The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw

The Afterlife of the Revolt

Avinoam Patt

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780814345177
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du peuple juif

The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt by Avinoam J. Patt analyzes how the heroic saga of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was mythologized in a way that captured the attention of Jews around the world, allowing them to imagine what it might have been like to be there, engaged in the struggle against the Nazi oppressor. The timing of the uprising, coinciding with the transition to memorialization and mourning, solidified the event as a date to remember both the heroes and the martyrs of Warsaw, and of European Jewry more broadly. The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw includes nine chapters. Chapter 1 includes a brief history of Warsaw from 1939 to 1943, including the creation of the ghetto and the development of the Jewish underground. Chapter 2 examines how the uprising was reported, interpreted, and commemorated in the first year after the revolt. Chapter 3 concerns the desire for first-person accounts of the fighters. Chapter 4 examines the ways the uprising was seized upon by Jewish communities around the world as evidence that Jews had joined the struggle against fascism and utilized as a prism for memorializing the destruction of European Jewry. Chapter 5 analyzes how memory of the uprising was mobilized by the Zionist movement, even as it debated how to best incorporate the doomed struggle of Warsaw's Jews into the Zionist narrative.Chapter 6 explores the aftermath of the war as survivors struggled to come to terms with the devastation around them. Chapter 7 studies how the testimonies of three surviving ghetto fighters present a fascinating case to examine the interaction between memory, testimony, politics, and history. Chapter 8 analyzes literary and artistic works, including Jacob Pat's Ash un Fayer, Marie Syrkin, Blessed is the Match, and Natan Rapoport's Monument to the Ghetto Fighters, among others. As this book demonstrates, the revolt itself, while described as a "revolution in Jewish history, " did little to change the existing modes for Jewish understanding of events. Students and scholars of modern Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and European studies will find great value in this detail-oriented study.

1

The Centrality of Warsaw

Warsaw was not the first ghetto to revolt but it would become the most famous case of Jewish resistance during the war, and in some ways would come to obscure almost every other case of armed revolt and resistance, despite the efforts of the surviving ghetto fighters themselves to highlight resistance elsewhere. As events unfolded in Warsaw, the ways in which they were reported, perceived, and understood at the time would influence subsequent historical writing on the revolt. In order to understand how this process worked, it is necessary to examine the factors leading to the development of armed resistance in Warsaw and the ways in which information was able to travel from Warsaw, through occupied Poland, to the wider world.

What was it about Warsaw that captured the attention of the Jewish world?

In 1939, Warsaw was the second largest Jewish city in the world; only New York had a larger Jewish population at the time. Rapid industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century helped turn Warsaw into a major Jewish center, making it the largest Jewish city in Europe (Warsaw’s population of 337,000 Jews in 1914 was equal to the Jewish population of France).1 Warsaw became the capital of an independent Poland after World War I, and Jews from parts of the newly created Poland that had formerly been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire (like Galicia) or the Russian empire streamed toward the new capital, eager to partake in the economic, educational, and political opportunities it offered. As the population of Warsaw grew in the interwar period, so did its Jewish population, although the number of Jews as a percentage of the overall population declined (by 1938, the 368,394 Jews in Warsaw constituted 29.1 percent of the total population of 1.265 million).2 Following emancipation in the nineteenth century and the removal of legal restrictions on Jews in Congress Poland in 1862, Jews were allowed to live wherever they wished in Warsaw, but the northwestern section of the city, especially Muranów, became the cultural, economic, social, and religious center of Jewish life. In 1938, Jews comprised no less than 90.5 percent of all inhabitants in the Muranów district alone.3 While Jews were increasingly dispersed around the city, the center of Jewish Warsaw remained around the Nalewki, a hectic thoroughfare awash with shouting peddlers, artisans, the unemployed, and those employed in legal and illegal ways.

Over the course of the 1930s, and especially after the death of Marshall Pilsudski in May 1935, the situation of the Jews in Poland (and of Jewish Warsaw) deteriorated, as public expressions of hostility against Jews increased, along with calls for the emigration of Jews from Poland, the establishment of separate seating for Jews (ghetto benches) in the universities, and a general increase in violence against Jews. At the same time, as prospects for migration to Palestine decreased with the growing “Arab revolt” after 1936, the political influence of Zionist parties declined and the Bund (along with the more radical right-wing Revisionist Zionists and the Communists) enjoyed greater popularity among the Jewish population of Warsaw.

