Stealth Altruism: Forbidden Care as Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust 1412865034, 9781412865036

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Motivators of Consequence
1 Altruism and Stealth Altruism
2 Judaism and Stealth Altruism
Part II. Pre-camp Horror and Help
3 Prewar Germany
4 War-Torn Europe
Part III. Unearthly “Planets”
5 Nazi Camps
Profile: eresienstadt
6 Horror Story
7 Predators and Isolates
Part IV. Amidah
8 Stealth Altruism under Wraps
9 Stealth Altruism in the Open
Profile: A New Perception of the Holocaust, Betty Bleicher, LCSW
Part V. Carers
10 Jewish Menschen
Profile: Camp Doctor and Nurse
11 Carers Up Close
12 Women Carers
Profile: Magda Herzberger
13 Gentiles as Carers
Part VI. Post-Holocaust Responsibilities
14 Explaining Neglect
15 Remedying Neglect
16 Looking Beyond
Bibliography
Research Sites 2003–16
Index

Citation preview

I have heard first-hand stories of altruistic giving and incredible mutual assistance, and I admire your dedication to focusing on the positive. —Chaim Waxman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Jewish Studies, Rutgers University; Senior Fellow, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Art Shostak has provided a healthy antidote to the “poor us” self-pity of much of modern Jewish identity. He has deconstructed the negative Nazi narrative of the Holocaust and reconstructed a new, affirmative Jewish narrative . . . a story of Jewish dignity and grace and humanity in the face of the worst terror in human history. When you read these stories you are not depressed, you are uplifted. —Tsvi Bisk, Israeli; author among other books of The Suicide of the Jews: A Cautionary Tale (2015). Your work makes a strong case for giving much needed attention to CareSharers. In fact, those people who provided acts of kindness and compassion, even at risk of cruelty and death, are the heroes who allow us to maintain moral balance and our faith in humankind. Your strong research and writing make this very clear, and provides a needed contribution to Holocaust and general humanities literature. —Jacqueline Silver, EdD, Seattle, Washington; author of …and yet They Learned: Education of Jewish Children in Nazi Occupied Areas between 1933 and 1945 (2016). The book shifts attention from the atrociousness of the perpetrators to the resilience of the victims, and provides a fascinating case study of altruism, morality, and social solidarity under extreme conditions. —Shai Dromi, Lecturer in Sociology, Harvard University. What a wonderful idea, giving examples of man’s humanity under terrible circumstances some well-deserved recognition . . . they fill gaps without which the history of this period is incomplete and, maybe more important, inaccurate. These stories capture an inspiring side of what

humans are capable of during a period when history records mostly the other end of the spectrum. —Lyn Cramer, amateur historian, Oakmont, California. I think it will become a classic. . . . Shostak highlights Jews who left us as a legacy a timeless model of upstander behavior worth emulation worldwide. —Diana Mara Henry, MA (Brandeis, 2000), independent scholar.

First published 2017 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2017 by Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2016049025 ISBN: 978-1-4128-6503-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-4128-6560-9 (pbk) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

Dedicated to my wife, Lynn Seng, whose ideas have enriched this project, whose collaboration made a finer manuscript possible, and whose love has always made all the difference.

Royalties after expenses have been assigned to Yad Layeled, the Children’s Museum in Beit Lohamei Hagetaot, Western Galilee, Israel.

Contents Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xxi

Introduction

xxv

Part I. Motivators of Consequence 1 Altruism and Stealth Altruism 2 Judaism and Stealth Altruism

1 5 17

Part II. Pre-camp Horror and Help 3 Prewar Germany 4 War-Torn Europe

29 33 43

Part III. Unearthly “Planets” 5 Nazi Camps Profile: Theresienstadt 6 Horror Story 7 Predators and Isolates

57 61 76 87 99

Part IV. Amidah 8 Stealth Altruism under Wraps 9 Stealth Altruism in the Open Profile: A New Perception of the Holocaust, Betty Bleicher, LCSW

109 113 121 133

Part V. Carers 10 Jewish Menschen Profile: Camp Doctor and Nurse 11 Carers Up Close

139 143 156 163

12 Women Carers Profile: Magda Herzberger 13 Gentiles as Carers

175 187 193

Part VI. Post-Holocaust Responsibilities 14 Explaining Neglect 15 Remedying Neglect 16 Looking Beyond

207 211 225 237

Bibliography

247

Research Sites 2003–16

313

Index

315

Preface To struggle with the Holocaust is to wrestle with the meaning of our lives and times. —Gerald K. Markle

Introduction

The Holocaust “keeps turning up new stories, different angles, fresh versions of events we thought we knew already.”1 Not surprisingly, then, seven decades after it ended in 1945, we continue to seek answers to the over-arching question: what can the Holocaust teach us today about society and ourselves?2 My book finds overlooked teachable lessons in the secret caring behavior of certain European Jews who defied Nazi prohibitions against helping landsmen (other Jews). I call their high-risk efforts “acts of stealth altruism,” and the men and women involved, “Carers.” They struggled in a bizarre world unlike anything known before or since, one which intertwined redemptive help and murderous horror. Ruth Kluger, one of the 178 survivors on whose memoirs I draw, was saved by an act of stealth altruism. Within an hour of arriving in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp she stood as a naked, emaciated thirteen-year-old ex-ghetto dweller among anxious female prisoners about to be “selected” by an SS officer. Almost all would be sent to die in a nearby gas chamber; a few would become slave laborers. Suddenly, Ms. Kluger was approached by a complete stranger, a young Jewish woman prisoner entrusted with keeping records for the SS “selector.” She gently asked Ms. Kluger her age: when the girl answered “thirteen,” the young woman quietly insisted she should say she was fifteen years old. The indifferent SS officer, however, decided she was too small and thin for allegedly being fifteen and pointed her over to the gas chamber line. xi

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To the astonishment of all, the record clerk then risked her own life by speaking up on Ms. Kluger’s behalf: “But she is strong. Look at her, at the muscles in her legs. She can work.”3 At that moment it suited the SS officer to shrug, listen to the clerk, and grant Ms. Kluger an extension on life. Now, many decades later, Ms. Kluger regards the brief incident as “an incomprehensible act of grace, or put more modestly, a good deed. I was saved by a young woman who was in as helpless a situation as the rest of us, and who nevertheless wanted nothing more than to help me.”4 She sees in this act of stealth altruism proof that “even in the perverse environment of Auschwitz absolute goodness was a possibility, like a leap of faith, beyond the humdrum chain of cause and effect.”5 Ms. Kluger believes every survivor has a similar story, a “lucky accident,” a “turning point” to which they owe their life.6 Professor Alvin H. Rosenfeld, after identifying the Holocaust as “one of the most copiously documented crimes in history,” goes on to explain: “For all of that it continues to present massive problems in understanding.”7 What, for example, can we understand of Ms. Kluger’s experience, and what about it should we choose to emphasize across the generations? Why? And how? Attention for more than seventy years has gone to what I call the Horror Story, a terrifying account of atrocious things perpetrators did to Jewish victims, that is, history as made by certain Germans and their collaborators.8 Haim Ginott, speaking for many other survivors, will never forget having seen “what no man should witness: Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and children shot and burned by high school and college graduates.”9 Along with the Horror Story, my book pays attention to what I call the Help Story, a little-known, yet inspiring account of what Jewish victims did for one another, that is, history as made by certain European Jews. For example, it includes the high-risk saving of young Ruth Kluger by the daring Jewish record keeper, “daring” because the SS did not welcome any unsolicited and challenging advice from “sub-human” Jewish victims. We need both stories—Horror and Help—in a revised Holocaust Narrative. Why? Because together they provide a more accurate history of Holocaust realities. They can bolster our appreciation of the human potentiality for doing good. And they can help raise the self-esteem of world Jewry, especially that of the young. xii

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Filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, himself a “hidden child” survivor, explains: “If we remember solely the horror of the Holocaust, we will pass on no perspective from which meaningfully to confront and learn from that horror. If the hard and fast evidence of the possibility of good on Earth is allowed to slip through our fingers and turn to dust, then future generations will have only dust to build on.”10 Book Origins

Soon after my eight birthday in 1945, I saw unprecedented Life magazine photos and RKO newsreel coverage of the liberation of the German camps. I found myself especially intrigued by scenes of enfeebled prisoners holding one another up, trying to feed one another, and in many other caring ways, behaving nobly, albeit their lives seemed to hang by a thread. Although only a boy at the time, I resolved to learn more about the Holocaust experience of European Jews, especially the noble in it, as the mass media and popular culture were preoccupied with only dark matters. After retiring in 2003 from forty-two years as a campus-based sociologist, I turned my attention full time to my 1945 concern. Beginning in 2005, my wife Lynn Seng and I made study visits to forty-eight Holocaust museums and education centers world-wide. Ten of the European museums were on the sites of former Nazi camps.11 I learned much about the barbaric manufacture of death, as almost all museums and education centers displayed mounds of eyeglasses, human hair, shoes, suitcases, and the unnerving like. Museum walls offered photos of unburied, naked corpses and of emaciated survivors barely distinguishable from the dead . . . unforgettable testimony to unforgivable crimes. To my bewilderment, however, I learned almost nothing about the forbidden caring efforts Jewish victims made on one another’s behalf. A few museums and education centers did display prohibited hand-made birthday cards or knitted gloves, materials which the SS considered “stolen” from the Third Reich, a harshly punished offense. Most such Help Story displays, however, lacked placards or wall panels with a full explanation, and they were greatly outnumbered by Horror Story items. This disregard of stealth altruism and of Carers was at sharp odds with survivor memoir accounts. Further research found little or no mention of stealth altruism in school material used in the six states with a Holocaust curricular requirement (California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and xiii

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Pennsylvania), or in related films or television productions, or in all but a few academic publications. Similar neglect was conspicuous at the Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Commemoration Day) events.12 A fortuitous friendship was formed in 2004 with Henrik Skorr, a Polish Jewish survivor who lived nearby. He asked my help in turning vivid recall of involvement in stealth altruism into a publishable memoir. Henrik had led his family and several neighbors out of Poland into Russia, where they survived thanks to his courageous employ of highrisk, forbidden care. With the help of two collaborators, we succeeded in having his 384-page memoir, Through Blood and Tears: Surviving Hitler and Stalin, published in 2006 in Sir Martin Gilbert’s outstanding series of Holocaust testimonies.13 In 2006 Lynn and I joined a “Jewish Heritage” tour that included several East European Holocaust-related sites, such as concentration camp museums, iconic monuments, and Otto Schindler’s slave labor factory. We heard an American-born Holocaust scholar lecture almost daily about gruesome Nazi atrocities and about Jewish victims, whom he characterized as abjectly passive. Nothing was said about nonviolent resistance and forbidden caring. (As recently as 2016, I heard the Horror Story emphasized in a similar setting). Disturbed by the puzzling omission, by the tour’s end I had resolved to assess the validity of what I now call Horror Story centrism. I interviewed many survivors, among whom Magda Herzberger, Gerda Weissmann Klein, and Dora Apsan Sorell were especially helpful. I also reviewed survivor oral history transcripts and saw video interviews at the Shoah Institute (aka the Spielberg Foundation) offices at New York’s Columbia University and on the USC campus.14 Since 2004, I have very closely read 195 memoirs authored by 178 survivors (94 men, 84 women) imprisoned in Nazi camps, the Holocaust experience of the majority of Jewish survivors.15 Almost all have included eyewitness accounts of stealth altruism, often directly involving the writer either as a giver or as a receiver.16 Holocaust scholar William Younglove would have us understand that while such books necessarily probe “the depths of deprivation, degradation, desolation, destruction, and death,” they also with fidelity explore the “heights of helpfulness, honorableness, honesty, humor, and humanity.”17 Similarly, psychologist Henry Greenspan writes that, while a Holocaust memoir he helped develop is “inevitably about loss and deprivation, irremediably so, . . . [it is also] about nurture and human connection.”18 xiv

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Especially rewarding was the genre’s readability. Historian Saul Friedlander, a pioneer in the use of survivor memoirs, explains that, “like flashes that illuminate parts of the landscape, they confirm intuitions, they warn us against easy generalizations, they tear through the smugness of scholarly detachment.”19 I sought out scholarship that explored caring behavior from “30,000 feet up,” as the expression goes.20 Writer Tzvetan Todorov, for example, concluded in 1996 that, in the Nazi camps, acts of kindness, moral courage, and even sacrifice on behalf of others were far more common than nonparticipants might expect.21 Professor Nechama Tec, a survivor and scholar, noted that “practically all prisoner accounts, oral and written, mention clusters of friends who made life more bearable. I have not come across a single Lager [camp] autobiography that does not mention bonding of some kind as a part of the prisoners’ experiences.”22 Outsider Role

Survivors understand they know only a limited part of the whole. Felix Opatowski, a veteran of several camps, insists, “nobody ever really knew everything about Auschwitz.”23 As well, their ranks shrink with the passage of time, for example, in 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, some fifteen hundred Jewish survivors attended; in 2015, on the seventieth anniversary, when the average age of a survivor had reached eighty-seven, about three hundred were present. By an eightieth commemoration event in 2025 no survivors may be alive to attend.24 My role as an outsider has significant limitations.25 Many survivors have had a stranger and far more demanding life than I can ever imagine.26 I thank God that I have “not seen the inside of sealed trains . . . not been covered with the ashes of our mothers and fathers and children raining down from the sky . . . [and I have] not known the collapse of human significance and human sanctity.”27 Outsiders, however, can make a distinct contribution, for, as maintained by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer, a fellow outsider, the “sympathetic power of the imagination should be granted the role it deserves.”28 Likewise, Professor Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli outsider, would have us understand that real events “can, with a great deal of effort, be reconstructed, at least in their main outlines; the events happened to real people, whose stories must be heard and analyzed.”29 My book tries to connect stealth altruism “dots” others—participants and outsiders alike—have missed, overlooked, or undervalued.30 xv

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Book Readership

During the six years spent writing this book (2010–16), I ranked highest among prospective readers Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren. It can help them appreciate the unique life-saving contribution of stealth altruism.31 All can learn there was far more to the Holocaust than the Horror Story alone. A second reading audience consists of museum and education center careerists, along, of course, with their key allies—board members, major donors, volunteer guides, and so on. Serving as consequential “Shapers of the Memory,” these men and women can someday get the Help Story overdue attention, and nurture its considerable potential. (See chapter 15, Remedying Neglect.) Fellow academicians may find fresh ideas about familiar matters. Likewise, K-12 teachers can employ ideas with which to raise the Holocaust “IQ,” the genocide “IQ,” and especially, the social action resolve of young learners. This can bolster confidence in humanity’s long-term prospects. Parents can use the book’s Help Story to address the innate curiosity of youngsters about human behavior in extremis. Teenagers and young adults can employ lessons in ethics, idealism, resiliency, and sagacity. (See Part I, Motivators of Consequence.) Clergy have in the example of Carers a model well worth bringing to the attention of their parishioners. They could salute parishioners for previously unknown acts of stealth altruism. Similarly, non-Jewish victims of genocidal violence might be inspired to acknowledge acts of stealth altruism in their own dark history.32 (See chapter 14, Explaining Neglect.) Finally, Jewish people might appreciate learning about Jewish Carers. (See Part II, Pre-camp Horror and Help.) A scholar notes ruefully, “Usually we read of the Holocaust as a matter of German policy, with the Jewish victims appearing just before, or even just as they are killed.”33 The Help Story tells far more in an inspiring way. Conclusion

In 2013 pollsters asked a large representative sample of American Jews to rank ten criteria they considered essential to being Jewish: “Remembering the Holocaust” came in at the top of the list.34 Serving as the glue that presently binds the American Jewish community together, memorialization of the Holocaust has become the “touchstone for its sense of communal purpose.”35 xvi

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It is time to move memorialization beyond Horror Story centrism, beyond the preoccupation with “done to” atrocities, for example, Livia Bitton-Jackson, in her 1997 account of the several years spent in Auschwitz-Birkenau, tells stories “of gas chambers, shootings, electrified fences, torture, scorching sun, mental abuse, and constant threat of death.” She also tells “stories of faith, hope, triumph, and love. They are stories of perseverance, loyalty, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, and of never giving up.”36 Similarly, Manya Frydman Perel, a survivor of six years of struggle at eight concentration camps, tells of her reliance on stealth altruism: “We resisted in every way we could. Our weapons were our bare hands, our minds, our courage, and our faith. I resisted by stealing bread and potatoes to share with my friends. I resisted by risking my life time and time again. The Nazis could not crush our spirit, our faith, or our love for life and humanity.”37 It is time to repurpose memorialization. Over the past seventy years we have let it become only mournful, a dark matter from which Jewish people understandably shy. It should be a far more nuanced event, one looked to for insight and guidance. This requires recognition of the inseparability of two stories, Horror and Help, for memorialization is “a sacred act that elicits a double mandate—to expose the depth of evil and to raise goodness from the dust of amnesia.”38 Notes

The epigraph is from Markle, Gerald E. 1995. Meditations of a Holocaust Traveler, p. 25. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Applebaum, Anne. October 9–15, 2006. “Five Germanys I Have Known.” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, p. 33. Fund-raising appeal (“Join the Conversation: Fall 2014 Events Calendar”) from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) received by me on September 11, 2014. Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (translated by Weiter Leben), p.108. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 108. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 1995. The Americanization of the Holocaust, p. 2. See in this connection, Engelking, Barbara. 2001. Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust and Its Consequences: An Investigation based on Personal Narratives (translated by Emma Harris; edited by Gunnar S. Paulsson), p. 145. See also www.stealthaltruism.com, at which website you can find five published essays of mine. xvii

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8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

xviii

Perpetrators will always have to answer for “the greatest lapse in the moral advance of our species.” Konner, Melvin, “Foreword,” in Schneider, Tosia Szechter. 2007. Someone Must Survive to Tell the World: Reflections by Tosia Szechter Schneider, p. 14. As cited in Wegner, Gregory. 1998. “‘What Lessons are There from the Holocaust for My Generation Today?’ Perspectives on Civic Virtue from Middle School Youth.” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 13, 2, p. 167. Sauvage, Pierre. 1988. Cited in Garber, Z., ed. 1988. Methodology in the Academic Teaching of the Holocaust, p. 118 (see also pp. 107–28). I assessed exhibits, and listened critically to the influential words of guides at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Plaszow, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt, Westerbork, and the newest concentration camp museum in Europe, the Jasenovac Camp Museum outside of Zagreb. (Staffers were interviewed at Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, and Jasenovac). Beginning in 1971, I have made ten trips to Israel’s Yad Vashem, and many research visits between 2008 and 2015 to the Shoah Memorial in Paris. In 2010, I went to the newest of the American Holocaust museums in Skokie, IL. In 2011 I made my second research trip to the USHMM in the District of Columbia. In 2012 I visited the Holocaust section of the newest Jewish Museum in America, now located in Philadelphia. I have also been to museums in Albuquerque, NM; Brooklyn, NY; Farmington Hills, MI; Manhattan, NY; St. Petersburg, FL; Israel’s Ghetto Fighters Museum and the Children’s Holocaust Museum, both in Kibbutz Beit Lohamei Hagetaot; and museums in Estonia and Netherlands; also two Holocaust galleries in major museums in Kyoto (Kyoto Museum for World Peace, Ritsumeikan University—since 1992 the first peace museum in the world to be established by a university) and Osaka, Japan. In Brooklyn, NY, I have been to the Holocaust room of a new Museum of Jewish History, the world’s first Orthodox Jewish Museum designed for children. I have also visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the third most visited museum in Europe. These events survivor Ruth Kluger associates “with the usual self-enclosed phrases that don’t engage anyone’s attention, let alone imagination . . . .” Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (translated by Weiter Leben). Op. Cit., p. 92. See Skorr, Henrik. 2006. Through Blood and Tears: Surviving Hitler and Stalin. Much credit is owed to Ivan Sokolov, a graduate student, and Ann Weiss, a distinguished Holocaust scholar. I saw oral history accounts at the Northern California Holocaust Research Center in San Francisco and at Gratz College outside of Philadelphia. The survey guide used over several years in the Shoah Foundation fifty-two thousand taped interviews that does not mention altruism, and the subject therefore came up haphazardly, a major limitation of its use where forbidden caring is concerned. A friend, Dan Falcone, studied ninety Shoah Foundation Video Oral Histories and found evidence of giving or receiving forbidden care in thirty-two cases, and ambiguous clues in many others. Attention is owed to stealth altruism in the lives of hidden Jewish children, Jewish adults passing as Gentiles, Jewish adults living in hiding, and urban Jewish rescuers of Jewish victims. Relevant here are the annual issues of

Preface

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

The Hidden Child ([email protected]). In the 2012 issue (Volume XX) can be found an essay of mine, “Six Slices of Apple: Stealth Altruism in the Concentration Camps.” pp. 3, 16–18. The five or so exceptions were memoirs by a few hard-boiled impersonal males. I drew as well on some survivor diaries, where a similar distribution emerged regarding stealth altruism. Used with permission given in a private e-mail correspondence with William Younglove, May 30, 2012. Greenspan, Henry. “Introduction.” In Rubin, Ari and Greenspan, Henry. 2006, Reflections. Op. Cit. p. xxi. See also Handeli, Ya’acov (Jack). 2001 (1992). A Greek Jew from Salonica Remembers (translated by Martin Kett), p. 9. Friedlander, Saul, as cited in Pfeiffer, Michael. 2011, “Guest Foreword: Mapping Out the Mountain.” In Lowe, Camila. The Memory of Pain: Women’s Testimonies of the Holocaust, p. xviii. I am indebted to the writings of Viktor E. Frankl (1959), Terrance Des Pres (1976), Joseph Rudavsky (1987), Samuel and Pearl Oliner (1988), Shamai Davidson (1995), Tzvetan Todorov (1996), Ronald Berger (1998), Peter Suedfeld (1998), Paul Bartrop (2000), Yehuda Bauer (1973, 2009), Nechama Tec (2003, 2013), Paul Henry (2014), Tuvia Friling (2014), and Michal Aharony (2015), all of whom but for Frankl and Tec were outsiders like myself. Full citations are available in the Bibliography. Fischel, Jack. February 15, 1996. “Challenging a View that the Overriding Impetus of Camp Inmates was Survival.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, p. K-4. (Book Review: Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, by Tzvetan Todorov.) Tec, Nechama, 2003, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust, pp. 183, 379. Particularly helpful in this regard was Professor Tec’s 2013 book, Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror, which, however, differs from mine in not discussing altruism per se or Jewish altruistic precepts, and in sidelining museum and education center neglect of the Help Story. Cited in Kadar, Marline. “Introduction.” 2012. In Opatowski, Felix. Gatehouse to Hell, p. xv. The anniversary data are from Lyman, Rick. January 24, 2015. “For Auschwitz Museum, A Time of Great Change.” New York Times, p. A-8. I first heard the concept—spiritual survivor—from its presumed developer, artist Elsa Wachs, at Gratz College, Philadelphia, on November 9, 2008, Memorial Holocaust Teach-In, seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. Ms. Wachs believes it is original to her, and I have not found it used elsewhere in the literature. Both types—actual survivors and spiritual survivors—differ from “non-survivors,” Jews and Gentiles alike, who live apart from the entire matter, whether by choice, distraction, ignorance, or indifference. Patterson, David. 2006. Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, p. 7. Jean Amery, an Auschwitz survivor, insists anyone who has not undergone torture, but who would write about it, is as constrained as “a blind man talking about colors.” Amery, Jean, 1986, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities, p. 93. xix

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27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

xx

Nine out of ten children died. Denenberg, Barry. 2005. Shadow Life: A Portrait of Anne Frank and Her Family, p. 161. The estimate is about 1.5 million children. Langer, Lawrence L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, p. xv. On the difficulty here, see Steinbacher, Sybille. 2005, Auschwitz: A History, p. 30. Bauer, Yehuda, 2009, The Death of the Shtetl, op. cit., p. vii. An opposing view is that of Elie Wiesel who insists “Auschwitz defies perceptions and imagination, it submits only to memory. Between the dead and the rest of us there exists an abyss that no talent can comprehend.” Gerald Fleming quotes Wiesel in the Foreword for the book We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz, by Gideon Grief, 2005, p. vii. See Rubin, Ari and Greenspan, Henry. 2006, Reflections. Op. Cit.; Greenspan, Henry. 1998. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History. Carers were “teachers of life, ethics, decency, and love . . . who modeled how to live the life we are given more fully and more deeply.” Hirschfield, Brad, editor in 2008 of Remember for Life: Holocaust Survivors’ Stories of Faith and Hope. As cited in Leiter, Robert. September 25, 2008. “Witness with a Message.” Jewish Exponent, p. 52. I refer here to the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, the Holodomor famine (starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s), and similar tragedies in Cambodia, Darfur, Iraq, Kosovar, Laos, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tibet, Turkey, and elsewhere. Snyder, Timothy. May 19/20, 2012. “Their Sense of Belonging.” Wall Street Journal, pp. C-5, 6. (Book Review: Antony Polonsky’s three-volume history, The Jews in Poland and Russia). Seventy-three percent ranked it first. Desilver, Drew. October 1, 2013. “Jewish Essentials: For Most American Jews, Ancestry and Culture Matters More than Religion.” www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/01/ jewish-essentials-for-most-american-jews-ancestry-and-cuklture-mattersmore-than-religion. Almost as many, 69 percent, cited “leading an ethical and moral life”; 56 percent, “working for social justice and equality.” Caring for Israel got a 49 percent citation. Samuels, David. November 13, 2013. “Q & A with Art Spiegelman, Creator of ‘Maus’. ” Tablet. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-amd-culture/ 152310/art-spiegelman-jewish-museum?all=1. Bitton-Jackson, Livia. 1997. I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust, p. 11. Perel, Manya Frydman. 2012. Six Years Forever Lost: The Testimony of Manya Frydman Perel (As Told to Marc Joel Adelman), p. 80. Schulweis, Rabbi Harold M. 1994. For Those Who Can’t Believe, p. 157. See also Weber, Bruce. December 26, 2014. “Harold M. Schulweis, Progressive Rabbi, is Dead at 89.” New York Times, p. B-12; Eibeshitz, Jehoshua, ed., et al. 1994. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies, Volume II (translated by Jehoshau and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz), p. xii.

Acknowledgments Four survivors in particular taught me much: Eva Brown (If You Save One Life), Magda Herzberger (Survival), Henry Skorr (Through Blood and Tears), and Dora Apsan Sorell (Tell the Children: Letters from Miriam). It was a distinct privilege to learn from these menschen. Sound advice came from such fellow academics as Wendell Bell, Tsvi Bisk, Joseph Coates, Marcia Landy, Stuart Liebman, Rakhmiel Peltz, Vivian Rosenberg, Rochelle Saidel, and Chaim Waxman. Holocaust scholars who helped include Yehuda Bauer, Moshe Dror, Charles Ades Fishman, Tamara R. Freedman, Pierre Sauvage, Dr. Sam Sugar, Mariana-Emilia Teszler, and William Younglove. Nechama Tec encouraged me, even though she herself had been criticized for daring to call attention to Help Story matters. Staff at Holocaust museums who contributed include Roni Brandl, Holocaust Studies Department at the University of Croatia in Zagreb; Karen Dengler, a staffer at Yad Vashem; Beth Doran, former director of the International Department of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel; Ariel Sion, the lead librarian at the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris; and Diane A. Foumado, at the time (2007) documentary historian at the Memorial of the Shoah, and now with the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC (USHMM). Irene Steinfeldt, the director of the Righteous Among the Nations Department, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, explained exhibition goals, and Robert Rozett, director, Yad Vashem Libraries, gave valuable counsel and encouragement. Staffers at the Ravensbruck Camp Museum who helped include Alyn Bessmann and Johanna Wensch. Staffers at the USC Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, who aided the project included Douglas Ballman, Crispin Brooks, Amy Carnes, Ita Gordon, Jenna Leventhal, and Kirk Stageberg. Likewise, Peter Black and Geoffrey Megargee of the USHMM ably answered data questions. xxi

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Sarah Glover, of the Leo Baeck Institute in Manhattan, NY, facilitated research, as did also David Schwartz, program associate with Facing History and Ourselves, and Rachelle Goldstein, editor of The Hidden Child (Hidden Child Foundation/ADL). Emily Fuggle, of the Imperial War Museum, in London; and the Azrieli Foundation (Toronto, Canada) also contributed. David Meeres, a guide with the Original Berlin Walks organization, shared insights into a key source of Holocaust learning for many citizens. University staffers who helped include Drexel University librarians Jay Blatt, Deirdre Childs, Stephanie Clark, Stephanie Davis, Lawrence Milliken, and Ellen Wolk. Josey Fisher and Elie Wise, both at Gratz College in Philadelphia, were generous with advice and aid. Judith Janec, archivist at the Holocaust Center of Northern California, facilitated my study of their many oral history transcripts. Readers included Skip Aldrich, Yvonne Alexander, Jeff Demsky, Claudia J. Kingsley, Matthew T. Lee, Jane Allyn Piliavin, Henry Thompson, Ira Weiner, and Edwina Werner. Rabbi George Gittleman of Temple Shomrei Torah, Santa Rosa, read my chapter on Judaism and provided constructive suggestions. Rabbi Yitzhak Nates provided a mix of insightful questions and warm encouragement. Friends who helped include Liz Brandl, Kirsten Chalfen, George Calmenson, Elly Cohen, Ernest Cohen, Danielle Cohn, Lyn Cramer, Peggy Dombeck, Joyce Eisenberg, Carol Elias, Josh Hayes, Peter James, Jerry Jennings, Carolyn S. Karp, Joseph Pace, Jane Piliavi, Mark Polis, Jacqueline Silver, Jerry Sosinsky, Ellen Sue Spicer-Jacobson, Clarisse Vivier and her father Guy Vivier, Charles Weinblatt, and Barbara Zasloff. Dan Falcone had his students share museum visit research results with me, Ivan Sokolov inspired me, and Ann Weiss was a valuable booster. Early on my two brothers, Stanley and Peter, were generous with constructive criticisms. Daniel Shostak, a learned nephew, provided many resources. Scott and Mark Shostak, my sons, and my step-sons, Matthew and Daniel Seng, shed valuable light on related matters and encouraged me throughout. Emily von Scheven and Eileen Sullivan, my two daughters-in-law, helped me refine my understanding of altruism. Lynn Seng, my wife and colleague, helped with her intellect and intuition. As well, her willingness to tolerate my thirteen-year absorption in this writing project was invaluable—as was and is also our love for one another. xxii

Acknowledgments

Mary E. Curtis, the president of Transaction Publishers, and her colleagues—Caroline Russomanno, Assistant Editor; Allyon Fields, Managing Editor; Mindy Waizer, Marketing Manager; and Jeffrey Stetz, Communications/IT Manager and Executive Assistant—provided the high quality of cordial support every writer hopes for, and I am very grateful. Naturally, the book’s shortcomings are entirely my own responsibility. Please call these to my attention for welcomed correction in later editions: [email protected].

xxiii

Introduction To learn about the Holocaust is to learn about life as well as about death. —Lawrence Sutin

Introduction

About 250,000 Jewish prisoners were briefly held at the Treblinka Death Camp during its eighteen months of operation, though less than fifty survived to liberation.1 In his 2010 memoir Philip Bialowitz recalls fellow prisoners “were helped by heroic individuals or small groups of people whose consciences led them to risk their lives to save others. They must always be remembered as shining examples of the ability we each have to respond to humankind’s worse actions with both physical and spiritual resistance. We must remember not to forget.”2 To help us not to forget, five introductory questions are addressed below. First, what do American Jews now associate with the Holocaust, and what difference does this make? Second, what does such association neglect, why, and so what? Third, how frequent were acts of stealth altruism? Fourth, how does this book cover this complex subject? And finally, what are the book’s major limitations and how might they be regarded? Holocaust Word Associations

In 2011 and 2012, a nonscientific sample of 164 Jewish-Americans provided, at my request, five words they associated with the Holocaust in general, and with concentration camps in particular.3 Cited ten or more times were five Horror Story words: death, horrifying, inhuman, pain, and sad. Cited three to nine times were atrocity, barbaric, brutality, degrading, evil, family, fear, gas, genocide, Hitler, loss, Nazis, starvation, suffering, terrifying, torture, tragedy, tragic, unbelievable, xxv

Stealth Altruism

unforgivable, and unthinkable. All of the words appear after the Introduction’s close. Not surprisingly, the list demonstrated “fear and despair, persecution and suffering.”4 The Holocaust was represented as “uniquely horrific and horrifyingly unique,” a dark image grounded in what in this book is called the Horror Story.5 The subject would seem to have become something of a “third rail” in modern Jewish thought—touch it and you burn. As for what difference this “third rail” association makes, consider that a decade ago Professor Alvin H. Rosenfeld asked, “Who, after all, wants to stare into the abyss and discover only blackness? Few people have the nerves to sustain so dark a vision of life.”6 Arnost Lustig, a survivor of three camps, has warned that a stark emphasis on unspeakable atrocities and unforgivable suffering “cannot inspire. It only scares.”7 Many Jewish parents shield their children from mention of the subject until the teenage years, and even then insist teachers tread lightly.8 Accordingly, many teachers treat it with trepidation.9 Holocaust museums limit attendance to those aged twelve and over, and warn adults they are not responsible for a youngster’s reaction to graphic exhibits. Many adult Jews confine their attention to once-a-year attendance at a Yom HaShoah commemoration (a Holocaust memorial event), and even more shy from that. As long ago as 1985, survivor Werner Weinberg noted with rue a general indifference among the American Jewish public to survivor memoirs.10 In 2013 some 27 percent of American Jews did not think remembering the event was an essential part of what it means to be Jewish, as did also 40 percent of Jewish college students.11 Guarded whispers continue to circulate about “Holocaust fatigue,” defined as a “sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of will . . . when we try to look squarely at the matter.”12 For as Samuel G. Freedman, an expert in American Jewish realities, warns, “a community preoccupied with death and destruction [the focus of the Horror Story] is in danger of substituting a cult of martyrdom for the Torah’s insistence instead on struggling to preserve life.”13 Survivor Linkages

Professor Nechema Tec, a scholar/survivor who interviewed hundreds of survivors over a long academic career, found that many had been involved with “humane acts on behalf of others . . . Unprecedented oppression led to equally unprecedented forms of resistance.”14 Such xxvi

Introduction

behavior is hereafter called the Help Story, a mix of acts of compassionate care barely tolerated by the Third Reich and also acts of stealth altruism, care-giving fiercely prohibited by the Nazis, the latter being the focus of this book. Without doubt, the Horror Story belongs at the center of Holocaust consciousness, for it has had the greatest and most lasting impact on victims and, arguably, on perpetrators, bystanders, and upstanders as well. At the same time, the Help Story merits a close second place. In some camps there were shooting walls and torture cells. But there were also Jewish prisoners who dared to prop up weak comrades during incredibly long assemblies, a violation of strict rules of conduct that could have cost all of them their lives. There were merciless work assignments that stole life from exhausted prisoners. But there were also prisoners who, at risk of their own lives, would secretly substitute for others too ill to survive another day at their slave labor tasks. There were men and women who were overwhelmed by the horror of it all and became Muselmänner (the walking dead) or threw themselves on electrified fences. But there were also men and women who aided one another through to liberation. The authors of the 195 survivor memoirs I studied commonly shared two stories—one of Horror and another of Help.15 Indeed, unlike American Jewish respondents, the European Jewish survivors associated the Holocaust and concentration camps with such Help Story words as aid, admiration, altruism, bravery, care, compassion, companion, commitment, dedication, devotion, devout, encouragement, enlightenment, emulation, faith, fellowship, fight, freedom, friend, future, help, hope, inspiration, love, loyalty, sharing, spirit, strength, support, and risk.16 Stealth Altruism Statistics

As ghetto dwellers and camp prisoners had far higher priorities than to keep statistical records of their behavior, no statistical count exists of expressly forbidden acts of stealth altruism or of grudgingly permitted acts of compassionate care. Subjective testimony from scholars shed some qualitative light. For example, Lyn Smith, former lead recorder of Holocaust survivor oral life histories for London’s Imperial War Museum, has concluded that, “while the law of the jungle prevailed in the camps, many instances of mutual support, goodness, and little acts of reciprocity are recalled. xxvii

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There are countless examples of how, even in the most deprived, degrading, and cruel circumstances, people held firm in their humanity and steadfastly clung to the values their parents and communities had bequeathed them.”17 Similarly, in 1948, scholar Hilde Bluhm studied twelve survivor memoirs written by men and women within a few years of their 1945 liberation. She found that “all the authors remember deeds which proved to them that kindness, courage, and consideration for others had not perished altogether . . . testimonies of a genuine humaneness were to be found in all camps, in members of all nations, in all groups of prisoners (italics added).”18 Likewise, scholar Bernard Rammerstorfer authored an exacting study in 2013 of the experiences of nine quite varied survivors, only three of whom were Jewish. Each of the nine answered the same hundred wide-ranging questions, one of which asked, “What did you do to relieve the suffering of others?” While one admitted to doing nothing, eight others of the nine prisoners either gave forbidden care to sufferers or received forbidden care from others.19 Accounts of participation in or observation of stealth altruism occurred in nearly all of the 195 memoirs by 178 survivors I studied. Typical is the report of Betty Rich, sixteen years old in 1939, who maintains in her memoir, “the extraordinary did occur in random acts of kindness, emotional and material generosity, and in the discovery of love and friendship . . . Jews both suffered and found compassion.”20 In the spring of 2010 I reviewed sixty oral history transcripts chosen at random in a Holocaust library archive in San Francisco and found acts of stealth altruism in 85 percent of them.21 In May 2010, secret caring was cited in fifteen of the twenty oral histories I consulted in the Holocaust Collection at Gratz College.22 Also in 2010, my wife, Lynn Seng, assisted me in reviewing thirty-five randomly chosen videos from the over fifty-three thousand testimonies in the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation. We found stealth altruism provided or received in many of them.23 In 2014, Dan Falcone, a friend and high-school teacher, watched a random selection of ninety of the online “iWitness” Shoah Foundation audiovisual histories, thirty-two of which had clear evidence of stealth altruism, even as ambiguous hints of stealth altruism were noted in many others.24 Historian Zygmunt Bauman speaks directly to the challenge posed here by statistical inadequacy: “It does not matter how many people xxviii

Introduction

chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation—what does matter is that some did.”25 Similarly, Pierre Sauvage, a “Hidden Child” survivor, asks in turn, “What criteria do we have by which to decide what is few and many in the midst of such an unprecedented hell?”26 The last word in the matter can appropriately go to Ruth Kluger, who, as was made clear in the Preface, knows she owes her life to such altruistic behavior: “I don’t know how often it was consummated. Surely not often. Surely not only in my case. But it existed. I am a witness.”27 Book Content

Attention in Part I goes to the question of what could possibly motivate high-risk forbidden caring? Chapter 1 introduces the Altruistic Impulse, while chapter 2 goes into detail regarding the deep-set influence of Judaic altruistic tenets. Part II focuses on the experience European Jewry had with stealth altruism before being shipped in cattle cars to the Nazi camps. Chapter 3 discusses overt and covert care sharing for several centuries in pre-Hitler Germany, and then after 1933 in Nazi Germany. Chapter 4 looks at forbidden care efforts in twenty-four countries in Occupied Europe after the 1939 start of the war. In Part III attention is paid to life and death in the Nazi camps. Chapter 5 distinguishes among four major types of camp (transit, death, concentration, slave labor) and highlights a prime example of acts of stealth altruism in each of them. The first of the book’s four profiles follows: this one of Theresienstadt, a unique transit camp whose Jewish prisoners drew strength from both the arts and forbidden caring. Chapter 6 explores six deterrents in camp to stealth altruism, three of which originated with the Nazis (starvation, terror, uncertainty) and three others with Jewish prisoners themselves (factionalism, low self-esteem, callousness). Chapter 7 identifies six types of Jewish prisoners who posed a threat to the well-being of fellow Jews—collaborators, criminals, informers, thieves, independents, and Muselmänner, and thereby aided the Nazis in undermining acts of stealth altruism. In Part IV, attention goes in chapter 8 to forbidden care inside camp barracks and out of sight of the guards, such as sharing food stolen from the Third Reich, punishing informers and thieves, and so on. Chapter 9 discusses high-risk caring behaviors that could have been seen by the guards, such as substituting at work for a sick friend or furtively holding up a weak prisoner during lengthy appells (roll calls). xxix

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A profile written by Betty Bleicher follows that shares what one adult child of survivors has learned about stealth altruism, inside and outside, and what we might learn from her experience. Part V puts the spotlight on Jewish prisoners who were menschen (people with integrity and honor). Chapter 10 distinguishes among four types, that is, companions, comrades, militants, and observants, and explores the relationship of each to stealth altruism. It is followed by a profile of remarkable women prisoners who managed to keep 149 youngsters alive to liberation in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. Chapter 11 goes into depth concerning five personality traits of Carers —sociability, adaptability, resiliency, ethicality, and self-esteem. Examples are provided of the utility of each trait. Chapter 12 focuses on female prisoners, as their world both overlapped with, and yet also differed in significant ways from, that of males. The chapter is followed by a profile of Magda Herzberger, an exemplary female Carer. Chapter 13 focuses on four categories of supportive Gentiles with whom Jewish victims interacted: civilians, coworkers, coprisoners, and German military members. Part VI explores both the questions of why the Help Story has been neglected and what might be done to correct this. Chapter 14 describes an almost “perfect storm” of varied sources of neglect, and chapter 15 recommends reforms for them and offers a brief rebuttal to opponents of reforms. Chapter 16 highlights futuristic aids for advancing the Help Story and closes the book advocating a new Horror-and-Help Narrative. Book Limitations

Note was taken in the Preface of a personal limitation: my status as an outsider. Here I call related attention to impersonal matters worth knowing about at the book’s outset. To begin with, no master list exists of the estimated ten thousand or more survivor memoirs currently available in English (the number grows slowly annually). I was therefore unable to draw a scientific random sample of the genre, and had to employ a sample of convenience.28 I make use only of survivor memoirs published in English, albeit many had originally appeared in another language. Likewise, I conducted my interviews with survivors in English, aided often by their friends or relatives. xxx

Introduction

Of the 178 memoirists on whose 195 memoirs I draw, most had been raised in Western Europe and educated in conventional ways. As cosmopolitan nonobservant Jews, many had been persecuted for their commonly left-oriented political views or their opposition to Nazism. In contrast, a majority of Jewish prisoners were raised in East Europe, had received traditional Old World schooling, were often Observant, and had a limited grasp of worldly politics. Unfortunately, hardly any such individuals wrote memoirs available in English-language editions, thereby limiting the generalizability of my findings.29 No one can know what percentage of Jewish victims, or of the subset of post-1945 survivors, were male or female. My sample of convenience happens to include eighty-four memoirs authored by Jewish women, or 47 percent, a portion that may or may not be true of the universe of prisoners.30 Nor are there reliable data about the percentage of Jewish prisoners held at the major camps, though a plurality were held at one time or another at Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, the largest of all four types of camp . . . and not surprisingly, the one therefore most discussed in the survivor literature. Finally, as it lacks independent verification, the after-the-fact representation of the past in memoirs or videotaped interviews does not rise to the level of scientific evidence. First-person writing or testimony, particularly if done decades after events, has many pitfalls, for example, it is vulnerable to denial, distortion, repression, and other forms of misdirection, to say nothing of the opacity of human motives.31 Questions persist about perceptions preconditioned by standardized images, along with pitfalls that lurk in memoirs per se.32 Accordingly, I kept in mind the Yiddish adage, “For instance is not proof,” and the related wry contention, “The line of any story is likely to be crooked.”33 Little wonder a historian warns that “Work in memory necessarily defies statistical analysis.”34 Conclusion

The Holocaust included “the most savage events of human history,” and in bringing about a rupture in history, it “permanently collapsed the distance between the unthinkable and the actual.”35 Consistent with this, Primo Levi has warned us to never forget the camps are “an alarm system for the present.”36 Elie Wiesel, in turn, would have us understand, “the only thing that can save mankind would be a real awareness of the Holocaust. I don’t believe anything else has the moral power.”37 xxxi

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If we are to ever achieve “real awareness” we must first correct an imbalance in the Narrative that has the Horror Story overwhelm all else. We must place the Horror Story and the Help Story in a reformulated, far more accurate account of the European Jewish experience.38 This overdue reform can help us correct history and memory, enrich our understanding of human nature, and lift our confidence in the survivability not only of Jewry, but of our species . . . the better to keep Primo Levi’s “alarm system for the present” from ever going off. List of Word Associations

The underlined words have three or more citations: Amoral, anger, annihilation, antisemitism, apathy, atrocious, atrocity, Auschwitz, awful, barbaric, barbarous, betrayal, bones, brutality, bugs, catastrophe, cattle cars, chaos, cold, collaborators, complicity, confinement, cruelty, dark, death, degrading, dehumanizing, deportation, deprivation, dereliction, despair, desperation, destruction, devastating, devastation, dirty, disgusting, disregardful, disrespectful, dissimulate, emaciated, emptiness, extermination, extinction, extreme, evil, falsehoods, fear, ferocity, fiendish, filth, frightening, furnaces, futility, gas, gas chambers, genocide, Germany, G-less, grotesque, guilt, guns, hair, hate, hateful, heart-breaking, Hell, helplessness, hide, Hitler, hopeless, horror, horrific, horrifying, hostage, humiliation, hunger, incomprehensible, incredible, inhuman, inhumane, inhumane, injustice, insanity, killers, Kristallnacht, lies, liars, loss, madness, maniacal, massacre, mass graves, merciless, misery, monstrous, murder, mutilate, Nazi(s), nightmare, numbing, obscene, oppression, oven, pain, painful, pathetic, persecution, pitiful, pogroms, politics, preventable, prison, rape, reprehensible, repugnant, retaliation, ruthless, sacrilegious, sad, sadism, sadness, shame, shocking, shoes, showers, sickness, sickening, skeletons, slaughter, smells, smoke, sorrow, starvation, stupid, suffering, tattoos, tears, telling, terror, terrifying, tolerated, torment, torture, totalitarianism, tragedy, trains, trauma, tremble, unacceptable, unbelievable, unfair, unfathomable, unforgettable, unforgiving, unspeakable, unthinkable, vicious, violence, waste, wickedness, and Zyklon-B. Notes

The epigraph is from Sutin, Lawrence. 1995. Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance, p. 9. 1. xxxii

See in this connection www.history1900s.about.com/od/holocaust. See also Kuperhand, Miriam and Saul. 1998. Shadows of Treblinka.

Introduction

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

Bialowitz, Philip “Fiszel” (with Joseph Bialowitz). 2010. A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland, p. 186. See also Blatt, Thomas Toivi. 1997. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, p. 235, passim. In 2010 I asked this question of twenty-five American Jews of varying age, most of who lived as I did at the time in the Greater Philadelphia area. Later in 2010 and in early 2011 I used the Internet to get lists from ninety-six widely scattered Jewish adults, and a friend secured responses from thirteen Jewish males in a nearby federal correctional institution. In April 2011, thirty adults in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Temple University (Philadelphia, PA) each sent me five words before I gave a guest lecture on this subject. Benner, Patricia, Ehel Roskies, and Richard S. Lazarus. 1980. “Stress and Coping Under Extreme Conditions.” In Dimsdale, Joel E. Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators, p. 221. Markle, Gerald E. 1995. Meditations of a Holocaust Traveler, p. 26. See also the call to replace simplistic representations with “ . . . the complexity of discrete historical events, the ambiguity of human behavior, and the indeterminacy of wider social processes . . .” Friedlander, Saul, as cited in Pfeiffer, Michael. 2011. “Guest Foreword: Mapping Out the Mountain.” In Lowe, Camila. The Memory of Pain: Women’s Testimonies of the Holocaust, p. xviii. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 1995. The Americanization of the Holocaust, p. 13. In 2011 Professor Rosenfeld noted “ample grounds to support Weinberg’s sad assessment of what will be lost with the passing of his generation of survivors.” Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 2011. The End of the Holocaust, p. 239. Lustig, Arnost. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993. Voices from the Holocaust, p. 27. Doneson, Judith. 2002. The Holocaust in American Film, p. 3. Writing in 2006 Elie Wiesel recalls that forty-six years earlier “there were always people ready to complain that it was senseless to ‘burden our children with the tragedies of the Jewish past.” Wiesel, Elie. 2006 ed. Reflections on the Holocaust, p. xiv. See also Rosenberg, David, ed. 1989. Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal. See in this connection, Fallace, Thomas D. 2008. The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools. Weinberg, Werner. 1985. Self-Portrait of a Holocaust Survivor, pp. 14–15. Pew Foundation. October, 2013. “A Portrait of Jewish Americans.” www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/. Large majorities of US Jews say that remembering the Holocaust (73%) is what being Jewish means. I draw here also on http://mosaicmagazine.cm/ picks/2013/10/this-is-Jewish-America. The college student data are from Schrieber, Zachary. September 22, 2014. “Jewish College Student Survey: Israel is Most ‘Crucial Issue’ for Young Jews Today.” JEWCY News. http:// www.jewcy.com/jewish-news/jewish-college-student-survey-results. As cited in Rudoren, Jodi. October 17, 2014. “In Exodus from Israel to Berlin, Young Nation’s Fissures Show.” New York Times, p. A-4 (A-4-A-9). Other Israelis I know strongly reject this notion, and insist the mood is just the opposite; they see pride and strength as dominate. xxxiii

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12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

xxxiv

Clendinnen, Inga. 1999. Reading the Holocaust, p. 4. Regarding Holocaust fatigue, see also Schweber, Simone, 2006. “‘Holocaust Fatigue’: Teaching It Today.” Social Education, 70, 1, pp. 48–55; Engelking, Barbara. 2001. Holocaust and Memory: The Experience of the Holocaust and Its Consequences: An Investigation based on Personal Narratives (translated by Emma Harris; edited by Gunnar S. Paulsson). Freedman, Samuel G. 2000. Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry, p. 344. See also Goldberg, Michael. 1995. Why Should the Jews Survive: Looking Past the Holocaust toward a Jewish Future. Tec, Nechama. 2013. Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror, pp. 6, 15. Halberstram, Yetta, and Judith Leventhal. 2008. “Introduction.” Small Miracles of the Holocaust: Extraordinary Coincidences of Faith, Hope, and Survival, p. xiii. Carers are men and women “who supply images of ‘light,’ ‘hope,’ ‘affirmation,’ and ‘goodness.’” Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 1995. The Americanization of the Holocaust. Op. Cit., p. 27, Passim. This matter of proportionality merits full-blown exploration. See, for example, Fogelman, Eva. 1994. Conscience and Courage: Rescue of Jews During the Holocaust; Snyder, Timothy. May 19/20, 2012. “Their Sense of Belonging.” Wall Street Journal, pp. C-5, 6. (Book Review: Antony Polonsky’s three-volume history, The Jews in Poland and Russia). Remarkably enough, a scholar has characterized five of the positive terms above—faith, freedom, future, hope, and spirit—as conceptual “gifts from the Jews” to civilization. Cahill, Thomas. 1998. The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads. Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, p. 241 Smith, Lyn, 2005. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust. Op. Cit., pp. xiii, 184. A 1976 analysis of many memoirs had a researcher note that “acts of care and decency seem so out of place in the camps that survivors themselves are perplexed [about what to make of them]” Des Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor, p. 99. Another Holocaust scholar noted in 2008, “even in the personal accounts of survivors themselves, there is a surprising lack of emphasis on helping activities, on caring and mutual support among the inmates of the concentration camps.” Davidson, Susanna. 2008. The Holocaust, p. 557. Bluhm, Hilde O. 1948. “How Did They Survive? Mechanisms of Defense in Nazi Concentration Camps.” American Journal of Psychotherapy, 2, p. 21. Rammerstorfer, Bernard. 2013. Taking the Stand: We Have More to Say. Four of the nine respondents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, three of whom gave care. Of the other five, three gave care (one of whom was Jewish), and two received it (both of whom were Jewish). Lassner, Phyllis. “Introduction.” In Rich, Betty. 2012. Little Girl Lost, pp. xxiv–xxv. I am indebted to Judith Janec, archivist at the Holocaust Center of Northern California (then at 121 Stuart St., San Francisco), who made this research possible. Small tallies are valued in the Jewish religious tradition, for example, God gave Moses only Ten Commandments. Had just ten righteous persons been found God would have spared Sodom and Gomorrah. See Schulweis, Rabbi

Introduction

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

Harold M. 1994. For Those Who Can’t Believe: Overcoming the Obstacles to Faith. passim. Researchers are needed to listen to the fifty-two thousand-plus oral history tapes now digitalized in the Shoah Foundation archives, and the hundreds now digitalized in the Fortunoff Collection at Yale University. See also Kirshner, Sheldon; November 16, 2012; “Holocaust Heroism Took Various Forms: Historian.” New York Times. www.cjnews/index.php?q=node/97416. The survey guide used over several years for Shoah Foundation’s fifty-two thousand taped interviews has no mention of altruism, and the subject therefore only came up haphazardly, a major limitation of its use where forbidden care is concerned. Http://jasss.soc.surry.ac.uk/16/3/7.html As cited in Deak, Istvan. September 8, 1989. “The Incomprehensible Holocaust.” The New York Review, p. 72. (Book Review: 15 books). The quotation is from Sauvage, Pierre, 1989, “Learning Hope from the Holocaust.” In Bauer, Yehuda, et al., eds., Remembering for the Future: Jews and Christians During and After the Holocaust, p. 528. Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (translated by Weiter Leben), p. 109. There is no way of knowing how many of the over 90 percent of all Jewish prisoners who died before liberation were involved with secret efforts to help others. Kirshner, Sheldon; November 16, 2012; “Holocaust Heroism Took Various Forms: Historian.” New York Times. www.cjnews/index.php?q=node/97416. Fortunately I also had help from interviews generously provided by leading Holocaust scholars (Yehuda Bauer, Mordecai Paldiel, Rochelle G. Saidel, etc.). A similar gap involves Jewish collaborators, criminals, or informers, none of whom, understandably, seem to have written about their Holocaust lives. Regrettably, nor it would seem have any Jewish rescuers come forward. See http://www.holocaustchild.org, “Jews Rescue Jews” and the annual issue of The Hidden Child, a publication of the Anti-Defamation League. Women made up 52 percent of the death march contingent that on January 18, 1945, left from the largest camp of them all, Auschwitz. Rittner, Carol and John K. Roth, eds. 1993. Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, p. 14. See in this connection, Schiff, Benjamin, et al. 2011. “Collected Stories in the Life Narratives of Holocaust Survivors.” Native Inquiry, 11, 1, pp. 151–94; Kushner, Tony. 2006. “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation.” Poetics Today, 27, pp. 275–95. See Matthaus, Jurgen. 2010. Approaching a Holocaust Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and Its Transformations. Stephens, Bret, July 5, 2011, “The DSK Lesson,” Wall Street Journal, p. A-13. Waddell, William, December, 2012. Book Review: Hazareesingh, Sudhir. 2012. In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of De Gaulle. www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=36448 The first quotation is from Browning, Christopher R., “Foreword,” in Blatt, Thomas Toivi. 1997. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival. Op. Cit., p. xiii. The second is from Scott, A.O. October 15, 2014. “Paris Wasn’t Burning: A Look at Why Not.” New York Times, p. C-4. (Movie Review: “Diplomacy”). xxxv

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36. 37. 38.

xxxvi

Levi, Primo. 1993. Survival in Auschwitz, p. 9. Wiesel, Elie. Spring, 1981. “The Art of Fiction: Interview by John S. Friedman.” Paris Review, p. 170. See in this connection, Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, by Eyal Press.

Part I Motivators of Consequence He who does not live in some degree for others, hardly lives for himself. —Michel de Montaigne

While the Holocaust is one of the most researched of contemporary issues, our grasp of the event is weakened by an imbalance in its representation of which we are generally not aware: We know much about that which should never have occurred—the Horror Story—but we do not know much about that which we can admire—the Help Story. Professor Terrence Des Pres maintains “the most significant fact about the struggle [against dehumanization] is that it depended on fixed activities: on forms of social bonding and interchange, on collective resistance, on keeping dignity and moral sense active.”1 He found many stories from survivors of “small deeds of courage and resistance, of help and mutual care,” all in the face of fanatical Third Reich opposition.2 Accordingly, attention goes in the book’s first chapter to one of two key motivators for “small deeds,” namely, the Altruistic Impulse, a subconscious need of ours to respond to others still needier yet, even if such behavior puts us and the recipient of our care at serious risk of punishment by powerful others. Of this Professor Lawrence L. Langer has written, “Few would dispute that the urge to remain alive, and to a lesser extent, to sustain others, was a powerful impulse for prisoners in the camps.”3 Typical was the response of Martha, a thirty-three-year-old unwed Jewish nurse, as recalled by Nina K., a thirteen-year-old in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The girl, who was “orphaned” when her older sister died in her arms, was “adopted” on impulse by Martha, who knew full well the sacrifice and peril entailed: “She saved my life about four or five times. Four times from the gas chambers, and others when I was deathly ill with typhoid, or God knows what else. She would steal injections and save me that way . . . She hid me . . . People did care for each other . . . Martha is a perfect example.”4 1

Stealth Altruism

Chapter 2 focuses in turn on a second key motivator: certain altruistic tenets in Judaism familiar to Jewish victims.5 According to legend a Jew seeks through a Covenant with God, known as tikkun olam, to try to help improve “the tear in the world,” since much in Jewish religious commentary encourages doubts about the status quo.6 Indeed, every year during the Passover Seder (holiday observance), Jews are reminded that since their ancestors had been slaves in Egypt over two thousand years ago, so should they help care for contemporary “slaves” . . . such as those oppressed by the Third Reich or its contemporary counterparts. Jews are obligated to help preserve the life of humans in danger, as “that has always been the purpose of the Torah.”7 Much reliance is placed here on a teaching in the Mishnah (revered historic rabbinic commentaries on Torah content) which identifies the one good deed that overrides all others, namely, the saving of a life through acts of loving kindness, as that is like saving the entire world.8 An example is available in a diary entry made on September 8, 1943, by a fourteen-year-old girl, Tamarah Lazerson, who lived in the Kovno Ghetto (Hungary). She was one of scores of subteens who, after schools in the ghettos were prohibited, substituted at risk of her life as ersatz “teachers.” She wrote: “I now belong to four study groups, two of which I lead. Ceclia and I have become attached to the pitiful children of Zeznier [a ghetto neighborhood]. We help them; they are so dependent on us. We comfort them, teach them Jewish values, and inspire them with goals for living. I am alive and dynamic. I feel that I am needed and useful.”9 Taken together, the book’s two opening chapters address a basic question in moral theory: Why might anyone risk their life to help another? They also initiate a book-length answer to the question, What can we learn from the Holocaust about society and ourselves? Notes

The epigraph is cited in Cook, John, ed. 1993. The Book of Positive Quotations, p. 84. 1. 2. 3.

4. 2

Des Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, p. vii. Ibid., p. 3. Langer, Lawrence L. 2006. Using and Abusing the Holocaust, p. 39. Likewise, research suggests “we are driven by morality much more than standard economic models allow.” Brooks, David. June 8, 2012. “The Moral Diet.” New York Times, p. A-23. Miller, Joy Erlichman. 2000. Love Carried Me Home, p. 35.

Motivators of Consequence

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

Browning, Christopher R. “Foreword.” In Blatt, Thomas Toivi. 1997. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, p. xiii. “Over half the victims of the Holocaust were Polish Jews. Moreover, as the Nazi regime constructed on Polish soil the major extermination camps . . . Poland became the graveyard for most of European Jewry as well.” Where the camps were concerned, this may have helped motivate the effort some prisoners made to help “repair” their hellish reality. See in this connection, Sacks, Jonathan. December, 1997. “Tikkun Olam: Orthdoxy’s Responsibility to Perfect G-d’s World.” http://advocacy.ou.org/1997/ tikkun-olam-orthodoxys-responsibility-to-perfect-gods-world. http:// advocacy.ou.org/1997/tikkun-olam-orthodoxys-responsibility-to- perfect -gods-world., and Cooper, Levi. Fall, 2014. “The Assimilation of Tikkun Olam.” Jewish Political Studies Review, 25, 3–4. http://mosaicmagazine.com /picks/2014/02/how-Jewish-is-Tikkun-Olam. See also Prager, Yossi. 2001. “Megillat Ruth: A Unique Story of Torat Hesed.” TRADITION, 34, 4, p. 21. Hirschfield, Brad, editor in 2008 of Remember for Life: Holocaust Survivors’ Stories of Faith and Hope. As cited in Leiter, Robert. September 25, 2008. “Witness with a Message.” Jewish Exponent, p. 52. Sanhedrin 4:5, as cited in Patterson, David. 1999. “The Moral Dilemma of Motherhood in the Nazi Death Camps.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. Problems Unique to the Holocaust, p. 18. See in this connection, Schulweis, Rabbi Harold M. 2014. Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey. As cited in Holliday, Laurel, ed. 1995 ed. Children in the Holocaust and World War ll: Their Secret Diaries, p.130. She survived, and her Theresienstadt Diary was published in 1966 in Israel.

3

1 Altruism and Stealth Altruism We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men. —Herman Melville

Introduction

In the Langenbielau Slave Labor Camp, Helen Sendyk recalls watching a daily high-risk act of stealth altruism. A young Jewish prisoner working in the kitchen carefully smuggled an extra ration of soup back to her sister in their barrack. There her sister fed the soup to a fellow prisoner in especially dire need, a different starving person each day. The recipient, or any nearby starving informer, might have betrayed the sisters to the Gestapo in return for a reward of precious bread, but none ever did. Betrayal would have had the sisters sent to the gas—as well the women knew. Ms. Sendyk believes this dangerous altruistic behavior helped the kitchen worker “bear her own hunger and torment.”1 Background

Attention goes in this chapter to a key motivator for all such high-risk behavior. Known as the Altruistic Impulse, it is an innate drive humans have to try to help alleviate the suffering of less fortunate others. In combination with another key motivator, Judaic altruistic tenets (the focus of the following chapter), it helps explain the undertaking of high-risk acts of stealth altruism. Comparably sound, though widely different motivations are cited in explanation of acts of stealth altruism. Secular humanists, for example, give credit to the influence of ethical and moral education. Men and 5

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women of “the cloth,” in turn, give credit to religious education, sermon exhortation, and noble role models. Where the sciences are concerned, evolutionary psychologists give credit to empathetic attitudes that have strategically promoted the survival of the species. Biologists give credit to oxytocin, a mammalian hormone, and amygdala, a part of the brain. Neuroscientists give credit to a “hard-wired” physiological system (“molecules to behavior” biology), while social scientists give credit to reward-based learning and problem solving systems (“ideas to behavior” culture).2 Fortunately, advances in better understanding the Altruistic Impulse are coming rapidly from brain imagers, cultural anthropologists, economists, ethicists, ethnologists, marketers, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, sociobiologists, sociologists, and theologians. Much to its benefit, the concept also intrigues imaginative artists, lyricists, playwrights, poets, and writers. Altruism as a Concept

In 1830, Auguste Comte (1798–1857, a nineteenth-century social philosopher and the “father of sociology”) coined a concept—altruism—to refer to an “unselfish interest in the welfare of others.”3 He believed it derived from an innate need or impulse humans have to help relieve the pain of others without expecting any material reward for their effort, as that would taint and possibly even derail the relationship.4 Those Jewish men and women who were especially guided by it from 1933 through 1945—and are referred to in this book as Carers—were not put off by knowing of the related high risks to their own well-being, as when throughout the Holocaust the Nazis explicitly forbade at pain of life all such behavior by captive Jews. Altruism is now closely associated with a related matter— empathy—which is understood as a “natural capacity to share, understand, and respond with care to the affective states of others,” even those whom some in society might regard as “inferior.”5 Considered by social scientists a prerequisite for altruistic behavior, empathy enables users to imaginatively think and feel like others . . . such as seems true of the two soup-providing sisters in the Langenbielau Slave Labor Camp. Darwin and Altruism

Viewing a human being as an elaborate machine for passing along the genes that made it, biologist Charles Darwin (1809–82) asked if altruistic behavior enhanced reproductive success, as by increasing 6

Altruism and Stealth Altruism

the number of copies of genes an altruist passed on to future generations. His research found adaptation could do so, as altruists seemed more successful at being fruitful and multiplying than were selfish individuals. This led Darwin to formulate the concept of a Social Instinct (aka, Altruistic Impulse), a need that has us want to get along with one another, control our emotional impulses, divide up necessary labor, and advance group well-being . . . all invaluable aids to group survival: “Obvious distress elicits help from others and hence offers a survival advantage.”6 Darwin concluded the Social Instinct buttressed our willingness, without a guarantee of a fair return on provided care, to care for dependent offspring, that is, kin altruism, as in “blood is thicker than water.” It also promoted willingness to exchange favors with nonrelatives and even strangers—reciprocal altruism, otherwise known as “tit-for-tat,” this arguably the simplest moral principle of all. “Survival of the kindest” might actually be the evolutionary root of our species.7 It might also be the key to its prospects, and the ultimate evolutionary triumph.8 Darwin was confident humankind had learned from eons of evolution “the oldest known commandment [the Golden Rule] that requires a certain behavior not just to members of one’s own community, but to all humanity.”9 Culture and Society

Over the past fifty thousand or so years human beings learned the advantages of moralistic social inventions, such as shaming and shunning, with which we punish violators of those social norms that favored empathy with, and concern for one another.10 Evolution, in short, seems to have favored givers over takers, and kindness over cruelty.11 Instinctive empathy and the Altruistic Impulse help make humans—unique among animals in consciousness of self and of social group membership—the most mutually helpful of all species.12 Darwin’s “survival of the kindest” concept has growing support nowadays from Positive Psychology and Humanistic Sociology, along with computational modeling, laboratory studies, and observations from real-world interactions. Dacher Ketner, Professor of Positive Psychology, maintains “we are born to be good to each other . . . we instinctively want to alleviate suffering through nurturance . . . there are a lot of data that suggests we are wired to care, down to the neurochemical level . . . 7

Stealth Altruism

we are wired for good.”13 Helping others, in short, may be inherent in human nature. Human society has always had incentives that favored a “default orientation toward trust, toward sharing resources, toward forgiveness.”14 Since biology, however, does not tell the whole story and is certainly not destiny, additional credit for the altruistic behavior of the two risk-taking sisters noted at the chapter’s outset is shared with “the surroundings in which we live and the values we most prize.”15 This includes our learning ancient systems of ethics, morality, religion, and philosophy—“tools of the heart, mind, and soul we use to help shape our moral self.”16 Also germane are “a suite of cultural products, such as virtue and vice words related to fairness, religious injunctions about reciprocity, cultural constraints such as rights, and social institutions related to justice.”17 The average family, as a prime incubator of altruism, can provide caring experiences “that stay with us as mental imprints . . . memories that at a deep level of consciousness may be long regarded as guides to worthwhile behavior.”18 Parents learn early on that infants have “rich, broadly pro-social tendencies . . . [and are] predisposed to care about other people . . . children often act in an altruistic fashion.”19 We learn in infancy to value our biological dependence on one another, as in getting the gift of breast milk in infancy, and aid in learning to walk, talk, and control body functions. Indeed, some academicians believe “caring for children may, literally, have made us human—and allowed us to develop our distinctive abilities for cognition, cooperation, and culture.”20 Rounding out incentives for altruistic care sharing are two new social inventions. “Effective Altruism” emphasizes the use of computer monitoring to assure that an altruistic gift of money to a charity is performing as intended. Likewise, several states now authorize “Public Benefit Corporations,” the corporate charter of which requires biannual reporting of progress made in meeting altruistic goals of explicit benefit to the public.21 Controversy and Progress

Certain orthodox biologists dismiss Darwin’s “survival of the kindest” theory as utterly untenable since they believe species preservation requires robust self-interested “Me first!” behavior. Likewise, some critics doubt the availability of altruism for scientific testing, and a few go so far as to doubt its very existence. 8

Altruism and Stealth Altruism

Other biologists respectfully disagree and, taking Comte’s perspective, link the Altruistic Impulse concept across the long arc of human history to benevolence, ethicality, generosity, morality, philanthropy, and selflessness. Certain neuroscientists are confident the Impulse is a genetically programmed evolutionary trait “as hard-wired into our brains as our most primitive and basic functions.”22 They maintain we are born with empathetic impulses and are aided by a simple peptide (oxytocin) that draws us to others and inclines us to care about them. It may be as ingrained in our biological makeup “as surely as height, hair texture, and eye color.”23 In modern times new insights into altruism have come from ongoing research into the part altruism—overt, covert, or stealth—plays in adoption policies, blood and organ donation, bystander intervention, charity drives, crime prevention, disaster prevention, foster care, occupational values, philanthropy, and voluntarism. In this same vein, in 2013 the American Sociological Association approved a new section devoted to the study of altruism, morality, and social solidarity. (An early issue of the section’s Newsletter published my first public overview of this book.)24 Stealth Altruism

As noted at the chapter’s outset, when altruism is preceded by the word stealth, the new concept refers to secret, unarmed efforts to provide care in violation of Nazi rules, with full knowledge of the risks entailed, and with no expectation of material reward.25 The concept has five components: First, acts of stealth altruism are deliberately hidden from sight, as they break life-threatening rules emphatically enforced by promulgators, but conscientiously resisted by providers. Second, no use is made of conventional arms, though providers feel “armed” by moral resolve. Third, providers know their lives and those of loved ones are put at risk. Fourth, providers may get spiritual rewards, but none of an ordinary nature. And finally, while compassion and empathy are necessary motivations, it is actual behavior that makes all the difference. Between 1933 and 1945 in war-torn Europe, stealth in the provision of care to others by Jewish victims was a grim necessity. Nazi anti-Semitic eugenics held that the Jewish “race” was composed of subhumans, none of whom could possibly demonstrate altruistic behavior, a noble form of higher morality. Evidence to the contrary had to be emphatically suppressed, even if that entailed extermination of the entire “race.” 9

Stealth Altruism

However, much to the consternation of the Nazis, certain Jews persisted in trying to help one another. Israeli Professor Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust historian, maintains that “the only form of reaction [to the Nazis] that was specific to Jews—and it was very important indeed—was unarmed resistance [which included] mutual aid, education, health care, food smuggling, and morale building were chiefly accomplished by maintaining a minimum of cultural life,” all of which the Nazis forbade.26 In a 2013 interview in his office at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, Professor Bauer insisted that anyone who survived had to have benefited from outlawed care provided by other risk-taking Jews.27 Stealth Altruism Variations

At one end of a continuum of prohibited acts of stealth altruism were relatively low-risk gestures, for example, out of the earshot of the Gestapo and SS guards some camp prisoners dared to whisper one another’s name, a morale-boosting, if also strictly forbidden, act since the Nazis insisted no prisoner had a pre-camp personal name, only an assigned number.28 Much such altruistic behavior was unplanned and spontaneous, although it could have soon turned into deliberate, repeated, and systematic acts of stealth altruism, as exemplified in the Langenbielau Slave Labor Camp by a sister’s daily smuggling of stolen soup into the barrack.29 Further along the behavior continuum were creative varieties of still hard-to-believe, high-risk acts, for example, male prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau smuggled themselves into female sections of the camp bringing items previously owned by victims who had been gassed on arrival. Bread, margarine, medicines, and even silk stockings and French perfume gave women prisoners “some little solace and comfort in their daily struggle with a very harsh life.”30 A male participant recalls decades later that “the main motive was not so much sexual, but simply the need to have someone to care for. All family ties had been forcibly and abruptly severed, and it was this feeling of desolation, of being utterly alone in the world, which awoke in almost everyone the longing to have somebody to care for.”31 High-Risk Altruism

Arnost Lustig remembers an eighteen-year-old prisoner, Ernest Braunstein, who, on his arrival at a camp, noticed a semiconscious prisoner hanging by his wrists high above the ground on a pole, his wrists bound 10

Altruism and Stealth Altruism

behind him. Hearing the man’s agonizing pleas for water, Mr. Braunstein rushed over and held a cup up to him. Spotted by an outraged SS guard, Mr. Braunstein was himself immediately strung up on an adjacent pole. When he mercifully blacked out from the pain, he was lowered, revived by water splashed by the SS guards, and strung up again. After about three hours of this “lesson,” the SS guards allowed the unconscious Mr. Braunstein to be carried off by other prisoners to their nearby barrack. For several days, these men shared their scarce food and drink with him and kept him hidden until he could make his way to his assigned barrack and hobble off to work. For the rest of his life, Mr. Braunstein could only lift his right arm as high as his shoulder. The prisoners secretly involved in Mr. Braunstein’s altruistic care understood they could have been severely punished and possibly sent to the gas for the “crime” of hiding and caring for this man, a complete stranger to them.32 Lustig comments that comparably caring prisoners he knew ran similar risks to do the right thing. He adds ruefully that they “represented a triumph for humanity. But nobody knows about them.”33 Conclusion

Pelagia Lewinska remembers that “strength lay in the friendship and solidarity that bound some of us together. It was a mutual fraternal aid that kept away and took the place of savage rivalry. Mutual aid was the only health in the presence of the death that was dogging our every step. We saved each other and extended a helping hand to others not in our group.”34 Lucie Adelsberger recalls heroic Carers who “themselves already on the verge of starvation would sell their own bread ration in order to buy potatoes for a dying comrade, and thus give him a last happiness.”35 Ruth Kluger, drawing on her several years in Auschwitz-Birkenau, contends that such “gift giving is a human impulse, generosity a function of social behavior which doesn’t disappear when you have virtually nothing to give.”36 Such men and women seemed to grasp with Comte and Darwin a truism advanced by Spinoza: “We are all connected.”37 Their efforts as Carers crossed “a fine line at the upper limit of altruism that bends into heroism.”38 Although embedded in one of the worst mass murders in human history their acts of stealth altruism attest to the finer possibilities of our species. 11

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Notes

The epigraph is from Cook, John. 1993. The Book of Positive Quotations, p. 79. 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

12

Sendyk, Helen. 2000 ed. The End of Days, p. 203. Ancient Greek Athenians believed altruism was the glue that “held the republic together.” Klein, Daniel. 2012. Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life, p. 11. Comte, Auguste. 1975 ed. [1851] System of Positive Polity, Vol. 1. The date 1830 is taken from Shattuck, Roger. 1996. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, p. 40. The word derives from the Latin alter, for “other.” See Coser, Lewis. 1965. Men of Ideas, p. 238, passim; Marvin, F. S. 2013 ed. [1907]. Comte—The Founder of Sociology. Regarding Hobbs, see Sorrell, Tom, ed. 1996. The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes. Comte formulated his concept in opposition to the hard-nosed anti-care thinking of contemporaries like pioneering political scientist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and his followers. Hobbesians insisted human beings were naturally selfish and wicked actors inclined to act only in their own best narrow interests. This narrow “Me first!” orientation is championed at present by arch libertarians, ideological followers of Ayn Rand, and certain Tea Party ultra-conservatives. See in this connection, Piliavin, Jane Allyn. September 2009. “Altruism and Helping: The Evolution of a Field: The 2008 Cooley-Mead Presentation.” Social Psychology Quarterly, 72, 3, p. 215; Oliner, Samuel P. and Pearl Oliner. 1988. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. Decety, Jean, ed. 2012. Empathy: From Bench to Bedside, p. vii. Finlay, Barbara. May 9, 2015. “The Unique Pain of Being Human.” New Scientist, p. 28. Regarding the Social Instinct, see Sayer, Andrew. 2011. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values, and Ethical Life, pp. 119–24. See also Paul, Diane B. 2003. “Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics.” In Hodge, Jonathan and Gregory Raddick, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, pp. 214–39. Regarding Darwin, I draw on Keltner, Dacher. 2009. Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, pp. 53, 186. As to whether or not we are really trustworthy stewards of other species, a resolve of which may determine the planet’s well-being, see Klinkenborg, Verlyn. October 9, 2014. “True Altruism: Can Humans Change to Save Other Species?” http://e360. yale.edu/feature/true_altruism_can_humans_change_to_save_other_ species/2813? Darwin’s notion of the “survival of the kindest” is debated by the doctrine known as “survival of the fittest,” one inaccurately identified with Darwin. Actually developed by conservative philosopher Herbert Spencer (1826– 1903), it was famously championed by the conservative sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), who popularized it as Social Darwinism. The Spencer-Sumner bloc maintained that self-centeredness and selfish acts were the evolutionary triumph, a conclusion that had them oppose private behavior and government acts that subsidized financial and social support for needy individuals: theirs was a policy of “let the devil take the hindmost.” See Heilbroner, Robert L. 1953. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times,

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9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. See also El-Hai, Jack. 2014. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. Klein, Stefan. 2014. Survival of the Nicest: How Altruism Made Us Human and Why It Pays to get Along (translated by David Dollenmayer), p. 185. See Piliavin, Jane Allyn. September 2009. “Altruism and Helping: The Evolution of a Field: The 2008 Cooley-Mead Presentation.” Social Psychology Quarterly, 72, 3, p. 213. See in this connection, Dachner Keltner, a psychologist, as quoted in Carey, Benedict. November 2, 2010. “Cede Political Turf? Never! Well, Maybe.” New York Times, p. D-1. Some orthodox biologists believe species preservation requires robust self-interested “Me first!” behavior. Other biologists link the Altruistic Impulse concept across the long arc of human history to benevolence, ethicality, generosity, morality, philanthropy, and selflessness. Helpful in this connection is Hitlin, Steven and Stephen Vaisey. August, 2010. “Handbook of the Sociology of Morality.” Newsletter of the Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section, p. 12. Some take Darwin’s holistic view of nature to suggest genetics “has evolved to include cooperative inclinations and has created brain structures that predispose us to help one another.” Svoboda, Elizabeth. 2013. What Makes a Hero? The Surprising Science of Selflessness, p. 27. Especially helpful is Keltner, Dacher. 2009. Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. Keltner, Dacher. July 31, 2012. “The Compassionate Species.” http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the-compassionate-species. See also on Keltner, Dacher. 2009. Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Op. Cit., p. 269. Critics insist we can grow more altruistic or possibly more mean-spirited, as by nature and nurture we remain malleable. See North, Anna. September 30, 2014. “Fighting ‘Human Nature.’” OpTalk. http://optalk. blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/fighting-human-nature/. Sayer, Andrew. 2011. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values, and Ethical Life, pp. 119–24. Enough cannot be made of the formative value of the parental caregiving motivational system which teaches the strategic value of inter-dependence. Gopnik, Alison. May 17–18, 2014. “What Made Us Human? Perhaps Adorable Babies.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-2. Svoboda, Elizabeth. 2013. What Makes a Hero? The Surprising Science of Selflessness, Op. Cit., p. 27. While empathy has a genetic basis, and may be encoded in heritable genes, it is thought capable of improving “with familiarity, learning, and salience,” and its existence would seem to attest to the indomitability of human bonds. Zahavi, Dan and Soren Overgaard. 2012. “Empathy without Isomorphism: A Phenomenological Account.” In Decety, Jean, ed. 2012. Empathy: From Bench to Bedside, p. 10. Shea, Christopher. June 27, 2011. “Rule Breaker.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com) Essay about “neurophilosopher” Patricia S, Churchland, author of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality. See also Pinker, Steven. October 20, 2011. “Decline of Violence: Taming the Devil within Us.” Nature, pp. 309–13; Kohn, Alfie. 1990. The Brighter Side of Human Nature. See in this connection, Piliavin, Jane Allyn. 1997. “Review of The Heart of Altruism, by Kristen Monroe.” American Journal of Sociology, pp. 495–7. 13

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

14

Keltner, Dacher. 2009. Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. Op. Cit., p. 53. Ibid. Tucker, Abigail. January 2013. “Born to be Mild.” Smithsonian Magazine, pp. 36–40. See also Jencks, Christopher. 1990. “Varieties of Altruism.” Cited in Mansbridge, Jane, ed. Beyond Self-Interest. p. 53. Isaac, Mike and David Gelles. September 21, 2015. “Kickstarter Focuses Its Mission on Altruism Over profit.” New York Times, pp. B-1, B-4. Harmon, Oren. 2007, November 7. “Nice Genes.” Op. Cit. The New Republic, p. 55. Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene. See also Sapolsky, Robert M. February 1/2, 2014. “A Height Gene? One for Smarts? Don’t Bet On It.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-2. Harmon, Oren. 2007, November 7. “Nice Genes.” The New Republic. Op. Cit. p. 55. See also Angier, Natalie. July 5, 2011. “Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive.” New York Times, p. D-2. Shostak, Arthur B. August 9, 2012. “AMSS and the Holocaust: Stealth Altruism in the Concentration Camps.” Web Newsletter of the Altruism, Morality, and Social Structure Section of the American Sociological Association. See www.stealthaltruism.com. See also the work of Erik Erikson, Abraham J. Maslow, Robert Lifton, Stephen Pinker, Pitirim Sorokin, Peter Suedfeld, Edward Wilson, and others of like standing. (See the Bibliography for sources.) Helpful here is Mish, Frederick C., ed. 2004. The Merriam- Webster Dictionary, p. 21. See also Morehead, Albert H., ed. 1962. The New American Roget’s College Thesaurus in Dictionary Form, p. 18. Biologist Richard Dawkins maintains that “as with language, the principles that make up our altruism grammar . . . fly beneath the radar of our awareness.” Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion, p. 223. Like our capacity for language, humans would seem to also have a “moral sense built into [our] brains.” Ibid., p. 222. See also Zak, Paul J. June 2008. “The Neurobiology of Trust.” Scientific American, pp. 88–95. Bauer, Yehuda. 2009. The Death of the Shtetl, p. 158. Related here is the contention that Jewish rebellions in the camps “were the only ones of their kind.” Bauer, Yehuda, in Roth, John K. and Michael Berenbaum, eds. 1989. Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, p. 145. See also Oliner, Pearl M. Saving the Forsaken: Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe, p. 164. See also Oliner, Samuel P. and Pearl Oliner. 1988. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe, Op. Cit. From my notes taken during a discussion held in Prof. Bauer’s Yad Vashem office, July 2, 2013. Israeli writer/survivor Aharon Appelfeld would have us understand that “man as a number is one of the horrors of dehumanization.” As cited in Lang, Berel, ed. 1988. Writing and the Holocaust, p. 83. See in this connection Bond, Michael. January 24, 2015. “We Could be Heroes.” New Scientist, p. 39. See also Oliner, Samuel P. and Pearl Oliner. 1988. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe; Oliner, Pearl M. 2004. Saving the Forsaken: Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe. See also Tucker, Abigail. January 2013. “Born to be Mild.” Smithsonian Magazine, pp. 36–40.

