Review of Bohaterowie, Hochsztaplerzy, Opisywacze, Wokol Żydowskiego Związku Wojskowego
[Heroes, Hucksters and Story-Tellers: On the Jewish Military Union in the Warsaw Ghetto]
by Mary V. Seeman August 25, 2013
Bohaterowie,
Hochsztaplerzy, Opisywacze, Wokol Żydowskiego Związku Wojskowego
(Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zaglada Żydów, 2011) 635 pp.
[Heroes, Hucksters, and Storytellers: On the Jewish Military Union
(ŻZW)]
This book is written by two historians,
one a Pole, Dariusz Libionka, and the other an Israeli, Laurence
Weinbaum. Dr.
Libionka is the director of the Majdanek State Museum Research
Department and chief editor of the journal, Zagłada Żydów. Studia i
Materiały [Holocaust Studies and Materials], published by the Polish
Academy of Science Center for Holocaust Studies. Dr. Laurence Weinbaum
is chief editor of the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, published by
the Israel Council on Foreign Relations of the World Jewish Congress,
and an adjunct lecturer at the Ariel University. Beneficiaries of a
research grant from Israel’s Jabotinsky Institute, and in relentless
pursuit of their objective, the two authors analyze an overwhelming
amount of source material in both Israel and Poland, much of it
previously unknown, and much of it entirely contradictory.
Libionka
and Weinbaum’s book is both a scrupulously detailed examination of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, focusing on the smaller and less well known the
two resistance formations that fought, and
a comprehensive collection of survivor, bystander and perpetrator
accounts, some published earlier, much of them not. The authors trawled
official archives, diaries and correspondence from the period and from
the years that have followed. They have also carefully evaluated the
secondary sources that have arisen over the years, including, for
example, books by Chaim Lazar, Dan Kurzman, Israel Gutman and Moshe
Arens, to name but a few. Significantly, their research is as much about
the evolution of the narrative as the actual events themselves. Indeed,
the first half of this hefty tome is devoted to a painstaking
deconstruction of the story as it evolved over time.
The
prevailing image of Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust is one of
persecution, humiliation, mass murder and submission. The Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising (which took place in April/May 1943) is the best known act of
Jewish resistance during the Shoah. There were, in
fact, many other forms of resistance, and a number of other, smaller
uprisings. Individual acts of defiance took place in ghettos other than
Warsaw, and there was actually a full-fledged revolt in Białystok
(August 1943), There were other smaller, though no less heroic, armed
confrontations. Attempts at armed resistance erupted in three
extermination camps: Treblinka (August 1943), Sobibór (October 1943) and
Auschwitz-Birkenau (October 1944). Thousands of Jews escaped from the
ghettos and joined partisan groups in the forests of Poland and
Lithuania. Resistance took other forms in other parts of Europe. But
resistance without arms and without some form of support from
sympathetic non-Jews was all but impossible. Arms cost money, and the
Jews had almost none. They also needed allies to assist them on the
so-called Aryan side and these were in short supply. Indeed, assistance
from outsiders was difficult to come by, and took time to develop.
Tragically,
time was something that Jews in Warsaw during the German occupation did
not have.
As part of “Operation Reinhard,”
approximately 300,000 residents of the Warsaw Ghetto were rounded up
from July to September 1942 and deported to Treblinka where they were
gassed on arrival. It was only after that calamitous event that the Jews
of Warsaw seriously began to organize resistance. On 18 January 1943, a
second deportation began, this time met with unexpected armed action.
Hundreds of people in the Warsaw ghetto, armed with a few handguns and
Molotov cocktails, caused German casualties and brought a halt to the
proceedings. “Only” 5,000 Jews were removed from the ghetto, instead of
the 8,000 originally planned.
Two resistance
organizations, the ŻZW (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy or Jewish Military
Union) and the ŻOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa or Jewish Combat
Organization) took control of the ghetto.
They built bunkers and fighting posts and executed a number of
collaborators, including Jewish Police officers, and members of a
resistance organization called Żagiew, which was sponsored and
controlled by the Germans as a trap to ensnare Jews.
The
final phase of the ghetto started on the eve of Passover, April 19
1943. When German troops entered the ghetto in order to liquidate it,
and were met with gunfire. The relative initial success of the revolt is
usually attributed to the efforts of ŻOB in large measure due to the
fact that the story of the revolt was told mainly through the eyes of
two ŻOB leaders who survived: Yitzhak “Antek” Zukerman, who was ŻOB’s
liaison to the Polish underground, and Marek Edelman, deputy commander
of ŻOB, who wrote a tract entitled The Ghetto Fights that was published
immediately after the war.
