While the historical record reveals a generally strained and frequently tortured existence for Jews living within the larger German and Bohemian cultures for well over a thousand years, it is commonly acknowledged that the interim between the career of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) and the rise of the Nazis was a period of relative tolerance and prosperity for the Jews of Northern and Central Europe. Of course, the pendulum of social equality continued to swing both for and against Jews during this time; anti-Semitism rising predictably when fueled by periodic financial crises and growing nationalist tides. But with the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919, Jewish political and commercial interests were elevated to heights previously imagined to be beyond reach. More than in any other European society, Jews in Germany had integrated and formed political and national sympathies to a degree that offered them liberation from their historical lot as permanent aliens in the regions they had inhabited for centuries. This contrasted sharply with the status of Jews in most of the rest of Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe (Poland, for example, was the more typical experience). Anti-Semitism was a constant and unfaltering fact-of-life to be sure, but opportunities for assimilation - both economic and social - were available if Jews chose to embrace them; and many did.
In hindsight, we cannot argue that these pre-WW2 years were the best of times for world Jewry, especially in comparison to the trend of positive strides made in North America since 1945 and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1949. But relative to both their own history in the territories of proto-Germany as well as the continuing plight of Jews in neighboring states of Eastern Europe, German Jews had entered a notably prosperous era. However, it was to be short-lived. The conditions of the Versailles Treaty would doom the young Weimar Republic and with it, all of the improvements in Jewish status. The illusion of security collapsed around them and in the space of less than three years German Jews ceased being German in the eyes of society and were once again reduced to a humiliating status of Ausländer (foreigner), this time under the auspices of the Nürnberg Laws. The seeds of the Shoah had already begun to sprout in this early period of Nazi growth in the German political system.
The calls coming from Jews championing the assimilationist cause - even going so far as to encourage the renunciation of Jewish identity in the name of nationalist fervor - was of course rooted in a deluded, if idealistic, confidence in the ability of a liberalized German society to resist the deeply-ingrained historical pattern of descending into mob panic when faced with economic and political uncertainty, casting all blame for their woes on their resident whipping boys, the Jews. Incredibly, Boris Pasternak continued to preach the very same promises of Jewish assimilationist ideals even after the devastation of the Shoah (!) and Stalin’s brutal Gulag imprisonment of repatriated Russian Jews, summing up the argument in Dr. Zhivago as a challenge to those who fell under the Nazis and Soviets. “In whose interests is this voluntary martyrdom?” he asks. Later, he begs “Dismiss this army which is forever fighting and being massacred, nobody knows for what? …Say to them: ‘That’s enough. Stop now. Don’t hold on to your identity. Don’t all get together in a crowd. Disperse. Be with all the rest.’”
It is unsettling to read Pasternak’s condemnation of a people so terribly brutalized as the result of zealous political ideology. And it is beyond difficult to know what to make of such an argument. Undefeated by the furious retort of the Shoah and the Soviet terrors, Pasternak seems here to blame the victims for their own hardships and murders! “If you’d only abandoned your Jewishness,” he implies, “…if you had joined the Nazi assault on Europe then maybe you’d have survived.” Never mind their total exclusion from such an option. How he was able to reconcile this strange logic with the total disenfranchisement of all Jews almost immediately following the rise of the Nazis to political dominance is baffling considering that observant, secular, non-self-identified, descendants of converts from Christianity, descendants of converts to Christianity, atheists … ALL categories of people with any traceable link to Jewish heritage were targeted by the Nazis. So, while initially assimilation held the promise of liberation for those who sang its praises, the promise went unfulfilled and their songs fell on deaf SS ears as they were herded along with every other Jew into walled ghettoes, prison camps, and eventually train cars bound for Poland. The Final Solution contained no opt-out clause for Jews, even assimilated ones.
