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Jewish Press
See USY story on page 8.
Serving Nebraska and Iowa Since 1920
Vol. LXX No, 28 Omaha
25 NISSAN, 5753 Friday, Aprir 16,1993
The Warsaw Ghetto — Why America watched in silence By Dr. Rafael Medoff special correspondent, The Miami Jewish Tribune Shortly before Passover, 1940, Jews.serving in foreedlabor battalions in Nazi-occupied Warsaw were suddenly ordered to begin a new task: lugging sacks of bricks to construction sites around the city where they would begin erecting giant walls to border the planned Jewish ghetto. Like their ancestors in Egypt, who were ordered to supply the bricks to use in their slave labor, the Jews in Warsaw were compelled to provide the bricks with which the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto would be built. In a macabre parody of the Jewish experience in ancient Egypt, Passover in Warsaw marked tJhe beginning of an important new phase in the Nazis' enslavement of the Jews. Unlike the original Passover saga, in which slavery was followed by freedom, the enslavement of Warsaw Jewry was to be a prelude to their annihilation. When the Nazis occupied Warsaw in September, 1939, Hitler had not yet formulated his genocidal plans for the Jews. Options Uien under consideration by the Nazi hierarchy included the deportation of European Jews to the African island of Madagascar or, alternatively, the concentration of all captured Jews on a vast reservation in Poland's Lublin region. In the meantime, the German occupation authorities exploited the Jews in occupied Poland, stripping them of I their possessions, conscripting them into forced-labor j^^rigades, and using them as convenient targets for Ger^^pian soldiers who wanted a "Romp" — that is, an evening ^^of plunder, torture and rape. V Building the Ghetto By the spring of 1940, the Nazis decided that the task of controlling Warsaw's Jews would be made easier if the Jews were i:onfmed to a walledin ghetto. It was the beginning of the end for Warsaw Jewry. The city's Jewish community of 300,000, which had swelled to nearly 400,000 as refugees poured in ftxTm other parts of Poland, was soon ravaged by hunger, disease, and Nazi atrocities. The German occupation rulers imposed strict limits on the amount of food that could enter the ghetto, resultiiig in mass starvation (some 11,000 Warsaw Jews starved to death in 1941, according to one estimate). Extreme overcrowding in the ghetto (one doctor described the average dwelling as being "narrow as the grave") encourage the spread of deadly diseases such as typhus, which killed tens of thousands of Jews. Many more Jews were murdered in random Nazi pogroms or were literally worked to death in forced-labor groups. In early 1941, Hitler decided that genocide was the appropriate Tinal solution" to the "Jewish problem." It wastried ou^ first in tJie Nazi-occupied Ukraine" in the summer and autumn of 1941, where mobile Nazi killing units I machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of Jews into : ditches that the victims themselves were forced to dig moments before being murdered. During the winter of 1941-liM2, the first death camps, . equipped with gas chambers, were established in occunipd Poland In Januarv. 1942. the Nazi nffirsni in rhanre
of implementing the Holocaust met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to coordinate their strategy: the Jews -would be shipped by train to the camps in Poland. Those Jews who were already confined to ghettoes would be the simplest to apprehend. In less than eight weeks during the summer of 1942, from July 22 through Sept. 13, more than 300,000 Jews were rounded up in Warsaw. Lured to the train stations by the offer of a few scraps of food, the starving, demoralized Jewish masses could not know that their destination was the Treblinka death camp. By early 1943, only 35,000 Jews remained alive in Warsaw. Birthday Present • As Hitler's birthday, April 20, neared. Gen. Stroop imagined that the Fuhrer would like nothing better than to be presented with the charred rubble of the once-thriving center of Polish Jewry, so on April 19, 1943, Stroop ordered his troops to march into the heart of the ghetto. Stroop expected that one day would suffice to level the battered remnants of Warsaw Jewry. He was sorely mistaken. For the past nine months, young Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had been constructing underground bunkers, stockpiling the guns and hand grenades they were able to obtain from the Polish underground, and manufacturing crude homemade weapons from the sparse materials available. (Jewish fighters in the Vilna ghetto, lacking sand to fill the sandbags needed for their battle against the Nazis, instead used the large, leather bound Talmudic volumes from the cit/s famous yeshivas — a dramatic, if unconventional, confuination of the Talmud's role as "the central pillar of Jewish life," as it has been called.) "Not Like Sheep' The Warsaw Ghetto rebels were, because of personal and political differences, divided into two factions: the Jewish Fighting Organization (known by its Polish initiils ZOfl), led by Mordechai Anielewicz, and Betar (the youth wing of the Revisionist ZioniiU), led by Paul Frenkel. ^Dn|>ite