At the
Beginning ...
Prior to being put
in ghettos, the Jews of Poland were not under any
particular threat.
In the early days
of the occupation, the Nazis were more concerned with
squashing any Polish opposition than with the Jews, and
the mortality rate was actually higher among the Poles
than among the Jews. The Jews were for sure robbed and
mistreated, but --little-known fact-- Auschwitz was set
up in 1940 as a concentration camp for Poles, and the
Nazis launched the "AB program" --Ausserordentich
Befriedungsaktion, "Extraordinary pacification action" --
which was mainly aimed at the Polish intelligentsia. Jews
were actually released from POW camps. We hadn't arrived
at the Holocaust yet.
One thing you
should understand about my book [Secret City: The
Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945; Yale University Press
(2003)]. Forget about the snippets that people quote
out of context. It isn't a book about Poles, or about
Polish-Jewish relations, much less is it an attempt to
defend the Poles. It is about the Jews' attempts to
survive. I focused on Warsaw because it was the best
documented: I found extraordinary records kept by the
three organizations that sprang up to help Jews in hiding
(two Jewish, one joint Polish-Jewish - the latter
misrepresented by Poles as a Polish organization). But
there were lists of people in hiding, together with all
kinds of information about them.
Between those
records and the various Jewish memoirs and diaries, and
then the survivor records, I was able to put together a
pretty good statistical picture. It comes out like
this:
-
before the deportations started, Jewish attempts to
survive focused on smuggling, which was very
successful.
Judenrat chairman
Adam Czerniakow estimated that smuggling brought in 80%
of the food, and an Oneg Shabbat study similarly
estimated that it brought in 80% of the export income.
Suffice it to say that it was enough that of the 490,000
Jews who passed through the Warsaw Ghetto, 360,000 were
still alive when the deportations started, which would
have been impossible on the 300 calories a day the Jews
were officially allowed. Those who died were the paupers,
the orphans and the "refugees" (people transplanted from
other ghettos), who simply had no-one to turn to on
either side of the ghetto wall. You can criticize the
Jewish council for not distributing food more evenly
--for example, they could have "taxed" the rich people's
ration coupons and used them to buy food for the poor.
Hard to fault the Poles, though -- they had no access to
the poor in the ghetto. The child smugglers went in and
out every day to beg food, and generally the Poles gave
it to them. During this period, the idea of escaping from
the ghetto hardly crossed anyone's mind, and in fact was
seen as a form of betrayal. Jews should stick together,
not leave and save themselves. So by the time the
deportations started, there were only about 5,000 Jews in
hiding outside the ghetto, or about 1%.
-
during the big deportation, things got difficult. The
walls were hermetically sealed, smuggling stopped dead,
food prices skyrocketed, there was chaos and confusion,
people hadn't yet figured out what the Germans were up
to. Mostly people tried to survive by getting jobs in
German workshops or by finding hiding places inside the
ghetto. About another 6,000 escaped, mostly in the last
two weeks of the Aktion. So in September 1942, you have
11,000 Jews hiding outside the ghetto.
-
after the 1942 deportation, things settled down. The Jews
figured the Germans had gotten rid of the "unproductive
elements", and the rest of them would be safe because
they were needed for the war effort. The rate of escape
from the ghetto declined, but people did start building
hiding-places inside the ghetto. Hey, it worked last time
- about 30,000 "wild" Jews survived the big deportation
in hiding places inside the ghetto. This time they
started building proper hiding places, some even with
electricity, running water and telephones (naturally only
the rich folks).
-
then came the 1943 deportation. 6,000 Jews were taken
away (leaving 54,000). And only now did the panic set in.
The big wave of escapes was between January and April
1943, when about 11,000 more Jews escaped.
That brought the
total "on the Aryan side" to about 24,000 (about 2,000
escaped between Sept. 1942 and Jan 1943).
-
on the eve of the Ghetto uprising the picture was thus
that there were about 66,000 Jews left in Warsaw, of whom
24,000 were hiding "on the Aryan side".
Pause for
assessment.
According to the standard narrative, the ghetto fighters
had only a choice between dying on their feet or on their
knees, because escape was allegedly impossible. But this
is manifestly untrue: at that point more than one-third
of the Jews were living "on the Aryan side", and
Ringelblum estimated that "hundreds" more were escaping
every day. What's more, the other 2/3 had prepared hiding
places inside the ghetto, hoping to ride out the next
deportation. In other words, the Jews weren't thinking of
how best to die, they were thinking of how best to
survive.
