The widespread religious life of the Jews under German domination which we are describing in these pages has been the most neglected subject of the entire Holocaust literature. Eugen Kogan, in his The Theory and Practice of Hell, laments the absence of religious observance in the camps and comments that the blessings of the “merest rudiments of spiritual care” were limited to an “infinitesimally small circle of men who were unusually courageous and already endowed with strength of character.” He found such religious consciousness only among the Dutch and the French at Buchenwald, and only during the final period of the war when “an underground ministry” became possible. He also knows of some Catholic priests and Protestant pastors who were engaged in pastoral activity at Dachau. Of Jews, and of authentic Jewish behavior, he knows nothing. He never heard, for instance, of the Tahara Bretter, “the Boards of Purity” of the fourth tier of the bunks at Buchenwald. Nor did he hear the voice of Torah as Jews there studied the talmudic tractate of Megillah in preparation of the festival of Purim, which they celebrated with the reading of a Scroll of Esther written on scraps of paper. And so Kogan concludes: “By and large religious work in the camps was without practical significance.”1Op. cit., p. 243.
Of course, Jews did not engage in any kind of “pastoral activity,” nor did they do any kind of “religious work.” They were simply endeavoring to live as Jews. For a gentile it may be difficult to understand this since Judaism is not really a religion in the generally understood meaning of the term, but rather a communal way of life lived in the presence of God. Still Kogan should have been more careful with his generalization. For at least in one passage of his work he shows an understanding awareness for “a heightened religious faith” that developed in camp conditions. He writes:
“Provided a man had any trace of moral sense and true religious devotion, these qualities at the very core of personality, were, if anything, promoted by the powerful appeal emanating from the humanity and inhumanity of the concentration camp. In keeping with camp conditions, their presence and their effect could be but rarely manifested in the open, especially since the outwardly predominant groups in the camps acted at best on political, never on religious manifestations and applied the highest standards of ethical conscience only in exceptional circumstances. Thus there are likely to be plenty of old-time concentrationaries who will deny that religion and moral sense played any considerable part.”
If this was true of Christians, how much more so was it the case for Jews! Camp conditions did not allow that religious practices be publicized. It would appear from Kogan’s statement that Christians had to be circumspect about their religious devotion, especially under the pressure of the dominant secular political groups. It is unlikely that those Jews whose stories we related in the previous chapters paid any attention to any such pressure. They had to practice Judaism under the strictest secrecy, because nothing infuriated the Germans and their Polish or Ukrainian lackeys more than a Jew who dared observe Judaism, defying the laws that proscribed any such observance under the threat of inhuman punishments. Kogan concludes by stating:
“But just as the ordinary prisoner remained in ignorance of the true situation in camp, so few if any camp functionaries knew anything about the inner life of the thousands under them.”
It seems that not only the camp functionaries, but Kogan himself knew nothing about the “inner life” of thousands of Jews in the camps.
How widespread was what we have called the authentic Jewish attitude? The material that we are able to present is but a small part of the available documents and eyewitness accounts, yet it speaks of many thousands of Jews who were involved in “underground” Jewish observances. Undoubtedly, those whose stories we know represent many thousands of others. Most of the Jews in those stories were nothing exceptional. In the shtetlech of Poland, Hungary and Lithuania there were tens of thousands of Pinche Steiers. Not even Shlomo Zlichovsky was an exceptional Jew. Or the “girl from Hungary”; she was not essentially different from numerous others like her. We know of entire communities, Jews in their thousands, who faced the ultimate on earth singing Ani Ma’amin, “I believe.” Beside the tales of unparalleled misery and humiliation, there is also a saga of unequalled mightiness of the spirit. Where man was most depraved and degraded, there he also reached his highest exaltation and dignity.
Peter Schindler quotes one of those invited to participate in writing the memorial volume on the Jewish community of Lemberg, the Book of Lvov. Among the thirty participants he was the only religious Jew and in the course of the discussion as to the nature and contents of the volume he soon realized that the book would completely falsify the character of one of the great historic Jewish communities, presenting it “as a secular-nationalistic, proletarian and socialist city, void of its most important source — that of authentic traditional Judaism.” Schindler adds the concluding comment of his witness: “I have seen this time and again in the hundreds of memorial volumes … [that they] ignore the truth that the great majority of Jews in the destroyed communities were believing Jews.”2Peter Schindler, Responses of Hassidic Leaders and Hassidism during the Holocaust in Europe, 1939-1945, and a Correlation between such Responses and Selected Concepts of Hassidic Thought (Ph. D. Dissertation, School of Education, New York University, 1972), p. 14.
