A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz

History, Memory, and the Politics of Survival

Tuvia Friling, Haim Watzman

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781611685770
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Eliezer Gruenbaum (1908–1948) was a Polish Jew denounced for serving as a Kapo while interned at Auschwitz. He was the communist son of Itzhak Gruenbaum, the most prominent secular leader of interwar Polish Jewry who later became the chairman of the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee during the Holocaust and Israel's first minister of the interior. In light of the father's high placement in both Polish and Israeli politics, the denunciation of the younger Gruenbaum and his suspicious death during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war add intrigue to a controversy that really centers on the question of what constitutes—and how do we evaluate—moral behavior in Auschwitz. Gruenbaum—a Jewish Kapo, a communist, an anti-Zionist, a secularist, and the son of a polarizing Zionist leader—became a symbol exploited by opponents of the movements to which he was linked. Sorting through this Rashomon-like story within the cultural and political contexts in which Gruenbaum operated, Friling illuminates key debates that rent the Jewish community in Europe and Israel from the 1930s to the 1960s.

1Jerusalem, May 22, 1948, Morning

HAD YOU WALKED PAST THE Ta’amon Café on the corner of Hillel and King George Streets in Jerusalem on the morning of May 22, 1948, you would have spotted a gaggle of about thirty men, all in the fourth decade of their lives. Packs on their backs, they were waiting to be picked up and sent into battle. The city was under attack, with the Egyptian army advancing from the south and Jordan’s Arab Legion attacking from the north and east. The soldiers had been enlisted in the city’s garrison the week before and served under David Shaltiel, the controversial commander of the Jerusalem front.¹ One of them was a solidly built man who looked to be on the verge of forty. Silent and introverted, he clenched a cigarette between lips set in a bitter smile. His black beret hid a large bald spot. Few of the other men in the group were likely to have noticed the number tattooed on his forearm.² Those that did probably knew nothing of what the man had seen and suffered between fleeing Poland for Paris in 1931 and arriving, inadvertently, in Jerusalem in the spring of 1946. But both he and his fellow recruits knew very well that some of them would not see the end of that day and that their bodies would soon lie in the temporary military cemetery at Sheikh Bader.³ In Jerusalem, where Jewish tradition still reigned supreme, dead men did not pass the night unburied.

Ten days previously, the men in charge of the war effort of the Yishuv had estimated the chances of a Jewish victory at 50 percent. This evaluation was given to the Yishuv’s provisional government by Yisrael Galili, chief of the National Staff of the Haganah (the Jewish army that would, after independence and the incorporation of two smaller militias, become the Israel Defense Forces), and Yigal Yadin, the acting chief of staff of the Jewish forces. Golda Meyerson (later Meir) reported on the results of her frustrating meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan. He had told her that, unfortunately, he would not be able to honor the commitments he had made to her previously. Despite his promises, he declared, if war broke out, his army, the Arab Legion, would join the forces attacking the young Jewish state. In Meir’s evaluation, he probably already saw himself as the king of Jerusalem. Proof of Abdullah’s resolve was quick to come—in the middle of the meeting the assembled Jewish leaders received news that the four kibbutzim that made up the Etzion bloc of settlements were under attack by the Legion. The Jewish defenders were defeated two days later.⁴

The meeting, in Tel Aviv, had been called to decide whether the Yishuv should proclaim the establishment of a Jewish state. David Ben-Gurion, premier of the provisional government, was not deterred by his colleagues’ pessimism. He spoke at length, explaining why the decision to declare independence had to be taken “now or never.” The United States, fearing war, had proposed a trusteeship that would maintain foreign rule over Palestine. Ben-Gurion urged his colleagues to reject the American initiative. Accepting it would tie the Yishuv’s hands and make its defense more difficult at a time when the inevitable war with the Arabs was already under way. An independent Jewish state should be declared, he maintained, as soon as the British left.

Word of the debate in the Yishuv leadership reached besieged Jerusalem. Even those who did not know about the plans to declare independence could hardly help being caught up in the surge of joy that overcame the Yishuv two days later. On Friday, May 14, 1948, a bit after four o’clock in the afternoon, Ben-Gurion declared, in a clear staccato voice, the establishment of the State of Israel. He and his colleagues had finished polishing the draft of the declaration only a short time before.

Ben-Gurion commenced a fresh volume of his diary when he returned from the ceremony. He opened with a somber nod to that momentous day, a single austere line that took in all the complexities he saw before him and his nation. “We declared the founding of the state. Its fate is in the hands of the military forces.”⁵ This may have been an expression of his inner emotions, or it may have been his version of ab urbe condita, written to establish a foundation myth for the State of Israel—most likely, it was a bit of each. No matter what his intentions, that story was etched in the collective memory of the Jewish state, born as it was in a storm, in blood and fire.

