Читать книгу The Courage to Care - Carol Rittner - Страница 10

Each one of the Hasidei Umot HaOlam, “Righteous Among the Nations of the World,” saved an individual or individuals who were precious and unique, as all people are. The people who saved others also deserve respect for their own uniqueness. One must speak with diffidence of the righteous rescuers; we do not know much about most of them. What we have, mainly, are anecdotal accounts and, truthfully, not many of them. Obviously, there cannot have been a large number of rescuers. We know this is so because the evil forces unleashed in the Holocaust swallowed up many of them; besides, there were so many victories for the other side, the murderers, that there could not have been too many resisters.

Still, one of the most important points to remember is that when a large number or a majority of people came together, as in Denmark or in Le Chambon, they saved not just individuals but thousands. The rescuing bystanders, or the bystanders in general, made the critical difference in the survival of Jews.

The difference in Jewish survival in the various European countries is enormous. It ranged from 95 percent surviving in Denmark to 90 percent dead in Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania. Why the incredible variation in rates of Jewish survival?

Clearly the difference lay not in Jewish behavior, neither in passive nor armed resistance. Armed resistance was a decision how to die, not how to live. Nor was it Nazi behavior that made the crucial difference, because it was murderous everywhere. The single critical difference was the behavior of the bystanders. The more bystanders there were who resisted, the greater was the chance that Jews would survive.

In this introduction, I will present a very general sketch of the Holocaust, not only to allow us to see the Righteous in the proper perspective, but also to give a sense of the context in which their actions occurred and, in a sense, can be measured. The universal destruction is the backdrop against which lifesaving can be appreciated.

The Holocaust can be dated from any of a number of events. I will begin from an obvious point, the Nazi ascent to power in Germany in 1933. The first six years, from 1933 to 1939, was the period of consolidation of Nazi power within Germany. It was also the time in which the seeds for the Holocaust were sown. During this period the Jews of Germany were expelled from the civil service, the army, the schools, and the professions. Jewish professionals, first prohibited only from service to non-Jews, were eventually forbidden even to help Jews, their own community. In this way Jews were isolated, This was an essential and crucial dimension of the Germans’ scenario for destroying them: to isolate the Jews, which included exclusion from citizenship, in the notorious Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and additional restrictions on where and how they could live, and move about. There was an attempt to keep these matters quiet, especially during the period of the Olympics in 1936. The goal was to reduce objections to the Nazis’ behavior by people outside Germany.

In general, although there was a continuing, growing violence, both legal and physical, against the Jews, it was not completely random. The whole stage is marked by a pattern: First, there would be an attack on Jews, then an extension of the attack, then a pause. And, frequently the pause was used as a time in which the Nazis watched world reaction and gauged whether they could forge ahead or would have to modify their plans. Then, as happened repeatedly, in the absence of significant reaction from the rest of the world, the Nazis would resume the attacks on the Jewish community and engage in further oppression.

People often look back and wonder when the Jews could have been saved. I believe, in retrospect, that the key time they could have been saved was in this very period, 1933-39. As we now know, when Hitler invaded the Rhineland in 1935, even his generals did not believe that he would be able to escape a crushing Allied retaliation. The generals even prepared to attempt overthrowing Hitler in a coup. But when the world let him get away with that triumph, his prestige among the generals soared. This gave him the power base from which to begin to implement his plans for world conquest and for destruction of the Jews.

Often, these plans had a kind of perverted logic, some were even not anti-Semitic in their initial focus. The notorious euthanasia program was originally supposed to be a program to rid Germany of so-called mental defectives. It was begun in a rather tentative way. Gassing, in particular, was tried only as an experiment. The program was stopped for it evoked a series of severe criticism and protests, first from the Catholic bishops and later from Protestant leaders and families.

The euthanasia program was dropped at that point because the government did not enjoy the full confidence of the people. Yet, it turned out that the research done during this time on killing with gas was to be used later in developing the gas chambers in which so many Jews and others were murdered.

