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THE

INCREDIBLE

STORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE

THE PATTERN OF BEHAVIOUR OF THE MEMBERS OF THE JUDENRAT FALLS INTO FOUR CATEGORIES.

 

      1.)  Non cooperation with the Germans over economic issues.

      2.)  Acquiescence over the seizure of property, but not people.

      3.)  Resignation over the partial destruction of the community.

      4.)  Compliance in full with German orders, for their own personal interests.

EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR MICHAEL MARRUS

Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto December 12, 1997, Jerusalem

Interviewers: Adi Gordon. Amos Morris Reich, Amos Goldberg

From Yad Vashem    (Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies)

Source: The Multimedia CD ‘Eclipse Of Humanity’, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2000.

Q- Raul Hilberg criticized the Judenrat for cooperating – at least collaborating, if not cooperating – with the Nazis. What is your opinion of the Jewish leadership during the Holocaust?

A.  We should only generalize with a great deal of caution. The leadership of the ghettos, the heads of the Judenrat, were utterly unprepared for the kind of catastrophic circumstances they faced. Remember that these were Jewish organizations established at the behest, and on the demand, of the Nazis who, at gunpoint, required people to assume these positions in most cases. The kind of blackmail that these Jewish leaders faced is something scarcely imaginable today.

These were hardly Jewish leaders acting under conventional circumstances of leadership. If you take a man like Adam Czerniakow, one finds a person of relatively limited horizons. Someone who was used to thinking bureaucratically, and who, I think, was responding in what we would call a normal way, namely, how they could make things a little bit better – how to preserve the meager resources they had, be it medical facilities, food provisions, or sanitary conditions. The normal human response was to try to protect the minimum of conditions for life. Let us remember that the sense that all of this was an exercise doomed to failure – this is our understanding. From where those leaders sat, there was some reason to believe, and to hope, that if they could hang on for a certain period of time, they might be able to deliver alive these small communities at the end of the war. It only became progressively evident to some of them that they were hardly going to be able to save anyone at all.

This consciousness seems to have dawned on different leaders at different moments. Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Judenrat in Warsaw, realized this, of course, in the Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies summer of 1942 – specifically, the demand made on him by the Nazis that he preside over the deportation of Jewish children. It was at that point that Czerniakow snapped and poisoned himself. Should he have behaved otherwise? Should he have had a clearer sense beforehand of what lay ahead? Should he have devoted more attention to Jewish resistance? All of these are questions that we ask ourselves about him now, and, to be fair, a handful of Jewish resistors put to him at the time, albeit not directly.

What we do now as historians is try to look back at that situation and imagine what those people experienced then, what they were thinking. In a few remarkable cases you find Jewish leaders – such as Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz – who seem to have been deformed by these catastrophic circumstances into believing that they were there specifically to be the salvation of their communities; that they alone were the instruments by which those Jewish communities were going to be able to survive. They seemed almost intoxicated by this sense of being irreplaceable, by their own capacity to be the saviors of their community, and they became increasingly dictatorial. They confused their own abilities, their own capacities, and their own positions with those of their communities. In the end, they too succumbed and were ultimately murdered by the Nazis.

But let us make an effort and imagine how things looked from their standpoint. It obviously seemed so utterly irrational. Why should the Nazis devote precious energy, in wartime, to the extinction of an entire community, such as the Lodz Ghetto? Why not put the Jews to work? Why not allow them to work to serve the Nazi war machine? Wouldn't this be more reasonable? Wouldn't this make sense? People did not easily assume that this entire murderous apparatus was essentially an irrational fantasy on the part of the Nazis. Their assumption was rather that, if the communities could be productive; if they could be allowed to work for the Nazi war machine; if they could produce to help the Wehrmacht in its struggle against the Red Army, then they could survive. To many Jewish leaders, this seemed to be a rational solution.

