The Betrayal in Warsaw

By Steve Rodan

Eighty years later, there remains competing versions of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. One narrative argued that the revolt stood no chance and was merely symbolic. This has been the line of the State of Israel and particularly Yad Vashem. The bottom line was that Jewish resistance never mattered.

The official narrative, however, reflected an active effort to conceal or distort the betrayal by the Zionist leadership in London and Jerusalem before and throughout the uprising. As the Zionists themselves put it, they did nothing to help Jewish resistance, and in many ways torpedoed any serious effort to repel the Germans.

Melech Neustadt, the secretary of the World Union of Poalei Zion, closely monitored the genocide in Poland and neighboring countries. He maintained correspondence with such Zionist movements as Hashomer Hatzair and Kibbutz Hameuchad. He was a loyal colleague of Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion. Neustadt agreed with the bitter denunciations of the Zionist leadership by the grassroots trapped in Hitler-occupied Europe.

"I am convinced that they are right," Neustadt wrote weeks before the uprising. "The help we gave them was so small." [1]

Despite their denials, Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann knew virtually every step of the formation of the Jewish resistance that culminated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943. They were told that young Zionists had decided to fight the Germans and their collaborators. The fighters were also acquiring weapons despite the refusal of significant cooperation by the Polish underground, laced with anti-Semitism and dismissive of the campaign for revolt. [2] The fighters knew this might be the last round as SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the destruction of the ghetto with a force of 10,000 men, most of them from the Waffen-SS and police.

On April 19 at around 2 a.m., the Germans returned to collect the last Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. SS Gen. Jurgen Stroop sent in the Lithuanians and Ukrainians, followed by the remaining members of the Jewish police. Those Jewish policemen who hesitated were shot. After the quislings came the SS. In all, the invaders numbered around 850, supported by a light tank and two armored cars. For four hours, Stroop’s force moved freely through the ghetto. Rippling in the breeze were banners that called on Polish Christians to join the revolt.

Astounding results

At 6 a.m., the Jews opened fire. From windows and balconies, they shot bullets and hurled grenades and firebombs. The results were astounding. The SS light tank exploded, burning its crew alive. Two hours later, the Germans and their collaborators withdrew from the ghetto. Jewish casualties were minimal. Revolt leaders, particularly Mordechai Anielewicz, were ecstatic. Perhaps the Jews were not doomed after all?

“It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. One thing is clear: What happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto. One of our companies held out for 40 minutes, and another for more than six hours... I feel that great things are happening and what we dared to do is of great enormous importance.” [3]

And then everything collapsed in a frenzy of hate and division among the Jewish fighters. The Zionist group commanded by Anielewicz, Eyal, refused to cooperate with Betar, the youth wing of the anti-Ben-Gurion Revisionist movement. Strategically, this made no sense: Betar had nearly double the number of fighters as well as two heavy machine guns. Betar also controlled two tunnels to acquire supplies or escape the ghetto.

In other parts of Europe, Zionist socialist groups and the Revisionists were cooperating in organizing illegal immigration to Palestine. But in the final days of the Warsaw ghetto, the orders were that the Mapai-aligned movements could not work with Betar. Instead, Hashomer Hatzair and its allies worked with the communists and the Bund. -- both hostile to Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Eyal also resorted to smearing Betar as fascists. Whether Eyal’s boycott of Betar was decided in Warsaw or by the Zionist leadership in Jerusalem has never been answered.

Still, Betar supplied Anielewicz with fighters and weapons.The strategy was to push the entire city of Warsaw to revolt. By Day 2, Betar raised Polish and Jewish flags high over the ghetto, where they could be seen by the rest of the city. It took two days for the German military to tear down the flags.

But Warsaw did not revolt. The Polish Home Army, which supplied fighters to Betar, attacked the Germans six times outside the ghetto. But this was not enough to stop the German onslaught. In many cases, the Jewish resistance, albeit divided, held their own against the SS. That changed when the Luftwaffe was recruited to destroy the ghetto from the air. Within a week, there was barely a building left standing.

“We flew several circles above the city," a Luftwaffe pilot wrote to his family in Germany. "And with great satisfaction, we could recognize the complete extermination of the Jewish ghetto. There, our folks did a really fantastic job. There is no house that has not been totally destroyed.” [4]

Flight and betrayal

On the night of April 27, after eight days of battle, the Eyal leadership decided to flee. Nobody from Betar was included in the escape; Betar commander Pavel Frankel and most of his men had already been killed. Two nights later, Eyal selected 40 fighters to crawl through the sewers to the Aryan part of Warsaw. Anielewicz and some 80 fighters decided to stay.

The Eyal decision marked the greatest betrayal of the Jews still in the ghetto. For all its sins, the Judenrat had never called for a revolt that would ensure German liquidation of the ghetto. In contrast, Eyal had spent 10 months appealing for Jewish resistance only to run after a week of fighting. In the end, only several dozen Eyal fighters managed to flee through the sewers to the Aryan side of Warsaw, where they were driven by the Polish resistance to the forest in Lomianki, some seven kilometers outside the city.

