Psychiatrists who study concentration camp behavior examine it as a response to concentration camp conditions. The lifestyle of the authentic Jew that we have described and analyzed thus far was behavior in concentration camp, but cannot be characterized in the same way as concentration camp behavior, for it was not prompted by concentration camp conditions. The Jews who refrained from eating cooked food, or who rose earlier than the others in order to put on tefillin, or who did not eat bread for the eight days of Pesaḥ, did these things in spite of concentration camp conditions, not because of them. Various writers on the subject of behavior in the camps emphasize the humanizing and comforting aspect of the spiritual life, but strangely enough they usually refer to it as an escape from the tragic reality.1Cf. Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp, p. 162; see also Frankl, From Deathcamp to Existentialism, p. 38.
The authentic Jew did not escape into spirituality but simply lived the life of the Jew in the circumstances in which he found himself. Nevertheless, most Jews fully realized that this was a confrontation unto death between the Jewish people and what it represents in world history and Nazified Germany and its spirit. While it is true that the Nazis killed not only Jews, but also Poles, Russians, Norwegians, and Gypsies, they did not plan a “Final Solution” for these peoples except for the poor gypsies, who fell victim to the Teutonic madness for ideological consistency. The diabolical hatred and venom of the Germans were reserved for the Jews, not as individual saboteurs, dissidents, political adversaries, war prisoners, or potential underground fighters, but as a people. The Gypsies were exterminated as an “inferior race”; the Jewish people and Judaism were to disappear from the earth as salvation for mankind.
There are two kinds of people who cannot acknowledge that the Jewish people was singled out for ultimate destruction: the assimilationist Jew and the dogmatic ideologist of the Left. The assimilationist Jew usually does not recognize the existence of a Jewish people. How, then, could the Jews be singled out as a people? The assimilationist Jew has an uncertain position in the world. If the Jews are a people, he, too, might be rejected. He is unsure of himself. If he does recognize the existence of a Jewish national entity, it is one with which he refuses to identify. In a sense he finds himself in a most uncomfortable psychological proximity to the Nazis themselves. He, too, considers this people unworthy of existence. To maintain his self-respect, he has to assert that Jews were not really treated much differently from other nationalities, nor did they behave differently from other prisoners. On the one hand, there is really nothing special about Jews. On the other hand, in his estimation, they were the only ones who went like sheep to the slaughter. Strange! If they were the only ones who were led like sheep to the slaughter, then they were singled out; and if they were the only ones who walked like sheep to the slaughter, then, somehow, they did behave differently from other prisoners. The assimilationist does not see the contradiction. For him, it is reassuring to know that the people of his ancestors, whom he had forsaken, did not really deserve much better. Those ghetto Jews had no courage to act, did not move, although it was quite clear to any enlightened, visionary assimilationist what was in store for them. Even later, when the “Final Solution” was already being implemented, the inferior ghetto Jews were unable to see the wide-open doors that were still available for them to escape.2See, for example, Bruno Bettelheim, “Freedom from Ghetto Thinking,” in Midstream, Spring 1962. The assimilationist Jew needs all this. On the one hand, there is no such thing as a Jewish people, therefore — unlike the Nazis — he does not reject them. On the other hand, there used to be a people of ghetto Jews who deserved nothing better than to be rejected. They got what they had asked for. Thus, the assimilationist Jew saves his self-respect and soothes his conscience.
Neither can the dogmatic ideologists of the Left recognize that the Jewish people and Judaism were a target of Germany, specifically selected for annihilation. According to them, the struggle was essentially a political one between Fascism and the progressive forces of freedom. This battle was chiefly fought by these forces and had very little to do with Jews qua Jews. Were they to acknowledge that the Jewish people as such were the target, it would mean only one of two things: either that the Jews were in the forefront in the political struggle for freedom, or that the battle was not a political one fought in accordance with the textbook rules on class struggle. The leftist ideology permits neither of these possibilities. Furthermore, the Jewish question itself is a bogey, since it is going to disappear in the classless society of universal brotherhood. There is, therefore, no such thing as a Jewish people. As for Judaism, there could be no point in making an issue of it. It had no influence on the course of human history, which proceeds in accordance with the laws of dialectical materialism. Very few, if any, have had the intellectual honesty of a Beardayev, who foreswore dialectical materialism because he could not deny the reality of the history of the Jewish people.