The Bund’s platform, which called for a culturally autonomous Jewish people living in a socialist state, increasingly focused on specifically Jewish issues in the interwar period, as the Bund played a central role in organizing Jewish trade unions, representing Jews professionally as workers and nationally as Jews. The Bund came to see itself as representing the “Jewish masses” more broadly and enjoyed most of its electoral success on the local level, winning seventeen of the twenty city council seats taken by members of Jewish parties in the Warsaw municipal elections of 1938; in December 1938 it won fourteen seats (61.7 percent of the Jewish vote), as opposed to five seats for the Jewish National Bloc, which included both Zionists and Agudas Yisroel, and one for the Democratic Zionists.4 Ideologically, the Bund was completely opposed to Zionism, which its leaders understood as representing only the interests of “bourgeois” Jews and offering false promises to solve Jewish problems “there” (in Palestine) not “here” (in Eastern Europe), which Jews had made their home for centuries. In general, the Bund refused to collaborate with any of the Zionist parties (with the exception of the socialist Left Poalei Zion); as will be seen, such internal divisions within the Jewish community, between political parties and youth movements, would have implications for the development of the Jewish underground during the war. During the war, however, the Bund continued to maintain connections to the Polish government-in-exile, as well as to party leaders in New York, and Bund reports smuggled out of Warsaw would be an important factor in the spread of information about the war in Poland and development of the Final Solution.5

From the Outbreak of War to Creation of the Ghetto in Warsaw

In August 1939, just before the outbreak of the war, the 375,000 Jews in Warsaw made up approximately 30 percent of the city’s total population. While some Jews in Poland assumed that events in Germany were still distant, more and more Jews in Warsaw and throughout Poland anxiously tracked developments in the German Reich over the summer of 1939, as it became increasingly clear war was likely to break out. With the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939, Jews and non-Jews alike suffered from the indiscriminate bombing of the Luftwaffe. A JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) report in Warsaw estimated twenty thousand Jews were killed in the first month of the war, with seven thousand Jews killed in Warsaw alone in September 1939.6 In the first weeks of the war, Warsaw’s Jewish population fluctuated as a result of mobilization, flight to the East, and the arrival of refugees fleeing the advancing German army; by early 1940, the Jewish population of Warsaw swelled to some four hundred thousand as Jews from areas annexed to the Reich were deported to the Generalgouvernement, and refugees crowded into Warsaw.7 This only further compounded the scarcity of housing, food, and medical supplies in the city.

Adam Czerniakow, who had served as deputy chair of the Jewish community before the war, was appointed head of the Jewish community by the mayor of Warsaw, Stefan Starzynski, on September 23. He would subsequently be named head of the Warsaw Jewish Council (Judenrat) under the Nazis. At the beginning of the war in September 1939 most of the official Polish Jewish leadership fled east from Warsaw and the other major cities of Poland, bound for Vilna, the Soviet Union, or abroad, while others were captured, imprisoned, and executed. Among the leaders who fled at the beginning of the war were the leaders of all of the major Jewish political parties and movements in Poland: from the General Zionists, Moshe Kleinbaum (Sneh), Apolinary Hartglas, and Moshe Kerner; from the Bund, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter; from Poalei Zion Z.S., Anshel Reiss and Abraham Bialopolski; from Mizrachi, Zerah Warhaftig and Aaron Weiss; from Left Poalei Zion, Yitzhak Leib and Nathan Buksbaum; from Agudat Israel, Yitzhak Meir Levin; and from Betar and the Revisionist party, Menachem Begin.8 The flight of the leadership during the first week of the war left Warsaw without most of its political leadership (from across the political spectrum) and most directors of Jewish relief organizations.9

After the start of the war, however, a number of Zionist youth leaders who had managed to flee to the east made the decision to return to occupied Poland. This was the case among the youth movement leadership of Warsaw, many of whom had fled to Vilna in order to escape the Nazi invasion in September 1939. The leaders of Hashomer Hatzair (including Haim Holtz, Zelig Geyer, Yosef Shamir, Yitzhak Zalmanson, and Tosia Altman) decided that “as long as there is a Jewish community in Poland, the movement must be there.”10 Taking refuge in Vilna at the start of the war (Vilna would fall under German occupation after June 1941), movements like Hashomer Hatzair shifted their focus from solely training an elite cadre of movement members for aliyah (emigration) to the Land of Israel, to a broader effort to represent the wider Jewish public in the struggle against Nazism, and to an ideological position that would enable them to support the Soviet Union in this struggle.11 The Hashomer Hatzair movement leadership sent emissaries from Vilna back to the occupied zone of Poland, first sending Tosia Altman, later to be followed by Yosef Kaplan, Mordecai Anielewicz, and Josef Kaplan.12 Likewise, the Dror movement decided at a secret conference in L’vov on December 31, 1939, to send Zivia Lubetkin to Warsaw; she was followed several months later by Yitzhak Zuckerman.13 While much of the leadership of the Bund fled Warsaw, Abrasha (Abraham) Blum (1905–43) was one of the few Bund leaders who remained in Warsaw and would eventually become a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) and one of the leading figures in the revolt. As the Bund’s veteran leadership left Warsaw, younger leaders like Abrasha Blum, who were members of the Tsukunft youth movement, helped prevent the complete disintegration of the party.

