Trudy Gold
Resistance in the Ghettos, Part 2
Trudy Gold - Resistance in the Ghettos, Part 2
Well, Pesach is over and I guess we’ve opened up and welcome back everybody. I hope that everybody had a good Pesach. Last night I had a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Something to look forward to. And yeah, I have to say the world is beginning to open up and please God the same thing will happen in South Africa soon as soon as they get that vaccine. So, how are we doing for time?
It’s 17:32 whenever already Wendy.
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Okay, Trudy. So welcome back everybody and welcome to a new week, and welcome… Yeah. Off we go into April.
Okay. Thanks very much Wendy, thank you Wendy. And I hope you all had a good Pesach as good as it can be in this extraordinary lockdown. Before I go on I’m going to recount an extraordinary experience, which really I haven’t even told Wendy this yet, which really echoes for me the joy of lockdown University. Through one of our students, I got in touch with the nephew of Mordechai Anielewicz who is living of course one of the great heroes of the ghetto, who is living in Canada, and he, I’ve had correspondence with him and evidently his family, and his second cousin actually is, of course Mordechai Anielewicz tragically died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but some of his family had got out of Poland in 1925, and evidently his aunt knew quite a bit about him so it’s good to know that the name goes on. So, and again, the ramifications of the lockdown University. This is a bit of a health warning lecture, I had an email from one of the students saying, why are we in such dark times, and I think it’s important to state that we started over a year ago in fact we have a wonderful gala to celebrate and Jewish history is not just about dark times and over the- I think we’ve given over 320 presentations myself, my colleagues, all of our special guests in the past year. So we’ve been looking at the highs and the lows, and it will be absolutely impossible to not look at the Shoah.
And I asked myself the question, why is it just to honour the dead? Or is it just possible that every aspect of human behaviour is there, and just maybe if we can face it, that perhaps out of that appalling catastrophe that robbed us of a third of our people, we might just come up with the, some sort of key to how humans behave, because of course we had William Tyler lecturing at the- on the Einsatzgruppen. What I propose to do in the next couple of presentations, obviously I’m going to be looking at physical resistance in the ghetto. I chose the Warsaw Ghetto, why? A, because of the Oneg Shabbat archives, which means we have so much knowledge about it, and also it was the largest ghetto in the whole of Poland, and it’s given us the opportunity to look at all sorts of characters. We of course looked at the extraordinary Janusz Korczak, and I was very gratified to have an email from somebody who’s on the lockdown that they were going to use their Seder to talk with their children and grandchildren about Janusz Korczak. And this is another spin off from, I think, lockdown university. So many people online know so much about so many things, but not necessarily enough about their own history. And maybe, just maybe, it’s going to give us the opportunity to be able to better teach our children and our grandchildren because I believe really strongly that knowledge is a great defence against everything.
And it’s very important to reaffirm Jewish identity. So that’s another spin off. So we’ve looked at the great Janusz Korczak, we looked at Ringelblum, but we came up to that dreadful part of the syllabus, syllabus, I don’t even want to call it a syllabus, of that appalling calamity when having invaded Russia, having broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler goes against his old adversary, the Soviet Union, and there can no longer be a Judenrein Reich. It’s very important to remember that up until the invasion of Russia, Jews were getting out of Europe. Europe is huge, it’s porous. Yes, there are appalling things happening to Jews, they are being… They’ve been socially, legally and politically excluded. They are being humiliated, they are dying of starvation, it’s a terrible time. But there were other plans, in fact Eichmann had considered the solution of shipping all the Jews to the island of Madagascar, but there was a naval blockade and it’s with the invasion of Russia that the murders begin with the Einsatzgruppen. And I think it’s very important before we dare to judge anyone in the ghettos, you will remember that Adam Chernikov, we also looked at him, the head of the Judenrein, he really organised the Jewish police, he organised the ghetto in a very systematic way because he believed up until the great deportations in July 1942 that if he behaved himself, if the Jews behaved themselves, that at least most of them would survive.
It is when Korczak’s children have to be deported and that is when he of course decides to commit suicide. So later on I know that Dennis and David will be talking about this kind of issue when we deal with Hannah Arendt because Hannah Arendt was later quite critical of the Judenrein but when I think of the dilemma that Adam Chernikov found himself in, this is the evil of Nazism, one of the evils was that they put the responsibility on the community itself, but never for one minute think otherwise, it was the Nazis and their helpers who did it. When we look at the Einsatzgruppen actions and I will be looking at them when I look at the Wannsee Conference with you tomorrow, one of the things that it’s very important to remember is the Einsatzgruppen, the hip squads were not doing it on their own and the other point I brought up was the high level of intellectual achievement that most of the leadership had attained. Another great area of study, academic excellence, love of high culture does not make you a decent human being. The ideas of the Enlightenment, the Bildung, if you educated everyone to a certain level we would understand that they were general rules of life, but Nazism pushes it completely out of the window. So we know that working with the Einsatzgruppen were battalions of the German police, we know that working with the Einsatzgruppen were quite a few regiments of Wehrmacht, also Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, often overzealous and that is when the shootings begin.
So let’s turn now back to the Warsaw ghetto. The man who was in charge of Poland and I’m not just looking at the heroes, I’m also going to be looking at some of the evil ones because as we go through, because perhaps if we can understand we can begin to make people more aware. This is a speech by Hans Frank. Hans Frank was the Governor General of Poland. Let’s have a look at that face. He was the son of a barrister, he joined the party early on, although he served briefly in the First World War, not very long because he was too young. He graduates in law, he went to one of the best gymnasium in Munich, one of the best schools in Munich, it’s important to remember that. He’s a very clever man intellectually. He’s also a very good musician. One of the most peculiar episodes of my own life was I once interviewed his son Niklas along with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. His son Niklas, who was the baby of the family, was actually brought up in the castle in Krakow. Those of you who’ve been to Krakow will know that the beautiful Wawel castle was the place that Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland, made his home.