Jewish emigration itself shows an interesting pattern. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, German-Jewish emigration soared. Thirty-three thousand left Germany in that year alone as people panicked. Yet although things grew worse, Jewish emigration decreased each year thereafter. Of course, this was, in part, due to the fact that the number of Jews in the population was declining. In addition, some were perhaps able to “adjust” to the new reality, remaining hopeful that Germany—the “true” Germany—would outlast Hitler. Germany was their home, their country, and they were confident that this kind of barbaric thing would not go on indefinitely. After all, had not Jews experienced discrimination and pogroms for centuries, and had they not always managed to survive?

The victorious German troops parading through Holland.

In 1938, this hope, this illusion, came to an end. The violent Kristallnacht of November, 1938, caused a huge leap in emigration. Frantic and desperate, 50 thousand Jews left Germany in late 1938 and early 1939. After that point it was too late; the war cut off the exits—too little room had been made in other countries for Jews who might otherwise have chosen to leave Germany to emigrate to another country.

Exclusion of Jews is an important measure of the world’s response to the Nazis. In 1938, there was refugee conference in Evian, France, at which the question of how to deal with the Jews was discussed. The fact that the Allies—or, perhaps one should say, the world powers—came in without a serious refugee acceptance program was taken by the Nazis as a signal that, essentially, the world was sympathetic to their position. Indeed, it was during this period that Hitler made the famous comment that other nations liked to criticize him to make their hands look clean, but that, in fact, they would not accept Jews because they felt the same way about them as he did.

In 1938, Austria was taken over, and in 1939, Czechoslovakia was swallowed by Germany as a part of the consolidation of power. In 1939, with the invasion of Poland by the Germans, all-out war developed, and with it the full-scale war against the Jews. Lucy Dawidowicz has pointed out that while the declaration of war came in September 1939, the “declaration of war” against the Jews had come some eight months earlier. On January 30,1939, in a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler said, “If international-financed Jewry should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.” (The War Against The Jews, Bantam, 1976). I read this quote for many years without appreciating the full horror of it—until I saw Hitler on film, presenting this speech. The most chilling thing about the speech is that when he had finished that sentence, there was a standing ovation in the Reichstag.

According to Lucy Dawidowicz, in Hitler’s mind, “War and annihilation of the Jews were interdependent.” The disorder of war would provide the cover for unchecked murder of civilians. Within a month’s time, Poland surrendered and Russia came in to take over its share, the eastern half of Poland. Millions of Jews fell under German domination, and from 1939 to 1941 there was again a process of attack and consolidation.

During this period the dominant policy was not all-out murder. There were initial atrocities when the Germans first came through but the policy was more understated—murder, yes, but no mass murder. There was also ghettoization, which followed within the year, by October 1940. At first, the ghettos were mostly open and people could move about quite freely even while being forced to live there. One must remember that ghettoization meant poverty for the Jews, who had to leave behind them much of their property, homes, and wealth. In many cases, their bank accounts were frozen. It meant hunger and malnutrition, and slave labor or random seizures for forced labor.

Within that period, the German government incorporated parts of Poland directly into Germany. The central core of Poland (called the General Government) was set aside as an S.S.-controlled zone in which the Germans had total control and domination. During this period there was racial screening of Poles, and so-called Aryan-type children were sent off to Germany. A half million Germans were brought into the places from which Poles had been evacuated or expelled. In short, the atrocities were directed, in part, against the local Polish population, and not against the Jews alone.

Postcard from Mielic, near Krakow, in the “General Gouvernement” area of occupied Poland, dated October 22, 1941. It arrived in the United States two and one half months later on January 9, 1942, heavily censored on both sides.

There was a brief period after the fall of Poland when the Western Front was quiet. In April 1940, the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway, followed in May 1940 by the invasion of the Low Countries, the Netherlands and Belgium. This led to the surrender of France in June. This was the peak of German power. Hitler had planned the invasion of England by September 1940, but that attempt was thwarted by the Royal Air Force in what is now known as the famous Battle of Britain. During the period 1940-41, plans were laid for the invasion of Russia, which was intended to become Hitler’s culminating triumph in Europe. Despite the frustration of not conquering England, the conquest of Russia was the first priority in Hitler’s mind. During this period of full-scale war, plans were being made for mass murder. Once again, the notion of unrestrained war paved the way for a stepped-up attack on the Jews.

