Arendt, Hilberg, & the Warsaw Ghetto

by Nicholas Jahr

Nathaniel Popper (formerly of The Forward) has a great essay in The Nation on Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg. The latter’s The Destruction of the European Jews was the first serious scholarly study of the Holocaust and the bureaucracy necessary to murder 11 million people. Prior to Hilberg’s work, “there was not a subject,” Michael Marrus, a leading historian of the Holocaust, told Popper. “No panoramic, European-wide sense of what had happened. That’s what Hilberg provided.”
He also provided a major, arguably the major, source for Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. ‘Source’ is generous — while they never fought it out, Hilberg carefully documented how Arendt had freely plagiarized his work. Popper doesn’t dwell on this, instead focusing on the intellectual sympathy and synergy between the two. As he notes, they shared “a deep disappointment over the lack of Jewish resistance to the Nazis.”

Popper seems to take for granted that this constitutes the “blind spot” of their respective oeuvres. Maybe in these days of Hollywood shlock such as Uprising and Defiance, or more literary takes on the subject such as Rich Cohen’s The Avengers, we can make the assumption that people no longer think the Jews went meekly to the slaughter. I’m not so sure.
Today is, of course, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which began on the first day of Passover in 1943. Hitler’s birthday was the following day, and the ghetto was to be judenrein. It didn’t work out that way. One eyewitness described the scene as that morning’s second battle between the Jewish resistance and the Nazi forces came to an end: “There runs a German soldier shrieking like an insane one, the helmet on his head on fire. Another one shouts madly, ‘Juden... Waffen... Juden... Waffen! [Jews... Weapons... Jews... Weapons!]’”
That’s from Prof. Ber Mark’s The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, excerpted in Yuri Suhl’s They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, which I just reread, searching for material that might work for the Seder my friends and I hold every year. Suhl’s anthology — which does not pretend to be comprehensive — pulls together eyewitness accounts, historical essays, and a fistful of secondhand reconstructions of individual heroism to give a broad picture of Jewish resistance.
Jewish underground movements staged revolts in Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz, three of the largest death camps. Suhl leads off with a fierce memoir of the uprising in Sobibor: in the course of an hour the resistance systematically assassinated the officers in charge of the camp and led hundreds of prisoners in a mad dash toward freedom. Jews in Treblinka set a fire so fierce that camp’s arsenal exploded, providing cover for a mass escape. In Auschwitz, the Sonderkommando succeeded in blowing up one of the four crematoria, effectively taking it out of commission for the remaining six months of the war.
Besides Warsaw, the ghettos of Bialystok, Vilna, Marcinkonis, Lachwa, Tuczyn, Minsk were all home to underground movements, which resisted the Nazis with varying degrees of success. Most of the time that success didn’t amount to much in military terms. But asking why Jewish resistance wasn’t more effective, or more widespread, is a very different question from asking why it didn’t exist.
As to why more Jews didn’t rise up and, say, simply trample the guards at any given umschlagplatz, it’s worth keeping in mind that the Nazis pursued a policy of starvation and elaborate subterfuge. So the starving masses were herded to the cattle cars, which they were told would take them for ‘resettlement in the east for labor.’ At Treblinka, one of Suhl’s contributors writes:

The whole station was camouflaged in the most cunning fashion. Thus, the large barracks adjoining the platform which served as the main storehouse for the stolen clothes was covered with timetables of trains that allegedly came to Treblinka station (some months later, when Treblinka had become famous, the name of the station was changed to Ober-Majdan). Then one saw a huge signpost bearing the inscription: ‘To Bialystock and Baranowicze’: such signs as ‘Tickets’ and ‘Stationmaster’, and finally an enormous painted arrow with the words: ‘Change for eastbound trains’. There was also a large station clock.

With this ruse in place, and a long history of enduring communal violence, it must have been all too easy to put your arm around your daughter, or grandfather, say ‘this too shall pass,’ and step aboard the train. (I’d argue that being acclimated to violence is an essential ingredient of genocide; if memory serves, Philip Gourevitch describes a similar phenomenon in Rwanda.) It’s easy to say now that they should’ve known, that they should’ve remembered the Armenians, but the bureaucracy of extermination established by the Third Reich — the einsatzgruppen, the gas trucks designed to kill the prisoners packed into their trailers, the IBM punch cards, the train schedules — this was, historically, something fundamentally new. As whispers of what was really at the end of the line were heard in the ghettos, acts of organized resistance increased.
In his introduction, Suhl specifically takes issue with Hilberg and Arendt’s view of Jewish passivity, and specifically the former’s dependence on Nazi documentary sources:

Did Mr Hilberg expect to find the true facts of Jewish resistance reflected in the reports of German officers to their superiors? Would those who were taught to believe that Jews were Untermenschen (subhuman) admit in print to Jewish heroism? Because Hilberg found no sign of resistance in official German documents, he concluded that none existed.... More recently Hannah Arendt, leaning heavily on Hilberg’s conclusions, described Jewish resistance as “... pitifully small... incredibly weak and essentially harmless.”

Suhl convincingly documents several points at which Hilberg’s sources lead him to understate the extent of Jewish resistance. Of course, had that resistance been more successful, one assumes the functionaries of extermination would’ve had to account for it in their memos to the home office. So Suhl’s parry fails to deflect the full force of the blow. It is hard to argue with Arendt’s characterization of that resistance as “essentially harmless,” at least in a military sense.
In Popper’s analysis, Arendt and Hilberg shared “an almost visceral desire to distance themselves from the weak Jews that they imagined they had left behind,” and he traces the roots of that desire to their youthful Zionism. But if the belief in Jews as victims and the moral leverage of the Holocaust is now more associated with Zionist defenses of Israeli policy, Hilberg was resolutely contrarian within the organized Jewish community, lending his support to Norman Finkelstein after the latter published The Holocaust Industry.
Suhl’s book was published in ’67, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn it was part of the pushback against Arendt coordinated by the Jewish institutional world (Abe Foxman, already with the ADL, contributed an essay, as did his father; at least some of Suhl’s research was supported by the Committee for the Book on Jewish Resistance, which seems to have been an arm of the American Federation of Polish Jews, about which I know nothing and Google offers little clarity in the first 50 hits or so). I’m almost certain it’s now out of print. If there’s a comprehensive, analytical history of Jewish resistance to the Nazis, I’m not aware of it (and if you can point me to it, please do so in the comments), which makes Suhl’s book all the more ripe for digital re-publication in some form or another. It’s a valuable record of a struggle which was never simply contained within the walls of the Warsaw ghetto.