Warning: This is a very good book, but it has tons of anecdotes
that are extremely disturbing. I’ll quote some here so just be ready. Overall,
I would say that this is a hugely important book because of the detail it goes
into in exposing the crimes committed. However, it is nearly 1,000 pages long
and is absolutely brutal to read.
Where does our information about the Holocaust come from?
The
reason we have proof that the Holocaust occurred, targeted the Jewish people,
and succeeded in robbing and killing six million of them (and 2.5 million
Russian prisoners of war) is thanks to witness accounts (German, Jewish, Pole,
Ukrainian, American, Russian, and more), documents preserved by the Germans,
documents that were hidden by Jews such as time capsules, diaries, and journals,
forensic evidence of where bodies were buried and burned in pits, and physical
evidence such as the actual trains, ghettos, and camps. I would like to read
more about holocaust denial, but this book makes it clear how insane it is to
deny the historical existence of the Holocaust. It provides names, dates, sources,
and all sorts of material that corroborate stories, often told from the Nazi point
of view as well.
The story
The Nazis
gained true power in 1932, when they won a large number of seats in the German
legislature, the Reichstag. Hitler refused to join a coalition unless he was
made Chancellor and no government was formed. Three months later, the Nazis
lost seats in another election, and they were outnumbered by Socialists and
Communists, who would not unite. Instead, the right (Nazis) and center united
and Hitler became Chancellor.
By 1933,
small but significant numbers of Jews began to leave Germany, with over 5,000
going to British Palestine and a further thirty thousand going to Western
Europe and the USA. In Palestine, it coincided with riots in which Arabs
attacked public buildings in Nablus, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, as Jews had been
steadily growing as a portion of the population for several decades. There was
a strong connection to the rioting, as Nazis were broadcasting anti-Semitic
propaganda to the Arab world. With the Arabs incensed against Jews, Britain
restricted Jewish immigration, likely costing thousands if not far more lives
in the Holocaust. But at least Britain accepted more than ten thousand Jewish
children into the United Kingdom, whereas the United States admitted only 500.
A major tragedy of the Holocaust is that it stemmed from not only a German
desire to rid themselves of Jews, but that no other country would take them.
In
Germany, Jews were robbed, lynched, and otherwise wronged with impunity
throughout the Nazi years, leading to hundreds of Jewish deaths. These times
would end up looking like a golden age by 1944. For example, many know about
Kristallnacht, the night when Nazis and German people broke into and looted
Jewish stores and homes (“Kristallnacht” for all the broken glass). However,
most probably don’t know that the Jews, not the German criminals, were then
fined for the damage, and every Jew had 20% of his/her property confiscated.
The
Holocaust ramped up with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the
Soviet Union. Until that point, 30,000 Jews had been murdered in 21 months, but
during the worst years of the Holocaust, the Nazis would hit that number every
few days. Within just five weeks of the German invasion, they had killed more
Jews than in the previous eight years of Nazi rule thanks to “a remote region,
the cover of an advancing army, vast distances, local collaborators, and an
intensified will to destroy.” The SS leaders did so with tremendous amounts of
help from local Eastern European gentiles. They formed the Einsatzgruppen, mobile death squads that rounded up and slaughtered
Jews all over the German-occupied territories as far as the Caucasus Mountains.
A major theme in the book is how the men who committed these slaughters were
able to do so, and often it was thanks to alcohol. Most people cannot commit
these atrocities, but the Nazis would get each other and their collaborators
drunk and with some group pressuring, they were able to kill. After killing one
person and then a dozen more, each murder is easier.
