Intellectuals in the Warsaw Ghetto: Guilt, Atonement, and Beyond

Introduction

This article raises the issue of the responsibility of the Jewish public and leadership in the Warsaw Ghetto for shaping the social reality and apportioning the available scanty resources under the rules and regulations that the Nazi occupation regime imposed on them. The question of responsibility is chiefly a moral one, and is raised here in regard to the Jewish public. Behind the question, of course, lies an indisputable premise: the moral responsibility for the Jews' agonies lies solely with the Germans and the occupation regime, which established an inhuman reality of oppression, isolation, humiliation, and systematic starvation in the ghettos of Eastern Europe. However, intellectuals and public activists in the ghettos asked about moral responsibility in regard to the management of the ghetto within the cramped and constraining space that the German occupation regime left to them. Was it possible, within these tight confines, to do something that might ease the plight of most of the public, or had it been policy adopted that gave preference to certain groups, distributed benefits to the well-connected, and subjected most of the public to neglect? Was it possible in the constricted space that the Germans left the Jews to transform the coerced ghetto society into a creative community that would seek the betterment of most of its inhabitants? And to whom did this duty belong?

Finger pointing, guilt feelings, and demands for a change of course were present in writings produced during the Holocaust itself. They surface in many diaries, and in the statements of intellectuals and leaders. Importantly, too, the writings produced during the war lack the perspective of the magnitude of the devastation and of the end of the war; they reflect the immediacy of the disaster that was unfolding at the collective and individual levels. The grim realities of life and the social and economic relations in the ghettos, especially the large ghettos, raised questions and ruminations about morals, society, and responsibility for self, family, and the other. Wrestling with moral values was prominent among the concerns of the Jews under Nazi occupation.¹

The tormenting issues of responsibility and guilt were also debated among survivors at the end of the war, when even those who had been under the yoke of Nazi rule became aware of the magnitude of the devastation. They surfaced in two guises: blaming of self, and blaming of specific institutions and entities that had operated within the Jewish collective. Survivors expressed these sentiments in spoken and written form, both immediately after the Holocaust and for many years after. Many asked themselves, "Why did we survive and not our dear ones?" "Why were the best of us obliterated?" and "What responsibility should we bear as survivors?" One of the most conspicuous and fluent examples of this feeling is the chapter on shame in Primo Levi's book The Drowned and the Saved.²

Levi tackles honestly and, unswervingly, the sense of guilt that flowed from his having survived, and the memories that he bore from his life in the camp. After the fact, Levi attempted to submit to a reckoning for his behavior as a prisoner. His memoirs reflect two aspects that fueled his sense of shame. One originated in the humiliation and lowliness that typified his existence as a subhuman, or animal, that wished to survive and submitted at all times to the oppressor's whims. The other flowed from actions that he committed, or should have committed but did not, because of his fixation on survival, including retreat into self, and insensitivity and inattentiveness to the other. These actions stalk Levi as a survivor who seeks retrospectively to understand his existence in that special universe: the Auschwitz death camp. Levi notes emphatically that these feelings of shame and guilt are experienced after the fact; they did not exist during the camp era. And even though many would insist that neither he nor other survivors have any reason to feel this way, the guilt weighs onerously on his world.³

The survivor's guilt feelings are paradoxical. The Nazis created the reality that subjected the individual to...