The Warsaw Ghetto and Resistance

In July 1942 Germans had begun to deport some of the approximate half a million by then resident in the Warsaw ghetto. Treblinka, just 40 miles away, was the chosen site for their destruction. In the first month 66,701 were taken and gassed on arrival. Large scale deportations continued until in January, 1943 they were suspended after the Jewish underground in Warsaw co-ordinated resistance within the ghetto itself. In April a German military unit with tanks entered the ghetto with the aim of quelling the resistance and resuming deportations. The organized Jewish groups fought back fiercely forcing the Germans to withdraw. For the next three weeks German militia retaliated by burning the houses of the ghetto, street by street. During this period most of the ghetto was destroyed and 56,000 of its inhabitants were either burned to death, shot trying to escape, or were rounded up for deportation. About 15,000 escaped into the “Aryan” parts of Warsaw. Some were later caught or betrayed but many were sheltered by sympathetic Poles and were later to fight in the Warsaw uprising in 1944.

The resistance of the Warsaw ghetto to the overwhelming power of the German military and SS commandoes is the best known example of Jews fighting back against their oppressors, but it is far from the only one. The common idea of the Jews going “like sheep to their slaughter” is belied by Gilbert’s careful documentation of the resistance of individuals, families and communities throughout the war. The rapid mobilization of the German army into Poland and then further east after the June, 1941 declaration of war against the USSR meant that Jews in the quickly occupied areas had little time to flee. Close behind the troops came the Einsatzgruppen dedicated to collecting and eliminating all Jews within the newly dominated territories. In Germany and other countries like France and Holland the laws ridding Jews of various rights continued to tighten early in the war. When deportations began, despite fears and rumours about the intentions of the SS, most could not take in the idea that total annihilation was planned. Rounded up by armed troops, often during the night, terrified families would obey instructions to bring only one suitcase for their transportation. The myth sold to them was that they were to be “resettled” further east. Thus the SS managed to control large numbers of deportees with a minimum of revolt.

As the machinery for the destruction of the Jewish population gained traction, however, the reality of the true destinations of those rounded up or transported became clearer. Despite the overwhelming force and brutality with which people were detained and moved about, as well as the near impossibility of obtaining weapons, incidents of resistance and revolt began to mount. Aware, as were the inmates of the Warsaw ghetto that their revolt against the Gestapo would only lead to ultimate defeat and death, the preference of many fighters was to die with honour, to resist with all of their strength the power of their oppressors. Throughout the Atlas, Gilbert reports on hundreds of incidents of resistance across the whole of Europe, some spontaneous, some planned, some very small in scale and others much larger.

Gilbert recounts a spontaneous revolt by the 300 Jews being brought by train in April, 1943 from villages close to Vilna, Lithuania. They had been told that they were to be resettled in an existing ghetto in Kovno but when the train stopped at another site nearby, they realized as one that they were to be murdered. Gilbert quotes from the diary of a 15 year old boy in Vilna that at that point,“Like wild animals before dying, the people began in mortal despair to break the railroad cars; they broke the little windows reinforced by strong wire. Hundreds were shot to death while running away. The railroad over a great distance is covered with corpses.” Any survivors were later shot in nearby pits by German and Lithuanian SS men. Shortly afterward another train carrying 4,000 Jews arrived. Seeing the carnage at the station they too resisted using their fists, some knives, and a few revolvers. Most were shot down on the spot. A few dozen managed to escape to Vilna.

Some who had escaped initial capture or who had eluded their guards on transports or in ghettoes were able to find their way into forest areas where partisans were attempting to survive and even to fight against the insurgent Germans. Local partisans typically were men who co-operated to resist the incursions of the German armies against their motherlands. Their focus was sabotage. Some Jews who escaped to the forests joined local or Soviet groups operating behind German lines, working with them to thwart the army or the SS wherever possible. Many Jewish partisan groups on the other hand were accepting of whoever of their people joined them – men, women, children, and the elderly. Their primary goal was to help their people survive the war. In some cases local and Jewish partisan groups would loosely co-operate but in others the locals would turn against the Jews because of anti-Semitism or because they were seen as rivals in the relentless struggle for the means of simple survival.

Despite the examples of individual and group rebellion and resistance to the Nazis that Gilbert documents, the idea that the Jews as a collective went meekly to their deaths persists. It can only be believed and accepted if they are seen as essentially different from the rest of humanity, which clearly they are not. Why has this idea had so much traction over the decades since the war? In the next post I will look at the storm that erupted when Hannah Arendt reported on the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker magazine in 1963.

