COLLABORATION

    The Nazis relied to a great extent on foreign collaborators. In many of the occupied countries, the Nazis established puppet regimes that ably assisted them in the destruction of Jews. In Paris, when the Jews were rounded up in the summer of 1942, the French police did the job. In Slovakia and Croatia, the local rulers actually paid the Nazis to deport the local Jews. The violence meted out to the Jews in the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) resembled a 17th century pogrom. These countries had been occupied by the Soviets since April 1940. During that time a large number of people of those countries had been executed and a large number deported to Siberia. The disaster visited upon the Baltic countries during the Soviet occupation was blamed on the Jewish population (in general) because a large number of Jews were highly visible as members of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, this combined with the long honored association of Jews with communism, etc.

    In all of Nazi-occupied Europe, there were people who betrayed the Jews to the authorities. The Nazis promised a reward to such people. In Amsterdam, the family and friends of Anne Frank were betrayed by a person whose identity has never been discovered. In Poland, a professional class of denouncers emerged, the "szmalnowicki," the innumerable dastardly figures who preyed on Jews trying to escape from the ghetto or trying to "pass" as a Christian on the forbidden Aryan side of the wall. They were "a plague," said a Jewish survivor.

    In the "liquidation" actions of the eastern and central European ghettos, the Nazis relied heavily on Ukrainian and other foreign auxiliaries known as Trawnikis, named so because they had been trained by the SS at Trawniki near the Madanjek death camp in eastern Poland. The regular Polish police, known as the Blue Police, helped the Germans in the round up of Jews. Polish peasants also assisted in the "liquidation" actions by capturing the fleeing Jews in the fields and forests.
 

    "Generally a strange brutalization has taken place regarding the Jews," a Polish underground officer wrote in November 1942. "People have fallen into a kind of psychosis: following the German example, they often do not see in the Jew a human being but instead consider him as a kind of obnoxious animal that must be annihilated with every possible mans, like rabid dogs, rats, etc."

JUDENRAT

    The Nazis also established a Judenrat, or Jewish Council, in every village, town, or city, to serve as a conduit of Nazi orders to the Jewish inhabitants. The Judenrat members were usually taken from the pre-war Jewish leadership. Some refused to work with the Nazis and were murdered. Others worked with the Nazis hoping to alleviate Jewish suffering. The Judenrat has been accused of collaboration in the Nazi annihilation process. Many condemn the Judenrat. The opposite argument is that the Judenrat, with exceptions, were composed of decent men who did the best they could for their people in an inhuman hour. The tragic rationale of the Judenrat was that in order to save some Jews, other Jews had to be given up. In this way, it was reasoned, the "biological substance" of the Jewish people would be preserved. It was impossible for even the most hard core realists to believe that the Nazis intended to destroy all the Jews. Jews worked in German factories, assisting the German war effort. The Nazis, Jews believed, had an economic interest in the Jews. Historically, the Jews had experienced waves of violence and always survived. Hitler, of course, was different.

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

    In the beginning of the war, the Nazis established a prisoner of war camp at the former Polish cavalry barracks in the town of Osweicim, known as Auschwitz in the German language. In February 1941, prior to the Russian campaign, Himmler visited Auschwitz and saw the potential for expansion in a nearby field (a marsh, really) at the village of Birkenau. Jewish slaves were forced to build a new camp there. Architects from Germany designed and built four large (underground) gas chambers and (above ground) crematoriums. In the summer of 1941, two civilians from Hamburg arrived at Auschwitz to familiarize the SS staff, including the medical doctors (who ran the place) with the killing agent Zyklon B, an industrial poison used to kill rodents. Pellets of Zyklon B, dumped from a small hole in the ceiling of the gas chamber (transported in a truck marked with a red cross), would be used now to kill human beings, succeeding diesel exhaust as the prime killing agent. In September 1941, the first gassing of human beings was conducted in the notorious Block 11 at Auschwitz. The victims were two hundred and fifty patients from the camp hospital and six hundred Russian prisoners of war.

