. However, Giron demonstrates how Edith, in saintly fashion, comforted her fellow Jews en route and at Auschwitz before their deaths. Yet the major reason for her martyrdom was that she surrendered her life as an offering for peace in the world and as a means to reconcile Judaism and Christianity, which, to the pope, was a Christlike gesture and one that defied the evil spirit of Nazism. Edith’s persona transcended the barriers of prejudice that precipitated the Holocaust, demonstrating that empathy can allow the Christian and Jew to live as one, fulfilling the biblical prophecy that the lion can lie down with the lamb. Thus, Edith Stein’s martyrdom is certainly in the tradition of the priests and pastors, such as the Bonhoeffors, Niemöllers, Kolbes, von Galens, Wurms, and Lichtenbergs, who risked their lives for their faith. What remains to be determined for Jewish audiences is whether Edith Stein did personify the unification of the two religions. According to Jewish law, Stein’s conversion to Catholicism meant that she was no longer Jewish. According to Nazi law, she was Jewish, which is the reason she was deported to her death in Auschwitz. Quite proud of her Jewish heritage, Stein never did renounce her Jewish identity; instead, as her biographer and great-aunt Waltraud Herbstrith has indicated, anti-Semitism pushed Stein to her unique vocation—“the merging of Judaism and Christianity into a single redemptive unity.”52 Stein’s life consisted of affirmation, not renunciation, so she saw no conflict in the melding of her becoming one with Jesus while maintaining her ties with the Jewish religion. Instead of trading one religion for another, she preferred to accumulate knowledge. Giron states that Edith was not raised to be a religious Jew: “She was a cultural Jew. And, as she became more Catholic, she also became more Jewish. Even in the convent, she kept the Jewish fast.”53 Giron demonstrates Edith’s continued faith in Judaism several times in the play. For example, when her mother dies, Edith recites the Mourner’s Kaddish in Hebrew (65). She explains to Karl-Heinz, “And through all my moments of belief and disbelief, the discipline of the Synagogue remained” (80). Beneath her nun’s habit remains the Star of David. Furthermore, as Giron states, “Her life came full circle when she died in community with her people.”54 Edith Stein was singled out for martyrdom because her life reflected an empathy for two religions, Christianity and Judaism, that were threatened with annihilation by the Nazis. Stein was both a Jewish martyr and a Christian martyr. As such, she is to be remembered as an icon of unity between two

126 Staging Holocaust Resistance diverse religions—a person who, like her clergy brethren who preached against Third Reich tyranny, resisted Nazi ideology even when it meant certain death. As problematic as Giron made Edith Stein’s martyrdom, in contrast, British playwright David Gooderson’s portrayal of Maximilian Kolbe’s sainthood is unequivocal. Gooderson, who studied law and English at Cambridge University, has been an actor and dramatist for over thirty years. His first play, The Killing of Mr. Toad, premiered in 1982. He has written four radio plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and five plays for children cowritten with David Conville, all of which were produced at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, London. One of these children’s plays is a musical adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, which has played two Christmas seasons in London and has twice broken box office records. He has also edited My Dearest Mouse, a facsimile edition of Kenneth Grahame’s letters to his son. As an actor, Gooderson is best known for his television work, especially his roles as Davros in Dr. Who and Simpkins the pathologist in A Touch of Frost. Gooderson’s interest in Kolbe began in the mid-1980s after attending a Church of England service and hearing the priest tell the story of Kolbe’s extraordinary self-sacrifice. Busy working on other projects, Gooderson could not devote time to pursuing his interest in the subject, but the tale remained lodged in the back of his mind for years. In 1995, he began doing what turned out to be five years of research by perusing essays and books about Kolbe, conducting interviews with Auschwitz survivors such as Dr. Jozef Garlinski, and visiting Poland twice to find more information on Francisczek Gajowniczek, the man Kolbe saved from the gas chamber at Auschwitz. Kolbe’s Gift was given a trial run by the New Farnham Repertory Company at St. Andrew’s Church in Farnham in November 2005. The play, consisting of two acts, each with eleven scenes, premiered on September 13, 2006, during New Farnham’s summer season in Brightwells Marquee, Farnham. After five performances, it moved to POSK, the Polish theater in Hammersmith, West London, and the tour ended at the Central Studio in Basingstoke. During the following year, Tenten Productions toured the play to various venues in and around London to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kolbe’s canonization. Maximilian Kolbe was born on January 7, 1894, in Zdunska Wola in the Lodz district of Poland. At the age of seventeen, he entered the Franciscan order and became Friar Maximilian. In 1912, he went to Rome to study theology and philosophy. After being ordained a priest in 1918

Resistance from the Clergy

127

and being awarded a doctor of divinity degree, he returned home to Poland the following year. In 1927, he founded the City of the Immaculata in Niepokolanow, near Warsaw, for the purpose of preaching Catholicism in the spirit of the Virgin Mary. Despite suffering from tuberculosis, Kolbe went to Nagasaki, Japan, in 1930, to establish a Catholic mission. In 1936, he returned to Niepokolanow, where he was responsible for producing and disseminating the center’s religious newspaper and magazine. During the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939, Kolbe was arrested and spent seven weeks at an internment camp at Amtitz before being allowed to return to Niepokolanow. Fourteen months later, in February 1941, the Gestapo, under orders to arrest all priests, sent Father Kolbe to Pawiak prison. During his prison stay, Kolbe was in the hospital for several weeks, where he was diagnosed as having contracted pneumonia. Kolbe was kept in incarceration for interrogation until May 28, when he was deported in a consignment of 305 prisoners sent to Auschwitz. Maximilian Kolbe, inmate number 16670, arrived in Auschwitz on May 28, 1941, and died on August 14. While in the lager, he viewed his imprisonment as a chance to minister to the most wretched of God’s creatures, extending his faith in the Lord to the other prisoners and spending considerable time comforting them. During a mandatory selection for the gas chamber, Kolbe volunteered to replace Francisczek Gajowniczek, one of the victims singled out for execution who was distraught at the realization that he would never again see his wife and children. Kolbe was tortured to death in a cramped starvation cell before being murdered with a phenol injection. In 1971, Kolbe was beatified by the Vatican. On June 7, 1979, when Pope John Paul II visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, he praised the redemptive martyrdoms of Father Kolbe and Edith Stein. Despite the fact that some of his writings contain strains of anti-Semitism, Kolbe was canonized by his fellow Pole, Pope John Paul II, as a saint on October 10, 1982.55 In his introductory note prefacing the play, Gooderson wrote, “The play is based as accurately as possible on the biographies of Maximilian Kolbe, various interviews with Francisczek and Helena Gajowniczek etc. and many other documents of the period.”56 Although much of Kolbe’s Gift is presented realistically based on historical documents, Gooderson, at times, includes an omniscient narrator who speaks directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. Much of the modern British theater has been directly modeled on Brecht’s epic theater, but Gooderson conveyed to me that Greek tragedy, not Brecht, influenced his use of the narrative voice: “I felt intuitively that attempts to dramatise Kolbe’s time in the starvation bunker would inevitably belittle it. It has to be described in the style

128

Staging Holocaust Resistance

of a Greek ‘messenger speech’ so that the audience’s imagination is given maximum scope.”57 Gooderson also alternates time in the play, as scenes are juxtaposed from the events of Kolbe’s life before his deportation to his time spent in Auschwitz to the immediate postwar period in Poland and then to 1971 Poland, where survivor Francisczek Gajowniczek (Franek) and his wife Lenna are being interviewed by communist journalist Magda Penc. Gooderson presents an intimate portrait of how Kolbe’s religious commitment contributed to his defiance of Nazism before he was deported. In scene 1, the SS colonel in Warsaw during 1940 interrogates Kolbe because he wants to “get him on our side” (2). Kolbe publishes an influential newspaper and a journal with more than one million subscribers, and since church and state are strongly linked in Poland, the SS colonel realizes the importance of having the support of such a respected Roman Catholic priest. Upon meeting Kolbe, the SS colonel urges him to sign the volkslist so Poles such as himself can be protected as citizens of the Reich. Kolbe, realizing the extent of Nazi brutality after having been interned at Amtitz, refuses, stating that he is Polish and always will be. He then displays a strong streak of defiance toward the Nazis: “Forgive my frankness, Colonel, but under no circumstance would I ever join ranks with those who have invaded my country and are terrorising my people” (5). In January 1941, at his monastery in Niepokolanow, Kolbe has been denounced to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi statements. Although thousands of priests and intellectuals have been shot or deported by the Nazis in Poland, Father Kolbe refuses to abandon his sanctuary. He tells Irena, one of his minions, “My place is here, with my Brothers. Besides I’m not a criminal” (12). Echoing Christ’s words, “Do not fear; I am with you,” Father Kolbe asserts, “I’m grateful for your concern, Irena. But our Lord didn’t run away. He stood his ground. So shall I” (13). In scene 7, which takes place during February 1941 at Kolbe’s monastery, the Polish priest gives a sermon to his brothers. Kolbe argues that although the Catholic faith is being tested by the Nazis, the Lord will provide. He mentions that the three stages of life are preparation, activity, and suffering. He confesses, “I think the third stage will be my life shortly” (21). Kolbe recognizes himself as a possible martyr but proudly proclaims, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church” (21). Like Christ, Kolbe embraces suffering for the sins of the world. He acknowledges, “I know that any suffering we may endure, whether moral or physical, will only help towards our sanctification” (22). The speech is reminiscent of Archbishop Thomas Becket’s sermon to his congregation on Christmas morning in 1170 as represented in T. S. Eliot’s 1935 play Murder in the

Resistance from the Clergy

129

Cathedral. During that “Interlude,” Becket preached that martyrdom is never the effect of a man’s will but is instead the design of God. A martyr is one who has become the instrument of God. Becket, who defied the king, like Kolbe who protested against Nazi law, understands that this sermon will be his last. Gooderson acknowledged to me that the tone of Kolbe’s sermon is similar to the archbishop’s address to his congregation, and both Kolbe and Becket are aware of their fates. However, Gooderson stressed that Kolbe is speaking to priests that will be called upon to suffer (four others went sent to Auschwitz with him) while Becket’s speech is less a battle cry for his congregation and more “academic, outlining first the theology of the Christian mass and then of martyrdom itself . . . ”58 The fundamental conflict between the church and Nazi ideology is embodied in scene 8 in which Kolbe spars with the Commandant of Auschwitz. After the war, a copy of a sworn SS act of faith was found in Auschwitz, dated April 30, 1940. The affidavit read as follows: Prayerbooks are things for women and those who wear skirts. We hate the stink of incense. It corrupts the German soul just as the Jew corrupts the German race. We believe in God but not in his representatives. That would be idolatry and paganism. We believe in our Führer and in our great Fatherland. It is for these and these alone that we wish to fight: and when we come to die, it will not be with the words, “Holy Mary, pray for us.” We live like free men and like free men we go from this world. Let our last breath be: Adolf Hitler!59

Both Kolbe and the Commandant came from religious Catholic backgrounds, and both yearned for the priesthood. Kolbe was sent to a seminary but dreamed of fighting to free Poland of Russian tyranny. The Commandant, after being punished when the priest violated the confidentiality of the Confessional by reporting an assault that he committed at school, joined the army. Kolbe swore obedience to a new mother (Mary) while the Commandant gave his allegiance to a new father (Hitler). The Commandant reiterates the SS credo and tells Kolbe, “Religion is for women and nancy-boys” (24). He repeats the SS affidavit almost verbatim: “The stink of incense corrupts the German soul just as the Jew corrupts the German race” (25). When the Commandant states, “We live like free men and like freemen we shall die!” (25), Kolbe responds, “Die for the cause we believe in!” (25)

130 Staging Holocaust Resistance In Auschwitz, Kolbe practices what he preaches and proves that he is willing to die to defend the Christian principles of humanitarianism. Kolbe, suffering from pneumonia and subjected to beatings by brutal kapos, nevertheless cared little for his own well-being and went out of his way to help others in the camp. He spends time giving away his rations and even his shoes to others that he feels are more needy. Desmond Forristal, Kolbe’s biographer, wrote, “Now at Auschwitz he [Kolbe] had the opportunity to minister to the most wretched and forsaken of God’s creatures.”60 When Teddy, the camp boxer, intervenes on Kolbe’s behalf as the priest is being hit savagely by the brutal Ukrainian Krott, Kolbe pleads with Teddy not to strike his tormentor. Kolbe prefers to leave fate to divine justice and advocates for the victims: “It’s not your business—or mine—to hand out punishment to another human being, however richly we think he deserves it. God alone is the Judge. We must leave justice to Him” (31). Kolbe views Auschwitz as a denial of God, a destructive force behind the eradication of human will, and a means of obliterating all of the world’s Christian and humanitarian values that mark us as civilized human beings. He tells Teddy that Auschwitz “is the gospel of hate, which can only be defeated by the Gospel of Love” (33) and plans to practice humanism to “undermine everything this place stands for” (33). During his internment in Auschwitz, Father Kolbe comforted the downtrodden prisoners and bolstered their faith in God. He gave them spiritual consolation and heard their confessions. One such inmate remembered that he typically confided in Kolbe after evening roll call, “and his words gave me strength and hope to bear my sufferings, along with a great and deep contentment and joy. He spoke in such a way that after hearing him I felt full of courage and felt no more fear of death, even though it threatened me all the time.”61 Kolbe also made peace among quarreling prisoners, helped others carry corpses to the crematorium, and consoled the sick and the dying in the hospital ward. Through his sense of compassion, he defied the spirit of Auschwitz. Kolbe’s supreme effort of sacrifice came after a prisoner of Block 14 escaped from the camp. To discourage any recklessness, the SS had devised a rule that ten prisoners from the blockhouse from which any prisoner fled would be selected for death. When the fugitive was not caught, the men of Block 14 were forced to stand for hours at roll call, deprived of food and water. Before their eyes, they were forced to watch as the midday soup was poured down the drain. When Franek learned that he was one of the unfortunate ten randomly chosen for the tortuous death, he realized that he would never see his wife and children again.

Resistance from the Clergy

131

Kolbe, in an unbelievable act of compassion, offered to sacrifice his life to save Franek. Kolbe and nine others are stripped naked and then crammed together like sardines in a cell ten feet square, where they languish for fourteen days without food or water. Teddy describes the torture of the starvation cell: “Nothing to do. Nothing to distract you from the utter hopelessness of your situation. Nothing but the stink of piss and shit and stale sweat. Hunger can make you passive, light-headed, but thirst maddens. The gut dries up. The veins fill with fire. You lick the sweat from your own body” (40). Prisoners in the starvation cell watched as their colleagues wasted away one by one. In desperation, they drained the contents of the sanitation bucket, drinking any urine deposited there. When the cell door was opened for daily inspection, the tortured men were fully immersed in prayers led by Father Kolbe. By the third week, only four remained alive, including Kolbe. The SS, deciding that the torture was taking too long for the men to die, gave the remaining prisoners a phenol injection to finish the ordeal. On August 14, 1941, Father Kolbe willingly offered his arm to the executioner and was cremated the next day. Martyrdom cannot be willed but must instead derive from a willingness to sacrifice one’s faith to God. To sacrifice one’s own life to save someone else represents an unbelievably rare act of supreme heroism. Adhering to the Vatican’s test for sainthood, Kolbe died at the hands of a totalitarian regime that became the arch enemy of the church. Moreover, canonization means more than merely holding up the martyr as a holy person; the individual must always be an inspiration and model of exceptional conduct for others. In an environment where death reigned supreme, Kolbe countered the evil atmosphere by inculcating others with religious faith and a sense of compassion that negated a Nazi ideology that was designed to relieve people of their sense of human dignity. Finally, many of the early martyrs were made saints because they elicited miracles of some sort. Act 2 of Gooderson’s play delves into the remarkable second life of Franek, who, through both Kolbe’s gift and the memory of the significance of that sacrifice, is inspired miraculously to survive two other near-death experiences. While Magda interviews Franek in 1971, he tells her of two miracles accrued to Father Kolbe. A woman suffering from tuberculosis and a man afflicted with blood poisoning each prayed to an image of Kolbe and were miraculously cured. In Auschwitz, Franek was beaten unmercifully by Krott who perceived him to be a coward who begged for his life and thus cheated the system. Teddy comments, “The SS pursue him without mercy.

132 Staging Holocaust Resistance Smash his teeth, break his ribs, fracture his skull” (49). When Franek feels as if he would rather commit suicide than face the punishments, Teddy reminds him, “You mustn’t give up. You have to survive. You of all people! You owe it to the priest” (49). Teddy manages to get Franek treated by Doctor Dering, a prisoner who works with Mengele in the cellar of the camp hospital. Although the doctor’s wards, most of them suffering from typhus, have been commissioned for the gas chamber, he manages to make an exception for Franek. Too weak to stand, Franek clambers up a pile of corpses and lies shivering on his mattress of decomposing flesh. Franek amazingly is hidden for nearly six months in the cellar and later admits to Teddy, “The Doc saved my life” (56). One of the SS guards respected by the Häftlinge managed to get Franek assigned to a work “Kommando” in Harmenz, two miles from the main camp. Then, in an attempt to dismantle the resistance movement in the camp, the SS dispersed the Poles; Franek was transported to Sachsenhausen, where he knew no one and had to fend for himself. In April 1945, Franek has a second miraculous near-death experience during the camp’s evacuation. On a forced death march to the north, Franek befriends a fellow prisoner whose appearance reminds him of Father Kolbe. The prisoner encourages Franek to keep marching at whatever cost since stopping will result in being shot. Ironically enough, while giving such advice, this unnamed prisoner twists his ankle and is unable to continue. He is shot immediately. Franek, however, given the encouraging advice at the right time, continues to march for fourteen days even though he is fatigued, starving, and thirsty. As inspiration, he recalls, “Father Kolbe . . . couldn’t . . . even drink . . . ” (68). Franek is eventually rescued when American troops intervene to end the death march as the Germans were about to shoot the prisoners. Franek explains to Magda that this near-death experience could not have been accidental: “Magda—please—listen—how can I make you understand that Father Kolbe was protecting me” (69; emphasis in the original). Magda herself even notes the strange coincidence: Father Kolbe was in the starvation bunker for fourteen days—the same length of time that Franek endured the forced march. When Franek reveals that only fourteen of the five hundred finished the march, the statistics indicate that only those who had been inspired and determined to live were the only possible survivors. After the war, Franek, diagnosed with a spine that had disintegrated, needed an operation; he decided to forego the surgery, and miraculously, the pain gradually disappeared. Franek attributes his recovery to “Father Kolbe’s protection” (71).

Resistance from the Clergy

133

During her interview with Franek and Lenna, Magda, the communist reporter, tries her best to undermine Kolbe as a miracle worker.62 Franek consents to the interview because he has Kolbe’s story to tell and wants the world to be aware of the great sacrifice that Kolbe made for him. Magda, on the other hand, works for the Party and is thus skeptical about the ennobling power of religion. Realizing that Franek has recently returned from the beatification ceremonies, she reduces the event to “pomp and magnificence” (44) and dismisses Franek’s fate to “amazing good fortune” (45). When Magda asks Franek what he has done after being saved by Kolbe, he admits to being an ordinary person who worked as a civil servant after the war. However, Franek puts his life into context for Magda, comparing Kolbe the martyr to Christ: “I mean he didn’t give his life for a special person—someone clever or brilliant—he gave it to me— anybody—like Jesus on the Cross—He didn’t die for the rich and powerful. He died for everyone” (46). To Magda, Franek sank to his knees, cried out, and begged for mercy, which is why Kolbe intervened. Franek swears that she is distorting the truth and reminds her that the SS despised weakness and always, with glee, sent whining, weak victims to their deaths. Magda degrades Kolbe as an anti-Semite who failed to criticize the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and even classified Jews as heretics and sinners in his magazine articles and letters. In defense of Kolbe, Franek describes his efforts to shelter Jewish refugees in his monastery in the early years of the Occupation. During the latter stages of the war, a Russian shell killed Franek’s two sons; when this story is revealed to Magda, it gives her the opportunity to undermine Father Kolbe’s sacrifice further. She states, “He chose you, Franek, because you were a family man, so that you could be reunited with your wife and children” (73). Franek finally explodes and ends the interview after dismissing Magda for her condescending attitude, coming from someone who could not possibly understand what salvation from genocide signifies. Franek has lingering doubts about what salvation from Auschwitz means for him in postwar Poland. When Lenna reminds him of the tortures and beatings that Kolbe endured, Franek understands that he has a duty to tell the story so that it is never forgotten: “I have to survive, don’t I” (14; emphasis in the original). However, his experience in the death camp blots out all other events; the terrible memories can never be erased. For example, when Lenna pours coffee down the sink, it reminds Franek of the large cauldron of soup that was wasted during the punishment while the inmates of Block 14 stood for hours at roll call. When Franek spills coffee and Lenna accuses him of being clumsy, not fit to live in a nice

134

Staging Holocaust Resistance

house, Franek recalls the SS voices: “You’re not fit to live!” (10). When Lenna removes Franek’s plate, the harrowing thought of wasting food elicits memories of Auschwitz: “No! I can eat food in any state, any time, anywhere. I’ll finish when I’m ready” (15). Franek also feels guilty that he survived while his sons died when their luck faded. He had visions of Dan becoming an engineer and Julius a writer or journalist. Franek laments to Lenna, “They’d have married, lived in Warsaw, given you grandchildren. And sometimes they’d have remembered their father, dead long ago in a concentration camp. That’s how it should have been” (75). Franek has traveled all over Poland to talk about Father Kolbe and even has plans to lecture in the United States. Nevertheless, he is so frustrated by the terrible memories of the Holocaust that he no longer wants to tour and is thinking of returning his medals of achievement. Franek does mention that Teddy, the hard-nosed boxer, has joined Father Kolbe’s monastery and has become a crusader for Christ. Teddy has turned his life around by coaching boxing to young adults and has remarried for the third time. To Franek, Teddy’s prosperity is a bit of a miracle (76), which reminds Franek of how he was saved by the grace of one courageous individual. Franek thus surrenders any notion of momentary depression, reiterating, “It all goes to show the amazing power of what Father Kolbe did” (76). Hitler knew that the church would oppose the racial state and the Nazi ideology of using genocide to rid the Reich of what he considered to be enemies of the Volk. Having a binding Concordat with the Catholic Church was one means of stifling the protests from the clergy. However, Hitler could not predict that many clergymen were to save innocent lives during the war by hiding them from the Nazis, forging identity papers, and escorting them to safety to neutral countries. Noted theologians who defied the Nazis need to be remembered as courageous resistance leaders who risked their lives to maintain their faith in humanism. Others, such as Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe, who died for their faith in humanity, will be remembered as saints whose sense of compassion should also never be forgotten.

7. Staging America’s Response to the Holocaust: Susan Lieberman and Stephen J. Morewitz’s Steamship Quanza

A

lthough American Jews were enamored with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies, Roosevelt did little to save Jews during the Holocaust. With a constant eye toward reelection, Roosevelt supported immigration policies that were popular with his constituents but which concomitantly hindered Jews from entering the United States to escape Nazi genocide. Thus, kowtowing to popular opinion, Roosevelt and his advisors acted cowardly in their efforts to save Jewish lives; in retrospect, one realizes that much more could have been done by American politicians in power during the late 1930s and early 1940s. This chapter examines Susan Lieberman and Stephen J. Morewitz’s Steamship Quanza to argue that admiralty lawyer Jacob L. Morewitz managed to singlehandedly save eighty-six European Jews from their deaths by using his legal skills to influence immigration laws created by the Roosevelt administration, demonstrating that courageous acts of individuals led the way for what American politicians could have done to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. There remains little doubt that Roosevelt was cooperative with American Jews and that Jews in the United States considered the president to be a friend. With the majority of Jews during the 1930s voting Democratic, Roosevelt understood Jews to be a part of his constituency, albeit a small percentage of it. Henry L. Feingold notes that after 1932, Jews were consistently loyal to the New Deal and never wavered from its socialistic appeal even when other ethnic groups did so after the election of 1936.1 The Jewish community knew that Roosevelt confided with many Jewish authority figures, lawyers, and politicians. Felix Frankfurter, who helped to create the

136

Staging Holocaust Resistance

American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 and was one of the few Jews to ever hold a chair at Harvard Law School (1921), was a loyal advisor to Roosevelt after the 1937 election; in 1938, Roosevelt nominated him to the Supreme Court. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., a well-respected economist, was appointed by Roosevelt to be secretary of the treasury in 1934. Bernard Baruch, formerly a wealthy Wall Street broker, advised Roosevelt on economic issues, including the New Deal. Rabbi Stephen Wise, founder of the American Jewish Congress, was a well-known confidante to Roosevelt. Political consultant Benjamin Cohen assisted Roosevelt in drafting much of the New Deal’s legislation while Justice Louis Brandeis provided legal counsel. Jews such as Felix Cohen, Abe Fortas, Jerome Frank, Sidney Hillman, Herbert Lehman, David Lilienthal, Isador Lubin, Nathan Margold, Robert Nathan, David Niles, Saul K. Padover, Anna Rosenberg, Samuel Rosenman, and Charles Wyzanski, Jr. were also members of Roosevelt’s administration. Jewish congressmen elected or reelected through Roosevelt’s political coattails in the 1930s began to hold prominent positions in the federal government: Sol Bloom chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Samuel Dickstein presided over the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, and Emanuel Celler ran the House Judiciary Committee. Jews were more conspicuous in the courts after Roosevelt appointed a few more Jewish federal judges.2 The Nazis reinforced the idea that Roosevelt was joined at the hip with the Jews. Julius Streicher, who promulgated anti-Semitic propaganda for the Nazis, disseminated the notion that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were descendants of Sephardic Jews who had fled Spain in 1492.3 The myth claimed that after settling in Holland, the Rossacampo name was changed to Roosevelt. Hitler mocked the name, calling it Rosenfeld and referring to the New Deal as “Jew Deal.” The Nazis therefore propagated the idea that the Roosevelt administration was controlled by Jewish international bankers and bolsheviks, visibly demonstrated by the number of Jews who were prominent in Roosevelt’s administration. Thus, American Jews, aware that the Nazis vilified their president, became even more comfortable with Roosevelt. Jews would not have been so enamored with the Roosevelt administration had they known the extent of the Holocaust and Roosevelt’s apathy toward the genocide. Although most American Jews knew about Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany, they were not aware of the extermination of the Jews in the occupied countries. Even as late as December 1944, a Roper poll indicated that a majority of Americans were not cognizant that Nazi technology resulted in the murder of millions of Jews.4 Roosevelt

America’s Response to the Holocaust

137

knew of the Final Solution in November 1942 after its implementation at the Wannsee Conference, yet because of political exigencies that will be explained in depth in this chapter, he refrained for fourteen months from informing the American public about the exterminations.5 Roosevelt, who understood that he could count on the Jewish vote and thus did not have to inform Jewish leaders of the extent of the Nazi extermination plans, did not care to alienate conservatives who wanted to restrict immigration to the United States. Thus, Jews and conservative Christians were placated knowing that Roosevelt planned to save as many Jews as possible by placing the emphasis on winning the war rather than rescuing Jews. American anti-Semitism was rampant during the early years of the Third Reich, thus contributing to Roosevelt’s anti-immigration policies. Several organizations, such as the Social Justice movement, William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, the German-American Bund, and the Defenders of the Christian Faith, inundated Americans with anti-Semitic vitriol. The rhetoric culminated in violence during the early 1940s, when youth gangs vandalized Jewish cemeteries, defaced synagogues, assaulted Jewish adolescents, and distributed anti-Semitic literature.6 Gallup polls taken in 1937 indicated that 47 percent of Americans would not vote for a well-qualified Jew as president, one-third thought that Jews were less patriotic than other Americans, and 53 percent indicated that they believed anti-Semitism was leveling (24 percent) or increasing (29 percent).7 In a 1938 Roper poll, 72 percent of those Americans who were polled opposed allowing Jewish refugees from Germany into the United States.8 Surveys conducted in the late 1930s indicated that one-third of Americans objected to contact with Jews, and nearly one-third believed that Jews were to blame for their own persecution in Germany.9 Polls released in 1938 revealed that one-third of the respondents found Jews to be greedy, dishonest, aggressive, clannish, and selfish; one year later, a Roper poll noted that 53 percent of those surveyed believed that Jews were “different” and should be “restricted.”10 Thus, it is no surprise to learn that in 1938, eight out of ten Americans were opposed to increasing the quotas for European refugees (often demeaned as “refu-Jews”) from Nazi terror.11 American anti-Semitism of the 1930s was exacerbated by the mainstream rhetoric of Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Canadian-born Catholic priest. With a weekly Sunday radio audience of 3.5 million regular listeners, Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic rants that characterized Jews as Christ killers became ubiquitous. His anti-Semitic weekly paper, Social Justice, had between 185,000 and 350,000 paid subscribers.12 Coughlin, with a

138

Staging Holocaust Resistance

mellifluous voice that sounded reasonable while spinning simple truths, was particularly popular with working-class Americans, many of whom were Catholics. Coughlin consistently railed against the communists who had infiltrated American capitalist society and its newly powerful trade unions. He exhorted Americans to maintain a conservative stance that supported America for Americans, rejecting foreign interference from subversive communist foes, many of whom he associated with the Jews. In particular, he castigated Roosevelt for being influenced by what he considered to be communist-inspired Jews, such as Professor Felix Frankfurter and labor leader David Dubinsky.13 Coughlin’s isolationist stance was in direct opposition to any of Roosevelt’s plans to offer more visas to foreign refugees. Since Coughlin’s supporters were Roman Catholics, which Roosevelt considered to be a major part of his electoral support, Coughlin was certainly a factor in Roosevelt’s determination of foreign policy. Moreover, Coughlin’s stance that Jews advising Roosevelt were part of a conspiracy of international Jewish bankers that favored a European war became more pertinent during the recession of 1937–1938, when impoverished workers were jealous of any Jews who prospered during difficult economic times. The tough economic climate of the 1930s served to make immigrant Jews easy scapegoats for financial difficulties. After pulling out of the Depression, most Americans were of the view that America must help Americans to achieve financial prosperity first, and foreign immigrants be damned. To many, the high unemployment rate precluded additional immigrants entering the United States to compete for the few job vacancies that were available. World War I veterans insisted that they should have first rights to job opportunities; foreigners meant unwarranted competition. With Jews becoming more visible in finance and politics during the Roosevelt administration, the impression was that Jews, unlike most Americans, were prospering; Roosevelt’s New Deal was good for the Jews, hence the epithet “Jew Deal.” Furthermore, with the widespread appeal of the movie and radio industries providing entertainment during tough economic times, Jews were more in the limelight. For example, Father Coughlin preached against the highly popular Walter Winchell, the famous Jewish broadcaster who once referred to Congress as “the House of Reprehensibles.” Jewish movie producers, such as Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zucker, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers, seemed to be successful in the eyes of the American public. Many of the acclaimed film directors were also Jewish, for example, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, Erich von Stroheim, and Sergei Eisenstein. Moreover, Jewish performers inundated

America’s Response to the Holocaust

139

the entertainment industry, with actors and comedians (many of the latter had been performing since vaudeville), such as the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, the Ritz Brothers, Jack Benny, Peter Lorre, Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor, Mae West, Al Jolson, Edward G. Robinson, and Douglas Fairbanks, obviously prospering. Jews were also viewed by most Americans in the 1930s as a bad influence on U.S. foreign policy. Many Americans understood that Jewish American citizens would be quick to urge American politicians to increase the immigration of refugees to save the European Jews who were being persecuted by the Nazis. In the late 1930s, when Hitler had occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, Jews became more vociferous in their demands; however, many Americans who viewed the German aggression as unwarranted also considered it to be endemic to Europe, thus requiring no U.S. intervention. In other words, many Americans were fearful that U.S. Jews were warmongering and would drag the United States into what they considered to be a “European war.” In particular, the popular aviator Charles Lindbergh, campaigning heavily through newspapers and visits to college campuses, argued that the United States should not meddle in European affairs. Although the general public did not accept Lindbergh’s argument that the Jews were trying to drag the United States into war,14 anti-Semitic groups welcomed his comments, and the Roosevelt administration certainly took note of his remarks. Another major factor that ultimately affected U.S. immigration policies was the notion of a “fifth column” on U.S. soil. The Russian Revolution precipitated a Red Scare in the United States in 1919. During the 1930s, Hitler had done a good job of linking Jews with bolsheviks, and some of that propaganda was convincing in the United States, where senior politicians had not forgotten the post–World War I hunt for communist spies. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936, the term “fifth column” was in vogue for those who supported Francisco Franco in his fight against the Spanish Republic. In the United States, “fifth column” translated to refugees, many of them Jewish, who were loyal to their native countries in what might be considered a civil war of sabotage against America. As the Nazis became more successful in overthrowing European governments, fear of German plans to do the same in the United States became palpable. Thus, many European immigrants were suspected of being German or communist spies. Widespread fear developed about refugees who could conceivably endanger national security through sabotage. Such refugees, loyal to their native countries rather than to the United States, were subject to intense scrutiny. The State Department even warned that German

140 Staging Holocaust Resistance agents might pressure refugees to spy for their native countries under threat of retaliation against their relatives.15 In the spring of 1940, the fear of internal sabotage became a reality when an American code clerk named Tyler Kent, serving in the American embassy in London, presented secret government documents to the fascists.16 The result was that in his fireside chat of May 1940, Roosevelt warned against a “fifth column” that would betray a nation unprepared for treachery committed by spies, saboteurs, and traitors. The increasingly popular film industry contributed to a national awareness of the dangers of foreign spies in the United States. Films such as Espionage Agent (1939) and Foreign Correspondent (1940), both starring Joel McCrea, created panic about the possibility of a fifth column in the United States. However, the most controversial film about foreign espionage was definitely the 1939 Warner Brothers exposé, Confessions of a Nazi Spy. For the film industry, 1939 turned out to be a stellar year, with an impressive array of box-office successes that included Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz , Ninotchka, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and The Little Princess. Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which starred Edward G. Robinson, hit a nerve with the American public and thus became part of the box-office bonanza, earning $2 million—an enormous sum for 1939. Preying upon American fears of a fifth-column threat, the film, narrated as a newsreel, was frighteningly real to Americans and helped spread the myth that Nazi spies were capable of infiltrating all spheres of U.S. life. Nazi infiltration of America was not only represented in the fiction of the cinema, but was also part of the reality of American society in the 1930s. On March 19, 1936, Hitler anointed Fritz Julius Kuhn as head of the German-American Bund. Although Kuhn was a naturalized citizen of the United States, he was born and educated in Germany, earning an Iron Cross for his infantry service during World War I. Kuhn recruited thousands of Americans into the Bund—an anti-Semitic pro-Nazi organization. He even established a training camp in Sussex County, New Jersey, and one in Yaphank, New York, both of which the news media suspected were training grounds for the Nazi fifth column.17 Kuhn preached a doctrine of U.S. isolationism, fully understanding that Hitler wanted the United States to remain neutral in any pending European war. At the height of his popularity, Kuhn’s German-American Bund had approximately twenty-five thousand members, one-third of whom were clad as Hitler’s brown shirts.18 At a rally on President’s Day, February 20, 1939, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, twenty thousand Bundists

America’s Response to the Holocaust

141

heard Kuhn criticize Roosevelt as a bolshevik Jewish American president, mocking him as Frank D. Rosenfeld. Kuhn’s activities and his speeches were reported in the American press, adding fuel to the fire that spies and military agents from Nazi Germany were fully operative in the United States. The Hour, Dr. Albert Parry’s magazine, alerted Americans to how dangerous the fascist spy network could become in the United States. Leon G. Turrou, an FBI agent whose articles formed the foundation for the film Confessions of a Nazi Spy, also wrote Nazi Spies in America, which became a best-selling novel in 1938. Turrou’s book claimed that the Bund was the hand of the Nazis reaching into America—an argument that did not go unnoticed by alarmed politicians. With Gallup polls reflecting the notion that Bundists were a threat to U.S. existence, the Roosevelt administration had yet another reason to restrict immigration to the United States. Given the American public’s perception of Roosevelt’s overt support for Jews, a difficult economic situation that saw immigrants as vying for scarce jobs, increased anti-Semitism, and anxiety over foreign spies and saboteurs undermining American society, Roosevelt’s administration was slow to save refugees from Hitler’s persecution in the 1930s. Yet these Jews were allowed to emigrate from Germany because Adolf Eichmann, following the will of his superiors, encouraged Jews to leave, believing that as Untermenschen (subhumans), they would taint any country that they entered, similar to bacteria infesting the host. As early as 1933, executives of the American Jewish Committee and the B’nai B’rith urged Secretary of State Cordell Hull to make additional visas available to German Jews—all to no avail.19 Although the annual quota for German immigrants was twenty-five thousand, the United States only admitted twenty-seven thousand German refugees between 1933 and July 1, 1938.20 At the Evian Conference in July 1938, the purpose of which was to discuss Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, Roosevelt did not even send a government official. Instead, businessman Myron C. Taylor represented the U.S. government opinion that the United States would make the immigration quota of 27,370 fully available for German and Austrian citizens.21 However, no formal resolution or commitment to other refugees was forthcoming, and the conference was thus deemed a failure. Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith argued that more liberal immigration quotas would exacerbate latent American anti-Semitism. Thus, when Roosevelt was pressed by the 1938 news media about whether immigration quotas would be modified to accept more refugees into the United States, he replied that no modifications were planned.22 In February 1939, Senator Robert F. Wagner and Representative Edith

142

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Nourse Rogers introduced a bill into Congress that would allow twenty thousand German refugee children to immigrate to the United States; however, with public sentiment against an increase in quotas, the bill never made it out of the House Immigration Committee, and Roosevelt never offered to argue on its behalf. Alarmed at possible threats to national security, the State Department in 1939 also urged consuls to issue fewer visas than they ever had granted in the 1930s.23 The United States not only refused to fill its annual immigration quota during the 1930s, but also reduced its immigration rolls. Thus, many Jewish lives were lost because of the U.S. immigration policies in the 1930s, and several ships were stranded on the sea, unable to land passengers in the United States. The Roosevelt administration’s misguided immigration policy of the 1930s culminated in perhaps its major embarrassment during the Holocaust—the inept handling of the St. Louis affair. On May 13, 1939, the St. Louis ocean liner sailed from Hamburg to Havana, Cuba, with 936 passengers, including 930 Jewish refugees. After a brief stop in Cuba, 743 of the refugees, having fulfilled U.S. immigration requirements, were to continue the journey to the United States.24 The passengers also had landing certificates that would allow them to disembark in Havana. However, eight days earlier, Cuban president Federico Laredo Bru, under pressure from his country’s anti-Semitic press, invalidated the landing certificates that had been sold to the Hamburg-American Line that issued them to the passengers. Captain Gustav Schroeder, the anti-Nazi commander of the ship who was empathetic to the plight of his passengers, was uninformed about the Cuban decision to invalidate the certificates. When the ship docked in Havana on May 27, no one was allowed ashore. The Cuban government demanded a visa fee of 500 pesos; 28 passengers were able to comply, but the remaining 908, mostly destitute after Germany confiscated most of their savings, were left stranded on board the ship. In panic, the refugees feared that their lives would be lost if they were forced to return to Germany, where they likely would have been sent to concentration camps; a few refugees attempted suicide. Meanwhile, the story made front-page headlines in American newspapers. Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and members of the Joint Distribution Committee (a worldwide Jewish aid and disaster relief organization) tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with the Cuban government to accept the refugees. When the negotiations broke down, the Joint Distribution Committee begged the Roosevelt administration to offer temporary safe haven for the refugees in the United States. However, Roosevelt refused to budge on his