The Roma (Gypsies)

From the earliest days of gathering and killing the Jews of Europe and beyond, the SS and the Einsatzgruppen had another, smaller “racial” group in their sites. Gypsies, often hated nomads of Europe, were also targeted for extinction. Many hundreds died alongside Jews at Babi Yar. In Lithuania over a thousand were locked into a synagogue by the Gestapo and simply abandoned to starve to death. Others were shot at places where they were found or were collected at concentration camps for their eventual transportation. In December, 1942 a decree ordered all German Gypsies to be deported to Auschwitz. In March, 1943 those living in Holland were also transported east. There a separate holding area was arranged for their numbers. Depending on schedules of trains arriving with Jewish prisoners, the Gypsies would be mobilized in large numbers to receive “special treatment” in the gas chambers. Unlike many arriving by train who went directly to their deaths, the quartered Gypsies knew well what lay in store for them and suffered the agonies of the wait and its inevitable conclusion.

“A People Uncounted,” a documentary about the Roma, the “Gypsies” of Europe was shown recently at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. Two young Canadian men, director Aaron Yager and producer Marc Swenker, wanted to capture some of the experiences of the Roma people during the Holocaust. In the event meeting with and studying the plight of the Roma in eleven countries, they broadened their scope to include some of Roma history as well as their current political and economic conditions in Europe. These people, like the Jews, were marked out by Nazi ideology and hence policy, as a minority to be not only excluded from the “Aryan nation” but to be systematically murdered, eliminated altogether from the Aryan universe. Like the Jews the Roma experienced a true genocidal action against them during WWII, an estimated 500,000 dying during this period. Because their numbers were and are considerably smaller and because they had not succeeded the degree of integration into the larger European communities that Jews had in many countries preceding the war, their experiences though known, have not received world-wide attention, concern, and understanding.

Roma people migrated from northern India about 1,000 years ago, settling in relatively small numbers in most European countries. Because of their darker skins and non-Christian backgrounds, they were generally perceived as “Other” in their host countries. It is likely that in some locations centuries ago some integrated into local societies where their “differences” were not particularly threatening to the inhabitants. But many remained distinct and like the Jews they were variously tolerated and persecuted. Restrictions were imposed in many locales preventing them from owning land and from working in particular professions. Like the Jews, the limitations imposed upon them shaped the areas in which they could and did operate and solidified stereotypes about the kind of people that they were and are. Barred from the military and from professions, Jews in more urban settings developed particular skills in selling and in finance. As usury was forbidden to Christians in earlier ages, the lending of money offered the potential for wealth and thus power to some Jews. From these historical conditions developed many of the stereotypes of Jews which have currency even in today’s world.

Without land or stable jobs the Roma developed an itinerant style, moving from areas where there were few opportunities or considerable persecution, to places where they could find some tolerance or means of livelihood. One of the skills that they possessed and developed has traditionally been in the field of music. Because in so many places and eras their conditions have been desperate, however, some developed ways of taking or scamming what they needed to survive. Historically they have been seen and used as have Jews (also black people in the USA and to a certain extent in Canada as well) as a population upon which to vent frustrations and hatred, particularly during periods of economic or social strife. The vilification of Jews and Roma by the Nazis was consonant with much of European history. The historical hatreds and persecutions of these peoples led directly to the Holocaust and genocide.

In all of the places where the acts of killing took place an environment of intolerance toward Jews and Roma already was prevalent. Though the Nazis in some areas tried to mask their genocidal policies as simply “the deportation of certain groups to settlements further east,” locals “knew” in the sense of having at least an awareness that their often former neighbours and colleagues were being stripped of all civil rights and that they were being forcibly removed under deplorable conditions to at best questionable futures. This could only happen in places where historically these marked out and separated groups had always been considered “different” and in some ways “suspect,” not like “us.” In places where there were local and official resistances to Nazi policies, the situation of the Jews, for example, was markedly better. In other places the populous not only did not complain about the treatment of the Jews in their midst but rather turned a blind eye; in every country where the Holocaust took place there were people, even significant numbers of people who collaborated with the SS in the detention, transportation, and murder of Jews and of Roma.

The film incorporated several modalities. Old movies demonstrated stereotypical views of the Roma as dancers and singers leading a carefree, bohemian lifestyle, though with implications that they were also disreputable, dishonest, and sexually promiscuous. Professors, some Roma, gave overviews of the historical and social locations of these people. There were scenes of the housing facilities available for them in some of today’s modern European cities – usually at a far remove from their centres. A Roma man who recently moved with his family to Montreal described living in one of those units: each apartment had two bedrooms but was occupied by two families, often with parents and five or six children. The units had running water for brief periods twice a day. About 90% of the adults were unemployed. They simply were not employed by locals. “Skinhead”-type groups organized violent actions against them individually or sometimes in a co-ordinated fashion.

