Camden New Journal
Publications by New Journal Enterprises
spacer
  Home Archive Competition Jobs Tickets Accommodation Dating Contact us
spacer
spacer
spacer
spacer
spacer
spacer
spacer
The Review - BOOKS
 

German soldiers checking Jewish residents of the Warsaw Ghetto


Poverty-stricken inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto.


A member of the Jewish resistance snipes at the German army
The secret world under the noses of the Nazis

The most famous attempt by Jews to resist the Nazis in armed fighting occurred in the Warsaw ghetto, writes David Rosenberg

Five Years in the Warsaw Ghetto
by Bernard Goldstien
AK Press/Nabat Books, £13

JUST weeks before the Nazi army burnt the Warsaw Ghetto to a cinder, and flushed out the last heroic resisters an acquaintance of mine, and her twin sister, were smuggled over the wall.

Barely 11 years old, they were hidden by Catholics on the ‘Aryan side’ of Warsaw and later by poor peasants risking death sentences to shelter Jews.
This peasant family resolutely shared their last pieces of bread with their guests, yet, the father regularly voiced anti-semitic beliefs. Israel’s former premier, Yitzhak Shamir, infamously claimed that “Poles imbibe antisemitism with their mother’s milk”. Certainly, the Polish-Jewish encounter has been replete with paradoxes.
Poland’s medieval monarchs welcomed Jews, granting them unprecedented liberties while their cousins suffered persecution in Western Europe.
In 1170 Warsaw’s Jews administered the Polish mint and early Polish coins bore Hebrew inscriptions. At the outbreak of World War II, one in ten Poles were Jews; in urban Warsaw and Lodz the proportion was one in three.
After centuries of coexistence, though, many Jews today view Poland only as a Jewish graveyard. The Nazis sited most of their death camps in Poland and deported Jews there from other countries. Of the six million Jews the Nazis murdered, more than four million drew their last breath on Polish soil.
Bernard Goldstein’s riveting and poignant memoir, written originally in Yiddish in 1947, when his wounds were still raw, challenges the myths that a politically skewed hindsight has nurtured – that all Poles betrayed the Jews, that Jews went like lambs to the slaughter, and only the Zionists foresaw the calamity that the Jews faced.
Goldstein recounts his story both as an observer and as an activist. When the ghetto was established, he was 50-years-old – and a trade union organiser esteemed by Jewish and non-Jewish workers alike.
Smuggling himself in and out of the ghetto, he collaborated with non-Jewish comrades to procure arms for ghetto fighters, swap illegal newspapers with the Polish underground resistance and maintain contact with other ghettoes
His political party was the Bund – a secular Jewish workers’ movement that swept the Jewish vote in elections to town councils and Jewish community councils in the maelstrom of 1930s Poland. Its
strongest suit was spearheading the fight against anti-semitism, confronting discrimination which excluded Jews from many jobs, and directly combating
street-level anti-Jewish violence.
Goldstein led the Bund’s self-defence militia in Warsaw and cooperated closely with Polish Socialist Party militants.
The Bund opposed rabbis who counselled Jews to trust their fate to God, and Zionists who disdained the daily fight against anti-semitism to concentrate on recruiting a young, fit elite for emigration to Palestine.
The most painful episodes of anti-semitism Goldstein encountered and observed, occurred in 1945, as the anti-Nazi war ended and ravaged people fought each other for personal survival. Yet his own endurance through five years of Nazi occupation would have been impossible without assistance from courageous non-Jewish Poles.
Goldstein acknowledges that people of every nation could descend to appalling depths in an “atmosphere of terror…and complete human demoralisation” when “every decent instinct was choked off”.
He had, after all, witnessed fellow ghetto inhabitants joining the Jewish police and zealously hunting other desperate Jews at the Nazis’ behest.
In the 21 months between the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and Poland’s liberation, Goldstein was one of 500 Jews who, incredibly, maintained an underground existence within Warsaw, many hidden by sympathetic Poles. From their rabbit holes, Goldstein and others endeavoured to support several thousand more Jews surviving similarly on Warsaw’s outskirts. He was periodically hidden by the half-Polish, half-German Chumatovsky family. While Mrs Chumatovsky sheltered a prominent organiser of the Jewish underground resistance, her older brothers, raised in Germany, were fighting as Nazi soldiers.
Though he portrays situations of unbearable horror, Goldstein’s memoir is ultimately uplifting because he demonstrates the ingenuity by which people found ways to support each other in terrible circumstances. Secret schools, libraries, orphanages and soup kitchens were set up within the ghetto. Tenement committees collectively employed engineers and builders to create hidden doors, secret passages and cellars as hiding places to thwart deportation by the Nazis.
Goldstein comments sardonically: “With great sacrifice we managed to perform pathetic wonders”.
This sacrifice was not in vain. His testimony gives strength to those who, albeit in a modest way, are rebuilding Jewish life in Poland today.
In recent years I have encountered increasing numbers of Poles who feel the depth of Poland’s loss, not only of Jews but of inter-war Poland’s vibrant mix of that included Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Germans and Gypsies too.
Although Poland’s political climate has recently swung rightwards, these Poles continue to strive for the kind of Poland that Bernard Goldstein was proud to be a part of.

David Rosenberg is a teacher and writer on history and current affairs.
spacer
» A-Z of Theatre
» Local Reviews
» Local Listings
» West End Reviews
» West End Listings
» Theatre Tickets
» Theatre & Hotel Packages













spacer


Theatre Music
Arts & Events Attractions
spacer
 
 


  up