Warsaw Ghetto – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{^{Photograph Source: Tasnim News Agency – CC BY-SA 4.0}}

_{Reposted from Counterpunch}

_{^{“Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”}}

_{^{– Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, The Wall Street Journal, December 26, 2023.}}

_{^{“The painful commonality between the tragedies of Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto is the utter disregard for human lives in a war setting by the citizens of even the most enlightened countries. Such disregard is so much more painful when it is committed by ‘our own people,’ whether it be American soldiers in Vietnam and Iraq or the Israeli soldiers in Gaza.”}}

_{^{– Alex Hershaft, A Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, The Washington Post, December 22, 2023}}

_{^{“Yes, how many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?”}}

_{^{– Bob Dylan, “Blowing in the Wind,” 1962}}

The Nazi bombing of Guernica, a Basque town in northern Spain, took place in 1937 during the Spanish civil war. The Germans were testing their new air force, and their bombs killed or wounded one-third of Guernica’s five thousand residents. Guernica’s agony was captured in a painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso; it is considered the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. The painting shows the suffering caused by modern war and brought the atrocities of the Spanish civil war to an international audience.

For Gaza, a Picasso would presumably use Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals to depict the terror and horror of Israel’s use of heavy ordnance. Just as the Nazi bombing of Guernica had a casual aspect, Israel’s use of its air force is casual in its destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, indeed Gaza itself. The use of U.S.-supplied one thousand and two thousand pound bombs puts the lie to Israel’s claim that the primary objective of the war is to destroy Hamas. The primary objective of Israel’s war is to destroy Gaza itself; it is the latest step in Israeli efforts over 75 years to displace Palestinian populations from the river to the sea. Israel’s right-wing war cabinet and Israeli Defense Forces are not taking aim at the West Bank, where the death count is climbing.

The Warsaw Ghetto housed 350,000 Jews who—like Gazans—were surviving hunger and disease, when the Nazi’s began their campaign of liquidation. In the wake of the roundup of Jews, the Nazis deployed tanks and heavy artillery to destroy the remaining 50,000 survivors and level every building, until the Warsaw Ghetto was no more. The Israeli destruction of Gaza is designed to ensure that Palestinians will have no place to live.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have put the lie to Israel’s claim that Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital was directly involved in Hamas activities and that the buildings of the al-Shifa complex sat atop underground tunnels that were used to direct rocket attacks and command fighters. The Post analysis demonstrated that “the rooms connected to the tunnel network…showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas;” “none of the five hospital

buildings…appeared to be connected to the tunnel network;” and that there was “no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.” The Israels lied, and the Central Intelligence Agency corroborated the lies.

Overall, the mainstream media continues to assist Israeli propagandists in making their case to an international audience. U.S. media consistently refer to last month’s killing of three Israeli hostages by Israeli defense forces as “accidental.” There was nothing “accidental” about the killing; it was intentional with the hostages being shirtless, carrying a white flag of surrender, raising their hands, speaking Hebrew, and posting SOS notices as well as scrawling “Help! 3 hostages” in Hebrew on nearby walls. The shooting may have been “mistaken,” but it was not “accidental.” The Israeli soldiers intended to kill the three men; they just didn’t know they were Israelis. The father of one of the victims poignantly asked why the IDF didn’t just shoot his son in the leg.

The killing points to an ethical failure in the IDF, according to Ron Ben-Yishal, senior national security columnist for the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, who has reported on all of Israel’s wars since the Six-Day War in 1967. These failures are predictable in view of Israeli racism toward Palestinans. Former Prime Minister Golda Meir’s dismissed Palestinians as “roaches” prior to the October 1973 war. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has described Palestinians as “human animals,” and “we are acting accordingly.” In this way, Gallant justifies the Israeli war crime of cutting off food and water to the residents of Gaza.

U.S. media have supported Israel’s line that the shooting of the hostages was due to the “fear and confusion” caused by Hamas’s “war of traps and trickery,” which meant that Israeli “troops were spooked and too fast to fire.” (The Washington Post, December 24, 2023, p. 1) At least, the Israelis are investigating the killing, and will have the assistance of an IDF combat dog with a GoPro camera that recorded the voices of the three victims. Of course, if the victims had been Palestinian, there would have been no publicity, let alone an investigation. We will never know how many innocent Palestinian men have been murdered in similar fashion.