I enjoyed seeing the lovely faces of the Roma children as they scampered and played like kids everywhere. I was forcibly struck by the anguish of two former prisoners at Auschwitz who were interviewed on camera. A woman spoke of being taken with others from her labour camp to the gas chambers on two separate occasions toward the end of the war, but being reprieved because the SS had run out of the chemicals needed to kill them. The rest of her family was destroyed, however. She showed the camp registration number that had been tattooed onto her forearm. The number was preceded by a “Z” to indicate that she was of Roma parentage. On one occasion after the war her tattoo was observed by some people in a nearby town. Far from empathizing with her experience, they became angry and outraged, saying that all of the talk about concentration and death camps was a lie and that she and others had had themselves tattooed to create troubles. After having been through so much terror and suffering as well as losing her family to the Holocaust, she found this outright denial terribly disturbing.

A man told of his encounter with Dr Mengele at Auschwitz. Pictures were shown of several of the children upon whom Mengele had performed operations without anesthesia as part of his “experiments.” He had tried turning girls into boys and boys into girls. This man, as a child had been taken to Mengele’s lab, stripped and tied down tightly to a gurney. Mengele entered the room, put on a white jacket and yellow gloves. He approached the boy with a long, twisted piece of metal, rather like a corkscrew and proceeded to push this instrument into the boy’s groin. The boy felt as though it was going up into his body as far as his heart and would tear his heart out of his body. He saw Mengele’s face even as he was experiencing excruciating pain and knew that Mengele derived sexual pleasure from inflicting pain upon his subjects. In telling us of his suffering he was overcome with emotion as he momentarily relived the pain, the horror and the helplessness of his situation.

This film was a particularly affecting document of genocide, bringing the overall statistics of Nazi brutality into the concrete reality of the personal experience of a few people, people with whom the audience could easily identify.

Auschwitz

The most infamous of the death camps, Auschwitz, had been opened in the summer of 1940 for Polish intelligentsia. By 1942 it had been restructured. Its gas chambers and crematoria began to function that May. In the following year it was extended to include another extermination camp, Birkenau, and a slave labour camp, Monowitz. Deaths incurred at all three sites were usually registered under the name of Auschwitz. From 1942-5 over 2,000,000 Jews were put to death there, along with large numbers of gypsies, Poles, prisoners of war, and other so-called “undesirables.”

Despite the German focus on killing Jews in extermination camps during and after 1942, other means such as shooting civilians on the spot or rounding them up into larger groups for mass executions by machine gun continued unabated, especially in the east as the German army moved further and further into Soviet-held territories. In already controlled lands the starvation of ghettoized populations, and the murderous brutality inflicted upon labour camp inmates, accounted for many tens of thousands of deaths. But Hitler’s determination to eradicate all vestiges of European Jewry led to the development and extension of rail lines and cars for the sole purpose of transporting Jews to concentration camps, thus diverting immense resources from the war effort.

Martin Gilbert’s maps show in detail the origins and numbers of Jews deported from areas throughout Europe in each of the months of 1942. Early on most came from Poland and were directed to Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka. But as the facilities at Auschwitz were extended, they became the preferred termination point for trains originating in France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Croatia. Within all of the conquered areas efforts were escalated to further refine the capture of Jews, garnering information from government documents or from informants about those who had evaded early detection.

Reading through the pages that accompany Gilbert’s 316 maps is a harrowing experience that over and over again brings the true horror of the Holocaust into perspective. His detail breaks down the overall numbers into particular incidents, locales, and even individuals. In some cases Gilbert includes names and ages of, for example, some of the children as young as four deported to their deaths without parents to accompany them. He gives the birth places and names of people born in North Africa, Uzbekistan, Mexico, the United States and others who had migrated to Paris before the war in order to begin new lives, only to be swept up by the SS and transported to Auschwitz to their deaths. He includes many instances of resistance or revolt among groups or by individuals attempting to save themselves, as well as the outcomes of these attempts. Overriding all of this detail though, is the inexorable fact of the unremitting activity of the forces dedicated to the destruction of the Jews. The deportations throughout the whole of 1942 and the numbers murdered at the death camps or in large scale massacres show the determination and the deadly organization of the SS. Reporting to their masters in Berlin entailed an exactitude of numbers and dates of deportations and murders. It is from the records of the Germans themselves that Gilbert was in great part able to assemble such a detailed picture of their atrocities.

