Resistance Through Resilience and the Power of Music

The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous presented a video titled “JFR Reunion 2005: A Story of Moral Courage,” which is now available on YouTube in 2 parts (JFR Reunion Part 1 & JFR Reunion Part 2). In the video, Ruth Gruener shares her experiences in hiding from the Nazis during the Third Reich. Gruener used to go to schools in the New York area to teach people of how the Jews were resilient and her experiences. Gruener has been sharing her story about how the Christian family took her in and hid her from the Nazis. In the videos, Ruth Gruener is reunited with Joanna Szczygiel; a member of the family who saved her from certain death. Mrs. Gruener goes as far as to call Joanna her “sister,” for the experience that they shared with one another. Fortunately, I personally met Mrs. Gruener in October 2019 when she came to speak at Kean University. Ruth Gruener spoke at Kean University with some regularity, even during the Covid 19 pandemic, Mrs. Gruener spoke to audiences over Zoom. Unfortunately, Ruth Gruener recently passed away on September 29^th, 2021 (Ruth Gruener Memorial). Much like in the video, she shared with us her stories about her family’s candy store and the generosity that she experienced from the Szczygiel family.

Unlike the video, the presentation was designed for adult educators that were either teaching about the Holocaust or those in training to do so. Mrs. Gruner had us sing the song that she sang at the beginning of the first video clip. She gave us the English translation from the Yiddish, and we talked about how there was, as she put it, “magic” to be found in music. If one notices, in the video when she is speaking to the children about horrible things, she tries and succeeds at maintaining her tone of voice and she keeps her composure very well. Even when she was asked by a student, “Was there anyone you knew who survived?” Ruth answered honestly, “I lost my family, my cousins, everybody except my parents. I was the only child to survive.” (2005 JFR Rescue Video Part 2, 1:43). For Mrs. Gruner to say those horrible realities without breaking down, took years of practice. In fact, she suggested that to us when we met, that we should give our lectures to ourselves in the mirror to watch our facial expressions and tone. “We cannot make the lesson about ourselves; we need to present the facts.” (Ruth Gruner 2019). These words have bounced around my head since she said them in 2019. I think she was right. Objectivism is important when discussing any history, especially one that is as emotionally charged as the Holocaust. For that reason, I have followed her instruction and I utilize objective measures, or at least, I do my best, when lecturing on the Holocaust.

The second lesson that I learned from Ruth Gruner was the value of music. Music, entertainment, whatever it is that makes us feel normal. It is important to have that when dealing with an extended period of crisis. For young Ruth while hiding from the Nazis, music was a coping mechanism, it gave her the feeling that things would be ok. She is not alone on this matter. In the Vilna Ghetto in modern Lithuania, from 1941 – 1943, the Nazis regularly rounded up Jews and killed them in the nearby forests in Ponar and then later in the death camp Sobibor. Despite the uncertainty, the Vilner Trupe in the Vilna Ghetto fought for the privilege to maintain a theater that provided music and entertainment for the residents. Out of confusion due to their ever-changing orders, the Nazis permitted it. They saw it as a means to pacify the damned. Like in modern prisons, the incarcerated have access to music and even television! The reason behind permitting these luxuries is to prevent an uprising. The choice to allow the Jewish people of the Vilna Ghetto was made with a similar justification.

This small luxury split both the Nazis and the Jews themselves because the theater provided a sense of hope. For some, hope was a deterrent from doing what needed to be done. If the Jews in the ghetto were optimistic that they would live, then they were less inclined to resist their Nazi overlords. On the other hand, without hope, there is only despair and nihilism, which is no way to live. The Nazis had planned to destroy the Jews, and killing their hope is a part of that destruction. Maintaining a hopeful position is itself a form of resilience and resilience is one of many forms of resistance.

In Chapter 5 titled, “VICTIMS: Why didn’t Jews Fight Back More Often?” of Peter Hayes’ book, Why? Explaining the Holocaust, Hayes attempts to answer the question; “why didn’t the Jews fight back more often,” with case study examples from ghettos, labor camps, and death camps. Hayes attempts to illustrate the state of privation found in Jewish ghettos, the ineffective nature of physical resistance, the differences between political and Jewish prisoners, the motivations behind Jewish collaborators, and the consequences of resistance. As always, Hayes, presents the facts with statistics that support his claims. Through Hayes, we are reminded of how desperate the Jews of Europe really were.

