Subject:  JUICE Holocaust 6 
Date:     Tue, 21 Apr 1998 23:47:17 +0000 
To:       "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>  
  
From:          JUICE Administration <juice@virtual.co.il> 
To:            holocaust@virtual.co.il 
Subject:       JUICE Holocaust 6 
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                  World Zionist Organization 
                Jewish University in CyberspacE 
          juice@wzo.org.il         birnbaum@wzo.org.il 
                     http://www.wzo.org.il 
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Course: Meanings of the Holocaust 
Lecture:  6/12 
Lecturer: Elly Dlin 
Lecture 6: Why Were WE KILLED? 
Why the Jews?  Is it always the Jews?  Does it always have to be the Jews? 
And what else could WE, should WE have done during the Holocaust?  These are 
some of the central issues from the perspective of WE as VICTIMS.  Not 
individuals victims - the Nazis had little interest in particular people, 
only that the person was classified as a Jew.  Indeed they expended 
considerable effort on the "who is a Jew" question, how many Jews in one's 
family tree make one "a full Jew" or "a mischlinge" or mixed blood and were 
the Karaites Jews or not?  All in order to seek out every Jew to kill them. 
The question of why were WE KILLED may be subtitled: "the dilemmas of the 
condemned".  In this lecture I will raise some of the central issues related 
to the responses of the Jews. 
WHY DIDN'T THEY RUN AWAY? 
The simple answer is inconsistent, but German Jews did not want to leave 
Germany and yet most did go.  Overall, there was no where to go and yet they 
did emigrate somewhere.  Even after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, 
German Jews considered Germany to be their home and felt firmly rooted to 
the culture and body politic of their country.  If anything, they regarded 
Nazism as the aberration whose presence would be temporary. 
Panic and flight was not in the nature of German Jews.  Still, the shock and 
terror of the Nazi onslaught on their position and person was sufficiently 
serious that 63,000 Jews left during the first year of the Third Reich (over 
11% of the 566,000 Jews by race in the country).  Nearly 1/3 of them 
returned to Nazi Germany: not because they had changed their minds regarding 
the dangers of Adolf Hitler but because insufficient preparation had left 
them facing humiliation, deprivation and even starvation. 
Over the next 5 years, emigration rates stabilized at about 5% per year and 
there was the growing hope of a semblance of stability.  The pressures to 
leave were insidious but until November 1938 not dramatic enough to clear 
them all out.  The Kristall Night pogroms broke all illusions and 49,000 
Jews left Germany in 1938, 68,000 more in 1939.  Overall about 2/3 of 
Germany's Jews managed to get out and by the outbreak of the War, most of 
the remaining were poor and unwanted.  Yet even more of them would have 
emigrated had it been possible for them to gain a precious entrance visa. 
The fate of the passengers on the S.S. St. Louis is illustrative. 
The 930 Jews on board held landing certificates for Cuba.  Some had spent 
their last funds to buy passage.  Unknown to the passengers, the Cuban 
government decided to cancel their landing certificates so when the St. 
Louis reached Havana port the Jews were not allowed to land.  The 
sympathetic captain sailed his ship in circles off the coast of Florida in 
order to stir up sympathy but the American response was to scramble Coast 
Guard cutters to keep the ship in international waters.  This despite the 
fact that 700 of the passengers held US immigration numbers that would have 
allowed them to emigrate there within 3 years.  Unable to remain afloat 
indefinitely, the ship was forced to return its Jews to Europe in the summer 
of 1939.  Many who had done everything that could be expected of them to 
escape the Nazi terror found themselves in countries overrun by the armies 
of the Third Reich.  Many were murdered in the Holocaust. 
Austrian Jews emigrated at even a faster pace.  Nearly 70% left between 
March 1938 (Anschluss) and September 1939 (War).  But the bulk of the 
victims of the Holocaust were NOT the Jews of Central Europe.  Millions of 
Jews who lived in Poland and Eastern Europe wanted to get out, but NOT 
because of the dictator who sat in Berlin.  They wanted to escape from 
antisemitism and from the tough conditions around them.  But emigration for 
Eastern European Jews was even more difficult, especially after the Western 
countries adopted restrictive emigration policies in the 1920s.  Soon after 
the War began emigration from Eastern Europe was largely impossible, 
trapping the millions of  Jews. 
