Choice, Politics, and the Anomalies of Survival

Given the enormity of mass murder perpetrated during the Holocaust, it is of little surprise that historical analysis has focused largely on the actions, motivations, and choices of those who participated directly in the extermination of European Jewry. Studies by Christopher Browning, Daniel Goldhagen, and Saul Fridelander—among many others—have sought to explain the local dynamics and the broad ideological drives that coalesced into an unprecedented systematization of continent-wide annihilationist violence. Far less attention, Evgeny Finkel posits, has been devoted to understanding the experience of victims of “collective violence” and the “different patterns of behavior” and tactics they adopted in the face of this staggering onslaught of human brutality.¹ Turning the focus from perpetrators to victims, Finkel has mined rich collections of written autobiographical statements and oral histories of more than 500 Holocaust survivors to craft an impressive comparative study of survival strategies adopted by Jews as individuals and collectives within the Kraków, Białystok, and Minsk ghettos.

Adopting qualitative and quantitative methodologies of political science and history, Finkel seeks to analyze the efficacy of what Lawrence Langer aptly called the “choiceless choices” available to Jews trapped in the maelstrom of genocide. In each ghetto location, he asserts, Jews faced similar possible strategies: cooperation and collaboration; coping and compliance; evasion; and resistance. Through an analysis of survivor accounts, Finkel seeks to explain how local conditions and individual factors delimited choices and survival strategies, leading to discernible differences in Jewish collective and individual responses to Nazi violence. At its center, the book analyzes two fundamental questions: why, in certain locations, did Jews gravitate toward strategies of collaboration or evasion, while adopting resistance and rebellion in others? And why, within individual ghettos, did certain Jews embrace more or less active responses of collaboration or compliance, on one hand, or evasion and resistance on the other?

Both answers, the book as a whole argues, came down to politics. When comparing overarching trends of survival strategies, Finkel stresses the central importance of prewar political and social context. Despite their relatively similar size and demographic compositions, the three ghettos existed in radically different political milieus shaped by longstanding statist policies and the immediate interwar upheavals. In Kraków, the legacy of integrationist liberalism inherited from the pre– World War I Austro-Hungarian rule fostered a relatively high degree of social interaction between Jews and Poles, as well as widespread Jewish acculturation in interwar Polish society. The resultant level of linguistic integration in Kraków was surpassed only in Minsk, where twenty years of heavy-handed statist measures adopted following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 led to the supposed diminution of specific Jewish communal life and the forcible integration of Jews into broader, Communist-dominated Soviet society. As a result, when confronted with genocide, significant numbers of Jews in these locations gravitated toward tactics of evasion, many seeking refuge among non-Jewish populations outside the ghetto. In Białystok, by contrast, legacies of Jewish social exclusion in the late Russian Empire intensified during twenty years of Polish independence following World War I. Social exclusion enhanced internal Jewish communal cohesion but limited integration among the predominantly Yiddish-speaking Jews of Białystok. Local hostility from surrounding Polish populations intensified throughout the 1930s—particularly following the Soviet occupation of 1939 and supposed Jewish enthusiasm for the new regime—further exacerbating isolation. In this context, where few Jews possessed the linguistic and cultural knowledge necessary for evasion, resistance became the dominant, if doomed response, leading to the quickly suppressed uprising of August 1943.

Politics—specifically internal Jewish political participation—likewise conditioned Jewish survival strategies. Stated simply, Jews who had been most active in prewar communal organizations adapted the most “active” available strategies of survival. Individuals with histories of prewar political and cultural participation, particularly within general Zionist and religious institutions, gravitated toward strategies of cooperation or collaboration with Nazi authority, willingly or reluctantly, through service in positions of authority within ghetto institutions—including the oft-decried Jewish Councils (Judenräte). Rejecting Hannah Arendt’s caustic denunciations in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Finkel interprets such forms of cooperation and collaboration as...