To begin, Hayes describes the Polish resistance in Cracow of 1942 as largely ineffective, despite killing German officers. There were Jewish uprisings along the boxcars that transported the Jews. This would be an opportune time for the Jews to escape because there was not much surveillance. However, only 10 escapees successfully fled the Nazis on the train to Auschwitz from Belgium in 1943. Most ghettos had underground resistance movements, but few were successful. The Jews largely held the belief that compliance was preferable to the alternative. Hannah Arendt held resentment for the Jews in their compliance with the Nazis, she wrote, “Without Jewish help in administration and police work . . . there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower” (Hayes, 177). From my position as a healthy American, a part of me wants to share Arendt’s view, but I cannot. For those of us who did not experience the horrors of the Nazis regime, it is easy to say that the Jews should have done more. The fact is, the Jews were disarmed and demoralized way before the 1940s. For resistance to have had any meaningful impact, it should have happened years before ghettoization.

The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer rejects Arendt’s argument and instead asserts that unarmed resistance could take many forms, including smuggling, maintaining a pursuit for education, and preserving human dignity in the face of unrivaled humiliation and destruction. For Bauer, survival was a form of resistance. Many of the political prisoners did not share Bauer’s view or that of their Jewish cohabitants. For that reason, most of the violent resistance was led by non-Jews. Benjamin Ginsberg attempted to herald the fact that more Jews resisted the Nazis than contemporary historians give them credit for. However, the numbers he used in his book, How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism, are deceiving. Ginsberg included Jews from the United States, England, and the Soviet Union (Hayes, 179). The Jews from these countries were vastly different from the emaciated and demoralized Jews in Nazi-occupied countries during the Third Reich. While it is true that Jewish soldiers from the United States had every reason to fight the Nazis, they were different from the European Jews who were already destroyed by the time the United States entered the war. To bolster numbers in such a way is a form of misunderstanding the difficulties of conducting resistance from within. As we now know, the Nazi war machine was organized, and they had their ever-changing plans on what to do about the “Jewish Question.” For example, six days after the Nazis invaded Poland, they had a bureaucracy established to plunder, segregate, deport, and ultimately exterminate the Jews in that region (Hayes, 179). In less than a month the Nazis effectively segregated the Jews of Poland and positioned them in such a way that execution would be made easier. The quickness of the military Blitzkrieg was matched by the SS men’s desire to answer the “Jewish Question” for their Fuhrer and the preservation and expansion of the Reich.

The Nazis used Jewish councils to minimize German involvement and maximize resources. The tactic of dividing and conquering was effective. By privileging some Jews over others, animosity was created in the Ghettos, but more importantly, the Jews of the community felt a sense of agency (Hayes, 180). All the while the Nazis could focus on other aspects of the war and the genocide. People on the Jewish Councils that refused the Nazis were shot. “In Lodz, for instance, twenty-two of the first thirty council members were killed to set an example. Serving on the councils and executing German orders were the first iterations of the ‘choiceless choices’ (Lawrence Langer) with which the German occupation repeatedly confronted Jews” (Hayes, 180). Given the choices between collaborating with the Nazis or dying, most Jews chose the very human trait of self-preservation over death. I am reminded of “The Trolley Problem.” Merriam-Webster describes the “Trolley Problem” as, “A thought experiment in ethics about a fictional scenario in which an onlooker has the choice to save 5 people in danger of being hit by a trolley, by diverting the trolley to kill just 1 person. The term is often used more loosely with regard to any choice that seemingly has a trade-off between what is good and what sacrifices are “acceptable,” if at all” (Merriam-Webster). In this regard, the members of the Jewish Council were actively pulling metaphorical levers that led to some people’s death while saving others. The utilitarian problem of doing what is best for the many at the expense of the few is that the person pulling the levers is now more guilty than if he had done nothing.