America’s Response to the Holocaust

143

strict immigration quotas, ostensibly because he feared that the St. Louis refugees would eventually seek asylum in the United States.25 After hovering off the coast of Miami while the Coast Guard prevented any passengers from swimming ashore, the ship was forced to return to Hamburg on June 6. Passengers had sent a telegram to Roosevelt, pleading for him to intervene on their behalf; there was no reply from the president. With the aid of the Joint Distribution Committee in contact with foreign diplomats, Captain Schroeder was able to deposit the refugees in Belgium, Holland, the United Kingdom, and France. Approximately 287 of the refugees who found sanctuary in England were spared from the Holocaust; many of the others perished when the Nazis invaded Belgium, Holland, and France in 1940, although the exact number of those who died hiding from the Nazis, enslaved in internment camps, or deported to extermination camps (Auschwitz and Sobibor), is inconclusive.26 The tale of the illfated passengers on board the St. Louis became the inspiration for a 1974 novel titled Voyage of the Damned, written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, a 1976 film with the same title, and Dutch playwright Jan de Hartog’s 1942 drama, Schipper Naast God (Skipper Next to God ).27 Although the St. Louis affair was a disaster for the Roosevelt administration, it occurred during a brief period from March 1938 to September 1939 when immigration of German Jews to the United States increased. During this period, nearly twenty thousand Germans with visas, most of them Jews, were admitted monthly to the United States; but that number represented a small fraction of the Germans who applied for immigration visas.28 The somewhat liberal immigration policy changed drastically in January 1940 with the appointment of Roosevelt’s friend and confidante Breckinridge Long as assistant secretary of state and head of the Special War Problems Division. Roosevelt himself maintained a hands-off policy on immigration, relegating the responsibilities to the State Department. Having served as secretary of state since 1933, Cordell Hull, nearly seventy years old in 1940, was only too glad to relinquish some of his responsibilities to Breckinridge Long. During Hull’s tenure as secretary of state, although he demonstrated minimal interest in Nazi persecution of Jews, any mention of his possible anti-Semitism with regard to restricting Jewish immigration was always countered by the fact that Hull was married to a Jewess. From 1940 on, visas were granted by Breckinridge Long’s office, which then became more prone to charges of anti-Semitism. Long, a sixty-one-year-old Missourian, had descended from southern aristocracy from North Carolina and Virginia. After graduating from Princeton

144 Staging Holocaust Resistance University, he studied law at Washington University. He made an unsuccessful senatorial bid in 1920 and then returned to his law practice. Long frequently gave large financial donations to the Democratic Party, including a generous pledge to Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign. For his efforts, Roosevelt had rewarded Long by appointing him ambassador to Italy in 1933 and then assistant secretary of state in 1940—a position that was responsible for overseeing all foreigners entering the United States. While in Italy, Long, observing Mussolini’s dictatorship firsthand, began to understand the dangers of fascism. Although it is unclear whether he was anti-Semitic or simply wanted to protect American society from foreign elements, Long’s references to “Frankfurter’s boys” and “New York liberals” definitely had anti-Semitic overtones. He consistently maintained a hardline policy of restricting immigration to protect the national security of the United States from possible infiltration by potential spies and saboteurs. Moreover, he defended the policy that Jewish immigrants should not receive special favors that would deprive other refugees of the possibility of obtaining visas.29 Long seemed to accept the Nazi notion that linked communism with Jewish internationalism, thus making him very cognizant that Jews could be bolshevik spies.30 He refused to listen to the complaints of those advocating increasing the immigration quotas, citing his opponents as radicals or bleeding heart liberals. By mid-1940, under Long’s supervision, the requirements for entry into the United States were therefore tightened, thus slashing the number of Jewish refugee admissions in half.31 Roosevelt, trusting Long’s judgment and viewing the Jewish immigration issue as a political liability, refused to get involved personally in matters that he thought would best be handled by the State Department.32 Lisbon became the gateway port for many of the refugees fleeing the Nazis. On August 9, 1940, the S.S. Quanza departed Lisbon with 317 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees, destined for New York and Vera Cruz, Mexico.33 Portugal had established colonial governments in Africa, so Portuguese ships sailed there regularly; however, a voyage to America and Mexico was indeed unusual.34 Many of the passengers were artists and intellectuals of the middle and upper classes of Europe, including members of the wealthy Rothschild family and actor Marcel Dalio, who had starred in Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game.35 En route, passengers were sequestered in cramped quarters and ate sardines for many of the meals. When the ship arrived in New York on August 19, 196 passengers who had U.S. visas or transit visas disembarked.36 As the ship sailed for Vera Cruz on August 20, Rabbi Stephen Wise, the president of the American Jewish Congress, asked Cordell Hull to

America’s Response to the Holocaust

145

intervene on behalf of the European Jews that Rabbi Wise argued could be admitted as political refugees. However, the State Department took no action. Rabbi Wise also contacted Josephus Daniels, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, asking for his assistance. When the Quanza made port in Vera Cruz on August 30, Mexican officials, refusing to listen to the advice of Daniels, permitted only thirty-five passengers to disembark, claiming that the remaining passengers were issued invalid visas by the Mexican consul in Lisbon. The State Department received erroneous information that the ship was en route to Nicaragua; however, the ship was actually sailing to Norfolk, Virginia, to take on enough coal for the voyage back to Europe.37 Passengers on board the ship were informed of the disastrous news that they were departing for Europe, where many feared that they would lose their lives in Hitler’s concentration camps. The S.S. Quanza arrived in Hampton Roads, Virginia, with eightysix passengers on September 11 for what was supposed to be a temporary eleven-hour stop for refueling. Passengers were distraught at the thought of returning to Nazi-occupied Europe. One such German refugee, Hillman Wolff, jumped overboard and swam for nearly three hours in frigid water before being apprehended by the military police. Friends and relatives of the refugees on board sent telegrams to Roosevelt administration officials, pleading with them to intervene. Meanwhile, a New York businessman and friend of the Rand family members, who were prosperous PolishCzechoslovakian Jews on board, asked Jacob L. Morewitz, a Virginia maritime lawyer, to represent them. Morewitz, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, had a successful law practice that he shared with his wife Sallie Rome, one of the few female attorneys in the United States. When lawyers for four passengers learned that Captain Harberts detained the eighty-six passengers and allowed no visitors to board the ship, they filed habeas corpus (held in custody against one’s will or literally, “bring the body to court”) writs to prevent the ship from heading back to Lisbon immediately.38 Morewitz then filed a one-hundred-thousand-dollar libel suit, claiming that the ship’s owners had breached the contract to allow the Rand family to disembark at Vera Cruz. Morewitz’s action legally attached the ship to port until a bond could be set by a judge. Morewitz, an intelligent and courageous man of action, intended to tie up the libel suit in the courts while mobilizing support for the refugees from federal officials. When the U.S. District Court decided that the bond would be set at five thousand dollars for the ship’s release, the ship’s attorney took several days to wire Lisbon and obtain the money; thus, the S.S. Quanza’s departure had been effectively delayed by Morewitz’s legal skills.

146

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Roosevelt, facing another election campaign in 1940, refused to alienate the isolationists who were adamant about not increasing immigration quotas and therefore viewed the controversy as a political liability; he thus maintained a hands-off policy. Under pressure from his humanitarian wife Eleanor, Morewitz, and Rabbi Wise, who was a member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees (PACPR), Roosevelt allowed the State Department to settle the issue. At the State Department, Hull and Long feared that the refugees may be spies seeking to undermine U.S. intelligence. Eleanor Roosevelt, who, as honorary chair of the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, sympathized with the plight of refugee children, arranged for Dr. Nahum Goldmann and Rabbi Wise, both of the World Jewish Congress, to meet with Hull. With her persistent pleadings, Mrs. Roosevelt managed to convince her husband, Hull, and Long to resolve the Quanza dilemma. Long worked with James Grover McDonald, chair of PACPR, and with Marshall Field III, the civic leader who actually chaired the U.S. Committee for Care of European Children, to come up with a plan. They kept in mind that a repeat of the St. Louis affair might have negative consequences in an election year. PACPR sent its representative Patrick Murphy Malin to Norfolk to help immigration inspectors certify which aliens would qualify as political refugees. The U.S. Immigration Department, on September 14, granted temporary sixty-day landing permits to all of the refugees. The result was that none of the refugees were forced to return to Europe. When Long discovered that all of the refugees were allowed to disembark, he became furious, especially since his authority had been undermined. With his paranoia over Eastern European Jews acting as saboteurs in the United States, Long was determined to clamp down on immigration. He soon convinced Roosevelt to dissolve the emergency visa program and remove PACPR of any authority in determining who should be issued emergency visas; instead, he made sure that the American consuls in Europe would issue visas, a tactic that inevitably would delay or limit, perhaps even halt, emergency immigration into the United States. More restrictions were developed in late November, after Roosevelt had been reelected, which mandated security checks on all refugees requesting visas. When Eleanor Roosevelt heard in November that practically no new visas were being issued, she complained to her husband—with no success. Understanding that public support for the refugees would lead to less restrictive immigration requirements, Long and Hull even began to conceal news of the genocide from the American citizenry.

America’s Response to the Holocaust

147

The result was that after refugee immigration had increased during 1938–1939, by July 1941, it had decreased to 25 percent of allowable quotas.39 Long managed to develop a State Department regulation that stated that any applicant with a parent, spouse, child, or sibling in German, Italian, or Russian territory had to pass an extremely rigid security test of assurance that refugees from those countries would not engage in espionage under Nazi threat of retaliation against their relatives. In short, whereas the maximum number of refugees admitted under the quota law was 27,370 in 1939, by 1942, that number had been reduced to only 4,883.40 By July 1943, the visa application form, now more than four feet long and requiring six copies, had to be filled out by two refugee sponsors, sworn to vouch that the refugee posed no immediate threat to the United States and was financially stable. As Long had suggested, not only was the application to be approved by two consuls abroad, but also the applicant had to pass scrutiny from the FBI, the Interdepartmental Visa Review Board, and the Primary Visa Committee. Moreover, another State Department barrier adopted in fall 1943 was the stipulation that Jews in countries that were not under Axis control, such as those in Spain and Portugal, were considered “not in acute danger” and were thus refused a visa. Several church groups, labor and professional organizations, as well as women’s clubs protested vehemently to pressure the Roosevelt administration to save more Jews once the Final Solution was public knowledge. A massive rally was held at Madison Square Garden on March 1, 1943, and other protests followed in Chicago and Washington, D.C. However, between Pearl Harbor and the end of World War II, only twenty-one thousand refugees (10 percent of the allowable quota), most of them Jewish, were allowed to immigrate to the United States.41 Tens of thousands of Jews that could have been spared were exterminated because of Roosevelt’s unwillingness to become personally involved in their plight. In 1943, the Roosevelt administration, adopting a policy that avoided rescue, refused to confirm extermination figures and insisted that the best way to save Jewish lives was to win the war.42 With increased criticism of Long and the State Department by congressional representatives, members of the media, and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, Roosevelt, in January 1944, fearing a political scandal, removed Long’s control over the awarding of visas to refugees. With an Allied victory imminent, Roosevelt, on January 22, 1944, established the War Refugee Board, whose purpose was to save the remainder of Europe’s Jews. Working with a disinterested State Department, the War Refugee Board, under the leadership of John Pehle, aided the victims of National

148 Staging Holocaust Resistance Socialism by providing visas, funding, identity cards, work permits, and birth/baptismal certificates to displaced Jews, many of whom found safe passage into neutral Switzerland. Admittedly, Pehle removed most of the roadblocks that Long had established with regard to acquisition of visas, but Roosevelt, fully aware that 1944 was another election year, refused to alienate the isolationists and thus ignored the request by Pehle to establish temporary havens, or free ports, for refugees entering the United States. The War Refugee Board was responsible for some notable achievements. The Swedish diplomatic mission led to the recruitment of Raoul Wallenberg; Iver Olsen, the agent for the War Refugee Board in Stockholm, was able to brief Wallenberg on the situation of the Hungarian Jews about to be exterminated. However, Wallenberg’s own heroic efforts, which will be documented in chapter nine, were primarily responsible for saving the thousands of Hungarian Jews he could rescue; the War Refugee Board did little to aid Wallenberg. The War Refugee Board did manage to rescue nearly two hundred thousand Jews and at least twenty thousand non-Jews, most of whom were barely surviving in Budapest when the Russians had liberated the city in mid-February 1945.43 However, most of the Eastern and Western European Jews were dead by the time the War Refugee Board was fully operational; only the Hungarian Jews awaited extermination. Roosevelt took little interest in the War Refugee Board, and, consequently, it was inadequately funded and poorly staffed.44 The War Refugee Board was created for a noble cause, but it was too little and too late for the agency to be effective. Susan Lieberman, a graduate of Duke University, was a production assistant at Charles Marowitz’s Open Space Theatre and served as the associate editor for four years at Theatre Crafts magazine. Her plays include Arrangement for Two Violas, the musical Prairie Lights (cowritten with David Rush and Rosalie Gerut), the musical Whirlybirds (cowritten with David Rush and Jeff Bouthiette), Marek’s Monkey, and The Pink Parlor, which was a finalist at the National Playwrights Conference. She has also written two Emmy-nominated television scripts for children: Sandy and Sam and Prairie Latkes. Susan has been a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists for many years. In an email message that she sent to me, Lieberman revealed that she met Stephen Morewitz while doing laundry in a Chicago highrise in 1988.45 After mentioning that she was a playwright, Morewitz acknowledged that he had a story to tell that was worthy of a script. Lieberman was dubious: Generally when people say they’ve got a great story, they really don’t. But Steve went on to show me a huge stack of research that his uncle had been collecting

America’s Response to the Holocaust

149

about his parents—Jewish maritime attorneys in Virginia whose quick action, together with Eleanor Roosevelt’s intervention, helped to save 82 Jewish refugees from returning to Europe in 1940.46

Among the documents that Morewitz had in his possession was a memorandum from Long to President Roosevelt stating that PACPR be closed. Lieberman recalls, “At that point, I realized how the courage of Eleanor Roosevelt and J.L. and Sallie Morewitz had unwittingly contributed to the United States’s closing its doors to Jews during the Holocaust.”47 Lieberman understood that the subject was historically significant and agreed to write the play. Stephen provided the details about the historical developments, the political environment, and the legal proceedings that his grandparents went through to hold the ship in port. Stephen, a sociologist, had originally gotten involved with his family’s historical achievement through his uncle David, who persisted that telling the story of Stephen’s grandfather, Jacob L. Morewitz, was much more meaningful than self-promotion of the family.48 After doing extensive research on the subject, Stephen wrote a heavily footnoted research paper on the subject and put together an exhibit about the S.S. Quanza, which has been displayed at various museums and universities. He has also given presentations about the Quanza affair and has interviewed survivors who were on board the ship in 1940. Written in nineteen scenes spread over two acts, Steamship Quanza premiered during June 1991 in Chicago at the Building Company, in association with Chicago Dramatists Workshop, in a production directed by Robert Teverbaugh.49 In December 1991, the play was produced at Potsdam State College in Potsdam, New York. The next production was November 2007 at the Morgan Park Academy in Chicago. Finally, the play was staged in April 2008 at the Jewish Theatre in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The cast includes nineteen characters; five are historical figures (Breckinridge Long, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Eleanor Roosevelt, Josephus Daniels, and Judge Luther Way), while many of the others are based upon historical personalities. Lieberman explained to me why she took poetic license to change the Morewitz family name to Abrams: I changed the family name from Morewitz to Abrams because much of the personal story about the family is my own fabrication. Steve was far more comfortable sharing the historical facts about the incident than the personalities at home. With so little in the way of anecdotes or revelations, I took the

150

Staging Holocaust Resistance

information that I had (e.g., Sallie Morewitz was one of Virginia’s first women to pass the bar; J.L. raced his motorcycle), changed the name so as not to upset the Morewitz family or confuse audiences, and made up a domestic narrative that would best tell the history of the SS. Quanza.50

Ben Abrams, modeled on Jacob L. Morewitz, is a Jewish attorney fully assimilated into American life in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He practices law with his wife Darcy and is a respectable member of the community. Ben is well rounded and has other interests besides law, including spending time supervising his fifteen-year-old son, making sure that David manages his stardom as an outfielder on the baseball team and his newspaper route while keeping up his grades. Ben is also an avid motorcycle racer, which the citizens of the community find odd for a Jewish lawyer. Though assimilated into American society, Ben is fully cognizant of his European roots. He is the son of immigrant Russian Jews from a small village outside Minsk who came to the United States in steerage with only twenty-five dollars and some socks. Understanding his proletariat background, Ben is quick to defend in court the working class, such as shipyard workers and deckhands, who are not members of the bourgeoisie. For example, he managed to allow deckhands on the foreign vessel S.S. Helsinki to disembark by filing a writ of habeas corpus. Ben defends his actions to his wife Darcy: “The day I’m scared to make a scene about it is the day I get on one of those ships and go back to the place my father ran from. They don’t have laws like that over there.”51 He is also aware of anti-Semitism in the community, explaining that his son, with the Jewish sounding name of David Isadore Abrams, will not win the Courier award given to the most enterprising young man—won last year by Reginald Porter III, of obvious Aryan descent. In the small-town parochial environment of Hampton Roads, he has also had the reputation of being outspoken, stepping into fights merely to demonstrate his intelligence. He is thus perceived as a troublemaker who defends the downtrodden, which, in this genteel Southern Anglo-Saxon community, gives him the reputation of being a communist; the publisher of the local newspaper thereby refuses to report on his court cases. The play demonstrates that the United States in 1940 was inundated with political commentary warning about the dangers of an influx of immigrants who could be foreign spies and espionage agents. President Roosevelt’s speeches are echoed by local journalists who reiterate, “danger comes to us from outsiders who seek to disrupt the freedom and democracy with which this country has been blessed since its inception . . . ” (34). Tom

America’s Response to the Holocaust

151

McPherson, Ben’s friend who is a dock worker, laments foreigners coming to America to compete for jobs when decent Americans are unemployed. When Ben defends their right to disembark, Tom responds, “You send ‘em back where they belong! They could be spies” (11). Julia Millstein, Darcy’s sister-in-law, corroborates the feeling of enmity for the foreigners, arguing, “Who wants more jobless schlepps coming in on boats?” (14). Darcy herself tries to make Ben aware of the American Zeitgeist, commenting, “People are nervous that Roosevelt will get us into war” and “Don’t you hear them saying ‘New Deal, Jew Deal’? ‘President Rosenfeld!’” (23). One obvious dilemma for Lieberman when she was writing the play was how to humanize the subject and avoid making the play into a history lesson. Lieberman personalizes the narrative by creating audience empathy for the disastrous plight of the characters on board the S.S. Quanza. Teenager Ann Wolff and her prosperous father Gerhardt, both drawn from historical accounts of two German Jews who were on the voyage, lived happily in Frankfurt before the rise of the Third Reich. Gerhardt calls Germany home and plans to return after the Holocaust, believing that “Hitler cannot last. His regime is a house of cards” (26). Anna is more realistic and fears imminent disaster, especially since she and her father do not have American visas for the trip abroad. The Nazis have ransacked their house, so staying in Germany after Kristallnacht was no longer an option. Anna is idealistic and hopes to study music history at Barnard College. En route, the Wolffs, with Mexican visas, hope to get off the ship at Vera Cruz. On board, they meet Helman Levy, a Hungarian Jewish musician traveling third class, and Ida Lipschultz, a Polish Jew from a small village who carries her baby son. Ida’s husband Solomon was murdered by the Nazis. Helman still maintains a sense of humor even though his family members have perished in Hitler’s concentration camps. Helman jokes about playing at Carnegie Hall, yet, obviously, the humor serves to mask a fear that is palpable, particularly since most of these refugees know no one in America and have no idea what to expect when they arrive. Helman reveals his desperation at leaving Europe almost at wit’s end: “My life depended on having enough money for a ticket” (49). Ida mentions that the Nazis burned down her home, so she is also living in a state of despair. Steamship Quanza is an indictment of a crass Roosevelt administration that displayed no humanistic regard for the terrified prisoners on board the ship, most of them refugees fleeing the Holocaust. Lieberman takes the audience through to the ship’s docking at Hampton Roads, demonstrating that at every stage of the journey, apathy from government officials

152

Staging Holocaust Resistance

was the norm. After the ship weighs anchor at Vera Cruz, Rabbi Wise contacts Ambassador Daniels, but the only accomplishment is assurance from the State Department that the ship’s progress will be “monitored.” Through the intervention of the Abrams and their law firm, Eleanor Roosevelt, known for her humanitarian efforts, had been contacted for her help. Mrs. Roosevelt pleads with Patrick Malin, of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, to intervene. Malin is obviously sympathetic but can only recommend to the State Department which individuals qualify as refugees. He explains that Long, fearful of allowing communist spies into the country, makes the final decision. Mrs. Roosevelt brings up the political issue at stake for her husband in an election that is two months away: “Congress won’t take well to raising the immigration quota” (67). Nevertheless, Mrs. Roosevelt, claiming that all Americans are descendants of refugees, agrees to consult with her husband. As the ship ostensibly sails to Nicaragua, Daniels communicates to Rabbi Wise that he could not convince the Mexican authorities to accept the passengers into the country. Rabbi Wise still hopes that Long and the State Department will allow the refugees to come in as “persons who are in danger” (70). When news of the ship’s refueling at Hampton Roads reaches Long, he refuses to budge. Deeming the episode to be nothing more than a “special interest complaint” and not a “real crisis” (76), Long tells Malin, “It’s an election year—don’t forget that. Raising the immigrant quota would destroy Franklin’s campaign” (77). Long had demonstrated earlier in the play that he would not allow even well-known scholars, such as the linguist Elise Adler, nor even Resistance fighters, such as Father Jerzy Kempenski, into the country, explaining to Malin that even such ostensibly benign individuals may be spies. When Malin tries a last-ditch effort to convince Long that a repeat of the St. Louis affair would not be politically advantageous for Roosevelt two months before the election, Long merely dismisses the comment, saying, “The St. Louis is not relevant” (77). Amid these political wranglings that never come to fruition, Lieberman intersperses the wailing cries of babies on board the ship, intimating that the State Department was heartless in its treatment of Jewish refugees. While the State Department failed to assume any responsibility for the refugees, Ben, on September 11, upon learning that the ship was in the harbor, decided to file a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Gerhardt Wolff, one of his colleague’s acquaintances. Ben assumes that judge Luther Way, who ruled in his favor during the Helsinki decision, will do the same for the S.S. Quanza passengers. David tells his father that one of the passengers, who turns out to be Helman, jumped off the ship and swam one mile to

America’s Response to the Holocaust

153

shore before being picked up by the military police. The implication is that as desperate as these individuals were, risking their lives to avoid returning to Nazi-occupied Europe, the U.S. government still ignored their plights. Steamship Quanza is much more than an indictment of a crass Roosevelt administration; instead, the play implies that heroic individual efforts were made to save Jewish lives, and if such tenacity had been demonstrated by federal officials, the Nazis would not have been nearly as successful in their plans for genocide. Ben Abrams becomes a beacon of strength and civility, an icon of humanitarianism who defied a government bureaucracy to do what was morally right. Ben, initially denied access to the ship, claims that he has the right to board in order to visit with his clients. When Gerhardt first meets him, the German Jew states, “Mr. Abrams, you are a brave man” (86). Although Gerhardt is dubious that the son of a Russian immigrant can get anyone off the ship, Ben begins to work in court by arguing his case that the refugees are being held on board without their consent, which is a violation of constitutional law. However, Judge Way, the federal authority of the district, decides that he will rescind the writ, for he cannot grant habeas corpus for all the refugees. He has bought into Long’s ideology and tells Ben, “Those boys on the Helsinki were foreign—these folks are too, and Jewish besides! You’ll end up as the guy who lets half of Europe into Virginia” (92). Instead, Ben refuses to quit, insisting that the U.S. Court of Appeals states that no one can keep a person on board a ship from seeing an attorney. Ben tries another tactic. He tells Gerhardt that he plans to file a breach of contract between the ship owners and the passengers who were promised to be taken to Vera Cruz but were denied landing rights. Ben realizes that the ship sails back to Europe at noon, so the libel suit is basically a stalling tactic. When stubborn Gerhardt refuses to comprehend how the son of a Russian immigrant can sue to prevent a Portuguese ship from sailing, Anna chastises her father: “We are not citizens, Papa. We are refugees. If we don’t let Mr. Abrams help us, we’ll go back to Europe and die like rats” (99). Ben consequently obtains a copy of the receipt of passage from Lisbon to Vera Cruz and the ticket the passengers were forced to buy from Vera Cruz to Hampton Roads. The news of the retention of the ship makes headlines in the local newspapers. Ben and Darcy Abrams file a libel suit of one hundred thousand dollars for breach of contract between passengers and the shipping agent. Upon seeing the story in the Virginia newspapers, Eleanor Roosevelt feared that if the ship remained in port much longer, the Washington Post would pick up the story, and President Roosevelt would have another St. Louis

154

Staging Holocaust Resistance

affair on his hands. With such adverse publicity coming weeks before the election, Patrick Malin of PACPR was dispatched to Virginia. The result was that eighty-one of the refugees were awarded emergency visas to enter the United States. Long, infuriated that his power was undermined, discussed the issue with Roosevelt; afterward, the power to grant emergency visas was removed from PACPR’s auspices and given to the State Department through American consuls who served in Europe. Lieberman concludes her historical note to the play thusly: “This [removal of PACPR’s authority], in effect, closed the doors of the United States to thousands of people fleeing Nazi persecution” (2). Steamship Quanza is an ironic tale in which the heroic efforts of admiralty lawyer Jacob L. Morewitz, whose persistence, legal experience, and humanism saved Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, inevitably led a recalcitrant U.S. government to restrict immigration even further. Hitler, understanding that Roosevelt would not rally around anti-Semitism enough to enter what was then considered a European war, was encouraged to continue with the genocide. Roosevelt simply did not act responsibly; he gave no priority to rescue and covered up the privileged information that his administration knew about the Holocaust. He could have made the information public, which would have created worldwide protests that Hitler may have heeded, especially when the Fuehrer realized the war was lost. Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to discuss the immigration issue with Jewish leaders and took a hands-off attitude toward the State Department’s restrictive immigration policies. Roosevelt, consistently unwilling to take political risks on saving the Jews, refused to consider all rescue proposals. Holocaust historian David S. Wyman writes, “Franklin Roosevelt’s indifference to so momentous an historical event as the systematic annihilation of European Jewry emerges as the worst failure of his presidency.”52 During the period of American apathy, at least four million people, most of them Jews, perished during the Holocaust.53 However, if more individuals had taken moral responsibility for their actions and had had the courage to stand up for their convictions, like Jacob L. Morewitz did, Hitler’s plans for genocide would have been greatly hampered.

8. Aharon Megged’s Hanna Senesh

I

sraeli playwright Aharon Megged was born in Poland in 1920 and emigrated from there to Palestine in 1926. He lived in Kibbutz Sedot Yam from 1939 to 1950, which is where he met Hanna Senesh.1 Although he has written nearly twenty novels and short stories, as well as several plays, his literary reputation is largely confined to Israel.2 Megged was Israel’s cultural attaché in London and writer-in-residence at Oxford University and the University of Haifa. Living in Palestine during World War II, Megged was only indirectly affected by the Holocaust. The Habimah Theatre in Israel conducted a play contest on Hanna Senesh as part of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. When none of the entries in the contest was found to be stageworthy, Megged was commissioned to write the play. Megged based his play on Shaw’s Saint Joan, comparing Hanna’s stoical resistance to the Christian martyr Joan of Arc. The 1958 staging of the play at the Habimah Theatre became one of the major productions of any Holocaust drama performed in Israel. The cast included Miriam Zohar, a Holocaust survivor, as Hanna, as well as founding members of the Habimah Theatre in Moscow. The performers visited Kibbutz Sedot Yam and met with Hanna’s mother, who provided great inspiration. The two-act realist play was given 116 performances during the 1958–1959 theatrical season; the print run was sold out soon after the play was published. Hanna Senesh was revived with minimal revisions at the Habimah in 1964 and was also staged as The Legend of Hannah Senesh in May of that year at the Princess Theatre in Los Angeles. The play has since been performed internationally, the most notable of these productions probably being Habimah’s 1969 version at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Other performances of the play in Holland and Germany also served to make European audiences aware of Jewish resistance during the war. Chana Szenes was born on July 7, 1921, in Budapest. Her father, Bela Szenes, one of Hungary’s most respected journalists, theater critics, and playwrights, passed away from a heart attack that he suffered in 1927. In

156

Staging Holocaust Resistance

grade school, Hanna wrote poetry, kept a diary, and won prizes for her literary achievements. The family was fully assimilated into Hungarian culture and was not religious, even though Hanna was bat mitzvahed and the family observed the High Holidays. Hanna’s mother, Catherine (Katalin), stated, “Although we considered ourselves good, steadfast Jews, we did not feel it important to observe the outer formalities of religion.”3 Hanna was so adept at learning that from age eleven on, she consistently tutored other pupils. Hanna was always at the top of her class, yet she was rejected for admission into a high school for gifted children because she was Jewish. In May 1937, although she was an outstanding student, she was rejected as secretary of her school’s Literary Society because of her religion.4 In 1938, Hungary passed anti-Semitic decrees, which forced Hanna to question her love for her native land. Hanna realized that because of her country’s anti-Semitic bias, she might be denied entrance to the university. She could convert to Christianity, as some of her friends did, but she would still be despised for her Jewish origins. Instead, Hanna, admittedly feeling miserable in Hungary, rejected a country that had ostracized her. Trying to find a place where she might belong, Hanna joined a Zionist group, diligently studied Hebrew, and often attended meetings at the Maccabee Society. After graduating summa cum laude, Hanna said her farewells to her teachers and made plans to work on a farm in Palestine. In 1939, at the age of nineteen, she emigrated to Palestine, despite objections from her mother. Speaking of her daughter’s steadfast desire to emigrate, Catherine noted, Once she said that even if she had not happened to be born a Jew she would still be on the side of the Jews because one must help, by all possible means, a people who were being treated so unjustly now, and who had been abused so miserably throughout history.5

Her brother Gyuri (George) was in France, learning the textile trade, when Hanna disembarked for Eretz Israel. Hanna landed in Haifa on September 21, 1939. Understanding that Palestine had far too many intellectuals but instead needed workers who could help build the country, Hanna was prepared for hard labor. She began her service at Nahalal Agricultural School, a cooperative settlement where girls worked the land while studying chemistry, botany, agricultural science, and fruit gardening. Hanna’s biographer, Peter Hay, notes that this transition to Eretz Israel must have been a culture shock for her: “Chana had never lived in a boading school and she was unprepared for the

Aharon Megged’s Hanna Senesh 157 close and sometimes abrasive intimacy produced by people living, working, and studying together twenty-four hours each day.”6 Hanna was now engaged with speaking nothing but Hebrew; she improved her language skills rapidly to the point where she even began tutoring other students at the school. After two years at Nahalal, Hanna, in fall 1941, arrived at Kibbutz Sedot Yam, near Caesarea, where she worked and wrote poetry. She was fully immersed in the communal ideal of equality demonstrated by daily labor in the kibbutz. In her diary entry of January 8, 1943, Hanna felt the urge to return to Hungary to organize youth immigration and bring her mother out as well.7 Ever since leaving for Palestine, Hanna had felt increasingly guilty about leaving her mother behind. The war in the Ballkans had cut off the mail routes, so Hanna’s contact with her mother became sporadic at best. Meanwhile, in her diary, Hanna revealed that while the Nazis were controlling Central Europe, she felt that she had it relatively easy living in the security of the kibbutz and wanted to become more directly involved in the war effort.8 As fate would have it, in February 1943, Yonah Rosen, a Hungarian refugee, revealed to Hanna a plan to rescue the Jews of Central Europe. The secretive Palmach, which included members who still had relatives in Nazi-occupied Europe, was recruiting Jews who could speak any tongues native to Hungary, Yugoslavia, Slovakia, or Romania for a rescue mission. The mission was supported by British Intelligence whose initial goal was to rescue Allied pilots shot down over Central Europe. Since there was a shortage of trained pilots, the British understood the need to rescue their aviators in countries where the Nazis were already closing off the escape routes. Such pilots needed to meet up with the partisans in the areas in order to avoid capture by the Germans, and Jews with language skills could obviously offer essential support. Hanna did not hesitate to volunteer her support to join parachutists who were planning to be dropped behind enemy lines in Central Europe. Hanna was sent to Haifa to attend a month-long seminar sponsored by the Palmach. The purpose of the training was to inculcate Jews with the proper ideological values so that they could represent Eretz Israel to the Jewish Diaspora. Following the ideological indoctrination, Hanna received arduous military training in guerrilla warfare, including ambush and infiltration tactics. She was trained in judo and also in the use of weapons, including knives, clubs, Sten guns, Tommy guns, and .45 Colt Automatics.9 In February 1944, Hanna was among thirty-two volunteers who arrived in Cairo to participate in espionage training under British supervision.10 Hanna’s training consisted of learning Morse code, as well

158 Staging Holocaust Resistance as preparing to forge documents, provide misleading information to the enemy, react under interrogation, and operate a wireless transmitter. She was also a leader in the group, inspiring her fellow parachutists to embrace the task ahead and lose their fear of jumping out of planes. Reuven Dafne, serving with Hanna in Cairo, remarked about his fearless comrade, “She, more than any of the others, showed a lack of fear of jumping. During those dreadful, difficult moments when my heart would pound with trepidation before a jump, I would think of Hannah, her comforting words of encouragement, and feel relaxed, reassured.”11 Hanna’s comrades remember her as a sanguine spirit, providing a vital sense of morale for a group of young parachutists who realized the danger associated with what could turn out to be a suicidal mission. Hanna was among four parachutists, including Dafne, Yonah Rosen, and Abba Berdichev, who were flown in early March 1944 to Bari, Italy, to begin the first leg of their journey as part of their mission to rescue downed pilots in Yugoslavia. Hanna was totally unconcerned about her own safety; her inner conviction that the mission would inevitably succeed helped to assuage the fears of her fellow parachutists. On the eve of the parachute drop, Hanna told her comrades, “Even if they catch me, that will become known to the people in the concentration camps. They will know that someone was coming to try to help them.”12 On March 13, 1944, the parachutists left Brindisi, Italy, and made the jump into Yugoslavia. Hanna and her comrades spent three months with Tito’s partisans waiting for the proper time to cross the border into German-occupied Hungary. Germany had invaded Hungary on March 18, so the original plan to have Hanna enter her native country as a Jewish refugee was no longer feasible since the Nazis had captured the entire region. Meanwhile, the partisans were in awe of this seriously committed, pistolpacking Jewish girl who was overzealous about completing her mission. Hanna, however, had no time for their adulation since she was anxious to return to Hungary to save her mother and as many Jews as possible from the Nazis. With Tito’s partisans aimlessly wandering to escape the Nazis, Hanna, by the end of May, decided that the recalcitrance of the partisans could no longer be tolerated. The parachutists divided into two groups that were to enter Hungary separately; Hanna went with several partisans, leaving Yugoslavia on May 13 for what may have been considered a suicide mission. The trek took twenty-six days, for they had to avoid Nazi patrols and thus took a circuitous route. On June 9, 1944, Hanna entered Hungary with Jacques Tissandier; they immediately buried their weapons and a radio transmitter that they were carrying. By this time, two of her

Aharon Megged’s Hanna Senesh 159 colleagues had already been captured with earphones, leading the Nazis to believe that Hanna and Tissandier possessed a radio transmitter.13 Hanna was taken to a local prison and tortured by Hungarian officials, who beat her for two days on the palms and soles of her feet and pulled out large chunks of her hair; Hanna refuged to divulge any information. Once the radio transmitter was found, Hanna was now implicated in espionage and sent to Miklos Street Military Prison in Budapest for further questioning. The Hungarian fascists were planning to use the transmitter to send out false information to Allied pilots. Realizing that the transmitter was useless without the cipher, the Hungarian police tortured Hanna, but even after repeated beatings that included knocking out her teeth, she refused to divulge the radio transmitter’s code. Thinking that she might receive some respite if they knew that she was the daughter of the well-respected Bela Szenes, she revealed her identity to her torturers. Thus, the Nazis were able to locate Hanna’s mother and threw her into the same jail that Hanna occupied. Obviously, Hanna’s mother could not reveal much to the Gestapo since she had no idea that her daughter had even left Palestine and was shocked to see her back in Hungary. The Germans now threatened to torture and then kill Catherine in front of Hanna’s eyes unless she surrendered the code. Despite the threats and beatings, Hanna refused to divulge the code for the transmitter. The Nazis, who respected bravery and despised cowardice, refused to believe how this Jewish girl could endure so much pain and defy the German stereotype of Jews going to the slaughter like sheep. Hanna even reprimanded the Germans, promising them that they would soon go down in defeat at the hands of the Allied forces. At one point during the Gestapo interrogations, Hanna asked an SS guard what type of punishment he would dole out if it had been up to him to decide, and he responded, “I wouldn’t punish you at all, because I have never met a woman as brave as you.”14 After five months in jail, on October 28, 1944, Hanna was brought before a military tribunal in Budapest for trial on charges of treason. Hanna urged the court to consider her to be a prisoner of war, since she was officially a British officer. The court denied the request, offering her leniency if she revealed the code for the radio transmitter. Instead, Hanna defended herself and argued that after the war was over, citizens would realize that the Hungarian judges betrayed their own country by joining their “blood enemies” (the Germans) in crimes against the state and will be the ones tried for treason. Refusing to ask for clemency when given the opportunity to do so after the trial, Hanna, at the age of twenty-three, was shot by a firing squad in Budapest on November 7, 1944.15 Witnesses verify that

160 Staging Holocaust Resistance she refused to be blindfolded but instead watched the proceedings unfold until her death.16 In 1950, her remains were buried in a national military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Senesh became consecrated as an Israeli national symbol of Holocaust resistance and collective national memory.17 Although she was only one of seven parachutists from Palestine who lost their lives during the Holocaust, Hanna became a symbol of Jewish heroism during the Shoah. As Judith Tydor Baumel indicates, Hanna was the spirit that bridged the gap “between the Holocaust and the rebirth of a sovereign Jewish nation.”18 Although she never saved any Jewish lives, Hanna’s defiant personality made for comparisons with the French warrior maid Joan of Arc, romanticizing the Hungarian’s image as one who chose death rather than dishonor. She thus became an icon for the new state of Israel in which a heroic woman from Palestine voluntarily chose to return to the diaspora to fight against the threats to European Jewry. Despite her Hungarian origins, Hanna became the epitome of Sabra (native Israeli) strength and resolve. A village (Yad Hannah), a ship, forest, thirty-two streets, and two farming communities have been named after her. Her poems, diary entries, and songs are read every year during the ceremonies commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day. Several plays, staged in Israeli amateur repertory theaters and in schools during the 1950s, documented her heroism. Biographical studies were written about her, the first of which, Moshe Braslavsky’s Hannah Senesz: Her Life, Mission and Death, was published in fifteen Hebrew editions. Her tale became legend in Israel and served as a framing device to teach schoolchildren and soldiers about the meaning of heroism. Decades after the Holocaust, the story of Hanna Senesh became a means of education for Israeli children who were often ignorant about Jewish resistance during the Nazi genocide. Israeli history books typically provided schoolchildren with a chapter on the parachutists from Palestine, effectively linking Eretz Israel with Jewish resistance in Europe. During commemorative ceremonies memorializing the Shoah, Hanna’s saga was published in pamphlets that educated new generations about her heroism. For many who questioned the role of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, the memory of Hanna Senesh mythologized Jewish heroism and became an affirmation of faith for the newly emerging state of Israel.19 The myth-making of Hanna Senesh was firmly cemented in Israel with the 1988 ninety-minute film Hanna’s War, directed by Menachem Golan. Best known for adventure films such as Operation Thunderbolt, Enter the Ninja, and The Delta Force, Golan embellished the tale of Hanna’s mission

Aharon Megged’s Hanna Senesh 161 by fictionalizing the action. In the film, Hanna assists the partisans in their demolition of a Nazi freight train and rescues Jews destined for the extermination camps. The remainder of the film depicts Hanna’s stoicism when faced with physical and psychological torture, with Hanna ultimately being the center of admiration from the British, Hungarians, Yugoslavian partisans, and fellow Zionists.20 The film, shown in Israel in theaters and then on the state television channel, educational television, and the cable film channel, further helped to merge Hanna’s saga into a relatively more positive public memory of the Holocaust in Israel. Megged’s Hanna Senesh, which occurs in Hungary from June to November 1944, is historically accurate.21 Megged was painstakingly precise with regard to specific dates, characters, and locations and even incorporated some of Hanna’s poetry and correspondence into the play, much of it presented in the form of flashbacks of her earlier life in Budapest. After Hanna is captured by the Hungarians, she is almost beaten to death in prison at Szombothy before being whipped for three days in an investigation cell in Budapest. Accused of being a British spy carrying out a mission of sabotage against her fellow Hungarians, Hanna refuses to reveal the radio transmitter code and initially identifies herself only as Maria Ardy, perhaps Megged’s reference to Hanna’s “hardy” character. Hanna will not disclose any information, even when Rosza, the Hungarian investigating officer, threatens to torture Pierre Tarandier [sic], her colleague in the Resistance, if she continues to be stubborn. When Hanna proudly reveals her real name and the Hungarian authorities learn of her Hungarian ancestry, they arrest her mother and threaten to harm her if Hanna continues to be uncooperative. Moreover, the Hungarians portend to turn Hanna over to the Gestapo, whose brutal methods of torture far exceed those of her countrymen and would certainly lead to her execution. After the Gestapo complete their interrogation and torture her further, Hanna remains steadfast. When Devcsery, Hanna’s defense counsel, promises Hanna that her testimony will save many Jews from deportation, she retorts, “I’ll never believe the promise of murderers.”22 Even in the eleventh hour, when her sentence of death had been passed by the judges with the only possibility of reprieve being to ask for mercy, Hanna refused to adhere to their demands. Hanna Senesh is flawed by Megged’s faithful realist portrayal of his pure, idealistic heroine, whom he denies any self-introspection. Megged admits that, although he was not religious, his writing is based upon the idealistic, emotional experiences of Zionism and the utopian visions of communal living in a world of equality.23 The emotional thrust of the play is palpable.

