Black Earth(94)

At one extreme of state destruction, the Holocaust took place; at the other extreme of state integrity, it did not. The middle cases, where the Nazi leadership sought but could not complete a Final Solution, are places where German power reached but where the state was not destroyed: the countries that were allied with Germany or occupied by Germany (or both). German policy was that Jews who inhabited such places were to be extracted, deported, and killed. Although a horribly high number of Jews from such countries were killed, and the fate of Jews in such places was always worse than that of their fellow citizens, more than half of the Jews who had been citizens of these countries, taken together as a group, survived. The scale of suffering, almost one murder for every two Jews, exceeds that of any other category of people in the Second World War. Yet it is sufficiently different from the murder rate in the stateless zone, something like nineteen murders for every twenty Jews, to warrant serious attention. The history of each country that retained (some measure of) sovereignty despite German influence was, of course, distinct, but the logics of survival were everywhere the same: citizenship, bureaucracy, and foreign policy.

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Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one was a citizen, and human life could be treated carelessly. Nowhere in occupied Europe were non-Jews treated as badly as Jews. But in places where the state was destroyed, no one was a citizen and no one enjoyed any predictable form of state protection. This meant that the other major German mass crimes, the starvation of prisoners of war and the murder of civilians—mostly Belarusians and Poles and Gypsies—also took place almost entirely within zones of statelessness. These policies together killed about as many people as the Holocaust, and they were implemented, and could only be implemented, in the same places. Where the state was not destroyed such extremes were impossible.

In states allied with Germany or states under more traditional occupation regimes, where the major political institutions remained intact, non-Jews who protected Jews were rarely punished for doing so. Non-Jews who were citizens of states could not simply be killed if they aided Jews. In the General Government and in the occupied western Soviet Union, however, the punishment for aiding Jews was death. More Poles were executed for aiding Jews in individual districts of the General Government than in entire west European countries. This is not because Poles were particularly inclined to rescue Jews, which they were not. It is because they were, in fact, sometimes executed for doing so, which rarely happened in western Europe. Indeed, in some places in German-occupied western Europe it was not even a punishable criminal offense to hide a Jew.

Compare the fates of Victor Klemperer, Anne Frank, and Emanuel Ringelblum, three famous chroniclers of these years. Klemperer was a German scholar of Jewish origin who wrote a brilliant analysis of the language of the Third Reich. Frank was a German Jewish girl in hiding in the Netherlands who kept a diary that later became the most widely read text about the Holocaust. Ringelblum was a historian of Jewish life in Poland who, within the Warsaw ghetto, organized the assembly of an entire archive, creating one of the most important collections of sources of the Holocaust. “Collect as much as possible,” said Ringelblum to a colleague in the project known as Oneg Shabbat. “They can sort it out after the war.” Klemperer lived and so did the person who cared for him; Frank died but the people who tried to shelter her survived; Ringelblum was shot along with several people who had helped him. These fates reflect the different legal structures of Germany, the occupied Netherlands, and occupied Poland during the war.

Because Klemperer was a German citizen with a non-Jewish wife, he was not subject to the general policy of the deportation and murder of German Jews. Since his wife did not divorce him, he, like many such German Jewish men, survived. Anne Frank was also a German Jew, but in fleeing to the Netherlands she lost even the residual state membership available to her under the Nuremberg Laws. She and her family were eventually discovered and deported to Auschwitz. She died after a transfer to Bergen-Belsen, probably of typhus. The Dutch citizens who had hidden her family survived, since what they did was not subject to criminal prosecution in the Netherlands. Ringelblum’s history was different. He was captured and rescued multiple times, aided by both Polish Jews and non-Jewish Poles. In the end, he and the Poles with whom he was hiding were all executed, probably together, in the ashes of the Warsaw ghetto. Most Poles who tried to aid Jews were not killed, but many of them were; and it was a risk that they all faced. This was the stateless predicament.