A task force was set up for political administration and special Einsatzgruppen were recruited to carry out the killing orders. The Einsatzgruppen were shooting squads, some three to four thousand men, broken into smaller units—A, B, C, and D—travelling right behind the Germans’ front lines in priority transportation and with special status. In many cases, as the German Army pursued its blitzkrieg through Russia, the Jews were trapped and caught. Right behind the front came the killing squads. Typically, the Nazis would go into a village or town, round up the Jews, take them nearby, and shoot them down.

On June 22, 1941, an all-out invasion of Russia was unleashed. This initial attack on Russia was enormously successful. The Russian Army was unprepared. Stalin had ignored the warning signs, and the Russian people, in many cases, were initially restless and disloyal as the Germans rolled through. However, they soon got a taste of German recklessness and ruthlessness. Although German atrocities were primarily directed at murdering every last Jew, they also killed Russians and Poles whom the Nazis considered subhuman because they were Slavs.

During this period the Germans’ success in Western Europe had left most countries in one of three basic zones: colonial, command, and S. S. In the colonial zone, the Germans allowed the existing local governments to go on functioning—either because they were allies or because it was more convenient to conquer them and allow the local governments to rule under Nazi “guidance.”

France, Denmark, and Finland are examples of highly integrated prewar states that were allowed to have their own governments, as long as they did not fight the Germans. In the case of Denmark, the government was a popularly chosen government. In the case of France, while the government was installed by the Nazis, it had strong ties to the people. Several less unified prewar states were allowed their own governments because they were allies; these include Croatia (now part of Yugoslavia), Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. Although an ally in a different way, Italy also had its own government.

In the second of the zones, the command zone, the Germans replaced the local governments with quislings, or collaborators. They were not popularly chosen representatives, but the Germans did not take over totally. In these countries, including Belgium, Norway, and the Netherlands, the Germans had a somewhat stricter level of control. The people were ruled by indigenous local groups, but under German supervision.

In the third zone, the S. S. zone, the German administration installed itself, abolishing or destroying all local governments and taking complete charge. This was done in Austria before the war. During the war, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Estonia, and Serbia—essentially the Eastern European areas—whose populations, being Slavic, were considered lower-grade humans, were taken over. Hitler’s whole attitude toward the Slavs, as an inferior “racial” group, rationalized this total dominance for him and his minions.

Eastern Europe had a long-standing record of anti-Semitism. Helen Fein, in her book Accounting for Genocide (Free Press, 1979), has noted correctly that where there was higher prewar anti-Semitism and a tighter S. S. grip, the result was a higher level of Jewish victimization. In these countries (although somewhat less directly linked to Jewish survival rates) higher prewar political and social disunity allowed the Germans to use the nation’s ethnic tensions against the Jews. This often led to higher rates of victimization because crimes were committed by collaborators or by the Nazis with the compliance by silence of local populations.

A Jewish child in Holland during one of the round ups for deportation to the East.

The opposite was true in countries in which less control was exercised or which had lower prewar anti-Semitism and greater national unity. In short, both individual and collective responses were factors in the amount of power brought to bear on the side of evil.

At first, in Poland from 1939 to 1941, the destruction of the Jews was essentially slow killing by hunger, disease, and overwork. As time went on, however, the ghettos were closed increasingly more tightly. This cut the Jews off, not only from non-Jewish Poles, but also from their homes, their sources of livelihood, and a great deal more. The closing of the ghettos carried a death penalty, not only for Jews who left the ghetto, but for anyone caught aiding and harboring Jews. Such a policy was announced in November 1941, in Warsaw. And the Einsatzgruppen were extremely successful in killing Jews. Estimates run from a million to a million and a half victims. It is possible to read the statistics in the chilling text of the records of Einsatzgruppen A, which kept a daily head count of deaths—men, women and children—for months on end. What is particularly striking is the percentages of women and children in these groups. Frequently, the men were sent off to labor or were killed immediately, with the women and children left to be finished off by the Einsatzgruppen.