162

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Hanna is portrayed as an idealistic young girl whose potential is snuffed out by Nazi genocide. At age seven, Hanna was writing plays, already following in the footsteps of her illustrious father. At school, she received a first prize in literature from Professor Molnar, who admitted to her mother, “I’m old enough to predict that if your daughter continues to excel the way she does in poetry—she’ll be the pride and joy of her country, Hungary” (90). Instead, she is tortured and murdered by her fellow Hungarians, who end her aspirations prematurely at the age of twenty-three. Moreover, Hanna’s posthumous reconciliation with her mother is emotional overkill that provides the audience with an unnecessary sentimentality that borders on melodrama. Glenda Abramson describes the denouement as an exalted note that was once fashionable in Israeli drama but has not worn well with time: “The concluding scene is an anti-climax, a device which fails thoroughly in a play that is structurally simple and thematically factual and which could have attained something of the spiritual grandeur of Lorca’s Mariana Piñeda instead of remaining on a plane of naiveté brought about by its earnest sincerity.”24 Despite the melodramatic emotional impact of Hanna’s raw sense of idealism, the play is a testimony to courage and commitment during the Holocaust. Hanna Senesh is fully capable of taking action on her own. Hanna, living more than a thousand miles away, visits the site of the genocide with the intention of thwarting it. Hanna Senesh chooses armed resistance, which is depicted as admirable and morally righteous. Throughout the play, Hanna maintains her conviction that persecuted Jews must die with dignity and fight against their oppressors. In assuming moral responsibility for her actions, Hanna’s existential awareness, in the tradition revered by Jean-Paul Sartre and Arthur Miller, safeguards the honor and respect of Jews for generations to come. Although she fears dying young before she has experienced the “joys of life,” Hanna is willing to risk death for a noble cause. Her conviction derives from Socratic teachings based on the incident when the Greek philosopher told the judges before his death, “If you’re sure that justice is on your side—you must stand firm in peril, must not be swayed by death or anything else, or face disgrace” (105). Although she comes from an assimilationist family that was not particularly religious, Hanna maintains a spiritual faith. Despite the fact that her mother wonders how God can retreat in the face of the Holocaust (111), Hanna insists that her courage accrues from “the certainty that in the end justice prevails, and the belief that spiritual power is greater than physical power” (105). She finds it appalling that Jews would attempt to negotiate with the Nazis, who have consistently proven to be untrustworthy. By

Aharon Megged’s Hanna Senesh 163 adhering to her faith in moral responsibility despite undergoing the worst torture and beatings imaginable, Hanna earns the respect of everyone in the play. Stephan, one of the Yugoslavian freedom fighters, recalls, “At a partisans’ party once, she spoke—there was such applause after every sentence that the walls were shaking!”(100). The unnamed Hungarian officer is surprised by the stoicism that he did not believe could be demonstrated by any Jewess: “Although it’s hard to believe they’d be so brave. The more you beat her, the tougher she gets” (82). Clary, a Hungarian prisoner, declares, “She’s not telling a thing! And they know she won’t. I heard a German SS officer say that she’s the bravest girl he’s ever seen, and if she weren’t Jewish, he’d give her a gold medal!” (110). Hanna Senesh is an indictment against the Hungarians who did not assume moral responsibility for their actions during the Holocaust. The onus falls directly on the Hungarians, for there are no Nazis in the play. Hanna states, “But if I could have moved ten, five people to stand up against these murders, with might and with dignity—I would have believed that my mission had been accomplished” (115). The implication is that if others had acted like Hanna, genocide could have been prevented. Devcsery tells Hanna’s mother, “And I thank you for the privilege of knowing your daughter. If we had many like her, maybe the world would look differently” (116). Clary states about the Nazis, “if you’re determined and fearless they retreat” (110). During her court testimony, Hanna, not primarily worried about her own life, instead is more concerned about condemning a Hungarian government that does not protest Nazi genocide as traitorous. Hanna’s plea to the court is a Joan-of-Arc call for moral responsibility and recognition of complicity with universal evil: “How will you defend your actions? This is your last chance to retreat! One good deed can purge you of your sins! I know my actions are pure in God’s eyes, so I am not afraid of death” (121). Hanna’s mother also indicts the Hungarians who remained paralyzed, preferring not to take action: “This land is a cursed land! Where are the noble hearts, the intellectuals, the teachers, the poets, the revolutionaries, the noble souls? They are dirt, all of them!” (111). However, the underlying subtext of the play is an indictment of the Old World diaspora Jews who refused moral responsibility, much like their Aryan Hungarian neighbors, during the Nazi occupation. Yael S. Feldman reminds us that early Israeli drama of the 1950s is largely conflict-ridden, “illustrating the tension between the Sabra, or native Israeli, and the Holocaust survivor.”25 We have the clash between two cultures: the Zionism of the aggressive Sabra Jew who was largely ashamed of the Old World Jew, whose spirituality reflected passive adherence to Divine Providence.

164 Staging Holocaust Resistance Feldman sees the dichotomy between the two cultures characterized by the all-too-familiar binary oppositions of Talmud versus Bible, Yiddish versus Hebrew, and Diaspora versus Zion.26 Writing about Holocaust drama in Israel, Glenda Abramson remarked that many of the young Israeli writers associated the diaspora Jews with an ignominious past.27 In an interview with Anat Feinberg, Megged confirmed this chasm between the Sabra and the diaspora Jews as a fundamental part of his writing: Zionism is based on rebellion against the diaspora. For that reason, the members of the first wave of immigration, as well as the generation born and raised in Eretz Israel, wanted to free themselves from all traces of diaspora life: from its culture, which was largely based on religion and religious practices; from its customs; from its spoken languages; and even from its character traits and outer appearance. “Diaspora Jew” became a pejorative term.28

At one point in the play, Rozsa attempts to coerce Hanna into cooperating by threatening to call in the ruthless Judenkommando, who operated under the guise of Jewish cooperation, and Hanna retorts, “You really think I discriminate between one murderer and another. I’ve learned from experience how little humanity is left in all of you” (86). Hanna Senesh is a response to the call for Jews to take moral responsibility and not to assume complicity with the world’s evil. The play is meant to embarrass and indict Old World Jewry—a culture that Megged abandoned early in his life. The fact that Hanna is a courageous woman who fights for a noble cause emasculates Old World male Jews who went to their deaths like sheep going to slaughter. Moreover, Hanna, coming from Palestine, had to go far out of her way to fight for her moral convictions while the Central European Jews, facing genocide in their own neighborhoods, reacted passively. Finally, the irony of the play is that Hanna, as a Jew living in Palestine, never had her life personally threatened by the Nazis. Instead, she risked her life for a cause while the Hungarian Jews refused to fight for themselves or for their families and remained, like many uncommitted Jews, in a state of denial or paralysis.

9. The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg: Nicholas Wenckheim’s Image and Likeness

B

y the time the War Refugee Board was operational in early 1944, most of the European Jews had been exterminated. The largest remaining concentration of Jews, approximately eight hundred thousand, was in Hungary. Although anti-Semitic decrees were instituted in Hungary by the start of the war, none of the Jews had been murdered. Realizing that Hungary needed to be a buffer zone between Austria and the advancing Russian army invading from the south and east, as well as recognizing that Hungary’s remaining Jews were obstacles to the Nazi goal of making Europe Judenrein, the Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944. Immediately they set up a puppet government and installed General Döme Sztójay as prime minister. Coinciding with the invasion, Adolf Eichmann brought in his experienced murderers, including Dieter Wisliceny, Anton Brunner, Hermann Krumey, Theodore Dannecker, and Siegfried Seidl, to manage the deportations. During March, the Nazis moved quickly to carry out the exterminations of Jews. As usual, a Judenrat was created to facilitate an orderly transition. Jews were then systematically deprived of all of their rights and possessions, including their jobs, bank accounts, and property. They were excluded from most public facilities and were forced to wear the Yellow Star. By April, the Jews were herded into ghettoes near railway stations, where they were imprisoned with only a fourteen-day supply of food, a meager amount of clothing, and baggage weighing up to fifty kilos, yet sans money, jewelry, or any other valuables.1 The Nazis then divided Hungary into six concentric zones from which the Jews were to be deported. The first major deportations to Auschwitz took place in May in CarpathoRuthenia and Transylvania; many other Hungarian Jews were sent to labor camps, where they perished due to the severity of the conditions.

166

Staging Holocaust Resistance

By June 7, Eichmann had completed the first phase of his extermination plan2 —eventually, 437,000 Jews were deported from the provinces (zones one through five) on 148 trains that left between May 14 and July 83 ; the 230,000 Jews living in zone six (Budapest) were scheduled for transport in July. At times, as many as five trains departed for Auschwitz each day, each convoy transporting as many as 4,000 men, women, and children. Eichmann, who proudly referred to himself as “the Bloodhound” when speaking with the Jewish Council in Budapest, had been true to his word in his monomania of promising the deportation of all of Hungary’s Jewish population. Meanwhile, the extermination of Hungary’s Jews did not go unnoticed by world leaders. Norbert Masur of the World Jewish Congress began searching for a mediator, under the auspices of the Swedish Embassy, who could negotiate with the Germans to ease the persecution of the Jews in Hungary.4 Sweden, a neutral country whose diplomatic immunity was honored by the Nazis, and, as a Nordic neighbor, still had good relationships with the Germans, became the perfect country to intervene on behalf of the Allies. The U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Herschel Johnson, requested that the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs designate an emissary to go to Budapest to apply diplomatic pressure on the Germans and to issue passports to Jews. Propitiously at this time, Raoul Wallenberg had been working with a Hungarian Jew named Koloman Lauer, who had relatives stranded in Hungary. Lauer had offices adjacent to those of Iver C. Olsen, who was the financial attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm. Lauer conveyed to Olsen that his partner Wallenberg was disturbed about the plight of the Jews in Hungary and was eager to be of assistance. Olsen, who served as the War Refugee Board’s representative in Stockholm, met with Wallenberg in June 1944, who offered to go to Hungary to save as many Jews as possible. Since Wallenberg’s mission was obviously going to be life threatening, the Swedish government appointed him as third secretary of the Swedish legation in Budapest, thus ostensibly giving him diplomatic immunity. Through Olsen, Wallenberg was to serve as the War Refugee Board’s representative in Hungary and thus received American funding from the Joint Distribution Committee for his venture.5 Wallenberg was supplied with a list of forty corrupt Hungarian officials who could be bribed and with the names of other potential anti-Nazi facilitators who could be of assistance; moreover, he was granted complete authority to save lives. At the same time, the chief rabbi in Stockholm appealed to the Swedish government to halt the deportations in Hungary. At the end of June, King Gustav V of Sweden made a personal appeal to

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

167

Admiral Miklós Horthy to defy the Nazis and save the remaining Jews of Hungary.6 The Swedish government realized that Wallenberg would be the ideal person to confront the Nazis. Although he was raised as a Christian, Wallenberg had Jewish ancestry, for his great-great-grandfather was a Jew who fled German anti-Semitism to settle in Stockholm in 1780.7 Raoul came from a heritage that consisted of Swedish diplomats, bankers, and industrial magnates who were often on cordial terms with Swedish royalty. His father, an officer in the Swedish navy, died of cancer three months before Raoul’s birthdate of August 4, 1912. Raoul’s mother, Maj Wising, daughter of Sweden’s first professor of neurology, remarried when Raoul was six. However, it was Raoul’s paternal grandfather, Gustav Oskar Wallenberg, who had served as a Swedish minister to Japan and Turkey, who was largely responsible for his early education and tutelage. Gustav was convinced that Raoul’s education should consist of mastering languages, so he sent the young man to Germany for a summer and to France for a year; Raoul also became fluent in English and Russian.8 Raoul consistently excelled in his schoolwork and developed camaraderie with his classmates, who were fascinated by his knowledge of politics, culture, and religion. He had a particular passion for architecture and avidly observed new building construction in downtown Stockholm. After graduating from high school in 1930, he enlisted in the Swedish army to fulfill his compulsory military service. Rejecting Oxford and Cambridge as too elitist, Raoul’s grandfather steered him toward study at an American university. With an established reputation in the field of architecture, the University of Michigan became Raoul’s choice for a college education. During his summers while at Ann Arbor, he vacationed in Arizona, California, and Mexico before graduating on June 9, 1935, as the top student in his class of eleven hundred undergraduates. After graduation, Raoul, still under the tutelage of his grandfather who wanted his grandson to become a banker, went to South Africa to gain business experience. After six months in Capetown, he moved to Haifa, where his grandfather secured work for him in a bank. In Palestine, Raoul met a number of German Jews who had fled Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. John Bierman, one of Wallenberg’s biographers, writes, “It was his first experience of the results of Nazi persecution and it affected him deeply— not just because of his humanitarian outlook but also, perhaps, because he was aware that he himself had a dash of Jewish blood.”9 When he returned to Stockholm in 1937, Raoul was not shy when speaking to friends and relatives about the dangers of National Socialism.

168 Staging Holocaust Resistance In 1937, Raoul’s grandfather died, which thus freed the young man to choose his own career. Although he was trained as an architect, the Swedish government did not recognize his degree from an American university. Thus, Raoul turned to his family’s connections in banking and was put in touch with Koloman Lauer, a Hungarian Jewish refugee who ran an import-export business dealing in exotic foods. When the war broke out in 1939, Lauer needed a reliable gentile who could travel throughout Hitler’s Europe in a way that he, a Jew, obviously could not, to buy and sell food. Lauer recognized that Raoul’s knowledge of languages, his intelligence, and his exuberant personality made him the ideal choice. In 1941, Raoul was sent to Germany, Switzerland, and France; in Rumania, he experienced German anti-Semitism firsthand. Raoul developed a successful business relationship with Lauer and soon became the company’s troubleshooter and eventually its junior partner. Wallenberg’s work also took him to Hungary during 1942 and 1943, where he visited Lauer’s relatives who were living in Budapest. Raoul began to understand the plight of the Jews in this country that had pro-Nazi sentiments and thus adopted anti-Semitic decrees to placate their German cohorts. During these business trips that took him to Nazi-occupied countries, Raoul learned how to deal with Nazi bureaucracy and became accustomed to understanding the Nazi mentality. As a result of his experience with languages, his Jewish ancestry, and his business acumen dealing with various cultures throughout Europe, Raoul was the ideal person to send to Hungary to represent Swedish interests in saving Jewish lives. Without a family, Raoul had fewer responsibilities and therefore less liability at stake engaging in a mission that was life threatening. Moreover, Wallenberg had youthful energy, imagination, intelligence, and a dogmatic will to be successful. He was also able to mingle effectively among working-, middle-, and upper-class echelons, appeared to command respect, and made friends easily. At the age of thirty-two, Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944. At that time, the situation for the Jews there was dire. All of the Jews in zones one through five, which represented 70 percent of Hungary’s Jewish population, had been deported. The only moment of respite for the Jews came when Horthy ordered the suspension of the deportations. Pope Pius XII had sent Horthy a letter appealing for mercy for the “persecuted,” and President Roosevelt warned the regent that there would be consequences to pay unless the deportations were halted. The president of the International Red Cross also sent a letter to Horthy in early July, protesting the deportations.10 With the imminent advances of the Russian

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

169

army and with threats from Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill indicating that the Hungarians would be tried as war criminals after the Allies were victorious, Horthy took a stand. On June 26, he ordered a halt in the deportations and the removal of Sztójay. Ultimately, Hitler disagreed and thus kept the puppet government in place while disallowing any Jews to leave Hungary with any immigration visas. Upon arriving in Budapest, Wallenberg set up a humanitarian relief unit, Section C, that eventually expanded to four hundred workers, including nearly forty physicians, most of them Jews. With War Refugee Board funds, Wallenberg supplied food to ghetto residents. Despising conventional diplomacy and mainstream bureaucratic methods, Wallenberg took it upon himself to design an official-looking Swedish passport—the Schutz-pass —as a passport for Jews.11 Realizing that the Nazi mentality would be impressed with a document with seals, stamps, and signatures, Wallenberg created this “protection pass,” which, in actuality, had no official status. The Schutz-pass effectively granted Jews who were sentenced to die slowly in internment camps, the ghetto, or labor camps protection as “Swedish citizens” and thus freed them of wearing the Yellow Star. At first, Hungarian officials only allowed the printing of fifteen hundred such documents, but after Wallenberg bribed and blackmailed corrupt government leaders, he managed to issue nearly thirteen thousand and five hundred protection passes, many of which contained his own signature.12 Wallenberg even had the nerve to hand out Schutz-passe s to deportees about to disembark for Auschwitz. He would appear at the railway station, ignore the orders of the SS, hand out the fake documents, and literally rescue Jews from the jaws of death before the trains were to depart. When the deportations were briefly suspended because of Horthy’s intervention, Wallenberg worked around the clock to create hospital wards, orphanages, nurseries, and soup kitchens while providing the Jews with food, clothing, shelter, and identification papers. He provided inspiration for his support staff and worked like a man on a mission, sleeping only four hours each night in order to get the job done. Moreover, Horthy allowed Wallenberg to set up “safe houses,” where holders of the protection passes could reside under the auspices of the protection of the Swedish legation. Eventually, the number of safe houses grew to thirty-two, and they sheltered nearly fifteen thousand Jews. Although the conditions were obviously overcrowded and supplying food for that many people was a difficult challenge, the important fact to note is that these Jews were protected from deportation thanks to Wallenberg’s heroic efforts.

170 Staging Holocaust Resistance Eichmann planned to deport the Budapest Jews on August 27, thus completing his mission to make Hungary Judenrein. However, with the surrender of Rumania to the Russians in August, Horthy decided it would be propitious to break ties with the Germans as well. Horthy now insisted that the deportations cease. When Eichmann was informed of the regent’s decision, he became infuriated. However, Himmler, who was conflicted in opposing Hitler yet made minor ventures to assuage the damage as he sensed that the end of the war was near, summoned Eichmann and his minions back to Berlin. Thus, in late August, September, and early October, conditions drastically improved for the Jews of Budapest. The improvement of conditions was largely due to Wallenberg’s mission empowering Jews despite the horrendous suffering they were forced to endure. As was typical of Jewish reaction during the Holocaust, the Jews of Budapest had come to believe that the world had abandoned them; in short, no one cared about their extermination. However, the Schutz-pass created by Wallenberg became a great morale booster. Budapest Holocaust survivor Edith Ernster recalls that Wallenberg’s efforts “made us somehow feel like human beings again after being reduced to mere things by all the measures and propaganda against us.”13 Furthermore, Wallenberg’s efforts were noticed by other neutral countries and by the International Red Cross. Switzerland soon began providing similar protective passes to Jews, and Portugal offered amnesty for several hundred Sephardic Jews. Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio in Budapest, in conjunction with the Vatican’s Apostolic Delegate Angelo Roncalli, sent thousands of baptismal certificates and safe conduct passes to the Jews of Budapest to save them from death at the hands of the Nazis and Hungarian fascists.14 Conditions quickly deteriorated after October 15, when Horthy declared that Hungary was negotiating a peace settlement with the fastapproaching Russians. The Germans moved quickly to stage a coup and set up a new government with the virulently anti-Semitic Arrow Cross (Nyilas) fascists in charge; after the Nazis kidnapped Horthy’s son, the regent was forced to abdicate, giving power away to Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi. The day after this power shift occurred, Jews were under siege again; the Hungarian fascists immediately demonstrated their exuberance by murdering nearly six hundred Jews and depositing their bodies in the Danube River. Budapest became a city of looters and terrorists who went from house to house flogging and murdering Jews. The violence soon became so palpable that Jewish suicides increased dramatically. In ecstasy at the turn of events, Eichmann soon returned to Budapest and boasted that he would complete the extermination of the Jews remaining in the

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

171

city. Wallenberg now realized that he would have much more difficulty dealing with the vicious Nyilas than he had when confronting Horthy’s officers. The Nyilas refused to recognize the validity of foreign passports or safe houses and began a reign of terror against the Jews. A curfew was held for ten days in which Jews were threatened with murder if they left their residences. Meanwhile, the Arrow Cross invaded these shelters, selecting Jews for deportation. During one such selection, when Jews were being held in the synagogue on Dohány Street, Wallenberg and the Swiss Consul Charles Lutz intervened. Wallenberg and Lutz demanded the release of the prisoners, claiming that they were Swedish or Swiss citizens. Wallenberg, who always appeared confident and gave orders to the Nyilas in fluent German, was able to secure the release of the interned Jews. On other occasions, Wallenberg devised plans for young Hungarian Jews to disguise themselves in SS or Arrow Cross uniforms to defend Jews from the barbaric fascist looters and even to prevent their deportation.15 Even when Jews were dragged to assembly points for deportees, such as the brick factory in Buda or Saint Stephen’s Square, Wallenberg went to those internment camps and, by issuing protective passports, managed to secure the release of many Jews. By November 7, Wallenberg filed an official report stating that all Jews with protective passes would have them honored by their respective legations—an extraordinary act of chutzpah in which a third secretary from a neutral country was able to exert influence over the Third Reich hierarchy. With the Russians within striking distance of Budapest, the German rail lines were no longer accessible for transports to Auschwitz or other extermination camps in Poland. Moreover, the freight trains and trucks were needed by the German military to move supplies. As the German supply of slave labor dwindled, the armament factories in Austria thus became undermanned. Despite Himmler’s objection, Eichmann devised a plan to send the remaining one hundred thousand Budapest Jews who were unprotected by the neutral countries to march on foot to Austria to provide the needed slave labor. These death marches began on November 8 and ran through December 10 in which forty thousand men, women, and children were forced to march 125 miles to Hegyeshálom on the Hungarian Austrian border. Many Jews were seized abruptly and did not even have the chance to grab proper clothing for the frigid trek in ice, snow, and sludge. Supervised by the brutal Arrow Cross gangs that whipped and clubbed the marchers, the Jews, without food, medical supplies, sanitation facilities, or shelter, were typically forced to march thirty

172 Staging Holocaust Resistance to forty kilometers each day. Any stragglers or those who stopped from sheer exhaustion were shot immediately. Every evening, when they reached a marketplace of a town, they rested for the night in frigid conditions; the following morning, corpses typically littered the ground. The total death toll for these marches was nearly ten thousand.16 Many others who reached Austria were found unfit for labor and were forced back to Hungary to die of disease and starvation. Wallenberg pursued the marches and supplied the persecuted with food, medicine, bandages, shoes, and warm clothing. He entreated the local peasants and the International Red Cross to offer the marchers water and even warm food. In addition, Wallenberg marched along with the Jews, offering encouragement and boosting their morale by demonstrating that someone cared about their plight. While his colleagues such as Per Anger were passing out passports to the marchers, Wallenberg was negotiating with Nazi officers and the Arrow Cross for release of those holding these protective documents. His attitude was so bizarre yet so convincing that the stunned Nyilas and SS officers turned over to him all those who claimed to hold protective passes. Per Anger estimated that approximately fifteen hundred Jews were rescued by Wallenberg from the death marches, but Wallenberg reported in December 1944 that the number was closer to two thousand.17 Arguing for protection of many of these Jews under the auspices of the Swedish government, Wallenberg also forced the return of several thousand laborers who had already entered Austria. The marches raised such a furor among the international community that Himmler, aware that the end of the war was imminent, summoned Eichmann to Berlin and told him to tell Szálasi to cancel the marches. By November 1944, the remaining Jews of Budapest were herded into two ghettoes. The enclosed Central Ghetto held nearly eighty thousand Jews while the International Ghetto, operated by the Red Cross and neutral countries, sheltered approximately fifteen thousand Jews in thirty-one hostels.18 Jews with passports from neutral countries were exempt from the ghettoes and remained in safe houses marked by the Yellow Star. Although the SS in Auschwitz were busy trying to conceal the evidence of mass extermination, and the rail lines leading to the Polish extermination camps were inoperable, the Nazis still rounded up trainloads of Jews for departure from Budapest. Wallenberg, who had a network of contacts throughout the city, typically would receive word of the deportations and would appear at the railway station in protest. Upon arrival, Wallenberg would bark orders at the Nazis, present “official documents,” and then have any Jews with papers released.

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

173

In late November and December, conditions deteriorated drastically as Eichmann and the Arrow Cross gangs were determined to murder the remaining Jews of Budapest before the Russians arrived. One gang was led by András Kun, a mad priest who roamed the city with a gun in one hand and a crucifix in the other; another sadistic leader was Mrs. Vilmos Salzer, who particularly delighted in torturing Jewish women to death.19 These Arrow Cross Death Brigades of young hooligans broke into the Swiss, Swedish, and Red Cross safe houses to murder Jews. Even babies, children, and hospital patients were not spared. Budapest became a lawless town, where Jews were murdered on the streets in nightly raids or were tied together in threes, shot, and then dumped into the Danube River. The Nyilas frequently amused themselves by torturing their victims, either by blinding, scalping, maiming, or knifing the Jews before administering killing blows.20 Meanwhile, conditions in the two ghettoes were deplorable, with the inhabitants suffering from starvation and frigid weather conditions. Many Jews became mentally ill; others committed suicide. The total number of deaths of Jews in November and December at the hands of the Arrow Cross exceeded ten thousand.21 In December, when conditions worsened and Wallenberg was the only obstacle that stood in the path of the total destruction of the Jews of Budapest, Eichmann made plans to murder his adversary. He publicly announced to a Swedish Red Cross representative that he would “kill that Jew-dog Wallenberg.” Wallenberg even invited Eichmann to dinner, at which time he admonished him, predicting that the Nazi reign would soon come to an end since the Russians were already bombarding the outskirts of the city. Eichmann even made attempts on Wallenberg’s life. For example, in early December, one of Eichmann’s adjutants rammed his truck into a diplomatic car in which Wallenberg and his chauffeur Langfelder were riding. SS headquarters in Berlin reminded Eichmann that Wallenberg was a senior Swedish diplomat and that any attempt on his life would damage German-Swedish diplomacy. However, the Arrow Cross gangs had no qualms about murdering Wallenberg. As a result of death threats, Wallenberg moved from place to place, changing residences almost nightly, yet he never hesitated to rescue Jews when no one else would do so. Shortly after the Russians reached the suburbs of Budapest on December 24, Eichmann and his henchmen fled back to Germany. Wallenberg managed to bribe Pál Szalay, a senior police officer who was also an Arrow Cross member, which resulted in momentary protection for the Jews in several of the safe houses. Yet the Nyilas, still functioning

174

Staging Holocaust Resistance

under Eichmann’s plans, were determined to exterminate the remaining Jews of Budapest before the Russian takeover. Five thousand Jews of the International Ghetto were moved into the Central Ghetto to facilitate extermination procedures that were to be carried out by the Waffen SS and the Hungarian fascists. General August Schmidthuber, the SS panzer commander, would supervise the operation. Since Wallenberg’s life was threatened, he sent Szalay to convey to Schmidthuber that if he carried out the Aktion, after the war, he would be held personally responsible and then hanged for his crimes. Amazingly, Schmidthuber cancelled the planned massacre in the second week of January 1945. In effect, Wallenberg’s quick thinking had saved the seventy thousand Jews of the Central Ghetto from extermination. When the Russians finally liberated Budapest once the street fighting diminished in mid-February 1945, approximately one hundred and twenty thousand Jews remained—the largest number of Jewish survivors in any city in Europe.22 Wallenberg was directly responsible for saving the lives of seventy thousand Jews of the Central Ghetto and another twenty-five thousand who were protected in the safe houses; single-handedly, Wallenberg had saved nearly one hundred thousand Jewish lives.23 As early as November 1944, Wallenberg had in place a detailed social and economic plan to restore Jewish assets, locate missing persons, reunite families that had been separated, create employment opportunities, find suitable housing for displaced persons, and distribute food and medical supplies to the survivors of the ghettoes. On January 17, 1945, Wallenberg left with Langfelder to present the plan to Marshal Rodion Malinovsky in Debrecen, 130 miles east of Budapest. Wallenberg carried a considerable sum of money with which he hoped to buy supplies and perhaps bribe Russian officials. This was the last moment that Wallenberg would ever be a free man and the last time his friends would ever see him. The Russians were in no mood to negotiate with Western allies. Instead, their reaction to the German invasion of their country was to reciprocate for the violence the Nazis had inflicted on their nation. As the Russians plundered Hungary, they also refused to recognize the rights of representatives from the neutral countries who were temporarily residing there. The Russians ransacked the Swedish legation, raped Hungarian women, and looted throughout Budapest with impunity. In this barbaric environment, Wallenberg, unaware of the extent of Russian hostility, was naïve to expect that his ideas for reconstruction would be warmly received. Wallenberg and Langfelder were turned over to the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and were sent to Lubianka Prison in Moscow by February; by

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

175

May, Wallenberg had been transferred to Lefortovo Prison with little hope of being released. Wallenberg told the Russians that he had been on a humanitarian mission in Budapest to save Jews from extermination. The Russians certainly found this tale to be incredulous since they typically accepted “humanitarianism” as a code word for espionage. The Russians were also predominantly anti-Semitic and could not believe that anyone would risk his life to save Jews. When Roosevelt failed to set up a second war front to divert Nazi resources away from the East (even after repeated Russian pleas to do so soon after the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941), the Cold War had begun. If the Russians had ruled out Wallenberg as a German spy, they certainly were not convinced that he was not working for the Americans. The Russians obviously learned both that the War Refugee Board sponsored Wallenberg’s Swedish legation and that the large sum of money that he had in his possession came from U.S. funding. Thus, the Russians concluded that Wallenberg was an American spy, which marked him as an enemy of the Soviet Union. Moreover, Wallenberg’s family ancestry deemed him to be a descendant of a long line of bankers and Swedish diplomats—a true capitalist, not to be confused with the Russian “comrades” now hoping to liberate Europe from the fascists. Finally, as David S. Wyman infers, Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board representative in Sweden, Iver Olsen, who was Wallenberg’s mentor, was an Office of Strategic Services operative; the Soviets thus reasoned that Wallenberg had some connection with U.S. intelligence services.24 After the war, on August 18, 1947, Senior Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky issued a statement that declared that Wallenberg was no longer in the Soviet Union and his whereabouts were unknown. This viewpoint was corroborated as late as 1956, when Soviet officials ostensibly completed a thorough investigation and concluded that Wallenberg had never been in Russia.25 With Wallenberg sightings becoming more numerous, the Soviets obviously had a dilemma on their hands—in no way could they release him because there would have been no logical reason to have imprisoned a diplomat from a neutral country for so many years. Wallenberg obviously would have mentioned that he repeatedly asked to speak to a representative from the Swedish embassy and was consistently denied the opportunity to do so. Since Soviet-Swedish diplomatic relations were strained because of the Wallenberg affair, on February 2, 1957, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko sought to put the issue to rest by declaring that Wallenberg had been a prisoner in Russia but died of a heart attack in 1947 in Lubianka Prison. Gromyko’s statement went on

176 Staging Holocaust Resistance to declare that Wallenberg’s body had been cremated. Sweden, with its close and amicable ties to Russia, never fully challenged the report, and perhaps due to fear of antagonizing the Russians, the Swedish government accepted the official Russian explanation despite reports of Wallenberg sightings in various Russian prisons. When U.S. bureaucrats tried to intervene, they were told by Russian authorities that inquiries about Wallenberg rested firmly with Swedish diplomats. In January 1961, Nanna Svartz, an internist who was treating Maj von Dardel, Wallenberg’s mother, went to a scientific conference in Moscow. At the conference, she met an old colleague, Professor Aleksandr Miasnikov, who had frequently had conversations with her in the past; they typically spoke in German. As head of several Russian hospitals, Miasnikov informed Dr. Svartz that Wallenberg was in a mental hospital in the Soviet Union. After Dr. Svartz returned to Sweden and relayed this information to Prime Minister Erlander, the Swedish government contacted Premier Nikita Khrushchev, offering to send a physician to Moscow to bring Wallenberg home. By March, when Dr. Svartz confronted Miasnikov again, he had changed his story. He acknowledged that he had mentioned Wallenberg to her in the earlier meeting but now claimed that because of his poor German, she had misunderstood the conversation. Svartz argued that they frequently spoke in German and never had any trouble communicating. It was later discovered that Khrushchev had been furious at Miasnikov’s indiscretion, threatening the scientist if there were any deviation from the official Soviet position as expressed by Gromyko. Between 1947 and 1980, at least fifteen different witnesses claimed to have seen or spoken to Wallenberg at various prisons, gulags, or mental wards throughout Russia. Some of these testimonies are apocryphal, yet others, such as Efim Moshinsky’s account of sharing frigid work conditions with Wallenberg at Wrangel Island near the Arctic Circle in 1962, have been supported by similar evidence.26 Without any official proof of Wallenberg’s death coming from Russian statesmen, Wallenberg’s fate will forever remain a mystery. Wallenberg’s achievements have been honored by many countries worldwide to ensure that his name will never be forgotten. When the war ended, the Jews of Budapest named a hospital building and a street after him; Hungarian artist Pal Patzay was commissioned to create a statue of the Angel of Rescue. In 1948, 1949, 1983, and 1992, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1960, he became one of the first to be recognized as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem in Israel. In 1980, after the death of Raoul’s mother and stepfather, a tree was planted on the

