CASE STUDY #5: WARSAW GHETTO

1. Zofia Korbonska was a member of the Polish underground resistance movement known as the Home Army or AK. By radio she informed British authorities in London that the Nazis were deporting the Jews of Warsaw to their death at Treblinka. The message urged British authorities to do something, suggesting the rail lines be bombed. London did not reply. 
 
 
 
 

2. Vladka Meed, a Jewish resistance fighter "passing" as a Polish Christian, stood in nearby Krasinski Park among the festive crowd and watched as the ghetto burned and listened as the screams of the Jews mingled with the sound of the carousel. 
 
 
 
 

3. Janusz Zawodny, a fighter in the Polish underground movement (Home Army), was in Krasinski Park and watched the ghetto burn. He wondered why there was no help given to the Jewish fighters. There was, in fact, an effort to blow up the wall, but it failed. 
 
 
 
 

4. Adina Blady Szwajger, a Jewish woman "passing" as a Christian, worked in the Jewish resistance and was present at Krasinski Square as the ghetto burned. 
 
 
 
 

5. Jan Blonski was a Polish fourteen year old at the time of the ghetto revolt. He saw the carousel at Krasinski Park and remembers the music. In 1987, he wrote an article about the carousel and called for Polish introspection on the subject of Polish indifference to the Nazi destruction of the Jews. 
 
 
 
 

6. Marek Edelman was a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization known as ZOB. He fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto and was one of the few Jewish commanders to survive; he is the only ghetto fighter still living in Poland. On April 19, 1943, Edelman could hear the sound of the carousel at Krasinski Park. 
 
 
 
 

7. On the same day as the start of the ghetto revolt in Warsaw, British and U. S. diplomats met on the island of Bermuda to discuss what might be done to help the European Jews. 
 
 
 
 

Krall, Hanna, Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Marek Edelman, The Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Henry Holt Co., New York, 1986. 

Meed, Vladka, On Both Sides of the Wall, Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto, Holocaust Library, New York, 1979. 

Szwajger, Adina Blady, I Remember Nothing More, The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1990.  
 
 
 

CAMPO DEI FIORI

 

    This is a poem by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. He was present at Krasinski Park while the ghetto burned. He published the poem in an underground newspaper on the first anniversary of the ghetto revolt, April 19, 1944. The title, "Campo dei Fiori," is a reference to the market place in Rome where, in 1600, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by order of the Inquisition.

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with rose-pink fish; armfuls of dark grapes heaped on peach-down.    On this same square they burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died the taverns were full again, baskets of olives and lemons again on the vendors' shoulders.  I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were flying high in the cloudless sky.  At times wind from the burning would drift dark kites along and riders on the carousel caught petals in midair. That same hot wind blew open the skirts of the girls and the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral that the people of Rome or Warsaw haggle, laugh, make love as they pass by martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read of the passing of things human, of the oblivion born before the flames have died.  But that day I thought only of the loneliness of the dying, of how, when Giordano climbed to his burning he could not find in any human tongue words for mankind, mankind who live on.  Already they were back at their wine or peddled their white starfish, baskets of olives and lemons they had shouldered to the fair, and he already distanced as if centuries had passed while they paused just a moment for his flying in the fire.  Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet's word. --CZESLAW MILOSZ

 
 
 

DENMARK

    Of all the countries in Europe, only Denmark rescued the majority of its Jewish citizens, numbering a little over seven thousand. The Jews of Denmark were highly assimilated into Danish culture. They were viewed by the Christian populace as Danish citizens. The non-Jews of Denmark, because of a racial affinity with the Germans, were treated leniently by Nazi authorities for the first year of the war. The fighting, and the annihilation of the Jews, swirled around Denmark during these early years but left the tiny nation unscathed. In October 1943, however, the Nazis prepared to seize the Jews of Denmark and transport them to their (unannounced) death in Poland. A Nazi official warned the Danes that an "aktion" was imminent, and the Danish response was immediate. A cross section of the non-Jewish population rallied to the Jews.
 

    The Lutheran Bishop of Copenhagen urged Danes to help the Jews: "We shall fight for the cause so that our Jewish brothers and sisters may preserve the same freedom which we ourselves evaluate more highly than life...We must obey God before we obey man."

    Fishing boats were rented to transport the Jews from Denmark across the Baltic Sea to neutral Sweden. Scores of non-Jews, including fishermen and police, risked their lives to save the Jews. In October 1943, 7,220 Jews fled Denmark on the fishing boats. Only the handicapped and the poor were left behind, the former because they could not move, the latter because they could not pay for transport across the narrow straits to Sweden. Four hundred and sixty-four Jews were transported to Theresienstadt. Most of these survived Nazi incarnation, largely because Dutch authorities ceaselessly harangued Nazi authorities about their well-being. When the war was over, the Jews returned to Denmark and discovered their property untouched and guarded by their neighbors.

THE JEWS OF HUNGARY

    The five hundred thousand Jews of Hungary were the last Jews to be deported to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis began the well-practiced task of rounding up and centralizing the Jews in a ghetto and then loading them on cattle cars for "transport" to Poland. The Nazi annihilation of European Jewry had been going on for three years by this point, but the Jews of Hungary (including the young Elie Wiesel) did not have the slightest idea that murder awaited them in Poland. Jews who listened secretly to the Voice of America radio or to the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) did not hear any reference to the Holocaust. For the reception of Hungarian Jewry, the Nazis constructed a special railroad spur that led directly into the Birkenau camp and facilitated the destruction process admirably.

