When Hope Is the Enemy

By Lance Morrow Friday, Oct. 25, 2002
    • The real struggle in the world may be not between good and evil but rather between hope and evil. Hope seems more active and creative than the somewhat nebulous good. Hope aspires; good has arrived. Good, like God, lives outside time; hope keeps people alive, moving forward, inside time. As long as hope remains healthy, it is a match for evil; about good, no one can be so sure.

    But in the Warsaw ghetto, German evil learned to manipulate Jewish hope and turn it into a Nazi tool of management. It was hope — the faintest, most tantalizing, vanishing glimmers of it — that led the victims on from day to day. Surely the worst is over now, they repeatedly told themselves, against the mounting evidence. They won't take me. They need me at the Tobbens factory. This new identification card will keep me safe. Day by day, hope deflected the full, unillusioned despair that, when it came later — too late — roused the ghetto to armed resistance.


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    The story began on Oct. 12, 1940--on Yom Kippur, a little more than a year after Hitler's invasion of Poland — when the Nazis decreed the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto; 400,000 Jews would be confined in 1.3 sq. mi., roughly the size of New York City's Central Park. The story has been told before — a once thriving Jewish community, the largest outside New York, squeezed incrementally by humiliation, poverty, hunger, cold, starvation, epidemics of typhus and tuberculosis, marauding Nazis who murdered on a free-lance basis, and at last, mass systematic deportations, the hopeless trudge to Umschlagplatz (the transshipment station) at the end of Zamenhof Street, and the trains to "resettlement," which meant to death camps like Treblinka.

    Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, edited by Michal Grynberg (Metropolitan Books; 493 pages), tells the story in a new way, with riveting immediacy, through a collection of 29 personal records assembled in Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute and now available for the first time outside Poland, in English translation. Most of the writers of these accounts are unknown. Many of their records, scribbled in Yiddish or, more often, Polish, were found in attics and basements of the ruined city after the war. Some of the stories are unbearable to read. The Diary of Anne Frank was a poignant solo piece for cello. Words to Outlive Us is a work of full orchestral anguish.

    Themes, sometimes of immense moral complexity, thread through the scraps and diaries. There are more than enough glimpses of what might be called the sporting beast — for example, an SS officer's satanically playful execution of a young Jewish mother with a baby on her shoulder, to whom the officer had, a moment before, given a loaf of bread. Or this, recorded by an anonymous woman: "One day a small Jewish boy was killed on Biala Street as he attempted to pull a carrot lying in the gutter on the Aryan side through a hole in the fence. A German spotted him, inserted his gun in the hole, and killed the boy with one well-aimed shot." Through such scenes runs a vibration of Caligula's boast "Remember, I can do anything to anyone": the pleasure that power takes in its own vicious freedom.

    Still, there was that fatal vein of hope. A dental technician named Natan Zelichower analyzed it: "The Jews did not believe in their own extinction. At the very center of their 'spiritual refuge' sat God, who, having led them through the Red Sea, would surely knock down the walls of the ghetto...The Germans [might] eliminate a few thousand, or, let's say, even tens of thousands, but surely not half a million people! Logically speaking then, since not everyone inside the ghetto was doomed, each person had a chance of escaping alive." For Zelichower, the hope actually proved justified: he went from the ghetto to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945.

    The diaries reveal the moral complexity of those Jews who served in the SP, the Jewish police who did the bidding of the Nazis in exchange for promises of immunity. There are fascinating passages on Adam Czerniakow, the first head of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council. Czerniakow, a decent man dedicated to his people (who sometimes mocked him and sang nasty ditties about him), illustrates among other things the dangers of meliorism, of trying to negotiate with evil.

    Czerniakow worked like a dog to mitigate a horror that could not be mitigated. When he at last understood the terrible dimensions of the German ambition, on July 23, 1942, after the Nazis demanded that he sign a Judenrat order purporting to request that the Germans start "resettling" everyone "to the east," Czerniakow excused himself from his SS masters for a moment and swallowed a cyanide pill.

    From a distance of 60 years, one wonders what exactly to make of that suicide. An act of weakness? The final extinction of hope? Or a warning to his people of what was to come, expressed in terminally eloquent language?