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Confronting The Plague of Bigotry: The Warsaw Ghetto uprising began on Passover eve, 1943.

Even as it was happening, some appear to have understood the Holocaust as a new chapter in the old biblical story of the Exodus: The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began, history books tell us, on Passover eve, April 1943.

The Passover holiday has certainly apprehended that history in hindsight. In their meditations on the God of freedom that delivered us from bondage in Egypt, modern-day Seders can hardly fail to measure freedom in relation to the paucity of it in 1943, nor can they fail to measure prejudice in relation to the scale of it then.

Dr. Edward Reicher observed the uprising from outside the ghetto wall that April. He was a Polish-Jewish dermatologist who survived the ghettoes of Lodz and Warsaw and then escaped into hiding in Nazi-occupied Warsaw with his wife and daughter. In his stirring memoir “Country of Ash,” forthcoming this year in its first English translation, Reicher recalls a confrontation he had with a Pole in July 1943 outside the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, which by then had been totally destroyed.

The passage set me to thinking once again about the psychology of bigotry, a subject to which I gave considerable thought during the writing of my first novel, “The Jump Artist.” (I don’t particularly enjoy thinking about bigots — except maybe Archie Bunker — but a good novelist has to understand his characters, especially evil ones.)

It seems to me that Reicher’s account of his confrontation further exposes to the light the inner organs of this skewed thinking.

It was a hot, still July day in 1943 when Reicher wandered along the walls of the destroyed Warsaw Ghetto in the guise of a railroad worker. Of all the humiliation and devastation he’d seen wrought against his people, the defeat of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto was perhaps most heartbreaking: The tattered band of Jews remaining in the ghetto had provided a sliver of pride and hope when they rebelled with force, but the Nazis had crushed the uprising and burned the ghetto to the ground.

Reicher was ruminating on this by the wall when a Polish peasant and a young boy approached. The man told Reicher proudly that he was showing his son the capital of Poland.

Reicher asked what he’d told his son about the liquidation of the ghetto. The father got angry and replied that Hitler had been right to exterminate the Jews because they were parasites.

Reicher asked, “But aren’t there both good and bad people in every nation?”

The peasant grudgingly conceded that perhaps some Jews somewhere, sometime in history, may have been good, “but the ones who died here in the ghetto were forgers and thieves.”

The man didn’t know that he was speaking to a Jew who’d escaped from the very same ghetto, and that Reicher was not a thief but an esteemed and rather selfless physician. The bigot was wrong in his bigotry, not least because it was delusional, and it’s perhaps the delusion of it that renders the bigotry a little bit accessible to insight.

The bigot’s words to Reicher by the ghetto wall remind me of a passage from Tolstoy’s “Hadji Murad” that describes persecution not of Jews by Poles, but of Poles by Russians. Tolstoy writes of Czar Nicholas: “He had done much evil to the Poles. To justify that evil he had to feel certain that all Poles were rascals, and he considered them to be such and hated them in proportion to the evil he had done them.” Tolstoy’s inspiration for this idea may have come from the great Roman historian and psychologist Tacitus, who said, “Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris,” or, “It is characteristic of human nature to hate the man you have wronged.”

To Tacitus and Tolstoy’s point, there is probably not only ignorance and crudity to racism, but also a rather surprising element of misguided conscience; the Jews were slaughtered, so in the mind of that peasant, they must have deserved it. If they didn’t deserve it, that would mean an atrocity had occurred before God on Polish soil, and I suspect this Polish nationalist couldn’t countenance the idea of such a Polish sin.

Sigmund Freud would not have been surprised to see conscience behind bad behavior. He spent his career studying the ways that conscience causes us to avert our eyes from certain of our own thoughts, and the ways that this sort of “repression” can sometimes do more harm than good — not only to ourselves, but also to others. In his 1916 paper “Some Character-Types Met With in Psycho-Analytic Work,” Freud describes one type, to which he gives the name “Criminals From a Sense of Guilt.” While that short segment does not cover Tacitus’s or Tolstoy’s ground — it doesn’t touch on bigotry at all — it does supply a useful title to a general principle of psychology that’s highly relevant to bigotry: the notion that guilt can cause crime in addition to preventing it. What an idea!

The term “scapegoat,” which is by now a commonplace in explanations of racism, has to do with, of course, guilt — what else? It furthermore derives from the traditions of the ancient Jews — who else? Today, we use the term to mean a person or a people blamed for something he/they didn’t do. It’s invoked almost in a sense of mistaken identity or sloppy detective work. Yet the origins of the word itself in the book of Leviticus point directly back to the psychology of guilt management. What William Tyndale translated as a “scapegoat” in 1530 was a reference to an actual goat in primitive Jewish atonement ritual; the goat was magically bestowed with the sins of the Jewish people and then shooed into the wilderness to carry away the sins. In one of Leviticus’s creepier dalliances with paganism, the Lord decreed that the scapegoat should specifically be dispatched to an angry demon of the wilderness named Azazel (who is thenceforth scarce in the Bible but does turn up in Marvel Comics as an ancient mutant enemy of the X-Men).

