“On Friday morning, September 1, the young butcher’s lad came and told us: There has been a radio announcement, we already held Danzig and the Corridor, the war with Poland was under way, England and France remained neutral,” Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary on September 3. “I said to Eva [that] a morphine injection or something similar was the best thing for us; our life was over.”1
Klemperer was of Jewish origin; in his youth he converted to Protestantism and later on married a Protestant “Aryan.” In 1935 he was dismissed from the Technical University in Dresden, where he taught Romance languages and literature; yet he went on living in the city, painstakingly recording what happened to him and around him. The British and French responses to the German attack remained uncertain for two days. “Annemarie brought two bottles of sparkling wine for Eva’s birthday,” Klemperer reported on September 4. “We drank one and decided to save the other for the day of the English declaration of war. So today it’s the turn of the second one.”2
In Warsaw, Chaim Kaplan, the director of a Hebrew school, was confident that this time Britain and France would not betray their ally as they had betrayed Czechoslovakia in 1938. On the first day of the war Kaplan sensed the apocalyptic nature of the new conflict: “We are witnessing the dawn of a new era in the history of the world. This war will indeed bring destruction upon human civilization. But this is a civilization that merits annihilation and destruction.”3 Kaplan was convinced that ultimately Nazism would be defeated but that the struggle would entail enormous losses for all.
The Hebrew school director also grasped the peculiar threat that the outbreak of the war represented for the Jews. In that same September 1 entry, he added, “As for the Jews, their danger is seven times greater. Wherever Hitler’s foot treads there is no hope for the Jewish people.” Kaplan quoted Hitler’s notorious speech of January 30, 1939, in which the Nazi leader threatened the Jews with extermination in case of world war. The Jews were thus more eager than most to take a hand at common defense: “When the order was issued that all the inhabitants of the city must dig shelter trenches for protection from air raids, the Jews came in numbers. I, too, was among them.”4
On September 8 the Wehrmacht occupied Lodz, the second largest Polish city: “All of a sudden the terrifying news: Lodz has been surrendered!” Dawid Sierakowiak, a Jewish youngster, barely fifteen, recorded. “All conversation stops; the streets grow deserted; faces and hearts are covered with gloom, cold severity and hostility. Mr. Grabinski comes back from downtown and tells how the local Germans greeted their countrymen. The Grand Hotel where the General Staff is expected to stay is bedecked with garlands of flowers: [Ethnic German] civilians—boys, girls—jump into the passing military cars with happy cries of Heil Hitler! Loud German conversations in the streets. Everything patriotically and nationalistically [German] that was hidden in the past now shows its true face.”5
And in Warsaw again, Adam Czerniaków, an employee of the Polish foreign trade clearinghouse and an active member of the Jewish community, was organizing a Jewish Citizens Committee to work with the Polish authorities: “The Jewish Citizens Committee of the capital city of Warsaw,” he wrote on September 13, “received legal recognition and was established in the Community building.”6 On September 23 he further noted: “Mayor Starzynski named me Chairman of the Jewish Community in Warsaw. A historic role in a besieged city. I will try to live up to it.”7 Four days later Poland surrendered.
I
The voices of many Jewish chroniclers will be heard in this volume, and yet all of them, as different as they may be, offer but a faint glimpse of the extraordinary diversity that was the world of European Jewry on the edge of destruction. After a steady decline of religious observance and an increase in the uncertainties of cultural-ethnic Jewishness, no obvious common denominator fitted the maze of parties, associations, groups, and some nine million individuals, spread all over the Continent, who nonetheless considered themselves Jews (or were considered as such). This diversity resulted from the impact of distinct national histories, the dynamics of large-scale migrations, a predominantly urban-centered life, a constant economic and social mobility driven by any number of individual strategies in the face of surrounding hostility and prejudice or, obversely, by the opportunities offered in liberal surroundings. These constant changes contributed to ever-greater fragmentation within the Diaspora, mainly during the chaotic decades that separated the late nineteenth century from the eve of World War II.
