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

Preface

ix Preface As a young child, I awaited my grandfather’s visits with a little anxiety. He was every bit the pünktlich German: rational, serious, bookish. Every morning he would leave for the university library, and every evening he would return with a stack of photocopies, retreat into the guest room, and study them late into the night. If he emerged, it seemed, it was only to lecture me on my poor manners or to chastise my mother for my failure to read “the classics” and my lack of diligence in practicing piano. The family photo albums bulge with snapshots of my grandfather and his books, reading, speaking, writing. I came to believe that he had emerged from the womb as an austere intellectual in reading glasses and a suit. I grew up hearing all the stories of his academic prowess: he had sent in a correction to a prominent German encyclopedia at the age of eight; he had learned four languages by the time he was twelve. His achievements continued to mount in Lithuania, the ancestral home for which he and his father had left in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws and growing antisemitism in Eastern Prussia. At the Hebrew Gymnasium in Kovno, his Latin teacher had announced in class that my grandfather’s knowledge was surpassed only by God’s. When I was a bit older, I heard another story of my grandfather’s obsessive bookishness. Even under the life-threatening oppression of the Nazis in Dachau-Kaufering concentration camp, he had continued to write. He had risked everything to edit and circulate the Zionist underground Hebrew journal Nitzotz (Spark). At first, I took this logical progression for granted. The young pupil who had dismissed his private tennis lessons as a waste of time and had preferred to spend his afternoons reading Goethe and Schiller had simply translated his desire for intellectual exchange into a new medium. x . Preface In Kovno ghetto, he hid his books and read during the night. In DachauKaufering concentration camp, reading materials were virtually nonexistent. So he filled the gap with his own writing and that of his peers. It took me years to recognize the inconsistencies between my grandfather ’s early scholarly feats and the deep resolution and spirituality of his underground activity. After liberation, the change had left its mark: my grandfather, erstwhile connoisseur of everything European, made aliyah to Palestine in 1948. In 1955, Selimar Frenkel became Shlomo Shafir. Together with my grandmother Mina, his lifelong companion and a fellow member of the Zionist underground, he dedicated himself to a new life in the state of Israel. My grandfather would never stray far from his academic roots. While working as a journalist in Israel, he received a B.A. and M.A. at Hebrew University. In the 1960s he traveled to Washington, D.C., as the U.S. correspondent for the Israeli Labor daily Davar—and in the meantime earned a doctorate in European history from Georgetown University. By that time, his Dachau days had faded into the past. Once again a consummate rationalist , he struggled to situate the experience of his youth in a framework of politics and international relations. His dissertation examined the persecution of Jews in Germany during the 1930s and its impact on American-German relations. Later, he wrote monographs on German Social Democrats and their attitude toward Israel and on the relations between the American Jewish community and postwar Germany. Nonetheless, the spiritual transformation wrought by his wartime travails had left an indelible impression. His commitment to the struggle for a Jewish state grew out of a complete intellectual and spiritual rebirth. Not surprisingly, the origin of the transformation lay in his prewar education in Kovno and in years of underground work for Nitzotz. The journal represented a basic challenge to the perceived passivity of Western Jewish intellectualism . In maintaining his voice even amid the dehumanizing rhetoric of Nazi destruction, my grandfather and his colleagues asserted a uniquely Jewish mode of resistance. In the following pages, I will situate Nitzotz in the context of the history of Zionist ideology and the politics of language and resistance. The journal was circulated underground for almost five years. It was founded in 1940 in Preface . xi Soviet Kovno and was published regularly in Kovno ghetto. Frenkel, who had been active in the underground since the Soviet occupation, became managing editor of Nitzotz in 1942...