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

177

Avenue of the Righteous at the Israeli Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. On October 5, 1981, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed a bill passed by Congress bestowing honorary U.S. citizenship on Wallenberg. In 1985 and 1986, Wallenberg became an honorary citizen of Canada and Israel, respectively. Hungary, which had once been reluctant to honor Wallenberg (perhaps because he is a reminder of the country’s sordid record during the Holocaust), agreed to unveil a life-sized statue of him in April 1987. The Russians had destroyed Patzay’s original monument of “St. George” Wallenberg attempting to slay a snake representing the evils of fascism. Imre Varga recreated Patzay’s statue of Wallenberg and added swastikas to the body of the reptile (the Hungarians also made Wallenberg an honorary citizen in 2003). Monuments in Wallenberg’s honor were erected in Budapest, Buenos Aires, London, Melbourne, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Stockholm, and Tel Aviv. A postage stamp commemorating his courage was issued in the United States in 1997. Finally, schools, parks, and streets have been named in honor of the heroic Swede; for example, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is located at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place in Washington, D.C. Nicholas Wenckheim, born in Vienna in 1922 into a Roman Catholic Hungarian aristocratic family, left Hungary in May 1939 to live in Argentina. In Buenos Aires, he met Catalina Wulf, a German Jewish theater agent and began translating plays that she represented, including Peter Shaffer’s Equus, Caroline Franke’s The Father of the Bride, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit and Romulus the Great, and D. L. Coburn’s The Gin Game, into Spanish for performances in Buenos Aires. In 1979, he settled in the United States, married a Hungarian, and eventually became a U.S. citizen, currently residing in New York City. He has also written several plays for production in the United States, the most noteworthy of which was Ice Eaters, staged at the American Theatre of Actors and winner of the Jean Dalrymple Award for best one-act play in 1987. In the early 1970s, Wenckheim sent a letter to Fredrik von Dardel, Raoul’s stepfather, asking for authorization to write a play about his son; von Dardel gave his permission. In an email message that he sent to me, Wenckheim wrote that his departure from Hungary “saved me from ‘fighting for Hitler,’ like all my male contemporaries had to do. I feel, however, that I carry a moral obligation to render testimony of what happened there . . . during my age and time.”27 Using Jenö Lévai’s 1948 biography of Wallenberg (later to be suppressed for nearly forty years), the first ever published in Hungary, Wenckheim crafted his play, Image and Likeness. After sending it to von Dardel, who had the play translated into Swedish

178 Staging Holocaust Resistance in 1973, Raoul’s stepfather wrote to Wenckheim, in non-native English, “I and my wife approve and admire your work as a correct and shaking representation of our son’s fight for humanity and we wish you success.”28 In 1995, Wenckheim retitled the play The Wallenberg Mission for its New York premiere. The play was staged at the Harold Clurman Theatre in Manhattan for a three-week run in September 1995 under direction by Francine Trevens29 ; the following year, The Wallenberg Mission was staged by Love Creek Productions, and in mid-May 1997, it was performed at the Park Performing Arts Center in Union City, New Jersey. Image and Likeness is structured into three acts that encompass a total of eighty-four scenes. Act 1, which consists of twenty-four scenes, is subtitled “Antiworld” and focuses primarily on the Holocaust in Hungary before the arrival of Wallenberg in July 1944. Act 2, “Challenge,” documents, in forty-three scenes, Wallenberg’s efforts to save as many Jews as possible until the Russian liberation of Budapest in January. The nineteen scenes of the last act, “Silence,” focus on Wallenberg’s imprisonment in the Soviet Union and the thirty-year search for his whereabouts. Wenckheim designates a series of ramps for quick changes of scenery and notes the need for actors playing multiple roles to preclude having a large number of performers to accommodate the huge cast. Dummies are also used to reduce the need for such a large cast. As a result of Wenckheim’s careful rendering of Lévai’s biography of Wallenberg, Image and Likeness is historical drama. In a letter that he wrote to me, Wenckheim emphatically stated, “The interesting part of this play, if you have the patience to look into it, is the fact that every one of its numerous scenes has actually happened, in the way they are narrated.”30 In earlier correspondence with me, Wenckheim also emphasized the play’s historical authenticity: Every single event of the action actually happened and every single name of its characters is authentic. And that goes even for the incredible “Jewish Christmas” that happened on the very Christmas eve when Budapest was first surrounded by the Soviet troops, and later the dramatic appearance of Fleischmann, announcing that the Swedish legation had been “re-conquered” by the Jews.31

Using Erwin Piscator’s original idea of projecting images onto stage screens, much in the way that Brecht employed such narrative devices to convey historical and political ideas, Wenckheim exhorts the director to incorporate during the production photographs and films of the major Hungarian,

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

179

Nazi, and Russian historical figures (e.g., Horthy, Eichmann, Szálasi, Khrushchev) and events (e.g., air raids, death marches) that played major roles during and immediately after the Holocaust in Hungary. Finally, to simplify the muddled historical situation for lay audiences, Wenckheim suggests that the nondescript persecutors wear white masks, the major persecutors (e.g., Eichmann, Ferenczy, and Szálasi) wear masks of assorted colors, and those helping the persecutors (e.g., Horthy and Schmidthuber) have their faces veiled by transparent stockings.32 Wallenberg Prisoner, who has been incarcerated in Russia for nearly thirty years and is now in the mental hospital that Miasnikov referred to in his conversation with Dr. Svartz, performs the role of a Brechtiantype narrator for the audience. Wallenberg Prisoner is in thirty-five of the play’s scenes, and Wenckheim, in his stage directions, stresses the centrality of his role by placing his cell center stage (13) surrounded by various ramps for the entrances and exits of the subordinate characters. Wallenberg Prisoner’s primary roles are to put the play into historical context and to clarify, reiterate, and fill in the gaps of the historical record of the Holocaust in Hungary and of the aftermath when he disappeared into the bowels of the Russian gulags. Image and Likeness is concerned with the notion of whether man, made in God’s image, is essentially good or evil. Wallenberg Prisoner presents the dilemma to the audience: “Perhaps it would have been better never to have been born rather than see certain things—certain things that man made in the image and likeness of God is capable of doing” (38). Obviously, the Holocaust in Hungary can be attributed mainly to the anti-Semitic evil intentions of the Nazis, the Hungarians, and the Arrow Cross. Wallenberg, the only person fighting against the world’s evils, eventually realizes that his fate is determined by a Russian society that interprets his humanitarian gestures as highly suspect. The play thus questions the idea that if man is made in God’s image, is Wallenberg, the courageous Angel of Rescue, the norm, or do the representatives of ubiquitous evil set the standards for behavior. In an email message that he sent to me, Wenckheim wondered, “How could it ever be possible that a ‘civilized’ European country suddenly decides to eliminate its own citizens?”33 Wenckheim is therefore questioning whether man is made in God’s image. Although Wenckheim traces the eradication of Hungarian Jewry from March 9, 1944, when the Nazis invaded, to early January 1945, when the Russians were on the verge of liberating Budapest, he also includes personal anecdotes to humanize the events of the Hungarian Holocaust. In act 1, scene 5, when a German major wonders why a former medical

180

Staging Holocaust Resistance

student now serving in the Hungarian Army has no uniform, no decent shoes, and no weapons, the young man replies, “We’re Jews, sir” (23). In scene 15 of act 1, we witness an anonymous Jewish Mother and Father who have spent their last savings to transform their son into a Christian so they can send him away to live with a Hungarian count. They have forged their son’s birth certificate, created a genealogical tree for him, had his nose surgically altered, baptized him, and presented him with a title and coat of arms so that he could survive under the roof of one of the country’s most well-known aristocrats who would shelter him from the Nazis. We are also introduced to Jews, desperate to save their lives, being converted in churches throughout Hungary; for example, a Jew goes through the motions of receiving absolution in church, but before he can do so, he must remove his kipa, kneel before the confessional, and then attempt to make the sign of the cross, albeit clumsily (33). In another scene, a Jewish Husband and Wife temporarily stave off deportation after having been baptized as Roman Catholics. Béla Judicsák was not so lucky; his wife, a Jewess who had been baptized, was taken to the ghetto, where she died without having access to her heart medicine. Moreover, to cement the idea that the fate of the Jews in Hungary will be death in Auschwitz, Wenckheim sets act 1, scene 19, in the extermination camp. In this scene, the SS guards discuss the nutritive benefits of the inmates living off of a bowl of dirty water and even habitually being forced to eat coal or resort to cannibalism to survive. A “Moslem,” representing the most emaciated of the walking dead, enters, and after he babbles mechanically about filling ditches with machine-gunned bodies, the Guard exclaims, “he’s a sure candidate for the oven” (38). Wenckheim puts the onus on the Hungarians for contributing to the genocide in Hungary during 1944. When Eichmann and his staff first enter Hungary and broach the subject of deportation of Jews, the Hungarian authorities are more than eager to help.34 Colonel Ferenczy even suggests to Eichmann that he begin with the Jews in the rural areas and then proceed to deport the Jews of Budapest. He states to Eichmann, “I answer for my gendarmes, and I can also get you the necessary number of boxcars. Give me a month to prepare everything. Deportation could be started in May and completed in the first days of July” (20–21). Later in the play, when Leopoldina, the wife of Stern, the president of the Jewish Council, accuses Ferenczy of conspiring with the Nazis, he lies to her, both by calling himself “an insignificant cog” in the wheel who was never antiSemitic but who merely carried out German orders and by arguing that the Jews would have inevitably been deported with or without his help (55).

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

181

Ferenczy then lies to Stern when he says that he will have his gendarmes refuse to cooperate with the deportation of the Jews in Budapest. He dismisses the deaths of more than a half million Jews by posing a toast to “forget the deportations of the past” (56) and instead focus on the future. Even the old admiral Horthy, a stalwart representing the spirit of Hungary who certainly could be perceived of as a reluctant supporter of Nazi genocide, is complicit. When Wallenberg mentions that 476,000 Hungarian Jews have already been deported, Horthy responds, “All right, but they are in Poland and in Austria” (47). After Wallenberg replies that their ashes are in Poland and Austria, Horthy does not refute the statement but merely bows his head in shame. In act 1, scene 10, Dr. Varga puts the blame for the Holocaust in Hungary squarely on the Hungarian citizens who have ignored the genocide. He states to the authorities, Is it possible for us to go on opposing such a monstrosity only with notes and humble requests? The whole country is ignorant of this opprobrium—and why? Through our fault! Only because of our deplorable refusal to face facts. How long are we going to be the accomplices of the gestapo? (25)

When Dr. Varga suggests that the Hungarians make their voices heard courageously instead of concealing the truth, an anonymous voice of authority reminds him to “express himself with more moderation” (25). Of course, the Nazi plan for the Final Solution made the Hungarian Jews the target of German genocide, yet the Nazi presence in the play is fairly muted. However, Wenckheim makes it clear that the Nazis did more than follow orders, which would not, in itself, be evil. When the Nazis are on stage, they not only follow orders, but also relish the task of murder, treating genocide as a mere triviality. When Eichmann is asked by Ferenczy if he is ready for the task of murdering nearly one million people, Eichmann responds with the idea that the Jewish deaths are necessary, for the Yellow Stars they must wear are too costly: “Do you know how much felt was needed to make those silly yellow stars the Jews are obliged to wear on their chest? Not less than seventy thousand meters. Do you realize? Seventy kilometers of material” (24). Eichmann is depicted as lacking a conscience, demonstrating an inability to make moral decisions for himself. He is so ingrained in Nazi ideology that he trivializes the murder of innocent Jews so long as he believes their annihilation contributes to the success of the Reich. Eichmann is similar to an automaton that cannot see two sides to the issue and is willing to go to his grave for a just cause. He states, “Adolf Eichmann will not have died in vain because when my time

182 Staging Holocaust Resistance comes, those six million lives on my conscience will make me leap into my grave with a great burst of satisfied laughter!” (50). Wenckheim does not reserve the German trivialization of the Holocaust for merely the upper echelon of the SS. He also demonstrates how this sense of evil was endemic to the lower ranks of the SS who carried out the genocide with the help of Hungarian gendarmes. In act 1, scene 21, a Gestapo officer demonstrates his callous attitude toward life in front of his nine-year-old son. Jewish women, each carrying a baby, are brought before the Gestapo. The women are forced to throw their babies in the air so that the Gestapo officer can shoot them for sport. The first woman tosses her child in the air twice, but the Gestapo officer misses both times. His son is disappointed and laments, “Oh, Father, you shot too low twice” (40). After missing a third time, another woman enters, and this time the Officer, now getting more practice, makes a direct hit. As the son states in ecstasy, “Well done, Father. Well done!“(40), other women enter for the same torture. The implication is that the Nazis were diabolical in their machinations—their genocide went far beyond merely following orders; there was a spirit of malevolent enjoyment in their murderous pursuits. The third group of persecutors, the Arrow Cross, is fully immersed in this web of evil. The leader of the Nyilas, Szálasi, cannot fathom that any Swede, by definition an Aryan, could defend Semitic people. When Wallenberg states that Jews are human beings, Szálasi can only spout Nazi ideology and responds, “We must exterminate them completely” (67). When Wallenberg uses logic and explains to Szálasi that the end of the war is imminent and that the neutral countries are prepared to recognize Hungary as an ally if it respects the rights of its citizens, Szálasi still refuses to acknowledge murder as a crime, stating, “Oh, I know what you mean, but I won’t go along with you there, because they’re Jews and nothing more. They’re not Swedes, they’re not Hungarians or anything like them, and we shall take good care to get rid of them. Understood?” (68). Thus, the Arrow Cross rampage against the Jews, pillaging and murdering them with impunity. During the forced marches, they rob the Jews, who are bewildered, fatigued, and shivering from the cold, of their clothing, rings, money, and watches. Nothing is sacred to the Arrow Cross thugs. They also have the gall to raid the orphanage, pull the children out of their beds, and murder them for the crime of being born Jewish. The helplessly wounded and sick recovering in the hospital are not spared either, and the nurses tending to the infirm are also gunned down (91). Wallenberg entered Budapest in July 1944 without any support, yet Wenckheim demonstrates that he consistently risked his life on a

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

183

humanitarian mission to save Jews. Wallenberg recalls that his business partner Koloman Lauer cautioned against the venture: “He considered that without due backing my expedition to Budapest and my life were doomed” (42). Wallenberg Prisoner remembers that once in Budapest, he rushed to prisons, railway stations, and ghettoes issuing Jews protective passports; with its official appearance, his signature managed to save lives. Then he rented houses in the name of the Swedish embassy to shelter the Jews. He also bribed high-ranking officials and officers to obtain safe-conduct passes for his minions. Wallenberg created two emergency hospitals, bought food and medicine for the Jews in the ghettoes, and led the way for Switzerland, Portugal, and El Salvador to do the same. In contrast, regent Horthy, the seventy-six-year-old admiral who is well respected by his fellow Hungarians, is portrayed in the play as powerless to defy the Nazis. When Horthy asks for an armistice on October 15, the Gestapo kidnap his son. Like a coward, Horthy allows the Arrow Cross to regain power, appoints the Nazi sycophant Szálasi as prime minister, and resigns his position. Wallenberg, with no power in this foreign city, succeeds because of his courage and determination; Horthy, with visible support from his fellow citizens, fails due to cowardice and recalcitrance. When the Arrow Cross assume control of the city, Wallenberg’s mission becomes even more problematic since the new fascist “government,” which is not recognized by the neutral countries, obviously makes Wallenberg’s authority moot. Immediately upon assuming power, the Nyilas declared the protective passports issued by Wallenberg to be null and void. Wenckheim demonstrates that Wallenberg risked his life speaking with the renegade blackguard Szálasi but managed to get the gullible prime minister to agree to reissue protective passports if Wallenberg intervened to have Sweden stop the air raids on Budapest and recognize the new government. Eichmann pressures Wallenberg to transport the protected Jews to Sweden, but Wallenberg realizes that sending thousands of Jews through Germany to do so would mean sentencing them to concentration camps; thus, Wallenberg is forced to stall for time until the Russians arrive. Meanwhile, despite the fact that the Nazis have made three attempts on his life, Wallenberg remains undeterred. Wallenberg is faced with one challenge after another. When the Nazis decide to move the forty thousand protected Jews out of the country in what was to be known as the “death marches,” Wallenberg acts without hesitation. Wallenberg trails the marchers, providing them with food, clothing, shoes, and medical supplies. By December 24, when the Russians have surrounded the city and the Arrow Cross thugs have left Budapest to

184

Staging Holocaust Resistance

young hooligans who have no qualms about murdering Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat tells his friends, “Too many attempts have been made on my life for me to be able to give you a fixed address, but I won’t stop fighting, and I promise that you’ll find me wherever I may be of use” (84). Wallenberg’s final coup, with his life clearly at risk, is to confront Schmidthuber, who is charged with the extermination of the seventy thousand remaining Jews in the Central Ghetto. With the Swedish embassy now evicted, Schmidthuber admits to Wallenberg that “there are no more tricks in the bag” (88) and that he has no authority to impose conditions on the SS. Wallenberg counters by stating, “My embassy may be an abstraction, and I a victim of thugs, but I am still a man with a conscience” (88). On the spur of the moment, Wallenberg threatens the marshal with the notion that if he conducts the massacre, he will be held accountable in a civil court. Wallenberg tries one last plea to the commanding officer: “So that you know: If you want to enjoy yourself shooting these 70,000 people, you’ll pay for it with your life” (88). With the Russians only hours from bearing down on the city, Schmidthuber heeds Wallenberg’s warning and calls off the mission. Act 3, with its subtitle of “Silence,” continues the motif that evil and deception are endemic to humanity as the Russians demonstrate their crassness at every turn by denying any knowledge of Wallenberg’s whereabouts. Vishinsky announces that Wallenberg died during the last days of street fighting in Budapest or perhaps was “taken prisoner by Szálasi’s followers” (94). After Wallenberg is ironically accused of being a German spy and of having hindered various humanitarian efforts, the Russians transport him from prison to prison. At best, Wallenberg was viewed by the Soviet Secret Police as a rich capitalist who concocted an outlandish tale in which he risked his life to try and save Jews. As the Russians glean the information and they learn that the Swedish diplomat received money from the War Refugee Board, Wenckheim indicates that Wallenberg is then perceived to be an American spy. After all of the alleged Wallenberg sightings in the Soviet Union, Gromyko issues the proclamation stating that Wallenberg died in the Moscow prison of Lubianka in July 1947, thus officially closing the case. The reliable news communicated to Dr. Svartz that Wallenberg was still alive in a mental hospital in Russia is quashed by Khrushchev. In the revised version of the play, Wenckheim adds a scene that occurs in Butirky Prison during 1975, where a Jewish prisoner named Jan Kaplan visits Wallenberg, who is resigned to his fate, and later reports the incident to his daughter.35 Thus, from July 1944 until his death years later in the Soviet Union,

The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg

185

Wallenberg, who surrendered his life for the purpose of saving Jews, never had a moment of peace. The notion of God’s omnipotence remains unchallenged by the Jewish community. During the Rosh Hashanah prayers in Budapest, the hazan recites the text of the Unne Sane Tokef: Thou art the true judge who decides who must live and who must die, who must perish by the sword . . . (A more violent explosion interrupts him ) Who must perish by the sword or by pestilence, who from hunger, who from thirst; who may live carefree and who must be battered by life. (59)

To end the play, Wenckheim presents a prayer written by Rabbi Stephen N. Végházi, who witnessed the Holocaust in Hungary and provided insight on the play when Wenckheim originally wrote it in Buenos Aires. In the denouement, the Russian prisoners recite this prayer in honor of Wallenberg, asking God to bless the Angel of Rescue: “Give him his due reward for the persecuted; preserve him from all evil, anguish, and pain. Let the clamor of your servants’ voices reach Thee, bringing Thy blessing down on him: Raul Wallenberg, may God bless you, and keep you” (111). After the prayer, Wallenberg rises, his arms outstretched, suggesting crucifixion. The implication is that Wallenberg is a redeemer, like Christ. In scene 32, the Stranger had already presented Wallenberg’s comparison to Christ as comforter, stating, “and this legion of damned, of persecuted, has a name they can say; a man who is among them, who has risked his all for them, who respects them, helps them, understands them, and even loves them” (77). Thus, Wallenberg is viewed as being made in God’s image, which means that evil exists but is not necessarily the norm. Before the prayer is recited by the Prisoners, an anonymous Voice intones, “We mustn’t give up. If we lose our image, only the others will be left. Imagine a world inhabited only by the others. They could boast they represented Man” (110). The implication is that although evil may have been ubiquitous during the Holocaust, good is still possible. The notion of God allowing the Angel of Rescue to waste away in the Russian prison system after devoting his life to saving lives can be mindboggling. However, the idea of Wallenberg as suffering redeemer seems to make some sense. In their book on Wallenberg, Nicholson and Winner conclude, “We may never know his fate. But one thing is certain. At a time when most of the world stood aside and did nothing, Raoul Wallenberg’s rescue mission continues to stand out as one of the most extraordinary acts of the twentieth century.”36 Wallenberg did more than just save nearly one

186 Staging Holocaust Resistance hundred thousand lives—he also provided people with a sense of dignity as human beings. Mrs. Lantos, one of the Hungarian Holocaust survivors, recalls that Wallenberg “saved not only our lives, but our faiths, our beliefs. He was a shining example of the triumph of the human spirit. Seeing this courage, in the midst of the unspeakable brutality, somehow enabled us to rise above ourselves, too.”37 In scene 32, the Stranger mentions that Wallenberg the redeemer will not be forgotten: “In prisons, in concentration camps, in cellars where so many of these wretches hide, his name is mentioned in many prayers. Even the dying pray for him” (77). Wenckheim’s play presents two sides of the human persona, reminding audiences that the Holocaust was not inevitable and could have been deterred if more citizens acted as Righteous Gentiles rather than like their evil, barbaric counterparts.

10. The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

P

erhaps the most fitting way to end a book about Holocaust resistance is via a chapter on stoical moral defiance of the Nazis, which is best represented by the spirit of Dr. Janusz Korczak, a well-known pediatrician in charge of an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Although he had repeated offers to leave the Ghetto and flee to the safety of the Aryan side of Warsaw, Korczak denied each opportunity, refusing to abandon the orphans. During the deportations of the Warsaw Jews in August 1942, Korczak led his two hundred children to their unknown destiny, which became the gas chambers of nearby Treblinka. The children, in their best clothing, scrubbed from head to toe, each carrying a small bag of bread and a flask of water, were led to the boarding cattle cars near the Umschlagplatz.1 Soothed by Korczak’s comforting words, the children, with their inspiring and trustworthy confidant leading the way, never wept and never tried to flee. Korczak surrendered his life to ensure that the children were comforted so that their deaths were not so terrifying. An SS officer pointed to Korczak and asked, “Who is that man?”—a query that has since resonated as a testimony to Korczak’s stature. During the youngsters’ three-mile trek to the trains, “Remember Korczak’s Children” was first heard; the slogan later became a battle cry for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and for the Jewish resistance movement throughout Eastern Europe. This chapter will focus on two plays that personify Korczak’s spirit of resistance: Michael Brady’s Korczak’s Children and Gabriel Emanuel’s Children of Night. Korczak was born Henryk Goldszmit in Warsaw on July 22, 1878 or 1879; the birth year is inconclusive because his father delayed registering the birth certificate. Janusz’s mother was the daughter of prominent Kalisz Jews. Józef, his father, was a prominent lawyer, whose Jewish family prided itself on being fully assimilated into Polish culture, which is why he chose a common Christian name for his son, whose last name certainly was of

188 Staging Holocaust Resistance Jewish origin. After being tutored at home by a governess until age seven, Henryk attended the Praskie Gimnazjum, later known as Wladyslaw IV Liceum, where he developed a strong interest in nature and a passion for reading. By 1891, at the age of thirteen, he began keeping a diary; from this moment on, writing became a lifelong preoccupation for him.2 While at school, Henryk began writing humorous sketches, and in 1898, when crafting a four-act play for a literary competition, he used the pseudonym Janusz Korczak, perhaps because he thought that he could better prosper in anti-Semitic Poland with a Christian-sounding surname. Meanwhile, Korczak’s father, who had been in and out of mental hospitals for several years, was committed to an asylum in the early 1890s. The psychiatric treatments drained the family’s resources, so Janusz began tutoring children to help support his mother. When his father passed away in 1896, the funeral was well attended by Catholics and Jews who came to pay their respects to one of their more prominent citizens. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who had been a physician, Korczak entered medical school in 1898 at Warsaw University. During his six-year medical apprenticeship, he wrote hundreds of articles about social issues and travel using various pseudonyms; for his essays on science and health, he used his birth name.3 In his first novel, Children of the Streets (1901), Korczak’s message was that children living in poverty could only be saved by providing them with a suitable education in their early years. Upon receiving his medical degree in 1905, Korczak was mobilized into the Russian army to serve on the front lines of the Russo-Japanese War. During his time in the Far East, he experienced firsthand the horrors of war. While dispensing medicine to the poor, he was still able to write for newspapers and even penned another novel, Child of the Drawing Room, in 1906. Upon returning to Warsaw in 1906, Korczak became resident doctor for a children’s hospital on Sliska Street. He began publishing essays about public health issues, midwives, and the problems physicians typically encountered. To advance his knowledge of pediatrics, Korczak traveled to Berlin in 1907 and to Paris in 1909 to study with Europe’s best physicians in the field. In 1910, Korczak left his medical practice to set up a children’s orphanage with Stefania (Stefa) Wilczynska, a Jewish educator who shared Korczak’s pedagogical interests in nurturing the child’s soul. Together they created a type of utopian Jewish shelter for the homeless in which the children would learn morality, fair play, and honesty by creating their own court of judgment by their peers. Korczak’s orphanage opened in October 1912 and was soon revered as a model for its sanitary conditions. Betty Jean Lifton,

The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

189

Korczak’s biographer, notes that Korczak’s goal was to provide the children with a sense of self-respect by treating them as people of today, not just of tomorrow: “He was concerned not with teaching children their ABC’s— they would go to public school for that—but with the grammar of ethics.”4 With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Korczak was conscripted to serve the Czar’s Imperial Army, leaving Stefa to manage the orphanage. He was assigned to tend to the wounded in a field hospital on the Ukrainian front. During the war, Korczak wrote How to Love a Child, which formulated his philosophy of education that began with the premise that the child is a separate being with inalienable rights that must be honored if that child is to mature productively. During this time, Korczak was transferred to work in the children’s shelters in Kiev, where he treated orphans suffering from malnutrition, hunger, and disease. The drastic effects of war on the children that Korczak witnessed in Kiev had a profound effect that remained with him throughout his life. Once the war ended in 1918, Korczak returned to his orphanage in Warsaw, where his minions were enthralled to welcome him home. After a brief stint serving as a reserve major in military hospitals in Lodz and Warsaw, Korczak, who made the mistake of not washing after treating an infected patient, contracted typhus. While he was delirious and was being nursed back to health by his mother, she became afflicted with the disease. She died before her son could regain his senses; for the rest of his life, Korczak carried the guilt of causing his mother’s death because of the seemingly benign omission of not washing his hands. In the 1920s, Korczak was in charge of two orphanages, lectured at universities, supervised summer camps for the children, created a newspaper (the Little Review ) for children, and continued his literary pursuits by writing King Matthew the First, a 1923 children’s book about a child king’s unsuccessful utopian dreams of reforming society to improve the lives of children. Eschewing the beatings and punishments endemic of the time, Korczak’s orphanage was progressively structured to cater to the emotional needs of the children. Korczak drew up a Code of Laws and, adopting a unique system of self-government, he allowed the children to become their own judges in a court of peers that “tried” any rules violators. He relinquished the educational mission to schoolteachers and focused instead on teaching the orphans life skills. Korczak maintained that a child was to be respected as an individual, not trained as someone who would suit adults but rather as someone whose soul was unique.5 Under the country’s dictatorial regime of Józef Pilsudski, who fostered the assimilation of Jews and Christians, the orphanages prospered in the

190 Staging Holocaust Resistance 1920s. However, after Pilsudski’s death in 1935, anti-Semitic right-wing fascists came into power and soon became critical of Korczak’s humane approach to the education of Jewish children. Korczak’s reputation began to wane, and he was removed from several positions, including his consulting post at the juvenile court. He thus briefly flirted with Zionism and made summer trips to Palestine in 1934 and 1936, primarily to study educational achievements of the kibbutz movement. Upon his return to Warsaw after his first trip to Palestine, Korczak was offered a radio show aimed at reaching thousands of children. Aware that fascist authorities would be suspicious of allowing a Jewish doctor to influence Polish children, Korczak astutely chose the pseudonym of the “Old Doctor” as his underground name. Korczak’s warm, intimate style was popular with the masses, but his radio career ended abruptly in 1936 when the fascist cabal organized a smear campaign against him in the newspapers. Korczak was at a crossroads in his life; he had aspirations to settle in Palestine, yet he always insisted that Warsaw, his homeland, was the only place in which he felt comfortable and concomitantly felt guilty about abandoning the children in the orphanage. Despite the anti-Semitism of his native country, Korczak felt proud of his literary output, which eventually numbered hundreds of essays and more than twenty books, including novels, short stories, and a successful play (Madmen’s Senate ) that was performed in 1931 at the Atheneum Theatre in Warsaw. On November 4, 1937, he received confirmation of his literary achievements when he won the Golden Laurel awarded by the Polish Academy of Literature, which exacerbated his already divided feelings about how his reputation was perceived in his much beloved anti-Semitic country. When the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Korczak viewed the war as a means to galvanize the country’s Christians and Jews against a common enemy. He resumed his voice as the Old Doctor in patriotic messages presented on the radio station Warsaw II, newly formed by his friend Jan Piotrowski.6 Korczak’s appeals on the radio exhorted Polish citizens to resist the Nazi invasion, evoking remembrances of such defiance during Czarist Russia and World War I. Once Poland succumbed to the Nazis, the persecution of Jews began immediately; Jews were sent to labor camps, imprisoned, and shot on the streets for disobeying Nazi decrees. Meanwhile, Korczak consistently defied the Nazis by refusing to wear the white armband with the blue Star of David and instead paraded through the streets of Warsaw in his old Polish military uniform. Korczak’s main concern during the Nazi occupation was to find food and funds to keep the orphanage functional and the children alive. His

The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

191

days were spent visiting wealthy Jews and Christians, pleading with them to contribute funds for the children. If such aristocrats refused a contribution, Korczak appealed to them time and again until he wore them down or until they were embarrassed enough to donate some meager amount of money. As nearly 138,000 Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, Korczak’s gentile friends pleaded with him to go into hiding; however, he refused to abandon the nearly 170 Jewish children in his orphanage. When the orphanage was moved to a smaller venue in the Ghetto, Korczak protested at Gestapo headquarters. When Korczak proudly announced to the Gestapo that he himself was Jewish, they beat him and then threw him into the brutal Pawiak prison. Only after Korczak’s former students were able to bribe corrupt Nazi officials with thirty thousand zlotys was he released from Pawiak, after having been there for one month. During the persecution of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s, Korczak was busy providing a safe haven for the children in his orphanage. He raised additional funds through concerts that he held at the orphanage during Purim and Passover. The children, dressed in their best clothes, were ecstatic at the opportunity to witness these performances in what was otherwise an environment of neglect and poverty. Professional singer Romana Lilienstein recalls these special occasions for which she chose musical selections for the children: “We knew they were as hungry as we were, as everyone in the audience was, yet I’ll never forget the intensity of those hundreds of eyes fixed on us. It is difficult to explain what such a concert meant at that time.” 7 Korczak held an assembly of the children (usually on Sunday), provided literary evenings, and maintained an active choir, a drama-reading group, a sewing circle, and a puppet workshop. The students’ routine was coordinated into school activities and work assignments. Meanwhile, despite Korczak’s attempt to preserve civility, conditions in the orphanage rapidly deteriorated under Nazi rule. The children began starving, disease, particularly typhus, was more ubiquitous, and there was only one bathroom for the 170 children and staff. Korczak himself became emaciated and suffered from a congested lung, a ruptured hernia that he never had time to repair surgically, and badly swollen legs. Korczak felt guilty about eating anything while his minions were starving, and so his nourishment was often confined to black bread, water, and vodka (later to be replaced by pure alcohol mixed with warm water). In May 1942, Korczak again began a diary that he had intermittently kept since 1939. Strangely enough, the diary was not a chronicle of Jewish strife in the Warsaw Ghetto; instead, Korczak, writing at night while the children slept in the orphanage, used the memoir as a series of

192

Staging Holocaust Resistance

reminiscences that functioned as a catharsis about his own history and about life in Poland before and after the war had begun. In the diary, he obsessed about providing food and resources for what eventually turned out to be two hundred children in the orphanage. His motto, established in 1937, was “It is inadmissible to leave the world as one finds it.”8 Korczak’s life work was to bring happiness to children so that they could prosper as adults. With more homeless children entering the orphanage, Korczak felt overwhelmed. By day, he had to beg patrons for money to support the children; when he returned to his acolytes to administer love and support, the expressions on their faces indicated how bleak the situation was. Faced with constant shootings in the streets each evening and aware that the Ghetto population was slowly wasting away, the children were in terror. In his diary entry of July 15, 1942, Korczak wrote, “The children moon about. Only the outer appearances are normal. Underneath lurks weariness, discouragement, anger, mutiny, mistrust, resentment, longing.”9 He was beginning to become fatigued both physically and mentally, and his apathy increased because of his malnourishment. Yet he refused to consider his own needs; in the diary, he wrote, “I exist not to be loved and admired, but myself to act and love. It is not the duty of those around to help me but I am duty-bound to look after the world, after man.”10 Although he thought quite a bit about suicide in late spring 1942, he always rejected it because he refused to abandon the children. When the deportation orders began in July 1942, Adam Czerniakow, chair of the Judenrat, asked that the Jewish children of the orphanages be exempted. However, since the Nazis viewed the children as unproductive, the Jewish Police were forced to deport them. Czerniakov, who had followed Nazi orders scrupulously until then,11 could not force himself to deport the children; refusing Korczak’s stoicism, Czerniakov committed suicide by swallowing poison. On August 6, 1942, with the deportation imminent, Korczak arose early to calm the children and assuage their fears. On the spur of the moment, the Nazis ordered all of the children out of the orphanage; they were given fifteen minutes to pack their belongings. As the children lined up fearfully in rows of four, clutching their flasks of water, their pieces of bread, their favorite toys, and their books, Korczak tried to reassure them. Carrying five-year-old Romcia in his arms, Korczak led the 192 children and 10 adults through the streets of Warsaw to the train station. During the march, several Poles yelled, “Goodbye, good riddance, Jews!” Meanwhile, the Jewish Police and the denizens of the Ghetto, recognizing that one of their most respected citizens was being deported, were exasperated. Many

The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

193

today still consider that this three-mile trek was miraculous since none of the children wept and none tried to flee or hide; instead, they drew comfort in clinging to their savior. As they approached the Umschlagplatz, the children were herded through the gate by SS and Ukrainian guards with whips, guns, and dogs. After they waited in the hot sun with no water, food, or sanitation facilities, Korczak ordered the children to rise so they could be loaded into the freight cars. Reliable sources indicate that a member of CENTOS, the organization that represented 180 orphanages in Poland, had petitioned the Gestapo to free Korczak; before boarding the train, Korczak received the information that he was allowed to leave but refused to abandon his orphans.12 Instead, Korczak, with quiet dignity, walking with his head held high while holding a child in each hand, led the children in an orderly procession to board the train. The Jewish Police cordoned off a path for the deportees and saluted Korczak almost instinctively. Even a German officer, impressed by Korczak’s courage, asked, “Who is that man?” Nahum Remba, a member of the Judenrat, recognized the procession as a distinguishing moment that sparked the spirit of resistance: “I shall never forget this scene as long as I live. This was no march to the train cars, but rather a mute protest against this murderous regime . . . a procession the like of which no human eye has ever witnessed.”13 When Korczak and his contingent arrived at Treblinka, they were immediately gassed. Dr. Korczak’s name has become legendary, and many believe that his silent resistance was equivalent to martyrdom; had he been Catholic, he probably would have been canonized. The first homage paid to him occurred shortly after the war, when surviving orphans and teachers formed a club in his honor. Since then, schools, hospitals, and streets carry his name worldwide. In Warsaw, writers have traditionally honored his legacy by retracing the famous steps that he took during the final procession to the Umschlagplatz. To coincide with the centenary of his birth, UNESCO, celebrating the Year of the Child, declared 1978–1979 the Year of Korczak. Korczak associations were created to honor his legacy in Poland, Germany, Israel, Canada, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, and Russia. In Poland, the Janusz Korczak International Society was formed to host annual conferences to discuss and disseminate Korczak’s research on child education; the Janusz Korczak Pedagogical Legacy Group at Warsaw’s Pedagogical Research Institute is devoted to ongoing collection of information about the great educator. In Israel, Korczak has been chosen as one of the Thirty-six Just Men (the Talmud’s Lamed-Vav Tzaddikum ) whose pure souls justify the purpose of humankind in the eyes of God. At

194 Staging Holocaust Resistance Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, a memorial, Janusz Korczak and the Children, with the Old Doctor’s arms encircling the children, prominently conveys the memory of Korczak the mystical miracle worker. In both Poland and Israel, postage stamps have been issued to commemorate him. There are several plays about the legendary figure of Dr. Korczak, but not all of them focus on Holocaust resistance. The most successful play about the eminent Old Doctor is German playwright Erwin Sylvanus’s Korczak und die Kinder (Dr. Korczak and the Children), which premiered at the Schauspiel in Krefeld, West Germany, on November 1, 1957. The play depicts Korczak as a religious man of faith whose credo is honesty, which is in sharp contrast to a German nation that lies about the Holocaust by refusing to recognize its latent anti-Semitism that precipitated the Shoah. Although Dr. Korczak and the Children is tangential to the subject of Holocaust resistance, I discussed the play in depth in my previous book, Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity.14 Polish playwright Tamara Karren’s 1979 play, Kim, byl ten czlowiek (Who Was This Man? ) was presented at the La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City during October 1984.15 Who Was This Man? is a one-act monodrama set in the Warsaw orphanage during August 3 and 5, 1942, as Korczak ponders the imminent deportations.16 The play, one long monologue, presents Korczak reflecting on his life and philosophy through Karren’s almost verbatim references to Korczak’s diary entries.17 Although the Holocaust obviously looms largely in the background, the play focuses primarily on Korczak’s nostalgic reminiscences in order to provide a raison d’être for his life and to steel him for the disaster that awaits him. Furthermore, Karren depicts Korczak’s heroism as muted, preferring to characterize it instead as his devotion to children—just another pastime. Korczak admits, “Some people like playing cards, others chase women, others still can’t be dragged away from a race-course. I love children. There’s no question of sacrificing myself—I’m doing it for myself. I need it. I don’t believe in ‘sacrificing yourself’” (31). Karren emphasizes that Korczak is not a martyr; moreover, although the Holocaust is omnipresent in the play, she tends to downplay Korczak as a symbol of Jewish resistance, allowing him to state, “The ‘human’ question was always more crucial to me than the ‘Jewish’ question” (36). Finally, Korczak’s march to the train station is barely noted, eliding any emphasis on his legacy as a martyr for the resistance. However, two plays about Korczak that do personify him as the quiet symbol of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust are Michael Brady’s Korczak’s Children and Gabriel Emanuel’s Children of Night. Brady and