Why
could Jews not resist and fight back against the Nazis? They did. However, they
were confronting a truly difficult situation. The Jews were largely unarmed,
unable to communicate between ghettos due to Nazi interference, unable to
comprehend that such horrific crimes could be committed, and found very little
support from outside forces, who were either collaborating with the Nazis or
under tremendous pressure themselves from the Third Reich. All of these
combined to create hell. No one could have believed that men would smash babies’
heads against walls, pipe car fumes into trucks full of people, and bury and
burn men, women, and children alive. They also rarely heard that this was
happening because Nazis cut off all communication. Therefore, people believed
the Nazis when they said they were sending people to work, especially the Western
European Jews, who were especially targeted with deceptions. They even believed
the Nazis when they saw the smokestacks, really burning human flesh, and
believed they were bakeries. Sometimes, on slow days, the SS would pull people out
of the cattle cars filled with living, dead, and dying, acting as if it was all
some mistake, apologizing, and leading them to the gas chambers that they lied
and said were showers. Lilli Kopecky, a Slovakian survivor of Auschwitz,
recalled that “This is the greatest strength of the whole crime, its
unbelievability.” With all this in mind, it makes sense that an unarmed people would
not resist, yet many did.
Often,
resistance would be an escape from the ghetto. Realizing that their ghettos
would be liquidated, many Jews created a diversion, like a fire, and all ran at
once. Usually a minority would reach the forest and survive for some time
longer, and a smaller minority of them would survive the war. There were also
individual acts of resistance and heroism. A male nurse, Z. Stein, refused to
leave his sick patients and he was killed with them. In Nieswicz, Jewish girls
Rakhil Kagan and Liya Dukor stole and reassembled machine gun parts and taught
the young men how to use them. When the Nazis came for the Jews of the ghetto,
the head of the Jewish Council announced, “No! There will be no selection! If
some are to live, then all must; if not, we shall defend ourselves!” The Jews
opened fire and leapt at the Nazis with knives and bottles. The Jews set fire
to their houses and small groups burst forth in escape.
There
were also non-violent acts of resistance, such as the preserving of diaries and
memories of what was happening, to give evidence for others to condemn the
Nazis. In the Warsaw ghetto a group called the Ringelblum circle buried archives
that they kept of all the deaths, tortures, robberies, and crimes committed by
the Nazis in the ghetto, and while they did not survive, the milk cans
containing their evidence did, and that record of the destruction of the Polish
Jewry is crucial to our history of the Holocaust. Below is an excerpt of just
some of the acts of resistance in just one region:
In the Volhynia, August 1942 saw
the massacre of more than sixty thousand Jews. It also saw the escape of tens
of thousands to the woods. At Kostopol, on August 24, a Jew, Gedalia Braier,
called upon his fellow Jews to run. All seven hundred ran. But less than ten
survived the war. At Rokitno, where sixteen hundred Jews were assembled on
August 26, surrounded by armed Ukrainians, a Jewish woman called out, ‘Jews! We
are done for! Run! Save yourselves!’ and more than seven hundred managed to
reach the woods. At Sarny, where fourteen thousand Volhynian Jews were
assembled on August 28, two Jews, one a carpenter with his axe, the other,
Josef Gendelman, a tinsmith with his tin-cutters, broke through the fence
surrounding the ghetto and led a mass escape. Three thousand Jews reached the
gap in the fence, and sought to push their way through it. But the Ukrainians
were armed with machine guns, and two and a half thousand Jews were shot down
at the fence. Five hundred escaped, but many of these were killed on their way
to the woods, and only a hundred survived the war and its two more years of
privation, manhunts, and frequent local hostility.
On August 25, when a group of Jews
was taken from the town of Zofjowka, under guard, to dig burial pits, one of
their number, Moshe-Yossel Schwartz, realising what was intended, urged his
fellow Jews to attack their guards. They did so, using their spades to crush
the heads of one of the German policemen and two of the Ukrainians. They then
fled. But on the way to the woods, Schwartz was shot and killed.
Elsewhere in the Volhynia,
individual Jews sought to challenge the German power. In Szumsk, two young
women attacked the chief of the police, ‘choking him and biting him until they
were shot to death’. In Turzysk, a young man, Berish Segal, stole a gun, hit a
German policeman in the face with it, but was shot by other policemen.
