A Mile In His Tallis

How do we judge people involved in events that are entirely outside of our own experience? Would we have made better decisions, given our own backgrounds? Is it even possible to put ourselves in their places?  Let’s take this story, which my great grandfather Henoch once told me:

It was Shabbat morning in the village of Chelm, and all the Jews were in shul donning their tallises, preparing to pray. Just as the Shaliach Tzibur was about to kick off Pesukei d’Zimra, one of the assembled mentioned news he received from a cousin in Warsaw. A rag dealer purchased an old sofa, and when he brought it back to his hovel, he discovered a bag full of gold coins hidden in one of the cushions.

Now, the rag dealer lived in abject poverty. A widower who suffered from crippling arthritis and failing vision, he worked long hours to support his many children and elderly mother-in-law. It was a struggle to feed his family, but of course, he was always the last to eat.

As great as his misery was, his fear of Hashem was even greater. Without hesitation, he returned the bag of gold coins to its owner.

The Jews of Chelm were stunned to hear this story. At first, there was total silence. Then, one shouted out: “What a tzaddik! That’s just what I would have done!”

To which his brother replied: “Nonsense! You’ve been cheating me since we were in cheder!”

Another one chimed in: “No question at all! I would have kept the gold!”

To which his brother replied: “You scoundrel! I’m grateful our father of blessed memory is not alive to hear you talk that way!”

Complete bedlam ensued. Everyone shouting, no one listening, punches thrown, gaberdines ripped, it went on for hours until all heard a great, booming voice:

“Whisky! Tango! Foxtrot!”

The assembled all turned towards the voice, and who was it but Eliyahu Hanavi! Yes, the Prophet Elijah himself. And he continued: “Will you Jews get a grip? This isn’t the only shul I need to visit today. Can we please get started?”

A few generations ago, Jewish ears would have tuned into a mention of the village of Chelm, and sardonic Jewish smirks would have appeared on knowing Jewish faces. But these days, not so much. For the uninitiated, here’s a quote from “A Treasury of Yiddish Stories” edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg:

“Finally, there appear in this section some stories about Chelm, the legendary Jewish town populated by fools and innocents. (There was a real Chelm in Poland, but it had no connection with the Chelm of these stories.) The attribution of humorously unattractive qualities to a certain place is hardly unique to the Jews; the Greeks, for example, have made the town of Koutsopodi synonymous with stinginess. But one may doubt whether so many absurdities, so many delightful and telling inanities, have ever been heaped upon any single place as the East European Jews have heaped upon Chelm. In time Chelm became a kind of mirror-in-reverse of the Yiddish world; all the strains of a highly intellectualistic culture were relaxed in these tales of incredible foolishness and innocence.”

The Jewish world that took such pleasure in laughing at Chelm is gone. Some of that is due to the onset of modernity, some of it because of Russian pogroms, but overwhelmingly, the wonderful legend of Chelm was destroyed by the Shoah, the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe.

We all know something of the villains and atrocities of the Holocaust, and we should never forget. We all know something about the many courageous and selfless rescuers, and we should always remember. Still, there is another, less well-known group that I have only recently started to think about: Jews who were accused of collaboration with the Nazis.

The first time I ever read about Judenrat, councils of Jews established to deal with Nazi occupiers, was either in Leon Uris’s “Mila 18” or John Hersey’s “The Wall”. If memory serves, the members of the Judenrat viewed themselves as working on behalf of their beleaguered communities. These novels were engaging works of fiction but presented highly sanitized descriptions of the Warsaw Ghetto.

A far more horrific account is Emmanuel Ringelblum’s “Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto”.  A historian by training, Ringelblum was in Switzerland when the Germans invaded Poland, but returned to Warsaw, assembled a staff, and produced an enormous archive documenting life in the Ghetto. Therein was recorded vicious German brutality and terrible Jewish suffering, but what surprised me most was the level of corruption and venality that was enabled by the Judenrat and the Jewish police.

As head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków was responsible for carrying out German policy in the Warsaw Ghetto. I am in no position to judge him. I have not read his diary yet, but it is on my bucket list. Perhaps he felt that dealing with the criminal element was the only way to bring any food into the Ghetto. Perhaps he didn’t have that much control over events. When the order came to deport children in Ghetto orphanages to death camps, he committed suicide rather than comply. Whatever his sins were, his memory should be for a blessing.

It is not surprising that after the Nazis were defeated, many among the liberated populations turned on collaborators and informants in their midst. There were certainly acts of vigilante justice, and it seems likely this resulted in the murders of the falsely accused. It seems just as likely that real criminals went unpunished.

Imagine how much harder this must have been for the Jews. They faced persecution and death if they returned to their prewar homes, and the British White Paper prevented them from going to Mandatory Palestine. The Allies interned Jewish survivors in Displaced Person Camps, sometimes in the same locations as the concentration camps. The worst was over, but the Jews were still locked up: Judenrat members, ghetto policemen, kapos, functionaries, and the just plain miserable. There was considerable violence as victims took revenge on their tormentors. To restore some semblance of civil society, honor courts were established and presided over by prominent survivors. Although I have a lot more to learn about these courts, it seems that they were reasonably successful, even if punishments were limited to verbal reprimands.  A few years later, a similar process took place in Israel.