So let's
rethink the ghetto uprising.
The ghetto fighters also could have escaped and saved
themselves, but they chose to stay and fight. That, to my
mind, means they made a heroic choice, and answers the
antisemitic taunt that the Jews fought only when they had
no choice. They did have a choice.
IMHO, of the two
organizations, the ZZW made the better choice: to stage a
standard military holding action, to hold out in
strongholds for as long as they could, and then to
retreat via prepared routes and live to fight another
day.
ZOB's plan, on the
other hand, was pure romanticism: "Ghettograd", Masada,
the fight to the death. I criticize ZOB: their method of
fighting provoked the Germans to destroy the ghetto,
flush people out of their hiding places, and wreck the
whole plan of surviving within the ghetto. I said this at
a conference once, and a survivor came up to me
afterwards to thank me for telling the truth that he had
never dared to tell. Meanwhile, ZZW has been written out
of history and the uprising is told entirely from the ZOB
pov. They don't like me in Israel for saying these
things.
That's
escape.
Once the ghetto was destroyed, you had only the Jews in
hiding, and their number had grown by this time to 28,000
(the 24,000 I've already accounted for, plus 3,000 who
came to Warsaw to hide, plus 1,000 who escaped after the
uprising, by jumping from trains or escaping from labor
camps. This by the way is in the same ballpark as
standard estimates. Adolf Berman estimated 25,000. So
nothing very new there, I just approached it more
scientifically. Of the 28,000, I counted 11,500
survivors, give or take. That's about 40%.
Crucial
Points
Crucial point
1: the
Jews were driven from pillar to post by policemen and
blackmailers, and had to change hiding places on average
7 times. Since they were recognized as Jews by
blackmailers (and almost all Jews, even the most
assimilated, say they had run-ins with blackmailers), I
doubt the validity of the concept of "passing",
i.e. that Jews survived because they weren't
recognized as Jews. If the blackmailers recognized them
as Jews, then so did landlords, janitors, passers-by,
etc. There were just too many little cultural differences
between Poles and Jews --you would have had to be an
accomplished actor, and stay in character for as long as
4 years to give a perfect imitation of a Pole.
Crucial point
2: as they
changed hiding places, they were passed from hand to hand
and the network of helpers grew. I estimate 70-90,000
helpers, which is not too far off Ringelblum's estimate
of 40-60,000. I had more complete sources than he did.
70-90,000 is about 8% of the population. In the Polish
edition of my book, I point to Wieslaw Kielar's book Anus
Mundi: Kielar was a Polish prisoner at Auschwitz for
almost the entire existence of the camp, and he says that
around 8% of the SS guards at Auschwitz were decent.
Therefore it is nothing for Poles to be proud of, or Jews
to be surprised at, that 8% of the population of Warsaw
was prepared to help Jews.
They don't like me
in Poland because of that (and they never quote that on
their websites).
Crucial point
3: Just as
each Jew had to rely on multiple helpers, because they
needed to change hiding-places so often, so each
blackmailer, policeman, denouncer, etc., could victimize
multiple Jews. In fact, from the scant evidence we have,
it seemed to me that the average szmalcownik must have
been hitting up 2-3 Jews a month at least. Therefore if
the number of helpers was some multiple of 28,000, the
number of bad guys was some fraction of 28,000. I
estimated 2-3,000.
Preliminary
Concluding Remarks
Conclusion
1: around
30 times as many Poles were helping Jews as harming
them.
Conclusion
2: 92% of
Poles were not involved with Jews one way or
another.
Conclusion
3: given
that Jews were easy to recognize and must have been
recognized many times by landlords, passers-by, etc., if
a majority of the population had been murderously hostile
- or even a sizable minority --then simply nobody would
have survived. Because surviving meant that every single
person who recognized you as a Jew had to stay shtum,
whereas it took only one bastard to denounce you. I
calculated that to account for the mortality rate
actually observed, the number of bastards would have had
to be around 2%.
Strange
coincidence 1:
the fascist-style ONR got about 2% of the pre-war
vote.
Strange
coincidence 2:
fascist-style parties generally got around 2% of the
popular vote in European countries, except in Germany, of
course, and in the Netherlands, where it was 8%. (I guess
a lot of Dutch people were proud to be
"Germanen")
Strange
coincidence 3:
estimates of the number of Jews in hiding, and the number
of survivors, are by chance almost exactly the same for
Warsaw as for the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, 28,000
Jews went into hiding, of some 16,000 survived until
liberation in September 1944. In Warsaw, 28,000 Jews went
into hiding, of whom 17,000 survived until the outbreak
of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944.
