Valley of death
STUART HOOD
A Warsaw Diary Michael Zylberberg (Vallentine, Mitchell 35s)
In 1942 there were half a million Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Of these the very large indigenous Jewish community, which dated its origins back to the fifteenth century, accounted for some 350,000—thirty per cent of the population of the city; the rest had been concentrated there by the Germans fiom the provinces and abroad. All were awaiting the Final Solution. By January, when the Red Army entered the city, there were officially no Jews left.
Warsaw was judenrein, purged of Jews; but a few thousand had survived, hidden by Poles for motives that ranged from human- ity and Christian charity to greed, living precariously, passing as Catholics, in constant danger of being unmasked, denounced, shot out of hand. To survive one had, in the first place, to break out of the ghetto, which meant a painful decision to separate oneself from the Jewish com- munity and refuse to accept a fate about which there could be no doubt. Then came the need for courage, quickness of mind, and—above all—luck. At the instigation of his wife Michael Zylberberg took the decision to cross to the 'Aryan side.' He had courage. He was quick-witted. Luck was with him. Both he and his wife survived.
His Warsaw Diary is an unadorned account of his experiences based on a diary he kept while living underground, lost when he had to move from his hiding-place and recovered, astonishingly, after the war. It is supplemented by his memories of life in the ghetto, of the desperate armed uprising of the Jewish underground in 1943, and of the Warsaw rising of 1944. We have become terrifyingly familiar with the images of the holocaust, with photographs, pieces of film and eyewitness accounts such as this book contains, which give us glimpses of horrors we can never fully imagine. . What Michael Zylberberg does is to make his reader marvel at man's capacity to maintain, on the brink of destruction, social structures within which he can live and even experience a certain joy. He des- cribes, for instance, a children's service held to mark the end of the school year of 1942. The news of the massacre of Jews in other Polish towns had already reached the ghetto, which was walled off, a territory set apart for death. Yet the boys and girls were able to fill the synagogue with the cheerfulness of their treble voices; they were dressed in their Sabbath best. Few, if any, of these children can have survived the extermination camps.
There are figures like Dr Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage inside the ghetto with love and devotion and, when the children were deported, insisted on accom- panying them to the gas chambers. There are the two rabbis, Reb Zishe and Reb Zalman, aged eighty and seventy respect- ively, living with their wives in a single room divided by a sheet, celebrating the Sabbath together. Towards the end Reb Zalman faltered. 'We lived by the Law,' he said, 'is this our reward?' His brother rabbi rebuked him: it was a sin to lose hope. On the eve of the Day of Atonement their house was surrounded by the Germans. Reb Zishe saw to it that they had their prayer shawls and ritual garments. Then hand in hand they walked out with their wives. 'The religious ones,' wrote Zylberberg, 'inhabited a world of their own .. .. Their unique way of life segregated them so completely that they all vanished in the smoke of the extermination camps.'
What one is forced to reflect on when reading Zylberberg's account is the problem of the closed community such as the Jews of Eastern Europe inhabited. It was their strength and support, their guarantee of existence, their island of safety in a fierce intolerant world where anti-semitism was endemic, nurtured by a Church which--as Zylberberg was reminded when he listened to an Easter sermon preached by a Jesuit after the destruction of the ghetto and its inhabitants—could not forgive the Jews for the death of Jesus. How deep its roots were he illustrates by two incidents in the first days of the Liberation. He asks a young Red Army man if he is a Jew and is met by a stream of anti-semitic obscenities. A Red Army officer, providing him with papers, advises him to keep on using the Polish, non-Jewish name he had adopted in the underground. One is also forced to reflect on the negative aspect of the closed community. The crisis in the ghetto made it clear. From being a haven the community could become a death-trap; this Zylberberg recognises, although he does not put it in these terms.
Nor does he discuss—one could not expect him to—a more difficult topic which is suppressed in a conspiracy of silence by almost everyone, Jewish or non-Jewish, who discusses the etiology of anti-semitism. It is the degree to which the closed com- munity contributed to the phenomenon; for the community was closed in two senses— as a protection against the Goyim, who might at any time, incalculably, rise and massacre its inhabitants, and as an island undefiled by the Goyim who were unclean (not only in their eating habits), who were not 'our people', who were despised by the fanatics as ignorant heathen. It is one of the deepest tragedies of anti-semitism that its victims have in some degree been accom- plices in nurturing the disease from which they perished. It is an aspect of the question that deserves examination if only for the sake of its millions of victims.
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