So he joins the party in 1923. He participates in the Beer Hall Putsch. In 1926 he passes his bar examination and he begins to practise as a barrister in Munich. He is the star defence counsel for the Nazi party. He actually fought two and a half thousand cases for them. He was Hitler’s personal lawyer and he becomes head of the Nazi party legal office. He is elected to the Reichstag in 1930. He is a Nazi deputy to the Reichstag and after Hitler came to power he became the head of the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. One of the most peculiar areas I found when I interviewed Niklas, who as I said he’s completely repudiated his father, he said my father wasn’t an anti-Semite. He did it for Korea. I do not believe that and I’m going to explain why in a minute. Anyway, he never actually belonged to the inner circle. He believed in, he’d been a member of the Thule Society, that very esoteric strange society, many of whose members folded into the Nazi party, that believed in this strange system of German justice and he was actually very upset with the Night of the Long Knives. You will remember that in 1934, Hitler cleaned out the SA. Any political opponents on the right who might hurt him and Rohm, the leader, was too popular. He had them all eliminated and Hans Frank objected to that, not because he believed that, he believed everything the Fuhrer did was right, not because he had any concept of morality, but he felt that it should have been done through a legal framework. Nevertheless, he’s appointed General Governor of Poland and he’s responsible for the civil administration of Poland.
He lived, as I said, in the Wawel Castle with his family and he lived in the most extraordinary luxury. Of course, Poland was plundered of many of its art treasures and in the Wawel Castle, he lived this with his wife, who was herself a very corrupt woman. He lived with his wife and his children and Niklas said that the life they lived was beyond luxury, but decadent luxury. Anything went in their private lives and this is a speech he made on December 16th 1941. Now the murders, the shootings, remember, begin in the summer of 1941, but it’s a secret, but Europe is porous and rumours are beginning to filter through. The ghetto, the situation in the ghetto, nearly 500,000 people at its height crammed into these small blocks the appalling situation and this is the speech of Frank. “One way or another, I would tell you quite openly, we must finish off the Jews. The Fuhrer put it into words months, should united Jewry again succeed in setting off a world war, then the blood sacrifice shall not be made only by people driven into war, but then the Jews of Europe will have met his end.” And he goes on to say, “In January there will be a major conference on this question in Berlin to which I shall send State Secretary Dr. Buhler, and of course that is the Wannsee Conference.
The conference is to be held in the office of SS Heydrich at the Reich Security Main Office. A major Jewish migration will certainly begin.” One of his problems that he kept on talking to headquarters about, “I’ve got too many Jews to feed, they are feeders.” He says at the end, “We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them, wherever it’s at all possible in order to maintain the whole structure of the Reich. The views that are acceptable up to now cannot be applied to such gigantic unique events. In any case we must find a way that would lead to our goal.” Nevertheless, so this is the man, the Nazis were quite upset by this speech, not because they didn’t believe it, it was already happening but they felt it was too public, and he was also fighting with the SS. He had a huge sense of his own self-importance and of course it’s Himmler and Heydrich who are with Eichmann as the functionary who are actually in control of what the Nazis euphemistically called the final solution, so he was worried about any erosion of his personal power. Now he was actually arrested by the Allies, he was put on trial at Munich, I beg your pardon, at Nuremberg, and what is fascinating is he converted to Catholicism.
He and Albert Speer were the only two Nazis who expressed any kind of remorse. His son said that this wasn’t real remorse at all, he had hoped that he would in fact get a life sentence, that there was no remorse in the man. He certainly converted to Catholicism which his son also doubted whether it was sincere, but at Nuremberg he actually said a thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased. His wife of course survived and was a committed Nazi till the day she died. Ironically she went to South Africa at the height of apartheid and that is where she died. Niklas wrote a book about her, he called her the mother of Queen of Poland, his mother the Queen of Poland. He hated her with an absolute passion. So important to remember this is the man who is in charge of the civil government. And you know, but things were going wrong for the Einsatzgruppen. Now what can possibly be going wrong for these monsters? Well basically it was, remember they’re fighting a war, they are having to mop up as they called it in areas and as William told us the other day the most terrifying I think of all the instances was Babi Yar in Ukraine where 33000 people were shot within two days.
I mean these figures is beyond imagination that’s why I try and personalise it because and I’m going to be coming on to the good guys but I think it’s important to look at these characters of evil because look he was a human being, Frank, what was it that motivated him? What happens when you take away the need for law? This is a man who believed in the law but he believed in a law that was about race and power and might and he actually said once, Adolf Hitler’s word is the law. But already certain members of the Einsatzgruppen were drinking too much, others of them there were even a few cases of insanity, also it was messy. What do I mean by that? Well the local population was stealing the clothes of the victims etc so the Nazis decided that they needed something so much more modern and radical so they decided to actually set up camps whose purpose only was death. There were six camps, there were hundreds of camps over the Nazi regime, four of the camps are going to be in the general government, four of the camps their purpose only was death, they actually set up factories of death, the only people kept alive were those who were responsible for the mopping ups. Auschwitz and Majdanek were not that, they were also labour camps, of course they were death camps but they were also slave labour camps and camps for prisoners of war but Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, they were camps for death alone and it’s important to remember that when the camps were established it was done in a modern industrialised way.
They called in experts, they called in experts to develop the crematorium, they called in gas companies, they called in electricity companies, they were chosen because they were near railway lines. I’ve been to say Kaddish at all the camps in Poland and Sobibor is in the heart of a beautiful forest, about a quarter of a mile away there’s a holiday camp, and some of these sites… I remember the first time I went to Poland I believed it would be such a dark grey place, actually visually it’s very beautiful in the summer and it even gives you, it makes it even more extraordinary and when these camps were set up and Treblinka was really for the Jews of Warsaw, when Treblinka was established as were all the other camps, you need to remember all the individuals that would have to be involved in setting it up. So it’s the technical side, this is mass murder, this is mass murder on an industrial scale, this is the use of modernity to horror, this is taking all the benefits of the modern world, you know trains that run on time, machinery that can take over from human beings, this is the effects of modernity harnessed to mass murder and what is even more extraordinary is can you just imagine how many people were involved and how many people knew about it. When do we lose our moral compass? The secretaries who took the minutes or worked at the railways, all the little functionaries on the way, the gas companies, the electric companies, the architects who designed the plans, they knew what it was for, could they sleep nights or did it just pass them by, again the moral compass.
