Analyzing Jewish Behavior during the Holocaust

Evgeny Finkel’s Ordinary Jews is an important book for two reasons. First, it offers one of the few sustained efforts to analyze how Jews in different places behaved in response to Nazi rule instead of simply describing how they experienced it. Most Jewish-centered narratives about the Holocaust have been descriptive and evocative in nature: they have concentrated upon “giving voice” to victims’ perceptions, to elucidating their plight, or to tracing the evolution of their behavior. Ordinary Jews does these things, to be sure, but it also notices aggregate patterns of behavior that varied from community to community, and it tries to account for them using methods and insights from the social sciences.

Among other things, the book’s analytical thrust contributes to the study of one of the central problems with which scholars of the Holocaust are grappling today: explaining the wide variation in outcomes of the final solution over space. This is the second reason why Ordinary Jews is an important book. By identifying collective patterns of Jewish behavior that also vary over space, it invites the question of the extent to which those patterns may have affected differences in survival rates from place to place. Debates about that question—which can also be stated as, “To what extent did Jews under Nazi rule affect their personal and collective fates by their own actions?”—have a long history, but until now they have not been informed by much systematic analysis of available data. The author appears to regard it as axiomatic that “the actions of people targeted by mass murder impact the outcomes of the violence.”¹ The findings presented in Ordinary Jews do not demonstrate that proposition conclusively. Nevertheless, those findings do suggest that an attempt to map more fully the two sets of variations and to explore possible correlations between them may eventually help scholars understand how victim behavior and outcomes are related.

For example, in Kraków in May 1945, 4,262 Jewish survivors registered with the provincial office of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland.² That number amounted to about 9 percent of the city’s Jewish population according to the 1921 census.³ By contrast, in the same month only 189 Jewish survivors registered in Białystok, or less than half of 1 percent of the 1921 Jewish population.⁴ Of course, those figures do not necessarily show that Jews in Kraków were 18 times more likely to survive than were Jews in Białystok. But they do call for explanation, and the possibility that the differences in the distribution of Jewish survival strategies between the two cities that the author has noted contributed in some measure to the difference between them surely ought to be considered in the effort to find one.

We are, however, still a long way from being able to make any generalizations in the matter, or even to offer any plausible hypotheses. For one thing, it is far from obvious that the particular combination of significantly greater compliance, marginally greater resistance, and significantly lower evasion in Białystok than in Kraków that the author has highlighted should have manifested itself in any difference in survival rate. We can easily think of numerous other factors that also merit consideration. Some have less to do with the German pursuit of the final solution than with the postwar environment. But other factors are anchored squarely in the conditions of Nazi rule, including the timing of ghetto establishment and liquidation in relation to the overall progress of the war effort; the timing and pace of Aktionen; the identity of the various local Nazi authorities and the relations between them; the strategic importance the Germans attached to particular locations; the proximity of labor camps; the availability of food; and the sources of supply. Still others were functions of the topography of the surrounding region, the density of nearby village settlement, or proximity to political borders. And others involved not the behavior of Jews under Nazi impact but demographic, socioeconomic, and historical conditions independent of any the Nazis imposed: age distribution (which helped determine...