And what did the Jews of Eastern Europe expect from the German invasion? 
Some, hearing of discrimination and oppression feared pogroms.  But "pogrom" 
is a Russian word.  The Nazis did not have a monopoly on antisemitism. 
True, they invented the most horrible and lethal antisemitic policies known 
to man, the Death Camps, but these began much later, in December 1941.  In 
the early years of the War Polish Jewry suffered restrictions, ghettoes, 
terror and murders but nothing they had not survived in the past.  And 
besides, didn't good things come from the West and the bad from the East? 
And hadn't Polish Jews survived the last German invasion and the last World 
War - true, not without a dear price paid in blood and souls, but had WE not 
survived...always? 
Some Jews run, but the only escape route that opens briefly leads to 
Bolshevik Russia and deportations to Siberia.  And is that necessarily 
preferable to the Nazi occupation?  Can you be sure?  Some Jews hide in the 
forests, but for how long?  And what do you do when winter arrives?  Other 
Jews hope for the best and greet the Nazi invaders at the city limits with 
the traditional blessing of bread and salt. 
THE DILEMMAS OF CHOICELESS CHOICES 
The Judenrats or Jewish Councils illustrate the dilemma of being condemned 
to choose in a choiceless situation when each alternative is dangerous and 
undesirable yet abdication of responsibility is even worse.  The Judenrat 
has been called a "dual institution" caught between German demands and 
Jewish interests.  Could the Judenrat follow German order without hurting 
Jews?  Yet could it disobey German orders without hurting even more of them? 
Was it a German instrument to manipulate and fool the Jews, eventually 
facilitating if not outright supporting their murder?  Or was it basically a 
Jewish body in the tradition of Jewish leadership that strove to represent 
and to protect Jews during a difficult time?  Answers are not simple and 
evaluations are painful and unclear. 
Overall, we can characterize the tasks of the Judenrat as being 3-fold: 1) 
routine responsibilities that continued from pre-war times (such as 
education, kashrut, rites of passage, social welfare) and which strengthened 
the traditional aspects of Judenrats; 2)  new roles it is forced to fill as 
a result of the vacuum of municipal services in the ghettos (such as 
sanitation, health, mail service, police, etc.) that strengthen their 
helping role but thrust the leadership into roles of making life-determining 
choices, and 3) new tasks imposed by the Nazis that initially are benign and 
understandable ones such as a providing census lists, supplying "volunteer" 
laborers, transferring taxes and other payments that only later deteriorate 
into selecting some people to receive life-promising benefits such as work 
permits, scarce medicines, choice job placements and finally exemptions 
(temporary) on deportation lists to the East. 
Take "the dilemma of Jewish self-help" that Emanuel Ringelblum articulates 
in his diary entry for May 26, 1942 (what medical personal know as "triage"): 
"Relief work doesn't solve the problem...people have to die anyway.  It 
lengthens suffering but cannot save them...It remains a proven fact that the 
people fed in the soup-kitchens will all die if they eat nothing but the 
soup supplied and the dry rationed bread.  The question thus arises whether 
it would not serve the purpose better to reserve the available money for 
selected individuals, for those who are socially productive, for the 
intellectual elite, etc.  But...the question arises why should one pronounce 
judgment on artisans, laborers and other useful persons, who were productive 
people back in their small towns, and only the ghetto and the war have 
turned them into non-people, into scrap, into human dregs, candidates for 
mass graves.  There is left a tragic dilemma: What shall one do? Shall one 
[hand out the food] with little spoons to everybody, and then no one will 
live, or in generous handfuls to just a few...?"  (DOCUMENTS ON THE 
HOLOCAUST, p. 232). 
