Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

    I really liked this book, which has been recommended to me for years, and I'm happy I read it when I did after reading a couple yizkor books, in order to really appreciate it as a yizkor book in its first half, in which Frankl describes his experience in the Holocaust. I was amazed to learn that he wrote the portion about his Holocaust in just nine days in 1945. It is so interesting to have such a great thinker also be a Holocaust survivor, and makes me think how many other great thinkers were murdered in the Holocaust, and left manuscripts unpublished. Like so many others, Frankl feels that his life was decided by forces greater than him. He describes an opportunity to escape, to leave Austria before the Holocaust began, but that he was stuck in a dilemma, unsure whether he should leave, or stay to take care of his elderly parents. He was looking for a sign. He writes:

It was then that I noticed a piece of marble laying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, "Which one is it?" He answered, "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days be long upon the land." At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.

    Frankl's book is most interesting because he can address the behaviors of Holocaust victims and survivors from a trained psychological perspective. One interesting aspect was humor: he describes entering showers with several other men, and them joking that at least it was water coming out of the sprays instead of gas. Another was curiosity: at some points, he didn't fear death as much as he was just curious whether he would live or die. Another time, as prisoners were shipped in an overpacked cattle car from Auschwitz through Bavaria, they marveled at the beauty of the mountains they could see through holes and slats in the wooden walls. In camp, they observed beautiful sunrises in th midst of their slavery and torture.

    One thing that I think was horrible for survivors was the trauma of dreaming about the Holocaust for the rest of their lives, and how painful it would be to relive that memory. But something less obvious is how painful dreaming would be for those same people as they lived through the Holocaust, since waking up was worse than any nightmare! Frankl describes that, as one time he observed a man writhing around, obviously having a nightmare. But he decided not to wake him, since whatever the nightmare was in the man's sleep would be better than their waking nightmare. 

    Frankl comes away with several short life lessons that I'll list here:

• The salvation of man is through love and in love.
• From Nietzsche: That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.
• A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthlessness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. 
• Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also the being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. 
• Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
• Also Nietzsche: He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

There is also an additional chapter in which Frankl discusses the tragic triad of (1) pain, (2) guilt, and (3) death. How can one embrace life in spite of those three things? He calls it "tragic optimism," which is: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.

    Frankl is just a strong believer that, for most people, mental health is shaped by circumstances and how we react to circumstances. No one can take away a man's source of meaning. But no one can give him one either. Every person has to figure it out for themselves, and he observed, in the camps, people who gave up on life and died shortly after. His book is a classic because suffering is classic, and Frankl shows his readers how to find meaning in suffering.

Flight to Survival: Wloclawek - Warszawa - Czestochowa ... Eretz Yisrael by Peninah Cypkewicz-Rosin, translated by Sarah and Mordehai Kopfstein, and Josef Rosin

    This was my favorite of all the yizkor books I've read, mainly because it continues onward until she makes it to Israel and has a family there, so it is a very happy ending. In her memoir, Peninah recalls how no one had any idea in 1940 and even 1941 what was in store--it was generally thought that there would be pogroms and killings here and there, but no one at the time imagined the scale of slaughter that was coming. Peninah arrived to Czenstochowa at the end of 1941, about a year and a half after my grandpa's family. She says that Czenstochowa had a population of about 28,000 in 1939, of which one in five were Jewish. When she arrived, the Judenrat was already up and running, and the ghetto was still physically open to the rest of the city, and while it was forbidden for Poles to stop and shop at Jewish stores in the ghetto, that rule was often broken.

    Like my grandfather, Peninah attributes so much of her reason for survival on luck. In one case, she was at selection on September 22nd, 1942, when she was un-selected as "not needed," Yet moments later, Degenhart, the commander of the "action," called her back and said to the SS man that perhaps they would need her. It was impossible for Jews to understand what was real and what wasn't. Around the time of her selection, Peninah recalls that the Jewish intelligentsia were gathered and told that a deal had been reached to send them to Israel. Instead, they were taken to the Jewish cemetery and shot.