The Jews who reached the Volhynian
woods and formed small partisan bands did so six months before the arrival of
Soviet partisans from White Russia. When the Soviet partisans came, Jews helped
them, and were protected by them. But in the interval, the death toll was high.
Of a group of a hundred Jewish partisans and escaped Soviet prisoners-of-war
near Radziwillow, only one, the platoon commander, Yechiel Prochownik,
survived. Another of the Jewish partisan leaders, Moshe Gildenmann, began his
anti-German activities with ten men and a single knife. A year later, in the
marshes north of Zhitomir, Gildenmann’s group was to guide to safety a Russian
division surrounded by the Germans.
Life was not much easier in a partisan group. The Jews were
generally unarmed or very lightly armed and other partisan groups or escaped Soviet
prisoners of war would rob them, assault them, and rape the women. Zipora Koren
who survived in the forests “tells of how Russian partisans bound an old woman,
tied her to a tree, and tortured her, because she refused to reveal the hiding
place of her daughter whom they schemed to rape.” On the other hand, the Polish
underground organization, Home Army, gave 22 rifles to the Jews in anticipation
of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. These stories of resistance show the remarkable
will of the human spirit to survive, and if not to survive, to take vengeance
on their oppressor. They also reflect the conflicting currents of human nature
that occurred on a small level among individual gentiles who chose to rescue/help
or denounce Jews- the two conflicting currents of human nature.
I would
say there are three themes told through statistical data and individual stories
in the book, covering the failure of Jews to escape Europe in time, the gentile
reaction to Jewish persecution (and their own oppression at Nazi hands), and the
culture of the Jewish people in Europe that was lost. The failure of Jews to escape
from Europe was due to the physical Jewish presence like Synagogues and holy
sites that made Jews want to stay, family and social linkages that made leaving
hard, the feeling that they could “weather the storm,” as had been done in the
past, and the absence of places to go to. Almost no country would take the Jews
in, even in the late 1930’s, when conferences were being held on the Jewish
situation in Germany and Jews were attempting to illegally enter the United States
and British Palestine. The book goes in depth into the gentile reactions to
persecution. It covers stories that are incredibly heart warming and others
that are incredibly chilling, as gentiles make the decision to hide and protect
Jews or to denounce and kill them. So much of it seems like luck, and the largest
sector of the population did very little on any side, hence siding with the
oppressor. It seems like the next largest group is those who denounced, and the
smallest is those who protected the Jews. It was especially disturbing to read
about the pogroms in Poland after the war, when more Jews were slaughtered, and
the rapes carried out by Russian soldiers against the Jewish women that they “rescued.”
Third, the book addresses the massive amount of culture that was lost in the
Holocaust. The Jewish language, Yiddish was nearly wiped off the map, as well
as all the Jewish architecture and physical evidence of our society. The book
points out that life was very different for “Aryan” Poles. Most of them never
even had to leave their homes. Jews could not even return to their homes for
fear of murder by their Polish neighbors, and even if they could there was no single
community where there were enough Jews to start the Jewish community over. In
addition, all the Jewish buildings, homes and synagogues, were burned to the
ground while gentile buildings were left standing.
Many
more Jews died after liberation. They continued to be murdered without any
punishment and many continued to starve at astounding rates due to the logistical
difficulties of delivering food to them and the medical difficulties of
bringing an adult back from 70 pounds to full health. Jews were regularly
eating dirty table scraps and boiled eggs with the shell still on as we were
desperate for any sustenance. Each Jew had at one point thought they were the
last Jew on Earth and the urge to build a community of Jews was strong. This
brought Jews together in the two places outside of Europe that would hold them,
the United States and the Jewish homeland, Israel. These places were settled by
Jews out of necessity, because no other place on Earth would take Jews in, even
after the war. Jews have thrived over the last 70 years and new generations
have triumphed and gotten the best vengeance by living well.
