Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

When you leave the synagogue today, pause to look at the bronze relief on the front façade of the building above the Madison Avenue entrance. At the center of the Nathan Rapoport sculpture is Janus Korczak; surrounding him are children gripping his arms and legs, each one with a look of terror on his or her face. Born Henryk Goldzmit, Dr. Janus Korczak was a famed Polish-Jewish educator, a combination Mister Rogers and Dr. Spock of his time. His academic work in child psychology and education and the orphanages established and modeled on his principles continue to be subjects of study to this day. The Rapoport sculpture depicts what is referred to as “Korczak’s Last Walk,” that dark day on August 6, 1942, when the Nazis took Korczak and the children of his orphanage to the Umschlagsplatz, along with thousands of others, to board the cattle cars to Treblinka. During 1942, Hitler decided to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto, deporting some 230,000 Jews to the concentration camps. I cannot help but appreciate the decision of our synagogue’s past leadership to put the Korczak sculpture where it is. If one understands the mission of this synagogue, as I do, to be to preserve our Jewish heritage and pass it on to our children, then every time you walk into this building, every time you enter this space, you are making a statement that the Nazis’ hoped for victory – the Final Solution – will never come to pass. Nobody can bring back the hundreds of thousands of children who perished, but every time you are here, every young man or woman who emerges from this community, every Jew and non-Jew who comes into the orbit of this institution and what it represents – all of these are thundering statements that the values of Korzcak, his children, those murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto and all the Six Million live on.

Tomorrow evening we will begin our observance of Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. When the establishment of Yom HaShoah was first proposed by Israel’s Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, the suggested date was the fourteenth of Nissan, corresponding to April 19, 1943 – the day upon which the ghetto uprising began. (That date was not chosen, because it would not have worked to observe a memorial day on erev Pesah.) In fact, the name of the commemoration was initially Yom HaShoah u’Mered HaGetaot, Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising. Even as it is now called – Yom HaShoah V’HaGevurah, Holocaust and Bravery Remembrance Day – our memorial is linked to the events of this one particular uprising which began exactly 70 years ago.

I imagine many here know the outline of the story. With the Ghetto population reduced to fifty or sixty thousand Jews, the Nazis pressed forward towards their Final Solution. In January 1943, a small band of resistance fighters fired upon German troops, a tiny and temporary victory that if nothing else gave the Jews hope – to fight, to inspire others, and to delay the onslaught – maybe just long enough until help arrived from the outside. When word arrived of the final Nazi action on the eve of Pesah 1943, some 750 ill-equipped Jewish fighters rebelled against well over 2,000 heavily armed German troops. The German troops withdrew to return with more firepower. The Jews held out for 27 days until eventually, with the leadership of the Jews killed or captured, the Ghetto was burned to the ground – the fighting over by May 16. Beginning to end, it lasted under four weeks – not long relative to the length of the war. Some 300 Germans and 7,000 Jews were killed in the battle – not so many relative to the millions murdered. But as the histories relate and we ourselves know, their story has become the object of our study, inquiry and inspiration.

Of everything I read on the uprising, the most interesting came from an unexpected place, a journal for history teachers. The author, Dr. Barbara Burstin, asks the question that any good teacher should ask, the question we must ask today, namely: aside from the facts of the uprising, what are its enduring lessons decades later? Why does it absorb our focus as it does? And perhaps most importantly, how shall we teach it to the coming generations who, with every passing year, become more and more removed from its immediacy?

This morning, I want to limit our focus to three such “teaching questions” raised by the uprising.

The first and most basic question is whether we even teach the uprising, and if we do, how we should go about it. You may wonder why this is an interesting question at all. Surely, we have a right if not a responsibility to spotlight the heroism of the uprising – if for no other reason than to tell of the heights to which humanity can soar, even when – especially when – the rest of humanity has sunk so low. But as any student of the Shoah knows, one can fall into the trap of putting a disproportionate focus on the uprising, revealing an ambivalence to confront the horror of the Shoah itself. In other words, we focus on heroic martyrs because we are uncomfortable dealing with the really bad stuff. There is a reason why Jews in Israel and the Upper East Side gravitate towards talking about Masada, Hanukkah, Tel Hai, Warsaw and other scenes of resistance and martyrdom throughout Jewish history. There is a reason Ben Gurion linked Holocaust Remembrance with the Ghetto Uprising. Namely, because it is a usable past that enables us to shout out (as did Trumpeldor), “It is good to die for our people.” Furthermore, if you know a bit about the subject, then you know there exist chapters of Holocaust history, most famously written by Hannah Arendt, suggesting that in their passivity, Jews themselves somehow contributed to their own demise. Do we, the thinking goes, focus on the uprising because it serves as a counter-narrative to the charge of passivity?

