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Masterfully covering such topics as pre-war Jewish life, the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, and the reflections of Holocaust survivors, Gilbert interweaves firsthand accounts with unforgettable photographs and documents, which come together to form a three-dimensional portrait of the lives of the Jewish people during one of Europe’s darkest times.
“This volume introduces the crime to a new generation, so that it knows of the atrocities and the seemingly futile acts of defiance taken, in the words of Judah Tenenbaum, ‘for three lines in the history books.’” —Booklist
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780795346743 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 185 |
| Sales rank: | 495,192 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
European Jewry
The story told in these pages is of a people — the Jews — who had lived in Europe for many hundreds of years. Some Jewish communities in early twentieth-century Europe dated back more than a thousand years. Jews had been living in the central and southern areas of the European continent since Roman times, and in the Aegean and Mediterranean area since Greek times more than two and a half thousand years before the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Holocaust witnessed the savage destruction of six million Jewish lives — of men, women, children and babies — as well as the destruction of Jewish life itself — of long-established patterns of religious worship, ethics, culture, languages and livelihoods.
Chapter One looks at some of the Jewish experiences and contributions to life in Europe up to the moment in 1933 when Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Until then, Jewish life in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, had not been free from external struggle and conflict, but it had seen a growth and a flourishing, a pattern of vigorous participation and the hope of even more fulfilling times to come. It had seen a variety of Jewish experience that stimulated literature and art, music and science, commerce and self-confidence — vibrant manifestations of Jewishness in more than a dozen countries, as well as confident assimilation in the national life of all the countries of Europe, both before and after the First World War.
The prevalence of anti-Semitism, the two-thousand-yearold Christian hostility to Jews, was challenged by Pope Pius XI when he told a group of Christian pilgrims on 20 September 1938: 'Abraham is our patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with that lofty thought. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. Spiritually we are all Semites.'
JEWISH LIFE IN EUROPE
Some of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe were in Greece: they had been in existence for more than two thousand years, since the flourishing of Ancient Greece, at a time when there was still a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. In the late nineteenth century, and during the inter-war years, the Jews of Salonika played a central part in the life of the port, as dockworkers and stevedores as well as merchants.
Jews had lived in Italy for more than two thousand years. They had been an integral part of the life of the Roman Empire, at a time when the Temple was destroyed by Rome and the city of Jerusalem reduced to rubble. Jews had spread with the Romans to every corner of the Roman world, benefiting from the law and order, relative tolerance and social peace of Roman rule.
Jews were to be found living in scattered communities throughout the Roman provinces that later became France, Hungary and Roumania. Indeed, large Jewish communities existed in every European country many hundreds of years before the founding of the national States of which they were later to be a part.
The Jews of Germany had already been living continuously in different parts of Germany for more than 1,500 years when the German Empire was established in 1870.
The contribution of Jewish life to the new Germany was appreciated. Bismarck, the architect of German unity, had been present at the opening of the Oranienburger Strasse synagogue in Berlin in 1866. It was a triumphal moment for him, as Prussian troops were even then on their way back to Berlin, having defeated the Austrian army and paved the way for a united Germany. Berlin Jews welcomed this unification, and were as patriotic as any Germans in their national fervour. Their service in the Prussian army in the war against France in 1812 had led to an edict that gave them equality within the Prussian domains.
Jews fought as national patriots in all the armies of the First World War. They were to be found in the opposing trenches on both the western and eastern fronts. Jewish soldiers died on the battlefield fighting in the ranks of the Entente armies (Britain, France, Italy and Russia) and as part of the forces of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey). In each of these armies, Jews won the highest awards for bravery. In the German army, 12,000 Jewish soldiers were killed in action on the battlefields.
Jewish life, with its own inner religious and cultural experiences and links, was also intertwined with the life of the nations among whom the Jews lived. The Biblical prophet Jeremiah had expressed this aspect of the Jewish experience when he declared, after tens of thousands of Jews had been carried off as captives from Jerusalem to Babylon: 'Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof shall you have peace.'
No Jewish community had a continuous, entirely peaceful existence in the two thousand years from the ascendancy of the Roman Empire to the creation of the modern nation States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Again and again, local rulers, the Church or a population incited by hatred and prejudice, turned against the Jews and drove them out. Central European cities such as Prague saw several expulsions, but the Jews always returned, refounding — often three or four times — their broken communities, rebuilding their homes and re-creating their shattered livelihoods.
By the opening years of the twentieth century, many Jewish homes and livelihoods were as secure as they had ever been, yet there were still large areas of poverty, particularly in eastern Poland and western Russia, nor had anti-Jewish prejudice disappeared, even in the most modern and cultured States of Europe.
Jewish life in Europe had survived two millennia since Roman times. Despite continual upsurges in persecution and expulsion, it had flourished, but, even in the age of parliamentary democracies, liberalism and enlightenment, it was far from secure.
LANGUAGES AND CULTURE
As the Roman Empire spread north of the Alps, the Jews also moved north. Many of those who settled in Germany, particularly along the river Rhine, were later expelled eastward. They settled in what became Poland and Lithuania, bringing with them their own medieval German language, known as Yiddish.