    Jewish people from all of the countries in Europe were sent on trains to Auschwitz. Ninety percent were gassed immediately, having been told they were going to take a shower and to breath deeply. Some of the young and healthy Jews were "selected" by an SS doctor to live, in other words, to live long enough to be worked to death. The average life expectancy of a prisoner at Auschwitz was three months. The vast camp was also the site of the extermination of tens of thousands of Polish prisoners.

    On October 7, 1944, Jewish slaves ("sonderkommandos"), whose task was to burn bodies in the crematorium, blew up a crematorium and staged a short-lived revolt. It was, of course, brutally suppressed by the SS. Jewish revolts occurred at Trebinka and Sobibor. SS men were killed, and scores of Jews fled to the forests. Jewish slaves attempted a revolt at Belzec; the effort was discovered and the conspirators hanged.

    German industry fully participated in the Holocaust. Auschwitz-Birkenau was not only a large factory of death, it was the site of major German industries, like Krupp and I. G. Farbens. Jewish slaves provided a vast reservoir of free labor.

    Auschwitz-Birkenau had the capacity to exterminate 17, 280 persons a day. The SS doctor Mengele described the destruction process at the camp as "applied biology."

 RIGHTEOUS GENTILES

    The Nazis made it very clear to the non-Jewish population that helping the Jews was a very grave matter and that the punishment would be severe. In western Europe, where the Nazis viewed the civilian population more or less as Aryan, a Christian might be caught sheltering a Jew and still manage to survive a Nazi concentration camp. In eastern and central Europe, whose population the Nazis viewed as barely human, it was a different matter. In Poland, the Nazis issued a decree in October 1941 making assistance to Jews an offense punishable by death. The decree applied to "abettors and assisters."

    The Nazis applied terror as a weapon to pacify the people of the conquered territories. They did not have German soldiers to spare for the extermination of Jews. The healthy German men were fighting on the different fronts in Russia, North Africa, Italy, Yugoslavia, and France. Terror, and collaborators, proved the key. It was much more liberally applied in eastern Europe, where the inhabitants were despised "subhumans," as opposed to western Europe, where the population was viewed as racially akin.

    Still, in every occupied territory of Europe, a relative handful of non-Jews risked their lives to rescue a relative handful of Jews from Nazi annihilation. The fact that these people were very few in number makes their activities all the more significant. The Righteous Gentiles had to overcome the fear of Nazi terror, and the fear of being denounced by neighbors who did not look kindly on the idea of helping Jews. Long before the Nazis arrived, the Jews had been defined as different and as living in a dark world beyond the boundaries of human obligation. That, too, was an obstacle.

    Beginning in the 1950's, the State of Israel's Yad Vashem, Holocaust Memorial, has honored the non-Jews who rescued Jews from the Nazis. The largest number of Righteous Gentiles honored have been from Poland and Holland. The very term Righteous Gentile is controversial in some countries. Some in the wartime generation argue: do you mean if I didn't risk my life and the lives of my family members to rescue Jews, I am somehow not righteous?

ZEGOTA

    In Poland, a small, unique group of Polish Catholics, led by the novelist Zofia Kossack, whose writing was not free of anti-Semitic references, formed a clandestine group called Zegota that devoted itself to the rescue of Jews. Older Jews in hiding were given money to live on, as well as medicines, and an estimated four thousand Jewish children were spirited out of the ghettos, taught to be Catholic, and transported to Catholic orphanages, convents, or cloisters where they assumed new identities and where, under the kindly eye of a mother superior or a priest, they survived the Nazi annihilation in a relative oasis. Some Jewish people later complained bitterly that the children had been saved in order to convert them to Catholicism. After the war, some of the children were returned to their parents or to surviving relatives; some were not, their identities, long a secret, lost in the chaos of war, or the emotional bond between child and protector unbroken by conscience.

WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING

    Jewish resistance, in one form or another, occurred in the ghettos of virtually every village, town, and city. There were no arms available to Jews (or to civilians in general). Jews sometimes acquired guns from disgruntled Italian soldiers (reluctant allies of the Germans), from the black market, from the Polish communist underground, or, rarest of all, from the nationalist Polish underground movement known as the AK, or Home Army, which did not have a reputation of friendliness towards the Jews. Armed resistance was virtually impossible.

   "We didn't even have a stick," a Jewish survivor said.

