Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive

8. The Tidings of Job

285 The “Two and a Half Years” project was just getting into high gear when disquieting news arrived in the Warsaw Ghetto about German massacres in the Soviet-occupied eastern territories. As early as the summer of 1941 the underground press in the ghetto began to report eyewitness accounts of shootings in Slonim and the burning of a synagogue, crammed full of Jews, in Białystok. But the clandestine newspapers categorized these killings as “pogroms ,” the latest in a long chain of anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe. Some of these articles even questioned whether it was the Germans or local anti-Semites that bore major responsibility for the violence.1 More ominous reports soon arrived from Vilna of mass shootings in Ponar, a small wooded area near the city. Shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, both Dror and Hashomer Hatzair had been able to establish contact with Vilna, thanks to trusted couriers from the Polish scout movement.2 In October Aryeh Wilner, a member of Hashomer, arrived in the Warsaw Ghetto from Vilna and corroborated the Poles’ grim reports. With­in a short time, other envoys from the Vilna youth groups also arrived in Warsaw. In October 1941 Neged Hazerem, the underground newspaper of the Hashomer Hatzair, carried Grabowski’s account of the mass killings in Vilna: In the last three months the Jewish population of Vilna has dropped from seventy thousnd—the number during the Soviet occupation—to thirty-five thousand. Only a few Jews succeed in escaping from the city. The small ghetto has been almost completely destroyed by mass killing. The Tidings of Job chapter 8 286 Who Will Write Our History? The Jewish population is terrified and depressed. All are convinced that death is near, and all they can do is wait for their turn.3 Shmuel Breslav, the editor of the paper, did not seem entirely sure what to make of the news. In a rare departure from his common practice, he prefaced the article with a brief note explaining that a comrade had arrived from Vilna on October 16 and that Neged Hazerem was relaying his account of what had happened. Clearly Breslav was still not ready to believe what he was hearing. Shortly after Aryeh Wilner returned to Warsaw, the Oyneg Shabes assigned Daniel Fligelman to debrief him and record his detailed testimony for the archive. Wilner, a trusted member of the inner circle of Hashomer Hatzair, described how the Germans seized thousands of Jews on the streets and in their homes and transported them to an unknown destination. At the beginning of September a Jewish woman, who had escaped from the killing grounds of Ponar, gave the ghetto its first eyewitness account: in large pits that the Soviets had dug to store oil, the Germans and Lithuanians were shooting thousands of Jews every day. It was this witness who convinced Vilna Jewry that something terrible was happening.4 The Jewish population of Vilna, Wilner told Fligelman, had already dropped from seventy thousand to twenty-five thousand: “The tidings of Job are coming from provincial Lithuania. In town after town—Landwarów, Troki, Święciany, Niemenczyn, Nowo-Wilejka, Ejszyszki—the entire Jewish population has been wiped out. Even infants have been killed.”5 As other refugees from Vilna arrived in Warsaw, they, too, were interviewed by the Oyneg Shabes staff—Huberband, Gutkowski, Fligelman, Salomea Ostrowska, and others. Rabbi Huberband, who took down a young woman’s reports of shootings in Ponar, prefaced his transcript with a brief statement: “It was not regrettably an empty dream nor a mad fantasy or an evil tale but naked bitter reality.”6 Horrible as these testimonies were, what did they actually mean? Was this a sign that the Germans had decided to wipe out all European Jewry? The first Jews who indeed grasped that they were seeing the beginning of the Final Solution were the leaders of the youth movement in the Vilna Ghetto, including the Hashomer leader Abba Kovner. On January 1, 1942, they issued an appeal to the Jews to resist. The Germans, they warned, were going to kill all the Jews of Europe.7 But even in the Vilna Ghetto, and even in Kovner’s own youth movement, not everyone was ready to believe that the Germans planned total genocide. Perhaps, some argued, the massacres in Lithuania were a local phenomenon, caused by Lithuanian anger at Jews for their al- [18.119.160.154] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10...