Overall
Concluding Remarks
Overall
conclusion 1: the degree of local antisemitism didn't
have that much to do with survival rates. The low
survival rate in Warsaw (2%) was almost entirely due to
timing and knowledge: the Jews didn't figure out what the
Germans were up to until it was too late. By the time
they realized that escape was necessary, the vast
majority were already dead. That had nothing to do with
either the attitudes or the actions of the
Poles.
Overall
conclusion 2:
in history nothing is simple, and there are many other
factors that I don't have time to go into
here.
For example, it
was harder to hide "on the surface" in Holland because
the documentation system was more foolproof. Dutch Jews
had to hide physically, like Anne Frank in her "Secret
Annexe". On the other hand, Dutch Jews didn't have to
change hiding places as often. On the other hand, they
were also betrayed anyway (Anne Frank, for example). On
the other hand, the 8% of people in Warsaw were far from
a random sample. As with any other underground movement,
people were drawn into it because people already involved
in it thought they could be trusted.
So in the end, we
really can't tell very much, except that your picture of
the vast majority of Poles being murderous antisemites
doesn't fit the facts. It also doesn't fit the fact that
the Jews had lived in Poland for 800 years, and for 800
years the Poles had been antisemitic (as I pointed out,
it was part of their religion), and for 800 years Poles
and Jews had mostly coexisted peacefully anyway. In fact,
for most of those 800 years, Jews considered Poland an
especially favorable place for Jews.
We see Poland
through the distorting lenses of the Holocaust, which was
only 5 years out of 800 and perpetrated by the Germans.
Was there collaboration? You bet. Was it on the same
scale as in most other Nazi-occupied countries? Mostly
no.
There was no
collaborationist regime or movement, no Polish Waffen-SS
unit or police battalions, no Polish Golta complex, Vichy
regime, Father Tiso paying the Germans to take the Jews
of his hands, etc. I don't find that these things make
the Poles particularly virtuous: they are all historical
accidents. German plans for the Poles themselves were so
extreme that even the most radical Polish fascists were
anti-German (and anti-Jewish at the same time). And in
other countries, the active perpetrators were also a
small percentage of the population.
Considering that
the Holocaust was a highly efficient, technologically
advanced killing machine, you have to figure that the
number of active perpetrators was a small fraction of the
number of victims. 3,000 members of the Einsatzgruppen
for example killed 2 million Jews. Somebody or other
wrote a PhD thesis on the railway system, and pointed out
that there were 6 main killing centers, that one train a
day went to each of them, and that makes 6 trains a day,
out of a total traffic of I think 50,000 trains a day in
Europe overall. All these things challenge received
assumptions about the Holocaust and require a lot of
rethinking. Consider also that the Nazis managed to kill
3.5 million Soviet POWs, many of them by just penning
them up and leaving them to die of starvation and
exposure.
Conclusion:
It actually isn't that hard to kill large numbers of
people (consider what was achieved in Rwanda with
high-tech machetes), and it has always struck me that the
Nazis made heavy weather of the Holocaust. There must be
some psychology behind it: the industrialization of death
had to be some kind of symbolic statement. Anyway, enough
rumination for now.
Closing
Statement
I hope I have
given you some insight into what my book is actually
about, as distinct from what the deniers and the Polish
apologists claim on the basis of selected quotes. I
personally don't give a damn about the Poles, one way or
the other.
I just report what
came out of my research, which was about Jewish
responses, not Polish behavior. The comments on the Poles
are merely a side-effect, and they certainly aren't a
defense of them. I just think that we have tended to
exaggerate the importance of local attitudes, not just in
Poland, but everywhere. The Nazis were in control. They
found enough helpers everywhere to get the job done.
National differences are mostly down to timing, Nazi
priorities, and other random factors (Michael Marrus
pointed this out 20 years ago. Consider France and
Holland. It happens that the Nazis set the same timetable
for both countries: one train of 1000 victims per day. No
train ever left either country with less than the quota.
The difference in outcome (25% of the French Jews were
killed v. 75% of the Dutch Jews) is mainly because there
were a lot more Jews in France. As Marrus says, "if the
war had lasted another year, there would have been too
few Jews left alive anywhere to speak of meaningful
national differences."
And that's enough
said.