Q- But some leaders, such as that of Vilna and Lodz, sent the Jewish policemen to round up the Jews and send them to deportation.

A- As Hannah Arendt wrote, the darkest chapter in the history of the Holocaust is perhaps the involvement of particular Jewish groups and individuals in the destruction process, which of course happened. It was part of the horror of the Nazi machinery of destruction – as Raul Hilberg refers to it – that not only involved the mobilization of collaborators and perpetrators, but also of elements of the victimized community itself, which is to say that the Jews were enticed into the destructive process.

This happened in part through trickery (the Jews did not always know that they were doing this) and partly through bribery and threats (people were told that they could save themselves and perhaps also their families). Ordinary human cowardice, and the belief on the part of some of the people that they were saving themselves, also came into play. This almost always proved to be an illusion; they did not save themselves.

Looking back, what can one say? Did everyone behave heroically? Of course not. Did some people behave as now we hope that we would not have behaved? Of course, this is true as well. It was part of a vast European enterprise, in which the Jews were, for the most part, utterly helpless.

As a historian spanning this whole process, seeing the Jewish police and the Kapos in the camps, the Jews behaved no differently from other communities where you find this massive victimization. I don't think that there is anything unusual about this process. This is what happens when civilian communities are victimized in this particular way: You find a range of reactions and experiences.

JUDENRÄTE
From Encyclopedia Brittanica

Judenräte, ( German: Jewish Councils) Jewish councils established in German-occupied Poland and eastern Europe during World War II to implement German policies and maintain order in the ghettos to which the Nazis confined the country’s Jewish population. Reinhard Heydrich, chief of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo, established the Judenräte (singular: Judenrat) by decree on September 21, 1939, three weeks after the German invasion of Poland. No aspect of Jewish behaviour during the Holocaust was more controversial than the conduct of the Judenräte.

The Judenräte were composed of up to 24 Jewish men, chosen from “remaining authoritative personalities and rabbis.” When the Judenräte were first established, the Jews did not know the ultimate intensions of the Germans toward them nor, according to most scholars, were the intentions of the Germans yet clear. Jewish leaders assumed that their responsibility was to provide for the needs of Jews, who they assumed would remain in the ghetto indefinitely. The Judenräte became a municipal authority providing sanitation, education, commerce, and food for their increasingly beleaguered community. With meager resources at their disposal, they struggled to meet the basic needs of starving ghetto residents and to make life bearable. Their German oppressors provided the basis of their power. At first unaware of their people’s fate, in time they understood their role in maintaining communities destined for annihilation.

The Judenräte relied on forms of taxation to support their activities. Jewish police forces were established to enforce Judenräte decrees and provide order in the ghetto. The individual Judenräte used different models of governance. In Warsaw, the largest of the ghettos, laissez-faire capitalism was the rule under Judenrat chairman Adam Czerniaków. Private enterprise continued for as long as possible. In Łódź, under the chairmanship of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, authority was more centralized. Commerce, trade, and all municipal services, including the distribution of food and housing, were tightly controlled.

The level and tenor of interaction between the Judenräte and the Germans differed ghetto by ghetto, leader by leader, and meeting by meeting. Some meetings with Nazi officials were courteous and might even appear friendly, others were harsh and threatening. Generally, the Germans would make demands of the Judenräte, who, in return, would beg for supplies and relief on behalf of their beleaguered populations.

Among the ghetto residents, the Judenräte often drew anger. Many viewed their role in enforcing German decrees and conditions as indistinguishable from the role of the Germans who had ordered them. This anger grew when conditions in the ghettos deteriorated under an intensified German campaign of deprivation.

Perhaps the defining test of the courage and the character of Judenrat leaders occurred when the Germans ordered lists drawn up indicating those to be protected by work permits and those to be deported to concentration camps. Judenrat members knew that deportation meant near-certain death. Thus, while the Judenräte used tactics such as bribery, postponement, importuning, and appeasement to secure work permits for as many residents as possible, only a specified number of work permits were available and decisions were required. This became especially wrenching when it came to children and the elderly, who were incapable of working.