Something of the spirit of believing Jews is conveyed in a report of the Jewish Historical Committee in Poland from 1947, published on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto. It reads as follows:
“The religious youth, concentrated in groups of the ‘Gerer Ḥasidim,’ distinguished itself in the ghetto with a unique zeal. Hiding in cellars and attics, in all kinds of secret places in the overcrowded houses, these young people devoted themselves to the study of the Torah with radical disregard of the tragic reality. Giving no thought to persecution and dangers of death, occupying themselves with divine truth, with their faith afire, they stood in the midst of the tearing Nazi beasts that surrounded them. They lived in communes, mutually aiding each other; at the same time ready to any sacrifice in their willingness to help others. Out of deep understanding that their blood-sacrifice was not in vain, they faced death with strength and steadfastness …”3Prager, I. p. 85.
This was in the ghetto of Cracow. But Cracow was like many other great historic Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, in no way unique in Jewish living and Jewish history. Of course, not all of those involved were ḥasidim, but hundreds of thousands were. Not all were young, but the young ones were the children of their fathers in spirit as well as in blood. Again, the ghetto was not the death camp. That is, however, no reason to overlook the fact that even in the ghettos conditions were intolerably inhuman. And while the opportunities for an “underground Judaism” were much more limited in the camps, the attitude of the authentic Jew in the ghetto was continued in the concentration camps as well. Conditions in the camps were much more dangerous; many more perished. If hardly a memory is left of so many Jews of the spirit, it is due, to a large extent, to the fact that the aim of the authentic Jew was not survival at any cost.
It is doubtful whether anyone has written with more self-assumed authority and with less understanding of and sympathy for the millions of Eastern European Jews than Bruno Bettelheim. According to Bettelheim, “the non-political middle class prisoners” were among the first to disintegrate as “autonomous persons.”4Quoted by Terrence Des Pres in The Survivor, p. 122. Nothing illustrates more strikingly than this generalization Bettelheim’s complete ignorance about the behavior of the believing Jews, especially if they came from Eastern Europe. These Jews were all “non-political middle-class prisoners.” It is fair to say that many of them did not disintegrate as autonomous persons and that others were among the last to lose their personal autonomy. Perhaps the significance of the authentic Jewish ghetto and camp behavior may be appreciated only if one compares it with what the psychologists have described as “human behavior” in the concentration camps.
The first commandment for a prisoner to observe upon entering the camp was adaptation; he had to adjust to the radically new conditions of his existence. But adaptation meant, first of all, lowering one’s spiritual standards, disregarding one’s sense of values. Ella Lingens-Reiner puts it this way: “We camp prisoners had only one yardstick: whatever helped our survival was good, whatever threatened our survival was bad and to be avoided.”5Ella Lingens-Reiner, Prisoners of Fear, London 1948. To some of the more conscientious people this was, of course, only a temporary surrender of values. Bettelheim sums up the prisoner’s feelings in these words: “What I am doing here or what is happening to me does not count at all; here everything is permissible as long and insofar as it contributes to my survival.” Ultimately, however, adaptation led to a change of personality to the extent that one even accepted the “Gestapo values.” According to Bettelheim, this was true for practically all old-timers, especially in their attitude to so-called unfit prisoners.6“Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1943, p. 38. Kogan, too, speaks of this change of mental outlook, which in essence was a regression to a more primitive state. It was necessary, he explains, for the mind to develop a “protective crust,” to acquire a certain lack of sensitivity. Torn from “the anchorages of the outside world and thrust into life-and-death turmoil,” the mind needed a long period of adjustment before it could find a “new inward center of gravity.”7The Theory and Practice of Hell, p. 276. Kogan does not describe sufficiently well the nature of this “new inward center of gravity.” It might well be possible to maintain that both the Kapo and the formerly respectable businessman, now reduced to scavenging in garbage dumps for food, each in his own way acquired a new inward center of gravity along the lines of the camp philosophy of Lingens-Reiner: anything is right that helps my survival.