The truth, of course, is that there was a direct confrontation between Hitler’s Germany and the people of Judaism because the Nazi ideology was essentially not a political one, but a nihilistic rebellion against all human values and a satanic defacing of the divine image of which man is the bearer on earth. Ernst Junger, whom Camus, in The Rebel, calls “the only man of superior culture who gave Nazism even an appearance of being a philosophy,” formulated the essence of this German nihilism by saying: “The best answer to the betrayal of the body of life by the spirit is the betrayal of the spirit by the spirit, and one of the great and cruel pleasures of our times is to participate in the work of destruction.”3The Rebel, Penguin Modern Classics 1971 edition, p. 147. In order to understand what the issue at stake was, it is worth pondering this statement. What is the betrayal of life by the spirit? In this context the very existence of the spirit is adjudged to be a betrayal of life. Spirit, with its affirmation of freedom as an instrument of responsibility, with its demands of discipline, with its value affirmations that originate in a realm of transcendence reaching out toward the Divine, is seen as the enemy of life, a life limited to its purely biological needs, drives, and appetites. This, in itself, is nothing more than the negation of the spirit, not its betrayal. It cannot serve as the dynamic of a nihilistic state organization. The betrayal of the spirit by the spirit is an ideology; it is the conscious elevation of the satisfaction of primitive biological needs and dark demonic drives to the level of a cult. It is the “sanctification” of the satanic in human nature. It is the planned desecration of the spirit that demands the dehumanization of man. Nazism was not a political movement but, in its betrayal of the spirit, a spiritual one, and the battle against it should have been a spiritual one. It is this struggle that the nations refused to join, understandably, since Nazism itself was only a manifestation of a spiritually bankrupt civilization. This explains the world’s indifference toward the plight of the Jewish people.
The natural adversary of this kind of a rebellion is always the Jew, not on account of what he does, but on account of what he represents in history. It is neither the Ten Commandments, nor the “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” of the Torah, nor the belief in God that is responsible for the singling out of the Jew by the nihilistic rebels against the domain of the spirit. Indeed, other religions may affirm the same principles and believe in the same kind of divinity. But it has been the spiritual misfortune of the other world religions that they have been too successful in the domain of Caesar. In the history of the human race, half a billion believers in a God prove nothing about the presence and power of that God in history. The believers and their affirmations may have their psychological significance for the individual; ultimately the hundreds of millions of human beings, in possession of vast territories, natural resources, and vast military establishments, only prove the power of the material forces that they represent. The nihilistic rebellion has to aim at defeating the material power bases of such adversaries and this was the aim of Germany with regard to the other nations. There was no need for a “Final Solution” against the peoples themselves. But the Jew and Judaism represent in human history the affirmation of values that have survived without the physical power base that has otherwise been the sole guarantee of a permanent place on the world scene. That the Jewish people has withstood all the barbarous attacks upon it, that it has been able to maintain itself in the midst of deadly enemies, bespeaks the presence of another kind of power, invisibly playing its part in the history of men. The survival of the Jew, his capacity for revival after catastrophes such as had eliminated mighty nations and empires, indicate the mysterious intrusion of a spiritual dimension into the history of man. The more radical the rebellion against the world of the spirit, the greater the hatred against the Jew. The Final Solution was not only to eliminate the Jewish people from history, but through the destruction of Israel it was meant to finalize the defeat of that mysterious spiritual force against which the rebellion was directed. The Nazis were quite correct in believing that if they did not succeed in the elimination of the “Jewish influence” upon world history, they would also fail in their plans for world conquest. No matter what they said in their official propaganda, they sensed the mysterious nature of that influence, the presence of a hiding God in history. It was, indeed, a course of nihilistic violence that meant not only to conquer the earth, but also to poison the soul of man by successfully trampling on all human values and on all human feeling.