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1942 the gathering and deportation of Jews from western Europe to Auschwitz and from central and eastern Poland to Treblinka, Chelmno, and Sobibor continued apace. At Treblinka in the last two weeks of October, for example, over 80,000 Polish Jews were sent to the gas chambers. Further east Jews continued to be murdered in the streets or in large scale massacres in woods and quarries. In the town of Luboml in the Ukraine 10,000 were machine gunned on October 1. People living for some time in camps or ghettos which had been established as holding areas such as Sachsenhausen near Berlin, Buchenwald in central Germany, and Theresiendstadt close to Prague, were now taken by train to Auschwitz to be gassed. In October the SS also effected its first deportation of Jews from Norway, sending 209 men and boys over the age of 16 by steamer to Stettin, Germany and from there by train to Auschwitz. In November 531 women and children were taken by the same route.

In my next post I will write about another specific "racial" group marked out by the SS for eradication: the Gypsies.

The Final Solution

The Wannsee Conference proposed an alternative method to exterminate the Jews in part because of the moral and psychological toll these atrocities were taking on some of the men perpetrating them. Many had begun to drink heavily and some had had breakdowns because of the internal stress that the outright murder of civilians caused. Over 1941 more and more men were sent to Berlin for sick leave as they succumbed to the pressures of recurrent nightmares, for example, of thousands of persons being gunned down and buried in mass graves. At first Himmler condemned these men for “succumbing to weakness” but as incidents of their disturbance grew, it became clear that another methodology was needed. The gassing of large groups had been considered and experimented with for some time. Used even before the outbreak of war at the “euthanasia institute” at Bernberg, a city south of Berlin, its purpose was to rid the area of mentally or physically infirm Germans considered pollutants of the desired Aryan “race.” Groups of people forced into lorries were driven about while the trucks’ exhaust fumes, fed into the body of the vehicles, would suffocate the passengers. Their deaths would be an agonizing scramble as in their panic they struggled with one another for any breath of air.

Between the April, 1941 German occupation of Belgrade and August, 1941 this method of killing was copied. Following the deportation of 15,000 Jews to a concentration camp at Zemun, the deportees had been systematically killed in mobile gas units -- trucks falsely labelled Red Cross vans. A report was sent to Berlin that the “Jewish problem” was totally solved: 20,000 of Serbia’s 23,000 Jews had by that time been murdered. Interest grew over the year in this method of killing Jews and some experiments were taken to judge its merit. In November a group of 1200 inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp were transported to Bernberg to be gassed.

Two weeks later another mass gassing at Chelmno, a town west of Warsaw claimed close to 4500 lives. Jewish villagers in the area were rounded up and taken by train to a station near Chelmno. Here they were locked overnight in an abandoned mill without food or water. The next morning they were loaded into one of five lorries which had a total capacity of about 650 people. Exhaust fumes killed them as they were driven to woods nearby. There the bodies were thrown into deep pits while the lorries returned to the station area to gather more victims. Gilbert mentions that Adolf Eichmann, in charge of transportation to the death camps from this period into 1945, was present at Chelmno to witness the effectiveness of the gassing method. He and other Nazi leaders were experimenting with the idea of using large scale gassing camps as a way of eradicating Jews, an efficient method which also limited the moral and psychological damage being inflicted on their personnel. At these death camps it was planned that some Jewish prisoners would be used to carry out the preparation of the new arrivals for the gas chambers as well as the disposal of corpses. At a later date they themselves would join the ranks of victims. At Wannsee these decisions were presented and plans were formed for the most systematic methods of their achievement.

Much thought had already gone into the presentation given there. Numbers had been tabulated showing the estimated populations of Jews in countries already controlled by the Germans as well as ones for countries that Hitler planned to take over. These people were the targets of what now was called “The Final Solution” of the Jewish question, a solution which entailed slave labour for able-bodied Jews and mass deportation to extermination camps for all others. The numbers given were:

1)Under German control: Occupied France: 165,000; Vichy France (and French North Africa): 700,000; Belgium: 43,000; Holland: 160,800; Norway: 1,300; Denmark: 5,600; Germany: 131,800; Bohemia and Moravia: 74,200; Austria: 43,700; Italy: 58,000; Slovakia: 88,000; Hungary: 742,800; General Government (an area of conquered Poland): 2,284,000; the Bialystok District: 400,000; the Eastern Territories of Poland: 420,000; Latvia: 3,500; Lithuania: 34,000; Byelorussia: 446,484; Ukraine: 2,994,684; Rumania: 342,000; Croatia: 40,000; Serbia: 10,000; Bulgaria: 48,000; Albania: 200; and, Greece: 69,600.