So as early as the spring of 1942, news of mass murder in the east is filtering through. First the killings and then of course the use of gas. The use of gas was decided on because it was already being used to murder the mentally and physically unfit Germans. So imagine the world of nightmare. This is beyond Dante’s Inferno and this is when they first started with mobile gassing near Belzec, of the other of the death camps, and then they start the actual setting up of the camps. And the deportations begin on the January 23, 1942. These are the first transports from the Warsaw Ghetto. Between July 23 and September 21, 254 Jews from Warsaw and another 54,000, 254,000 from Warsaw and 112,000 from the Warsaw district were killed. By the time the camp was closed in autumn of 1943, nearly 900,000 people had been murdered. Now, I want to divert into the kind of characters who were involved in setting up these camps, who were the commandants. Franz Stangl was the commandant of Treblinka.* He had previously been the commandant of Sobibor. He was born in Austria. He was the son of a night watchman who’d served in the Habsburg Dragoons. He joined the Austrian police in 1931. He graduated in 33. He joined the illegal Nazi party because Austria remember wasn’t… The Anschluss doesn’t happen until 1938, so it’s illegal. After the Anschluss, he is in the Gestapo because he was very useful to the Nazis already in Austria. He’s posted to the Jewish Bureau. He reaches the rank of captain. He begins his career with the euthanasia programme and the reason he actually asked for this position because he wasn’t getting on too well with his boss in the Gestapo in Linz.
He met with Victor Brack, who was the man who came up with the whole gas programme, and he went to work in the Hartheim Institute near Linz. This is one of these terrible sites where it begins with doctors giving lethal injections to the mentally and physically handicapped and then because it’s not quick enough, they take over gassing. Now I want you to remember these people are doctors. We’re looking at lawyers. We’re looking at doctors. And he, March 42, he’s given a choice, either go back to Linz or work in or go to work in Operation Reinhardt. And that’s exactly what he wanted to do. And that is the mass murder of the Jews. He was first put in charge of Sobibor death camp. And during his time, about 100,000 people were murdered. He then transfers to Treblinka. Now this is Robert Wistrich on Stangl. Robert’s made a very detailed analysis of the personalities involved. A highly efficient, dedicated organiser of mass murder, receiving official commendation as the best camp commander in Poland. Do you see how upside down the world is? Evidently he was always impeccably dressed. He always attended the arrival of transports. He wore white riding clothes. He was polite. He had a soft voice. He was friendly. You’ve got a complete absence of any moral code. He was interviewed by Gitta Sereny towards the end of his life. He said this, Victims of Cargo, I rarely saw them as people. Always a huge mass.
They were naked, packed together, being driven with whips. He also said he didn’t hate Jews. They were weak, he said. They allowed everything to happen, to be done to them. That is how contempt is born. I could never understand how they could give in as they did. There was a revolt in, of course, there was a revolt in Sobibor and in Treblinka, actually sparked off by the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And he’s then transferred. Now I’m going to tell you what happened to him at the end, because I think justice or no justice. He was captured by the Americans. He was interned as a member of the SS. And his time, this stage, nobody knew about his time as camp commandant. He was handed over to the Austrians and transferred to an open prison in Linz because of his connection with Hartheim. One day he walked out of the prison with his with his colleague, Gustav Wagner. He made his way to Rome, where an Austrian bishop called Bishop Alois Hudal with a huge network in the Vatican obtained a Red Cross passport giving him entrance visa to Syria. We’ll be spending quite a lot of time on these Nazi war criminals and how many of them got out through the Vatican and through this man Alois Hudal. On May the 5th in the second session, and Philippe Sands is going to be interviewed by Judge Dennis Davis. And this is important that you listen to this and also Philippe Sands’ written two wonderful books, East West Street, which is about Hans Frank and other lawyers, including the extraordinary Hersch Lauterpach and the extraordinary Raphael Lemkin, who really worked on crimes against humanity, the categories at the end of the war. So the point is, he makes it to Damascus, he works in a textile mill, he’s joined by his wife and family, and in 1951 the family emigrated to Brazil, where later on he works in the Volkswagen factory under his own name. Only in 1961 does he appear on the list of wanted war criminals.
He’s tracked down finally by Simon Wiesenthal,* he’s arrested, he’s extradited to West Germany, and he’s tried for his co-responsibility in the murder of 900,000 Jews. He’s sentenced to life, but he actually died of heart failure, so it’s before he could really serve a proper sentence. So it’s fascinating because when you think of justice in this world, about 10% of those guilty of crimes against humanity were brought to justice. But let’s now turn from the evil ones and turn back to the victims. Now remember what Stangl said, they didn’t resist. Now, there’s a lot to say about resistance. We’ve looked at many kinds of resistance, we’ve looked at physical resistance, we’ve looked at moral resistance, there could be no greater resistance than Janusz Korczak, we’ve looked at Zygielbojm there was so- I beg your pardon Ringelblum there was so many kinds of resistance, staying alive. And when do you resist? If you’re in your family group, do you actually resist if you think you can keep your grandmother or your child alive? But anyway, it’s because the news after the great deportations, there were only 60,000 people left in the ghetto. Already, back in April 1942, as news came in of the shootings, this is actually before Treblinka was established, as news come in and remember the rumours, and important to remember, particularly young people, they were getting out of the ghetto, news was being smuggled in. An anti-fascist block was founded in April 1942, but it only included some members of the underground. In fact, on July 23, just as the great deportation started, a meeting was called by the youth, by young political activists, to try and get something going. You know, they say that the Jews are a Cornish people, even in the times of incredible extremity, we couldn’t work together. Would the Bund work with the socialists? Would they work with the revisionists?