The Pole by the ghetto wall seems to have used a scapegoat in the ancient, literal sense more so than in the modern, metaphorical sense: He has used the Jews to carry off his guilt and shame as if by a magical goat — not into the wilds belonging to the demon Azazel, but onto the pyre of the Warsaw Ghetto. He bears no sin; they do. And now the fire does. And now the sin is gone in the smoke, curling up and away from the earth.

Such magic acts derive from a condition of blindness, a refusal to look with the rational mind. The Freudian irony is that the courage to look upon and acknowledge a sense of guilt instead of invoking goats and demons to dispel it, helps forestall criminality of a much more damning kind. That is to say that the parable of Reicher and the Pole instructs that there would perhaps be fewer great sins in the world if people were not so frantic to purify themselves of small ones.

Austin Ratner is the author of “The Jump Artist” (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009) and the recently released “In The Land of the Living” (Reagan Arthur Books).

Shmuel Zygielbojm gave up his own life as a symbol of frustration at the Allies’ inaction in the face of the slaughter of the Jews.

Captured Jews being led by German troops to the assembly point for deportation following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Photo by wikimedia

On May 12, 1943, Shmuel Zygielbojm, one of two Jewish members of the Polish government in exile in London, killed himself, in despair and in protest of the insufficient action being taken by the Allies to end the ongoing German campaign against European Jewry. His death came a few days after he received news that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which had begun on April 19, 1943, had been successfully suppressed by the Germans, and that his wife, Manya, and son Tuvia, had been killed there.

Shmuel Mordechai Zygielbojm was born February 21, 1895, in the Polish village of Borowica (then part of the Russian empire). Growing up in an impoverished family, he left heder (Jewish school) at age 10 to work in a factory that manufactured apothecary boxes, and two years later moved to Warsaw, where he worked a number of menial industrial jobs.

Shortly after the start of World War I, he moved with his family to Chelm, where he became involved in the labor movement. In 1917, he represented Chelm at the first convention of the Polish Bundist (workers) movement. In 1920, he was appointed secretary-general of the Polish Jewish metalworkers union.

By 1924, Comrade Arthur, as he was known in the labor movement, was a member of the Bund’s Central Committee, and was involved in organizing Jewish workers both in Warsaw and later in Lodz. When World War II broke out in 1939, he returned by foot from Lodz to Warsaw, and was now the movement’s senior official. When the Germans occupied Warsaw, he served briefly as a member of the Judenrat, the Jewish council that acted as a liaison with the occupying forces. When the Germans decided on the establishment of a ghetto to house all of the city’s Jews, and demanded that the victims themselves carry out its creation, Zygielbojm opposed cooperating with the order. When his colleagues on the Judenrat voted to respond favorably to the Nazi demand, he resigned from the body, declaring, “I feel that I would not have the right to continue living if the ghetto is carried through.” He also spoke before a large body of some 10,000 Polish Jews outside the headquarters of the Jewish Council and urged them not to voluntarily enter the ghetto.

Shmuel Zygielbojm Photo by wikimedia

When Zygielbojm’s activities led to his being summoned to Gestapo headquarters in Warsaw, he went into hiding until the Bund succeeded in smuggling him out of occupied Poland. He went first to France, and later traveled on to the United States, where he worked with the local branch of the Bund and went around the country lecturing about what was happening to the Jews of Poland.

In 1942, Zygielbojm went to London and joined the Polish National Council, the government in exile, as the representative of the Bund. Although the movement was traditionally non-Zionist, and had tense relations with the various Zionist groups in Poland, after Zybielbojm learned more and more about the actions being taken against Polish Jews, he became committed to cooperating with other Jewish organizations of all political stripes in order to save Jewish lives. He quickly understood that rescuing Jews was not a high priority – neither for the Polish government in exile nor for the Allied leaders with whom they were working. Even when politicians from the Alliance met in Bermuda in late April to discuss the problem of Jewish refugees, they could not agree on raising their quotas for the admission of any Jews who might be able to escape from Europe. This, too, was dispiriting news for Zygielbojm.

On May 11, 1943, Shmuel Zygielbojm addressed a letter to Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz and Wladyslaw Sikorski, respectively the president and prime minister of the Polish government in exile. In it, he explained his inability to “continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered.” He backed up his claim by quoting Bund figures suggesting that of the 3.5 million Polish Jews who were alive before the war, and the 700,000 Jews who had been deported to Poland since the start of the World War II, only 300,000 remained alive in April 1943.

