15 - In the labyrinths of persecution: Survival attempts

Summary

This chapter focuses on Jewish action and the possibilities of Jewish survival, but also the lack thereof. Concentrating on survival, as such, is unrepresentative because most Jews did not survive. Close to 6 million were murdered; about 1.3 million Jews once living under German rule – or in countries allied with Germany – lived to see the end of the war in 1945 (see Chapter 5). Also, the experiences of the survivors are not always representative of all the persecuted. For instance, living in a camp – so prominent in survivors’ accounts and the imagination of today's public – was far from a universal Jewish experience (unlike other victim groups, like Soviet POWs and Polish and Soviet forced laborers). A majority of Jews were in camps, but I estimate that 2.5 million never so much as spent a single night in a camp. This number includes those Jews, predominantly in the occupied Soviet territories, who Germans and their helpers massacred close to their towns; and those who were deported to extermination camps and murdered within hours of their arrival. Life in confinement of other kinds (in ghettos, Jewish neighbour-hoods, or ‘Jew houses’) was more typical. But as this chapter also deals with many failed attempts to survive, and the reasons for these failures, it does account for Jewish responses in general to German and Axis persecution, which has been covered before.

The perspective of this chapter is narrow in that it does not offer a full account of Jewish life and emotions during the persecution. Like most other parts of this book, it analyzes actions, as a principle, and tries to explain their background, also in terms of ideas and emotions. But, like elsewhere, I do not elaborate much on thoughts, attitudes and emotions that did not lead to action. I think that a total history of that side of life, in all its aspects, remains to be written (as it does for perpetrators too). In particular, we have not fully understood the everyday lives of the persecuted in which, it seems to me, not everything was related to being persecuted. This would have to have been so. Psychologically, their everyday lives can be understood in terms of an instinctive distancing of themselves from the dangers they faced.