The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

195

Emanuel have done extensive research to ensure that their portraits of Korczak are historically accurate; Brady, however, has taken a bit more poetic license by creating fictional German characters that confront the pediatrician. American playwright Michael Brady was born in Peabody, Massachusetts, in 1949. After graduating from Boston College in 1971, he embarked on his playwriting career. His first play, Sara, was produced by Equity Library Theatre in 1980 at Lincoln Center. To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday was developed through the literary department of the Ensemble Theatre and M Square Entertainment before moving to Circle in the Square in New York City during 1984. Gillian won the Oppenheimer Award for best play of 1983 and has been staged by approximately two hundred professional or amateur theater companies since then; it was also produced as a film by Sony Pictures in 1996. His other plays that have been produced on stage include Semper Fi (1987), Two Bears Blinking (1995), and Hard Time (2003). Brady is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Ensemble Studio Theatre; he also served for several years as the Program Officer for Artists for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, supervising a grants program for literary, visual, and performance artists. Brady told me that he became curious about Korczak in 1981 after reading an article about a fourteen-year-old poet in Soweto, South Africa, who smuggled her poetry out of the country via her publisher’s shoes.18 The United Nations presented her with the Janusz Korczak Prize, typically awarded to a young writer/artist who produced work under conditions of great adversity. Brady decided to find information about Korczak and did so primarily through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. Brady confided to me that his main sources of information were Korczak’s diary, Celia Heller’s On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars, and Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s A Holocaust Reader.19 Korczak’s Children received a reading at the Ninety-second Street Y in New York City in 1981 before premiering at Boston College University Theater on March 3, 1983. This production was directed by Howard Enoch and featured Michael Sellers as Dr. Korczak. Korczak’s Children includes eight scenes spread over two acts that depict the dire situation in Warsaw in early August 1942, a few days before the children of the orphanage were deported. The play begins with the children’s performance of Good King Casimir in the orphanage—one of the typical cultural activities provided by Korczak and his staff to distract the children from the Nazi horror taking place outside the protected shelter. Brady uses the real names of the children who were with Korczak

196 Staging Holocaust Resistance until the deportations. Mendel plays the role of devil’s advocate in the play, arguing that the Jews are filthy parasites who “spit on all our holy things,” killed Christ, and should therefore be expelled from Poland.20 As the Nazis inflict punishment outside on the streets of Warsaw while the play is in performance, we hear bottles breaking, doors smashing, and shouts of “Yids, out”; the petrified children tear off their costumes until the tumult subsides. Moski, playing the role of Casimir, the former king of Poland, consoles the frightened orphans: “My mind’s made up. So here’s my decree. The Jews are welcome in Poland, and shall always be” (117). Korczak spent his life trying to assimilate into anti-Semitic Polish society and thus imbued in his disciples the need for Poles and Jews to unite as brethren; Moski’s Casimir speaks for Korczak when he ends the play with, “So now he’s [Mendel] gone and hear my last words. Be friends, Poles and Jews the same” (117). In unison, the children conclude, “Yes. Yes, I’m a Jew. It’s good enough for Casimir; it’s good enough for you” (117). In his commentary on act 1, scene 1, of Brady’s play, Robert Skloot writes, “There is both charm and irony in this little playlet, for, in 1942, there was no one to protect the Jews, and their condition was truly desperate.”21 Thus, at the beginning of Korczak’s Children, we immediately get a glimpse of Korczak’s attempt to alter the psychological personae of traumatized Jewish children. We soon learn that the children in the orphanage are not only faced with psychological trauma, but are also confronted with the reality of physical deterioration and emaciation. The children are starving, donations have been sparse, and illness abounds in the orphanage. Yet the children recognize that Dr. Korczak is their only redeemer—the sole voice of salvation in a world that has ceased to care about them. In an honorary ceremony to indicate their appreciation, the children present Korczak with a scroll. Hanna indicates that the children view Korczak as a lone heroic voice amid the genocide taking place outside the orphanage: When the world went dark, you spoke to thousands to fight against the enemy. To us you will always be Mister Doctor, our friend, our teacher, and our father. We know we speak for the hundreds of children who have lived in the Children’s Republic. The debt we owe you is our lives. (119)

In the play, Brady includes Emmanuel Ringelblum, a professor of history whose archival collections of thousands of pages of diaries, letters, underground newspapers, posters, and photographs provided a chronicle of Jewish life during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Ringelblum has been training

The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

197

Hanna, Moski, and Mendel to pose as Catholics to survive on the Aryan side of the city. Ringelblum mentions to Korczak that the Resistance has selected the pediatrician as “a national hero” (123), the voice on the radio who rallied Warsaw against a common enemy. Ringelblum promises him safe evacuation to the Christian sector, along with his loyal protégé Stefa and a few staff members; the Warsaw historian hopes that after the war, Korczak, like King Casimir, will be the voice of inspiration to unite Poles and Jews. When Korczak learns that his children must remain behind, he emphatically states, “Well, Emmanuel, you have delivered your message. There is one thing I can’t do for you, nor for Poland, not to save the lives of all the Jews in the world. I can’t leave the children” (124). As the son of a madman who realized that this affliction may be hereditary, Korczak wrote a novel about suicide when he was seventeen. However, he rejected the notion of suicide when he began to read Chekhov. Like Korczak, Chekhov was a physician who could apply his objective and diagnostic medical perspectives to his writings. Korczak tells Stefania, “Chekhov is the master. Indirection, subtlety. A great help in my own writings” (118). Moreover, Chekhov, like Korczak, treated people from all walks of life; both physicians often went unpaid for their services when their poor patients could not afford the medical fees. As a physician, Chekhov, suffering from tuberculosis, knew that he was dying, yet he kept writing and penned his best plays at the end of his career, virtually on his deathbed. Korczak, emaciated and near death at age sixty-four, was suicidal and hardly had the strength to continue on in 1942; he carried a vial of mercuric chloride and morphine pills that would facilitate his suicide if ever he faltered. Yet Korczak, with Chekhov as his mentor, perseveres for the sake of the children. Act 1 demonstrates Korczak’s perseverance as he makes his rounds, pleading with well-off benefactors to donate contributions to save the orphanage. He calls on wealthy Jews, such as Frau Fallenberg, and chides them for being greedy. When Fallenberg responds that times are tough, Korczak asks her for a loan that will be repaid in full and even with interest. Then he appeals to her Jewish heritage: “It is our tradition. Aid to the needy. They say among Jews it is always in the family. Your family is starving. Will you let your children starve?” (129). As she ignores his pleas, he threatens to denounce her: “I will go into the streets. A warning. Shouting to the roofs. The injustice of it” (129). Fallenberg accuses Korczak of giving money to smugglers, but he defends his actions, not as illicit activities, but as serving a higher purpose: “Yes, I consort with smugglers. I pay, and they bring food. They don’t talk morality to me. They talk cabbage” (129).

198

Staging Holocaust Resistance

When Fallenberg states that her children are safe from the Nazis in Spain, Korczak counters with, “And what of my children who are not in Spain? And who will die in Warsaw?” (129). When Fallenberg finally concedes (her name suggests “fallen Jew”) by offering some money, Korczak argues for more and even coerces her to pry her expensive ring off her finger. Korczak meets with the smugglers, who tempt him to flee to the Aryan side of the city to save his life. Korczak’s well-connected Christian supporters expect him to continue providing encouragement to Poland as the Old Doctor did during the German invasion. However, the children cannot possibly be smuggled out of the Jewish Ghetto. Korczak responds to the smuggler, “Tell them no, my friend” (131), again adamantly refusing to consider sparing his own life if it means abandoning the orphans. Korczak even has the audacity to go to Gestapo headquarters to ask Commandant Auerswald to provide bread and potatoes for the orphans. He comes as Colonel Korczak, a retired Polish military officer, but Auerswald is wary and wonders why he is there: “Poles hate Jews, didn’t anyone tell you? We pull them apart all the time. Why does a Polish officer care about Jew kittens?” (132). When Korczak reveals that he is a Jewish doctor, Auerswald tells his assistant to investigate whether Korczak is lying about being a physician. If so, he is to be executed; if not, Korczak is to be beaten, yet Auerswald warns, “But not too severe a beating. And not on the hands. We’re going to need doctors” (134). Act 1 ends with Korczak attempting to provide some hope for the children amid the terror outside the safe haven of the orphanage. Fifteen-year-old Mendel regrets his helplessness while watching the Germans laughing as they threw elderly Jews off a roof to their deaths. Korczak tries to convince Mendel, Hanna, and Moski, who have been receiving tutelage in Catholicism, to flee to the Aryan side of Warsaw when Ringelblum deems them ready to do so. However, Moski protests, “You’re asking me to do something you would never do” (137). Moski’s protest is exacerbated by the fact that Korczak tells Moski that God understood why he remained helpless while watching the Nazis murder Jews with impunity (135). Meanwhile, Korczak, who created the guidelines for the orphanage, refused to sanction prayer under his domain because he insisted, “Belief must be discovered, not imposed” (138). In an attempt to remain a steadfast role model for the children, Korczak decides to abandon the idea that religion is the choice of the child and, putting on his prayer shawl, begins to pray to God. The stage directions indicate, “Korczak screams, very loud and piercing, a scream of complete anguish ” (138). When I asked Brady about why he chose to make Korczak, a nominally religious Jew whose

The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

199

family refused to speak Yiddish at home in order to more readily assimilate into Polish culture, suddenly religious, he responded, “I do have some notes on Korczak observing Yom Kippur as he got older and this causing tension between him and other staff members. I think the scene is trying to visualize profound despair . . . But I did try to honor the man, warts and all, as best I could. Again, I tried to be true to the voice I heard in the Diary, a relentless, painful self-analysis.”22 Act 2 introduces Lieutenant Gustav Stenhnman, a former orphan who has recently distinguished himself by being awarded two field commendations and three medals for his service in the German army. When he was eleven years old, Stenhnman served eight months under Dr. Korczak’s tutelage. When asked by Auerswald whether Korczak was a good man, Stenhnman, trying to find appropriate words to praise a Jew in front of a German officer, says, after hesitating, “I thought so” (144). Auerswald sends Stenhnman as an emissary, “an orphan sent to the orphans” (144), to inform Korczak of deportation plans for his wards. Auerswald assures Stenhnman that despite rumors of extermination camps, the children will have better food than they now have, will be absolved of work, and the visit to the countryside will provide them with plenty of fresh air and sunshine. As Auerswald tells him that Korczak and his staff will remain in Warsaw, the former orphan, understanding Korczak’s mentality, says, “He won’t want to be separated from the children” (144). When Stenhnman arrives at the orphanage and presents his orders to Korczak, he can only spout verbatim the platitudes he heard from his superior: I’m also to inform you that there will be food for the children. So you need not concern yourself with that. Bread and marmalade will be provided on the shipping platform. Better food, I think, than the children receive here. Due to shortages beyond your control, I know. (Pause ) You can see, they will be better off. Clean air, sunshine. Not like here. (147)

Korczak is so stunned by the automatonlike quality of the messenger that he initially does not recognize Gustav as his former pupil. When Korczak informs Gustav that the children will be gassed in a concentration camp, the German soldier refuses to believe him. Although Stenhnman admits that his only experience of kindness was in the orphanage, his loyalty to the Nazis takes precedence over any argument Korczak extends. The scene does not intimate that Korczak’s teachings have fallen on deaf ears; instead, the implication is that even benevolent individuals fell prey to

200

Staging Holocaust Resistance

the Nazi propaganda machine, which makes Korczak’s allegiance to his children much more illustrious. He confirms with Stefania that although the Germans have offered to spare their lives, the staff will remain with the children, not to see them die, but to “never betray the idea of the Children’s Republic” (151). Korczak’s Children ends with a brief playlet in which the children reminisce about happier times during summer vacations in the countryside. The children dream of marching to the sun to escape, but the Chekhovian moment of happiness is fleeting. The reality is the death march that awaits them. A Voice narrates the trek to the Umschlagplatz and the train ride to Treblinka. The Voice notes that before boarding the train, Korczak “was saluted by the Ghetto police and Germans who witnessed the event asked, ‘Wo ist deisser mann? Who is this man ?’” (156). In the eleventh hour, Korczak heroically proceeds to his death, crushing the morphine pills as if to reject any suicide attempt. Brady allows Korczak to have the last line of the play: “If my presence will save even one child one second of terror, my life will be well lost” (156). The Nazis murdered 1.5 million children during the Holocaust; those stories are preserved with plays such as Korczak’s Children. The play’s title refers to the children, but the focus is on Korczak, whose sense of heroism suggests that the evil personified by the Nazi genocide was preventable. Gabriel Emanuel is a Canadian-born playwright who received his bachelor of arts degree in 1977 from the University of Toronto, where he studied theater and took courses in Judaic studies. In 1983, he obtained a law degree from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and has since practiced law in Canada and Israel, where he currently resides. Emanuel has been a featured writer on CBC’s award-winning radio program The Scales of Justice. With director Howard Rypp, Emanuel cofounded Toronto’s Nephesh Theatre Company, Canada’s only professional Jewish theater troupe, which has since relocated to Israel. His most popular play, Einstein, premiered at Toronto Workshop Productions in 1985, has since been translated into six languages, and has been performed at La Mama in New York City, as well as in Israel, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, and India. Emanuel’s other notable plays include Nobody’s Fool (1979), P.S. The Cheque Is in the Mail (1984), and The Golem of Prague (2008). While he was a student at the University of Toronto in 1976, Emanuel enrolled in a course taught by eminent philosopher Emil Fackenheim, a Holocaust survivor who later immigrated to Canada. Fackenheim, once interned in a German concentration camp, would tell his students that there should be an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not give Hitler

The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

201

any posthumous victories.”23 As a Jew growing up in the first generation of a post-Holocaust world, Emanuel felt compelled to learn more about the Shoah. Reading about Dr. Korczak and also about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising inspired him to keep the memory alive that Jews did not go to the slaughter like sheep. Emanuel read copious amounts of sources on the Holocaust, including the Warsaw Ghetto diaries of Chaim Kaplan and Emmanuel Ringelblum, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, Eliezer Berkowitz’s Faith after the Holocaust, Fackenheim’s God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections, as well as histories of the Holocaust written by Yehuda Bauer and Lucy Dawidowicz. The first draft of Children of Night was submitted as a philosophy paper for professor Fackenheim’s class, and from there it was turned into a play. Emanuel explained to me that the title of the play derived from the famous photograph of a young Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, with a Yellow Star pinned to his chest, raising his arms in the air while the Nazis pointed their guns at him.24 The photo was originally submitted as part of Jürgen Stroop’s report to Himmler during May 1943 about progress made during the attempt to quash the uprising in the Jewish Ghetto. When Emanuel initially saw this photo several years before he wrote the play on a visit to the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz in northern Israel, he became transfixed by the starkness of the image. Emanuel explained, “So the title was borne of this image, and was also meant to include the other children who were consumed in the long, dark night of the Holocaust.”25 Children of Night was first staged by the Nephesh Theatre Company at Toronto’s Bathurst Street Theatre in March 1978. This production, starring John Juliani as Korczak and E. M. Margolese as Adam Czerniakov,26 was directed by Howard Rypp. In May 1979, the play was remounted at the Warehouse Theatre in Winnipeg with Paul Kligman as Korczak. Children of Night was also presented as part of the International Jewish Theatre Festival in a production starring Lou Jacobi at the Marymount Theatre in New York City during June 1980. Children of Night is a two-act play that occurs in the Sienna Street Children’s Home in Warsaw in 1942. The play indicates that despite the chaos outside the orphanage that produced filth and starvation on the streets of the Ghetto, Korczak, who feared the spread of disease, maintained an immaculately clean environment for the sequestered children. While evil raged outside, Korczak, the great educator, created a sanctuary in which decency, respect for others, and rules adopted according to strict guidelines provided solace inside the orphanage.

202

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Emanuel’s purpose in act 1 seems to be to convey to audiences the impression that Korczak provided children who had lost their families during the Holocaust with love and compassion—a sense that someone cared about them. During their bleakest hours, with the fear of death constantly looming over them, Korczak imbues the children with the hope of a future in Palestine. Moreover, instead of feeling as if they were outcasts or waste products, as the Nazis viewed them, Korczak treated the children with dignity, believing that they were just as intelligent and sensitive as adults, only lacking the experience of their elders. Korczak teaches the children to work, to make themselves useful, rather than to act listlessly. Despite the fact that the children cannot understand why they are forced to starve, Korczak placates them by promising them something nutritious to eat, even though he can only scrounge up bread and potatoes. Korczak is seen in the play as a father figure to his two hundred wards, making them laugh amid the horror and having patience for the children instead of punishing them when they make mistakes. The children trust their mentor, who has developed a reputation for never having lied. Korczak also attends to their health needs, and although the children ruefully swallow their cod liver oil, they realize that the Old Doctor administers it for their own good. Korczak also tells them about his trips to Palestine, whose pristine climate creates a fantasy environment that is much different from the harsh reality of Warsaw winters to which the children are accustomed. Although the Promised Land may be an illusion for the soon to be deported, Korczak encourages the children to dream: “Dreams are the only true possessions that we own—everything else is either false or borrowed.”27 Furthermore, Korczak commissions an instructor to educate the children because the venerable physician insists that they continue to learn despite immediate threats to their survival. Although the daily murders in the streets suggest an atmosphere filled with evil and hatred, Korczak instills the children with a sense of morality and a belief in the benevolence of humankind. When Gittel expresses disgust with the Nazi soldiers who frighten Jews, march through the city as ruthless dictators, and appear to be elitists, Korczak responds, “but you should still know that your own hatred will never make anyone else’s go away” (75). Korczak tries to convey to the children that the Nazis do not know the Jews, and ignorance breeds hatred. Korczak tells Gittel, “Ignorance is poison. It is contagious. It will spread through your mind, through your body, through your home, through your city, your country, the whole world if you give it a chance. And hatred is just like that, Gittel” (76). Korczak is not merely spouting clichés, for when Mrs. Fleishman

The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

203

enters and asks the doctor to take in Motl, whose parents were called up for deportation, Korczak, reluctant to accept another orphan into an overcrowded environment of starving children, cannot refuse. To prepare for a Cultural Night, the orphans are rehearsing a play about Passover, retelling the tale of Moses leading the Children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. Motl, whose grandfather was a rabbi, extols the virtues of the Passover story: “Let my people go! Let my people go! Let my people go!” (81). The Passover tale reminds us of the time when the Jews were slaves for Pharoah, whose soldiers beat the Hebrews with clubs and whips. To prevent future generations of Jews from getting stronger in numbers, Pharoah ordered all first-born Hebrews to be killed. Most families tried to hide their children, but if they were found, the first-borns would be murdered by the Egyptians. Moses was one such child hidden by his mother in order to save his life. Moses was found by an Egyptian and raised in the house of Pharoah. After reaching adulthood, Moses killed an unusually cruel Egyptian taskmaster and had to flee into the desert. At the site of the Burning Bush, Moses, the shepherd, is compelled by God to lead his people out of Egypt “and into a good land, flowing with milk and honey” (106). God, through his messenger Moses, promises to inflict plagues upon the Egyptians until they relent to letting the Hebrews go. For the children in the orphanage, the Passover story obviously suggests important parallels with Nazi-occupied Warsaw. The play the children will perform is titled Let My People Go, which reflects the plight of the Jews under Nazi rule. The Jews have seen how the Nazis plan to use them as forced labor, much in the same way that they were treated as slaves in ancient Egypt. The Nazis, like the Egyptians under Pharoah, do not hesitate to hunt down and then murder innocent children either, and both types of perpetrators view children as potential future threats that are better off eradicated. However, the orphanage children have Dr. Korczak as their benefactor, who, like Moses, hopes to lead them to Palestine in the future and who, like Moses who defied Pharoah, is confident in his ability to confront the Nazis. Emanuel seems to have done his homework, for Korczak in the late 1930s had written a manuscript on Moses that was translated into Hebrew and published in the journal Omer in 1939. Moses, like Korczak, the assimilated Jew, was forced to live with strangers until he found his way back to his origins. In that manuscript, Korczak compared himself to Moses, who Korczak assumed must have thought about suicide under the heavy burden of responsibility for so many lives.28 Both Korczak and Moses were pariahs in their homelands but overcame internal

204 Staging Holocaust Resistance prejudices to become righteous Jewish leaders displaying courage and perseverance under enormous pressure from mighty totalitarian forces. The performance of Let My People Go is interrupted when the anonymous Nazi enters with Czerniakov to announce the “resettlement” of all Jews, regardless of age or sex, in the East. The fantasy world of theater that raised the spirits of the children in the orphanage is halted by the grating reality of the Holocaust. The Nazi’s brusque delivery of the ungracious news that any Jews not complying with the deportation orders will be shot and then buried by the Judenrat is too much for the children, accustomed to being treated compassionately by Korczak and his staff, to bear. Motl picks up his staff and starts beating the Nazi, exclaiming, “I hate you! I hate you! God will punish you like he punished Pharoah . . . even worse. Pharoah let us go . . . ” (111). When the Nazi draws his pistol and aims it at Motl, Korczak shields the child. The Nazi orders him to let the boy go, to which Korczak responds, “You will have to kill me first” (112). Motl’s life is thus temporarily spared as a result of Korczak’s intervention. As the representative for the Judenrat, Czerniakov must comply with Nazi orders despite Korczak’s insistence that Jews should never aid the perpetrators. Emanuel creates a dialectic between the two Jewish leaders. Korczak has explained to Czerniakov that resettlement in the East means gassing in the extermination camps, but the latter insists that those horror stories are merely rumors. Czerniakov argues that the deportees have written back letters stating that the working conditions are better than they were in the Ghetto, with the Nazis supplying pay, more food, and more recreation. Korczak mocks Czerniakov by telling him to write his recently deported mother about the carefree, relaxing vacation he is enjoying in the Warsaw Ghetto. Korczak chastises Czerniakov, claiming that the ghetto police are as pitiless as the Nazis, to which Czerniakov responds that they are merely trying to stay alive by following directives. When Czerniakov states that not everyone can be as righteous as the Old Doctor, Korczak corrects him: “Who is trying to be righteous? I am just trying to stay human and save my self-respect. Let’s not disgrace ourselves. Let them do their own dirty work. They don’t need our help” (93). The dialectic between Korczak and Czerniakov represents the debate about the efficacy of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Emanuel noted, “Children of Night explores the agonizing choices that face innocent and often helpless victims who are terrorized by an enemy who is bent on their physical destruction.”29 Czerniakov had earlier promised that the orphans would never be deported, but now with the Nazi decree, his debate with Korczak becomes more resolute. Korczak, realizing that Czerniakov

The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak

205

now has to sign papers for the deportations, urges him to reconsider so as to send a signal to the Germans that the Jews are not gullible. The Judenrat leader argues that if he does not comply with Nazi orders, he will be putting the whole Jewish community at risk for mass suicide. Korczak disputes any evidence that the world cares about the plight of the Jews and contends that spreading false hopes about outside intervention is only hastening the destruction of the Warsaw Jews. Czerniakov counters that spreading rumors about murdering children will only lead to panic. Korczak’s solution is to defy the Nazis: “But if we could only shock ourselves into believing this horrible truth, then maybe something could emerge . . . even if it is just a grain of resistance . . . or . . . or . . . the tiniest spark of defiance” (119). Czerniakov views the situation as hopeless and pleads that without weapons or aid from the underground, defenseless, starved citizens cannot possibly rebel against an army. Czerniakov’s premise is that the Jews are condemned but are still alive; if they revolt, they will surely die, but at least compliance means that some Jews may survive. Czerniakov thus poses the question of what is to be gained by a revolt that will be suicidal. Korczak responds, “Our dignity, Adam. Our dignity! ( pause ) We must resist” (120). However, Czerniakov acknowledges that the solution is much more profound than Korczak suggests since the Nazis tend to punish en masse when one person defies them. He prefers to play the chess game with the Nazis, especially since they control the board and the pieces. Nevertheless, chess involves saving the valuable pieces, and thus Czerniakov argues that thus far only the elderly and the weak have been deported; some Jews have been smuggled out of the Ghetto, but all of that will end with resistance. The implication is that Korczak still has a chance to save himself. Korczak stands on his principles, emphatically stating, “I’m not going anywhere without these children” (121). At the end of the play, a core of five individuals, functioning as a chorus of Jewish citizens in the Ghetto, come on stage to lament their fate. They plead for work permits to avoid the deportations while sounding anxious and helpless. Number 5 breaks the melancholic mood by suggesting that the Jews fight back. Number 2 hesitates, claiming that she prefers to be shot. However, Number 2 finally acquiesces when Number 5 reaches out to her in a show of communal strength. Together the five comrades chant “We will fight” and “We are together” (127). As the core continues to chant, they pick up the props left by the children, heightening their image of defiance (128). We are left with a tableau that clearly implies that “Remember Korczak’s Children” became the impetus for the

206

Staging Holocaust Resistance

resistance: “The Children of Night enter two by two, dressed in overcoats and holding hands. They take their places in and around the tableau of resistance. Janusz Korczak enters last, a tiny child in his arms. The lights slowly fade and the train heaves a final sigh of steam” (128). Emanuel commented, The deportation of some 200 children from the orphanage to “work camps in the east” put the lie to the Nazi ruse and helped to spark the rebellion. Many who witnessed the eerie yet dignified march through the streets of the ghetto, with Korczak carrying a young child in his arms, were moved to take action and to deny the Nazis a similar fate planned for themselves.30

Although one may consider Korczak to be a martyr because he sacrificed his life for his principles, during the play, Korczak rejects the notion of martyrdom and certainly does not consciously seek to be a martyr. However, he is definitely a hero of the Holocaust in the way he inspired defenseless children, who ultimately rekindled the spirit of resistance. Robert Skloot notes, “As a theatrical character, the figure of Janusz Korczak has come to represent the qualities of integrity, responsibility, and courage that enhance the image of the Holocaust’s victims, who so often are pictured as compromising, passive, and helpless.”31 Emanuel confirmed to me that when he wrote the play, he considered Korczak to be both a hero because of his nobility and courage in the face of barbarism and despair and one whose legacy continues to inspire because of his selfishness, humanity, and dedication to oppressed children.32 Korczak has been embraced by playwrights such as Brady and Emanuel because he is seen as a heroic figure who demonstrated that dignity and moral courage were at least possible in the prevailing world of despair and destruction that typified Europe during the Holocaust.

11. Conclusion

T

here was no unified resistance movement during the Holocaust. Non-Jewish resistance was typically fueled by the savagery of the Nazis, the severity of the genocide, and the degree of economic exploitation in each country. However, there was non-Jewish resistance in every German-occupied country in Europe. Jewish resistance was also widespread and was more typically related to issues concerning survival, dying with dignity, and the need to bear witness. It began with rescue operations and eventually led to armed combat. Non-Jewish resistance during the Holocaust appeared in myriad forms. Various members of the German military and clergy risked charges of treason to oppose a ruthless, fanatical regime that they believed had strayed from the original tenets of National Socialism. In Western and Central Europe, Christians hid Jews in safe havens and shelters, smuggled children to the safety of neutral countries such as Spain and Switzerland, arranged for Jews to be baptized, protested deportation orders, supplied Jews with identity papers, provided Jews with financial assistance, and participated in civil disobedience against the forced wearing of the Yellow Star. Resistance groups in the occupied countries cut German lines of communication, sabotaged trains, and physically attacked German units. Newspapers published by resistance groups gave conquered Western European nations a sense of pride and countered Nazi propaganda. Clergymen protested Nazi decrees, hid Jewish children in monasteries and convents, and distributed forged identity cards and certificates of baptism; a few members of the clergy surrendered their lives to uphold the moral positions of the church. Jewish resistance in Western Europe focused primarily on rescue operations. Jewish youth movements greatly aided the rescue of Jewish children in France, Italy, and Belgium. Since the Western European resistance movements were democratic in principle and thus were not openly antiSemitic, unlike their counterparts in Eastern Europe, Jews were able to serve as armed resisters in these organizations. Jews were particularly active

208 Staging Holocaust Resistance in armed resistance groups in Belgium, France, and Algeria.1 In France, the Armée Juive punished traitors, attacked German trains and planes, and sabotaged munitions factories. Jews in the underground resistance in Italy battled against the Nazis; in Yugoslavia, they fought with Tito’s partisans. In Eastern Europe, where forests made underground activity more palatable, non-Jewish partisan groups were more prevalent than in Western Europe. The Soviet partisans alone were responsible for more than three thousand acts of sabotage.2 Despite the fact that aiding or abetting Jews was punishable by death in the Eastern territories, many Christians risked their lives to shelter Jews. Such righteous gentiles also provided food, clothing, financial support, and medicine for Jews hiding from Nazi persecution. Most importantly, these Christians who sought to spare Jews ultimately saved the vestiges of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and provided a means to maintain cultural memory. Jewish resistance in Eastern Europe, which was typically suicidal, was diverse. Twenty to thirty thousand of the fifty thousand Jews who fled to the forests of White Russia, western Ukraine, and eastern Poland formed Jewish fighting groups that joined the Soviet partisans in organized resistance.3 Although the Jews were often untrained, poorly prepared, lacked weapons, had no strategic base, and could not rely on support from the local population, they staged revolts in eighteen forced labor camps and in the ghettoes of Warsaw, Bialystok, Czestochowa, Cracow, Minsk, Kletsk, Mir, and Lachwa.4 Many Jewish resisters who remained in the ghettoes and did not confront the Nazis physically still defied their persecutors; they created Jewish schools, theaters, orchestras, underground newspapers, and pamphlets in order to preserve their culture and to buttress morale. Zionist youth movements in the ghettoes taught children, presented lectures, and promoted social welfare programs despite Nazi interdictions. In the concentration camps of Plaszow, Lwow-Janowska, Mauthausen, and Sachsenhausen, as well as in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, Jews staged armed rebellions to bear witness to the fact that they did not die in vain and to maintain their sense of dignity even in an environment designed to destroy their humanity. The Holocaust is perhaps the seminal historical event that changed our perception of humanity. Many believe that if humans are good at heart, the Holocaust would never have been possible, for the Nazis could not have exterminated so many Jews without the help of indigenous populations. Yet there was more widespread resistance than originally believed, and with many of these tales going undiscovered and unreported with the

Conclusion 209 inevitable deaths of so many such resisters, perhaps the negative judgment of humankind is premature. Why did non-Jews risk their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust? In a study conducted by Samuel P. Oliner, in which seven hundred gentile rescuers in various countries during World War II were interviewed, 87 percent agreed that they acted because of ethical or humanitarian reasons.5 Most of the rescuers cited a need to assume personal responsibility to relieve pain and suffering or, in other words, to demonstrate compassion for the persecuted. These resisters believed that it was their moral duty to act and that they would feel shame or guilt if they failed to do so. Rescue thus became an affirmation of the resisters’ own moral behavior. Other researchers found that Christian charity or some other religious factor motivated resisters to rescue Jews.6 Jews who risked their lives in stoical moral defiance of the Nazi barbarism did so primarily because they were willing to die with dignity and were determined to bear witness to the world that they refused to be subjected to evil forces that had debased them. The Holocaust is replete with moral exemplars who, because of their stance against genocide, made society a better place. These acts of heroism and altruism are not the exclusive property of larger-than-life legendary figures; instead, these were ordinary people whose sense of empathy, moral courage, ethics, and humanitarian responsibility made them act as resisters to tyranny. The Nazis were successful in their plans for genocide because they understood that most individuals gravitated toward complicity rather than toward resistance. The Holocaust may not have been prevented if the world had protested; however, the majority of the angoisse could have been mitigated if other moral individuals had realized that there would have been strength in numbers. There is no doubt that genocide was prodigious in the majority of Nazioccupied countries during the war and that many Christians contributed to it willingly. Meanwhile, the tales of courage and resistance to the Nazis largely are either dead and buried or vastly underestimated. Thousands of resisters will always remain anonymous or forgotten. As a result of Oliner’s study of rescuers and resisters during the Holocaust, he concluded that schools should rework their curricula to instill in students the need to act on behalf of others and avoid indifference. Oliner wrote, “Heroic and conventional helpers need to be included in history books and remembered as moral heroes and role models who made a difference, thus helping to correct the distorted image of humanity brought about by the great wars and genocides.”7 I agree with Geoffrey Hartman’s statement that art is a more viable means of remembering the Holocaust than memorials or monuments. I

210

Staging Holocaust Resistance

have tried to argue that drama, because of its ability to reach more people than other forms of literature, is the ideal artistic medium to keep alive the memory of the heroes, martyrs, and rescuers who risked their lives to maintain their moral or religious values at a time when saving others meant death. Of course, this study is limited and cannot possibly be inclusive; many prominent heroes during the Holocaust have never had their stories told. I am limited by the fact that I must go where the plays take me. In short, there is much work to be done. In contrast to scholars who argue that Holocaust literature can be inundating, I suggest that there are still vast areas ripe for exploration and that presenting the tales of many of the heroes of the Holocaust could create a more balanced and nuanced view of the genocide. Playwrights need to research the historical and biographical information and then write plays about these noble role models in order to keep alive the memories of those who sacrificed themselves to make the world a better place.

Notes 1

INTRODUCTION

1. See Berel Lang, “The Concept of Genocide,” Philosophical Forum 16, nos. 1–2 (1984–1985): 8. 2. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), 3. 3. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 365. 4. Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time, trans. Steven Donadio (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 190. 5. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Introduction: Darkness Visible,” in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 3. 6. See Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), 3. 7. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 7. 8. Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 65. 9. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. ed., 3 vols (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 23, 1030–1031. 10. Ibid., 1030. 11. Ibid., 1038. 12. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 11. 13. Ibid., 118. 14. Langer, Versions of Survival, 10. 15. Klemens von Klemperer, “‘What Is the Law That Lies behind These Words?’: Antigone’s Question and the German Resistance against Hitler,” in Resistance Against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, eds. Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 143. 16. David Clay Large, “‘A Beacon in the German Darkness’: The Anti-Nazi Resistance Legacy in West German Politics,” in Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, eds. Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 244.

212

Notes

17. For the texts of these three sermons, see Patrick Smith, ed. and trans., The Bishop of Münster and the Nazis: The Documents in the Case (London: Burns Oates, 1943). 18. Jacques Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939– 1943, trans. Suzan Husserl-Kapit (Westport and London: Praeger, 1993), 103. 19. See Lucien Steinberg, Not as a Lamb: The Jews against Hitler, trans. Marion Hunter (Hunts, UK: Saxon House, 1974), 44. 20. For details about the Baum Group, its members, and its activities, see Ber Mark, “The Herbert Baum Group: Jewish Resistance in Germany in the Years 1937–1942,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 55–68; and Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), xxii–xxv. 21. For more information on Madritsch, see Arieh L. Bauminger, Roll of Honour (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1970), 13–15. 22. See Christiane Moll, “Acts of Resistance: The White Rose in the Light of New Archival Evidence,” in Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, eds. Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 173–200. 23. For details concerning the mockery of French citizens wearing the yellow badge, see Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 239. 24. Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (New York: Schocken Books), 435. 25. For more information on the efforts of the clergy to save Jews from persecution in France, see Philip Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), 49–59. 26. Levin, The Holocaust, 455. 27. For more information about the Jewish partisans in Paris, see Abraham Lissner, “Diary of a Jewish Partisan in Paris,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 282–297. 28. Lucien Lazara, Rescue as Resistance: How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 215. 29. Haim Avni, “The Zionist Underground in Holland and France and the Escape to Spain,” in Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977), 585. 30. Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 251. 31. Steinberg, Not as a Lamb, 107. 32. Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), 276. One person of note who single-handedly was responsible for saving

Notes

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

213

the lives of thousands of French Jews was the Portuguese counsel general at Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa-Mendes. Acting out of his moral convictions as a devout Catholic, Mendes, without seeking compensation and in opposition to government orders, stamped close to ten thousand visas of Jews emigrating to Portugal during summer 1940. In the 1960s, Yad Vashem, the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, planted a tree in his honor so as not to forget his acts of heroism. Marie Syrkin, Blessed Is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976), 301. Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler, 151. Levin, The Holocaust, 421. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 70. “Jewish Resistance in Italy,” in Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939– 1945, ed. Isaac Kowolski (New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986), 433. Martin Gilbert cites the precise number of Jews sheltered in Rome as 4,238. See Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 623. Robert Leiber, “On Hochhuth’s Historical Sources,” in The Deputy Reader: Studies in Moral Responsibility, eds. Dolores Barracano Schmidt and Earl Robert Schmidt (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1965), 163. For a thorough analysis of the aid provided to Jews by the Assisi Underground network in Italy, see Alexander Ramati, The Assisi Underground: The Priests Who Rescued Jews (New York: Stein and Day, 1978). Ibid., 178. However, Philip Friedman’s calculations are a bit different. He writes that the Italian clergy saved forty thousand Jews while fifteen thousand perished. See Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 74. Steinberg, Not as a Lamb, 157. See B. A. Sijes, “Several Observations Concerning the Position of the Jews in Occupied Holland during World War II,” in Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977), 548; and Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 581–582. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 582. Yehuda Bauer claims that the Judenrat, frightened by Nazi threats, “aided the Nazis in suppressing the strike.” See Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, 242. However, the Nazis actually took control of the situation by issuing death threats to the strikers, firing guns into crowds of strikers, and then ultimately penalizing the Dutch population with fines and taxes for their inappropriate behavior. Nora Levin reports that in 1942, twenty-five thousand Jews were in hiding in Holland. During the liberation, only seven thousand remained in hiding. When the Nazis discovered anyone sheltering Jews, they often had such individuals murdered. Thus, these acts of hiding Jews in Christian homes are certainly heroic. See Levin, The Holocaust, 418.