    In the autumn of 1944, as the Soviet army was approaching the Hungarian capital Budapest, a "diplomat" from neutral Sweden named Raoul Wallenberg, recently arrived, began passing out forged Swedish identity cards to the beleaguered Jews, enabling them to pose as Swedish citizens and thus to avoid Nazi deportation. Wallenberg managed to find a loophole in the Nazi destruction process: namely, the reluctance of even Eichmann to tamper with foreign policy by arresting citizens holding papers (even false papers) to a country with whom the Nazis enjoyed good relations, or at least neutrality. Wallenberg managed to save an estimated twenty thousand people. He disappeared into Soviet captivity at the end of the war, and has never emerged.

    Leaders of the Jewish resistance in Europe and in Palestine petitioned the western powers to disrupt the flow of death trains by bombing the railroad lines leading from Hungary to Poland. The British and U. S. air force, stationed in Italy, followed precisely these same railroad lines while navigating their way to the very region where Auschwitz-Birkenau was located, a region heavily populated by German industries that were availing themselves of the Jewish slave labor nearby. When the possibility of rescuing war refugees (which meant Jews) was first raised, the War Department made the decision that the U. S. armed forces would not engage in rescue efforts at all. It refused to bomb the railroad lines or the Auschwitz-death camp itself, although U. S. bombers passed directly over the camp (and photographed it) while on bombing mission to hit the nearby German industries. In fact, the Americans accidentally dropped a few bombs on the camp, to the exultation of the Jews below who prayed that the camp would be bombed and the machinery of death crippled. The official view of the American government on rescue was blunt: winning the war was the best way to rescue the Jews. There were, however, two wars going on: a conventional war between armies; and a war the Nazis waged against the Jews. In the war against an undefended, unsuspecting civilian populace, the Nazis won.

    During the period of time when the Jews of Hungary were being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the German army was fighting a desperate battle to hold back the Soviet Red Army on the eastern front. The German troops needed trains to bring arms and supplies to the front. Despite the urgency of the situation, Hitler ordered that trains carrying Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau have priority over trains carrying the needed war material to the eastern front. The war against the Jews came first.
 

    Historian David Wyman has written, "To kill the Jews, the Nazis were willing to weaken their capacity to fight the war. The U. S. and its allies, however, were willing to attempt nothing to save them."

MAY 8, 1945

    On April 30, 1945, ten days after his fifty-sixth birthday, as Soviet artillery shells landed in the garden above, Hitler (with his wife of several hours, Eva Braun) committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin. The German armed forces surrendered to the Soviets and to the western allies on May 8, 1945. The annihilation of the Jewish people of Europe finally ground to a halt. Himmler, in disguise, was captured by the British and promptly committed suicide when his identity was discovered. With the wealth of their victims as financial backing, the Nazi killers created a secret organization called Odessa which organized the escape of countless war criminals to friendly countries in the Middle East and South America. Eichmann, for one, fled to Argentina, where he worked as a mechanic under his own name until Israeli agents kidnaped him in 1961. According to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian priest located in an office near the Vatican in Rome was a critical link in organizing the flight of the Nazi criminals to post-war safety.

    On November 20, 1945, the first of the war-crimes trials began in Nuremberg, the German city where before the war the Nazis had staged their annual rallies. The leading Nazis were tried by judges from the Allied countries. This was somewhat awkward given the fact that the Soviets had begun the war on the side of the Nazis. Indeed, the Soviets had their own crimes to account for, including the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles to Siberia and the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn Forest and elsewhere. None of this was raised at Nuremberg. Twelve leading Nazis were sentenced to death; in addition, three received life prison sentences; four received reduced prison terms; and three were acquitted. Goering managed to commit suicide a few hours before he was to hang. In general, the majority of Nazi criminals returned to normal life without a hitch. It was not a difficult transition from murderer to ordinary citizen. Indeed, in many cases the murderer was an ordinary citizen who, he or she pleaded, was just taking orders. The elite were involved in the Nazi crimes up to their necks. In the Who's Who of the Austrian and German war time generations, a curious gap invariably exists between the years 1939-'45. In the post-war years, the Austrian judiciary has made a joke out of prosecuting Nazi criminals: the victims are ridiculed, the perpetrators accorded deferential treatment. In contrast, Nazi criminals have often been pursued rigorously in (then West) Germany itself.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL

    Jewish survivors of the Holocaust tried to leave Europe. The U. S. quota system was still intact. Palestine (present-day Israel) was a British Protectorate, and the British blockade of Palestine was formidable. In the meantime, many of the survivors left eastern Europe (particularly after the July 1946 pogrom in Kielce, Poland, when local Poles slaughtered forty-two Jews) and settled in Displaced Persons camps in Germany under the protective eye of the Western Powers. After the Holocaust and the almost total abandonment of the Jewish people, Jewish leaders (although not all) believed that a Jewish state was the only guarantee the Jewish people could trust. The Jewish underground group Hassad secretly smuggled Jews out of Europe to Palestine. The Jewish refugees were often arrested by the British and the survivors of Hitler were placed in camps behind barbed wire. The Jewish underground in Palestine fought a terrorist war against the British authorities until the British government decided to withdraw from Palestine. On May 14, 1948, the United Nations voted for the establishment of the State of Israel. Simultaneously, six Arab armies attacked the infant state. The Israelis, the Arabs said, were stealing their land. The Arab armies were thrown back. This was the first of four wars between Israelis and Arabs, wars that serve to explain the acrimony typical of the Middle East today.

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