The soldiers waiting at the corner by the café belonged to the military forces of which Ben-Gurion had written. They did not have to stand there for long. The situation on Jerusalem’s southern reaches was dire, so they, members of a regional reserve, were to be sent into battle. A truck pulled up and swallowed up the men. Menachem Richman, the commander of the fresh force, sat by the driver. The man with the number tattooed on his forearm, along with his comrades-in-arms, huddled pensively in the rear.⁶

2Poland, Lancicia, District Prison, 1929

LANCICIA (ŁĘCZYCA IN POLISH) is a district capital in Łódź Province in central Poland, about eighty miles north of Warsaw. It lies at the crossing of two important roads, one a north–south route that runs through the Pinsk Marshes and the other an east–west route through the Bzura River valley. The prison there, formerly a Dominican monastery, is located on Pocztowej Street at the city’s northwestern end, not far from a fire station and brewery and next to the King’s Garden, one of the most beautiful parks in Poland. The man who would later, as a soldier in Israel’s War of Independence, wait by the café to go into battle, was incarcerated in this prison in 1929. Eliezer Gruenbaum was then a member of a Communist cell in Warsaw, and, along with four comrades—Daniel Michael Warszawski, Szulim Krengel, Izrael Frydberg, and Janow Gutner, all in their mid-twenties—had been convicted of membership in the illegal Communist Youth Union. According to the indictment, their participation in an illegal gathering sponsored by the CYU in Łódź was tantamount to an intention “to carry out a crime of attacking the foundations of the Polish regime.” It related that the interrogators had learned by covert means that “the Communist Central Committee in Warsaw has sent its loyalists to establish close connections with the Communists of Łódź,” the first signs of a plot that had to be uprooted while still embryonic.¹ The judge sentenced the five men to four and a half years in prison. Perhaps Gruenbaum’s family name and his father’s position helped him. Perhaps not.

His father, Yitzhak, was a leader of Poland’s Jews, the organizer and head of the Bloc of National Minorities in the Sejm, the Polish parliament. Even some of his political foes praised his courage, candor, honesty, and integrity. Others intimated that he was pedantic, tightfisted, and unable to acknowledge the limits of his power—failings that his son shared. Some suggested that, were the father prepared to rein in his criticism of the government, it might be possible to mitigate his son’s sentence and that the president might view favorably a petition for a pardon. The father rejected the idea categorically. It was an attempt at political blackmail, he declared.²

Eliezer Gruenbaum was almost twenty-one at the time of his arrest. According to one version of the story, two uniformed policemen and two plainclothesmen forcibly entered his parents’ home on Tłomackie Street in Warsaw. Yitzhak protested the violation of his privacy and of his parliamentary immunity, but to no avail. The policemen discovered a mimeograph machine and piles of placards in the son’s room, proof of the young man’s involvement in the outlawed Communist Party. They arrested Eliezer. According to another version, he was arrested far from home, at an illegal party meeting in Łódź.³ The regime of Józef Piłsudski used whatever means it thought fit to fight against those it viewed as its enemies. Eliezer was interrogated, tortured, and brought to trial. The authorities were determined to prevent the Communist leadership from staging attention-grabbing demonstrations and disturbances that could produce martyrs. They had learned their lesson from the case of Naftali Botwin, a young Jewish Communist executed in 1925 for shooting a police informer. Botwin had become an icon of bravery and sacrifice, and an inspiration for other revolutionaries. Parents even named their children after him.⁴

The trials were summary. The prisoners—Gruenbaum and his four comrades were but part of a much larger group—were brought into the courtroom in groups of five to ten, or even twenty to thirty, seated on a bench, and told to give their versions of the story. Without listening to their answers, the judges convicted and sentenced them en masse, in assembly-line fashion. The trial was over even before his parents had decided which lawyer to retain. A member of the family who held a top post in the Polish Ministry of the Interior told Eliezer’s parents that their son had been turned in by someone inside the party. The young Gruenbaum, who already had a reputation for bucking authority, had acquired enemies who feared his independence of thought, his critical bent, and his sharp tongue.⁵

Eliezer was born in Warsaw on November 27, 1908, a year and a half after his older brother. He attended Tarbut, a school run in the spirit of non-religious “general”—meaning middle-class—Zionism, and, to his bourgeois parents’ chagrin, he and his brother joined the socialist-Zionist HaShomer haTza‘ir youth movement, which by 1930 counted eighteen thousand members in Poland.⁶ Both attended the movement’s “nest,” as its chapter houses were called, on Rimarska Street, where they sang Hebrew songs and tried to evoke a little bit of the Land of Israel in Poland. They also held mock trials of literary characters as a means of debating issues relating to the individual’s responsibility to himself and society, the Jewish question and its solution, the modern world, the Zionist pioneer movement, and democracy versus dictatorship. They discussed the role of youth in society, lifestyles, love, double standards, and collective living. From time to time they attended seminars at a training farm outside Warsaw, where they heard lectures given by the brilliant speakers who belonged to or were sympathetic toward the movement. They hiked along the banks of the Vistula and in the countryside, played pranks, and showed Polish toughs that Jewish boys weren’t cowards.

