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First published in the United States of America by Indiana University Press 2007
Published in Great Britain in Penguin Books 2009
Copyright © Samuel D. Kassow 2007
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-90877-9
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Language Use
Introduction
1 From “Bichuch” to Warsaw
2 Borochov’s Disciple
3 History for the People
4 Organizing the Community
5 A Band of Comrades
6 The Different Voices of Polish Jewry
7 Traces of Life and Death
8 The Tidings of Job
9 A Historian’s Final Mission
Appendix A. Guidelines for a Study of Polish-Jewish Relations
Appendix B. Guidelines for a Study of the Warsaw Ghetto
Appendix C. Guidelines for a Study of the Jewish Shtetl
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
PENGUIN BOOKS
Samuel D. Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, Connecticut. He is author of Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, 1884–1917 and editor (with Edith W. Clowes and James L. West) of Between Tsar and People: The Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia. He has lectured on Russian and Jewish history in many countries, including Israel, Russia and Poland.
Dedicated to my wife Lisa,
my daughters Miri and Serena,
and to the loving memory
of my parents
Jacob Kassow and Celia Kassow
Efsher veln oykh di verter
Dervartn zikh ven oyf dem likht—
Veln in sho in basherter
Tseblien zikh umgerikht?
Un vi der uralter kern
Vos hot zikh farvandlt in zang—
Veln di verter oykh nern,
Veln di verter gehern
Dem folk, in zayn eybikn gang.
[Perhaps these words will endure
And live to see the light loom—
And in the destined hour
Will unexpectedly bloom?
And like the primeval grain
That turned into a stalk—
The words will nourish,
The words will belong
To the people, in its eternal walk.]
—AVROM SUTZKEVER,
“Grains of Wheat,”
Vilna Ghetto, March 1943.
Translated by
Barbara and Benjamin Harshav
Many people helped me in this daunting and difficult project. David Roskies encouraged me to begin this book and I learned a lot from many conversations we had and from comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Havi Ben Sasson graciously took the time to share her enormous knowledge of the subject and read an earlier version of the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to Josephine Woll, Robert Shapiro, Justin Cammy, Berel Lang, Greta Slobin, Mark Slobin, Lisa Kassow, Lisa Grant, May Pleskow, Susan Pennybacker, Natalia Aleksiun, Ronald Spencer, and Kathleen Kete for their careful readings of this work and for their important suggestions, and to Raya Cohen, Joanna Michlic, Ben Nathans, Michael Steinlauf, Nancy Sherman, Aaron Lansky, and Ronald Kiener for their comments on earlier articles and chapter drafts. I appreciate the productive conversations I had with Gunnar Stephen Paulsson about the Ringelblum-Berman correspondence and fruitful discussions with Israel Gutman, Dani Blatman, and Alvin Rosenfeld.
I would like to thank Deans Miller Brown and Steve Peterson for the financial support I received from Trinity College and for the dedicated work of Gigi St. Peter, the history department administrative associate at Trinity, and Mary Curry, the interlibrary loan librarian. Ewa Wolynska of Central Connecticut State University helped me decipher many Polish handwritten documents. I am very grateful to Michlean Amir, archivist at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, to the entire staff of the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, and to the staff of the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum at Beit Lohamei Ha-getaot. I am indebted to Eleonora Bergman of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw who helped in my research there, and who read my work and gave me invaluable suggestions. I also thank Jan Jagielski of the Jewish Historical Institute and Elana Weiser of Yad Vashem for their help in making photographic reproductions available to me from their collections. My work in Poland benefited greatly from the kindness of Dr. Feliks Tych, the director of the Jewish Historical Institute, and from Professor Monika Garbowska of the Marie Curie University in Lublin. Alan Schiffman endowed a Trinity research fund which aided my research significantly. I am also grateful to the staff of the YIVO archives and library, including Fruma Mohrer, Marek Webb, Leo Greenbaum, Aviva Astrinsky, and Yeihaya Metal.
I warmly acknowledge the financial support I received from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX).
I thankfully appreciate and acknowledge the magisterial scholarship of Ruta Sakowska, whose work on Ringelblum taught me much. I owe a large debt of gratitude to my editor Janet Rabinowitch of Indiana University Press for her patience and encouragement, and to Miki Bird, Jen Maceyko, and Rita Bernhard.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to my loving wife Lisa, and to my special daughters Miri and Serena, who will always remind me of what is most important in life.
How to spell the names of cities like Warsaw, Lodz, Lwów, Vilna, or Krakow is not an easy matter to decide. In the multinational spaces of Eastern Europe, which saw frequent changes in political sovereignty until the end of World War II, cities were often known under different names. The Polish Lwów was the Austrian-German Lemberg and the Ukrainian L’viv. Jews, who made up a sizable proportion of the city’s inhabitants often used the Yiddish Lemberik or Lemberg, especially when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Vilna presents even greater problems. Claimed by Poles (Wilno), Lithuanians (Vilnius), and Belorussians (Vil’na), Vilna changed hands seven times just between the years 1915 and 1922! Vilna Jews, who modestly believed that they were living in Yerushalyim d’Lite, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, called Vilna by its Yiddish name, Vilne.
The proper Polish spellings of Warsaw and Lodz are Warszawa and Łódź. Poznan, Posen in German, is spelled Poznań. The proper spelling of Krakow or Cracow is Kraków.
To simplify matters this book will use common English spellings for large cities like Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow. Lwów will remain Lwów while Wilno will be called Vilna. Smaller cities will receive proper Polish spellings with diacritics.
(Jewish residential zone), according to the German decree of August 7, 1940 | |
Ghetto borders on November 16, 1940 (the date the ghetto was established) | |
Border changes during February–April 1941 | |
Ghetto borders on July 22, 1942 (the beginning of the mass deportation) | |
Area of the ghetto remaining on April 19, 1943 (the first day of the uprising) | |
Gates of the ghetto | |
Overpass | |
Principal public institutions | |
Locations of fighting during the uprising of January 1943 | |
Positions and bunkers of the Jewish fighters during the uprising of April–May 1943 | |
Churches | |
Railroad |