A Tale of Three Ghettos

Evgeny Finkel’s recently published book, Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust, lays out a very ambitious agenda. The Holocaust has been overlooked by social scientists, Finkel believes, and he wants to put that right: “a ‘political science’ of the Holocaust,” he states, “is both feasible and desirable.”¹ To further this aim, he uses three specific Jewish ghettos—Kraków, Minsk, and Białystok—to serve as a “controlled comparison” of Jewish behavior.

This “controlled comparison,” Finkel argues, suggests a new topology of Jewish options under German occupation. Finkel suggests four basic behavioral templates: compliance/coping, collaboration/cooperation, escape/evasion, and resistance. Having outlined this topology, Finkel then tried to show why Jews acted as they did:

The factors that shaped the Jews’ choice of a particular strategy are … the patterns and contents of their political activism, the type and intensity of the repression they experienced, the degree of their integration into non-Jewish society, and the ethnic composition of their social networks.²

And, Finkel argues, the crucial variable that shaped all these factors was the city’s pre-Holocaust political regime.

Professor Finkel quite rightly asserts that it is important to study the Holocaust not just at the macro-level but also at the micro-level and the meso-level; to discard broad-brush descriptions of passivity in favor of serious inquiry into the broad range of Jewish reactions; to consider the impact of prewar experience and culture on the behavior of Jews under Nazi occupation. He also wants to correct a tendency of Holocaust scholarship to pay more attention to the perpetrators than to their victims. Furthermore, he argues that scholars should not minimize the degree of agency that those victims had. This is all well and good.

Professor Finkel asks good questions. Chapter 3, “What Did the Jews Know?” compares what Jews in Kraków, Białystok, and Minsk knew and did not know about Nazi intentions. For example, Finkel argues, Jews in Minsk knew less than the others because the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact caused the Soviet propaganda machine to obfuscate the truth about Nazi behavior in occupied Poland. Therefore they were less likely to flee in 1941. Kraków Jews knew more and thus fled in quicker numbers in September 1939. Of course Kraków Jews did not have to deal with a Soviet regime that often made the decision to flee quite difficult.

Chapter 4, “Cooperation and Collaboration,” is less straightforward and more controversial. Finkel states that cooperation and collaboration meant “working with the enemy by either participating in or facilitating the persecution.”³ Cooperators acted for what they felt to be the good of the community while those who collaborated “knowingly acted to the detriment of the community’s or individual Jews’ survival.”⁴

Finkel, unfortunately in my opinion, largely discards the more compelling distinctions between collaboration and cooperation made by Isaiah Trunk and Yehuda Bauer. “The forced dichotomy between ‘collaboration’ and ‘cooperation,’ ” he states, “limits our ability to understand their choices and actions.”⁵ The same leader, Finkel states, might, over the course of time, both cooperate and collaborate.

In my opinion Finkel’s distinction between cooperation and collaboration is somewhat forced, and it leads him to certain untenable judgments, such as his assertion that Efroym Barash, the head of the Białystok Judenrat, crossed the line into collaboration when he broke his promise to warn the ghetto underground of a final deportation. He learned the shocking news on the night of August 15–16, 1943 and kept silent. But scholars should think twice before they pass such a judgment on a harried Judenrat leader who had done the best he could, who had gotten the news of impending deportation literally at the last moment, and whose relations with the resistance had been under strain in the last days of the ghetto. Can one presume to know his psychological state, the impact of this shock on his ability to decide what to do?

Chapter 5, “Coping and Compliance,” develops an interesting discussion on how Jews who did not flee the Germans and who did not...