Jews understood instinctively the nature of the confrontation. However, nowhere did the meaning of the confrontation call for a more heroic opposition than among the underground groups of young ḥasidim, as expressed in the words of one of them:
“I shall not go to slave labor; I shall not join any workers’ group! The intention of the Nazi Satan is not only to enslave the body; his main goal is to subjugate the soul. We shall not submit. We give up the food rations. We shall starve, but will not be moved. We shall find somehow some way of getting something to eat…We shall oppose the decrees of the Satan.”4Prager, I, p. 48.
Who were these young Jews? In certain circles of the ghetto and camp survivors, legends are told about a widespread association of young Gerer ḥasidim known as the Mottesovzes. They were members of a group organized by one Motte (Mattityahu) Gelman. He was born in Vienna into a well-to-do, completely assimilated Jewish family. A highly gifted young boy, he distinguished himself in his studies at school. One day in 1933, after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, one of his classmates called him “a dirty Jew.” Motte spat in his face. Since he knew nothing of Judaism — he did not even know how to read Hebrew and had never held a prayerbook in his hand — he decided, instead of going home, to cross over the bridge above the Danube into the Zweiter Bezirk, “the Second District,” which was known for its Jewish population, many of whom were of Eastern European origin. He wanted to find out about Jews. It chanced that he encountered there the distinguished Rabbi Schapiro of Lublin, the founder of the world-renowned Yeshiva of Ḥakhmei Lublin. He approached the venerable rabbi. He wanted to find out why he was called “a dirty Jew.” He had been insulted. The others had laughed; no one had come to his defense. “They are the ones who are crude and vulgar; who use dirty language; who often act immorally. And they call me dirty?” The rabbi told him: “Don’t get excited about it. The prophet already warned about the same thing: ‘Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil; that change darkness into light and light into darkness …’ ”5Isaiah 5:20.
There it was, the classical summation of the betrayal of the spirit by the spirit. In this short encounter, Motte became a changed person and with the help of a religious youth organization he started to learn about Judaism. During his next summer vacation, with funds from a prize he had won for an essay on modern Austrian poetry, he joined a ten-day antiquities study tour of Poland. But his real purpose was to run away to Lublin and to learn in the yeshiva of Rabbi Schapiro. He was only fifteen years of age at the time, but all the efforts of his father to bring him back to Vienna were of no avail. Soon, Motte joined the Gerer ḥasidim and by the time he was seventeen he was already an outstanding Talmud student and a fervent ḥasid, an inspiration to numerous other young Jews. When the German armies shattered Poland and spread havoc, murder, and destruction among Polish Jewry, Motte became a tower of strength in the midst of the chaos. In numerous ghettos he organized secret groups who refused to obey the laws of the Germans and went into hiding to study Torah, to pray, sing, and dance. These groups, which then became known as Mottesovzes, “men of Motte,” existed in Cracow, Warsaw, Szydlowiec, Radom and other cities. Strict voluntary discipline was the rule in their hiding places. Winter and summer, the members of the group had to be present in their bunkers at 6 A.M. In all the ghettos they lived together in communes sharing everything. Although their main purpose was the study of the Torah, biKedushah uveTohorah, in holiness and in purity, they were also deeply engaged in charitable work. They took into their midst lonely children, remnants of families that were expelled from the ghetto, and helped children who had run away from places outside the ghetto, a capital crime in the eyes of the Germans. Motte, the moving spirit of this conspiratorial organization, travelled in his ḥasidic garb on all kinds of secret roads from ghetto to ghetto, from labor camp to labor camp, appearing and disappearing mysteriously, collecting donations, assembling help for his secret Torah communes. Although still in his early twenties, he became a legend in the ghettos.6Cf. Unger, p. 102; Prager, I, the opening pages which discuss him, and also pp. 43–44.
People who remember him would say, this is what Motte was like: he taught us to shatter the conditions around us and not to be shattered by them; to deny them, but not to deny ourselves. And he would sing: “Whatever is beauty in the world out there, see it in its defiling ugliness.”
