Black Earth(86)

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Many Jews yielded to dreams of food when the Germans deliberately associated nourishment with deportations. In Cracow, where Governor-General Frank lived in his castle, the claim in 1942 was that Jews were being deported to the East to bring in the harvest in Ukraine. In Warsaw, in the largest ghetto in Frank’s General Government, Jews were promised bread and jam if they reported to the Umschlagplatz for deportation. With time, as Jews came to understand what deportation meant, the politics of relative deprivation became the politics of the delay of death. Precisely because the Germans themselves were always uncertain as to whether they were more desperate for food or for labor, Jews could always persuade themselves that some of their number would be spared. The very fact of selection, as Warsaw Jews reported, meant “a division between the productive and the nonproductive” that “broke down the morale of the people of the ghetto.” The hope of the individual for survival worked against the solidarity of the community. The Jewish policemen were assigned quotas of Jews to deliver to the trains, the fulfillment of which became their source of hope for themselves and their families and their alienation from others. As one of their number in Warsaw responded to the pleas of a fellow Jew: “That’s your problem. My problem is to bring ten people.”

Most likely there was never a definitive decision to murder all the Jews of Poland in death facilities. Once the process began in March 1942, however, the alternatives became infeasible, and for this reason unmentionable. As late as that February, Himmler and Heydrich were still discussing sending Jews to the Gulag. But absent a victory over the USSR in 1942, which was not forthcoming, this was impossible. Thus the deportations that began in the Lublin District spread throughout the General Government. At first Jews were sent from ghettos to Be??ec, then to Be??ec and Sobibór, and finally to Be??ec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Over the course of 1942, some 1.3 million Polish Jews were murdered in these three death facilities. In Warsaw alone, in what was called the Grosse Aktion, some 265,040 Jews were deported to Treblinka and murdered and another 10,380 shot in the ghetto between July 23, 1942, and September 21, 1942. Tens of thousands remained, mostly young men, as the ghetto became a labor camp.

In Warsaw in late December 1942, some of those survivors, working together in a loose confederation known as the Jewish Combat Organization, began to assassinate the Jewish authorities of the ghetto. In January 1943, Himmler ordered that the ghetto be dissolved entirely. Jewish resistance prevented this deportation from being carried out. In February, Himmler renewed his order. When the Germans came again to the ghetto in larger numbers in April 1943, a significant number of Jews resisted. Some were from the Jewish Combat Organization, which included representatives of major Jewish parties such as the Bund as well as left-wing Zionists and communists; others fought within a Jewish Military Union that was dominated by the Revisionist Zionists of Betar. It was the Revisionists who, following old habit, raised both the Polish and the Zionist flags. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first major urban resistance to German rule in Europe. The Jews understood that they were not risking very much: In most cases, their families were already dead, and they believed, correctly, that the same fate awaited them. The rebellion led to the physical destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, as the Germans used flamethrowers to extract Jews from bunkers and then burned the entire district to the ground. The survivors were sent to other labor camps, as originally planned, where almost all of them were shot in 1944. This was the end of the most significant Jewish community in the world.

The man who suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jürgen Stroop, believed that he was doing his part to win a war that would make Ukraine a German land of milk and honey. In fact, his superiors saw the extermination of Warsaw Jews as a necessity in July 1942 because of pressing food shortages. The logic was similar in the ghettos of the Warthegau, such as ?ód?. German Jews were dispatched to the overcrowded ghetto there, then local German authorities were left to solve the problem of overpopulation by their own means.

In July 1941, the local head of the SD had proposed direct killing rather than slow starvation for the Jews of ?ód?: “There is the danger this winter that the Jews can no longer all be fed. It is to be seriously considered whether the most humane solution might not be to finish off those Jews not capable of working by some sort of fast-working preparation. This would be in any event more pleasant than letting them starve.” In a mental world where starvation was taken to be the norm, other forms of killing could be presented as a kindness.