Now while it is true to say that the authentic Jew also tried to adjust himself to the physical conditions of the ghettos and the death camps, the raison d’être of his entire existence became his heroic refusal to adopt the standards and values of the Holocaust world into which he had been thrown. What was right before remained right and what was wrong remained wrong even after the dark age of the ghettos and the camps descended on him. The overall desire for survival did not change his mental outlook nor his personality. He had no need to find a “new inward center of gravity.” The reason for all this has its source in the very nature of the authentic Jew. His inner center of gravity is not anchored in the outside world. His roots are within himself, in a dimension of being that is not subject to the sway of the uncertain destiny of an outside reality.
This autonomous inward center of gravity spared many authentic Jews some of the serious problems with which others, especially assimilated Jews, had to contend. One of these was a radical loss of self-respect which played havoc with the prisoner in a two-fold sense: in relation to his former social status and to his own sense of personal worth. From the very outset of his existence in the concentration camp, the prisoner was subjected to a cruel process of planned humiliation and degradation. In the words of Kogan, “naked they were driven through the unbridgeable abyss that separated the two worlds, ‘outside’ and ‘inside.’” After this and other similarly crushing humiliations, nothing could be more fatal to a person than to cling to the memories of his former social status and standards. “The whalebone of social stays was irretrievably bent and battered the very first day.”8Ibid., p. 275. Social stays are, of course, not unimportant. But to the authentic Jew they are of minor significance. Ultimately, what really matters is what kind of a Jew one is; that alone is the source of one’s self-respect. Elie A. Cohen tells about a Jewish colleague who could not get over the fact “that he as a physician was forced to burn the contents of garbage cans.”9Op. cit., p. 74. His inability to liberate himself from his past hastened his death. The case illustrates the spiritual tragedy of the assimilated Jew. His self-respect derived from his social position in the “outside” world. When that world expelled him from its midst, he had little left on which to fall back.
It seems that Bruno Bettelheim was more fortunate in this respect than that physician. Defining what he calls private behavior in the concentration camp, he cites his own case as an example. In order to occupy himself in some meaningful manner, he collected material about camp behavior. He did this, as he says, in order “to protect the individual against the disintegration of his personality.” He then continues to explain that “as time went on the enhancement of my self-respect due to my ability to continue to do meaningful work, despite the contrary efforts of the Gestapo, became even more important than the pastime.”10Op. cit. Of course, Bettelheim was relatively fortunate in being brought to Buchenwald and Dachau in 1938–39, i.e. before the outbreak of the war and before the beginning of the implementation of the Final Solution. Conditions at Buchenwald and Dachau in those days are not to be compared with what came afterwards, when the camps became slaughter houses, working to an efficient, planned schedule. So having been able to start his scientific work in camp as a pastime, Bettelheim enjoyed the welcome side effect of having it enhance his self-respect vis-à-vis the Gestapo.
One cannot help wondering how Bettelheim would have found enhancement for his self-respect had he been in the position of that poor physician and, instead of collecting scientific data, had been forced to pass his time, day in and day out, burning the contents of garbage cans to the exhaustion of his strength. The renowned psychiatrist Victor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor who has earned our gratitude for his insights and our admiration for his humanity, tells about the personally shattering experience of the loss of a manuscript which he had succeeded in smuggling into the camp. When another inmate responded to his tale of woe with the word “Shit!”, Frankl realized the nature of the radical change in his situation and, as he says, at that moment “I struck out my whole former life.”11Op. cit., p. 12. For Frankl this was vital, if he wished to survive. There were, of course, others — not too many — who had the strength of character to do the same. Cohen himself reports that he did not feel that his task as “lavatory inspector,” which was added to his responsibility as “room physician,” was disgracing him.12Op. cit., p. 150. He understood that this was the only way for him to survive.