And there’s a lot of tales to tell about that, because the story that was told originally of the Warsaw ghetto, that it was only the left, it’s only really in the past 20 years that we now know that the revisionists were just as active, perhaps even more active in the actual resistance. But the point is, people are people, and when they came together, the deportations are happening, what are they going to do? Remember Chernikov has killed himself. It was his deputy who actually went ahead with the deportations, because he said, I will be less brutal than the Ukrainian guards. Who in this lifetime would want to make these kinds of decisions? The historian Yitzhak Schipper another historian in the ghetto, he argued, it would put the whole ghetto in jeopardy. If you resist, imagine what will happen to you, what will happen to all your family. And he said, look, this isn’t the first time, because why do we know all of this because Ringelblum wrote it all down? This was not the first time in history the Jewish people had to sacrifice some of its sons to continue its existence. Alexander but, Alexander Friedmann, he was the popular Agudat Israel representative, he said please put your faith in the Almighty, the Almighty will not desert you. It’s at this stage on the 28th of July, the seventh day of the deportation, that representatives of the Hashomer Hatzair, Yitzhak Zuckerman, Joseph Kaplan, Shmuel Breslau, Zivia Lubetkin, Mordechai Tenenbaum and Izrael Kanal decided to form a group. Now this is the left and they decided to send Arie Wilner to the Aryan side. Mordechai Anielewicz who I’m going to talk about in a minute, one of the great heroes, he was actually outside the ghetto running training camps because despite all the hell there are Zionist cells in areas outside of Warsaw, in Warsaw. You know when Jabotinsky died, the revisionists had commemoration services and there is contact, there is news coming in.
Now it was the Bund, can we go on please Judy and see the first of the good guys, the Gustav Wagner run over him, he was the deputy commandant, we’ll talk about him another time. Now this is Zalman Frydrych, the Bund because the left-wing Bund, the largest actually of the Jewish groups in the ghetto, remember the old have gone, most of the young have gone, who is left? They know they’re going to die but they’re making decisions as how they’re going to die. They send Zalman Frydrych on a mission. What have we got to do? We’ve got to find out what really is happening in Treblinka and can we actually link up with the Polish home army through Arie Wilner. Now ironically the communists were prepared to help, the communists were prepared to help and the Bund and the left-wing groups do decide as it were to almost cooperate. So there you have Zalman Frydrych, he was a young Bundist and of course he’s going to die in an action in 1943. Now when the actions come to- When the deportations come to an end, Anielewicz returns to the ghetto, he assumes the leadership of what is called ZOB, this is the left wing, he’s got a small supply of arms and what he does is he tries to bring together all the socialist groups from the socialist Zionists to the communists. There was another group, the other group was the military union and these, can we go on please and see some faces, shall we see Mordechai Anielewicz please?
Okay so I’m going to keep his face there and I’m going to talk a little bit about the military union. They were the revisionists, some still took their orders from the Irgun in Palestine, they knew that they couldn’t win, the two groups together, the revisionists and the socialists and the Bund, they still, there were about 750 fighters. And what is going to happen is they are both going to rise up in the most extraordinary way and they are going to do the most extraordinary things and they are going to set a torch alight that is not just going to lead to resistance in the death camps but it’s going to lead to the Polish resistance itself. So Mordechai Anielewicz, let me first give you a little bit of background on him because I really think these characters, let’s give them back their lives. He was born near Warsaw and as I already mentioned one of his relatives is actually on, I hope online, he was always, he came from a relatively poor family, he was always ideologically drawn to left-wing Zionism, Hashomer Hatzair, he was a brilliant organiser, he was born, we’re not sure if he was born in 1919 or 1920, he’s going to die fighting in 1943, they are all heartbreakingly young. He was a brilliant organiser, a brilliant motivator, his dream was to settle in Palestine. Now September 7th 1939 when the Nazis invaded he fled with many other members of the left-wing movement to eastern Poland. He hoped the Polish army would establish their defence there but of course on the 17th of September eastern Poland is occupied by the Soviets. He reaches the Romanian border because what he’s going to try and do is to find an escape route. He’s going to get as many of his young Zionists out as possible. He’s captured by the Soviets, he’s imprisoned, he escapes, he makes the decision to go back to Warsaw into the ghetto and on the way he stops in many towns, cities, villages visiting Jewish communities.
Then he left first of all for Vilna which was in Soviet-occupied Lithuania where there was a large concentration of Jews who had fled from Warsaw. Before he returns to Warsaw he organises youth groups there. What he said was you’ve got to keep us human, you’ve got to remain with the political groups, the educational groups, teach, teach, teach. And it’s not just teaching Hebrew, it’s not just preparation for life in Palestine. They discussed philosophy, these were young intellectuals, these were young people of huge vision and huge dreams. At a time of terrible crisis what was thrown up in the ghetto were dozens of these brilliant people. He had a girlfriend Mira Fuchrer, his lover, and they decide they’re coming back to the ghetto. He is a completely dedicated political activist. In the ghetto he sets up a newspaper, he sets up seminars in the ghetto, he arranges meetings and he would smuggle himself out of the ghetto through the sewers to visit communities in the provincial centres to try and motivate them to not despair. He read history, he read sociology, he read economics, and he tried to analyse the situation the Jews were facing. And as the killings reached the ghetto he was totally, he more than any of the others, he realised we’ve got to go for self-defense. He wasn’t so lucky as I’ve already mentioned with the army at Krakow but he was part of the anti-fascist group and when the great deportations happened he was out of the ghetto again. He was actually in southern Poland transforming these Jewish youth groups into armed resistance movements. They would get hold of money, they would find, they would borrow, they would beg, they would steal money, they would buy arms, they would buy arms.
The Germans were prepared to sell, some Poles had arms and he tried when he comes back to the great the time of the great deportations he tries to reinvigorate and it’s all going to kick off on the 18th of January 1943. This is when the Nazis decide the next resistance and it’s at this stage that ZOB* and the other group that I’m going to come on to make their incredible statement. This is the call to resistance by the Jewish fighting organisation in the Warsaw ghetto and I should also mention that much of this information is getting out of Warsaw to the west. There has already been a minute silence in the House of Commons on January the 7th on, sorry, December the 17th 1942 for the murdered Jews of Europe. When we come to this part of the presentation in a few weeks I’m going to be reading you from newspaper articles so it’s not hermetically sealed. I’m talking about a man who gets in and out, I’m talking about underground radios, I’m talking about underground press and I’m talking about information. This is what his group wrote on January the 22nd 1943. Six months will have passed since the deportations. We all remember well the days of terror which 300,000 of our brothers and sisters will cruelly put to death in the camp Treblinka.
