Finding Common Ground
From Facing History and Ourselves:
The Jews of Poland, Chapter 6
Not long after the Nazis occupied Poland, many Jews began to realize that the political, social, and religious differences that separated them before the war were no longer meaningful. As Emmanuel Ringelblum reminded them, “The Germans did not distinguish between the Zionists and the Bundists. They hated the former and the latter as one, and wanted to annihilate them both.” Although Jews in Warsaw and other cities agreed on the need to oppose the Germans, they disagreed on the “right” way to do so.
No issue divided the Warsaw Ghetto more deeply than the question of armed resistance. On July 23, 1942, the second day of the Great Deportation, sixteen Jews met secretly in the ghetto. They represented political and religious groups ranging from the Orthodox Agudat Israel to the Communists. Among them were a number of individuals who did not represent a particular group but were known and respected by almost everyone in the community. In his autobiography, Yitzhak Zuckerman recalled the meeting:
First, they talked about the question of what could be done. Should we defend ourselves? Presenting the problem like that required dealing with it. [Historian Yitzhak] Schipper, for example, said he had information that [the deportation] concerned taking only 80,000 Jews! He spoke of historical responsibility: it’s true, he said, these people might be executed, but can we endanger the lives of all the other Jews? Schipper was a good speaker. He said that there are periods of resignation in the lives of the Jews as well as periods of self-defense. In his opinion, this wasn’t a period of defense. We were weak and we had no choice but to accept the sentence.
. . . . I proposed that those present and their comrades, the community leaders (we could assemble a few hundred Jews) demonstrate in the streets of the ghetto with the slogan: “Treblinka Is Death!” Let the Germans come and kill us. I wanted the Jews to see blood in the streets of Warsaw, not in Treblinka. . . . That was the direction of my thought. I explained it like this: we have no choice. The world doesn’t hear, doesn’t know; there is no help from the Poles; if we can’t save anyone—at least let the Jews know! So they could hide. I also said that we had to attack the Jewish police. If we had worked in this spirit, we might have prolonged the process, made it hard for the Germans to carry it out. . . .
Alexander-Zysze Friendman, one of the leaders of Agudat Israel, was weeping as he said words of love and respect to me: “My son, the Lord gives and the Lord takes.” Since we couldn’t save anyone, perhaps, that should have been our answer too, since in the situation the Jews were in, what difference did it make who went to his death first? But we thought we could save some. We thought that if people saw blood, if they knew that going meant death, murder, and if they knew it not from afar, not behind fences, but if they saw it with their own eyes, they wouldn’t go willingly. . . 1
In the end, Zuckerman reported that the group chose to take no action. Instead they “pleaded for patience and held that we should still wait. How long then? Until the situation was clarified.” Zivia Lubetkin, a leader of Dror, writes:
We saw that we were facing an impenetrable wall. Again we asked ourselves: “What can we do?” . . . We made another attempt. We called a meeting of [the Zionist workers’] parties . . . and the Bund Socialist Party. . . . Yitzhak Zuckerman outlined the situation, presented the information we had at our disposal and proposed the formation of a Jewish Fighting Organization. . . . When Yitzhak finished speaking, Maurici Orzech, the well-known Bund leader, rose to his feet, looked disdainfully at him and replied: “You’re still a very young man, and your evaluation of the situation is too hasty. The Germans simply wouldn’t be able to destroy all of us—three-and-a-half million Polish Jews. You’re an alarmist. Thousands of Poles . . . are being killed as well. We have to wage our struggle together with the Polish working class for a better world, for the redemption of mankind. We will not participate in an all-Jewish organization.”2
The leaders of the pioneering Zionist youth groups decided to meet on their own. Six days after the deportations began, they agreed “to organize for defense and struggle for our honor and the honor of the Jewish people.” But they disagreed on other issues, including where the fighting ought to take place. Some argued that from a military point of view, the ghetto was no place to wage a war against the Nazis. They wanted to join the partisans, fighters who hid in the forests and harassed the enemy. Zuckerman, Lubetkin, and others agreed that the ghetto was not the ideal place to wage guerrilla warfare. But they feared that if they left, there would be no one to defend the ghetto. They asked, “Could we abandon our parents, our children, the helpless among us, our ill, the place where we were formed? May we leave them helpless and defenseless in order to seek out a war where there are better chances for life and victory and where there is a chance for greater contact with non-Jewish movements?”
In the end, the majority decided to remain in the ghetto and organize the Jewish Fighting Organization. The ZOB, the initials in Polish of the new group, would consist of Jewish soldiers led by Jews fighting in and for the Jews of the ghetto. Mordecai Anielewicz of Hashomer Hatzair was the commander of the ZOB and Yitzhak Zuckerman second in command. But in reality, no one person was in charge. Decisions were made jointly by representatives of the various youth groups.
How did those who attended the various meetings in July answer the question of whether to resist? What attitudes, values, and beliefs do their answers reflect? What did you have to believe in order to favor armed resistance in July of 1942? To what extent did those who attended the meeting make a “choice-less choice?” These are decisions made in the “absence of humanly significant alternatives—that is, alternatives enabling an individual to make a decision, act on it, and accept the consequences, all within a framework that supports personal integrity and self-esteem.”
Elie Wiesel has written, “The question is not why all the Jews did not fight, but how so many of them did. Tormented, beaten, starved, where did they find the strength—spiritual and physical—to resist?” How might Zuckerman and Lubetkin answer Wiesel’s question? How do you answer it? Some have called resistance a choice Jews made about how to die rather than about how to live. Others argue that resistance is more about the will to live and the power of hope than it is about death. Which view is closest to Zuckerman’s or Lubetkin’s thinking? Which view is closest to your own?