After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Spanish Jews settled throughout the south of Europe, North Africa and Holland, where they continued to speak a version of the Spanish language of the time of their expulsion: it was known as Ladino.
However remote were the places in which Jews settled, as the result of expulsion or migration, they also maintained the Hebrew language — the language of their religion, of the Old Testament and their prayer book. Biblical Hebrew provided a link between all Jewish communities. With the advent of printing in the fifteenth century, Jewish prayer books were printed in Hebrew throughout Europe. The first Rome prayer book was printed in 1486, the first Cracow prayer book in 1592, the first Berlin prayer book in 1798. Many of the towns in which such printing took place were to see mass deportation during the Holocaust.
The cultural impact of Hebrew throughout the Jewish world was stimulated from the earliest years of the twentieth century by the growth of Jewish nationalism — the Zionist movement — which called on Jews to see Palestine as their national home, and to use the Hebrew language — modernized for the new century — as the language of daily life.
By 1933, hundreds of thousands of Jews, particularly in Poland and Lithuania, but also in Germany and throughout central Europe, spoke modern Hebrew as well as Yiddish, Polish or Lithuanian. Modern Hebrew was taught at Jewish high schools, and had a growing literature.
Jewish culture was manifested in many forms, and in all the languages spoken by Jews as the twentieth century dawned. Jewish printing presses produced books, novels, histories, and even Jewish cookbooks, in many languages, including modern Hebrew. Jewish newspapers appeared in every European language.
RELIGION
During two thousand years of dispersal and persecution after the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, the twin traditions of communal and family worship gave the Jews a powerful sense of continuity with the Biblical narrative and its ethical commandments, serving as an emotional shield during hard times, and as a powerful source of unity despite wide geographic dispersal.
Observance of the Holy Days — including the Day of Atonement when Jews everywhere fast and seek forgiveness for their sins, and the Rejoicing of the Law, when the Scrolls containing the Five Books of Moses (the Torah) are carried around the synagogue in joyous triumph — gave each community a sense of solidarity.
Just as each Jewish family maintained the traditions of weekly observance, so rabbis and teachers maintained the study of the Divine Will, perpetuating the all-pervading sense of Jewishness and the observance of the Jewish spiritual heritage.
Between the years 1000 and 1642, a series of rabbinical councils laid down laws for Jewish communal life. Some of the towns in which these councils were held saw the deportation and destruction of their Jewish communities hundreds of years later. One such council was held in the Rhineland city of Worms in 1196. During the Holocaust, the 300 Jews then living in Worms were deported 500 miles eastward to their deaths. A rabbinical council was also held in Corfu in 1642. During the Holocaust, 1,800 Jews were deported from Corfu to their deaths 900 miles away.
Among the most powerful Jewish religious movements was Hassidism. Founded in the 1730s, and manifesting itself in the vibrant rejoicing at religious worship, Hassidism flourished throughout Eastern Europe for two hundred years. The main centres of Hassidism were to be destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of its adherents murdered, in the brief period of the Holocaust.
The weekly Sabbath ritual in each home, with the lighting of the candles and the blessings on wine and bread, thanking God for his goodness, strengthened — in good times and bad — the belief in the common destiny of the Jewish people, as a people chosen by God to carry out his commandments.
Hugo Gryn, born in Berehovo, Czechoslovakia, in 1930, later recalled:
'Home life and religious life were inseparable. ... Prayer books, elegant editions of Bibles as well as well-thumbed ones dotted the shelves in our home. One of my earliest literary activities was to cut open the pages of the religious books to which we had endless subscriptions.
Set prayers were recited three times a day. Although my father considered himself an emancipated man, he would never fail to put on his tefillin — the leather phylacteries — while reciting the morning prayers before breakfast. Gabi and I usually joined him, each with our own prayer books. During the winter months we joined him in reciting the evening service before supper as well.
As far as I know, virtually every Jewish home in Berehovo observed a high level of kashrut: only ritually slaughtered meat and poultry were eaten — and great care was taken to remove every possible trace of blood. Meat and dairy dishes were strictly separated and it would never have occurred to anyone that any of the Biblically forbidden foods were even tempting!
Before baking bread or challot — the special plaited loaves for Shabbat — my mother would take a small ball of dough and throw it into an open fire in memory of the Temple of Jerusalem. I cannot recall actually learning, but only knowing the blessings before eating and after meals, or before tasting fruits or cakes. I came to recite the special blessings instinctively on seeing lightning, hearing thunder and looking at a rainbow. ... In one of my more pious phases I actually kept a list to make sure that in the course of any given day I recited the recommended one hundred benedictions.
There was a blessing on waking up and to this day I cannot drop off to sleep before invoking the archangel Michael on my right, Gabriel on the left, Uriel ahead of me and Raphael behind, and the Shechinah, or the presence of God, always above my head....'