Recognizing the ceaseless threats to the existence of Jews around the world several decades before the rise of the Third Reich, the various players behind the development of the different threads of Zionism understood that without a geographic state established in the historical homeland of Eretz Israel, Jews would forever remain at the mercy of their persecutors. So, the establishment of the contemporary state of Israel represents a source of collective relief for Jews around the world – both those resident in the land and the millions living outside of its borders. The promise of a secure homeland to shelter Klal Israel against the seemingly irrepressible tides of hostility that rise in every generation offers hope to a people who suffered exile for nearly 1,800 years. But since the earliest moments following Independence, Israel has faced near-constant threats from its neighbors until once again the future of the Jewish homeland – and by extension, the security of the Jewish people - looks anything but guaranteed. So, it seems quite understandable that a large amount of political will and energy be dedicated to maintaining the concept of what is at stake for Jews forced to live without the backing of a geographically anchored Jewish state by carrying the banner of Shoah memory forward into generations beyond the days remaining for our last living witness to those times.
With the future security of the Jewish people invested in both preserving the memory of the past in the form of Shoah memorialization and commemoration and guaranteeing the future in the form of a viable, defendable Eretz Israel, the methods of one are dependent upon the other. That is, keeping alive the memory of the Shoah helps to reinforce the necessity and political justification of the state of Israel. Perhaps this was one of the considerations that led Knesset members to authorize Yom HaShoah in April, 1951, though other rationales abound. Certainly, law makers were not bound to the creation of a special day to honor the victims of this Jewish tragedy and many Orthodox rabbis have never solemnified the date, preferring instead to remember it with other losses observed together on Tisha B’Av or the Tenth of Tevet. In particular, the timing of Yom HaShoah raises conflicts owing to its appearance in the month of Nisan when fasting and certain mourning observances are restricted (Nisan, of course, is the month in which Pesach is observed and expectations of joyful celebration set the tone for daily rhythms). The Orthodox position seems justifiable and even preferable considering this context alone.
So, understanding the possibility of conflict that might (and did) arise between Orthodox and other observant denominations and secular Jews, why did the Knesset ignore the Chief Rabbinate’s 1949 designation of the 10th of Tevet as the preferred date for Shoah remembrance? The date chosen as well as the full name of the commemoration – Yom HaShoah V’Hagevurah, “Day of Remembrance of the Shoah and the Heroism” - yield a significant clue. According to various sources compiled and summarized in the Yom HaShoah guide of the publication Conservative Judaism, the Shoah education programs in Israel in the early 1950s were characterized overwhelmingly by a high emphasis on the suffering of European Jews. This evidently bypassed the sympathies of young Israelis who simply deduced (though incorrectly) from the scale of the Shoah that European Jews must have remained docile in the face of the threat and were easily led to their slaughter.
I should pause here to admit that before taking on this project one of the biggest obstacles with which I wrestled during my visit to Europe and at the start of my research on this topic was paving over my preconception of Jewish resistance to the Shoah as minimal or non-existent. But what I have learned since beginning this exercise (one that I hope to continue) is that examples of resistance – both aggressive and passive – abound in the documentation and oral histories of the countless acts that comprise what we call now the Shoah. Though our ideas about what resistance should look like come in many forms, we often overlook the more subtle but hugely significant instances when it occurred. When people chose dignity even when that meant losing their lives and when others shared ridiculously meager rations at the cost of their own remaining shreds of health, they were resisting. Of course, the “Heroes” mentioned in the full title of the commemoration are linked to one of the better known examples of aggressive resistance: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19 April 1943 (14th of Nisan). The largest single instance of revolt by Jews against the Nazis during the Shoah, the Uprising was intended to thwart Germany’s transference of the remainder of the Warsaw Ghetto population to the extermination camp at Treblinka, Poland.
Since the beginning of the concentration of the Warsaw region’s 400,000 Jews into the ghetto in 1940, many thousands had died from starvation and disease. In just a three month period during the summer of 1942, nearly 300,000 of those who had survived the horrible conditions of the ghetto during the previous year and half were transported to Treblinka and murdered. By the end of that same year word was passed to the remaining ghetto residents that the Nazi “relocation program” was a rouse and that their family members and friends had ended up in the extermination camps rather than in forced labor details as was previously believed. So, in early 1943 a group of 400+ insurgents armed with smuggled handguns, primitive hand-crafted weapons, and very little ammunition began to organize a resistance formed of two units: the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB (Jewish Combat Organization) and the Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW (Jewish Military League). On January 18th when the Nazis initiated the second mass transport of residents to Treblinka, ZOB fighters who had sneaked into the lines of deportees responded to a signal and opened fire on Nazi guards. Most of the other deportees were able to slip away during the fighting so the second wave was limited to a relatively small transport of 6,000 residents. Deportations resumed for another four days but were limited due to further strikes from the ZOB. The resistance grew to nearly 1,000 during the following three months.