And the dilemmas get harder.  On September 4, 1942 the head of the Judenrat 
in Lodz, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski addressed the people of the ghetto: 
"I cannot give you comfort today.  Nor did I come to calm you today...I have 
come like a robber, to take from you what is dearest to your heart.  I tried 
everything I knew to get the bitter sentence canceled.  When it could not be 
canceled, I tried to lessen the sentence...(Y)esterday...(I tried) to save 
at least one year - children from nine to ten.  But they would not yield.  I 
succeeded in one thing - to save the children over ten.  Let that be our 
consolation in our great sorrow... 
Give me these sick people (with tuberculosis), and perhaps it will be 
possible to save the healthy in their place...(A)t a time of such decrees 
one must weigh up and measure who should be saved, who can be saved and who 
may be saved.  Common sense requires us to know that those must be saved who 
can be saved and who have a chance of being saved and not those (for) whom 
there is no chance to save in any case..." (DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST, pp. 
283-4). 
Jacob Gens in Vilna sent Jewish policeman to round up Jews in neighbouring 
Oszmiana (Jewish population of 4,000).  Jews selected 406 Jews and knowingly 
handed them over to the Nazis to be murdered.  Yet he did it to save 1,094 
other Jews since the Nazis had wanted 1,500 victims and Gens succeeded in 
getting the others past the Nazi shooters and in to the relative safety of 
the Vilna ghetto.  Did the Jewish leader Gens help murder 406 or did he 
rescue 1,094, or both?  Or were all of the !,500 condemned by the Nazis to 
die anyway and nothing Gens could do would affect their eventual fate? 
Some accuse the Jews of contributing to their own destruction.  "(T)his role 
of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly 
the darkest chapter of the whole dark story...In the matter of cooperation, 
there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities 
of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East." 
(Arendt, pp. 117-8).  Raul Hilberg uses the phrase "anticipatory compliance" 
to suggest that the Judenrat obeyed Nazi orders even before they were given 
and that conscious or not, it became a lethal tool in the hands of the 
killers.  Therefore Judenrats are all guilty as accessories to murder. 
Not so, argues Yehuda Bauer and others.  Those who look only at results are 
blind to the actual complex situation.  The results are that millions of 
Jews are killed - where there are Judenrats and before they are ever formed 
(no Judenrat is involved in the shooting of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar outside 
of Kiev over a 2 day period in September 1941); when Judenrats comply and 
when were part of the Jewish armed resistance (Minsk).  Jews died 
regardless; the results were always the same because the Nazis held 
exclusive control.  If we can accuse Judenrats of having helped cause the 
deaths of Jews, then we are implying that they had the power to have saved 
Jewish lives had they acted differently.  Not so, say the historians who 
have carefully studies the behaviours of different Judenrats. 
Bauer argues that the crucial indicator is NOT results, but intentions 
(Bauer, pp. 155-67).  Did the Judenrat strive to help Jews or did they sell 
out community interests to save their own skins?  With this as his question, 
Aharon Weiss studied 146 Judenrats in Poland.  He found that 100 (68.5%) 
deserve a positive evaluation for having resigned, refused cooperation on 
any level or were removed, even murdered.  25 more (17%) get a mixed 
evaluation and 21 (14%) are judged negatively (Weiss, p. 356).  His study 
shows that the glass is decidedly much more than half-full. 
RESISTANCE 
Probably no question related to the Holocaust has generated as much heat as 
that of resistance.  In later lectures we will consider the wider social 
contexts of each of the competing interpretations, but here we will restrict 
our concerns to some basic clarifications. 
Firstly, if resistance is understood as actions intended to oppose, fight 
off, withstand and work against the Nazis that every Jew is resisting all of 
the time.  The Nazis wanted the Jews to disappear, so unless they did, it 
was resistance.  And except for a few suicides, the Jews stubbornly remained 
and steadfastly tried to survive.  If passive resistance is refusing to 
comply through non-violent actions, then there was nothing passive about 
Jewish resistance.  They could not often refuse to comply and everything in 
their relationship was violent. 
