The rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto is frequently pictured in
Israeli society as the heroic effort of a small group of
youths determined to commit suicide in order to "die with
honor." The "heroism" of the ghetto rebels is contrasted to
the "cowardliness" of the six million kedoshim, who
are accused of having "gone like lambs to the slaughter," to
what is called a "disgraceful and humiliating" death.
Once Al HaMishmar, the extreme leftist daily newspaper
of Hashomer Hatzair (no longer publishing), published an
interview with researcher and historian Dr. Dinah Porat, in
which she explained just what was the motivating the ghetto
rebels. "There was certainly an element of personal honor,"
she said. Dr. Porat quoted a section from the diary of a
rebel, who wrote: "We are fighting so that our esteemed
brothers in Eretz Yisroel will not say that Polish Jewry died
like dogs." The writer expressed the motive driving the
rebels in one short sentence: "We are fighting for three
lines in history!"
These rebels were confronted by a mythos of "we will take our
destiny in our own hands," created by the Zionist movement.
They feared that they would not measure up to the
expectations of the arrogant Israeli pioneers of their day.
Considerations of life and death were not the only issues
they weighed, but also considerations of vain pride and empty
self-glorification. These appear to have been the deciding
factor. The rebels desired "three lines in history," and for
that they decided to sacrifice themselves, so as to sanctify
the national myth.
Eventually a complete educational system and an extensive
literature were built around such "heroism," which was in
actuality no more than an act of despair without any hope of
real conventional success. The rebels were acclaimed with
honor and made into objects of respect and reverence, while
parallel to them the six million holy martyrs were presented
deridingly and degradingly.
Tom Segev recounts in his book The Seventh Million how
the members of Kibbutz Lochamei HaGetta'ot (the Ghetto
Fighters) insisted that this name and no other must be given
to their kibbutz, and they rejected all other suggestions
that a Governmental Committee presented to them.
According to Segev, the campaign to have the kibbutz called
"Ghetto Fighters" accurately "portrayed the tendency of the
veterans of the organized opposition to separate themselves
from the rest of the Holocaust survivors, as if they belonged
to an exclusive aristocratic order." Yet, he adds, despite
all the noise-making and campaigning, many members of the
kibbutz found it more than a little difficult to bear the
burden of the myth they had created.
The poet Chaim Guri once told him, for example, that when he
visited the kibbutz in its first years he would hear screams
of nightmare terror bursting out at night from the windows of
the shacks. In plain fact, less than half of the founders of
the kibbutz were among those who rebelled against the Nazis.
"Many of them were tormented with the fact that they had only
been rescued from the horrors of the Holocaust, and were not
among the fighters; the myth of heroism was a heavy burden
upon them."
*
In the year 5663 (1903) on the Eighth Day of Pesach, forty
years before the Holocaust, a pogrom took place in Kishinev,
the capital of Bessarabia. This cruel organized assault
received hidden backing from the Czar's officials, and
wrought havoc among Kishinev's Jewish community. Hundreds
were killed and wounded, and thousands of families were left
without shelter.
After the pogrom, the Center of Hebrew Enlightenment in
Odessa (in the Russian Crimea) set up a "Historical
Committee" to investigate the incident in Kishinev in the
"enlightened" spirit. The committee appointed the poet Chaim
Nachman Bialik to be their representative, to travel to
Kishinev and to gather testimony and material for an
anthology about the incident.
Bialik carried with him an official letter of authorization
from the committee, in which the aims of the investigation
were specified. A central paragraph said that the objective
of Bialik's appointment was "to transcribe all incidents of
self-defense, whether organized or spontaneous." This was the
topic that most concerned the leaders of the Haskalah
movement. They hoped that Bialik would publish an appeal to
preserve "national pride," and harshly criticize those who
went to their death like "lambs to the slaughter."
Bialik didn't disappoint them. The voluminous testimony that
he compiled in bulky notebooks remained unpublished. Instead
he wrote a poem called "The City of Slaughter," in which he
sharply denounced those who were murdered, and claimed that
they went to their death "like lambs to the slaughter"
without defending themselves.
This poem was extensively used in the years that followed to
spur Jewish youths throughout Europe and Eretz Yisroel to
organize themselves in self-defense units, more for the sake
of their "national pride" than to defend their own lives.