But could these strong-minded individuals really succeed in striking out their “whole former life” completely? Once again let our witness be Frankl. On one occasion, he got into a furious altercation with a Kapo, who spoke to him disparagingly about his profession. Frankl, in a cooler moment, saw, of course, that the incident was trivial, but he tells the story in order to show what can happen even to a “hardened prisoner” because of an insult. He explains himself by saying that the blood rushed to his head because he had to listen to a judgment on his life by a man who had so little idea of it, a man “who looked so vulgar and brutal that the nurse in the out-patient ward in my hospital would not even have admitted him to the waiting room.”13Op. cit., p. 24. Contending with this brutal attack on his self-respect, Frankl discovered that he had evidently not struck out his past at the beginning of his life in the camps as he thought he had, but was still under its spell. Elie Cohen, on the other hand, was able to accept his function as a “lavatory inspector” with a measure of equanimity, since this was in addition to his position as a “room physician.” The attack on his self-respect was limited; he was still able to serve in his profession as a doctor as he had always done.
However, much more serious than the destruction of one’s self-respect on the social level was the imposed sense of inferiority as the result of the loss of human status. Terrence Des Pres, in his study The Survivor, makes the point that everything in the camp conspired to reduce the prisoners “to where they were and what they were — living bodies in a place of death…14P. 188. Frankl describes the same experience in more penetrating language:
“Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the values of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated — under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value: he thought of himself as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life.”15Op. cit., p. 49.
Frankl was struggling heroically against this destruction of the dignity of personal worth, not only for himself but also on behalf of many of his fellow prisoners. One gains a heartrending insight into the nature of this struggle against dehumanization when Frankl writes about the mental agony, caused by an insult to his humanity, which hurt him more than physical pain. It appears that on one occasion Frankl was slow at his slave labor; perhaps he was loafing a bit. The guard, quite playfully, picked up a stone and threw it at him as a reminder to work harder. “That, to me,” says Frankl, “seemed the way to attract the attention of a beast, to call a domestic animal back to its job, a creature with which you have so little in common that you do not even punish it.”16Ibid., p. 22.
One of the striking aspects of the authentic Jewish ghetto and camp behavior is the fact that it is completely free of this struggle for the maintenance of one’s self-respect. Since, as we have seen, the self-respect of the Jew derives not from his social status or from his profession, but exclusively from his being a Jew, no kind of work imposed upon him by the Germans could humiliate him. Bettelheim’s summation of the prisoner’s feelings, which we quoted above, would have to be varied for the authentic Jew somewhat like this: “What I am doing here does count; indeed, it is of supreme importance. That I have to burn the contents of garbage cans, that does not matter. That is not my doing; that is done to me. My doing is being a Jew under all conditions and circumstances. That alone is what I am doing.” When young ḥasidic Jews in the ghettos refused to go to work or did everything in their power to escape from the transports to labor camps, they did so not because the work they would have been forced to do would have been degrading, but as one of their leaders, Yankel Gefen, put it: “I was not created to serve the Germans; I am to serve God. That is my only business.”17Prager, I, p. 11. Nothing that the Germans did to the authentic Jew hurt his self-respect. On the contrary, it only increased his own sense of personal value, for it proved to him the ultimate degradation of his enemies. It was all summed up in an exclamation of the immortal poet of the ghetto, Yizhak Katzenelson: “Oh, my God! How could You have created such filth in Your world!”18Pinkas Vital, p. 217. That is how these Jews saw the Germans. Far from inducing in them any sense of inferiority, the Holocaust kingdom revealed to them the polluted soul of a Nazified humanity. It filled them with radical contempt.
The assimilationist Western Jews, however, were in an entirely different psychological situation. They owed their social status to the “outside” world, to Germany, Austria, etc. Their values were derived from the culture of Western civilization; it is there that they had their roots. All their self-respect stemmed from there, from the recognition they had received in the German or Austrian social structure. Suddenly, they were thrust out. The world to which they thought they had belonged went bankrupt, morally and spiritually. Frankl, the distinguished product of Western culture, was upset when the guard, instead of taking him seriously enough to punish him, just threw a stone at him to remind him of his status of a “domestic animal.” Yizhak Katzenelson would not have paid any attention to an incident of this kind. In his eyes the ghetto and concentration camp guards were creatures with which you had so little in common that they could never insult you. According to an old established talmudic principle, the severity of an insult is relative to the human dignity of the one who administers it and to that of the one at whom it is directed.19T.B. Bava Kama 83b. A pest does not insult you.