There’s more information coming already people some somebody’s escaped from Treblinka and not only that the courier from Warsaw Jan Karski a member of the Polish underground has been into the ghetto so I’ll be discussing this later on. Six months have passed of life in constant fear of death not knowing what the next day may bring. We have received information from all sides about the destruction of the Jews. During the past few weeks certain people have spread stories about letters that were said to have been received from Jews deported from Warsaw, who were said to be in labour camps near Minsk and Babrusk. Jews in your masses do not believe these tales, they are spread by Jews who are working for the Gestapo. The blood-stained murderers have a particular aim to reassure the Jewish population in order that the next deportation be carried out without difficulty. So this is when they attack. So when the Nazis go into the ghetto on January 1943, they actually begin their attack. I will be talking about other members of ZOB but because I want to create a balance, I’m talking- Can we just run through some of the pictures that we come back to tomorrow. There you have it, Yitzhak Zuckerman, who is the deputy commander. He was on the outside and he survived. Much more about him, probably tomorrow. Can we go on please? That is a brilliant woman, member of ZOB, who married later on Zuckerman in Israel, one of the founders of the ghetto survivors, Kibbutz, gave him, and this is Simcha Rotem, another one of the survivors, and you can see from that wonderful picture he died in 2018, an extraordinary man.
And now I want to talk about the revisionists, complicated this. History, who said history would always be written by the victors? Well because of the work of the incredible Ringelblum archive, it wasn’t written by the victors. Having said that, the story of the resistance of the revisionists was very much played down. Don’t forget that at the end of the war, civil war breaks out in Poland, the communists take over, the communists support those who have been part of the anti-fascist bloc, the left become heroes, the revisionists are written out of history for quite a long time, and then more. What happens is the survivors, the majority of the survivors, came from the left and they told one story. And it’s only, and the left had power in Israel, remember, for 30 years. Ben-Gurion, Golda, they were all members of the same kind of socialist groups, these were their heroes, but there were another kind of heroes, and these of course were Jabotinsky’s people. And their leader was a man called Pawel Frenkiel. Just as Anielewicz was an incredible hero, so was he. This is their statement at the same time. In the end they did cooperate, they never liked each other politically, but they never, in the end they did cooperate, but they never worked as one group. And this is what his group put out, we are rising up for war, we’re of those who have set themselves the aim of awakening our people, our wishes to take this watchword to our people, awake and fight, do not despair of the road to escape, know that escape is not to be found by walking to your death passively like sheep to the slaughter, it’s to be found in something much greater, in war.
Whoever defends himself has a chance of being saved, whoever gives up self-defense from the outset he has lost, nothing awaits him except only a hideous death in the suffocation machine of Treblinka. Let the people awaken to war, find the courage in your soul for desperate action, put an end to our terrible acceptance as such phrases we are under centres of death, it is a lie. We also were destined to live, we too have a right to life, one only needs to know how to fight for it, it is no great art to live when life is given to you willingly, but there is an art to life just when they are trying to rob you of this life. Let the people awake and fight for its life, let every mother be a lioness defending her young, let no father stand by and see the blood of his children in silence, let not the first act of our destruction be repeated, an end to despair and lack of faith, an end to the spirit of slavery amongst us. Now please don’t forget also one of the motifs I’ve often brought up in my presentations over the past year is Ben Zakkai Bar Kokhba, now this is Bar Kokhba from the left and the right and this is the sentiment that is going to be carried into the creation of the state of Israel. So I think it’s very important that we understand and also be they to the left or be they to the right, they were brave like lions. And can we really judge though the Chernikov’s. He committed suicide when he realised his route was impossible. He had really believed that if he behaved himself, if he made the ghetto behave, he could save the bulk. So as Anita Lasker-Wallfisch says, only judge when you’re in hell.
But let’s talk a little bit about Pawel Frenkiel. He was born in 1920, died in 1943, in the uprising. You see, when they rise up in January, the Nazis, they actually, his organisation has contacts with the Polish Home Army, because some of the revisionists. In the late 30s, Poland was very anti-Semitic. After the death of Pilsudski, you had a very anti-Semitic government. And I’ve talked about this before. Believe it or not, that government was allowing Jews to set up training camps, because they wanted to get rid of their Jews. So consequently, if it helps them fight to get to Palestine, so be it. And many of the revisionists that actually fought in the Polish Army. So he is the one who managed to get far more weapons from the Polish Home Army than the revisionists. So he was a member of Masada, which was a revisionist youth group. It was a group of Polish students. He was born in Warsaw. They’d gone to Polish schools, and they attracted the intellectuals who didn’t necessarily join Betar, which of course was Jabotinsky’s group. In 1938, he actually turned his Masada into Betar.
And he was head, by the time he’s 18 years old, he’s head of Betar in North Warsaw. He’s also part of the Irgun framework in Poland. He was head of an Irgun cell. He was very much influenced by news from Vilna. I’ll be talking about this later on when I talk about Abakovna. The Jews of Vilna were attacked very early on. Remember the Operation Barbarossa, but begins in June 1941. Within three weeks, we’re beginning to see the murders in Vilna. News comes from Vilna, and he already is recruiting more and more people and more and more Irgun cells to really set up a very tight organisation. And what he wanted is, you’ve got to leave your families. We’re going to house you all together. And he saw the movement in the ghetto very much as an arm of the Irgun in the land of Israel. They called themselves the Jewish military organisation. They managed to get far more weapons, as I said, than ZOB. He also was highly intelligent. In fact, he was called by his colleagues the personification of Hadar. Hadar was a concept of Jabotinsky’s. The Jew must, it’s really bildung for Jews, if you like, cultivation, education, but beyond bildung, because you have to be a strong fighting man. He had a number two, can we see the number two, please?
