Historians of Jewish Resistance
by Jan T. Gross

Yisrael Gutman. The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, trans. from the Hebrew by Ina Friedman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. xviii, 487 pages.

Shmuel Krakowski. The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944, trans. from the Hebrew by Orah Blaustein. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1984. xii, 340 pages.

Dov Levin. Fighting Back: Lithuanian Jewry's Armed Resistance to the Nazis, 1941-1945, trans. from the Hebrew by Moshe Kohn and Dina Cohen. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1985. xvi, 298 pages.

I must warn the reader that I am writing the following observations as an outsider. I do not read Yiddish or Hebrew. Jewish history is not my field. Indeed, I am not a historian; I teach in a department of sociology. I have written about the experiences of Polish society during World War II, and the subject of my current research is Soviet strategies of social control. Thus, I will most likely appreciate the books under review for what many readers may find commonplace, and I will see their weaknesses where many would not be particularly disturbed. What follows, then, is a reading. And I insist on the indefiniteness of the article; it is but one of many possible readings.

"Next to the atrocious facts [of the Holocaust] the very idea of literature seems indecent." Those words were spoken by Czeslaw Milosz,1 one of the greatest contemporary poets who lived through the war years in Warsaw and witnessed the destruction of Polish Jewry. And yet, we have been commanded by victims of the Holocaust to ponder their fate. Whether the apocryphal story of Simon Dubnow's admonition shouted in the streets of Riga to write it all down, the numerous diaries that unlike their authors were salvaged from the cinders of Jewish communities, or the monumental collaborative effort of documentation undertaken by Emmanuel Ringelblurn and the "Oneg Shabat" group in the Warsaw ghetto-all are a charge to subsequent generations of scholars to put the materials that the dying victims have recorded together in a way that would render the facts intelligible. Can we make sense of the evidence? This is an awesome task, or else a great poet would not confess to the barrenness of literature when confronted with it. We should, therefore, look upon all efforts that accept the challenge with sympathy, although aware that they are not likely to succeed.

The three books under review have a lot in common. Their authorsYisrael Gutman, Shmuel Krakowski, and Dov Levin-witnessed the destruction of Jewish life in Poland and Lithuania during World War II; they were young at the time, yet old enough to be involved in the resistance movement. Their books-as, indeed, the titles of two plainly indicate-are primarily about Jewish resistance. Even Gutman's study of The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943 is mostly (350 pages out of 500) devoted to the Jewish underground and the revolt in Warsaw. The works are, in a way, extrapolations of their authors' biographies. In a more general sense, they belong to a collective biography of a particular generation of Jewish youth who came of age in East Central Europe in 1940.

I hasten to add that these are scholarly contributions, not autobiographies in even the broadest sense of the term. They merely share a focus, the phenomenon of organized Jewish resistance, grounded in each author's individual experience, that of participation in organized conspiratorial activity. More specifically still, the involvement of the authors was on the left of the political spectrum. Gutman, for instance, was in the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) in Warsaw, and Krakowski joined a cell of the Communist Party sponsored youth organization in the Lodz ghetto. Ideologically oriented toward the Left and defiant of the traditional authorities within their own communities, such teenage men and women were the nucleus of Jewish resistance throughout Poland, the Ukraine, and Lithuania under Nazi occupation. The "heroic" Jewish historiography of the war years draws primarily from the experience of this generation.

The books under review are works of historical reconstruction. All three authors used primary sources and worked with archival collections. Krakowski's book-I understand that it is his doctoral dissertation written under the direction of Yehuda Bauer-is the result of many years of research begun while he still lived in Poland. (He quotes from Polish archival collections, including the Archives of the Ministry of Interior and of the Institute for Communist Party History in Warsaw, to which he would not have had access as a Jewish emigre to Israel after March 1968.) In the mid-sixties in Poland, Krakowski published a few articles about the Jewish resistance, but they were narrowly focused on his own experiences in the Lodz ghetto or on Jewish participation in the Communist underground. He authored one informative piece comparing relative strengths of combatants in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and indeed the longest chapter of his present book is devoted to the Uprising and includes a very good criticism of Stroop's report.2

The War of the Doomed represents a significant broadening of Krakowski's research interests and offers a survey of Jewish resistance not only in the ghettos of the General Government, but also in partisan units and concentration camps. Krakowski describes the ubiquity of Jewish resistance as well as its isolation. In this respect an estimate by Dov Levin is truly extraordinary. He tells us on page 133 of his Fighting Back that "the resistance organizations did not comprise more than five percent of the population in any of the ghettos." But even that is an astonishing number, as if one and a half million Poles were thought to have been potentially members of the underground. An endless list of episodes illustrates the ambush of Jewish units and escapees in the countryside by Polish, Soviet, or Lithuanian partisans; the prevalent hostility of the surrounding population; and the fate of Jewish soldiers of the Lithuanian Division, who were identified by their Lithuanian comrades in arms soon after capture in battle by the Germans and then put to death. The matter-of-factness with which the episodes are recorded by both Krakowski and Levin, the sheer volume of the evidence, and the variety of contexts in which such incidents took place make a fresh impact on the reader even though they are but a confirmation of a familiar pattern.

