B-H
A Few Reflections on My 57th Birthday and the Warsaw Ghetto
A few days ago, on May 16, 2023, or the 25th
of Iyar in the Hebrew calendar, I turned 57. My Hebrew birthday, fell just one
day after my solar birthday, marking the moment when Earth was in the same
position in its orbit around the sun as it was on the day I was born.
As I was scrolling through a Polish
newspaper, as I often do to gather information from various sources and
perspectives, I came across an article commemorating the last day of the Warsaw
Ghetto. The piece featured several images from the infamous chronicle of Jürgen
Stroop, the Nazi officer responsible for the liquidation of the Ghetto, along
with a reminder of the basic facts about the Ghetto and the uprising by its
remaining inhabitants.
Many of these images are well-known, even
iconic, in Holocaust and WWII historiography. Among them was one I had seen
countless times before: a group of Hasidic Jews standing before Nazi soldiers.
What I didn’t realize, or what I hadn’t fully
comprehended before, was that this particular photograph was taken around May
16, 1943—just days before the Ghetto’s destruction.
The realization struck me deeply, and I
couldn’t shake it. The image of these Hasidic Jews, standing in the final days
of the Ghetto, stayed with me longer than a day—almost obsessively. This was a
community caught at the end of an unimaginable tragedy, in the final days of a
war that had already annihilated so much. In those final days, the Ghetto was
no longer the home to an almost half-million-strong Jewish population. Of the
initial number, over 300,000 had already perished in the gas chambers and crematoria
of the Treblinka death camp, part of the Nazi "death industrial
complex."
I think I’ve already described my personal
discovery of the Holocaust in my book, but since it’s currently unavailable,
I’ll briefly recount it here.
Growing up in 1970s Poland was, in many ways,
a blissful childhood. We weren’t taught much about the large Jewish population
that had coexisted with us for over a thousand years. In fact, I didn’t know
about it at all—not my generation. Poland had once been home to one of the
largest Jewish populations in Europe, with Jews making up about 8-10% of the
population for centuries. Yet, the trauma of WWII overshadowed any meaningful
education about Jews, their culture, or their history in our schools. Nearly
every Polish family had lost someone during the war, with personal stories of
suffering, death, and slavery under the Nazi regime. My own maternal
grandfather had survived a gunshot wound to the chest, thanks only to a thick
ID booklet he carried. My paternal grandfather, along with his two brothers,
was murdered at Mauthausen.
What we didn’t realize at the time was that
the Jewish people had faced an entirely different, far more tragic fate. For
many Jews, surviving the war, even one member of a family, would have been an
extraordinary rarity. If multiple family members survived, it was nothing short
of a miracle.
At the age of 19, I learned the full extent
of the Holocaust. By then, I was already a student of the Bible, and had
recently become the youngest clergyman in my religious denomination. It was at
this time that I began to grasp the profound tragedy of the Jewish people’s
fate during the war. In 1985, French filmmaker Claude Lanzman released his
nine-hour documentary Shoah,
which would be instrumental in deepening my understanding of the Holocaust. In
Poland, the state-controlled TV aired two hours of the film, primarily to show
how it portrayed some Polish collaboration with Nazi forces. The documentary,
which was shown in select cities, further fueled my awareness of the horrors
that took place during those years.
Watching Shoah
changed my perspective forever. I remember going to the screening, as a young
person eager to understand the truth of what happened, though I wasn’t a
journalist and had no particular access. The film’s portrayal of the systematic
extermination of the Jewish people left a lasting imprint on me. It was not
just the physical killing but the calculated dehumanization and moral
degradation that stunned me.
Polish state TV disclosed two hours of experts from the film in order to
show that the film is anti-Polish for in hours of interviews with survivors,
perpetrators, collaborators and heroes, there were some parts of the
documentary indicating collaboration of some Polish individuals or groups with
German nazis.
The Polish
nation is still struggling with this topic.
Historians have long pointed out that the
Holocaust stands out because of its unprecedented scale and efficiency. The
Nazis had created a "death industry," making use of modern technology
and bureaucratic organization to carry out mass murder. This was a new level of
cruelty in human history.
For thousands of years, Jews had adhered to
the teachings of the Torah, believing in a divine, spiritual connection to the
Creator. But the rise of nationalism in Europe two centuries ago introduced a
new, dangerous ideology: the idea of defining nations through blood, language,
and land. For the Nazis, this meant reducing Jews to an inferior race—a view
that ultimately led to the horror of the Holocaust.