Because he also, a man called Leib Rodal, who was, he was a very important personality. He was previously head of the revisionist in Kielce. He was a writer in the in Betar’s and Masada’s magazine. He’d also written for Yiddish dailies in New York. He was the co-founder. He was in charge of the information department. He probably penned the pamphlet I have just written. Now, so what happens is in the first fight, January the 18th, the two groups come together and what they managed to do is to fire on the Germans. And in the end, the Nazis only managed to get 5,000 people onto the deportation lorries that took them to the Umschlatz park, that took them to Treblinka, so it was unsuccessful. And it’s at this stage that Heinrich Himmler, one of the most loathsome creatures the world has ever known, gives the order for the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. This is February the 16th, 1943. Of course, those in the ghetto didn’t know that. They were hiding out. They were trying to find arms. They created this whole network in the sewers of going to the Aryan side. And this is what he says. You’ve got these Jews fighting back. Can you imagine what it did to the German high command? And to make matters worse, there was an infamous filmmaker called Fritz Hitler. Fritz Hitler had become head of UFA in 1933, the great German film industry.
You know when you think of the characters who’d once been part of it Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, beyond imagination, it’s now run by this Nazi documentary filmmaker, he’d already made the most notorious propaganda film of all time, The Eternal Jew, and he’d come in to shoot pictures of the sub-humans in inverted commas in the Warsaw ghetto and ironically he saw the January the 18th revolt where they managed to mow down 26 German soldiers, they even blew up a tank, so they you know in these underground bunkers they were making Molotov cocktails, they’d managed to get all sorts of weapons as I said, and they were training, training, training. So what Himmler writes, for reasons of security I hereby order that the Warsaw ghetto be pulled down after the concentration camp has been moved. The raising of the ghetto and the relocation of the camp are necessary as otherwise we would never establish quiet in in Warsaw. An overall plan for raising of the ghetto is to be submitted to me, in any case we must achieve the disappearance from sight of the living space for half a million sub-humans that has existed up to now but could never be suitable for Germans and reduce the size of the city of millions.
Warsaw which has always been a centre of corruption and revolt. I think I want to leave it there but before we do can we just run through the other pictures Judy because I will be going back to them. This is the site of the one of the the final onslaught of the battle. On the day of the first night of Seder which was April the 19th 1943 under General Stroup they come in, the Nazis come in all tanks blazing. What they didn’t count on was the unbelievable resistance of ZOB and of the revisionists. The revisionists actually took Muranowski Square and of course the ghetto is going to hold out longer than the whole of Poland. This is what’s going to be extraordinary and what happened in Muranowski Square can we see how the Nazis actually mowed it down if you don’t mind Judy with the next pictures. Yeah they send in the flamethrowers, they burn the ghetto and then can we see the last one. Is that the last one? No that’s Szmul Zygielbojm let’s leave him. Okay believe it or not what they managed to do at the height of the fighting they raised two flags in Muranowski Square above the ghetto. One was the Polish flag and the other was the blue and white flag of really what became the state of Israel and I think what I’d like to do is actually tragically both Anielewicz and Frenkiel are going to die fighting but I think it’s important to read to you the last letter from Mordechai Anielewicz. They actually got it out of the ghetto. Why? Because Zuckerman remember is on the outside.
Zuckerman is the courier, he’s on the outside and they managed to get Mordechai Anielewicz’s last letter before they are finally destroyed in the ghetto in the bunker of Mila 18. It’s impossible to put into simple words which we have been through. One thing is clear what happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto one of our companies held up for 40 minutes and another for more than six hours. The mindset in the brushmaker’s area exploded. Several of our company attacked the dispersing Germans. Our loss in manpower is our minimal that is achievement. Yechiel fell, he fell a hero at the machine gun. I feel that great things are happening and what we were dared to do is of great enormous importance. It is impossible to describe the conditions under which the Jews of the ghetto are now living. Only a few will be able to hold out. The remainder will die sooner or later. Their fate is decided. In most all the hiding places in which thousands are concealing themselves it’s not possible to light a candle for lack of air. Peace go with you my friend.
Perhaps we will still meet again. The main thing that the dream of my life has come true self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance revenge effects. I have been a witness to the magnificent heroic fighting of the Jews in battle. That’s the last letter of Mordechai Anielewicz. Now what I propose to do tomorrow is to continue which means we probably won’t look at the van Saet conference until Thursday. I just think it’s not too important to hurry. I hope, I know it’s a very, very dark subject. I’m trying to hold it to a timeline. What is most important, of course, are all the issues that it brings out. And that’s why I’ve interposed the heroes with Nazi monsters, because we are all human. And out of this, perhaps, just perhaps, we might be able to come up with some sort of analysis of the human condition. Never forget what Einstein said. He said man is a wonderful monster. So let me have a look. Have I got time for questions, Wendy?
You do. You do Trudy.
Okay, okay. Let’s have a look. Sorry about my hand.
It’s up to you. Our meeting is at 11 o'clock, it’s in half an hour.
Yes.
So you just, you-
Q&A and Comments:
But listen why do I think the Jewish people are still in shock from the Holocaust? Are you still, have you got an hour? That’s a terribly important question that will be answered, I promise you, but not just on questions. I mean, we have a lot of individuals from different disciplines working together, and I think that’s something that deserves a much, it deserves a very important answer.
Yes, this is from Freda. Thank you, Freda. You help so much. It will be worth to mention that Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first civil fight in Europe in the world against the Nazis. Fight over people who really didn’t have guns or help. Yes, Freda, that is so important.
And it set a shockwave, it led to the Polish uprising. Yeah, and the Poles themselves. They had, in the end, they gave huge respect to the Warsaw Ghetto. Yes. And remember they fought when they were going to die.
Q: What was the size of the Jewish community in Poland?
A: It was the largest Jewish community in Europe. There were 3.2 million Jews in Poland in 1939. Germany, there were, well, in 1933 there had been over 500,000. Russia, it’s a bit more complicated because under communism, nobody really had the figures. So I don’t want, I will check that for you.
Please, pronunciation. This is from Victoria Kocak, thank you. My Polish has never ever been proper.
Q: Is there a list of those who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? How can I accept?
A: Ghetto, the Ghetto Survivors Kibbutz will have quite a- There are, I’ve got 20 books on the Warsaw Ghetto. I would start with Yad Vashem and the Ghetto Survivors Kibbutz.