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Muller, Filip. 1999. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (translated by Susanne Flattauer), pp. 64–65. Ibid. Ulman, Jane. February 1, 2012. “Survivor: Ernest Braunstein.” [Los Angeles] Jewish Weekly, p. 33. Lustig, Arnost. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993. Voices from the Holocaust, p. 27. Lewisnka, Pelagia. 1968. Twenty Months in Auschwitz, p. 112. Adelsberger, Lucie. 1995. Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story. p. 130; see also Cohen, Elie A. 1954 ed. Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp (translation by M.H. Braaksman), p. 138. Kluger, Ruth. 2001. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, p. 77. Barbash, David. June 13–14, 2015. “Genes Are Selfish; Humans Are Not.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-7. (Book Review: Altruism, by Matthieu Ricard; Does Altruism Exist, by David Sloan Wilson). Zimbardo, Phil, as cited in Svoboda, Elizabeth. 2013. What Makes a Hero? The Surprising Science of Selflessness. Op. Cit., p. 7. Passim. See in this connection, Hitlin, Steven and Stephen Vaisey. August, 2010. “Handbook of the Sociology of Morality.” Newsletter of the Altruism and Social Solidarity Section. Op. Cit., p. 12. We may be “savage, selfish brutes at heart, as well as inherently affiliative creatures yearning to love and connect . . . two sides of a V [that] may be inextricably linked.” Angier, Natalie. April 1, 2014. “Spite is Good. Spite Works.” New York Times, p. D-3.

15

2 Judaism and Stealth Altruism Since we all sometimes question the existence of God, when we see another human being in need, we all run to help. —Rabbi Zusya of Anipoli

Introduction

Coming back from a ten-hour-day at slave labor, Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was startled to see Hebrew writing on the grease-stained paper wrapped around an SS guard’s half-eaten sandwich. Although near death from starvation, exhaustion, and hard labor, Rabbi Halivni traded his day’s bread ration for the disheveled wrapper, dried it out, and discovered it was a piece of a desecrated Torah. Thereafter, men in his bunk sat together every night and read and reread it, a practice that both jeopardized and yet also helped them save their lives: “Just looking at the text made them feel like human beings again, made them feel like they were part of a story that was thousands of years long and wouldn’t die with them.”1 Similarly, Rena Kornreich Gelissen got permission to bury Jewish women prisoners who had allegedly died from “natural” causes, for example, disease, exhaustion, and malnutrition. Her work crew of Carers secretly murmured the Kaddish, a mourning ritual prayer, at the burial site, this a very high-risk gesture: “The guards do not notice our stillness, our silence. It is very important to me to give these women who had died some sacred ground in recognition of their lives. The prayer makes us feel good, and there is not much that does that.”2 Judaism’s Core

For more than three thousand years Jews have been a landless, wandering tribe endlessly under siege by unfriendly landowning neighbors. In self-defense they have developed a set of beliefs, 17

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doctrines, and traditions that, among other things, motivated their caring for one another. Indeed, the Talmud, a compendium of rabbinic commentary, law, stories, and wisdom, holds that saving a life supersedes almost every other religious obligation and gets at the core of the faith: “For what we are, we are by sharing. And as we share we move toward the light.”3 Building on the preceding chapter’s discussion of a motivator known as the Altruistic Impulse, this chapter explores a second motivator of significance in the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, namely, altruistic religious tenets. Showing the Way

Throughout the Holocaust years (1933–45) many observant European Jews struggled to continue providing tzedakah, a religious obligation to help the poor. Some also practiced gemilut chasadim (acts of personal kindness to the poor and nonpoor alike). In turn, many assimilated Jews struggled to continue honoring tikkun olam, a religious obligation to help “mend” our broken world.4 All such ancient altruistic tenets were revered for helping “build bridges from [what the Jews were] to what the Torah tells they may become.”5 At the core was rachmones (compassion), sometimes thought the glue of existence: “This quintessential word lies at the heart of Jewish thought and feeling. All of Judaism’s philosophy, ethics, ethos, leaning, education, hierarchy of values, are saturated with a sense of, and heightened sensitivity to rachmones.”6 Related as it is to empathy (a key component of the Altruistic Impulse), rachmones drew on deep reservoirs of sympathy for the needy and helped motivate the high-risk provision by Carers of forbidden acts of stealth altruism.7 All of this was influenced, especially in the Eastern Europe countryside, by a highly emotional tradition in Judaism known as Hasidism, a religious revival founded in the eighteenth century.8 It “gave hope to hopeless Jews, while emphasizing the notion that the way to God is through [caring about and for] one’s fellow man.”9 Believers also learned that a gevura (hardship) was always followed—even if at a trying distance—by a chesed (kindness), this a forecast many Hasidic victims of the Third Reich found consoling and reassuring. Judaic Responses to Nazism

Nazi rule notwithstanding, observant Jews took “orders” from the Mishnah Torah, a compilation of 613 attitudinal and behavioral 18

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faith-based rules. Formulated in the twelfth century by “the Rambam” (Moses Maimonides), they had been continuously updated through rabbinical interpretations over the centuries.10 Adherence required the secret performance of morning and evening prayers in out-of-the-way “safe” camp barracks, an affirmation of faith that could significantly aid morale. Nonobservant Jews were informally guided by secular moral precepts, as sporadically updated by highly regarded ethicists and philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, and others. Some such Jews met secretly for learned discussion in “safe” camp barracks, this a dangerous form of nonviolent resistance comparable to prayer in its power to aid and abet resistance to Nazi dehumanization schemes. With rare exception observant Jews lived guided by an ancient doctrine, kiddush hashem: sanctification of God’s name at any cost, lest it be desecrated. Similarly, with rare exception, secular Jews favored a comparatively newer religious doctrine, kiddush hahayyim: sanctification of God’s name by striving to stay alive, the better to be able to continue to do his will. Throughout the Holocaust, adopters of kiddush hashem entrusted their lives to God, believing unconditionally that whatever ensued— including tragic human losses to genocides, pogroms, and/or forced exile—God knew of it and, for unfathomable reasons, allowed its occurrence. Accordingly, besieged orthodox Jews would endure atrocities and torture and even accept martyrdom rather than participate in behavior that insulted God’s name. Spiritual resistance was regarded as an empowering affirmation of religious identity. Less obvious, but no less consequential, was the belief that an observant Jew did not to take up arms. All humankind had been made in God’s image, and no human should ever be shot, even in self-defense. Instead, to die as a Holocaust victim was to die a holy martyr, an exemplar of “the truest form of Jewish heroism.”11 Tragically, adherence to this ancient doctrine came at a high cost. Refusal in the ghettos or camps to work on the Sabbath often meant immediate execution: “[The Nazis] could not bear that a Jew, that vermin, even in the camps, did not lose faith in God.”12 A ghetto factory worker or a camp prisoner who refused to eat nonkosher food was soon crippled by malnutrition and, if judged by the SS too weak to work, was routinely shot or sent to the gas. Not surprisingly then, research suggests a higher percent of observant than of nonobservant Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.13 19

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Adopters of the alternative doctrine, kiddush hahayyim, sanctified God’s name both by striving to survive and helping to protect the life of others in danger. An ancient doctrine, it rejected “God’s Will” fatalism and emphasized instead an obligation to try to stay alive and also aid others to do so, as when Carers provided acts of stealth altruism. Indeed, adopters believed Judaism required anticipation of life-threatening dangers and acting to foil them. Typical was the behavior of Rabbi Yechezkel Shraga Landau, a leading orthodox rabbi in a Slovakian town. In response to an SS ultimatum he agreed to save his own life by shaving off his beard and peyos (sidelocks or sidecurls of hair). Thanks to this once unthinkable concession, the rabbi soon after developed a kosher kitchen in a Czech slave labor camp and ministered there to many needy Jewish prisoners. His example inspired other rabbis to adopt strategic accommodations.14 Nathan Eck, a Warsaw Ghetto survivor, recalls that, in 1940, when kiddush hahayyim first earned the attention of Zionist leadership, not surprisingly, “the will to live, not only physically, but of equal importance, spiritually, surfaced among ghetto inhabitants with an almost mystical vigor.”15 Judaism in the Camps

Every camp had its own mix of ultraorthodox, orthodox, conservative, reform, agnostic, and atheistic Jews. Given this wide diversity in religiosity, “it is all the more remarkable . . . that under extreme conditions, some semblance of religious life was possible.”16 It helped that rabid Nazi antisemitic rhetoric was not matched by consistent prohibition of religiosity.17 Across about 980 concentration camps and over 35,000 slave labor camps, a never-to-be-known number of Jewish prisoners risked keeping the faith, albeit in a wide range of ways.18 In the Sobibor Death Camp, for example, fifteen-year-old Thomas Toivi Blatt watched while “on every holy day small groups of pious Jews gathered. One cantor hid behind piles of clothing and valises to pray daily with the others, ignoring the potential danger of getting caught.”19 Especially to observant Jews, doing so “was both a discipline and an inspiration, an act of obedience and an experience of joy, a yoke and a prerogative. . . . the Jewish way of life was to reiterate the ritual, to meet the spirit again and again.”20 Religious resistance often took the form of a ruse, for example, a woman prisoner in the concentration camp part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp urged others in her sewing workshop to secretly do a little extra 20

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work every day and then hide it away at their workstations under uncut material. On the arrival of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement, the most holy day of the year) they pretended to obey the SS rule of having to work hard all of that day. Secretly they prayed, as in a daylong religious reverie, and, thanks to their hidden stash, they met the day’s work quota. A participant remembers thinking “we were doing our duty to God and to the miserable Germans.”21 Religious resistance also took the form of charity, for example, two professional tailors imprisoned in the Ebensee Camp did tailoring on the side for SS officers in exchange for extra food and cigarettes, both used in camp as a form of currency. A fellow prisoner recalls that “these two noble souls distributed their profits . . . with a generous hand, to all those truly in need, earning themselves a golden reputation.”22 Surprisingly enough, in Auschwitz, one of the harshest of all of the camps, prayer accessories known as tallit and tefillin were secretly available, as they had been “organized” (meaning, they were stolen) by Jewish prisoners tasked with sorting the contents of luggage brought along by doomed new arrivals. These religious items were smuggled into barracks where observant Jews could pay for them with the “currency” of their precious daily bread ration. In 1941 in the Poitiers Transit Camp in the German-occupied zone of France, Jewish prisoners openly celebrated Simchat Torah (Festival of the Torah).23 In 1942 in Auschwitz a clandestine Yom Kippur service was held, complete with the sacred chanting of the opening prayer, Kol Nidre.24 In remote slave labor camps close to the Piotrkow-Trybunalski ghetto in central Poland, religious services were held on a regular basis. In one of them Jewish prisoners were covertly given the day off from work on Yom Kippur.25 In 1945 men in the Ebensee Camp were able to secretly bake and distribute Pesach (Passover) matzos.26 Across the war years in the women’s barracks, the lighting of Friday night “candles,” made from twigs with cotton string wicks, was a welcomed clandestine ritual. Observant women demonstrated spiritual toughness in their secret employ of traditional, though now forbidden, practices. For example, many secretly fasted on Yom Kippur and pretended on Passover that the day’s one slice of bread was matzah (unleavened bread), both of which acts put their lives in jeopardy. In 1944, in certain barracks in Auschwitz the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were observed. The holiday of Sukkot, in turn, was celebrated with a makeshift sukkah (temporary shelter): “Many [prisoners] had not seen a sukkah for years. We enjoyed the 21

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spiritual refuge of that sukkah for the seven days of the festival without any of the guards taking note or hindering its use in any way.”27 Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, was observed by the nightly lighting of another improvised candle, this one made of blanket threads and margarine. When the first American military rabbi entered Buchenwald on its liberation, he quickly arranged a festive Friday evening prayer service. An attendee reported it was “impossible to describe the excitement on the part of observant and non-observant Jews alike, who were able, for the first time since the war, to openly and fully identify as Jews.”28 Rabbinical Cooperation

Many Jewish prisoners were helped by rabbinical relaxation of religious strictures that might have otherwise fatally weakened them.29 The ancient Talmudic precept of pikuach nefesh was employed: “To save a life you may break a [religious] law.” Certain progressive rabbis ruled, for example, that prisoners could labor on the Sabbath if refusing to do so would mean their death.30 These rabbis maintained that God appreciated all efforts made by prisoners to stay alive, much as urged by the doctrine of kiddush hahayyim. In 1944 at Bergen-Belsen a rabbi told prisoners at his clandestine high-risk Passover service God would accept their one slice of bread as a satisfactory substitute for obligatory matzah, a dispensation that enabled the attendees to feel they had kept faith and enjoy themselves—a rare feeling in a concentration camp.31 In the Gusen Slave Labor Camp, a lead rabbi taught that risking death from malnutrition by refusing to eat nonkosher meat was a sin. He insisted, “You need not feel guilty or even repent over such an act.”32 Moral support also came from rabbis and orthodox elders who taught clandestine “courses” that emphasized the importance of providing mutual support and being guided by positive values such as compassion, empathy, ethics, goals, hope, and vision. Typical were secret lectures in philosophy and theology offered at the Theresienstadt Transit Camp by Leo Baeck (1873–1956), Germany’s best-known rabbi. Ruth Kluger, who heard his talks as a twelve-year-old nonreligious girl, came to believe “this rabbi offered us our heritage like a gift: the Bible in the spirit of the Enlightenment . . . life was going to be a wonder and a joy . . . I learned for the first time who we were, what we could be . . . I became a Jew.”33 22

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Religious Controversies

Argumentation and dissent have a proud history in Judaism. For example, some hardcore Haredim (ultraorthodox) prisoners maintained publicly that God was using the Holocaust to punish cosmopolitan European Jewry for the sacrilegious “crimes” of assimilation, intermarriage, and violation of many of the 613 commandments. Suffering was regarded as necessary to help cleanse the soiled Jewish character, especially cleanse it of relativism as regards ethical autonomy.34 Zionism was also held to blame, as its proponents had forgotten there could be no Jewish State until the Messiah had returned. Indeed, the Horror Story could be understood to herald “the birth pang of the Messiah,” provided, that is, that all of the world’s Jews soon embraced literal orthodox adherence to Torah commandments. Not surprisingly, secular Jewish prisoners and even some progressive religious ones were outraged by the notion that their suffering and the cold-blooded murder of their loved ones was a deserved punishment, one somehow mitigated by a tenuous link to the eventual arrival of the Messiah. All such metaphysical constructions seemed unforgivably callous and inexcusably cruel.35 “The most awesome question of all,” according to Elie Wiesel, “is why was man’s silence matched by God’s?”36 Chil Rajchman remembers angrily shouting at fellow prisoners in the Treblinka Death Camp while they were saying Kaddish: “If there were a God he would not allow such misfortune, such transgression, where innocent small children, only just born, are killed, where people who want only to do honest work and make themselves useful to the world are killed!”37 Deeply aggrieved prisoners like Rajchman, some of whom renounced the religion of their birth, did so in agreement with Primo Levi that “There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.”38 At issue was theodicy, “the defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.”39 To help relieve demoralizing anguish, some Carers employed one or more of three related theodicy ideas: First, that God’s ways are beyond human understanding, given limitations of the heart, language, mind, and soul. Prisoners should find guidance and solace in the divinely inspired Torah and/or prime ethical tenets of secular humanism, as mortals simply cannot expect to fathom God’s mysterious ways . . . ways that may not even be human-centered. Second, as God allows humans free choice, humankind alone—not God—remains responsible for real-world outcomes, both laudatory 23

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and otherwise: “The tragedy of the Holocaust was precisely not in the Divine realm, but rather in the failure of human beings to behave in the image of God.”40 An old Jewish saying holds that, when man does not act on his own behalf, God folds His arms . . . and remains blameless. And finally, the existence between 1933 and 1945 of safe and secure Jewish communities elsewhere in the world at that time, as in America, Australia, British Mandate Palestine (Israel), China, England, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, and Sweden, demonstrated that God had continued to keep his Holy Covenant with at least the non-European Jewish community.41 Conclusion

Altruism-supporting tenets in Judaism teach “the love of God is unreal, unless it is crowned with love for one’s fellow men.”42 Throughout the Holocaust these tenets connected twentieth-century European Jews with a three-thousand-year-old Jewish history that relates “suffering, and [also] resilience, endurance, and creativity.”43 The tenets enjoined European Jews to lift up their brother and sister before they fell, this a mitzvah of significance, “a prayer in the form of a deed.”44 Yisrael Gutman, a scholar/survivor, wrote about the part Judaism played in the Warsaw Ghetto: “[Victims] struggled to maintain traditions even as scarcity and distress contributed to human frailty . . . as long as there was a spark of normality hidden in the darkness, trust in the spiritual world endured.”45 Zahava Szasz Stessel remembers fellow prisoners who took action in camp to better the lives of others, and thereby “maintained humanity and integrity under the most stressful conditions.”46 In explanation of such altruistic behavior, Ms. Stessel credits “culture and heritage . . . the tradition that sustained the Jews in the thousand years of persecution were still with us in the camps.”47 Little wonder many Jews then and now appreciate their religion as “a state of the art system for human potential.”48 Notes

The epigraph is from Rabbi Shmuley Botech. 2012 ed. The Modern Guide to Judaism, p. 29. 1. 2. 24

As recounted by Brous, Rabbi Sharon, contributor to “Speaking of Faith,” NPR Radio, September 2, 2010. See also “God on Trial,” a 2008 BBC/WGBH Boston television play. Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, p. 152.

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

Cited in a 1996 guide to prayer on Rosh Hashanah (New Year’s Day): Stern, Chaim, ed. 1996. Gates of Repentence: The New Union Prayerbook for the Days of Awe, p. 118. Some Jews revere mitzvoth as the “sacred sociology” of Jewry. Rosten, Leo. 1968. The Joys of Yiddish, p. 250. According to legend a Jew seeks through a covenant with God to try to help improve the world, given its sorry state of affairs. This motivated the effort some prisoners made to help “repair” their hellish camp reality. See Sacks, Jonathan. December, 1997. “Tikkun Olam: Orthodoxy’s Responsibility to Perfect G-d’s World.” http://advocacy.ou.org/1997/tikkun-olam-orthodoxys-responsibility-to-perfect-gods-world, and, Cooper, Levi. Fall, 2014. “The Assimilation of Tikkun Olam.” Jewish Political Studies Review, 25, 3–4. http:// mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2014/02/how-Jewish-is-Tikkun-Olam. Neusner, Jacob. 1987. The Enchantments of Judaism: Rites of Transformation from Birth through Death, p. 202. Passim. Rosten, Leo. 1968. The Joys of Yiddish, p. 299. “God is often called the God of Mercy and Compassion: Adonai El Rachum Ve-Chanum.” I drop the use of a hyphen as Semites are thought to be a race, which Jews are not. Without the hyphen the word more accurately represents “what it really is—a generic name for modern Jew-hatred which now embraces this phenomenon as a whole, past, and present and—I am afraid—future as well.” Almog, Shmuel. 1989. “What’s in a Hyphen?” SICSA Report: Newsletter of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.) As well, antisemitism is the authority heading used by the US Library of Congress. As cited in http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/hyphen.html. Above all, there was unswerving confidence the Messiah would soon miraculously come, and the pious would then return triumphantly to a redeemed Israel. Wiesel, Elie. Spring, 1981. “The Art of Fiction: Interview by John S. Friedman.” Paris Review, p. 134. Jews were held responsible for the welfare of one another because any Jew might be one of the disguised “Thirty Six,” the mystical figures whose continued well-being was all that kept God from destroying the World (Hasidic legend). This code was laid out by Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), a twelfth-century doctor, judge, and, arguably, the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Medieval Period. He maintained that rational inquiry and strong faith were compatible. Hausner, Gideon. “Preface.” In Huberband, Rabbi Shimon. 1987. Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust, p. x. Frilling, Tuvia. 2014. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz: History, Memory, and the Politics of Survival, p. 248. There was even the spirit-lifting thought that “after the world war, the goyim would be weak from destroying one another, and Jews would be free to return to the Promised Land. . . .” Sendyk, Helen, 2000 ed. The End of Days, p. 69. Kofman, Sarah. 1998. Smothered Words (translated by Madeline Dobie), p. 76. Brenner, Reeve R. 1980. The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors (New York: Free Press), p. 36. Rose, Binyamin. February 16, 2012. “From Slovakia to Flatbush.” In Jewish Ideas Daily ([email protected]). 25

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

26

Cited in Rudavsky, Joseph. 1987. To Live with Hope, To Die with Dignity, p. 5. Credit for the concepts’ modern adaptation is given to Rabbi Issac Nissenbaum of the Warsaw Ghetto. http://holocaustchronicle.org/ staticpages/370.html. Adopters taught that “prudent judgment [in favor of surviving] was an essential aspect of faith.” Schulweis, Rabbi Harold M. 1994. For Those Who Can’t believe: Overcoming the Obstacles to Faith, p. 55. Complex relations of Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Agnostic, and Atheistic Jews with one another were probably much as they had been before SS imprisonment—frosty and problematic. Acts of stealth altruism commonly occurred within these types rather than across time-honored boundaries, this at once both a life-aiding strength (a Jew knew exactly whom to look for altruistic care) and yet also a life-threatening weakness (divisiveness undoubtedly aided the enemy). See in this connection, Pingel, Falk. 2010. “Social Life in an Unsocial Environment: The Inmate’s Struggle.” In Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, p. 67. The Third Reich, a model of remorseless clarity in many things (such as unrestrained enmity against Bolshevism), remained confused in this matter. The overlords in Berlin never issued clear-cut policies regarding religious practices in the ghettos and camps. Instead, there existed “consistent inconsistency.” Michman, Dan. 2003. Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective, p. 262. The statistics are from Lichtblau, Eric. March 3, 2013. “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking.” New York Times, p. SR-3. I also draw on e-mail correspondence from Geoffrey Magargee, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM, June 27, 2011. See also Karin Orth, “Camps.” In Hayes, Peter and John K. Roth, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, p. 364; Smith, Lyn, Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust, p. 155. See also the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Vol. 1. The quotation is from Blatt, Thomas Toivi Blatt. 1997. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, p. 138. The quoted words are those of Heschel, Abraham Joshua. 1955. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, pp. 34–35. Judd, Lillian and Dennis L. 2011. From Nightmare to Freedom: Healing After the Holocaust, p. 64. Unfortunately, a Kapo discovered the hidden material and proceeded to beat all the participants and draw blood from the head of the memoirist. Skakun, Michael. 1999. On Burning Ground: A Son’s Memoir, p. 87. Baumel. Judith Tydor. 1997. Kibbutz Buchenwald: Survivors and Pioneers, p. 20. Hitchens, Christopher. 2010. Hitch -22: A Memoir. Op. Cit., p. 370. Michman, Dan. 2003. Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective. Op. Cit., p. 262. Ibid. Harfenes, Rav Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell. Op. Cit., p. 228. Ibid. In a transport of especially long duration to a death camp, the chief rabbi from Salonika, Greece, urged cathartic weeping. When the transport finally arrived at Auschwitz, “this car alone among many had not lost anyone to

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

death.” Cited in Kovnor, Abba. 2002. Scrolls of Testimony (translated by Eddie Levenston), p. 119. Brenner, Reeve R. 1980. The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors, p. 232. For a provocative critique of what he disparages as the “Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption,” see Neusner, Jacob. 1987. The Enhancements of Judaism. As related by Shani Harel, the Rabbi’s granddaughter, and cited in Zion, Mishael and Noam. 2007 ed. A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices, p. 99. Harfenes, Rav Yechezkel . 1988. Slingshot from Hell. Op. Cit. p. 104. 31. Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, pp. 86–87. Zapruder, Alexandra, ed. 2004 ed. (2002) Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, p. 92. The Lubavitch in 1943, according to a survivor, “taught that the Holocaust was God’s will, a cleansing of our sins, and a prelude to the coming of the Messiah.” Wells, Leon W. 1993. “Interview.” Cited in Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993. Problems Unique to the Holocaust, pp. 91–92. In 2013 Professor Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust expert, indicted two contemporaries—Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, and kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak Kedowri—for propagating the “deserved punishment” contention. As cited in Karpel, Dalia. February 21, 2013. “History Professor Yehuda Bauer: ‘Netanyahu Doesn’t Know History.’” www. haaretz.com/weekend/magazine. Wiesel, Elie. Spring, 1981. “The Art of Fiction: Interview by John S. Friedman.” Paris Review, p. 169. Wiesel, Elie. 1993. “For the Dead and the Living” [Adapted from a speech Wiesel gave at the Dedication Ceremony of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]. As cited in Rochman, Hazel and Darlene Z. McCampbell, eds. 1995. Bearing Witness: Stories of the Holocaust. p. 9. Rajchman, Chil. 2011. The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory, 1942–1943 (translated by Solon Beinfeld), p. 27. As cited in Pugliese, Stanislao. 2011. “Primo Levi’s Politics: Giustizia e Liberta, the Parito d’Azione, and “Jewish” Anti-Fascism.” In Sodi, Risa and Millicent Marcus, eds. 2011. New Reflections on Primo Levi: Before and After Auschwitz, p. 27. See also Sorin, Gerald. September 1984. “Resistance in Sobibor.” Jewish Currents, pp. 24–27. [Book Review: Escape from Sobibor, by Richard Rashe; Sobibor: Martrdom and Revolt, by Miriam Novitch], p. 26. Mish, Frederick C., ed. 1987. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, p. 1223. Zvielli, Alexander. December 29, 2014. “Challenging the Past.” Jerusalem Post. http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/15528/challenging-the-past-jerusalem-post. The Torah calls this hester panim (“hiding the face”), a time when it seems as if God has relinquished His/Her concern with human affairs. Besdin, Rabbi Abraham R., ed. 1993 ed. Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish Thought, Volume One, adapted from the Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, pp. 35–37. Especially valuable here is a unique study done in the early 1970s in Israel of survivor faith and doubt. Of a (nonscientific) bloc of 708 survivors 27

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42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

28

(69 percent, male) some 75 percent believed the six million deaths were a consequence of man’s inhumanity to man and had no connection to God. Almost half (48 percent) reported no change in faith (p. 77). Among the others, almost 75 percent had experienced either an attenuation, or a complete loss of faith (16 percent), while another 28 percent were brought “nearer to God.” (pp. 92, 103, 104.) Brenner, Reeve R. 1980. The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors. Op. Cit., pp. 37–38, 81, 129, 230. Buber, Martin, ed. 1947. Ten Rings: Hasidic Sayings, Collected and Edited by Martin Buber, p. 7. Simon Schama, British historian, as cited in Chottiner, Lee. March 19, 2014. “Five-part ‘Story of the Jews’ premiers on PBS.” The Jewish Chronicle. http:// thejewishchronicle.net/view/full_story/24774353/article_five_part_story_ of_the_jews_premiers_on_PB57instance=home_news1st. Heschel, Rabbi Abraham Joshua. As cited in Goldberg, Rabbi Edwin C., et al., eds. 2015. Miskan Hanefesh: Machzor for the Days of Awe, p. 434. Gutman, Yisrael. 1994. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, p. 85. 6. In contrast, Professor Yehuda Bauer found “no evidence of the impact of Jewish traditions or customs, religious or others, on Jewish behavior during the period of annihilation [of the shtetls].” Bauer, Yehuda. 2009. The Death of the Shtelt, p. 162. Similarly, Historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz writes: “ . . . the experience of Jewish history and of past Jewish persecution was utterly inadequate as a guide for Jews who now confronted a new phenomenon in their history—a powerful nation that had committed its energies and resources to their total annihilation.” Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1986 ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, p. xxii. I respectfully disagree with both of these scholars. Stessel, Zahava Szasz. 2010. “The Lost World of a Holocaust Survivor.” The Hidden Child, Vol. XVlll, p. 23. Ibid. Relevant here is that Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut, when serving in 1945 as Chaplain with the 104th Infantry, found that Jewish prisoners just liberated at Dora-Nordhausen “did not ask for food, but for religious items.” As cited in Fox, R. Margalit. February 12, 2012. “W. Gunther Plaut Dies at 99; Defined Reform Judaism.” New York Times, p. 27. Boteach, Rabbi Shmuley. 2012 ed. The Modern Guide to Judaism, p. 10. See also Kluger, Jeffrey. 2009. “What Makes Us Moral?” TIME: Your Brain: A User’s Guide, p. 84.

Part II Pre-camp Horror and Help Understanding the past largely depends on the ability to bridge between our everyday reality and that of the Holocaust period. —Daila Ofer

With the war’s start in1939, Henry Orenstein recalls that the “nightmare had become reality.”1 First in Germany and then in twenty-four other European countries Jews became de-emancipated, despised, isolated, and pauperized. They ceased not only being citizens, but also being in the eyes of the law human beings. European Jewry was in shock. For as Alexander Donat points out, “Jews had looked to Berlin as the symbol of law, order, and culture. We could not believe the Third Reich was a government of gangsters embarked on a program of genocide to ‘solve the Jewish problem of Europe’ . . . [We had faith] that even a German, even a Nazi, could never have so far renounced his own humanity as to murder women and children coldly and systematically.”2 Such faith was grievously misplaced. Nazi ideologists added to the usual antisemitic theories, such as a worldwide Jewish conspiracy against Gentiles, a pseudo-scientific and mystical taxonomy of races that condemned Jews as agents of social decomposition and therefore as “enemy combatants.” Indeed, Hitler insisted Jewry sought to distract Germans from the necessity of a victorious war to expand its ability to feed its people. This deranged theoretical system, with its assertion of Jewish impurity, had extermination as its logical endpoint.3 As explained in chapter 3, German Jewry defended itself with the “weapon” of nonviolent resistance. Carers drew on social welfare precedents honed over the centuries. Guided by both the Altruistic Impulse (see chapter 1) and Judaic altruistic tenets (chapter 2) they operated threadbare facsimiles of a once vast social welfare network: “Every Jewish community rallied to help the Jews survive.”4 29

Stealth Altruism

Likewise, as chapter 4 explains, Nazi invasion brought with it a previously unimaginable “transition from an era of human troubles to one of inhumanity and destruction.”5 Invasion meant arbitrariness, chaos, and disorganization in a new police state, all of which undermined the ability of Jewish captives to forecast, plan, and develop defenses. Anti-Jewish measures the Nazis had taken six years to implement in Germany were generally imposed during a few bewildering post-invasion weeks: “Everything is forbidden. Yet we never know whether we aren’t doing something that’s even more forbidden. Or from which direction the bullet will come.”6 It became the turn of Jewish Carers in twenty-four conquered countries to borrow ideas from the example of German Jewry: Captive Jews somehow found “energy, inventiveness, and optimism to face each cheerless day.”7 Many overtly accommodated to the new rulers even while covertly protecting selected ancient customs, family traditions, lifelong schooling, and earnest religiosity.8 In 1941, for example, a Jewish family in Siemiatycze, Poland, took in several hundred fleeing German Jews over a six-month period. The head of the household, once a well-off furrier, “spent his savings to make sure there were large pots of food cooking at all times.”9 Later, when living under German occupation the furrier—at peril of his life and that of his family—smuggled much of his own food rations to coworkers in his workshop.10 Across the months from the 1939 start of the Holocaust through the beginning of mass killings in 1942, more harm was done to more European Jews than at any other time in modern Jewish history. This four-year period was the prototypical Holocaust experience of the greatest number of European Jewish victims. Before their unnatural deaths many of these men and women left us “a shining example of how people can live meaningfully under the most trying circumstances.”11 Notes

The epigraph is from Daila Ofer. Spring, 1995. “Everyday Life of Jews under Nazi Occupation: Methodological Issues.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 9, 1, p. 69. 1.

2. 30

Orenstein, Henry. 1997 (1987). I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds, p. 74; see also Sacks, Sam. September 27–28, 2014. “Love at Auschwitz.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-8 [Book Review: The Zone of Interest, by Martin Amis], p. C-8. Donat, Alexander. 1965. The Holocaust Kingdom, pp. 103, 108.

Pre-camp Horror and Help

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

I draw here on Brooks, David. March 24, 2015. “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” New York Times, p. A-23. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1976 ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, p. 347. Passim. Ibid. See in this connection Kaplan, Marion.1998. Between Dignity and Despair, p.157. Berenbaum, Michael. 1993. A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of its Survivors, p. 37. See also Morrison, Jack G. 2000. Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–1945, p. 66; Snyder, Timothy, May 19/20. 2012, “Their Sense of Belonging.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-6. [Book Review: Antony Polonsky’s three-volume history, The Jews in Poland and Russia. Rubin, Agi and Henry Greenspan. 2006. Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated, p. 14. Rose Farkas remembers that in 1943 refugees fleeing from German-occupied parts of Poland told her Rumanian Ghetto neighbors “terrible stories about executions and mass graves. Listening, our blood curdling, we refused to believe such things could be true.” Farkas, Rose (with Ibi Winterman) 1998. Ruchele: Sixty Years from Szatmar to Los Angeles, p. 92. Orenstein, Henry. 1997. (1987) I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds. Op. Cit., p. 74. In Izbica, Poland, in December, 1941, a letter arrived telling of large-scale gas van murder in the Chelmo Death Camp, and adult Jews dismissed it as a fabricated story. Orenstein, Henry. 1997 (1987). I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds. Op. Cit., p. 74. Gutman, Israel. 1994. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, p. 48. Berenbaum, Michael. 1993. The World Must Know, p. 22. The survivor quotation is from a novel-like “memoir” by Ligocka, Roma (with Iris von Finckenstein). 2003 ed. (2002). The Girl in the Red Coat (translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo), p. 22. “The Europe that permitted the Holocaust was not created in 1933 [or 1939]. It took centuries to descend so low, but descend Europe did.” Dwork, Deborah and Robert Jan van Pelt. Holocaust: A History, p. 5. Variations in occupations related to the year it was initiated, the culture of the occupied country, previous Jewish–Gentile relations, the relationship of the home government to Berlin overlords, and other decisive matters. Rudavsky, Joseph. 1987. To Live with Hope, To Die with Dignity, p. 30.

31

3 Prewar Germany No other people on the darkening continent of Europe took as seriously the injunction to be fully human. —Ruth R. Wisse

Introduction

After the 1935 Nuremburg Laws deprived German Jews of both their citizenship and their status as fellow human beings, Jewish youngsters were banned from attending German school. Almost immediately, Carers secretly opened forbidden Jewish day schools in the living rooms of unemployed Jewish school teachers, all of whom who knew detection would mean long prison terms or worse. A clandestine “university” adopted the same high-risk model.1 Background

To understand the part overt care sharing (soup kitchens, etc.) and also stealth altruism (secret classrooms, etc.) played in the wartime experience of European Jews is to first consider its employment in Germany before the war’s start (1933–39). As much of that period’s Horror Story is well known, attention goes below instead to its overlooked Help Story, one that foreshadowed the increasing employ of stealth altruism throughout the war. German Jewry

From their arrival in about the fourth century, Jewish immigrants to Germany experienced antisemitic malice across the centuries, complete with unpredictable pogroms. Only after they had gained citizenship in 1871 did the situation gradually improve. By the early twentieth century those in the assimilated middle and upper classes had an enviable degree of complacency and well-being, although their upward social mobility provoked increasing antisemitic envy and jealousy. 33

Stealth Altruism

Malice notwithstanding, German Jews did much to demonstrate—at least to themselves—their civic worthiness, for example, during WWI one in six Jewish males (more than a hundred thousand) served in the Kaiser’s Army, 80 percent in combat roles, and thirty-five thousand were decorated for bravery.2 Similarly, of the thirty-eight Nobel Prizes won by Germans between 1905 and 1936, fourteen were received by German Jews. By 1933, the Jewish community included 11 percent of the nation’s doctors and 16 percent of its lawyers, albeit Jews then constituted less than 1 percent of the nation’s population.3 Accordingly, before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, an influential minority of Germany’s 525,000 Jewish citizens, especially those who were wealthy and well connected, were paragons of material success and high culture.4 Hovering always in the background, however, was an age-old linkage of Judaism with the malevolent subversive, the “destroyer of Eden.” Jew haters made reference to the crucifixion (Jews as “Christ-Killers”) and the fourteenth-century Black Death (Jews as plague spreaders). New attacks focused on Jewish-linked capitalism, as reviled by the Left, and Jewish-linked Bolshevism, as hated by the Right. These links to “spiritual pestilence” helped foment permissible hatred, and German Jews became scapegoats for all that had ever troubled the nation.5 With its own chilling logic German antisemitism “antedated Hitler, and dwarfed him . . . in a sense, it was the German people who willed the end and Hitler who willed the means.”6 Historian Neil Gregor would have us understand that “the Nazis were not outsiders, but ultimately came from the very center of German society.”7 Hitler’s Rise to Power

After Germany’s humiliating defeat in WWI, the victorious allies tried with the 1918 Treaty of Versailles to force the payment of huge reparations. This crippled a fragile German democracy, grievously harmed an already devastated economy, and poisoned relations among European nations. German people suffered during a worldwide economic crisis, and antisemites were quick to allege that Jews, especially if Communists or Socialists, were somehow complicit in causing runaway inflation and ruinous unemployment. An impotent Weimar Republic government (Germany’s first full attempt at democracy, 1918–33) was soon stymied by an impasse in Parliament of Socialists versus Communists (the latter commonly voted as dictated by distant Russian Bolsheviks). Jews who 34

Prewar Germany

were Socialists or Communists had acrimonious disputes with one another, disputes that divided and weakened Jewry throughout the Holocaust.8 In the early 1930s, a deadlocked and always fragile Weimar Republic government collapsed. Ensuing chaos, growing hysteria, and mounting dread “opened the floodgates to the unhappiest of them all, a former resident of Vienna and would-be Fuhrer who offered to lead all to the promised land.”9 Adolf Hitler had long promised to strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) by ending economic chaos, libertine disorder, and related “offenses” charged to the Jews.10 In January 1933, a dominant 44 percent of the electorate voted for Adolf Hitler, an uneducated high-school dropout, WWI veteran, spellbinding orator, shrewd politician, and rabid antisemite.11 On March 23, 1933, the Reichstag (German Parliament) granted the new Chancellor the right to override the nation’s parliamentary process, suspend individual freedoms, and assume dictatorial rights, effectively ending German democracy. The country then defaulted on its debts from World War I and underwent a debilitating period of hyperinflation and economic depression. Many citizens looked hopefully to Hitler for extreme “remedies.” Jewish Response

Many culturally assimilated members of the German Jewish community expected that their usefulness as accomplished bankers, craftsmen, doctors, professors, scientists, teachers, writers, and so on, insured that, as always before, they had the protection of the State and powerful elites, especially as Germany was then among the most “civilized” of all nations. They fatally underestimated their vulnerability. Hitler believed Bolshevism was actually a Jewish scheme for world domination, and Jews had therefore to be destroyed, along with their Bolshevik “comrades.” War Against the Jews

Nazi ideologues developed four immediate goals: First, to swiftly demonize Jewry and set average Germans against their Jewish neighbors. Second, to end Jewish influence in every sphere of German life. Third, to severely undermine the Jewish standard of living. And fourth, to rapidly drive Jews out of the country. A fifth goal, known as the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question,” was first posed in Hitler’s writings in the 1920s. It was not fully enacted 35

Stealth Altruism

until 1942 when a determined Third Reich set out to murder Europe’s almost eleven million Jews, expecting to do so “even in countries like England and Ireland, which Hitler’s legions had not yet had the opportunity to conquer,” this a geopolitical genocide strategy without precedent.12 On September 15, 1935, Germany adopted the Nuremberg Laws. These stripped German Jews of their citizen rights and privileges, a legal move with no precedent in the history of western civilization. They were consigned to a brand-new legal category not just as second-class citizens, but also as figuratively subhuman beings (untermenschen). Barred from employ in the civil service, from voting or holding office, Jews were also purged from the professions. They were banned from using such public spaces as beaches, parks, movie houses, libraries, parks, and theaters. They could only be outside in public during specified hours. And they were required to rapidly sell their businesses on very advantageous terms to eager Gentiles.13 Worse yet, one’s family tree became literally a matter of life and death. Jewry was defined for the first time as a race, rather than a religious identification. The identity of one’s Jewish mother, if attested to on one’s official identification papers, became the equivalent of a death sentence. Antisocial characteristics ascribed by the Nazis to Jews were regarded as existing “in the blood” and were therefore unalterable through conversion or intermarriage. Indeed, if left unchecked, these toxic characteristics might first infect and then destroy Germany, followed by the world. Beginning on September 19, 1941, German Jews had to attach a hexagonal Judenstern (yellow Jewish Star of David) marked with the word Jude (Jew or Jewish) to their outer garments.14 This emblem of identification also went on the front of buildings in which German Jews lived, a requirement that simplified matters “when the gray canvas-topped trucks came to gather their harvest” of Jews who were soon after tightly packed into trains headed to ghettos or death camps in Poland.15 Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass)

On November 8, 1938, a carefully organized, nationwide attack on German Jewry ended any doubt about Nazi intentions. The largest state-sponsored pogrom ever in Central European history, the riot was carefully planned with technical skill by the Intelligence Service of the SS. It included the ravaging of hundreds of Jewish households, the 36

Prewar Germany

smashing of over eight thousand store windows of looted Jewish-owned businesses, the burning of 191 of Germany’s 275 synagogues, and the desecration in public of Torahs and Jewish tombstones. Thousands of German Jews suffered wanton violence and ninety-six were murdered.16 A few Gentiles courageously intervened, as in hiding targets of potential street violence or trying to put out fires, but most were passive bystanders. Two psychological impacts of Kristallnacht were especially devastating: First, as one’s home had long been thought an inviolable sanctuary, Jewish women were horrified by unprecedented and violent break-ins. Second, public defilement and burning of Torahs was understood to signal the “birth” of a Nazi version of Christianity, one that declared it owed nothing to the Jews and to conventional Christianity . . . thereby writing a death warrant for world Jewry. While shocked by the event, governments elsewhere imposed no economic sanctions, severed no diplomatic relations, and did not expand visas numbers to enable immigration by desperate German Jews. Chaim Weitzmann, then head of the Zionist Movement, observed: “The world is divided into countries where the Jews cannot live, and countries where the Jews cannot enter.”17 On November 12, 1938, the German Government levied a huge “expiation” fine (a sum equal today to about $400 million) on the Jewish population for damages caused by Kristallnacht. This made it impossible for a German Jew to get insurance reimbursement for actual damages to his or her property, and it also cut severely into any remaining financial resources of the German Jewish community.18 Some thirty thousand German Jewish men—one in five such men, or 10 percent of all German Jews—were held personally responsible by the Nazi Government for having “caused” the Nazi-instigated pogrom. They were harshly arrested, commonly late at night, and sent away for “protective custody” to the first German concentration camps (Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen), allegedly to keep them from being hurt by German neighbors outraged by the damages their Jewish neighbors had “caused.” Several hundred Jewish women were sent to local jails.19 The new concentration camps were a Horror Story experience, “bereft of all moral principles, one where all the basic precepts of human society were cast to the winds,” this an eerie forerunner of what lay ahead in the Nazi camps after the war’s start a year later.20 Over one thousand of the new prisoners died under “mysterious” circumstances, 37

Stealth Altruism

for example, beatings, denial of medicine, exposure to the elements, and malnutrition.21 On release, traumatized ex-prisoners were sworn to secrecy and were pressured to try to immediately emigrate with their families, even though entry visas anywhere, including the United States, were almost impossible to secure. Nevertheless, by 1939 when the war began, about half of German Jews (about 320,000) and two-thirds of Austrian Jews (about 160,000) had somehow managed to leave the country.22 Most, however, only got as far as other European countries which the Nazis later overran, at deadly cost to stateless Jewish émigrés.23 Prewar Community Care

German Jews who remained in the Fatherland turned to one another for altruistic support, at first overt, but soon of the stealth variety.24 Fortunately, over many centuries they had developed their own vast, private social welfare system. Operated in part by communal organizations, it provided tzedakah (help for the poor), as mandated by tikkun olam, an ancient theological obligation to “help repair the world.” (See chapter 2.) Strategic material and spiritual aid were offered by many Jewish-operated clothing exchanges, day care centers, orphanages, loan offices, old-age homes, soup kitchens, and the strategic like. An unexpected boost came from a far-reaching “changing of the guard.” Many older administrators of social welfare agencies fled the country, and their younger “overnight” replacements were quick to relax Prussian-like operating practices. They developed a helter-skelter emergency response system that rushed out scarce resources (clothing, food, medicine, etc.) to the needy. Typical was the response of Jewish women in Berlin. After having been barred by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws from participating in the annual German Winter Relief Project, the Carers among them developed their own ad hoc relief program. They managed to send about thirty thousand care packages to needy German Jewish families during every winter month, a critical aid to about 20 percent of Berlin’s Jewish population.25 Similarly, in 1937 the Berlin Jewish community, albeit hard-pressed, somehow supported fifteen soup kitchens, and helped clothe nearly sixty thousand people from its used clothing warehouses.26 It expanded critical financial aid to Jewish orphanages and old-age homes, even while providing journey-to-work cash subsidies. A German Jewish 38

Prewar Germany

Cultural Association, in turn, developed hundreds of art exhibitions, concerts, literary lectures, plays, and so forth to provide a small payroll for many jobless Jewish artists. While all such projects bolstered morale and provided precious sustenance, they suffered over time from the loss by emigration of wealthy Jewish supporters, from a tragic and unprecedented rise in the suicide rate, and especially, from intensifying harassment by an unrestrained Gestapo and SS. Stealth Altruism

At considerable personal risk teenagers in Berlin joined a secret and forbidden chapter of the Zionist youth movement, Hachshara, where they were taught agricultural skills thought helpful if and when they ever got to British Mandate Palestine. After the wars’ start many developed valuable vegetable gardens amidst the war rubble in sealed ghettos. Likewise, other teenagers were secretly trained as blacksmiths, carpenters, cooks, dressmakers, electricians, locksmiths, tailors, tinsmiths, and other trades . . . training in blue-collar occupations the Nazis valued enough to later select the youngsters to live at least a while as slave laborers. Across the entire spectrum of professions and occupations German Jews adapted to the Nazi crackdown with high-risk acts of stealth altruism, for example, when Jewish doctors were denied hospital privileges, many made outlawed house calls, often after curfew at high risk, and they improvised forbidden home care practices. Jewish craftsmen, lawyers, rabbis, and the like behaved in a comparable manner. As everything about life had overnight become ever more problematic and dangerous, most realized they had best look to one another for care, encouragement, and sympathy . . . even if this Upstander role put their lives in even greater jeopardy. Conclusion

As averred by Holocaust Studies Professor Antony Polansky, “one can only explain the Holocaust by explaining its beginning.”27 From 1933 on, guided by the Altruistic Impulse and by Judaic altruistic tenets, Jewish Carers in Germany sought to blunt the worst for as long as possible. They drew increasingly on private altruistic aid, ever more of the highrisk stealth variety. Later, after the war’s start in 1939, many caregivers of all nationalities applied blood-stained lessons learned the hard way in Germany about provision of stealth altruism. 39

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Notes

The epigraph is from Wisse, Ruth R. 2007. Jews and Power, p. x. 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

40

Dwork, Deborah, and Robert Jan van Pelt. 2002. Holocaust: A History, p. 76. Berenbaum, Michael. 1993. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, p. 22. Opfermann, Charlotte G. 2002. The Art of Darkness, p. 30. The data on doctors and lawyers are from McMillan, Dan. 2014. How Could this Happen? Explaining the Holocaust. Many insisted they had no interest in politics, and were German patriots first and foremost. Religion was not a common denominator among them. It was said of some, especially those who were indifferent about their Jewish roots, that they forgot to tell their children they were Jewish. Hitchens, Christopher. 2010. Hitch – 22, p. 376. Dissenters in the ranks warned being embedded in German culture and society was an act of suicidal self-deception. German antisemitism was “not just a form of racism or prejudice, [but also] a deeply held belief, religious in it’s power, through which the world’s events are interpreted.” Rothstein, Edward. September 5–6, 2015. “The Frying Pan and the Fire.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-7. Johnson, Paul. 1983. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, p. 420. Gregor, Neil. October 17-18, 2015. “The Myth of Two Germanys.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-7. [Book Review: Germany, by Neil Gregor]. Many cultural institutions came under attack for what antisemites condemned as irreverent ultra-modernism. They charged that a “degenerate” amoral Berlin-based culture was being foisted on Germany by cosmopolitan Jewish devotees of American Jazz, avant-garde art (Bauhaus, DaDa, Expressionism, etc.), homosexuality, sexual license, and so on. Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels later ranted against “Jewish-Hottentot frivolity.” Admirers, in contrast, enjoyed claiming Berlin was a contender with New York for being the free-spirited cultural capital of the twentieth century. Sacks, Sam. February 25–26, 2012. “The Endless Victims of the Nazi Nightmare.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-6. [Book Review: Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan]. Self-deluded strongly conservative power-holders such as bankers, business leaders, conservative politicians, industrialists, and media owners mistakenly thought they could control the Nazi Party, a small extreme rightwing group, and carelessly helped its rise to power. Eksteins, Modris. November 30-December 1, 2013. “The Scourge of False Sentiment.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-6. [Book Review: The Kraus Project, by Jonathan Franzen]. Loss of the Weimar Republic’s democratic legitimacy and the subsequent economic chaos in the interwar period “produced the most abominable regime ever to emerge from a modern democracy.” Craig, Gordon A. 1999. The Germans, p. 143. See also Ferguson, Niall. 2006. The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, p. 225. The vote data are from John Simkins, “1933 Election in Germany,” in http:// www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk. Craig, Gordon A. 1999. The Germans. Ibid., p. 67.

Prewar Germany

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1946_1947_13_Statistics. pdf. See also Marrus, Michael R. September 6, 2015. “Hitler’s Ecological Fantasies.” New York Times Book Review, p. 9. [Book Review: Black Earth, by Timothy Snyder]. This level of destruction “might well have marked the end of the Jewish people as history knows them.” Dershowitz, Alan M. 1997. The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century, p. 24. Elimination of Jews was one of four over-arching goals, the others including resounding defeat of the Allies, the eradication of Bolshevism (seen as part of a Jewish world conspiracy directed from Moscow), and permanent enslavement of inferior races (Slavs, Poles, etc.). As cited in Bullock, Alan. 1964. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, p. 365. Schneider, Tosia Szechter. 2007. Someone Must Survive to Tell the World: Reflections from Tosia Szechter Schneider, p. 16. As the State and its laws had made it a serious crime for any non-Jew to demonstrate concern or, worse yet, dare to interfere, the Judenstern made it easier for German Gentiles to identify and avoid someone Jewish, including once dear friends. Helen Lewis remembers “the psychological effects were cleverly and cruelly calculated to impress upon us that we were outcasts who had no place in society.” Lewis, Helen. 1992. A Time to Speak, p. 18. Edvardson, Cordelia. 1997 (1984). Burned Child Seeks the Fire (translated by Joel Agee), p. 42. Victimization even spread to include certain Gentiles. In the spring of 1939 handicapped babies, infants, and children, along with the mentally ill began to be systematically murdered . . . a process temporarily halted only after some clergy and humanitarians bravely protested. Thalmann, Rita and Feinermann, Emmanuel. 2000 ed. (1974). Crystal Night: November 9–10, 1938 (translated by Gilles Cremonesi), p. 64. See also Confino, Alon. June 1, 2014. “Why the Nazis Burned the Hebrew Bible.” Commentary. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/why-thenazis-burned-the-hebrew-bible/ See also Confino, Alon. 2014. A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. As cited in Bauer, Yehuda. 2009. The Death of the Shtetl, p. 153. President Roosevelt expressed disapproval and symbolically withdrew the American Ambassador for “consultation,” the only head of state to do so. However, he privately told his Ambassador that Germany’s treatment of its Jews “was shameful, but it was not the business of the American government.” See Gallagher, Dorothy. June 12, 2011. “Sleeping with the Gestapo.” New York Times, p. 31. The German Jewish community was required to cover the cost of the cleanup. The dollar estimate is from Hogan, David J., ed. The Holocaust Chronicle, p. 144. The government seized Jewish business insurance funds to get the money, along with 20 percent of each Jewish person’s property. Konner, Melvin. 2003. Unsettled. Op. Cit., p. 271, Passim. Yahil, Leni. 1990. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, p. 100. Only two years earlier the world helped legitimize Hitler by granting him the 1936 Olympic Games, a huge celebration of Germany’s prowess. Yahil, Leni. 1990. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945. Op. Cit., p. 100. The thousand figure is from Hogan, David J., ed. The Holocaust Chronicle. Op. Cit. 41

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22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

42

Kaplan, Marion A. 1998. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, p. 188. Austrian Jews in particular had good reason to flee: Austrians eventually made up 80 percent of Adolf Eichmann’s staff and were 75 percent of his death camp commandants. Wiesenthal, Simon, as cited in Gill, Anton. 1988. The Journey Back from Hell: An Oral History: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors, p. 224; Kaplan, Marion A. 1998. Between Dignity and Despair, p.37. Synagogue attendance, which grew significantly after 1933, soared, as did enrollment in Jewish education courses and subscriptions to the German Jewish press. There was also unprecedented support for Zionism (which, ironically, the Nazis had rhetorically supported since 1933), and for the first time it became more than a small minority movement. Kaplan, Marion A. 1998. Between Dignity and Despair. Op. Cit., p. 37. Ibid. Polonsky, Anthony. “Letter.” September 20, 2015. New York Times Book Review, p. 8.