Bialik's poem is filled with scorn for the martyrs of
Kishinev. His vulgar style of name-calling and derisiveness
is of a sort that is difficult to find even in classic
antisemitic literature. He wrote, for example, that his
fellow-Jews "scampered away like rats, hid themselves like
vermin, and died the death of dogs." He labeled the holy
martyrs, who died in agonizing pain after undergoing
excruciating tortures, as "eternally disgraced," and finally
pronounced his verdict: "You died for nothing. Just as your
life was meaningless, so too was your death."
The poem shocked the people of Kishinev. One of them recalls:
"When we read the poem the first time we were astounded. Each
word was like a fiery iron, branding us with bitter mockery,
disgrace and condemnation, that seared the depths of our
souls like a stream of boiling lead. All this the poet
directed — not to our persecutors and those who
attacked us - - but to the persecuted and the attacked; and
this is a man who only a few weeks before had touched the
dried blood and bashed brains of their fallen brothers
staining the plastered walls!"
This Jew from Kishinev later attempts to justify Bialik
somehow that he "surely had good intentions." Still, he does
not hide the fact that this justification is based upon his
blind adulation of a man whom he terms the "prophet of the
nation," and he openly admits that "if a poet of less stature
than Bialik had dared to hurl such harsh and bitter rebuke at
the nation, they would have openly showed him their
discontent, and would have considered him cruel and hard-
hearted to thus rub salt on the people's wounds in the midst
of their great tragedy!"
From various accounts that were published after the pogrom it
seems that the truth was in fact just the opposite of what
Bialik would have liked to think: there were those who tried
to protect their lives by force of arms, and those who tried
to fight back instead of fleeing, but in many cases their use
of arms only hastened their death.
In a "Letter From Kishinev" that was published by the writer
Mordechai Spektor (in Yiddishe Folks Tzeitung, Lemberg-
1903, vol. 19), the author writes that he recalls the pogroms
that occurred in Podolia twenty years earlier. There the Jews
did not defend themselves: "They silently suffered the blows
that we received from the attackers; they kept quiet, and
therefore were not killed or murdered, only wounded and
robbed." However, in Bessarabia ten Jews were killed by the
attackers: "Because the Jews of Bessarabia always felt
themselves stronger and more robust than the `weak' Jews of
Podolia, and they forcefully resisted giving up their small
possessions to be stolen and destroyed. The men fought, and
therefore many of them were killed."
Moshe Kireh, also an eyewitness of the pogrom in Kishinev,
tells in his memoirs (Haolam 6.15.28) about the
various attempts at opposition that were brutally suppressed.
He sums up: "Once one knows what truly occurred, how is it
possible for one to open his mouth and say that `it was a
terrible disgrace for the Jews of Kishinev that they hid
themselves in cellars,' when at the time anyone who lifted
his hand in self- defense was immediately killed like a dog
in the street? If they had, back then, obeyed the advice of
these present-day advisors, there would not have been 42
murdered, but 1042 murdered in that city of murder.
"Those who demean the holy martyrs of Kishinev are sinning
gravely, and they are also causing the public to sin. Who
does not know that if Ben Zion Galanter had not shot at the
murderers who came to rob him of his possessions and destroy
his house, he would be alive today? As it was, he fired, and
was immediately surrounded by the murderers, together with
soldiers, who put an end to his life . . . And it is easy
enough to quote many details like these, which were published
in HaMeilitz in a series of articles (`Letters From
Kishinev') during the entire summer after the pogrom in
Kishinev."
*
It is reasonable to assume that Bialik, too, knew the truth:
that self-defense in such circumstances would be nothing
other than hopeless and senseless suicide.
Bialik gathered many accounts from those saved from the
pogrom in Kishinev but refrained from publishing them. Many
historical researchers have wondered in amazement why Bialik
concealed such important information. Seventeen years ago a
researcher supplied an astounding answer to these questions.
Dr. Yaakov Goren, who spent several years editing the diaries
of Kishinev survivors, explained in an interview to Yediot
Achronot (14 Nisan, 5748) as follows: "It was apparently
soon evident to Bialik that as far as the goal of national
awakening — the declared aim of his mission — a
poem would be more effective than a book . . . Bialik avoided
publishing the report. In the poem he wrote as if there was
no self- defense at all, yet the testimony he collected
provided ample evidence of self-defense. Bialik reasoned that
if he were to report this self-defense, people would discover
that even self-defense does not help. . . ."