    The most famous example of Jewish resistance was the ghetto uprising in Warsaw. On July 22, 1942, the Nazis, ably assisted by their collaborators, began deporting three hundred and fifty thousand Jews in the Warsaw ghetto to the death camp located at the village of Treblinka some seventy kilometers directly east of the city. This was the "liquidation" of the Warsaw ghetto that had long been awaited. In January 1943, the last of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, attacked the Nazis and their foreign collaborators, forcing them from the ghetto in a stunning retreat of the "super race." The Nazis bid their time, and planned their next move with a little more caution. It came on Passover, the Jewish holiday which coincided with Easter that year.

    On April 19, 1943, the Nazis entered to the ghetto with their collaborators, including the despised Jewish ghetto police. Once again they were attacked by the Jewish fighters, mostly from the Jewish Fighting Organization, or ZOB, led by twenty-one year old Mordechai Anilewicz. On the first day of the ghetto revolt, a carousel, or merry-go-round, was operating near the ghetto wall in the so-called Aryan Side of Warsaw. Poles flocked to the carousel while a few feet away (literally) the ghetto burned. The Jewish fighters, numbering several hundred, had a few weapons of inferior quality obtained on the black market or from the small communist underground. Bullets did not fit the pistols, and pistols were virtually useless because they required the Jewish fighter be close to the enemy, which was not always possible. The Jews had a very effective bomb in the form of bottles filled with gasoline and thrown at the Nazis. This was dubbed the Jewish Cocktail. The Polish underground, for reasons both tactical and anti-Semitic, did not lend a hand to the Jewish fighters, although an AK detachment made a noble but futile effort to blow a hole in the ghetto wall on the first day of the fighting. Met by resistance (and casualties), the Nazis decided simply to burn the ghetto to the ground, and called on the Luftwaffe to rain incendiaries on the Jews. After several weeks of fighting, in the sewers, the attics, house to house, room to room, the Nazis managed to crush the uprising. The last of the Jewish fighters committed suicide in a bunker beneath the ruins at 18 Mila Street. These Jewish fighters did not want to be taken alive, and shot one another rather than submit to that fate. To symbolize the destruction of Polish Jewry, the Nazis blew up the largest synagogue in Warsaw.

THE BERMUDA CONFERENCE

    On April 19, 1943, the same day as the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, British and American diplomats (of a relatively low rank) met on the island of Bermuda ostensibly to discuss what might be done to relieve the plight of European Jews. It should be noted that tens of thousands of Jews were still alive in countries beyond the reach of the Germans: Bulgaria, Spain, Hungary, and Rumania. The Bermuda Conference was held largely as a result of growing public pressure in England.

    However, as historian David Wyman (Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945) has said, "Rescue was not the purpose of Bermuda. The purpose was to dampen growing pressures for rescue." In a phrase, Bermuda was "a facade for inaction."
 

    Bermuda was selected as the site of the conference because travel to the island was strictly limited under war-time conditions. There would be a few (hand picked) reporters and no nettlesome Jewish representatives hovering over the shoulders of the diplomats, who stayed at the Horizons Oceanside resort "set among hibiscus and oleander and lilly fields in bloom for Easter." The State Department made it very clear to the diplomats at Bermuda that there would be no special emphasis placed upon the suffering of the Jews. This was "strictly prohibited." In addition, it was made clear that the Roosevelt administration did not have the power to relax or to rescind the immigration laws. It was not mentioned, however, that the administration did have the power to permit the quota to be filled to its legal limit. During the Second World War, the U. S. quota was virtually untouched: 21,000 refugees, most of them Jews, were admitted into the country. This number constituted ten percent of the allowed quota. In other words, nearly 190,000 openings went unfilled while the slaughter of Jews continued unabated. The diplomats at Bermuda did not reach any conclusions regarding the rescue of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. Perhaps because of the "poverty" of their results, the diplomats did not issue a final report.

   "Not even the pessimists among us expected such sterility," said Sam Dickstein of the House of Representatives.
 

    Several months after the Bermuda Conference, the Jewish newspaper The Frontier wrote, "The Warsaw ghetto is liquidated. The leaders of Polish Jewry are dead by their own hand, and the world which looks on passively is, in its way, dead too."

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