2)Under envisioned future German control: Great Britain: 330,000; Ireland: 4,000; Portugal: 3,000; Spain: 6,000; Switzerland: 18,000; Sweden: 8,000; Finland: 2,300; and, European Turkey: 55,000.

Before the Wannsee Conference deportations from smaller towns and rural villages had been aimed at gathering all Jews into large-scale ghettos. In these thousands died from starvation, brutality, and illnesses brought on by overcrowding in poorly heated and ventilated, generally unhygienic conditions. Ghettos already established were maintained for some time while other groups of Jews were rounded up and transported by trains to three new extermination camps already being prepared by March, 1941. The slave labourers used to build the facilities were among the first to be sacrificed to its purpose. The new camps were at Belzec in south eastern Poland, Sobibor, further north, and at Treblinka, about forty miles north and east of Warsaw. With these camps in operation hundreds of thousands of Jews from Poland, Germany, and western and southern Europe were marshalled for deportation eastward by train. Deportees were told that they were being taken to places for resettlement. Most were taken directly to the camps to be murdered on arrival.

In the next blog I will write about the development of Auschwitz as a central hub of the Holocaust. We will visit there as well as Birkenau, its nearby slave labour camp, during our visit to Cracow.

The Atlas of the Holocaust

I have been doing a close reading of Martin Gilbert’s 1982 Atlas of the Holocaust. Gilbert’s seven years of research resulted in this breakdown of the over-all figures usually reported of casualties of the Holocaust in a manner that more powerfully brings home its horror. Along with hundreds of maps his text outlines the progress of the Nazi offensive against the Jews from the early sporadic killings, to mass executions, the systematic expulsion of populations from their homelands, the development of ghettos in central cities with the starvation of those held within, the creation of labour and death camps filled by means of mass deportations, and the death marches and executions that continued even as the Allies were invading Germany. When statistics are reduced to smaller units one can more easily envision the impact of this juggernaut of aggression on individuals, families, and communities. For example, a map of the Banat area of Yugoslavia shows the distribution of about 3000 Jews scattered in small towns and rural areas, prior to the German invasion in April, 1941. By August all had been expelled from their homes and forcibly taken to a camp called Tasmajdan, close to Belgrade. On the banks of the Danube they were shot in a series of daily executions. By the end of August the SS commander in charge, proclaimed Banat “Judenrein -- purged of Jews.” Gilbert comments that in this fashion, “the life, the culture and the achievements of more than thirty communities had been destroyed for all time.”

The infamous Wannsee conference held in January, 1942 to plan and organize the mass execution of Jews and other “undesirables” through the establishment of death camps, is often viewed as a definitive moment in the progression from sporadic killings and the herding of people into ghettos to an outright determination to eliminate these populations entirely. That determination had, however, been made much earlier. Even before the invasion of Poland Hitler had declared that a European war would result in the extermination of the Jewish race. Many read his announcement as simply one threat among many, designed to warn the Allies off an armed response to further planned aggression. But he was absolutely in earnest. Wannsee merely co-ordinated and focussed the means to this end.

In preparation for the German advance eastward into the USSR in June, 1941, Heydrich and Himmler, following the orders of Hitler, had instituted four killing squads of up to 1,000 men each, drawn from the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, and later, local police and volunteers. Known as Einsatzgruppen A, B, C, and D, each followed the progress of the army on the long front of the German penetration into the USSR, fanning out from north to south, each responsible for the annihilation of Jews in the area they covered. Entering villages these commando groups would kill any known communists or partisans before entering the Jewish quarters. There they would burn the houses and shoot all of the inhabitants: men, women, and children. In larger settlements the Jewish population would be rounded up and taken to a clearing where some would be forced to dig deep trenches. Then the entire group in shifts would be pushed into the trenches, eventually on top of others already killed or dying, where they also would be slaughtered with machine guns and pistols. Careful records were kept and sent to Berlin of the numbers thus massacred. One sent from Einsatzkommando 3 in December, 1941 lists 99,804 civilians murdered. In the Vilna, Lithuanian area a German lieutenant recorded the precise numbers murdered each day, his report subdivided into the numbers of men, women, and children.