214 Notes 46. For more information on Süsskind, see Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, trans. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 438. 47. See Bauminger, Roll of Honour, 49–52. 48. See Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews, 120. 49. See Sijes, “Several Observations,” 527. Yahil calculates that eighteen thousand Jews, including forty-five hundred children, survived by hiding in Holland. See Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, 440. 50. When the king vowed to wear the Yellow Star, his official protest was reported in the international press. As time passed, the tale became apocryphal when revisionists embellished the story by stating that the king and his family wore the Yellow Star to protest the Nazi decree against the Jews. 51. Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler, 41. Harold Flender writes that by the end of the war, the Danes had committed 2,548 acts of sabotage against factories, German military installations, and ports, as well as 2,156 destructive acts involving railroad sabotage. See Flender, Rescue in Denmark (New York: Holocaust Library, 1963), 229. 52. For the most thorough details about Danish resistance against the deportations, see Flender, Rescue in Denmark ; and Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy, trans. Morris Gradel (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969). 53. Levin, The Holocaust, 395. 54. See Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry, 275. Gerald Reitlinger’s figures are a little different; he reports that between September 26 and October 12, more than 6,000 full Jews and 1,376 half-Jews were smuggled into Sweden. See Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945, rev. ed. (Cranbury, NJ: Thomas Yoseloff, 1968), 375. Raul Hilberg contends that the exodus to Sweden during October 1943 included 5,919 full Jews, 1,301 part-Jews, and 686 non-Jews. See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 568. Hilberg’s numbers are corroborated by Martin Gilbert. See Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews, 614. 55. Ibid., 274–275, 319. Flender states that the number of Jews deported to Theresienstadt was 472. See Flender, Rescue in Denmark, 219. 56. Levin, The Holocaust, 399. 57. Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, 396. 58. For more information on Dimo Kazasov and his efforts to save the Bulgarian Jews from persecution, see Bauminger, Roll of Honour, especially 21–23. Although Kazasov and the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian church protested to the prime minister and managed to allay the legislative furor, the law was eventually enacted on January 21, 1941, and signed by King Boris on February 15. 59. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 105. 60. Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler, 144.

Notes 215 61. See Matei Yulzari, “The Bulgarian Jews in the Resistance Movement,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 275–281. 62. Marie Syrkin estimates that twenty thousand Jews were not deported during the months of negotiations with Wisliceny. However, she cautions that it is impossible to calculate the total number of Jews saved since many of those individuals were sent to their deaths in Poland once the deportations resumed in 1944. See Syrkin, Blessed is the Match, 107. 63. See Yehuda Bauer, “They Chose Life,” in Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, ed. Isaac Kowolski (New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986), 48. 64. See Steinberg, Not as a Lamb, 297. One such member of the uprising was Edith Katz, who escaped from Novaki to join the communist partisans. Edith, a devout member of the Zionist Hashomer Hatzair and whose uncle was chief rabbi in Bratislava, became the commander of the Third Battalion of the Jan Zizka Slovak Partisan Brigade. She was killed in battle on September 26, 1944, while staying behind to fend off the Germans with only a machine gun and hand grenades while her comrades hastened to retreat. 65. Charles W. Steckel, “Survivors and Partisans,” in Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, ed. Isaac Kowolski (New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986), 473. 66. One such National Hero of the Peoples of Yugoslavia was Esther Ovadia, better known in the underground as Mara. In her youth in Bitol, she was a member of Hashomer Hatzair and later joined the Communist Party after the German invasion. Despite being designated as a noncombatant political commissar, Esther insisted on taking up arms and thus fought alongside the partisans in Macedonia. In 1944, she was killed in battle while leading the Seventh Macedonian Partisan Brigade in their attack on a German army unit. 67. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 107–108. 68. Levin, The Holocaust, 525. 69. Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Poles and Jews during World War Two (New York: Holocaust Library, 1986), 106. 70. Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, 270. 71. Steinberg, Not as a Lamb, 233. 72. For additional information about the resistance in Lachwa, see Aaron Schworin, Chaim Shkliar, Abraham Feinberg, and Chaim Michali, “Revolt in Lachwa,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 165–167. 73. For more information on resistance in Minsk, see Lester Eckman and Chaim Lazar, “The Jewish Resistance,” in Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, ed. Isaac Kowolski (Brooklyn: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986), 313–332.

216 Notes 74. For a thorough account of the Bialystok revolt, see Lester Eckman and Chaim Lazar, The Jewish Resistance: The History of the Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and White Russia during the Nazi Occupation 1940–1945 (New York: Shengold Publishers, 1977), especially 71–80; and Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in NaziOccupied Eastern Europe, 518–547. 75. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 546. 76. Ibid., 256. 77. Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, 256. 78. Levin, The Holocaust, 344. 79. These figures have been corroborated. However, when testimony was given by Stroop and his adjutant Karl Kaleske at their postwar trial, they overestimated the number of Jewish fighters, claiming that there were between fifteen hundred and two thousand Jewish combatants in the ghetto. See Steinberg, Not as a Lamb, 209. 80. Levin reports that Stroop had 2,090 men, including regular army, Waffen SS, and SS police, reinforced by 335 Lithuanian militia and Polish police. See Levin, The Holocaust, 350. These numbers have also been cited by Reitlinger, who includes the 335 Lithuanians, 228 German security policemen, 363 Polish policemen, and 166 Polish firemen among the 2,090 troops that entered the ghetto. See Reitlinger, The Final Solution, 295. 81. Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews, 565. 82. Gutman and Krakowski, Poles and Jews during World War Two, 166. 83. Fleeing to the forests was a courageous and difficult decision for many young Eastern European Jews to make. The majority of the Polish and Russian Jews were city dwellers who had difficulty adapting to life in the wilderness and to abandoning their cherished possessions. Jews were faced with leaving members of their families behind, particularly the elderly, who could not cope with uncertain survival in the forests and thus instead chose to take their chances in the Nazi-occupied ghettoes. Since these family units were typically nestled deeply into the forests, ghetto dwellers at times had to trek more than one hundred kilometers, often through hostile territory. Finding enough food to sustain hundreds of people was always problematic. Moreover, many informers among the anti-Semitic Eastern Europeans would gladly turn in these nomadic Jews to the Nazis for a reward. 84. Yitzhad Arad, “Jewish Family Camps in the Forests—An Original Means of Rescue,” in Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977), 336. 85. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1987), 143. 86. Nora Levin, “Rescue and Resistance by Jewish Youth during the Holocaust,” in Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, ed. Isaac Kowolski (New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986), 114.

Notes 217 87. For a thorough history of the Bielski group, see Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Peter Duffy, The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). 88. Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, 62. 89. Duffy, Bielski Brothers, 264. 90. Gutman and Krakowski, Poles and Jews during World War Two, 106. 91. Joseph M. Foxman, “The Escape From Koldyczewo Camp,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 174. 92. The number of Germans killed during the revolt varies. Testimony given by Franz Rum and Franz Suchomel in October 1960 indicated that two Ukrainians were among the dead, but no German officers were reported killed. See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 916, n. 92. 93. These numbers were compiled by Ainsztein, whose account of the revolt in Treblinka is probably the most specific and detailed of any synopses available. See Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 737. 94. See Alexander Pechersky, “Revolt in Sobibor,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 45. Pechersky refutes Hilberg’s estimate that only 150 prisoners made a break for freedom during the uprising. 95. Ibid. Ainsztein’s numbers are close to what Pechersky reports. Ainsztein notes that “at least 300 escaped” and maintains that the “Jews killed eleven or twelve SS men.” See Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 764. 96. For more information on the heroic exploits of the less well-known resisters Glimovska and Eichenbaum, see Eckman and Lazar, The Jewish Resistance: The History of the Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and White Russia during the Nazi Occupation 1940–1945, 147, 157, respectively. 97. For details about some of the more well-known members who have been honored in this select group of saviors, see Moshe Bejski, “The ‘Righteous among the Nations’ and Their Part in the Rescue of Jews,” in Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977), 627–647; also see Bauminger, Roll of Honour ; and Peter Hellman, Avenue of the Righteous (New York: Atheneum, 1980). 98. Leitz’s daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, assisted Jewish women in escaping to Switzerland and tried to improve the working conditions of seven hundred Ukrainians who were assigned to work in the Leitz factories. The Gestapo roughed her up in prison before releasing her. After the war, she received the Officier d’honneur des Palms from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy during the next decade. 99. Hartman, “Introduction: Darkness Visible,” 20.

218 Notes

2

GERMAN RESISTANCE: CARL ZUCKMAYER’S DES TEUFELS GENERAL

1. Peter Hoffmann, German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 78. 2. Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 1933–1945, trans. Richard Barry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 113. 3. Theodore S. Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf ’s Lair: German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 224. 4. Ibid., 319. 5. For details about the abortive assassination attempt, see Hoffmann, German Resistance to Hitler, especially 117–125; and Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 397–411. 6. Joseph Goebbels was at the University of Heidelberg at the time, completing his doctoral work in eighteenth-century Romantic drama. Later, Goebbels criticized Zuckmayer’s pacifism and accused him of writing comedies that mocked German life. Goebbels certainly had a major hand in getting Zuckmayer’s plays banned when the Nazis staged book-burning rallies after 1933. 7. After World War I, Udet founded an aircraft construction company in Munich and then became a stunt pilot who dazzled audiences in Germany, Western Europe, and the United States. In 1933, he introduced the Stuka, a high-speed dive bomber, to Lufthansa. Despite the fact that he had never joined the Nazi Party, he was appointed head of the Luftwaffe Technical Office in 1936 and was promoted to Generalluftzeugmeister in 1938. Ultimately, the Nazis blamed him for faulty aircraft production and for the failure of the air war in the Battle of Britain. On November 17, 1941, he committed suicide in Berlin, but the Nazis covered up the shooting by calling his death a flying accident and giving him a state funeral. For details about Udet’s life, see Herbert Lederer, “The Drama of Ernst Udet: A Nazi General in Eastern and Western Perspective,” in Theatrum Mundi: Essays on German Drama and German Literature Dedicated to Harold Lenz on His Seventieth Birthday, September 11, 1978, ed. Edward R. Haynes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1980 ), 175–184. 8. Carl Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 381. 9. Siegfried Mews, Carl Zuckmayer (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), 83. 10. Throughout the course of Hilpert’s career, he directed nine of Zuckmayer’s sixteen plays. Zuckmayer and Hilpert first met in 1925, the year the latter directed Der fröliche Weinberg in Berlin; the play went on to be successful in Frankfurt and then throughout smaller cities in Germany. Hilpert’s wonderful direction also contributed to the success of Der Hauptmann von Köpenick when it was staged at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin during 1931. Actually, Zuckmayer had written Des Teufels General with Hilpert in mind as the director. For details about the collaborations between Zuckmayer and Hilpert, see

Notes

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

219

William Grange, Partnership in the German Theatre: Zuckmayer and Hilpert, 1925–1961 (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). Ibid., 122–123. For a summary of the critical debate concerning the play, see Alan Robertshaw, “The Downfall of General Harras: Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General and Its Critical Reception,” Modern Languages 66, no. 4 (1985): 242–247; and Hans Wagener, Carl Zuckmayer Criticism: Tracing Endangered Fame (Columbia: Camden House, 1995), especially 83–104. For a comparison of the film version and the play, see Edward M. V. Plater, “Helmut Käutner’s Film Adaptation of Des Teufels General,” Literature/Film Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1994): 253–264. For a review of this production, see Reinhold Grimm, “Harras in Dallas,” Brecht-Jahrbuch (1980): 201–205. Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself, 382. Robertshaw, “The Downfall of General Harras,” 245. Mariatte C. Denman, “Nostalgia for a Better Germany: Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General,” German Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 372. In particular, Zuckmayer cites Theodor Haubach, Wilhelm Leuschner, and Count Hellmuth von Moltke, all of whom were hanged as coconspirators with Stauffenberg. Roy C. Cowen, “Type-Casting in Carl Zuckmayer’s The Devil’s General,” University of Dayton Review 13, no. 1 (1976): 83. The major difference between Zuckmayer and Chekhov, who were writing realist plays about life in Germany and Russia, respectively, is that Chekhov was aiming for a more universal appeal whereas Zuckmayer clearly had a German-Austrian audience in mind. Carl Zuckmayer, The Devil’s General, trans. Ingrid C. Gilbert and William F. Gilbert, in Masters of Modern Drama, eds. Haskell M. Block and Robert G. Shedd (New York: Random House, 1962), 935. All subsequent citations are from this edition and are included within parentheses in the text. Margot Finke, Carl Zuckmayer’s Germany (Frankfurt am Main: Haag and Herchen, 1990), 201–202. In 1966, Zuckmayer publicly lamented the fact that intellectuals procrastinated too long before 1933 to stem the rise of National Socialism. See Michael H. Kater, “Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in the Third Reich,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire 16, no. 2 (1981): 263. Ausma Balinkin, The Central Women Figures in Carl Zuckmayer’s Dramas (Bern: Peter Lang, 1978), 95. Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself, 402. Lutz Weltmann, “Two Recent Plays,” German Life and Letters 2 (1948–1949): 161. Anthony Waine, “Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General as Critique of the Cult of Masculinity,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29, no. 3 (1993): 268. Ian C. Loram, “Carl Zuckmayer—German Playwright in America,” Educational Theatre Journal 9, no. 3 (1957): 183.

220

Notes

28. The name Harras probably derives from Friedrich von Schiller’s 1804 play Wilhelm Tell. According to legend, in the fourteenth century, William Tell murdered the brutal Austrian bailiff Albrecht Gessler, who forced Tell to shoot an apple off his son’s head. Rudolf der Harras, Gessler’s adjutant, was portrayed as a sympathetic soul even though he was “the devil’s general.” In act 1 of The Devil’s General, strangely enough, Harras is asked to shoot a wine glass off a young officer’s head. 29. Plater, “Helmut Käutner’s Film Adaptation of Des Teufels General,” 259. 30. Hitler consistently demeaned Americans as being weak, particularly Roosevelt, whom he called Rosenfeld to suggest that the American president, who had Jews appointed to Cabinet positions, had an affinity for Jews. 31. Henry Glade, “Carl Zuckmayer’s The Devil’s General as Autobiography,” Modern Drama 9 (May 1966): 59. 32. Plater, “Helmut Käutner’s Film Adaptation of Des Teufels General,” 262–263. 33. Waine, “Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General as Critique of the Cult of Masculinity,” 259. 34. Henry Glade, “The Motif of Encounter in Zuckmayer’s Dramas,” Kentucky Foreign Language Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1963): 187. 35. Lederer, “The Drama of Ernst Udet: A Nazi General in Eastern and Western Perspective,” 178. 36. Waine, “Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General as Critique of the Cult of Masculinity,” 264. 37. For example, see Sheila Rooke, “Carl Zuckmayer,” in German Men of Letters, vol. 3: Expressionism and After, ed. Alex Natan (London: Oswald Wolff, 1964), 218; Robertshaw, “The Downfall of General Harras,” 243; and Wagener, Carl Zuckmayer Criticism, 86–104, passim. 38. Robertshaw, “The Downfall of General Harras,” 242. 39. Glade, “Carl Zuckmayer’s The Devil’s General as Autobiography,” 58. 40. Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself, 378. 41. Ibid., 319. 42. Ibid., 320. 43. Jennifer Taylor, “The Dilemma of Patriotism in German Plays of the Second World War,” New German Studies 9, no. 3 (1981): 188. 44. Murray B. Peppard, “Carl Zuckmayer: Cold Light in a Divided World,” Monatshefte 49, no. 3 (1957): 126. 45. Denman, “Nostalgia for a Better Germany,” 377.

3

THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

1. Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 554. 2. Israel Gutman, “Warsaw,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 4, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 1604.

Notes 221 3. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 555. 4. There were a few random heroic acts of resistance during the first Aktion. Several Jews who tried to flee were shot immediately. Emmanuel Ringelblum’s diary records many acts of heroism, but each was met with severe reprisals by the Nazis. More notable in his efforts to save those scheduled for deportation was Nahum Remba, the secretary of the Jewish Council, who drove to the Umschlagplatz in emergency ambulances to rescue as many children as possible. Remba and his wife took their lives into their own hands but managed to save hundreds of Jewish children. For accounts of acts of resistance during the 1942 Aktion , see Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 391, 393. 5. Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), 257. 6. Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Poles and Jews during World War Two (New York: Holocaust Library, 1986), 157. 7. For more information about Anielewicz, see Emmanuel Ringelblum, “‘Comrade Mordecai’: Mordecai Anielewicz—Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 85–91. 8. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 2, rev. ed. (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 507. 9. For more information about Lubetkin, see Israel Gutman, “Lubetkin, Zivia,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 3, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 914–915; and Marie Syrkin, Blessed Is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976), 192–194. 10. Gutman and Krakowski, Poles and Jews during World War Two, 160. Some accounts put the number of deported to be between six thousand and sixtyfive hundred. For example, see Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, 261; Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 2, rev. ed., 510; and Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 344. 11. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 2, rev. ed., 510. 12. Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945, rev. ed. (Cranbury, N.J.: Thomas Yoseloff, 1968), 295. 13. Gilbert, The Holocaust, 557. 14. Gutman and Krakowski, Poles and Jews during World War Two, 162. 15. For specific information with regard to the first encounters between von Sammern’s forces and the Jews on April 19, see Ber Mark, “The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 96–99. 16. For a detailed account of the fighting on April 20 in the brushmakers’ quarters, see Lucien Steinberg, Not as Lamb: The Jews against Hitler, trans. Marian

222

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

Notes Hunter (Hants, UK: Saxon House, 1974), 214–216; and Kazimierz IranekOsmecki, He Who Saves One Life (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971), 99–100. Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945, rev. ed., 296. Ibid., 297. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 623. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 2, rev. ed., 512. Before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising occurred and through the last months of its existence, the Polish Council for Jewish Aid (Zegota) had rescued nearly twenty thousand Jews. Most were living in the Aryan sector of Warsaw. Zegota was responsible for finding Jews hiding places, placing Jewish children in convents and with foster parents, forging documents, and assisting the combatants to obtain arms. Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945, 360. Gutman, “Warsaw,” 1601. After the 1940s, Wishengrad was a writer for radio, television, film, and theater before he died prematurely in 1962. His most notable success in the theater was his 1957 play, The Rope Dancers, which made it to Broadway in a production directed by Peter Hall that starred Siobhan McKenna, Art Carney, Joan Blondell, and Theodore Bikel. The Rope Dancers was nominated for the Tony Award for Outstanding Play in 1958. Morton Wishengrad, The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, in Radio Drama in Action: Twenty-five Plays of a Changing World, ed. Erik Barnouw (New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945), 33. All subsequent citations are from this edition and will be included within parentheses in the text. See Gene A. Plunka, Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 217–225. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “The Curious Case of Marek Edelman,” Commentary 3 (March 1987): 66. Timothy Garton Ash, “Introduction,” in Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation With Dr. Marek Edelman, The Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, trans. Joanna Stasinska and Lawrence Weschler (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), xi. Jadwiga Kosicka, “Introduction: A Memory Play,” in Hanna Krall, To Steal a March on God (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), xi. Paul Backer, Review of Hanna Krall, To Steal a March on God, Slavic and East European Journal 41, no. 4 (1997): 712. Hanna Krall, To Steal a March on God, trans. Jadwiga Kosicka (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 7. All subsequent citations are from this edition and will be included within parentheses in the text. Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, The Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, trans. Joanna Stasinska and Lawrence Weschler (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 77.

Notes 223 33. 34. 35. 36.

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 33. Zivia Lubetkin, Yitzhak Zuckerman’s wife, actually became the voice of the Polish resistance. As one of the more famous resistance leaders, Zivia’s name was synonymous with the code word for “Poland” and, more specifically, the life of the Jews in Poland. For example, resisters passing on information about conditions of the Jews in Poland would say “Zivia is very sick.” Like Marek Edelman, Zivia chose to remain in Poland after the war until she could do whatever possible to help survivors. She emigrated to Palestine in summer 1946. 37. Kosicka, “Introduction: A Memory Play,” xvi.

4

RESCUING JEWS IN WESTERN AND EASTERN EUROPE: LOIS LOWRY’S/DOUGLAS W. LARCHE’S NUMBER THE STARS AND JULIAN GARNER’S THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT

1. Philip Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), 13. 2. Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 373. 3. Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 392. 4. Harold Flender, Rescue in Denmark (New York: Holocaust Library, 1963), 29. 5. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 150–151. 6. Jacques Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939– 1943, trans. Suzan Husserl-Kapit (Westport and London: Praeger, 1993), 41. 7. Niels Bohr, the brilliant Danish nuclear physicist who had won the Nobel Prize, had much to do with Sweden’s acceptance of the Jews. Bohr, who was Jewish, managed to escape to Sweden on September 30. The Allies were hoping that Bohr would be instrumental in developing the atomic bomb; thus, Swedish authorities were supposed to shuffle him off safely from Sweden to the United States via London. However, Bohr refused to budge from Sweden unless he had assurances that all Danish Jews could take refuge in Sweden to escape Nazi persecution. King Gustav of Sweden promised Bohr that the Danish Jews would receive information about Sweden as a safe haven. Once the Swedish press carried such news in its newspapers and the state-supported Swedish radio broadcast the information to Danish Jews, Bohr agreed to assist the Allies. 8. Flender, Rescue in Denmark, 73. 9. For information about specific groups of citizens that vehemently protested the deportations, see Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy, trans. Morris Gradel (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 231–233.

224

Notes

10. Levin, The Holocaust, 396. 11. Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945, rev. ed. (Cranbury, N.J.: Thomas Yoseloff, 1968), 375. 12. Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry, 319. 13. Levin, The Holocaust, 399. 14. Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler, 138–139. 15. Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), 294–295. 16. Joel D. Chaston, Lois Lowry (New York: Twayne, 1997), 106. 17. In an email message that she sent to me on June 18, 2010, Lowry listed these as her primary sources: Harold Flender, Rescue in Denmark ; Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry ; Leo Goldberger, ed., The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage under Stress ; and Vibeke Malthe-Bruun, ed., The Diary and Letters of Kim Malthe-Bruun. 18. Lois Lowry, “Afterword,” in Number the Stars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 136–137. 19. Lois Lowry, “Newbery Medal Acceptance,” Horn Book Magazine 66, no. 4 (1990): 418. 20. Douglas W. Larche, email message to author, June 29, 2010. 21. Douglas W. Larche, “Preface and Acknowledgments,” in Number the Stars (Woodstock, Il: Dramatic Publishing, 1996), unpaginated. All subsequent citations from the play are from this edition and will be included within parentheses in the text. 22. David L. Russell, “Reading the Shards and Fragments: Holocaust Literature for Young Readers,” Lion and the Unicorn 21, no. 2 (1997): 271. 23. Lois Lowry, email message to author, June 17, 2010. 24. Chaston, Lois Lowry, 108. 25. When Lowry was in the final stage of editing the novel, she met a woman from Holland who had survived the Holocaust as a toddler. The woman recalled that the Nazis invaded their Amsterdam home in the middle of the night and took away her mother. As she peeked through the wallboard, the toddler saw the high, shiny boots of the Nazi soldiers. The image of the black boots thus became part of Lowry’s depiction of the Nazis in the novel. Moreover, the woman claimed that she wore the Star of David to remember her Jewish mother, whom she never saw again after that night. Lowry thus decided to incorporate the image of this sacred necklace into the novel. Moreover, the Star of David plays a role in the apocryphal tale of King Christian threatening to wear the Star if the Jews of Denmark were forced to do so. 26. Don Latham, “Childhood under Siege: Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars and The Giver,” Lion and the Unicorn 26 (2002): 8. 27. Lois Lowry, email message to author, June 17, 2010. 28. Lowry, “Newbery Medal Acceptance,” 420. 29. Russell, “Reading the Shards and Fragments,” 271.

Notes

225

30. Virginia A. Walter, “Metaphor and Mantra: The Function of Stories in Number the Stars,” Children’s Literature in Education 27, no. 2 (1996): 128. 31. For a detailed comparison of Lowry’s novel with the fairy tale Little Red Riding-Hood, see Laura M. Zaidman, “Lowry’s Number the Stars : A PostHolocaust ‘Little Red Riding-Hood,’” Journal of Children’s Literature 22, no. 1 (1996): 39–42. 32. Latham, “Childhood under Siege,” 12. 33. Zaidman, “Lowry’s Number the Stars,” 41. 34. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews in Europe during the Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 987), 504. 35. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewin, The Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust (New York: Twayne, 1970), 12. 36. Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in NaziOccupied Poland (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 68. 37. Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki, He Who Saves One Life (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971), 264. 38. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 17. 39. Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Poles and Jews during World War Two (New York: Holocaust Library, 1986), 193. 40. Ibid., 242. 41. Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness, 11. 42. Ibid., 120. 43. Ibid., 140. In particular, Jewish children in Poland were hidden by the Congregation of Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary, the Ursuline Sisters, the Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Conception, the Carmelites, the Benedictine Samaritan Order of the Holy Cross, and the Sisters of the Order of the Resurrection. 44. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 19. 45. Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness, 163. 46. Bartoszewski and Lewin, The Samaritans, 45. 47. Joseph Kermish, “The Activities of the Council for Aid to Jews (‘Zegota’) in Occupied Poland,” in Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977), 373. 48. See Roman Gronowski, “Zegota—Polish Council for Jewish Relief (1943– 1944),” in Saving Jews in War-Torn Poland, ed. Andrzej Chciuk (Clayton, Australia: Wilke and Company, 1969), 23; and Kermish, “The Activities of the Council for Aid to Jews (‘Zegota’) in Occupied Poland,” 394. 49. Julian Garner, email message to author, June 28, 2010. 50. Julian Garner, The Flight into Egypt (London: Nick Hern, 1996), 10. All subsequent citations from the play are from this edition and will be included within parentheses in the text. 51. Julian Garner, email message to author, June 28, 2010. 52. In his email message of June 28, 2010, Garner wrote that he did not feel comfortable writing another German-bashing play and thought that German

226

Notes playwrights could do it much better than he could. Besides, he did not feel that he had the talent to portray such monsters on stage. Instead, he wanted the focus to be on the bonding between Jews and Poles during the war. Garner reiterated to me, “Perhaps as a proud non-Jewish father of Jewish children I am probably searching, albeit unconsciously, to find those links of common humanity and, let’s face it, love.”

5

RESISTANCE IN THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS: SUSAN B. KATZ’S COURAGE UNTOLD

1. For a discussion of the philosophy behind the Nazi desire to destroy the prisoners as impure bodies that threatened the Volk, see Gene A. Plunka, Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71–76. 2. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 168. 3. Ibid. 4. Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 102. 5. For details about the Babi Yar uprising, see Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 612–614. 6. At Mauthausen, on February 3, 1945, several hundred condemned men of Block 20 escaped after using fire extinguishers to blind SS guards. Only twenty-two of the escapees were not recaptured. See Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 718–719. 7. For more information about the revolt at Sachsenhausen, see Lucien Steinberg, Not as a Lamb: The Jews against Hitler, trans. Marion Hunter (Hants, UK: Saxon House, 1974), 50–53. 8. For the most thorough discussion of the preparation for the revolt at Treblinka, see Jean-François Steiner, Treblinka, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967). 9. Raul Hilberg estimated that there were nearly seven hundred Jewish inmates in Treblinka, but he does not specify an exact date. See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. ed. (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 915. However, Leni Yahil notes that at the time of the revolt, there were sixty conspirators among the twelve hundred Jewish inmates. See Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, trans. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 484. 10. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 729. 11. Ibid., 281–282.

Notes 227 12. Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 189. 13. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 736–737. 14. Ainsztein’s account of the revolt is the most detailed and is derived from courtroom testimony, so we may assume that his figure of six hundred escapees is the most accurate. His estimates are based on those who revolted in two camps in Treblinka. However, other historians have claimed that the number of escapees is far less than the six hundred documented by Ainsztein. Martin Gilbert asserts that “more than one hundred and fifty succeeded in escaping.” See Gilbert, The Holocaust, 597. Gilbert’s figures could be based upon Samuel Rajzman’s testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on March 25–26, 1945. Rajzman, who participated in the Treblinka revolt, remembered only 150–200 escapees. See Samuel Rajzman, “Uprising in Treblinka,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 132. This is the same number cited by Hilberg, whose statistics rely largely on German records and trial testimony. See Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 916. 15. Rajzman, “Uprising in Treblinka,” 133. 16. For details about the revolt, see Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 748–769; Steinberg, Not as a Lamb, 271–278; and Alexander Pechersky, “Revolt in Sobibor,” in The Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 7–50. In 1987, a British-made television film Escape from Sobibor, was aired by CBS. The film, directed by Jack Gold, featured performances by Alan Arkin as Leon Feldhendler and Rutger Hauer as Alexander Pechersky. 17. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 764. 18. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 916. 19. For detailed information about the escapes from Auschwitz, see Erich Kulka, “Five Escapes From Auschwitz,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 196–218. 20. See Erich Kulka, Escape from Auschwitz (South Hadley, Ma: Bergin & Garvey, 1986). 21. Gilbert, The Holocaust, 696–697. 22. For more information about the life of Roza Robota, see Yuri Suhl, “Rosa Robota—Heroine of the Auschwitz Underground,” in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 219–225. 23. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, 802. 24. Gilbert, The Holocaust, 746. 25. Susan B. Katz, telephone conversation with author, July 30, 2009. 26. Kulka’s book may have been a starting point for Katz, but the focus of Kulka’s study is about Siegfried Lederer’s escape from the camp; the text actually has

228 Notes nothing to do with the revolt during October 1944. In an email message that she sent to me, Katz reiterated that Kulka’s book did not provide the background that she needed to write the play: “Interestingly enough, the book, Escape From Auschwitz, if I recall correctly, and this was years ago, was more focused on the men and not the women. Whereas, I learned about activities about the men in the Underground, it did not provide me the information I needed about the women.” Susan B. Katz, email message to author, July 31, 2009. 27. Susan B. Katz, telephone conversation with author, July 30, 2009. 28. Susan B. Katz, Courage Untold (Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991, photocopy), 8. All subsequent citations from the play are from this edition and will be included within parentheses in the text.

6

RESISTANCE FROM THE CLERGY

1. Theodore S. Hamerow, “On the Road to the Wolf ’s Lair”: German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 133. 2. Jacques Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939– 1943, trans. Suzan Husserl-Kapit (Westport and London: Praeger, 1993), 101. 3. The play that focuses on the pope’s role during the Holocaust is Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy ). One might reasonably expect that a discussion of the play would be included in this chapter. However, I have previously written extensively on the play. See Gene A. Plunka, Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 170–188. 4. Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 304. 5. Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler, 102. 6. For information about the development of Bonhoeffer’s emergence as a resister, see Raymond Mengus, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Decision to Resist,” in Resistance Against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, eds. Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 201–213. 7. See Peter Hoffmann, German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 133. 8. Levin, The Holocaust, 504. 9. Hamerow, “On the Road to the Wolf ’s Lair,” 305. 10. See The Bishop of Münster and the Nazis: The Documents in the Case, ed. and trans. Patrick Smith (London: Burns Oates, 1943), 7–19. 11. Ibid., 32. 12. Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler, 103. 13. In 1939, American playwright H. S. Kraft wrote a one-act play, The Bishop of Munster. The five-minute play represents a composite of von Galen’s antiNazi speeches of the 1930s, before he became a more vocal critic of the state.

Notes 229

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

Himmler even requested his arrest, but the Gestapo seemed to relent when von Galen agreed to go with them willingly. The sermon delivered in the play calls for the Germans to be merciful to the Jews; moreover, von Galen admits to praying for the Jews and for all the men and women in the concentration camps. He goes on to declare that the church cannot accept a state that is ruled by murder and assassination, marches its youths to death, and makes slaves of its laborers. The play concludes with von Galen vowing to stand behind the principles of the church. See Kraft, The Bishop of Munster, in Six Anti-Nazi One Act Plays, ed. Stephen Moore (New York: Contemporary Play Publications, 1939), 65–70. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 271. Philip Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), 53. Ibid., 71. B. A. Sijes, “Several Observations Concerning the Position of the Jews in Occupied Holland during World War II,” in Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977), 550. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 74. Levin, The Holocaust, 642. Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki, He Who Saves One Life (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971), 50. Joseph Kermish, “The Activities of the Council for Aid to Jews (‘Zegota’) in Occupied Poland,” in Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977), 369. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 133–134. Celeste Raspanti, No Fading Star (Woodstock, Il: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1979), 4. All subsequent citations from the play are from this edition and will be included within parentheses in the text. Arthur Giron, email message to author, July 24, 2010. Arthur Giron, “A Long Love: The Quest for Edith Stein,” in Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, ed. Donald Marinelli (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994), 5. For the most thorough biographical information about Edith Stein, see Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography, trans. Father Bernard Bonowitz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985). Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, or “Amor fati, amor mundi,” trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 16. Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 63. Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 59.

230

Notes

30. Freda Mary Oben, “Holiness in the 20th Century,” in The Unnecessary Problem of Edith Stein, ed. Harry James Cargas (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1994), 6. 31. Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 104–105. 32. Courtine-Denamy, Three Women in Dark Times, 174. 33. Edward R. Isser, Stages of Annihilation: Theatrical Representations of the Holocaust (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 147. 34. Arthur Giron, Edith Stein (New York and London: Samuel French, 1991), 8. All subsequent citations from the play are from this edition and will be included within parentheses in the text. 35. Eva Fleischner, “Contemplation & Controversy: Carmelite Monastery at Auschwitz,” Commonweal, June 1986, 368. 36. Jane Perlez, “Pope Orders Nuns out of Auschwitz,” New York Times, April 15, 1993, 13A. 37. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, “Introduction: Memory Offended,” in Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, eds. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991), 6. 38. Stanislaw Krajewski, “The Controversy over Carmel at Auschwitz: A Personal Polish-Jewish Chronology,” in Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, eds. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991), 125. 39. “Panel Discussion on Edith Stein,” in Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, ed. Donald Marinelli (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994), 148. 40. At the Nuremberg Trials, Rudolph Hoess, the former commandant of Auschwitz, testified that 2.5 million persons were exterminated in the camp and another 500,000 died from disease and starvation; he derived his figures from Eichmann’s estimates of the number of individuals sent on the transports. Historians Raul Hilberg and Gerald Reitlinger, both writing in the 1960s, revised the number of total deaths to 1.1 million. 41. Although many Jews who enter Auschwitz want to recite the Kaddish, these prayers for the dead can be chanted anywhere. Reciting the Kaddish in Auschwitz does not make it a holy place. Auschwitz lacks any of the qualities of a cemetery: Jews were not given burial rites in the extermination camp; there are no headstones, no coffins, no grave sites. Even more appalling is the notion that there are no bodies; instead, Jews were gassed and then cremated, producing ash. By any account of those who survived Auschwitz, it was pure hell, an evil place. Thus, the argument is that a religious sanctuary, whether it is a convent or a synagogue, is out of place on grounds that are putrid— certainly not hallowed or holy. 42. Elie Wiesel and Carol Rittner, “An Interview, August 29, 1989,” in Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, eds. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991), 113–114.

Notes 231 43. Ronald Modras, “Jews and Poles: Remembering at a Cemetery,” in Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, eds. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991), 58. 44. During the debate about the convent’s presence at Auschwitz, Sister Maria Teresa, the mother superior of the Carmelite nuns, reinforced these antiSemitic sentiments expressed by Poles. In an interview on September 29, 1989, at Auschwitz, she blamed Poland’s misfortunes on Jews and compared their protests of the convent to the attitudes of “Hitler and his henchmen.” 45. Albert H. Friedlander, “Jewish and Christian Suffering in the Post-Auschwitz Period,” in Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, eds. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991), 180. 46. Krajewski, “The Controversy over Carmel at Auschwitz,” 125. 47. Marian Zailian, “The Jewish Nun Who Died at Auschwitz,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 1989, 38. 48. For example, see Isser, Stages of Annihilation, 148–149. 49. Arthur Giron, email message to author, July 25, 2010. 50. Ibid. 51. Arthur Giron, email message to author, July 28, 2010. 52. Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 63. 53. Zailian, “The Jewish Nun Who Died at Auschwitz,” 35. 54. Giron, “A Long Love: The Quest for Edith Stein,” 14. 55. For more information on Kolbe’s life, see Desmond Forristal, Kolbe: A Saint in Auschwitz (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Don Bosco Publications, 1982). 56. David Gooderson, Kolbe’s Gift (London: Photocopy, 2007), “Note.” All subsequent citations from the play are from this edition and will be included within parentheses in the text. 57. David Gooderson, email message to author, December 17, 2009. 58. Ibid. 59. Forristal, Kolbe: A Saint in Auschwitz , 157. 60. Ibid., 159. 61. Ibid., 164. 62. One subtext of the play is Gooderson’s conflation of Nazism with communism and his argument that both ideologies destroy individual will. Of course, the Nazis had no elections from 1933 to 1945; the communists make a show of having elections in Poland after the war, but the outcomes were predetermined by use of force. Lenna admits, “Whoever heard of Communists having elections. They’re no different from the Nazis” (7). Gooderson demonstrates that the communists physically beat their opponents to a pulp and then have the gall to claim that they adhere to democratic principles of free choice. Franek states, “They’re as bad as the Nazis. Worse. You knew where you were with the Nazis” (14). Franek mocks the communists’ “electoral” system: “You know what they plan to do on Sunday? March all the Town Hall workers to the polling place under armed guard!—with a band playing! Like being

232

Notes back in the camp again” (14). The prime example of the communist mentality is personified by Magda, a woman who lost all of her family in Auschwitz. Instead of consoling Franek with the understanding of the mental and physical anguish that he endured in Auschwitz, Magda has become a vehicle of state propaganda. Her only interest in listening to Franek’s near-death escapes is to undermine the church in much the same manner as the Nazis tried to do.

7 STAGING AMERICA’S RESPONSE TO THE HOLOCAUST: SUSAN LIEBERMAN AND STEPHEN J. MOREWITZ’S STEAMSHIP QUANZA 1. Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 8. 2. Ibid., 9. Still, the number of Jewish appointments to federal judgeships was meager, and many more Catholics were appointed as judges. 3. Robert Edwin Herzstein, Roosevelt & Hitler: Prelude to War (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 178. 4. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, 304. 5. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), x. 6. Ibid., 10. 7. Herzstein, Roosevelt & Hitler, 160. 8. Ibid., 115. 9. Ibid., 186. 10. Ibid., 256–257. 11. Theodore Solotaroff and Marshall Sklare, “Introduction,” in Jews in the Mind of America, ed. Charles Herbert Stember (New York and London: Basic Books, 1966), 9. 12. Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 87. 13. Herzstein, Roosevelt & Hitler, 184. 14. See Charles Herbert Stember, “Reactions to Anti-Semitic Appeals before and during the War,” in Jews in the Mind of America , ed. Charles Herbert Stember (New York and London: Basic Books, 1966), 114. 15. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 125. 16. Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 237. 17. Herzstein, Roosevelt & Hitler, 197. 18. Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 87. 19. Ibid., 12. 20. Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 126.