    The most amazing part of the book for me was Peninah's description of an event I already knew about from my grandfather. He had told us about how he had been digging a tunnel through a bunker to reach outside the walls of the ghetto. But that while he was at work with his brothers, the Germans surrounded the Jews in the bunker, who tried to use the tunnel. The Germans knew about it and were waiting at the other end, where they massacred the Jews as they came through the tunnel. Peninah provides a date for that event: June 25, 1945, as the ghetto was liquidated. She even writes the address of the bunker: Nadzhechna 88. Apparently, Avraham Zilberstein told Peninah that 40 people had gathered in the bunker and planned to throw a grenade at the Nazis while others escaped through the tunnel to the Polish side of town that connected into a deserted shop near a German sentry post, which they would then attack, taking the sentries' guns and break into the ghetto and set everything on fire. But at about mid-day, after the day shift and the night shift switched, the Germans came and killed nearly everyone involved in the plan. This is detailed on pages 88-90 and 137. On the earlier pages, she writes:

On June 25, 1943, Germans surrounded the ghetto. This was preceded by two weeks of tension, alarms and standbys in the underground. On that morning a standby and call up of the members had also been declared. About 40 people gathered in the central bunker at Nadzhechna No 88. The plan, according to Avraham Zilberstein ... was that in case of an Action or detection of the bunker, the Germans were to be stopped by throwing a grenade at them. At the same time we were to get into the passage and crawl through the tunnel to its exit at the Polish side of the town that was camouflaged in a deserted shop of light drinks near the house of the German sentry post. We were to then attach the post by taking the sentries guns, and breaking through into the ghetto from the outside, setting fire to everything possible and urging the ghetto population to escape....

 Suddenly, at about 10:00 AM, we heard footsteps and knocks at the door above. It was clear the Germans were looking for the entrance to the bunker. Tenson was great and we waited to see what the Germans' next step would be, but then at 11:00 AM it became quiet. Our guards reported that the workers from the nightshift had entered the ghetto, the dayshift went out to work, and that the Germans had left. We were relieved and waited until 1:30 PM, at which time the standby state was cancelled."

At that point, Peninah describes hearing the outcry from her point of view, and picks it up from the action in the bunker on page 137 from the point of view of Avraham Silberstein:

 He said that on June 25th and 26th of 1943, the day of the liquidation of the Small Ghetto, one group of underground members went to the bunker at Garncharska St. 40. Their plan was to leave through the tunnel in this bunker, to the polish side, and then continue on to the partisans in Konitspol. Avraham was in that group. When, after crawling to the outside, he suddenly heard shots. At that moment he realized they had been betrayed and that the Germans knew all about the exit of the tunnel and were waiting for them. Since he was last in line, he stayed put, clinging to the wall beneath the exit, so that the Germans could not see him. They also lit up the tunnel and shot into it, but fortunately Avraham was not hurt. 

Outside a battle raged with unequal forces with most of the underground members killed. In that battle one German was killed and a few wounded. Only one member of the group managed to escape to Konitspol under a smoke screen from a grenade he threw. Avraham stayed in the tunnel until he was sure that the Germans had left and then went out to the Polish side and continued to Zharky." 

 My grandfather said the following about the same tunnels:

... so me and my brothers and some other people were very seriously considering to dig in a big tunnel, and this was a long tunnel, so went into another house where the other people lived, and went in downstairs, in the cellar, and we started to dig a tunnel. We had no--we're not prepared to dig tunnels. We needed materials to support the earth, and that they're done. And we dug pail by pail of sand every time we came home from work, at first, we went to HASAG every day to work until they made it permanent. So whenever we came home from work, after an afternoon, we went into the--or Sunday or Saturday, dig the tunnel. We dig the tunnel, and we hoped that when we have the tunnel finished, if something happens, we knew that sooner or later, they're going to liquidate it. They're going to liquidate that ghetto. So when we find out that they're going to liquidate the ghetto, we were going to start make use of that tunnel. That tunnel led us to what's more, called the manhole, you know, was covered with a [garbled].

So when we heard that they're going to liquidate together, we're going to do that. In the meantime, they got a hold of us, and they put us into the HASAG to work. But when they liquidated the ghetto later, after we were already at work, we heard from other people that came later, that other people made use of that tunnel, not us. But everyone that was in a tunnel, the Nazis were standing with a machine gun from the distance, and didn't say nothing, and they made everybody come out bang, like rats coming out from the tunnel everybody was killed. Had we not been stuck, put to work there first, maybe I wouldn't be talking to you today. You could never plan nothing you didn't know. So luck played for us in this way, you can call it.

The summer of 1943 would mean the end of the Jewish ghetto and the transfer of all Jews to concentration camps, including Hasag, also located in Czestochowa. On July 20, 1943, all the Jewish policemen and their families were taken to the Jewish cemetery and murdered.

