Yizkor 2

The three men below played central roles in the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB, from the initials in Polish: Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) and the Anti-Fascist Bloc that organized the resistance, and eventual 1943 uprising, in the Warsaw Ghetto established by the Nazis following the 1939 invasion of Poland that started WWII. In the centre is Mordekhai Anielewicz, already mentioned earlier here as the ZOB commander. He was of the countrywide leadership of Ha-Shomer Ha-tzair, the organization I had belonged to. Long after the war I read that he had been in Vilna in the winter of 1939-40, when I was at our kibbutz there. So I must have met him, but at least could not recall him when I read that (from the one photo I found). We did not know, of course, what he would represent a few years later. He died when the Nazis discovered the command bunker at Mila 18. The book by that name is far from the most authoritative about the events.

http://members.shaw.ca/ElSol/One_Life/Part_VI.html

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Emanuel Ringelblum, at the right, was a historian who, with his Oneg Shabat group, secretly assembled an archive on what was going on in the ghetto, including the resistance being organized. He was captured and killed by the Gestapo along with his wife and son. But most of the buried archives were found after the war beneath the rubble of the former ghetto in metal containers, e.g. milk cans, some welded shut before burial. Shortly before the war, Ringelblum had come to Zbaszyn when we were confined there at the end of October 1938 to organize minimal services on behalf of the Joint Distribution Committee.

Yitzkhak Zuckerman, at the left, ZOB co-commander, then commander following the death of Anielewicz, survived fighting in both Warsaw uprisings, albeit wounded; a possible reason for his early death at the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz in Israel.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/2851.html

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His book of memories, the publisher website and cover of the English translation of which is shown here above, records the stories of many who died fighting; in other ghettos, too, although the Warsaw one was clearly the outstanding one. Not that a lot of SS were killed, but for the shock value that they can no longer just come and pick out their next extermination victims without fear of becoming victims themselves. And if the most oppressed and least armed can fight back for a month in this first revolt in a Nazi-occupied city, then others can follow; and did.

And then there were the partisans in the forests around Vilna, after their attempt at an uprising in the Vilna ghetto had failed, but who may have caused more serious Nazi casualties. The main initiator there, and the commander following an especially tragic death of the first (Itzik Wittenberg), was Abba Kovner, a poet. He is shown below, first in a decent photo many years later, then (left) with another partisan at the time.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~wgst60/projects/poetry/Yaarah-Tami/Biographies.html

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It may have required the imagination of a poet to conceive of the possibility that the shootings of masses of Jewish men and women in the Ponary forest outside Vilna were not just too many massacres, as has happened in wars, but a program of systematic annihilation of the whole people, subsequently termed genocide. After more evidence and consultation, this was transmitted to others by couriers, mostly women; e.g. to Warsaw where the ZOB, with aid from Polish railway workers, later obtained confirmation of a death camp at Treblinka and passed that news to Allied leaders through a Polish underground liaison. In a meeting of Jewish youth organizations in Vilna next to the headquarters of the SS while these were being drunk on New Year's eve 1942, Kovner made the first impassioned appeal for resistance; including the often repeated call: "Let's not go like sheep to the slaughter !"

http://www.juden-in-europa.de/baltikum/vilna/biographien.htm

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Abba Kovner became one of Israel's foremost writers. He also died too early, before quite finishing his biggest writing project; a really ambitious work to pass on the feel of what was done to Jews and by their resistance under Nazi occupation. It is based on what really happened in diverse places by one almost uniquely qualified to know, but woven into a coherent fiction-like account with fictional names. The format is somewhat like the Talmud, with commentary adjacent to the text, and like the parchment scrolls of the Hebrew bible (as e.g. the Book of Ester) recited in synagogues on Jewish holidays. The site of the publishers' and the cover of the English translation are shown below.

http://www.jhom.com/bookshelf/kovner_scrolls/index.html

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Abba Kovner was of the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair in Vilna. As a leading member there, he must have spent time at our kibbutz there also, again without my recalling him. There were over 600 members there, all of that age, about 20 (+) except for me at 14; so they are likely to have remembered me. Oddly enough, these two main surviving resistance leaders, who wrote the two probably most significant books of a huge literature, both came from Vilna and had gone to the same gymnasium (~ high school), without having interacted then. Zuckerman, again shown on the right below, was of the He-kHalutz Ha-Tzair-Dror, as were all the others on that photo.The related text in the website from which the photo is taken is quite wrong. Next to Antek is Zivia Lubetkin, also of the Warsaw ZOB command, later his wife, and Yudke Helman, emissary from Palestine. At the left is Oskar Handler, the "guardian angel" mentioned, in whose apartment in Lvov the photo was taken in early 1940. My brother and I had been with him and slept overnight there in November 1939. There should be more on Oskar later. Here only that in a History Channel program on the Warsaw ghetto earlier this year, where this photo was shown, Oskar Handler, who also died too young, had simply been cut out of the the picture. That sure is strange.

http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/HolocaustChronicle.taf?_function=largepicture&RecordID=141211

Such odd omissions and gross inaccuracies can have an innocent explanation. The time to deliberately distort the record of these anti-fascist fighters has not come. There may no longer be those from WWI able to stand and march, but many who fought against fascism in WWII are still alive and kicking.