Notes 233 21. Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1998), 213. 22. Ibid., 231. 23. Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 119. 24. Ibid., 70. 25. Herzstein, Roosevelt & Hitler, 237. 26. Morse, While Six Million Died , 287. 27. The 1976 film Voyage of the Damned was based on the 1974 novel. The script, cowritten by Steve Shagan and David Butler, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film included a bevy of well-known actors and actresses, including Faye Dunaway, Lee Grant, Oskar Werner, Wendy Hiller, Jonathan Pryce, Orson Welles, James Mason, José Ferrer, Ben Gazzara, Katherine Ross, Malcolm McDowell, Nehemiah Persoff, and Julie Harris. Jan de Hartog’s Christian philosophy was cultivated through his father, who was a theologian at Amsterdam University. After attending Netherlands Naval College, Jan worked as a sailor, war correspondent, and naval inspector before becoming a writer of detective fiction and a playwright. His best-selling novel about the Dutch resistance, Holland’s Glory, which made him a public figure in the Netherlands, reinforced a Dutch sense of identity and pride during the War. During World War II, as a resistance member himself, he protested the German occupation of Holland, and, under threat of arrest by the Gestapo, was forced to flee to England, where he continued to write novels and plays. His most successful theatrical achievement was the 1951 comedy The Four Poster, which ran in London before being staged on Broadway; the play won the 1952 Tony Award for Best Play and was then made into a film with the same title, which starred Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer. In 1962, he took a residency in playwriting at the University of Houston, where he assumed an active role in advancing social causes, such as exposing the horrendous conditions facing patients in many public hospitals. In 2002, he was presented with an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at the University of Houston. Skipper Next to God premiered November 27, 1945, at the Embassy Theatre in London. This production featured de Hartog himself in the role of Captain Joris Kuiper. During the same time, as de Hartog recalls, the play received informal presentations in Holland as well, many of which were staged before the fisherman of the Zuider Zee. The play was instrumental in convincing the fishermen that it was their Christian duty to save Jews from the Nazis, and thus many Jewish children were hidden from the Nazis by these noble Dutch sailors. See Jan de Hartog, “The Writer in Violent Times: The Dutch Underground Theater,” Weber Studies 4, no. 1 (1987): 7. On January 13, 1948, Skipper Next to God, directed by Lee Strasberg, opened at the Playhouse Theatre on Broadway and starred John Garfield in the role of Captain Kuiper; the play ran for ninety-three performances. In 1951, Skipper Next to God was made into a French film titled Maître après Dieu.

234

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Notes Modeled after the St. Louis affair, Skipper Next to God occurs on board The Young Nelly, a steamship commanded by Captain Joris Kuiper, who is transporting 146 persecuted Jewish refugees to freedom in South America during summer 1938. Upon arriving, Captain Kuiper is notified that the passengers are not allowed to disembark, even though they have visas for South America—quite reminiscent of what occurred in Cuba during the voyage of the St. Louis. Captain Kuiper, a devout Christian, refuses to return his passengers to Europe, where they will inevitably be sent to German concentration camps. Instead, he sails for the United States, hoping that the U.S. government will accept the refugees. Six weeks later, Kuiper, cruising his ship off the coast of the United States, has been rejected three times for rights to land. Moreover, he is officially warned that his ship may be sunk if the refugees attempt to come ashore. Meanwhile, the Jews on board are famished, in panic at having to return to Germany, and virtually losing their minds in claustrophobic small cabins below the deck; a few have attempted suicide. Without support from the Dutch government and facing mutiny among his own crew members, Captain Kuiper, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, takes a moral stance. After receiving a telegram stating that the U.S. Senate is on recess for eight weeks and thus cannot resolve the problem, Kuiper decides to scuttle his ship via a triggered propeller explosion during the Hatteras Cup yacht race. Those racing on the yachts then will be compelled to pick up the stranded passengers and take them to safety in America. Although scuttling his ship will mean that he will never command another vessel for the Dutch government and that he is, in essence, sinking a ship that he has lived on most of his life, Kuiper is adamant that following the humanitarian vision of Christ is the most important element in his life. At the end of the play, when he is mocked at losing everything to become Skipper Next to God, Kuiper notes, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” See Jan de Hartog, Skipper Next to God (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1949), 58. The play becomes an indictment of a passive Roosevelt administration that turned its back on fundamental humanitarian principles for political purposes. Albert Wertheim astutely remarks, “In sculpting Kuiper as a modern Christian martyr, Skipper Next to God points an accusing finger at an unfeeling prewar America whose actions were, de Hartog implies, tinged with anti-Semitism.” See Wertheim, Staging the War: American Drama and World War II (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 273. Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 74. Ibid., 145. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, 135. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 125. Roosevelt knew that Long was an important liaison to the conservative southern agrarian Blue Dog Democrats, who were an essential component

Notes

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

235

to reelection. The Jews made up a small minority of the electorate; besides, most Jews knew little about Roosevelt’s hands-off policies with regard to immigration and instead considered the Democratic president to be their ally. Moreover, the socialist concept of the New Deal appealed to many Jews. Thus, Roosevelt was certain of securing the largely Democratic Jewish vote anyway. Feingold reports the number of passengers departing to be eighty-three, but he is probably confusing it with the number that remained after refugees disembarked in New York and Vera Cruz. See Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, 143. The correct number of 317 has been reported by both Stephen J. Morewitz and Frank Overton Brown, Jr. See Morewitz, “The Saving of the S.S. Quanza,” William and Mary Magazine, Summer 1991, 26; and Brown, Jr., “Jacob L. Morewitz, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Steamship Quanza,” Virginia Lawyer 56, no. 9 (2008): 29. The name of the ship derives from the Swahili “Kwanza,” which means “celebration of the harvest.” See Malvina Schamroth Parnes et al., Saving of the S.S. Quanza Refugees: A Prelude to the Holocaust (Richmond: Audio-Visual Reporting Services, 1999), part 1, 45. Dalio’s parents both perished in Nazi concentration camps. The voyage to America thus probably saved his life, and he was able to continue his acting career, most noteworthily starring in 1942 as Emil, the croupier, in Casablanca. His wife, Madeleine LeBeau, seventeen years old at the time of the voyage, was on board as well; she also later had a bit role in Casablanca, playing Yvonne, one of Rick’s love interests, and drowning out the Nazis by picking up the guitar while accompanying the singing of “La Marseillaise” in the film’s famous homage to French patriotism. Morewitz, “The Saving of the S.S. Quanza,” 26. Some historians have mistakenly reported that the ship stopped in Nicaragua before docking in Norfolk. For example, see Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, 143. The owners of the ship were furious because it was getting expensive to keep the ship in port for so many days. Captain Harberts was appearing in court daily but was having no success in convincing the judge to allow him to depart. See Parnes et al., Saving of the S.S. Quanza Refugees, part 3, 38. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 125. Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 112. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 136. In 1943, Long had ordered Minister Leland Harrison in Bern not to transmit any reports on Nazi extermination that he had received through the World Jewish Congress. Morgenthau and John Pehle registered their complaints with Roosevelt and produced a memorandum titled “Report to the Secretary [Treasury] on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of Jews” that documented evidence that cables about Nazi genocide were kept from

236

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

Notes public dissemination. See Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 401. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, x. Ibid. Susan Lieberman, email message to author, May 19, 2009. Ibid. Ibid. Parnes et al., Saving of the S.S. Quanza Refugees, part 1, 4. For a review of this production, see Mary Shen Barnidge, “Steamship Quanza,” Reader: Chicago’s Free Weekly, June 21, 1991, sec. 1, 44, 46. Susan Lieberman, email message to author, May 21, 2009. Susan Lieberman and Stephen J. Morewitz, Steamship Quanza, unpublished manuscript, 1990. All subsequent citations from the play are from this edition and will be included within parentheses in the text. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, xi. Morse, While Six Million Died , 98.

8

AHARON MEGGED’S HANNA SENESH

1. In the literature, Hanna Senesh’s name is spelled with different variations. For example, in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, her name appears as Hannah Szenes. See Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 1447–1448. 2. For more information on Megged’s major plays, see Michael Taub, “Aharon Megged,” Modern International Drama 27, no. 1 (1993): 97–98. 3. Hannah Senesh, Hannah Senesh: Her Life & Diary, trans. Marta Cohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 7. 4. Peter Hay, Ordinary Heroes: Chana Szenes and the Dream of Zion (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986), 32. 5. Senesh, Hannah Senesh, 8–9. 6. Hay, Ordinary Heroes, 43. 7. Anthony Masters, The Summer That Bled: The Biography of Hannah Senesh (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 115. 8. Hay, Ordinary Heroes, 99. 9. Masters, The Summer That Bled, 136. 10. Hay, Ordinary Heroes, 157. 11. Senesh, Hannah Senesh, 171. 12. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 685. 13. These two young Jewish underground fighters were named Kallos and Fleischmann. Kallos had earlier escaped from the Hungarian ghettoes, so perhaps his fear of being returned as a prisoner to Nazi-occupied Hungary forced

Notes 237

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

him to commit suicide. There is also a report that he was firing at the Hungarian authorities, but being in a panic, he mistakenly shot himsef in the head. In any event, he escaped the brutal beating that was given to Fleischmann. Hay, Ordinary Heroes, 205. After the war, the military prosecutor, Captain Elemér Simon, who had fled to Argentina, was interviewed by Knesset member Dov Shilansky. Simon confessed that he had no regrets over Hanna’s death sentence, claiming that although the Russians were about to liberate Hungary and the tribunal judges were thus having second thoughts about her execution, Hanna’s Jewish pride made them so angry that they gladly sentenced her to death. See Hay, Ordinary Heroes, 240. Marie Syrkin, Blessed Is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976), 52–53. For detailed information about Hanna Senesh as a legend in Israel, see Dan Laor, “Theatrical Interpretation of the Shoah: Image and Counter-image,” in Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance, ed. Claude Schumacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 95–101. Judith Tydor Baumel, “The Herosim of Hannah Senesz: An Exercise in Creating Collective National Memory in the State of Israel,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 3 (1996): 521. See Syrkin, Blessed Is the Match, 76; and Baumel, “The Herosim of Hannah Senesz,” 543. For a more detailed synopsis of the film, see Lawrence Baron, “Women as Resistance Fighters in Recent Popular Films: The Case of Hanna Senesh and Helene Moszkiewiez,” in Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation, ed. Esther Fuchs, Studies in the Shoah, vol. 22 (Lanham: University Press of America, 1999), 90–91. For a detailed account of the Nazi occupation of Hungary, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 2 (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 796–857. Aharon Megged, Hanna Senesh, trans. Michael Taub, in Israeli Holocaust Drama, ed. Michael Taub (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 115. All subsequent citations are from this edition and are included within parentheses in the text. See Anat Feinberg, “An Interview with Aharon Megged,” Modern Hebrew Literature nos 3–4 (Spring/Summer 1983): 46. Glenda Abramson, Modern Hebrew Drama (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 138. Yael S. Feldman, “Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 224. Ibid., 226.

238 Notes 27. Abramson, Modern Hebrew Drama, 205. 28. Anat Feinberg, “Anat Feinberg Interviews: Aharon Megged,” Modern Hebrew Literature (Fall–Winter 1988): 47.

9

THE SAGA OF RAOUL WALLENBERG: NICHOLAS WENCKHEIM’S IMAGE AND LIKENESS

1. Harvey Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, rev. ed. (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1995), 11. 2. Ibid., 14. 3. John Bierman, Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 39. 4. Philip Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), 159. 5. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 241. Although Wallenberg’s mission was funded by the United States, it was a Swedish, not an American, effort to help save Hungarian Jews. 6. Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 212. 7. Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 23. 8. Michael Nicholson and David Winner, Raoul Wallenberg: The Swedish Diplomat Who Saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazi Holocaust before Mysteriously Disappearing (Milwaukee: Gareth Stevens, 1989), 6. 9. Bierman, Righteous Gentile, 24. 10. Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 213. 11. In truth, a similar approach had already been taken in Budapest by the Swedish minister Carl Ivan Danielsson, who had issued six hundred provisional passports to Jews who had personal or financial ties to the Swedish government. Wallenberg went one step further by issuing protective passports for individuals who had no direct connection to Sweden. The Hungarians and Germans accepted these stipulations because they probably did not want to challenge Wallenberg’s authority emanating from a neutral country. See Arthur D. Morse, When Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1998), 363–364. 12. Bierman, Righteous Gentile, 52. Other accounts claim that between fifteen to twenty thousand documents were printed, and perhaps fifty thousand Jews were saved by such forgeries. See Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 37. 13. Nicholson and Winner, Raoul Wallenberg: The Swedish Diplomat, 34. 14. See Morse, When Six Million Died, 365–366. 15. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 162.

Notes

239

16. Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 57. 17. See Bierman, Righteous Gentile, 83, 86. Two thousand is probably accurate, although several Holocaust historians place the number higher. For example, Arieh L. Bauminger claims that Wallenberg rescued twenty thousand Jews from the death marches. See Bauminger, Roll of Honour (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1970), 80. 18. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, trans. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 648. 19. Nicholson and Winner, Raoul Wallenberg: The Swedish Diplomat, 44. 20. Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 68. 21. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 241. 22. Ibid., 242. 23. Bierman, Righteous Gentile, 116; and Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 96. 24. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 243. 25. This investigation was conducted because other prisoners at Lefortovo alleged that they communicated with Wallenberg or even shared a cell with him while they were also interned there. At Lefortovo, prisoners were frequently isolated and communicated with each other via a knocking system where they used hard objects to tap on the doors and pipes. Each knock designated a certain letter of the alphabet, usually German. The procedure was laborious and time consuming, but the inmates had nothing but time on their hands. 26. Moshinsky’s account of Wallenberg’s imprisonment on Wrangel Island has been seconded by Abraham Shifrin, who acknowledged that he was a KGB captain who remembers Wallenberg at a Russian camp in 1967 after the Swedish diplomat had been sent there from Wrangel Island. See Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 165–166. 27. Nicholas Wenckheim, email message to author, April 15, 2011. 28. Fredrik von Dardel, letter to Nicholas Wenckheim (photocopied to author), May 13, 1973. 29. For a review of this production, see David Sheward, “The Wallenberg Mission,” Back Stage, September 15, 1995, 18. 30. Nicholas Wenckheim, letter to author, March 23, 2011. 31. Nicholas Wenckheim, email message to author, March 20, 2011. 32. Nicholas Wenckheim, Image and Likeness, trans. Wanda Grabia (Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1979), 13–14. All subsequent citations are from this edition and are included within parentheses in the text. 33. Nicholas Wenckheim, email message to author, May 17, 2011. 34. When I questioned Wenckheim about whether he had portrayed Ferenczy as being overzealous in his plans to deport the Jews, the Hungarian playwright, in an email message that he sent to me on May 17, 2011, described Ferenczy as “a clever little worm” who “made his ‘plan’ clear to him [Eichmann] and proved to be devilishly clever in its execution.”

240 Notes 35. Jan Kaplan was a Soviet citizen who was in Butirky Prison because he asked for a visa to go to Israel to visit his daughter who was working as a dentist in Tel Aviv. Although Wallenberg warned Kaplan about letting anyone know that he was still alive in a Russian prison, Kaplan ignored the plea and instead informed his daughter by telephone. That transgression resulted in Kaplan’s arrest and subsequent disappearance. 36. Nicholson and Winner, Raoul Wallenberg: The Swedish Diplomat, 58. 37. Rosenfeld, Raoul Wallenberg, 172.

10 THE LEGACY OF DR. JANUSZ KORCZAK 1. The description of this processional is confirmed in many historical sources. For example, see Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 70–71; and Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 307. 2. Tadeusz Lewowicki, “Janusz Korczak (1878–1942),” Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 24, nos 1/2 (1994): 38. 3. Betty Jean Lifton, The King of Children: The Life and Death of Janusz Korczak (Elk Grove Village, Il: American Academy of Pediatrics, 2005), 32 4. Ibid., 62. 5. See Israel Gutman, “Korczak, Janusz,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 2, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 817. 6. Lifton, The King of Children, 253. 7. Ibid., 283. 8. Lewowicki, “Janusz Korczak (1878–1942),” 47. 9. Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 92. 10. Ibid., 69. 11. The decision to follow Nazi decrees was more profound than merely making moral decisions. Like many members of the Judenrat whose families were held hostage by the Nazis, Czerniakov understood that his wife’s life was in danger if he refused to comply. 12. Lifton, The King of Children, 351. 13. Ibid., 352. 14. See Gene A. Plunka, Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 225–233. 15. The title of the play was changed to Who Was That Man? for staging by the Polish Theater Institute, a New York–based performing arts organization. This production was directed by Richard Harden and starred Philip Pleasants as Dr. Korczak.

Notes 241 16. Jacek Laskowski’s translation of the play is unpublished and unpaginated. However, to clarify the citations, I have numbered the pages, beginning with the title page. See Tamara Karren, Who Was This Man ?, trans. Jacek Laskowski, unpublished manuscript (Central Connecticut State University, 1979). All subsequent citations are from this edition and are included within parentheses in the text. 17. The diary entries are reproduced almost verbatim in the play, with variances expected due to the translations. For example, on page 9 of the play, Korczak reminisces about his youth, stating, “But even at that age I always sensed that it wasn’t for me to be loved by people, that it was my place to love and admire them. It’s not up to my neighbors to help me, it’s my duty to care for the world and the people in it.” The diary entry reads as follows: “I exist not to be loved and admired, but myself to act and love. It is not the duty of those around to help me but I am duty-bound to look after the world, after man.” See Korczak, Ghetto Diary, 69. To cite another example, when Korczak ponders his fate in Karren’s play, he notes, “Being born and living is a hard thing. It’s so much easier to die. I’d like to die in full possession of my senses, fully conscious. I don’t know what I could say to the children by way of a farewell” (46). In his diary entry of July 21, 1942, Korczak writes, “It is a difficult thing to be born and to learn to live. Ahead of me is a much easier task: to die . . . I should like to die consciously, in possession of my faculties. I don’t know what I should say to the children by way of farewell.” See Korczak, Ghetto Diary, 101. 18. Michael Brady, email message to author, May 22, 2011. 19. Michael Brady, email message to author, May 25, 2011. 20. Michael Brady, Korczak’s Children, in Plays by Michael Brady (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2002), 116. All subsequent citations are from this edition and are included within parentheses in the text. 21. Robert Skloot, The Darkness We Carry: The Drama of the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 28. 22. Michael Brady, email message to author, May 25, 2011. 23. Gabriel Emanuel, email message to author, May 22, 2011. 24. Gabriel Emanuel, email message to author, May 23, 2011. 25. Ibid. 26. In the play, Emanuel spells Czerniakov’s name as Czernikov. 27. Gabriel Emanuel, Einstein and Children of Night (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1985), 64. All subsequent citations are from this edition and are included within parentheses in the text. 28. See Lifton, The King of Children, 228. 29. Gabriel Emanuel, email message to author, May 22, 2011. 30. Gabriel Emanuel, email message to author, May23, 2011. 31. Skloot, The Darkness We Carry, 26–27. 32. Gabriel Emanuel, email message to author, May 23, 2011.

242

Notes

11

CONCLUSION

1. See Eli Tzur, “Resistance in Western Europe,” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Laqueur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 554–556. 2. Nechama Tec, “Resistance in Eastern Europe,” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Laqueur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 550. 3. Ibid., 546. 4. For dates of the ghetto uprisings, see Shmuel Krakowski, “Resistance, Jewish,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 1269–1270. 5. Samuel P. Oliner, “Heroic Altruism: Heroic and Moral Behaviour in a Variety of Settings,” in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in the Age of Genocide, vol. 2, ed. Margot Levy (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 320, 6. Ibid., 324. 7. Ibid., 330.

Bibliography Abramson, Glenda. Modern Hebrew Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press, 1973. Ainsztein, Reuben. “The Bialystok Ghetto Revolt.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 136–143. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. ———. Jewish Resistance in Nazi–Occupied Eastern Europe. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Arad, Yitzhak. “Introduction.” In Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, edited by Isaac Kowolski, 17–32. New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986. ———. “Jewish Family Camps in the Forests—An Original Means of Rescue.” In Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff, 333–353. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Ash, Timothy Garton. “Introduction.” In Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, The Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, by Hanna Krall, vii–xiii. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. Avni, Haim. “The Zionist Underground in Holland and France and the Escape to Spain.” In Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff, 555–590. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977. Backer, Paul. Review of To Steal a March on God. Slavic and East European Journal 41, no. 4 (1997): 710–712. Balinkin, Ausma. The Central Women Figures in Carl Zuckmayer’s Dramas. Bern: Peter Lang, 1978. Banki, Judith Hershcopf. “Some Reflections on Edith Stein.” In The Unnecessary Problem of Edith Stein, edited by Harry James Cargas, 43–49. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1994. Barnidge, Mary Shen. “Steamship Quanza.” Reader: Chicago’s Free Weekly, June 21, 1991, sec. 1, 44, 46. Baron, Lawrence. “Women as Resistance Fighters in Recent Popular Films: The Case of Hanna Senesh and Helene Moszkiewiez.” In Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation, edited by Esther Fuchs, 89–96. Studies in the Shoah, vol. 22. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1999.

244 Bibliography Bartoszewski, Wladyslaw and Zofia Lewin. The Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust. New York: Twayne, 1970. Batzdorff, Susanne M. “A Martyr of Auschwitz.” In Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Donald Marinelli, 151–157. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994. Bauer, Arnold. Carl Zuckmayer. Trans. Edith Simmons. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976. Bauer, Yehuda. American Jewry and the Holocaust. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982. ———. A History of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin Watts, 1982. ———. “They Chose Life.” In Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, edited by Isaac Kowolski, 43–52. New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986. Baumel, Judith Tydor. “The Heroism of Hannah Senesz: An Exercise in Creating National Memory in the State of Israel.” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 3 (1996): 521–546. Bauminger, Arieh L. Roll of Honour. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1970. Bejski, Moshe. “The ‘Righteous among the Nations’ and Their Part in the Rescue of Jews.” In Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff, 627–647. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977. Bettelheim, Bruno. Surviving and Other Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. Bierman, John. Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust. New York: Viking Press, 1981. Brady, Michael. Korczak’s Children. In Plays by Michael Brady, 109–156. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2002. Breitman, Richard and Alan M. Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. “Ethical Convergence in Religious Conversion.” In The Unnecessary Problem of Edith Stein, edited by Harry James Cargas, 77–102. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1994. ———. Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Brown, Frank Overton, Jr. “Jacob L. Morewitz, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Steamship Quanza.” Virginia Lawyer 56, no. 9 (2008): 29–31. Cargas, Harry James. “Edith Stein.” In Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Donald Marinelli, 31–35. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994. ———, ed. The Unnecessary Problem of Edith Stein. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1994. Chaston, Joel D. Lois Lowry. New York: Twayne, 1997. Chciuk, Andrzej, ed. Saving Jews in War-Torn Poland, 1939–1945. Clayton: Wilke and Company, 1969.

Bibliography

245

Courtine-Denamy, Sylvie. Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, or “Amor fati, amor mundi.” Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000. Cowen, Roy C. “Type-Casting in Carl Zuckmayer’s The Devil’s General.” University of Dayton Review 13, no. 1 (1976): 81–94. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. “The Curious Case of Marek Edelman.” Commentary, March 1987, 66–69. ———. The War against the Jews, 1933–1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975. DeGiacomo, Albert J. “Edith Stein: The Story of Conversion and Regeneration.” Christianity and the Arts 7, no. 4 (2000): 26–29. Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. Trans. Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Denman, Mariatte C. “Nostalgia for a Better Germany: Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General.” German Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 369–380. Duffy, Peter. The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Eckman, Lester and Chaim Lazar. “The Jewish Resistance.” In Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, edited by Isaac Kowolski, 313–332. New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986. ———. The Jewish Resistance: The History of the Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and White Russia during the Nazi Occupation 1940–1945. New York: Shengold Publishers, 1977. Emanuel, Gabriel. Einstein and Children of Night. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1985. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Feinberg, Anat. “Anat Feinberg Interviews: Aharon Megged.” Modern Hebrew Literature, Fall–Winter (1988), 47–49. ———. “An Interview With Aharon Megged.” Modern Hebrew Literature 8, nos 3–4 (1983): 46–52. Feingold, Henry L. The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970. Feldman, Yael S. “Whose Story Is It, Anyway?: Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature.” In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” edited by Saul Friedlander, 223–239. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Finke, Margot. Carl Zuckmayer’s Germany. Frankfurt am Main: Haag and Herchen, 1990. Fleischner, Eva. “Contemplation & Controversy: Carmelite Monastery at Auschwitz.” Commonweal, June 1986, 368, 370–371. Flender, Harold. Rescue in Denmark. New York: Holocaust Library, 1963. Forristal, Desmond. Kolbe: A Saint in Auschwitz . New Rochelle, N.Y.: Don Bosco Publications, 1982.

246

Bibliography

Foxman, Abraham H. “Resistance: ‘The Few against the Many.’” In Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, edited by Isaac Kowolski, 85–105. New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986. Foxman, Joseph M. “The Escape From Koldyczewo Camp.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 172–175. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Friedlander, Albert H. “Jewish and Christian Suffering in the Post-Auschwitz Period.” In Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, 177–190. New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991. Friedman, Philip. Their Brothers’ Keepers. New York: Holocaust Library, 1978. Fuchs, Esther, ed. Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation. Studies in the Shoah, vol. 22. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1999. Garber, Zev. “The Problem of Edith Stein: Jewess and Catholic Saint.” In Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation, edited by Esther Fuchs, 1–7. Studies in the Shoah, vol. 22. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1999. Gardner, William. “Arthur Giron and Edith Stein.” In Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Donald Marinelli, 25–30. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994. Garner, Julian. The Flight into Egypt. London: Nick Hern, 1996. Garten, H. F. Modern German Drama. New York: Grove Press, 1962. Geyer, Michael and John W. Boyer, eds. Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933– 1990. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt, 1987. Giron, Arthur. Edith Stein. New York and London: Samuel French, 1991. ———. “ A Long Love: The Quest for Edith Stein.” In Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Donald Marinelli, 1–24. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994. Glade, Harry. “Carl Zuckmayer’s The Devil’s General as Autobiography.” Modern Drama 9 (May 1966): 54–61. ———. “The Motif of Encounter in Zuckmayer’s Dramas.” Kentucky Foreign Language Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1963): 183–190. Glicksman, William. “The Story of the Jewish Resistance in the Ghetto of Czestochowa.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 69–76. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Gooderson, David. Kolbe’s Gift. Manuscript. 2007. Grange, William. Partnership in the German Theatre: Zuckmayer and Hilpert, 1925–1961. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Grimm, Reinhold. “Harras in Dallas.” Brecht-Jahrbuch, 1980, 201–205. Gronowski, Roman. “Zegota—Polish Council for Jewish Relief (1943–1944).” In Saving Jews in War-Torn Poland, 1939–1945, edited by Andrzek Chciuk, 22–23. Clayton: Wilke and Company, 1969. Gutman, Israel. “Kolbe, Maximilian.” In Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Vol. 2, edited by Israel Gutman, 811–812. New York: Macmillan, 1990.

Bibliography

247

———. “Korczak, Janusz.” In Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Vol. 2, edited by Israel Gutman, 816–818. New York: Macmillan, 1990. ———. “Lubetkin, Zivia.” In Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Vol. 3, edited by Israel Gutman, 914–915. New York: Macmillan, 1990. ———. “Warsaw: Jews during the Holocaust.” In Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Vol. 4, edited by Israel Gutman, 1601–1625. New York: Macmillan, 1990. Gutman, Yisrael, and Efraim Zuroff, eds. Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977. Gutman, Yisrael, and Shmuel Krakowski. Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews during World War Two. New York: Holocaust Library, 1986. Hamerow, Theodore S. “On the Road to the Wolf ’s Lair”: German Resistance to Hitler. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hartman, Geoffrey H. “Introduction: Darkness Visible.” In Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman, 1–22. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. ———, ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Hartog, Jan de. Skipper Next to God . New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1949. ———. “The Writer in Violent Times: The Dutch Underground Theatre.” Weber Studies 4, no. 1 (1987): 5–12. Hay, Peter. Ordinary Heroes: Chana Szenes and the Dream of Zion. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986. Hellman, Peter. Avenue of the Righteous. New York: Atheneum, 1980. Herbstrith, Waltraud. Edith Stein: A Biography. Trans. Father Bernard Bonowitz. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985. Herzstein, Robert Edwin. Roosevelt & Hitler: Prelude to War. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Rev. ed. 3 Vols. New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1985. Hoffmann, Peter. German Resistance to Hitler. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988. ———. The History of the German Resistance, 1933–1945. Trans. Richard Barry. Cambridge; MIT Press, 1977. Innes, Christopher. Modern German Drama: A Study in Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Iranek-Osmecki, Kazimierz. He Who Saves One Life. New York: Crown Publishers, 1971. Isser, Edward R. Stages of Annihilation: Theatrical Representations of the Holocaust. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. ———. “Jewish Resistance in Italy.” In Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, edited by Isaac Kowolski, 430–435. New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986. Karren, Tamara. Who Was This Man? Trans. Jacek Laskowski. Manuscript. Central Connecticut State University, 1979.

248

Bibliography

Kater, Michael H. “Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in the Third Reich.” Canadian Journal of History/Annales Canadiennes d’Histoire 16, no. 2 (1981): 263–277. Katz, Susan B. Courage Untold. Manuscript, 1991. Kermish, Joseph. “The Activities of the Council for Aid to Jews (“Zegota”) in Occupied Poland.” In Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff, 367–398. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977. Klemperer, Klemens von. “‘What Is the Law that Lies Behind these Words?’: Antigone’s Question and the German Resistance against Hitler.” In Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, edited by Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, 141–150. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Korbonski, Stefan. “Foreword.” In Saving Jews in War-Torn Poland, 1939–1945, edited by Andrzek Chciuk, 1–4. Clayton: Wilke and Company, 1969. Korczak, Janusz. Ghetto Diary. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Kosicka, Jadwiga. “Introduction: A Memory Play.” In To Steal a March on God , by Hanna Krall, xi-xvi. Trans. Jadwiga Kosicka. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. Kowolski, Isaac, ed. Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945. New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986. Kraft, H. S. “The Bishop of Munster.” In Six Anti-Nazi One Act Plays, edited by Stephen Moore, 65–70. New York: Contemporary Play Publications, 1939. Krajewski, Stanislaw. “The Controversy Over Carmel at Auschwitz: A Personal Polish-Jewish Chronology.” In Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, 117–137. New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991. Krakowski, Shmuel. “Resistance, Jewish.” In Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Vol. 3, edited by Israel Gutman, 1265–1271. New York: Macmillan, 1990. Krall, Hanna. Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman,The Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Trans. Joanna Stasinska and Lawrence Weschler. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. ———. To Steal a March on God. Trans. Jadwiga Kosicka. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. Kulka, Erich. “Five Escapes From Auschwitz.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 196–218. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Lang, Berel. “The Concept of Genocide.” Philosophical Forum 16, nos 1–2 (1984–85): 1–18. Langer, Lawrence L. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975. ———. Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982. Laor, Dan. “Theatrical Interpretation of the Shoah: Image and Counter-image.” In Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance, edited by Claude Schumacher, 94–110. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Bibliography

249

Larche, Douglas W. Number the Stars. Woodstock, Il: Dramatic Publishing, 1996. Latham, Don. “Childhood under Siege: Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars and The Giver.” Lion and the Unicorn 26 (2002): 1–15. Lazara, Lucien. Rescue as Resistance: How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France. Trans. Jeffrey M. Green. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Lederer, Herbert. “The Drama of Ernst Udet: A Nazi General in Eastern and Western Perspective.” In Theatrum Mundi: Essays on German Drama and German Literature Dedicated to Harold Lenz on His Seventieth Birthday, September 11, 1978, edited by Edward R. Haynes, 175–184. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1980. Leiber, Robert. “On Hochhuth’s Historical Sources.” In The Deputy Reader: Studies in Moral Responsibility, edited by Dolores Barracano Schmidt and Earl Robert Schmidt, 161–164. Glenview, Il: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1965. Levin, Nora. The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945. New York: Schocken Books, 1973. ———. “Rescue and Resistance by Jewish Youth During the Holocaust.” In Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, edited by Isaac Kowolski, 111–126. New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986. Lewowicki, Tadeusz. “Janusz Korczak (1878–1942).” Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education 24, nos 1/2 (1994): 37–48. Lieberman, Susan and Stephen J. Morewitz. Steamship Quanza. Manuscript, 1990. Lifton, Betty Jean. The King of Children: The Life and Death of Janusz Korczak. Elk Grove Village, Il: American Academy of Pediatrics, 2005. ———. “Who Was Janusz Korczak?” In Ghetto Diary, by Janusz Korczak, vii-xxx. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Lissner, Abraham. “Diary of a Jewish Partisan in Paris.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 282–297. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Loram, Ian C. “Carl Zuckmayer: An Introduction.” German Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1954): 137–149. ———. “Carl Zuckmayer—German Playwright in America.” Educational Theatre Journal 9, no. 3 (1957): 177–183. Lowry, Lois. “Newberry Medal Acceptance.” Horn Book Magazine 66, no. 4 (1990): 412–421. ———. Number the Stars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989, Marinelli, Donald, ed. Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994. Mark, Ber. “The Herbert Baum Group: Jewish Resistance in Germany in the Years 1937–1942.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 55–68. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. ———. “The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 92–127. New York: Schocken Books, 1975.

250 Bibliography Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1987. Marrus, Michael R., and Robert O. Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews. New York: Schocken Books, 1983. Masters, Anthony. The Summer that Bled: The Biography of Hannah Senesh. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972. Megged, Aharon. Hanna Senesh. Trans. Michael Taub. In Israeli Holocaust Drama, edited by Michael Taub, 79–126. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Mengus, Raymond. “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Decision to Resist.” In Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, edited by Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, 201–213. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Mews, Siegfried. Carl Zuckmayer. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981. Modras, Ronald. “Jews and Poles: Remembering at a Cemetery.” In Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, 54–61. New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991. Moll, Christiane. “Acts of Resistance: The White Rose in the Light of New Archival Evidence.” In Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, edited by Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, 173–200. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Morewitz, Stephen J. “The Saving of the S.S. Quanza.” William and Mary Magazine, Summer (1991), 25–27. Morse, Arthur D. While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1998. Nicholson, Michael and David Winner. Raoul Wallenberg: The Swedish Diplomat Who Saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazi Holocaust before Mysteriously Disappearing. Milwaukee: Gareth Stevens Publishing, 1989. Oben, Freda Mary. “Holiness in the 20th Century.” In The Unnecessary Problem of Edith Stein, edited by Harry James Cargas, 1–12. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1994. Oliner, Samuel P. “Heroic Altruism: Heroic and Moral Behaviour in a Variety of Settings.” In Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in the Age of Genocide. Vol. 2, edited by Margot Levy, 319–333. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001. “Panel Discussion on Edith Stein.” In Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Donald Marinelli, 133–150. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994. Patraka, Vivian M. Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pechersky, Alexander. “Revolt in Sobibor.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 7–50. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Peppard, Murray B. “Carl Zuckmayer: Cold Light in a Divided World.” Monatshefte 49, no. 3 (1957): 121–129.

Bibliography

251

———. “Moment of Moral Decision: Carl Zuckmayer’s Latest Plays.” Monatshefte fur Deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur 44 (1952): 349–356. Perlez, Jane. “Pope Orders Nuns out of Auschwitz.” New York Times, April 15, 1993, 13A. Plater, Edward M. V. “Helmut Käutner’s Film Adaptation of Des Teufels General.” Literature/Film Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1994): 253–264. Plunka, Gene A. Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Polish, Daniel. “A Painful Legacy.” In The Unnecessary Problem of Edith Stein, edited by Harry James Cargas, 13–16. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1994. Rajzman, Samuel. “Uprising in Treblinka.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 128–135. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Ramati, Alexander. The Assisi Underground: The Priests Who Rescued Jews. New York: Stein and Day, 1978. Raspanti, Celeste. No Fading Star. Woodstock, Il: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1979. Reitlinger, Gerald. The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, Rev. ed. Cranbury, N.J.: Thomas Yoseloff, 1968. Ringelblum, Emmanuel. “‘Comrade Mordechai’: Mordecai Anielewicz— Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 85–91. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Rittner, Carol and John K. Roth. “Introduction: Memory Offended.” In Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, 1–15. New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991. ———, eds. Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy. New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991. Robertshaw, Alan. “The Downfall of General Harras: Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General and its Critical Reception.” Modern Languages 66, no. 4 (1985): 242–247. Rohrlich, Ruby, ed. Resisting the Holocaust. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998. Rooke, Sheila. “Carl Zuckmayer.” In German Men of Letters. Vol. 3: Expressionism and After, edited by Alex Natan, 209–233. London: Oswald Wolff, 1964. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980. Rosenfeld, Harvey. Raoul Wallenberg. Rev. ed. New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1995. Russell, David L. “Reading the Shards and Fragments: Holocaust Literature for Young Readers.” Lion and the Unicorn 21, no. 2 (1997): 267–280. Saving of the S.S. Quanza Refugees: A Prelude to the Holocaust. Richmond: Audio– Visual Reporting Services, 1999.

252 Bibliography Schworin, Aaron et al. “Revolt in Lachwa.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 165–167. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Semelin, Jacques. Unarmed against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939– 1943. Trans. Suzan Husserl-Kapit. Westport and London: Praeger, 1993. Senesh, Hannah. Hannah Senesh: Her Life & Diary. Trans. Marta Cohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. Sheward, David. “The Wallenberg Mission.” Back Stage 36, no. 37 (1995): 18. Sijes, B. A. “Several Observations Concerning the Position of the Jews in Occupied Holland during World War II.” In Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff, 527–553. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977. Skloot, Robert. The Darkness We Carry: The Drama of the Holocaust. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Smith, Patrick, trans. and ed. The Bishop of Münster and the Nazis: The Documents in the Case. London: Burns Oates, 1943. Solotaroff, Theodore and Marshall Sklare. “Introduction.” In Jews in the Mind of America, edited by Charles Herbert Stember, 3–28. New York and London: Basic Books, 1966. Spahr, Blake Lee. “Carl Zuckmayer.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 124: Twentieth-Century German Dramatists, 1919–1992, edited by Wolfgang D. Elfe and James Hardin, 457–469. Detroit: Gale, 1992. Steckel, Charles W. “Survivors and Partisans.” In Anthology of Armed Jewish Resistance, 1939–1945, edited by Isaac Kowolski, 471–482. New York: Jewish Combatants Publishers House, 1986. Steinberg, Lucien. “Jewish Rescue Activities in Belgium and France.” In Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff, 603–615. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977. ———. Not as a Lamb: The Jews against Hitler. Trans. Marion Hunter. Hants, U.K.: Saxon House, 1974. Steiner, Jean-François. Treblinka. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Stember, Charles Herbert. “Reactions to Anti-Semitic Appeals before and during the War.” In Jews in the Mind of America, edited by Charles Herbert Stember, 110–135. New York and London: Basic Books, 1966. ———, ed. Jews in the Mind of America. New York and London: Basic Books, 1966. Suhl, Yuri. “Rosa Robota—Heroine of the Auschwitz Underground.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 219–225. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Suhl, Yuri, ed. They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Syrkin, Marie. Blessed Is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976.

