of order in the ghettos that made it easier for the Nazis to round up and deport
Jews. Most notorious in this regard were the decisions by the Judenratas to
which Jews should be deported. In 1942, for example, the ód ́z Judenrat
selected 20,000 Jews for deportation and certain death.
Others, however, have defended the actions of the Judenrat, citing three
arguments. First, it seems clear that if the Judenrathad done nothing, Jews
would not have lasted very long. Second, the members of the Judenratwere
operating under the perfectly sensible supposition that the demands of the
war effort would preclude the Nazis from killing a large potential labor force.
Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the ód ́z ghetto, carried this assumption to
its extreme, putting thousands of Jews to work in the name of a strategy
called “survival through work.” Finally, armed resistance in the ghettos,
though heroic, left most or all Jews dead. Virtually all Jews in Warsaw who
were still alive when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out in April 1943
were killed during the revolt. By contrast, when the ód ́z ghetto was liqui-
dated, in the summer of 1944, more than 68,000 Jews were still alive, a
tribute to the effectiveness of Rumkowski’s “survival through work” strategy.
The choice between heroism and survival was a trade-off.
Armed resistance generally reflected the mentality and political ideology of
a younger Jewish leadership. The older, prewar, conservative leadership tended
to rely on the traditional Jewish political tactic of shtadlanut, relying on the
state for protection. By 1941, much of the older leadership had either fled or
been deported. The younger leadership that took over was reared by a different
Jewish political tradition that drew on late-nineteenth-century notions such as
auto-emancipation, and the activist elements of Zionism and Bundism. In July
1942, Polish Zionists formed the ZOB (United Combat Organization).
No less ambiguous were cases where individual Jews worked with Nazi
officials to save Jews. Miklós Nyiszli, a “doctor-prisoner” in Auschwitz, aided
Josef Mengele in his cruel experiments on Jewish inmates. On the other hand,
the privileged status that Nyiszli gained through working with Mengele
allowed him to save many Jewish inmates from certain death.
At the heart of the problem of evaluating the actions of Jewish leaders dur-
ing the war is understanding how well they understood their situation – that
is, what information was known, and when? By early 1942, some information
was readily available and disseminated in numerous ways: the Polish under-
ground; refugees in Switzerland and Turkey; German soldiers who witnessed
atrocities; newspaper correspondents stationed in Germany; visitors from
allied states and neutral countries; diplomats such as Giuseppe Burzio, papal
nuncio in Bratislava, who reported the deportation of 80,000 Jews in March
1942; and the Bund, whose report of deportations and the death of 700,000
Jews at Chelmno was broadcast by the BBC on June 2, 1942. Information
was also transmitted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and by Jewish news-
papers such as the Jewish Chronicleand theZionist Review.
226 From renewal to devastation, 1914–45