One of the survivors who knew Motte in the Szydlowiec ghetto writes about him:
“The personality of Mattityahu stands before my eyes as if alive. A great deal passed over me during the years of bereavement and destruction. But I was also privileged to witness many manifestations of spiritual exaltation in the midst of the valley of the shadow of death. However, the appearance of Mattityahu was unique in its class. As I considered him, it became clear to me that here was a Jew; and that was his armour…Though I, too, lived in the same ghetto I did not get to see him there too often because most of the time he was travelling. People ceased already to wonder how Mattityahu managed to escape the numerous armed guards that were watching the roads. They simply considered him a man of miracles.”
One day he went on one of his errands and was never seen again. It was then that Yankel Gefen, another young Gerer ḥasid who had been Motte’s deputy, became the central guiding personality of the Mottesovzes groups. Originally, he had been known as a batlan, a world-strange, impractical young man, but he suddenly revealed himself to be a Jew of great courage and fearlessness. He would hasten to join in every risky venture, and again and again he escaped from the deadly grip of the enemy. He jumped from the death train that was speeding him towards the extermination camp of Belzec. He succeeded in getting out of the prison of the Juden Lager (the Jewish camp) in the slave labor camp at Plaszow. But the height of his heroism was thought to be his stealing himself across the Polish-Czech border to try to make his way on foot to the Gerer Rebbe in Jerusalem.
Two other incidents reveal something of his understanding of the nature of the confrontation, as well as his personal courage and strength of character in meeting it. Soon after the German conquest of Poland, a group of German soldiers was celebrating the victory by mocking and humiliating Jews in the streets of Warsaw. They happened to come upon a group of ḥasidim and fell upon them with derisive laughter. One of the officers pulled out a knife and turned to the Jews: “Moses! Give me your beard.” The Jews were speechless as the Germans went ahead with their joke of pulling and cutting some of their beards. There was nothing they could do and they were glad to escape with their lives. Then the Nazis got hold of Yankel. “Shoot me; kill me; but I will not let you cut my beard,” he shouted. The heroic Germans started cursing and threatening him. Finally, at the urging of some older ḥasidim who warned him that the Germans might avenge his resistance on all of them, Yankel agreed to let the officer cut off the edges of his beard. After the event, when he was asked how he dared endanger his life by inciting the murders, Yankel answered with complete composure: “I did it intentionally, I did not want these resha’im (wicked, evil men) to think that the world belongs altogether to them.”7Prager, I, pp. 74–75.
The second incident occurred in Cracow, the seat of the German occupation authorities, where clandestine activity was much more difficult than in other places. Motte had moved to the Szydlowiec ghetto and the situation of the Mottesovzes in Cracow became critical. The large group disintegrated and the members were scattered in private homes where they studied in twos and threes. Then Yankel Gefen arrived in the ghetto, immediately filling the place that became vacant when Motte left. He reorganized the ḥavurah (the Gerer fraternity), established a secret shtiebel, and became the organizer, the teacher, and the guide of a group of over thirty young baḥurim who often studied Torah deep into the night. Their shtiebel was high up in an attic. One night their study was interrupted by loud banging at the gate of the building. There were wild shouts outside and the tension within was great. The danger was imminent, the Germans were at the gate.
“We held our breath. We all sensed what was bound to happen here within a few minutes. However, no one moved from his place. Yankel Gefen was standing…completely composed, completely quiet and at peace, altogether strength and trust.”
Our witness thought of running away. There were possibilities of escape; it was a large building with many corridors, and secret nooks and niches. But he did not budge; nor did anyone else.
“Yankel Gefen looked at us with eyes free of fear. His glance removed our fear and sparked audacity in us. Let there be what may. We shall not be alarmed. We shall not run from them.”
The shouting grew louder and wilder. The gate was shattered. Knocking and banging; curses and screaming. “They are here!” shouted one of the youngest members of the group. With a gesture of his hand, Yankel ordered the boy to be quiet and to remain seated in his place.
“We were all silent; sitting in our places. The pages of the Talmud were open. Our hearts were beating fast, but the determination was formed: ‘We shall not budge!’ Many long minutes passed. Gradually our minds were once again engaged in the talmudic theme. We did not raise our voices, but quietly started to hum again the tune to which the Gemara is studied.”