Dr. Goren was questioned by the interviewer if, as a
historian, he agreed with this rewriting of history, and
whether he agreed that an ad-hoc patriotic poem was more
important than the historical truth? His answer, given at
length and with great convolution, boiled down to Yes,
"if there is no other choice and nothing else will do the
trick. Bialik had a clear patriotic aim. He wanted people to
be impressed about what happened in Kishinev. He feared that
the historical truth would weaken the impression made by
poetic truth."
It should be noted that the cynical use of the Kishinev
pogrom to revive the national uprising of the Zionist
Movement was carried out blatantly and openly. Chaim Shorrer,
a member of the Hechalutz Center in Kishinev and editor of
the Labor Movement organ Davar, wrote in the
introduction to his book The Kishinev Pogrom:
"The `modest' pogrom in Kishinev does not have to be
`ashamed' of its role in the twentieth-century martyrdom of
the Jewish people. Its impression was unmistakable and it
served as an important link in the chain. . . . It is well
known that the Second Aliyah and the Labor settlement in
Israel was greatly nourished, and sustained to a great
extent, by the atmosphere of the days after the Kishinev
pogrom. This is, in fact, a vital and obvious line stretching
from that pogrom — via the sea of blood and fire of our
generation — until the momentous feat of the great
Jewish endeavor of our time . . . ."
Already then, slogans as "lambs to the slaughter" set against
"we will take our destiny into our own hands" were being used
to spur on the Zionist Movement's wagon. Already then they
exhorted the people to acts of despair that would show plenty
of empty heroism, even at the cost of life itself. The point
that mattered was only that those who commit suicide would
merit "three lines in history."
*
One can see a subtle thread tying Bialik's poem about the
pogroms of 1903 to the national outlook towards the Holocaust
martyrs some 40 years later. In both incidents an attempt was
made to degrade the holy people who sacrificed their lives
al kedushas Hashem. Salt was spread upon the wounds of
the surviving remnant, the refugees from the slaughter, in
order to develop hollow and shallow national values of
"heroism" at the price of human life.
The Torah-observant writer R' Moshe Blau zt"l was the
first who warned against the myth of the ghetto rebels'
heroism. In a daring and penetrating article published in
Kol Yisroel (8 Iyar, 5703) he appealed to the masses
not to be swept away by the currents of the time and
fearlessly to express the stand of Torah-true Jewry against
the spirit of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion. (Also printed in
The Collected Writings of R' Moshe Blau, (Hebrew)
Mashabim Publications.)
"This rebellion was not planned by Torah-observant Jews, and
it undoubtedly caused the observant — even without
taking into consideration its results — much sorrow and
soul- searching. Only despondent people were capable of
rebelling in such conditions that offered no chance at all
for success. It cannot be denied that conditions then in
Poland were enough to make anyone despair, and that they
offered a powerful motivation for youth to do deeds that
could only bring their own lives to an early end.
"It is nevertheless clear that this was plain suicide! To
reach such a decision of suicide was a thing that only the
group in question was capable of doing. If these people
decided to die a death of heroes just for the sake of dying
the death of heroes, that is not a decision based upon our
faith. This is so even if their decision did not endanger
others.
"Still more so is it against our faith when such an act is
liable to endanger others, whose lives — however short
they are doomed to be — are dear to them; believing
people who even in the most despairing circumstances would
not leave off hoping for the salvation of Hashem, Whose ways
are miraculous, and Whose salvation comes in the twinkling of
an eye.
"Faithful Jews do not seek to end their lives prematurely
— still less to end the lives of others — because
of difficult circumstances. People in whom faith has
disappeared from their heart are, however, capable of doing
this. Those who judge each situation according to the laws of
nature are capable of such suicide, and are not bothered by
the fear that their suicide might bring harm to the lives of
others."
In another article (29 Elul, 5704) R' Moshe Blau writes:
"I am positive that the people who championed the rebellion
with all of their chimerical heroism did nothing but bring
about their own premature death and that of hundreds and
thousands of their brothers in the ghetto. It is certain that
the rebellion had no logical basis; it was merely an outburst
of despair and a lack of spiritual courage to bear life's
suffering.
"Therefore it is clear that people believing in G-d, who live
and die by His will, do not do deeds that are liable to
hasten their death even by one moment. And without a doubt
they do not do anything that will hasten the end of the life
for tens of thousands of their brothers.
