Imperfect Humans and Perfect Beasts: Changing Perceptions of German and Jewish Persecutors in Holocaust Ghetto Diaries

Daily existence for ghetto inhabitants during the Holocaust consisted of a continual struggle for life against hunger, disease, trauma, hard labor, and, not insignificantly, other people. Jewish diarists writing in the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos during World War II regularly described a life that consisted of a constant barrage of harmful decrees to which they had to either adapt or die. Along with these decrees came those people whose job—or sometimes choice—it was to enforce the decrees. Each day, as diarists described the painful regulations, they also depicted and presented evaluations of the people involved in making those regulations law, and others who took advantage of the ghetto situation for their own benefit. The overall image the reader gets of life in the ghettos from these diaries is one of perpetration from all sides.

Until recently, Holocaust scholars have primarily viewed perpetration through a hierarchical lens of power and ethnicity, placing Germans only in the role of perpetrators. In his seminal work on this topic, Raul Hilberg categorized Germans as perpetrators, Jews as victims, and all others as bystanders. He suggested that individuals in the victim and bystander categories could take part in perpetration, thereby becoming collaborators but never perpetrators. Hilberg was first and foremost interested in German perpetrators, their actions and motivations. In the past twenty-five years, Hilberg's triptych has been complicated by the addition of a category of "collaborators," as well as a discussion of the "gray zone" whereby Jewish behavior in the ghettos and camps has come under scrutiny. Some of this scholarship has focused on interpretations of historians and thinkers who did not experience ghetto/concentration camp life, while some has relied on wartime sources and postwar witness testimony.¹ Much attention has been given to the role of the Jewish councils and Jewish police as collaborators, or at least complicit actors, in the Nazi program of annihilation. Some scholars interpret the Jewish leadership's behavior during the Holocaust as reprehensible, while others fall on the other side of the debate, preferring to think of Jews' decisions during the Holocaust as "choiceless choices."²

The discussions surrounding the involvement of Jewish actors in the Holocaust have primarily been situated in a postwar historiography that still tries to describe the behavior of the persecutors (here Jewish) rather than their victims. Scholars examine the actions of Jewish policemen and council members (the "privileged") in the ghettos to determine their motivations, the results of their activities, and the moral dilemmas they faced.³ Even studies that use Holocaust diaries and other wartime sources to illuminate these issues focus primarily on the persecutors.⁴ A few books have even examined Jewish policemen's explanations for their own actions, both positive and negative, providing important perspectives on how Jews made impossible moral decisions and the repercussions of those choices.⁵ Contrary to that dominant trend, this study examines references to perpetrators in contemporaneous sources (diaries) to investigate the world of the non-privileged victims themselves. Instead of focusing on how diarists explained perpetrator motivations, this study interprets shifts in their perceptions of these perpetrators to understand changing notions of self and community. It asks what an analysis of the ways in which victims wrote about their persecutors can elucidate about their experiences in the ghettos. I argue that the relatively rigid victim, perpetrator, bystander, and collaborator categories currently used do not allow us to see the way people grappled with a constantly changing world and identity within the ghettos. This paradigm erases the sense of chaos and uncertainty Jews faced as they tried to understand the behaviors of people acting in the radically new circumstance of the Holocaust. People did not adhere to static categories in the midst of ever-evolving Nazi policy, fluctuating treatment of different groups of Jews, and daily rumors and new information. In the ghettos, Jews had both enough restriction and enough freedom to begin to understand the seriousness of their situation and to contemplate and analyze it. Unlike later life in the concentration camps (for many of these Jews), Jews...