Heroism of the resistance

Fighters and Martyrs. In a recently published book, Mr Reuben Ainsztein sets out to disprove “the self deprecatory approach of traditional Jewish historians to the fighting record of East European Jews’. In fact Mr Ainsztein goes further. While confining himself in substance to East European affairs on which he is an authority, he suggests that generally historians, poets and writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were ‘too preoccupied with Jewish martyrdom to appreciate Jewish heroism.” He is particularly angry with Raul Hilberg, author of the standard work on “The Destruction of the European Jews”, who found that ‘preventive attack, armed resistance and revenge are almost completely absent in 2,000 years of Jewish ghetto history”. If this is a sweeping verdict, so perhaps is Mr Ainsztein’s reaction. He is refuting too much. His elaborate effort to demonstrate that whenever given the chance, Jews made good soldiers is unnecessary. The point is: did Jews ever effectively challenge their persecutors? I remember how I, then a factory hand up North, was congratulated by my workmates when David Frankfurter in 1936 shot the Nazi boss Gustloff; well done, they said: had we at last begun to hit back? Of course we hadn’t, and Israelis who talk of “cowardice” understand the Galut as little as if they were ordinary Gentiles. “Jews simply could not always hit back. How many divisions did they have? one might ask. Paraphrasing Stalin’s query on the Pope. With all his admirable intentions, Mr Ainsztein cannot escape the facts of life. While he describes at length and in much uncharted “detail the desperate struggle in the ghettoes and the death camps, he has to admit that “against the massacres the Jews were as helpless as any civilians without arms against * powerful and ruthless armed force”; they were “without any of the opportunities which the rest of the population had to obtain arms”, fid in one particular camp, Mr Ainsztein notes, “the inability of the Jews to create a more efficient fighting organisation was, above all, due to the unimaginable terror”. Besides, Mr Ainsztein sensibly appreciates, there were “subjective factors” which affected the behaviour of Polish and Russian Jews then they were taken to the place of slaughter, because they were truly civilised and believed in progress and the perfectibility of man, they were the last to realise how bestial the Germans were. They “could not imagine” that the Nation of Bach, Beethoven and Goethe “could possibly outdo the Turkish massacres of the Armenians”; the Final Solution confounded “even the most pessimistic of the Polish Jewry”. The “eternal Jewish optimism and faith in the ultimate triumph of justice” could not grasp “the sheer improbability” of the crime. German Jews would not even believe in anything like the Nuremberg Laws. Part of the fiendish design was to get Jews to help in their own destruction by way of the Nazi-appointed Jewish Councils (Judenrat). In dealing with this delicate subject, Mr Ainsztein shows a judicious sense of discrimination. He has a definite, class-conscious animus against “the traditional Jewish establishment made up of the rich and the religious leaders, which by its very nature had always been undemocratic and collaborationist”, and he cites examples of some of the Councils operating as Nazi tools; how they “deceived” and “betrayed” their charges, and how, before going into action, resistance organisations, e.g. in Warsaw and Bialystok, “had to assert their authority against the Judenrat”. At the same time, the Councils’ “economic and administrative collaboration” is also seen as part of “the classical Judenrat policy of trying to ensure Jewish survival”. Many of them did abet the resistance, they occasionally disregarded orders, and some Jews boldly refused to join the compromising company in the first place. Mr Ainsztein for once relents in his anger: most of the Judenrat members —despite (according to him) their “middleclass background”—were, he says, “honourable men . . . but no more able to deal with the unprecedented situation in which they found themselves than the Czech mayor of Lidice or the French mayor of Oradour”. This consideration may well be applied to the whole story of Jewish resistance—in our age or any other. Mr Ainsztein is to be commended for his effort to trace the record of Jewish heroism, for his motive clearly is, like that one of his dramatis personae, “to recover Jewish dignity and self-respect through a return to the warlike traditions of the Jewish people”. A little more knowledge on this score might have saved our Foreign Office from those “experts” who contrasted the “nonfighting” Jews with the “fighting race” of the Arabs. Even so, Mr Ainsztein ought not to deprecate, because it is part of Jewish dignity, the faith of those who “saw in martyrdom the highest expressions of Jewish courage”. It seems a pity he takes a consistently negative view of the religious aspect of resistance. “A society which increasingly sought escape from reality in the religious mysticism of Hassidism” need not be despised, even if it is not admired. Mr Ainsztein himself says: “Whether the supreme demonstration of human courage was physical revolt is debatable”, but if (as he rightly argues) flight, in this context, is an act of courage and defiance, then surely so must have been the Sanctification of the Name. If this is to be denigrated as “fatalism”, then Mr Ainsztein must be reminded of his own truthful finding that there is a fatalism which is “synonymous with heroism”. Whether the majority of East European Jews were “God-fearing people, praying and learning”, as one of their apologists has claimed, is a moot point; they were ordinary people like the rest of us, behaving as everybody else would have done in like circumstances; they were neither less nor more than human, born to be neither heroes nor martyrs, and I fear there is rather more in Bruno Bettelheim’s psychology than is dreamt of in Mr Ainsztein’s historical philosophy. This book is a useful addition to historical research, though scholars are likely to frown upon the author’s often all too polemical approach. New sources in Yiddish, Polish and Russian (most of them published in Eastern Europe) have been consulted, though possibly not always with the necessary pinch of salt; the “select bibliography” names about 400 titles, and to peruse the 73 pages of Notes is in itself an education. The number of minute details added to the general picture is truly remarkable. Unfortunately Mr Ainsztein was often too zealously engrossed in the trees and so lost sight of the wood—that greater vision in which Jewish resistance is part not only of Jewish history but of the making of man, anywhere, as he meets the challenge of evil.