• Dawidowicz, L. S. (1986). The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Bantam Books.
  • Rudashevski, Y. (1973). The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto (P. Matenko, Trans.). Israel: Shamgar Press.
  • Karmel-Wolfe, H. (1970). The Baders of Jacob Street. New York: J. B. Lippincott Company.
  • Gross, J. T. (2001). Neighbors. New York: Penguin Group.
  • Kaplan, C. A. (1999). Scroll of Agony. The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (A. I. Katsh, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

I have a deep and abiding interest in the phenomena of anti-Semitism and its closely related anti-Judaism. The anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany in World War II concerned itself with physical eliminating every one of the world’s Jews. Implicit in this goal was the elimination of Judaism as a system of belief and conduct, one that Hitler disdainfully referred to as the inventor of conscience.

With respect to the physical annihilation of the Jews, the ghetto system in Eastern Europe—primarily Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania—expedited transport to the Polish death camps by first concentrating a country’s Jews into a walled urban setting. This system was a culmination of the systematic execution of the Final Solution. Its component parts required a vast bureaucracy; for example, prohibiting Jewish professionals from practicing their trade, removing Jewish academics from teaching positions; closing and then destroying and looting Jewish-owned stores; stripping Jews of German citizenship; wearing identifying badges whenever going outside; an obsessively designed system by means of which one could identify a member of the “Jewish race”; and so on.

Thus, the bureaucracy of the Holocaust is a fascinating topic in and of itself, and Davidowitz’s book provides an excellent overview of the thinking behind the implementation of the Jewish ghettos. The first half of her book describes the conception, planning, and implementation of Jewish ghettoization by the Nazis. The second half details the within-ghetto administrations—Jewish and Nazi—and how one interacted with the other. As one might imagine, the relationship was fraught to an extreme, marked by constant changes in rules and regulations for the hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of the ghettos, and the number and criteria for those destined to deportation to the death camps, often in groups of 5000-10,000 at a time.

Several books in her bibliography drew my attention. The ones I discuss here concern life “on the ground”: for residents of the ghettos or those who lived in the rural Polish countryside.

Yitskhok Rudashevski was a 15-year-old secular Jewish boy in the Vilna Lithuania ghetto. His diary offers a teenager’s perspective on the rapidly approaching end of his life and that of his people: community, family, and friends. What makes this work unique is how his innate optimism and youthful vigor still managed to compel him to study, engage in community building—academic, cultural, and political. He and his family were killed when Nazis discovered their hideout in a relative’s house.

The Baders of Jacob Street also concerns the life of adolescents and young adults in a Polish ghetto, this time in fictional garb. However, the book’s author and her family moved from ghetto to ghetto during the war before being sent to a death camp, and only her sister and she survived. Thus, it is clear that the author is drawing from her own experiences. The predominant theme is how love, against all odds, sustains the relationships among the various characters. The protagonist is a young secular Jewish teenager who lives with her parents and falls in love with an older boy who is part of the resistance. The emotional bonds linking together many other relationships—among her family, friends, neighbors, and community members—also appear in bold relief. In addition to managing her life after falling in love for the first time—young Ms. Bader must deeply examine the varied meanings of loyalty: to herself, her parents, and larger community.

Neighbors is a slim volume that documents the killing of all but seven of the 1600 Jewish inhabitants—one half the population—of Jedwabne Poland. Early in the war, before the massacre, the town’s occupiers changed from the Soviet to German armies. Here, the folk-rural version of Eastern European anti-Semitism, primarily Christian in origin, provides the backdrop for what occurred in the summer of 1941. The village leaders were given free rein by their Nazi occupiers to deal with their Jewish neighbors as they saw fit, in order to curry the favor of their anti-Semitic occupiers. A large number were killed haphazardly, but the most lethal outburst was herding hundreds into the village church and setting it on fire. What’s amazing is how long it took for this episode to come to light decades later. As might be expected, the author has received harsh blowback by Polish nationalists. More encouraging, however, is the careful and balanced attention both the Polish government and media gave this book when it appeared in Poland in early 2000’s. Gross bases Neighbors on court and archival documents, as well as interviews—primarily with those who either participated in or witnessed the massacre. The most salient themes weaving throughout his book are personal and collective choice, free will, responsibility, and recompense surrounding such barbarous acts.

The book from this genre I finished most recently is Scroll of Agony. Chaim Kaplan was a mid-level academic with a keen eye and acerbic wit. Unlike our other authors, he also was a serious student and practitioner of Judaism, deeply familiar with Hebrew Scripture and ritual, having been educated in the traditional yeshiva system of Poland before the Holocaust. He skillfully alludes to or directly quotes relevant scriptural references when narrating his accounts and posing the questions they raise. He takes upon himself the “holy task” of documenting everything he sees and learns about the daily day-to-day of the Warsaw ghetto. He describes the pervasive violence—psychological, physical, and bio-environmental—imposed by the Nazi overlords. The author complains—Where is justice? Why is no one helping us? Where is God? This book is less invested in relationships, at least 1 to 1 interactions (we rarely hear about his wife), than with systemic observations:. What is happening here today? Kaplan, too, perished in the ghetto, but not before leaving behind an extraordinarily, almost clinically-detailed, account of the hell realm he lived and died in.

My ability to concentrate on Holocaust literature waxes and wanes. The scale and magnitude of terrorization and suffering is difficult to comprehend. In addition, the emotions associated with the enormity of the various elements at work can be overwhelming. Nevertheless, as Abraham Lincoln is quoted by Gross in his epigraph, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.”