The United States itself provides support for Israel by vetoing or abstaining from every UN Security Council resolution that is critical of Israel. Since the October War of 1973, the United States has vetoed more than 50 measures. When the Obama administration abstained from a 2017 resolution that declared Israeli settlements on the West Bank illegal, there was considerable congressional criticism. The United States last month even abstained from a UN resolution that merely supported additional humanitarian aid for Gaza.

Meanwhile, the United States has offered no criticism of Israel’s killing of more than 70 journalists and media workers, mostly Palestinian, marking the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Israelis have also killed more than a dozen Palestinian writers and poets. More than a hundred international aid workers have also been killed—some of the along side their extended families.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, one of Israel’s leading apologists, has merely stated that “we want to make sure that that’s investigated, and that we understand what’s happened and there’s accountability.” The killing of journalists is an Israeli attempt to ensure that the rough draft of Israel’s war is not recorded accurately. Even the Post referred to Blinken’s remarks as a “nothing burger of a response.”

Netanyahu’s legacy is secure. When Guernica, the Warsaw Ghetto, and Gaza are discussed and analyzed in the future, the Nazis and Benjamin Netanyahu will be similarly condemned.

Meanwhile, there is much for all Americans to learn. President Biden should think about Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s loss to Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election because of his belated opposition to the Vietnam War. And for a better understanding of Israeli apartheid and the miserable life of Palestinians on the West Bank, read Nathan Thrall’s “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Autonomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.”

_{Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.}

_{Suppression of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Captured Jews escorted by the Waffen SS, 1943}

HOLOCAUST memorial events enable us to acknowledge and remember who and what was lost to the world, and learn from individuals’ personal experience.

The Nazis’ final solution attempted not only to wipe out a people, but erase a culture and civilisation — Yiddish culture.

But I am proud to use the Yiddish words of anti-Nazi resisters — “mir veln zey iberleben” — we will outlive them, and “mir zaynen do” — we are here!

Nazism was defeated in 1945, but the authoritarian, ethno-nationalist ideas that fuelled it are still aimed against targets in different countries.

Our responsibility is to expose them and build an inclusive, united resistance to those ideas today, drawing inspiration from those who fought fascism before us.

The Holocaust happened in the real world, within a capitalist system that reduced human beings to enslaved, disposable units of production, creating profits for companies that developed and packaged and installed poison gas.

This economic system channelled the skills of trained architects, engineers, scientists, physicians, administrators … to create factories of death that deprived the world of the talents and potential of millions of other human beings whom they labelled as inferior.

That’s my analytical framework, but my focus tonight is on resistance, and creators of memory, knowledge and hope through collective action.

In 1987, I attended a conference in New York, of around 50 participants, marking the 90th anniversary of the Jewish Socialist Bund which, together with Polish Socialist Party leftists, led the physical and ideological struggles against Poland’s far-right forces of the 1930s.

I met survivors who had been ghetto resisters and partisans in the forests. In one session we heard from Wladka Meed, a quietly spoken woman, whose mother, brother and sister were among more than 900,000 Jews and 2,000 Romani Gypsies murdered at Treblinka, a number exceeded only by Auschwitz, whose liberation we mark this week.

Wladka joined the Bund’s youth movement in Warsaw at 14 years old. In her early twenties she was part of a network, mainly women, collectively known as “couriers,” who lived beyond the ghetto with false papers.

They travelled around Poland under the Nazis’ noses smuggling themselves in and out of ghettos, delivering forged identity cards, messages, underground newspapers, and later, guns, grenades and other weapons.

The resistance fighter Marek Edelman remarked that most importantly she delivered hope to those walled off from the world.

I have a 90-year-old friend in London who owes her life to Polish Catholic families who hid her, after she and her twin sister were smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto, but she owes her life also to Wladka, who visited regularly and made payments to those hiding her.