"People who believe in G-d and live only by His will are the
true courageous ones, who listen to His voice and do His
will, even if that voice speaks harshly to them. They do not
despair of their lives, even though their lives become a
series of suffering and unbearable tortures, for this is what
the Supreme Providence has placed upon them. Heroism in such
a condition is not to die a death of fantasy heroes —
something that any child can do when in despair. The real
heroism in such times is precisely to live the life of
heroes within a sea of suffering. In this way we fulfill the
heroic fate that the Supreme Providence has placed upon
us.
"The highest spiritual bravery is to refuse to relinquish
even one moment of life because of external pressure, and
such bravery is a thing of which only G-d-fearing Jews are
capable. Only Jews who know enough to value each moment of
normal life, and even more, of a life covered with suffering
and fated to test us, a moment of exalted, glorious life, are
capable of such bravery. Such Jews were our brothers in the
ghettos.
"Chazal tell us, `One who lowers the eyelids of a dying
person is like one who sheds blood.' This is difficult for us
to understand. For people like us it is difficult to
appreciate the worth of one moment more in life to a person
who is headed for a certain and imminent death. However, in
the incident that we are referring to, not only do we realize
the value of such life, but with a heart aching and bursting
with pain we entertain the idea of how the situation
developed to a terrible end, and how many Jews would have
remained living to this day if not for the rebellion in the
ghetto. If they were ten thousand — they are dear to
us; if they were a thousand or a hundred — they are
dear to us; and if only one person, Chazal have taught us:
`Whoever saves one Jewish life is as if he has saved a
complete world.' Therefore we can infer that anyone who
causes one person's death is as if he caused a complete world
to die."
*
In conclusion, R' Moshe Blau appeals to us to battle against
the disgusting accusation of "lambs to the slaughter" by
presenting the concept of true Jewish bravery to the
public:
"Let the religious writers come and properly present the
courageous souls of the ghettos and camps, those who
sanctified and sanctify Hashem in their death while the
vicious hand deprived them of life against their will. Nor
should these writers skip over the spiritual bravery that
some secular Jews also attained when the spark of love for
Hashem suddenly blazed into a fire in their hearts during
those great hours. One should not yearn for that chimerical
bravery which, as we see it, does not stem from a Jewish
source."
*
Ludicrous as it may sound, even today, over 100 years after
the pogrom in Kishinev and 60 years after the rebellion in
the Warsaw Ghetto, the Israel national education system has
not yet succeeded in creating a mentality of "the proud
Israeli," and the complaints about "going as lambs to the
slaughter" are again loudly voiced.
One time over a decade ago, at the beginning of the first
intifadah, the late Prime Minister Rabin expressed his
disappointment with the behavior of the Israeli public in the
murderous attacks of the Palestinian terrorists. Rabin was
dumbfounded; how could a murderer stab and attack people
without being stopped, without anyone preventing him from
doing so? He even accused those murdered and the public who
act too passively for his taste, and appealed to them to act
like "a fighting people."
Rabin's remarks were greeted with scorn and mockery. Even
someone who accepted the definition in the school books, that
the martyrs "went like lambs to the slaughter," all the same
had difficulty accepting the accusations that Rabin aimed at
him.
Natan Brown wrote about this in Yediot Acharonot:
"Unexpectedly, like a sudden brainstorm, we became aware of
who exactly is to blame for the wave of attacks and terrorist
incidents that so furiously befell us. Not the terrorists,
not the cutthroats, not the terrorist organizations, not even
the leaders of the murderers; none of them is to blame. Whose
fault is it, then? All of us, you and I and he: we are all to
blame. Why? Because we do not properly meet up to the
definition of `a fighting nation.'
"Without any previous warning they found someone to denounce.
. . . [from] the explicit denunciations of the Prime
Minister, more and more light is being thrown on the subject.
Those who are responsible for leading the State and defending
its citizens are looking for scapegoats.
"And what is the meaning of the Prime Minister's
pronouncement that we have to be `a fighting people'? There
is no explanation except this extremely simple and basic one:
Listen, says Yitzhak Rabin; the situation is grave, and we
are doing all that we can, but we are not exceedingly
successful. Therefore, each person had better worry about
himself. Start fighting, start defending yourselves. Be a
fighting people, just as you were in the years of the
thirties and the forties. Go twenty years back in history,
and stop sitting around idly. Forward to the battle!