The massacre at Babi Yar, a ravine in the suburbs of Kiev is relatively well known because of its centrality in the novel The White Hotel by DM Thomas. I remember well the shock with which I read decades ago the passages in his novel describing this event. Though I had by then some knowledge of the Nazis, my first impulse was to believe the brutal facts recounted to be fictional. But they were not. On the 29th and 30th of September, 1941 in Kiev 33,771 Jews and some gypsies were rounded up and forcibly driven to Babi Yar. Here they were made to undress and to wait in large groups for their turn to be annihilated by machine guns. The atrocities committed there are but a piece of those enacted throughout all of the eastern areas overrun by the Germans in 1941. During this period similar massacres killed 48,000 Jews in Odessa, 15,000 in Dnepropetrovsk, 28,000 in Vinnitsa, as well as hundreds of thousands in other small and large settlements behind the lines of the German advance during that year.

Anti-Semitism was especially virulent in communities east of Germany where over the centuries Jews had been variously tolerated, ghettoized, expelled, and/or randomly murdered in spontaneous or politically organized pogroms. As the German army and their killing squads moved east, they were assisted by local police, militia, and civilians in rounding up and murdering Jews whose communities had dwelled with them for centuries. At Babi Yar, for example, the SS squads were assisted by Ukrainian militiamen. In Lithuania the SS had to stop the killing of Jews by local peasantry in order to bring greater systemization to the process. In Rumania an already well formed fascist community co-operated openly with the Germans as did many in Estonia, Latvia, Serbia, and Bosnia, for example.

In my next post I will look at the “more efficient” method of killing of Jews and others put in place after 1941.

A Return to Germany

The journey that I am making is by no means comprehensive in the sense of visiting the entire terrain of the Holocaust or of the reign of the Nazis. My time and means absolutely preclude such a trip. Rather I am venturing into a small circle of places from which the murder of Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, black people, the disabled, and other “undesirables,” as well as the subjugation of the native populations east of Germany to the level of slave labourers, were planned and facilitated. Central to this organization was Berlin. Over the past several years I have read and enjoyed a number of novels in which Berlin figures because of its centrality during the “Cold War” between the West and the USSR that dominated global relations following WWII. In April 1945 Berlin was overrun by the Soviet army; Hitler committed suicide in his bunker; and, Germany surrendered. According to an agreement made among the Allies prior to these events, Berlin was divided into four spheres of control: Soviet, American, British, and French. The country itself quickly settled into two separate entities becoming what we then called East and West Germany. As Berlin is situated in the eastern part of the country it fell within the Soviet-held region of Eastern Germany despite its division among the powers. It was an island, an anomaly in otherwise clearly delineated political spheres. Over the next four and a half decades which preceded the collapse of the USSR and the destruction of the infamous Berlin Wall, relations among the controlling powers shifted, forming in the city itself a kind of microcosm of global political dynamics.

The four spheres of control became two: Soviet-held East Berlin and an amalgamated West Berlin, held and protected especially by the post-WWII powerhouse, the USA. Reading in these stories about the mechanics and cultures of spying and the ideologies of the major “Cold War” antagonists, I found myself drawn into an interest in Berlin itself. In time this became a desire to visit and explore its present and past, an inclination that greatly surprised me due to my earlier sense of revulsion from all things German. I had been in Germany only once before, in 1988, while on a bus tour of Western Europe with my then 11 year old daughter, Elizabeth. It was a brief and entirely tourist-type of visit. I believe that we were only there for one night, staying at an inn near Heidelberg, visiting the cathedral in Cologne, and having a two hour boat ride on the Rhine. I found just being in the country difficult – not something that I had considered when arranging for our travel. I was constantly aware despite the prosperity and the loveliness of the scenery especially along the Rhine, that I was visiting places where terrible, almost unimaginable atrocities had occurred just decades earlier. I felt oppressed by this awareness and was unable to enjoy any aspect of the country. Since, when considering places to travel and explore, I have never envisioned going to Germany again.

Germans themselves, primarily West Germans prior to the re-unification of the country, have had to gradually acknowledge and come to terms with their own history in the 20th century. This is an on-going process that was facilitated by the entry of their country into the political hub of the USA in post war Western Europe and by the passage of time. Traumatized by the carnage inflicted on their own homeland and by the failure of the promised millennium, most wanted to simply put the near past behind them and work toward a restoration of “normality” in domestic and political spheres. There was wide spread denial of the reality of the mass murders conducted by German troops, in particular by the SS and their special killing squads. A friend who as a child and adolescent lived in Germany until 1953 says that the subject of Jews during that period was taboo in polite society and in his school. At home his mother would rail against the Jews and the Russians as the causes of her problems. Over time, however, questions that refused to go away, brought forward by German and international critics of the period as well as by their own children, forced many toward a deepening acknowledgement of the broad range of complicities with the Nazi regime. Under their Soviet-controlled government Eastern Germans were allowed a different view of the events of the war period. According to this version there were “bad people,” the fascists, the Nazis, who perpetrated all of the evils of the war and of the Holocaust. The German people as a whole knew nothing of these things and were basically blameless. Establishing relations with their new “partners,” i.e., subject states, required a condemnation of the Nazi perpetrators but an acceptance of the people themselves. This reading allowed a level of complacence in Germans in the east with respect to their past that continued to the re-unification.