Where, for example, should one locate young Sierakowiak, the Lodz diarist? In his diary entries, started just before the beginning of the war, we discover an artisan family steeped in Jewish tradition, Dawid’s own easy familiarity with this tradition and yet, at the same time, a strong commitment to communism (“The most important things are school work and studying Marxist theory,” he wrote somewhat later).8 Sierakowiak’s divided world was not untypical of the multiple and at times contradictory allegiances coexisting in various segments in Jewish society on the eve of the war: Liberals of various nuances, Social Democrats, Bundists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Zionists of all possible stripes and factions, religious Jews sparring in endless dogmatic or “tribal” feuds, and, until the end of 1938, a few thousand members of fascist parties, particularly in Mussolini’s Italy.9 Yet for many Jews, mainly in Western Europe, the main goal was social and cultural assimilation into surrounding society, while maintaining some elements of “Jewish identity,” whatever that meant.
All these trends and movements should be multiplied by any number of national or regional idiosyncrasies and internecine struggles, and, of course, by a high count of sometimes notorious individual oddities. Thus the old and terminally ill Sigmund Freud, who had fled from Vienna to London after the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria), still managed, shortly before the outbreak of the war, to witness the publication of his last work, Moses and Monotheism. On the eve of uncommon dangers sensed by all, the founder of psychoanalysis, who often had emphasized his own Jewishness, was depriving his people of a cherished belief: For him Moses was not a Jew.
Notwithstanding graver threats, Jews in many countries reacted with bitterness: “I read in the local press your statement that Moses was not a Jew,” an anonymous writer thundered from Boston. “It is to be regretted that you would not go to your grave without disgracing yourself, you old nitwit…. It is to be regretted that the gangsters in Germany did not put you into a concentration camp, that’s where you belong.”10
Some basic distinctions nonetheless structured the European Jewish scene between the two world wars. The main dividing line ran between Eastern European and Western Jewries; though geographic to a point, its manifest expression was cultural. Eastern European Jewry (excluding after 1918 the Jews of Soviet Russia, who were developing according to the rules and opportunities offered by the new regime) encompassed in principle the communities of the Baltic countries, Poland, the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, Hungary (except for the large cities), and the eastern provinces of post-1918 Romania. The largely “Spanish” (Sephardi) Jews of Bulgaria, Greece, and parts of Yugoslavia represented a distinct world of their own. East European Jewry was less integrated into surrounding society, more religiously observant—at times still strictly Orthodox—often Yiddish-speaking, occasionally fluent in Hebrew. In short, it was more traditionally “Jewish” than its Western counterpart (although many Jews in Vilna, Warsaw, Lodz, and Iasi were no less “Western” than the Jews of Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Paris). Economically the majority of Eastern Jewry often hovered on the edge of poverty, but nonetheless it nurtured a distinct, vibrant, and multifaceted Jewish life.11
In spite of such specific aspects, the Jews of Eastern Europe also underwent an accelerated process of acculturation and secularization during the interwar period. Yet, as historian Ezra Mendelsohn noted, “The process of acculturation did not contribute to the improvement of Jewish-gentile relations, thus giving the lie to the old accusation that the cultural separateness of East European Jewry was largely responsible for anti-semitism…. Such prejudices were particularly strong in Hungary, whose Jewish community was the most acculturated in East Central Europe, and they were relatively weak in Lithuania, where the Jewish community was the most unacculturated.”12 This perplexing situation may in fact be explained in a wider context.