"With little effort one can understand how all these appeals
to the public, demanding them to solve the difficult problems
of internal security, stem from simple helplessness. The
government is not succeeding in controlling the terror, to
prevent bloody attacks in the heart of the Jewish settlement,
to thwart dangerous and even fatal incidents — but
suddenly they have succeeded in one thing, they have found
the solution: The public should defend itself, they should
blame themselves if they do not succeed, and they should not
bother the government.
"But the matter is not so simple. First, it is far from
certain that the people want to be a `fighting people.'
[Emphasis ours — Y.N.] Look at what went on for so many
years with guard service for the schools. Look at what is
happening now with the National Guard. . . . the majority
prefer to sit quietly at home or enjoy themselves quietly
somewhere else — without having to be an eternally
fighting people, without having to fear that suddenly they
must help overpower an Arab terrorist who is killing their
friends with a knife.
"The Prime Minister, however, wants us to . . . walk around
armed and constantly ready for battle. He wants us, in short,
to have our finger constantly on the trigger. Then, if G-d
forbid someone stabs us or attacks us, it will always be
possible to say: My good fellow, if you had been a little
more of a fighting people, then somehow you would have gotten
yourself out of this predicament; but since you're not a
fighting people do not blame anyone else.
"I, at any rate, do not want to be part of a fighting people.
. . . Now I am going to suffer doubly. I will not only be
attacked and wounded, but also rebuked for my negligence and
unwillingness to be a fighting people. How did we get
involved in such a mess?"
Another writer, Meir Uziel of Ma'ariv, described a
present-day Israeli life in which every citizen feels
threatened. The State, which once pretended to grant security
and peace of mind to the Jewish nation, now demands from its
citizens that they close themselves behind gates, fortified
walls, and well-protected buildings, as if they days of fear
in the ghetto had returned.
Uziel writes:
"In my broadcast covering the latest attack in Jerusalem
something was shown that really stirred up a commotion: the
police found a kindergarten that had a gap in its fence, and
not only that, but the kindergarten's door was left open.
"But that is exactly how it should be! A kindergarten's door
should be open, and the kindergarten's fence should just be
for show, only good enough to prevent the children from
taking an unsupervised walk. It does not have to be a
fortified wall. A fighting nation is not a nation that puts
up electrified walls around every thirty small children
sitting around their teacher to hear a story . . . .
"Really, who would have believed that in the State of Israel,
which was intended to create a "new kind of Jew" — a
proud, erect Jew — we would still be hearing the echoes
of one of the central motives in the national ideology:
vigorously blaming the killed and wounded that they went to
their terrible death `as lambs to the slaughter'?"
*
This situation also came up during the course of the first
Gulf War. Israel took no action, but hundreds of thousands of
frightened citizens closed themselves up in sealed rooms, or
decided to escape from the "danger area" in Israel's center.
("They flew away like rats" — as Bialik, their favorite
poet, described it.)
Doron Rosenblum published an article in Ha'aretz,
reminding the readers of many myths that have been debunked
in the last years. Among these were the clumsy attempts of
the government, during the first Gulf War, to distract the
attention of the people from realizing that one of the
principle "faiths" of the Zionist Movement was being shaken.
"An example is the ritual of the gas masks and the sealed
room during the Gulf War (and especially after the
Comptroller's report), which were really only intended to
distract the people from the main question: How can it be
that after a hundred years of Zionist security we have no
protection from a ballistic attack on civilian population
areas; and how did Israel turn into the most vulnerable and
threatened Jewish community in the entire world?"
*
But it is difficult to get the Zionist leadership to trouble
itself with facts. At ceremonies marking the Warsaw Ghetto
Rebellion, the government officials will emphasize the
heroism of those who rebelled, and once again will overlook
the fact that they really committed suicide for motives that
were nothing but meaningless arrogance or momentary insanity.
They will temporarily forget, once again, that the State of
Israel has turned into "the most vulnerable and threatened
Jewish community in the entire world," and that fifty years
after the courage of the ghetto rebels, the Israeli Prime
Minister accused his citizenry of going off to die "like
lambs to the slaughter" and appealing to them to act like a
"fighting people."
If, at the end, the ghetto rebels died for "three lines in
history," how can we demand of those who organize the
official ceremonies that even this prize should be taken from
them?