One part of Krakowski's survey is particularly interesting. He devotes all of chapter 13 to the fate of "Jews in the Polish Warsaw Uprising. " Krakowski documents widespread hostility encountered by Jews who emerged at that time from hiding, and he notes several executions perpetrated on Jews by Polish underground detachments. Again, such information does not come as a complete revelation. In a recent interview with the Polish uncensored periodical Czas, Marek Edelman,3 the surviving deputy commander of the Ghetto (April 1943) Uprising, spoke in a similar vein about his experiences during the Warsaw (August 1944) Uprising, where he also fought. This general phenomenon opens a potentially fruitful research strategy for investigating an important issue. I mean the problem of Polish-Jewish relations during the war and the difficulty of understanding it in isolation, as it were, from the context of ever present German sanctions. Polish attitudes toward the Jews can be determined accurately from the underground Polish press published during World War II, because the Germans had no influence on the content of materials published therein. Analogously, Germans had no influence on how Poles related with Jews in Warsaw during the Uprising. Hence, by scrutinizing the record of PolishJewish encounters in temporarily liberated Warsaw of 1944, we can study Polish behavior toward the Jews in a setting uncontaminated by the threat of German sanctions. There is a very important monograph yet to be written on this subject.

Of the three books, Yisrael Gutman's is probably the most ambitious. Even though focused on one Jewish community, the Jews of Warsaw, it is twice as long as either of the other volumes and paints a broad canvas of social history. What the author attempts here, I think, is to sketch "the life of death."

I find this captivating phrase-the title of Timothy Garton Ash's review of Shoah4 - Most appropriate for an abbreviated description of the dense and frantic pace of human interaction in wartime Jewish ghettos. Ringelblum and his collaborators have left us the richest ethnographic material on all possible aspects of this life: many monographs with titles such as "Sources of Jewish Income in Warsaw," "Jewish Women in Warsaw from September 1939 to the Present Day," "New Wartime Occupations," "Circumstances of Jewish Children," and "Theater in the Ghetto"; and also surveys, memoranda, and statistical compilations. Gutman draws on some of this material and brings out a lot of these themes-and he ought to be praised for doing so. In the end, however, we find our imagination stirred and provoked, but not satisfied.

Consider, for instance, the extraordinarily important and intellectually challenging issue of social stratification in the ghetto. By gaining insight into the problems of enforced categorization, classification, discrimination, compartmentalization, segmentation, and segregation, we come to understand the process whereby a human community is set against itself as a necessary prelude to its own destruction. Gutman gives short shrift to doctrinaire explanations about "class roots" of conflicts and "social oppression" in the ghetto5 -and deservedly so. But he does not go beyond registering a complaint that "it is difficult to understand how supposedly objective authors of historical works can employ terminology and categories borrowed from the life of a normal society to illustrate the experience of a deformed society suffering under relentless stress."6 Or, for example, regarding the awesome subject of refugees in the ghetto, who by April 1941 comprised about one-third of the resident population, Gutman informs us only that "these refugees were one of the main sources of social tension in the enclosed area."7 I would like to see a more analytical disposition of this problem.

The main virtue of Gutman's book is to make us aware that a fascinating piece of interpretative social history can be written about the life of the Warsaw ghetto.