In Poland, Romania, and Hungary the Jews were numerically important minorities whose collective rights had been ensured, in principle, by the peace treaties following World War I and the “minority treaties” that, again in principle, had to be enforced by the League of Nations. International guarantees meant little to the exacerbated nationalism of the Poles, the Romanians, and the Hungarians, however: The Jews, like other minorities, were seen as obstacles to the full and unbridled national self-expression of the native population. Moreover, as the Jews represented a high percentage of the urban middle class, particularly in business and in the liberal professions but also among small artisans, the indigenous economic and social aspirations to middle-class status and professions forced a growing number of Jews out of these sectors of the economy, often with the help of various state measures. This trend, in turn, brought about a growing pauperization of these Jewish communities and created, mainly in Poland, a “surplus Jewish population” without any major outlets as the world economic crisis spread and most immigration doors closed.13 Such negative evolution for the Jews as such and in terms of their relations with the environment was of course more intense in countries (or areas) of Eastern and East Central Europe undergoing rapid economic modernization (Poland, Romania, Hungary) than in those still deeply ensconced in a rural economy and traditional social structure (the Baltic countries, among others)—a distinction that may in fact explain the apparently paradoxical impact of acculturation on anti-Jewish feelings.14
Despite growing difficulties, however, mainly from the early 1930s onward, Jewish emigration from Eastern and Central Europe to the West went on. By dint of deep-seated cultural and social differences, estrangement between Western and Eastern Jews grew in both directions. For Eastern Jews the Westerners lacked Yiddishkeit (Jewishness), while for the Westerners, some idealization of an “authentic” Jewish life notwithstanding, the Eastern European Jews appeared “backward,” “primitive,” and increasingly a source of embarrassment and shame.15
The migration from Eastern Europe in the 1930s was compounded, mainly for the French, British, or Dutch communities, by the arrival of Jewish refugees from Central Europe following Hitler’s rise to power, first from Germany, then from Austria, and finally, after 1938, from the so-called German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Cultural antagonism was reinforced by the stark difference in economic status: The new immigrants and the refugees were usually bereft of financial means and economically marginalized in countries that had not yet recovered from the Depression. Native Jews, on the other hand, belonged, for the most part, to the middle class and even, not insignificantly, to the haute bourgeoisie; furthermore, increasingly frequent intermarriage had brought them closer to complete assimilation. As a result, throughout Western Europe many native Jews were ready to defend their own position in the face of growing anti-Semitism by sacrificing the interests of their newly arrived “brethren.” The widespread urge was to send the immigrants on their way to some other country.
Whatever the degree of estrangement between Western and Eastern Jews on the eve of the war, there is little doubt that the stream of Jewish immigrants and refugees contributed to the surge of anti-Semitism in various Western European countries. But, as we shall see in the next chapters, Jewish immigration—those “hordes of Ashkenazim,” as Jean Giraudoux, the well-known French playwright and minister of information at the outset of the war, dubbed the Jewish newcomers in his notorious Pleins Pouvoirs—was but one aspect of the darkening scene. In the most general terms the crisis of Jewry in the Western world was the direct outcome and expression of the crisis of liberal society as such and the rise of antidemocratic forces throughout the West. Needless to say, Nazi propaganda had found an ideal terrain for its anti-Semitic invective: The Jews were profiteers, plutocrats, and basically warmongers intent on dragging the European nations into another world conflict to further their own interests and eventually achieve world domination.
Actually, at the very time it was accused of the most heinous plots and political maneuvers, European Jewry—Jews wherever they lived, in fact—whatever the political, economic, or cultural achievement of some individuals, was without any significant collective political influence. This powerlessness was not recognized by the environment, and individual success was often interpreted as symptomatic of a collective Jewish drive to undermine and dominate surrounding society.
German Jewry, for example, financially significant, politically sophisticated, with some of its members wielding considerable influence on the mainstream liberal and the left-wing press, was effortlessly swept aside, together with its natural political allies—liberalism and social democracy—by the rise of Nazism.16 In France, where a Jew, the Socialist Léon Blum, was elected prime minister in 1936, the anti-Semitic backlash had a far greater impact on the existence of the community than did Blum’s short-term presence at the national helm. In stable democracies such as Great Britain and the United States, some Jews had access to centers of power; however, aware of the rise of anti-Semitism in their own countries and of the very limited scope of what could be achieved, they became reluctant to intervene in favor of the threatened communities of continental Europe, particularly in matters of immigration.
No less blatant than their powerlessness was the inability of most European Jews to assess the seriousness of the threats that they faced. During the first five years of Hitler’s regime, barely one-third of German Jewry emigrated, even with the persecution and the indignities that descended on it month after month, year after year, starting in January 1933. Th...