On 19 April 1943 - Erev Pesach - the Nazis began their final wave of deportations. The 30,000 remaining residents remained hidden so that when the guards entered the ghetto the resistance was able to launch a guerrilla assault from windows in the empty apartment blocks. Though they had been surprised by the attack, the Nazis recovered and responded by burning the apartment buildings and consequently trapping or flushing out the resistance fighters. By the middle of May the deportation officials declared a victory with the expulsion of all but a tiny number of residents who had somehow managed to remain hidden, and marked the occasion by demolishing the Great Synagogue. The SS commander who oversaw the action, SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop, remembered supervising its destruction: “What a wonderful sight! I called out Heil Hitler! and pressed the button. A terrific explosion brought flames right up to the clouds. The colors were unbelievable. An unforgettable allegory of the triumph over Jewry. The Warsaw Ghetto has ceased to exist.” Stroop reported to his bosses that 180 resistance fighters – “bandits and subhumans” - had been killed during the final day of armed confrontation. Altogether, the Nazis recorded the deaths of more than 13,000 Jews during the length of the resistance –nearly 6,000 of those had died in the apartment block blazes set by the guards. Nearly all of the surviving residents were finally captured and deported to Treblinka where, in most cases, they were murdered shortly after arrival.
Though official counts of German casualties are difficult to accurately pin-down due to Nazi propaganda policy forbidding the release of any but reduced numbers of wounded, Marek Edelman, one of the few Uprising leaders to survive the Shoah, estimated that upwards of 300 German casualties resulted from the resistance guerrilla assault. Of course, the efforts of the resistance fighters in the Uprising were the driving force behind the Knesset’s decision to honor their sacrifices with the settling of the Yom HaShoah near the anniversary date of the launching of the main resistance assault. Ultimately, the decision to push the commemorations to a date 13 days after the Uprising anniversary was a practical concession to the complications that would have resulted from layering Yom HaShoah on top of the eve of Pesach. So, the 27th of Nisan is now the official date established for Yom HaShoah. This also serves to locate it just eight days before the twin public holidays of Yom Hazicharon and Yom Ha’atzma’ut (Israeli Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism Remembrance Day and Israeli Independence Day respectively), thus forming the Yom Trifecta of public observances in Israel weaving together the themes of Jewish collective identity over the millennia: hardship, perseverance, and triumph.
Official observances in Israel include the sounding of sirens at sundown and at 11am on 27 Nisan. Traffic is halted and pedestrians come to attention for the duration of the two-minute siren blast. Television and radio programming is focused on the Jewish experiences of the war and all public entertainment venues are closed. A state ceremony is conducted at Warsaw Ghetto Plaza at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem where the flag is lowered to half-mast, and candles are lit to honor the memory of those who died.
Yom HaShoah observances outside of Israel are generally more religious affairs. Diaspora Jews typically gather at synagogues or community centers. Vigils and educational programs are offered to the community and recitations of Psalms and poems and performances of musical pieces oftentimes are accompanied by talks from survivors. In some cases lists of names of those who died are read in public spaces. My first participation in a Yom HaShoah service occurred within three weeks of my return from Europe, so my reflections on what I experienced during my visit to the many memorials, museums, historical sites linked to the former Jewish communities and to the Shoah and to Dachau were still very raw. Yom HaShoah of 2011 proved to be both a healing and provocative experience. I say provocative because I left with more questions than I brought with me to the service. The speakers were two sisters who had survived the betrayals of their native Czechoslovakian society, relocation through several camps, and ultimately one of the many death marches before being liberated by the advancing American Army. It was a beautiful experience to listen to them re-live those times and to speak of how they have managed to reengage with life ever since. But, I was very troubled by the helplessness of their situation and of the other millions who were marched to death or forced to submit to medical experiments or be pulled away from a loved one and pushed into an underground death chamber.
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