In Łódź, Rumkowski cooperated with the deportations. He argued, “I must cut off the limbs to save the body itself. I must take the children because if not, others will be taken as well. The part that can be saved is much larger than the part that must be given away.” Similar decisions were made by Judenrat leaders in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) and Sosnowiec.

In Warsaw, Czerniaków committed suicide rather than participate in the deportation of children and the liquidation of the entire ghetto. “They have asked me to kill the children with my own hands,” he said in despair. To some Jews, Czerniaków’s suicide was an act of integrity. Others saw it as a sign of weakness and condemned his failure to call for resistance.

When the Germans ordered the final liquidation of the ghetto, there could be little pretense that many Jews could be saved. The Jewish resistance in several ghettos began to take control. While some Judenrat leaders, such as Dr. Elchanan Elkes of Kovno (now Kaunas, Lithuania) and his counterpart in Minsk (now in Belarus), Eliyahu Mushkin, cooperated with the underground and the resistance, most Judenrat leaders considered the resistance a threat to their efforts to maintain order and sustain the ghettos. As a consequence, Judenrat leaders and Jewish police were often the first to be assassinated by the Jewish resistance, even before direct battle with the Germans.

At the end of the war, virtually all Judenrat leaders, regardless of their level of accommodation with the Germans, were dead. Rumkowski, who perhaps tried the hardest to cooperate with the Germans to save “the body” of his ghetto, met the same fate as that body—death at an extermination camp.

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt revived the controversy over the role of the Judenräte by implying that their complicity actually increased the Holocaust’s death toll. She wrote, “The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” Her work triggered a storm of controversy but also provoked research that yielded a more subtle understanding of the impossible task these leaders faced in confronting the Nazis’ overwhelming power and fervent, disciplined commitment to annihilate the Jewish people.

ADDITIONAL READING

Raul Hilberg, “The Ghetto as a Form of Government,” in John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum (eds.) Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (1989), pp. 116–135, explores the Judenrat in its historical and political context. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. and enlarged ed. (1964, reissued 1994), is a collection of provocative and controversial studies that argues, in part, that Judenrat members bore partial responsibility for the Holocaust. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation (1972, reissued 1996), a wide-ranging and comprehensive study of all of the Judenräte in German-occupied eastern Europe, presents a more balanced view and refutes some of Arendt’s charges.

‘THE LAST OF THE UNJUST’
Claude Lanzmann, 1975. In Rome

From IMDB

A place: Theresienstadt. A unique place of propaganda which Adolf Eichmann called the "model ghetto", designed to mislead the world and Jewish people regarding its real nature, to be the last step before the gas chamber. A man: Benjamin Murmelstein, last president of the Theresienstadt Jewish Council, a fallen hero condemned to exile, who was forced to negotiate day after day from 1938 until the end of the war with Eichmann, to whose trial Murmelstein wasn't even called to testify. Even though he was without a doubt the one who knew the Nazi executioner best. More than twenty-five years after Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's new film reveals a little-known yet fundamental aspect of the Holocaust, and sheds light on the origins of the "Final Solution" like never before.

- Written by Synecdoche

1975. In Rome, Claude Lanzmann filmed a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadtghetto in Czechoslovakia, the only "Elder of the Jews"* not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the country, and preventing the liquidation of the ghetto. 2012. Claude Lanzmann, at 87 - without masking anything of the passage of time on men, but showing the incredible permanence of the locations involved - exhumes these interviews shot in Rome, returning to Theresienstadt, the town "given to the Jews by Hitler", a so-called model ghetto, but a ghetto of deceit chosen by Adolf Eichmann to dupe the world. We discover the extraordinary personality of Benjamin Murmelstein: a man blessed with a dazzling intelligence and a true courage, which, along with an unrivaled memory, makes him a wonderfully wry, sardonic and authentic storyteller. Through these three periods, from Nisko in Poland to Theresienstadt, and from Vienna to Rome, the film provides an unprecedented insight into the genesis of the Final Solution. It reveals the true face of Eichmann, and exposes without artifice the savage contradictions of the Jewish Councils. *according to Nazi terminology

