Defiance in the Shtetl

When we hear the word “amidah,” it is usually referring to the standing prayer that is the core of the Jewish prayer service. But the same word has an entirely different meaning in the work of Yehuda Bauer, a towering and commanding figure among the historians of the Holocaust. “Amidah” is his word for Jewish resistance, and it is the focus of his latest book, “The Death of the Shtetl” (Yale University Press, $35).

“In this context, [amidah] means literally ‘standing up against,’ ” Bauer wrote in “Rethinking the Holocaust,” one of his previous books, “and that includes both armed and unarmed actions [such as] smuggling food into ghettoes; mutual self-sacrifice within the family to avoid starvation or worse; cultural, educational, religious and political activities taken to strengthen morale; the work of doctors, nurses and educators to consciously maintain health and moral fibre to enable individual and group survival; and, of course, armed rebellion or the use of force (with bare hands or ‘cold’ weapons) against the Germans and their collaborators.”

In his latest book, Bauer tightens the focus to an especially poignant aspect of the Shoah — the mass murder of the Jews who lived in the small towns of Eastern Europe and Russia known as shtetls (or, in Yiddish, “shtetlach”). “[W]hat we want to know, and do not know,” Bauer writes, “is how the Jews lived before they were murdered, what their reactions were in the face of the sudden, unexpected, and, for them, inexplicable assault on their lives by a power whose policies they did not and could not understand.”

Our recollections of the shtetl are soaked in a sentimentality that begins in the stories of Sholem Aleichem and reaches its highest expression in the most successful of their offspring, the Broadway and Hollywood versions of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Shtetl life is depicted with somewhat more irony in the stories and novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer, but even Singer tends to knock the sharp edges off the real life of the shtetl.

Bauer, ever the open-eyed and truth-telling historian, reminds us that the shtetl was never a wholly benign environment for its Jewish residents. Rather, as Bauer points out, the facts of life in the shtetl included “the degrading poverty, the religious fanaticism, the authoritarian oligarchies that ruled over most, if not all of these places and the hopelessness of a people who were faced with anti-Semitic bureaucracies.” By 1939, when Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia invaded and divided up Poland, the shtetlach came under the rule of totalitarian states that would, one way or another, destroy them for all time.

Bauer’s book describes the fate of the shtetlach on the borderland between Poland and the Soviet Union, a region known in Polish as the “kresy.” He touches on the exploits of men and women who were able to reach the more remote forests and take up arms against Nazi Germany, including the Bielski brothers and other partisans. He also reports on other strategies for survival, including Jews who served in the Red Army or sought a place of refuge in the Soviet Union, and Jews who were sheltered in place by Polish protectors. But the fate of the overwhelming majority of shtetl dwellers, of course, was extermination.

Some residents of the shtetl were sent to death camps, but many more were simply shot to death at the edge of an open burial pit. “[L]ocal inhabitants were either direct witnesses of the mass murder or heard the shots and knew where the mass graves were located,” Bauer writes. “For decades afterwards, local inhabitants dug for the gold that Jews were supposed to have owned and been buried with — in areas where the Jews were at least as poor as their neighbors. Anti-Semitism is a very hardy weed indeed.”

Bauer credits the Jews of the shtetl with heroic acts of resistance, but he refuses to romanticize or idealize them. “Partisan fighting was cruel and bitter on both sides,” he explains. “Partisans caught sleeping while on guard, partisans who had lost their weapons, and partisans found guilty of similar misdemeanors were executed, usually in front of the whole unit.” Nor does Bauer overstate what armed resistance was able to accomplish.

“[W]hen we look at the dry statistics — frightening statistics, I must add — roughly 1.3 million Jews were murdered in the kresy, and the Bielskis, with tremendous courage and taking great risks daily, rescued fewer than 0.1 percent of that number,” he writes. “Saving a life is like saving a whole world, as Jewish tradition has it. They could not save more than 1,200 worlds, that pitiable percentage, and even that was an unequalled, heroic deed.”

What makes Bauer’s latest book — and, indeed, all of his work on the Holocaust — so important is his insistence on adhering to the highest and strictest standards of scholarship. At every point in his account he measures and tests the available evidence, and he is frank in disclosing when it is too sparse to confirm the details of a particular incident. Although Bauer is willing to treat the oral histories of the survivors — “testimonies,” as he calls them — as source material, he is always careful to cross-check the memories of an eyewitness against the available documentary evidence and the recollections of other survivors. “[H]owever,” he writes, “there is not much choice: Documents are rare, and there are many postwar testimonies.”

Precisely because Bauer is such a demanding scholar, “The Death of the Shtetl” can be seen as another act of amidah, in the sense that Bauer is standing up against the deniers, minimizers and apologists who have tried to use the Holocaust as a weapon against Jewish history and memory. l

Jonathan Kirsch, author of 13 books, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal and blogs at jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve. He can be reached at {encode=”books@jewishjournal.com” title=”books@jewishjournal.com”}.