4 War-Torn Europe We were pressed to the limits of human endurance and beyond, and the society did not break down. —Lucjan Dobroszyki

Introduction

Although the Nazis prohibited any schooling in the ghettos, in her Warsaw Ghetto diary Mary Berg noted “there are a great number of illegal schools, and they are multiplying every day. . . . Two such schools were discovered by the Germans sometime in June. Later we heard the teachers were shot on the spot, and the pupils had been sent to a concentration camp near Lublin.”1 Nazi Occupation

On September 1, 1939, the German invasion of Poland began a ruthless process that over the next six years brought about half of all of the world’s Jews, then about seventeen million, under harsh and murderous rule.2 With dizzying speed, Jews experienced a previously unimaginable “transition from an era of human troubles to one of inhumanity and destruction.”3 The impact was felt first in Poland. Its Jewish community had existed for over six hundred years and, as the world’s largest and most diverse Jewish community, it included in Warsaw the biggest Jewish population of any city in the world.4 Some 3,300,000 Polish Jews represented over 10 percent of the Polish population (German Jews had been less than 1 percent), a greater percent of Jewish citizens than anywhere else in Europe.5 Observant Polish Jews, some 30 to 40 percent of all, preferred to speak Yiddish. They generally lived in rural shtetls (villages) where revered rabbis ruled over all, men studied Torah, and women ran the family.6 Although strapped by religious rigidities, traditional sexism, and income inequality, shtetls took seriously the shared responsibility 43

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Torah indicated Jews had for the well-being of one another.7 Urban Polish Jews prized their assimilation and preferred to speak Polish. As their ranks included a sizable proportion of the country’s doctors and lawyers, many thought of themselves first as Polish nationals and only incidentally as Jews. By the end of 1942 Nazi occupation troops ruled all of Eastern Europe, and Polish Jews were joined in anguish and pain by millions of coreligionists.8 All were stigmatized and ostracized as outsiders in their own home countries. Barred from civil service posts, the professions, and business ownership, many suffered from extreme shortages of clothing, food, fuel, and medicines. Strict curfews were imposed, and they were prohibited from hospitals, movie houses, parks, shops, and so on. As in Germany, a yellow “Jewish star” had to be worn on outer garments, and anyone found without this marker could be shot. Various goods were seized, including bicycles, furs, radios, telephones, and even household pets. Helen Lewis recalls that, “to some, especially children and old people, this [loss of pets] was the hardest blow.”9 For adults, a counterpart was the sudden loss of supportive relationships with terrified non-Jewish neighbors, all of whom were under a strict ban against socializing with or having sympathy for the victims. All forms of overt caring by Jews of Jews were strictly forbidden and harshly punished. Accordingly, many activities provided by Carers went underground in complex ways, as it became clear that “everyone survives [only] as part of a chain of reinforcements.”10 Carers opened threadbare hidden soup kitchens and developed secret delivery routes in large cities for the distribution of scarce food and medicine. In Budapest, for example, sixteen-year-old Tom Lantos used his military school uniform as a disguise to enable him to move about the occupied city and bring precious food and medicine aid to Jewish families.11 Anticipating worsening conditions, secret efforts were made by Carers to place children in Gentile households willing to pledge to return them to their families at war’s end. Christian clergy were persuaded to take Jewish children into their hospitals and orphanages where they were “disguised” as Gentiles and taught how to “pass” as knowledgeable Christians, for example, serve as choirboys. Many Jewish congregations dared to hold forbidden religious services in private homes. Secret religious schools prepared boys for clandestine bar mitzvah ceremonies. Unable to publically access sealed-up ritual baths, many pious women dared to use secret entries. Rabbis 44

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performed covert circumcision rituals and conducted secret marriage and burial services, all of this at risk of life. Ghettoization

Two months after the 1939 invasion and occupation of Poland, the Nazis forced Polish Jews into ghettos, the first ever imposed in Eastern Europe.12 In short order, they developed some 1,150 urban ghettos, about 520 in Poland alone.13 Commonly located in decrepit neighborhoods already occupied by a city’s poorest Jews, the ghettos rapidly became disease-ridden, miserable, and vastly overcrowded. Thousands of hopeless beggars, many of them young orphans, starved to death and their bodies lay unattended for days in the street. Haunted by fear and uncertainty, residents were easily cowed by club-carrying Jewish police. Armed with machine guns and vicious dogs Nazi sentries or local fascist collaborators saw to ghettos’ isolation. Ghetto citizens expected atrocities, but even worse was uncertainty about Third Reich intentions. For example, while men from the Rzeszow Ghetto in Poland were away at day labor in a distant factory, the SS suddenly swept into the ghetto and rounded up all the mothers and children and sent them off by transport, allegedly to a farm in the Ukraine but actually to a death camp. When the fathers and husbands discovered this mass abduction on their return home from work they “screamed and cried for hours.”14 This Horror Story notwithstanding, as a result of the ghetto’s isolation, many ghetto dwellers were relieved of the immediate presence of the Gestapo, the SS, and antisemitic Gentiles. Certain internal social boundaries came crashing down: “The elite were brought closer to the masses, the assimilated closer to the committed, the secular closer to the religious, Yiddish closer to Hebrew.”15 Ghetto dwellers had their own form of local “government,” albeit one under the heel of the Germans. They could try to relocate to live closer to other family members or former neighbors. Relaying BBC news from hidden wireless radios, they could reassure one another the war would soon end, some of them would certainly survive, and, as before in World War I, the Germans would be soundly defeated. Finally, and above all, they felt somewhat protected by family ties and other supportive social bonds such as political party membership and welcoming religious congregations. Typical of ghetto Carers were people like Shmuelitzik, a Vilna Ghetto (Poland) carpenter who worked in a military-related carpentry shop. In 1942 he secured a life-saving work pass for his cousin, the father of 45

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then eight-year-old Steve Rotschild. In his memoir Mr. Rotschild recalls that his father, a bookkeeper, “didn’t know how to hold a hammer, and Shmuelitzik risked his life and that of his family by protecting him. He and his wife Fruma also took us in and made room for our family.”16 Such help led some residents to hope to outlast the enemy. Judenrat

An exceedingly controversial and beleaguered community council, known as the Judenrat (Council of Jewish Elders), had nominal control. In actual fact the SS chose its leaders, dictated its policies, scrutinized its every act, and held hostage the lives of its leaders, their wives, and their children . . . even while promoting the illusion of autonomy. The Judenrat assigned the only jobs available in the ghetto, that is, those in support of Nazi war production, such as assembling guns or sewing military uniforms. It also regulated rations, controlled housing, operated a police force, settled neighborhood disputes, promoted cleanliness, kept up an adequate sewerage system, and ran prohibited hospitals and orphanages. It also established “make do” relief committees charged with providing clothing, food, financial aid, health care, housing, legal aid, religious support, and social/cultural activities. Supplies, however, were grievously inadequate from the outset and got sparser over time. Much as earlier in prewar Germany, the question of how to feed starving masses was a top priority. In the Warsaw Ghetto, for example, which had about 450,000 people at its peak, a Judenrat Food Committee developed community soup kitchens.17 They daily fed tens of thousands of adults and about forty thousand dependent children whose parents had been deported to the death camps.18 Chaim A. Kaplan, the ghetto diarist, wrote, “For most patrons, the thin soup was their only meal of the day. Apart from the soup kitchens, these organizations . . . collected clothes, gave financial aid, and maintained children’s boardinghouses.”19 Many Judenrats developed house committees in apartment houses. Members mediated endless tensions and disputes among frazzled and frightened tenants, and thereby helped everyone stay sane. They set up kindergartens and day care centers, ran cultural events, and held religious services on site. By 1942, in the Warsaw Ghetto there were about fifteen hundred house committees covering over two thousand households, each committee employing a form of grass-roots democracy.20 46

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In the Warsaw Ghetto over two thousand children were housed in fourteen Judenrat orphanages; hundreds of others vainly struggled to survive on the streets.21 Some were employed as illegal smugglers, as this could give access to food, for example, youngsters climbed over, under, and around the tightly guarded ghetto wall to trade jewelry, gold, or other variables for food. Some of these boys and girls were captured and jailed by the Jewish police; others were shot on sight by SS guards. Teenagers could join various youth movements (Betar, Bnei, Akiva, Dror, Gordonia, Hanoar Hatzioni, Hashomer Hatzair, and Zukunft, an anti-Zionist group) that taught agricultural skills for later use in British Mandate Palestine. Vacant ghetto grounds were used to grow vegetables that helped alleviate starvation, even as the activity itself proved a welcomed distraction from the boredom of ghetto life. Within the ghetto walls the Judenrat reinstituted a wide range of cultural activities, popular in their previous communities and looked at warily by the Third Reich. Typical in the Vilna Ghetto was a nursery school, three elementary schools with two kindergartens, a technical school, a music school, a dormitory for abandoned children, and an art gallery.22 A large lending library held a festival on December 13, 1942, to celebrate the one hundred thousandth circulation of a library book.23 Some ghettos had Hebrew and Yiddish chorales, and a few even boasted a symphony orchestra. Political clubs, frequent sports competitions, and many theaters of varying levels of sophistication got support. Theatrical classics vied with broad slapstick. Youth clubs focused on literacy, nature, and poetry, and one in Vilna even researched Vilna Ghetto history and folklore. Medical lecture series emphasized preventive as well as remedial healthcare options.24 On July 13, 1940, Chaim A. Kaplan noted in his Warsaw Ghetto diary that “people are studying in attics and cellars, and every subject is included in the curriculum, even Latin and Greek.”25 Samuel Goetz remembers that “each lesson was accompanied with a fear of being discovered, and while walking in the street our books had to be camouflaged . . . our teachers risked their lives daily to help us.”26 Banned newspapers covered a broad political spectrum. Editorials often criticized enervating social injustices, particularly the presence of great wealth in some Jewish homes in front of which Jewish paupers first froze, then starved to death. Readers were reminded of their tzedakah charity obligations (responsibility to give alms for the poor) and their obligation to aid one another in resisting dehumanization . . . matters addressed by Judaic Altruism tenets. (See chapter 2.) 47

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Judenrat on Trial

Naturally, some critics at the time, and some ever since, have condemned leaders of the Judenrat as immoral collaborators, as quislings out to protect their own families and friends, whatever the cost to others. Hannah Arendt, for example, famously wrote, “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”27 In contrast, historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz maintained that, “for all of their weaknesses, failings, and wrongdoings, these [Judenrat leaders] . . . were no traitors . . . To say they ‘cooperated’ or ‘collaborated’ with the Germans is semantic confusion and historical misrepresentation.”28 Regarding one of the leaders—Dr. Elkhanan Elkes, chair of the Kovno Ghetto Judenrat—a scholar wrote, “His story is that of a moral and spiritual giant who dared to lead and continued to lead against impossible odds, who never lost faith in his community—or in the common humanity that binds us all.”29 A few ghettos developed information exchanges with their counterparts in nearby ghettos, a source at times of useful advice. A few dared to create high-risk alliances with ghetto underground fighters, for example, in the Minsk Ghetto, the largest one in the Soviet Union, the Judenrat secretly provided money, clothing, hiding places, and forged papers to the underground. This enabled both acts of stealth altruism and the escape of about ten thousand ghetto dwellers to nearby forests partisan bands. The Minsk Judenrat “was unusual in that it generally enjoyed the confidence of inhabitants, its members having apparently been chosen almost at random, generating sympathy for their unenviable burdens.”30 A few Judenrats in the Polish ghettos of Kozienice, Radziejow, Staszow, and Wolanow were successful in proposing the development of nearby small out-of-the-way slave labor camps. This kept young able-bodied “volunteers” close to their home ghetto, enabled their families to get the Judenrat to send their sons food packages (even though commonly plundered by camp officials), and lowered the chances of their prisoner-sons being transported to far crueler camps at a much greater distance.31 Yitzhak Arad maintained that, “from the point of view of 1942 or 1943, what else could the Judenrats have done? . . . No other real policy was open for the Jews at that time.”32 Ruth Kluger asks, in turn, “What would have happened to us if the Jews had done nothing to reduce the 48

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chaos?”33 Indeed, had the war ended one or two years earlier, some Carers among hundreds of Judenrat leaders might today be regarded as tragic moral heroes. “Final Solution”

Adoption by the Third Reich of “the Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem”—the systematic annihilation of European Jewry—was set in motion in June 1941 when four quasi-military squads (Einsatzgruppen) moved around the Ukrainian and Russian countryside murdering with rifles and machine guns 1.5 million Jews in Eastern Europe rural villages (shtetls).34 This unprecedented murder campaign was followed in January 20, 1942, by a ninety-minute conference in Wannsee, Germany. A small gathering of fifteen top-level representatives of ministries of the Third Reich and the SS adopted an orderly blueprint for premeditated murder of human beings on a scale never before seen: “No other event institutionalized the mass killings so explicitly—or stripped the inside operators and their folkways so naked.”35 The “Final Solution” Conference led to two genocidal actions. First, specialized death camps were opened, a grotesque instrument for impersonal large-scale murder. Nothing like it had existed before, and its terrifying novelty led many prospective victims to refuse to believe in its existence, until, that is, they were forced by conscripted Jewish prisoners (Sonderkommondo Squads) into the gas chamber of a death camp. Second, Jewish ghettos across Europe were swiftly and brutally shut down, as they had always been regarded by the Third Reich as only a temporary way station—much like the transit camps—along the path to the gas chamber annihilation of European Jewry and the eventual disappearance of Judaism worldwide.36 Ghetto dwellers soon understood their fragile insular world was doomed, and gradual degradation followed, countered weakly by the implausible efforts of Judenrats to keep up unrealistic hope. Many young ghetto Jews chose to escape to join forest partisans.37 Some who stayed behind eventually put up fierce resistance, as during costly revolts in the ghettos of Bedzin, Bialystok, Czestochowa, Minsk, Tarnow, Vilna, Warsaw, and elsewhere.38 In Warsaw alone approximately eighteen thousand ghetto occupants resisted by going into deep hiding in basements and attics, as did a never-to-be-known number of others across Occupied Europe. By the war’s end, only about 25 percent are thought to have remained alive.39 49

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Transport

Ghetto dwellers were told they were being relocated to worksites in the East, though many found it strange that the first train loads out consisted of little children, the elderly, the handicapped, and others ill-fit for factory work. Everyone was brutally forced into sealed cattle cars that lacked food or water for trips of many days’ duration, and the cars had twice the number of people they could reasonably hold. This inhuman situation broke the spirit of many who, as did Ruth Kluger, felt “abandoned in the sense of discarded, separated, trashed, and tossed in an old crate.”40 Carers tried to both relieve suffering and demonstrate what cooperation could achieve, for example, Moshe and Elie Garbarz remembered that, “with 80 of us to a car, there wasn’t enough room for everyone to sit on the floor at once. Fortunately, we were all friends, and we took turns resting . . . A few of my companions had some apples, which we shared, a sliver each . . . The air in the car became scarce and was filled with a nauseating smell. We rotated the groups in front of the vents.”41 Zoltin Zinn-Collis found himself in a cattle car in which a woman Carer unexpectedly took charge: “After battling with all the different languages, she managed to divide the occupants into four sections, with one quarter sitting down at a time.”42 Irving Roth, fourteen years old at the time, recalled that on transport to Buchenwald everyone took turns sitting. Likewise, “as the one waste bucket filled up it was passed to our part of the car and we poured it out the hole Grandpa had made.”43 On one transport 120 Hungarian Jews were packed in a rail car that would have been crowded with 60, but they nevertheless “decided to deal with the situation in a civilized manner. And from our luggage we built seats, and then we sat down very close, back-to-back, with very tightly pulled up knees.” Over the next three days, however, the heat, stench, and collapse of the elderly and ill undid nearly everything the Carers had sought to preserve, and a downward emotional spiral developed its own momentum. “People went into hysterics, people went mad, people had heart attacks, and people died.”44 Tally

At the war’s start in 1939 two-thirds of the world’s Jews lived in Europe. By the war’s end, two out of three European Jews—over six million— had died. The greatest toll was felt in Eastern Europe where 75 percent of European Jews lived.45 “Though one-third of them managed to survive, though the Jewish people and Judaism outlived the Third Reich, 50

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the Germans nevertheless succeeded in irrecoverably destroying the life and culture of East European Jewry.”46 Poland lost 90 percent of its 3,300,000 Jews.47 Out of about twentyseven thousand Polish Jews in the Lodz Ghetto, only about ten thousand survived to liberation.48 Out of about 150,000 in the Lvov Ghetto, only 184 are known to have survived. Out of about fifty-five thousand Jewish residents in Krakow, one of the oldest such communities in Europe, only about fifteen thousand survived.49 Out of thirty-five thousand Jews in the Kovno Ghetto, hardly any survived.50 Out of about thirty thousand in the Lublin Ghetto, none are thought to have survived.51 Conclusion

Between the war’s start in 1939 and the transport in 1942 of ghetto Jews to the camps, European Jewry experienced unprecedented Horror Story excesses, and yet also Help Story stealth altruism. Motivated in large part by the Altruistic Impulse and Judaic Altruistic tenets, Carers engaged in an unremitting struggle to secretly aid others, first under bizarre Nazi occupation conditions and later in surreal ghettos and inhuman transport. Historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz would have us understand that Jews “brought decency and fraternal solidarity to the ghetto. The traits of national character and the values that Jewish culture had fashioned stood many of the Jews in the ghetto in good stead.”52 Professor Joseph Rudavsky concludes, “there was hardly a ghetto in which men, women, and children did not add their own acts of Kiddush Ha Hayyim [obligation to promote life] to the composite image of Jewish pride and dignity [albeit] this aspect of the story is all too often obscured and lost.”53 Notes

The epigraph is from Adelson, Adam and Robert Lapides, eds. 1989. Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, p. xxi. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Berg, Mary. 1945. The Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, p. 66. As cited in Patterson, David. 1999. Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary, p. 66. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1986 ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. Op. Cit., p. xxxviii. See also Deak, Istvan. September 28, 1989. “The Incomprehensible Holocaust.” The New York Review, p. 65. Gutman, Israel. 1994. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, p. 48. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1986 ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, p. xxxviii. See also Hoffman, Allison. April 10, 2013. “The Curator of Joy and Ashes.” www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/128885/poland-new-Jewish -museum. 51

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5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

52

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1986 ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. Op. Cit., p. xxxviii. See also Smale, Alison. January 28, 2014. “Shedding Light on a Vast Toll of Jews Killed Away from Death Camps.” New York Times, p. A-10. Sendyk, Helen. 2000 ed. The End of Days, p. 140. See also Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1986 ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, p xxxviii. Out of Warsaw’s 1.4 million inhabitants, some 350,000 could pray in Yiddish; Deak, Istvan. September 28, 1989. “The Incomprehensible Holocaust.” The New York Review, p. 65. Nazi barbarism notwithstanding, aspects of the vanquished Shtetls have survived, honored in spirit and practice both in and outside of Israel. The situation grew worse after June 22, 1941, when the Third Reich launched against Russia the biggest and bloodiest invasion of all times, one that made Hitler’s reign seem invincible. Invasion statistics (two million German soldiers, ten thousand tanks, and thirty-two hundred planes) are cited without attribution in Moorehead, Caroline. 2011. A Train in Winter, p. 55. The German troops were aided by Croatian, Finish, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, and Spanish soldiers. Snyder, Timothy. June 21, 2012. “Stalin & Hitler: Mass Murder by Starvation.” The New York Review of Books, p. 51. Lewis, Helen. 1992. A Time to Speak, p. 27. Popescu, Petru. 2001. The Oasis: A Memory of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp, p. 230. See also Morrison, Jack G. 2000. Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–1945, p. 69. For some considerable time Lantos delivered goods to Jews in “safe” houses protected by Raoul Wallenberg, a heroic, selfless, and ill-fated Swedish diplomat. He and others also spread word of current developments in the war (there were forbidden wireless sets in the major ghettos). Mr. Lantos was the first and only Holocaust survivor to serve in the US House of Representatives, 1980–2008. See U.S. Government Printing Office. 2008. Tom Lantos, Late a Representative from California: Memorial Addresses and Other Tributes. Lantos lost his entire family in the Holocaust. While European Jewry had known this type of “prison” since Venice of 1516 and had endured it on and off for centuries thereafter, it had long since fallen into disuse. Lichtblau, Eric. March 3, 2013. “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking.” New York Times, p. SR-3; see also [email protected]; “Jewdayo,” April 10, 2011. See also Laqueur, Walter. 1998 ed. (1981). The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution,” p. 253. Salton, George Lucius. 2002. The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir, pp. 90–91. Roskies, David G. 1984. Against the Apocalypse, p. 196. As cited in Rotschild, Steve. 2014. Traces of What Was, p. 31. Katsh, Abraham I., ed. 1999 ed. Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (translated by Abraham I. Katch). Ibid., p. 48; see also Gutman, Yisrael. 1994. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Op. Cit., p. 95. When possible, the soup kitchens also provided fuel and coal, both of which were needed during frigid Polish winters. Katsh, Abraham I., ed. 1999 ed. Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (translated by Abraham I. Katch). Ibid., p. 48. See also Bauman, Janima. 1986. Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond, 1939–1945.

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19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

Katsh, Abraham I., ed. 1999 ed. Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (translated by Abraham I. Katsh). Op. Cit., p. 48. Everywhere ingenuity boosted illegal care-providing innovation, for example, “barley was ground by the most primitive methods, and in bakeries they made bread from smuggled wheat. . . . To replace electricity and gas, skilled artisans devised [short duration] carbide lamps. . . . Chemists contrived saccharine out of the remnants of vegetables.” Diarist Chaim A. Kaplan, as cited in Gutman, Israel.1994. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Op. Cit., p. 63. See also Stefen, Ernest, in Grynberg, Michal, ed. 2002. Words to Outlive Us: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 93–94; Katsh, Abraham, ed. Scroll of Agony. Op. Cit., p. 174. See in this connection, Dean, Martin. April, 2014. “Strategies for Jewish Survival in Ghettos and Forced Labor Camps.” Paper prepared for a 2014 Holocaust Conference at Millersville University, PA. (Applied Research Scholar, The Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM; [email protected]). The Lodz Ghetto placed small schools in separate rooms in factories and registered the youngsters falsely with the Gestapo as employed workers. Gutman, Yisrael. 1994. Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Op. Cit., p. 95. See also Bauman, Janima. 1986. Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond, 1939–1945; Lewin, Abraham. 1989 ed. A Cup of Tea: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Edited by Anthony Polonsky (translation by Christopher Hutton), p. 22. Zapruder, Alexandra, ed. 2004 ed. (2002). Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. Op. Cit., p. 217. Stefen, Ernest, in Grynberg, Michal, ed. 2002. Words to Outlive Us: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 93–94; Katsh, Abraham, ed., Scroll of Agony. Op. Cit., p. 174. “The ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’ became the ‘Jerusalem of the Ghettos.’” Suhl, Yari, ed. They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe., p.149 Katsh, Abraham I., ed. 1999 ed. Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan. (translated by Abraham I. Katsh), p. 22. Goetz, Samuel. 2001. I Never Saw My Face, p. 12. As cited in Kirsch, Adam. December 1, 2013. “Bookends.” New York Times Book Review. p. 30. See Arendt, Hannah. 1994 ed. (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Also Brody, Richard. December 4, 2013. “Hannah Arendt’s Failures of Imagination.” html://www.newyorker.com /online/blogs/books/2013/12/hannah-arendt-failures-of-imagination-html. After they had helped round up hidden Jews as the ghetto was being destroyed, the Jewish police and Gestapo informers were often murdered by the SS. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1986 ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. Op. Cit., p. 348. Palmer, Parker J. “Foreword.” In Elkes, Joel, ed. 1999. Dr. Elkhanan Elkes of the Kovno Ghetto: A Son’s Holocaust Memoir. Op. Cit., p. xi. Similarly, historian Nora Levin concludes the Judenrat “worked against impossible odds. All of the projects undertaken in good faith . . . were perverted by the Nazis into mechanisms of gross suffering and eventual destruction.” Levin, Nora. 1968. The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945, pp. 214–15. 53

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30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

54

Winstone, Martin. 2010. The Holocaust Sites of Europe: An Historical Guide, p. 362. See in this connection, Dean, Martin. April, 2014. “Strategies for Jewish Survival in Ghettos and Forced Labor Camps.” Paper prepared for a 2014 Holocaust Conference at Millersville University, PA. (Applied Research Scholar, The Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM; [email protected]). Arad, Yitzhak. 1993. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1999. Problems Unique to the Holocaust, p. 44. Note also—“As a former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin once famously said, ‘You don’t make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.’” Michael Traison, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, January 17, 2013, p. A-20. Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (translated by Weiter Leben), p. 78. “ . . . at least we had somewhere to turn when needed . . . you could buy your life if you knew the right people.” Sermer, Zuzana. 2012. Survival Kit, p. 7. In the Warsaw Ghetto, young activists insisted Judenrat leaders should have detected Nazi genocidal intent early on, warned the masses, and secretly developed escape routes to enable the young and able to get away and join forest partisans. See Browning, Christopher R. 1998. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; Browning, Christopher R. 2004. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March, 1942, p. 229; Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Shavit, Ari. 2013. My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, p. 83 Within six weeks the first gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau began to murder European Jews. Eight of the fifteen Third Reich power -holders who attended the Wannsee Conference had doctorate degrees. Sacks, Sam. September 27–28, 2014. “Love at Auschwitz.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-8 [Book Review: The Zone of Interest, by Martin Amis], p. C-8. Rumors were heard in whispers of Jews being gassed in sealed vans, of public hangings and shootings, and of unwarranted mass murder by atrocious new means. Nazi leadership was sorely troubled by Jewish partisan sabotage of rail lines and deadly guerrilla raids on German outposts, all of which tied down thousands of German troops needed on the Eastern Front. See Syrkin, Marie. 1947. Blessed in the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance. Acts of revenge occurred (including shootings of Nazis, punishment of Jewish collaborators, dissemination of anti-Nazi print material, the spreading of hope-raising news, and the sabotage of war material). Deak, Istvan. September 28, 1989. “The Incomprehensible Holocaust.” The New York Review, p. 64. The 25 percent figure is from Kaplan, Marion A. 1998. Between Dignity and Despair. Op. Cit., p. 203. Some 1,321 German Jews survived in deep hiding in Berlin, albeit the Third Reich declared the city Judenfrei in 1942. Wyden, Peter. 1992. Stella, p. 236. Staffers in the Judenrat Registration Office dared such acts of stealth altruism as falsifying or even destroying registration cards to help ensure the safety of those bold enough to go into hiding outside the ghetto.

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40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (translated by Weiter Leben). Op. Cit., p. 92. The crowding was so horrendous a survivor later admitted “we strangled the near dead so as to have more room on the train.” As cited in Seaman, David. August 23, 2013. “As Important as The Diary of Anne Frank and More.” http://www.amazon.com/ss /customer-reviews/0385537700/ [Book Review: Glaser, Paul. 2013 ed. (2010). Dancing with the Enemy: My Family’s Holocaust Secret (translated by Brian Doyle-DuBreuil). See also Heimler, Eugene. 1997 (1959). Night of the Midst, pp. 21–30. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992 ed. A Survivor (translated by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), p. 51. Efforts were made by both the Jewish underground and sympathetic Jews to help those being sent to the death camps, for example, in the unoccupied part of France, in 1942 “a Jewish underground group served some hot soup to all of us passengers. . . . [Later, during transport between transit camps] the Jewish population [of a nearby town] brought us some food and drink.” Salomon, Hans. 1989. A Personal Story of the Holocaust Years, 1940–1942, pp. 2, 15. As cited in Doorly, Mary Rose. 1994. Hidden Memories: The Personal Recollections of Survivors and Witnesses to the Holocaust Living in Ireland, p. 26. Roth, Irving and Edward. 2004. Bondi’s Brother, pp. 49, 50. Levi, Gertrude “Trude,” cited in Smith, Lyn. 2005. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust: A New History from the Men and Women Who Survived, pp. 212, 53. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1976 Ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, p. xxxviii. Ibid., p. xxxvi. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1976 ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. Op. Cit., p. 403. Shavit, Avi. 2013. My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. Op. Cit., p. 395. See also Hilberg, Raul. 2003 ed. The Destruction of the European Jew, pp. 1118, 1301. No interest was shown as in times past in achieving forced conversion or emigration; annihilation was the sole goal. See in this connection, Skakun, Michael. 1999. On Burning Ground: A Son’s Memoir, p. 45. The Lodz statistics are from Deak, Istvan. September 28, 1989. “The Incomprehensible Holocaust.” The New York Review, p. 68. See also Roy, Jennifer. 2006. Yellow Star; back cover, for much lower numbers. Other such Lodz data are in Eichengreen, Lucille, with Harriet Hyman Chamberlain. 1994. From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust, p. 48. Laskier, Rutka. 2008 ed. (1943). Rutka’s Notebook: A Voice from the Holocaust, p.v. 51. See also Smale, Alison. January 28, 2014. “Shedding Light on a Vast Toll of Jews Killed Away from Death Camps.” New York Times, p. A-10. 54. The Lvov statistics are from Wells, Leon W. 1978 ed. (1963). The Death Brigade, p. 252. The Krakow data are from a novel-like “memoir” by Ligocka, Roma (with Iris von Finckenstein). 2003 ed. (2002). The Girl in the Red Coat (translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo), p. 28. The Kovno data are from Elkes, Joel, ed. 1999. Dr. Elkhanan Elkes of the Kovno Ghetto: A Son’s Holocaust Memoir, p. 88. By the war’s end only three hundred thousand Polish Jews were alive, and by 2014 there were fewer 55

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51.

52.

53.

56

than thirty thousand in the country, albeit the community being slowly growing. Gera, Vanessa. October 28, 2014. “Sharing Rich Story of Jewish Life in Poland.” The Press Democrat, p. A-2. The Krakow and Lubin data are from Winer, Stuart. September 3, 2015. “School Timetable Offers Glimpse into Jewish Life in Krakow Ghetto.” www.timesofisrael.com/school-timetable-offers-glimpse-into-jewish-life -in-krakow-ghetto/?utm_source. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1976 Ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. Op. Cit., p. 347. See in this connection, Frend, Sophie. 1999. “Hilde O. Bluhm.” American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 53, p. 125. Bluhm studied twelve books about prisoners written between 1935 and 1947. Prof. Yehuda Bauer notes, “Almost everywhere there was corruption, collaboration with the murderers, and a decline in societal and personal norms that affected considerable parts of the Jewish population.” Bauer, Yehuda. 2009. The Death of the Shtetl, p. 7. Rudavsky, Joseph. 1987. To Live with Hope, To Die with Dignity, pp. 7, 30.

Part III Unearthly “Planets” The Lager [camp] was a universe; it taught us to look around and measure man. —Primo Levi

Among the first of Holocaust survivors to try to explain to utterly puzzled Americans what Jewish prisoners had endured was Dr. Gisella Perl, who had survived seven years in Auschwitz as a captive assistant to the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele, one of several camp doctors. These men assessed newly arriving prisoners and pointed each to a line which either went directly to the gas chamber—often 90 percent of the new arrivals—or a line which led to attenuated death from exposure, starvation, and hard labor in a slave labor camp. In 1946 Dr. Perl was challenged at a US Immigration Hearing to defend her assistant’s role and thereby justify her pending admission to the United States, as some bitter ex-prisoners had accused her of venal collaboration. To the astonishment of her listeners Dr. Perl told in terrifying detail the Auschwitz Horror Story, a dark apex of soulless technology. Detecting growing incredulity, she asked all to try to understand that “Auschwitz was another planet,” a phantasmagoric place unlike any with which outsiders were familiar—or might even be capable of imagining.1 Syzmon Laks recalls that his arrival at Auschwitz “plunged [him] into a lethargic stupor, and yet, at the same time, I felt as though I had been shot from a catapult to another planet.”2 When fourteen-yearold Samuel Goetz first arrived at the Plaszow Camp he found himself asking, “Was this another planet—the Nazi New World?”3 Similarly, when nineteen-year-old Felix Opatowski arrived at Auschwitz he was “already a veteran of camps and misery, but this was something entirely different. This was as if I was on another planet.”4 Thirteen-year-old

57

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John Freund, on arrival at the same camp, thought “it seemed like another planet.”5 Chapter 5 provides an overview of Horror and Help in four major types of camps—transit camps, death camps, concentration camps, and slave labor camps—each posing previously unbelievable peril. The last three types had a malevolent culture where expectations and conventions “were perverted at every step, victims were inscribed in the books and ledgers of death, and women, children, and elderly were murdered first.”6 Willie Sterner remembers the Gusen Concentration Camp “looked like a big cemetery . . . dirt, brutality, hunger, disease, lice, overwork, and the constant threat of mass murder.”7 Prisoners there had a survival expectancy of four to six months.8 On his second day at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, Moshe Garbarz found himself part of a two-hour-long outdoor exercise in whipping off one’s cap and then putting it back on one’s head “in such a way that a thousand caps would smack a thousand thighs in unison, with a single sound.” To his horror, before the end of the “lesson” five men around him were shot and killed, “guilty of missing the cadence by a fraction of a second.”9 Chapter 6 considers key deterrents to the undertaking of acts of stealth altruism. Three originated with the Nazis: starvation unto death, relentless terror, and debilitating uncertainty. Three other deterrents originated with Jewish prisoners: intergroup divisiveness, damaged self-esteem, and defensive callousness. All six drew malevolent strength from one another and, in combination, made forbidden caring exceedingly difficult to plan, implement, and expand. In like manner, chapter 7 looks at six menacing types of Jewish prisoners—collaborators, criminals, independents, informers, Muselmänner (the “walking dead”), and thieves. Their attitudes and behavior aided and abetted Nazi goals at considerable cost to fellow Jews. While there could be mitigating circumstances, the part played throughout the Holocaust by the menaces remains a damning one. Part III closes with the profile of a transit camp known as Theresienstadt, one whose complex story makes clear what creative Carers could accomplish if the SS granted latitude, albeit for their own perverse public relations purposes. Between 1933 and 1945 a network of over forty thousand camps blighted Europe’s countryside.10 By the war’s end a researcher contends, “you literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into 58

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forced labor camps, P/O/W camps, concentration camps. They were everywhere.”11 Each was devoted to the elimination of Jews, and this “was not a peripheral struggle undertaken by Nazi thugs . . . It was core Nazi ideology, a mission Nazism took upon itself as a sacred duty from its very beginnings.”12 All the resources of the Third Reich were to see to it that world Jewry vanished, as only then could a new Nazi civilization dominate the planet for the next thousand years, a geopolitical genocide strategy with no precedent in human history.13 George Mulisch, who was held in Auschwitz, would have us understand that “we can learn nothing about Auschwitz by calling it hell. But should we want to find out about hell, then Auschwitz is the place to study.”14 That in such hellish “planets” some Jewish prisoners risked all to provide forbidden care for one another, is remarkable . . . and worthy of the highest possible regard. Notes

The epigraph is from Levi, Primo. 1988 ed. The Drowned and the Saved (translated by Raymond Rosenthal), p. x. 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Perl, Dr. Gisella. 1948. I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, pp. 6, 124. Her testimony included an account of clandestine after-dark abortions performed in the barracks to help keep at least the expectant mother alive. See also a 2003 Showtime Cable TV film, Out of the Ashes, which details Dr. Perl’s efforts to stay human herself and save lives. Laks, Syzmon. 1989 ed. Music of Another World, p. 21. Goetz, Samuel. 2001. I Never Saw My Face, p. 53. Opatowski, Felix. 2012. Gatehouse to Hell, p. 45. Freund, John. 2014. Spring’s End, p. xix. Donat, Alexander. 1964. The Holocaust Kingdom, p. 95. Sterner, Willie. 2012. The Shadow Behind Me, p. 84. Ibid., pp. 84–85. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992. A Survivor (translated by Jean-Jacques Garbarz). Ibid., p. 63. Lichtblau, Eric. March 1, 2013. “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking.” New York Times, p. SR-3. Martin Dean, USHMM researcher, as quoted in Lichtblau, Eric. March 3, 2013. “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking.” New York Times, Op. Cit., p. SR-3. Wisse, Ruth, Winter, 2001. “The Brilliant Failure of Jewish Foreign Policy.” Azure. http://tikvahfund.org/uncategorized/the-brilliant-failure-of-jewish-foreign -policy. Three other overarching goals were resounding defeat of the Allies, the eradication of Bolshevism (seen as part of a Jewish world conspiracy directed from Moscow), and permanent enslavement of “inferior races” (Poles, Slavs, etc.). Potok, Chaim, “Foreword,” in Volavkova, Hana, ed. 1993 ed. . . . I Never Saw Another Butterfly, p. x11. Operational details were formalized by German bureaucratic leaders and the military at the January, 1942, Wannsee Conference. 59

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13.

14.

60

As cited in Bullock, Alan. 1964. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, p. 365. See also Heinrich Himmler, as cited in Ringelheim, Joan. 1998. “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust.” In Ofer, Dalia and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds. 1998. Women in the Holocaust, p. 345. Mulisch, George. Cited in Waterford, Helen. 1987. Commitment to the Dead: One Woman’s Journey to Understanding, p. 136.

5 Nazi Camps I don’t have to remind you of all the ways there were to die in Birkenau, every one of them atrocious. —Charlotte Delbo

Introduction

Longtime male prisoners on the train platform at the AuschwitzBirkenau Death Camp were kept busy by the SS working to toss out bodies and gathering up luggage left behind in newly arrived transport cattle cars. Working under close supervision they were forbidden at pain of death from having any communication with the utterly confused, exhausted, and starving Jewish victims tumbling out of the cars. In spite of the SS death threat, many of the workers regularly undertook a high-risk act of stealth altruism that had them whisper life-saving advice to complete strangers who did not expect and had not requested it. Teenagers heard whispers that strongly advised them to say they were sixteen or over and worked at a trade when the SS asked them a few minutes later about their age and skills. Adults were urged to say they were forty or under and had worked in a manual trade, for example, bricklayer, carpenter, driver, and tailor. No adults were to admit they were an educated professional, such as accountant, lawyer, or teacher, as the SS hated Jews who had such backgrounds. Elie Wiesel remembers his father and him getting such life-saving advice from platform workers who had nothing to gain from taking the risk.1 Camp Profile

With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Third Reich opened its first concentration camp (Dachau), and by the year’s end it was operating scores of them.2 Although locations are still being unearthed, as of 2015 the count across twenty-four occupied countries included six death 61

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camps, hundreds of transit camps, twenty-seven major concentration camps with close to a thousand sub-camps, and as many as forty thousand slave labor camps.3 Between 1933 and the liberation in late 1945 of the last operating camp (Stutthof ), the Third Reich imprisoned between ten and twelve million men and women, some three million of whom were Jews.4 It is estimated that only 10 percent of the Jewish prisoners survived.5 Every familiar social norm was turned upside down and prisoners “entered a world that defied logic, in which cause and effect bore no relation to each other, and where one crossed the line between death and life without knowing why.”6 In this disorienting world, “inhumanity was routine, barbarity the norm.”7 Jewish prisoners had no right to expect there would be any logical reason for their treatment, better yet a good one: “The SS guard or officer does not need a reason for beating you. The fact you are in [his or her camp] is reason enough.”8 There was no appeal from inconsistency, injustice, or unfairness. Jewish prisoners were entitled to nothing in the way of sustenance, shelter, or the humane like. As subhumans they had none of the entitlements once taken for granted. Mass assemblies (Appells) held twice each day could require standing outside in all types of weather for hours on end, while SS guards prowled to harshly punish such infractions as poor posture. Arbitrary and capricious murder of prisoners during Appell was unremarkable. Physical violence was pervasive; attacks from savage guard dogs, kicks to the groin, and skull-cracking clouts were an everyday occurrence. “When an officer wants to hang you from a tree limb by your wrists for an hour because he happens not to like your nose, you hang from a tree.”9 Every aspect of a prisoner could be exploited, for example, when the German army needed blood for battlefront transfusions, Jewish women were forced to serve as donors, regardless of their ideological status as untermenschen, as subhumans. Ari Rubin recalls she was “drained of as much blood as could be taken . . . I could hardly stand up when it was done.”10 Finally, Jewish and Gentile prisoners were treated quite differently, for example, in 1945 American military liberators noted that barracks in Auschwitz for non-Jewish political prisoners contained “relatively fed men housed in solidly built accommodations.” In contrast, the Jewish 62

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part of the camp was a “nightmare with intolerable and indescribable conditions.”11 Transit Camps

Under Nazi military occupation, Jewish citizens were commonly forced to swiftly pack a small bag and move from their homes into hastily built transit camps.12 At any time thereafter they could be sent in cattle cars to an unknown destination, one they were assured was a distant work site where survival was possible. In fact the transport almost always went to a death camp. To help pacify bewildered and frightened arrivals at a transit camp, the SS let the camps be ostensibly run by (cowed) local officials or even by a (cowed) Jewish administrative body. Residents could sometimes live in family units, dress in their own clothing, and possibly even get mail and “care” packages from relatives and Gentile friends, although most packages were first pilfered by camp officers. Living conditions were generally dismal. Barracks were either too hot or too cold. Food was insufficient and unpredictable in supply and quality. Bedbugs, fleas, lice, mice, rats, roaches, and other vermin were common. Overcrowding squeezed more and more people into less and less space. People of fragile health, such as children and the elderly, suffered greatly and died in large numbers from despair compounded by disease, malnutrition, or medical neglect. Armed guards in watchtowers, barbed wire fences, and large spotlights troubled all. Hard and distasteful work was especially taxing. Eva Ginzova, a fourteen-year-old girl held at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, wrote in her diary on January 16, 1945, that she “had been doing recycling the past two days. It’s an awful job, something completely inhuman. You stand outside in freezing temperatures for ten hours, picking tin plate and black plate from a pile of scrap metal and then sort it. I was frozen. I thought I’d go mad . . . we had a very nasty group leader [Jewish Kapo] who kept pushing us to work harder. He warmed himself in his shed and let us freeze.”13 Prisoners lived in a state of confusion or denial.14 Ruth Kluger recalled that in Theresienstadt “We sat in a trap with no hope except for the military defeat of Germany, afraid of the next transport [to somewhere unknown], unprotected by any civilized law.”15 Few camp dwellers believed terrifying (yet accurate) rumors that their transit camp was an antechamber to a death camp and the gas chambers. 63

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In transit camps (and only in such places) the Third Reich allowed Carers to openly help fellow prisoners. At Beaune-la-Rolande in France, for example, prisoners organized a formal committee to press for better food, more mail privileges, and greater respect for Orthodox prisoners and their religious practices. The committee succeeded in securing a little extra food for infants, the enfeebled, the sick, and the elderly. It also sponsored an art show, a choir, a drama club, a sewing workshop, and other such activities. Lectures were given on current events, and classes were taught, as in French, history, geography, and Yiddish.16 At Westerbork in the Netherlands, former teachers ran informal schools for youngsters of all ages. Denied educational supplies, they cobbled together ersatz schoolbooks and notepads made out of scrap material. Observant Jews ran a school where Hebrew and math were taught, and the Sabbath was marked with song.17 Before about four hundred youngsters a week were sent off from the transit camp in (fatal) transport to a death camp, “each child was given a report card and earnestly instructed not to lose it and to give it to the teacher in the next camp.”18 The only dangerous and outlawed type of stealth altruism the Carers provided involved aiding efforts to escape, a “crime” the SS punished quite severely. Despite the risk, Carers facilitated over 377 successful escapes from Beaune-la-Rolande and 40 from Drancy, also in France.19 Nearly six hundred children were smuggled out of Rivesaltes in France by an outside Jewish charity organization that had Carer assistance. Initially hidden in homes run by the charity, the youngsters were later successfully placed among Catholic clergy and foster parents.20 In Amsterdam the Dutch resistance succeeded with the help of inside Carers in smuggling out of a city-based transit center several hundred small children hidden in crates and potato sacks.21 Similarly, many children in Westerbork were first sedated by Carers, then strapped under trains that ran a loop between the camp and Amsterdam. On arrival in the city other Carers carefully and stealthily took the drugged children from beneath the trains, revived them, and hid them in Dutch homes throughout the war.22 Murder remained the endgame: Convoy 28, for example, left Drancy in France on September 4, 1942, with a thousand Jews who had been told they were being relocated to a distant work site. Instead, 946 of them were sent to the gas shortly after arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau; 54 were selected to die a slower death from slave labor.23 Between 1942 and 1945, Westerbork sent 103,000 Jewish prisoners away on 103 cattle 64

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car trains, 69 trains to the Auschwitz Death Camp, 19 to the Sobibor Death Camp, 9 to the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, and 6 to Theresienstadt.24 Only about 5,000 of Westerbork’s 103,000 Jewish victims were alive at the war’s end.25 Death Camps

Standing apart in infamy for all time were six death camps developed solely for systematic “processing”—the official Nazi term for assembly-line murder—of European Jews: Auschwitz-Birkenau (the gas chambers were concentrated in a separate section called Birkenau), Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. As Primo Levi noted, “at no other place or time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex; never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty.”26 A scholar estimates that the average life expectancy of someone who lived past the first day in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the death camps, was between six and seven weeks; perhaps 1 percent of all those sent there survived to liberation.27 From the opening of the first death camp (Chelmno) on December 8, 1941, through to the war’s end in 1945, these industrial-like killing centers accounted for about 60 percent of the deaths of an estimated six million or more European Jews.28 Over one million non-Jews, including clergy, Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, Russian POWS, Socialists, and other “undesirables” were murdered in camp gas chambers.29 Five months before the war’s end, during just one six-week period (December 1 to January 15, 1945), cargo trains took to Germany from Auschwitz-Birkenau nearly 222,269 sets of men’s suits and underclothes, 192,652 sets of women’s clothing, and 99,922 sets of children’s clothing . . . all of which had been packaged by Jewish slave laborers.30 Historian Raul Hilberg would have us understand “the most striking fact about the killing center operations is that, unlike the earlier phases of the destruction process, they were unprecedented. Never before in history had people been killed on an assembly-line basis.”31 In all, the lives of almost four million European Jews were stolen in the death camps.32 Arguably, the second most striking fact is that some new arrivals resisted, contrary to the image of Jewish victims going like “sheep to the slaughter.” Resistors had to be beaten, terrorized, and even viciously whipped as they struggled against being forced at gunpoint into the gas chamber.33 65

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Concentration Camps

The 10 percent or so of new arrivals spared at a death camp for slave labor were initially sent to one of the more than nine hundred widely scattered concentration camps.34 The war left German employers desperately short of manual labor and the main function of these nine hundred-plus camps was to provide cheap and readily replaceable workers to slave labor camps. This required turning new prisoners into pliable productive workers, at least until starvation and mistreatment left them unproductive, at which time they would be sent to the gas.35 A scholar has concluded that “poor nutrition, appalling sanitary conditions, iron discipline, the humiliation of prisoners, and the imposition of unspeakable brutal corporal and other punishments for even the slightest transgression—all made the concentration camp ‘educational system’ into a hell with few parallels in the history of humankind.”36 Little wonder, then, that a Jewish Kapo (prisoner “foreman”) told new prisoners, “Here you will work hard and receive little food. If you behave well, you will last for three or four months. And if not, you’ll die within a few days.”37 Hadassah Rosensaft spent over fifteen months as a doctor in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp. She wrote in her memoir that “it was a time of humiliation, torture, starvation, disease, fear, hopelessness, and despair, a time when Nazi brutality and sadism reached their height . . . the truth was always worse than anything one could imagine.”38 (See her profile elsewhere in the book.) Such Horrors notwithstanding, the concentration camps had extensive Help Story mechanisms. Carers, for example, secretly taught newcomers how to navigate chaos, how to employ cunning and guile, and how best to adjust. Rena Gelissen recalls that “you had to have a brain to figure out all that is going on, the tricks to being camp smart: where it’s the warmest, who’s the most dangerous, who doles out a bit more soup. The new arrivals barely have time to figure out how to survive before they die.”39 All the more valuable, therefore, was the willingness of some Carers to dare to teach prisoners to avoid eye contact with the SS, as this invited a severe beating; to warm their toes and fingers with their own urine after standing outside for hours on end; to scrounge for edible potato peels outside the windows of the SS kitchen, but keep a careful eye out for watchtower snipers; to eat charcoal whenever possible, as it was good for the gut; to alleviate thirst by sucking on a small stone. 66

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New arrivals were taught to guard one’s shoes with one’s life. “Organize” (steal) sellable stuff like cloth, food, and string. “Buy” an indoor work assignment with a massive bribe of one’s cigarettes (as provided by the SS while the Third Reich was winning). Avoid the infirmary, since frequent “selections” there had the SS identify wane-looking prisoners thought unproductive and send them to the gas chamber. Above all, earn acceptance in a small friendship group whose tight-knit members could aid one another make it through to liberation. Prisoners quick to learn and make it through “the first three months—and all the more so who were still alive after the first year— had an above average chance of surviving their incarceration.”40 Little wonder then that Primo Levi salutes the memory of Chaim, a watchmaker from Cracow: Chaim was “a pious [Polish] Jew who despite the language difficulties . . . explained to me, the [Italian] foreigner, the essential rules for survival during the first crucial days of captivity.”41 Slave Labor Camps

In the forty thousand or so slave labor camps situated near major employment sites (coal and salt mines, factories, large-scale farms, etc.), the Third Reich drew immense profit for its SS managers from the billions of marks collected in appropriated “wages.” Most of these were sub-camps of major concentration camps operated by the SS, for example, Buchenwald 130 sub-camps; Dachau 123; Stutthof 105; Auschwitz 45.42 All of them offered “far and away the cheapest alternative [source of human labor] for private industry,” which was quick to take advantage of the immoral opportunity.43 Starving prisoners worked in all kinds of weather to plant and harvest crops. Or assist in fish and poultry breeding plants. Or work deep underground in inhuman conditions in coal or salt mines.44 A majority labored in war-related factories making ammunition or army uniforms, or helping to manufacture Luftwaffe airplanes, Panzer tanks, heavy guns, or V1 and V2 “buzz” bombs.45 By the end of 1944 over five hundred thousand prisoners, most of them European Jews, were being leased to large German companies. “There was hardly a single [German] town without its own satellite camp.”46 Since prisoners came into contact with the nearby civilian population, it was necessary to keep them looking more alive than not. Accordingly, some slave labor camps had showers, provided shoes and clothing taken from murdered Jews in nearby death camps, and, so long 67

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as Germany was still winning the war, offered a bit more food than was common in other types of camp. The presence of a small minority of Gentile slave laborers, including POWs, was also welcomed by Jewish prisoners since German guards “did not randomly shoot and kill the Gentile prisoners as they routinely did Jews in other camps.”47 Because Jewish slave laborers were rental “property,” civilian foremen were officially not allowed to beat or punish them; only their SS “owners” had that right. Unofficially, however, the rule was widely ignored and no prisoner dared complain. As the supply of replacement prisoners was great, little effort was made to keep slave laborers from slowly dying of exhaustion, exposure to poisons, or workplace accidents . . . preferably, however, out of sight of nearby citizen coworkers.48 Acts of stealth altruism took many different forms, for example, on hearing a despondent, freezing friend whisper that she could no longer go on with excruciating outdoor labor and wanted to give it all up, a fellow prisoner stealthily moved over to do the ditch digging in the frozen ground for both of them, an exhausting deed that could have cost them their lives had it been detected. When later a hovering SS guard wandered elsewhere, the same Carer reached over, tightly embraced her despondent friend, and encouraged her to cry her heart out, this a long overdue catharsis that helped them both resolve to hang on longer.49 Going to Extremes

After 1942 when the war turned against the Third Reich a murderous new doctrine became the arch operating principle, “annihilation through labor.” At the Gusen Camp, for example, Rabbi Yechezkel Harfenes recalls that “we arrived fresh, strong, and full of energy. After two months we were mere wrung rags, hunched over creatures dragging legs swollen from malnutrition. We were literally skin and bones.”50 At the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Moshe and Elie Garbarz remember that, “in the space of a few weeks, with the exception of a handful, a thousand dead would be replaced by another thousand.”51 Many complicit German power-holders (corporate, military, scientific, etc.) were indicted at the end of the war and some few served light prison sentences, soon reduced. A scholar maintains of many such individuals that “each made the decision not just to take part, but to contribute initiatives in order to solve the problem of how to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies on a scale never attempted before.”52 Eleven camps in Germany were operated by Todt, a private German civil and military engineering company. “Witnesses noted prisoners dropped 68

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and died with extraordinary speed . . . [the company] proved itself to be just as brutal as the SS in mistreatment of [12,000] prisoners.”53 Not surprisingly then, slave labor camps had “a higher death rate than even the concentration camps themselves.”54 Other than rare acts of support from risk-taking Gentile coworkers (see chapter 13), “and the sharing that inmates could—and often did—provide each other, death was the only release.”55 Conclusion

Henry Orenstein, on being transferred from a concentration camp to a slave labor camp, recalls his shock on seeing Jewish prisoners in such poor condition: “Emaciated, with hollow eyes; their hands were covered with scabs. They didn’t walk; they shuffled. They had a look of degradation, stupor, and despair.”56 Henia Reinhartz recalls in her 2007 memoir that on liberation on April 15, 1945, of her camp “we had no strength to rejoice. Someone slowly opened the bolted door [to our barrack]. Standing there were British soldiers, tears streaming from their eyes, overwhelmed by what they saw in Bergen-Belsen.”57 Allied liberators report being troubled forever after by camp images “even the medieval Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch could not have imagined.”58 No surprise then that, as expressed in a New Yorker article of April 6, 2015, “the Nazi concentration camp stands as the ultimate symbol of evil.”59 It is time, however, to reevaluate this analogy. There was far more to the camps than evil and horror alone. Dr. Albert Haas, a veteran of Auschwitz and several other camps, recalls that, “although Germany’s concentration camps carried out a philosophy that was unthinkable beyond our most terrible imaginings, my existence there was mercifully tempered somewhat with humor, with friendship, and with some extraordinary incidents of human kindness.”60 Carers risked their lives to assist would-be escapees get away from transit camps. They provided invaluable life-saving answers to bewildered new arrivals at the death camps. They schooled them in the esoteric secrets of surviving the brutal “planets” of the concentration camps. And they dared in slave labor camps to secretly help do the work of a weaker prisoner verging on giving up. Historian Ben Shepard, author in 2009 of a book about the BergenBelsen Concentration Camp, advises that the camp “should be remembered not simply for the evil perpetrated there, but for the 69

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humane and life-affirming work that was also done. It was a place that brought out the best, as well as the worst, in human beings. As such, it has invaluable lessons to teach us.”61 Notes

The epigraph is from Delbo, Charlotte. 1995. Auschwitz and After (translation by Rosette C. Lamont), p. 22. 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

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Wiesel, Elie. 1982 ed. Night, p. 28. See also Fritzche, Peter. 2008. Life and Death in the Third Reich, p. 219. Lichtblau, Eric. March 3, 2013. “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking.” New York Times, p. SR-3. I also draw on e-mail correspondence from Geoffrey Magargee, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM, June 27, 2011. See also the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Vol.1. Other types of camps included civilian camps, POW camps, and labor education camps to which foreign workers were sent by the Gestapo as a punishment. There were also “care centers,” where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth. Karin Orth, “Camps.” In Hayes, Peter and Roth, John K., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, p. 364; Smith, Lyn, Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust, p. 155. See also the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Vol. 1. Note that the camps changed radically, not once but several times over the war’s six-year duration, as chances faded after 1942 of an ultimate German victory. Lichtblau, Eric. March 3, 2013. “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking.” New York Times. Op. Cit., p. SR-3. In contrast 97 percent of the Allied prisoners held in POW camps were liberated. Geck, Stephan. Book Review [Monteath, Peter. 2011. P.O.W.: Australian Prisoners of War in Hitler’s Reich. Sidney, AUS: Macmillan]. H-Net Staff (May 13, 2012); http://www.h-net. org/reviews. The forty thousand estimate of slave labor camps is at the USHMM website. The one thousand-plus estimate is from Frilling, Tuvia. 2014. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz (translated by Haim Watzman), p. 32. As cited in Nerenberg, Ellen. 2011. “Mind the Gap: Performance and Semiosis in Primo Levi.” In Sodi, Risa and Millicent Marcus, eds. 2011. New Reflections on Primo Levi: Before and After Auschwitz, p. 175 See Moorehead, Caroline. 2011. A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France, p. 185. Numbers were substituted for names as a form of identification, as namelessness was erasure. Neurath, Paul Martin. 2005 (1943). The Society of Terror: Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps, pp. 86–87. Paul Martin. 2005 (1943). The Society of Terror: Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps. Op. Cit., pp. 86–87. Rubin, Agi and Henry Greenspan. 2006. Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated, p. 50. Pingel, Falk. 2010. “Social Life in an Unsocial Environment: The Inmate’s Struggle.” In Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Washsmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, p. 63.

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12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

The transit camps included Amersfoort, Herzogenbusch, Vught, and Westerbork in Netherlands; Beaune-la-Rolande, Drancy, Gurs, Joffre, Pithiviers, and Rivesaltes in France; Fossoli in Italy; Kazerne Dossin and Mechelen in Belgium; Theresienstadt in Czech Republic; and many others. As cited in Zapruder, Alexandra, ed. 2004 ed. (2002). Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, p. 183. Inhuman orders could and did rob prisoners of their lives, for example, at the Vught Camp in January 1944, the commandant ordered that seventyfour women be punished for some infraction of the rules by being put in a cell measuring about nine square meters, a decision that caused ten of them to die from asphyxiation. http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunker_Tragedy. Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (translated by Weiter Leben), p. 76. Frilling, Tuvia. 2014. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz (translated by Haim Watzman), p. 29. Cultural offerings were valued for their ability to lift morale and distract from peril. They included original children’s plays, engaging concerts, holiday commemorations, a lending library, a cabaret show, and so on. Residents at the Westerbork transit camp operated a cabaret, child-care programs, an infirmary, an old people’s home, an orphanage, and a theater. Teenagers were recruited to sit by and comfort despondent or ill residents at bedside or in a camp’s threadbare infirmary. See Hillesum, Etty. 1983. An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943. Muller, Melissa. 1998. Anne Frank: The Biography, p. 235. Winstone, Martin 2010. The Holocaust Sites of Europe: A Historical Guide, p. 22; Frilling, Tuvia. 2014. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz (translated by Haim Watzman), Op. Cit., p. 29. Winstone, Martin 2010. The Holocaust Sites of Europe: A Historical Guide. Ibid., p. 22. More than twenty-two hundred of the seven thousand Jewish victims who were interned at Rivesaltes were sent to death camps. Breeden, Aurelien. January 21, 2016. “French Memorial Draws Uncomfortable Parallels.” New York Times, p. A-9. Kren, George M. 1988. “The Holocaust in History.” In Rosenberg, Alan and Gerald E. Myers, eds. Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, p. 40. DiSilva, Daniel. 2010. The Rembrandt Affair, p. 110. Zapruder, Alexandra, ed. 2004 ed. (2002). Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, p. 65. Muller, Melissa. 1998. Anne Frank: The Biography (translated by Rita and Roberty Kimber), p. 241. On Westerbork, see http://www.kampwesaterbork.nl. See also Boas, Jacob. 1995. We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Dies in the Holocaust; Blatt, Thomas Toivi. 1997. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, p. 99 Levi, Primo. 1988 ed. The Drowned and the Saved (translated by Raymond Rosenthal), p. 114. Gill, Anton.1988. The Journey Back from Hell: An Oral History: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors, Op. Cit., p. 158. Professor Otto Friedrich maintains that “perhaps the most terrible single fact about Auschwitz is that nobody knows, even to the nearest hundred thousand, exactly how 71

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28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

72

many people died there . . . many of the Nazi records were falsified with terms like ‘special handling,’ and many of even these falsified records were destroyed in the evacuation of the camps.” Friedrich, Otto. 1994 ed. The Kingdom of Auschwitz, pp. viii, 125. Dvorjetski, Mark. 1963. “Adjustment of Detainees to Camp and Ghetto Life, and Their Subsequent Readjustment to Normal Society.” Yad Vashem Studies. Op. Cit., p. 200. The Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz in 1943 during what they now call the Porajmos (“Devouring”), and between 220,000 and 1.5 million men, women, and children were murdered. See http://Jewishcurrents.org/november-15-the-gypsy-holocaust-3216. Madajczyk, Czeslaw. 1984. “Concentration Camps as a Tool of Oppression in Nazi-Occupied Europe.” In Gutman, Yisrael and Avital Saf, eds. The Nazi Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference. Op. Cit., pp. 53–54. Well over 1.5 million Jews are thought to have died as a result of mass shootings primarily in the East by four Einsatzgruppen squads. Some one million died in the ghettos and in slave labor concentration camps. About seven hundred thousand died in mobile gas vans and perhaps eight hundred thousand as victims of disease and hunger in the ghettos. Almost 1.5 million victims were children. Steinbacher, Sybille. 2005. Auschwitz: A History (translated by Shawn Whiteside), p. 134. Niewyk, Donald L., ed. Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survivors, p. 131, 132. Hilberg, Raul. 2003 ed. The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 223. Characteristic German efficiency and effectiveness was exemplified in the murder process: Historian Raul Hilberg notes that “a man would step off a train [as from a newly liquidated ghetto] and in the evening his corpse was burned and his clothes packed away for shipment to Germany.” Hilberg, Raul. 2003 ed. The Destruction of the European Jews. Op. Cit., p. 555. Auschwitz-Birkenau accounted for an estimated 1.6 million murder victims (just over half were killed on arrival); Treblinka about 850,000 murder victims; Belzec about 600,000 murder victims; Majdanek about 360,000 murder victims; Chelmno about 320,000 murder victims; Sobibor about 250,000 murder victims. The arrival figure for Auschwitz and an estimated total for all murders in the camps (2.7 million) are from www.ushamm.org/wic/en/ article.php?Moduled=1000 7327. One estimate is that a million Jews died during the death marches. Davidson, Susanna. 2008. The Holocaust, p. 60. Regarding resistance to being forced into the gas chamber, see Smith, Mark S. 2010. Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershel Sperling, p. 107. The statistics are from Zuroff, Dr. Efraim. April 30, 2014. 13th Annual Status Report on the Worldwide Investigation and Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals, p. 3. Prominent here were Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen-Gusen, Ravensbruck, and Stutthof. See Wachsmann, Nickolaus. 2010. “The Development of the Concentration Camps 1933–1945.” In Caplan, Jane and Nicklous Washmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, p. 28. The concentration camps were developed in the early 1930s as a type of penal colony in which Aryan “enemies of the State,” such as beggars, common criminals, drunkards, loafers, pacifists, political dissidents, and union

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36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

activists, could be “re-educated” for an upright return to society. In short order, however, the Nazis chose unlimited (deadly) discipline. As cited in Frilling, Tuvia. 2014. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz (translated by Haim Watzman), p. 35. Average life expectancy of someone who lived past the first day in Auschwitz was between six and seven weeks; perhaps 1 percent of all those sent there survived. Gill, Anton. 1988. The Journey Back from Hell: An Oral History: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors, Op. Cit., p. 158. Another estimate is that “under normal Auschwitz conditions you could last four to six months.” Smith, Mark S. 2010. Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershel Sperling, p. 54. Madajczyk, Czeslaw. 1984. “Concentration Camps as a Tool of Oppression in Nazi-Occupied Europe.” In Gutman, Yisrael and Avital Saf, eds. The Nazi Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference. Op. Cit., pp. 53–54. Rosensaft, Hadassah. 2004. Yesterday: My Story, p. 39. At a woman’s concentration camp in Germany, Ravensbruck, as many as 89 percent, or 117,000 of 132,000 women and children, died before liberation. Denenberg, Barry. 2005. Shadow Life: A Portrait of Anne Frank and Her Family, pp. 171, 190. Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, p. 103. Where health was concerned, old-timers could tell newbies to expect changes, not all of them negative, for example, the disappearance of “garden-variety” neuroses, such as hypochondria, and certain psychosomatic diseases, such as bronchial asthma and duodenal and gastric ulcers, so overpowering was the raw struggle to survive. Cohen, Elie A. 1954 ed. Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp (translation by M.H. Braaksman), p. 282. Pingel, Falk. 2010. “Social Life in an Unsocial Environment: The Inmate’s Struggle.” In Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Washsmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, p. 64. Savvy Carers could also teach survival skills learned long before imprisonment, for example, some sprigs of herbs and plants that had helpful vitamins could be secretly culled on the long walk back from distant work sites . . . although one did risk being shot for “stealing” the Reich’s property. Levi, Primo. 1989 ed. The Drowned and Saved (translated by Raymond Rosenthal), p. 63. See the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Vol. 1. Buchenwald in 1944 brought the SS over sixty million marks in profit. Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Op. Cit., p. 64. See also Karay, Felicja. 2002. Hasaq-Leipzig Slave Labor Camp for Women: The Struggle for Survival told by the Women and Their Poetry (translation by Sara Kitai). Op. Cit., p.19. On wages, see Johnson, Paul. 1983. Modern Times, p. 416. As cited in Donat, Alexander. The Holocaust Kingdom. Op. Cit., p. 98. Survivors who might have blocked out sights of horror tell in memoirs of their inability to forget the screaming. In 1941, this meant producing 3,790 tanks and 11,776 aircraft; in 1944, 19,002 tanks and 39,807 aircraft—despite Allied command of the air. Rose, Alexander. July 16–17, 2011. “How the Battle Was Won, if Not Yet the War.” 73

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46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

74

Wall Street Journal, p. C-6. [Book Review: Normandy Crucible, by John Prados]. Wagner, Jens-Christian. 2010. “Work and Extermination in the Concentration Camps.” In Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, p. 136. Salton, George Salton. 2002. The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir, p. 151. “More people died making V2 rockets [in Dora, a satellite camp of Buchenwald] than were hit by them.” Wachsmann, Nikolaus. 2010. “The Development of the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945.” pp. 17–43. In Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, p. 35. Delbo, Charlotte. 1995. Auschwitz and After (translated by Rosette C. Lamont), p. 118.46. Johnson, Paul. 1983. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, p. 413. Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal, p. 75. See also Mo, Is. 1994. U.B.B.: Unforgettable Bergen-Belsen, pp. 12, 25. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992. A Survivor (translation by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), p. 120. The life expectancy in an Auschwitz sub-camp operated by a private industrial company was “an average of about three months, and was often only a few weeks.” Steinbachev, Sybille. 1999. On Burning Ground: A Son’s Memoir, p. 56. Eisenberg, Azriel. 1981. Witness to the Holocaust, p. 132. Berlin considered these camps so valuable that as late as 1944, after the Allies had landed at Normandy, and the Russians were steadily capturing parts of Eastern Europe, new slave labor camps were added to an ongoing chain in Germany serving the war-related needs of I. G. Farben, Krupp, and Siemens. See in this connection, Gutterman, Bella. 2008. A Narrow Bridge to Life: Jewish Slave Labor and Survival in the Gross-Rosen Camp System, 1940–1945. Johnson, Paul. 1983. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, p. 416. Brenner, Reeve R. 1980. The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors, p. 75. Roth, John K. and Berenbaum, Michael, eds. 1989. Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications. p. xxvii. In the fall of 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau held 348,820 men’s suits and 836,516 dresses. Denenberg, Barry. 2005. Shadow Life: A Portrait of Anne Frank and Her Family, p. 189. See also Johnson, Paul. 1983. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, p. 417. Orenstein, Henry. 1997 (1987) I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against the Odds, p. 153. Reinhartz, Henia. 2007. Bits and Pieces: A Memoir, p. 45. The camps were unprecedented in combining “sadistic fantasies and rational action.” Kerr, Phillip. 2005. Hitler’s Peace: A Novel of the Second World War, p. 40. Levinson, Leila. 2011. Gated Grief: The Daughter of a GI Concentration Camp Liberator Discovers a Legacy of Trauma, p. 24. Kirsch, Adam. April 6, 2015. “The System: Two New Histories Show How the Nazi Concentration Camps Worked.” The New Yorker, p. 77. Haas, Dr. Albert. 1984. The Doctor and the Damned, p. 245. See also Johnson, Paul. 1983. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties. Op. Cit., p. 416.

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61.

Shephard, Ben. 2005. After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945, p. 6. Ironically, while “the Nazis needed to prove empirically [to themselves] the subhuman nature of the Jews . . . as a false justification for murdering them, [the process itself ] inherently recognized their victims’ humanity.” Wachsmann, Nickolaus. 2010. “The Development of the Concentration Camps 1933–1945.” Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. 2010. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, pp. 17, 28.

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Profile

Theresienstadt To revive a man is no slight thing. —Nachman of Bratslav

Introduction

Charlotte Opfermann credits acts of stealth altruism (secret cultural events, secret schooling, etc.) with shielding “illusions from the harsh reality.” To her and other prisoners at the Theresienstadt Transit Camp they seemed like “a dream come true, if only for a little while and for a select few. Many believed the dream. It did contribute to their quality of life in a setting where that phrase sounds ironic, cynical, and entirely inappropriate.”1 Between November 24, 1941, and May 11, 1945, Jewish prisoners in the Theresienstadt Transit Camp knew all too much of the Horror Story: Prisoners suffered from deadly deprivation (inadequate food and fuel supplies, shortages of vital medicine, etc.), and bedbugs, fleas, mice, lice, and rats had the place disease-ridden. It was always overcrowded: “Within one year—1942—almost 90,000 Jews . . . occupied the normal space of 7,000.”2 Beds were always in short supply, and many people had to make do in dirty attics or underground cells, places in which oldsters and children often suffered fatally from diarrhea, dysentery, jaundice, meningitis, pneumonia, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and typhoid. As well, between January 1942 and October 1944, a trainload of doomed victims left regularly for such death camps as AuschwitzBirkenau, Litzmannstadt, Majdanek Minsk, Sobibor, and others.3 By the war’s end, of the 156,000 Jews imprisoned at some time in the Transit Camp at one time or another, only 11 percent or so had survived at Theresienstadt or in the various camps to which they were sent.4 Of fifteen thousand children, fewer than three hundred over the age 76

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of fourteen had survived either at Theresienstadt or other camps to which they had been sent.5 In her memoir, Ruth Kluger recalls that when a twelve-year-old prisoner, she regarded Theresienstadt as “a hotbed of epidemics . . . hunger and disease . . . a sty where you couldn’t stretch without touching someone . . . there wasn’t enough of anything.” She maintains it was “a mud hole, a cesspool, . . . an anthill under destructive feet . . . the stable that supplied the slaughterhouse.”6 While unforgiving regarding the Thereseinstadt’s Horror Story, Ms. Kluger also credits human contacts, friendships, and conversation over her nineteen or twenty months there for having helped turn a raw twelve-year-old girl into “a social animal,” one now proud for the first time to be a Jew. As well, she maintains “the only good there was what the Jews managed to make of it . . . with their voices, their intellect, their wit, their playfulness, their joy in dialogue. The good emanated from our sense of self.”7 The Help Story had a significant life-aiding presence at this transit camp. Prisoners, motivated by the Altruistic Impulse and Jewish Altruistic Tenets, drew on major cultural tools (art, concerts, education, humor, imagination, satire, etc.) to help one another, and they left behind a legacy of instructive and inspiring merit. Forbidden Schooling

As noted in chapter 8, conventional teaching was strictly forbidden “on the principle that Jewish children were to be kept uneducated as a punishment for being Jewish.”8 Carers, however, provided many secret classes, athletic activities, and art studios. Inge Auerbacher, then a seven-year-old prisoner, recalls “some heroic teachers gathered us children in attics and other places where there was a little space. They taught us from memory, since very few schoolbooks were smuggled into the camp.”9 Child lookouts were appointed outside a classroom to warn of approaching danger from the Czech Police or the SS. Teenagers, in turn, developed their own forbidden educational program complete with informal classes in Czech literature, Esperanto, geography, grammar, Hebrew, Latin, literature, math, physics, poetry, Russian, Sanskrit, and Sinhalese. As well, some volunteered to organize and offer educational lectures on a variety of topics of interest to others of varying age.10 A ten-year-old Czech boy, thinking back of the teenagers who dared to be his “teachers,” recalls “great warmth was 77

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established among us young people, and we developed a deep love and respect for each other.”11 Between 1942 and 1944 a forbidden literary magazine Vedem [In the Lead] was worked on over time by about one hundred boys thirteen to fifteen years old, resident in a particular dorm room (eighty-five of them were murdered in due course after transport to Auschwitz).12 Its mixture of art, fiction, poetry, and jokes (many of which satirized camp administrators) emphasized upbeat matters to help lift spirits. Published in hand-written copies weekly for almost two years, and finally totaling some eight hundred pages, it was read aloud in dorm rooms on Friday nights. Vedem’s adviser, Professor Valtr Eisenger, a beloved teacher who chose to live in the dorm room, was saluted in the publication for inspiring the teenage staff with “his tremendous altruism.”13 Vaclav Havel, when serving as a postwar president of the Czech Republic, deemed this unique clandestine teen magazine “a proud testimony to values that transcend time, death, and destruction.”14 Forbidden Adult Education

A remarkable library, complete with a reading room with over sixty thousand volumes, came from twenty-six hidden crates smuggled in illegally as part of an enormous supply of bedding straw. The Nazis had given Czech Jewish prisoners permission to have the straw shipped to them, and at high risk the trainload also secretly included smuggled medicine, books, and supplies.15 The library, in turn, buttressed the operation of a forbidden “university over the abyss.” Across a three-year period this unique adult education venture drew on 520 volunteers from the Jewish intelligentsia (of whom only about 173 survived).16 In attics and overcrowded rooms early in the morning and late after supper they provided over 2,430 lectures on fifty-eight widely different subjects, including such forbidden topics as the war itself, disguised with such fake titles as “Some Thoughts about Literature” or “Fragments from World History.”17 A postwar admirer of the “university” thinks it “beyond comprehension and language to explain how, in the face of starvation, disease, and death there continued to be the desire to lecture on the great issues of mankind; create artistic, literary, philosophical, musical, and other gems for the benefit of those still barely alive and those who might possibly survive their living hell . . . [This] is a proud, perhaps unique legacy . . . [one] which will continue to live long after mankind will 78

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barely remember hundreds of years from now at what terrible cost it was created.”18 Forbidden Judaism

The Sabbath and the holidays were observed in secret, with use being made of religious objects smuggled in from a warehouse full with appropriated luggage. As noted earlier in chapter 2, secret lectures in Judaism, philosophy, and theology were offered by Leo Baeck (1873–1956), Germany’s best-known rabbi. Almost seventy years old when imprisoned in 1943, as a committed Carer the rabbi “could be seen ministering daily to the prisoners, lecturing on Plato and Kant, pulling garbage wagons or deeply involved in Youth Care Services.” When offered an opportunity after liberation to go immediately to Palestine he deferred the trip to aid the weakest of newly liberated fellow prisoners.19 Forbidden Art

When in 1942 Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a prominent Viennese artist, art teacher, and designer, was sent by the SS to Theresienstadt, she filled her suitcase with art materials to provide art therapy and visual self-expression for the children, this a forbidden type of care sharing. She expected war-traumatized children needed “a way to moderate the chaos of their lives . . . to reveal their feelings through their art,” as well as a momentary escape from the Horror Story realities around them.20 Over time she hid some five thousand drawings and collages created by the youngsters, many of which are shown today around the world.21 On October 6, 1944, she was transported with thirty of her students to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, and three days later they were sent to the gas. Admiring American artists maintain that “although their lives ended so early and so cruelly, their testimonies through art—a celebration of expression through color and form—defied the brutal end.”22 Other artists tried a different type of nonmilitant resistance. Forced by the SS to make romanticized artworks for German propaganda purposes some professional artists also secretly made and hid for post-liberation recovery disturbing sketches of anguished camp life, some of which were smuggled out of the camp, at the cost of the lives of certain of the artists. It had been hoped the hidden artworks would “terrify and engross the viewer, and in the end, enlighten and elevate,” this an intuitive 79

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Horror-and-Help Story approach.23 Among other things the artists sought “to show their persecutors that even under appalling living conditions, and mutilations, torture, and annihilation, they were functioning, sensitive, and vibrant people.”24 Forbidden Music

Performances were provided by bands, choirs, choral groups, orchestras, singers, and string quartets, even though obstacles were many; for example, “. . . any type of music making had initially been strictly prohibited . . . the artists were careful to stage their improvised concerts clandestinely in basements or attics. Many of the musicians had cleverly smuggled their instruments into the camp. In order to hide his cello one artist completely dismantled it, buried the parts in his clothes, and then glued the pieces together again in a men’s barrack. . . .”25 Emanuel Hermann, an adult student (who did not survive), wrote, “Cultural life in the ghetto was the only phenomenon that transformed us back into human beings. If after a hard day I could listen to Bach, I at once became human.”26 Alice Herz-Sommer, a concert pianist, shared similar recall: “. . . old people, desolate and ill, came to the concerts and this music was our food. Through making music we were kept alive.” (Ms. Herz-Sommer played more than a hundred programs and managed to give forbidden piano lessons to eager children.)27 Viktor Ullman, who composed sixteen works during his two years at Theresienstadt, took pride that “in no way whatsoever did we sit down to weep on the banks of the waters of Babylon . . . our effort to serve the Arts respectfully was proportionate to our will to live in spite of everything.”28 Zuzana Ruzickova, a professor of Music, believes secret artistic performances gave performers and audience members “comfort, courage, and the renewed will to live.” She adds “children and teenagers perceived it as conscious resistance.”29 Four musical presentations were especially memorable: “Brundibar,” a one-act short opera composed by Hans Krasa, a prisoner, was a moral fairy tale that had good triumph over evil. Its forty young (doomed) performers and their audience privately enjoyed knowing their charming opera—performed fifty-five times—secretly spoofed Hitler and his Nazi Overlords, and provided an allegorical protest of great value to audience members “in the know.”30 A full-scale production (chorus, orchestra, and soloists) was mounted thirty-eight times of the nationalistic sentimental opera The Bartered Bride, ostensibly as an artistic venture, but surreptitiously 80

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also as an anti-Nazi gesture, since Czechs identified passionately with its patriotic tribute to the Czech psyche—a morale-aiding linkage apparently not known by the deceived SS.31 The opening performance in mid-1943 of Verdi’s Requiem, a Catholic liturgical choral work, had a front-row seat occupied by SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann. He heard four professional vocalists and a chorus of 150 starving Jewish prisoners sing words that seemed to condemn the Nazis and called for liberation. Done fifteen times thereafter, it was finally undone when its conductor and many choral singers were sent to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death camp; only 60 of the original 150 singers were alive for its last performance.32 A fourth noteworthy presentation was The Black Hand, a play for children by Charlotte G. Opfermann, It was based on bedside stories she had told orphans in her care. She wrote the play to “make [them] forget their empty bellies.”33 It was opposed by the Judenrat (Elder’s Council, chosen by the Germans) that feared her secret project would be detected and all would be sent to the gas. In the fall and winter of 1944–45 the play’s several clandestine performances “provided some a glimmer of hope . . . [as it offered] child hero role models who were battling unbelievable adversity, and ended up being victorious against all odds.”34 On a lighter note, cabaret performers secretly ridiculed Jewish guards and well-fed Jewish cooks, while others dared to offer scathingly anti-Nazi pieces. When a frightened Judenrat banned further performances the defiant performers continued to secretly perform their biting sketches in “safe” barracks. Cultural historian Cara de Silva maintains that Theresienstadt hosted “an artistic and intellectual life so fierce, so determined, so vibrant, so fertile as to be almost unimaginable.”35 A fifteen-year-old prisoner, Helga Weissova, remembers that “the [forbidden] culture was of a high standard and the people, including children, took a great interest in it. It was a source of hope and gave people the strength to carry on.”36 A scholar, in turn, applauds the art scene for “counteracting intense feelings of fear and helplessness” in ways that kept prisoners “from becoming paralyzed by despair and enabled them to get on with the daily fight for life.”37 Forbidden Food Support

Creativity reached even to matters of cuisine, albeit prisoners were starving. Although barely getting by on a slice of bread a day and 81

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watery soup, some women dreamed of “the cooking habits of the past, and found some consolation in the hope they might be able to us them again in the future.”38 With “organized” paper and pencils they secretly wrote down favored recipes and buoyed their morale by distracting themselves from the current Horror Scene with an act of psychological resistance. Professor Michael Berenbaum believes “[the now-published cookbook of the women gives insight into] the extraordinary capacity of the human spirit to transcend its surroundings, to defy humanization, and to dream of the past and of the future. One can sense a spiritual toughness in the sisterhood forged in its pages.”39 Forbidden Personal Support

Edith Kramer Freund, herself a physician, recalls that she and other doctors used to delay registering deaths for a day or two so that patients could benefit from the extra food portions that came to the infirmary earmarked for the dead, a delay ruse (common in many other camps) that put the infirmary administers in serious jeopardy.40 Some Carers joined a clandestine underground Thereseinstadt group, Yad Tomech (Helping Hand), dedicated to aiding the handicapped, old, and sick prisoners especially vulnerable to disease, filth, hunger, and neglect. Group members cleaned the area around infirmary cots, washed bedding and clothing of patients, straightened out meager personal possessions, and provided comforting and encouraging words. For many bed-ridden care recipients the Yad Tomech helpers were the only human beings who cared for them.41 Conclusion

Theresienstadt is well known for many things, such as having been the only camp the Germans allowed carefully monitored foreign observers to visit, as it was a unique exercise in duplicitous public relations, “a Potemkin Village, purporting to be an autonomous Jewish community.”42 It was also the setting for the only major Nazi propaganda film made to romanticize camp life and show how Jews were being prepared for life in Palestine.43 It held about two hundred prominent Jewish prisoners (celebrities, politicians, etc.), who might someday be traded in exchange for captured high-level German officers.44 Above all, however, it served as a “heartless antechamber to the gas chamber.”45 It is time Theresienstadt was recognized in still another way, this one a uniquely positive way—namely, its humanistic record affirms 82

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the power of a combination of the Altruistic Impulse, Judaic Altruistic Tenets, and High Culture to significantly blunt dehumanization efforts and make the most of the Help Story. Notes

The epigraph is from Rosten, Leo. 1977 ed. Leo Rosten’s Treasury of Jewish Quotations, p. 230. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

Opfermann, Charlotte G. 2002. The Art of Darkness, p. 67. Levin, Nora. 1968. The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945, p. 48. See also Auerbacher, Inge. 1993 ed. (1986). I am a Star: Child of the Holocaust. Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, p. 87. Levin, Nora. 1968. The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945, p. 493. Shek, Zeev. January 29, 1946. “Deposition before the Commission for the Concentration Camp of Terezin.” In Krizkova, Marie Rut, et al., eds. 1995. We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of KZ Theresienstadt (translated by R. Elizabeth Novak), p. 31. Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. Op. Cit., pp. 86–87. Ibid. Zapruder, Alexandra, ed. 2004 ed. (2002). Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. Op. Cit. Auerbacher, Inge. 1993 ed. (1986). I am a Star: Child of the Holocaust, p. 56. Freund, John. 2007. Spring’s End, p. 17. Brady, George. As cited in Krizkova, Marie Rut, et al., eds. 1995. We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of KZ Theresienstadt (translated by R. Elizabeth Novak), p. 195. Krizkova, Marie Rut, et al., eds. 1995. We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of KZ Theresienstadt (translated by R. Elizabeth Novak), p. 12. His influence may partially explain why no stealing ever occurred in the dorm although everything was kept on open shelves. Weissova, Helga. 1998. Draw What You See: A Child’s Drawings from Theresienstadt, p. 116. Havel, Vaclav; “Forward.” 1995, In Krizkova, Marie Rut, et al., eds. 1995. We Are Children Just the Same (translated by R. Elizabeth Novak), p. 11. Levin, Nora. 1968. The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945. Op. Cit., p. 478. As cited in Makarova, Elena and Sergei, along with Victor Kuperman, eds. 2004. University Over the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430 Lectures in KZ Thereseinstadt, 1942–1944, p. 13. The library number is from Berenbaum, Michael. 1993. The World Must Know. Op. Cit., p. 88. Outstanding among the teachers was Regina Jonas, Germany’s first woman rabbi. See Geller, Laura. October 15, 2014. “Rediscovering the First Woman Rabbi.” http://tabletmag.com/scroll/186315/rediscovering-the-first-woman-rabbi. Makarova, Elena and Sergei, along with Victor Kuperman, eds. 2004. University Over the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430 Lectures in KZ Thereseinstadt, 1942–1944, pp. 11, 13. 83

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18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 84

As cited in Makarova, Elena, et al. 2004. University Over the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430 Lectures in KZ Thereseinstadt, 1942–1944. Op. Cit., p. 238. Levin, Nora. 1968. The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945. Op. Cit., p. 488. Rubin, Susan Goldman. 2000. Fireflies in the Dark: The Story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the Children of Terezin, p. 39. Some prisoners who taught expected a bit of bread as payment; Friedl declined to take any. See also Anonymous. January–March, 2011. Program. “Through a Narrow Window: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Her Terezin Students” Art Exhibit, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. Ibid., pp. 37, 38. In 1943 Friedl Dicker-Brandeis helped youngsters put on a production of a Czech fairy tale called Adults and appreciated that the children had made everything. Anonymous. January–March, 2011. Program. “Through a Narrow Window: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Her Terezin Students” Art Exhibit, University of New Mexico, p. 3. Volavkova, Hana, ed. 1993. “A Note from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” . . . I never saw another butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942–1944, p. viii. Green, Gerald. 1978. The Artists of KZ Theresienstadt, p. viii. Some pictures were smuggled out and got to Switzerland where the SS learned about them. Two of the artists were tortured to death, and others were sent to die in Auschwitz. Stoessinger, Caroline. 2012. A Century of Wisdom, p. 96. As cited in Makarova, Elena, et al. 2004. University Over the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430 Lectures in KZ Thereseinstadt, 1942–1944, p. 15. See also Dwork, Deborah. 2008. The Terezin Album of Marlanka Zadikow. Cited in an e-mail obituary circulated on February 23, 2014, by the Gerontology Research Group ([email protected]). See also Fox, Margalit. February 27, 2014. “Alice Herz-Sommer is Dead at 110; Survived Holocaust Devoted to Chopin.” New York Times, p. B-9; Stoessinger, Caroline. 2012. “Prelude.” A Century of Wisdom. Op. Cit., p. xvii–xviii. As cited in Makarova, Elena, et al. 2004. University Over the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430 Lectures in KZ Thereseinstadt, 1942–1944. Op. Cit., p. 15. See also Dwork, Deborah. 2008. The Terezin Album of Marlanka Zadikow. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. As cited in Opfermann, Charlotte. G. 2002. The Art of Darkness, pp. 82–83. Israeli Professor Yehuda Bauer notes that, “even in these [horrific] conditions, literature, music, theater, and art flourished. And, still today, the musical pieces, poetry, and plays made at Theresienstadt continues to be heard around the world. . . .” As cited in Makarova, Elena, et al. 2004. University Over the Abyss, p. 9. Rubin, Susan Goldman. 2000. Fireflies in the Dark. Op. Cit., p. 29. Stoessinger, Caroline. 2012. A Century of Wisdom. Op. Cit., pp. 102–3. http://chorus.ucdavis.edu/verdi/text.htm. Many print versions exist about this occasion. Outstanding here is a book by Josef Bor, published in 1963, and entitled The Terezin Requiem (translated by Edith Pargeter). See also http://oregonmusicnews.com/2014/07/8 /. Opfermann, Charlotte. G. 2002. The Art of Darkness, pp. 82–83, 85–86.