In “Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators”, Dan Porat divides these trials into phases.  In the first phase, which he dates from August 1950 to January 1952, legislators and prosecutors viewed alleged collaborators as fully partnered with the Nazis, and essentially guilty until proven innocent. Charges included “crimes against humanity”, the same wording used against the Nazi leadership in Nuremburg.  Any mitigation of the defendant’s actions was only allowed during sentencing, if at all.  One three-and-a-half-month trial resulted in a verdict against Yehezkel Jungster.  He lost his wife and children to the Nazis. He was already a dying man, having lost a kidney and his left leg, about to lose his other leg due to necrosis, and suffering from circulatory disease and high blood pressure. He had been assigned by the SS as a kapo to supervise other prisoners within the camp.  Witnesses testified that Jungster brutalized his victims, even when there were no Nazis around.  He was given the death sentence, but this was overturned on appeal.

The second phase lasted until 1957. As Porat describes it, “functionaries were cast not as Nazis but as Jewish collaborators of the Nazis.”  That strikes me as a distinction with a great deal of difference.  The accused could no longer be charged with war crimes and were not subject to the death penalty.  Around that time, some of Israeli society was beginning to question whether there should be any prosecutions at all.  Understandably, how could anyone who did not live through the Shoah judge anybody who did?

During the third phase of trials, “the legal system viewed most functionaries as men and women who had committed wrongs but had done so with good intentions.” This seems in line with what I took away from reading “Mila 18” and “The Wall”. Collaborators were only held to account if prosecutors believed that they had aligned with Nazi aims.  One witness described a Jewish policeman who climbed into the attic of an orphanage and dragged out dozens of children who were then handed over for deportation to Auschwitz. That probably counts as being aligned with Nazi aims.  But Jewish policemen typically had to round up Jews or have their own families taken. Hashem should protect us from such choices.

There was a reversal of sorts, shortly after the Eichmann trial in 1961.  One prosecutor filed charges against a former Jewish police chief that included “membership in a hostile organization”.  This could have been used against anyone who had joined a Jewish council or police force, regardless of actions or intentions.  Before the start of the trial, the Israeli Justice Ministry had this count removed from the indictment.

For what it’s worth, the Nuremburg judges who tried the surviving Nazi leadership struggled with using mere membership in a criminal organization as a basis for assessing guilt.  For example, being part of the SA, aka the Stormtroopers, was not enough to sustain an indictment. This might not be as outrageous as it sounds since the Brownshirts were essentially neutered in 1937 during the Night of the Long Knives, and became little more than a drum and bugle corps.

Of all the cases of alleged collaboration with the Nazis, one strikes me as a particularly grievous miscarriage of justice.  Rudolph Kasztner was a Zionist leader who worked to smuggle Jews out of Nazi-occupied Hungary.  He met Adolph Eichmann of the SS, who proposed an exchange of “Blood for Goods” – war materiel in trade for 10,000 Jews.  Kasztner reported the offer to the Jewish Agency, which sent Chaim Weizmann to get support from the British.  Unsurprisingly, His Majesty’s government rejected the idea.  Undeterred, Kasztner went back to the SS and was still able to bluff them into slowing down deportations. He was able to arrange for a single train to take about 1700 Jews to safety.  No war materiel – just gold: at this point, the SS knew the war was lost.

After the war, Kasztner arrived in Israel all but penniless.  The government gave him a job producing Hungarian language newspaper and radio, but it was quite a step down from his days of importance in Budapest.  At one point, Kasztner was attacked by an opposition newspaper for enabling Nazi aims.  Malkiel Gruenwald, a Hungarian-born Jerusalemite accused Kasztner of helping to keep Hungarian Jews in the dark about the death camps and helping Nazis evade punishment after the war.

The Israeli government initiated criminal liable proceedings against Gruenwald, but this led to Kasztner being smeared in court and in the press.  Gruenwald was acquitted, and shortly thereafter, Kasztner was assassinated.

Why was the Israeli public inclined to think the worst about Kasztner?  A lot of it was political.  The Irgun and Revisionists were frozen out of the Labor Zionist government, and Kasztner was a convenient means of attack.  It’s also likely that the Jews of the Yishuv could not understand how the Diaspora Jews allowed themselves to be herded into extermination.

The Israeli justice system ultimately exonerated Kasztner of charges of collaboration, and he has since been recognized by the Yad Vashem for his heroic efforts on behalf of Hungarian Jewry, but his Wikipedia page still blames him for hiding the truth from that same Hungarian Jewry.  We may all be doomed to die in a cesspool of disinformation.

Sister Rose Thering, may her memory be for a blessing, did so much to document the history of antisemitism within the Catholic Church.  As I’ve said before, and with Hashem’s help I will keep on saying: every Jew should know her story and revere her. She was once in a classroom teaching some students about the Holocaust.  One young girl asked her what she would have done had she lived in Nazi occupied Europe. Surely, the good sister would be one of the rescuers.

But that’s not what Sister Rose answered.  Rather she hoped she would have done the right thing, but she just couldn’t say for sure.

As for me, I’d like to think that as poor as I was, I would have returned the bag of gold coins to its rightful owner.  But who can know what someone else should have done without walking a mile in his tallis.

Now, go and study.