There was a "promenade" in the ghetto that attracted groups of young strollers, and special courtyards were outfitted with chairs and established as spots for sun-bathing. Skits and satires on daily life were performed in the ghetto theaters, and there was also a kind of folklore of the ghetto-popular heroes, special mottoes, jokes about the state of affairs, and even a special ghetto slang. "Ghetto" songs were sung, and a substantial corpus of prose and poetry (much of which has been preserved) was written by veteran artists and novices alike. The social gatherings of tenants of all ages, set up by the building councils, also contributed to the 8 special atmosphere of life in the ghetto.8

Dov Levin's book represents the result of painstaking efforts to piece together the history of Jewish resistance in Lithuania, a chapter of history to which the author himself had contributed. Levin has read through numerous archives, interviewed survivors, and consulted published memoirs and memorial books. His is a book grounded in original sources and, as such, a genuine and lasting contribution to scholarship. With astonishing self- restraint, he has managed to remove himself from the narrative and the commentary on subject matter that certainly brings him painful recollections. Dov Levin's book covers two distinct subjects. He sketches the history and sociography of the Lithuanian Division, established at the end of 1941 within the framework of the Red Army, and he chronicles the struggles of Lithuanian Jews in the territories under German occupation.

The history of the Lithuanian Division belongs to the subject matter of the Jewish struggle against the Nazis, because up to 50 percent of its manpower was Jewish when the division was established. The unit was referred to by its soldiers as the "Jewish Division," even though by the end of the war the number of Jews in it had declined in relative terms to about 10 percent.10 In fact, the history of the division belongs to a more general topic covering the various national units and committees (Latvian, Polish, Czech, or German, for example) that were established by the Soviet authorities with broad political purposes in mind. As Dov Levin puts it: "There is no doubt that the motive for its [Lithuanian Division's] creation was political: to assume the resumption of the Soviet hegemony in Lithuania."11

Every detail Levin provides concerning the division's history is interesting. He traces the dynamics of the national antagonisms in the unit: the initial widespread antisemitism, tempered somewhat in view of the heroism shown by Jewish soldiers in battle, followed by mounting resentment against Lithuanians on the part of the Jews when the division entered reconquered Lithuanian territory in 1944 and the soldiers realized the horrible fate inflicted upon the Jewish population. We learn with great interest about the unusual "Operation Correspondence," lasting from April through August 1942, during which soldiers were encouraged to send letters to their relatives, friends, and "even ordinary acquaintances" in the United States, England, or Palestine in the apparent hope that this would help to persuade the Allies to open a second front.12 Twelve percent of the Jews who fought in the division and survived the war were close relatives13 - given that the division's manpower was groomed for the task of the sovietization of Lithuania in the future, this offers food for thought about the character of Soviet administration. And there is more useful information in Levin's volume.

In the second half of the book (comprised of parts III and IV, and twice as long), Levin recounts Jewish resistance in Lithuanian ghettos, labor camps, and forests. The narrative is a numbing reconstruction of the horrors and the solitude to which the Jews were condemned. There was no sensible course of action for the Jewish inhabitants of the area. Even joining the resistance confronted one with a tragic dilemma. An example of one such tragedy is the surrender to the Gestapo of its commander by the Vilna underground. But in a deeper sense, Levin calls our attention to the ambiguity that must have been experienced when people realized that joining the resistance also implied giving themselves a chance for survival while all the others were condemned beyond reprieve. Should we remain in the ghetto or go into the forest? Should we share the fate of the community or abandon it? - these were endlessly debated questions by the mostly young resisters in Lithuania.14 The simple fact of membership in a clandestine organization immediately put at one's disposal a network for life support, sometimes in the most literal sense, such as in Warsaw, where different conspiratorial networks were organized around soup kitchens.15 The very fact that Marek Edelman survived to tell the journalist who interviewed him in 1976 that the Warsaw ghetto insurgents were but choosing a manner of death undermines his own point. How inhuman that man-created world must have been to instill such a sense of guilt in those who survived in it.

Levin's book is comprehensive, rich, and well thought through despite an occasional senseless table, as on pages 174 and 176, and the untenable claim that the 1,000 surviving Jewish soldiers of the Lithuanian Division, on whom Levin compiled data, are "a representative sample" of Jews in the division.16 Is the survival rate in combat the same for officers and enlisted men, for those at the front and those in support detachments, for those recruited early and those who enlisted in the later phase of war? There seems to be a lingering-and in my opinion wrongheaded-conviction among authors writing about wartime Jewish history that narrative history must be improved by an occasional ornament of sociological lingo. Nechama Tec's useful compilation of testimonies was marred by an extraordinary display of such spurious computations.17 Dov Levin occasionally falls into the trap as well. But occasional methodological naivete notwithstanding, it is truly disturbing how Polish wartime history gets cavalier treatment from two of these authors. This is a serious flaw that undermines their work in toto.