It was the Shoah
documentary that first brought the topic of Jews in Poland to the forefront.
For several more years, Poland remained under communist rule, with censorship
still in place, yet the conversation gradually became more open.
In the years that followed, Jews were
rediscovered as an integral part of Polish history, and this rediscovery was
not viewed negatively. The younger generation of Poles was increasingly willing
to acknowledge the part of the population that had, at times, openly
collaborated with the Nazis, as well as the far more widespread passive
indifference of the majority. By the time I was living in the United States, a
nationalist movement had reemerged in Poland, sometimes in mild forms, other
times in more extreme manifestations. Curiously, this movement found some
common ground with the Israeli government and Zionist ideology.
However, in the second half of the 1980s,
some books on Jewish topics began to be published. Holocaust history, though
crucial, was not the direct catalyst for my eventual decision to convert to
Judaism. That process had begun much earlier, driven solely by my desire to
connect with the Supreme One—a relationship as described and expressed in His
Revelation.
Yet, discovering the scope and scale of the
Holocaust, especially the fact that it occurred on the land of my youth and
ancestry, was something no intellectually curious or sensitive person could
ignore. I immersed myself in the subject, reading everything I could about
holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto. Warsaw was not my own city, but I was familiar
with it.
I believe the first book I encountered on the
topic was the diary of Henryk Makower, a doctor in the Ghetto’s Jewish Police.
From there, I explored every memoir, diary, interview, and, eventually, Jürgen
Stroop’s chronicle of the Ghetto’s destruction. Edition of his work, however,
lacked photographs or, if they were included, they didn’t stand out in my
memory.
Most of the material I came across was
written by non-practicing Jews, including Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of
the Ghetto uprising, who lived in Poland until his death in 2009. I pored over
maps, timelines, and any available resources. But no matter how much I studied,
it was clear that only a small fragment of the Ghetto’s reality could be
understood. The horror that unfolded there is impossible to fully grasp.
Then came the Ghetto’s picture album, a
powerful collection of images. One picture can convey more than a thousand
words, and in this album, there were hundreds of such images. Many of them were
taken by Nazis themselves, part of their antisemitic propaganda aimed at
justifying the existence of the Ghetto and its brutal enclosures. Walls, after
all, always require justification, while bridges are self-explanatory.
It became clear to me—and to many historians
and sociologists—that the Nazis had a plan, and that plan was grounded in a
disturbing social philosophy: "We are all animals—and Jews are no
exception." The Nazis sought to destroy the Jewish claim to an angelic,
spiritual essence within humanity. They aimed to shatter the notion of a divine
connection between the Jewish people and the Supreme Creator. Darwin’s theories
provided the foundation they needed, offering the "beautiful idea of design
without the Designer," as they saw it.
From the very beginning, it was openly
declared that Darwin had provided humanity with the “beautiful idea of design
without the Designer.” The existence of Jews became the final obstacle on the
path to a world free from guilt and moral responsibility. As outlined in Mein Kampf, Jews were said to
have caused two scars on humanity: one on the male organ, symbolizing moral
purity, and the other on human conscience—where the weak, sick, and
underprivileged must be helped, rather than eliminated from existence or erased
from view.
Nazi propaganda sought to reinforce this
narrative. It portrayed humanity as merely a higher form of randomly evolved
animals, where only the fittest and strongest survive, dominating and
ultimately eliminating the weak. This, they argued, was the law of nature. The
elimination of the “parasitic element,” namely Jews, was depicted as the
righteous thing to do.
The Nazis insisted that Jews were not merely
animals like themselves, but that in order to prove the superiority of their
own race, it was necessary to eradicate both Jews and their ideology from the
conscience of mankind. To achieve this, they created a multitude of propaganda
films designed to portray Jews as deserving of their fate.
One such film was made in May 1942, just two
months after the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials formalized the Endlösung—the Final Solution—to
exterminate all Jews. Nazi filmmakers were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto to
document the supposed inhumanity of its inhabitants. The resulting footage
depicted the Jews as immoral and animalistic in their behavior. Some of the
scenes were staged, while others documented the very real moral degradation
that occurred within the Ghetto’s walls.
When basic human needs such as breathing are
denied, survival instincts force people to act in ways that defy their inherent
sense of rationality and dignity. You can label any kind of torture as “enhanced
interrogation,” but it does not change the fundamental truth that denying
someone the ability to breathe—denying the most basic instinct of
survival—compels a person to behave in ways that strip them of their humanity.