This is from Joan. Hans Frank’s son.
Q: Again, how does one define an anti-Semite?
A: That’s a very important question, Joan. What he said in public debate is my father was a careerist, but I cannot believe a man who joined the Nazi Party so early. Remember the Thule Society, of course he was an anti-Semite. I don’t understand, I think, but don’t forget the Jewish world might be in total shock, but it’s something that I became, for a long time I wasn’t really involved in this whole issue of the children and grandchildren of perpetrators, but because of the work I’ve done I’ve met many of them. And if you are a sensitive character, to have that kind- It no way comes near families who lost everything, or families who, or the people you’re mourning, but if your grandfather was a mass murderer. How do you deal with it? If you’re a decent person. Look, Frank’s wife, as I said, she was an unrepentant Nazi. Niklas tells the story of driving with her into the Ghetto of Krakow. She lights a tailor there, and he remembers, he was only a very small child, and they used to go in in a very, you can imagine a splendid automobile, and he was sitting in the back with her and he saw these dark eyes of a child that he’s never forgotten. You’d think it’s important to know there was a pogrom at the end of the war.
Sarah’s saying my father was killed in 46. Yes, Sarah, this is such an important issue. What I’m begging you to remember is I’m trying to do this chronologically. We will be spending quite a lot of time on 45 to 48. In fact that’s what I have a meeting with Wendy on in a few minutes, because it’s crucial. So many things are going to happen between 45 and 48, including the murder of survivors. So, yes, we will spend a whole session at least on the Kielce pogrom.
Now this is from Lawrence, when you study the Holocaust and ghettos and antisemitism, do you sometimes think enough already, let’s move on to something. Yes, I’ve had a few comments like this, can I just say Lawrence, we have been on, Wendy’s Lockdown University has been going for over a year, we have looked at 300, there’s been at least 350 lectures, we have looked at the highs and the lows of the Jewish experience, we’ve been looking at Jewish music, literature, we talked long and hard about this, how we deal with the Shoah, should we deal with the Shoah, I’m talking about Wendy and my colleagues and we all believed we should. There is positive, but we have to take this too, I feel very very strongly that we have to do this. I think some of you who come on late to joining the Lockdown University, we’ve looked at the European Enlightenment, we’ve looked at France, we’ve looked at Vienna at the turn of century, Paris at the turn of century, you know the art, the music, the literature, we are balanced, look, despite all the horror that I’m talking about now, we have survived as a landless people for 2,000 years and we have an extraordinary history, this is one of the darkest chapters, but we are the people of memory and we owe it to the victims to remember.
Bev, I don’t know which part of South Africa Mrs Frank went to, but I know that Niklas wrote two books.
Yes Romaine, she talks about Zygielbojm went to London try and get help and they wouldn’t listen to him, I’m going to be talking about Szmul Zygielbojm of course I am, yes we will also be looking at the indifference of the Allies, was it complicity, that’s a big sentence. I promise you, I’m trying to keep chronological.
Robert Turner asks about the Estonian helpers, there are books, these are people who worked with the Nazis, look there is a chilling, absolutely chilling entry in the Wannsee document where through Eichmann they list the number of Jews country by country, including those that Hitler hadn’t conquered, like England and Ireland, and for Estonia it says free of Jews. Yeah there’s at least two very good books on Estonia.
And I think, here we go, Arlene thank you, she’s actually given two or three books, Estonian Jewry, Historical Summary, Holocaust of Estonian Jews, Taline thank you.
Doc Levin wrote the one with survivor testimony, thank you Arlene, I just love our group.
This is from Anna, read the Einsatzgruppen, 95% of the family members of my survivor parents of blessed memory were murdered in Sarny Volhynia which is now western Ukraine. Years ago I interviewed my parents, I learned that local Ukrainian collaborators helped, what did the killing, why the Nazis supervised, yes I’m afraid Anna it’s true, in the main it unleashed, you see, remember what Hugo Grin said, imagine a regime that overturned the Ten Commandments and venality, once you unleash the beast without the rule of law, yes there was a rule of law in Germany, but it was an evil law and I think that’s a question that David and Dennis will be beginning to answer on the weekend when they look at the circle of evil.
When this is from Marzia, when we went to Wannsee the guide emphasised they were brought into the Ukraine, they brought Ukrainians in to learn from as they were already experiencing killing local Jews. Well I don’t know if they could learn anything, there’s some extraordinary, there are some extraordinary letters from the Germans complaining that the Ukrainians and the Lithuanians were too zealous, they wanted them all dead but they wanted an orderly fashion.
Yes this is from Arlene, I was shocked and horrified when my daughters brought back photos of the Polish concentration camps, they looked like tranquil woods in upstate New York. Yes that is one of the horrors of visiting in Poland as I mentioned, Sobibor, there’s this beautiful holiday camp, Poland’s a beautiful beautiful country. I’ll tell you something we did which might give a bit of, my colleague Jerry who lost most of his family in the Warsaw ghetto, he was also my partner, we went back to Oswiecim which was a beautiful town, Auschwitz, 50% Jewish and we read the Purim Megillah there because we could and that’s the victory. We talk about the men like Hans Frank Him, that I can never, about the invisible perpetrators, the architects. Surely, we need to learn more about these people because any of us can be like them. Yes, of course, it’s very… there are lots of studies done now. You know, you’ve got to remember most of the archives were in the Soviet Union, in East Germany. In fact, it was Gerald Fleming who was a German Jew, a professor at Sussex University. He was the first Jew into the archives to actually examine the architects and he wrote a book called Blueprint for Genocide where he looked at the architects who made the camp, who made the crematory. I mean, yeah, the question is when do we lose our humanity?
Q: Were there any repercussions for the countries that helped set up and design the camps?
A: Ah, look, ah, you’ve got to remember that at the end of the war we had a new enemy: the Soviet Union. I’m going to leave that question because it’s a huge question. Some of the directors of IG Farben went on trial. Henry Ford had a great big car plant in Germany and he actually managed to claim compensation from the Americans for bombing it.
Q: Now, Audrey Travis, can you… How do we lose our moral compass? Does it depend on whether we were taught a moral compass in the first place or that one values every single life that God created?