Consider the following passage from the beginning of Gutman's volume:

The mass flight from Warsaw to the east began on 7 September [19391. It was a spontaneous, panicked escape of civilians with no clear destination in mind. Most of the refugees in this flood of hundreds of thousands were young men, who left parents, wives, and young children behind in the City.18

Gutman's sympathies drive him relentlessly, eventually from ignorance to pure invention. Thus he informs us that "the Polish underground press received the news of the German-Soviet hostilities with mixed feelings and undisguised vexation."20 There is no reference to any underground publication to back that observation, which reappears in an elaborate passage three pages later:

The general mood of the Polish public indicated a degree of vexation and division over the sharp, manifest change that has taken place with the Soviet adherence to the anti-Nazi alliance, the Jews tended to welcome and place great hopes upon the new developments. The Poles looked forward to the war concluding with both Germany and the Soviet Union on the defeated side. To achieve that end, they were prepared for a long war, so long as it ensured the undoing of Poland's traditional enemies and the resurrection of the independent greater Polish state. Not so the Jews....21

Gutman is also wrong when he describes the Polish reaction to the ,,- outbreak of Russo-German hostilities as "mixed feelings and undisguised vexation," and for a good reason there is no footnote to back his claim that the view was expressed in the Polish underground press. He could not have found it there because, on the contrary, the reaction was a widespread and unmitigated sigh of relief at the welcome news across the entire political spectrum of Polish society. And Gutman knows why: precisely because the Poles longed for the "undoing of Poland's traditional enemies" (Russia and Germany), since, of course, there was no possibility whatsoever of Russia's being defeated as long as it stayed out of the war. The Soviet-German collaboration brought about the dismantling of Poland, and every citizen of Poland, Jews and Christians alike, knew that. Poles were eagerly anticipating the moment when Hitler and Stalin would finally go to war with one another, or else there would be no chance for the "resurrection" of their country. just as in Gutman's book ' we stumble already in the introductory remarks upon Krakowski's unfortunate mistakes and misrepresentations. When sketching the Polish context of the war years, both authors are setting the stage, as it were, for the subsequent narrative. If the reader knows something about the period, the introduction will immediately put him on the alert. Krakowski, for example, gives us the following overview of Polish resistance:

The largest group of registered members put under the command of the Home Army by various political groups was the National Armed Forces (NSZ)- extreme fascists and anti-Semites.... The fascist units of the National Armed Forces, which were not under the command of the Home Army. . .,were better organized and equipped.22

"It is surprising to note how meager the number of those registered and sent out to fight was": only 2,000 men in Home Army partisan units in the summer of 1943, then another thousand and a half a year later, but in any case most partisans active east of the Bug River.23 That brief summary of the Polish underground's record shows Krakowski's misconception about the realities of clandestine activity in German-occupied Poland. Unlike the Jewish or Communist partisans, who were essentially conducting their activities in a hostile environment, the Polish underground was intertwined with and, on the whole, supported by the local population. Neither the active units of Kedyw (Directorate of Sabotage) of the Home Army nor, say, the Peasant Battalion cells of the Home Army in the countryside, had to be established as standing partisan detachments. As a rule, they were not. Their members were leading a double life: peaceful, toiling peasants in a village by day, they were part of a network that could mobilize on short notice for a nighttime action and return by dawn to their daily chores. Such was the standard and effective strategy of clandestine warfare and deployment adopted by the Poles. Thus, it is patent nonsense to consider those who were "sent out to fight" as synonymous with standing partisan units.

The clincher for Krakowski is the Home Army's failure to mobilize its forces for the Burza (tempest) campaign in the wake of the progressing Red Army's offensive. Arguments of "the Polish historian Zbigniew Zaluski"24 are presented to establish the point. It is as if someone invoked the authority of the American historian Alexander Haig to establish the truth about Watergate. Colonel Zaluski was not much of a historian; rather he was a military man with a vigorous, partisan point of view to defend. He was peddling a quasi-respectable "national-Communist" historiography and was sponsored in those efforts from the milieu of the then Minister of Interior Mieczyslaw Moczar, who, among other "accomplishments," instigated the antisernitic campaign of 1968. Since Krakowski lived at that time in Poland, he could not have missed the debate generated by Zaluski's dabbling in history.

