Nitzotz: The Spark of Resistance in Kovno Ghetto and Dachau-Kaufering Concentration Camp

By Laura M. Weinrib

Under the brutal conditions of the Dachau-Kaufering concentration camp, a handful of young Jews resolved to resist their Nazi oppressors. Their weapons were their words. During the Soviet occupation of Kovno and, after the German invasion, within the Kovno ghetto, the members of Irgun Brith Zion circulated an underground journal, Nitzotz (Spark). In its pages, they debated Zionist politics and laid plans for postwar settlement in Palestine. When the Kovno ghetto was liquidated, several contributors to Nitzotz were deported to the Kaufering satellite camps of Dachau. Against all odds, they did not lay down their pens.

Nitzotz is the only Hebrew-language publication known to have appeared consistently throughout the Nazi occupation anywhere in Europe. Its authors believed that their intellectual defiance would insulate them against the dehumanizing cruelty of the concentration camp and equip them to lead the postwar effort for the physical and spiritual regeneration of European Jewry. Laura Weinrib presents this remarkable document to English readers for the first time. Along with a translation of the five remaining Dachau-Kaufering issues, the book includes an extensive critical introduction. Nitzotz is a testament to the resilience of those struggling for survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2009
• ISBN: 9780815651611

Book preview

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Konrad Charmatz; Miriam Dashkin Beckerman, trans.

Laura M. Weinrib is a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at the New York University School of Law. She is the granddaughter of Shlomo Shafir, who edited Nitzotz (Spark) in Dachau-Kaufering concentration camp.

Copyright © 2009 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244–5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2009

091011121314654321

Some photos courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views or opinions expressed in this book, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit our Web site at https://press.syr.edu/.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-3233-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nitzotz : the Spark of resistance in Kovno ghetto and Dachau-Kaufering Concentration Camp / edited and with an Introduction by Laura M. Weinrib ; translated by Estee Shafir Weinrib. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-3233-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Jews—Lithuania—Kaunas—History—20th century. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Jewish resistance—Lithuania—Kaunas. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Lithuania—Kaunas—Influence. 4. Jews—Germany—Dachau—History—20th century. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Jewish resistance—Germany—Dachau. 6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Germany—Dachau—Influence. 7. Nitzotz. I. Weinrib, Laura M.

II. Weinrib, Estee Shafir. III. Nitzotz.

DS135.L52K386 2008

940.53’158793—dc222009026569

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Part One The Voice of Resistance

1.Introduction to Nitzotz

2.The Making of an Underground

3.Reading Nitzotz

4.Liberation and Legacy

Part Two Nitzotz

5.Nitzotz, Issue 3 (38) (1944)

6.Nitzotz, Issue 4 (39) (1945)

7.Nitzotz, Issue 5 (40) (1945)

8.Nitzotz, Issue 6 (41) (1945)

9.Nitzotz, Issue 7 (42) (1945)

Postscript, SHLOMO SHAFIR

APPENDIX: Other Materials

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1.Shlomo Frenkel (Shafir), 1946

2.IBZ group portrait, 1943

3.Nitzotz issues, 1947

4.David Wolpe, ca. 1950

5.Kovno ghetto, ca. 1942

6.Elkhanan Elkes, ghetto period

7.Clandestine school in Kovno ghetto, ca. 1942

8.Azriel Levi, 2000

9.Member of Eshel, ca. 1943

10.Yitzhak Shapira, 1938

11.Deportation action in Kovno ghetto, 1943

12.Yehoshua (Ika) Grinberg, prewar

13.Maapilim group portrait, 1943

14.Mina Kaminski (Shafir), 1946

15.Kaufering at liberation, 1945

16.Kaufering barracks, 1945

17.Abraham Melamed, 1940

18.Chaim (Rosenberg) Rosen, date unknown

10.Abraham Melamed and Shlomo (Frenkel) Shafir, 1990

20.Mendel Sadovski (Menachem Ganoni), prewar

21.Chaim Alexandrovitz, ca. 1948

22.Chaim Nachman Shapira, prewar

23.Leib Garfunkel, prewar

24.Chana Silberzweig, 1956

25.Displaced persons attending demonstration, 1945

26.Cultural conference, 1947

27.Samuel Gringauz, 1946

28.Central Committee of the United Zionist Organization, 1946

29.Emblem of the She’erit Hapletah, 1948

30.Shlomo (Frenkel) Shafir, 1990

31.Mina (Kaminski) Shafir and Shlomo (Frenkel) Shafir, ca. 1998

32.Nitzotz 3 (38), Chanukah 1944

33.Nitzotz 4 (39), Tu Bishvat 1945

34.Nitzotz 5 (40), Purim 1945

35.Nitzotz 6 (41), Erev Pesach 1945

Preface

As a young child, I awaited my grandfather’s visits with a little anxiety. He was every bit the pünktlich German: rational, serious, bookish. Every morning he would leave for the university library, and every evening he would return with a stack of photocopies, retreat into the guest room, and study them late into the night. If he emerged, it seemed, it was only to lecture me on my poor manners or to chastise my mother for my failure to read the classics and my lack of diligence in practicing piano.

The family photo albums bulge with snapshots of my grandfather and his books, reading, speaking, writing. I came to believe that he had emerged from the womb as an austere intellectual in reading glasses and a suit. I grew up hearing all the stories of his academic prowess: he had sent in a correction to a prominent German encyclopedia at the age of eight; he had learned four languages by the time he was twelve. His achievements continued to mount in Lithuania, the ancestral home for which he and his father had left in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws and growing antisemitism in Eastern Prussia. At the Hebrew Gymnasium in Kovno, his Latin teacher had announced in class that my grandfather’s knowledge was surpassed only by God’s.