The SS men were conflicted about what to do with the Jews. With the supreme goal being to kill them all, some saw them as a means for much-needed labor. The two viewpoints can be seen as attritionists vs productionists. The Nazis themselves did not know what orders they would receive regarding the “Jewish Question.” Some thought that they would eventually relocate the Jews to a permanent “reservation,” much like the Native Americans in the United States. For that reason, the attritionists and productionists found themselves at odds. Surviving in the ghetto left the Jews in a state of complete privation that eroded their health, their lives, and their morality. “On May 30, 1942, Dawid Sierakowiak, an eighteen-year-old boy trapped in the Lodz ghetto, recorded one of the more extreme consequences in his diary, as he told of how his own father seized and ate both Dawid’s and his mother’s bread rations, and then devoured all of the family’s small allotment of meat and whey. If even family ties snapped, imagine what happened to solidarity among unrelated people” (Hayes 182). The example provided by Sierakowiak’s diary is a reminder of how the human mind breaks down under long-term exposure to nutritional deprivation. This kind of behavior is common in Genocide studies that include famine and starvation.

The ghetto communities each had to decide on how they would respond to Nazi occupation. Most Jewish ghettos chose compliance because they did not believe that the Nazis intended on killing all of them. The Nazis’ demand for labor left the Jews hopeful. How could the Nazis force them to work if they were all dead? The ghettos were filled with intergenerational conflict between the older and younger Jews. The older Jews, who were in positions of authority, held the belief that the Nazis were conducting a horrible pogrom that was unique in scale but not intentions, while the younger Jews felt the urge to resist using violence and strategies of noncompliance. The Jews also faced inner conflict due to class division. Working-class Jews resented the upper classes because they were in positions of authority: leading them to have privileges that promoted survival. Upper-class Jews were motivated to collaborate with the Nazis to preserve their lifestyles. Jewish collaborators were often rewarded with less labor and more rations (Hayes, 184). On the occasion that the Jews of a ghetto would hear the news that the Nazis liquidated a neighboring ghetto, the Jews would rationalize that they wouldn’t do it to them. The greatest rationalization for the Jews was that they were productive skilled and unskilled labor. As previously stated, the Nazis needed both. “This conviction that the Germans would not act against their own interests has much to do with the remarkable refusal of ghetto residents in both Lodz and Bialystok to believe that deportees were being killed, even after the trains that took them away returned to the ghettos with the clothing and personal identification cards of inhabitants who had left only recently” (Hayes, 185). Simply put, the Jews could not believe that the Nazis were killing these people.

The changing policy on how the Nazis treated the Jews left them confused and hopeful. “The Nazis mixed the carrot and the stick, bait and threats, to assure compliance with deportation orders. Soup, bread, and jam were offered at assembly points and prospective deportees were told they could have certain privileges with regard to baggage and rations if they showed up when ordered to, but that these would be taken away if they failed to appear” (Hayes, 187). The members of the Jewish Councils found themselves in a position of great responsibility. They had the agency to decide who would be deported from the ghettos; meaning, they could alleviate the destruction by picking less desirable people from the population. People like criminals or the elderly, over the young and innocent. “In Warsaw, the SS demanded delivery of the first 6,000 people on July 22, 1942, and the same number by 4:00 every subsequent afternoon until further notice” (Hayes, 187). It is difficult to imagine such a choiceless choice. At some point, the ghetto would run out of volunteers, criminals, the sick, and the elderly. 

One Jewish Council member, Leon Rosenblatt shares his strife in an entry from his diary. Rosenblatt wrote:

I have to choose people for this. If not, I will be shot. That for me would be a simple solution. What will they do then? The SS already told me. Then they will choose. That is, the strong ones, the pregnant women, the Rabbis, the learned ones, the professors, the poets—they will be the first for the oven. But if I stay where I am, I can take the volunteers. Often they demand to be taken, and sometimes I have as many as I have to deliver, and sometimes they are few, and then I take the dying that Jewish doctors tell me about, and if these do not suffice, I take the seriously ill. If these, too, are not enough, what shall I do? I can take the criminals. . . . Who will be the judge? I asked the heads of the community, the Rabbis, the learned people; all of them said: You did the right thing by staying at your post. . . . Tell me—should I remain at my post, or should I prefer to be killed?”