On these two pages of his introductory chapter, Krakowski deals with complex problems of wartime Polish history and dismisses them all lightly, in a few simple phrases, which show ignorance, willful distortion, or both. NSZ was not the largest component of the Home Army. In fact, it was not a component of the Home Army at all. It came into existence precisely because it refused to be integrated into the Home Army and broke away (thereby establishing itself as an independent entity, NSZ) from the National Democratic military organization when the latter finally consented to incorporation into the Home Army. A formal agreement subsuming NSZ under the Home Army's command was concluded in March 1944, but it remained a dead letter. The general problem of integrating within one framework a myriad of party-sponsored clandestine military organizations was the most conspicuous task dominating the wartime labors of the Polish underground. Krakowski's ignorance of such elementary political history of the Polish underground was exposed in a letter published in the Fall 1986 issue of the Slavic Review. Moreover, Krakowski's suggestion that the only mode of active involvement in underground work was through membership in partisan detachments is also wrong. The partisans were not publishing, writing, distributing (or reading, for that matter) the 2,000 underground periodicals that were appearing in occupied Poland at the time; yet people who were carrying out this work-tens of thousands in effect-were indeed fighting the German occupation.

One finds in Krakowski's posture a visible trace of doctrinaire Communist perspective on wartime Polish history: only sabotage and armed struggle that brought relief to the Red Army are held, implicitly, as a worthy fighting stand of the underground. Everything else was at best inaction and at worst collaboration with the Nazis. Indeed, many a Home Army member was sentenced after the war in Communist courts for imputed collaboration, and the Home Army itself was branded "fascist" in postwar propaganda. Krakowski supports this label implicitly by falsely designating NSZ as the core of the Home Army.

And then there is the problem of Burza. For the last two years of the war (say, since the break in diplomatic relations between Poland and the U.S.S.R. over the Katyn forest massacre), with urgency and helplessness mounting from month to month, the Polish underground and government-in-exile searched to find an effective strategy in view of the impending defeat of the Germans in Poland by the Red Army. They had to find an answer to the question: What should be done, given the prospect of another occupation coming in the guise of liberation by an ally of one's own allies? Burza was perceived as an answer to this unsolvable problem, and it did not work. A quarter million civilians were killed by the Germans during the Warsaw (August 1944) Uprising while the Soviets watched the city being razed to the ground from the opposite bank of the Vistula River. Thousands of Home Army soldiers who assisted the Soviet offensive by engaging the retreating Germans in combat-especially east of the Bug River, where, as Krakowski noted, most of the partisan detachments operated-were disarmed by the Red Army and then forcibly incorporated into its ranks, deported to labor camps, or executed on the spot. All we learn from Krakowski about that protracted and exasperating politico-military problem (how to confront the Russians entering Polish territory in pursuit of the Germans) is, on Colonel Zaluski's authority, "that the attempt to mobilize the AK forces failed."25 Krakowski's subject is Jewish armed resistance in Poland from 1942 to 1944, and perhaps he need not say a word about the Home Army, NSZ, Burza, and many other things. But if he chooses to address those topics in order to provide background, he is bound by the canons of historical scholarship. And so is Gutman, who ought to keep his sympathies within the bounds of scholarly discourse.

With Gutman's and Krakowski's books, we are forced to reflect on the very nature of historical writing about World War II. Are we practicing in effect two histories of that period? Obviously, historians are free to select research topics, to define them narrowly, and to focus attention on specific problems. In this sense, there are Jewish subjects and therefore Jewish history, and there are Polish subjects and therefore Polish history of the war and occupation. But it is not a case of narrow vision that Krakowski's and Gutman's volumes exemplify. Theirs is a case of double vision. They do not merely choose not to address Polish subjects; rather, they demonstrate that they are not bound by standards of professional conduct vis-a-vis those subjects. First, they display compromising ignorance of Polish history. Second, they openly voice contempt for Polish society. While I do not question their feelings, for those are a private matter, I do question their judgment.

NOTES

1. Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1983), p. 84.

2. Krakowski, pp. 185-87. See also The Stroop Report, ed. and trans. Sybil Milton (New York, 1979).

3. Across Frontiers 3, no. 3 (Spring 1987).

4. Timothy Garton Ash, "The Life of Death," The New York Review of Books, 19 Dec. 1985.

5. Gutman, pp. 108,127,169.

6. Ibid., p. 108.

7. Ibid., p. 63.

8. Ibid., p. 111.

9. Ibid., p. 108.

10. Levin, pp. 46-47.

11. Ibid., p. 36.

12. Ibid., pp. 82-83.

13. Ibid., p. 51.

14. Ibid., pp. 137-40.

15. Gutman, p. 135.

16. Levin, p. 50.

17. Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness (New York, 1986). See also my review in New York Times Book Review, 12 Jan. 1986.

18. Gutman, p. 4.

19. Ibid., p. 121.

20. Ibid., p. 153.

21. Ibid., p. 156.

22. Krakowski, p. 7.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., p. 8.

25. Ibid.