"I
am not acquainted with the young author of this booklet, one of the leaders of
the Jewish Uprising. He brought me a typewritten copy, and I read it all at
once, unable to interrupt my reading for a single moment. ... "I am not a
writer, " he said. "This has no literary value. "However, this
non-literary narrative achieves that which not all masterpieces can achieve.
For it gives in serious, purposeful, reticent words a record, simple and
unostentatious, of a common martyrdom, of its entire involved course. It is
also an authentic document about perseverance and moral strength kept intact
during the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind."
Zofia
Nalkowska, LODZ, November 1945
This book is the second reprint by Bookmarks (the publishing arm of the British Socialist Workers Party) of Marek Edelmann's extraordinarily harrowing and inspiring account of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto uprising 1941-43 against the Nazis. The book contains an introduction by SWP member John Rose of which more will be said later in this review.
Edelman
was a member of the Bund, an organisation of Jewish socialists, who, along with
other groups, including radical left-wing Zionist organisations, militarily attacked
the Nazis after they began to deport Jews from the Ghetto to the various Nazi concentration
camps.
Despite
several warnings from outside that Jews were being systematically murdered on
an industrial scale, few inside the Ghetto believed it was happening. Edelman writes
that "The Warsaw ghetto did not believe these reports. People who clung to
their lives with superhuman determination could not believe that they could be
killed in such a manner. Only our organised [youth] groups, carefully noting
the steadily increasing signs of German terror, accepted the Chelmno story as probable
and decided upon extensive propaganda activities to inform the population of
the imminent danger. A meeting of the Zukunft cadres took place in mid-February
1941, with Abrasha Blum and Abramek Bortensztein as speakers. All of us agreed
to offer resistance before being led to death. We were ashamed of the Chelmno
Jews' submissiveness, of their failure to rise in their defence. We did not
want the Warsaw ghetto ever to act in a similar way. "We shall not die on
our knees," said Abramek, "Not they will be an example for us, but
men like our comrade Alter Bas." While Chelmno victims were dying
passively and humbly, he, after having been caught as a political leader with
illegal papers in his pocket, and tortured in every manner known to the
Germans, resisted the barbarous torment through superhuman efforts when but a
few words would have saved his life".[2]
The
book is light on analysis and is narrative-driven. Edelmann's description of
everyday life in the Ghetto is harrowing and, at times, hard to comprehend. He
writes, "The sick, adults and children, previously brought here from the
hospital lie deserted in the cold halls. They relieve themselves right where
they lie and remain in the stinking slime of excrement and urine. Nurses search
the crowd for their fathers and mothers and, having found them, inject longed
for deathly morphine into their veins, their own eyes gleaming wildly. One
doctor compassionately pours a cyanide solution into the feverish mouths of
strange, sick children. Offering one's cyanide to somebody else is now the most
precious, irreplaceable thing. It brings a quiet, peaceful death. It saves from
the horror of the cars".[3]
The
Nazis used the Ghetto as a holding area to process people to the concentration
camps, and they were able to do this with a minimum of fuss because of the pernicious
role played by the Jewish Council, who collaborated with the Fascists in the industrial-scale
murder of Polish Jews.
After
the final decision was made to liquidate the Ghetto, many different political
organisations came together to fight the Nazis. Despite having few weapons, the
various fighting units killed many Nazis.
Marek
Edelman wrote this book just after the war finished and was published in Warsaw
in 1945, then in English in 1946. The book raises several important issues,
such as the collaboration of the Jewish Council in facilitating the Nazi's mass
death programme. It also highlights the difference between the lives of working-class
people who lived and died in abject squalor and sections of middle-class Jews
who could live a relatively comfortable life for a short time. As Jim O'Connell
writes, "During the early days of the Ghetto and indeed to different
degrees even, later on, many aspects of normal social life continued to exist
relatively unaffected by the enforced confinement and growing instances of
deportations and physical abuse. Some of the wealthier members of society
carried on a relatively privileged existence while their fellow residents died
of hunger on the streets. Commerce continued along with black-market dealings
for profit. In such an environment, it might be that even those people with the
most access to information (by paying for it) refused to believe that the same
fate that was visited on the lower classes could be inflicted on themselves".[4]
The book counters the myth that there was no opposition amongst the Jews to the
Nazi Genocide. It is clear from the bravery of the Ghetto Fighters that some
Jews fought back.[5]
There
are several issues that Edelmann does not touch upon it in the book. The fact
that the Ghetto fighters fought alone and had few weapons was primarily down to
the role of Stalinism. Their brutal stance was best summed up by Stalin's
general, Rokossovsky, "We are responsible for the conduct of the war in
Poland, we are the force that will liberate the whole of Poland… [The Home
Army] have butted in like the clown in the circus."[6] The
Red Army might have helped deliver the knock-out blow against Hitler in the
end, but the 1944 Polish uprising was defeated because Stalin ordered them to
halt outside Warsaw. Most importantly, the Kremlin's suppression of independent
political action by the working class of Europe had a devastating impact on the
ability of the Jewish working class to fight the Nazis.
Edelmann
is slightly critical of some of the political parties' lack of support for the Uprising,
writing, "the fact that none of the other active political parties took
part in this action is significant as an example of the utter misconception of
existing conditions common to Jewish groups at the time. All other groups even
opposed our action. It was, however, our determined stand that momentarily
checked the Germans' activities and went on record as the first Jewish act of
resistance". Other than a few paragraphs, Edelmann has no substantial
political analysis of the leadership inside the Ghetto.
While
it is commendable of the SWP to publish this account of the Warsaw Ghetto, a
couple of issues arise from John Rose's introduction. Rose's friendship and use
of the work of Professor Anthony Polonsky is questionable. Polonsky's defence
of Adam Czerniakow(who committed suicide rather than collaborate with the
deportations of the Jews to the concentration camp) is contentious.
The
most important thing I take issue with is Rose's uncritical attitude towards
Edelmann's participation in the Solidarity movement. As Dorota Niemitz points
out "the vast majority of the petty-bourgeois and academic advisers of the
Solidarity trade union aspired to integrate Poland into the world and European
capitalist economy and supported "shock therapy", austerity measures
and Poland's accession to NATO and the EU. This, and not the defence of the
working class, was the content of their call for "freedom" and "democracy."[7]
This
is an important book as it gives an account of the bravery of sections of the
Jewish people in their fight against Fascism and nails a myth that the Jews
went quietly into the good night. It is not a political account of the struggle
against Fascism, so I have included some further reading.
Further
Reading.
1.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/jewish.htm
2.
The
Myth of "Ordinary Germans": A Review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's
Willing Executioners-David North- www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
3.
Wolfgang
Weber-Poland 1980-1981: The Solidarity Movement and the Perspective of
Political Revolution-Mehring Books.
4.
Abram
Leon (1918–1944)-The Jewish Question-A Marxist Interpretation- https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/leon/
[1] Abram
Leon-The Jewish Question-https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/leon/ch8.htm
[2] The
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, by Marek
Edelman-https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/warsaw-uprising.html
[3] The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, by
Marek Edelman-https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/warsaw-uprising.html
[4] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/irishmr/vol03/no09/oconnell.pdf
[5] http://irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/116
[6] https://socialistworker.co.uk/features/anti-nazi-fighters-who-were-left-to-fight-alone/
[7] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/05/03/wale-m03.html