(Hayes, 188).

Like in the Trolley Problem, the issue of guilt arises when the Jewish Council members selected people for deportation (execution). If the Nazis made the choice, there would be no guilt, but because the Councils made the decision, the members were often guilt-ridden for their actions. Eventually, the Nazis did not need the Jewish Councils to supply names for deportees. The Nazis began liquidating the ghettos when they escalated the “Final Solution” for the “Jewish Question.” The Nazis fueled the fantasy that the Jewish collaborators would survive the ghettos and deportations (Hayes, 190).

By the time the Nazis switched from segregation to extermination, the surviving Jews were so demoralized and emaciated that physical resistance was not possible. “Daily food intake for most ghetto inhabitants, aside from the privileged ones who worked in the administration or war production, hovered between 400 to 1,000 calories per day; in the largest ghettos, it usually averaged far less; in Warsaw in 1941, the daily allocation per person was between 180 and 220 calories” (Hayes, 191). Over 5,000 Jews died per month in the Warsaw ghetto due to malnutrition and disease. The people in the ghettos were in a constant state of deprivation, making violent resistance exceedingly rare; essentially not possible. “The Germans designed the ghettos to confirm the picture of Jewish degradation, dirtiness, and disease that Nazi ideology posited; they were in this sense the fulfillment of an ideological prophecy, and cramming people together was part of the plan” (Hayes, 191). Demoralization and privation took many tolls that included, The Jews losing their ability to think about the future. Assaults against the Germans were ineffective; so much so that one might say that they only provoked the Nazis into harsher treatment. One form of resistance was found in escaping or attempting to escape. However, even in the unsophisticated camps, the Jews were mostly unsuccessful. The overwhelming majority of the Jews who escaped, were found, and killed (Hayes, 192). Resisting the Germans was met with horrible consequences; for example, in Poniatowa (Polish Concentration camp), the Jews were locked in a barracks and the Germans set it on fire (Hayes, 193).

Smuggling food was one of the few things that the Jews could do to survive and survival was the greatest form of resistance. Endurance became their last survival strategy. Music and entertainment provided succor for the demoralized, the sick, and the weak. In Lithuania, the Vilner Trupe gave the Jews a sense of security. The same kind of security that Ruth Gruener lectured about. Through music, the Jews supported one another, and their spirits were raised; thus emboldening their resolve; they had to live long enough for the Allies to come and rescue them from the Nazi menace. I believe it is for this reason that Mrs. Gruener ended her lecture with us in 2019 saying, “Music is a part of what makes us human! We should be teaching about humanity in the humanities” (Ruth Gruener). It is important that we expand our notions of what resistance means in the face of totalitarianism. The issue with conveying these concepts to people who have never experienced true oppression is that the concepts themselves are difficult to understand. While it is true that modern Americans may have faced racism, sexism, antisemitism, and the like, they have never survived for years at a time on less than 300 calories per day. They have never seen their peers lined up and shot for no reason other than when their parents were at birth. For this reason, educators are grateful for the stories of survivors like Ruth Gruener. The answer to, “Why didn’t the Jews fight back more often?” is that they fought back every day that they were alive, and they survived through one another.

Bibliography

Gruener, Ruth. “2005 JFR Rescue Video (Part 2).” YouTube, February 27, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmNajTEOWnA.  

Gruener, Ruth. “2005 JFR Rescue Video (Part 1).” YouTube, February 27, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttyU4z3lU4A.  

Gruener, Ruth. “Music in the Holocaust.” Teaching Music in the Holocaust. Lecture presented at the Teaching Music in the Holocaust, October 24, 2019.

Hayes, Peter. “Chapter 7: ONLOOKERS: Why Such Limited Help from Outside?” Essay. In Why?: Explaining the Holocaust, 259–99. W.W. Norton and Company, 2018.

Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. “Gruener, Ruth.” Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, March 8, 2022. https://mjhnyc.org/in-memoriam/gruener-ruth/.

Thomson, Judith. “What Is the ‘Trolley Problem?’” Merriam-Webster, 1967. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/trolley-problem-moral-philosophy-ethics.