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34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

Ibid. Children also gave a concert of songs from the opera Carmen and were coincidentally sent the next day to their deaths at Auschwitz. Gill, Anton. 1988. The Journey Back from Hell: An Oral History: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors, pp. 207–8. de Silva, Cara, ed. 1996. “Introduction.” In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of KZ Theresienstadt (translated by Bianca Steiner Brown), p. xxvi. Lest the misimpression be given that all prisoners appreciated the Theresienstadt Help Story some were far more impacted on by its Horror Story, for example, Opfermann, Charlotte G. 2002. The Art of Darkness, pp. 58, 96. Weissova, Helga. 1998. Draw What You See: A Child’s Drawings from Theresienstadt, p. 120. Peschel, Lisa, editor and translator. 2014. Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezin/Theresienstadt Ghetto, p. 6. As cited in Merkin, Ros. Spring, 2015. Cabarets and Plays from the Terezin/ Theresienstadt Ghetto: A Review. Prism, 5, p. 103. Stern, Amy, daughter of Mina Pachter, the main writer of the cookbook. As cited in de Silva, Cara, ed. 1996. “Introduction.” In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of KZ Theresienstadt. Op Cit., p. xliii. Postwar editor Cara de Silva, a cultural historian, maintains that “to recall personal gastronomic traditions in desperate circumstances is to reinforce a sense of self, and to assist us in the struggle to preserve it.” de Silva, Cara, ed. 1996. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin (translated by Bianca Steiner Brown), p. xxvi. Berenbaum, Michael. “Foreword.” In de Silva, Cara, ed. 1996. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of KZ Theresienstadt (translated by Bianca Steiner Brown), p. xv. The hand-written cookbook is now available in English. See also Armour, Marilyn. 2010. “Meaning Making in Survivorship: Application to Holocaust Survivors.” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 20:4, p. 441. As cited in Gill, Anton. 1988. The Journey Back from Hell: An Oral History: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors. Op. Cit., p. 207. Opfermann, Charlotte. G. 2002. The Art of Darkness, pp. 82–83. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1986 ed. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, p. 137. To this day it is unclear whether the visitors were fooled as to the real nature of the camp, or, gave positive reports to have further entry and continue to be allowed to send food and medical supplies. Its production by movie professional among the prisoners required a superficial and short-lived makeover of parts of the camp (construction of a coffee house, planning of gardens, etc.); transport of aged, handicapped, and ill residents to their death at Auschwitz; and the highly controlled casting of many prisoners (including children) in ersatz roles as “satisfied” residents. Jepson, Barbara. January 17, 2012. “Still, the Music Played On.” Wall Street Journal, p. D-5. The first such exchange occurred in 1942, and then again, in July 1944, when 250 European Jews were traded for high-level German nationals. Shephard, Ben. 2005. After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945, pp. 12–13. Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. Op. Cit., pp. 86–87. My wife Lynn Seng and I made two research visits in 2006 and 2007 to its remarkable camp museum, one of the finest we found in any European country. 85

6 Horror Story No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace. —Old Hebrew Saying

Introduction

Rabbi Yechezel Harfenes recalls an ailing eighteen-year-old teenager for whom he felt “fatherly affection” for he reminded the rabbi of his dead son, a young man he had helplessly watched beaten to death by a Kapo.1 When the teenager was unable to come to attention one morning an SS officer casually wrote his number in black chalk on his chest and “had him shoved into the pile of the dead or dying. And to think that a drink of warm tea would have revived, and brought him back among the living! But who had warm tea?”2 Background

Throughout the twelve years of the Holocaust (1933–45), perpetrators and victims put significant obstacles in the way of Jews caring for Jews. Nazis employed starvation, fear, and uncertainty. Jewish prisoners were handicapped by their own divisiveness, low self-esteem, and callousness. All combined to make acts of stealth altruism more difficult to even conceive, better yet leverage for further gains in the struggle to survive. Starvation

While the Nazis may not have invented systematic, state-sanctioned genocide through malnutrition, Professor Yehuda Bauer believes “they surely brought it to a totally new stage of development . . . the control they exercised over people through their physiological needs . . . is without precedent in human history.”3 Jewish victims were provided just enough food and drink to help the strongest live a bit longer as slave laborers, while less productive others of all ages were casually allowed to starve, wither, and die unnatural deaths. 87

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Starvation was arguably the dominant anguish in camp life, as prisoners feared dying a slow death beyond their control. Samuel Goetz recalls that in the Ebensee Camp in April, 1945, “people began to eat grass or even the soft coal in the [work] tunnel . . . [the coal] did not taste bad and did fill me up.”4 Dora Sorell wrote, “the painful grip of hunger is relentless. I am always hungry, when I get up, when I go to bed, when I eat, food is constantly on my mind, it is an obsession.”5 The agony of thirst was especially difficult to endure, as dehydration kills faster and surer than starvation. Securing food of any kind, quality, or amount became a prisoner’s highest priority, at almost any cost, including the fraying of precious friendships. Janny Brandes-Brilleslijer remembers that when starving in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp “we were set against each other, and the closest relatives would begrudge each other a few potato peels. That wasn’t meanness. That was hunger or nakedness. You became dehumanized in spite of yourself.”6 Elly Gross recalls “the daily hunger created jealousy between inmates. Often the person who was ahead in line thought the next one would receive a slightly thicker slice. It happened between friends and even relatives, so that miserable days turned even more distressing.”7 Never-ending hunger and thirst stirred the sort of animosities that made altruistic sharing of food and drink hard to contemplate, better yet act on. Survivor Is Mo writes that men he knew in Bergen-Belsen “would sell their friend or a parent or anybody for a piece of bread, only to suffer the same fate himself soon after.”8 Lucie Adelsberger, a doctor at Auschwitz, would have us understand that grotesque things prisoners did, such as steal the food of weaker peers, or even in rare instances, stoop to cannibalism, things “that rightly seem outrageous and monstrous to the outsider, become understandable and to a certain extent excusable when seen from the perspective of starvation.”9 Fear

The SS made fear arguably the camp’s second most common emotion, fear that Ruth Kluger recalls felt like “the psychological equivalent of epileptic fits . . . like a theater in which a fire alarm has gone off.”10 Jewish prisoners had good reason to abjectly fear Gestapo and SS sadists, along with depraved Jewish collaborators. (See chapter 7.) SS officers had blanket permission to murder at will, making some of them especially terrifying figures, for example, a platoon leader at the 88

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Treblinka Death Camp left daily with thirty Jewish prisoners whose job was to shovel sand over bodies dumped the previous day in a massive open grave. Prisoners did all they could to avoid his eye when he chose the day’s contingent at the morning role call: this platoon leader often showed up alone, having casually murdered his entire thirty-man crew the day before.11 Similarly, Leon Wells, who was a sixteen-year-old inmate at Janowska, a slave labor camp, recalls that on any day for no apparent reason an entire work brigade was taken out to be shot. “Every male individual never knew when he woke in the morning whether he would be going to work or to death that day.”12 Much as never-ending hunger and thirst made efforts at forbidden care difficult to undertake, so also did never-ending fear of unimaginable murderous behavior. Ernest Michel remembers that on April 12, 1945, while he was on a death march just a month before the war’s end, the SS Commander learned to his delight that America’s President Roosevelt had just died. Convinced this signaled a positive turn in Germany’s favor, he decreed he would celebrate by shooting ten Jewish prisoners for a few days, and he did so for the next five days.13 Other such human beings were not the only severe threat. Jewish prisoners had good reason to fear Doberman pinscher guard dogs: “God help you if they ever got loose . . . They would calmly tear apart a baby before your eyes.”14 Dr. Albert Haas remembers them as “a constant peril, as they had been trained to rip an inmate to pieces. The animals had been taught to recognize our smell, which sent them frothing.”15 Indeed, the dogs were so dangerous their own handlers wore thick armbands and carried dog whips and pistols.16 Carers understood reaching out to aid another prisoner could bring a fearful reprisal. Moshe Garbarz recalls running to help two Muselmänner put an overloaded cart back on the rails before they got seriously hurt, only to have a Kapo “almost choke me to death. After which I got five [whip lashes] on the rear, preceded by a warning: ‘If I see any of you going to the help of another team member, I’ll kill that man. Each man works for himself!’”17 Uncertainty

An anonymous survivor maintains that, “nobody was certain of anything. One could be transferred. Or lose the function to which one owed a measure of security. Or fall into disgrace. Or be caught in an 89

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offense.”18 Such uncertainty could turn courage into resignation, hope into despair. Life in a camp meant lack of control and a high frequency of unpredictable situations: “Every eight hours, three times a day, you were subject [during roll-calls] to selections that could have ended your life immediately . . . very few kept their reason together through three roll-calls a day, continuous starvation, loss of family members, total humiliation, and impossible work.”19 Dora Sorel writes, “one would wake up in the morning and run to meet a friend or a relative only to realize they were gone [to the gas]. New people had come overnight, and no one knew for certain where the others had gone.”20 Sixteen-year-old Eva Brown felt that “the most terrifying thing was the unknown. From one instant to the next, I never knew who would be the next one to be shot or beaten or tortured. At any moment, none of us knew what the next moment would bring. This made Auschwitz a hell on earth.”21 Marcus Reich survived a thirty-mile death march, then, for three months, watched “people being led to the gas chamber, people being shot as they stood in formation, people being hanged. And every day he wondered if this would be the last day of his life.”22 Rabbi Yechezkel Harfenes describes sleeping outside with fellow prisoners, lying on the ground next to one another. “In his sleep, one person stretched his foot beyond what the guard in the lookout tower determined to be the limits. The latter shot him, killing him on the spot.”23 A woman prisoner will never forget that “every night we could hear black trucks moving around the camp collecting prisoners—2,000 per night—and taking them to the gas chambers. We lived in constant fear that one night they would come for us.”24 Another woman prisoner watched during an Appell (roll call) as two prisoners who had barely survived an aborted escape attempt the previous night sneaked back into line: “When the guards counted the girls, and there were more at the Appel than there should have been, the last few women to be counted were killed.”25 Unpredictable transfers happened with blinding speed and were not subject to appeal. Prisoners often went through several such moves, each of which entailed an enervating “learning curve,” the loss of accumulated privileges in the former camp, and the perilous insecurities of being a “newbie.” When overwhelmed by the uncertainties, some prisoners attempted to run into the electrified wires to kill themselves. Many 90

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were shot during their fatal dash by alert tower guards who were later rewarded for their marksmanship. Suicide was forbidden: the Third Reich reserved the right to decide about a prisoner’s time and type of death. Above all, uncertainty drew on unpredictable changes in Nazi policy. On August 24, 1943, some 1,260 barefooted, dazed, emaciated, and filthy Jewish children (ages three to thirteen) arrived at the Theresienstadt Transit Camp from the just-liquidated Bialystok Ghetto. The children had been told they were going to be sent to Switzerland and safety, as the Nazis would trade them there for captured German Officers. Carers worked overtime to rehabilitate their new charges, who when lined up for showers tried to resist and shouted “gas!” After six weeks a modicum of success was achieved, but suddenly on October 5 the youngsters were put on transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death camp along with their fifty-three Carers (volunteer doctors and nurses). None were ever heard from again.26 Divisiveness

As if these Nazi obstacles were not enough to discourage attempts at providing forbidden care, there were deterrents that originated with the Jewish prisoners themself. Many brought with them the divisiveness, low self-esteem, and callousness of their pre-camp lives, all of which undermined the emergence of a survival-aiding “community” of landsmen (close-knit compatriots). Scholars believe “there was much greater variation in nationality, social background, and political affiliation [among the Jews] than among any other [prisoner] group.”27 Many prisoners harbored deep-reaching national animosities, such as German Jews verses Polish Jews, and these age-old divides deterred any solidarity-by-faith.28 As well, prisoners divided sharply, and often antagonistically, by language, level of education, social class background, political allegiance, views of Zionism, and type of religiosity. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, a member of an early transport to arrive at the Stutthof Concentration Camp, found there “a motley crew who shared nothing in common but the tragedy of having been born Jewish. No wonder we met with little sympathy from the other prisoners.”29 Hanna Levy-Haas remembers fellow women prisoners in Bergen-Belsen with rue: “The worse thing is that . . . there was no clear, common consciousness to unite us . . . People [were] united in a common misery, but [could] barely tolerate each other.”30 91

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Where religion was concerned prisoners divided: some were atheistic; others were agnostic, reformed, conservative, or orthodox.31 Politically they divided antagonistically between right- and left-wingers, for example, “No fewer than 44 different political parties competed in the Jewish community’s internal elections in Warsaw in 1936.”32 Well-educated and poorly educated prisoners kept distance from each other. Likewise, Nationalists and Zionists were intolerant of one another. In Poland before the war, the Bund (a nationalistic working-class socialist movement) would “not even dream of collaborating with the religious or Zionist bourgeoisie, and the Zionists could not agree among themselves what to do.”33 These deep-reaching rifts carried over into the ghettos and later into the camps. In the Theresienstadt Transit Camp, for example, which Czech Jews dominated, some German Jewish prisoners came to feel they were being “routinely assigned the worst housing and the most difficult work details.”34 All such divisiveness discouraged empathy, mutual concern, and solidarity, without which Carers were sorely disadvantaged. Quick to see this as a costless opportunity, Gestapo and SS officers stealthily promoted the ancient Roman tactic of “divide-and-conquer.” Low Self-Esteem

Everything conspired to undermine prisoners’ self-esteem and thereby weaken their capacity for empathy. Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker explains that, “if you are cramped, trapped, weak, overwhelmed, underneath your experience—then your thoughts are mean, chilly, poor, humorless, dogmatic, and closed.”35 Arnost Lustig maintains that “humiliation [in a camp] was almost as bad as the killing. They wanted the Jews to accept that they were inferior before dying . . . members of families betraying each other, sometimes killing each other.”36 Arrival at a camp involved devastating blows to self-esteem, as when both males and females were crudely shorn of all body hair. Livia Bitton-Jackson, when a thirteen-year-old girl, recalls the experience had a “startling effect . . . We were transformed into like bodies. Indistinguishable. . . . Facial expressions disappear. . . . We became a monolithic mass. Inconsequential.”37 Before imprisonment all the girls had “longed for dignity and compassion. And [they had] been transformed instead into figures of contempt.”38 The psychological and spiritual harm caused by an arbitrary and abrupt loss of hair, especially the long tresses of unmarried young women, cannot be overstated. 92

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Self-contempt was exacerbated by an “excremental attack, the physical inducement of disgust and self-loathing . . . With water in permanent shortage, with latrines submerged in their own filth, with diarrhea rife and mud everywhere, strict cleanliness was just not possible.”39 Denied access to wash water, soap, or toilet paper, many prisoners were soon repulsed by the stink of one another caked with mud and feces, all of which understandably impeded bonding, fellow-feeling, and mutual support. The Nazis arranged everything to promote physical degradation and its spiritual aftermath: “When conditions of filth are enforced, befoulment of the body is experienced as befoulment of the soul . . . something inwardly untouchable is ruined beyond repair, [and when unable to clean up] the will to live dies.”40 Indeed, “subjection to filth seems often [to have caused] greater anguish than hunger or fear of death.”41 It also made it easier for guards to rationalize murder of prisoners they found repulsive. Self-esteem was under endless assault from one of “the most uneducated groups in a modern state,” the SS guards who harbored a deeply ingrained hatred of urban assimilated Jews they associated with intelligentsia and modernity.42 To compound the matter, Harry Postmantier, a survivor of twelve different camps, recalls “their excuse for beating up Jewish prisoners was ‘Ihr habt den Christus ermordet (You murdered Christ—and for this you must suffer).”43 Callousness

Atop the entrance gate to many camps an ancient adage was often posted: “To Each His Own.” The Nazis wanted new arrivals to look out only for themselves, a soul-shriveling notion that denigrated altruism and empathy. Over and again devastating incidents reminded prisoners of their powerlessness and worthlessness, a message that devastated self-esteem. Abe Mohnblum, when interviewed in 1946 as a fourteen-year-old boy, recalled that observing frequent vicious beatings of fellow prisoners—beatings sometimes to the death—left him “frozen,” and unable to care: “I could not do a thing. I couldn’t even open my mouth. It does something to a person. It does something to a bystander more than to the one who is actually beaten . . . I am still ashamed that I have to tell such a thing.”44 Understandably, many such prisoners came to rely on callousness as a psychic shield against the toll the Horror Story could otherwise 93

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take. Helen G., a sixteen-year-old slave laborer in an ammunition plant, watched as her original group of one thousand dwindled to fewer than two hundred. She remembers her coworkers “attempted to help each other, but all of them were experiencing loss of strength and hope while trying desperately to survive.”45 Sara Nomberg-Przytyk recalls that, “from the moment I got to Auschwitz I was completely detached. I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness.”46 Of her three years in Auschwitz Rena Gelissen remembers having “simply learned it’s better not to become close friends with people who may die in a few minutes. There’s no sorority of sympathy or understanding.”47 Lillian Judd, when a twenty-one-year-old on a death march, closed herself off after losing friend after friend to death day after day (only 250 of 1,200 survived): “I suffered each time we lost someone. Finally I decided not to make close contact with anyone. I did not want to be hurt over and again. Every day our group was shrinking more and more.”48 Eva Olsson remembers having “tried to put myself out of all of it: it wasn’t taking place. It was like watching something going on and you are standing in the shadows on the sideline.”49 The situation was much the same with male prisoners. A survivor admits he “deliberately overcame the terrible memories of people being tortured by forcing myself to become as hard as stone. I did not permit myself one single emotion, otherwise I would probably not have made it alive.”50 Samuel Goetz recalls finding it “impossible to bond with any of my fellow Jewish prisoners. If a temporary friendship did develop as a result of a rare flash of humanity, it soon ended, as the friend who walked beside you to work or shared your bunk suddenly disappeared . . . beset by cruelties, starvation, beatings, hangings, shootings, and separations from loved ones, I had become numb to my surroundings.”51 Elie Cohen, a survivor/scholar, believes emotional callousness was for certain prisoners “a sheer necessity, because otherwise the ego could not, through the weight of misery, have kept up the struggle for survival.”52 Such prisoners relied on mental toughness as a numbing buffer against fear, this a stultifying posture that discouraged many from responding to their Altruistic Impulse and Judaic altruistic care tenets. Conclusion

The Nazis “set out to destroy Jewish souls before they destroyed Jewish bodies.”53 Felix Opatowski may never forget seeing “a father and son fighting for a piece of bread. I saw it with my own eyes.”54 Elie 94

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Pfefferkorn ruefully concludes that suffering did not have the salutatory effect of turning “apathy into compassion, greed into generosity, meanness into graciousness, and ambition into humility.”55 Starvation, fear, and uncertainty, along with divisiveness, low self-esteem, and callousness combined to weaken one’s ability to remain a caring human being. At the same time, there was a “thread of grace,” as an old Hebrew saying promises. After interviewing over 120 survivors in the late 1980s, writer Anton Gill concluded that, “as the ultimate testing ground of human integrity, the KZ [concentration camp] system had no equal, and it is important to record mankind was not broken by it.”56 The possibility of “choosing moral values continued to exist,” and to their everlasting credit it was exercised by Jewish male and female prisoners who somehow managed to live as Carers.57 Notes

The epigraph is from Mary Doria Russell. 2005. A Thread of Grace, p. 154. 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

Harfenes, Rav Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal (BeKaf HaKelal). Edited by Howard Shapiro and Yehazkel Harpanes, p. 250. Ibid. Bauer, Yehuda. 2001. Rethinking the Holocaust, p. 267. “Hunger recognized no restraints of any kind.” Ibid., p.134. See also Collingham, Lizzie. 2012. The Taste of Food: World War 11 and the Battle for Food; Naik, Gautam. January 25, 2011. “Hungry? Your Stomach Really Does Have a Mind of Its Own.” Wall Street Journal, pp. D-1, 2. Goetz, Samuel. 2001. I Never Saw My Face, p. 71. Sorel, Dora Apsan. 1998. Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam, p. 96. See also Popescu, Petru. 2001. The Oasis: A Memoir of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp, pp. 22–23. Concentration Camp (translated by M.H. Braaksman), p. 280. Brandes-Brilleslijer, Janny, as cited in Lindwer, Willy. 1991 (1988). The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, p. 63. Pervasive starvation endlessly sapped mental as well as physical strength: Ruth Kluger remembers “hunger gnaws at and weakens you. It takes up mental space which could otherwise be used for thinking.” Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (translated by Weiter Leben), p. 75. Gross, Elly Berkovitz. 2007. Elly: My True Story of the Holocaust, p. 51. Mo Is. 1994 ed. U.B.B.: Unforgettable Bergen-Belsen, p. 50. Offered cooked human meat by a Russian POW, Felix found the idea “too horrifying. We moved away, although we were so hungry that it wasn’t easy to resist. That’s how desperate we were in Ebensee. I want you to know that I never did eat it, but I did think about it.” Opatowski, Felix. 2012. Gatehouse to Hell, pp. 111, 114. Felice Cohen was an eyewitness to the fatal price some paid for their boundary crossing: “Prisoners, desperate and starving, came by and cut out pieces of flesh from the dead bodies. But the corpses, already rotting, were 95

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 96

poisoned from sickness. And these prisoners who ate the flesh died right away, collapsing in front of my eyes, sometimes on top of me. . . .” Cohen, Felice. 2010. What Papa Told Me, p. 57. Adelsberger, Lucie. 1995. Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story (translated by Susan Ray), p. 45. Kluger, Ruth op. cit., p. 11. Rajchman, Chil. 2011. The Last Jew of Treblinka: A Survivor’s Memory, 1942–1943 (translated by Solon Beinfeld), p. 59. Wells, Leon W. 1978 ed. (1963). The Death Brigade, p. 133. As cited in Gill, Anton. 1988. The Journey Back from Hell: An Oral History: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors, p. 286. Brandes-Brillesliiper, Janny, as cited in Lindwer, Willy. 1991 (1988). The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, p. 60. Haas, Dr. Albert. 1984. The Doctor and the Damned, pp. 249, 263. Perl, Lila and Marion Blumenthal Lazan. 1996. Four Perfect Peebles: A Holocaust Story, p. 70. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992. A Survivor (translation by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), p. 91. The situation was much the same in the women’s side of camp. Hillman, Laura. 2005. I Will Plant You a Lilac. Op. Cit., p. 124. Lubling, Yoram. 2007. Twice-Dead: Moshe Y. Lubling, the Ethics of Memory, and the Treblinka Revolt, p. 39. Twice-Dead: Moshe Y. Lubling, the Ethics of Memory, and the Treblinka Revolt, p. 181. Sorel, Dora Apsan. 1998. Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam. Op. Cit., p. 26. Brown, Eva (with Thomas Fields-Meyer). 2007. If You Save One Life: A Survivor’s Memoir, p. 86. As cited in Zullo, Allan and Mara Bovson, 2004. Survivors: True Stories of Children in the Holocaust, p. 65. Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal, p. 160. Olsson, Eva. 2001. Unlocking the Doors: A Woman’s Struggle Against Intolerance, p. 54. Herskovitz, Michael. 2009. Our Cherry Tree Still Stands (as told to Jennifer K. Mittlman), p. 40. Adler, H. H. 1960. Theresienstadt 1941–1945. Tubingen, Ger.: Mohr, 2nd ed., p. 208. Cited in Schwertfeger, Ruth. 1989. Women of Theresienstadt, p. 125. Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara. 1985. Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (translation by Roslyn Hirsh), p. 3. Levy-Haas, Hanna. 2009. Diary of Bergen-Belsen 1944–1945, p. 74. Pingel, Falk. 2010. “Social Life in an Unsocial Environment: The Inmate’s Struggle.” In Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, p. 67. See also Mueller, Filip. 1979. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (translated by Susanne Flattauer), p. 65. As well, time-honored rifts among Jewish prisoners of the same country had a long history. “There is mutual contempt between what are called ‘universalistic Jews’ and Jewish Jews. It’s an old situation.” Michaels, Leonard. 2009. The Essays of Leonard Michaels, p. 192.

Horror Story

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

Bauer, Yehuda. 2009. The Death of the Shtetl. Op. Cit., p. 30. Still others were aligned with Brit HaChayal (Jabotinsky’s Brigade), a post-1933 arm of Revisionist Zionism that stood for militancy, self-determination, and emigration to British Mandate Palestine. Frilling, Tuvia. 2014. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz (translated by Haim Watzman), p. 7. Opfermann, Charlotte G. 2002. The Art of Darkness, p. 42. Becker, Ernest. 1969. Angel in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on the Nature of Man, p. 150. Lustig, Arnost. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993. Voices from the Holocaust, p. 8. Bitton-Jackson, Livia. 1997. I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust, p. 79. Human hair was used in blankets, pipe insulation, pillow and mattress stuffing, matting for U-boats, and in the manufacture of time-delayed fuses for bombs. Ibid. Des Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, p. 62. Ibid. p. 60. “Washing, if only in a ritual sense—and quite apart from reasons of health—was something prisoners needed to do . . . and those who stopped soon died.” (p. 63) Ibid. p. 64. “There is strange circularity about existence in extremity; survivors preserve their dignity in order ‘not to begin to die’; they cared for the body as a matter of ‘moral survival.’” (p. 65) “. . . there are things absolutely unacceptable because something—let us keep the word ‘dignity’—in our deepest nature revolts.” (p. 68) Neurath, Paul Martin. 2005 (1943). The Society of Terror: Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps, p. 72. Posmantier, Harry. 1984. The Last of the Numbered Men: A Memoir of the Holocaust, p. 108. Mohnblum, Abe, cited in Boder, David P. 1949. I Did Not Interview the Dead, p. 110. As cited in Miller, Joy Erlichman. 2000. Love Carried Me Home: Women Surviving Auschwitz. Op. Cit., pp. 35, 40. Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara. 1985. Auschwitz (translation by Roslyn Hirsch). Edited by Eli Pfekkerkorn and David H. Hirsch. Op. Cit., p. 18. Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, p. 177. Judd, Lillian and Dennis L. 2011. From Nightmare to Freedom: Healing After the Holocaust, p. 79. Olsson, Eva. 2001. Unlocking the Doors. Op. Cit., pp. 63–64. As cited in Cohen, Elie. Op. Cit., p. 150. All understood that “in this world of death, everything beyond a whisper could be destroyed in an instant.” Nowak, Susan. 2003. “Ruptured Lives and Shattered Beliefs: A Feminist Analysis of Tikun Atzmi in Holocaust Literature.” In Baer, Elizabeth R. and Myrna Goldenberg, eds. Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, p. 183. Goetz, Samuel. 2001. I Never Saw My Face, p. 66. 97

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52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

98

Cohen, Elie. Op. Cit., p. 144. Patterson, David. 1999. Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary, p. 93. Opatowski, Felix. 2012. Gatehouse to Hell. Op. Cit., p. 71. Pfefferkorn, Elie. 1980. “The Case of Bruno Bettleheim and Lena Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties.” In Gutman, Israel and Avital Saf, eds. Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference. Ibid., p. 14. Gill, Anton. 2000 ed. (1988). The Journey Back from Hell: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors, p. 70. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1996 ed. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, p. 43.

7 Predators and Isolates For Judaism the problem is not why God allows evil but why man allows it. —David Hillel Gelernter

Introduction

Elly Gross, fifteen years old on her arrival at Auschwitz, remembers how “human feelings disappeared for the majority of inmates who were incarcerated. Some detainees willingly collaborated with the Nazis.”1 Elie Cohen, a survivor/scholar, would have us understand that “the standards of normal society did not obtain in the concentration camp. Theft, egotism, lack of consideration for others, pitilessness, disregarding of laws, all of this was prohibited in pre-camp days; inside the camp, however, it was normal.”2 Background

Prime predators among Jewish prisoners were collaborators, criminals, informers, and thieves. They discouraged, impeded, and sometimes even betrayed or sabotaged acts of stealth altruism. The damage these four types did was much greater than that of two other harmful types—independents (loners) and Muselmänner, neither of whom as isolates deliberately hurt others prisoners, though their behavior indirectly did so. The first four types did not hesitate to do so. While the human toll taken in combination by these six sorts of Jewish prisoner is beyond quantitative measurement, it would seem quite high, as based on anguished and outraged comments in survivor memoirs and oral videotapes. Out of all proportion to their seemingly small numbers these six types of Jewish menaces would seem to have significantly lowered the survival chances of many Jewish men and women. 99

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Collaborators

Certain Jewish prisoners were carefully chosen by the Gestapo or SS to collaborate as barrack leaders and Kapos (work group foremen). All were expected to “extend the SS regime of pitiless capricious authority and favoritism down to the daily life of the barrack, block, and labor detail.”3 Often no strangers themselves to bruising hardships in their pre-camp lives, most were quick to make the most of a camp’s perverse culture and were therefore commonly regarded by peers with “a mixture of fear, hatred, and disdain.”4 Some were known to “never put out their cigarettes on anything except the skin of a prisoner.”5 Barrack leaders were in charge of food distribution, cleanliness, general behavior, and sleep hours. They were rewarded with a tiny separate room, extra food, less work, indoor work, an opportunity for homosexual exploitation, and so on. They had “unquestioned license to kill whomever they pleased, however they pleased.”6 Their handpicked assistants provided them with “organized” (stolen) valuables, spied on the other prisoners, and hurt or even murdered other prisoners. Kapos, in turn, chose the members of work crews, delivered them to a work site, supervised them, and brought them back to camp, alive or dead. Halina Birenbaum, when thirteen years old in Auschwitz, feared a twenty-year-old Slovakian Kapo, a Jewish female who, after rising in the ranks over recent years, “had succeeded in learning all the secrets of Hell and was literally a monster.”7 Intent on staying healthy and well nourished, such collaborating Kapos spoke and acted in the same brutal manner as did the SS; domination came easy to them, and protection of their privileged post was paramount. Many barrack leaders and Kapos stole food rations and clothing intended for fellow prisoners. For a significant bribe they could arrange a requested transfer to another camp with a very low death rate. Or as punishment for someone they didn’t like, arrange a transfer to a camp with notoriously high death rate. They could also arrange for a genuine “rest break” of several days in a cooperating camp infirmary (again, for a bribe), or, in contrast, arrange for a prisoner’s public hanging on trumped-up criminal charges. Naturally, both barrack leaders and Kapos strongly opposed acts of stealth altruism. They knew the Gestapo and SS wanted Jewish prisoners cowed by starvation, terror, and uncertainty, and, in return for being allowed to keep their valued appointed posts, they did what they could to support the Nazi dehumanization process. 100

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Typical was the situation of two young Jewish women who secretly helped each other “organize” a small beet from a vegetable garden of a nearby sub-camp. It was going to provide beet juice with which to redden their pale cheeks, as this might improve their chances of surviving a pending “selection.” Betrayed by a female Jewish Kapo and charged with “sabotaging the war effort” with the theft of a beet, they were summarily shot.8 A Jewish Kapo at Auschwitz was notorious for having as many as thirty Jewish prisoners murdered one night by his associates, allegedly “to make up for the severe handicap of being Jewish. To hold onto his position he had to outdo his Polish and German colleagues” in his daily quota of killing Jews.9 In due course, Jewish prisoners saw to his murder, an act of revenge repeated in several camps during the end-of-war chaos.10 Criminals

Jewish criminals—burglars, car thieves, muggers, murderers, pedophiles, rapists, robbers, and so on—were expected by the Gestapo and SS to help “shatter the cohesiveness of a prisoner group and create a threat to the prisoner community from within or without.”11 Jack Matzner believes that “usually, the more unprincipled and corrupt [the Jewish criminals] were, the greater their chance for survival . . . Some would have committed any despicable act to remain alive even though others would suffer and die because of them.”12 Commonly uneducated and from the lowest social class, most criminals were rejected by their peers because they seldom kept faith with others. At the same time many were respected for their ability to “do business” with greedy SS members and amass considerable wealth in the camp’s black market. There, they secretly secured from the Germans items desperately needed by other prisoners, like medicines, soap, and winter clothing. The criminals secured these necessities in exchange for diamonds, gold coins, or jewelry Jewish prisoners had “organized,” at high risk, from Kanada—the warehouse where luggage was kept from new (now dead) arrivals. Self-centered and sometimes mentally unbalanced, Jewish criminals had no use for acts of stealth altruism, as they could not see any financial profit in it for them. They shunned any behavior that put at risk their clandestine business dealings with the Germans and/or their corruptible counterparts, that is, Croatian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian guards. 101

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Most Jewish criminals had uncertain prospects of making it to liberation. A Kapo who had previously been a convicted murderer became hated for actually murdering Jewish children in his charge. Rabbi Harfenes went with other prisoners to threaten revenge, “but he merely laughed. The children were slated for death anyway. ‘What difference did it make, a day earlier or later,’ he would reply with a smirk.”13 Soon after, when this killer, along with the rabbi and the rabbi’s friends, was unexpectedly and rapidly transferred to another camp, he was quickly denounced and then brutally and publicly murdered by enraged prisoners: “They pounced upon him shouting ‘you killed my child!’ and so forth . . . it did not take us long to complete the job.”14 Informers

Some Jewish victims traded the lives of peers for extra bread or cigarettes offered by the Gestapo and the SS. Despised as evil betrayers, these informers were feared for just cause: “He is a fellow Jew, but he is a despicable informer. We all dread him. The Kapos hate him just as much, but keep him [alive] because of his usefulness.”15 Rabbi Simon Huberband, who served in a slave labor camp with four hundred Jewish men, later wrote, “Many of the laborers were types from the criminal underworld. They immediately established ‘alliances’ with the guards, became informers, and in return were never beaten and were given double portions at meals. Their denunciations cost fellow detainees dearly, causing many deaths, and needless to say, numerous beatings.”16 An anonymous fifteen-year-old female prisoner in the Lublin Slave Labor Camp recalled that, “we suffered greatly at the hands of a woman informer named Dora. She always pointed out [to the SS] the girls who slept beneath our work table during work.”17 Another Jewish woman prisoner informed the SS about an illegal gathering at the Ravensbruck Camp, and as a result, a popular Jewish Block leader, Olga Benario-Prestes, was sent to the gas. A model Carer, she had been warmly regarded by many as a “mother, comrade, and friend.”18 Despite the ratio of few guards to many prisoners, efforts to escape were not as successful as might have been if there had not been informers. At the Treblinka Death Camp in December of 1942, “an informer thwarted the escape plans of 24 Jews. All the participants were seized and killed.”19 The following spring, on April 27, 1943, about seventy Dutch Jews at the Sobibor Death Camp were shot to death in 102

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connection with an alleged escape plot now thought to have been revealed by a Jewish informer.20 Thieves

An informal social norm in the camps discouraged stealing from barrack mates, family members, and those in the same affinity groups, for example, coreligionists; landsmen (from one’s town or village); or members of the same political persuasion. “Honorable” thieves stole only from the Germans, as from the camp kitchen, food dump, or supply warehouses. They tried to “organize” enough booty to be able to share with needy others. Dishonorable thieves, in contrast, stole the bread and shoes of vulnerable fellow prisoners, especially weaker or dying individuals . . . anything they could trade for extra bread or for a cigarette. If a prisoner had some precious item—a comb, a towel, a toothbrush—the overwhelming problem was how to keep it: “Foreign hands grazed our faces at night,” wrote a female survivor, “trying to steal anything we had.”21 Suzy Glaser remembers how she rationalized her thievery: “If you wanted to survive you needed more than a little luck: you had to lie, steal, and cheat, mostly at the cost of other prisoners.”22 A relative of hers, Rosie Glaser, contends that, “those who survived did so by stealing the bread of those who would die.”23 Much like collaborators, criminals, and informers, a camp’s thieves saw nothing to gain personally from involvement in stealth altruism, and much in it that would put their survival at risk. Their time and energy went instead into precariously bartering deals with untrustworthy Gestapo and SS “partners,” and with the victimization of peers. Independents

Labeled “asocials” by the Germans, the ranks of Jewish independents included alcoholics, anarchists, beggars, drifters, drug users, free loaders, homosexuals, individualists, the mentally ill, panderers, pimps, prostitutes, vagabonds, and the “work-shy” (those opposed to being an employee and indifferent about working for themselves). While independents preferred not to hurt anyone, they would do so if their survival seemed to require it. Having no interest in helping others, they were deaf to the low-keyed advocacy by Carers of Jewish solidarity. Their hard-boiled response was something like “I intend to ignore your plight, and I expect you to do the same. No offense taken.” 103

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Independents numbed and/or shut down their capacity for empathy, intimacy, and tenderness. Dismissive of the sensitivities of others, they considered their peers only in terms of their utility.24 While they might have acquaintances, they deliberately had no friends, as this entailed encumbering responsibilities. Existing by choice in solitude and intent on invisibility, independents hoped a lack of presence improved their chances of escaping notice by the Gestapo and SS, the Kapos, and even fellow Jewish prisoners—all of whom commonly held them in very low regard. Hanna Levy-Haas represented many peers in disparaging them for behavior that bordered “on meanness, on overt greediness, on total disloyalty toward their fellow internees in this dire suffering and ordeal we all share.”25 Although independents may have been a plurality in many camps, Carers knew they could not be counted on. Their irrelevance to “community” placed them on the bottom rung of the camp status hierarchy, as many prisoners understood survival chances were increased by alliances, trust, and mutual support. Muselmänner

The SS was zealous in seeing to it that Jewish prisoners suffered the most. Accordingly, a camp’s near-death prisoners, known by the slang term Muselmänner, were commonly Jewish men and women.26 Almost dead inside a near-human form, they listlessly stalked the campgrounds in a stupefied daze, a state of delirium. Having given up trying to survive, each was indifferent to food or warmth. In the grip of morbid debilities and paralyzing melancholy, they were only hours or a few days away from a fatal collapse. Many of these Jewish prisoners had probably been doomed early on. On arrival, they likely had been assigned to the worst possible work assignments and later transferred to the harshest camps. This led to a rapid loss of at least half of original body weight and thereby a downward spiral from which recovery was near impossible. This was especially true of habituated smokers, as these nicotine addicts regularly traded away the little food they got for desperately needed cigarettes. Halina Birenbaum remembers that in the Majdanek Camp, “others wrote off such a person, as if dead already . . . a triage judgment of harsh finality.”27 Helen Lewis reacted with “horror and with pity,” as such lethargic women had “stopped communicating with others and were locked within themselves: they had become the living dead of the camps.”28 104

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Muselmänner were an indirect type of menace. At the Flossenberg Concentration Camp (and undoubtedly elsewhere) some prisoners envied their ability to no longer feel pain. Others feared the very sight of them would tempt one to gain similar relief by throwing oneself on the electrified fence. Rabbi Harfenes knew these prisoners worried that, “The difference between us [and the Muselmänner] was only one of time and degree; it was just a matter of days or weeks.”29 Judgment

On rare occasion a “trial” was held of a collaborator, criminal, informer, or thief by a midnight “court” secretly operating in a relatively safe barrack. Penalties ranged from a severe beating to an execution at the hands of Jewish Militants. (See chapter 10.) Transports between camps were also used as the site for the vengeful secret murders of offenders now beyond Gestapo or SS protection. Philip Bialowitz, a prisoner at the Sobibor Death Camp, remembers having dared to plead with a savage young Jewish Kapo that he be a little more lenient, only to unexpectedly hear plaintively back, “I am suffering more than you, because I was given more responsibility. I didn’t want this job.” Bialowitz recalls thinking soon afterwards, “I know I cannot blame him. I am not in his shoes.”30 Likewise, and indicative of the complexity of the matter, Benjamin Murmelstein, the last head of the Judenrat in the Theresienstadt Transit Camp, told filmmaker Claude Lanzmann that while he and similar camp elders “should be condemned as collaborators, they should not be judged.”31 Composer Bertolt Brecht (“Three Penny Opera,” etc.), a German Jew who knew the prewar Horror Story at first hand, reminds us to “remember when you speak of our weaknesses the dark times you have been spared.”32 Similarly, a reviewer of a 2014 book about a woman collaborator in Paris (1940–44) insists, “we aren’t entitled to condemn the choices people made back then when the most urgent question was how you might survive.”33 Primo Levi would have us understand that “every victim is to be mourned, and every survivor is to be helped and pitied, but not all their acts should be set forth as examples.”34 Conclusion

A German camp was a “demented and glacial universe . . . [where] disciplined, educated men in uniform came to kill, and innocent children and weary old men came to die.”35 As an SS guard at Auschwitz famously explained to Primo Levi, “Here there is no why.”36 In such an unnatural 105

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setting the attitudes and behavior of Jewish predators significantly undermined the contribution acts of stealth altruism might have made to survival. Notes

The epigraph is from David Hillel Gelernter. 2009. Judaism: A Way of Being, p. 156. 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

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Gross, Elly Berkovitz. 2007. Elly: My True Story of the Holocaust, p. 61. “This multi-layered system [of Jewish collaborators beholden to Nazi Overlords] . . . played havoc with the concepts of good and evil, of decency and villainy.” Zertal, Idith. 2005. Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (translated by Chaya Galai), p. 72. Cohen, Elie A. 1954 ed. Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp, pp. 136–7. In this vein, Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer cautions against “idealizing the situation in the camps. There were plenty of cases where people stole from each other, or gained advantages at the expense of others.” E-mail sent to me by Professor Bauer; May 1, 2013, in response to my April 9, 2013, request for an interview with Professor Bauer at Yad Vashem that occurred on July 2, 2013. See also Hemelrijk, Dr. J. 2003. There is a Way to Freedom (translation by Ellen Holmes-van Caspel), p. 73. Caplan, Jane and Nickolaus Washsmann, eds. 2010. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, p. 90. Similarly, Rabbi Yechezkel Harfeles notes “within each [of the seven camps in which he served] each block was to a greater or lesser extent its own private gehinnom [hell], depending on the block elder . . . who could deal with his prisoners according to whim, without restriction.” Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal (BeKaf HaKelal), p. 17. Caplan, Jane and Nickolaus Washsmann, eds. 2010. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Op. Cit., p. 90. A scholar concludes “only a very few prisoners tried to use their [Kapo] positions to the benefit of their fellow prisoners.” Steinbacher, Sybille. 2005. Auschwitz: A History (translation by Shawn Whiteside), p. 36. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992. A Survivor (translation by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), pp. 54, 89. Haas, Albert, Dr. 1994. The Doctor and the Damned, p. 97. Birenbaum, Halina. “Hela.” 1994. In Eibeshitz, Jehoshua and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, eds. 1994. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies, Vol. ll. (translated by Jehoshau and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz), p. 119. See also Bernstein, Mashey. 1992. “Foreword.” In Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. A Survivor (translated by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), p. 14. Popescu, Petru. 2001. The Oasis: A Memoirs of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp, pp. 22–23. See also Perel, Manya Frydman. 2012. Six Years Forever Lost: The Testimony of Manya Frydman Perel (As Told to Marc Joel Adelman), p. 52. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992. A Survivor (translation by Jean-Jacques Garbarz). Op. Cit., p. 60. See, for example, a revenge murder in Blatt, Thomas Toivi Blatt. 1997. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, pp. 128–9. See also in this connection, Friling, Tuvia. 2014. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz: History, Memory, and the Politics of Survival. It painstakingly explores what

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

really constitutes moral behavior in a German camp. See also Hofmann, Michael. 2009 ed. “Translator’s Afterward.” In Wander, Fred. 2009 ed. The Seventh Well (translated by Michael Hofmann), p. 153. Hoffman’s words were written in 1966. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992. A Survivor (translation by Jean-Jacques Garbarz). Op. Cit., p. 60. Pawelcznska, Anna. 1978. Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis (translation by Catherine S. Leach), p. 44. Matzner, Jack, as cited in Bodner, David P. 1949. I Did Not Interview the Dead, p. 205. A measure of usefulness is found, for example, in the fact that a strategic effort in 1944 to sabotage a crematorium at Auschwitz was informed on, and the Sonderkommandos[gas chamber aides] plotters were gassed. Snyder, Timothy. June 21, 2012. “Stalin and Hitler: Mass Murder by Starvation.” New York Review of Books, p. 51. Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal. (BeKaf HaKelal), p. 251. Ibid. Matzner, Jack, as cited in Bodner, David P. 1949. I Did Not Interview the Dead, p. 208. As cited in Huberband, Rabbi Shimon. 1987. Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust, p. 438. Ibid., p. 75. Kuhn-Wiedmaier, Maria. As cited in Krause-Schmitt, Ursula and Christine Krause, eds. 2003. Through the Eyes of the Survivors: A Guide to the Ravensbruck Memorial Museum, p. 19. Smith, Mark S. 2010. Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling, p. 115. As cited in Seaman, David. August 23, 2013. “As Important as The Diary of Anne Frank and More.” http://www.amazon.com/ss/customer-reviews/0385537700/ [Book Review: Glaser, Paul. 2013 ed. (2010). Dancing with the Enemy: My Family’s Holocaust Secret (translated by Brian Doyle-DuBreuil).] Moorehead, Carolyn. 2011. A Train in Winter, p. 211. “. . . organizing was probably the most important word in the Camp’s vocabulary . . . As an organizer, you were respected.” As cited in Seaman, David. August 23, 2013. “As Important as The Diary of Anne Frank and More.” http://www.amazon.com/ss/customerreviews/0385537700/ [Book Review: Glaser, Paul. 2013 ed. (2010). Dancing with the Enemy: My Family’s Holocaust Secret (translated by Brian Doyle-DuBreuil).] Ibid. Earlier, as when the Vilna Ghetto was still operating, the Jewish Police hung several Jewish thieves who had lured people to a basement with the promise of food for sale, murdered them for their money, and buried them there. The Judenrat encouraged public viewing of the corpses. RotschildGalerkin, Steve. 2014. Traces of What Was, p. 30. “Solidarity was very limited—everyone was interested in his own survival. It doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t help someone else, but you wouldn’t care particularly to help him.” Cited in Smith, Lyn. 2005. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived, p. 161. 107

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25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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See Levy-Haas, Hanna. 2009. Diary of Bergen-Belsen 1944–1945, p. 44. See also Frietzche, Peter. 2008. Life and Death in the Third Reich, p. 113. A high suicide rate has been noted in research on prisoners with few social bonds and extreme self-reliance. Sayer, Andrew. 2011. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values, and Ethical Life, p. 119. Ruth Kluger would have us understand “no racial slur was implied, since Islam wasn’t an issue either for the Nazis or the inmates of the camps.” Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (translated by Weiter Leben), p. 90. Birenbaum, Halina. 1994. “Hela.” Eibeshitz, Jehoshua, ed., et al. 1994. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies, Vol. ll. (translated by Jehoshua Eibeshitz and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz), p. 127. See also Van Pelt, Robert Jan. 2012 ed. “Introduction.” In Koker, David. At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943–1944 (translation by Michael Horn and John Irons), p. 6. Lewis, Helen. 1992. A Time to Speak, p. 71. Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell, Op. Cit., p. 260. Bialowitz, Philip “Fiszel” (with Joseph Bialowitz). 2010. A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland, p. 87. Scott, A.O. February 7, 2014. “Eichmann’s Rabbi Gazes Backward.” New York Times. p. C-10. Lustig, Arnost. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993. Voices from the Holocaust, p. 8. As cited in Nelson, Anne. 2009. Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground, p. 334. Massie, Allan. January 18–19, 2014. “Sleeping with the Enemy.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-8. [Book Review: Priscilla, by Nicholas Shakespeare]. Levi, Primo. 1989 ed. The Drowned and Saved (translated by Raymond Rosenthal), p. 9. As cited in Epstein, Leslie. November 16, 2011. “Child of His Time.” http://www. tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/83325/chiild-of-his-time/3. Levi, Primo, in Roth, John K. and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, p. 114.

Part IV Amidah Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not the absence of fear. —Mark Twain

The Horror Story notwithstanding, two motivators—the Altruistic Impulse and Judaic altruistic tenets—encouraged in certain Jewish victims a bracing attitude known in Hebrew as Amidah (to stand up against; to go forward). Exemplified by the resistance of “suffering people who continued to act according to their conscience,” it helped many European Jews make it through to liberation.1 Of survivor Moshe Garbarz, a distant relative, Professor Mashey Bernstein writes, “Moshe shows that to survive one hour, even one minute in such an atmosphere [Auschwitz] was an act of resistance; to survive three days took more will power than many could possess; to survive three years without succumbing to despair or insanity took resources that leaves me full of admiration and respect.”2 Amidah is typically associated with armed resistance, as in the case of the militant underground groups active in about a hundred ghettos.3 Similarly, many concentration camps had secret armed groups.4 As many as twenty thousand or so European Jews fought as forest partisans.5 And at least one million Jews (American, British, Canadian, French, Russian, among others) served in the armies of the Allies.6 Less well known are nonviolent forms of Amidah, prominently including acts of stealth altruism. Robert Rozett, a Yad Vashem librarian, would have us understand “heroism is not just armed resistance. It is also the spiritual courage that enabled Jews to wear the [Nazi] yellow star, and Jewish women to keep their families together against all odds. It is a different kind of heroism.”7 Amidah was unevenly distributed, for as Elie Weisel notes, “like all tragedies, the Holocaust produced heroes and villains, ordinary human 109

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beings who never lost their humanity, and those who, to save themselves or for a mere piece of bread, helped send others to the gas chambers.”8 Prime requirements included interpersonal bonding, reciprocity, and sharing as “an essential source of strength for ‘adaptation’ and survival.”9 At one end of an Amidah continuum Carers in the ghettos “foraged for food to feed the children, set up [illegal] makeshift hospitals and schools, and put on [banned] plays and concerts.”10 Further along the continuum, Amidah in the camps included the secret sharing of “organized” food, the secret circulation of welcomed news of German military setbacks, and other such clandestine matters, all of which risked severe punishment or even death. Elie Wiesel recalls hearing in Auschwitz a long-time prisoner, at some risk to himself—given the SS insistence on prisoner selfishness—urge new arrivals to tirelessly care for one another: “We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke [from the crematorium] floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.”11 Chapter 8 explores out-of-sight high-risk care provided in camp barracks avoided by SS guards fearful of contagious diseases, or in workplaces where the SS were constrained by exposure to the public to be less overbearing. Quite different were the out-in-the-open acts of stealth altruism discussed in chapter 9, as some Carers had little choice at times except to publicly care for one another even if at great risk of being noticed by the Gestapo, the SS, Kapo collaborators, or Jewish informers. Leni Yahil’s magisterial 1990 history, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, would have us understand there was not “a clear-cut division of roles, that is, that the Germans were acting and the Jews were [abjectly] acted on.”12 Failure to grasp this undergirds a false image of European Jews going passively to their death, this a pernicious falsehood that is “one of the aims of those who wrought the Holocaust as well as one of its [worse] results.”13 Far more accurate is the contention of British Historian Lyn Smith that “given the extraordinary weak circumstances of Jews under the totalitarian rule of the Nazis, one can only wonder at the range and level of resistance [militant and non-militant Amidah] that did take place.”14 Notes

The epigraph is from Cook, John. 1993. The Book of Positive Quotations, p. 410. 1. 110

Dworzecki, Meir. 1968. “The Day-to-Day Stand of the Jews.” In Yad Vashem. Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference of

Amidah

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Manifestations of Jewish Resistance, p. 153. See also http://www.shoahlegacy. org/monitor/beyond-lambs-and-lions-jewish-resistance-holocaust. Bernstein, Mashey. 1992. “Foreword.” In Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992 ed. A Survivor (translated by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), p. 14. Bialowitz, Joseph. “Introduction.” Bialowitz, Philip “Fiszel” (with Joseph Bialowitz). 2010. A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland, p. xix. Fierce resistance occurred during revolts in the ghettos of Bedzin, Bialystok, Minsk, Tarnow, Vilna, Warsaw, and elsewhere. See in this connection, Suhl, Yuri, ed. 1975 ed. (1967). They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe (translated by Yuri Suhl). Bialowitz, Joseph. “Introduction.” Bialowitz, Philip “Fiszel” (with Joseph Bialowitz). 2010. A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland. Op. Cit., p. xix. See also Lichtbau, Eric. March 3, 2013. “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking.” New York Times, p. SR-3. Bialowitz, Joseph. “Introduction.” Bialowitz, Philip “Fiszel” (with Joseph Bialowitz). 2010. A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland. Op. Cit., p. xix. Rozett, Robert, Director of the Libraries, Yad Vashem Library. Cited in Kirshner, Sheldon, November 16, 2012; “Holocaust Heroism took Various Forms: Historian.” www.cjnews/index.php?q=node/97416. Wiesel, Elie. 2009. “Foreword.” In Buergenthal, Thomas. A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy, p. xvi. Bauer, Yehuda. 2009. The Death of the Shtetl. Op. Cit., p. 158. Ibid. Wiesel, Elie. 1969 ed. Night (translated by Stella Rodman), p. 52. Yahil, Leni. 1990 ed. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (translated by Ina Friedman and Haya Galai), p. 11. Ibid. Smith, Lyn, 2005. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust, pp. xiii, 184. See also See also Bluhm, Hilde O. 1948. “How Did They Survive?: Mechanisms of Defense in Nazi Concentration Camps.” American Journal of Psychotherapy, 2, pp. 3–32 (Reprinted: 1999), pp. 96–122.

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8 Stealth Altruism under Wraps The fact that the human face was preserved in such extremity counteracts the presentation of the Jewish survivor as having been entirely dehumanized. —Shami Davidson

Introduction

Believing that Rena Gelissen, a Jewish prisoner, had dared to steal a potato, a crazed barrack leader set out to capture her and beat her to death. As he chased her wildly through the camp and into a barrack foreign to her, she unexpectedly heard a sharp whisper from a stranger. A nearby woman urged her to quickly hide herself under the blanket in the woman’s bunk. SS guards rushed in screaming aloud for the location of the potato thief. Ms. Gelissen recalls that “no one said a word, no one let them know where I am. An SS woman came down our row, counting us, inspecting us, looking for me.” Much later, after thanking the risk-taking whisperer and her closed-mouth barrack mates for daring to deceive the SS, spontaneous behavior that all knew risked severe retaliation, Ms. Gelissen made her way carefully back to her own barrack.1 “Safe Barracks”

SS guards feared making contact with contagious diseases—especially typhus spread by lice—and they rarely entered dark, decrepit, and odorous camp barracks. Politicals and militants used these barracks (and also the camp latrines) for clandestine meetings, the sharing of the latest radio news about Allied gains, and on rare occasion, the indictment, “trial,” and punishment of fellow prisoners found guilty of informing, stealing, or in other severe ways, betraying peers.2 Residents of some out-of-the-way “safe” barracks could offer highrisk refuge, for example, a Carer at the Sobibor Death Camp, aware the 113

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penalty for missing work was being sent to the gas, convinced a Jewish Kapo to give an injured prisoner a job cleaning the barrack. Since three others already shared the same job, the Kapo arranged for one of them to secretly take the place at work of the injured man. Philip Bialowitz, the beneficiary of this act of stealth altruism, remembers that the two other prisoners—both strangers to him—did his cleaning job for him while he lay in bed recuperating, and they agreed to warn him if German or Ukrainian guards approached the barrack.3 Carers, at risk of their lives, used “safe” barracks to provide essential care and community support.4 Each service—education, entertainment, medical care, and spiritual support—put prisoners who lived in one of those barracks in jeopardy of collective punishment by a vengeful Gestapo or SS, a serious threat trumped by a sense of moral community. Children’s Education

Schooling of very young prisoners was strictly forbidden “on the principle that Jewish children were to be kept uneducated as a punishment for being Jewish.”5 Nevertheless at the concentration camp section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, Carers provided a rigorous daily routine of secret classes, athletic activities, and art studios. Youngsters over sixteen who were required to have jobs studied very early in the morning or at night and on Sundays. Pavel Stransky and two fellow prisoners dared to teach informal classes. Although they had no texts, notebooks, or writing equipment, each taught groups of six to eight youngsters between ages eight and twelve: “We told the children stories from the books and plays we had known in our normal lives.”6 When warned of the approach of the SS, the men immediately became playmates of savvy children who were quick to join the high-risk ruse. Little wonder that Ruth Kluger writes decades later of comparable teachers—“Most of what I know about living with others . . . I learned from the young Socialists and Zionists who took care of the children in Theresienstadt, looking after them until they had to deliver them up to destruction and were themselves destroyed.”7 Adult “Boot Camp”

Secret education for adult prisoners often involved new arrivals in camp desperately seeking guidance and support of experienced old-timers. Typical was the situation in Buchenwald when twelve young Jewish 114

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men, all strangers to one another and new to the camp, searched about for an inspiring mentor who “knew the score.” In short order the group chose to bond together under the demanding leadership of Peter Strum, a slightly older Jewish man with much longer experience in Nazi camps. Everyone understood SS rules expressly forbade all such alliances, fearing they might foment insurrection. Accordingly, the Strum group carefully stayed out of sight in a “safe” barrack, one from which disease-phobic guards kept their distance. Mr. Strum set out four rules: You had to try to keep clean. You had to help hold one another up when necessary during the daily forced march to and from work (slackers and laggards were often shot). You had to share your food ration, especially with any ill member of the group; one-fourth of everyone’s daily ration would go to a sick comrade. And you had to watch each other’s back for unexpected danger from guards, informers, or thieves. Before the early morning assembly, Mr. Strum would set an example by stripping and washing himself from head to toe at the outdoor pump, regardless of the weather. At 5 , he would cheerfully whistle a wake-up bugle call to give all a slightly upbeat start to the day, rather than allow it to arrive as just another grey and depressing one. Throughout the workday Mr. Strum urged his young comrades to keep up the quality of their conversation and avoid emotionally trying references to God, family, or food. Instead, he had them focus on empowering issues in literature, music, or the possible shape of the world after the Nazis are defeated. In the evenings in their freezing barrack the group might enjoy a round of a song Mr. Strum had composed for them: “The world is more beautiful than anything in the world; you just have to take a good look; its living that I like most about life, you just have to understand it; open your eyes up wide and you will understand it.”8 Afterwards some would talk about good things that could be achieved after liberation . . . provided, that is, the SS did not first uncover and punish this sort of prohibited male bonding. In a taped interview made in 1997 for the Shoah Foundation, the last living member of the Strum group describes members being fed extra food in the “safe” barrack when seriously ill: “I am not sure if the supplementary food helped us survive. I think it was more the psychological aspect that, if we are down and out and are ready to croak, somebody will come and help. And the proof of the pudding is that most of us survived.”9 115

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Entertainment

A camp often contained high-risk informal entertainment. It was held late at night in a darkened “safe” barrack, the better to shield it from humorless guards certain to punish all involved. Every such opportunity to get back in touch with positive emotions was understood by Carers as a key defense against dehumanization. Especially popular in the women’s quarters were hidden performances by experienced singers, along with informal songfests and poetry readings of original or iconic pieces. Enactments of memorized scenes from plays, and occasional recitals of an entire play, were substantial aids to morale. Performers were rewarded with the heartfelt appreciation of peers eager to be reminded of their shared humanity. East European Jewish men had a special appreciation of spoken poetry, a popular art form in their pre-camp world. Israel Cendorf, a prisoner at the Pithiviers Transit Camp for two thousand Jewish prisoners, went from barrack to barrack reading his poetry in Yiddish and arranging for evening cultural gatherings. One of his poems, “Our Courage Is Not Broken,” soon became the camp’s unofficial anthem and was later heard being sung at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp by new arrivals from Pithiviers when they realized they were being led to the gas.10 In some barracks, forbidden late-night entertainment included a cabaret-like setting that featured unrestrained satirical skits aimed at the Nazis. Laughter was appreciated as an essential and important aspect of defiance, “a material form of aggression, an actual act of self-defense, even a duty.”11 Carers encouraged skits that lampooned the hated enemy, as this form of biting humor lowered tension and bolstered self-esteem. A scholar maintains that “the very act of composing an old-new song was a radical affirmation of life . . . a time-bound but timeless document on the ultimate value of life . . . it provided a measure of catharsis . . . keeping at bay the despair that threatened to overwhelm . . . [it was] a form of temporary solace.”12 “Safe” barracks also played covert host to such high-risk forbidden events as the celebration of birthdays, the marking of which were common in the women’s quarters. Prisoners also often observed Yahrzeits, the memorial Day of Remembrance for loved ones who had died. Attendance was generally good for services on Jewish High Holidays, 116

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for example, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. All of this helped lift the morale of participants and that of some onlookers. (Such a scene occurs in the movie “Fateless.”) Medical Care

Intent on avoiding the camp infirmary, as very few ill prisoners returned alive from it, most Jewish prisoners sought forbidden makeshift medical care in a “safe” barrack, including minor surgery that had to be done without anesthetics. The quality of such care determined whether a delirious, high-fever victim made a speedy recovery or did not, the latter a sure path to the gas chamber. Unfortunately, as in the case of tending to the wounds of whipped prisoners—twenty-five or more lashes on bare skin—Carers often lacked appropriate medicine or bandages. At the Dessauer Ufer Slave Labor Camp, for example, Lucille Eichengren regrets how Carers could “give only the comfort of word and touch.”13 In contrast, in Auschwitz, some very scarce medicines were available in certain “safe” barracks. When Rena Gelissen lost her voice, she was immediately in danger of having this detected by the SS who would send her to the gas. Her younger sister arranged for a secret injection of strychnine, a tonic and central nervous system stimulant: “We were deep in the night when four nurses arrived at my bedside [in a barrack of 150 women]. Silence was imperative; if any of us had been caught we would all have been shot.”14 Secret abortions were a vital act of stealth altruism. The SS forbade childbirth, and expectant mothers, once detected, were immediately sent to the gas. Carers therefore arranged for high-risk abortions late at night in a “safe” barrack. Much as did other medical staffers in different camps, Dr. Gisella Perl often moved about at night helping to save a woman’s life by taking the life of her fetus. Had she been detected, everyone involved would have been sent to the gas. Carers and barrack residents knew this before they urgently asked for her covert help.15 Forbidden medical care was not always successful, often through no fault of the Carers. In the safety of their barrack in the Janowska Slave Labor Camp, ninety-four prisoners secretly tried to keep twenty-eight others alive who were slowly dying from typhus. As Leon W. Wells, their seventeen-year-old leader, writes, “Everyone helped . . . even to risking his own life . . . To every sick inmate I had appointed a healthy one as 117

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a nurse, to wash him, obtain food, and so on . . . we all tried to save the best of everything for the sick . . . [we took] all kinds of risks [for them] for between us a real and true feeling of comradeship had grown.”16 Tragically the sick men could soon not stand up during the frequent and interminable Appells (roll calls), and this had the SS soon lead them all off for execution. Carers who had long helped them mourned briefly, and some, including Wells, then set about helping others.17 Other comparable efforts had the desired results, for example, an anonymous prisoner attributes his survival “to the solidarity of fellow prisoners who made him get up from his sickbed when he felt like dying so that he would not be listed as incapable of working and sent to the gas chambers.”18 Spiritual Support

Tender support was secretly given by some Jewish prisoners to others slated for imminent execution. For instance, when some young religious Carers learned mothers and daughters in an adjacent barrack were scheduled to go the gas in the morning, they began to softly recite aloud the Psalms. Soon the entire barrack of doomed women, comforted by the sound, joined in and “the sobbing [of the doomed] grew silent . . . they all sang the entire night,” oblivious to the fact they were violating a strict SS order forbidding such collective “disturbances.” At the scheduled time the next morning, the order to send the women to the gas was unexpectedly ignored.19 Despite a ban against group singing in the evening, some observant women often did so in their barrack, commonly in Yiddish, “like a secret they were sharing that linked them from note to note, from refrain to refrain.”20 Hearing the beauty of such music stirred compassion and empathy far beyond the bunk area. Most exotic of spiritual practices were the late-night séances in “safe” barracks used to make “contact” with recently murdered loved ones, exchange messages with them, and lessen the gnawing pain of loss. Prisoners used bread and cigarettes and rations to purchase the forbidden services of fortune-tellers and palm readers, a mental health resource long part of the shtetl scene. According to Agi Rubin, at the Malchow Concentration Camp, a French woman there “predicted the future. She helped people believe, not in their own future, but in the idea of the future itself . . . there was a gentle kindness about her. She read palms, and she told me I would get out, I will survive.”21 118

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Conclusion

Carers, guided by the Altruistic Impulse and Judaic altruistic tenets, helped others in “safe” barracks, latrines, and other out-of-sight places. Thanks to what Professor Terrence Des Pres memorably calls their “innumerable small acts of humanness,” Carers were often able to blunt the unrelenting efforts the Nazis made to dehumanize prisoners.22 Brave and creative, in the words of Isaiah 32:2, Carers “turned [all such “safe” sites] into hiding places from the wind and shelters from the tempests.”23 Notes

The epigraph is from Shami Davidson. 1980. “Human Reciprocity Among the Jewish Prisoners in the Nazi Concentration Camps.” In Gutman, Yisrael and Avital Saf, eds. 1980. Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference: The Nazi Concentration Camps. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, p. 571. 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, p. 264. New arrivals took heart from confirmation of a familiar Yiddish adage, “Bei yidn vert men not ferlon.” (One doesn’t get lost among Jews.) Bialowitz, Philip “Fiszel” (with Joseph Bialowitz). 2010. A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland, p. 95. Some barrack leaders, a noble small minority, tried secretly in the spirit of the Help Story to accommodate both the Nazis and their Jewish barrack mates. “The deportations had netted Jewish communities so ancient and closely knit that . . . the chances of finding relatives [or neighbors or fellow nationals] in Auschwitz [and other large camps] were high.” Popescu, Petru. 2001. The Oasis: A Memoir of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp, p. 23. Newbies were advised to expect radical changes, not all of them negative, for example, “garden-variety” neuroses, such as hypochondria, and certain psychosomatic diseases, including bronchial asthma and duodenal and gastric ulcers, were known to fade away. Cohen, Elie. A. 1954 ed. Human Behavior in a Concentration Camp (translated by translated by M.H. Braaksman), p. 282. Stransky, Pavel. 2006. As Messengers for Victims, p. 78. Kluger, Ruth. 2001 ed. (1992). Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, p. 86. Based on a Shoah Foundation Video Tapes: Baum, Kurt, #29790; Shoah Foundation. Accessed at Columbia University, 2012 Ibid. www.USHMM.org; see the profile on their homepage of Israel Cendorf. Wander, Fred. 2009 ed. The Seventh Well (translated by Michael Hofmann), p. 5. Ibid., p. 12. Eichengreen, Lucille. 1994. From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust, p. 105. 119

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14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

120

Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, p. 237. In the few cases of childbirth she attended, Dr. Perl would secretly smother or even strangle a newborn infant, believing it the only option if at least the mother was to have a chance to survive. See Perl, Dr. Gisella. 1948. I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, p. 124. Wells, Leon W. 1978 ed. (1963). The Death Brigade, pp. 177–8. Ibid. Laqueur, Walter. 2001. Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany, p. 62. Soffer, Dalia. February 6, 2011. “Castaways.” New York Times Book Review, p. 18. (Review of The Last Brother, by Nathacha Appanah). Ibid. See also Lustig, Arnost, in Cargas, Harry James. 1993. Voices From the Holocaust. Helpful as well is Bitton-Jackson, Livia. 1997. I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust, p. 109. Rubin, Agi and Henry Greenspan. 2006. Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated, p. 57. This type of therapy had wide appeal across all sorts of divide (age, educational attainment, gender, nationality, religiosity, social class, etc.). Des Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, p. 142. The scripture terms are from Schulweis, Rabbi Harold M. 1994. For Those Who Can’t Believe: Overcoming the Obstacles to Faith, p. 156.