Initially, when the
Jews were driven into the ghetto many
underground factions took hold, representing the whole gamut of pre-war
Jewish political life (left, right, and middle of the road, Zionist,
Bundist, assimilationist, religious, militantly secular). After the
summer deportations of 1942, the many youth groups coalesced, all under
the banner of ŻOB, except that is for the Zionist right, which remained
separate and formed its own armed formation, the ŻZW, That group traced
its roots to the prewar Zionist youth movement Betar, founded by the
Odessa-born maximalist Jewish leader, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. In the
years before the war it had been one of the largest Zionist movements in
Poland. Menachem Begin had been its leader. However, with the outbreak
of the war and the rapid German advances, he and many of his colleagues
headed east in hopes that from there they could make their way to
Palestine. The authors take pains to explain that, unlike some of the
other Jewish youth groups, the right
was bereft of most of its senior leaders, and this fact also influenced
the course of its development. The Betar underground group was later
bolstered by a number of politically unaffiliated fighters, and even
some leftists who had not been absorbed by the ŻOB. Among the other
aspects of its evolution, the authors pay close attention to the fate of
the Betar members who were dispatched from the ghetto to work on farms
in the area of Hrubieszów.
The ŻZW and ŻOB did
not share their arms; each maintained a separate hierarchy of command.
But they did co-operate, at least to the extent that each demarcated its
territory and waged war against the Germans from specific coordinated
zones. Very few ŻZW fighters survived the uprising and none of the
senior leaders. Because of this, they were not initially given as much
credit for bravery as was ŻOB. No less significant was the left-wing
dominance of Israeli political life.
Accordingly, documents that seemed to suggest that the longest-lasting
defense action in the Uprising took place around the ŻZW stronghold at
Muranowski Square were largely ignored or downplayed.
Jürgen
Stroop, the Nazi commander in charge of putting down the uprising
reported in his infamous official description of the event that two
flags (the red and white Polish flag and the blue and white banner of
the ŻZW) fluttered over the ghetto. Stroop sent daily reports on the
German “aktion” in the ghetto plus a final summary report in which he
noted that the flags not only motivated but also unified Poles and Jews.
Himmler, apparently, ordered him to bring down the flags as his first
priority. This book demonstrates that the story of the two flags is
depicted very differently in various accounts and was often used, as was
the whole ŻZW story, in a symbolic fashion. It is debatable whether the
Polish underground fighters
aided ŻZW (who actually tended to be more favorably disposed toward the
Polish state) more than they did ŻOB, or even at all. The Polish
underground, of course, had its own internal political divisions and the
extent of Polish aid to which group is difficult to determine with
certainty.
There is not even a consensus, for
instance, as to who led the ŻZW. The authors dispense with the idea
popular in Poland that a Dawid Moryc Apfebaum—and for whom a square is
named in Warsaw—was the key personality in the group. They maintain that
Apfelbaum never existed (or played any role in the formation) and that
the commanders were actually Leon Rodal, a well-known Yiddish
journalist and Revisionist activist from Kielce, and Paweł (Paul)
Frenkel. Certainly, one additional difficulty in pinpointing the
relevant personalities is that both Jewish and Polish fighters are
referred to in the various documents by code names so even
that the identity of some individuals is rather uncertain. This is
especially noteworthy in the case of Pawel Frenkel, about who almost
nothing is known, not even his precise age, and of whom not even a
photograph has been found.
Libionka and
Weinbaum examine the documents and demonstrate why many of them are
unreliable. They identify many that are blatant falsifications or
fabrications created out of personal or ideological motives—including
several shameless memoirs penned by survivors. Many of the reports that
were (and still are) considered trustworthy contradict one another, and
many of the survivors’ stories have changed over time. In fact, thanks
to Libionka and Weinbaum, some of the original sources have now been
definitively discredited and can be discarded. Significantly, the
authors explain that neither Poles nor Jews have a monopoly on
confabulation. Indeed, both individual Poles and Jews contributed to the
way in which the history of the organization was distorted, though each
for different reasons.
During the battle, the
ŻZW lost all of its commanders, and, on April 29, the surviving fighters
escaped the ghetto through the Muranowski tunnel. On May 8, the Germans
uncovered the main command post of the ZOB. Most of that organization’s
leadership, including chief commander, Mordechai Anielewicz, took
cyanide. Marek Edelman and a few comrades escaped through the ghetto
sewers two days later. The suppression of the Uprising officially ended
on 16 May 1943, when Stroop personally pushed a detonator button to blow
up Warsaw’s Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street.
This
book, in great detail, focuses on the factual and fictional
contributions of the ŻZW to the Ghetto Uprising. Some of what has been
reported about its role is exposed to be fraudulent or exaggerated. Its
authors hasten to explain that this in
no way detracts from its very real and heroic contributions to that
foremost display of Jewish courage in World War II. Libionka and
Weinbaum have succeeded in exploding many of the myths that obscured the
real story of the ŻZW and in so doing, have finally set the record
straight. Their book is not yet available in English, but one presumes
it will be soon.
Mary
V. Seeman, Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychiatry at the
University of Toronto, was born in Lodz, Poland. She has published in
the area of women’s mental health and psychosis, receiving numerous
awards, including an honorary degree from the University of Toronto and
appointment as Officer in the Order of Canada.
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