    Peninah was transferred to Hasag, where my grandfather was forced to work, and also described Director Luth as a more or less decent man. He apparently stopped the prisoners from being forced to wear striped pajamas like in other camps, and that conditions were bad, but better than in other camps. She describes different departments of the camp on pages 97-98. Unlike my grandfather, Peninah was lucky to be liberated from Czestochowa instead of deported into Germany. However, they both would have experienced the arrival of SS men weeks before liberation who took everyone out to run around the yard several times each morning, and generally escalated the mistreatment of the prisoners.

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750 - 1804 by Alan Taylor

    American Revolutions was a creative telling of American History from 1750 to 1804, which told the story of the split of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain in chapters like "land," "allies," and "wests" that sought to thematically cover the Revolution while also moving chronologically. That was cool. Otherwise, the book was just a solid survey of the American Revolution period that was pretty good. It felt like a very undergraduate book, and, at least for the purposes of this unit I was doing on the American Revolution, it worked as a reminder book to reorient me to what I already knew, but was otherwise pretty basic.

    One thing that is clear about the American Revolution to me is that it is in large part an issue of the victors not getting the spoils they expected. American colonists fought the French and Indian War, but didn't get what they expected. They thought that victory would mean new lands to settle west of the Appalachians and in Canada, but they were deemed outlaws for settling that land. But British law failed to stop them. New York's population doubled from 80,000 to 168,000 from 1761 to 1771, mostly growing on the frontier. North Carolina's population grew sixfold from 1750 to 1775 and Georgia grew by a factor of fourteen. Colonists were having lots of babies and creating a huge demographic pressure that pushed up against the Appalachian boundary that was once a physical boundary, later a diplomatic boundary with the French, and by the mid-1760s, was just a flimsy internal boundary that could no longer be enforced.

    While most American focus is on why the Thirteen Colonies rebelled, it is just as interesting to learn about why the other colonies in Canada and the Caribbean didn't rebel. In Canada, it was mainly because Britain granted the French new liberties that had never been granted before in the Protestant empire: allowing Catholics to own land and serve in government. They also enlarged Quebec to extend south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi. With so many fewer people (so no demographic pressures to settle), the French-Canadians didn't have much reason in rebel. Their lives got better when they entered the British empire, since they entered a republic where they could participate in government and were enriched by entering a larger, freer trade zone. In the Caribbean, they didn't rebel mostly because they still needed the Redcoats to provide security to keep down the slave population. Whereas slaves made up about 40% of people in the southern portion of the Thirteen Colonies, they made up over 90% in the Caribbean, well past the threshold that the slavers could manage without government help.

    So, it looks like there were six big laws that connect the post-French and Indian War revenue-raising attempts to the Revolutionary War protest against "taxation without representation." They are the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Quartering Act, the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, and the Intolerable Acts. After the French and Indian War, the British intended to maintain a 10,000-strong army in North America. In order to raise the revenue to pay for that army (as well as to pay down the national debt that had ballooned during the war), the British taxed sugar exports from the Caribbean. This hit at the same time as a post-war economic downturn in North America, and led to boycotts.  At the same time, Britain his the colonies with the Currency Act of 1764, which more tightly controlled the production of paper money, exacerbating the economic downturn by essentially doing the 18th century version of a modern-day Fed raising interest rates. Then, in 1765, the Quartering Act required colonial authorities to pay the costs of housing and feeding British soldiers, and was resisted and circumvented in all colonies except Pennsylvania. In the same year, the Stamp Act directly taxed Americans and required that basically all printed materials be printed on specific paper from London that was embossed with a stamp. This was also extremely unpopular and spawned the "no taxation without representation" outcry, since no American consented to the tax. In 1773, the Tea Act was passed. This one was interesting because it actually reduced the tax on tea in order to undercut tea smuggling from the Dutch East Indies. But colonial merchants, who saw that they were being undercut, were angrier than tea consumers were made happy, and everyone joined a conspiratorial mindset that this was part of a plot to take away American liberty, leading to the Boston Tea Party. Finally, in response to the Boston Tea Party, Britain passed the "Intolerable Acts," also known as the "Coercive Acts," which were five punitive laws that closed the port of Boston, removed Massachusetts' charter (brining it under direct British control), allowed trials to be removed from Massachusetts to Great Britain, brought back quartering (which had lapsed in 1767), and dramatically increased the size of Quebec (thus restricting the frontier). These acts combined to inspire the colonists to hold the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1764.