A text central to my preparation for my journey was Martin Gilbert's Atlas of the Holocaust. In the next several posts I will write of his research and findings.

Looking at Evil

When I came upon the literature of the Holocaust and of the deliberate eradication of other groups deemed “unworthy” of existing in the desired “racially pure” Third Reich, I discovered a terrain within which over decades I could explore questions of morality, philosophy, and religion, in other words, of the nature of humanity, both historically and personally. I had a deeply felt need to understand myself and my own history. Over time I have come to realize that my experience is but one tiny event in the vast history of trials that humans have borne and have inflicted upon one another from the very beginnings of what we call our evolved humanity. Whether we bracket categories of familial abuse, racial, class, or gender persecutions and discriminations, slavery, war, or genocide, ultimately all come down to the same reality: humans are capable of inflicting harm upon one another, harm that reverberates from generation to generation within the individuals who both suffer it and inflict it upon others. We are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Our experiences and importantly, the experiences of our forefathers and mothers, shape our manner of dealing with life and with others in ways that we don’t necessarily understand.

Much has been written about ways that we differ from (and are superior to) other animals. More interesting to me are the myriad ways that we resemble our cousin creatures. Looking into the lives and cultures of other mammals, we can see mirrored many of our own basic propensities. Like them we love and nurture our young, band in kinship groups for company and protection, and devise hierarchies of power in our communities. We fight, at times even to the death, to protect ourselves and our loved ones from aggression. Our battles are also fought to protect territories, sexual connections, and resources such as food and water that are necessary for survival. We develop strategies (technologies) to exploit and harvest whatever is perceived to be for the good of our own groupings, without particular regard to the costs accrued to those (in our present day, basically all other animal forms) subjected to our domination. Groups other than our own can represent a threat that must be beaten back least they overwhelm and destroy what is deemed vital among us. Viewed as “the Other,” our multi-faceted attacks upon them are justified by ideology, race/ethnicity, or religion.

Historian Niall Ferguson identifies WWII as the focus of what he calls “The War of the World,” a conflict that raged with unprecedented violence in various periods and locations throughout the 20th century. The "hot" wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 gave way to the "cold" war, which though truncated in 1989 as the USSR lost its power to dominate Eastern Europe, continues its impact in the lives of those it has damaged. He argues that the rapid development of military technology and extreme ideologies can explain the incendiary quality of this period only when viewed within a context of economic volatility (ex, the great depression of the 1930s), of ethnic disintegration as populations shifted, intermingled, and rivalled one another for control, and, of the end of the empires that had for centuries maintained a relatively peaceful co-existence of the religious and ethnic groups within their borders.

The crimes against humanity acknowledged to have been committed during WWII and the prisoners brought to book afterward represent but the merest fraction of the actual carnage inflicted. To the victors the glory and to the defeated the blame. I say this not to imply any lack of culpability on the part of the Nazis (or of non-German nationals who assisted them in their atrocities), but to underscore the insufficiently acknowledged criminality (in this broad sense of crimes committed against innocents) of the Allied forces in their deliberate bombing of civilian populations in the “war effort.” Justifications are easy to come across in the literature describing these events but at bottom they are simply a mirror image of the kinds of dehumanizing and consequent destruction of others that the Allied forces considered themselves to be assailing.


There are times that I feel quite overwhelmed by the material that I am studying and by pieces I read in the paper about the on-going fall-out from the events of the 20th century. Mostly though, I am not in touch with that sense of horror and pain. If I were I would not be able to function as I do, going about my various lives as a city dweller, a psychotherapist, a mother and grandmother, a traveler, a reader and a writer. In my work as a therapist and even in meeting and talking with friends or random acquaintances, I am over and over again made aware how all of us are in some fashion the bearers of the residues of all that has gone before us. Each of us comes from a particular historical background – in the sense of her ethnicity, the lives and experiences of her parents, grandparents, and their ancestors, and the ways that she herself has interacted with these. Often it is difficult for us to clearly see the myriad ways that these residues have impacted upon us, influencing us in our understanding of our world and in our choices.