The Nazis discovered that mobilization of the Einsatzgruppen was not the best way to implement the plan for exterminating the Jews. It had several drawbacks: the use of bullets was expensive; it was slow; and it was not without its effect on both the killers and the local population. Even the killers, despite their hardening and their ideology, found week after week of shooting women and children somewhat disturbing—not disturbing enough to stop, but disturbing enough to cause sleepless nights and nightmares, excessive drinking, and different forms of brutalization. Perhaps the very weakness and vulnerability of their victims led to ever greater hostility and sadism in their behavior.

The result was the decision to look for cheaper, more effective, and less personal ways of killing the Jews. This meant bringing in some of the technicians who had been involved in the euthanasia program, as well as experimenting with travelling vans in which carbon monoxide was piped back into the trucks. This was followed by the use of a more potent gas for killing humans and then the construction of gas chambers and the death camps.

Eventually the Nazis put into operation six killing camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, and Maidanek. All except Chelmno were in the so-called General Government, meaning Polish territory totally controlled by the Nazis.

The Germans began to transport three million people across Europe to their deaths. Raul Hilberg summarizes what was involved in transporting three million Jews: “It meant railway timetables had to be devised, wagons hired, frontier crossing points organized, shunting arrangements (along the tracks) perfected. Whole communities had to be uprooted, first by means of registration, then confinement to special sectors of towns, then deportation to holding camps, and from there regular dispatch to the East.” (The Destruction of the European Jews, 2nd edition, Holmes and Meier, 1985.)

Tens of thousands, one might say hundreds of thousands, had to be involved in such a process. At every crossing people were standing and watching. At every stop there were people hearing about it from families and relatives, seeing pictures, and yet few when questioned after the war, would concede to having seen what was going on. Deportations went on, relatively unchecked, throughout the period.

German soldiers taunting a Jew in Poland.

By 1942, Allied counterattack had begun: first in Russia, where the winter turned into a nightmare for the Germans, and then in North Africa where the Allies began organizing for their comeback. It is interesting to note that organized armed resistance to the Germans inside Europe did not exist until the Allies began to regain their strength.

When the Warsaw ghetto revolted in 1943, it was the first serious organized armed resistance in Europe. It was not that the Jews were better fighters, but they knew that they were going to die, and they decided to make a choice of how they were going to die. Great numbers of Jews already had been killed. Those who still remained began to buy a few guns and to organize this incredible revolt. Of course, it was a symbolic statement more than anything else, a statement of hope that others would learn from them for the future of Jewish life, at least, by reading about them in the history books.

The degree of Nazi control in various European countries was a major factor in how Jews were treated throughout this period. The classic examples are Denmark and Bulgaria. The Danes, because they were Aryan, and therefore identified in the German mind as the “right” kind of people, and because they agreed to surrender under certain conditions, had their own government. It is interesting to note that their conditions of surrender included, first and foremost, that the government would not tolerate discrimination against the Jews. The second condition was that they would not have a Danish army fighting in the East, and the third condition insured Danish neutrality vis-à-vis the Axis.

Danish insistence that the Jews in their country were Danes and that they would not accept separation led to the now famous rescue of the Jews of Denmark. The Danes’ solidarity was remarkable, thus assuring that no individual rescuer would be punished by a fellow citizen. Further, the Nazis were reluctant to attempt to punish an entire nation. This is in contrast to such countries as Poland, where saving a Jew could bring a sentence of death on the individual.

Equally interesting is the Bulgarian situation. Bulgaria was a far less unified and democratic country than Denmark but Bulgaria’s sense that native Jews were also Bulgarians was so strong that the government insisted on protecting its own people (in spite of the fact that the same government abandoned “foreign” Jews in newly annexed provinces). The Orthodox Church in Bulgaria played an important role in the decision to help Jews, which only proves one must avoid sweeping generalizations about the churches during the Holocaust.