There was some more drunken shouting downstairs, cries and shrieking whistles. Then, silence! The Germans had left. It turned out that they had come for plunder and departed. When the danger was over, Yankel Gefen gave his students a lesson in the “virtue of indifference.” Turning to the boy who had shouted out, he said:
“You lost yourself. So, what did you discover? Didn’t we all know that they were here? Didn’t we hear them? But what? Whom does it concern at all! That is exactly what they want; that we abolish ourselves before them. It is because of it that they make the noise and cause the terror — in order to break and subdue us. They cling to their own — and we stay with our own. Therefore, we shall not run nor withdraw before them. That is why it is written: ‘Blessed is the man who trusts in God; God is his safety.’”8Jeremiah 17:7; Prager, I, pp. 76–79.
Yankel Gefen had no disrespect for life. But in his philosophy it was more important to ignore the enemy and retain the independence of one’s being than to run in order to escape, to lose one’s self-respect and submit in the spirit to threats and fear. The Mottesovzes were a fairly widespread conspiratorial organization. But they were no saboteurs in the normal usage of the term; nor were they partisans (though many of their survivors joined the ghetto fighters in the end). Yet, when the Germans would discover their hiding places, they would accuse them of sabotage and rightly so. From the point of view of a nihilistic faith, rooted in the betrayal of the spirit by the spirit, the manifestation of the authenticity of the life of the spirit is a much more dangerous threat than the blowing up of railway tracks by ordinary saboteurs. The emergence of a Motte Gelman from the apparently barren womb of a completely de-Judaized home of assimilated Vienese Jews symbolizes the mysterious capability of the Jewish people for eternal recovery and renewal. Motte Gelman, who appeared over the dark skies of the ghettos like a brilliantly shining meteor, demonstrated that the betrayal of the spirit by the spirit was doomed in the history of man, and proved the irrepressible mightiness of the spirit.
We know of at least one other group of young ḥasidim who saw the confrontation with the Germans very much like the Mottesovzes. Overcoming the tyranny of fear in the ghetto of Lodz, this ḥavrutah trained itself to remember each day three fundamental principles:
(a) The German is Amalek (the traditional enemy of the Jewish people). Whatever he says, one has to do the opposite.
(b) Because he is indeed Amalek, one need not be surprised by his behavior and actions and one must not be afraid because of them.
(c) This is the method of Amalek: to confuse the senses and to prove in every possible way that all is lost; that there is no escape and that the only choice is — to submit.9Prager, II, pp. 84–85.
The meaning of this formulation was not intended as a call to arms, which — in their situation — was beyond them. It was similar to Yankel Gefen’s “We shall not budge”; part of the battle in the realm of the spirit, the retention of the authenticity of one’s own being, defying the force of the dehumanizing conditions, and, in the style of Motte Gelman, to break and not to be broken. In the terminology of these Jews, the battle was with Satan.
It is doubtful that anyone was able to offer a clearer understanding of the significance of the confrontation than Rabbi Mendele Alter of Pabianice, brother of the Gerer Rebbe. The account of his walk to the gas chambers in Treblinka at the head of a large group of Jews has become a legend. As he was taken to the gas chamber, he pleaded with one of the Kapos for some water. To everyone’s surprise, the man, who was one of the most sadistic among the German lackeys, brought the water. However, Reb Mendele did not drink it, but used it to wash his hands preparing himself for the last prayer on earth, the saying of the Viddui (the customary confession of sins before death). Along the way, a badly wounded child was thrown across Reb Mendele’s path. He picked up the bleeding baby whose little body was quivering in his hands. There was still time; the Germans dragged out the death march for their entertainment. Reb Mendele, holding the child, turned to the others and said:
“…this is holiness, purer than all purity, a Jewish child. This little Jewish child is sick, weak like a fly…how come that the Satan, in possession of the most advanced weapons of war and destruction, has to wage war and vent his cruelty on little children? These ‘defiled ones,’ when they see a Jewish child in the arms of his mother are immediately filled with the urge to murder…the forces of tumah, demonic defilement, cannot endure the sight of holiness, the spirit of purity that hovers over the face of a Jewish child.”
