In the Ghetto

April 17, 2009
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

     Every history of the Holocaust is predominately a history of the destruction of Jewish pride, property, wealth, health, liberty, and life. The scale of this destruction is nearly indescribable, though thousands of pages have been filled in the attempt to describe it. Hundreds of thousands of primary documents and hundreds of photographs exist which provide the evidence. Most of the primary documents are the official records of the Nazi state, recorded in the hands of meticulous accountants and on the typewriters of efficient secretaries. Minutes of meetings, lists of deportees, reports on actions taken in the field by the military and the SS -- all records compiled by the perpetrators of the Holocaust. In addition, there is an enormous trove of propaganda issued by the Nazis in defense of their attempt to eliminate political adversaries, Jews, homosexuals, the mentally ill, the deformed, Gypsies and many other categories of individuals. A much smaller amount of writing and photography was left behind by the victims -- a handful of personal diaries, drawings of the camps, poetry, songs, letters, and desperate pleas for help. In addition, some of the victims attempted to transcribe their experiences on a first-hand, eye-witness basis, hoping that their researches and studies would provide valuable information for future generations and would insure that they would never be forgotten.

     Nevertheless, for the Nazis extermination was the goal and for the victims death was a destination. Between 1933 and 1945 more than six million Jews and several million others were murdered, an average of one-half million per year over twelve years, forty thousand Jews per month, four thousand four hundred per day. And these would be the rates of murder if the number remained stable through all twelve years but, in fact, the speed of the executions shot up beginning in 1939 when the German armies invaded Poland and special death squads followed them with the express purpose of murdering Jews and other undesirables; and it sped up again in the last few years of the war with the development of the gas chambers and the ovens in extermination camps throughout the Reich. In other words, left unchecked, the murder and the death rate would have continued to progress and accelerate until the last enemy of the Nazis was exterminated.

     The first impression of many -- Jew and non-Jew alike -- was that the victims went like lambs to the slaughter. But the truth was more shaded than that. There was much defiance and much courage. There were righteous people of all faiths who helped to hide and save Jews. And there were many instances of organized Jewish resistance. The most outstanding of those instances was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

     The Warsaw ghetto had once contained nearly half a million Jews, but 100,000 died of starvation, disease, exposure, and random killings. Thousands of other Jews were imported to the ghetto from nearby towns and villages, but the number remained fairly constant due to the continuing death rate. In the space of a few months, from July to September of 1942, nearly 300,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto by train to the extermination camp at Treblinka. Word reached the remaining Jews that the deportations meant death.

     In January of 1943, when only 70,000 Jews were left in the ghetto a small revolt broke out. Many German soldiers were killed in skirmishes around the ghetto and Heinrich Himmler himself came to see what was happening. Based on his visit, he decided the time had come to transport all the Jews to the death camps and destroy the ghetto.

     The night of April 18, the final act of the Warsaw ghetto began. It was intended to be a birthday gift for Adolf Hitler. Nazi troops surrounded the ghetto and prepared to invade it. The next morning at 6:00 am, a contingent of 2,000 heavily armed SS men entered the ghetto with tanks, machine guns, three trailers of ammunition, and ambulances. The Jewish population had fled the streets. Most were hidden in underground bunkers. But a thousand Jews had organized themselves into a resistance force and they were standing on alert in the apartment buildings.

     The Jews had three machine guns, some 80 rifles, perhaps 300 pistols and revolvers, and a small stock of hand grenades and gasoline bombs -- homemade Molotov cocktails. They took the Germans entirely by surprise. Grenades and bombs blew up the leading German tanks, blocking the entrance to the ghetto and forcing the Germans to retreat.

     That night, April 19, was also erev Passover. One of the fighters was searching for flashlights in a ghetto building, when she opened a door to one apartment and was shocked to see a family sitting down to celebrate the first Seder. As she later told the story, it was the family of Rabbi Maisel.

The room looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. Bedding was everywhere, chairs lay overturned, the floor was strewn with household objects, the window panes were all gone.

     Amidst this destruction, the table in the center of the room looked [out of place] with glasses filled with wine, with the family seated around, the rabbi reading the Haggadah. His reading was punctuated by explosions and the rattling of machine guns; the faces of the family around the table were lit by the red light from the burning buildings nearby... I could not stay long. As I was leaving, the rabbi cordially bade me farewell and wished me success. He was old and broken, he told me, but we, the young people, must not give up, and God would help us.

     The resistance was able to hold out for several days of fighting. Starting on the second day, the Germans burned one building after another, advancing a little at a time, taking losses from gasoline bombs and shootings. At the end of the first week, the German commander sent out for reinforcements. By the end of the second week, the Jews were running out of ammunition and using weapons they removed from the hands of dead German soldiers.

     It was not until May 8, after the Germans had begun using flame throwers and calling in air strikes on ghetto buildings, that the Germans reached the central command post of the Jewish resistance. Over a hundred Jewish fighters fell in that one building. Inside, the leaders discussed what to do. They decided to commit suicide rather than allow the Germans to capture them. One after another took his or her own life. Sometimes a pistol would jam and a voice would cry out, begging "Someone kill me," but nowhere did a Jew take the life of someone else. A few managed to escape through a hidden exit, but when the Germans threw in a gas bomb, the rest slowly suffocated in the gas.

     News of the Warsaw ghetto uprising spread far and wide through all the concentration and labor camps, inspiring many more Jewish revolts. Against the artillery and the tanks and the machine guns, these revolts and uprisings were nearly all doomed from the start. Of course, uprisings proved that Jews would fight given even the slightest possibility.

     True courage was more than fighting, though. The Jewish family celebrating their Passover Seder in the ghetto left us a spiritual message. When we decide not to bother celebrating a holiday, not to bother belonging to a synagogue, not to bother preparing a special meal for Passover or for Shabbat, we exercise our right to be free, but we fail to hear the message of those who resisted evil with spiritual courage. They wanted more than anything else to model a Judaism central to their lives, as much as those who fought wanted to inspire others to fight for the simple right to be Jewish.

     This is what we remember when we remember the Holocaust. We commemorate the loss of six million, even as we give thanks for our right to live as Jews in peace and freedom. May we always find our Judaism precious even as they did. And let us say: Amen.