The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, today, has a permanent exhibition celebrating Emanuel Ringelblum who co-led a network of mutual aid societies organising underground soup kitchens, and secret educational and cultural initiatives with drama and poetry programmes.

But above all this exhibition highlights an underground research project he founded calling itself Oyneg Shabbes — “Society for the pleasure of the Sabbath.”

Its 12 co-workers documented and archived what was happening in the ghetto under Nazi occupation.

They had contact with around 60 others who, to protect the secrecy of the operation, knew few of the others. They distributed and collected questionnaires and notebooks to ordinary people.

When mass deportations began in July 1942, they recorded the destruction of the people, and sent that information out of Poland through clandestine routes.

Its archived materials were buried in metal boxes and milk churns. History, they say, is written by victors, but here it was described by victims on the eve of their destruction. Researchers are still making new insights based on those archives. The first cache was unearthed in 1946, the second in 1950.

Rokhl Oyerbach was one of the few members of the project who survived. She said there was a third cache that has not been found.

One of the people who buried the archive, 19-year-old Dovid Graber, was killed soon after in Treblinka, but his message survived with the material.

It said: “What we were unable to shout out to the world we hid underground. May this treasure end up in good hands, may it live to see better times. May it alert the world.”

The most significant physical resistance by Jews during the Holocaust took place over three to four weeks in the Warsaw Ghetto, but less prolonged acts of collective rebellion, inspired by Warsaw’s example, and informed by messages from couriers, took place in many ghettos, labour camps, concentration camps, even death camps.

The April 1943 uprising in Warsaw built on an earlier act of rebellion whose anniversary just passed. In January ’43, the Nazis tried to resume their mass deportation programme from the ghetto, but were assailed by gunfire from four different barricaded positions organised by a united fighting body, comprising Bundists, communists and left-wing zionists.

That body’s ammunition was boosted by a small donation of 10 pistols from the Polish Home Army.

The Nazis cut short their action. A few days later the Polish Home Army smuggled in 50 pistols and 55 hand grenades to the fighters which were used in the April uprising.

I want to finish with one more example of mutual aid in 1943 and a comment on solidarity actions in Poland today.

A Bund activist, Bernard Goldstein, describes the ghetto population and the fighters organisation making collective preparations for their final struggle: “We concentrated on the building of bunkers … hiding places for men and supplies. … Groups of inhabitants in a tenement or in neighbouring tenements organised, collected money, and hired engineers and technicians to supervise the building.

“The bunker took various forms … Sometimes it was a double wall, parallel to the old one, with enough room between the two for several people to wait out a raid. Access … might be through an old wardrobe … its side might be lifted … to allow one person at a time to crawl into the corridor between the walls. … sometimes the bunker was a double cellar, constructed by digging a tunnel under the old cellar and hollowing out a large cavern at the end of it … in some of the double cellars crude ventilation systems were installed as well as connections for electricity and water … tunnels were dug to connect one courtyard to another.

“Passages were connected through the cellars and the attics — a communications system which proved to be of great strategic value during the ghetto uprising.

“The entire ghetto worked with singleness of purpose … in the conviction that the final battle of annihilation was inevitable…”

Contrast that co-operation with the Nazi system of utilising people’s education and skills to build death factories.

Anti-racists in Poland today are challenging not only fascist groups but also racist state forces who have built a militarised zone on the Poland-Belarus border to keep out mainly black and brown asylum-seekers.

Fourteen Polish NGOs have united within Grupa Granica –– to help and support asylum-seekers who get through. It was heartening to read an activist explaining that they campaign today because they knew their grandparents had secretly helped Jews in the 1940s.

In 1948, Wladka Meed wrote a book in Yiddish, translated into English in 1972, called On Both Sides of the Wall.

It’s a harrowing account of resisters and collaborators, courage and betrayal — and many who were simply bystanders, who witnessed terrible injustices but did not intervene. Our job, as anti-racists and anti-fascists is to turn bystanders into upstanders.

_Dr._{David Rosenberg on a panel at Stand Up To Racism’s Holocaust Memorial Day event 2022}

_{Morning Star (UK), April 19, 2022, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/}