- Written by Cohen Media Group

THE COST OF SURVIVAL “THE LAST OF THE UNJUST.”   
By Anthony Lane, New Yorker February 10, 2014

Benjamin Murmelstein and the director Claude Lanzmann
in a new documentary.
*The Last of the Unjust”

Photograph from Cohen Media Group

No character that you see onscreen this year will match the impact that is made by Benjamin Murmelstein. “The Last of the Unjust” a new documentary, runs three hours and forty minutes, much of which is spent in his company, and very good company it is. We first see his head from behind, with its solid rolls of flesh. He turns to reveal a face of undimmed liveliness—seventy years old, and thickly spectacled, yet verging on the combative, and never too far from a smile. His voice tumbles over itself, so much does he have to impart, and any question sent in his direction is fired straight back, with barely a pause for thought. It is hard to imagine that doubts perplex his sleep. At a glance, you would guess he was a burgomaster: prosperous, well nourished, and well pleased with the world—retired from the bakery trade, perhaps, with a nice pile of dough.

This is not the case. Murmelstein was a Viennese rabbi, born in 1905. After the Anschluss, in 1938, he was involved in the emigration of Austrian Jews, more than a hundred and twenty thousand of whom escaped the country. In the course of his duties, Murmelstein had to answer to Adolf Eichmann, and among the satisfactions of the film is the scalding verbal portrait that he draws of Eichmann, whose rabidity was equalled by his bent for corruption. Short shrift is given to Hannah Arendt and her celebrated coining, in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” of “the banality of evil.” The man was far from banal, as Murmelstein explains: “He was a demon.”

If Murmelstein remains a figure of controversy, it is because of what happened at Theresienstadt. This is a town northwest of Prague which was picked as a suitable site for the housing of Jews; opened in 1941, it was, in one of the Nazis’ poisoned oxymorons, a “model ghetto.” Immense numbers of Jews were sent to Theresienstadt—more than seventy-three thousand from Czechoslovakia alone—and some thirty-three thousand people died there, many from disease and malnutrition. Tens of thousands more were dispatched to labor camps and to Auschwitz, although that name, Murmelstein recalls, was unknown.

He held an important position at Theresienstadt, in the Jewish Council—the internal organization that oversaw practicalities in the ghetto and negotiated with the Nazis who governed it. Murmelstein was made the Elder of the Jews in 1944, after the first two Elders had been killed; one was sent to Auschwitz, where he saw his wife and child shot in the head, before meeting the same fate. To be an Elder was, by definition, to risk the charge of moral compromise. After the war, Murmelstein was accused by the Czechs of collaboration, although the case was dropped for want of evidence. Gershom Scholem, who opposed Eichmann’s execution, thought that Murmelstein should be hanged for his pains. Murmelstein, savoring the wryness of the contrast, says of Scholem, “The gentleman is a little capricious with hanging, don’t you think?”

What we discover in Murmelstein is an ironist of the deepest hue. Nobody could see all that he saw and emerge with any illusions about our limitless capacity to inflict and suffer hurt. What he shouldered in Theresienstadt was a dirty, thankless, and all but impossible task that someone had to do. He was, in his words, caught between the hammer and the anvil. When the Red Cross came to the ghetto, in 1944, Jewish workers were instructed to spruce the place up. Some of them refused, understandably, but Murmelstein told them to proceed with the embellishment, claiming that to be visible to the outside world, even through the prism of a lie, was better than not being seen at all. “If they hid us, they could kill us,” he says of the Nazis. You take his point, although it is challenged by a clip we see from a Nazi propaganda film, made after the Red Cross tour, showing the inhabitants of Theresienstadt working in pleasant conditions, playing chess and football, and munching buttered bread. Most of the happy children who appeared in the film were deported to Auschwitz afterward and gassed.

