It does not matter whether the torturers are Nazis or prison personnel
(from
@Freida 's articles)
One thing that always interested me about my studies into WWII history were the descriptions of individuals known as
kapo. Basically, "collaborator" (from the German "
lagercapo" or "camp captain") - these were Jewish prisoners, usually criminals, who were selected to perpetrate abuse and control the other individuals in their particular block, most often through use of violence and coercion. They were promised better accommodations, work exemptions, and that their families would live.
Even today,
kapos are reviled by the Jewish community (just look at "King Chaim," the man who "gave up" his a portion of his community, the man who created the speech "
Give Me Your Children" to be deported, to avoid every single person getting slaughtered instead). Knowing what I know about myself, it is difficult to look at these two instances (both Chaim Rumkowsky and the
kapo) as being purely evil or without any sense of soul.
It is coming more to light that the
kapo of the concentration camps had far less choice in their penchant for violence than many are lead to believe (even though it is
absolutely taboo even today to mention this and this is an opinion I keep very firmly to myself when speaking with other Jews) - and that the public perception of these guards is greatly enhanced by their victims, who believed (because of the actions that were taken against them by the
kapo absolutely undoubtedly) that these were pure and total collaborators who would do whatever the Nazis told them because they were of weak spirit.
When in reality, they knew that they had no choice - if they didn't comply, they and their loved ones would be killed,
and they also knew that the Nazis would do much worse to the prisoners than
they would personally to do them. (So, in an account where a man beat a prisoner with a metal pipe, it was known that the Nazi guard would be much more likely to have his dog rip the prisoner to shreds and kill him outright.)
And that's difficult to conclude when faced with this:
Chaim Rumkowsky's speech said:
A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They [the Germans] are asking us to give up the best we possess – the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I've lived and breathed with children. I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters! Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children!
My own family have a history from Łódź (great-great grandfather), so it's of particular significance to me. Arnold Mostowicz, a survivor, claims that Rumkowski's speech spared a significant portion of the ghetto (Litzmannstadt) from deportation for two years longer than Warsaw, but as Dobroszycki puts it succinctly, this was never
truly Rumkowski's decision to make.
I suppose anyone familiar with the particulars of my history might understand why these two things stick out to me. It's a kind of Devil's Trolley Problem, you know? Do you beat one up for the good of the many? Do you go purely by the numbers and give up 20,000 children, to save 164,000 more? As a child, my answer would have been
yes. And it
was yes. I'm someone who deeply, deeply, comprehends the motivation behind "collaboration," especially when so many are at stake. I myself was a
collaborator. I was an instrument of my perpetrators. I followed orders. I did as I was told. I harmed who I was told to harm.
Would I have given up 20,000, if it meant saving 100,000? As a child, absolutely. It was a numbers game. It was always a numbers game - do I beat someone up, or do they die? Do I rape and torture them, or do they die? Do I maim them permanently, or do they die? If I had to kill one to save two, I would have. But now I have the presence of mind to comprehend what is truly at stake, and what I
truly have the right to decide for another person. If that means 164,000 should die, that is not my responsibility. It would be my responsibility to the 20,000 children I
personally condemned to death.
So I understand why Rumkowski was wrong, and I do not agree with his actions. But I can absolutely say, with certainty, that at age 12? I would not have comprehended what he did wrong. 20,000 is less than 164,000.
Had he survived his own tragedy...no tribunal would have absolved him, nor, certainly, can we absolve him on the moral plane. But there are extenuating circumstances: an infernal order such as National Socialism exercises a frightful power of corruption against which it is difficult to guard oneself. To resist it requires a truly solid moral armature, and the one available to Chaim Rumkowski...was fragile.
And as someone who can solemnly say "
f*ck the Grey Zone," (aka
stop trauma dumping to the general population and calling it science, motherf*cker!) it is laughably understandable to me that
Primo Levi is the only guy going, "
there are extenuating circumstances," because, like, duh. You can't be
that guy and also universally shit on Rumkowski without understanding the greater forces at work, nor the greater "animalistic instinct" (according to my forensic psychologist - who describes much of my actions during my captivity as "animalistic evolutionary responses") that overtakes us when we are presented with a superior force.
I certainly couldn't be
that guy and I wasn't a sonderkommando. But I remember the first time I ever learned that word - a word that referred to this group of people who were forced by threat of death, by threat of death to their family, to participate in the extermination of their own kind, that were viewed as no better than Nazis - that the people around them didn't understand that they had no choice... the people who I tortured, who I raped, who I abused, who I trained, certainly
never realized that I didn't have a choice, because I acted with what appeared to be complete autonomy.
Obviously, Rumkowski was a piece of shit who sexually abused people and deported his political rivals, so it's certainly not as
grey as Levi would have you believe -
But at the
same time, like I said, parts of me really understand what was going through the dude's mind. Regardless of his shitty, Trump-like nature and regardless of the fact that a lot of
kapos were actually the exact same (since many of them were promoted from the ranks of criminals, many of whom were also sexual abusers, and we can thank Mossad,
literally Mossad, for removing almost every single reference to
Screaming Silence on the internet today because until 2006
this part of the Holocaust was literally classified information? There is testimony in original Polish which I've read, that only became available
after 2006, so. Go ham, Mossad.)
I suppose Gideon Greif was correct in his assessment that a lot of people are afraid to broach the topic for fear of "hurting the dignity of the survivors," but at the same time, because of my own experiences, I find it completely incomprehensible that this isn't a more widely understood aspect of the Holocaust. I mean,
whenever you get groups of crazy, sadistic,
methed-out people in power, there is always going to
also be gratuitous amounts of disgusting sexual abuse and sexual torture.
And that's for good reason, since it was actually completely unavailable to the general public until very recently and that was on purpose. And I think a lot of that, probably, contributes to the "silence" of the matter.
We Wept Without Tears was a book that had a transformative effect on me, because before I'd read it, I'd honestly never encountered anything
remotely resembling my circumstances before.
(Unlike Levi's book, Gideon Greif approached the subject with an extreme degree of respect and personal dignity to those whose testimonies he took - demonstrating an understanding of causality that I had not previously been exposed to before - and it is understandable that Levi's book lacks this, because he is still working out what it means for
himself given his own role in the matter - that they were forced, and had no choice, and just because someone takes an action doesn't necessarily mean that action is their responsibility or that it originates with them.)
And like Yehuda Bauer says, had Lodz
been liberated in 1944 (as was planned by the Russian offensive), it would have had a majority of its inhabitants still alive and been the
only ghetto with that distinction - and history might remember Chaim Rumkowski very differently.