Then he told them of a personal experience. When the Nazis first came to his home to beat and torture him, it hurt very much and he was in great pain. But suddenly his eyes were opened with understanding. The Germans discovered a scroll of the Torah in his room. At once they let him go and threw themselves with “cruel anger and mad murderous desire” upon the Sefer Torah. They trod on it with their feet and tore the parchment with fanatical hatred, as if sensing that the letters on them contained the life blood of the Jewish people. (Witnesses tell of similar events in other places. On at least one occasion known to us a German officer, upon discovering a Torah scroll in a secret shtiebel, pulled out his bayonet and stabbed the scroll several times in his fury.10Ibid., p. 140.) Reb Mendele concluded his remarks by saying:
“When I saw this I regained my composure. I understood the meaning of the words in the Psalms: ‘You make me wise through my enemies.’11Psalms 119:28. It is not my body that the enemy means to crush. When he fights against the source of holiness, he slaughters the children of Israel; and when he wants to destroy the strength of the Jew, he treads underfoot the parchment of the Torah.”12Prager, I, pp. 160–162.
It is doubtful if anyone had a deeper understanding of the nature of Nazi Germany than these Jews. The struggle was not a political one. It even transcended the realm of morality and ethics. It had to be fought against the consciously planned defilement of the very sources of man’s humanity. Nazi Germany was the deification of the diabolical; the religious befouling of all purity and innocence. Jews rightly saw in it the rebellion of Koḥot haTumah (a phrase well understood in the context of Judaism, which can only be weakly rendered in English as “the forces of impurity”), the satanic relishers of destruction. It was against all this that the authentic Jew was fighting. In the words of Yankel Gefen, he was holding on to his own, to himself. Even if his body was destroyed, in his own life the rebellion of Koḥot haTumah was defeated. This truth found its dramatic affirmation in the final hour of the Chencziner Rebbe. When a German soldier was trying to cut his beard, he shouted at him: “Don’t touch me with your defiled hands.” He was shot.13Schindler, p. 220; also M. Unger, Admorim sheNispu baSho’ah, Jerusalem, 1969, p. 103. The incident recalls a passage from Paul Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, which defines the “dread of the impure.” It is a reaction to “a threat which, beyond the threat of suffering and death, aims at a diminution of existence, a loss of the personal core of one’s being.”14Quoted by Terrence Des Pres in The Survivor, p. 68. It was this that the Chencziner Rebbe dreaded more than death itself, the diminution of his existence, the loss of the personal core of his Jewish being.
Because of their conscious, and often unconscious, understanding of the nature of the confrontation, no matter what their personal fate might be, Jews did not doubt the ultimate defeat of Germany and the survival of the Jewish people. The two were inseparable from each other as the following story, from the early days of the German conquest of Poland, shows. The Germans came to Lublin to set up a “Jewish area” and ordered the chairman of the Judenrat to assemble the Jewish population in an open field outside the city for a “general parade.” As the Jews presented themselves at the appointed time, the German commander ordered them to sing a gay and happy ḥasidic tune. The crowd was fearful and confused, but one hesitant voice started singing the moving song: Lomir sich iberbeiten, Avinu shebaShamayim, “Let us be friends again, our Father in Heaven.” The crowd remained unresponsive. The German soldiers threw themselves with murderous blows upon the Jews who would not obey their command. Suddenly, a voice broke from among the crowd singing the same tune with might and joy, but with the words now changed to: Mir wellen sei iberleben, Avinu shebaShamayim, “We shall outlive them, our Father in Heaven.” The song gripped the crowd. They sang it with enthusiasm and danced to it ecstatically. It became for them the hymn of Jewish eternity. The Germans, bewildered and at a loss, started shouting: “Stop it! Stop it!”15M. Prager, Niẓuẓei haGevurah, Tel-Aviv, 1952, pp. 10–11. Did they sense that it was the song of their doom?