their dififerehces, the two groupatcooperated closely as they planned the armed revolt tnat they intended to launch the next time the Germans tried to round up Jews for deportation. The fateful moment arrived on Jan. 18, 1943, eariier than they had expected and before they were fully prepared. Nonetheless the Jewish flghters fought valiantly, engaging the startled Nazi troops in four days of street batr ties. The Germans regarded Jews as racial weaklings, and had become accustomed to tlie sight of Jews passively going to their deaths. Now they encountered Jews who fought back; the shocked Nazis suspended the round up and hastily withdrew from the ghetto. When Gen. Stroop decided to try again, on April 19, he came with tanks and artillery. But even the appearance of such weapons could >iot deter tiie Jewish resistance fighters. The initial German penetration was repelled'by Jewish guns, as were subsequent Nazi assaults. German tanks were hit bv molotov mrk
A Jewish Agency rescue I naoMd by the Jcwiih Aftncy from dvil war in Duchanbi. TiOiUaUn (a Motima RapubUc at UM for•=a'-.*tj-^ia!a
nwr Sovtot Union), arrivt In IVMI thanka to OporaUon Eiodua ftindt. Photo by UJA/DR GuUirW
tails and exploded in flames. Defeated in street fighting, Gen. Stroop completely shifted his strategy, and began systematically setting fire to every building in the ghetto. Fighters and civilians alike were gunned down as they fled from the flames. Gas and hand grenades were used to flush out underground bunkers. Yet it was not until.. May 8 that the main headquarters of the Jewish fighters was captured and destroyed. On May 16, (5en. Stroojp reported to his superiors that the ghetto had been liquidated, but he spoke too soon; sporadic fighting continued untU well into June. Estimates of the number of casualties inflicted upon the Nazis by the Jewish rebels range fitim several hundred to more than two thousand. Whatever the final numbers, one fact would always be remembered, wrote William Zuckerman in the N.Y. Yiddish daily Morgen Zhumal: "Jews died fighting, rather than like sheep led to the slaughter." What Americans Knew What did Americans know about the Warsaw Ghetto .revolt? How did they respond? News of the Jewish rebellion, while fragmentary, reached the U.S. press within days of the start of the uprising. 'TVarsaw's Ghetto Fights Deportation," a page 9 dateline in the New York Times declared on April 23. The Nazis were reported to be employing "armored cars and tanks" against the Jews, who were said to have been supplied with unspecified "arms" and even "trained commanders" by Polish underground. The fighting, according to the Times, was 'said to be costing the Germans many lives." Two weeks later, a small item in the Times reported that Jewish fighters hid been mounting a "furious resistance" to the Nazis, with the battle having been "raging for 17 days." Wliile information about the revolt was sketchy, there was much more information available than the Times saw fit to print; during the period from late April until late May, when tlie Times ran just one story about the Warsaw rebellion, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published seven separate stories about tlie fighting, Throughout the Holocaust years, the editors of the Times consistently gave more attention to the casualties suffered by non-Jewish partisan fighters than they did to either JJewish fighters or to the mass murder of the Jews. On Jiine 27, 1942, for example, the Times ran a headline about the deeds of the Czech partisans; that story was followed by tfiree short news items from Europe — the very last of which announced (ip two brief paragraphs) that 700,000 Polish Jews had been anniliilated by the Nazis. Under tlie leadership of tlie assimilated and self-conscious Sulzberger family, the Times constiously sought to avoid giving the impression thaU it was paying ton inurli attention to Jewish suffering. The "Show Me" Syndrome Not many Americans were partiLumnj uucrcsu-d i[i , the Warsaw Ghetto events, or in the Holocaust in general. Part of the reason was tliat reports about the slaughter of hundreds of civilians were difficult to believe; many Americans remembered World War One atrocity stories ttiat later turned out to be false. ^ Deborah LipsUdt (author of Beyoftd Belief, a study of ! the American media's coverage of the Holocaust) has characterized such skepticism as the " 'show me' syndronte" — unless actual physical evidence of the atrocities could be produced, the reports of what had happened were ri'ot believed. There were other reasons for Airierica's apathy, too.' Naturally tlie public was abaorbed with n«ws of the war effort, and regarded the suffeHng of the Jews aa one small part of a much bigger ordeal. The prevalenc* of . ' anti-Semitism in wartime America also helped blunt public interest in the fate of European Jewry. "Rescue llirouKh Victory* Feeling no public prai' sure to take action, Presi d«nt Franklin Roosevelt lell it to the SUta Department to explain to American Jews Uutii Is of Aiaiatant Adolph Berle) 'Notluii^ can ba dona to aava thsaa halpless unfortunates t'\ through the lnvaak>n ropa, the defeat ofthc Uer man army, and the breaking Of the German powtr Thm ia no other way* Conlmtmi On pa^ 4