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
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. ]
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
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. ]
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
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
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
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
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.
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
http://members.shaw.ca/ElSol/One_Life/Part_VI.html
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
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
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. ]
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
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. ]
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
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
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
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
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.
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
posted by solar_sol | 8:31 PM
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