    I would love to get deeper into more military history. But for now, the American Revolution can be described as this: in 1775, British forces attempted to impose control in Boston. They failed to do that at Bunker Hill. In 1776, the British occupied New York City, the Americans declared independence, and George Washington crossed the Delaware to win victories that did not win the war for the Americans, but prevented the British from winning the war. After a cold winter at Valley Forge in 1777, the French (and to a lesser extent the Spanish) joined the war in 1778, which required the British to focus forces elsewhere. As the war went on, support for the Patriot cause increased, and the British were unable to recruit loyalists to form militias. While the classic divide is one-third Patriot, one-third Loyalist, one-third neutral, Taylor says it was more like one-third Patriot, one-tenth Loyalist, and the rest were neutral. Without local support, and forced to deal with old rivals, Great Britain was basically not able to win the war by 1778, and fought the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, lost, and signed a peace treaty recognizing American independence in 1783.

    The result of the revolution, according to Lord Macartney, was that without America "the building not only looks much better but is a great deal stronger." It worked out for Britain to lose the Thirteen Colonies, since it subordinated the rest of the empire in India, Africa, and the West Indies to taxation. The empire was now less ethnically British, but had gained many more people--for example, Bengal had 20 million, more than double the population England and more than seven times the population of the Thirteen Colonies. These people wouldn't be so troublesome in "demanding their rights as Englishmen." The British made good on a 1778 pledge to no longer tax colonists purely for revenue, so in the time immediately after the war, Americans paid higher taxes than Canadians, and dealt with a period of near-anarchy under the Articles of Confederation until the Constitution was ratified in 1787. Westward expansion proceeded, at the great expense predicted by the British, but the Americans were willing to make the investment since they could have the reward. Western warfare would drain revenue for years, and even cost up to five-sixths of all federal expenditures under Washington, but would obviously yield big gains in years to come.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Seven Years' War brought British national debt from 74 million pounds to 133 million pounds, and servicing the debt in the mid-1760s cost five million of the empire's annual eight million pound budget.
• In 1764, the British Empire transferred smuggling cases from colonial courts to vice-admiralty courts, which took away jury trials that regularly favored the accused.
• I thought this was a good quote from the loyalist perspective, Mather Byles, 1774: "Which is better--to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?"
• The English landed on Staten Island on July 2nd, 1776, and brought enough ships over the coming years to require participation of half the Royal Navy, two-thirds of the British army, and 8,000 Hessian mercenaries.
• The women who were camp followers of the Continental Army actually drew rations and pay and were subject to court-martial.
• Deborah Sampson used a fake name to serve for nearly two years in the Continental Army before she was discovered after being wounded. She later got a veteran's pension (paid to her husband) and publicly reenacted her time in uniform to make money later in life.
• In January 1778, Washington boosted recruitment, which was faltering, by endorsing plans to recruit the enslaved in New England states (this plan was stopped in the South), and by the end of the war, Blacks made up a tenth of the Continental Army, double the rate of proportion in the northern population. Southern states considered and shot down similar plans.
• Rhode Island remained independent until Congress barred its trade with the United States in May 1790.
• The early American republic had one of the highest literacy rates in the world with about three-quarters of free American adults being literate. There was just one American magazine in 1785, but 28 in 1795. There were 100 American newspapers in 1790 and nearly 400 by 1810. There were 69 post offices in 1788 and 903 by 1700.
• In 1807, Thomas Jefferson said, "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper... The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them."
• In New Jersey, women who owned property had the right to vote from 1776 until 1807, when Democratic-Republicans rewrote the law.

The Destruction of Czestochowa by Shlomo Waga, edited and translated by Gloria Berkenstat Freund

    This one was not as good as Resistance and Death, but as a yizkor book, it is just a memoir of someone's time, so my criticism is not with what their memories were, it is just that Resistance and Death had several authors, whereas Destruction was just one person's memory. Some things that I thought were interesting were descriptions of ID cards for Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, the five aktsias in September-October 1942, and the description of a Jew named Fajner initiating resistance in 1943 that led to the liquidation of the ghetto. Also, I am noting that certain individuals like Degenhardt, Linderman, and Kurland are mentioned by many people, and it might be interesting to compile a "who's who" list of notable people in the ghetto.