9 Stealth Altruism in the Open We endeavored to survive, not so much for our own sake, as for the purpose of upholding one another. —Adam Starkopf

Introduction

In 1942, Thomas Buergenthal, an eight-year-old Jewish prisoner in Poland, while serving as a factory errand boy, devised a plan that let him warn about the unpredictable arrival of a sadistic German manager who savagely beat slave laborers he thought shirkers, some of whom were then sent to the gas. On the manager’s arrival, the boy would run wildly through factory halls silently signaling danger. Some sixty years later Mr. Buergenthal wrote in his memoir, “I got a big kick out of performing this service, and probably saved many a prisoner from a beating.” Detection or betrayal by an informer would have cost him his life, something understood from the outset.1 Background

Any display of altruism by Jewish untermenschen (subhumans) refuted Nazi ideology, as the Third Reich insisted only superior human beings, specifically Aryans, were capable of noble sentiments. Accordingly, the Gestapo and SS went to no limits to prevent refutation by Jewish victims. Detection of altruism brought harsh beatings, torture, and/or execution. Regardless, forbidden caring was sometimes “hidden in plain sight,” and it served as a major aid to survival. Examples follow of observable acts of stealth altruism selected from scores of eligible illustrations. Arrivals

While in transit from a ghetto to a death camp, an overcrowded cattle car train slowed to a stop and the train’s anguished Jewish prisoners, 121

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starving and thirsty beyond reason, noticed two weeping women in a close-by, snow-covered woods who had prepared snowballs to give to the transport victims: “Trembling, though brave, hands are outstretched towards us. They were Jewesses, as like as not, and they could have had much unpleasantness but our imploring eyes had affected them so much that they forgot the reality—and took up their positions near to our windows as to be able to reach us . . . The lucky ones who had caught the snow divided it . . . [As the train moved on] all greeted these brave women and wished them very much happiness for their sympathy and help.”2 When Janny Brandes-Brilleslyper arrived at Auschwitz via cattle car transport, she heard the camp loudspeaker calmly advise mothers and children to get into nearby SS-operated cars to go directly to their barracks. Fortunately, “little men in blue-striped uniforms whispered ‘You are healthy! Walk!’ They were trying to warn us.” The men knew the SS cars actually went directly to the gas chamber.3 Later, when removing baggage from the empty cattle cars, the same men often found medicines and other health aides abandoned by illfated new arrivals: “At great risk to themselves, they got it all to Jewish doctors in the camps to help other prisoners.”4 As noted in earlier chapters, some new arrivals got muted life-saving advice from altruistic prisoners in violation of strict SS rules against such behavior. Elie Wiesel remembers a Carer who whispered, “18 and over, 40 and younger.”5 Hugo Gryn writes, “there were these peculiar-looking people in striped uniforms. I made the assumption they were inhabitants of the local lunatic asylum . . . one of them, as he passed me, muttered in Yiddish, ‘you’re 18 and you’ve got a trade.’”6 Groups

Appell (roll call assembly) could drag on for hours in every type of weather.7 Care, however, was often secretly tendered, for example, unable due to illness to stand erect, a fourteen-year-old girl relied on her seventeen-year-old sister to stand behind her and discretely prop her up. This gesture, they knew, could cost them both their lives but for fellow prisoners who whistled warnings about the approach of SS guards.8 Similarly, at the Birkenau Death Camp, Dora Apsan Sorell and friends helped to drag out of the barrack a girl “who can hardly get up, and [we] tried to hold her up straight without being noticed. If a sick girl stays behind we will not find her there on our return from work.”9 122

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Moshe Garbarz was required with others to stand outside for hours while camp guards searched for a missing prisoner. When he began to lose consciousness “luckily, friends managed to keep me on my feet.” The guards would kill anyone who fell down.10 Later, in the same camp but during a different six-hour Appell, Mr. Garbarz describes how “a number of men weaken and have to be supported, everybody is holding someone up . . . with all our might we prop each other up, friend to friend,” a gesture strictly prohibited by camp rules, and potentially grounds for execution.11 Weather extremes often led to forbidden care adaptations. Roman Halter remembers joining others during an Appell to form a “human oven” in defense against fierce cold and wind. “We moved into a big block, like a haystack, and rotated one way and then the other. And those inside had to come out after a few minutes. Anyone who was excluded from it suffered from cold and pneumonia, and died. So really, solidarity existed between us.” The SS ordered Kapos to disperse the prisoners, but they soon regrouped, and repeated this banned Help Story behavior over and over again, “because it was the only way to survive.”12 Arnost Lustig, as a seventeen-year-old newly-arrived prisoner at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, was outside waiting to be assigned to a barrack when he began to freeze to death. To his surprise a small group of hardened older prisoners called him over, put him in the middle of their bunch, and “pressed me for five minutes with their own bodies because they didn’t have anything else [to give]. They warmed me up . . . It was a human touch you can dream about. Once you get such a lesson about friendship and solidarity you know that friendship and solidarity exist.”13 Women prisoners in the Birkenau Death Camp, trying to keep warm during interminable outside roll calls, also broke camp rules. Backs to chests, they would press against each other to keep warm and prop up one another. Those who found themselves in the front row would sooner or later rotate almost invisibly to the back. They would furtively place their hands under the arms of the women in front of them. Charlotte Delbo recalls that, “when they [the SS women officers] have passed by, each of us places her hands back in another’s armpits.”14 Workers

Prisoners were able at times to leverage group solidarity in order to take control of desirable job slots. These included the roles of camp accountant, bookkeeper, butler, carpenter, chauffeur, child watcher, 123

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clerk, cook, electrician, gardener, housekeeper, maid, mechanic, and personal aide. Especially prized were jobs in a camp’s headquarters, as jobholders could stealthily influence life-and-death decisions about which Jewish prisoners got the most or the least desirable work assignments, as in being able to stay indoors during the winter; which got access to extra “organized” (stolen) food or medicine; which got warnings in time to hide before an SS selection suddenly targeted a particular barrack; and so on. Secret high-risk alterations could be made to office lists of prisoners scheduled to go next to their death in the gas chamber or to an execution site. Office workers could furtively revise a prisoner’s age upward in the case of subteens or downward under a cutoff point for older prisoners. They could replace an ID card that had the letter “J” for Jew with one from which it was absent. They could also substitute the tattoo numbers of deceased prisoners or of unsuspecting Muselmänner for others newly scheduled to go to the gas. Or even substitute the names of Jews condemned in an ad hoc way by the Jewish militant leadership of a camp underground as irredeemable informers or thieves.15 In the Ravensbruck Camp, Jewish women prisoners serving in the Labor Deployment Office took great risks to rescue others. “If you trusted the Block Officer [who daily came in to report tallies] you would say—‘Listen, we’ve got someone here who is in danger. She has got to get out [of her current work assignment]. Perhaps you can take her in your block.’ Most of them did. . . . Often, inmates would come to us themselves. ‘Please, please, I’ll never survive this.’ We would see what we could do.”16 Carers in Auschwitz who were responsible for keeping records of prisoners who had died in the medical barracks stealthily let a high mortality rate lead to a persistent backlog in clerical accounting. “Not all deaths could be registered in the very day they occurred. And as long as a death was not registered, the inmate kitchen would still bring a ration of food to the medical barracks . . . where the extra food could be divided among the [starving medical] workers who, as long as they were not morally broken, were constantly reminded [by Carers] of their duty to assist ill fellow inmates as much as possible.”17 Charlotte Opfermann, while working in the Theresienstadt Youth Labor Assignment Office, led her colleagues in covertly inventing statistical details and totally fictitious numbers to keep the SS 124

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Kommandantur thinking everything was in proper order, a strategy which made possible precious types of forbidden care.18 In a similar way, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, when serving in the lead orchestra at Auschwitz, recalls with a wry smile that “we had a whole team of people copying out the music after it had been orchestrated— that’s how a whole group of people were saved from being corpses,” prisoners who might otherwise have been on far more difficult and even perilous outside work.19 At the Treblinka Death Camp, a time came when long-time prisoners assigned to sweep out the cattle cars stealthily found new arrivals to whom they could lend their brooms and quickly coach them to act as if they were also old-timers. This allowed the new “sweepers” to avoid the line of fellow new arrivals headed directly toward the gas. When later the SS guards counted far too many workers, they “sometimes ignored the difference.” Other times they took out their anger and frustration by shooting workers from both groups.20 The Treblinka veteran sweepers knew the life-and-death risk they were taking on behalf of complete strangers—and they still took it. Jewish male prisoners left the Sobibor Death Camp daily to secure fire-resistant bricks in town for use in the camp. They noticed 150 or so Jewish female prisoners busy sorting the spoils of abandoned Jewish households. Fifteen-year-old Thomas Toivi Blatt remembers how “we thought we might be able to help them. Risking torture and death—the likely result of unexpected searches often conducted by the SS Guards—we smuggled money and other valuables into town. We hoped the female slaves would find them and use them to save themselves by buying false papers and food.”21 Possibly the most unique of all worksite acts of stealth altruism took place at the Janowska Camp. A Sonderkommando Squad (“Special Command Unit” of prisoners assigned to help handle the dead) decided one day to try and rescue “living corpses.” These were Jewish victims of the daily mass executions who had not been killed, but were slightly wounded or not shot at all yet were fated to be buried alive. Instead, at the start of the day, Squad members secretly put clothing beside the bodies, with sugar cubes in the pockets. They also hid two pairs of shoes complete with money and exact directions for how to escape from the killing grounds and then from the camp. During the day, prisoners carried victims to the edge of pits into which the Sonderkommando Squad would soon place the dead for incineration. While doing this, the body carriers covertly identified 125

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“living corpses,” put sugar in their mouths, and, while pretending to talk to one another, actually let the “corpses” know where escape clothing and shoes could be found. All were very pleased when the next day revealed the escape clothing was missing which meant some of the “corpses” had escaped. However, the capture soon after of one of the escaped “living corpses” and his public execution, deliberately staged in front of the Squad as a warning, put a sharp end to this audacious one-time project. Its swift cessation, though, did not crimp a significant lift in prisoner morale.22 Naturally, high-risk acts of stealth altruism put Carers in extreme peril. Eva Brown, a sixteen-year-old prisoner in Auschwitz, worked at extracting gold teeth from the mouths of recently gassed adults, a job that paid so poorly in food she was slowly starving to death. One day she learned from the grapevine that an official camp orchestra was soon going to perform for SS guards and officers; its members would get an extra ration of bread at the close of their concert. Ms. Brown went to the gathering spot where some of Europe’s finest professional musicians— all starving Jewish prisoners—were about to begin a practice session. Noticing an available flute in an open case, she picked it up and sat down as the orchestra’s newest “flutist.” Others around her gently asked what was she doing? She plaintively explained that, like all of them, she was starving to death and she urgently needed extra food if she was to survive. Orchestra members knew they would be sent to the gas if the SS detected a ruse during the concert, since humorless Nazis had no tolerance for such deceptions. They had become accustomed to hearing fine performances from renowned (Jewish) performers and they would tolerate nothing less. This notwithstanding, after brief discussion of the girl’s plea, the musicians chose to take pity and go along. Ms. Brown was taught how to appear to be a flutist, while cautioned not to make a single sound. After the concert’s close, she got a portion of bread she rushed to share with friends. She even got to repeat the ploy one more time the following day before agreeing to turn elsewhere in her desperate pursuit of additional food.23 Outside worksite risk was often immediate and deadly serious. Laura Hillman, when a fifteen-year-old girl, was working alongside an ailing older woman who had suddenly moaned, collapsed, and dragged them both down on the ground. A nearby SS guard shouted, “Get up, you lazy swine!” Ms. Hillman got up immediately, and then, without thinking of the SS prohibition against helping others, tried to get the older woman 126

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to her feet. The guard aimed his rifle at the girl and shouted, “She’ll get up by herself!” But on finding the old woman unable to move, he “screamed more obscenities at the poor woman before emptying his gun into her.”24 Had he been just a little less observant, Ms. Hillman might have gotten away with her act of stealth altruism. As it was, she barely escaped being capriciously murdered herself. Easily one of the most rewarding acts of stealth altruism in a work setting involved Sala Garncarz. When assigned one day to clean offices in the headquarters of the Geppersdorf Slave Labor Camp, she discovered undelivered mail for camp inmates (352 letters, documents, and photographs) thrown carelessly under a desk. Knowing her life was forfeit if she was discovered with “stolen property,” Ms. Garncarz took only a few of the letters at a time over many days until the entire pile had gone unnoticed. Then, at risk of being turned in by an informer, she began to deliver the treasures. From 1940 through 1946, while being moved among seven slave labor camps in two countries, often with little advance notice of being moved, Ms. Garncarz secretly made unorthodox mail deliveries. Other prisoners who knew of the contraband kept her secret, and some even aided her in transporting it among camps.25 Finally, it should be noted that high-risk workplace acts of stealth altruism had their rare pleasurable moments, for example, a small group of Carers who regularly smuggled food out of a camp kitchen where they worked secretly passed it on to starving Jewish Greek males held in a nearby separate compound: “The Greeks had dignity, and would not panhandle without giving something in exchange—they danced for us, or sang. One of them brought us a collection of miniature birds made from cement paper.”26 Camp orchestras provided the inspiring music the SS wanted prisoners to hear when leaving camp at 5 am to march to work. Despite a strict rule against Jews playing Jewish music, Fania Fenelon, the female Jewish director of the Auschwitz 11 Orchestra, regularly disguised works of Jewish composers so that prisoners “marched off to the rhythm of Jewish music that some clearly recognized. Not a single SS guard ever noticed.”27 Likewise, in a camp recital program required by the SS, Director Fenelon included an inspirational piece by Mendelssohn, a Jewish composer. She entitled it “Violin Concerto, composer unknown,” and noted in her memoir that she found it “amusing to be able to sing a song of hope under their noses. Guile is the revenge of the weak.”28 127

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Strangers, Friends, and Lovers

Music could and did help directly, as when at Bergen-Belsen a group of young men asked after the 10  curfew if they could go to the latrine. Instead they dared to sneak to the wall of a nearby barrack and sing several Chanukah and other Hebrew songs for any prisoners who could hear them. Leslie Meisels recalls this act of stealth altruism had a great impact: “Living amidst such hopelessness, hearing uplifting, heartwarming, and inspiring words was the most beautiful, unforgettable experience. Even now, when I think about this moment, I get goose bumps.”29 In a similar way, prisoners who carried the morning tea kettle from the kitchen into the women’s quarters in Auschwitz dared to also whisper information about Nazi losses taken from a radio hidden in the men’s camp. Rena Gelissen remembers this as the favorite time of day because the news was “food for the soul. And even those weak from hunger feast on this free meal of information, holding it close to their hearts as one would an extra ration of bread.”30 As for the men who risked their lives daily to bring the encouraging news, Ms. Gelissen was “in such awe of their bravery. They do not know me; they are not blood relatives. But they would die before they gave up my number,” that is, identify her under torture as a rule-breaking listener.31 Sometimes even against the wish of a prisoner, his or her friends dared to save a life out in the open. Arnost Lustig, as a new seventeen-year-old arrival, “refused to go back into the barracks because [having just lost his family to the gas] I didn’t care for life . . . Fortunately there were friends with me . . . They dragged me back into the barracks because after dark I would have been shot.”32 Detection might have had all sent to the gas. During a death march, Agi Rubin became delirious and began to hallucinate from the effects of exhaustion, starvation, and the recent loss of blood drained from her for battlefront transfusions. “One of the soldiers was about to shoot me for wandering toward him out of line. Someone pulled me back and shoved a piece of sugar in my mouth. Somehow I gained energy. They hid me in the line [of marchers], and we went on walking.”33 Later on the same march, Rubin and two friends managed in desperation to hold up each other: “While three walked, one slept, being dragged along by the [two] others. We took turns, walking and sleeping.”34 Fifteen-year-old Edith Balas asked some friends from outside her barrack to stay close by during a life-and-death selection process. They 128

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had pails and brooms and pretended to be a cleaning task force. When Balas was selected with others to go to the gas she seized an opportunity to secretly grab an extra broom away from a cooperating friend standing nearby and pretend to be part of the cleaning task force. “I knew I was doing a very dangerous thing and I knew I could be sent to my death if caught. However, I also knew I would not survive without my group.”35 Unexpected crises could make novel high-risk demands on friends. Typical was a situation that developed in early 1944 when Vera Korkus, then a fourteen-year-old girl, arrived at the Auschwitz Death Camp Auschwitz with her middle-aged mother. The two hoped to catch up with the girl’s older sister who had been transported there over a year ago. Each, however, was assigned by a flick of the wrist of an SS officer to a different line, the mother alone sent to the gas chamber line. Decades later Ms. Korkus, now an eighty-one-year-old woman, recalled that, “soon after my older sister found me; she had been there some months already. She asked where our mother was, and when I told about the two lines, she went crazy. She pulled a knife out of her clothing [taken from the storage warehouse, Kanada] and screamed that she was going to go and kill those Germans who had sent our mother to the ‘death’ line. Her friends quickly grabbed the knife, and held her tightly to keep her from going anywhere—and they all wept a long time together.”36 The veiled presence of lovers also lifted the spirit of onlookers attuned to the emotions it conveyed. Since male and female prisoners were in separate parts of the camp, Carers arranged a perilous system of affectionate communications between them: “When the attention of the guards wandered at the morning appel, friends, relatives, or aspiring lovers quickly passed notes up and down the line of standing prisoners.”37 Guardians

In April of 1945, as the war was winding down, close to one thousand Jewish youngsters in the children’s barrack in Buchenwald were slated to join thirty-eight thousand adults in a pending death march. It would have meant certain death for many youngsters. Elie Wiesel, one of the youngsters, recalls that when a well-organized camp underground, which included staunch Jewish antifascists or communists, learned of this peril, its leaders decided not to allow it to happen. 129

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Officers of the underground were sent to the children’s barrack where they told the youngsters to remove the Star of David from their clothing, and not to answer when the SS came with a Nazi evacuation order and asked who were the Jewish children. The underground next, at some considerable risk, “persuaded” SS guards to fake the morning’s roll call and thereby altruistically saved the children. Theirs was the largest such group among those who survived: 1.5 million Jewish children did not.38 On February 4, 1945, the SS at the Ravensbruck Camp attempted to round up young Jewish women prisoners. They had survived medical vivisection experiments and, a few days earlier, been allowed to return to their barrack. The roundup would have them sent to the gas. To the astonishment of the SS, many other prisoners in the barrack shouted that they would not hand over the “guinea pigs.” In an instance, saboteurs cut off the camp lights and, during the planned chaos, the hunted prisoners were hidden away by Carers . . . all of this altruistic action occurring at considerable risk. One of the “guinea pigs” later recalled with pleasure that “we mingled with the other inmates. They took us in very warmly, and were glad to have been able to help us.”39 Conclusion

Drawing on her personal experience in camp, Dr. Lucie Adelsberger would have the reader understand, “No Jewish prisoner reckoned on ever leaving Auschwitz alive . . . Death was as close and familiar to us as the landscape in which we were born and raised.”40 All the more significant, therefore, were in-plain-sight acts of stealth altruism, especially as they had a way of stimulating low-keyed imitations.41 Keenly aware of this, the Gestapo and SS worked fiercely against such behavior. To judge cautiously from survivor accounts of overt acts of stealth altruism in the camps, the Nazis had good reason to vigorously oppose such nonviolent resistance. While it was not always everything that participants might have wished for, acts of stealth altruism provided Jewish prisoners with morale-boosting evidence that some of them could achieve “a transcendence of evil and of faceless dehumanization.”42 Guided by Carers, these men and women honored an ancient tenet, Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh—we are all responsible for one another as a community. 130

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Notes

The epigraph is from Starkopf, Adam. 1995 ed. Will to Live: Our Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust, p. 242. 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Buergenthal, Thomas. 2009. A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy, pp. 58–59. Gradowski, Salmen. 1943. “The Manuscript.” In Bezwinska, Jadwiga, ed. 1973. Amidst a Nightmare of Crime: Manuscripts of Members of Sonderkommando, pp. 88–90. One of five manuscripts found on the site of the Birkenau Camp, and translated in 1964. The words of Janny Brandes-Brilleslyper are cited in Lindwer, Willy. 1991. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (translated by Alison Meerrschaert), p. 56. See also Handeli, Ya’acov (Jack). 2001 (1992). A Greek Jew from Salonica Remembers (translated by Martin Kett), pp. 67, 74. Lindwer, Willy Op. Cit., p. 56. See also Harfenes, Rav Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal (BeKaf HaKelal). Edited by Howard Shapiro and Yehazkel Harpanes, p. 131. Wiesel, Elie. Night (translated by Marion Wiesel), p. 28. Gryn, Hugo, cited in Smith, Lyn. 2005. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived, p. 213. See in this connection, Denenberg, Barry. 2005. Shadow Life: A Portrait of Anne Frank and Her Family, p. 162. Lazar, Helen. 2/13/1989. Oral History Transcript, Holocaust Center of Northern California, p. 12. At some camps each line of five prisoners was positioned an arm’s length from the other so as to deny anyone the ability to lean on others for momentary relief. Sorell, Dora Apsan. 1998. Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam, p. 95. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1972 ed. A Survivor (translated by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), p. 82. Ibid. Halter, Roman, as cited in Smith, Lyn. Op. Cit., pp. 225–6. Lustig, Arnost. 1993. In Cargas, Harry James, ed. Voices from the Holocaust, p. 3. Delbo, Charlotte.1985 (2001 ed.). Days and Memories (translated by Rosette C. Lamont), pp. 63, 66. The absence of “due process” and of a chance to adequately defend oneself was trumped by a need for secrecy, speed, and finality, especially as many suspects were thought to have the protection of the Gestapo and/or the SS. Gerda Szzepansky. Cited in Berner, Maria. 2003. Krause-Schmitt, Ursula and Christine Kruase, eds. 2003. Through the Eyes of the Survivors: A Guide to the Ravensbruck Memorial Museum, p. 11. Czech, Danuta. 1990. Auschwitz Chronicles 1939–1945, p. 367. Opeffermann, Charlotte G. 2002. The Art of Darkness, p. 100. She notes tactfully that such false tallies are now “taken for gospel truth by contemporary researchers. But they are not always factual.” Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita, in Smith, Lyn. Op. Cit., p. 180. See also LaskerWallfisch, Anita. 2000. Inherit the Truth: A Memoir of Survival and the Holocaust. 131

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

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David Wolkowitz, as cited in Zullo. 2009. Escape: Children of the Holocaust, p. 120. Blatt, Thomas Toivi. 1997. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, p. 109. “Eventually, though, most of these girls were brought to Sobibor and gassed.” Wells, Leon W. 1978 ed. (1963). The Death Brigade, pp. 209–10. See also Eddie Weinstein, Eddie, as cited in Zullo, Allan. 2009. Escape: Children of the Holocaust, p. 120. Brown, Eva (with Thomas Fields-Meyer). 2007. If You Save One Life: A Survivor’s Memoir, pp. 97–98. Hillman, Laura. 2005. I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree: A Memoir of a Schindler’s List Survivor, p. 118. The book based on this material—Sala’s Gift—written by the prisoner’s daughter, Ann Kirschner, remains one of the finest of all such accounts. Kirschner. Ann. 2006. Sala’s Gift, p. 147. Popescu, Petru. 2001. The Oasis: A Memoir of Love and Survival, p. 161. Fenelon, Fania. 1977. Playing for Time (translated by J. Landry), p. 125 Ibid. Meisels, Leslie. Suddenly the Shadows Fell, pp. 39–40. Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. Op. Cit., p. 228. Ibid. Lustig, Arnost. Op. Cit., p. 3. Rubin, Agi and Henry Greenspan. 2006. Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated, pp. 50, 52. Ibid. Balas, Edith. 2010. Bird in Flight: memoir of a Survivor and Scholar, p. 25. Taken from my notes written on February 15, 2011, at a Holocaust Course event at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California. Brown, Eva (with Thomas Fields-Meyer). Op. Cit., p. 72. Passim. Ranz, John. Autumn. 2015. “Rescuing Jewish Children in Buchenwald: The Role of the German Underground.” Jewish Currents, p. 39. See also Wiesel, Elie. Op Cit., p. 114. See also Buchler, Yehoshua. 1984. “Discussion.” In Gutman, Israel and Avital Saf, eds. The Nazi Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, p. 111. Symonowicz, Wanda, ed. 1970. Uber Menschliches Mass Warsaw, p. 142. As cited in Krause-Schmitt, Ursula and Christine Kruase, eds. Op Cit., p. 19. Some others had died, as all had been operated on without anesthetic. Adelsberger, Lucie. 1995. Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story (translated by Susan Ray), p. 65. I adapt here a thought about “acts of conscience” offered by Franklin, Ruth. February 17, 2012. Wall Street Journal, p. A-11 [Book Review: Beautiful Souls, by Eval Press]. Davidson, Susanna. 2008. The Holocaust, p. 571. For an alternative perspective, see Langer, Lawrence L. 2006. Using and Abusing the Holocaust.

Profile

A New Perception of the Holocaust Betty Bleicher, LCSW

A child of two Holocaust Survivors from Poland I grew up hearing stories of what life was like before, during, and after the war, but mostly stories about the “camps.” My dad, Paul Bleicher, was the storyteller. Around the dinner table or when their group of survivor friends, “their little shtetal,” would gather, the talk would always turn to what they had endured during those horrible years. What I didn’t realize until just recently was that dad often spoke of heroic achievements rather than just specific horrific events. Sure, I heard about the “evil,” the “darkness,” the “despair,” and the “death,” but as I look back at the many stories my father shared with my sister Paula and me, great strength emerged—as displayed by concentration camp victims, “righteous gentiles,” or other non-Jewish Prisoners of War my parents had met. This was a surprise as my perception of the war and the camps were not tuned to heroism. All the Holocaust reading I had done (a great deal across the years) and the fact that my parents lost their whole families except for one sister on each side shaped my thoughts in terms of its negative consequences. Some heroic acts happened in Poland before my father and his family were taken away to the camps. One occurred in October 1939, on Yom Kippur day, when my father looked out the window and saw a German soldier with his gun pointed at him. The soldier kicked open the house door and ordered my father to take him to the home of the president of the synagogue and then bring the president outside. When my father went inside, he found a group of twenty men praying the 133

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Yom Kippur prayers (including his own elderly father), a forbidden act at pain of death. Dad quietly told the men to flee immediately before the soldier came in looking for rule-breaking Jews. They got out through the backyard, and both my dad and grandfather stayed away from their homes for a week fearing Nazi retaliation. Later on the German soldiers burned the synagogue down thinking that Jews were praying inside. When dad told us this story, he did not acknowledge he had saved the lives of his father and the other men. My dad, however, was able to praise the bravery and heroism of his mother. A few months after the 1939 German occupation of Poland, German police patrolling the streets would enter Jewish homes, especially on Friday evenings when the Jewish families were observing Shabbat. They would “help themselves” to silver candlesticks and other objects of value. Jewish victims understood these police officers were stealing the items for themselves, and not as ordered by the military or the SS. My grandmother and another woman friend of hers went together to police headquarters to complain about these officers. After the complaint, a room full of silver items was found, and two offending police officers were “taken away.” My father acknowledged his mother did a very brave thing because she could have been punished or killed for her behavior. In 1940, my father was taken to Germany and transferred among various slave labor and concentration camps. At one of the camps, he was placed with a group of men who were “shady characters.” My father, however, always made a point of being nice to everyone and helping or sharing things with them, especially individuals who might cause him harm. The “scary guy” my dad bunked with, a Prisoner of War, was one such man. One time, as a penalty for walking too slowly, my dad was going to be punished by a hundred lashes on his back, after which he would probably be too hurt to work and would therefore be sent to his death. His bunkmate, the very large, “scary guy”, was in charge of implementing punishments the Gestapo and/or German guards chose to inflict. When it was my father’s turn to be whipped, he took my father to a secluded area and told him to cry out loudly as he hit the chair with his whip. Others did not have my father’s luck. Another time in Bergen-Belsen toward the end of the war, my dad heard that there was a women’s concentration camp nearby. Although the German officers had fled, the camps were still being patrolled by 134

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German guards, and the inmates were not yet allowed to leave. Also, there were still individual German soldiers and SS men who were sniper shooting at prisoners. At great risk my dad dug himself out of the camp under the barbed wire and walked a few miles to the women’s camp. He asked around if anyone knew of his sisters, Yadga, Sala, and Hela, and someone (who later turned out to be my mother) said “yes.” Dad then sneaked under the barbed wire to the women’s side and found his sister Sala (Sally). He was told his other sister Hela (Helen) was extremely ill in the infirmary. Not recognizing her as he walked up and down the infirmary aisle, he heard a faint whisper of his name. It was Hela and she was dying. Dad told her to hold on, that the war was almost over, and that he would be back the next day with some potatoes for her. He slipped out, walked to his camp, and sneaked back in. Dad did the same very risky thing again the following day, this time with a few potatoes in his pocket. But when he arrived at the women’s Bergen-Belsen camp, he found he was too late, as his sister had died. Over the years I heard this story several times, but until recently, I never viewed his actions as heroic. I now understand it as a story of a man who risked his life to try to save his sister. When dad retired he wrote his autobiography, a handwritten account of life and characters before, during, and after the war. He told of the circumstances surrounding the war, and as he said, the “evil” in the world. But when writing about his personal experiences, he was never too graphic about the atrocities perpetrated upon him or others. He would briefly mention some brutality, but then go into great detail about what he had learned, how he had survived, how he had helped others, and how they had helped him. While poetry dad also wrote included the Holocaust, most of it spoke of hopeful and funny times. He would always end his poems, letters, and stories with “Don’t Forget to Live and Let Live” and “Be Happy and Smile.” My mom, Fay Bleicher (nee Majtles), never spoke of the war or her experiences in the concentration camps. But later in life my dad told us “You know, mommy was a hero.” When I asked what happened to her he told me a story of great suffering and courage. When my mother was taken away from home at the age of thirteen, her mother gave her a diamond ring and said, “just in case you need this.” And indeed, one day in the camp my starving mom traded that ring with a civilian Czechoslovakian worker for a desperately needed 135

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loaf of bread. She told her friend about it and they kept the bread hidden and shared it at their “work station.” Unfortunately the camp guards found the bread and demanded to know who had provided it. Mom and her friend denied knowing the answer and said they just found it. Their interrogation went on for an entire day, and then the guards took my mother and her friend out in the snow, had them undress and stand naked, with their hands tied up above their head for everyone to see. The two women stood like that for a day or more and the camp administrators even sent a Gestapo officer to see and question them. My mom’s friend said they should tell the officer where they got the bread. But mom said “No,” that they would be killed either way, so best not to get someone else in trouble. Mom and her friend continued to deny that they knew where the bread came from. After much time hanging naked outdoors in the snow, they were finally released, and a few days later, thanks to help from fellow prisoners, both had recovered enough to return to work. My mother would never talk of this or other such events, saying that it was too painful. She did not see “sticking to the story” and saving this Czech worker’s life, when hers was in danger, as heroic . . . though I do. Writing these memories down has made me think about whether your captors can also be your saviors. A story my father told us included how some of the German guards and even SS officers helped him escape starvation, pain, and even death. One such time, at the end of 1943, a high-ranking official came to the camp in which my dad was working. This German man was dressed in civilian clothes with a swastika in his jacket lapel, and he became the new head manager. My dad was told to help unload the man’s furniture into his new home. After that, his job was to work for him. Every few days, my father’s new boss would give him food and cigarettes, which he would barter for other food and give away to Jewish prisoners. One day the manager caught my father sleeping in the boiler room. Instead of sending my dad for punishment, he told him to “be careful” so that he would not be caught by someone else. He also urged my dad to “hold on, as this will all be over soon.” My father always remembered to be grateful to those who helped him. He returned kindness, even to German Guards and Nazi Party members. One of those times, when my father was unloading truckloads of liquor to be put in the officer’s lodging, dad stole a few bottles and gave it to his old boss, “Hoffman.” 136

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On several occasions, “Hoffman” saved my father’s life. For example, when dad had typhoid fever, he begged his nurse to let him leave the infirmary and go back to work so that he wouldn’t be on the next transport out to a death camp with the other sick inmates. When he got back to work, “Hoffman” took one look at him and told him to lie down underneath a big nearby tree and not do any work until he gained more strength. My father later “saved” his boss. An SS official asked dad to bring “Hoffman” to him immediately. When he went to “Hoffman’s” office, he found his old boss quite drunk (on the liquor my father had given him) and making drunken comments about the Nazis. Dad helped sober up “Hoffman” and brought him down to the SS official, certainly saving not only his life but also that of his boss’s. In 1945, as the Allies were approaching, the Germans were in retreat and there was talk of evacuating the whole camp. A few days before the evacuation, “Hoffman” gave dad a key to the storage room that housed new clothing, shoes, and linen. He told my father to “straighten out the place.” It was wintertime and dad realized what “Hoffman” actually wanted him to do. Dad clothed himself in double shirts, double underwear, sweaters, and a pair of new shoes good for walking. When my father returned the key, his boss told him to dirty his shoes and clothes so no one would know they were new. In the middle of the night, the guards woke all the prisoners to begin a six-week death march westward. Dad was always grateful to “Hoffman,” since wearing all those clothes saved his life during the cold winter days and nights of walking for six weeks. As I pass down stories of my parents’ survival to my daughter Hana, we can talk about ways my parents were not just victims, but were heroes as well. They were, they are, and they will always be more than just the atrocities that befell them. Acknowledging their stories of heroism is a treasured part of my family’s Holocaust legacy.

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Part V Carers If you have done something kind and loving for somebody else, you have served the world. —Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi

Care Sharers were people who “did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance. . . .”1 Thanks to them Israeli Attorney Gideon Hausner has been able to boast that “even there [in the camps], in the bowels of darkness, many of the prisoners maintained their spirit.”2 Chapter 10, Jewish Menschen, discusses four types of male and female prisoners who can be thought of as companions, comrades, militants, and devout Jews. Many other prisoners considered their attitudes and behavior worthy of admiration and emulation. Dr. Albert Haas, for example, succeeded in getting forbidden life-saving medicines smuggled into his concentration camp.3 Rabbi Yechezkel Harfenes and his many counterparts in other camps regularly conducted forbidden morale-aiding religious services.4 Dora Aspen Sorell, Rena K. Gelissen, Agi Rubin, Helen Lewis, and many others among the eighty-four Jewish women cited in this book risked their lives to bind wounds, raise hope, and make a life-aiding difference. (See chapter 12.) These were the Jewish prisoners likely in mind when an anonymous survivor of Auschwitz drew on the legend of Jonah’s search to find in Sodom at least ten Just Men (the number God had agreed to find sufficient to justify sparing the city’s 150,000 dwellers). The survivor would have us understand that “in Auschwitz, God would be able to find his ten Just Men and more.”5 A brief Profile follows chapter 10 of two remarkable Carers— Hadassah Rosensaft and Luba Trszynska-Frederick—who, with a small number of compatriots, managed for months to keep 149 children alive in Bergen-Belsen, a most remarkable altruistic feat.6 139

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Chapter 11 explores five personality characteristics of Carers, namely, sociability, adaptability, resiliency, ethicality, and self-esteem. In combination with two previously discussed motivators (the Altruistic Impulse and Judaic altruistic tenets), these characteristics help explain much about the distinctiveness of these menschen. Chapter 12 focuses on Jewish females (subteens to elders). For them, the Holocaust produced “a set of experiences, responses, and memories that do not always parallel those of Jewish men.”7 Typical were two Carers in the Ravensbrück Camp, Olga Benario Prestes (a Jew) and Kathe Pick Leichter (a Gentile), known for “intelligence, political integrity, and a sense of justice, as well as their altruistic concern for suffering of the other women in the camp.”8 A brief profile follows of Magda Herzberger, a Carer whose story addresses two major questions: What goes into the “making” of a Carer long before imprisonment? And what of this background can be drawn on when one is struggling under Nazi tyranny? Chapter 13 discusses Gentiles as Carers, although Jewish victims considered them the least likely source of forbidden care. Contrary to the script written and zealously enforced by the Nazi overlords, a small number of German military personnel and of Gentile coworkers risked all to provide forbidden care for Jewish victims. Unexpected and very welcomed, this behavior challenges generalizations about an “evil enemy” and demonstrates that altruistic support has unpredictable sources. While the vast majority of European Gentiles were bystanders, whether out of antisemitic conviction or overwhelming fear, chapter 13 attests to the welcomed presence among them of “upstanders.” In this matter the record shows “not only the evil man is capable of, but also at the margins, so to speak—the opposite, the good.”9 Regrettably, a visitor to contemporary Holocaust Museums worldwide, a student in a typical Holocaust Education Center, or a reader of Holocaust-related books must be excused for having learned little, if anything, in these sources about Carers, Jewish, and Gentile alike. Notes

1. 2.

140

The epigraph is from Davidson, Sara. 2014. The December Report, p. 123. Cahill, Thomas. 1998. The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, p. v. Hausner, Gideon. 1987. “Preface.” In Huberman, Rabbi Shimon. Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland during the Holocaust, p. 105.

Carers

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

For details, see Haas, Albert. 1984. The Doctor and the Damned. See also memoirs by Eva Brown, Livia Bitten-Jackson, Ruth Kluger, Shirley Russak Wachtel, Gerda Weissmann Klein, and Blima Weisstuch, among scores of others, as noted in the Bibliography. Fully recounted in Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal. Brenner, Reeve R. 1980. The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors, p. 249. See Rosensaft, Hadassah. 2004. Yesterday: My Story; McCann, Michelle R. (and Luba Tryszynska-Frederick). 2003. Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen. See also the film of the same name. Ringlheim, Joan. 1998. “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust.” In Ofer, Dalia and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds. 1998. Women in the Holocaust, p. 350. Saidel, Rochelle G. 2006. The Jewish Women in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, p. 52. Both were betrayed by an informer and executed. There is reason to suspect proportionately fewer Jewish females than males were “predators” (see chapter 7), and proportionately more may have been menschen (see chapter 10). Bauer, Yehuda 2009. The Death of the Shtetl, p. 271. See also Klein, Stefan. 2014. Survival of the Nicest: How Altruism Made Us Human and Why It Pays to get Along (translated by David Dollenmayer), pp. 173, 221.

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10 Jewish Menschen The measure of a man is this: how swiftly can he react to another’s need. And how much of himself can he give? —Philip K. Dick

Introduction

During his first year after having been liberated, scholar/survivor Viktor Frankl (1905–97) wrote with warm admiration about Jewish fellow prisoners “who walked through the [camp barracks] comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”1 Background

The focus in chapter 7 was primarily on four Jewish “predators,” that is, collaborators, criminals, informers, and thieves, who seriously undermined the survivability of fellow Jews. While two other related types, independents and Muselmänner, posed an indirect, lesser threat, in combination, the six types made acts of stealth altruism much more difficult to contemplate, better yet to bring to fruition. Rabbi Hugo Gryn, who survived five camps, found himself among Jewish “predators” who were reduced to a level of callousness, even cruelty. At the same time he knew other prisoners “who remained decent.”2 Their ranks included Jewish prisoners called hereafter companions, comrades, militants, and observants.3 Each “decent” type made its own valuable contribution to the Help Story: Companions were the source of a disproportionate share of Carers. Comrades and Militants provided strategic aid to the Carers. Observant Jews inspired many other prisoners, including secular Carers, with their high-risk fidelity to Judaism.4 143

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All four types were regarded by many fellow prisoners as menschen, an honorific Yiddish term for men and women who are honorable, noble, trustworthy, and well worth taking as models.5 A scholar highlights their character, or more specifically, “rectitude, responsibility, decorum, generosity of spirit.”6 Primo Levi, in turn, cautions us to understand that, “in the camp, to be a Mensch was a factor in survival; not every survivor was a Mensch.”7 Companions

Most prisoners could not maintain self-esteem and self-mastery without support from empathetic others.8 Regularly in the early evenings, Jewish prisoners of both genders sought to visit “with a friend and offer words of consolation and reassurance—or at least sigh and commiserate together.”9 Richard Glazer recounts that he and Karl Unger, a fellow prisoner, “were like twins. In this camp you could not survive an hour without someone supporting you and vice versa . . . No one could make it alone . . . we supported each other constantly. We divided absolutely everything, even a small piece of bread . . . In Treblinka, a person could not make it unless he or she belonged to a group—at least a group of two.”10 Professor Yehuda Bauer, in turn, maintains “the few Jews who did survive could not have done so without the companionship and cooperation of companions. Companionship under such conditions is itself a remarkable achievement.”11 New arrivals had a special need for friendship. Fourteen-year-old George Lucius Salton remembers, “a special kinship arose among the Jews in the camp. Our very suffering, our longing for our families, made us reach out to one another for companionship and support. . . . These were friends who would help me at every chance, whom I could trust to watch my shoes or bowl, and who [as risk-taking Carers] would even lie to a kapo or the SS to save my life.”12 Friends commonly hailed from the same or similar pre-imprisonment locale or school and had a similar lifestyle, occupation, type of religiosity, political leanings, and/or avocation (fans of the same soccer teams, etc.). New companionships were formed in “the shadows of blazing chimneys, and old ones were reborn in the infernal glow of the crematorium.”13 In short order, much as from time immemorial, like found like, a sorting process eased by widespread appreciation of its distinct contribution to survival. 144

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Rabbi Yechezkel Harfenes believes “camp life, by its nature, produced very close companionships in a short period of time.” He thanks “devoted companions who had inspired me and encouraged me through every crisis by their faith in and hope for the future. They had treated the wounds of my heart when I had remained alone after having lost my beloved son” to a savage fatal beating from a crazed Kapo. And he recalls that members of his small work group “had grown used to one another. We were like one happy family.”14 Helen Lewis, after many hard months in several camps, later emphasized the centrality of “sharing in every sense. The little bit of space, the little bit of food, the moments of acute danger, and the occasional laughter. We gradually came to understand this type of friendship was based on necessity first and on affection afterwards. To have a friend meant to have an extra pair of eyes to spot approaching danger, a voice to warn, and a pair of hands to support you when in need. When a true friendship developed out of this symbiotic relationship it became a precious tool in the fight against our desperate sense of aloneness and anonymity.”15 A secret handshake or a gift of “organized” clothing was an act of friendship that could significantly bolster a prisoner’s self-esteem. Little wonder then that Dr. J. Hemelrijk believes “for many, it was the most precious memory of their time in a camp.”16 Scholar/survivor Nechama Tec explains, “The more degraded life became in a camp, the greater became the need for mutual cooperation. In my research I have been finding the same thing again and again: the direr the conditions under which one was forced to live, the greater the need for solidarity and compassion among those sharing them. . . . In the end, there was no more extreme place than the concentration camps, where life hung by a thread. There, companionships were particularly valuable, and indeed invaluable.”17 Comrades

Jewish anarchists, Bundists, Communists, Socialists, and Zionists rigidly based their camp “companionships” on ardent ideological motivation. Each drew on a political ideology rather than on Judaism for self-definition, and each treated “their partisan affiliation as a form of ethnicity . . . [it] gave them a sense of righteousness and belonging.”18 Scholar/survivor Elie A. Cohen noted that, “among those groups in the camps whose members were united by a common idea, good 145

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comradeship existed.”19 Communists and Socialists, for example, both of whom had been a majority of the first camp inmates in the early 1930s, bonded together by the early 1940s in disciplined, supportive fellowship units, and their longevity among the living attests to the hard-earned acquisition of considerable survival skills. One type in particular—a camp’s Communists—served as a major source of nonviolent resistance and secular hope. Many such “comrades” fostered solidarity across nationality boundaries, challenged the brutal rule of German criminals, and helped prisoners buffer against the toll the Horror Story threatened to take. At night in “safe” camp barracks, comrades would conduct Marxist book talks, indoctrination courses, and panel discussions . . . strictly forbidden events that provided mental and spiritual food for thought.20 Some comrades as Carers provided an inspiring role model. Henry Orenstein writes of Willie, a young Communist who, “when a guard hit a prisoner in his presence, would protest loudly, sometimes even placing himself between the guard and the victim . . . Such extraordinary courage was in stark contrast to the behavior of the rest of the prisoners.”21 In this same vein prisoners may have been inspired by rare acts of unity between arch rivals. Communist and Socialist prisoners at Buchenwald, for example, banded together in a “large and efficient underground organization and were able to give aid to the ill and save the dying, [while] at the same time prepare themselves for the day of resistance and liberation.”22 Little wonder, then, that the SS and Gestapo regarded comrades, especially when Jewish, as an unacceptable threat. Paul Martin Neurath, a scholar/survivor, explains that “the Nazis wanted to destroy in these men the feeling that they were representative of a force that was still fighting. Therefore they tried to depersonalize them.”23 Unfortunately, antisemitism brought into camp by many bigoted comrades undermined the contribution they might have otherwise made to Jewish survival: “A communist inmate could be concealed in the Buchenwald hospital compound, an area the SS avoided as far as possible. But if the party comrade also happened to be Jewish, the risk was often deemed too great.”24 Not surprisingly, Gentile Communist prisoners “had, roughly speaking, an even chance to survive; the prospects of [Jewish Communists] were infinitely worse.”25 As many Communists had had more formal schooling than did other prisoners, the SS—who hated the “Bolsheviks”—were obliged 146

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to put some in strategic office jobs. Jewish Carers who cultivated a good relationship with Gentile Communist leaders were sometimes able to get care-related favors from “Red” office workers in return for doing comparable favors, like secretly passing along messages, serving as lookouts, and so on. Communist clerks, for example, could secretly arrange a Jewish prisoner’s assignment to a favorable work environment, for example, low-key, inside, and overseen by lenient guards. One’s assigned job, as commonly determined by the Communists, went far in determining one’s life or death chances, an equation Jewish Carers sought to turn to advantage.26 These clerks could also secretly arrange a prisoner’s reassignment to a more desirable barrack, one known for cleanliness and discipline, or the prisoner be placed where he or she could “organize” food with less chance of being noticed by the guards. Best of all, when a prisoner receiving forbidden care was tragically put on a list to soon go to the gas, a clerk could replace the prisoner’s number with a different one, such as that of a near-death Muselmänn or a hated informer or an inveterate thief. An endangered Jewish prisoner could be made to officially “die,” at least according to camp records, only to immediately reappear with a new safe identity, as of a long dead prisoner. “Red” clerks sometimes saved a Jewish prisoner as a favor to another comrade, for example, a Gentile woman prisoner chose to “mother” a young Jewish arrival whose prisoner card marked her for death as a Jew. The caring Communist used her party connections to have comrades who worked in the camp’s Labor Deployment Office put the young prisoner in a transport destined for a safe job in a metal goods factory in Geislingen. Decades after being liberated the young woman wrote how important it had been “to have somebody who you could trust at your side. . . . I owe my survival to international solidarity.”27 In addition to saving an individual prisoner, a Communist clerk could exaggerate statistics about the number of Jews recently murdered and thereby diminish high-level pressure for still more deaths. He or she could “lose” an SS order for punishment, or warn others, especially party members, when to “submerge” (go into hiding in the camp). Manipulations of such data were arguably one of the most significant acts of stealth altruism Jewish prisoners could possibly accomplish.28 Communist leaders, in short, the majority of whom were non-Jews, might choose to aid Jewish Carers and bolster stealth altruism success, provided they first saw a significant political advantage in doing so.29 147

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Certain Jewish Communists, whether or not Carers, artfully sought the cooperation of such powerful men and women, as lives hung in the balance. Militants

Among the “comrades” above were Jewish militants who used physical force and weapons in the camps. They commonly had a long history of previous anti-Nazi activism and imprisonment and “wore the badge of their offense[s] with pride,” something that could not be said of most Jewish prisoners.30 Indeed, proportionately far more German Jews than Gentiles fought inside Germany in the underground.31 Jewish militants participated in armed resistance in sixty or more ghettos outside Germany, “the first urban struggles against the Germans anywhere in Europe.”32 Once captured and sent to a Nazi camp, most Jewish militants were quick to join a high-risk underground cell found in almost all of the camps. Its ranks included anarchists, Bundists, Communists, Socialists, and Zionists. Among them, the Communists were the most tightly disciplined individuals and generally dominated the cell’s leadership, with Socialists sometimes serving as junior partners. Militants passed along short-wave radio news of Allied progress and Nazi setbacks, news that generally helped bolster morale. Carers profited from the “law and order” culture the militants could and did enforce. On request, for example, Jewish militants could forcibly stop the stripping by thieves of the bodies of prisoners newly dead from a contagious disease, a halt that lowered the chances of an epidemic. They could capture, judge, and punish a thief thought guilty of preying upon the ill and weak. In the case of an unrepentant offender, militants might summarily hang him from a barrack’s rafter or drown him in the camp latrine. Carers also appreciated the ability of militants to constrain the worse predators among Jewish Kapos and barrack leaders. Rena Gelissen, for example, knew Jewish women who, as clerks in the SS offices at Auschwitz, felt cruelly oppressed by a tyrannical Jewish Kapo. Militants crept into the Kapo’s room at night, pinned her down, and gave her a sore beating. No one investigated because the Kapo did not report the incident: “She learned her lesson. She stopped berating the scribes and started to act with a little shred of humanity toward her co-prisoners.”33 Similarly, in the Sobibor Death Camp a much-hated Jewish Kapo was murdered by militants in plain sight of his many relieved barrack 148

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victims.34 As the war drew to a close, Jewish women in Hasag-Leipzig “no longer accepted discriminatory [antisemitic] practices without protest, and numerous fights and arguments flared up over this issue.”35 All understood that militants did not “play games.” Militant violence had detractors as well as supporters. The latter now, decades later, get support from twenty-first-century research that suggests “human decency and cooperation requires a certain degree of so-called altruistic punishment to punish rule breakers . . . even when the infraction does not directly affect the [punishers].”36 Memoirs suggest proponents of both types of behavior—nonmilitant and militant resistance—held each other in high regard. Sara Pechersky recalls that in the Sobibor Death Camp, the scene of the largest breakout of the war, “all the days were the same. Except when the Organization [militant underground] met. Then there was hope. You had to have hope. Otherwise you’d never have made it.”37 Militants often dared to develop and aid escape attempts. From 1940 to 1944 at least 647 people attempted to escape from the Auschwitz and only 270 were caught, 16 percent of whom were Jews.38 Unfortunately, only limited success in escape was achieved at other camps, including Kronen, Mauthausen, and Sobibor. At the Treblinka Death Camp, for example, only 40 out of 375 escapees in a mass breakout made it to liberation.39 Henry Orenstein recalls, “the SS took escapes hard. They took it personally. It was a blow to the whole Nazi empire. Their defeat at the front lines was negligible in comparison. And since the escapees could not be punished, we [those left behind] had to suffer in their place.”40 In at least five major concentration camps and eighteen slave labor camps, including Auschwitz, Birkenau, Mauthausen, Sobibor, and Treblinka, certain militants fomented armed revolts, albeit to uneven results. These actions were “the only ones of their kind,” as non-Jewish prisoners commonly chose to wait out Germany’s defeat.41 Disproportionate SS retaliation (such as the immediate murder of fifty or more randomly chosen Jews for any one German death) discouraged militant actions and they remained controversial, for example, the October 1944 revolt of the Auschwitz Sonderkommandos (work teams who disposed of the dead prisoners) took 3 SS lives but cost the lives of 451 prisoners.42 In recognition of the collective responsibility each prisoner had for the well-being of all others, comrades at times stopped militants from undertaking arduously planned escape attempts, as the SS guaranteed reprisals too drastic to risk. 149

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Some Carers, especially those who believed Judaism could be a redemptive force in a postwar world, thought it morally inconsistent to resort to violence to end violence, lest Jews become like “them,” a mirror of the foe. A woman prisoner, for example, had a lover in the men’s section required by the SS to serve as an unexploded bomb defuser, an exceedingly dangerous job. Knowing he was a secret militant, she asked him why he didn’t leave some half-buried Allied bombs “alive” to later go off and kill unsuspecting German civilians. “I don’t want to do that,” he thoughtfully explained, “that’s what they do. They’re the ones who kill civilians, women, babies. That’s why they’ll lose the war!”43 Observant Jews

Observant menschen “were not among those who pushed others aside to receive more food. Pious Jews wanted to save themselves, too, but not at the expense of others. They produced no Kapos.”44 Typical of these individuals was a political Jewish prisoner known as Tierhaus, a member of a Sonderkommando squad at the Janowska Camp. Raised in a Chasidic family he was a graduate of a rabbinic seminary and, not surprisingly, was widely respected as one of the most religious of all prisoners. Leon Wells remembers Tierhaus as having served as the Squad’s “moral conscience . . . No important decisions were made by our leaders without his presence. He always cited passages from the Bible or Talmud, and somehow even the ‘tough guys’ [hard-boiled ‘asocials’] among us listened to him.”45 Likewise, a Jewish foreman of a Sonderkommando squad in Auschwitz was warmly remembered for risking his life nightly in a religious act of stealth altruism. After spending each day directing disposal of the bodies of hundreds of Jewish victims gassed that very day, he said Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) out loud every evening, showing reverence for the bodies which his Judaism had him believe were made in God’s image: “There were tears in his eyes . . . Later he said quietly [to his squadron], ‘It’s prayer which makes you a human being.’” In the mornings, using tefellin (prayer apparatus) and tallit (prayer shawl) taken from the deceased, this devout mensch secretly led his Sonderkommando squadron in reciting the morning prayers. When he died at twenty-three from typhus, his memory was revered by coworkers who believed he “never once in his innermost soul renounced the faith of his Fathers.”46 150

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A Jewish Kapo in the Birkenau Death Camp surreptitiously arranged for fifteen Orthodox Jews to be assigned to a small workroom in the crematorium area. They processed hair that had been cut that day from women prisoners for use in the manufacture of industrial felts and threads. In their free time, these prisoners prayed for the dead and studied Jewish religious writings from books salvaged from recently gassed arrivals. Intent on keeping kosher, they survived on bread, margarine, and onions. Other Jewish prisoners “generally treated [these menschen] with respect because they shunned the habits of the camp, and were not prepared to [practice the subservience] customary here in order to survive.”47 Much later, just before the SS sent these devout Jews to the gas, a leader among them rose and was heard to say, “Brothers! It is God’s unfathomable will that we are to lay down our lives . . . we must submit to the inevitable with Jewish resignation. It will be the last trial sent to us by Heaven. It is not for us to question the reasons, for we are as nothing before Almighty God. Be not afraid of death . . . let us now go to meet death bravely and with dignity!”48 Conclusion

Ruth Kluger observed in her memoir that “later in life, nothing offended me more than the generalization that the camps turned us all into brutal egotists . . . Again, the blithe refusal to look closely, to make distinctions, to reflect a little.”49 To do so is to discover the capacity of some Jewish victims to make an extraordinary contribution. Dr. J. Hemelrijk recalls “the hunger of the soul made of each token of companionship an unheard of joy . . . an unexpected gain in the concentration camp . . . the positive side of a negative experience.”50 Those who enabled such gains were menschen who as companions, comrades, militants, and observant Jews lived as urged centuries ago by Rabbi Hillel, “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a human being.”51 Notes

The epigraph is from Dick, Philip K. 1970. Our Companions from Frolox 8. As cited in Gary Wetfahl, ed. 2005. Science Fiction Quotations, p. 197. 1. 2.

Frankl, Viktor E. 2006 ed. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 65. Gryn, Rabbi Hugo, in Smith, Lyn. 2005. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived, p. 224. Authenticity was taken quite seriously in the prisoner culture. 151

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

152

See in this connection the types cited by scholar/survivor Paul Martin Neurath in his seminal 1943 dissertation/book, The Society of Terror, pp. 54–70. Space constraints barred employ of Neurath’s types. In 195 memoirs only one typology was offered, and it came close to my own approach. I found it after completing my manuscript. Orenstein, Henry. 1997 ed. (1987). I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against the Odds, pp. 240–1. Pawelczynska, Anna. 1978. Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis (translation by Catherine S. Leach), pp. 143–4. Relevant here is advice from Ecclesiastes, 49:10: “Two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.” Rosten, Leo. 1968. The Joys of Yiddish, p. 234. Rosten, Leo.1982. Hooray for Yiddish: A Book about English, p. 215. Levi, Primo. 1987 ed. A Memoir of Auschwitz: Moments of Reprieve, p. 251. Lewis, Helen. 1992. A Time to Speak, p. 73. Dorit Novak, director of Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies, maintains that “someone in a camp who shares his last bread with a friend sheds new light on the word ‘friendship.’” As cited in Bronner, Ethan. February 15, 2012. “From Overseas Visitors, A Growing Demand to Study the Holocaust.” New York Times, p. A-9. A scholar maintains “one could not exist in a camp without participating in a sharing relationship.” Luchterhand, Elmer. 1967. “Prisoner Behavior and Social System in the Nazi Camp.” International Journal of Psychiatry, 13, p. 262. Glazer, Richard. 1995 ed. Trap With a Green fence: Survival in Treblinka (translated by Roslyn Theobald), p. 47. See also, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal (BeKaf HaKelal), pp. 137, 168, 189. “Those within the group could develop social bonds, and so enjoy an enhanced status in the camp and a better chance of surviving,” p. 137. Bauer, Yehuda, et al., eds. 1989. Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda, p. 141. Salton, George Lucius. 2002. The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir, p. 92, 170. Ties were honored even after atrocities. For example, at the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, when prisoners in the spring of 1942 learned that several hundred recently relocated prisoners, many of them Jewish, had unexpectedly been gassed at a nearby Euthanasia Center, “the camp went silent. We [who were in positions of influence] didn’t arrange that. There was no singing, and speaking was reduced to the necessary.” Rosa Jochmann. As cited in Krause-Schmitt, Ursula and Christine Kruase, eds. 2003. Through the Eyes of the Survivors: A Guide to the Ravensbruck Memorial Museum, p. 19. Eliach, Yaffa, 1988 ed., Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, p. xxvii. Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel 1988. Slingshot from Hell, p. 86. Lewis, Helen. As cited in Doorly, Mary Rose. 1994. Hidden Memories: The Personal recollections of Survivors and Witnesses to the Holocaust Living in Ireland, p. 95. Hemelrijk, Dr. J. Op. Cit., p. 278. Tec, Nechama. 2013. Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror, pp. 148, 196. Sociologists Steven Hitlin and Stephen Vaisey explain that when “the conditions of life are particularly harsh, making survival very

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18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

difficult, there is often an increase in reciprocal [sharing] relationships.” Hitlin, Steven and Stephen Vaisey. August, 2010. “Handbook of the Sociology of Morality.” Newsletter of the Altruism and Social Solidarity Section, p. 12. Brooks, David. December 3, 2013. “The Stem and the Flower.” New York Times, p. A-23. Predatory criminals (a menacing type discussed in chapter 7) were used by the SS to dehumanize and/or murder comrades in a bloody civil war. Over time the comrades, as hopeful idealists with a strong “fellow-feeling,” managed to defeat the criminals, a weak atomized aggregate of cynics. After 1943 many criminals were sent to bolster the Wehrmacht’s sagging Eastern Front, a transfer that gave comrades uncontested power. Later, when the SS began the death marches, comrades sought with militants to buffer the toll, as by making clothing preparations, and so on. Cohen, Elie A. 1946. Human Behavior in the Concentration Camps, p. 184. See also Frend, Sophie. 1999. “Hilde O. Bhulm.” American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 53, p. 125. The events helped reinforce doctrinaire education, “discipline” the mind, and possibly win over new members. Orenstein, Henry. 1997 ed. (1987). I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against the Odds, p. 240. Mermelstein, Mel. 1993 ed. (1979). By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685, p. 182. Neurath, Paul Martin. 2005 [1943]. The Society of Terror: Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps, p. 65. Pingel, Falk. 2010. “Social Life in an Unsocial Environment: The Inmate’s Struggle.” In Caplan, Jane and Nickolaus Washsmann, eds. 2010. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, p. 65. Laqueur, Walter. 2001. Generation Exodus, p. 41. The record here is uneven regarding provision of forbidden care by Communists for Jews: “In some cases, Comrades prisoners abused and exploited Jewish prisoners. In other cases, they protected, assisted, and collaborated with them.” Nelson, Anne. 2009. Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground, p. 366. At the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, for example, comrades “taught the Jews how to survive, what to do and not to do.” Kurslansky, Mark. 2000. A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry, p. 108. Researchers in 1971 learned from 184 Jewish survivors that one’s job in a camp correlated strongly with what a prisoner experienced of hunger, sickness, mistreatment, and terror. As well, it also correlated with the amount of support, help, and protection he or she got. Matussek, Paul, et al. 1975 ed. Internment in Concentration Camps and Its Consequences (translation by Derek and Inge Jordan), p. 248. Charlotte Muller. As cited in Krause-Schmitt, Ursula and Christine Krause. 2003. Through the Eyes of the Survivors: A Guide to Ravensbruck Memorial Museum, p. 31. See also Gertrud Muller. 2003. “Foreword.” Krause-Schmitt, Ursula and Christine Krause. Through the Eyes of the Survivors: A Guide to Ravensbruck Memorial Museum, p. 5. Morrison, Jack. Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Woman’s Concentration Camp, 1939–45, p. 79. See also in this connection Luchterhand, Elmer. 1967. “Prisoner Behavior and Social System in the Nazi Camp.” International 153

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29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

154

Journal of Psychiatry, p. 13; Matussek, Paul, et al. 1975 ed. Internment in Concentration Camps and Its Consequences (translation by Derek and Inge Jordan). See in this connection, Handeli, Ya’acov (Jack). 2001 (1992). A Greek Jew from Salonica Remembers (translated by Martin Kett), pp. 111–12. Karay, Felicja. 2002. Hasag-Leipzig Slave Labour Camp for Women: The Struggle for Survival, Told by the Women and Their Poetry (translated by Sara Kitai), p. 135. See also in this connection Signer, Michael A. 2000. “Preface.” In Signer, Michael A. Humanity at the Limit: The Impact of the Holocaust Experience on Jews and Christians, p. xi. Perhaps two thousand to three thousand German Jews actually fought inside of Germany in the anti-Nazi Underground, a number equivalent to six hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand anti-Hitler Gentile fighters, far more than the actual number. Fritzche, Peter. 2008. Life and Death in the Third Reich, p. 227. Still others, over thirty thousand, may have served in thirty or so widely scattered forest partisan units that sabotaged trains, and fought against both well-armed German troops and deadly bands of fanatical Eastern European antisemites. Winstone, Martin. 2010. The Holocaust Sites of Europe: A Historical Guide, p. 35. Bauer, Yehuda. 1989. “Forms of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust.” In Roth, John K. and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, pp. 143–5. Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, p. 217. Militants, in turn, were unsparing of those they regarded as unworthy. See Bauer, Yehuda, in Roth, John K. and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Op. Cit., p. 145. Blatt, Thomas Toivi. 1997. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, pp. 127–9. Karay, Felicja. 2002. Hasag-Leipzig Slave Labour Camp for Women: The Struggle for Survival, Told by the Women and Their Poetry (translated by Sara Kitai), p. 143. Angier, Natalie. April 1, 2014. “Spite is Good. Spite Works.” New York Times, p. D-3. As cited in Sorin, Gerald. September 1984. “Resistance in Sobibor.” Jewish Currents, pp. 24–27. [Book Review: Escape from Sobibor, by Richard Rashe; Sobibor: Martrdom and Revolt, by Miriam Novitch], p. 25. Yahil, Leni. 1990 ed. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945, p. 567. See also Steinbacher, Sybille. 2005. Auschwitz: A History (translated by Marion Hunter), p. 37. Yahil, Leni. Op. Cit., p. 567. Orenstein, Henry. Op. Cit., p. 240. Bauer, Yehuda, in Roth, John K. and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Op. Cit., p. 145. See also Grupimski, Anka, et al. 2006. Warsaw Ghetto (translated by James Richard), p. 5. Research has found an “increase in the number of ghettos and concentration camps in which organized Jewish resistance happened.” Tec, Nechama. 2013. Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror, p. 210.

Jewish Menschen

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

Jankowski, Stanislaw. April 16, 1945. “Deposition.” In Bezwinska, Jadwiga, ed. 1973. Amidst a Nightmare of Crime: Manuscripts of Members of Sonderkommando, p. 65 (pp. 31–68). As cited in Popescu, Petru. 2001. The Oasis: A Memory of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp, p. 81. Rabbinical wisdom warns vengeful violence kills something of precious value in the doer. See also in this connection Gutman, Yisrael and Shmuel Krazowski. 1986. Unequal Victims: Comrades and Jews during World War 11, p. 106. Militants knew certain Carers regarded armed revolt as far too costly endeavor. Many V-2 rockets, however, were covertly rendered inaccurate by Jewish slave laborers, and after the war’s end Winston Churchill saluted them and their high-risk militancy for having strategically aiding Britain’s survival. Smith, Lyn. 2005. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust. Ibid., p.182. Frilling, Tuvia. 2014. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz: History, Memory, and the Politics of Survival, p. 248. Wells, Leon W. 1978 ed. (1963). The Death Brigade, p. 209. Muller, Filip. 1999. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (translated by Susanne Flattauer), pp. 28–29, 33. Ibid. Ibid. SS officials could and often did turn a blind eye in the surety that providers and receivers of stealth altruism were all of them slated for unnatural deaths. Kluger, Ruth. 2001. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, p. 77. Typical was Stefan Heyman, Chief Clerk of the Buna Camp Infirmary, a man remembered as having “saved many Jewish lives. After the war he became the first Minister of the Interior in the East German [Communist] government.” Michel, Ernest W. 1993. Promises to Keep, p. 27. Hemelrijk, Dr. J. 2003. There is a Way to Freedom (translated by Ellen Holmes-van Caspel), p. 77. Drawn from Ethics of the Fathers, and cited in Grossman, David. June 27, 2013. “The Highway, the Village, and the Road Not Taken.” Haaretz, p. 5.