The youth movement leaders who returned to Warsaw were motivated by a sense of responsibility as local leaders, not only to their young chanichim (movement trainees) but to the Jewish community as a whole. These youth movement leaders (like Zionists Mordechai Anielewicz, Zivia Lubetkin, Yitzhak Zuckerman, Josef Kaplan, Frumka Plotnicka, Tosia Altman, and Shmuel Breslaw; along with Abrasha Blum, Marek Edelman, Leon Feiner, and other members of the Bund) would play a key role in the formation of the ghetto underground, and eventually, the Jewish Fighting Organization, or ŻOB. On the other hand, it was a group of Jewish military officers who had participated in the defense of Poland in September 1939, including Kalman Mendelson, a Revisionist and former officer in the Polish Army, Henryk Lipszyc-Lipiński, and Szymon Białoskóra (Białoskórnik), who would form the core nucleus from which developed the Revisionist Zionist fighting organization, the ŻZW. Later, along with Leon Rodal, members of Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, including Peretz Lasker and Pawel Frenkel, joined and helped to further organize the group.14

By September 28, 1939, the siege of Warsaw was over, with fully one quarter of the city’s buildings having been destroyed, and as many as fifty thousand citizens killed or injured.15 As the Wehrmacht entered the city and organized soup lines for the starving population, Jews quickly experienced the changing dynamics of Polish society under German occupation. In addition to the rapid process of social isolation and extreme persecution that quickly unfolded in Warsaw and throughout occupied Poland, the official establishment of the Generalgouvernement, which replaced the German military administration under the leadership of Hans Frank, soon subjected Jews to special decrees that limited them to two thousand zlotys in cash, blocked their access to bank accounts, limited Jewish use of trains and public transport, instituted the “aryanization” of Jewish businesses, and subjected Jews between the ages of fourteen and sixty to random seizure for forced labor.16 By December 1, 1939, Hans Frank had decreed that all Jews over the age of ten residing in the Generalgouvernement must wear white armbands with a Star of David on the right sleeve of their clothing.17

Szmuel Zygielbojm, the Bundist leader and member of the first Warsaw Judenrat (Jewish council) (before his escape from Poland in February 1940, first to France, then New York, and finally London), detailed the efforts of the Judenrat to intervene and prevent random kidnappings of Jews for forced labor in the fall of 1939 as Jews young and old were seized in the streets to perform hard labor, enduring terrible torture in the process:

The Warsaw Jewish Community approached the Gestapo with a proposal: if the German occupation authorities need people for labor, they should obtain them in an organized fashion; but the kidnapping of people in the street must stop. . . . From that time (November 1939) the Warsaw Jewish Community did, indeed, provide two thousand Jews a day for labor service. But the kidnappings of Jews from the streets did not stop.18

The Jewish council, which had sought to end the indignity and harassment of random kidnappings, had now obligated itself to provide two thousand workers for the Germans daily, even as random seizures continued. For the Jewish public in Warsaw, this seemed to make the Judenrat complicit in German policy, eventually opening a space for an alternative underground leadership in Jewish Warsaw to emerge as the Nazi policy of persecution continued and increased.

Following the occupation of Warsaw, German military leaders discussed the idea of creating a ghetto in Warsaw, although the idea was initially shelved for economic reasons, partly in response to petitions from Jewish leaders in the city, who argued that imprisoning the Jewish population in a ghetto would lead to the rapid spread of disease. On March 27, 1940, however, the Warsaw Judenrat received orders to begin the construction of walls around a “plague-infected area” in the Jewish residential section of Warsaw, and, as noted by Czerniaków in his diary, on April 13, 1940, the Jews of Warsaw were even ordered to pay to build their own ghetto walls.19 By the beginning of June at least twenty sections of the wall had been erected and in August 1940, German authorities issued an official announcement that the city would be divided into German, Polish, and Jewish quarters.20

On Yom Kippur 1940 (October 12), the Jews of Warsaw were informed by announcements made over street megaphones that all Jews in the city would be required to move into the ghetto by the end of the month.21 As Chaim Kaplan put it in his diary, the Jews of Warsaw were gradually being imprisoned in their own dungeon, walls rising before their very eyes.

In all the thoroughfares leading to the Aryan quarters, high walls are being erected. . . . Before our eyes a dungeon is being built in which half a million men, women, and children will be imprisoned, no one knows for how long. (November 10, 1940) What we dreaded most has come to us. . . . We went to bed in the “Jewish quarter,” and the next morning we awoke in a closed Jewish ghetto, a ghetto in every detail. (November 17, 1940)22

On November 15, 1940, German authorities ordered the Warsaw ghetto in the Generalgouvernement sealed off, creating the largest ghetto in both area and population in Poland. Over 350,000 Jews, approximately 30...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Warsaw, A Place in Jewish History
• 1. The Centrality of Warsaw
• 2. News about the Destruction of European Jewry and the Uprising during WWII
• 3. The Surviving Ghetto Fighters Write the First Draft of a History of the Revolt
• 4. The First Anniversary of the Revolt
• 5. Crafting a Zionist Narrative of the Revolt
• 6. The Place of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising among the Surviving Population in Europe
• 7. The First Published Testimonies of the Surviving Ghetto Fighters
• 8. Literary and Artistic Representations before the Fifth Anniversary of the Revolt
• 9. Warsaw in Israel and America, 1948–53
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author