Miscellaneous Facts:
·
“One small Jewish community in Japan, that of
Kobe, gave the Japanese authorities a guarantee that refugees would not become
a financial burden on Japan. Following this guarantee, refugees who landed at
the port of Tsuruga from Vladivostok were admitted to Japan without question,
welcomed at Tsuruga by members of the Jewish community, and brought to Kobe by
train. In this way, ‘many hundreds’ were housed and cared for, a German Jewish
refugee, Kurt Marcus, later recalled. But the task of financing the refugees
was beyond the resources of the Kobe Jewish community; they therefore sought,
and received, help from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Recalling his nine years as a refugee in Japan, Marcus added: ‘At no time did I
experience even the slightest hint of anti-Semitism.’”
·
On January 30, 1942, Hitler announced his plan
that had been secret- “the complete annihilation of the Jews.”
·
Mussolini did not deport any Jews to the Nazis
and the first Jews from Italy were only deported to Germany and its occupied
territories when Mussolini fell in the autumn of 1943 and the Germans took
over.
·
In Bulgaria, farmers threatened to lie down on
the railway tracks to prevent passage of deportation trains and it is said that
the ethnically German king himself intervened. The Bulgarian Jews were released,
and it shows that European states could have refused the Nazis, as was
happening by March 1943 in Finland, Italy, and Hungary. Slovakia and Vichy
France, however, complied with the demands, as did the Quisling government in
Norway. These countries also put their police forces to work rounding up Jews
for the Nazis, being collaborators in the crime.
·
A good story:
o
“Among those deported from Cracow were Moses and
Helen Hiller, whose two-year-old son had been given refuge by Josef Jachowicz
and his wife in nearby Dabrowa. Neither parent survived. When Shachne cried out
for his father and mother, as he often did, Jachowicz and his wife feared that
neighbours would betray them to the Gestapo. Mrs Jachowicz became very attached
to the little boy, loved his bright inquiring eyes, took great pride in her
‘son’, and took him regularly to church. Soon, he knew by heart all the Sunday
hymns.
o
A devout Catholic, Mrs Jachowicz decided to have
Shachne Hiller baptised, and went to see a young parish priest, Karol Wojtyla,
who had a reputation for wisdom and trustworthiness. Revealing the secret of
the boy’s identity, Mrs Jachowicz told the priest of her wish that Shachne
should become a ‘true Christian’ and devout Catholic like herself.
o
Wojtyla listened intently to the woman’s story.
When she had finished, he asked: ‘And what was the parents’ wish, when they
entrusted their only child to you and to your husband?’ Mrs Jachowicz then told
him that Helen Hiller’s last request had been that the child should be told of
his Jewish origins, and ‘returned to his people’ if his parents died. Hearing
this, Wojtyla replied that he would not perform the baptismal ceremony. It
would be unfair, he explained, to baptise Shachne while there was still hope
that, once the war was over, his relatives might take him.
o
Shachne Hiller not only survived the war, but
was eventually united with his relatives in the United States. Karol Wojtyla
was later to become Pope, as John Paul II.”
·
Another good story:
o
“The Jews who were made to dismantle the camp
realized that once their work was done they too would be killed. But within the
camp, they were always outnumbered by the armed guards. On September 2,
however, a group of thirteen Jews killed their Ukrainian SS guard with a
crowbar while working just outside the camp wire. The leader, an
eighteen-year-old Polish Jew, Seweryn Klajnman from Falenica, put on the dead guard’s
uniform, took his rifle, and ‘marched off’ his fellow prisoners as if to a new
work detail further off, cursing and bellowing at them as they went, as
befitted an SS guard. Guided by one of their number, Shlomo Mokka, a carter and
horse-trader from Wegrow who knew the area well, they escaped their pursuers
and evaded capture.”
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