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Profile

Camp Doctor and Nurse Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Born in 1912 in Sosnowiec, Poland, Ms. Hadassah Rosensaft was raised in an orthodox lower middle class family by parents and other adults known for charitable ways, for example, her well-educated father made a point of bringing home a poor person as their weekly Sabbath luncheon guest. In turn, as a child Ms. Rosensaft often brought home one or another poor Polish children whom she washed, fed, and played with. Decades later she wrote in her 2004 memoir, “If there is any good in me I know I owe it to my parents.”1 While attending an all-girls private Jewish School Ms. Rosensaft discovered that the Polish children at the next-door public school came from homes so poor they did not have breakfast. She persuaded some classmates to join her in discretely passing part of their breakfast food through the fence to those hungry children. A few years later, she and a sister tendered a small garden plot in a ghetto that enabled them to share scarce vegetables with starving neighbors. On their arrival in 1944 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp Ms. Rosensaft lost to the gas chamber her parents, brother, two sisters, her husband, and their six-year-old son. Some forty-five hundred of five thousand victims on their transport were sent directly to their death.2 It took her several days to recover from the devastating awareness of this atrocity, and she came very close to losing her mind. Ms. Rosensaft came back to her old self on overhearing an SS woman guard loudly ask a newly arrived Greek Jewish girl a direct question. Recognizing that the girl was a deaf mute, and realizing her silence 156

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could have the girl murdered, she quickly explained to the SS guard that the girl did not understand German, a daring effort at forbidden care that had the Guard beat her to the ground. The resulting blindness lasted throughout the following day. A few days later the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, the camp’s Chief Medical Officer, on learning that Ms. Rosensaft had been a dentist, ordered her to serve as a “doctor” and oversee the Auschwitz Jewish Women’s Infirmary. Patients came primarily with abscesses, or wounds inflicted by the guard dogs or SS whips. The infirmary had almost no supplies (perhaps a hundred aspirins for several thousand prisoners), so Ms. Rosensaft “organized” medicine from the camp’s SS Pharmacy.3 A Dutch Jewish girl and a Hungarian Jewish man in charge allowed her to “organize” ether for anesthesia and aspirin for everything else—a “theft” of German property punishable immediately on detection by the death of all of them. On several occasions Ms. Rosensaft and her aides waited until nightfall to silently smuggle pregnant women prisoners into the adjacent men’s camp. There an abortion could be performed in the men’s clinic, one far better equipped than hers. (Likewise, on certain nights one of Mengele’s top aides, Dr. Gisella Perl, dared to perform secret abortions directly in the women’s barracks). When warned by the camp underground about an impending “selection” in her infirmary Ms. Rosensaft and her aides quickly dressed sick patients in heavy clothes “organized” from the Kanada (camp warehouse) and sent them out to work on a cooperative labor commando. When Dr. Mengele would arrive to “select” patients to die Ms. Rosensaft would present him with a falsified list attesting to their being out at work, a ruse that saved many lives at the risk of death for them all. After a tortuous year and three months Dr. Mengele sent Ms. Rosensaft to the Bergen-Belsen camp as the leader of a medical team of eight other Jewish women that included Ms. Luba Tryszynka, a layperson Mengele had designated a “nurse.” Born in 1921 in eastern Poland, Ms. Tryszynska had lived a conventional shtetl life until 1941 when she was forced to spend fifteen months in a ghetto marked by the dominance of death. In January 1943, she was sent in transport with her husband and young son to Auschwitz. On arrival their three-year-old son was torn from Ms. Tryszynska’s arms by the SS and immediately sent with many other children to the gas. Her husband was first deemed a slave labor carpenter, only to be shot soon after with many other Jewish men suddenly deemed superfluous. 157

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In December of 1944 Ms. Tryszynska was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen Camp as a “nurse” although she had only informal qualifications for the post, no medicines, and no medical instruments. Under Ms. Rosensaft’s leadership the team found themselves among eight thousand emaciated and overworked women, of whom seventy one hundred were Jewish.4 About twenty-two hundred women were ill in bed in the camp hospital, and another fifteen thousand men and women were in need of medical care.5 Medical supplies, however, amounted to only three hundred aspirins a week (many months later just before liberation huge quantities of locked-up medical supplies provided by the International Red Cross were discovered hidden away by the Germans).6 Conditions, always terrible, got rapidly worse as many tens of thousands of enfeebled death march prisoners from other camps were abandoned in Bergen-Belsen. Dismal sanitary conditions spread deadly diseases, and food was almost nonexistent. Twice-a-day roll calls, regardless of the weather, killed hundreds daily. Epidemics raged, and several thousand bodies lay everywhere unburied and decaying (rats were rampant and large). At 3  of a bitter cold December, 1944, night the SS abruptly turned over to Ms. Rosensaft’s care forty-nine Dutch Jewish boys and girls between eight months and fifteen years old.7 All were now orphans, as their parents (the men were diamond cutters) had been taken away earlier that day, never to be seen again. The next day Ms. Rosensaft told her supervisor, an elderly German doctor, that the SS had “ordered” the children be cared for, an enabling stealth altruism lie that endangered her life and saved the lives of the children. Soon twenty-one more boys arrived from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, and some toddlers came from the Theresienstadt Transit Camp. A search thereafter in Bergen-Belsen itself located additional orphaned youngsters in hiding, and in short order 150 or so youngsters were unexpectedly under her care in Barrack 11, called the Children’s House.8 It was located in a separate compound that included the Women’s Hospital run by Ms. Rosensaft and her eight colleagues—two buildings that were later remembered as the only clean ones in the entire camp.9 As Ms. Tryszynska’s nurse armband enabled her to move freely around the camp she became an invaluable daily gatherer of whatever scarce food and clothing could be secretly donated, all at great peril to giver and receiver. Twice a day Ms. Tryszynska walked to the kitchen 158

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area, and on her return hid from SS guards whatever food she could bring back to the Children’s House. Jewish men who worked in the SS Food Depot “organized” food and smuggled it to her, as did a Jewish woman who ran the bakery and also Jews employed in the SS pharmacies. All knew their lives were at stake, and they kept the secret. Help was volunteered by Jewish Dutch nurses newly arrived from Auschwitz. One of them, Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, recalls they went to see the children regularly to tell them stories, clip their nails, and “provide them with a little balance and sometimes a little culture. We acted toward them like anxious mothers.” Two younger females, the sisters Anne and Margot Frank, “also involved themselves with the children and we [the older Dutch women] did our best to help them.”10 In her 2004 memoir Ms. Rosensaft wrote with admiration for fellow prisoners who had lent a hand: “In spite of being exposed to subhuman conditions in the ghettos and camps, they had the strength and courage to help others and thereby retain their humanity.”11 In turn, Ms. Tryszynska wrote, “I never thought of myself as a particularly brave person, certainly not a hero. But I found that inside every human being there is a hero waiting to emerge. I never could have done what I did without the help of many heroes.”12 Along with food and clothing Ms. Tryszynska also gathered scraps of wood from abandoned camp buildings and burned them to help warm the children’s barrack (but only after dark when the smoke would not be seen). A friendly German SS guard actually chopped wood to help her effort (though whether he knew about the children was unclear). Most surprising was the fact that as she spoke fluent German, Polish, and Russian Ms. Tryszynska even got donations of children’s clothing from sympathetic wives of SS guards: “She didn’t tell them why, and if they knew about Ms. Tryszynska’s children, they didn’t say a word.”13 Many of the children themselves helped out, even though often ill with diarrhea, dysentery, indigestion, and even typhus. They did chores in the barrack, read aloud stories to educate and entertain one another, wrote and acted out their own plays, and listened with rapt attention to the Hebrew and Yiddish songs and stories Ms. Rosensaft and others enjoyed sharing.14 None did anything childish that might have called disastrous SS attention to them. When Ms. Tryszynska’s birthday came the children presented her with a red silk scarf an adult prisoner had “organized” from Kanada, a gift the children had bartered for in the black market with precious bread each had contributed over time to a gift fund. 159

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When toward the war’s end the SS learned of Ms. Rosensaft and Ms. Tryszynska’s success at both keeping the children alive and the Children’s House clean, they began to show it off when the International Red Cross came infrequently to inspect the camp. Visitors were easily duped, though the need the SS felt to impress the Red Cross enabled Ms. Rosensaft to bargain for some extra food and water for the children, along with firewood and, best of all, a ban against any of children being beaten. Hela Los Jafe, an aide of hers, recalls that “she conducted herself so honorably that even the Germans respected her.”15 For five months through to liberation by the British on April 14, 1945, Ms. Rosensaft and her medical colleagues gave the children all their love and whatever strength they had left . . . and thanks to forbidden care sharing all but one of the children survived. When the British liberators saw the high quality of the hospital compound Ms. Rosensaft had directed she was asked to organize and head a medical team from among the survivors. Some 28 emaciated Jewish doctors and 30 weak male prisoners and 590 weak female prisoners—only a few of who were trained nurses—came forward to serve.16 In due course Ms. Rosensaft accompanied 101 children and twenty expectant mothers to Palestine in April of 1946, after which she returned to help at Bergen-Belsen, now organized as a DP Camp.17 Estella Degen, the youngest of the Dutch children Ms. Tryszynska had helped care for later recalled—“My mother always told me that she gave birth to me, but that Ms. Tryszynska saved my life.”18 Ms. Tryszynska, in 1946, with the help of the Dutch Red Cross, accompanied the surviving fifty-two of the fifty-four Dutch orphans back to the Netherlands where they were reunited with members of their extended Jewish families. Hailed by the Queen and media as a national hero, she was given the title “the Angel of Bergen-Belsen.” Invited by Queen Wilhelmina to remain forever in that grateful country, Ms. Tryszynska choose instead to return to Bergen-Belsen to rejoin Ms. Rosensaft and others in caring for more orphaned children sent there by the allies who had found them hidden away in the various camps. Two decades after moving to America in 1958 with her husband, also a survivor, Ms. Rosensaft was asked to serve on the Federal Commission that developed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). She served from 1978 to 1994, and is remembered, among other things, for strongly urging USHMM to curb proposed Horror Story displays, for example, she successfully opposed exhibiting women’s 160

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shaven hair—which might have included some of her own. She also successfully opposed requiring museum visitors to walk through a cattle car to get to and from exhibits.19 In 1991 she went to Israel to persuade fifteen of the grown-up rescued children to make oral history videotapes (as she had) for storing at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.20 Ms. Tryszynska came to America in 1947 and married a survivor with whom she had two children. She was honored in 1995 when, in the presence in Amsterdam of twenty-five former Dutch “children,” all now adults in their fifties and sixties, she was awarded the Silver Medal of Honor for Humanitarian Services, the highest honor that nation can bestow on a civilian.21 While Ms. Rosensaft was unable to attend the event, she was sent a beautiful scroll with touching remarks from the same child survivors. In all, their story would seem to affirm “strength, dignity, and hope can take root in even the darkest of places.”22 [This Profile owes much to the cooperation of Diane M. Plotkin, who helped Dr. Ms. Rosensaft write early chapters of her memoir, wrote a chapter about her for her invaluable coedited book, Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust, and authored an unpublished essay, “Suffer the Little Children . . .,” which she generously shared with me.] Notes

The epigraph is from Press, Eyal. 2113ed. Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, p. 5. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Rosensaft, Ms. Hadassah. 2004. Yesterday: My Story, p. 6. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 43. Bimko, Dr. Ada. 1998. “Don’t be Afraid, Child.” In Ritvo, Roger A. and Diane M. Plotkin. Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust, p. 191 (pp. 187–96). Ibid. Ibid., p. 192. Rosensaft, Ms. Hadassah. 2004. Yesterday, Op. Cit., p. 44. Ritvo, Roger A. and Diane M. Plotkin. Sisters in Sorrow, Op. Cit., p. 209. As cited in Lindwer, Willy. 1991. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (translated by Alison Meersschaert), p. 71. Rosensaft, Ms. Hadassah. 2004. Yesterday, Op. Cit., p. 203. Tr yszynska-Frederic, Ms. Luba. As cited on the back cover of Ms. Tryszynska: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen, as told to Michelle R. McCann by Ms. Tryszynska-Frederick. McCann, Michelle R. 2003. Ms. Tryszynska: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen, p. 27. 161

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

162

See in this connection, Verolme, Hetty. 2010. Hetty: A True Story. Although only fourteen, Hetty served as a “Little Mother,” and relied on the eldest of her peers for support as they worked out how to keep up morale and survive. Jafe, Hela Los. 1998. “People Didn’t Go Willingly.” In Ritvo, Roger A. and Diane M. Plotkin. Sisters in Sorrow, Op. Cit., p. 181. As cited in Ritvo, Roger A. and Diane M. Plotkin. Sisters in Sorrow, Op. Cit., pp. 193, 283, Footnote 34. Jafe, Hela Los. 1998. “People Didn’t Go Willingly.” In Ritvo, Roger A. and Diane M. Plotkin. Sisters in Sorrow. Op. Cit., p. 185. As cited in McCann, Michelle R. 2003. Ms. Tryszynska, Op. Cit., p. 3. See also Bolter, Abby. March 6, 2014. “Holocaust Survivor Describes Scenes of ‘Hell’ at Bergen-Belsen Death Camp to Maesteg School Pupils.” www.walesonline. co.uk/news/local-news/holocaust-survivor-describes-scenes-hell-6777177. See in this connection, Linenthal, Edward T. 1995. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. Rosensaft, Ms. Hadassah. 2004. Yesterday, Op. Cit., p. 197. In 2005 Jacob Lubliner, a Polish Jewish child survivor who lived under Ms. Rosensaft’s care and knew Ms. Tryszynska only at a distance, wrote a critical essay now at www.ce.berkeley.edu/-coby/essays/coalchild.htm. A Professor of Engineering Science at the University of California-Berkeley campus, he notes that the book about Ms. Tryszynska regretfully ignores Ms. Rosensaft and the non-Dutch children. He credits his mother’s survival in part to additional food Ms. Rosensaft got for her from the children’s provisions. He also credits Hela Los Jafe with becoming the mother substitute for the children from Slovakia, another matter oddly absent from the book. McCann, Michelle, ed. 2003. Ms. Tryszynska, Op. Cit., p. 42. After many other accomplishments, Ms. Rosensaft passed away in 1997 from illnesses originally contacted in the camps, and Ms. Tryszynska died a decade later.

11 Carers Up Close Side by side with unspeakable persecution, suffering, and death, there were those who sought to rise above their calamitous situation. —Joseph Rudavsky

Introduction

A transport train moving victims toward their death in Auschwitz slowed to a stop, and anguished Jewish prisoners, starving and thirsty beyond reason, noticed two weeping women in a close-by woods. “They want to hand to us, to fling up, already prepared snowballs . . . Trembling, though brave hands are outstretched towards us. They were Jewesses, as like as not, and they could have had much unpleasantness [SS guards killed such Carers], but our imploring eyes had affected them so much that they forgot the reality—and took up their positions so near to our windows as to be able to reach us . . . The lucky ones who had caught the snow divided it . . . All greeted these brave women and wished them very much happiness for the sympathy and help.”1 Background

Elie Wiesel maintains, “the question is not, as some would pose it, why did Jews fail to mount cohesive and effective resistance to the Nazis, but rather, how was it possible that so many Jews resisted at all?”2 Part of the answer comes from Henry Orenstein, who in the men’s section of Ravensbrück appreciated “a rather small number of people . . . always kind to others, trying to be as helpful as far as they could, never taking advantage of other prisoners. They were the moral elite . . . something within them refused to become dehumanized and demoralized.”3 Most Carers did not regard themselves as moral heroes or heroines, but as ordinary folk who did what came naturally, what conscience bid them to do. Modest even to a fault, most downplay their highrisk efforts at providing forbidden care.4 They call to mind Winston 163

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Churchill’s contention that “there are no great men. Only ordinary men facing a great challenge.”5 To judge cautiously from 195 memoirs, most Carers were fortunate enough to have been raised in settings that help widen a child’s repertoire of humanistic emotions, a child’s capacity for kindness, intimacy, compassion, empathy, and so on. These emotions were cultivated by altruistic parents and grandparents, the kind of adults many children value as warm role models. Likewise, “significant others” like neighbors, rabbis, relatives, and teachers also modeled altruistic behavior. Many Carers had had Jewish schooling that revered age-old altruistic tenets, both through book-learning and the tzedakah (charitable) behavior of the rabbi, the teachers, and key members of the congregation. Some Carers were also active as teenagers in progressive secular organizations (Bund, Communist, Socialist, Zionist, etc.) with altruistic tikkun olam (repair the world) projects. Accordingly, as impressionable youngsters, Carers commonly got practice with “those small acts of service that condition the mind for the moments when the big acts of sacrifice are required.”6 This background nurtured habits and strategies that bolstered participation in the Help Story. It worked in a synergistic way with five major personality characteristics—sociability, adaptability, resiliency, ethicality, and self-esteem—that seem integral to their adoption of the Carer role in ghettos, in transport, and in the camps. Sociability

Carers, who commonly knew sooner than others which victims were particularly in need of support, reached out. For when conditions of life “are particularly harsh, making survival difficult, there is often an increase in reciprocal relationships.”7 Kitty Hart-Moxon “soon realized that alone one could not possibly survive. It was necessary, therefore, to form little families of two or three. In this way we looked after one another.”8 Relationships, however, were not stress-free. Rena Gelissen recalls struggling with unwelcomed issues raised by new support responsibilities: “Friendly faces amid so many strangers is a comfort, but it is also a burden . . . Now I have three more people to worry about—how will we manage? If we don’t help each other, who will? . . . Trying to act with a little bit of dignity helps me, reminds me of home . . . This is my legacy, to treat everyone with compassion . . . How else can we survive if we do not care for one another?”9 164

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Not surprisingly, then, a 1971 study of 186 Jewish survivors found they identified “camaraderie with fellow inmates” and “active initiative in making social contact” as the foremost explanations of their survival.10 Given gender socialization norms of the times, proportionately more Carers could be found in the ranks of female than of male prisoners. Females “emphasized emotional ties built on repeated instances of mutual help and sustained conversation, reflecting less anger and depression than those authored by men.”11 Kitty Hart-Moxon points out “the girls were stronger mentally, they were not prone to depression as I believe the men were. They looked after one another, they formed little families . . . Men tended to survive alone, and this was a very difficult thing to do.”12 (See also chapter 12.) Relationships required that Carers employ considerable social and problem-solving skills, a fascinating mix of “magic, messiness, serendipity, and insanity.”13 Some, for example, encouraged prisoners to believe in improbable reunions of widely scattered loved ones and/or immigration to British Mandate Palestine. Such invigorating imagery helped listeners buffer against the lure of depression, followed closely thereafter by Muselmänn-like death. Some Carers even promoted hope that loved ones—parents, siblings, children—might still be alive somewhere “out there,” even while privately suspecting it wasn’t so. From her considerable experience in camps, Petru Popescu insists that, “good lies were the best a stronger prisoner could offer to alleviate the suffering of a weaker one. They were what they needed to hear: ‘There are no Selektions [sic] here’ [and] ‘I’m sure your family survived.’”14 Certain Carers fed forbidden morale-boosting items, even if fabricated, into the camp’s dynamic gossip stream. Allegedly provided by the “JPA” (“Jewish Press Agency,” a faux news source), the banned “news” assured prisoners that Allied liberators would soon be at the camp’s gates and the underground would prevent the SS from murdering all beforehand. One such rumor generator, Moshe Garbarz, recalls giving “encouragement to all those I encountered . . . I repeated over and over [the fantasy] that tomorrow we’d be freed, that this was not the time to give up hope. In the end, I even convinced myself.”15 Carers also countered the Nazi effort to make prisoners forget and/ or despise their Jewish past. Among other strategies they promoted creative talk of food among starving men and women. Scholar/survivor Elie A. Cohen reports, “the prisoners would go ‘dining’ out together and 165

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exchange recipes for special dishes.”16 Such deliberate daydreams motivated them to exercise, keep up personal hygiene, and remain hopeful. Theresienstadt Carers secretly encouraged starving women prisoners to talk aloud about their mother’s warm kitchen, the family’s favorite recipes, and memorable holiday feasts. The best of these memories were committed to paper and published after the war. Fantasies about using the recipes after liberation motivated many women to take better care of themselves and of each other. While “unable to feed the body, this creative exercise helped quell the hunger of the soul.”17 Adaptability

Carers nurtured in themselves the ability to know what did and did not really matter.18 Unlike other prisoners who were overwhelmed and paralyzed by fear, they understood how to benefit from chance events, from errors—including their own—and from stress. They recognized what they could not change and did not waste time or energy on it. Kitty Hart-Moxon relates how “the key to survival was instant adjustment, and having the sixth sense of where danger came from . . . if you didn’t learn these sorts of things within the first few days you were doomed.”19 Carers figured out early on that life “demanded compromise in every situation . . . traditional ethical and legal criteria developed within a civilized society were inapplicable.”20 Agi Rubin, a seventeen-year-old Carer, was punished for a minor infraction by being put to work in an outdoor garbage area. A fast learner, she took advantage by locating and collecting garbage potato peelings, this a salvage operation she knew the SS regarded as “theft” and thereby made her eligible for far more severe punishment. “Over a little candle I cooked [potato] soup I brought to our camp mother, who was failing more and more. This was hot food, which is what I thought she needed. Crazy or not, oblivious or not, we did what we could with the garbage where they tossed us.”21 Resiliency

Of necessity, Carers cultivated a high tolerance for pain and punishment. While aware resilience did not necessarily equate to a desirable outcome, many probably knew an Eastern European folk wisdom that held “He who cannot endure the bad will not live to see the good.”22 Agi Rubin, for example, unexpectedly saw her father’s sister pass by at a short distance. Mistaken in thinking a nearby SS guard was looking elsewhere, she rushed over to lightly touch her aunt and exchange 166

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silent looks of love and support. “As punishment I was made to kneel on the gravel in front of our barracks. I had to stay that way for twentyfour hours. I was to be an example, as though [living] across from the crematoria, we needed more examples. It rained part of the night. I remember the rain was soothing.”23 Certain Carers even undertook forbidden care projects knowing beforehand chances of success were poor. In the Auschwitz kitchen, Jacques Razon, a Jewish Greek prisoner and unofficial “boss” of the worksite, ordered kitchen workers to give up a daily portion of soup. He used it to help rehabilitate declining Greek prisoners in danger of becoming Muselmänner. Razon even secretly sent many to a camp doctor. In the absence, however, of manageable work assignments and rest opportunities at work, it proved impossible to reverse the tragic slide of the doomed “walking dead men,” and they all were soon sent to the gas.24 Mussia Deiches remembers, “the girls [in my barrack] suffered with boils. The only [medicine available] was a foul-smelling ointment whose odor was so terrible it was impossible to sleep next to those who had been smeared. I tried to overpower my disgust and applied the ointment myself to many girls who were ailing, and afterward I slept near them.”25 Carers had an ability to shoulder far more than might have seemed reasonable to them before incarceration. For example, after four days of working in steady rain, “we distributed what blankets we had to those with fevers. The rest of us had no choice but to sleep in soggy clothes.”26 Lucie Adelsberger recalls Carers who “themselves already on the verge of starvation would sell their own bread ration in order to buy potatoes for a dying comrade, and thus give him a last happiness.”27 Elly Gross writes that, “even though we were starving . . . we pushed [our soup] under the barbed wire to the Czechoslovakian Jews . . . They were only skin and bones, those starving skeletons eagerly waiting to receive the bitter green soup.”28 Caring required the ability to recover from deep-reaching emotional and spiritual wounds. It enabled one to anesthetize oneself so as not to “break” when feeling helpless in the hands of fate. Dora Sorel had bonded with her fourteen-year-old cousin, a frail younger girl in the next barrack, and they enjoyed meeting every day after roll call. “But very soon I lost her [to an unexpected “selection” that had her sent to the gas] . . . it broke my heart that she would not be with me so I could help her, and protect her as a little sister.”29 Ms. Sorel also describes how she and other long-time prisoners threw their scarce food to penned-up starving adults and children 167

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newly arrived in Auschwitz from Theresienstadt. They “were there for a week. Then one morning the camp was quiet. They were all gone [to the gas]. We stood there in shock. The silence was more eloquent than the human voices, the cries, and the screams.”30 Janny Brandes-Brillesliiper recalls helping a rapidly failing Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen: “She had such a horror of the lice and fleas in her clothes that she had thrown all of her clothes away. It was the middle of winter and she was wrapped in one blanket. I gathered up everything I could find to give her, so that she was dressed again. We didn’t have much to eat, and my sister was terribly sick, but I gave Anne some of my bread ration. Terrible things happened. Two days later I went to look for the girls [Anne and her sister Margot]. Both of them were dead.”31 Ethicality

An anonymous survivor of Buchenwald recalls, “there were a number of older prisoners who, insofar as they remained alive, served as models of purity, humanity, and personal courage from beginning to end.”32 A 1973 scholarly analysis of life in Auschwitz found that “a deeply internalized value system enabled many prisoners to survive biologically and morally, that is, to resist surrender to violence.”33 Mussia Deiches explains there were “true angels. Maybe they were given this strength in order to prove that even in the midst of the most gruesome bestiality, an individual has the ability to remain a human being if he really tries. And perhaps it was in the merit of these remarkable few that we survived.”34 George Lucius Salton, when a fifteen-year-old prisoner in the Reichshof Slave Labor Camp in Poland, remembers that “the crowded camp, hunger, brutality of the guards, constant exhaustion, and frequent illnesses left us all depressed and bad-tempered. When we argued, the peacemakers [Carers] reminded us we needed each other to survive.”35 Lily M., a sixteen-year-old kitchen worker in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, dared to smuggle food one night to newly arrived Hungarian Jews who had not been fed for days. She learned the next day, however, that overnight all had been sent to the gas. “They were all gone. And I could have lost my life . . . but I felt in my heart I wanted to help these people, and this [food smuggling] was all I could do.”36 Ethical values helped prisoners adjust and improve their chances of making it through to liberation. “Although little has been written on this subject, ex-prisoners well remember the mutual solidarity and friendly relations existing between prisoners; the aid extended by one 168

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prisoner to his fellow sufferer . . . Ethical values were therefore of prime importance in mental acclimatization.”37 Staying in close touch with their own ethical values may help explain why Carers would seem to have had “less neurotic disturbances after the war than the others.”38 Eugene Heimler, after receiving twenty-five punishment lashes, was left delirious by the savagery of that beating. He was cared for over several days by two Carers he knew from pre-camp days, a rabbi and a doctor, neither of whom had any medicines. “I made a slow recovery. My persecutors allowed me to lie on my bunk, and my fellow-prisoners brought me soup and bread and water. Some [prisoners] stole my food, but others did not. Those who cared for me remained human beings in spite of the prevailing barbarity.”39 Ethical actions in the unnatural environment of a Nazi camp led inevitably to conundrums. Carers could learn from a recipient of their aid that a starving man or woman was secretly stealing the bread of dying barrack mates. Or be asked by the daughter of a starving and delirious mother to lie so as to get her to eat nonkosher food. In such trying situations Carers tried to find counsel in Judaic altruistic tenets and/or comparable secular values.40 (See chapter 2.) Self-Esteem

A person “who shoots for virtue,” according to journalist David Brooks, “will more reliably be happy with her new self, and will at least have a nice quality to help her cope with whatever comes.”41 New social science research finds “humans who act for the benefit of others are as a rule more content, and often more healthy and successful than contemporaries who think only of their own welfare.”42 Consistent with this, many Carers privately acknowledge lifeenhancing gains from their altruistic role. They got, as well as gave in the coinage of emotions. Gerda Klein writes, “when we bring comfort to others, we reassure ourselves, and when we dispel fear, we assuage our own fear as well.”43 Agi Rubin regards certain of her acts of stealth altruism as part of a mutually beneficial relationship. As a seventeen-year-old prisoner she sought to save the life of the thirty-six-year-old mother of a girlfriend and fellow prisoner. “It was a kind of vow, and it gave me strength. I had someone to care for, and that was much easier than simply caring for myself. I was not being generous. I was giving myself a purpose and a responsibility. When everything else is taken, still having a responsibility is not a trivial thing.”44 169

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Carers believed looking out for the well-being of others bolstered their own. Agi Rubin concluded one day that the Horror Story had reduced her, at age seventeen, to animal existence—“beaten, numb, and dumb”—and she was no longer a human being. “And yet, in all the little ways, I rebelled—taking care of our camp mother, deciding I had a purpose, comforting another prisoner as she was dying. Resignation brought defiance; it brought a stubborn anger.”45 Rena Gelissen wrote decades later of her extensive caring: “I do not feel virtuous or good about myself. I feel used and hungry, but I also know that I will never look back and regret trying to help my cousin’s wife.”46 Mussia Deiches asserts that her many acts of stealth altruism “filled me with a sense of purpose. I knew it was a special privilege to be in a position to help people, and this awareness strengthened my own desire to live; it made the slavery and the humiliation bearable.”47 Flora Rom-Eiseman recounts that, first in the Vilna Ghetto, and later in the Riga Slave Labor Camp, “any type of favor or assistance was valued beyond normal proportions, and if I could lighten a friend’s load by granting even a small wish, it was not too trivial a task . . . through most of these ordeals I was lucky to find myself in a circle of true human beings, and to be in a position where I could help others—especially the young girls and the elderly women. In encouraging others I created my spiritual reservoir.”48 Conclusion

In 1946, shortly after being liberated, survivor/psychiatrist Elie A. Cohen wrote that certain prisoners he had known “had room for altruistic sentiments, and compassion with their fellow men . . . the original values of their superego could maintain themselves unimpaired . . . in character they were superior to many other prisoners.”49 Distinctive personality characteristics, including sociability, adaptability, resiliency, ethicality, and/or self-esteem, along with experiences with the Altruistic Impulse and related aspects of Judaism, led certain prisoners to become Carers. They would seem to have discovered, as Albert Camus so artfully put it, “In the middle of winter, I found out at last that there was within me an invincible summer.”50 Notes

The epigraph is from Rudavsky, Joseph. 1987. To Live with Hope, To Die with Dignity, p. 7. 1. 170

Gradowski, Salmen. 1943. “The Manuscript.” In Bezwinska, Jadwiga, ed. 1973. Amidst a Nightmare of Crime: Manuscripts of Members of

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2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

Sonderkommando, pp. 88–90. One of five manuscripts found on the site of the Birkenau Camp, and translated in 1964. Wiesel, Elie. As cited in Mais, Yitzchak. 2007. “Jewish Life in the Shadow of Destruction.” In Mais, Yitzchak, ed. 2007. Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust, p. 24. Orenstein, Henry. 1997 ed. (1987). I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against the Odds, p. 241. See in this connection Oliner, Samuel P. and M. Pearl. 1988. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe; also Oliner, Pearl M. 2004. Saving the Forsaken: Religious Culture and the Rescue of the Jews in Nazi Germany. See also Huneke, Douglas K. 1989. “Glimpses of Light in a Vast Darkness: A Study of the Moral and Spiritual Development of Nazi Era Rescuers.” In Bauer, Yehuda, et al., eds. 1989. Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda: Jews and Christians after the Holocaust, p. 492. As cited in Roth, John K. and Michael Berenbaum, eds. 1989. Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications. Op. Cit., p. 115. Brooks, David. 2011. The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, p. 291. See also Taleb, Nassin Nicholas, 2012, Antifragile: Things that gain from Disorder. As cited in Kakutani, Michiko, December 17, 2012. “You Are All Soft! Embrace Chaos.” New York Times, p. C-4. Hitlin, Steven and Stephen Vaisey. August 2010. “Handbook of the Sociology of Morality.” Newsletter of the Altruism and Social Solidarity Section, p.12. Hart, Kitty. 1982. Return to Auschwitz: The remarkable Story of a Girl Who Survived the Holocaust. Op. Cit., p. 16. Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, pp. 117, 149, 190. Matussek, Paul, et al. 1975 ed. Internment in Concentration Camps and Its Consequences (translated by Derek and Inge Jordan). Op. Cit., p. 32. Lagerwey, Mary D. 1994. Gold Encrusted Chaos: An Analysis of Auschwitz Memoirs. [PhD Dissertation], p. 38. See also, in this connection, Rittner, Carol and John K. Roth, eds. 1993. Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, p. 2. Hart-Moxon, Kitty. 2005. Cited in Smith, Lyn. Remembering Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived, pp. 104, 106. Jewish women prisoners coped by “bonding emotionally to others, while men coped by focusing on tasks.” Rapport, Sondra. 1991. Coping and Adaptation to Massive Psychic Trauma: Case Studies of Nazi Holocaust Survivors. Dissertation Abstract, Union Graduate School. University Microfilms No. 9202325. As cited in Miller, Joy Erlichman. 2000. Love Carried Me Home, p. xxiv. Far more than the men, women drew support from religious ritual and observances. Women emphasized affective rationality, while men relied more on instrumental rationality. Women put their trust in moral-practical reasoning, while men favored survival by whatever means were necessary. Women relied on resolution and informal ties, while men sought efficiency through dominance–submission relationships and official institutional ties. Overall, more Jewish women than men seem to have resisted domination of the weak. Heinemann, Marline F. 1986. Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust, p. 110. 171

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

172

Druckerman, Pamela. March 2, 2014. “What You Learn in Your Forties.” New York Times, p. SR-7. See also Egan, Timothy. March 22, 2014. “Creativity vs. Quants.” New York Times, p. A-19. Popescu, Petru. 2001. The Oasis: A Memory of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp, p. 82. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992 ed. A Survivor (translated by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), p. 240. Cohen, Elie A. 1954 ed. Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp (translation by M.H. Braaksman). Op. Cit., p. 132. Adapted from De Silva, Cara, ed. 1996. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin (translated by Bianca Steiner), p. xxxii. Carers had the women secretly contribute to a hand-written cookbook now available in English. See also Baer, Elizabeth R. and Myrna Goldenberg, eds. 2003. Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, pp. 173, 174; Armour, Marilyn. 2010. “Meaning Making in Survivorship: Application to Holocaust Survivors.” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 20:4, p. 441. I draw here on Aaron, Joseph. November 20, 2011. “If Arabs with Sechel Have Their Say, Palestinians Will Have Their State.” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, p. 1. http://www.jewishchronicle.org/article.php?article-id-821.47. Hart-Moxon, Kitty. 2005. In Smith, Lyn. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived, p. 173. Pingel, Falk. 2010. “Social Life in an Unsocial Environment: The Inmate’s Struggle.” In Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Washmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, pp. 67, 71. Rubin, Agi and Henry Greenspan, 2006. Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated, p. 38. Bialowitz, Philip “Fiszel” (with Joseph Bialowitz). 2010. A Promise at Sobibor: A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland, p. 9. Rubin, Agi and Henry Greenspan. 2006. Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated. Op. Cit., p. 36. Matussek, Paul, et al. 1975 ed. Internment in Concentration Camps and Its Consequences (translated by Derek and Inge Jordan). Op. Cit., p. 32. Deiches, Mussia. 1994. “A Bittersweet Laugh.” In Eibeshitz, Jehoshua and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, eds. 1994. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies, Vol. ll, p. 169. Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992 ed. A Survivor (translated by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), p. 143. Adelsberger, 130; see also Cohen, 138. Gross, Elly Berkovitz. 2007. Elly: My True Story of the Holocaust, p. 54. Sorell, Dora Apsan. 1998. Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam, p. 26. Ibid., p. 39. As cited in Lindwer, Willy. 1988. The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (translated by Alison Meersschaert), p. 74. As cited in Hackett, David A., ed. 1995 ed. (1945). The Buchenwald Report (translation by David A. Hackett), p. 39. Leach, Catherine S. 1978. “Introduction.” In Pawelczynska, Anna. Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis (translated by Catherine S. Leach), p. xxv. See also in this connection Miller, Lisa’s book, The Spiritual

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

Child, where Professor Miller contends spiritual awareness is innate and has a proven genetic component. As cited in Brooks, David. May 22, 2015. “Spiritual Capital.” New York Times, p. A-25. Deiches, Mussia. 1994. “A Bittersweet Laughter.” In Eibeshitz, Jehoshua and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, eds. 1994. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies, Vol. ll, p. 179. Salton, George Lucius. The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir, p. 82. As cited in Michel, Ernest W. 1993. Promises to Keep. Op. Cit., p. 50. Cited in Dvorjetski, Mark. 1963. “Adjustment of Detainees to Camp and Ghetto Life: And Their Subsequent Readjustment to Normal Society.” Yad Vashem Studies, p. 204. Eitinger, Leo. 1993. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1999. Problems Unique to the Holocaust, p. 120. Heimler, Eugene. 1997ed. (1959). Night of the Midst, p. 127. Langer, Lawrence. 2006. Using and Abusing the Holocaust, pp. 45, 102. Brooks, David. August 25, 2015. “The Big Decisions.” New York Times, p. A-19. Piliavin, Jane Allyn. September 2009. “Altruism and Helping: The Evolution of a Field: The 2008 Cooley-Mead Presentation.” Social Psychology Quarterly, 72, 3, p. 221. Of special relevance is research on Gentile Carers—some twenty-five thousand or more of whom are honored by Yad Vashem’s ongoing “Righteous Among the Nations” Program. Many feel strengthened nowadays by their wartime role in both moral identity and whole body “musculature.” In comparison with contemporaries many now enjoy better physical and mental health, along with more interesting, fulfilling, and longer lives. See in this connection, Press, Eyal. 2013 ed. Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, pp. 181–3, passim. Klein, Gerda Weissman. 1995 ed. All But My Life. Op. Cit., p. 260. Rubin, Agi and Henry Greenspan. 2006. Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated. Op. Cit., p. 32. Rubin, Agi and Henry Greenspan, 2006. Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated, p. 32. Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, p. 149. Although focused on those they were secretly helping, Carers coincidentally and unknowingly aided their own resilience and salvation. Klein, Stefan. 2014. Survival of the Nicest: How Altruism Made Us Human and Why It Pays to Get Along (translated by David Dollenmayer), p. x. See also in this connection, Eitinger, Leo. 1964. Concentration Camps Survivors in Norway and Israel, p. 120. Deiches, Mussia. 1994. “A Bittersweet Laugh.” Eibeshitz, Jehoshua and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, eds. 1994. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies, Vol. ll. (translated by Jehoshua Eibeshitz and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz). Op. Cit., p. 171. Reflecting on the nuances of the characteristics of Jewish Carers brings to mind the notion that “Jewishness and ‘normality’ are in some profound way noncompatible.” Hitchens, Christopher. 2010. Hitchens -22, p. 401. Rom-Eisenman, Flora. 1994. “The Golden Coin.” In Eibeshitz, Jehoshua and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, eds. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies, Vol. ll, p. 169. Another such Carer was regarded by a survivor as 173

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49. 50.

174

“a hidden saint . . . upon whose merit the world continues to exist.” Harfenes, Rav Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal (Bejkal HaKelal) Edited by Howard Shapiro and Yehazkel Harpenes, p. 159. Cohen, Elie A. 1954 ed. Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp (translation by M.H. Braaksman), p. 139. www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/albert_camus.html. The quotation is also used by Menachem Z. Rosensaft, in his April 18, 2012, tribute to his mother, “My Mother: A Heroine of the Holocaust,” in The Hidden Child, xx, 2012, p. 11. (pp. 1, 4, 8, 11). See in this connection Oliner, Samuel P. and Oliner, Pearl. 1988. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. The study included 150 rescued Jews. As cited in Oliner, Pearl M. Saving the Forsaken: Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe. See also Monroe, Kristen Renwick. 2004. The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice during the Holocaust, p. ix.

12 Women Carers What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other? —George Eliot

Introduction

The “Final Solution” was “one of the first such events in history that did not treat the female population primarily as spoils of war, but instead explicitly sentenced [Jewish] women and children to death.”1 Mothers who had their small children with them discovered on arrival at a death camp the Nazis were immediately murdering all who could not “serve” as slave laborers (babies, children, elders, the handicapped, etc.). Some mothers resolutely refused to give up their children, despite the blunt advice Esther Weiss recalls hearing in urgent whispers from gruff male Jewish prisoners: “If you want to live, throw away the children!”2 Petru Popescu watched such a struggle at a train-side “selection” when an experienced Jewish prisoner tried to persuade a newly arrived young mother to hand her infant over to any older woman slated to die soon in the gas chamber—thereby at least saving her own life. The mother refused and only hugged her infant closer, thereby sentencing them both to death. Finally, with a weary shrug of despair, “the male prisoner rushed off, looking for another mother to save.”3 The emptied baby carriages were sent to Germany and given to expectant German women. Memories of the parades of carriages being rolled from the Auschwitz Camp to waiting freight trains haunted women prisoners long after. An onlooker noted “it took more than an hour for a column of [baby] carriages, five abreast, to pass.”4 In contrast to the arriving mothers other Jewish women who were childless were spared by the Third Reich to serve as slave laborers. However, since they could assure the biological continuity of Judaism, 175

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they were secretly condemned to die unnatural deaths when no longer productive workers. Jewish Women Prisoners

Gemma LaGuardia Gluck (sister of Fiorello LaGuardia, then Mayor of New York) recalls that at the Ravensbruck Camp, the Jewish women (about 15 percent) “had the worst and dirtiest work to do. Their block was the most unhealthy and dirtiest, with no electric lights. They were treated like animals and not like human beings.”5 Carers, however, succeeded in getting some of the women to help one another by “keeping secret lists of prisoners, moving women’s names to safer lists in the camp offices, hiding prisoners, sabotage, medical assistance, and collective childcare.”6 According to Professor Rochelle Saidel, “There is much evidence of women’s kindness to one another.”7 Despite the sustained effort at care sharing, Jewish women were underrepresented among female camp survivors.8 By the war’s end on May 8, 1945, there was “sound evidence the odds for surviving the Holocaust [had been] worse for Jewish women than for Jewish men.”9 They made up at least 60 percent of all of the Jews murdered in the six major death camps.10 Slave Laborers

An estimated 10 percent of new female arrivals at a death camp were immediately “selected” to serve as slave laborers.11 Although nominally expected to be productive, women prisoners were treated miserably. Much as on the men’s side of camp, so also did women prisoners suffer from incredibly poor conditions, unending hunger, painful overcrowding, fearful uncertainty, and the demoralizing attitudes and behavior of those who had become “predators” to their peers. (See chapter 7.) “Rented out” at great profit by their SS “owners,” some women labored as debris cleaners in bombed-out areas, as manual laborers on farms, and as road builders outside in all types of weather, through ten- to twelve-hour shifts, day and night. A plurality served as factory workers, a job envied as one worked inside and sometimes got secret gifts of food from sympathetic citizen coworkers. The best jobs, though many fewer in number, were working at childcare and housekeeping for the SS officers, or served as infirmary aides, kitchen help, and office workers, all of which posts shielded one from the Horror Story atrocities everywhere evident in a camp. 176

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Women as Carers

Although always hungry themselves, some women who worked in the camp kitchens passed along “organized” food. Rabbi Yechezkel Harfenes has fond memories of one such woman: “This girl had a heart of gold. She utilized every possible opportunity to take whatever she could find for the hungry and the sick. She did so tirelessly, devotedly, risking her very life at it.”12 Blima Weisstuch, a twenty-year-old Polish Jewish woman, shared extra food secretly given to her at times by a sympathetic Gentile Kapo. “Once or twice when a girl became particularly ill or gaunt-looking back in the barracks, I would slip her the bread I had saved.”13 Many female medical personnel were able to save lives “by hiding [prisoners in the Infirmary], exchanging the files of the dead for those of the living, and performing clandestine abortions to save mothers from the gas chamber.”14 For example, Sonia R., a doctor at the Birkenau Death Camp, did not record cases of typhus and other contagious diseases, but instead used false, innocuous labels to disguise the situation, lest the SS rush these patients to the gas. She also kept more women patients than permitted in her hospital section, and “did not take care of her own maladies, having no time to spend a few days in bed.”15 Margita Schwalbova, a doctor in the same camp, insists that “it was our endeavor to be true to ourselves, to fulfill our humanitarian mission, even in this inferno . . . each of [us] determined to remain a human being in the death camp.”16 Typical of high-risk care was a ruse practiced at a Lublin Slave Labor Camp. Women there made it possible for every girl to take a turn slipping under a work table and resting for thirty minutes. “We all stood around the table, while working, and blocked the sleeping person from view.”17 Helen Farkas describes how she and her friends helped exhausted peers stay active in the workplace, for only then might SS guards let them live a little longer. In the winter of 1945, “we had to constantly keep a watchful eye on everyone, especially the very young and old . . . Many had reached a point of lost hope . . . They simply stopped working [digging ditches in the frozen soil], sat down on the ground, and froze to death . . . [With whispers and slaps and tugs] we continuously attempted to provide encouragement.”18 Relationships: Substitute Mothers

Supportive relationships—substitute mothers, “camp sisters,” friends, and same-sex lovers—were essential to the survival of many female slave 177

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laborers. Carers, knowing “life is made through belonging, through deepening connections,” encouraged and helped maintain such relationships as long as possible.19 Cordelia Edvardson, one of the thousands of beneficiaries of substitute mothers, remembers the psychological darkness that “threatened to devour her” soon after her arrival as an utterly bewildered teenage girl at the Theresienstadt Transit Camp.20 Fortunately two adult Carers were quick to assume a mothering role when they “discovered, saw, and confirmed her [Edvardson’s] existence, gave her the strength and the will to live and to breathe, thawed out her frozen soul and heart, and gave her a human face.”21 Similarly, Lillian Judd, as a fifteen-year-old newly arrived at Auschwitz, failed to hear the bullhorn announcing orders to vacate all camp streets or be shot. She was suddenly grabbed by the arm and dragged into a nearby barrack by an older woman prisoner who vociferously scolded the teenager for almost losing her life. But when the rescuer detected how sad and hungry was the child, she produced a pot halffull of thick soup and urged Ms. Judd to eat. The teenager later got permission to take the pot away to share what was left with her barrack mates. She was able to do so again for many days thereafter: “I was able to save up my bread and trade it for a pair of shoes. . . . I almost believed mother sent [this adult] to help me go on . . . what a wonderful person! She saved my life. God bless her.”22 At great peril, two women in a Bergen-Belsen five-hundred-person barrack “adopted” three parentless siblings (boys age six, seven, and twelve), each of whom resembled a murdered child they had known. Decades later, the oldest boy, Is Mo, wrote that what the two “mothers” did was “a very brave thing to do under the circumstances . . . They protected us, washed us, shared with us what little food we received, and removed lice from our bodies. It is in great measure thanks to them that we survived.” (Later Is Mo recalls in his memoir that, “out of thousands of children deported to Bergen-Belsen only a few dozen survived to the end of the war.”)23 “Camp Sisters”

As a twenty-two-year-old in the Birkenau Death Camp, Dora Sorell headed up a “family” of five females that ranged in age from twenty-two to thirteen. Ms. Sorell and another young woman, both who were stronger and more mature, “tried to support the others as best we could.”24 Women prisoners often formed small (three to five person) 178

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units of intense friendship and mutual respect and support, much like a small family. Known informally as “camp sisters,” the group’s close-knit members willfully (though also very cautiously) violated on one another’s behalf strict camp rules against fraternizing. These small units provided a welcomed degree of clarity, as they offered savvy protection, nostalgic courtesies, and emotional support. Members looked to them to maintain high moral standards in a coarse setting and to provide warm comradeship in a fearsome place. Camp sisters practiced a wide range of nurturing activities. They would share scarce resources (clothing, food, etc.). Help wash one another. See one another through prolonged illnesses (rather than go to the infirmary, a deadly “selection” site). Celebrate birthdays. Secretly aid one another at work, defend one another, and counsel one another through Horror Story experiences. The group literally and figuratively kept members on their feet and helped them maintain a sense of themselves as worthwhile human beings. In the safety of their barrack in the Geppersdorf Slave Labor Camp, some unrelated young Jewish women developed a caring camp sisters group: “[It was soon] the envy of the camp. They shared everything, and when one of them was weak, they pooled their meager rations to support her. . . . In the middle of the night, they washed with freezing cold water, picking the lice out of each other’s hair and skin . . . they kept a close watch on orphaned young girls, some of them hardly more than children.”25 In a different group, when a member had her glasses broken by a block senior, leaving the girl nearly blind, her three camp sisters rallied to her side: they “walked with her, helped her at work, and deloused her in the evening,” much in dangerous violation of SS-enforced camp rules against such fraternizing.26 Raya Kagan, an Auschwitz survivor, writing right after liberation, maintains such jerry-rigged “families” promoted mutual trust and “linked people from all corners of Europe, erasing differences of nationality and age. . . . It nurtured the brain and soul, and absorbed all our energy, saving us from the black depths of bitterness and despair.”27 Friends and Lovers

Helen Sendyk writes in her 2006 memoir of the extraordinary challenges and acts of friendship in the camps they experienced: “. . . at great risk, we [she and her older sister] would smuggle extra portions 179

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of ‘soup’ from the kitchen to give to people in our barrack. . . . [there] were those of us who fought over crumbs of bread or pails of clean water. There were ugly words, vicious name-calling, and curses pronounced. But in the midst of it all there were devoted friends, loving sisters, and cherished relatives who cared and sacrificed for each other.”28 In the two hours of free time available after the interminable appell (roll call) many women prisoners “hurried to find friends and relatives, exchange a few words of affection, and comfort one another with the hope that the day of liberation was near . . . if we could only keep alive until then.”29 Resulting friendships could prove “both profound and durable . . . in the transient and unpredictable world of the concentration camp, friendship was the one thing women could count on. It was more than a comfort; it was their chief survival mechanism . . . without [caring friendships] they had little or no chance.”30 Eva Brown, a teenaged prisoner, dared to violate a strict SS ban against having a close friendship: “God blessed me in that dark place with a companion, Klari. She and I looked out for each other. She was always right next to me. It wasn’t easy, but we worked very hard to avoid being separated.” Like many other survivors, Ms. Brown is certain “it made a huge difference having someone to care for. It gave me one more reason to keep going . . . Klari and I had made a pact together. And we honored it. That was my security blanket. We were there for one another.”31 Although harshly frowned on by Orthodox Jewish females, a neverto-be-known number of lesbian relationships existed in the women’s section, this an understandable response to a craving for love in a setting where one’s unnatural death or that of a loved one was an imminent possibility. As most homosexual pairings were in earnest, the parties gained strength from their forbidden caring. SS guards generally ignored the entire matter (as did German law where females were concerned), since such relationships were regarded as discrete, harmless, and unpreventable. The SS (and many secular Carers) valued these pairings as an aid to orderliness in an otherwise chaotic setting. Shielding Culture

As prisoners were sent to a camp to work and die, not to think or feel, and certainly not to be entertained, the Nazis prohibited cultural and intellectual activities. Women nevertheless “raised their sights above their circumstances and found the energy and vision to be creative,” the better to help protect mind, sanity, and soul.32 To judge cautiously 180

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from their memoirs, Jewish women drew far more support than men from cultural activities. Carers promoted a variety of high-risk cultural activities inside selected “safe” barracks, activities that included classical music concerts, free-wheeling book discussions, humorous skits, informal classes and lectures, poetry recitals, and song fests. Flora Rom-Eiseman recalls that in the Riga Slave Labor camp “these hours of salvaged inspiration were precious, and had the power to lift us above our desolate existence.”33 Rena Gelissen describes laughter being “as valuable as bread; it eases our hearts of just a little pain and gives us something to smile about secretly.”34 Many female teachers and professors taught informal forbidden classes on a wide variety of subjects, albeit without texts and other common classroom aids. Classes in English and Hebrew were especially popular with prisoners intent after liberation on getting away from Europe.35 These secret courses helped give students a feeling of camaraderie, a sense of purpose, and a boost in self-worth. Gemma LaGuardia Gluck, who covertly offered a course for English-language students, noted in her memoir: “We had to study in secrecy, of course. If we had been caught, all of us would have been severely punished, especially the teacher.” She wrote her own onehundred-page English grammar book and made thirty handwritten copies. Paper and pencils were “organized” (stolen) for her by women who worked in the camp office.36 As noted earlier in chapter 11, covert imaginative talk about favorite foods and recipes, legendary meals, food preparation secrets, and outstanding restaurants aided psychological and spiritual support. The magical prowess attributed to mother in the kitchen, especially during preparations for the Sabbath and holidays, sustained warm memories of the pleasures of palate and sustenance, all of which lighten relentless starvation. Carefully shielded from SS ears, “food talk” was “a good way of reconnecting with other prisoners as well as clear proof to all that the Nazis couldn’t control every aspect of the prisoners’ lives . . . Sharing the memories of past family life reminded them that they were not the animals or vermin the Nazis claimed they were.”37 This activity bolstered self-esteem, and reinforced religious values and rituals. Not surprisingly, all such talk was forbidden by apprehensive SS officers who feared participants were fomenting militant resistance (which was true of the camp’s Militants). 181

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Giving Gifts

Women secretly made small gifts for one another, an act of stealth altruism that ran the risk of severe punishment levied for “stealing” raw material the SS insisted belonged to the Reich (whatever its prewar legal ownership). Some women covertly knitted gloves and caps from wool or yarn “organized” at work. Some made drawings, embroideries, handkerchiefs, jewelry, greeting cards, mementos, and scarves, all of which helped keep up hope, affirmed friendship, and provided a degree of pleasure for both giver and receiver. Dr. Lucie Adelsberger recalls that in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp “we took as much delight in material things as [gifts] as we did in edible ones. Each piece of clothing [given as a gift] was an event, like the hand-knitted socks from Irene . . . the knife, the foggy-mirror—everything became a treasured possession [albeit possession risked SS outrage].”38 Rena Gelissen, for example, welcomed getting an “organized” bra. A friend who worked in Kanada (the sorting warehouse) smuggled it to her as a gift: “I cannot believe the difference this one tiny luxury makes in my outlook, my mood. To have one less thing to be in pain about gives me less to think about, worry over; my focus is more clear and I am more alert. I think this bra helped save my sanity.”39 Dora Sorell made illegal gifts with “organized” metals and a soldering iron in the Quality Control Section of a German factory. “Whenever I could I melted pieces of lead, pressed them, smoothed them, and cut them into round or six-pointed star medallions on which I carved names and patterns before giving them as pendants to my friends. It was our first jewelry.”40 This sort of handicraft extended to providing imaginative care for Jewish children hidden by women around the camp. Dolls, for example, were made from “organized” discarded gloves used by camp doctors. The fingers were cut off, artfully turned into tiny fantasy figures, and given as rare gifts to starving youngsters long accustomed to going without such toys.41 A 1997 museum exhibit of many such gifts noted that, “in these circumstances, gift giving took a kind of courage rooted deep in one’s character that challenged annihilation. It was a courage that reclaimed one’s humanness by connecting to past traditions of celebration and kindness.”42 Similarly, a scholar suggests, “these unpretentious little items speak of altruism, of affection, of a level and quality of human contact which helped to make even the concentration camp experience somewhat bearable.”43 182

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Conclusion

The male-dominated world of Holocaust scholarship and memorialization has long erred in generalizing men’s experiences to women, thereby sidelining women.44 Today, thanks to the persistent efforts of resolute female academics, overdue attention goes to the experiences of women throughout the Holocaust. We now understand that many Jewish women, especially those who were Carers, were determined to “maintain their dignity amid their despair by remembering who they really were, not who their enemies said they were.”45 While being held prisoner in the Stutthof Concentration Camp, Miriam Elkes was sustained by two objects: “One was a piece of bread, which she always had about her person. The other was a broken piece of comb. She kept the bread in case someone needed it more than she. And no matter what, morning and night, she would comb her hair to affirm her person.”46 A scholar who interviewed sixteen female survivors in depth maintains “their caring and compassion proved stronger than the hatred, inhumanity, and the atrocities that confronted them every minute of the day . . . the resiliency of the human spirit is astonishing.”47 Notes

The epigraph is from The Quotable Woman, edited anonymously, p. 41. 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

Ringlheim, Joan. 1998. “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust.” In Ofer, Dalia and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds. 1998. Women in the Holocaust, p. 344. See also Gurewitsch, Brana, ed. 1998. Mothers, Sisters, Registers: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust. Weiss, Esther. “A Miracle in Auschwitz.” In Eibeshitz, Jehoshua and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, eds. 1994. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies, Vol. ll. (translated by Jehoshau Eibeshitz and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz), p. 166. Popescu, Petru. 2001. The Oasis: A Memory of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp, p. 39. Strzelecki, Andrezi. 1994. “The Plunder of Victims and Their Corpses.” In Gutman, Israel and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camps, p. 256. As cited in Saidel, Rochelle G. 2006. The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, p. 115. The 15 percent figure is from the “Introduction” by Jeanne Armstrong to Renault, Maisie. 2013 ed. (1949) La Grand Misere (Great Misery), (translated by Jeanne Armstrong), p. vii. The women’s camp in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp had only two faucets, living quarters were far smaller than the men’s, lacked basic sanitary facilities, and the food ration was meager. Frilling, Tuvia. 2014. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz (translated by Haim Watzman), p. 34. 183

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

184

Hedgepeth, Sonja and Rochelle G. Saidel. 2010. Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust. Op. Cit., p. 63. Saidel, Rochelle G. 2006. The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, p. 53. By the war’s end on May 8, 1945, Gentile and Jewish women made up approximately 26 percent of about three million camp survivors, or just over two hundred thousand liberated individuals. Pingel, Falk. 2010. “Social Life in an Unsocial Environment: The Inmate’s Struggle,” pp. 58–81. In Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, p. 69. “Introduction.” Miller, Joy Erlichman. 2000. Love Carried Me Home, p. xix. Another source that thinks the odds were worse for women is Rittner, Carol and John K. Roth, eds. 1993. Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, p. 2. There is no academic consensus in the matter. Rigorous matching of gender samples currently remains impossible. Fritzche, Peter. 2008. Life and Death in the Third Reich, p. 216. For an overview, see Weitzman, Lenore. “Women in the Holocaust.” In Discussion papers Series, Volume 11, Discussion paper #5. http://www. un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/paper14.shtml. Although the Nazis prohibited sexual contact with untermenschen (non-German subhumans) some Jewish women prisoners were forced to “work” in camp brothels (Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, etc.) operated for the SS and certain elite Gentile Kapos. See Hedgepeth, Sonja and Rochelle G. Saidel. 2010. Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust. Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal, p. 143. Wachtel, Shirley Russak. 2005. The Story of Blima: A Holocaust Survivor, p. 72. Ritvo, Roger A. and Diane M. Plotkin. 1998. Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust, p. 169. Lewinska, Pelagia. 1968. Twenty Months at Auschwitz, pp. 152–3. Schwalbova, Margita. 1998. “They Were Murdered in the Infirmary.” In Ibid., p. 169. Herzberger, Magda. 2005. Survival, p. 215. See also Perl, Dr. Gisella. 1948. I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. Saidel. Rochelle G. 2006. The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. Op. Cit., p. 60. “There is much evidence of women’s kindness to one another,” p. 53. Farkas. Helen. 1995, Remember the Holocaust: A Memoir of Survival, p. 55. Schwertfeger, Ruth. 1989. Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp, p. 5. See in this connection, Baer, Elizabeth R. and Myrna Goldenberg, eds. 2003. Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, p. xxiii. Edvardson, Cordelia. 1997 ed. (1984). Burned Girl Seeks the Fire: A Memoir, p. 59. Ibid. Extraordinary care sometimes went to specially talented youngsters, for example, in 1943 in the Janowska Slave Labor Camp a small group of Jewish women decided Jania Heshele, a twelve-year-old, was so gifted a writer, especially of poetry, that they would not allow her murder (as was the common fate of youngsters). The women somehow arranged for her

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22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

escape, and also for her welcome as a hidden child in a Gentile home in Cracow. She later had her Holocaust diary published. Holliday, Laurel, ed. 1995 ed. Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries, pp. 67–68. Judd, Lillian and Dennis L. 2011. From Nightmare to Freedom: Healing After the Holocaust, pp. 64–65. Mo, Is. 1994 ed., U.B.B.: Unforgettable Bergen-Belsen, pp. 45, 51. Karola, a nurse at Auschwitz Infirmary, managed to get a German doctor to smuggle her five-year-old son, Zbyszek, into her barrack. Zbyszek lived through to liberation, much as portrayed in the unduly denigrated movie, “Life is Beautiful.” Although prisoners knew about the boy’s presence, “no one betrayed him to the Germans.” Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara. 1985. Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. (translation by Roslyn Hirsh), p. 88. Sorell, Dora Apsan. 1998. Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam, p. 73. Kirschner, Ann. 2006. Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story, p. 175. Morrison, Jack. 2000. Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–1945. Op. Cit., pp. 130. In the Birkenau Death Camp, “women very often cared for one another in modest but spiritually, symbolically, and practically significant ways . . . Moreover, they often committed to do so right to the end in the full knowledge that neither themselves or the others were likely to survive.” Raphael, Melisa. 2003. The Feminist Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust, p. 9. Kagan, Raya. 1947. Hell’s Office Women. Kibbutz Merhavia, Israel: Sifriat Hapoalim (Hebrew), p. 116. Cited in Rosenberg, Prina. Spring 2012. “Camaraderie as a Form of Resistance in Auschwitz: Sophie-Esther Manela and Ewa Gabanyi.” PRISM, vol. 4, p. 77. Berger, Alan. 2000 ed. (1992) “Foreword.” In Sendyk, Helen. The End of Days. Op. Cit., p. viii, 198. Popescu, Petru. 2001. The Oasis: A memoir of Love and Survival, p. 22. Caring friendships, albeit vulnerable to the vicissitudes of all such relationships, were not a casual matter in the struggle “to keep a semblance of normal lives and social conditions as women.” Saidel. Rochelle G. 2006. The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, Op. Cit., p. 215. Morrison, Jack. 2000. Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–1945. Op. Cit., pp. 125, 133, 147. While the reference is specifically to Ravensbruck female prisoners, I believe it applies to many such prisoners. Brown, Eva (with Thomas Fields-Meyer). 2007. If You Saved One Life: A Survivor’s Memoir. Op. Cit., pp. 87. 99. Morrison, Jack. 2000. Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–’45, Op. Cit., p. 147. Rom-Eisenman, Flora. “The Golden Coin.” In Eibeshitz, Jehoshua and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz, eds. 1994. Women in the Holocaust: A Collection of Testimonies, Vol. ll. (translated by Jehoshau and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz), p. 159. Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz. Op. Cit., pp. 123. See in this connection, Morrison, Jack. 2000. Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–’45, Op. Cit., p. 147. 185

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

186

Cited in Saidel, Rochelle G. 2006. The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. Op. Cit., p. 62. See also Gluck, Gemma LaGuardia. 1961. My Story, pp. 36–37. Baer, Elizabeth R. and Myrna Goldenberg, eds. 2003. Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, pp.163, 174. Adelsberger, Lucie. 1995. Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story (translated by Susan Ray), p. 65. Gelissen, Rena Kornreich, with Heather Dune Macadam. 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz. Op. Cit., pp. 123. Sorell, Dora Apsan. 1998. Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam, p. 107. See Boitelet, Christian. (Undated). L/Impossible Oubli: La Deportation dans Les Camps Nazis. (Translated for me by Clarisse Vivier.) Saidel. Rochelle G. 2006. The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp., Op. Cit., p. 60. The source is Congdon, Kristin. 1997. “Giving as Resistance.” In Adams, Carole Elizabeth, ed. Women of Ravensbruck: Portraits of Courage – Julia A. Terwillinger (Exhibit Booklet), p. 8. Morrison, Jack. 2000. Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–45, p. 164. Saidel. Rochelle G. 2006. The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, p. 204. On the background for neglect here, see Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 2011. The End of the Holocaust, pp. 54–55. Heinemann, Marline F. 1986. Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust, p. 110. Elkes, Joel, ed. 1999. Dr. Elkhanan Elkes of the Kovno Ghetto: A Son’s Holocaust Memoir, p. 992. Kaplan, Marion A. 1998. Between Dignity and Despair, Op. Cit., p. 236; see also Unterman, Phobe Eloise. 2009. Through Eva’s Eyes, p. 17.

Profile

Magda Herzberger I was an eyewitness to the Holocaust. I am an eyewitness to a new dawn, the rebirth of a new life, my second life, my second chance. —Magda Herzberger

Born in 1926 in Cluj, Romania, Magda Herzberger was brought up in a close and loving Jewish family that held to orthodox ways: her mother’s kitchen was kosher, and regular attendance at a local synagogue was second nature. Ms. Herzberger’s grounding in Judaism was reinforced as well by high-school courses she took in Bible, culture, Hebrew, and Jewish history. Little wonder then that she believes “in the camps my faith was one of my strong anchors to which I was clinging. And that was true of most of the survivors.”1 Before the Nazi arrived Ms. Herzberger’s father, a gentle and sensitive man, was a manager in a large engine factory. Her mother, who excelled in handicrafts, is remembered as a warm individual gifted with a very pleasant personality. Among many relatives one uncle, Eugene Mozes, stands out, as he was the fencing champion of Romania. He started to teach Ms. Herzberger fencing when she was barely five years old, as he recognized that she shared his talent. Eugene encouraged her to become a competitive fencer at age twelve. As girls at that time did not participate in fencing competitions, she fenced against boy opponents and won gold cups. All of this helped strengthen Ms. Herzberger’s self-esteem and her determination to be successful. She learned tactics to defend herself and became strong and limber. Her uncle taught the value of physical strength and perseverance without which she might not have later survived in the camps. He urged her to have “the courage to go on regardless of the difficulties [one] might face . . . Pain increases your endurance. You have to tolerate pain in order to survive in life.”2 187

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On Friday nights Ms. Herzberger’s parents welcomed poor neighbors and also some homeless people to share their Sabbath meal. She recalls being taught early on “the value of love, tolerance, and understanding.”3 The tradition of Mitzvah [Charity], of doing a good deed, was emphasized: “My mother taught me as a child to have concern for mankind and for your fellow man.”4 Her father, in turn, taught Ms. Herzberger that “no matter what, you should keep the humanness within you.”5 After arriving at age eighteen at Auschwitz from a horrendous transport, the father and daughter saw one another for the last time. He advised her, “Please practice the art of forgiveness, love, and tolerance in your heart. Take care of your mother. Cherish and respect her. Don’t forget your loving father.”6 Reflecting years later about what sustained her ability to go on at Auschwitz and to provide forbidden care there to others Ms. Herzberger cites “the three strong pillars of life: faith, hope, and love. Their importance was pointed out to me through my childhood and adolescence by my parents. I grasped their true value for the first time in the camp, where I was separated from my family at our arrival.”7 Below are just a few of many examples of Ms. Herzberger’s experience with altruism, some of it of a stealth nature and some of an overt nature, either as a recipient or provider. Early during her first seven weeks in Auschwitz Ms. Herzberger slipped into a very deep depression, something she had never experienced before. She felt overwhelmed by the loss of loved ones, the stench of burning bodies, the excruciating hunger, and the new pile of corpses laid out every morning in front of each barrack. One night she slipped outside her barrack and contemplated throwing herself on the camp’s electrified fence, much as she had seen done by other suicidal women. “Suddenly I felt a hand touching my shoulder. I was terrified. To my surprise it was my fellow prisoner Lily—my schoolmate in elementary school. Lily said, ‘… don’t you care about your loved ones, your family? Don’t you want to see them again? What if at the end of the war they are waiting for you? Do you want them to suffer until the end of their lives by losing you? Come back [inside the barrack] now and promise me that you will never do this foolish thing again.’ That was like a miracle. I came to realize she was right. I decided to get hold of myself before it was too late. She was my savior.”8 Ms. Herzberger recalls that “even one day in Auschwitz was enough to drive you insane . . . No one of us knew how long we were going to 188

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be around, and I think that brought us closer . . . we encouraged each other . . . a friend was of utmost importance. If I wouldn’t have been encouraged by my friends during three weeks of utter depression I don’t know what would have become of me. When I came out of the depression I tried to encourage others . . . there was togetherness . . . you developed friendships, or everyone was staying away from you because you were a menace to them.”9 Transferred from Auschwitz to the German port city of Bremen, with five hundred other young women, Ms. Herzberger spent long hours during many winter weeks clearing heavy and often dangerous rubble from heavily bombed homes and shops, and dragged away the charred corpses of citizens killed in the bombing raids.10 Ms. Herzberger recalls, “we were concerned about the women among us who seemed on the verge of collapse. We tried to help them as much as we could.”11 A friend, digging in the rubble (and trying to avoid unexploded incendiary bombs), found some big round blocks of cheeses that looked black and hard. Using a sharp fragment of brick she removed the hard crust, “and all had a feast that day. . . .” In an altruistic way they dared to offer a block of cheese to their Wehrmacht guards and were pleased with their appreciative response. On another day a friend found more “treasure” in the rubble, this time an old raincoat. She had need of it herself and chose to make a surprise gift of it to Ms. Herzberger—“which was a welcome miracle because I was shivering all over my body due to my fever. She gave it to me, seeing my sickly condition. It felt so good to have that coat on my body . . . The Wehrmacht guard who was standing next to me, supervising our work, allowed me to keep the coat [he could have shot me for allegedly ‘stealing’ German property]. He felt sorry for me. He was our most humane guard.”12 After an especially devastating daytime bombing, “we left Bremen [in trucks] in a hurry [as the guards feared ensuing Allied bombing], while so many people [citizens] needed help. Although not being on the streets [clearing rubble] was beneficial to me, I felt it was not fair to abandon the poor people who were hurt, and not give them any assistance. We would have liked to comfort and help them, but our guards did not allow us to do that. Their main concern was for their own safety, and nothing else mattered to them.”13 During her nine-month stay in Bremen Ms. Herzberger’s work group found itself working close to a nearby group of twenty to twenty-five French male prisoners who were also clearing rubble. The POWs 189

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seemed comparatively well fed, their prison garb was in good condition, they were able to talk aloud to one another, and had less strict German guards. To the astonishment of Ms. Herzberger’s work group they even offered some of their food to their guards with whom they seemed to be on good speaking terms. One day one of the Frenchmen walked over and talked to one of Ms. Herzberger’s guards, who, to the surprise of the Jewish women, agreed meat and potatoes left over in the kettle of the French prisoners could become an utterly unexpected altruistic gift to Ms. Herzberger’s group. She recalls that soon they were “pushing and shoving each other to get closer to the kettle, fighting among themselves. I couldn’t do that . . . I wanted to preserve my self-respect and not sink to the level of an animal . . . the end result was that I never managed to get any of the food because I always ended up the last one in the line.”14 This went on for several days, and at those times her refusal to become one of the fighting mob was noted and admired by the French POWs. As a reward, Jean, their leader, came over and complimented her, as she reminded him of a well-mannered sister of his the Nazis had murdered. Jean pledged to help take care of her and gave her a special gift: “My comrades next to me were amazed . . . I couldn’t eat the [gift of ] delicacies [a bottle of milk and a white roll] by myself. I shared some of it with some of them.”15 Throughout the cold month of January the daily “gift” kettle from the French POWs provided the Jewish women with invaluable extra food. Jean gave even more food to Ms. Herzberger, and she felt “God sent an angel in the form of Jean to save me . . . he was like a loving, caring, and protective father to me.”16 Unfortunately, the French POWs were unexpectedly relocated overnight at the end of January. Later, after a death march that cost the lives of about half of the participating prisoners, Ms. Herzberger arrived in Bergen-Belsen where she was forced to work at dragging dead bodies and digging graves. She tried twice to escape to another side of the camp where conditions might be better. In her second effort she got valuable secret help from French women prisoners who assured her they would not betray her. Unfortunately, each time the same SS women spotted her and beat her savagely, promising she would kill Ms. Herzberger if there was a third attempt. After three grueling weeks in overcrowded and disease-ridden Bergen-Belsen, the last week spent without any food, liberation finally came on April 15, 1945. By this time Ms. Herzberger was near death 190

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when she was found among thousands of corpses by a liberator: “A British soldier discovered me among the dead bodies, lifted me, and carried me away. I couldn’t talk, and he was crying, filled with compassion. I felt sad that I was too weak to talk. I wanted to thank him and all the liberators for saving us.”17 As the clean, empty barrack to which she was carried lacked beds, the soldier put Ms. Herzberger on the floor.18 She slept there for the next two months surrounded by eleven Hungarian Jewish women from Auschwitz and Bremen. Three of her new barrack mates suffered from typhus and had high fever, delirium, and hallucinations but only two beds were available. The third person, Eva, was supposed to sleep on the floor. “Nobody wanted to sleep next to her. I felt sorry for her and I volunteered to be the one. . . . Although I was concerned about contracting the illness, my strong desire to give her some comfort and assistance overrode my fear.”19 Ms. Herzberger then volunteered to work in a typhus hospital for the next three months, “even though I had not recovered my strength completely. My friends and companions advised me against doing that . . . [I explained to them that] ‘God was protecting me all along, and helped me to survive. I feel that I have to do something for being given that privilege. I have to assist others who are in need of care’ . . . I fed the sick, I washed them, carried their bedpans, and comforted them . . . I listened to their stories and their confessions before they passed away. I felt like a rabbi. I closed their eyes after that.”20 After Ms. Herzberger’s return from the camps she psychologically buried her father “on the first Friday night at home in the depths of my heart. I also buried there members of my family and all others who perished in the German camps. I erected tombstones for them through my books, music, and lectures as they should be honored, respected, and remembered.”21 She took a solemn vow on being liberated in 1945: “I knew that if I did recover and survive, I would always keep alive the memory of all of those victims of persecution who were left behind.”22 Now fully physically recovered and a former marathon runner, mountain climber, skier, and swimmer, Ms. Herzberger as a public speaker has given hundreds of Holocaust-related talks to an audience numbering in the thousands. (She always returns honoraria to the event sponsor for use in providing care for the needy). An accomplished author (thirteen books), composer, and poet, Ms. Herzberger feels motivated to talk publically by her deep-set desire “to help as a Doctor of the Soul,” much as modeled in her childhood home.23 191

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Notes

The epigraph is from Herzberger, Magda. Survival. 2005, p. 367. More information, including a complete list of Ms. Herzberger’s available publications, can be found by contacting Ms. Herzberger at [email protected]. 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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“You become less rigid [in the camps] . . . you were starving, you couldn’t see that something was kosher or not. I found that this [practice of keeping kosher] isn’t really [at the core of ] Judaism . . . you cannot come back from disaster without any change. It’s not possible.” Herzberger, Magda. 2011. Transcript of 1980 Magda Herzberger Interview by the Wisconsin Historical Society, pp. 243–4. Herzberger, Magda. 2005. Survival, pp. 35, 178. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 26. Herzberger, Magda. 1998. “God Saved Me for a Purpose.” In Ritvo, Roger A. and Diane M. Plotkin, eds. Sisters in Sorrow: Voices of Care in the Holocaust, p. 205. Herzberger, Magda. 1985 ed. Eyewitness to Holocaust, p. 11. Herzberger, Magda. 2005. Survival, p. 195. Herzberger, Magda. 2011. Transcript of 1980 Magda Herzberger Interview by the Wisconsin Historical Society, p. 104. Herzberger. Survival, p. 212. “If we didn’t die of scarlet fever, typhus, or other illness raging due to poor conditions, we had all the chances of collapsing under the weight of the corpses [we had to haul].” Ibid., p. 10. See also Herzberger, Magda. 1998. “God Saved Me for a Purpose.” In Ritvo, Roger A. and Diane M. Plotkin, eds. Sisters in Sorrow, p. 205. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., pp. 250, 259. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 271. Ibid., p. 274. Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., p. 315. Ibid., p. 321. Ibid., p. 320. Of the 1,074 acute typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis cases, only 474 women had bunks to sleep on. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday /hi/dates/stories/april/15/newsid_3557000/3557341.stm. Ibid., pp. 326–7. Op. Cit., p. 229. Historians say when the camp was liberated many thousands more subsequently died. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday /hi/dates/stories/april/15/newsid_3557000/3557341.stm. Among many other poems Ms. Herzberger wrote a “Requiem,” and developed a related musical composition, “Requiem: They died in Vain.” See in this connection, the second edition of the book Walz of the Shadows. Herzberger. Survival, p. 315. Ms. Herzberger and I spoke often in phone calls during 2013 and 2014; the phrase is from one of the calls. She read and approved this essay in 2014.