In short, “The Last of the Unjust” is every bit as quarrelsome as it should be. Murmelstein, recounting the circumstances in which he took mortally serious decisions, dares to ask us if we could have done any better. “An Elder of the Jews can be condemned,” he says. “In fact, he must be condemned. But he can’t be judged. Because one cannot take his place.” Did he, at one point, withhold food from his fellow-Jews? Yes, until they agreed to be inoculated against typhus, which was spreading through the camp. (The tactic succeeded.) His job was to save lives, at whatever cost, and however degraded those lives became; indeed, to expect anything other than degradation was fruitless. Tears were a waste. “If, during an operation, a surgeon starts crying over his patient, he kills him,” Murmelstein says. All his wit and learning come to the fore as he searches for analogies to his plight. The historian H. G. Adler likened him, in body and soul, to Falstaff, “clever, clear, superior, cynical, and artful,” but Murmelstein prefers Sancho Panza, cleaving to common sense while others tilt at windmills. He also invokes Orpheus (“Sometimes looking back is not a good thing”), and Scheherazade, whose life was preserved by a willingness to talk. Seldom has one man loomed so large as Murmelstein does in “The Last of the Unjust,” yet here’s the mysterious thing: I’m not sure that he is the hero.

That honor goes to Claude Lanzmann, the director of the film. His interviews with Murmelstein, many of them conducted in kindly sunshine, took place in Rome, in 1975. They were meant for use in “Shoah,” Lanzmann’s masterwork of 1985. In the event, he chose not to include them, and you can see why. “Shoah” was nine and a half hours long, cut down from three hundred and fifty hours of footage. Some of the discarded material has since been crafted into smaller films, one of them about the Red Cross inspection of Theresienstadt. “The Last of the Unjust” confirms that Murmelstein deserves his own film; he could well have thrown “Shoah” off balance, so bountiful is his testimony. Also, as Lanzmann says, “I had no right to keep it to myself.”

He is not the first artist to feel impelled by the Holocaust to carve new forms for his endeavors. The verses of the German-speaking Jewish poet Paul Celan, who drowned himself in 1970, shrank in their anguish to mere pocketfuls of words, some freshly minted to lend a voice to the inexpressible. At the other extreme lies Lanzmann’s method, the keystone of which is not so much duration as endurance. On what ground, “Shoah” asked, should we not surrender half a day of our easeful life to the scrutiny of mass extinction? To the formidable stamina with which he marshals his evidence, Lanzmann adds a more surprising virtue: he stays in the picture. Slipping coolly aside, as some documentarians do, is not his way, nor would his theme reward such reticence; he is dealing with enough ghostly presences as it is. In “The Last of the Unjust,” he is the first person we see, and it makes for a moving sight. Back in the nineteen-seventies, in Italy, in his blazer and shades, he was a handsome dog, like Peter Sellers disguised as a playboy spy. And now look at him: an old man of eighty-seven, standing alone at a railroad station, on a damp gray day, clutching a sheaf of papers. These contain passages from a memoir by Murmelstein, which Lanzmann reads aloud. He is defying age for the sake of bearing witness. The station is in Bohusovice, a small Czech town, unregarded nowadays but once a disembarkation point for Jews from Vienna and Hamburg, many of them elderly and infirm, who were expecting lakeside accommodation at a spa. Instead, they were marched to Theresienstadt. Lanzmann asks, “Who in the world today knows the name of Bohusovice?”