A: Audrey, that is a very profound question. You see, are we born with a conscience or is it an acquired characteristic? With the right kind of education, can we learn, if we, if we’re not born with it, can we learn? These are the questions that psychologists play with every day. There is such a thing as a humanist education and we will be looking at rescuers. You know, they had a moral compass, a huge moral compass. So, what creates it? It’s something you see, when I said that I think it’s important and I know a lot of you find this hard, believe me, I don’t find it easy to teach. I’ve got grandchildren, like many of you, and I still think it’s important because, as I said, all the answers to human behaviour are actually there. And we mustn’t despair of the human condition. It’s important that we don’t and we must also respect the rule of a moral law. I mean, this is something that Dennis and David will be talking about a lot, where law means justice and how often does a legal system- Is a legal system a justice system?
Norma Kirsch, is it true that IBM technology… It helped I’m afraid, facilitated the large scale. Be careful, Norma, be careful! There’s books out that’s giving a lot of blame to IBM. Be careful. Yes, the modern technology helped. Without modern technology and a very willing bureaucracy… You see, bureaucracy is another issue that I’ve always had trouble with because of my study of Marxism. When people say they’re doing it because they’ve been told to do it… It’s a terrible dilemma because I cannot… I’ve never really taught young children but I’ve taught sixth formers and university students. How do you tell people not to obey the law or not to obey rules unless you think they’re just rules? There are so many issues we have to think about.
Yes, this is from Anna, ‘I’ve read articles about IBM and hundreds of other companies that they did business, painful to realise that the mighty dollar takes precedence over moral values.’ You know, where I think that’s interesting, Anna. Yes, but if they cared enough about their grandchildren then maybe the mighty dollar wouldn’t be quite so important.
Yes, Howard is mentioning the IBM. It’s a million copies in print detailing IBM’s conscious co-planning and co-organizing of the Holocaust for the Nazis or micromanage from New York and Paris. Howard, I’d be careful. I think it’s part of the story. It’s not the whole story.
The gold refiners, dental and other gold, so much of it, Degussa, the company still exists. Yes, yes, most of the companies that were involved in the so-called euphemistic Final Solution. Yes, they do exist.
Q: What finally happened to Hans Frank?
A: He was executed at Nuremberg.
Q: Stangl raises the question, they didn’t resist. Are there any plans to discuss this issue?
A: They did resist. This is the point, Roma. It’s a huge issue because one of the problems in Israel after the war, and it’s something we’re going to talk about so much, did we go like sheep to the slaughter. Fred has already pointed out it was the first real civil resistance in the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe. They resisted like tigers, you know they blew up a crematorium in Auschwitz, you have no idea the amount of Jewish resistance. The point is can you imagine how the young- What it showed more than anything else was Jewish powerlessness. There’s got to be so many questions that on all of this that we will talk about.
Yes, Howard Gold mentions the book They Forged in Fury by Michael Elkins. It’s a story of courage and revenge. Now is it revenge or is it justice? I’ll be doing a whole session on something called Din justice or is it revenge?
And yes this is from Sue, Tom Bowers blind eye to murder covers the number of people tried and convicted and equally the vast number who disappeared others who were helped by the Vatican. Oh yes it’s a terrible story.
Yes Moshe Arens wrote a very detailed book, Flags over Warsaw showing conclusively that Pawel Frenkiel and the Betar fighters did most of the effective fighting and managed to raise the Magen David. Yes but I don’t, if I may quarrel with you over effective fighting. The point is why can’t we give honour to the revisionists and to the left. Most of them died fighting for honour. So after the war their story was ignored by the surviving ZOB fighters.
Why there is a Yad Mordechai and not a Yad Pawel. If one of the dreams is that we stop quarrelling so much amongst ourselves, yes there should be Yad Mordechai and yes there should also be Yad Pawel surely we need both and maybe that’s the story of the Jews that we are such…
Who, what was it we are meant to be this stubborn and stiff neck and quarrelsome people. Yeah yes the picture of Marek Edelman yes I’ve mentioned that maybe talking oh sorry there’s meant to be one on Yitzhak Zuckerman as well sorry.
Yes there is a picture on Mordechai Anielewicz. Marek Edelman is a Bundist yes I’ll be talking about him.
Yes Bernie Stern Jankowski wrote letters to Churchill and asked for help. He was the courier from Warsaw. I had the honour of meeting him. He was an extraordinary man. He brought back evidence to the Polish government in exile. They wanted to know what was going on in Poland and as I said he smuggled himself he was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto and he asked they begged for help.
Q: What is ZOB?
A: ZOB was the Jewish fighting force established by the left.
Q: What was the common language in the ghetto?
A: That’s a very good question. Yiddish most of the time some would have spoken Polish. The Hebrew would have been used by the revisionists though but they would have written- I would imagine the, it’s a very good question, I would imagine they would have been in Yiddish.
Martine if the UK and US knew what was going on why didn’t they stop the murders or open up their immigration policy? If I knew the answer to that… But if you want me to talk about human nature think of all the appalling things that are going on all over the world.
Today. Today exactly.
Which I think is a good point to stop isn’t it Wendy?
100%.
Exactly. Exactly
Look what’s been going on in Syria. Look what’s been going on in Yemen. I mean we can go on and on you know. And I think it’s a very good debate to have amongst us because, yeah. I’ve thought about that a lot. Okay Trudy thank you so so so much for another outstanding lecture.
[Trudy] Okay god bless everyone.
And to all my friends who know me who’ve been just texting me and sending me hugs and kisses I send them back to you and it’s just so lovely for us all to be connected and even those that I don’t know it’s just so great that you’ve become such a huge family.
[Trudy] We have haven’t we Wendy?
Yeah with all the ups and the downs and you know there’s just I’ve just been laughing about what’s been going on this past year. And how amazing this lockdown has been. Sorry?
[Trudy] It’s been quite a year hasn’t it? Yes including the naughty corner.
[Trudy] Oh yes the naughty corner is quite something. Anyway I’ll see you in a few minutes everybody.
Take care, bye.
[Trudy] Lots of love everyone
And to you, bye.