(2 of 2)
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?