He acknowledged, he wrote, that “the Polish Government contributed largely to the arousing of public opinion in the world,” but argued that “it still did not do enough. It did not do anything that was not routine, that might have been appropriate to the dimensions of the tragedy taking place in Poland.”

His death, wrote Zygielbojm, was meant to be understood as an act of protest.

At the same time, he sent a cable to Emanuel Nowogrodski, the general secretary of the International Jewish Labor Bund, who was in exile in New York, for the purpose of “[taking] leave and saying good-bey [sic] to all comrades and all people I love.” He expressed his belief that, while his brethren were dying in Poland, “I was unable to save asigle [sic] soul of them Stop I have a debt to pay to all I left behind when escaped from Warsaw in 1940.”

Having heard of the mass suicide of much of the ghetto uprising’s leadership on May 8, he continued, “I cannot survive them,” and thus, “I am going away as a protest against the democratic nations and governments not having taken any steps at all to stop the complete extermination of the Jewish people in Poland. Perhaps my death will cause what I didn’t succeed while alive.”

Zygielbojm committed suicide by turning on the gas in his apartment. His body was cremated, and his ashes placed in a storeroom in a Jewish cemetery in Golders Green, London. In 1959, they were discovered by a surviving son. He arranged for them to be transferred to the United States, where they received proper a Jewish burial – despite Zygielbojm’s suicide and despite his decision to be cremated – in the New Mt. Carmel Cemetery, in New York.

We are about to receive the Torah (the essence of G-d’s message to us), on the Holiday Shavuot this week. I wanted to share a little piece of my own recent Journey, heading towards the Mountain to receive the Word of G-d… Human beings are infinite. Our fears and disappointments may allow us to hide from our own powerful energy, but truly, we are infinite. Sadly, many of the trappings of this world, including the Words we depend on for our deepest communication are finite and limited. To say that your child is “extraordinary” or that a sunset is “beautiful” doesn’t even begin to describe the depths of that which we witness, or to express the breadth of our emotionality.

Still, there are moments that are (as my father would say) “Beyond the Beyond,” moments of infinite, abundant, Joy and Truth, where we can fully access the power of who we are. These moments are rare gifts but can be missed completely if we allow our own limitations to interfere. Personally, I beg for these moments, live for them, pray for them. They sustain me as a Mother, as an Artist, as a human being. We learn that where prayer (Tfilla) ends, song (Shira) begins. Music is often the only way to express the depth, the immense endlessness of all we long for, of all we can have inside. This is why I sing, I know we are all capable of so much more… The March of the Living is an organization I adore, I feel blessed to have worked with them and been inspired by the work and mission for many years. I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the incredible Eli Rubinstein, who has supported and encouraged me since we met so many years ago…

Click here to see some of my March performances over the years.

This past month, through the March of the Living, I was blessed to have had the Infinite experience of a lifetime. I sang in Poland, on Yom Hashoah, for over 10,000 people at the Gates of Auschwitz. The first time I was in Poland with the March, it was an experience that completely demolished me emotionally and spiritually. I was so devastated that I could barely breathe for days. I walked through the camps like a ghost, cried over the piles of hair, mourning my father all over again while seeing him in every abandoned Tallis (prayer shawl.) I ripped my soul in half, sobbing while staring at the piles of glasses, wondering how anyone alive at that time could have seen the light or anything at all. I was swallowed by the depths of my pain. This time, on this trip, I watched from the outside (below are some photos from the stage.) I saw the Gates of Auschwitz, the heartbreaking train tracks, the barbed wire, the vast emptiness. But most of all, miraculously, I saw the light shining on the thousands of people who were there. They walked in by choice and would leave freely, unlike the thousands who perished in that same place, just a blink of an eye ago… This time I focused on what I wanted to give to those who had perished, to the ones who survived and to all the generations to come… This time I watched, this time I grew, this time I received. My return to that dark place was different, I felt the light of G-d, I felt hope.

Click here to see some of that performance.

In 1990 my father traveled to Poland. His desire was to heal the relationship between the Jews and non Jews there, to show them that there was love, despite all the pain… An intense perspective to have as one who survived the that time himself, I never stop admiring his strength and incredible deep vision… While standing in Myjdanek death camp, he said he could hear the 6 million crying… He wrote a sad sad song to cry with them, stood in the corner of one of the barracks, singing with tears streaming down his face. Then, later, in Krakow he was sharing this new song and he had another Infinite Moment- he said he could again see the souls of the 6 million, but this time shining “from one corner of the world to the other”, laughing, dancing. In his words, he said he heard “Shlomele- this is not the way you go to the Promised Land… You need to cry, but then you need to dance… you need to dance…“ Then the second, joyous part of the Krakow Niggun came to his heart. The world continues to sing it, all these years later.