SELF-HELP
During the nineteenth century, as industrialization spread, and cities grew in size, there was a dramatic increase in the Jewish population in Europe, as in the general population. With the increase in numbers came new challenges but also new pressures. By the late nineteenth century there were more than a million Jewish poor in Russia and Eastern Europe.
In the Eastern Galician region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire there was intense Jewish poverty. In the White Russian (Belorussian) and Pripet marsh regions of western Russia many Jews lived in the poorest of shetls — small towns and villages in which they eked a precarious living, from the soil and from such trade as was possible with Jew and non-Jew alike.
Prosperous Jewish communities existed, and there were wealthy Jews who flourished in the expansion of nineteenth-century commerce and industry. Jews were among the leading railway builders, sugar manufacturers and even tea distributors of the Russian Empire. Jews were also at the forefront of the modernization of the newly united Germany, which since 1870 was Europe's most rapidly expanding industrial nation.
The Jewish sense of responsibility for fellow Jews in distress led to the growth of many charitable societies. The emphasis was on self-help: teaching a trade and providing an education to make it possible to meet the challenges of daily life.
The Alliance Israelite Universelle, founded in Paris in 1860, set up free Jewish schools in the poorest regions, including the Balkans. The Society to Promote Trades and Agriculture (ORT) was set up in Russia in 1880; after the Russian Revolution, it moved, in 1921, to Berlin.
Also founded in Russia, in 1912, the Society to Promote Health Among Jews (OSE) established hospitals, kindergartens and children's homes. It too moved its headquarters to Berlin after the Russian revolution, and, like ORT, was then forced to move again, after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Both set up their new headquarters in Paris.
Individual Jewish families also made substantial contributions to the well-being of their fellow Jews. The Rothschild family, originally from Frankfurt, financed schools, orphanages and poorhouses throughout Europe, and in Vienna set up a Home for Poor Musicians.
With the upheavals of the First World War, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, known colloquially as the 'Joint', and still, like ORT, in existence at the start of the twenty-first century, made strenuous efforts to alleviate the plight of Jewish refugees in Eastern Europe who fled from the war zones. After the First World War the Joint took a lead in helping the dispossessed, and the widows and orphans of the war.
More than a million Jews emigrated from continental Europe — in particular from Russia — before 1914. Many of them settled in Britain and the United States. As soon as they were able to do so, they sent back what money they could to their family members still in Europe, or to the communities from which they had come. This was especially true of Jews who had come from the poorer regions of Russian Poland.
POGROMS
The word pogrom comes from the Russian word for a violent mass attack against a section of the community. For the Jews of Russia, sudden violent attacks were a dreaded feature of their daily life. The most terrible of all such assaults took place almost three hundred years before the Holocaust, over an eight-year period between 1648 and 1656. These attacks were organized by a Cossack leader, Bogdan Chmielnicki, who, having defeated the Polish landed gentry and its army, joined forces with the local Ukrainian peasantry to attack the Jews.
More than 100,000 Jews were killed during the Chmielnicki massacres, and many more tortured or wounded. Jewish folk-memory of that time of torment persisted into the twentieth century. Jewish schoolchildren in Poland in the inter-war years from 1919 to 1939 were taught about the Chmielnicki massacres as a time of catastrophe for the Jews: a catastrophe that would surely not be seen again. Yet during the Holocaust, every town in which these frightening massacres took place was to have its Jewish community totally destroyed.
In the nineteenth century, violence returned to torment the Jews of Russia. It came in the form of pogroms that were often condoned by the Tsarist government, eager to find a scapegoat for its own economic failures — just as Hitler would seek to turn the German people against the Jews by falsely accusing them of controlling the wealth of Germany.
In the late nineteenth century four million Jews were living in Tsarist Russia, most of them in a specially designated area known as the Pale of Settlement, to which they had been restricted. The first organized pogrom broke out in Odessa in 1871. Jews were attacked in the streets and beaten up, Jewish shops were looted and Jewish homes destroyed. Waves of pogroms broke out in 1881 and 1882, and again between 1902 and 1905.
The period of the pogroms was a testing time for Jews throughout Russia. Self-defence groups were formed, and sometimes succeeded in driving the attackers away. But right-wing extremists, local hooligans and peasant economic discontent against the government found fierce outlets in the form of violence against Jews.
As the pogroms spread, as many as a million Jews emigrated to the United States. Many Jews from the Lithuanian region of Russia sought a new life in South Africa. Hundreds of thousands of others went to Britain and Western Europe, several thousand to Palestine.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Never Again"
by .
Copyright © 2000 Martin Gilbert.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction and Acknowledgements,
Chapter One EUROPEAN JEWRY,
Chapter Two NAZI GERMANY,
Chapter Three THE COMING OF WAR,
Chapter Four THE HOLOCAUST INTENSIFIES,
Chapter Five SURVIVAL: HOPE, RESISTANCE, REFUGE,
Chapter Six THE DEPORTATIONS CONTINUE,
Chapter Seven THE LAST YEAR OF THE WAR,
Chapter Eight LIBERATION: BEARING WITNESS,
Chronology,
Bibliography,
Other Books by Martin Gilbert,
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