The extent of the Zionist betrayal was seen outside Europe. In Palestine, the Zionist leadership censored news of the ghetto uprising and refused to acknowledge that the Jews had fought. The leadership quashed appeals by ghetto commanders for help and protests. Day after day, the Ben-Gurion-controlled daily newspaper Davar, the most prominent in Palestine, ignored the battle by Zionist and other fighters against the Germans. Finally, on April 23, Davar dropped a hint that the Germans were meeting serious resistance. Davar’s article had all the trappings of a last-minute decision by the Mapai leadership. There was no dateline, no author and the text consisted of one paragraph.[5]

On May 30, Yitzhak Greenbaum formally informed the Jewish Agency Executive of the failed revolt. Greenbaum recommended protests in the Yishuv, including a one-day general strike. He also called on the agency to relay 5,000 lira to the surviving Zionist fighters, most of them sheltered by Soviet-sponsored partisans. Most of the Executive opposed a strike. Members, however, did agree to stand in a moment of silence at the beginning of the session on June 13. Then, they proceeded to discuss the latest crisis with British authorities. [6]

'You have erased me from your memory'

What could Ben-Gurion have done for the Jews in Warsaw? The answer came from the Zionist fighters themselves. First, Mapai and the Jewish Agency could have used their influence to ensure that the Polish underground provide significant, rather than token, aid to the ghetto fighters. The Polish exile government, eager to cooperate with the Jews, had its headquarters in London, not far from Weizmann and the Jewish Agency. Ben-Gurion could have used his connections with the Kremlin for the Soviet air force to bomb Warsaw during rather than after the uprising. He could have worked with such U.S. Jewish leaders as Stephen Wise and Nachum Goldmann to urge Washington to support the revolt as the Allies had done in other cases. Ben-Gurion could have at least warned the Zionists not to cooperate with the Germans -- as governments-in-exile had done.

Instead, the Zionist leadership did nothing, and the Jews in the ghetto knew it. Little wonder then that virtually every uprising commander, regardless of his Zionist affiliation, condemned Ben-Gurion and the leadership. Indeed, there was nobody from Mapai in the Warsaw resistance command, something that would haunt Israel’s ruling party during the 1950s.

In December 1942, Tusia Altman, one of the heads of Hashomer Hatzair in Poland, published a letter that reflected the sentiment of the Jewish survivors. “You have erased me from your memory... Do not inquire after the welfare of anybody. I don’t want to inform them.” [7]

On the day of the uprising, world leaders met in Bermuda to discuss the plight of the Jews and other refugees. Two days earlier, on April 17, Greenbaum’s panel sent a series of recommendations to the conference. The Zionist position paper contained seven points. Not one of them demanded a stop to the Nazi killing. Not surprisingly, Bermuda ended up as a sham. [8]

Helping Hitler's collaborators

Instead, the Zionist leadership helped its members who collaborated with Hitler. They, rather than their victims, were given certificates to Palestine. The Jewish Agency distributed entry documents to an entire group of Jewish policemen who survived the German extermination camp at Radzillow. Haim Moldetsky, the cruel Judenrat chief of Bedzin, was granted a certificate after the war. During a hike in the Israeli mountains, Moldetsky was killed by survivors from his former ghetto. [8] In 1947, the Jewish Agency granted a certificate to Rudolf Kastner, the Zionist leader who facilitated the German killing of more than 400,000 Jews from Hungary three years earlier.

Perhaps the most damning example of the Zionist abandonment came months after the Warsaw ghetto uprising. It was in an editorial in the Mizrahi daily Hatsofe, the religious ally of Ben-Gurion's Mapai. Hatsofe, which had been denying reports of German atrocities throughout the war, finally told its Orthodox Jewish audience what they really should do: Just forget about their brethren.

“Many have grown sick and tired of the matter [of rescue],” Hatsofe said. “Not only the many who are not Jewish who are not overly pleased with being ‘harassed’ in this matter...[but also] for many Jews and members of the Yishuv in Palestine, talking about it has become a burden that is not highly desired.” [10]

Notes

1. “Beyond the Wall” Melech Neustadt. Hapoel Hatzair, Feb. 18-25, 1943.

2. Treasurer Eliezer Kaplan report to Jewish Agency Executive, March 28, 1943. CZA

3. “The Last Letter from Ghetto Revolt Commander Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw” April 23, 1943. Shoah Resource Center.

4. Letter from German Air Force Sgt. Herbert Habermalz in June 1943. Cited in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Page 451

5. “The Remains of the Jewish Diaspora Are Defending their Lives” Davar, April 23, 1943. Page 1. Also, “Actual Battles in the Warsaw Ghetto” Haboker, April 26, 1943. Page 1. “Jews in Warsaw Ghetto Ask for Food and Arms to Continue Their Resistance to Nazis” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 30, 1943.

6. Greenbaum to Jewish Agency Executive, May 30, 1943. CZA.

7. “Letters from the Ghettos” Bracha Habas. Page 41.

8. “Post-Ugandian Zionism” Shabtai Beit-Zvi. Page 94

9. “The Holocaust Victims Accuse” Moshe Schonfeld. Page 122

10. “So Short Is Our Reach” Hatsofe. Aug. 2, 1943. Cited in “The Jewish Press and the Holocaust 1939-1945” Yosef Gorny. Page 121

Below: ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, May 1943