This message is profound. We cry, we mourn, but then, we pick ourselves up and with superhuman strength, we dance, we celebrate all we have learned, all we can become. Then from this place of acceptance, of vision, of newness, we can open our hearts to G-d, to His Torah, to The Gifts of this World, to the Peace all of Humanity is so ready to receive. From this place of Peace, we can be One, we can find our individual and collective Redemption.

My Journey to the Mountain has different significance to me this year, next week, right after Shavuot, I will have the honor of visiting Japan for the first time, as the Jewish Faith Representative for the Symphony of Peace Prayers. I’ll be offering music and prayers to over 20,000 people gathering at the base of Mt. Fuji, all there to break through all our self imposed boundaries and change the face of the universe with prayer. I had to plan everything I would say, as it will be translated into almost every language. I cried over every word, here is a little piece of what I will share:

• When we are born, every one of us, we are filled with light and the desire to share it. Sadly, in this world too many of us grow confused, become filled with disappointment and feel alone. Too many of us, from too early an age, create the protective boundaries that block our Soul’s light from the world and sometimes from ourselves. To heal our world, to bring One-ness, we need to connect ourselves with that light and recognize its presence in every human being. We must learn to laugh with one half of our hearts and cry with the other, to acknowledge the hardships that we have faced but then celebrate that we are surviving, that we are able to grow and transcend.
• We must recognize the blessing inside this struggle. This is a gift to us, an essential gift that is sometimes difficult to unwrap.
• Today, may we, collectively, Return Again to this Peace and from there, together, may we thrive, may we heal, may we love, may we uplift, may we unite, may we dream, may we pray, may we sing…

I feel like I’m changing constantly, learning so much about myself. Sometimes I almost don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I’ve been working on this letter to you for almost three weeks, if you can believe it, maybe I’ve been searching for the words to deliver this thought for lifetimes. I feel blessed to be a Holy Messenger, to share this Torah with all of you, to cry and laugh, to sing and to be on the Front Lines with so many others who are also trying to change the world. I pray I can help to bring Peace for all the Holy people who came (and died) before us and even more, for our children and their children…

May this Shavuot create the opening for all of us to receive this message and the deepest essence of G-d’s Presence. I believe it is already within each and every one of us. I pray that our world has an Infinite Breakthrough and one by one, all of G-d’s children see this truth as well. Until that Great moment comes, we will continue to sing…

With love, light, laughter and tears, Neshama

Explore Your Heritage and Embrace Your Future (March of the Living)
Embark on a journey to Poland, where you will become familiar with the rich history of Polish Jewry and the destructive impact of the Holocaust. Visit Polish cities, towns and villages that were once vibrant centers of Jewish life and learning.  Your experience in Poland culminates with thousands of students from around the world joining the famous March of the Living on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) – a two-mile silent march between Auschwitz and Birkenau, the largest concentration and death camp complex built during World War II.

Continue your journey with seven weeks in Israel (AMHSI)
Be inspired.  Live outside the books.  Encounter new ideas and be challenged in endless ways.

A journey that will capture your soul, your heart and your imagination.

This is a unique academic and fun experience, unlike any other. Begin your trip with a special celebratory event for Yom Ha’atsmaut – Israel’s Independence Day – during which, thousands of youth from across the globe come together in a festive celebration of the establishment of the Jewish State.

Learn in a classroom without walls as the country and its rich history come alive! Travel across Israel, learning at the exact locations where history was made. Study atop a mountain, in a cave, or at the beach! Whether you’re hiking where King Saul battled the Philistines or following in the footsteps of Ben Gurion, study and live 4,000 years of fascinating history through first-hand experience and enjoy all Israel has to offer while you keep up with classes from your home schools.

Highly qualified teachers, experienced in teaching a wide range of high school courses, guide you through your individual assignments provided by your home schools. Live in AMHSI’s beautiful campus dorms and enjoy independence and freedom within a structured and supportive framework.

Participants earn high school credits and may be eligible to earn up to 6 transferable college credits from the University of Miami.

Visit amhsi.org for more information.

Pictures by igal Hecht, Ryan Blau, Yossi Zeliger, Patryk Słotwiński and other sources

The 2013 March of the Living Ceremony took place on April 8th, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Today MOTL The West visited the JNF 9/11 Memorial. The photo also includes Robert Levine, Vice President of Education for JNF (center).

My understanding is that not a lot of MOTL Groups have visited the site nor do they know about it, be great to share and make sure future MOTL groups from US have this amazing experience.

FYI – It is the only place outside of the United States that recognizes the names of the people who were killed on 9/11 as well as their countries of origin.

It was a moving experience for our teens.

All the best,

Ruth

Ruth Zaltsmann
Director
MOTL The West