It is nowhere easy to predict who will seek a lion’s fate or a dog’s fate. Sometimes two groups of the same people, undergoing the same oppression from the same source, will respond to the threat in utterly different ways. For proof of
It is nowhere easy to predict who will seek a lion’s fate or a dog’s fate. Sometimes two groups of the same people, undergoing the same oppression from the same source, will respond to the threat in utterly different ways. For proof of this, we need look no further than the history of Poland — martyr-nation in World War II — and, above all, two Polish cities: Warsaw and Lodz.
Among the best-known examples of Polish heroism is the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which television producer Y. Eric Bell discussed at length in The New American’s January 14, 2002 issue. There, the Polish Jews displayed an awesome mixture of anguish, pride, and absolute determination that if they had to die at the Hitler State’s hands, they would sell their lives as dearly as possible.
One Jewish eyewitness, Yitzhak Katznelson, reported the amazed shouts of a German soldier who had assumed his targets would be easily picked off. The soldier, Katznelson remembered, “ran down the stairs of the house which he had entered for the deliberate purpose of killing us. ‘The Jews are shooting!’ he cried out in utter bewilderment. Something unheard of! Jews firing! ‘They have guns!’” The Nazi high command had assumed that the uprising would be crushed by January 1943. But, as Mr. Bell recounts, it was May before SS General Jürgen Stroop could report to his bosses that “Es gibt keinen judischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr!” (“There is no longer a Jewish district in Warsaw!”). Most of the surviving Warsaw Jews ended up in death camps.
Lodz — Poland’s second-largest city, approximately 85 miles to Warsaw’s southwest — underwent a different, less celebrated, and even more horrific doom. Two months after the Second World War began, Lodz became officially part of the Third Reich; but the victors accorded it nominal independence, rather than openly incorporating it into the General Government under direct Hitlerite rule. Renamed Litzmannstadt (to commemorate Imperial German general Karl von Litzmann, who had died three years earlier), Lodz had 672,000 inhabitants. Among these, more than a third were Jewish.
Instead of unleashing full persecution from the outset, the conquerors decided to set up — on economic grounds, in part — an officially approved ghetto, as they later did elsewhere in Poland. They placed in charge of this ghetto a Nazi official named Hans Biebow. Answering immediately to Biebow was a Judenrat, or “Jewish Council”, which in practice served as the personal fiefdom of businessman and orphanage administrator Mordechai Chaim (“King Chaim”) Rumkowski. As more and more Jews were rounded up and herded into Lodz — frequently having been transported from areas as far distant as Luxembourg — so Rumkowski’s powers and responsibilities grew.
A sweatshop tyrant to whom the concept of shame meant nothing, Rumkowski kept the ghetto operational by conscripting his fellow Jews into a vast factory system, consisting of no fewer than 117 workshops. In return for being — when lucky — fed and housed, the employees had to suffer the ravages of disease (dysentery and typhus in particular), with wholly inadequate medical treatment, and with 12-hour working days. Rumkowski had no visible qualms about handing over personal antagonists on the Judenrat to the Nazi authorities. The Jewish, Hamburg-born Lucille Eichengreen — who by her 21st birthday had survived not only Lodz but also Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz — revealed in her 1994 memoirs From Ashes to Life Rumkowski’s sexual vices. One man who often saw Rumkowski close-up told Lucille bluntly: “He’s a pig, a child molester, and a lecher!” Of Lucille’s own encounters with “King Chaim,” she wrote:
He was well dressed, well fed, and seemingly without a care in the world. Most of us feared and detested him, although sometimes we thought of him with envy. He seemed to suffer none of the deprivations we did. He didn’t know the pain of hunger and cold. Even his horse and driver were well fed. He was responsible to the Germans for the entire ghetto, and it often seemed to us that he was more on their side than ours. All orders issued by the Germans appeared in ghetto posters over his name....
Eminent political philosopher and German-Jewish refugee Hannah Arendt, in her classic Eichmann in Jerusalem, noted Rumkowski’s appellation “Chaim the First.” She also mentioned him having “issued currency notes bearing his signature and postage stamps engraved with his portrait.” And Israel Gutman, specialist in Poland’s modern Jewish history, spoke in still more scathing terms:
The cult that he [Rumkowski] fostered leaves a repugnant, sickening impression... he exuded the arrogance of yesterday’s slave newly empowered.... He would walk around the ghetto, visiting workplac