In fact, in both Bulgaria and Denmark, the churches spoke up in defense of the Jews. In other countries, France, for example, individual churchmen spoke out against what was happening to the Jews. There are many areas where the churches played important roles in preventing the isolation of the Jews. It is equally true, however, that Pope Pius XII did not speak up clearly and publicly. We know too that the Slovakian Church actively supported the mass murderers.

In Belgium, 53 percent of the Jews evaded deportation, thanks to an active resistance in the underground and to the organized activities of the Comité de Defense des Juifs, which was organized as an offshoot of the underground. What is also striking about the connection of Jews and non-Jews is that in both Denmark and Belgium the underground itself often was organized or was brought into active being in response to the Jewish situation. Just as the mass killing of Jews paved the way for the mass killing of others, so the defense of the Jews paved the way for the defense or the resistance of others.

Furthering the cycle of deportation and the growing organization that made it possible was the infamous Wannsee Conference, which was convened to plan the Final Solution, to make sure it was done properly and to bring together those who would carry it out. One of the most chilling dimensions of the Holocaust is the use of bureaucracy and technology by the Nazis. As Himmler said later, they did not hate the Jews. The killing was done purely with sangfroid—and that was the power of it. When you hate people, you get furious, you kill some, and you work off the hatred. But if you can translate murder into rules, regulations, bureaucracy, technology, it can go on and on and on. The irony is that despite the fact that the Germans were beginning to lose the war in 1943-44 more Jews were being killed in those years than earlier, when the Germans were winning. The major killing of the Jews was done, during the period when the war was turning against the Nazis, a period when resistance was up.

The Warsaw ghetto.

In hindsight, we now know that the failure of the Allies to make any attempt to bomb the railroad lines leading to the death camps, their failure to try to halt the technology of mass death in places like Auschwitz contributed to the “abandonment of the Jews” and to the unrelenting atrocities committed against them. Attempts to save the Jews in concentration camps never got serious priority or serious attention in those quarters where it would have made a significant difference. Indeed, the very first warnings to the Germans that they would be held responsible after the war for their atrocities deliberately omitted mentioning Jews, even though everyone recognized that Jews were the greatest number of those being murdered. It could be argued that the Germans took that as a signal that they would be punished for atrocities against non-Jewish civilians, but not for those against the Jewish civilians.

A Polish deportation. “Some killed. Others helped the killers or made believe they didn’t know. The large majority was apathetic, uninvolved, unconcerned, indifferent... Only a few had the courage to care.” Elie Wiesel.

The Allies’ failure to confront the uniqueness of Jewish destiny in the Holocaust was a major factor in the successful killing of the six million Jews. When the Jews of America begged the Allies to bomb Auschwitz, they were refused outright. They were told that it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy.” One could not ask for a guarantee of a particular fate for the Jews.

Several times during the summer of 1944, when the Germans were at the peak of their killing of the Jews, they decided they were spending too much money on their killing. The gas they were using, Zyklon B, was very expensive; therefore the Nazis decided that the supply of gas they were using to kill Jews was to be cut in half. They saved half the money while doubling the time it took for a Jew to die of strangulation in the gas chambers. In the end, they even decided to burn Jewish children in the camps alive rather than waste money on gas. During all the time that this was going on, bombers were flying over Auschwitz on their way to bomb the nearby l.G. Farben synthetic rubber plant, known as Buna. That was an important war target, a priority, but the camps were not.

During the two years when the tide of war was changing, the murderers gave priority to killing Jews and some non-Jews in the camps. We know, for example, that German troop trains were shunted aside, and trains full of Jews were sent through. One of the great all-time technological achievements—the mass murder of totally innocent people—went on unchecked; a war that was being fought to save democracy in general betrayed the most fundamental responsibilities of humanity and democracy.

It is only against this backdrop of horror that one can appreciate the enormous force brought to bear against the Righteous Rescuers, the enormous risks that they took, and the variation in those risks. In recognizing their achievement, we must also be aware that failure to help those who were endangered rests not only on those who were right there and did nothing to hinder the Nazis but also on those who, possessing the power to help on a great scale, found other priorities and other responsibilities.

Irving Greenberg a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, is a well-known scholar, writer, and lecturer. He is President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York City.