We do, thanks to this film. It takes a stand, at once patient and irate, against the ebb tide of the years. You could say the same of “Shoah,” but the mood is different here. Death still laps at the edge of every frame, and our vision is flooded for a while by the names of the deceased, inscribed within the synagogues of Vienna and Prague. Yet the film is stirred and enlivened by the tribute that it pays to pure survival, even if that of Murmelstein will strike some viewers as too dearly bought. He died in 1989, but in the footage from 1975 he seems cussedly indestructible—a stubborn grace note to the refrain of “Shoah,” which proved that, under the Nazis, anyone and anything could be destroyed. In the beautiful closing sequence, as he and Lanzmann wander through the Roman Forum, by the Arch of Titus, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by a sense of multiple histories. The two men, in 1975, are nearer to the saga of Theresienstadt than they are to us. And Theresienstadt, in turn, bears echoes of the distant past, in 70 A.D., when Titus led the Roman army in the sack of Jerusalem, and the obliteration of the Second Temple. For centuries, no Jew in Rome would pass beneath the Arch. Of the days of affliction, there shall be no end. All we can hope for, time after time, is that somebody lives to tell the tale

ALLIED POW’S

During the war, Allied POWs who repeatedly attempted to escape from POW camps were sent to Theresienstadt as punishment. 21 British, 21 New Zealand, and 17 Australian POWs were held there. Keeping POWs from signatory countries of the Geneva Convention in such camp conditions was a war crime. Many of the survivors suffered chronic physical and mental health problems for most of their lives.

In 1964, Germany paid the British government £1 million as reparation for the illegal transfer of British POWs to Theresienstadt. Britain made no provision for dominion troops. For many years, the governments of Australia and New Zealand denied that any of their servicemen had been held at the camp. In 1987, Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke established a committee of investigation. It confirmed that POWs were held at Theresienstadt. The government then authorised payments of A$10,000 each to the Australian survivors of the camp. The New Zealand government also arranged for compensation for the New Zealand survivors.

NOTABLE PRISONERS WHO DIED AT THE CAMP

• Esther Adolphine, sister of Sigmund Freud, died 29 September 1942
• Alice and Hilde Archenhold, wife and daughter of astronomer Friedrich Simon Archenhold
• Eugen Burg, German film actor, died on 17 April 1944
• Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, editor of the conservative Süddeutsche Monatshefte, died 19 October 1942
• Ludwig Czech, chairman of the German Social Democratic Party in pre-war Czechoslovakia and former Czechoslovak minister of Social Care, Public Affairs and Public Health, died in the ghetto on 20 August 1942
• Robert Desnos, French Surrealist poet, died 8 June 1945
• Oskar Fischer, physician, died of a heart attack on 28 February 1942.
• Alfred Flatow, German Olympic gymnast, 1896 Olympics gold medallist, died 28 December 1942
• Gisela Januszewska, physician, died 2 March 1943
• Rudolf Karel, Czech composer, died 6 March 1945
• Emil Kolben, Czech industrialist (founder of ČKD), one of the founders of industrial use of electricity, died 3 September 1943
• Clementine Krämer, writer and social worker, died 4 November 1942
• Friedrich Münzer, German classical scholar, died 20 October 1942
• Ludwig Pick, German pathologist after whom Niemann-Pick disease and Lubarsch-Pick syndrome are named, died 3 February 1944
• Samuel Schallinger, Austrian businessman, co-owner of the Imperial and the Bristol hotels in Vienna, died 1942  
• Margarete Schiff, daughter of psychotherapist Josef Breuer, died 9 September 1942
• Zikmund Schul, composer, died 2 June 1944
• Amalie Seckbach (de) (née Buch), a noted painter and sculptor, died 10 August 1944
• Mathilde Sussin, actress, died 2 August 1943
• Ernestine Taube, mother of the pianist and composer Artur Schnabel, remained in Vienna after the Anschluss and at the age of 83, in August 1942, was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she died two months later.
• Josefine Winter, daughter of Helene and Rudolf Auspitz

From
Holocaust Research Project