The Death of the Shtetl (review)

Yehuda Bauer, Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has spent the past forty years approaching the Holocaust from the perspective of its Jewish victims. This makes him a unique figure in the fields of Jewish history and Holocaust studies. This slender yet significant volume is no exception; as he notes in the prologue, “this book was written as a contribution to the victims’ side of Holocaust history.” The volume is a welcome historiographical addition, for as historians Saul Friedländer and David Engel both have suggested recently, historians of the Holocaust have failed to integrate the Jewish perspective into the study of the Holocaust, while historians of the Jews have failed to integrate the Holocaust into their studies of Jewish history.¹ Through the lens of a term he has defined as Amidah (Heb: “standing up against”), Bauer examines the nature of Jewish responses to persecution with a focus on an almost completely ignored segment of Jewish experiences during the Holocaust—those of the Jews who lived in the shtetlekh.

Although thirty to forty percent of the 3.3 million Jews who lived in prewar Poland lived in small towns and villages, Bauer correctly notes there has been almost no historical or sociological analysis of the shtetlekh in the period immediately before and during the Holocaust. Bauer defines a “shtetl” as “a township with 1,000 to 15,000 Jews, who formed at least a third of the total population, and [whose communal] life was regulated by the Jewish calendar and by customs derived from a traditional interpretation of Jewish religion” (p. 3). As it would be impossible to focus on all shtetls in one study, Bauer focuses on eleven shtetls located in the kresy (Eastern Galicia, Volhynia, and Belorussia): Buczacz, Kosów, and Zborów in Eastern Galicia; Krzemieniec, Rokitno, and Sarny in Volhynia; and Baranowicze, Brześć, Dereczyn, Kurzeniec, and Nowogródek in Belorussia. The research is supplemented by additional material on Bolechów, Brzeżany, Czortków, Łachwa, Tuczyn, and several other communities.

In his study of these shtetls, Bauer focuses on the questions of how preexisting systems and structures of Jewish tradition and culture may have prepared Jews to face the Nazi onslaught; how the atomization and destruction of Jewish communal institutions during the Soviet period (1939–1941) may have undermined, before the arrival of German forces, any effective Jewish response; and how Jews reacted “in the face of the sudden, unexpected, and, for them, inexplicable assault” (p. 3). Utilizing his concept of Amidah, Bauer tests the hypothesis that the “unarmed and armed reactions intended to keep the community and its components going existed [also] in the shtetlekh of the kresy [enabling them] to stand up to the existential threat posed by the German regime” (p. 7). In Rethinking the Holocaust, Bauer identified Amidah as including “smuggling food into ghettos; mutual self-sacrifice within the family to avoid starvation or worse; cultural, educational, religious, and political activities undertaken to strengthen morale; the work of doctors, nurses, and educators to consciously maintain health and moral fiber to enable individual and group survival; and, of course, armed rebellion or the use of force (with bare hands or with ‘cold’ weapons) against the Germans and their collaborators.”² In applying his analytical framework to the shtetls of the kresy, however, Bauer finds it difficult to identify a common Amidah response. He discovers many diverse responses without clear explanations.

The type of Amidah found in the larger cities of Warsaw and Lodz almost certainly did not exist in the shtetls, although there was a higher incidence of armed resistance there than elsewhere in Poland (possibly because of the proximity to forests). He finds, too, that the nature and behavior of Judenrat leadership varied widely depending on individual personalities and local circumstances, and also that there was a perplexing diversity of responses in seemingly comparable shtetls. In Krzemieniec, for example, Bauer finds almost...