The distinction that needs to be made is between a resistance whose goal it 
is to help Jews survive and one whose goal is to kill Nazis.  The 2 types of 
resistance are mutual exclusive since given the unequal balance of power 
during the War, attacking Nazis is a death threat to Jews.  In the initial 
period, before the start of the Final Solution in June 1941, before it was 
possible to have any glimpse of the murderous Nazi intentions, only the 
first type of resistance was acted upon.  Helping Jews to survive was NOT 
without a price.  Jews who only ate the Nazi ration would die of starvation. 
Compliance meant suicide, and few took that path.  But smuggling food and 
black marketing were illegal and Jews could in illegal activities could be 
executed.  Compliance meant death and resistance threatened their lives, but 
life was only possible through resistance.  So Jews resisted. 
They also resisted in a myriad of other ways that were intended to help Jews 
survive.  Taking pot-shots at Nazis was not one of them since it could only 
result in the absolute opposite.  Physical attacks against Germans invited 
massive collective punishments.  So long as Jews were convinced that they 
could or might survive, the second type of resistance made no sense.  It was 
a collective suicide that most probably would drag others in, against their 
wills. 
The first recorded discussion of someone glimpsing the reality of the Final 
Solution was in Vilna on December 31, 1941 (Ruschka Korczak, pp. 261-74). 
Abba Kovner admits that he cannot prove it, but he senses that the threat of 
death is universal, for all Jews and therefore the sole response must be 
attack and kill Germans before all of the Jews are killed.  Some follow him 
and others who call Jews to arms.  Most cannot or do not accept that they 
are all going to die and so the armed resistance is in most cases supported 
only by a minority, usually young people, physically strong, unattached to 
spouses, elderly parents or young children, and ideologically committed 
(frequently Zionist activists or revolutionaries leftists). 
Warsaw is a popular uprising not because the Jews there were different, but 
because of the Nazis.  The Nazis made mistakes in Warsaw that they learned 
not to repeat elsewhere, specifically the January action which discredited 
the traditional leadership in the ghetto, seemed to prove the rightness of 
the path of resisters and fostered the illusion that the Nazis can be chased 
out of the ghetto.  Most of those who supported the fighters in the Warsaw 
Uprising hoped that by some miracle they would survive whereas most of the 
fighters themselves believed that the only end to the fight would be the 
deaths of all of the Jews. 
Those who hoped for rescue through armed resistance took the fight into the 
forests and swamps and tried to find sympathetic partisan allies.  Those who 
saw armed resistance as a struggle "for 3 lines in the history books" (Adolf 
Liebeskind quoted in Gilbert, pp. 505-6) or to inspire future generations 
with examples of selfless heroism while at the same time making the Germans 
and their accomplices pay for their crimes (Izhak Katznelson, quoted in 
Gilbert, pp. 524-5 ) fought the Nazis with weapons.  For if the Jews were 
all dead anyway, armed resistance was nothing more than shifting the 
initiative to Jewish hands and taking control over the place and 
circumstances of their own deaths.  This is certainly the spirit and feeling 
behind the uprisings in the Death Camps - in Sobibor and in Treblinka and in 
Auschwitz. 
FINAL WORD 
WE shouldn't loose sight of the main issue here.  Why were WE KILLED? 
Because they wanted to kill us and they had the power to do it and because 
the ones who could stop them (and who eventually did) allowed them to kill 6 
million of US over the course of years.  That is not an explanation, it is a 
description.  In the next lecture I will attempt some sort of synthesis 
relating to the question: "Can the Holocaust be Explained?" 
REFERENCES: 
Arent, Hannah, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL, 
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963. 
Bauer, Yehudah, A HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST, New York: Franklin Watts, 1982. 
DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST, Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman and Abraham 
Margaliot, eds.,        Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1981. 
Gilbert, Martin, THE HOLOCAUST, London: William Collins, 1986. 
Korczak, Ruschka, "Flames in Ashes," in THE MASSACRE OF EUROPEAN JEWRY, 
World   Hashomer Hatzair, 1963. 
Weiss, Aharon, "Jewish Leadership in Occupied Poland," in YAD VASHEM 
STUDIES, v. 12,         Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977. 
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