Nitzotz: The Spark of Resistance in Kovno Ghetto and Dachau-Kaufering Concentration Camp

Postscript

152 Postscript SH L OMO (FR E N K E L) SH A F I R The five issues of Nitzotz circulated in Dachau-Kaufering that appear in this volume are only a handful of the forty-two that were produced. The underground Zionist journal of which they were part, which began in opposition to the Soviet occupation and continued under the Nazis, lasted longer than others of its kind. The missing issues, along with other records, were intended to document the continuing Zionist activity of the members of Irgun Brith Zion in the face of spiritual persecution by the Soviets and physical extermination by the Nazis. Unfortunately, the bulk of the IBZ archives has been lost to history. Part was apparently destroyed by the people who retrieved it after the Soviet reconquest of Lithuania because they feared official retribution for their Zionist activity. Various IBZ protocols issued in Kovno ghetto under the leadership of Yitzhak Shapira purportedly found their way into the hands of the Communist Security Service officials. However, the majority of the archived underground materials, including the Nitzotz collection, have yet to be discovered; the collapse of the Communist regimes in Russia and Lithuania has failed to bring them to light. The postliberation experiences of the members of IBZ stand in stark contrast to those of Primo Levi and other less famous survivors who counted the first days after liberation from death and slave-labor camps among the saddest of their lives. Notwithstanding generalizations made by Holocaust historians like Hanna Yablonka, we and other Zionist youth activists were immediately elated at the opportunity before us. We were free, at last, to Postscript . 153 implement the ideas and plans that we had discussed throughout the war and especially during the cold winter of 1944–1945 in the Kaufering camps. Moreover, contrary to post- and anti-Zionist contentions that the survivors were the objects of exploitation by political actors within the Yishuv, it was the rapid mobilization by Zionist survivors in Germany that transformed the former prisoners of the slave-labor camps into crucial agents in the struggle to open access to Palestine and establish a Jewish state. The determination and fervor of the Zionist core infected a much wider periphery with a sort of “instant Zionism,” evident in the pervasive refusal by the She’erit Hapletah to return to their Eastern European countries of origin, their unwillingness to remain in Germany, and their desire to build their new lives in Palestine. Certainly, the arrival of the Jewish Brigade in the U.S. zone of Germany during the second half of June 1945 reinforced their pro-Zionist sentiments. But the first steps had already been taken by the survivors themselves. In anticipation of the publication of this volume, I recall the inspiration of the late Abraham Melamed, a senior commander of IBZ in Kovno ghetto. Under the inhuman conditions of the Kaufering II slave-labor camp, he was the first to suggest that we resume circulation of Nitzotz, and he persuaded me to serve as its editor—a task that I fulfilled from September 1944 until the end of April 1945. I recommenced publication of Nitzotz soon after liberation , in the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp, and I continued to edit it in Munich, where the first issue appeared in print in November 1945. Finally, I owe many thanks to my “third-generation” Holocaust granddaughter Laura, who authored this volume, and to her mother, my daughter Estee, who translated the Hebrew text. Appendix . Notes . Bibliography . Index ...