The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 Read Online Free PDF Page A

[Ethnic German] civilians—boys, girls—jump into the passing military cars with happy cries of Heil Hitler ! Loud German conversations in the streets. Everything patriotically and nationalistically [German] that was hidden in the past now shows its true face.” 5
    And in Warsaw again, Adam Czerniaków, an employee of the Polish foreign trade clearinghouse and an active member of the Jewish community, was organizing a Jewish Citizens Committee to work with the Polish authorities: “The Jewish Citizens Committee of the capital city of Warsaw,” he wrote on September 13, “received legal recognition and was established in the Community building.” 6 On September 23 he further noted: “Mayor Starzynski named me Chairman of the Jewish Community in Warsaw. A historic role in a besieged city. I will try to live up to it.” 7 Four days later Poland surrendered.
    I
    The voices of many Jewish chroniclers will be heard in this volume, and yet all of them, as different as they may be, offer but a faint glimpse of the extraordinary diversity that was the world of European Jewry on the edge of destruction. After a steady decline of religious observance and an increase in the uncertainties of cultural-ethnic Jewishness, no obvious common denominator fitted the maze of parties, associations, groups, and some nine million individuals, spread all over the Continent, who nonetheless considered themselves Jews (or were considered as such). This diversity resulted from the impact of distinct national histories, the dynamics of large-scale migrations, a predominantly urban-centered life, a constant economic and social mobility driven by any number of individual strategies in the face of surrounding hostility and prejudice or, obversely, by the opportunities offered in liberal surroundings. These constant changes contributed to ever-greater fragmentation within the Diaspora, mainly during the chaotic decades that separated the late nineteenth century from the eve of World War II.
    Where, for example, should one locate young Sierakowiak, the Lodz diarist? In his diary entries, started just before the beginning of the war, we discover an artisan family steeped in Jewish tradition, Dawid’s own easy familiarity with this tradition and yet, at the same time, a strong commitment to communism (“The most important things are school work and studying Marxist theory,” he wrote somewhat later). 8 Sierakowiak’s divided world was not untypical of the multiple and at times contradictory allegiances coexisting in various segments in Jewish society on the eve of the war: Liberals of various nuances, Social Democrats, Bundists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Zionists of all possible stripes and factions, religious Jews sparring in endless dogmatic or “tribal” feuds, and, until the end of 1938, a few thousand members of fascist parties, particularly in Mussolini’s Italy. 9 Yet for many Jews, mainly in Western Europe, the main goal was social and cultural assimilation into surrounding society, while maintaining some elements of “Jewish identity,” whatever that meant.
    All these trends and movements should be multiplied by any number of national or regional idiosyncrasies and internecine struggles, and, of course, by a high count of sometimes notorious individual oddities. Thus the old and terminally ill Sigmund Freud, who had fled from Vienna to London after the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria), still managed, shortly before the outbreak of the war, to witness the publication of his last work, Moses and Monotheism . On the eve of uncommon dangers sensed by all, the founder of psychoanalysis, who often had emphasized his own Jewishness, was depriving his people of a cherished belief: For him Moses was not a Jew.
    Notwithstanding graver threats, Jews in many countries reacted with bitterness: “I read in the local press your statement that Moses was not a Jew,” an anonymous writer thundered from Boston. “It is to be regretted that