Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940-1943

1. Introduction

1 1 Introduction It was March 1, 1940, and Arnold Szyfman, the director of Teatr Polski (pol. Polish Theater), one of Warsaw’s most illustrious stages, was finishing his work for the day. Like many other theater employees who lost their apartments in the bombings of September 1939 he was now living permanently in his office. It was only a few minutes past 9 pm, but, as he wrote in his memoir, because of the cold and the curfew imposed on the streets of Warsaw, he was used to going to sleep earlier than before the war. Suddenly, Szyfman heard a bang on the door and in the doorway appeared the building’s janitor followed by six Gestapo functionaries. The Germans searched the room thoroughly, asking him about the theater bonds, money, and jewelry. They were just about to leave, when, as Szyfman recalled, they saw his fur coat hanging on the door. Inspecting it, one of the Gestapo men asked why he did not wear an armband. Szyfman noted his answer in his memoir: “I explained that I am not a Jew neither from nationality nor religion and that is why I do not wear it. They asked me if I know that this risks the death penalty. I replied that they threaten me unnecessarily.”1 Szyfman was ordered to report to the Gestapo the next morning and was promptly imprisoned. Freed in the autumn of 1940, he left Warsaw for the countryside, where he survived the war. Thousands of others like him, Polish Jews or Poles of Jewish origin subjected to Nazi anti-Semitic legislation, followed in his footsteps, fleeing Warsaw or going into hiding. However, the vast majority of those who remained in a state of suspension, on the border of national and cultural identities , were not given this choice. In November 1940, with the closure of 2 | Assimil a t ed Jews in t h e Wa r saw Ghet to the Jewish Quarter in Warsaw, their fate became entwined with that of all of the victims of the Holocaust. The Concept and Classification of Assimilation The concepts of assimilation and acculturation evade clear definition . The borders separating assimilated and acculturated groups from other parts of the Jewish community are hazy, unclear, and ever changing. Nonetheless, at least as a starting point, some definition must be undertaken and such borders must be defined. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, in one of the first and most influential works on assimilation, define it as “a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and by sharing their experiences and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life.”2 Numerous other definitions, more or less rigid, have been proposed by those working on the history of Polish Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, the murkiness of the concept and the difficulty of applying it to the specific context of the Polish-Jewish community have resulted in the term “assimilation” being less commonly used in more recent scholarship. Instead, the process of assimilation is broken down into various components discussed separately. Historian Todd Endelman defines four changes in Jewish behavior and status, which are usually encompassed by the term assimilation: acculturation (the acquisition of the cultural and social habits of the dominant non-Jewish group); integration (the entry of Jews into non-Jewish social circles and spheres of activity); emancipation (the acquisition of rights and privileges enjoyed by non-Jewish citizens/subjects of similar socio-economic rank); and secularization (the rejection of religious beliefs and the obligations and practices determined by these beliefs).3 As a result, Jonathan Frankel notes, the discussion of assimilation has shifted “from the extremes, from the dichotomous archetypes, to that middle ground where it is no easy task to distinguish the exceptions from the rules.”4 This statement is especially viable when applied to the Jewish community of interwar Poland, where full integration could not take place because of factors such as weak economic development, In tr o d uc ti o n | 3 the dense concentrations of traditional Jews who opposed the emancipation process, and the negative attitude of the non-Jewish community . However, at the same time a new generation of Jews who were educated in Polish schools, were fluent in Polish, and were increasingly familiar with the environment outside traditional Jewish...