The “nest” was divided into “battalions” that bore names taken from the geography of the Land of Israel, such as Tel Hai and Merhaviah. They viewed themselves as a “fighting, not a dreaming” force imbued with Zionist, socialist, and collectivist consciousness. The nest also produced many of the young people who would, just a few years hence, become leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising—among them Tusia Altman, Margalit Landau, Israel Gutman, and Mordechai Anielewicz.

In 1925, when he was seventeen years old, Eliezer quit HaShomer haTza‘ir to join what he viewed as the “true” Left, meaning the Communist Youth Union of Warsaw.⁷ His HaShomer haTza‘ir friends later explained that they had opposed Gruenbaum’s ecumenical efforts to bring HaShomer haTza‘ir into an alliance of all left-wing and Marxist forces in Poland, one that would support the international revolutionary causes being promoted by the Comintern.⁸ They demanded that he desist. It was not, they stressed, a personal matter. Other members had also been forbidden to devote their energies and talents to the world’s problems. Members of HaShomer haTza‘ir were expected to focus on the Jewish nation, in particular the Polish Jewish community, as a means of realizing a full, fundamental, Zionist solution to the Jewish dilemma. They were warned against “red assimilation”—that is, the loss of Jewish national identity within the socialist movement. “If we disperse along many roads, we will turn into road dust,” Anielewicz cautioned. The relationships between the Jewish youth movements of the time were defined by their overwhelmingly ideological approach to all issues, both Jewish and international. No question was anything less than critical, and the fate of the world, hanging as it did in the balance, seemed to them to depend on the ideological positions they argued and carefully honed. In such an atmosphere, it was not unusual for a member to be expelled for ideological deviation. That did not happen to Eliezer, but he eventually concluded that HaShomer haTza‘ir’s ideology was not internationalist and revolutionary enough for his tastes.

His fervent activity in HaShomer haTza‘ir and afterward in the Communist Party did not prevent Eliezer from graduating high school and matriculating as a law student. His younger brother later related that their parents viewed Eliezer as the most successful of the three sons. He was good-looking and charismatic. Girls were drawn to him, undeterred by his trademark feature, a large bald spot that developed while he was still a teenager.⁹

The older Gruenbaum had cut his political chops in Poland of the 1920s, campaigning for two goals in parallel. First, he sought full civil rights for Poland’s Jews in the spirit of the Helsingsfors Program adopted by a convention of Russian Zionists in 1906, which Gruenbaum had helped draft. Second, he promoted a Zionist solution to the anomalous status of Poland’s Jews—that is, the resettlement of Europe’s Jews in the Land of Israel. By the time of Eliezer’s arrest, Yitzhak Gruenbaum’s political position had begun to erode, but many of his coreligionists still referred to him as “king of the Jews.” His fiftieth birthday, in 1929, was celebrated in the community with a pomp and circumstance that even some of his disciples thought bordered on a cult of personality. In any case, both friend and foe admired his political acumen, which he exercised over a large and demographically diverse country subject to frequent political and economic reversals. No matter what the crisis, he always managed to defend the interests of his constituencies.¹⁰

After being partitioned between Russia, Germany, and Austria at the end of the eighteenth century, Poland did not again gain its independence until the end of World War I, when a new Polish state had been constituted on the territory of the previous Polish kingdom. But these lands were not peopled only by Poles—about 40 percent of the new country’s population consisted of national minorities—Ukrainians, Germans, Belarusians, and three million Jews. The constant tensions between majority and minorities quickly undid the patchwork quilt of the Polish state. The minorities sought autonomy, while the Polish populace developed fierce animosity toward the non-Poles who threatened to unravel their new country. Antisemitic nationalist and clericalist factions that sought Polish ethnic suzerainty gained ever more support and power.

The dueling interests of so many ethnic groups paralyzed Polish politics. Governments rose and fell every few months, with a new one coming into power no fewer than fifteen times during the republic’s first four years. Yitzhak Gruenbaum labored to unite minority representatives in parliament into a single political grouping that could wield serious political power, and in 1922 became the leader of the Bloc of National Minorities. A coup d’état in May 1926 made General Piłsudski, a war hero who had served as the republic’s first head of state, the country’s effective strongman. He dismissed the government and brutally repressed all opposition.¹¹

The country’s dire economic crisis make matters worse for the minorities, the Jews included. The government imposed heavy taxes, which struck the middle class in particular. On top of this, special levies were imposed on the Jews. The worldwide depression of 1929 came to a Poland that was already in the midst of a severe economic downturn. A fifth of the working-age population was unemployed.

For Poland’s Jews, the political, economic, and social catastrophe was exacerbated by official and unofficial antisemitism. While the government promised to honor the Polish Minority Treaty (the “Little Treaty of Versailles”), which guaranteed the rights of all the country’s ethnic groups, the Jews included, in practice it was ignored. The state instituted a deliberate policy of discrimination that restricted the areas in which Jews and other minorities could work. Only a few government jobs were open to them. The government provided ethnic Polish businessmen with incentives and financial subsidies, such as cre...