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Yizkor

On Remembrance Day (elsewhere Armistice or Veterans Day, November 11) there were observances everywhere. That in Vancouver was again in Victory Square and seemed like a repetition of the August celebration described earlier (I didn't go but wore my campaign medals; out of sight). The national event in Ottawa for the first time did not have any World War I veterans, only five of whom are still alive.

Peter Mansbridge had a program with three Auschwitz survivors responding to questions of school youngsters. So let me here recall those who died fighting the Nazis in the ghettos and forests of Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere. That seems especially appropriate now, since this
blog has just been concerned with the part of my life which intersected with that of those people.
There have been other things I should, and meant to, write about first. Maybe later. Here only something on the ceremony at which I became a Canadian citizen. I had looked forward to it for what it meant, not for what would go on, but it turned out to be pleasant and interesting. The presiding judge evidently enjoyed herself, notably the interaction with the children involved. She was of Ukrainian origin so this also fits in well with where I had interrupted the account.

The neat little map below, found on the internet, provides a number of good features to show how "historic events", like wars, can move people across international boundaries from one sovereign state to another without their ever leaving their place of birth. Starting as we approached (cyan line) from Lublin toward Kowel, both in then independent Poland, the boundary line to Volhynia on this map is along the river Bug, as it became again a day after we passed and is to this day. But the town about midway was not yet Chelm, which we passed, but was rendered as Kholm, or Khelm. That goes to show that, when that map was published, this part of Poland was part of the Russian empire, where sounds rendered in Polish or German as ch were written like an X in the Russian Cyrillic and transcribed as Kh in English.


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As we moved south from Kovel, the boundary, just to the west, was still as it again became just then and is today, along the river Bug; until just to the west of Lutzk. There a new, very prominent, border is shown on the map; where there is none today. That was the border between two empires which fought each other in WWI and then disappeared: the Tsarist Russian and the Austra-Hungarian Habsburg empires.

Lemberg, the big city to the south had been the main city of Eastern Galicia. The Lembergers then became inhabitants of Lwow in newly independent Poland; until Eastern Galicia became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic along with Volhynia as the Red Army moved in in 1939, and as we were walking around there. They then were transferred to Lvov for about 50 years, when the newly independent Ukraine converted them into inhabitants of Lviv. We got to Lvov for the first time in early October 1939 after hiding out in Lanovitz for a couple of weeks, then again in November when we managed to make contact there with the zionist underground in the process of formation; specifically with Oskar Handler, already mentioned earlier as "guardian angel" in a quotation from Yitzkhak Zuckerman's memoir (June 28, 2005 posting).

The people of Czernowitz, the city further south on the map, became Ukrainians only at the end of WWII. They also had been subjects of the famous Habsburg Kaiser Franz Joseph until WWI, but then belonged to Romania until the victorious Soviet army came in the last winter of WWII. Kief, to the East, more often written Kiev (now officially Kyiv, I believe), has been the capital of Ukraine (and originally of "Kievan Rus). But there is no mention of "Ukraine" on the map; presumably because it was not recognised by the tsarist regime of that time as a separate national/ethnic or geographic entity. Just above Kief, however, the map has very prominent lettering (Littl), which in the complete map, not found on the internet, is likely to have read "Little Russia". I only paid attention to that now because a major hullabaloo touching on this surfaced while I was completing this posting: after the Canadian Liberal Party's minority government under prime minister Paul Martin was voted out of office by a no confidence vote (something that would require armed revolution in the USA). Harvard Professor Michael Ignatieff is returning to his native Canada after 30 years and was nominated to run as a star candidate for Liberal party MP in a Toronto riding (constituency) with a substantial ethnic Ukrainian minority. A group of these had earlier taken control of the local party organisation and is contestng the "parachuting" of Ignatieff into the riding. He has a paper trail, including a book in the 80-s with passages claimed to be offensive to Ukrainians. He claims to have opposed only Ukrainian nationalism, the way he opposes all nationalism (the definition of which varies). Specifically, he apparently referred to "Little Russians" as distinct from "Great Russians", from whose upper class he is descended. I have no way of judging whether that reference should cause offence. My guess is that he did not mean it seriously as a putdown. But that may not be good enough, especially since he is rumoured to be in line to succeed Paul Martin as leader of the governing Liberal party (something like the latter even armed revolution couldn't achieve in the US).