Black Earth(115)

The most effective rescuers were, and had to be, people who had good contacts with assimilated Jews, who, in their turn, had further contacts with other Jews. Such people were not antisemites. A good example was a leading ?egota activist in Warsaw, the well-connected Maurycy Herling-Grudziński. An impressive figure, he was widely known in Warsaw among Poles and Jews alike as an outstanding lawyer before the war. Using money from the Polish government-in-exile, he was able to aid more than three hundred Jews on an estate beyond Warsaw. The first people he rescued were his professional peers, jurists, and intellectuals. Then came Jews who were more socially distant.

Like Pilecki, Karski, and Bartoszewski, Herling-Grudziński was a member of the Home Army, the military arm of the Polish underground. He fought in its ranks in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, where he was wounded in battle. Like Pilecki (from eastern Poland), Karski (arrested by the Soviets in 1939), and Bartoszewski (who would later spend years in a Stalinist prison), Herling-Grudziński also felt the effects of Soviet power. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, the chronicler of the Gulag, was Maurycy’s brother. While Maurycy was hiding Jews in Warsaw, Gustaw was felling trees in a camp in the Soviet far north.

After the war was over, Maurycy would become a leading jurist, while Gustaw would become an admired writer. Neither of the two Polish brothers would make much of a fact that might have been crucial to their fates: They were Jewish.

All rescue involved self-rescue.





11


Partisans of God and Man


A nszel Sznajder and his brother jumped from a train evacuating them from Auschwitz in January 1945. The two of them spoke both Polish and Russian, and intimidated the locals by suggesting that they were fighting in the ranks of the Polish Home Army or with the Soviet partisans. Depending upon their initial impressions of the people they met, the brothers decided which story to use. The essential part of the story, the part that had to be believed, was that they had comrades who would protect or avenge them, “a force backing us up.” They needed to be seen not as two isolated Jews who could be killed, but as fearsome men who were part of something larger: an army or a state.

The Sznajder brothers were among the few Jews who made the threat of violence work for them. Sometimes Jews survived because they joined the forces that resisted the Germans, or pretended to have done so. More often, however, the Jews who were trying to take shelter from German killing policies were exposed to greater risks by open opposition to German rule. When French communists began to resist, the first victims of German retaliations were Polish Jews in Paris. In Serbia, the partisan resistance was used by German occupation authorities as the prompt to exterminate Serbian Jews. In the Netherlands, where there were many rescuers and many resisters, the two groups got in each other’s way. Where the German police sought the Dutch resistance, they tended to find Dutch Jews. In Slovakia, a national uprising led to a German intervention and to the murder of thousands of Jews who would otherwise most likely have survived.

This bloody irony was also apparent in Poland and the western Soviet Union, where more Jews were in hiding, where German rule was more violent, and where resistance was widespread. The Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 was the most significant urban rebellion against German rule. Although it was organized and fought in the main by the Polish Home Army, it was, perhaps, the largest single effort of Jewish armed resistance. In all likelihood, more Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 (and some fought in both). The Home Army was not technically a partisan army: Its members wore uniforms or insignia to distinguish themselves from civilians, and they were subordinate to the Polish government-in-exile in London. The official German position was that the Polish state had never existed, and German forces applied their main anti-partisan tactic by shooting civilians—at the very least 120,000 of them—in Warsaw. The defeat of the Warsaw Uprising meant the physical destruction of the entirety of Warsaw, building by building, just as the ghetto had been destroyed the previous year. Up until that point the survival chances of a Jew in hiding in Warsaw were about the same as that of a Jew in hiding in Amsterdam. When Warsaw was removed from the face of the earth its Jews had no place left to hide.

The Soviet partisans were the most significant irregular force fighting the Germans in the countryside of eastern Europe. They did not distinguish themselves from civilians. Instead, they mixed among them, knowingly bringing German reprisals upon villages, counting on this as a means of recruitment. In the hinterland behind the German advance, chiefly in northwestern Ukraine and Belarus, Soviet partisans had to compete with the Germans for the loyalty of the villages, which meant, in practice, for their food. If villagers gave food to the Soviet partisans, then the Germans killed everyone in that village, including any Jews in hiding, often by immolation in a barn. If villagers gave food to the Germans, they risked violence at the hands of the Soviet partisans. The nature of partisan warfare was fatal for Jews who were attempting to hide.