13 Gentiles as Carers Look not at the vessel, but at what it contains. —Rabbi Meir

Introduction

In a public lecture on October 21, 2010, Samuel Bak, a renowned Holocaust-focused artist, expressed his gratitude to the SS commandant of a slave labor camp in which he and his mother had been held prisoners. On learning that the thousand prisoners in his camp had been suddenly scheduled for transport to a death camp the commandant quickly got permission to instead keep them to perform what he told his superiors would be “deadly inhuman work.” In fact, he knew there was no such work, and had his deception been uncovered he would have been executed. Decades later the SS commandant was honored by Yad Vashem as a “Righteous among the Nations” hero.1 Some never-to-be-known-number of Gentiles—estimated to be fifty thousand to five hundred thousand—dared to secretly aid in the survival of European Jews.2 Israeli professor Yehuda Bauer believes “a minority, and no one can tell how many, were distinctly unhappy about the murder of Jews, Poles, and others.”3 Thomas Toivi Blatt included in his 1997 memoir a wish “to recognize and honor the following [eight] Gentiles who helped me to survive during a dangerous time in my life. To them I would like to say: In a world gone awry, you remained my hope.”4 Similarly, a trainload of Jewish prisoners, after a boxcar trip of five or six days out of Poland, arrived in Comar, France. While being marched through the town to a new slave labor camp, they were alarmed to hear angry shouting. George Lucius Salton, then fifteen years old, finally realized what was happening: “The people of Colmar were on our side! Their shouts of ‘Shame!’ were aimed at the Germans. With growing 193

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rage they shouted. It was a gift, a miracle. The people of Colmar felt our pain and gave us comfort, witnessed the injustice and protested, saw our despair and gave us hope . . . the cries of the people and the memory of their kindness stayed with us.”5 Other survivors recall meeting during these difficult years, “a few rare non-Jewish individuals who were compassionate, exceptional, daring, and helpful on our behalf.”6 Four types—civilians, coworkers, coprisoners, and enemies—provided forbidden high-risk support. While such individuals represented a small percent of each type they made a contribution out of all proportion to their numbers.7 Civilians

In October 1941, Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, sternly warned harsh punishments awaited Gentiles guilty of “Jewish-friendly behavior,” as Jews were “your mortal enemy.”8 By the war’s end, nearly half of all Germans “had embraced [Nazi doctrine] of their own free will.”9 Of the other half of German nationals, however, Arnost Lustig would have us understand that “if there hadn’t been good Germans I wouldn’t be sitting here today . . . it’s a mistake to see them as demons because that would be too easy. They were human beings.”10 Choices made in favor of providing forbidden care varied greatly. Helen Lewis knew a German doctor living in Prague who, during the Nazi roundup, issued false medical certificates to Jews that saved many, at least for a short while.11 Helen Sendyk knew a fellow prisoner who attracted the admiring attention of a German male as she and others walked to and from a slave labor camp. Daily he secretly tossed in her direction small gifts of food she later shared with barrack friends. “She would bend down to pick it up while the other girls would divert the guard’s attention. When she was unable to do so, another prisoner did, and passed it on to her.”12 Rabbi Shimon Huberman recalls being one of several dozen Jews who “owed our lives to the warm and fiery sermons [rejecting antisemitism] of a saintly person [the Catholic Priest in Kampinos, Poland] . . . He forcefully called upon the Christian population to assist us in all possible ways. And he also attacked the guards and the Christian [slave labor] camp administrators, referring to them as Antichrists. . . . As a result, the peasants began to bring various food items to our labor sites.”13 Although the matter remains quite controversial, at least one scholar gave credit to the Catholic Church. “No other institution produced a 194

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greater number of heroes in the years before and during the Holocaust: Polish, German, Italian, and French nuns, monks, and lay priests, gave their lives or suffered imprisonment for the sake of Jews.”14 In Berlin, some seven thousand Jewish Berliners went into hiding.15 Success required high-risk acts of stealth altruism by many non-Jewish Carers: estimates are that it took seven such Germans to sustain a single hidden Jew.16 Across Germany, perhaps twelve thousand to fifteen thousand Jews, especially young and unmarried males and females, went underground, “motivated by the eternal Jewish optimism that something perhaps would turn up.”17 Those who hid Jews ranged from “deeply religious people to prostitutes and simple, apolitical, but profoundly decent men and women willing to endanger their own lives to save another’s.”18 Help came as well from Christian witnesses to the death marches. Mel Mermelstein, when shuffling half-alive with hundreds of other Jewish prisoners through the German village of Manstein, was amazed by “an exchange of waving, greetings . . . and a shower of [bread] that carried the rain of compassion . . . More important than the pieces of bread we snatched was the unexpected surge of hope within us.”19 Samuel Goetz, as a seventeen-year-old boy in 1945 in a crowded open boxcar, remembers getting precious food when it pulled out of Pilso, Czechoslovakia. “Someone tried to throw bread into our car. Someone caught the bread, and the train moved on.”20 Felix Opatowski recounts how, during a death march that passed through Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, “the local people came close and saw the shape we were in. They didn’t have much themselves, but they threw some bread and potatoes at us. Some Germans started shooting at them. The people were yelling and still throwing bread at us, to whoever would grab it.”21 Marcus, a seventeen-year-old teenager, describes waving “at a woman who had tossed several loaves into the boxcar. As she waved back, smiling, she was shot by a guard.”22 As is well known, several thousand Danish citizens, including many Danish Jews, helped about 7,200 Jews, and their 680 non-Jewish family members, escape by boat to safety in neutral Sweden.23 Perhaps one hundred thousand Poles dared to save Jewish strangers.24 At his 1961 trial, Adolf Eichmann testified, “every Italian Jew who survived the war [80 percent] owed his life to an Italian [Gentile].”25 As many as 10 to 15 percent of 160,000 Dutch Jews who were present when the Germans invaded in 1942 were later hidden by Gentiles.26 Overall, however, 75 percent of all Dutch Jews lost their lives, most 195

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of them due to betrayals.27 Dr. J. Hemelrijk, himself hidden for three years before his capture and imprisonment, would have us understand “the fact that, in spite of the dangers, so many risked everything to come to the rescue of their fellow men, has been one of the greatest achievements of the Dutch.”28 Coworkers

Eva Olsson recalls that when she and her younger sister were assigned to slave labor in a sheet metal factory, she persuaded a sympathetic German foreman to allow the younger girl to occasionally rest in his office. Eva gave warning when the SS approached and the girl rushed to imitate a factory floor sweeper. “Another foreman might have had me shot for hiding my sister.”29 Arnold Lustig fondly remembers his German factory boss, a man whose three sons had died in the war. “I was like his son. And he brought me food every day, not only for myself, but also for my friends.”30 Similarly, Elly Berkovitz Gross recalls with lasting gratitude a German male supervisor in a slave labor factory who, noticing her bleeding gums, risked his life to secretly provide her with salt as a vital treatment.31 Henia Reinhartz had a German overseer whose “friendliness and kindness restored our belief in human goodness . . . He would bring us little things from his wife almost every day, little items that made us feel human . . . warm gloves or tiny sandwiches . . . despite knowledge of great risk . . . [he provided] a spark of hope for us that sustained us during the morbid months ahead.”32 Blima Weisstruch, a twenty-year-old Jewish woman, was held for three years in Grunberg, a slave labor camp in Poland. There she met Gizella, a kind-hearted older Catholic woman and sewing factory foreman who taught her the sewing craft. She brought Blima a daily slice of bread and often comforted her at great personal risk. Blima credits Gizella’s stealth altruism for “helping me keep my mind alert and my heart at a steady beat . . . she helped me because of her obligation to help me return to humanity.”33 After being liberated Blima sought out Gizella, only to learn she had been murdered by the Nazis just before the war’s end for the “crime” of having helped a Jew. Kept under armed guard and subject to dire punishments, conscripted foreign workers were housed in terrible conditions. Distained by native Germans, they were barely sustained by meager rations, though they could sometimes get mail and packages—often pilfered by the guards—sent from home.34 196

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This notwithstanding, Lorenzo Perone, an Italian “guest worker” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, secretly provided daily food drop-offs for several Jewish prisoners, including Primo Levi, author later of acclaimed Holocaust books. Levi, in fact, attributes his survival primarily to the forbidden care provided by Mr. Perone, especially that man’s humanistic warmth which reminded Levi he was still a man, even if also a prisoner. Levi wrote of Perone: “In the violent and degraded environment of Auschwitz, a man helping other men out of pure altruism was incomprehensible, alien, like a savior who’s come from heaven.”35 On Yad Vashem’s homepage where Perone is honored as a “Righteous Gentile,” Levi adds, “I believe it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today, and not so much for his material aid as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence . . . that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole . . . for which it was worth surviving.”36 Years later, Levi named his only son for Lorenzo Perone. Dora Aspan Sorell was chosen on December 12, 1944, to leave Auschwitz with two hundred other women for transport to Weisswasser, a small slave labor camp. There she worked in a factory alongside several hundred French male POWs, some of who soon fell in love with various Jewish women prisoners. Dora translated messages passed between the women and the POWs. As the French prisoners got mail packages from home they secretly provided her with combs, needles, thread, toothbrushes, and food she shared widely around. “If it were not for [them] we might not have survived these months.”37 Similarly, Italian POWs at the Grossrosen Concentration Camp secretly whispered words of encouragement and smuggled food to Jewish female prisoners. The Italians are fondly remembered in a survivor’s memoir for how very much those forbidden words and gifts of food meant to them all.38 Coprisoners

Franz Leitner, a Gentile prisoner at Buchenwald, had charge of a barrack of Jewish children and teenagers. At great risk to himself he secured extra food for them, shielded many from murderous work assignments, and kept their names off lists for transport to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp. “He even bribed the SS man in charge to save the children.”39 Mordecai Paldiel, former program director of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Gentile project, maintains 197

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our world is sustained through such good deeds, albeit we have had too few providers.40 Communist Gentiles had been imprisoned since 1933 when the Nazis took over. Many gave strategic forbidden care to the German Jewish men imprisoned in 1938 for allegedly “fomenting” the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom. The Communists showed the bewildered Jews how to mitigate their suffering, deceive the camp guards, and struggle to resist dehumanization . . . altruistic lessons of life-saving significance. In 1942 the SS commandant in the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp ruled that the entire block of Jewish female prisoners would hereafter receive food only every fourth day. This was a severe punishment for some infraction of camp rules and a chilling reminder of their disposability. In the Czech block, sympathetic Gentile prisoners collected food and smuggled it to the Jewish block every other day.41 In August 1944, about two hundred emaciated Jewish women were transported to this same camp where they lay out of doors, without food, shelter, or water for days on end. Gertrud Muller recounts how a camp committee run by Gentile delegates from many countries directed barrack leaders to reduce their barracks’ rations and take the extra food to the Jewish women. “We kept on supplying them with food until they left . . . This example of international solidarity involving many of the [barrack leaders] gave me a lot of strength.”42 Eugene Heimler was in a group of starving Jewish prisoners transported from Auschwitz to Buchenwald where they received secret altruistic help. As the SS had not provided any food rations for them, three blocs of Gentile political prisoners volunteered their own scarce food, a compassionate act frowned on by the SS. Norwegians donated their bread ration; French prisoners, their portion of margarine for the day; and Yugoslavs, their hot soup. Heimler remembers hearing “the first humane words that had been addressed to us for a long time, the first act of generosity we had encountered.”43 After the Danish police force of Copenhagen refused to cooperate with the Nazis, all of its members were sent to Buchenwald. One of their number, Niels Ahlmark, began to share food from his Danish Red Cross parcels with his new Jewish friend, the above Eugene Heimler. He even provided heavy underwear without which Heimler might not have made it through the German winter. Heimler later wrote, “I owe to him the restoration of my tottering faith in human beings, and even in humanity itself . . . I cherished and valued his friendship and his true Christian humanity.”44 198

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A young German woman Kapo (foreman), herself a Gentile political prisoner in Auschwitz, took pity on several exhausted Jewish women prisoners she was supervising. She covertly taught them how to work in a slower and less demanding way and told nearby SS guards some lie that protected her ruse. Helen Lewis credits this Kapo with “saving us from dying of exhaustion or being shot . . . In helping us she deliberately took a great personal risk. Even many years in the camps had not extinguished her compassion and humanity.”45 Similarly, in Ravensbruck, the Gentile woman in charge of the death lists, Ilse Hunger, “took names off lists and swapped inmate numbers. These tricks helped to save many women who were able to survive using numbers from the dead.”46 Enemies

Betty Rich recalls the forbidden help a Wehrmacht soldier (regular army; non-SS) gave her family in the ghetto. “Even if this man was only one isolated case, a drop of water in an ocean, it still reinforced in us the belief that there must be some decent human beings left among those Jew-haters, as we had initially perceived them all to be.”47 Rabbi Yechezkel Harfenes, a survivor of seven camps, remembers Wehrmacht guards who were “decent fellows who did not work us beyond our capacity. They were quiet and did not curse or ridicule us with coarse language taken from the Nazi lexicon. The very fact that a German considered us human meant a lot to us.”48 Helen Lewis knew a Wehrmacht officer who often stopped at work sites, ignored the SS guard, and offered “simple words meant to give courage and raise hopes . . . It was miraculous that a German officer should talk to us in this way, and it left a deep impression on us. The rest of the day was somehow easier to bear . . . In the evenings we talked of him, shaking our heads in wonder . . . I shall always remember the voice of humanity that reached out to us.”49 After escaping from a death march, Ms. Lewis waded through deep snow to the open door of a roadside cottage. There she found herself staring at a room full of Wehrmacht soldiers having their supper. Ms. Lewis stammered in German that she was a German refugee and had temporarily lost her family. “They laughed, and one of them said, ‘We know exactly what sort of family you have lost, but stay here in the meantime and warm yourself.’” She got hot soup, bread, and a corner of the room in which to sleep. In the morning after thanking them, “we wished each other good luck, and I was gone.”50 199

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On a January 1945 death march out of Ravensbruck, a fourteenyear-old teenager was suddenly offered a chance to escape by a passing Wehrmacht motorcyclist. She, her older sister, and their five cousins desperately tried to take up the offer, but an alert SS guard moved to kill all of them. Unable to aid their failed escape, the motorcyclist threatened to kill the SS guard unless the prisoners could rejoin the march and not be punished. They all survived the war.51 According to Ms. Lewis, “the most humane people were sometimes the most unlikely ones, like some SS guards.”52 Jewish prisoners and certain SS guards could sometimes work out mutually advantageous ways of cooperating. The prisoners, for example, would whistle to warn a friendly SS guard when his or her overbearing superiors were close by, and the guard would then immediately adopt a stern overbearing demeanor. In turn, these same appreciative guards would go light when required by circumstance to beat Jewish prisoners. Had the guard’s deviant behavior been detected, he would have been either summarily executed or sent to the Eastern Front, a transfer regarded as a death sentence. Typical was the situation of Leon Wells when he was a sixteen-yearold prisoner in Janowska—a notorious slave labor camp—and got to know an Austrian SS officer named Czekala. Wells came to regard the SS officer as “a very good sort who had never been known to strike a man in the workshop. It was only outside, in the course of inspection, that he struck out like the others, and then he did it only to save his face in the presence of senior authorities.”53 In Bergen-Belsen a particular female SS guard especially terrified Jewish women. One, however, was so desperate to feed her five-year-old son that she dared to beg for a little food from the guard. To everyone’s astonishment the guard, without saying a word, secretly smuggled some bread and milk daily thereafter to the mother. Even when caught and punished the SS guard persisted with her acts of stealth altruism.54 Leslie Meisels knew an SS guard in Bergen-Belsen who would “yell, scream, and curse at us [small children], but while doing this he would hand out small chocolate bars . . . Amidst all the inhumanity there were individuals who still had human feelings and were capable of demonstrating it.”55 Alexandra Sternberg, a survivor of Theresienstadt, recalls that, “among the Czech SS there were many who had been forced into this service and loathed it. If there had not been a group of decent men among them, no Jew would have ever survived.”56 She remembers one in particular who actually stole tomatoes to give to women prisoners. 200

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He went out of his way to encourage them to keep struggling to live, as the Russians were very close to being able to liberate them. Eva Olsson knew an SS guard who, during the train portion of a death march, would secretly go at night into the fields alongside the train and bring back sacks of sugar beets. “He wasn’t as cruel as some of the other guards. I also got the feeling he was a bit ashamed of what was going on and how we were being treated.”57 Joseph Katz knew an SS commander who insisted Jews had never wronged him and he, therefore, forbade humiliations in his camp, employed few punishments, and banned harsh measures.58 Other SS officers “crossed the line” once Germany’s defeat became inevitable. Prisoners promised to testify on behalf of cooperative SS officers who feared they would be put on trial after the war for “misunderstandings.” In these cases Jewish prisoners drove as hard a bargain as possible, as the aid they were seeking—medical supplies, access to extra food, and so on—was a matter of life and death. As the war was about to end, another SS commander ordered a roundup of Jewish women scattered among work sites in the area and grouped them together in his largest campsite. There he provided military protection against antisemitic marauding mobs of Ukrainians intent on their rape and murder.59 At Ravensbruck, the women’s underground gave an SS officer reliable news of the war’s development; the underground had its secret sources. They reminded him of his likely fate at the war’s end if he did not cooperate with them. In turn, the officer hid some Jewish prisoners in danger of dying or being murdered.60 A few days before the Russian liberation of the Kochstadt Concentration Camp, an SS officer there, already regarded by grateful prisoners as a caring human being, declined to flee but instead took charge of abandoned sick and dying Jewish prisoners. “He distributed the remaining food and medicines, tried to combat the worse infections, and most important of all, encouraged his charges to keep alive their spirits and their hope of delivery.”61 When Russian Army liberators moved to summarily shoot him, the sick women prisoners rose up in his defense and secured his freedom.62 Conclusion

The risks run by Gentiles who helped Jews were extraordinary. Mel Mermelstein often got soup and a slice of bread from Irena, a frail Polish civilian coworker. “She was like an Angel from Heaven, and she was 201

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aware of the chances she took . . . [He later learned] she was accused of being involved in an attempted escape; she was brutally beaten by a special SS killing squad and shot.”63 Women like Irena and her male counterparts would seem to have grasped a far-reaching relationship noted years earlier by Franz Kafka: “When a Jew is beaten down, it is mankind that falls to the ground.”64 Overall, it is estimated that over twenty-five thousand men and women honored by Yad Vashem as “Righteous among the Nations” saved the lives of almost three hundred thousand European Jews.65 Professor Mordechai Paldiel is convinced their example “lays the groundwork for something better in human relationships and human responsibilities.”66 Notes

The epigraph is from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 4:27. 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

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Before his 2010 lecture Mr. Bak met with a former SS camp guard, and he learned to his surprise that in addition to secretly aiding Bak and his mother, he had also aided a Jewish female prisoner and her daughter. Only now, in his late seventies, had he chosen to share his story with anyone, including his only daughter. Similarly, Primo Levi learned to his surprise years later from Lorenzo, a foreign worker who had aided Levi, that Lorenzo had also secretly helped others. See in this connection Paldiel, Mordecai. 2000. Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the “Final Solution,” p. 32. Extensive sharing of high-risk care occurred among Gentile prisoners, and it included high-risk secretive exchanges of help with Jewish prisoners. See Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (translated by Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak), by Tzvetan Todorov; Block, Gay and Malka Drucker. 1998. Rescuers: Portraits: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust. Bauer, Yehuda. 2009. The Death of the Shtetl, p. 70. Blatt, Thomas Toivi. 1997. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival, p. xi. Salton, George Lucius. 2002. The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir, p. 156. Roth, Irving and Edward Roth. 2004. Bondi’s Brother, p. 2. Survivor Elie Wiesel urges us to “learn from them, and in gratitude and hope, remember them.” As cited in Paldiel, Mordecai. 2000. Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the “Final Solution,” p. 32. France, Greece, and other countries now honor comparable men and women. Confino, Alon. 2014. A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, p. 217. Survivors vary widely in judgment of Gentiles: Of those many who hurt European Jews Dora A. Sorell writes, “I cry for them, for those who inflicted the suffering on our people, for those who collaborated, for those who simply stood by. They are tears of shame for

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

humankind.” 52. Sorel, Dora A. 1998. Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam, p. 93. Bettleheim, Bruno. February, 1956. “Returning to Dachau: The Living and the Dead.” Commentary, 21, pp. 144, 150. Lustig, Arnost. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993. Voices from the Holocaust, p. 15. Lewis, Helen. 1992. A Time to Speak, p. 21. Sendyk, Helen. 2000ed. The End of Days, p. 194. As cited in Huberband, Rabbi Shimon. 1987. Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland During the Holocaust, p. 95. The Vatican’s official newspapers contained “the same sort of antisemitic filth one might have read in [Nazi tabloids]. One article in the Vatican journal La Civilta Cattolica actually discussed the possibility of eliminating the Jews through annihilation.” Silva, Daniel. 2003. A Death in Venice, p. 118. Deak, Istvan. September 28, 1989. “The Incomprehensible Holocaust.” The New York Review, p. 66. Lacquer, Walter. Generation Exodus, p. 47. Perhaps 25 to 30 percent survived, p. 51. See also Fritzche, Peter. 2008. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Op. Cit., p. 244. The 7-to-1 estimate is from Nelson, Anne. 2009. Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground, p. 293. A clandestine resistance group, the Society for Peace and Reconstruction, whose members were German Jews in hiding and their Gentile German allies, provided false ID cards, information about border runners and bounty catchers, and the identities of German Jews working as Gestapo informers, and so on. Lacquer, Walter. Generation Exodus, Op. Cit., pp. 47, 51. Zullo, Allan and Mara Bovson. 2004. “So This is Where I’m Going to Die.” Survivors: True Stories of Children in the Holocaust, p. 66. Mermelstein, Mel. 1993 ed. (1979). By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685, p. 178. Goetz, Samuel. 2001. I Never Saw My Face, p. 66. Opatowski, Felix. 2012. Gatehouse to Hell, p. 102. Cited in Lacqueur, Walter. 2001. Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany, p. 41. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/source/Holocaust/denmark.html. See also Niewyk, Donald L. 2009 ed. “Holocaust: The Genocide of the Jews.” In Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, eds. Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, p. 134. Wells, Leon. 1993. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1999. Problems Unique to the Holocaust, p. 83. Silva, Daniel. 2003. The Confessor, p. 117. Hayes, Peter and Roth, John K., eds. 2010. “Introduction.” The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, pp. 8, 9. See also Lowenberg, William J. 1997. For My Family [as told to Susan Glick Rothenberg], p. 42. Tragically, due in large part to Dutch informers, only 20 to 30 percent of those in hiding survived. Niewyk, Donald L. 2009 ed. “Holocaust: The Genocide of the Jews.” In Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, eds. Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, p. 133. The 75 percent 203

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28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

204

figure is from Dawidowicz, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. 1984 ed. (Tenth Anniversary Edition) The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, p. 403. Hemelrijk, Dr. J. 2003. There Is a Way to Freedom (translated by Ellen Holmes-van Caspel), p. 10. Olsson, Eva. Unlocking the Doors: A Woman’s Struggle Against Intolerance, p. 73. See Stessel, Zahava Szasz. “The Lost World of a Holocaust Survivor.” The Hidden Child, Vol. XVlll, 2010, p. 23. Lustig, Arnost. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993. Voices from the Holocaust. Op. Cit., p. 15. Gross, Elly Berkovitz. 2007. Elly: My True Story of the Holocaust, p. 6. Jewish prisoners worked twelve-hour days all week long alongside of local citizens who could never thereafter honestly say—as far too many did after the war—“We did not know!” Reinhartz, Henia. 2007. Bits and Pieces: A Memoir, p. 43. Wachtel, Shirley Russak. 2005. The Story of Blima: A Holocaust Survivor, pp. 5, 49, 77. On recognizing a Gentile prisoner who had guided Jews to safety and refused pay for doing so, Rena Gelissen realized, “I have seen someone from our past; we are not dead. I can help [him]. I no longer feel helpless or at the whim of a fate governed by German SS.” Gelissen, Rena K. (with Heather Dune Macadam). 1995. Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, p. 80. Conscripted foreign workers were especially helpful, as “Belgian and French workers passed candy and cigarettes to the prisoners.” On rarer occasion local Germans also gave assistance. Fritzche, Peter. 2008. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Op. Cit., p. 228. Levi, Primo. 1987ed. “Lorenzo’s Return.” In Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz (translated by Ruth Feldman), p. 154. Cited in Marcus, Millicent and Risa Sodi. 2011. “Introduction.” In Sodi, Risa and Millicent Marcus, eds. 2011. New Reflections on Primo Levi: Before and After Auschwitz, p. 4. See also http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/ about.asp. Sorell, Dora Alpan. 1998. Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam, p. 120. As cited in Rochman, Hazel and Dariene Z. McCampbell, eds. 1995. Bearing Witness: Stories of the Holocaust, p. 105. The prisoner is identified only as Elena. See also Rabinowitz, Dorothy. 1976. New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust living in America. See also Oliner, Samuel P. and Pearl. 1988. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe; Berger, Ronald J., et al. 1998. “Altruism Amidst the Holocaust: An Integrated Social Theory.” Perspectives on Social Problems, p. 269. In 1999 Franz Leitner was named a “Righteous Gentile” by Yad Vashem. As cited in Lacqueur, Walter. 2001. Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany. Op. Cit., p. 32. In 2015 I interviewed Mr. Paldiel in his office at Yeshiva University in Manhattan. See Paldiel, Mordecai. 2000. Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the “Final Solution,” p. 32; also Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust (Spring 2017). Lewis, Helen. 1992. A Time to Speak. Op. Cit., p. 21. See also Jones, David H. 1999. Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character, p. 230. Pelagia Lewinska recalls that the uplifting influence of

Gentiles as Carers

42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

altruistic Gentile women prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp “could be sensed everywhere, threading its hidden progress through camp life like a tiny brook of fresh, revivifying water.” Lewinska, Pelagia. 1968. Twenty Months at Auschwitz, p. 120. Gertrud Muller. 2003. “Foreword.” In Krause-Schmitt, Ursula and Christine Krause, eds. Through the Eyes of the Survivors: A Guide to the Ravensbruck Memorial Museum, p. 5. In the same camp some Jewish women secretly participated in a sarcastic play. When an informer told the SS it ridiculed camp officers, it was violently shut down. The barrack in which it had been staged was sentenced to go without food for three days. Judging the penalty excessive Polish Gentile women prisoners smuggled in food on the second day. Morrison, Jack G. 2000. Ravensbruck: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–1945. Op. Cit., pp. 93, 197. Heimler, Eugene. 1997ed. (1959). Night of the Mist. Op. Cit., p. 76. Ibid., p. 157. Lewis, Helen. 1992. A Time to Speak, pp. 70–71. Elie A. Cohen, the only Dutch Jew believed to have survived from a transport of eight hundred sent to Malthausen, believes he owes his life to “the courage of German fellow prisoners.” Cohen, Elie A. 1954 ed. Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp (translation by M.H. Braaksma), p. 9. Berner, Maria. 2003. Krause-Schmitt, Ursula and Christine Kruase, eds. 2003. Through the Eyes of the Survivors: A Guide to the Ravensbruck Memorial Museum, p. 10. Some, especially certain Polish and German Gentile prisoners, “hated the Jews, holding them responsible for the war, and thus for the camp.” Garbarz, Moshe and Elie. 1992 ed. A Survivor (translated by Jean-Jacques Garbarz), p.104. Rich, Betty. 2012. Little Lost Girl, pp. 40–41. Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal, p. 170. Lewis, Helen. 1992. A Time to Speak, pp. 82–84. Ibid., pp. 104–5. Based on the story told by Lazar, Helen. Oral History Transcript. Holocaust Center of Northern California. February 13, 1989. Lewis, Helen. 1992. A Time to Speak. Op. Cit., p. 97. See also Neurath, Paul Martin. 2005 (1943). The Society of Terror: Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps. Edited by Christian Fleck and Nico Stehr, Op. Cit., p. 78. Wells, Leon W. 1978 ed. (1963). The Death Brigade, p. 66. As cited in Doorly, Mary Rose, ed. 1994. Hidden Memories: The Personal Recollections of Survivors and Witnesses to the Holocaust Living in Ireland, p. 29. Meisels, Lesli. 2014. Suddenly the Shadows Fell, pp. 41–42. Sternberg, Alexandra. No date. Unpublished Material. Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem Archives, 02/240. As cited in Schwertfleger, Ruth. 1989. Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp, p. 37. Olsson, Eva. Unlocking the Doors: A Woman’s Struggle Against Intolerance, p. 73. As cited in Leitner, Isabella and Irving A. 2000. Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom, p. 89. 205

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66.

206

Schneider, Tosia Szechter. 2007. Someone Must Survive to Tell the World: Reflections by Tosia Szechter Schneider, p. 112. Anthonioz, Genevieve De Gaulle. 1998. The Dawn of Hope: A Memoir of Ravensbruck (translated by Richard Seaver), p. 49. Lewis, Helen as cited in Doorly, Mary Rose, ed. 1994 Hidden Memories: The Personal Recollections of Survivors and Witnesses to the Holocaust Living in Ireland, p. 95. Ibid. Mermelstein, Mel. 1993 ed. (1979). By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685. Op. Cit., pp. 159–60. Between 1945 and 2012 fewer than a hundred of about sixty-five hundred SS members employed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death camp were ever tried, and only forty-nine were convicted by German Courts of war crimes. Homola, Victor. July 2, 2015. “Ex-Nazi Admits Complicity But Offers No Apology.” New York Times, p. A-8. Kafka, Franz. As cited in Schulweis, Rabbi Harold M. 1994. For Those Who Can’t Believe: Overcoming Obstacles to Faith, p. 191. See Paldiel, Mordecai. 2012. “Rescue during the Holocaust: The Courage to Care.”www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/paper22/html. Another six hundred thousand were “saved by official action, such as the refusal by the collaborationist governments of France, Bulgaria, and Romania to deport their Jewish citizens. Thus, help and rescue by Gentiles, acting as individuals or through their governments, saved close to a million potential victims of genocide.” Jones, David H. 1999. Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character, pp. 200, 230. Paldiel, Mordechai, in Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993. Voices from the Holocaust, p. 54.

Part VI Post-Holocaust Responsibilities A generation can only receive the teachings in the sense that it renews them. We do not take unless we also give. —Martin Buber

Awareness of the mainstream Holocaust Narrative—with which this book takes issue—is the prime component of being an American Jew.1 As noted earlier in the Preface, in 2013 it was identified as such by 73 percent of American Jews, and in 2014, by 60 percent of a national sample of American Jewish college students.2 Indeed, Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, the first Holocaust graphic novel, maintains “the primary thing that defines one’s Jewishness unfortunately is not Groucho Marx. It is the Holocaust.”3 Similarly, since the 1980s the Holocaust has become a defining memory for many Israelis, “an event that stands at the core of what it means to be a Jewish Israeli.”4 As part of the annual Yom HaShoah commemoration the entire country comes to a two-minute halt at sundown, and again at 10 , as almost all citizens stop whatever they are doing and stand solemnly while sirens bewail the murder of two-thirds of European Jewry.5 Recognition grows of major twenty-first-century challenges regarding the memory of the Holocaust and its memorialization: How are we to respond to deniers and distorters? How can trivialization and commercialization be thwarted? What can take the place of face-toface encounters after the last survivors have passed away? What might draw museum visitors back for return visits? And what can increase enrollments in Holocaust education courses and in turnout to commemorations on Yom HaShoah? Adequate answers require a wide range of creative reforms, prime among which is correcting current distortions in the Holocaust 207

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Narrative. Chapter 14 asks why has there been neglect of the Help Story? It offers ten explanations—not exonerations—that in combination lay bare a woeful record of misguided decisions. Chapter 15 asks what might be done to rectify matters? It recommends pragmatic and affordable changes in the spirit of reform that has long invigorated the Jewish community. Chapter 16, the final one in the book, highlights over-the-horizon reform aids such as interactive hologram avatars of actual Holocaust survivors—innovations that raise the bar, and then some. Why bother with reform? Because tomorrow’s generation of American Jews, as explained by Professor Alan Dershowitz, “will not remain Jews because of our enemies or because of our perceived status as victims. They crave a more positive, affirmative, contemporary, and relevant Jewish identity. Unless we move beyond victimization and toward a new Jewish state of mind, many of them will abandon Judaism as not relevant to their current concerns.”6 Young Jewish Americans are increasingly unwilling to “hold their lives hostage to a Jewish identity predicated on fear and defensiveness” and cannot imagine themselves “going to the gas.”7 While aware of the Horror Story, they look for more than a mentality shaped by remembered victimhood and endless siege.8 Many align instead with the little-noted words Anne Frank wrote at the close of her 1944 dairy two weeks before her betrayal: “I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”9 Anne Frank’s American counterparts want to live as best as possible “unconstrained by habits of fear.”10 Many call for “a Jewish world constructed on positives, not negatives . . . a vibrant, hopeful Judaism,” a world whose construction should include a finer Holocaust Narrative . . . along with nullification of pernicious “isms” (sexism, racism, etc.).11 They are as one with the advocacy by President Barak Obama at a memorial service for victims of terrorism who urged us “to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and to remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”12 Notes

The epigraph is from Buber, Martin. 1956. “Hebrew Humanism.” Cited in Herberg, Will, ed. 1965. The Writings of Martin Buber, p. 296. 1. 208

One who believes it is the major formative experience is Burg, Avraham. The Holocaust is Over; We Must Arise from the Ashes, p. 42. I side here

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2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

with Abba Kovner who maintains it is “an inseparable part of our historic consciousness and our Jewish identity.” Kovner, Abba. 2001. Scrolls of Testimony (translated by Eddie Levenston), p. xxxviii. The survey data are from Pew Foundation. October, 2013. “A Portrait of Jewish Americans.” www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-americanbeliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/. The college student data are from Schrieber, Zachary. September 22, 2014. “Jewish College Student Survey: Israel is Most ‘Crucial Issue’ for Young Jews Today.” JEWCY News. http://www. jewcy.com/jewish-news/jewish-college-student-survey-results. The two surveys produced similar findings: Remembering the Holocaust (73 percent/ 60 percent) and leading an ethical life (69 percent/56 percent) were thought essential to a sense of Jewishness. More than half (56 percent/40 percent) of those polled said working for justice and equality was essential to what being Jewish means to them. And about four in ten said that caring about Israel (43 percent/35 percent) and having a good sense of humor (42 percent/ 20 percent) were essential to their Jewish identity. Cited in Samuels, David. November 13, 2013. “Q & A with Art Spiegelman, Creator of ‘Maus’.” Tablet. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-amdculture/152310/art-spiegelman-jewish-museum?all=1. Porat, Dan A. October 2004. “From the Scandal to the Holocaust in Israeli Education.” Journal of Contemporary History, 39, 4, p. 635. So vivid is the current Holocaust memory that Aviad Kleinberg, a historian at Tel Aviv University, maintains “we live in a state of constant existential threat. There is this feeling that we’re always just a minute away from the trains leaving for Auschwitz.” As cited in Rudoren, Jodi. October 17, 2014. “In Exodus from Israel to Berlin, Young Nation’s Fissues Show.” New York Times, p. A-4 (A-4-A-9). Dershowitz, Alan M. 1997. The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century, pp. 13, 18, 39. Jewish children, the Professor counsels, should learn from their parents to never allow those who perished to be forgotten, but also learn “there is more to Judaism than remembering our terrible history of victimization.” Specifically, there is three thousand years’ worth of Help Story valor, that, in the Holocaust, being only the latest variety. Ibid., pp. 327–8. Yoffie, Rabbi Eric H. Spring, 2011. “New World Thinking.” Reform Judaism, p. 2. See in this connection, Neusner, Jacob. 1987. The Enchantments of Judaism: Rites of Transformation from Birth through Death, pp. 24–27, 202–5. Professor Neusner sharply criticizes the “Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption.” Frank, Anne. 1989. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition. Edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold Van der Stroom, p. 694. Obama, President Barak, speaking of American youth in general, as cited in Anonymous Editorial. August 29, 2013. “The Second Dimension.” New York Times, p. A-20. Yoffie, Rabbi Eric H. Spring. 2011. “New World Thinking.” Reform Judaism. Op. Cit., p. 2. As cited in Hertzberg, Hendrik. January 24, 2011. “Words and Deeds.” The New Yorker, pp. 19–20. The President’s words are from his speech at the January 17th Tucson memorial service for the six victims of the Giffords’ assassination attempt. 209

14 Explaining Neglect When smart people take a wrong turn at the beginning, they often go a long way before realizing their mistake. —David Sloane Wilson

Introduction

A survivor of seven camps, Rabbi Yechezkel Harfenes recalls in his 1998 memoir there were “Jews who performed and helped others perform mitzvahs [religious injunctions and good deeds], Jews who aroused and encouraged others, Jews who managed to illuminate this hell with their own Godliness. . . .” He then adds ruefully, “only an infinitesimal effort has been made to actually describe these acts of heroism.”1 School children commonly ask survivor speakers, “Why didn’t you and other Jews fight back? How did they hurt you? Did you want revenge?”2 Having no inkling of what stealth altruism is, they do not ask about it.3 Much as it is absent from classroom dialogue, so is stealth altruism also absent from relevant websites. In 2015, for example, no mention of it was made in answers to “36 Questions about the Holocaust” posted as a service for school teachers by the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance. It was also left out of “Frequently Asked Questions” posted in 2015 by Yad Vashem: one paragraph among a hundred or so mentioned caring in the ghettos. Why the neglect of the Help Story? Major reasons, discussed below, include the postwar focus of the Allied Military; the choices made by Jewish survivors and their audiences; the role of Holocaust scholars; the concern of the arts; the needs of Israeli and American policies; and, above all, the orientation of Holocaust museums and education centers. (In the following and concluding chapters, pragmatic and affordable remedies are offered for these reasons for neglect.) 211

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Allied Military and the News Media

Initial emphasis on the Horror Story can be traced to the end of the war focus of the Allied High Command. It wanted evidence of Nazi “crimes against humanity” for the impending 1946 Nuremburg War Crime trials. It was thought the success of ensuing military tribunals hinged on first winning an unprecedented “Guilty!” verdict at Nuremburg. Military interviewers sought testimony from recovering survivors about atrocities committed in the ghettos, during transit, in the camps, on death marches, and in the countryside by Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads). Jewish survivors were encouraged to “above all convey the otherness of the camps, their specific inhumanity.”4 Not surprisingly, little or no attention was given to securing stories former prisoners might have volunteered about their forbidden efforts to help one another, as these might distract jurors and world opinion from Horror Story accounts which were widely publicized (though oddly enough later underutilized in the Nuremberg Trial itself ).5 Indeed, certain Allied liberators came to regard survivors primarily as objects of pity, as abject lost souls, rather than as fellow human beings capable of “amidah!” resistance.6 Influenced by both the horror focus of Allied trial preparations and the public’s insatiable appetite for related dark material (film, photos, print, etc.), the news media spotlighted war crime excesses.7 Typical here was the writing of Meyer Levin, a journalist who in 1945 was among the first non-Europeans to speak with survivors at the newly liberated Buchenwald Concentration Camp.8 Shocked and outraged by Nazi excesses, he returned to America with a “passionate moral imperative to communicate to the world the horror he had witnessed.”9 Levin and his many counterparts (Andy Rooney, etc.) reported in vivid detail the horrors of the Jewish experience, and are likely to have known nothing of the Help Story.10 Jewish Survivors’ Stories

Many Jewish victims were pledged to tell the world about unforgivable Nazi crimes, the better to prevent their reoccurrence.11 Aware of what the Allied Military and the news media emphasized, many told their own Horror Story, one that enabled listeners to sympathize with their suffering and silently damn perpetrators. Typical are the comments of an elderly survivor at ceremonies in 2015 marking the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp: “In a trembling voice as tears rolled 212

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down his cheeks Roman Kent, chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, spoke to the over three thousand guests about his teenage years in Auschwitz: ‘How can I forget the smell of burning flesh that constantly filled the air? Or the heartbreak of children torn from their mothers? Those shouts of terror will ring in my ears until I am laid to rest.’”12 Similarly, stories by survivor guest speakers in classrooms in Israel “helped embed into the students’ minds unparalleled nightmares,” as reported to me by a visiting American student.13 Some survivors—both givers (Carers) and receivers of forbidden care—have long shied from speaking of acts of stealth altruism, a reticence rooted in ancient Jewish tradition. East European Jews grew up learning to keep their good deeds to themselves. While doing a mitzvah found favor in God’s eye, calling attention to it would lead God to deny it credit.14 For their part, many secular Carers insisted “I did not do anything special” or “I just tried to help a little bit, like you know you should.” Academic researchers, journalists, and others have been misled by these self-deprecating remarks.15 Leon Wells writes of Carers he knew in the camps: “They are such good people that they don’t even think they did something terrific.” He worries that if they “don’t advertise themselves, if it is not written about in books, who will know about it? Nobody. It will not remain in history.”16 Survivor speakers, in turn, discovered listeners were puzzled by anything that departed too far from an expected Horror Story. Szymon Laks attributes his survival “perhaps, above all, to my encounter with a few countrymen [Polish Jewish] with a human face and a human heart. . . .”17 But when he tried to explain supportive camaraderie and fierce Nazi opposition to it, he found “people did not understand the language I was speaking to them . . . feelings of dignity and humanity [in the camp] were regarded as an offense; logical reasoning, as a sign of madness; compassion, as a sign of pathological psychic and moral weakness.”18 In this same vein, Carers discovered early on that uninformed audiences have little or no curiosity about the Help Story. For example, at a 2008 book signing reception for Eva Brown, an eighty-year-old survivor of Auschwitz who had given hundreds of talks, I publicly asked about her experiences with stealth altruism. Smiling broadly, she thanked me for my “wonderful and very rare” question, one that she had never previously been asked. She then recalled at length a high-risk, life-saving ruse described in chapter 9.19 213

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Holocaust Scholars

Why the neglect of the Help Story? In part, because many academics have focused only on victimization. David Boder, an American Jewish sociologist, became in 1946 the first Western scholar to systematically tape interviews in Europe with Jewish survivors. He asked primarily about pain and suffering. Working with about 109 survivors, he recorded over 120 hours of interviews in Displaced Persons Camps but for unknown reasons left the subject of forbidden care out of his questionnaire and twelve-part Traumatic Index.20 Many academics adopted Boder’s methodology and variants of its tools, leading Meir Dworzecki, a scholar/survivor, to note some twenty-three years after the war’s end, “a great disproportion between the extensive accounts devoted to manifestations of moral degeneration in the ghettos and the few accounts of spiritual perseverance.”21 Academic publications have also commonly ignored the Help Story. In 2008 the editors of a guidebook for teachers of Holocaust courses defined its content as the study of “mass death, destruction, immense human suffering, a cataclysm.”22 In 2010, apart from a single discussion of “camp sisters,” the 740-page authoritative Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies had nothing else to say that related to stealth altruism.23 In 2011, the official Internet-based guide, “What to Teach about the Holocaust,” prepared by the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, ignored stealth altruism.24 Psychologist Peter Suedfeld, who has studied related academic work, concludes that makers of Holocaust-related scholarship “not only downplay or ignore the strengths of survivors, they sometimes go out of their way to deny them. For example, narratives that discuss the heroism and mutual aid of concentration camp inmates have been criticized for supposedly trivializing the horror and chaos of the Holocaust.”25 In like fashion, Robert Leiter, a book critic who spent decades reviewing Holocaust literature, ruefully concludes it focuses on “how badly people can behave in terrible times.” All too rare are Holocaust-related books “that instruct us—as opposed to informing us—about the opposite: how to be good.”26 The Arts

Holocaust-related art has long focused on anguish, atrocities, and suffering. A Yad Vashem online art exhibit, “Virtues of Memory,” featured a single work from each of twenty Jewish artists (twelve males/six 214

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females), sixteen of whom had been prisoners of the Nazis. Nineteen of the twenty works focused on aspects of the Horror Story, one artist explaining that the effort to make such art required her “to gird on the strength to return to hell. To start painting with trepidation, with convulsed guts.”27 Television has also been preoccupied with Horror Story representation, as in 1978 when the unprecedented TV miniseries “Holocaust” was watched by over a hundred million people around the world.28 Riddled with inaccuracies, its very few brief scenes of high-risk care were far outnumbered and outweighed by numerous horrific sequences. Likewise, major Holocaust-related films such as “Sophie’s Choice,” “Sunshine,” and “The Reader” are generally Horror-focused.29 Documentaries often hone in on one aspect of a complex matter. Claude Lanzmann, in the nine-and-a-half hours of material in his documentary, “Shoah,” chose to focus only on the Horror Story. A reviewer thought this unique and iconic film was preoccupied with “themes that haunted [the film-maker], such as the cold the victims endured, and how they waited in passageways before dying, or were beaten into the crematoria,” each a dark, unforgettable image.30 Public art sculptures are often narrow-focused. In 1988 a Gentile sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka completed a representational Holocaust statue in Vienna, Austria, that shows a yarmulke-wearing old man on his hands and knees, using a toothbrush to scrub anti-Nazi graffiti off a street. Based on an actual 1938 photograph, Hrdlicka explained his art was intended as a “thorn in the flesh” of his fellow citizens. He hoped it would force them to confront their “deep-rooted, home-grown anti-Semitism.” Exceedingly controversial to this day, the statue has earned considerable opposition from within the local Jewish community, some members of which fear it may actually reinforce antisemitic stereotypes.31 In America two major works feature Horror Story imagery. In 1964, a “Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs” by artist Nathan Rapoport was unveiled in downtown Philadelphia. The first massive outdoor artwork of its kind in America, it shows barely distinguishable victims in a writhing mass that resembles a tower of flames. In 1984, a life-size ensemble by George Segal was unveiled in the Legion of Honor Park, San Francisco, one that shows a lone prisoner staring in a forlorn way through barbed-wire fencing. Behind him in the same barren enclosure is a mound of ten mostly naked, emaciated corpses. Annually hundreds of thousands of onlookers get the (mis) 215

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impression that this captures the essence of camp life, when in fact it conveys only its dark dimension, bereft of any note of other possible dimensions. European cities offer similarly limited art. Venice, for example, has two memorials of note: one is a bronze panel depicting the last grim transport of Jewish victims being sent to a death camp, and the other, a collection of bronze reliefs, shows various types of Nazi brutality. No space is devoted to Help Story imagery, nor was any evident in other European cities where I sought out Holocaust memorial outdoor art. Israeli Focus

Between 1945 and 1951 the new State of Israel welcomed 750,000 liberated survivors, “a wave of immigration never experienced by any other state in modern times.”32 The state’s highest priority was to rapidly change its new arrivals into militant stalwarts of an endangered country. “The [Holocaust] slaughter was largely unacknowledged.”33 Help and Horror Stories were both sidelined as irrelevant distractions from the imminent danger of Arab genocide.34 Mental health specialists were charged with persuading survivors to forget the past and get on with their lives. They were to give up beloved European languages—especially Yiddish—in favor of modern Hebrew, trade Old World family names for new Hebrew names, and, in many related ways, rapidly reinvent themselves. This changed when in 1951 the government established a national memorial day, Yom HaShoah (Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism). In the background was the fact that certain early Israeli leaders actually “looked back on the Holocaust with fear and sometimes with shame. The only usable past, the only history of that period that they adopted for the image of the future was the heroic chapter of resistance,” such as camp revolts, forest partisan struggles, and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.35 No attention went to nonmilitant forms of resistance, including acts of stealth altruism. The April 21 date chosen by the Knesset (Israel’s governing body) deliberately coincided with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt in 1945 (begun on April 19), as it met the emotional need Israelis had in 1951 for macho heroic imagery.36 Opposition came from some survivors who urged instead the date of the liberation of Auschwitz (January 27, 1945) or Buchenwald (April 11, 1945). Had either liberation date been chosen the world probably would have learned over time about the related Help Story and acts of stealth altruism. 216

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In 1961 the televised Eichmann Trial in Israel had survivors encouraged by the court to tell the Horror Story, as did also many media commentators. As had been expected by the government, this proved invaluable in getting world support for the besieged country. Overnight, yesterday’s hapless shtetl-based Jewish victims were redefined as heroic, and their acts of stealth altruism were ignored as irrelevant. Since 1988, the Israeli Ministry of Education has sent several hundred Israeli high-school students each year on a government-sponsored “March of the Living,” so named in defiant contrast to Nazi death marches. After several months of study of the Holocaust and WWII, the young Israelis go to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp to conduct a Yom HaShoah memorial service. Short visits follow to the Belzec or Treblinka Death Camp Museums, plus Holocaust-related sites in Warsaw and Krakow. Critics worry aloud about what is not experienced. For example, in 2015 Israeli Professor Michal Gorin criticized what is known today as “Dark Tourism” for its obsessive focus on the Nazi murder process: “The result is that the people who were in the camps are not ‘experienced’— only the processes, the killing industry, the shoes that remained, the eye glasses.”37 American Focus

As in Israel, the American government and the general public urged arriving Jewish survivors to repress Holocaust memories (Horror and Help) and rapidly adopt an American “way of life.” Typical was the situation of a couple sent in 1949 by a Jewish Aid Agency to St. Louis, MO. They since recall it was “extremely difficult to talk with American Jews about the Holocaust . . . they simply could not understand . . . [we] had the feeling they didn’t believe what [we] were saying . . . It didn’t register with them at all. The horror of it, the magnitude of it—we could talk and talk, but it didn’t finally sink in. So, we decided we would stop talking about our experiences.”38 David Wolkowitz, sixteen years old on his arrival, was urged by his loving Aunt Golda to understand, “You have a new life now. Forget about everything that happened to you over there. Don’t think about it. Don’t even talk about it. You must move forward.”39 It took Wolkowitz a half-century before he felt able to tell his Horror/Help Story in American classrooms. Of such situations Elie Wiesel has written, “Let us be honest, people preferred not to hear what [survivors] had to say. [The Horror Story] 217

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prevented them from clinging to their own certainties or, more simply, from eating well and sleeping in peace.”40 This “clinging” indirectly sidelined not just the Horror Story, but the Help Story as well. Museum Message

Most Holocaust museums—the prime shapers and keepers of “the Memory”—have chosen to avert their eyes from the Help Story and thereby limited the grasp of visitors.41 In 2009 a specialist on museum content, New York Times reporter Edward Rothstein, reviewed the newly opened Jewish Museum in Berlin. He found the Holocaust-related displays “uninspiring and banal . . . rather than feeling something profound you almost expect moving platforms and leaping ghosts, as in an amusement park’s house of horrors.”42 Iconic photos offer grisly scenes of massacres or of skeletal inmates staring vacant-eyed through formerly electrified fences.43 As of the summer of 2013, visitors to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the flagship Holocaust museum in America, could sit in an enclosed sound chamber and hear short excerpts from as many as sixty survivors. By my count the ratio of Horror to Help Stories is fifty-eight to two in favor of the Horror Story. On April 8, 2015, sixty tenth grade Maryland students (fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds) made a three-hour visit to the USHMM. Thirty-five percent later indicated they did not see or hear anything even remotely connected to stealth altruism. Another 25 percent recalled hearing some mention of it by a survivor speaker, and 40 percent remembered having seen “something,” but they could not recall what it had been, so fleeting was the exposure.44 A year later, members of another class from the same school were exasperated when a USHMM staffer encouraged a survivor speaker to emphasize the horror he could recall. One student later wrote, “While in the Museum I saw almost no trace of stealth altruism. The Museum had some stories of sneaking people out of Germany, but no acts of kindness within the camps. We got to speak with a Holocaust survivor, and he did not mention any stealth altruism either.” A second student recalled the same survivor speaker “mentioned that many prisoners were a bit mean to each other because they were so hungry.”45 In 2015, America got its first Jewish Children’s Museum.46 Located in Brooklyn, NY, it has one small exhibit area devoted to the covert life-risking efforts made in some camps by courageous Orthodox Jews intent on secretly studying Torah. No mention is made of a wide variety 218

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of acts of stealth altruism with which religious Jews sometimes aided others in ghettos and camps. (See chapters 2 and 10.) In ten memorial sites/museums in former concentration camps visited in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Poland, no official state-trained and certified guide discussed any aspect of stealth altruism. Display material related to the Help Story was conspicuous by its absence from eight of the ten camp museums. The two exceptions—Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt—are saluted in chapter 15, Remedying Neglect. Professional guides and volunteer docents appear to know little about the Help Story: several have told me it is not covered in state-required staff training programs. As a result, several thousand well-intentioned guides and docents inadvertently tell several million visitors each year much less than is warranted, an egregious example of a missed teaching opportunity to improve the general level of Holocaust knowledge.47 Conclusion

To understand why “Holocaust” and “Horror Story” have become synonyms is to understand that key parties—artists, curators, docents, donors, fund-raisers, governments, guides, historians, Holocaust scholars, media professionals, movie producers, museum directors, and certain survivors themselves—have found the telling of Horror helpful.48 In consequence Jewry is saddled with a Narrative and related commemoration activities associated primarily with “fear and despair, persecution and suffering.”49 It is time to heed the Torah’s insistence instead on life, and remake the Holocaust legacy. Notes

The epigraph is cited in Barash, David. June 13–14, 2015. “Genes Are Selfish; Humans Are Not.” Wall Street Journal, pp. C1, C7. [Book Review: Altruism, by Matthieu Ricard; Does Altruism Exist, by David Sloan Wilson]. 1. 2. 3.

Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel. 1988. Slingshot from Hell: Holocaust Journal (BeKaf HaKelal). Edited by Howard Shapiro and Yehazkel Harpanes), p. 229. Runner-up questions included, “Why didn’t you try to escape?” “Why did you not lose faith in God?” “How did you keep from committing suicide?” “How do feel now about the Germans and their collaborators?” “Violence, cruelty, and derision of man’s weaknesses are easily apparent; compassion is less obvious.” Gutman, Israel and Avital Saf, eds. 1984. The Nazi Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, p. 154. 219

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

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Zapruder, Alexandra, ed. 2004 ed. (2002). Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, p. 1. See in this connection Coigley, Michael. H. Letter; 5 May 1945. Archives, Imperial War Museum, London (read on August 12, 2010). See in this connections Swift, Father Edmund. “Indelible Memories of Belsen.” Unpublished; 4/11/1990. Archives, Imperial War Museum, London (read on August 12, 2010). Rooney, Andy. 2000. My War, p. 266. Imagery of passive “sheep-to-theslaughter” was reinforced. See Melnick, Ralph. 1997. The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary. Rooney, Andy. 2000. My War, p. 266. Much to his credit, Mr. Rooney was able to see both the Horror and beyond it. See Rooney, Andy. 2000. My War. Op. Cit., p. 269. Jaap Polak, a survivor who became Chairman of the Anne Frank Center in America, characterizes himself as “an indefatigable publicist for extolling the horrors of the Holocaust, and keeping the memory of its inhumanity alive.” Ironically, his own memoir, written fifty-five years after the war’s end, centers around a surreptitious exchange in camp of love letters with a female prisoner he later married, a forbidden exchange which required the life-risking altruistic cooperation of many other Jewish prisoners. Polak, Jaap and Ina Soep. 2000. Steal a Pencil for Me: Love Letters from Camp Bergen-Belsen and Westerbork, p. 210. Berendt, Joanna. January 28, 2015. “Outliving Horror for 70 Years and Never Forgetting.” New York Times, p. A-4. In 2005, Idith Zertal, an Israeli writer, concluded that survivors “had nothing to offer but testimony to the dark, barbaric side. . . .” Zertal, Idith. 2005. Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (translated by Chaya Galai), pp. 55–56. Goldstein, Deva. 2010. Holocaust Education in Israel. Philadelphia, PA: Gratz College. (Unpublished College-Credit Paper), p. 6. A scholar maintains “the ‘good deeds’ of the anonymous run of the people in their relations with each other were taken for granted in terms of how they held on to their humanity, of their manifestations of solidarity, mutual help, and self-sacrifice.” Dworzecki, Meir. 1968. “The Day-to-Day Stand of the Jews.” In Yad Vashem. Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference of Manifestations of Jewish Resistance, p. 566. A Holocaust scholar noted in 2008 that, “even in the personal accounts of survivors themselves, there is a surprising lack of emphasis on helping activities, on sharing and mutual support among the inmates of the concentration camps.” Davidson, Shami. 1980. “Human Reciprocity Among the Jewish Prisoners in the Nazi Concentration Camps.” In Gutman, Yisrael and Avital Saf, eds. 1980. Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference: The Nazi Concentration Camps, p. 557. Wells, Leon. 1993. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993. Voices from the Holocaust, p. 89. Likewise, a scholar reports Righteous Gentiles “explain their behavior as normal . . . they don’t consider themselves as heroes.” Paldiel, Mordecai, 1993. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993.Voices from the Holocaust, p. 49.

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

Laks, Szymon. 1989 ed. Music of Another World (translated by Chester A. Kiesiel), p. 17. Ibid. See in this connection, Brown, Eva (with Thomas Fields-Meyer). 2007. If You Save One Life: A Survivor’s Memoir. Boder, David P. 1949. I Did Not Interview the Dead. See Niewyk, Donald L. 1998. Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival. Dworzecki, Meir. 1968. “The Day-to-Day Stand of the Jews.” In Yad Vashem. Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference of Manifestations of Jewish Resistance, p. 153. Eaglestone, Robert and Barry Langford. “Introduction.” In Eaglestone, Robert and Barry Langford, eds. 2008. Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film, p. 6. Hayes, Peter and Roth, John K., eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. http://www.holocausttaskforce.org/education/guidelines-for-teaching/ what-to-teach-about-the-Holocaust.html. In 2010, a collection of nine scholarly essays by distinguished academicians that drew on newly translated German language material ignored forbidden caring, even in an essay entitled “The Holocaust and the Concentration Camp.” Pohl, Dieter. 2010. “The Holocaust and the Concentration Camps.” In Caplan, Jane and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, pp. 149–66. Suedfeld, Peter, 1997. “Homo Invictus: The Indomitable Species.” Canadian Psychology, pp. 164–73. Two items he refers to are by Langer, Lawrence L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory; and Ringelheim, Joan. 1985. “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research.” Signs, 10, pp. 741–76. Leiter, Robert. September 25, 2008. “Witness With a Message.” Philadelphia, Jewish Exponent, p.13. See also www.1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/virtues_of_memory/ overview.asp. See also Sara Atzmon, quoted in Shendar, Yehudit. 2011. “Virtues of Memory.” Essay at www.1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/ virtues_of_memory/overview.asp. See also http://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/personal-history/theme.php?th=camps&=4. Much is conveyed about anguish and pain, little about compassion and care. Sharlet, Jeff. May 28, 1999. At my request Dr. Tamara R. Freedman, an eminent Holocaust music educator and recitalist, looked for examples of attention to forbidden care in compositions composed by victims during the Holocaust, and could find none. Some films have actually sidelined the Help Story, for example, a critic in 2007 noted that the novel on which the film “Schindler’s List” is based “has a strong Jewish man who is constantly battling the system and trying to help his fellow Jews. The fact that he is virtually absent from Spielberg’s [film] version shows how this director needed to de-emphasize for dramatic effect the role of the Jews in their own liberation.” Samuels, Robert. 2007. Teaching the Rhetoric of Resistance: The Popular Holocaust and Social Change in a Post-9/11 World, p. 158. 221

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30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

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Jones, Kristin M. December 8, 2010. “Epic History of the Holocaust Returns.” Wall Street Journal, p. D-7. See also Lanzmann, Claude. 1985. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. New York: Pantheon. As cited in Wise, Michael Z. June 24, 1990. “Vienna’s Statue of Limitations.” The Washington Post. www.washingtonpostcom/archive/lifestyle /style/1990/06/24/viennas-statue-of-limitations. See also Spivak, Rhonda. June 27, 2014. “Editor’s Special Report: Vienna’s Controversial Holocaust Monument – A Street Washing Jew.” Http://israelbehindthenews.com /editors-special-report-viennas-controversial-holocaust-monument-a. Shavit, Ari. 2013. My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, p. 148. See also Jones, Kristin M. December 8, 2010. “Epic History of the Holocaust Returns.” Wall Street Journal, p. D-7; Kessler, Oren. November 9–10, 2013. “The Hope of 2,000 Years.” Wall Street Journal. Op. Cit., p. C-7. [Book Review: My Promised Land, by Ari Shavit]. Vasvari, Louise O. 2009. “Introduction to and Bibliography of Central European Women’s Holocaust Life Writing in English.” In Vasvari, Louise O. and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, eds. Comparative European Holocaust Studies, p. 174. See also Foer, Franklin. April 10, 2011. “Days of Reckoning.” New York Times Book Review, p. 14. [Book Review: Lipstadt, Deborah E. 2011. The Eichmann Trial.] Indeed, the earliest published memoirs by survivors, and the groundbreaking Israeli scholarship about them, “were perceived for a time as a threat to the masculinized nation-building discourse of Zionism.” Foer, Franklin. April 10, 2011. “Days of Reckoning.” New York Times Book Review [Book Review: Lipstadt, Deborah E. 2011. The Eichmann Trial], p. 14. Gutman, Yisrael. 1994 ed. “Auschwitz: An Overview.” In Gutman, Israel and Michael Berenbaum. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, p. 255. This decision bolstered the highly contentious move taken the following year to secure a vital reparations agreement with Germany for otherwise destitute Jewish victims of the Third Reich. As recently as April 2015, some 25 percent of survivors in Israel (or forty-five thousand people) live under the poverty line. http://forward.com/news/Israel/324570/holocaust-survivors -go-hungry-as-Israel-court-fight-saps-restitution-group. As cited in Glazer, Hilo. April 11, 2015. “A Shoah that Speaks to Everyone.” www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/premium-1.651042. See in this connection, Crane, Susan A. 2008. “Choosing Not to Look.” History and Theory, 47, 3, pp. 309–30. I am still researching the matter, and am undecided. Sutin, Lawrence, ed. 1995. Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance, p. 195. See Roth, Chaya H. 2008. The Fate of Holocaust Memories: Transmission and Family Dialogues. As cited in Zullo, Allan. 2009. Escape: Children of the Holocaust, p. 24. Wiesel, Elie. 2010 ed. (2007) “Foreword.” In Buergenthal, Thomas. 2010 ed. (2007). A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy, p. xii. At a workshop held in 2009 to introduce teachers to Echoes and Reflections, a new Yad Vashem handbook for Holocaust education, I expressed disappointment with its neglect of the Help Story. The Yad Vashen staffer promoting the book strode angrily away shouting aloud that my subject (the Help Story) would “only confuse matters.”

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42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

Rothstein, Edward. May 2, 2009. “In Berlin, Teaching Germany’s Jewish History.” www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/arts/design/02conn.html?_ r=1&emc=eta1. Mr. Rothstein reserved his praise for an underground Government Information Center. Located at Berlin’s “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” the center offered “the most extraordinary informative and affecting display about the subject [the Holocaust] I have seen.” In 2013, however, a young uniformed German guide whispered to me her speculation that its Horror Story displays were there to deliberately disturb visiting Germans. The image of the gas chamber (conveyed by a table-sized detailed model) has become “the central emblem of the Holocaust—the ultimate reduction of human life to inanimate matter.” Kirsch, Adam. April 6, 2015. “The System: Two New Histories Show How the Nazi Concentration Camps Worked.” The New Yorker, pp. 77–81. Likewise, at the site of camp museums throughout Europe, “exhibitions of shoes, gold fillings, dust from the ovens, and railroad cars—have assumed the trappings of a secular religion, whose sacred objects are an analogical counterpart to Christian iconography with its splinters from the cross and its shroud of Turin.” Krystal, Arthur. 2006, Winter. “My Holocaust Problem.” The American Scholar, p. 42. A long-time friend, Dan Falcone, and two of his colleagues, Jane Baker and Mike Hyde, all staff at the Potomac School made this research possible. A survivor, Rachel Goldberg, a frequent speaker at the USHMM, got fine reviews from students, and Bob Behr, the second year’s speaker, was commended for taking on hard labor in his camp so as to gain the safety of his mother, also a prisoner. Ibid. Lipman, Steve. April 4, 2013. “Orthodox-focused Holocaust Museum to Open in Borough Park.” The Jewish Week, p. 1. At forty-eight Holocaust Museums worldwide I learned stealth altruism was new to guides and dozens, many of whom thanked me for explaining it. During only the first seven months of 2015 over a million people visited the Auschwitz Museum. Hauser, Christine. September 2, 2015. “Summer Precaution at Auschwitz is Grim Reminder to Some.” New York Times, p. A-4. See in this connection, Wollaston, Isabel. 2005. “Negotiating the Marketplace: The Role(s) of Holocaust Museums Today.” Journal of Jewish Studies, 4, 1, p. 74. A community which remains “preoccupied with death and destruction is in danger of substituting a cult of martyrdom for the Torah’s insistence on life.” This is a contention of Professor Ruth Wisse, who fled Europe as a child in the late 1930s. She warns against building an identity alone or even primarily on Horror Story victimization. As cited in Freedman, Samuel G. 2000. Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry, p. 344.