Bibliography

253

Taylor, Jennifer. “The Dilemma of Patriotism in German Plays of the Second World War.” New German Studies 9, no. 3 (1981): 181–192. Tec, Nechama. Defiance: The Bielski Partisans. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. ———. “Resistance in Eastern Europe.” In The Holocaust Encyclopedia, edited by Walter Laqueur, 543–550. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. ———. When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Tzur, Eli. “Resistance in Western Europe.” In The Holocaust Encyclopedia, edited by Walter Laqueur, 550–556. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Wagener, Hans. “Carl Zuckmayer.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 56, edited by James Hardin, 307–317. Detroit: Gale, 1987. ———. Carl Zuckmayer Criticism: Tracing Endangered Fame. Columbia: Camden House, 1995. Waine, Anthony. “Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General as a Critique of the Cult of Masculinity.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29, no. 3 (1993): 257–270. Walker, Virginia A. “Metaphor and Mantra: The Function of Stories in Number the Stars.” Children’s Literature in Education 27, no. 2 (1996): 123–130. Weltmann, Lutz. “Two Recent German Plays.” German Life and Letters 2 (1948– 1949): 158–163. Wenckheim, Nicholas. Image and Likeness. Trans. Wanda Grabia. Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1979. Wertheim, Albert. Staging the War: American Drama and World War II. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Wiesel, Elie. Legends of Our Time. Trans. Steven Donadio. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968. Wiesel, Elie and Carol Rittner. “An Interview, August 29, 1989.” In Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, 113–116. New York and Westport: Praeger, 1991. Wishengrad, Morton. The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto. In Radio Drama in Action:Twenty-five Plays of a Changing World, edited by Erik Barnouw, 34–45. New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945. Woodward, Kenneth L. “Edith Stein and the Transformation of a Saint.” In Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Donald Marinelli, 163–171. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994. ———. “The Nazi as Modern ‘Tyrant.’” In Arthur Giron’s “Edith Stein”: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, edited by Donald Marinelli, 159–161. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994 Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941– 1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

254 Bibliography Yahil. Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945. Trans. Ina Friedman and Haya Galai. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy. Trans. Morris Gradel. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969. Yulzari, Matei. “The Bulgarian Jews in the Resistance Movement.” In They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, edited by Yuri Suhl, 275–281. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Zaidman, Laura M. “Lowry’s Number the Stars : A Post-Holocaust ‘Little Red Riding-Hood.’” Journal of Children’s Literature 22, no. 1 (1996): 39–42. Zailian, Marian. “The Jewish Nun Who Died at Auschwitz.” San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 1989, 35, 38. Zuckmayer, Carl. The Devil’s General. Trans. Ingrid G. Gilbert and William F. Gilbert. In Masters of Modern Drama, edited by Haskell M. Block and Robert G. Shedd, 911–958. New York: Random House, 1962. ———. A Part of Myself. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

Index Abele, Jim, 113 Academy Award, 233 Actors Co-Op, 113 Adorno, Theodor, 1–2, 22 Akiva, 47 American Civil Liberties Union, 136 American Jewish Committee, 51, 141 American Library Association, 68–9 American Theatre of Actors, 177 Amitié Chretienne, L’, 5, 106 see also Christian Friendship Anastasia Krupnik, 68 André, Joseph, 107 Anger, Per, 172 Anielewicz, Mordechai, 14, 19, 47, 50, 56–7, 221 Anschluss, 29 Antony and Cleopatra, 113, 123 Apel, Darwin, 98 Aquinas, Thomas, 115 Arbeitgemeinschaft für Friede und Freiheit, 4 see also Union for Peace and Liberty Arena Stage, 54, 113 Arendt, Hannah, 2–3, 201 Aristide Briand Medal, 217 Armée Juive, 208 Arrangement for Two Violas, 148 Arrow Cross, 108, 170–3, 179, 182–3 Assisi Underground, 213 Association of Jewish Libraries, 69 Atheneum Theatre, 190 Auschwitz, 2, 11, 18, 20, 21, 53, 89, 94–102, 113, 116, 117–20, 124,

127–34, 143, 166, 172, 180, 208, 227, 230, 231–2 and the controversy over the Carmelite convent, 113, 117–20, 230 escapes from, 94–5, 227 resistance in, 95–102, 127–34, 208 Avenue Theater, 98 Awakening, The, 80 Award of the Culture Foundation, 55 Babi Yar, 91, 226 Baeza, Paloma, 81 Baruch, Bernard, 136 Bataillons de la Jeunesse, Les, 6 Bathurst Street Theatre, 201 Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, The, 51–4 and historical accuracy, 52 and Jewish resistance, 53–4 production of, 51 as tale of survival, 52–4 Batzdorff, Susanne M., 120 Becher, Kurt, 20 Beck, Ludwig, 26, 28 Becket, Thomas, 128–9 Becoming Memories, 112–13 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 41 Belin, Esther, 19 Bell, Jamie, 16 Belzec, 5, 14, 53 Benedictine Samaritan Order of the Holy Cross, 225 Benny, Jack, 139 Berdichev, Abba, 158 Bergen-Belsen, 95

256 Index Berkowitz, Eliezer, 201 Berle, Milton, 139 Bernes, Sister, 20 Best, Werner, 64–5, 67 Bettelheim, Bruno, 90 Bielski brothers, 16–17 Bielski otriad, 16–17, 217 Bikel, Theodore, 222 Billy Rose Theatre, 54 Binkley, Douglas, 98 Birkenau, 18, 19, 96 Bishop of Munster, The, 228–9 Bloch, Zelo, 91 Blondell, Joan, 222 Bloom, Sol, 136 Boegner, Marc, 5 Bohr, Niels, 223 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 4, 25, 104, 120, 125, 228 Bormann, Martin, 106 Boston College University Theater, 195 Bouthiette, Jeff, 148 Boyd, Christopher, 70 Brady, Michael, 187, 194–200, 206 biography of, 195 Brandeis, Louis, 136 Braslavsky, Moshe, 160 Braune, Pastor, 3, 104 Brecht, Bertolt, 29, 127, 178 British Broadcasting Company, 107, 108 Broz, Josip, 11 see also Tito Bru, Federico Laredo, 142 Brunacci, Don, 7, 107 Brunner, Anton, 165 Buchenwald, 38, 90 Buckwitz, Harry, 31 Building Company, 149 Bulgarian Orthodox Church, 10 Bund deutsches Mädel, 35 see also League of German Girls Burgtheater, 155 Buse, Otto, 20 Butler, David, 233

Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien, 106 Calvinist Church, 107 Canaris, Wilhelm, 26 Cantor, Eddie, 139 Carmelites, 225 Carney, Art, 222 Casablanca, 235 Cassulo, Andreia, 108 Castorf, Frank, 31 Catholic Church, 3, 7, 103, 107, 116, 120, 134 Cavalcade of America, 51 Celler, Emanuel, 136 CENTOS, 193 Central Studio, 126 Centre Stage, 109 Chaillet, Pierre, 5, 106 Charu, Monsignor, 107 Chekhov, Anton, 33, 197, 200, 219 Chicago Dramatists Workshop, 149 Child of the Drawing Room, 188 Children of Night, 187, 194 and the efficacy of Jewish resistance, 204–6 genesis of, 200–1 Korczak as hero providing solace for children, 201–6 Korczak compared to Moses, 203–4 productions of, 201 sources of, 201 Children of the Streets, 188 Christian Friendship, 5 Churchill, Winston, 169 Circle in the Square Theater, 195 Coburn, D.L., 177 Cohen, Benjamin, 136 Cohen, Felix, 136 Cohen, Marianne, 20 Combat, 106 Comité de la rue Amelot, 6 Committee for the Care of European Children, 146 Committee for the Defense of Jews, 6 Concordat, 103–4, 134

Index 257 Confessional Church, 4, 5, 25, 103–4 Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 140, 141 Congregation of Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary, 225 Conville, David, 126 Coughlin, Father Charles E., 137–8 Council for Aid to Jews, 79, 222 see also Zegota Courage Untold, 89, 97–102 genesis of, 97–8 productions of, 98 and resistance in Auschwitz, 98–102 structure of, 98 Craig, Daniel, 16 Crossley Theatre, 113 CulturaMobila, 80 Czerniakow, Adam, 19, 46, 192, 201, 204–5, 240, 241 Da Costa, Morton, 54 Dachau, 4, 90, 104, 105, 110 Dafne, Reuven, 158 Dalio, Marcel, 144, 235 Dallas Theater Center, 31 Daman, Jeanne, 20 Damaskinos, Archbishop Theophilos, 12 Daniels, Josephus, 145, 149, 152 Danielsson, Carl Ivan, 238 Danish-Swedish Refugee Service, 66 Dannecker, Theodor, 10, 165 Defenders of the Christian Faith, 137 Defiance, 16 Delbo, Charlotte, 89, 90 Delta Force, The, 160 Democratic Party, 144 Deputy, The, 7, 228 see also Stellvertreter, Der Des Moines Playhouse, 69 Deutsches Theater, 29 Devaux, Charles, 106 Devil’s General, The, 25–43, 220 as cross-section of German society, 32–3 film version of, 31

form of, 32 genesis of, 30 and German resistance, 37–43 origin of the title, 31–2 productions of, 30–1 and the tenets of National Socialism, 34–6 Diary of Anne Frank, The, 87 Dickstein, Samuel, 136 Dove, John, 81 Dr. Korczak and the Children, 194 see also Korczak und die Kinder Dr. Who, 126 Dramatists Guild, 195 Dror, 47 Dubinsky, David, 138 Duckwitz, Georg-Ferdinand, 9, 65 Dunaway, Faye, 233 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 177 Éclaireurs Israélites de France, Les, 6 see also Jewish Boy Scout Organization of France, The Edelman, Marek, 47, 55–61, 223 biography of, 55–6 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 80 Edith Stein, 103, 112–26 and controversy over the Auschwitz convent, 117–20 genesis of, 113 as problematic play, 120 productions of, 113–14 and resistance from the clergy, 121–6 Eichenbaum, Zenia, 19, 217 Eichmann, Adolf, 2, 67, 141, 165–6, 170–4, 179, 180, 181, 183, 230 and the extermination of Hungarian Jews, 165–6, 170–4 trial of, 2 Eine Liebesgeschichte, 34 Einstein, 200 Eisenstein, Sergei, 138 Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center, 70

258 Index Eliot, T.S., 128–9 Emanuel, Gabriel, 187, 194–5, 200–6 biography of, 200 Embassy Theatre, 233 Endliches und ewiges Sein, 115 Engel, Josip, 11 Englanderova, Raja, 109 Enoch, Howard, 195 Ensemble Studio Theater, 112, 195 Enter the Ninja, 160 Entraide temporaire, 6 Equity Library Theatre, 195 Equus, 177 Ernster, Edith, 170 Escape from Auschwitz, 94, 97, 228 Espionage Agent, 140 European Academy, 217 Euthanasia program, 3 Evian Conference, 141 Fackenheim, Emil, 200–1 Fairbanks, Douglas, 139 Father of the Bride, The, 177 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 147 Fédération des Sociétés juives de France, 6 Ferenczy, Colonel, 180–1, 239 Ferrer, José, 233 Fichandler, Zelda, 113 Fiddler on the Roof, 81 Field III, Marshall, 146 Final Solution, 12, 14, 27, 64, 67, 76, 87, 137, 147, 181 Fink, Ida, 81 Fleischman, Gisi, 11 Flight into Egypt, The, 63, 80–7 and anti-Semitism in Poland, 82–3, 86 genesis of, 81, 225–6 production of, 81 and the rescue of Polish Jews, 81–7 and Righteous Gentiles, 83–7 structure of, 81 Flossenbürg, 104

Foreign Correspondent, 40 Fortas, Abe, 136 Four Poster, The, 233 Franco, Francisco, 139 Francs-tireurs et partisans, 5–6 Franc-Tireur, 106 Frank, Jerome, 136 Franke, Caroline, 177 Frankfurter, Felix, 135–6, 138, 144 Freedom of Justice resistance group, 7 French Forces of the Interior, 5 Friedman, Zishe, 46 Frings, Joseph, 105 Froidure, Edouard, 107 Fröliche Weinberg, Der, 29, 218 Gajowniczek, Francisczek, 126, 127–34 Galewski, 91 Galinski, Edek, 95 Garfield, John, 233 Garibaldi resistance group, 7 Garlinski, Jozef, 126 Garner, Julian, 63, 80–7, 225–6 biography of, 80 Gazzara, Ben, 233 Georg Büchner Prize, 29 George Garel network, 6 Gerlier, Cardinal, 5, 106 German-American Bund, 137, 140 Gerstein, Kurt, 5, 25 Gertner, Ala, 97–8, 100–2 Gerut, Rosalie, 148 Gessler, Albrecht, 220 Ghetto Fights, The, 55 Gin Game, The, 177 Giron, Arthur, 103, 112–26 biography of, 112–13 Giver, The, 68 Glassberg, Abbé Alexander, 5, 106 Glazer, Richard, 92 Glemp, Jozef, 118 Glickstein, Lutek, 14 Glimovska, Mira, 19, 217

Index 259 Globocnik, Odilo, 14, 93 Goebbels, Joseph, 4, 34, 103, 106, 218 Goerdeler, Carl, 27, 28 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 41 Goethe Prize, 29 Golan, Menachem, 160 Goldmann, Nahum, 146 Goldszmit, Henryk, 187–8 Goldszmit, Józef, 187–8 Goldwyn, Samuel, 138 Golem of Prague, The, 200 Gomerski, Hubert, 93 Gone with the Wind, 140 Goodbye, Mr. Chips, 140 Gooderson, David, 103, 126–34, 231–2 biography of, 126 Gordon, Bill, 69 Göring, Hermann, 105 Grahame, Kenneth, 126 Grand Illusion, 144 Grant, Lee, 233 Greek Orthodox Church, 12 Grober, Konrad, 104 Gromyko, Andrei, 175–6, 184 Grueninger, Paul, 20 Grynszpan, Yekhiel, 16 Gutenberg, Johannes, 41 Gutenberg Plaque, 29 Gypsies, 1 Habimah Theatre, 155 Halder, Franz, 26, 28 Hall, Peter, 222 Hampstead Theatre, 80, 81 Hanna Senesh, 155 genesis of, 155 historical accuracy of, 161 as an indictment against Hungary, 163 as an indictment of Old World diaspora Jews, 163–4 as an individual tale of resistance, 162–4 productions of, 155

Hanna’s War, 160–1 Hard Time, 195 Harden, Richard, 240 Harold Clurman Theatre, 178 Harras, Rudolf der, 220 Harris, Julie, 233 Harrison, Leland, 235 Harrison, Rex, 233 Hartley, Sean, 70 Hartog, Jan de, 143, 233–4 biography of, 233 Hashomer Hatzair, 11, 13, 15, 47, 215 Haubach, Theodor, 219 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 29 Hauptmann von Köpenick, Der, 29, 218 Hechalutz, 11 Heidegger, Martin, 115 Heidelberg Festival Performance Prize, 29 Herbert Baum Group, 4, 25, 212 Hersey, John, 54 Hiller, Wendy, 233 Hillman, Sidney, 136 Hilpert, Heinz, 30, 218–19 Himmler, Heinrich, 9, 18, 47, 49, 51, 64, 92, 94, 170–2, 201, 229 Hitler, Adolf, 25–8, 30, 32, 41, 42, 65, 103–4, 129, 134, 139, 140–1, 151, 154, 169, 177, 200, 220, 231 Hitler Youth, 35–6 Hochhuth, Rolf, 7, 228 Hoeffner, Cardinal, 116 Hoess, Rudolf, 95 Hoess, Rudolph, 230 Holland’s Glory, 233 Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 20 Holocaust Remembrance Day, 160 Horthy, Miklós, 167–70, 179, 181, 183 Hour, The, 141 House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 136

260 Index House Foreign Affairs Committee, 136, 227 House Immigration Committee, 142 House Judiciary Committee, 136 How to Love a Child, 189 Howard, Trevor, 31 Hull, Cordell, 141–4, 146 Hungarian Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee, 11 Hurdalek, Georg, 31 Husserl, Edmund, 114–15 I Never Saw Another Butterfly, 109 Ibsen Prize, 80 Ice Eaters, 177 Image and Likeness, 165, 177–86 and attempts to humanize the Holocaust in Hungary, 179–80 and the concept of good versus evil, 179, 184–6 genesis of, 177–8 as historical drama, 178–9 and individual heroism by Wallenberg, 182–4 and the onus on Hungarians for contributing to genocide, 180–1 productions of, 178 structure of, 178 Insignia of the Order Pour le mérite for Science and Art, 30 Insurgé, L’, 106 Interdepartmental Visa Review Board, 147 International Jewish Theatre Festival, 201 International Ladies Garment Workers Union, 51 International Reading Association, 68 Jacobi, Lou, 201 Jan Zizka Slovak Partisan Brigade, 215 Janusz Korczak International Society, 193 Janusz Korczak Pedagogical Legacy Group, 193 Janusz Korczak Prize, 195

Jewish Boy Scout Organization of France, The, 6 Jewish Fighting Organization, 14, 19, 47 Jewish Military Organization, 14 Jewish Partisan Unit of Paris, 6 Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest, 20 Jewish Repertory Theater, 113 Joan of Arc, 155, 160, 163 Johnson, Herschel, 166 Joint Distribution Committee, 142–3, 166 Jolson, Al, 139 Juliani, John, 201 Jürgens, Curt, 31 Kaleske, Karl, 216 Kaplan, Chaim, 201 Kaplan, Jan, 240 Karren, Tamara, 194, 241 Kastner, Rudolf, 20 Katz, Edith, 215 Katz, Susan B., 89, 97–102, 227–8 biography of, 97–8 Käutner, Helmut, 31 Kazasov, Dimo, 10, 214 Kent, Tyler, 140 Khrushchev, Nikita, 176, 179, 184 Killing of Mr. Toad, The, 126 Kim, byl ten czlowick, 194 see also Who Was This Man? King Boris, 10, 214 King Christian X, 8, 63–4, 71, 224 King Gustav V, 166–7 King Matthew the First, 189 Kiril, Bishop, 10, 108 Kittner, Sergeant, 18 Kleist Prize, 29 Kligman, Paul, 201 Knout, David, 5 Knuth, Gustav, 30 Koch, Marianne, 31

Index Kolbe, Maximilian, 21, 116, 120, 125, 126–34 biography of, 126–7 canonization of, 127, 131–2 Kolbe’s Gift, 103, 126–34 and Christian humanism versus Nazi ideology, 129–31 and the conflation of Nazism with communism, 231–2 genesis of, 126 influenced by Greek tragedy, 126–7 productions of, 126 and resistance from the clergy, 127–34 Komoly, Otto, 20 Korczak, Janusz, 19–20, 187–206, 240–1 biography of, 187–93 legacy of, 193–4 see also Goldszmit, Henryk Korczak und die Kinder, 194 Korczak’s Children, 187, 194–200 genesis of, 195 and heroism during the Holocaust, 195–200 Korczak as mentor and redeemer of Polish children, 195–200 structure of, 195 Kosicka, Jadwiga, 56, 61 Kovner, Abba, 12, 13, 14, 16 Kraft, H.S., 228–9 Krall, Hanna, 51, 54, 55, 61 biography of, 54–5 Krents, Milton, 51–2 Kristallnacht, 27, 28, 36, 41–2, 104, 105 Krough, Kristin, 69 Kruger, Friedrich, 48–9 Krumey, Hermann, 165 Kube, General Kommissar, 13 Kuhn, Fritz Julius, 140–1 Kuhn-Leitz, Elsie, 217 Kulka, Erich, 94, 97, 227–8 Kun, András, 173

261

La Mama Experimental Theater Club, 194, 200 Lachwa Ghetto, 13, 215 Lampell, Millard, 51, 54 Lang, Fritz, 138 Lantos, Mrs., 186 Lanzmann, Claude, 81 Larche, Douglas W., 63, 69–76, 87 Lauer, Koloman, 166, 168, 183 Leader, Anton M., 51 League of German Girls, 35 LeBeau, Madeleine, 235 Lederer, Siegfried, 94, 227 Legend of Hannah Senesh, The, 155 Lehman, Herbert, 136 Leica Freedom Train, 21 Leitz II, Ernst, 21 Lejkin, Jakub, 47 Leuschner, Wilhelm, 219 Lewenthal, Zelman, 96 Libération, 106 Lichtenberg, Bernard, 4, 25, 105, 120, 125 Lieberman, Susan, 135, 148–54 biography of, 148 Lilienstein, Romana, 191 Lilienthal, David, 136 Lilith, 35 Lindbergh, Charles, 139 Literature Prize of the Rhenish Palatinate, 30 Little Princess, The, 140 Little Review, 189 Long, Breckinridge, 143–54, 234, 235 Lorca, Federico García, 162 Lorre, Peter, 139 Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Logue Award, 112 Love Creek Productions, 178 Lowry, Lois, 63, 68–76, 86–7, 224 biography of, 68 Lubetkin, Zivia, 19, 47, 61, 221, 223 Lubin, Isador, 136

262

Index

Lublin, 47, 50, 52 Lutheran Church, 3, 9, 104 Lutz, Charles, 171 Lwow-Janowska, 17, 91, 208 Madmen’s Senate, 190 Madritsch, Julius, 4, 25, 212 Magical Theatre Company, 70 Main d’Oeuvre Immigré (MOI), 5 Maitre après Dieu, 233 Majdanek, 54 Malin, Patrick Murphy, 146, 152, 154 Malinovsky, Marshal Rodion, 174 Malthe-Brunn, Kim, 68 Maquis, 5 Marcinkonis Ghetto, 13 Marek’s Monkey, 148 Margold, Nathan, 136 Margolese, E.M., 201 Mariana Piineda, 162 Marie-Benoit, Father, 5, 20, 107 Marowitz, Charles, 148 Marx Brothers, 139 Marymount Theatre, 201 Mason, James, 233 Massarek, Rudolf, 91 Massey, Raymond, 51 Masur, Norbert, 166 Mauthausen, 208, 226 Mayer, Louis B., 138 McCrea, Joel, 140 McDonald, James Grover, 146 McDowell, Malcolm, 233 McKenna, Siobhan, 222 Megged, Aharon, 155, 161–4 biography of, 155 Melchior, Marcus, 9, 65 Mendelssohn, Felix, 27 Messersmith, George, 141 Miasnikov, Aleksandr, 176 Mildner, Rudolph, 64, 67 Miller, Arthur, 162 Mister Smith Goes to Washington, 140

Morewitz, Jacob L., 20, 135, 145–6, 149–50 Morewitz, Sallie, 145, 149 Morewitz, Stephen J., 135, 148–9, 235 Morgan-Witts, Max, 143 Morgenthau, Jr., Henry, 136, 142, 147, 235 Moshinsky, Efim, 176, 239 Moss, Arnold, 51 Moszkowicz, Daniel, 13 Mouvement de la Jeunesse Sioniste, 6 Murder in the Cathedral, 128–9 Mussolini, Benito, 144 My Dearest Mouse, 126 Nathan, Robert, 136 National Council of Teachers of English, 68 National Jewish Book Award, 69 National Playwrights Conference, 148 National Socialism, 1, 3, 18, 23, 25, 27, 28, 33–6, 41, 54, 70, 104, 124, 148, 167, 207, 219 National Socialist Party, 103 Nephesh Theatre Company, 200, 201 Neumann, Joe, 97 New Deal, 135–6, 138, 151 New Farnham Repertory Company, 126 New York State Theatre Institute, 69 Newberry Award, 68–9 Niccacci, Padre Ruffino, 7, 107 Nicolini, Bishop, 7, 107 Niemöller, Martin, 4, 25, 104, 120, 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35 Niles, David, 136 Ninotchka, 140 No Fading Star, 103 production of, 109 and the rescue of Jewish children, 109–12 and resistance from the clergy, 109–12

Index 263 Nobel Prize, 176, 223 Nobody’s Fool, 200 Notre Dame de Sion, 107 Number the Stars, 63, 68–76, 86–7 as children’s literature, 70–6 genesis of Larche’s adaptation, 69 genesis of the novel, 68–9 productions of, 69–70 and rescue of Jews in Denmark, 72–6 and resistance in Denmark, 70–6 sources of, 224 Nuremberg Laws, 25, 27, 64, 104, 167 Nuremberg Trials, 230 Nyilas, 170–3, 182–3 Odra, 55 Officier d’honneur des Palms, 217 Olsen, Iver, 148, 166, 175 Omer, 203 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 113 Open Air Theatre, 126 Open Space Theatre, 148 Operation Thunderbolt, 160 Oppenheimer Award, 195 Ordzhonikidze, 17 Organisation Juive de Combat, 6 Our Lady of Zion, 7 Ovadia, Esther, 19, 215 Padover, Saul K., 136 Palmach, 157 Palmer, Lilli, 233 Panchencko, Victor, 17 Papp, Frank, 51 Park Performing Arts Center, 178 Parry, Albert, 141 Part of Myself, A, 30 Patzay, Pal, 176–7 Pechersky, Alexander, 18, 93–4, 217 Pehle, John, 147–8, 235 Pelley, William Dudley, 137 Pentabus Theatre, 80 Persoff, Nehemiah, 233

Peshev, Dimitur, 10 Pétain, Philippe, 106 Phillips, Stephen, 109 Pilsudski, Józef, 189–90 Pink Parlor, The, 148 Piotrowski, Jan, 190 Piscator, Erwin, 178 Pittsburgh Public Theater, 113, 119 Plaszow, 17, 20, 91, 208 Platt, Annelise, 68 Playhouse Theatre, 233 Playwrights’ Center, 98 Pleasants, Philip, 240 Polish Academy of Literature, 190 Polish Directorate of Civil Resistance, 50 Polish Home Army, 48, 56, 94 Polish PEN Club Prize, 55 Polish Theater Institute, 240 Polityka, 54 Pope John XXIII, 21 Pope John Paul II, 21, 114, 116, 118, 127 Pope Pius XI, 115 Pope Pius XII, 7, 104, 168 Popovici, Trian, 21 Populaire, Le, 106 POSK, 126 Prairie Latkes, 148 Prairie Lights, 148 President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees (PACPR), 146, 149, 152, 154 Primary Visa Committee, 147 Princess Theatre, 155 Protestant Church, 8, 103 Protestant Federation of France, 5 Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 133 Pryce, Jonathan, 233 P.S. The Cheque Is in the Mail, 200 Quisling, Vidkun, 9, 107 Rajzman, Samuel, 227 Rappaport, David, 6

264 Index Raspanti, Celeste R., 103, 109–12 biography of, 109 Reagan, Ronald, 177 Red Cross, 9, 20, 168, 170, 172–3 Regina Medal, 68 Reinhardt, Max, 29 Remarque, Erich Maria, 34 Remba, Nahum, 193, 221 Renoir, Jean, 144 Resistance in Belgium, 6–7 in Beloruss, 15–16 in Bulgaria, 10, 214 by the clergy, 103–34, 207, 213 in concentration camps, 17, 89, 208 in Denmark, 8–9, 63–76, 214 in Eastern Europe, 12–19, 208 in extermination camps, 17–18, 89–102, 208, 217 in France, 5–6 in Germany, 3–5, 25–43 in ghettoes of Eastern Europe, 12–16, 215–16, 221 in Greece, 12 in Holland, 7–8, 213–14 in Italy, 7, 213 in labor camps, 17, 91, 208 in Lithuania, 12, 13–14 by notable individuals, 19–20 in Poland, 12–16, 47–61, 63, 76–87, 216, 221 reasons for, 209 recognized through art, 22–3, 209–10 recognized through memory, 21–2 recognized through monuments, 22 in Scandinavia, 9–10 in Slovakia, 11 in Western and Central Europe, 3–12, 207 in Yugoslavia, 11, 215 Revicky, Imre, 21 Righteous Among the Nations, 20, 21, 78

Righteous Gentiles, 70, 78–9, 83–7, 119, 176, 186 Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 196–8, 201, 221 Ritz Brothers, 139 Robinson, Edward G., 139–40 Robota, Roza, 18, 19, 96–102, 227 Rogaland Theater, 80 Rogers, Edith Nourse, 141–2 Romulus the Great, 177 Roncalli, Angelo, 21, 170 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 136, 146, 149, 152 Roosevelt, Franklin, 38, 135–54, 168–9, 175, 220, 234–5 as ally to American Jews, 135–6 and anti-immigration policies, 137–43 apathy toward the genocide, 136–7 Rope Dancers, The, 222 Rosen, Yonah, 157–8 Rosenberg, Anna, 136 Rosenman, Samuel, 136 Rosenstrasse protest, 4 Ross, Katherine, 233 Rothschild family, 144 Rotta, Angelo, 108, 170 Royal National Theatre Studio, 80 Rules of the Game, 144 Rum, Franz, 217 Ruoti, Helena, 113 Rush, David, 148 Russian Revolution, 139 Russo-Japanese War, 188 Rypp, Howard, 200, 201 Sachsenhausen, 4, 91, 104, 132, 208, 226 Saint Joan, 155 St. Louis affair, 142–3, 152–4, 234 Saint Teresa Benedicta, 116 Saint Teresa of Avila, 114–15, 122 Saliège, Jules-Gérard, 5, 106 Salzer, Mrs. Vilmos, 173 Sandy and Sam, 148 Sankowitz, Lee, 113

Index Sapir, Regina, 97 Sara, 195 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 162 Savoy Theatre, 31 Scales of Justice, The, 200 Scarfe, Alan, 31 Scavenius, Erik, 8, 64–5 Scharff, Werner, 4, 25 Schauspiel, 194 Schauspielhaus, 30 Scheler, Max, 114 Schiller, Friedrich, 220 Schillinger, Josef, 95 Schindler, Oskar, 20 Schipper Naast God, 143 see also Skipper Next to God Schmidthuber, August, 174, 179, 184 Schreiber, Liev, 16 Schroeder, Gustav, 142–3 Scrap of Time, A, 81 Seidl, Siegfried, 165 Sellers, Michael, 195 Semper Fi, 195 Senesh, Hanna, 19, 156–64, 237 biography of, 156–60 as national hero, 160 as symbol of Holocaust resistance, 160 see also Szenes, Chana Seventh Day Adventists, 1 Seventh Macedonian Partisan Brigade, 19, 215 Shaffer, Peter, 177 Shagan, Steve, 233 Shakespeare, William, 113 Shaw, George Bernard, 155 Sheinbaum, Yehiel, 14 Sherin, Edwin, 54 Shielding the Flame, 55–6 Shifrin, Abraham, 239 Shilansky, Dov, 237 Shoah (film), 81 Silent Engine, The, 80 Silver Shirts, 137

265

Simon, Elemér, 237 Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Conception, 225 Sisters of the Order of the Resurrection, 225 Skipper Next to God, 143, 233–4 as indictment of a passive Roosevelt administration, 234 productions of, 233 Sobibor, 18, 93–4, 143, 208 resistance in, 93–4, 208, 217 Social Democratic Party, 9 Social Justice, 137 Socrates, 162 Soir, Le, 118 Sony Pictures, 195 Sousa-Mendes, Aristides de, 213 Spanish Civil War, 139 S.S. Quanza, 144–6, 149–54, 235 see also Steamship Quanza Stagecoach, 140 Stalin, Joseph, 160 Steamship Quanza, 20, 135, 149–54 and the fear of foreign immigrants, 149–50 genesis of, 148–9 as indictment of Roosevelt’s antiimmigration policies, 151–3 and individual heroic efforts during the Holocaust, 153–4 productions of, 149 Stein, Edith, 21, 112–26, 127, 134 biography of, 114–16 canonization of, 116–17, 125 reputation of, 116–17, 125–6 see also Saint Teresa Benedicta Stein, Rosa, 115–16, 125 Stellvertreter, Der, 228 Stephan, Monsignor, 10, 108 Stock Exchange (Theater), 30 Strasberg, Lee, 233 Streicher, Julius, 136 Stroop, Jürgen, 15, 49–50, 52, 201, 216

266

Index

Sublokatorka, 55 see also Subtenant Subtenant, 55 Suchomel, Franz, 217 Sugihara, Sempo, 20 Suhard, Cardinal, 106 Summer Circle Theatre, 69 Summer to Die, A, 68 Süsskind, Walter, 8 Svarte Okser, 80 Svartz, Nanna, 176, 179, 184 Sydney Taylor Book Award, 69 Sylvanus, Erwin, 194 Szálasi, Ferenc, 170, 179, 182–3 Szalay, Pál, 173–4 Szenes, Bela, 155, 159 Szenes, Catherine, 156, 159 Szenes, Chana, 155–60 Szenes, Gyuri, 156 Szeptycki, Andreas, 109 Szerynski, Jozef, 47 Sztójay, Döme, 165, 169 Taylor, Myron C., 141 Teitelboim, Niuta, 19 Tennenbaum, Mordecai, 13, 19 Tenten Productions, 126 Teresa, Sister Maria, 231 Terezin Promise, The, 109 Teufels General, Des, 25–43 see also Devil’s General, The Teverbaugh, Robert, 149 Textile Workers Union, 51 Théas, Pierre-Marie, 106 Theater am Schiffbauerdam, 29 Theresienstadt, 9, 66–7, 94, 109 Thomalla, Wolfgang, 93 Thomas, Gordon, 143 Three Stooges, 139 Tissandier, Jacques, 158–9 Tito, 11, 19, 158, 208 To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, 195

To Steal a March on God, 51 and arguments about the value of life, 59–61 genesis of, 55 as memory play, 56–7 as presentation of moral and ethical issues concerning resistance, 58–9 structure of, 55 as tale of resistance, 56–61 Toebbens, Walter, 48 Tony Award, 222, 233 Toronto Workshop Productions, 200 Touch of Frost, A, 126 Treblinka, 13, 14, 17, 20, 46, 50, 53, 59, 91–3, 187, 193, 200, 226–7 resistance in, 91–3, 208, 217 Trevens, Francine, 178 Trondelaag Teater, 80 Turrou, Leon G., 141 Two Bears Blinking, 195 Tyler’s Hill, 97 Udet, Ernst, 30, 31, 32, 37, 43, 218 UNESCO, 193 Union for Peace and Liberty, 4 Union of Bulgarian Journalists, 10 United Defense Organization, 13 United Nations, 195 United Partisan Organization, 12, 19 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 177 Ursuline Sisters, 225 van Roey, Joseph-Ernest, 7, 107 Varga, Imre, 177 Vatican, 5, 7, 21, 94, 103–4, 107, 127, 131, 170 Végházi, Stephen N., 185 Veissi, Elie, 12 Vergera, Pastor, 106 Veritate, De, 115 Verité, La, 106 Versailles Treaty, 25, 28

Index 267 Vienna Culture Prize, 29 Vishniac, Roman, 81 Visit, The, 177 Volksbühne, 31 von Dardel, Fredrik, 177–8 von Dardel, Maj, 176 von Galen, Count Clemens August, 3–4, 25, 105–6, 120, 125, 228–9 von Hannecken, Hermann, 65 von Moltke, Hellmuth, 219 von Renthe-Fink, Cecil, 63–4 von Ribbentrop, Joachim, 64 von Sammern-Frankenegg, Ferdinand, 47–8, 221 von Stauffenberg, Claus, 28–9, 32 von Stroheim, Erich, 138 Voyage of the Damned, 143, 233 Vrba, Rudolf, 94 Vyshinsky, Andrei, 175, 185 Wagner, Gustav, 93 Wagner, Robert F., 141 Wajcblum, Estusia, 97–102 Wajcblum, Hanka, 97–101 Wall, The, 51, 54 Wallenberg, Gustav Oskar, 167 Wallenberg, Raoul, 20, 148, 165–86, 238–40 biography of, 167–9 chosen to rescue Jews in Hungary, 166–7 disappearance after the war, 174–6 legacy of, 176–7 and rescue of Jews in Hungary, 169–74 Wallenberg Mission, The, 178 Wannsee Conference, 76, 137 War Refugee Board, 147–8, 165–6, 169, 175, 184 Warehouse Theatre, 201 Warner Brothers, 29, 138, 140 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 14–15, 19, 45–61, 91, 118, 222

Way, Luther, 149, 152 Weimar Republic, 25, 27 Weiss, Avraham, 118 Weissmandel, Rabbi Michael Beer Dov, 11 Welles, Orson, 233 Wenckheim, Nicholas, 165, 177–86, 239 biography of, 177 Werner, Oskar, 233 West, Mae, 139 Westerbork, 8, 116 Westerweel, Johan Gerard, 8 Whirlybirds, 148 White Rose, 4, 25 Who Was This Man?, 194, 240 Wiesel, Elie, 2, 119 Wijsmuller-Meijer, Geertruida, 8 Wilczynska, Stefania, 188–9, 200 Wilhelm Tell, 220 Wilner, Arie, 47, 50 Winchell, Walter, 138 Wind in the Willows, The, 126 Wise, Stephen, 136, 144–6, 149, 152 Wishengrad, Morton, 51–4, 61, 222 biography of, 51, 222 Wising, Kaj, 167 Wisliceny, Dieter, 11, 165, 215 Witenberg, Yitzhak, 19 Wizard of Oz, The, 140 Wolff, Hillman, 145 Women’s International Zionist Organization, 11 Woodstock Library’s Reader’s Theatre, 69–70 World Jewish Congress, 118, 146, 166, 235 Wulf, Catalina, 177 Wurm, Theophil, 25, 104, 120, 125 Wyler, William, 138 Wyzanski, Jr., Charles, 136 Yad Vashem, 20, 21, 78, 176, 213 Yesterday Now, 80 YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 195

268

Index

Zabladowicz, Noah, 97–8 Zalcberg, 17, 91 Zdazyc przed Panem Bogiem, 55 see also Shielding the Flame Zegota, 79–80, 222 Zephyr Theater, 113 Zimetbaum, Mala, 95 Zohar, Miriam, 155 Zorin, Shlomo, 16 Zucker, Adolph, 138

Zuckerman, Yitzhak, 47, 223 Zuckmayer, Carl, 25–43, 218–19 biography of, 29–30 Zwick, Edward, 16 Zycie Warszawy, 54 Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), 14, 47–50, 56, 61 see also Jewish Fighting Organization Zylberberg, Mordechai, 14