The Nazis exploited this second instinct: the
need for food. By cruelly depriving the Ghetto population of sustenance, they
created horrific scenes for their propaganda films—scenes in which Jews were
forced to engage in behaviors that, in any other time, they would have never
considered. These were actions that violated their deeply ingrained conscience,
shaped over millennia of tradition. The Nazis thought they had succeeded in
their mission: they believed they had broken the spirit of the Ghetto’s inhabitants.
But the truth is, the horrific conditions of
the Ghetto did not simply degrade its inhabitants. They tested the limits of
human endurance, and for many, the Ghetto undermined, if not destroyed, their
sense of humanity and their identity as Jews.
The film was made in May 1942, at a time when
gas chambers were already under construction in Treblinka and other camps. The deportation
from the Ghetto began on Tisha B'Av, 22 July 1942. Over the course of the
summer, approximately 300,000 Jews were transported to Treblinka, where they
were murdered.
Adolf Eichmann, may his name be erased, was
responsible for overseeing the logistics of these deportations. In an act of
cruel manipulation, the Nazis handed the task of selecting and organizing the
quotas of people to the Judenrat—the Ghetto’s Jewish Council.
The head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków,
upon learning what was expected of him, chose to end his life by swallowing a
cyanide pill. His successor, however, proved more compliant.
During the first wave of deportations, the
Nazis targeted the “unproductive” elements of society: the sick, the elderly,
the young, and the so-called “kley kodesh”—the rabbis, scholars, and spiritual
leaders of the Jewish community, along with their families. Those who could
prove their usefulness or skills were spared, but only for a short while, as
long as the Third Reich deemed them of any value.
Some Jews, determined to survive, refused to
register with the Judenrat and consequently were denied food rations. Without
official registration, survival became almost impossible, and many perished
from starvation.
By the fall of 1942, approximately 35,000
Jews remained in the Ghetto, forced to work as slave labor in the Nazi war
effort. However, estimates suggest that between 20,000 and 25,000 additional
Jews lived illegally within the Ghetto. These individuals survived, often
against all odds, through a “smuggling economy” that became increasingly
difficult to maintain as the Ghetto shrank and emptied.
On 19 April 1943, the first day of Passover,
the Ghetto Uprising began.
I will not delve into the specifics of the
Uprising itself, as it falls outside the scope of this discussion. Instead, I
will return to the image with which I began this narrative.
The same group of holy tzaddikim—nothing less
than malachim (angels) in human form—stood tall in defiance of the forces of
evil, once again proving that the forces of darkness could never uproot the
Torah from the hearts of the people of Torah. These were the men and women who,
in the face of unspeakable horrors, preserved their identity, held onto their
faith, and upheld their moral and spiritual convictions in the most dire of
circumstances.
They were the ones who, at great personal
risk, provided sustenance and strength to the Torah scholars, the Talmidei
Chachamim.
There are dark chapters in human history and
places so filled with evil that they are beyond comprehension. It is profoundly
disturbing to reflect on these moments in time. But the Warsaw Ghetto stands as
one of the darkest, most heart-wrenching of them all.
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Chelmno…
these places, like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda—the
list is endless—represent the physical annihilation of human beings by other
humans. But the Ghetto, with its pervasive dehumanization and demoralization,
symbolizes something far more insidious.
The Nazis sought to uproot the Divine from
the human spirit, to reduce humanity's angelic potential to mere physicality or
biology—according to their twisted vision of what it meant to be human.
In image above, Nazis saw the angels, yet
they refused to bow.
Perhaps it requires one to be truly human, in
the most profound sense, to recognize the Divine.
Religious Jews captured by the SS during the Warsaw ghetto
uprising. The original German caption reads: "Jewish rabbis."
From left to right are Rabbi Lipa Kaplan, Eliyahu
Levin (son of Rabbi Hersh Henoch of Bedzin), Mendel Alter (son of Rabbi
Nechemya Alter); Yankel Levin (son of Rabbi Mottel Levin of Lodz and grandson
of the rabbi of Bedzin), unknown and Rabbi Heschel Rappaport, a Gerer Chassid
and mentor to young Chassidim.
Photo Credit
United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration,
College Park
https://jewishaction.com/holocaust/the-warsaw-ghetto-an-eyewitness-account/
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