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15 Remedying Neglect The Holocaust shows not only how low humanity can go, but also how high it can go. —Dorit Novak

Introduction

A leading Reform prayer book, Mishkan T’filah, advises us to “live not by our fears, but by our hopes.”1 In that spirit, this chapter discusses six ongoing reform efforts that promote overdue appreciation for the Help Story: a campaign for recognition of Carers; upgrades in commemoration efforts; changes in the focus of education; changes in museum content; additions to bar/bat mitzvah preparation; and survivor/teenager collaboration. In closing, opposition to these six reforms is rebutted. Recognition of Carers

In 2000 a small group of survivors in Israel developed an Action Committee for the Recognition of Jewish Rescuers (JRJ). It has since vigorously lobbied the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) and Yad Vashem to recognize Jewish men and women who, during the Holocaust and at great peril, tried to help care for relatives, friends, and strangers.2 Stymied in the matter by Yad Vashem’s insistence on only honoring comparable Gentiles, JRJ has, since 2011, made its own annual award—the “Jewish Rescuer Citation.” By the end of 2015 it had honored over one hundred Jewish equivalents of the Yad Vashem’s “Righteous Among the Nations,” formerly known as the “Righteous Gentiles” Project.3 In 2013, JRJ’s lobbying efforts paid off in part when Yad Vashem allocated space in its new museum for a permanent exhibit devoted to the rescue of Jews by Jews, much as JRJ had long urged. Then, in 2015, JRJ hailed the Yad Vashem publication of a scholarly book it had 225

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long advocated, a first-ever anthology entitled Jews Rescuing Jews in the Holocaust.4 At present, however, it is only available in Hebrew. New hope is stirred by a book scheduled for publication late in 2017 by one of JRJ’s members, Mordecai Paldiel, for many years head of the Yad Vashem’s “Righteous Gentiles” Project. Entitled Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust, it “tells the stories of hundreds of Jewish activists who created rescue networks, escape route, safe havens, and partisan fighting groups,” all of which were activities outside the scope of this book.5 Attention to the Paldiel book is expected by JRJ to significantly aid its relentless effort to win official recognition for its stripe of Jewish hero . . . and this could lead to honorific Yad Vashem attention to a different, albeit related sort of heroism, that of Carers and their acts of stealth altruism (see chapter 16’s discussion of a Help Story advocacy organization). Commemoration Upgrade

Since its establishment by Israel on April 21,1951, Yom HaShoah (Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism) has become associated with unnerving anguish and grief. In America, turnout for commemoration, many marred by incipient Horror Story centrism, may be falling, especially that of younger Jewish adults. Fortunately, reforms indirectly boost awareness of the Help Story. Each year, for example, Yad Vashem determines Yom HaShoah’s central theme. In 2012 it chose what was in effect, if not by design, a Help Story theme: “My Brother’s Keeper: Jewish Solidarity during the Holocaust.” Promotional material indicated that in ghettos and camps, mutual help and a commitment to the other were actually quite common. High-risk examples saluted youth movement members who dared to open communal kitchens in ghettos. Likewise, attention went to former neighbors who shared what little they had with one another in the Nazi camps. Such altruistic behavior demonstrated that “the individual had little chance of survival without a sense of togetherness, and this Jewish unity . . . is what carried people and helped them endure another day.”6 Yad Vashem’s central theme in 2016 was “The Struggle to Maintain the Human Spirit during the Holocaust,” words that once again called attention to the Help Story. Commentary pointed to some victims who “demonstrated astonishing spiritual strength . . . they clung to the essence of existence and attempted to preserve life grounded in moral values, as well as a cultural dimension befitting a decent society . . . Many mobilized to help those weaker than themselves . . . their deeds 226

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and actions are a reminder to future generations of the stamina and the nobility of the human spirit (italics added).”7 In this same vein, commemoration speakers have begun to tell the two stories embedded in Holocaust history, Help and Horror. For example, in Philadelphia as far back as on April 11, 2010, the Yom HaShoah keynote speaker, historian Samuel D. Kassow, urged attention to European Jewish behavior that in this book is called stealth altruism. He spoke specifically of outlawed schools that were operated at risk of life in many ghettos and of clandestine religious services conducted at risk of life in many Nazi camps. Professor Kassow closed his talk by urging listeners to appreciate that all such forbidden care “transcended events and inspire us to this day.”8 On April 28, 2015, I participated in a young adult-focused Yom HaShoah event in Tel Aviv. In my invited brief talk I suggested the event’s main focus, the Holocaust death marches, could be actually perceived as “life marches.” I focused on those Jewish prisoners who secretly helped others survive even when their efforts put their own lives in jeopardy. My Help Story remarks were buttressed by the presence in the program of three stealth altruism accounts among the nine read aloud from survivor memoirs.9 On the same day, in ten widely scattered sites around Israel, another reform-oriented Yom HaShoah event took place. Introduced after three years of planning, thirty attendees at each site engaged in a searching Holocaust-focused dialogue. Motivated by strong “opposition to and revulsion from victimization,” Israeli Professor Michal Gorin sought with her experimental design to “deconstruct [Holocaust] memory into something that promotes life through which growth is possible (italics added).”10 Professor Gorin’s format redefined “heroism” to include not just militant Jewish fighters, but also “those [non-militant Carers] who taught, those who prayed, those who painted portraits of the people around them, those who documented events.”11 Believing the history of the Holocaust remains “unresolved,” the Gorin group sought to “wrestle Yom HaShoah away from the glorification of annihilation, and consider what we can take from it for the future, what meanings it possesses. To break with the fixation of worshiping death.”12 Educational Developments

Israel announced in 2015 on Yom HaShoah it was thoroughly revising its mandatory Holocaust curriculum. Beginning with kindergarten, it would now downplay “scary” Horror Story material, such as archival 227

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photos that could overwhelm or traumatize youngsters. By middle school it would explicitly cultivate the art of empathy via Help Story material. In the eleventh grade the new curriculum would include, among other things, creative exploration of high-risk ways European Jews dared to care for one another.13 Where relevant scholarship is concerned, attention grows to a relatively young social science, positive psychology, which draws on research into altruism, compassion, creativity, empathy, integrity, and resiliency, all integral features of the Help Story. Supporters boast it can “give altruism back its good name.”14 Youngsters should “be able to enter the dark cavern [of Holocaust studies] without feeling there is no exit.”15 Positive Psychology would seem to have much to offer teachers in the six American states (California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania) that require curriculum attention to the Holocaust.16 Museum Content

Certain key “Shapers of the Memory” have come to understand “the last thing people want to do is take on a heavy dose of depression.”17 Accordingly, they are discretely scaling back reliance on museum orthodoxies, such as Horror Story centrism. On its opening in 1957, for example, Yad Vashem focused primarily on militant resistance (forest partisans, urban underground, the Warsaw Ghetto revolt). Attention went also to uprisings in two Nazi camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor) and the valiant efforts by survivors to settle in Palestine/Israel.18 In recent years, however, Yad Vashem has widened the scope of its exhibits and added Help Story material alongside its iconic Horror Story display. When the newly enlarged museum reopened in 2005, a small placard informed Yad Vashem visitors, “The life of the solitary inmate resembled an arena of savage struggle in which violence and evil ruled. Yet even within this dark reality there were manifestations of humanity and fraternity, especially between inmates who shared the same language origin, or religious or political creed (italics added).” While there was no nearby related artwork, no display case items, nor access to any educational video, the novel presence of the small placard helped, after decades of neglect, bring the Help Story in out of the shadows. Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, noted in 2005 that the museum’s new approach offered “real stories of people 228

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who tried to keep their human dignity and their human values,” people whose ranks undoubtedly included many of the Carers saluted in this book.19 Personalized stories of European Jews—murdered victims and survivors—were used to restore individuality to the mass, and attention was paid, in a low-keyed indirect way, to examples of forbidden care. Payoff took many different forms. A Taiwanese psychologist, on completing a ten-day seminar at the museum in 2012, told a newspaper reporter, “Before I came, I felt worse about the Holocaust. This week I learned that inside the death camps people helped each other. It gives new meaning to human values. This is not something I expected to learn here—hope.”20 In 2015, with a tour group from Shomrei Torah (a California-based Reform temple in Santa Rosa), I returned to Yad Vashem for the tenth time since 1971. I asked fellow congregants to look for evidence of stealth altruism, and many later told me of secretly made-in-camp birthday gifts, museum wall panels that illustrated the punishable sharing of scarce food, and display case items that attested to Help Story behavior. All was supported by related prose museum staffers had culled, with attribution, from survivor memoirs.21 Five other Holocaust museums stand out in bringing the Help Story forward: Yad Layeled at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot in Israel has a unique child-oriented entrance walk that eases youngsters into a bearable awareness of the horror while emphasizing inspiring aspects of the Help Story. Display cases in the Ravensbrück Camp Museum (Germany) and the Lyon Resistance Museum (France) offer sketches or photos of Carers, along with engaging explanations and examples of their roles. The Theresienstadt Museum (Czechoslovakia) makes clear the many creative artistic ways Jewish prisoners defied dehumanization (see a profile in this book). Where high tech is concerned Australia’s Sydney Jewish Museum pioneers in use of cutting-edge apps, touch screens, and so on, to upgrade its long-established distinctive attention to stealth altruism (artifacts, descriptions, wall panel biographies, etc.). These five path-breakers demonstrate anew how to “excite the visitor enough to remember the visit forever and maybe want to come back again.”22 Bar/Bat Mitzvah Preparation

Gesher Calmenson was eleven years old in 1945 when he first learned about the Holocaust. Reflecting back sixty-five years later he recalls “no one provided a way for me and my peers to come to terms with the unthinkable. The facts were too raw, incomprehensible, horrible. 229

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Fifty years later, as a Jewish educator, I saw that although there was much teaching about the Holocaust, little of it helped children close the emotional distance and identify their own place in the chain of memory. Teaching them to identify with a ‘victimology’ did not serve them well. The question was how to make the inevitable encounter with the Holocaust an opportunity for self-esteem, appreciation, and compassion—an experience of empowerment (italics added).”23 In 2006 Mr. Calmenson developed the Remember Us Project (RUP) that reflects his belief memory is fulfilled when it motivates behavior. Youngsters preparing for a bar or bat mitzvah are given three unique opportunities: first, to form an empathetic “remember me” connection with a murdered European Jewish youngster; second, to create their own tikkunim (ways to improve the world) as part of bonding with the memory of the child victim; third, in the rarest of events, to uncover through research acts of stealth altruism performed by a remembered child . . . as in the case of teenagers at Theresienstadt who produced a forbidden satirical magazine until sent to die at Auschwitz.24 Endorsed now by all Jewish denominations, as of 2016 RUP has provided over eleven hundred congregations, schools, individuals, and institutions here and abroad with more than twenty-six thousand names of murdered Jewish children.25 Mr. Calmemson maintains, “in this way we hope to help develop the next generation of Jews who will take up the mitzvah [good deed] of [Holocaust] remembrance.”26 On the RUP website a psychiatrist notes, “It is a rare gift when we are given the opportunity to transform the shame of an intolerable and unfathomably toxic affective experience into something meaningful, interpersonally intimate, and actionable for the benefit of all.”27 Similarly, Helen Jacob Lepor, the mother of a participating class of 2012 high school senior, explains that she and others like her did not “want the Holocaust to be a footnote in kids’ minds. We want it to have an impact . . . What makes some people sacrifice their lives, their family for others? We want kids to be the voices of the victims, not the silent witness, and to understand they can save lives (italics added).”28 Survivor/Teenager Collaboration

On Gesher Calmenson’s retirement in 2011 a colleague, Samara Hutman, took the RUP with her when she assumed directorship of the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum (LAMOTH). She has added a Righteous 230

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Conversations Project (RCP), a bold new model for youth-oriented Holocaust awareness and remembrance efforts.29 RCP pioneers in connecting Holocaust remembrance “with the desire of youngsters to speak up about injustices through film and new media.”30 It brings elderly survivors together with Jewish teenagers to discuss matters of mutual interest, such as how to counter cruelty, as in the Horror Story, and how to nurture human kindness, as in the Help Story. In this way it frames a teenager’s encounter with the Holocaust as an invigorating source of activism, advancement, and altruism . . . this a far cry from the fright, horror, and passivity Mr. Calmenson experienced in the 1940s when a teenager. Elderly survivors sit in informal RCP group discussions with teenagers. Survivors relate “acts of kindness from others that provided them not only with care and safety, but ensured their future. Students take turns responding to these moments of selflessness by thinking about their own lives and times when they had turned to others for help or they themselves had provided assistance.”31 Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin maintains in this connection that “any kind of altruism, anything that carries kids out of their smartphone, selfieaddled worlds is good . . . Sure, tikkun olam is great. But tikkun ha’am— repairing the Jewish people—is just as important.”32 Hopefully, the twin LAMOTH projects will soon begin to draw deliberately, rather than only incidentally as at present, on the Help Story. Taking into account high-risk stealth altruism could enrich the moral education of an RUP or RCP participant even as it bolsters the salience of the Help Story in Jewish lives. Opposition to Reform

Some Holocaust museum officials fear that bringing any attention to the Help Story will let Holocaust deniers flaunt it as “proof ” the Holocaust wasn’t all that bad. While such deceitful behavior is likely, it would be a costly mistake to let deniers set the agenda. Their ranks are sparse, and their influence wanes with time. Handicapped by an incredulous misrepresentation of the past—text without evidence, details without support—they merit no serious regard. Some opponents of change to the Narrative worry it will weaken the ability of the Horror Story to elicit sympathy for the survivors, along with political support for Israel. It is possible, however, to leverage the telling of two stories—Horror and Help—as together they can 231

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earn sympathy and political support along with admiration for noble providers of stealth altruism. Finally, some supporters of the status quo (Horror Story centrism) cannot find “the resourceful human spirit in the face of the Holocaust disaster.”33 Typical is the stern insistence that we not let “the camps become storehouses for moral examples, because so much of what happened there makes morality collapse.”34 Academics of this persuasion worry that attention to forbidden care errs in “papering over” the Horror Story. The Help Story, however, is compatible with “Never Forget!” outrage against Nazi crimes. By no stretch of the imagination does it serve as a mindless “happy ending” to the Holocaust.35 What it does do, instead, is insist that respectful attention is owed to research that finds “most prisoners simply found themselves helping each other, as if by instinct, as if in answer to a need . . . Smallest favors saved lives time and again . . . Prisoners survived through concrete acts of mutual aid . . . In extremity, behavior of this kind [stealth altruism] emerges without plan or instruction, simply as the means to life.”36 As the salience of the Holocaust Narrative in modern Jewish life may be at stake, it is to be hoped the opposing sides will seek a constructive accommodation in the shadow of diplomacy and mutual respect. Conclusion

Eighty-three-year-old Mala Tibich explained to a reporter in 2014 that she hoped her classroom audiences would “use her tale of hell to create a better future.”37 Chances of this occurring would seem much better if her talk had some Help Story content. Indeed, there is reason to worry that tales of hell “have unintentionally transmitted a corrosive pessimism that has children remember only the ‘curse of the killers of the dream.’”38 Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis would have us employ memory as a healing art dedicated to moral education: “Memory must keep an eye on the future.”39 In his turn, Rabbi George Gittleman points out Jewish tradition “believes memory can be redemptive, even to the point of changing the past.”40 Meir Dworzecki, a scholar-survivor of nine camps, urged in 1968 overdue recognition be paid to “how the anonymous masses held on to their humanity [through] manifestations of solidarity, mutual help, self-sacrifice, and that whole constellation subsumed under the heading ‘good works.’”41 Now, half a century later, this book urges much the same sort of recognition, the better to help us hold onto our humanity. 232

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Notes

The epigraph is from Dorit Novak, Director, International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem; as cited in Bronner, Ethan. February 15, 2012. “From Overseas Visitors, A Growing Demand to Study the Holocaust.” New York Times, p. A-9. 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

http://jeffreysalkin.religionnews.com/2015/11/17/jews-muslims-torah. JRJ was created in 2000 by Haim Roet, an Israeli who, as a Dutch Jew, had been a hidden child throughout the Holocaust. For more about Haim Roet and JRJ, see Roet ([email protected]); Wachmann, Doreen. 2013. “Haim Is Still Campaigning Hard in His Eighties.” http://www.Jewishtelegraph.com/ prof_213.html. In 2015 the JRJ invited me to join its Advisory Council. Behar, Eitan. April 19, 2012. “Yom HaShoah—Letter from the International Committee.” http://izionist.org./3ng/tag/yad-vashem. For the position of Yad Vashem see www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/faq.asp. See also Schulweis, Rabbi Harold M. 1988. “The Bias Against Man.” Dimensions, pp. 4, 6, 8. Edited by Yad Vashem historian Avraham Milgram, it includes thirty-six accounts. See also Borschel-Dan, Amanda. April 16, 2015. “Is It Time to Honor Jews Who Rescued Jews in the Holocaust?” http://www.timesofisreal. com/is-it-time-to-honor-jews-who-rescued-jews-in-the-holocaust/. http://jps.org. Paldiel, Mordecai. 2000. Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the “Final Solution,” p. 32. The interview was held in Dr. Paldiel’s office at Yeshiva University in Manhattan. Anon. “Jewish Rescuers.” Archives: December, 2015. World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants. Yad Vashem has a collection of over 125,000 survivor testimonies, and 180 million online pages and five hundred thousand photos. About twelve hundred new testimonies are gathered annually by five Yad Vashem teams out everyday taking video testimonies from Israeli-based survivors. O’Brien, Kathleen. December 9, 2015. “From Yad Vashem to U. of T.: The Importance of Gathering and Sharing Holocaust Stories.” www.news.utoronto.ca/yad-vashem-u-timportance-gathering-sharing-holocaust-stories. http://yadvashem.org/yv/en/remembrance/2016/theme.asp. I was present on April 11, 2010, at a downtown annual Philadelphia ceremony honoring Yom HaShoah. Attendance included perhaps four hundred or so people, including perhaps fifty survivors. Executive director of The Israel Forever Foundation, and a Birthright Guide on the Poland Trip. See http://Israelforever.org. Dr. Heideman explained that including Help Story material was a result of her ongoing study of the European Jewish experience and many talks with survivors. As cited in Glazer, Hilo. April 11, 2015. “A Shoah that Speaks to Everyone.” www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/premium-1.651042. Ibid. Ibid. Grave-Lazl, Lidar. April 24, 2014. “New Education Program in Israel to Start in Kindergarten.” The Jerusalem Post, p. 1. See also Nir, Ayana. April 23, 2014. “The Crisis in Israel’s Holocaust Education.” Tikkun Daily. www.tikkin.org/tikkundaily/2014/04/23/the-crisis-in-israel’s-holocaust-ed233

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14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

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ucation/; Butnick, Stephanie. April 24, 2014. “Israel to Teach about Holocaust in Kindergarten.” Tablet. http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/170448/ Israel=to-tach-about-holocaust-in-kindergarten. In June 2014, after twenty years of no change, Pennsylvania joined five other states in requiring Holocaust Studies. Sponsors to whom I have sent material about stealth altruism assure me attention will go to it and other aspects of the Help Story. Piliavin, Jane Allyn. September 2009. “Altruism and Helping: The Evolution of a Field: The 2008 Cooley-Mead Presentation.” Social Psychology Quarterly, 72, 3, p. 211. Apropos Positive Psychology, see Seppala, Emma. July 24, 2013. “Compassionate Mind, Healthy Body.” http://greatergood.berkeley.edu. The website contains many helpful essays. Fallace, Thomas D. 2008. The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools. Op. Cit., p. 3. Fogelman, Eva. 1994. Conscience and Courage: Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, p. xix. These teachers already have to their credit “the most successful grassroots, teacher-inspired educational movement in American history.” Fallace, Thomas D. 2008. The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools. Op. Cit., p. 3. As cited in Glazer, Hilo. April 11, 2015. “A Shoah that Speaks to Everyone.” www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/premium-1.651042. See in this connection, Nir, Ayana. April 23, 2014. “The Crisis in Israel’s Holocaust Education.” Tikkun Daily. www.tikkin.org/tikkundaily/2014/04/23/ the-crisis-in-israel’s-holocaust-education/. See Wollaston, Isabel. 2005. “Negotiating the Marketplace: The Role(s) of Holocaust Museums Today.” Journal of Jewish Studies, 4, 1, p. 74. Hsiu-mei, Jen, a psychologist and child educator from Taiwan, as cited in Bronner, Ethan. February 15, 2012. “From Overseas Visitors, A Growing Demand to Study the Holocaust.” New York Times, p. A-9. See in this connection, Rozett, Robert, Director, Yad Vashem Library, as cited in Kirshner, Sheldon, November 16, 2012; “Holocaust Heroism Took Various Forms: Historian.” www.cjnews/index.php?q=node/97416. Rabbi George Gittleman designed and led the tour. Its members included Ann DuBay, Carol Berlant, Catherine Reisman, Cherelle Noel, Dena Lash, Jeremy L. Olsan, Jon Korin, Jon Sonander, Joyce Sokolik, Judith Bernstein, Julie Stout, Kie Korin, Laurie Wesler, Lynn Seng, Miriam Sterne Marlin, Olesia Korin, Rick Reisman, Robert Marmor, and myself. See in this connection, Rodriquez, Giovanni. March 26, 2015. “Yad Vashem: Israel’s Virtual Historical Space.” http://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriquez/2015/03/26/ yad_vashem_israel’s_virtual_historical_space_. Remer, Rosalind, a historian, vice provost at Drexel University, and consultant to museums, as cited in Strauss, Robert. “A Philadelphia Story.” The New York Times, March 17, 2016, p. F36. Calmenson, Gesher. Summer 2111. “Sabbath Candles and Game Boys.” News from Remember Us, p. 1. Bar or bat mitzvah candidates request from RUP a fact sheet with the name and details of an actual Jewish child victim. RUP suggests the young requester perform mitzvot (altruistic deeds) in the name of the child victim and mention him or her in a dvar Torah (commentary) or speech during the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony. Participants are encouraged to annually recite

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25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

the Kaddish (Prayer for the Dead) for the child victim and light a yahrzeit candle on the anniversary of the victim’s bar/bat mitzvah or death, if known. See Anonymous. Winter 2011. News from Remember Us. Santa Rosa, CA: Remember Us: The Holocaust Bnai Mitzvah Project. As cited in Anon. Spring 2006. “Remembrance for the Next Generation.” Reform Judaism Online. http://www.remember-us.org/pdfs/reform_mag_ article_spring06_2.pdf. As of October 1, 2013, Remember Us became a part of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Since 2006 the related mitzvah projects have been quite diverse, for example, some youngsters have used the Internet to interview European Jews who actually knew the child victim. They followed up by writing a book or making a video about the victim for use in their school. Some have invited relatives of the victim to attend the bar or bat mitzvah ceremony. All of this is thought to “add a personal layer of meaning and connection on a child-by-child basis.” As cited at www.remember-us.org or contact [email protected]. See also the web article above. Valuable help was given to me by phone and e-mail by Elly Cohen, a retired project administrator. Some twelve-year-old American Jews preparing for their bar and bat mitzvah now get involved in Tikkun Olam (“Repair the World”) work projects, as in making and bringing dinners to the homeless, helping out in free food shelters, and so on. As cited at www.remember-us.org. See also Cohen, Boaz. Spring, 2007. “The Children’s Voice: Postwar Collection of Testimonies from Child Survivors of the Holocaust.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 21, 1, p. 78. As cited in Gura, Alex. February 16, 2011. “Holocaust Survivors to Share Stories.” Harvard-Westlake Chronicle, p. 1. See www.righteousconversations.org. http://www.slingshotfund.org/directory/righteous-conversations-project/. See Rosenberg, Rabbi Dr. Bernhard H. 2014. The Holocaust As Seen Through Film: A Teacher’s Guide to Movies, Documentaries, and Short Films that Will Impact Your Students, and Spark Dynamic Classroom Discussion. Drawing on such dialogue RCP teenagers have developed short videos that feature student-made animated artwork (drawings and set designs) of great appeal to today’s younger generations, instructional and motivational videos that draw on “what we had taken from Holocaust survivors about dignity and self-respect.” As cited in Lobell, Kylie Ora. June 11, 2014. “Generation Inspiration: Emma Bloom.” Jewish Journal, p. 1. Topics have included such contemporary challenges as bullying, gay bashing, racism, and sexism, all illuminated by ideas and values gathered from the moral authority of participating Holocaust survivors. Salkin, Jeffrey K. October 14, 2015. “Enriching Mitzvah Projects by Giving Jewishly.” www.themitzvahbowl.com/tag/rabbi-jeffrey-k-salkin. Langer, Lawrence L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, p. xi. See also Magid, Shaul. January 26, 2015. “American Jews Must Stop Obsessing Over the Holocaust.” Tablet. http://tabletmag.com/jewish-artsand-culture/books/188365/stop-obsessing-over-holocaust; Rothstein, Edward. September 5–6. 2015. “The Frying Pan and the Fire.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-7. [Book Review: Black Earth, by Timothy Snyder]. See in this connection, Mikas, David. April 16, 2015. “Why We Keep Reading about the Shoah.” http://www.tablet.com/tag/holocaust. 235

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35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

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The Spring 2012 issue of PRISM, an interdisciplinary journal for Holocaust educators, boldly focused on both Help and Horror Stories. PRISM editors noted “the works herein do not challenge the primary significance of the grim fact of the murder of six million Jews; they do not imply that all Jews resisted, or that defense and defiance were the primary responses of the majority of Jews in the Holocaust, no matter where they were . . . .” Shawn, Karen and Jeffrey Glanz. Spring, 2012. “Introduction.” PRISM, p. 3. Des Pres, Terrence. 1976. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, pp. 132, 133, 134, 135, 147. “Prisoners in the concentration camps helped each other. That in itself is the significant fact” (p. 147). As cited in Bolter, Abby. March 6, 2014. “Holocaust Survivor Describes Scenes of ‘Hell’ at Bergen-Belsen Death Camp to Maesteg School Pupils.” www.walesonline.co.uk/news/local-news/holocaust-survivordescribes-scenes-hell-6777177. Schulweis, Rabbi Harold M. 1994. For Those Who Can’t Believe, pp. 156–7. Schulweis, Rabbi Harold M. 1988. “The Bias Against Man.” Dimensions, pp. 4, 6, 8, 15. Gittleman, Rabbi George. June 16, 2015. “ ‘I am Somebody’: Reflections on Hosting the AIDS memorial Quilt.” www.shromreitorah.org/2015/06/16/ I-am-somebody-reflections-on-hosting-the-aids-memorial-quilt. Dworzecki, Meir. 1968. “The Day-to-Day Stand of the Jews.” In Yad Vashem. Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference of Manifestations of Jewish Resistance. Jerusalem, IS: Yad Vashem (April 7–11, 1971), pp. 152–81.

16 Looking Beyond If there is an ethical duty to witness, there is also an ethical duty to do something about what you now know. —Susan A. Crane

Introduction

Philosophy Professor Yoram Lubling, an Israeli-born son of survivors, contends that the Nazi period of history (1933–45), with its “unspeakable violation of personhood and total elimination of life,” has made Holocaust research and memory “one of the most burning issues of our time. How we remember, use, document, and teach this period . . . will determine the moral space of our collective future.”1 Many precedents exist in Judaism for improving its key stories, and thereby its “moral space.” The ancient Passover Narrative (Haggadah), for example, is now available in feminist, gay, “green,” meditative, and even vegetarian adaptations. Sponsors of an updated Hanukkah Narrative believe their redesign “gives [disaffected] Jews a reason to reconnect.”2 The Purim Narrative, long criticized by some as sexist, exists now in a feminist reformulation popular with members of both genders.3 Improving the Holocaust Narrative—a key determinant of modern Judaism’s “moral space”—will require moving beyond “mournful years of bereavement, suspicion, and anger to the age of memory, optimism, trust, and hope.”4 Telling the Help Story

In 1993, Mordecai Paldiel, then a Yad Vashem specialist on “Righteous Gentiles” (see chapter 14), asked a telling question: “If we see so much evil on TV, in the movies, and in stories, and if we write so much about Mengele and Hitler and the Damjanyuks [notorious guards in Nazi camps] and so on, wouldn’t it be a measure of justice to be fascinated by those who did acts of goodness?”5 237

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A valuable way of gaining such attention would be to have more survivors tell more about “acts of goodness,” theirs and that of others, especially acts of stealth altruism. A fine example here is provided by a ninety-two-year-old survivor, Dora Aspan Sorell, who by 2013 had over the decades told her story 522 times in hospitals, schools, synagogues, and so on. Her 1998 memoir modestly recounts much of her personal involvement in the Help Story.6 In Santa Rosa, CA, a small group of which I am a founding member has organized what we call The Story Project. Twelve survivors who had previously not spoken publically are now getting our help in giving classroom talks. We also support an information-rich website that aids local teachers eager to improve their Holocaust education efforts.7 Helpful here is the 2007 edition of the Oral History Interview Guidelines prepared by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). It includes such Help Story prompts as “What were the relationships between people [in the ghetto and/or camp]? Did you have any good friends? Did anyone ever help you? Did you help anyone?” At a special website the USHMM also offers a videotape model of survivors discussing acts of stealth altruism.8 Survivors should tell their story to audiences of volunteer docents and professional museum guides. These individuals would be better “educators” if able to draw artfully on stories of forbidden care heard from a local former Carer.9 Likewise, museum staffers could collect such Help Stories for a special book offered for sale to visitors, with profits conspicuously earmarked for indigent survivors. Area congregations could give the book to bar and bat mitzvah youngsters during the ceremony. (See in this connection chapter 15.) Cultural Reforms

A perturbed writer asks: “What if, walking through the haunted halls of the Holocaust Museum, looking at evidence of the destruction of European Jewry, visitors do not emerge with a greater belief that all men are created equal but with a belief that man is by nature evil?”10 In like fashion, museum visitors, especially impressionable youngsters, might emerge with an unduly dark view of the European Jewish experience. Writer Susan Sontag was twelve years old when she first saw such horrific images. Over forty years later she distressingly asked, “What good was served by seeing them?” Ms. Sontag understood as a child 238

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“there was nothing she could do to change the circumstances or relieve the suffering.” Nevertheless, when she looked, “something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror. I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead, something is still crying.”11 In 2004 Ms. Sontag wrote, “Harrowing photographs . . . are not much help in the task to understand . . . they haunt us.”12 Constrained by vexing cross-pressures (the need to satisfy conflicting constituencies, attract heterogeneous crowds, earn return visits, offer competitive staff salaries, etc.), Holocaust museums and education centers incline to the safe “same old, same old.” But since there are well over two million Holocaust photos in the archives of over twenty nations, museum curators can find high-quality Help Story substitutes for many iconic Horror Story photos.13 As Rachel Korazim, an Israeli Holocaust educator, points out, “we have managed to place images like barbed wire and crematoria as central Jewish images. This is not Jewish history, this is Nazi history.”14 On a related front, performances could be held in museum auditoriums of cultural material with Help Story content. The Defiant Requiem Foundation, for example, has $20,000 grants to support bringing to college campuses the “Terezin Legacy.” Such events can include a live performance of “Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin” and/or the screening of the documentary film “Defiant Requiem,” both of which touch on the Help Story.15 Student and/or community theater groups could draw on the catalogue of over six hundred Holocaust-related plays available from the National Jewish Theater Foundation. Especially promising is the coordinated worldwide reading of Holocaust-related plays conducted annually a day or two before Yom HaShoah by the Holocaust Theater International Initiative.16 Finally, campus and community film festivals could highlight Help Story scenes in such films as “Bent,” “Fateless,” “God on Trial,” “Jacob the Liar,” “My Mother’s Story,” “Schindler’s List,” “Son of Saul,” “The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas,” “The Counterfeiters,” and “The Shop on Main Street,” among many others.17 Other links to the Help Story are available in documentaries, novels, poetry, and short stories that emphasize “sustaining values like humility and truth.” 18 Cultural allies, in short, exist with which to try to counterbalance Horror Story centrism. 239

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Interactive 3-D Hologram “Survivor”

Easily the most daring of relevant innovations is a project known as New Dimensions in Technology (NDT), an ongoing effort to develop permanent 3-D simulations of different types of Holocaust survivors. This project of the Shoah Foundation and its Silicon Valley partners could not be timelier as the average age of elderly survivors is seventy-nine.19 Six to ten percent of the world’s five hundred thousand or so survivors (about 120,000 of who reside in the United States) die annually, and, as early as 2025, the last one may pass away.20 In March 2015, the Shoah Foundation began public demonstrations at a Skokie, IL, Holocaust Museum of a hologram of Pinchas Gutter, an eighty-three-year-old Jewish survivor. From age eight through thirteen, he struggled to remain alive in several different camps and on a death march.21 Mr. Gutter had been filmed over the course of thirty intensive hours of interviews. He answered over two thousand wide-ranging questions thought likely to come from hologram viewers. Each question can trigger a relevant answer spoken by Mr. Gutter’s 3-D representation. “Pinchas” is now a fifteen-minute-long product similar to the iPhone’s personal assistant “Siri” and the Android platform’s Google Now. 22 Thanks to cutting-edge computer software a full-size hyper-photorealistic image of Mr. Gutter is complete with human gestures and expressions. A demonstration of “Pinchas” was available as recently as December 2016 on youtube.com by searching for “Pinchas Hologram.” A second NDT product near completion draws on another survivor, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was in one of the Auschwitz camp orchestras. Ms. Lasker was liberated after a death march had taken her to Bergen-Belsen. Other survivors are being “transformed” into 3-D holograms.23 Very expensive to develop, this brow-arching NDT product positions its developers to become consequential administrators of Holocaust memories. Our relationship to the Narrative—as artfully recounted by survivor doppelgangers—will differ in as yet unknowable, though undoubtedly significant ways. Skeptics worry that turning survivors into an illusion undermines the impact of their stories. They doubt the existence of unsavory matters—such as the presence of Jewish informers and thieves—will be included. Some dismiss NDT holograms as a tasteless gimmick, at 240

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best an artificial entertainment device, and not a serious medium for high-quality educational use. Enthusiasts, however, insist a warm and engaging “Pinchas” is incredibly close to the real thing. His rich memories and emotional responses effectively blur the line between illusion and reality . . . at least for most onlookers. They are confident a memorable educational and ethical engagement is highly likely.24 It remains to be seen if the Help Story is given its fair due. The SFI should ask Holocaust scholars and concerned survivors to review hologram “scripts” before employing, to insure inclusion of acts of stealth altruism.25 New Academic Aid

A new interdisciplinary academic specialization can shed light on stealth altruism and the lives of Carers. Cutting-edge neurological research, for example, focuses on the gratitude Holocaust survivors feel for having gotten critical forbidden help. Lead researcher Glenn Fox explains that, “in the midst of this awful tragedy there were many acts of bravery and life-saving aid. With the Holocaust we only typically associate the awful things. But when you listen to the survivors, you also hear stories of incredible virtue and gratitude for the help they received.”26 Related academic advancements in our understanding of altruism per se would be very welcomed, for, “as Darwin showed us, without altruism there would be no community, and without community, we could not survive.”27 Drawing on positive psychology and on applied sociology, a scholarly focus on Carers and character development could be undertaken, for example, by the Centre for Effective Altruism at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Findings are likely to bolster confidence in our ability as moral animals to “deepen the voyage of life.”28 Organizational Aid

An advocacy organization possibly called the Alliance for Advancement of the Help Story (AAHS) could first refine and then support reform ideas highlighted in chapter 15 and this one.29 It could assure their implementation got independent assessment, and it could oversee their continued improvement. It could offer Help Story curricula to teachers here and abroad. It could conduct Internet-based conferences of academics, survivors, and students. It could make Merit Awards to 241

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Holocaust museums and education centers that innovate in Help Story matters. It could also try to earn overdue media attention to the Help Story, as the multiplier effect of a well-reviewed movie or television series can be considerable. AAHS could also work to establish a dialogue with cultural leaders of the 67 percent of the world’s population—many billions of people— who, back in 2014, told pollsters they were unaware of the Holocaust. Or they thought it a myth. Or they were distrustful of conventional historical accounts. As such, they remain susceptible to the hateful lies of antisemites and Holocaust deniers.30 AAHS collaboration with ongoing UNESCO efforts at Holocaust education could, over the long run, lessen the hazard posed to Jews worldwide by a Holocaust information void. Carers in uninformed countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa where UNESCO is currently working, might also profit from learning about Help in the face of Horror.31 Above all, AAHS could rigorously analyze problematic aspects of Horror Story centrism, lest error continue to sap moral energy.32 Drawing creatively on the Help Story it would promote “a life of trust, not a reality composed of nothing but endless trauma.”33 Conclusion

According to Viktor Frankl, fellow prisoners most successful in staying human “lived by two big themes: optimism and altruism,” each a prime aspect of the Help Story.34 Despite inhuman efforts made to dehumanize them, they “sought to satisfy their hunger for lives of meaning,” a quest which had many dare to secretly aid others.35 These Carers seemed to understand that “one of the great contributions of Judaism to the world . . . is the notion that doing for others is the reward of our lives.”36 Reforms discussed in chapter 15 and this concluding one encourage “optimism and altruism.” Their implementation is a twenty-first century moral obligation. They challenge the mainstream Holocaust Narrative that characterizes the 1933–45 period as only the latest gloomy lachrymose episode in Jewish history. In its place the reforms would have us finally value the Help Story, even as we continue to regard the Horror Story as unforgettable and unforgiveable. Taken together—ongoing and prospective—the book’s reforms make possible a redemptive Holocaust Narrative that includes altruism along with anguish, care along with cruelty, and valor along with 242

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victimization. By substantially improving how we “remember, use, document, and teach” the Holocaust, we elevate the “moral space of our collective future.”37 Notes

The epigraph is from Crane, Susan A. 2008. “Choosing Not to Look.” History and Theory, 47, 3, p. 328. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

Lubling, Yoram. 2007. Twice-Dead: Moshe Y. Lubling, the Ethics of Memory, and the Treblinka Revolt, p. 12, passim. Simon, Stephanie Simon and Ann Zimmerman, 2011, December 17–18, “Hanukkah Boosters Light a Fire under Holiday.” Wall Street Journal, pp. A-1, 12. Certain Jewish feminists indict Mordechai for sending his young ward Esther to the king as a favor-seeking concubine, and champion instead a tale without sexist connotations. Burg, Avraham. 2008. The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, p. 240. Paldiel, Mordecai, 1993. “Interview.” In Cargas, Harry James, ed. 1993.Voices from the Holocaust, p. 49. As a twenty-two-year-old Auschwitz prisoner, Ms. Sorell helped drag an exhausted girl out of their barrack and into the courtyard for roll call. Using stealth, she held the girl up without being noticed, as that would have likely had them sent to the gas. Sorell, Dora Aspan. 1998. Tell the Children: Letters to Miriam, p. 94. See also May, Meredith. April 22, 2014. “Holocaust Survivor Speaks Up.” San Francisco Chronicle, p. E-1 Contact me at [email protected], and/or see www.storyprojectsite. wordpress.com. Oral History Staff (Joan Ringelheim, Dir.). 2007 ed. Oral History Interview Guidelines. D.C.: USHMM. See also http://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/ personal-history/theme.php?th=camps&=4. At a Midwest Holocaust Museum, I watched with dismay while a docent proved unable to draw fascinated school-age youngsters away from a detailed model of an operational camp gas chamber to also see prewar photos of the Hassidic lives of Jewish victims. When I later mentioned this to a high-level staffer she told me with rue the training of volunteers was a never-ending challenge. See, in this connection, Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 1995. The Americanization of the Holocaust, p. 23. Sontag, Susan. 1989. On Photography, pp. 19–20. A Holocaust scholar warns that, “. . . if people are exposed long enough to images of atrocity they will no longer remain fully thinking people, capable of recognizing differences and making distinctions between one order of human experience and another.” Rosenfeld, Alvin H. 1995. The Americanization of the Holocaust, p. 23. Sontag, Susan. 2004. Regarding the Pain of Others, as cited in Levinson, Leila. 2011. Gated Grief: The Daughter of a GI Concentration Camp Liberator Discovers a Legacy of Trauma, p. 3. A scholar worries that exposure “has undoubtedly reduced our ability to understand or envision the multifaceted reality of concentration camps.” Stone, Dan. 1995. “Chaos and Continuity: 243

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13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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Representations of Auschwitz.” In Doosry, Yashmin, ed. Representations of Auschwitz: Fifty Years of Photographs, Paintings, and Graphics, p. 27. Cited in Hirsch, Marianne. 2001. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journey of Criticism, 14, 1, p. 8. A contrary call-of-sorts for even more Horror Story material comes from a survivor, Lucille Eichengreen, in her 1994 book, From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust, p. 212. See in this connection, Hirsch, Marianne. 2001. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journey of Criticism, 14, 1, p. 8; Wiesel, Elie. 1995. “For the Dead and the Living.” In Rochman, Hazel and Dariene Z. Campbell, ed. Bearing Witness: Stories of the Holocaust, p. 8. Cited in Silverman, Rachel. November 30, 2006. “Steadfast Message to Educators: Best to Pinpoint Shoah’s ‘Key Issues.” Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, p. 8. Controversy has for decades also focused on alleged prurient titillation, an indelicate and taboo matter. Ultra-Orthodox spokesmen in particular have long criticized use of photos they judge beyond the pale. Oestreich, James R. March 8, 2015. “A Holocaust Story in the Music of Verdi.” New York Times, p. AR-16. See http://htc.miami.edu/about-holocausttheater-archive/. Helpful in this regard is Rosenberg, Rabbi Dr. Bernhard H. 2014. The Holocaust As Seen Through Film: A Teacher’s Guide to Movies, Documentaries, and Short Films that Will Impact Your Students, and Spark Dynamic Classroom Discussion. Kirsh, Adam. May 7, 2015. “The Age of Bad Holocaust Novels.” Tablet. http:// www.tablet/books/19076/bad-holocaust-novels. As regards art and artists, the content of whose work stirs controversy regarding the Holocaust, see Miller, Dr. Yvette Alt. February 14, 2015. “Mocking the Holocaust.” http:// www.aish.com/jw/s/mocking-the-holocaust.html7s=raw. The estimate is from the San Francisco Tauber Library. Cited in Katz, Leslie. February 11, 2013. “Tech Culture: Holograms of Holocaust Survivors Let Crucial Stories Live On.” www.cnet.com/news/tech-culture-holograms-of-holocaust-survivors-let-crucial-stories-live-on. Ibid. Smith, Stephen. March 28, 2014. “Blog: Through Testimony.” http://sfi.usc. edu/blog/stephen-smith/oral-history-turns-holographic. Coldewey, Devin. May 12, 2015. “Holograms add new dimension in Holocaust Survivor’s Story.” TODAY. http://www.today.com/series/are-we-thereyet/holograms-add-new-dimension-holocaust-survivors-story-20511. Ibid. Lokting, Britta. November 27, 2015. “Introducing the First Interactive 3-D Holocaust Survivor.” Forward, pp. 24–25. Candidates include the likes of Professor Henry Greenspan, survivor Magda Herzberger, Israeli activist Haim Roet, Professor Nechama Tec, and others I can suggest. Gersema, Emily. October 19, 2015. “Researchers Design a Study to Track Gratitude.” USC News, pp. 5–6. The research is being conducted by neuroscientists at the University of Southern California’s BCI and Dornsife Neuroimagining Institute. Stephen Smith, USC Shoah Foundation Execu-

Looking Beyond

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

tive Director, notes that the “small acts of generosity [under study] helped survivors hold onto their humanity” (p. 6). Sacks, Rabbi Jonathan. 2012. The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, p. 159. Careology could teach that “emotion may make altruism healthier. Generosity not only makes givers feel good, but reduces their stress level, and even extends their lives.” Zaki, Jamil. December 6, 2015. “The Feel-Good School of Philanthropy.” New York Times, p. SR-7. Brooks, David. January 15, 2016. “When Beauty Strikes.” New York Times, p. A-27. Avril Alba, Tsvi Bisk, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Mordecai Paldiel, Stephen Smith, and William Younglove are models of the type necessary to launch this type of organization. Mikas, David. April 16, 2015. “Why We Keep Reading about the Shoah.” http://www.tabletmag.com/tag.#. Burg, Avraham. 2008. The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, pp. xv. 239. http://global100.adl.org/public/ADL-Global-100-Executive-Summary.pdf. Ignorance ranged from a high of 76 percent in sub-Saharan Africa to a low of 6 percent in Western Europe; America was included in the Americas, with 23 percent of respondents professing no awareness. Progress is already being made by the Shoah Foundation which in partnership with the UNESCO is developing country-specific and sustainable Holocaust educational projects in Chile, Hungary, India, Korea, Lithuania, Mexico, Morocco, Namibia, Rwanda, and Turkey. Of note, however, is the fact that in 2015 some 60 percent of humanity was still offline. Sengupta, Somini. January 14, 2016. “‘Digital Dividends’ Uneven, Report Says.” New York Times, p. A-11. See http://en.unesco.org/news/genocide-history-seminar-cote-ivoirepinpoints-roots-violence. (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). “You change the world by changing people’s hearts and imaginations.” Brooks, David. January 15, 2016. “When Beauty Strikes.” New York Times, p. A-27. Frankl, Viktor E. 2006 ed. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 65. Ibid. Israeli Professor Yehuda Bauer urges us to understand “we must not only remember [fallen and surviving Jews] . . . we must learn from them.” Bauer, Yehuda, as cited in Markarova, Elena and Victor Kuperman, eds. 2004. University Over the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430 Lectures in KZ Thereseinstadt, 1942–1944, pp. 9, 10. See also Roth, Chaya H. 2008. The Fate of Holocaust Memories: Transmission and Family Dialogues, p. 132. Shapiro, Michael. 1997. Jewish Pride: 101 Reasons to be Proud You’re Jewish, p. 217. Lubling, Yoram. 2007. Twice-Dead: Moshe Y. Lubling, the Ethics of Memory, and the Treblinka Revolt, p. 12, passim.

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Oral Life History Transcripts

Holocaust Center of Northern California (27 Transcripts): Barbad. Tanya – 11/4/83, Barshak, Regina – 4/12/83, Batalion, Eta – 4/12/83, Beressi, Salvatore – 7/31/1989, Berk, Veronica – 8/10/90, Berlin, Herman – 8/9/1990, Blitz, Maria – 4/13/83, Boros, Eva – 11/8/1990, Cywinsko, Yanina – Spring, 1992, Drimmer, Max – 11/15/89; 1/15/ 96, Eger, Edith – 8/13/92, Herskovich, Allan – 5/36/90, Hertz, Otto – 3/21/91, Kobel, Aaron – 12/01/88, Lang, Paul – 8/16/84, Lawton, Harry – 7/19/90, Lazar, Helen – 2/13/89, Lyon, Gloria – 9/11/90; 10/25/90, Meyer, Trude – 10/28/84, Molho, Rene – 2/25/85, Moncharsh, Nathan – 4/25/91, Offen, Bernard – 6/6/85, Patipa, Anna – 8/11/85, Rotkopf, Lola – 4/13/83, Rotkopf, Samuel – 4/18/83, Samuels, Miriam – 12/18/91, Shine, Herman – 11/15/1989 and 1/15/1996. Imperial War Museum, London: (as excerpted in Smith, Lyn. 2005. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived. New York: Carroll & Graf ): Bergman, Anna – 238; Faull, Stanley, 172; Fink, John, 273; Gilliard, Frank, 287; Gryn, Hugo – 213; Halter, Roman – 225–6; Hartman, Jan – 161; Hart-Moxon, Kitty, 173; Huberman, Albert, 175; Knoller, Freddie, 182; Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita, 180; Levi, Gertrude “Trude”, 212; Lowit, Harry – 247; Pele, Helen – 249; Rub, Ignaez – 241; Stone, Helen – 246; Quint, Rena – 237. Shoah Foundation Video Tape (transcript): Baum, Kurt, #29790. Hirschfield, Brad, ed. 2007. Remember for Life: Holocaust Survivor’s Stories of Faith and Hope. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society: David A., Joseph F., Moses K.

Websites/Internet Resources

Aaron, Joseph. November 20, 2011. “If Arabs with sechel have their say, Palestinians will have their state.” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. p. 1 http:// www.jewishchronicle.orgf/article.php?article_id=821. Aderet, Ofer. January 27, 2012. “Welcome to the Fastest Growing Jewish Community in the World: Germany.” Haaretz. http://www.haaretz.com/ jewish-world/welcome-to-the-fastest-growing-jewish-community-in-theworld-germany-1.409388. 299

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Anonymous. April, 2015. “Alan Schneider Chairs Yad Vashem Seminar on Jews Rescuing Jews During the Holocaust.” www.bnaibrith.org/center-stage/ archives/04-22015. Anonymous. February 17, 2012. “Pupils Learn Lessons from Auschwitz.” The Jewish Chronicle Online http://www.jidaily.com. Anonymous. “Jewish Holidays: Yom Ha’Shoah – Holocaust Memorial Day.” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/source/Judaism/yomhashoah.html. Bauer, Yehuda. June 2009. “On the Holocaust and Its Implications.” In Mann, Kimberly, ed. June 2009. The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme: Discussion Papers Journal – Volume 1. Pp. 1–8. http://www. un.org/holocaustremembrance. ______. 2012. As cited in Segev, Tom; October 26, 2012; “Was the World Really Silent during the Holocaust?” http://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/ historylesson/1.1850532. Behar, Eitan. April 19, 2012. “Yom HaShoah – Letter from the International Committee.” http://izionist.org./eng/tag/yad-vashem. ______. April 13, 2014. Unto Every Person There is a Name.” http://izionist. org./eng/tag/yad-vashem. Berger, Paul. June 25, 2014. “How WW1 Shaped Jewish Politics and Identity. www.Forward.com/articles/200509/how-World-War-1-shaped-jewishpolitics-and-identity Biale, David. [Undated] “Power, Passivity and the Legacy of the Holocaust.” Tikkun, 2, 1. Pp. 68–73. http://www.tikkun.org. http://www.bje.org.ay /learning/texts/pirkeiavot.html. Bolter, Abby. March 6, 2014. “Holocaust Survivor Describes Scenes of ‘Hell’ at Bergen-Belsen Death Camp to Maesteg School Pupils.” http:// www.walesonline.co.uk/news/local-news/holocaust-survivor-describes-scenes-hell-6777177. Borschel-Dan, Amanda. April 16, 2015. “Is It Time to Honor Jews Who Rescued Jews in the Holocaust?” http://www.timesofisreal.com/is-it-time-tohonor-jews-who-rescued-jews-in-the-holocaust/. Bright, Martin. February 10, 2012. “The Auschwitz Papers Could Reveal a Hidden Shoah Story.” The Jewish Chronicle Online http://www.jidaily.com. Broady, Richard. December 4, 2013. “Hannah Arendt’s Failures of Imagination.” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/12/hannah-arendt-failures-of-imagination-html?printable=true¤tPage=all. Brooks, Ethel. 2012. “Remembering the Dead, Documenting Resistance, Honoring the Heroes.” www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/paper23.html. Butnick, Stephanie. April 24, 2014. “Israel to Teach about Holocaust in Kindergarden.” Tablet. http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/170448/Israel=to-tach-about-holocaust-in-kindergarden. Chottiner, Lee. March 19, 2014. Five-part ‘Story of the Jews’ Premiers on PBS.” The Jewish Chronicle. Cited in http://thejewishchronicle.net/view/ full_story/24774353/article_five_part_story_of_the_jews_premiers_on_ PB57instance=home_news1st. Cohen, Ben. March 1, 2014. “The Jew Survives It.” Commentary. http://www. commentarymagazine.com/article/the-jew-survives-it. 300

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Herrigel, Gary. Book Review: James, Harold. 2013. Krupp: A History of the Legendary Firm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. H-War, H-Net reviews, December 2013. http://forward.com/news/Israel/324570/holocaust-survivors-go-hungry-as-Israel-court-fight-saps-restitution-group. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35847. http://jewishcurrents.org/tag/bergen-belsen [British Movietone News interview with Hadassah Rosensaft, 1945] http://Jewishcurrents.org/november-15-the-gypsy-holocaust-3216. http://en.unesco.org/news/genocide-history-seminar-cote-ivoire-pinpoints-roots-violence. http://www.911memorial.org/message-museum-director. Joffee, Lawrence October 9, 2003. “Emil Fackenheim: Addressing Great Philosophical Questions for the Jewish People.” The Guardian. www.theguardian. com/news/2003/oct/10/guardianobituaries Katz, Leslie. February 11, 2013. “Tech Culture: Holograms of Holocaust Survivors Let Crucial Stories Live On.” www.cnet.com/news/tech-culture-holograms-of-holocaust-survivors-let-crucial-stories-live-on Karpel, Dalia. February 21, 2013. “History Professor Yehuda Bauer: ‘Netanyahu Doesn’t Know History.’” http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine. Keltner, Dacher. July 31, 2012. “The Compassionate Species.” http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the-compassionate-species. Kirsch, Adam. November 30, 2011. “No Exit.” [Book Review: Life and Faith, by Vasily Grossman]. http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/ books/84327/no-exit-2. ______. December 15, 2011. “Whole in One.”[Book Review: How Judaism Became a Religion, by Leora Batnitzky, and Jews and Race, by Mitchell B. Hart]. http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/86111/wholein-one. ______. May 7, 2015. “The Age of Bad Holocaust Novels.” Tablet. http://www. tablet/books/19076/bad-holocaust-novels. Kirshner, Sheldon, November 16, 2012; “Holocaust Heroism took Various Forms: Historian.” http://www.cjnews/index.php?q=node/97416. Klinkenborg, Verlyn. October 9, 2014. “True Altruism: Can Humans Change to Save Other Species?” http://e360.yale.edu/feature/true_altruism_can_ humans_change_to_save_other_ species/2813?. Kushner, Rabbi Laurence. 2006. “A Sign for You.” ReformJudaism.org.http:// www.reformjudaism.org/sign – you. Lacquer, Walter. August 10, 2015. “The Riegner Cable, and the Knowing Failure of the West to Act During the Shoah.” www.tabletmag.com/jewisharts-and-culture/books/192421/riegner-cable-shoah?utm_source=tabletmagazine Langer, Lawrence L. June 24, 2011. “The Erosion of the Holocaust: Alvin Rosenfeld Takes on the Fading of Consciousness.” The Jewish Daily Forward. http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/09/the-erosionof-the-Holocaust. Lipman, Steve. June 15, 2010. “Blue Card Artist/Survivor.” The Jewish Week. http://www.theJewishWeek.com. 302

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http://www.salon.com/2009/01/07/fake_memoir. Lev, Raphael. January 7, 2009. “The Holocaust Memoirs So Heartwarming It Had to be Fake.” http://www.teacheroz.com/holocaust.htm (many fine links, but last updated April 14, 2008) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/source/Holocaust/denmark.html. http://www.yadvashem.org – “Frequently Asked Question”/Shoah Resource Center. (Undated) http://www.ushmm.org – major site for resources. http://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/personal-history/theme.php?th=camps&=4. http://en.wiki/german_camp_in_occupied_poland_during_world_war_11; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheHolocaust. http://www.YadVashem.org – major site for resources; very hard to secure answers to questions directed to it. http://www.1.YadVashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/virtues_of_memory/overview.asp – unique account of Exhibition by 20-plus survivor artists; closed April, 2011. http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/flickers_of_light/index.asp – “Flickers of Light: The Stories of Six Righteous Among the Nations in Auschwitz.” www.wickealocal.com/brooklione/news/lifestyle/columnists/X1269. . . on-yom-hashoah-they-continue-to-tell-we-continue-to-learn.

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Ferrucci, Piero. 2008. The Power of Kindness: The Unexpected Benefits of Leading a Compassionate Life (translated by Vivien Reid Ferrucci). New York: Jeremy Ried Tarcher/Penguin. Finlay, Barbara. May 9, 2015. “The Unique Pain of Being Human.” New Scientist, Pp. 28, 29. Freedman, Samuel. October 18, 2014. “Stepping Off the Path and Redefining Faith.” New York Times, p. A-18. Furst, Alan. 2011. Spies of the Balkans. New York: Random House. Gallagher, Dorothy. June 12, 2011. “Sleeping with the Gestapo.” New York Times Book Review, p. 13. Gammell, Stephen. 1989 ed. (1980). Terrible Things: An Allegory of the Holocaust. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society. Gazzaniga, Michael S. 2008. Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. New York: Harper Collins. ______. April 7–8, 2012. “Evolution Revolution.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-5. Gelernter, David Hillel. 2009. Judaism: A Way of Being. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Gera, Vanessa. October 28, 2014. “Sharing Rich Story of Jewish Life in Poland.” The Press Democrat, p. A-2. Gersema, Emily. October 19, 2015. “Researchers Design a Study to Track Gratitude.” USC News. Pp. 5–6. Ghent, Janet Silver. October 22, 2015. “ ‘I Can Only Comprehend by Doing This’ “ Artist’s Newly Created Kinetic Sculpture a Moving Holocaust Memorial.” J – the Jewish News of Northern California. Pp. 25, 25A. Gopnik, Alison. September 12–13, 2015. “Personal Identity in our Morals, Not our Memory.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-2. Gregor, Neil. October 17–18, 2015. “The Myth of Two Germanys.” Wall Street Journal, p. C-7. [Book Review: Germany, by Neil Gregor]. Gura, Alex. February 16, 2011. “Holocaust Survivors to Share Stories.” Harvard-Westlake Chronicle, p. 1. Halberstam, Yetta and Judith Leventhal, eds. 2008. Small Miracles of the Holocaust: Extraordinary Coincidences of Faith, Hope, and Survival. Guildford, CN: The Lyons Press. Halkin, Hillel. July-August 2008. “How Not to Repair the World.” Commentary, 126, 1. Pp. 22–23. Heffernan, Margaret. 2011. Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril. New York: Walker & Co. Heilman, Uriel. 2011, December 15. “A Changing of the Guard Comes to Reform Movement.” [Philadelphia] Jewish Exponent. P. 22. [Rabbi Eric Yoffie is interviewed]. Herberg, Will, ed. 1965. The Writings of Martin Buber. New York: Meridian Books. Heschel, Rabbi Abraham Joshua. 1955. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ______. 1965. Who is God? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Herschthal, Eric. September 15, 2011. “Michael Arad: The Man Behind the Memorial.” [Philadelphia] Jewish Exponent, p. 16. 308

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Herzberger, Magda. 2006ed. The Waltz of the Shadows (Second Edition). Austin, Texas: 1st World Library. Hewlett, Maurice J. Letter; undated, 1945(?). Archives, Imperial War Museum, London (read on August 12, 2010). Hitchens, Christopher. 2010. Hitch 22: A Memoir. New York: Twelve. Hunt, Lynn. 2007. Inventing Human Rights. New York: W.W. Norton. Huyssen, Andreas. As cited in Ross, Alex. July 7 & 14, 2014. “Shattered Passage.” The New Yorker, p. 26. Jacobs, Jill. 2009. There Shall be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law and Tradition. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publications. Jacobs, Roz and Anna Huberman Jacobs, eds. 2012. Finding Kalman: A Boy in Six Million. New York: Abington Square Publishing. James, Ernest C. 1990. In Action in World War 11. Sacramento, CA: Unpublished Xeroxed Bound Manuscript. [Account of War Years in the 238th Engineer Combat Battalion]. Jepson, Barbara. January 17, 2012. “Still, the Music Played On.” Wall Street Journal, p. D-5 Jewish Labor Committee. 2002 ed. Passover Haggadah, p. 14. New York: Jewish Labor Committee. Johnson, Paul. 1983. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties. New York: Harper & Row. Kauffman, Jeffrey, ed. 2002. Loss of the Assumptive World: A Theory of Traumatic Loss. New York: Brunner-Routledge. Keltner, Dacher. 2009. Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. New York: W.W. Norton. Kenji, Yoshino. “The Ethicists.” Sunday New York Times, Magazine, April 19, 2015, p. 10. Kessler, Oren. November 9–10, 2013. “The Hope of 2,000 Years.” Wall Street Journal. p. C-7. [Book Review: My Promised Land, by Ari Shavit]. Killinger, Barbara. 2007. Integrity: Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason. Montreal, CAN: McGill-Queens University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara and Mayer Kirshenblatt. 2007. They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Kluger, Jeffrey. 2009. “What Makes Us Moral?” TIME: Your Brain: A User’s Guide. Des Moines, Iowa: TIME Books. Kohn, Alfie. 1990. The Brighter Side of Human Nature. New York: Basic Books. Konner, Melvin. 1982. The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ______. 2003. Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews. New York: Viking Compass. Korda, Michael. 2007. Ike: An American Hero. New York: Harper Collins. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita. In Smith, Lyn. 2005. Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust. New York: Carroll & Graf. 309

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312

Research Sites 2003–16 Camp Museums and Memorials

Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Germany Dachau, Germany Jasenovac Memorial Site and Memorial Museum, Croatia Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial, Austria Plaszow, Poland Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp Museum, Germany Sachsenhausen Memorial Site, Germany Salaspils Memorial, Latvia Theresienstadt (Terezin) Memorial, Czech Republic Westerbork, The Netherlands Overseas Holocaust Museums and Related Sites

Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Auckland War Memorial Museum, New Zealand Budapest House of Terror, Hungary Children’s Museum (Yad Layeled), Beit Lohamei Hagetaot, Western Galilee, Israel Deportation Museum, Paris Estonian Jewish Museum, Tallinn, Estonia Ghetto Fighters’ House: Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum, Western Galilee, Israel Holocaust Centre, Melbourne, Australia Holocaust Centre, Wellington, New Zealand Holocaust Memorial Center, Budapest, Hungary Holocaust Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Imperial War Museum, Holocaust Hall, London, England Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany Jewish Museum of Riga, Latvia 313

Stealth Altruism

Kyoto Museum of Human Rights, Kyoto, Japan Memorial de la Shoah Museum, Paris Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, Riga, Latvia Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, Canada Osaka International Peace Center, Osaka, Japan Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum, Riga, Latvia Sydney Holocaust Museum, Australia Topography of Terror, Berlin, Germany Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania Vilnius “Green House” Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel United States Holocaust Museums and Related Sites

Education Center (Orthodox), Brooklyn, NY Florida Holocaust Museum, St. Petersburg, FL Holocaust Center of Northern California, San Francisco, CA Holocaust Memorial Center, Farmington Hills, MI Holocaust Oral History Archive, Gratz College, Philadelphia, PA Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, Skokie, IL Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York City National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia, PA New Mexico Holocaust & Intolerance Museum, Albuquerque, NM Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Washington, DC

314

Index Adelsberger, Lucie (survivor) 11, 130, 167, 182 Alliance for Advancement of the Help Story (AAHS) 241–2, 244n25 altruism: Centre for Effective Altruism 241; community care 38–9; critics of 8–9; and empathy 6, 7, 13, 18, 92–3, 118, 208, 228; and motivation 5–6, 9, 13n14; new social inventions of 8; socialization for 145, 164, 170 Altruistic Impulse 5–7, 9, 18, 29, 39, 51, 77, 83, 94, 109 American Sociological Association (ASA): Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section 9 Amery, Jean (survivor): on torture xvii Auerbacher, Inge (survivor) 77 bad prisoner behavior 56n52, 88, 94, 105, 106n2, 214 Baeck, Rabbi Leo (survivor) 22, 79 Bak, Samuel (survivor) 193 Balas, Edith (survivor) 128 barracks: safe 19, 81, 113–14, 116–19, 146, 181 Bauer, Yehuda xiii, 27n34, 106, 144, 193, 245; on stealth altruism 10 Benario-Prestes, Olga 102, 140 Berenbaum, Michael 82 Bialowitz, Philip (survivor) xxiii, 105 Birenbaum, Halina (survivor) 100, 104 Bitton-Jackson, Livia (survivor) xv, 92 Bladd, Thomas Toivi (survivor) 125, 193 Brandes-Brilleslijer, Janny (survivor) 159, 168 Braunstein, Ernest (survivor) 11 Brown, Eva (survivor) 213 Buergenthal, Thomas (survivor) 121

Bund 92 bystander role 37, 140 “camp sisters” 177–9, 214 camps xxv–xxvii, 61–2, 69–70, 151; lessons from xxix, 57, 105 Camus, Albert 170 Carers ix, xiv, xviii, xxxii, 6, 11, 64, 139–40, 213, 225–6; and childhood influences 156, 164, 187–8; as peacemakers 168 Catholics 64, 194; and the Vatican 203n13 clergy xiv, 41n15, 44, 64–5 Cohen, Elie (survivor) 99 collaborators 99–101, 105 communists 34–5, 65, 129, 145–8, 153n25, 198 companions 143–5 comrades 143, 145–9, 153n18; antisemitism of 146 Comte, Auguste: on altruism 6, 12n4 concentration camps 66, 69, 72–3, 73n35n36; lessons from 58–9, 70, 149 criminals 99, 101–2, 153n18 cultural activities 79–81, 159; and women 180–1 Darwin, Charles: and altruism 6–8 Davidowicz, Lucy 28n45, 48, 51 death camps 49, 55n41, 72n32 Defiant Requiem Foundation 239 Deiches, Mussia (survivor) 167, 170 Dershowitz, Alan 41n12, 208 Des Pres, Terrence 1, 119 deterrents to stealth altruism 87, 95, 231–2; divisiveness 91; language 50 Dicker-Brandeis, Friedl 79 Donat, Alexander (survivor) 29, 58 Dworzecki, Meir (survivor) 232 315

Stealth Altruism Eck, Nathan (survivor) 20 Edvardson, Cordelia (survivor) 178 Elkes, Miriam (survivor) 183 evidence of stealth altruism xvi, xii, xxvi, 176, 229; see also research Falcone, Dan xvin14, xxvi Farkas, Helen (survivor) 177 Fenelon, Fania (survivor) 127 films: neglect of altruism in 221n29; stealth altruism in xii, 239 “Final Solution” 35, 49, 175 forest partisans 48–9, 109, 154n31 forgiveness 105, 202n8 Fox, Glenn: on survivor gratitude 241 Frank, Anne 159, 168, 208 Frankl, Viktor (survivor) 143; on optimism and altruism 242 Freedman, Samuel xxiv, 223n49 Freund, Edith Kramer (survivor) 82 Freund, John (survivor) 58 Friedlander, Saul xiii, xxxin5 friendships 11, 69, 77, 164, 179–80, 185n26n29, 189 Garbarz, Elie (survivor) 50, 68 Garbarz, Moshe (survivor) 50, 58, 68, 89, 109, 123, 165 Garncarz, Sala (survivor) 127 gas chambers x, 1, 65, 90, 118 Gelissen, Rena (survivor) 17, 113, 117, 128, 164, 182 Gentile Carers 137, 189–90, 193–9, 200–1, 202n2, 204n33n41, 206n65; Niels Ahlmark 198; Stefan Heyman 155; Ilse Hunger 199; Kathe Pick Leichter 140; Franz Leitner 197–8, 204n39; Lorenzo Perone 197, 202n1 ghettos: forbidden activities 2, 39, 43, 47, 227; and militant resistance 49; schools 2, 43, 77 Ginott, Haim (survivor) x Gittleman, Rabbi George 232, 236n40 Glaser, Suzy (survivor) 103 Glazer, Richard (survivor) 144 Gluck, Gemma LaGuardia (survivor) 176, 181 Goetz, Samuel (survivor) 94 Gorin, Michal 217, 227 Greenspan, Henry xii

316

Gross, Elly (survivor) 99, 167 Gryn, Hugo (survivor) 122, 143 Gutman, Yisrael (survivor) 24 Haas, Albert (survivor) 69 Halivni, Rabbi David Weiss 17 Halter, Roman (survivor) 123 Harfenes, Rabbi Yechezkel (survivor) 139, 145, 211 Hart-Moxon, Kitty (survivor) 164–6 Hausner, Gideon 139 Heimler, Eugene (survivor) 169, 198 Help Story x, xxv, 18–20, 69, 109 Hemelrijk, J. (survivor) 151, 196 Hermann, Emanuel 80 Herzberger, Magda (survivor) xxviii; see also Profile: Magda Herzberger Hilberg, Raul 65, 72n31 Hillel, Rabbi 151 Hillman, Laura (survivor) 126 Hitler, Adolph 29, 34–6, 61, 80 Holocaust 30, 207, 209n2, 237; lessons of the ix, xxv, 208, 227, 236n35, 245n35; and mass media xi, 215 Holocaust museums: exemplary 229; see also neglect of stealth altruism hologram (interactive 3-D Holocaust survivor): 208, 240–1 homosexuals 40n8, 180; see also samesex lovers Horror Story xxx, 50–1, 62, 68–9, 94–5; centrism xii, xv, xxiv, 228, 232, 242, 243n12; rejection of 208, 223n49 Hrdlicka, Alfred 215 Huberband, Rabbi Simon (survivor) 102 Humanistic Sociology 7 Hutman, Samara 230–1 imagery: Holocaust 151; negative 215–16, 220n7, 277n12, 278n14; positive 165 independents 58, 99, 103–4 informers 58, 99, 102–3, 110, 124, 240 Israel 216–17, 231 “iWitness” Program xxvi Jewish holidays xxiv, 2, 19–22, 79, 116–17, 133–4, 181, 237 Jewish Press Agency (JPA) 165 Jewish star (Judenstern, Star of David, Yellow Star) 36, 44, 109, 130, 182

Index JRJ (Action Committee for the Recognition of Jewish Rescuers) 225–6, 233 Judaic altruistic tenets 5, 18, 24, 39, 109, 164, 169 Judaism 242 Judd, Lillian (survivor) 94, 178 Judenrat 45; critics of 54n33; defense of 48, 105 K-12 teachers xiv, xxiv, 214 Kafka, Franz 202 Kagan, Raya (survivor) 179 Kanada 101, 157, 159, 182 Kaplan, Chaim 46–7 Kapos 66, 100–2, 105, 114; as Carers 151, 177, 199 Kassow, Samuel 227 Katz, Joseph (survivor) 201 Kent, Roman (survivor) 213 Ketner, Dacher 7 kiddush hahayyim 19–20, 22 kiddush hashem 19 kin altruism 7 Klein, Gerda Weissman (survivor) 169 Kluger, Ruth (survivor) ix–x, xxvii, 48, 88, 114, 151 Korkus, Vera (survivor) 129 Kristallnacht 36–8, 198 Laks, Syzmon (survivor) 57, 213 Landau, Rabbi Yechezkel Shraga (survivor) 20 Langer, Lawrence xiii, 1 Lantos, Tom (survivor) 44, 52n11 Lanzmann, Claude 105, 215 Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita (survivor) 125, 240; see also hologram Lazerson, Tamarah (survivor) 2 Leiter, Robert 214 Levi, Primo (survivor) xxix, 57, 105, 144; on death camps 65; on God 23 Levin, Meyer 212 Levy-Haas, Hanna (survivor) 91, 104 Lewinska, Pelagia (survivor) 11, 204n41 Lewis, Helen (survivor) 41, 44, 104, 199; on friendship 145 Life magazine photos xi Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust (LAMOTH) 230–231; see also Righteous Conversations Project

Lubling, Yoram 237 Lustig, Arnost (survivor) xxiv, 11, 92, 123, 128, 194, 196 Lyon Resistance Museum (France) 229 Maimonides 19, 25 mandatory Holocaust curriculum: Israel 213, 227–8; United States 227 medical care 47, 82, 114, 117–18, 139, 177; limitations of 63, 158 Meisels, Leslie (survivor) 128 memorialization: lessons from xiv–xv, 207, 209n6 Mengele, Joseph 57, 157, 237 menschen 144, 150–1 Mermelstein, Mel (survivor) 195, 201 Michel, Ernest (survivor) 89 militants 105, 113, 139, 143, 148–150, 153–5, 181 Mishkan T'filah 225 Mishnah 2 Mo, Is (survivor) 88, 178 Mohnblum, Abe (survivor) 93 moral theory 2 Mozes, Eugene 187 Mulisch, George (survivor) 59 Murmelstein, Benjamin (survivor) 105 Muselmänner (“the walking dead”) xxv, 58, 99, 104–5, 108n26, 124, 147, 167 National Jewish Theatre Foundation 239 Nazism 30, 37, 59 neglect of stealth altruism 36; in American culture xii, 217–18; in the arts 214–16, 221n28; Holocaust “fatigue” xxiv; in Israeli culture 216–17, 222n34; and “March of the Living” 217; and museums 211, 218–19, 221n27, 222n41, 228, 223n43n47, 238–9; and the public 11, 212–13; reforms of xii, xiv, 209n6, 217, 225–8, 237–8; and scholars 28n45, 214, 221n24; sources of 211; and Yom HaShoah 216; see also Horror Story centrism Neurath, Paul Martin (survivor) 146, 152n3 New Dimensions in Technology (NDT) see hologram Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara (survivor) 91, 94 Nuremberg Laws 36, 38

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Stealth Altruism Obama, President Barak 208 observant Jews 18–22, 43, 64, 143, 150–1 Olsson, Eva (survivor) 94 Opatowski, Felix (survivor) 57 Opfermann, Charlotte (survivor) 76, 81, 124–5 Oral History Interview Guidelines (USHMM) 238 Orenstein, Henry (survivor) 69, 146, 149, 163 “organize” (steal) 21, 82, 103, 157, 182 Orthodox Jews 18–23, 25n4, 26n16, 151, 218–19; and assimilation 23; criticism of 27n34 Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies: on stealth altruism 214 Paldiel, Mordecai 197–8, 202, 226, 237 Perl, Gisella (survivor) 57, 59, 117, 120n15, 157 Pechersky, Sara (survivor) 149 Perel, Manya Frydman (survivor) xv personality traits of Carers 109, 164, 170, 183; adaptability 66, 166; ethicality 168–9; resiliency 109, 166–8; self-esteem 169–170; sociability 165–6 pikuach nefesh 22 “Pinchas” see hologram Plotkin, Diane 161 Polansky, Anthony 39 Popescu, Petra (survivor) 165, 175 Positve Psychology 228 Postmantier, Harry (survivor) 93 POWs 68, 189–90, 197 Rabbinical cooperation 22–3, 30, 39, 44–5 rachmones 18 Rajchman, Chil (survivor) 23 Rammerstorfer, Bernard xxvi Rapoport, Nathan 215 Razon, Jacques (survivor) 167 reciprocal altruism 7, 152n17, 164 Reich, Marcus (survivor) 90 Reinhartz, Henia (survivor) 69 Remember Us Project (RUP) 230–1, 234n24; and George Calmenson 229–31 research 237; limitations of xiii, xvii, xxviii–xxix, xxxiin17, xxxiiin24n27n29, 221n28; methodology xi–xiii, xvin14, xxv, 218, 313–4 318

resistance xv, 95, 110, 128–30, 148; revolts 49, 64, 111n3, 148–9; unarmed 10, 47, 64, 81, 149 revenge 101–2, 148 Rich, Betty xxvi, 199 “Righteous Among the Nations” 173, 193, 202, 225 Righteous Conversations Project (LAMOTH) 235n29 Righteous Gentile Project (Yad Vashem) 197 Roet, Haim (survivor) 233n2, 244n25; see also JRJ Rom-Eiseman, Flora (survivor) 170, 181 Rooney, Andy 212, 220n10 Rosenfeld, Alvin x, xxiv, xxxiin15 Rosensaft, Hadassah (survivor) 66, 139, 160–2, 162n22 Roth, Irving (survivor) 50 Rothstein, Edward 40n5, 218, 223n42 Rotschild, Steve (survivor) 80 Rozett, Robert 109 Rubin, Agi (survivor) 118, 128, 166, 169, 170 Rudavsky, Joseph 51, 163 Ruzickova, Zuzana 80 Saidel, Rochelle 176, 185n29 Salton, George Lucius (survivor) 144, 168, 193–4 same-sex lovers 65, 103, 179–80 Sauvage, Pierre (survivor) xi, xxvii school curricula xi Schulweis, Rabbi Harold M. 232 Schwalbova, Margita (survivor) 177 secular humanism 23 Segal, George 215–16 self+esteem x, 87, 92–3; see also survivability Sendyk, Helen (survivor) 5, 179, 194 sexual abuse 100, 184n11 “Shapers of the Memory” xiv, 11, 228; see also neglect of stealth altruism Shepard, Ben 69 Shoah Foundation (Institute) xxxiiin24 Shomrei Torah 229, 234n21 Skorr, Henry (survivor) xii slave labor camps 48, 67–9, 74n52, 76 slave laborers 39, 102, 189, 175–7 Smith, Lyn xxv–xxvi, 110 Socialists 34–5, 65, 114, 129, 145–6, 148

Index Sonderkommando squads 107n12, 125–6, 149, 150 Sontag, Susan 238–9 Sorell, Dora Apsan (survivor) 88, 122, 178, 182, 197, 202n8, 238 Spiegelman, Art 207 Spinoza 11, 19 stealth altruism xxiii, 109–10, 237; conditions for xiii, xv, 9–10, 18–20, 24, 39, 44–5, 51, 91, 109, 146; and cultural life 81, 116; incidents of xxv–xxvii; lessons of ix, xiv, 39, 226, 232, 238 Sternberg, Alexandra (survivor) 200 Sterner, Willie (survivor) 58 Stransky, Pavel (survivor) 114 Stessel, Zahava Szasz (survivor) 24 The Story Project 238 Strum, Peter 115 substitute mothers 177–8 Suedfeld, Peter 214 suffering xxiv, xxvi, 95, 214; as God's punishment 23 survivability 1, 67, 187; and assimilation 18, 33, 35, 93; and callousness 93–94; and companionship 144–6, 151, 165, 226; and depression 165, 188–9; and friendships 11, 67, 88, 145, 152n8; and gender 165, 171n12; and gifts 11, 182; and humor 69, 116, 181; and ideology 145; and Judaism 26n16n17, 28n45, 51, 92; and relationships 10, 92, 144, 152n10, 164, 177; and self-esteem 92–3, 183, 187; and social class 91–2; and treatment of Jews 62; see also samesex lovers “Survival of the Kindest” 7–8, 12n8; see also Darwin Sydney Jewish Museum 229 Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research 214 teaching aids 235n30, 239, 241 Tec, Nechama (survivor) xiii–iv, 145 theodicy 23, 27n40 Theresienstadt: and culture 77–9, 83n16, 84n29

thieves 99, 101–3, 115, 124, 148, 240 Tibich, Mala (survivor) 232 Tierhaus (survivor) 150 Tikkun Olam 2, 3n6, 18, 38, 164, 231 Todorov, Tzvetan xiii, 202n2 Torah xxiv, 2, 17–8, 23, 37, 43, 218–9 Transit Camp 49, 55n41, 62–64, 76–77, 91 Trszynska-Frederick, Luba (survivor) 139, 162n21 Ullman, Viktor 80 UNESCO 242 Unger, Karl 144 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) 160, 218, 223n44, 238 Untermenschen 36, 62, 121, 184n11 upstander role xxv, 39, 140 Warsaw Ghetto 24, 43, 46–7, 49, 51, 54n33, 216 Weinberg, Werner (survivor) xxiv Weiss, Esther (survivor) 175 Weisstruch, Blima (survivor) 177, 196 Weitzmann, Chaim 37 Wells, Leon (survivor) 89, 117–18, 150, 200, 213 Wiesel, Elie (survivor) xviiin29, xxix, xxxin8, 23, 61, 110, 122, 129, 163, 202, 217–18 Wisse, Ruth (survivor) 33, 223n49 Wolkowitz, David 217 Women: Jewish xxxiiin30, 21, 184n8n11 Yad Layeled (Israel's Children's Museum) 229 Yad Tomech (Helping Hand) 82 Yad Vashem 10, 193, 202, 211, 214–5, 222n41, 225–6, 228–9, 233n6 Yahil, Leni 110 Yom HaShoah (Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism) xii, xxiv, 207, 216–17, 226–7, 239 Younglove, William xii, 245n29 Zinn-Collis, Zoltin (survivor) 50 Zionists 20, 23, 42n24, 91–2, 145, 148, 222n34

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