There are many sermons I could give on this topic, but for the moment, I would simply counsel that anyone teaching the Shoah – whether a parent, high school teacher or university professor – must avoid communicating one-dimensional renditions of such a complex narrative. When it comes to matters of resistance or passivity, as I indicated last week, none of us should presume to make ex post facto judgments over those who faced decisions that none of us in this room can even begin to imagine. Rapoport’s depiction of Korzcak, powerful as it may be, doesn’t hold a candle to the verbal account of that August day. Korzcak stood at the head of his 192 children, holding a child’s hand with each of his. One child carried the flag … with a Star of David, another played violin. They marched through the ghetto to the Umschlagsplatz, where they joined thousands of people waiting in the hot sun without shade or water. The children did not cry. They walked quietly in 48 rows of four. When given the opportunity to leave his children, Korzcak refused, replying that they would be terrified without him. One eyewitness recalled, “This was no march to the train cars but rather a mute protest against the murderous regime … a process the like of which no human eye has witnessed.” (cited in Gutman 139-140) Heroism and horror, passivity and protest – these are not alternatives in the Warsaw Ghetto or any chapter of the Shoah and we must reject the suggestion that one must choose. They exist side-by-side, all at once, every step of the way.

The second issue critical to any teaching of the Warsaw Ghetto is not was happening in the ghetto but outside the ghetto. Close by, just on the other side of the ghetto wall, Easter celebrations with carousels and laughter took place that spring of 1943 as clouds of smoke and smells of death wafted through the air. But more troubling than what went on in Warsaw itself, is the question of where the world was during this time. The third chapter of Arthur Morse’s book on American apathy, While Six Million Died, is called “Bermuda and Warsaw.” April 19, 1943 was not only the first day of the uprising, it was also the first day of the “Bermuda Conference on Refugees,” a much-publicized but totally ineffective gathering of world leaders meant to plan refuge for the millions of persecuted and soon-to- be-murdered Jews. While the United States, Great Britain and others side-stepped the inconvenient truth of mass murder, countless desperate cables for help fell on deaf ears. As Morse documents, “The outside world heard radio reports and read newspaper articles about the defense of the ghetto – and remained silent.” (p. 60) To remember the Warsaw Ghetto is to remember Shmuel Zygelboim, who took the plight of those in the ghetto to everyone he could to no avail. Finally on May 13, two days before the uprising was quashed, he took his own life, writing “In my death, I wish to express my strongest protest against mankind, which looks on and accepts the annihilation of the Jewish people.” (Gutman, 242) In studying the uprising, one must also study Bermuda. We must study what happened in the ghetto and what did NOT happen outside of it. We must do so, so the world never, ever sits idly by again.

And finally, to a subject about which I have had occasion to speak before. The third question is not what happened in the ghetto, not what happened outside the ghetto, but what happened in the heavens themselves. The Warsaw Ghetto, but really the entire subject of the Shoah, raises the most difficult theological questions for those of us who dare wonder where God was in the face of such suffering.

To this subject, I turn to the writing of the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, also known as the Esh Kodesh. While neither he nor his family would survive, his sermons – buried in his final days – would. They were discovered – dug up years later by a Polish construction worker – and continue to be studied to this day.

As a Rabbi, Shapira had the task of providing a religious framework in which the ghetto community could come to grips with their suffering. His early sermons in 1939 and 1940 reflect a traditional Jewish response to suffering – namely, that suffering comes as retribution for sin. However as the crisis worsened and more and more righteous were murdered, Shapira realized that this traditional response was painfully inadequate, and he was forced to take a daring theological leap. In one of his final sermons, Shapira expounded on a Talmudic passage in tractate Hagigah, explaining that at moments of great human suffering, like the one in which he found himself, when the divine presence is concealed from humanity, God retreats to the divine inner chambers and grieves and weeps for the sufferings of Israel. And we, as a suffering humanity, also enter this holy of holies and weep together with God. Shapira suggested that the pain a person undergoes by himself may break that person to the point that he or she is incapable of doing anything. But if one weeps together with God, that is a source of strength. One weeps and is strengthened; one is broken but finds the courage to go on. It is a stunning theological reversal that is not accepted by all, but its power is undeniable. When we ask where is God in suffering, be it in the Warsaw ghetto or anywhere else, Shapira suggests that it is at the exact moment when God seems most distant that God is right there next to us, weeping alongside us, supporting us as we wipe away the tears.

Since long before the Warsaw Ghetto, these weeks following Passover have been understood to be a mourning period of sorts. During this period of counting the omer, called the sefirah, we recall the Talmudic account of a plague that struck the students of Rabbi Akiva. For this reason, Jews in traditional communities don’t plan weddings; some Jews choose not to shave; and others keep other practices that reflect the somber mood of the season. To be honest, I have never quite related it to all. The overly reflective mood seems a bit too great a reaction to a story that I never quite understood or for that matter, understood to merit such continued attention.

So this year and perhaps in years to come let me suggest that rather than focusing on that Talmudic story, we might consider the thorny and vexing and enduring challenges raised by the Warsaw Ghetto: the telling of the story itself; the lack of response from the world at large, and the gnawing question of God’s presence. No easy answers exist. Yet it is our responsibility to engage with these questions even as answers remain elusive, even as their very presence weighs so heavily on us all. And maybe by doing so, we will find a path towards a new understanding of the sefirah, these weeks from the first day of the uprising to its end – weeks of somber reflection devoted to the very questions which every thinking, feeling and believing person should be committed to asking.