Nitzotz: The Spark of Resistance in Kovno Ghetto & Dachau-Kaufering Concentration Camp (review)

Every individual story casts more light on the experience of the millions of Jews forced to live in ghettos and then in labor or death camps, and is therefore important for historiography. Every single scrap of paper that reflects the anxieties, expectations, and emotions of even one person among these Jews is crucial to preserving memory and can help historians to take one small step ahead.

Hence, we cannot but welcome the publication of a series of prisoners' writings from Kaufering, a sub-camp of Dachau. The articles are translated and reproduced from a periodical written and circulated—with great difficulty—by Jews from the Kovno ghetto. The group, which was associated with the Zionist organization Irgun Brith Zion (IBZ), began publishing the journal in the ghetto but continued in the camp. Eventually about a dozen issues appeared. It is not important that the editor of the collection is not a specialist in the history of the extermination of Europe's Jews (Weinrib is a historian of law). She was spurred to produce this publication for reasons of family: she is the granddaughter of one of the initiators of the journal Nitzotz (Spark).

The editor's openly acknowledged family connections are not, in my opinion, an obstacle to analysis; her historical introduction is clear and precise. She reconstructs the work of these young Zionists mainly on the basis of survivors' testimony. In the second part she reproduces in their entirety five of the issues that were put together at Kaufering during the final phase of the war. It is a pity that more of the journal did not survive, but it is an even greater pity that the editor, without providing a reason, omitted the two surviving excerpts of the issues that were prepared and circulated in the ghetto. It would have been fascinating to compare the contents and tone of the journal in two such different moments. The reprinted texts date for the most part from a period when it seemed reasonable to hope that the war would soon end, and when victims of oppression could look to the future with some confidence. During the bleak period of the ghetto, darkness and uncertainty predominated. But the editor stresses that even in this phase, "the articles in Nitzotz assume life, not death—for the Jewish people, if not for the authors" (p. 5).

The editor argues correctly that the publication of the journal by this small group of young intellectuals should be regarded as "a uniquely Jewish mode of resistance" (p. x) in that it was based on writing and exposition—crucial means to ethical and psychological survival. This was a resistance pivoting on commitment to the project of "building a Jewish national community" after the war ended (p. 9). This conviction, which is conveyed clearly in articles in the journal, can be gleaned in part from the programmatic use of Yiddish in the drafting of the journal itself. According to the Nitzotz group, only by maintaining this positive outlook towards the future would it be possible to "give meaning to the Nazi crimes" (quoted p. 10). And although the journal's editors were fervent supporters of Zionism, they had the good sense to develop a version of Zionism that was vague enough to leave room for debate even from beyond the narrow circle of their group. Nitzotz is significant not only because it was in essence a document of moral resistance, but also because it tried to avoid, to some extent, the sectarianism and particularism that were so marked (and harmful) in the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe at that time.

The editor stresses not only the ethical and political importance of the work, but also its value as an example of the aggregation and discussion of issues: "Between eighty and one hundred people were active in IBZ during the ghetto years," she writes (p. 31), and we can estimate...