Because of my interest in history that began in my early teens, I have always wanted to know more about each individual’s antecedents, trying to link and to understand her within the context from which she has emerged. My good friend, a talented writer and story-teller must limit the boundaries of safety within which she can dwell, as she carries in her nervous system the terror of bombs falling nightly on the city of her birth scant months earlier. A grandson of Holocaust survivors continues to deal with his parents’ adaptations to their parents’ experiences. A man raised in Bangladesh but transported to Canada in his late teens experiences problems in his complex relationships with his Hindu parents. We cannot be understood or understand ourselves in a strictly intra-psychic or even intra-familial fashion as if we have come into the world and developed in it a-historically.

Before visiting these places in Eastern Europe, I wanted to lay out for myself some sense of their locations in the drama that unfolded between 1938 and 1945. In future posts I will explore this past.

The Journey

On September 12, 2013  I embarked upon a three week visit to Eastern Europe, travelling to Berlin, Warsaw, Cracow, Auschwitz/Birkenau, Vienna, Prague, Dresden, and back to Berlin. Like any travelling experience it occured in different dimensions all at the same time. But for me the deepest, at once the most interesting and the most chilling is the awareness that I have of these places as centres of difficult-to-fathom evils perpetrated in the 20th century. This journey is a kind of pilgrimage, a visitation to sites where terrible crimes have been committed against innocents.

I came into an awareness of the Holocaust gradually. I don’t remember any particular knowledge of these events percolating through history lessons or readings when I was young. There was a general sense for someone like myself, born during and growing up after the Second World War that the Germans were “bad” people and that they had been our enemy. Little else. Certainly I remember nothing of a sense of horror about crimes committed against the Jewish populations in Europe. I attribute this at least in part to an incipient, not particularly overt, anti-Semitic bias that reigned in my childhood. Only as a young adult did I realize attitudes of this kind in comments or jokes made casually by my parents and others.

In 1970-71 I returned to university to take a fourth year of history, preparatory to seeking a teaching position. One of my courses was on modern European history. It laid before me some of the bare facts of the persecution of Jewish people across Europe, a movement consistent with centuries of profound anti-Semitism within Christian societies intolerant of difference. In unstable post-WWI Germany Hitler was able to galvanize the hatred underlying various kinds of discrimination and the periodic aggression toward Jews as a unifying energy, pointing his followers to a new millennium of glory within a romantically envisioned Aryan nation. The glory of this desired “pure” nation stood in stark contrast to the dehumanization marketed of Jews who had lived for centuries among Europeans. Hitler’s theme was embraced to various degrees by the German populous – some whole-heartedly, some passively out of indifference or fear of the serious repercussions of resistance. Ultimately the inner logic of the complete degradation of a group of people characterized as “vermin” led to a determination and a plan to eradicate them entirely.

Since taking this course, I have been a quite consistent reader of materials related to 20th century European history with a special focus on the totalitarian regimes in Germany, Russia/the USSR, and China, as well as the earlier and on-going dramas of slavery and colonialism throughout the world. My interest has been deeply personal, not because of family connections, but because of a sense that I have had from the beginning of my immersion in these periods: if I myself had lived within that arena and era, how would I have reacted to these events, where would I have stood and what would I have done? Facing the horrors described in these readings gave me a tablet upon which I could confront the nature of evil itself – not as something objective and separate from myself, but rather as an interior journey, a way of acknowledging my own capacity for doing harm to others as well as my fear of having to act in a manner which demands courage in the face of terrible consequences. I was not aware at first that this personal identification was at the core of my interest. It took many years before I could reflect upon and understand the importance of this focus in my own life.

It is most likely that my sensitivity to these issues stems from abuse that I suffered as a child and the consequent disillusionment that resulted. Abuse can rob a young person of her childhood – not necessarily on a physical or intellectual level – more on a barely realized, and certainly not articulated, level of the emotional and even moral life. From a space of relative innocence one experiences that bad things can happen and that safety is only relative. People who had been assumed friendly or at least neutral could potentially be abusive. Now they must be watched and guarded against. Within, one experiences the shame of the abuse itself and the consequent self-punishment and anger, sometimes turned against oneself but at other times toward others, even toward others in no sense responsible for one’s pain. Thus one can enter into a cycle of abuse, the potential for inflicting injury upon another, the cycle of evil.

On my journey I wanted to visit and to reflect upon this terrain, both on the ground and within myself. I continued to post on this blog before, during, and after my trip. I encouraged readers to leave comments or questions for me throughout this process.