When I was a bit older, I heard another story of my grandfather’s obsessive bookishness. Even under the life-threatening oppression of the Nazis in Dachau-Kaufering concentration camp, he had continued to write. He had risked everything to edit and circulate the Zionist underground Hebrew journal Nitzotz (Spark). At first, I took this logical progression for granted. The young pupil who had dismissed his private tennis lessons as a waste of time and had preferred to spend his afternoons reading Goethe and Schiller had simply translated his desire for intellectual exchange into a new medium. In Kovno ghetto, he hid his books and read during the night. In Dachau-Kaufering concentration camp, reading materials were virtually nonexistent. So he filled the gap with his own writing and that of his peers.

It took me years to recognize the inconsistencies between my grandfather’s early scholarly feats and the deep resolution and spirituality of his underground activity. After liberation, the change had left its mark: my grandfather, erstwhile connoisseur of everything European, made aliyah to Palestine in 1948. In 1955, Selimar Frenkel became Shlomo Shafir. Together with my grandmother Mina, his lifelong companion and a fellow member of the Zionist underground, he dedicated himself to a new life in the state of Israel.

My grandfather would never stray far from his academic roots. While working as a journalist in Israel, he received a B.A. and M.A. at Hebrew University. In the 1960s he traveled to Washington, D.C., as the U.S. correspondent for the Israeli Labor daily Davar—and in the meantime earned a doctorate in European history from Georgetown University. By that time, his Dachau days had faded into the past. Once again a consummate rationalist, he struggled to situate the experience of his youth in a framework of politics and international relations. His dissertation examined the persecution of Jews in Germany during the 1930s and its impact on American-German relations. Later, he wrote monographs on German Social Democrats and their attitude toward Israel and on the relations between the American Jewish community and postwar Germany.

Nonetheless, the spiritual transformation wrought by his wartime travails had left an indelible impression. His commitment to the struggle for a Jewish state grew out of a complete intellectual and spiritual rebirth. Not surprisingly, the origin of the transformation lay in his prewar education in Kovno and in years of underground work for Nitzotz. The journal represented a basic challenge to the perceived passivity of Western Jewish intellectualism. In maintaining his voice even amid the dehumanizing rhetoric of Nazi destruction, my grandfather and his colleagues asserted a uniquely Jewish mode of resistance.

In the following pages, I will situate Nitzotz in the context of the history of Zionist ideology and the politics of language and resistance. The journal was circulated underground for almost five years. It was founded in 1940 in Soviet Kovno and was published regularly in Kovno ghetto. Frenkel, who had been active in the underground since the Soviet occupation, became managing editor of Nitzotz in 1942. Kovno was liquidated in July 1944, and the surviving male population was transferred to Dachau-Kaufering concentration camp. There, Frenkel single-handedly edited and circulated the journal.¹ Nitzotz is the only known Hebrew publication to have appeared consistently throughout the Nazi occupation anywhere in Europe.² Of the forty-two issues released prior to liberation, only two excerpts from Kovno and five complete issues published in Dachau-Kaufering survived.

English-language scholarship on Nitzotz has been sparse. Until recently, it received barely any treatment in the academic literature; the few articles that mentioned it did so peripherally and were, for the most part, commemorative. In 2002, however, historian Ze’ev Mankowitz published a major work on the She’erit Hapletah, or Surviving Remnant—the 250,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who sought to rekindle a Jewish community in the American zone of occupied Germany from 1945 to 1948.³ That study, for the first time, drew Nitzotz into the public eye, because it was in the pages of Nitzotz that the biblical term She’erit Hapletah first appeared as an emblem of the survivors. The authors who flouted death to plan for the future were among the most influential figures in the postwar organization and mobilization of the survivors.

Nitzotz is significant not only for the future it anticipated and would help to shape but also for the present it endeavored to overcome. This project is intended to make the hopes and aspirations of the Dachau-Kaufering Zionist youth accessible to English audiences for the first time. Several hectographed copies of the surviving issues of Nitzotz were distributed by Frenkel to archives after liberation, but they were never published. They have never before been translated into English.

Each issue, twelve to twenty pages long, was drafted by Frenkel on writing materials smuggled to him from the camp office where his father worked. He hid one copy of each in a workshop storeroom. The others were circulated in Dachau-Kaufering and neighboring camps and then destroyed. Several days before the end of the war, Frenkel was transferred to the central Dachau camp. Suspecting that the SS would confiscate his belongings, he entrusted five Kaufering issues to Monsignor Jules Jost, a member of the Luxembourg resistance. Jost, in turn, gave them to a Spanish Republican who had been an inmate of the camp since 1940. A few days after liberation by the United States Army, Frenkel retrieved the journals. These issues were to serve not only as a record of the ideological developments among the authors but as a testimony to the dedication of the Zionist underground.

Translations of the surviving issues of Nitzotz follow this introduction, which situates the journal in historical and ideological context. The introduction begins with an overview of the political and ideological strands that influenced the authors of Nitzotz. It examines the political climate of prewar Lithuania, with special attention to antisemitism and the development of the Jewish underground, as well as conditions in Kovno ghetto and Dachau-Kaufering concentration camp. Next, it lays out the crucial question of how the authors of Nitzotz found the will to write. What motivated them to endanger their lives to contribute to a national journal? How was representation even possible amid the dehumanizing conditions of the concentration camp?

The following sections endeavor to answer those overarching questions. Nitzotz facilitated the authors’ commitment to community and to assisting their fellow prisoners. It also invested the authors with a crucial sense of continuity with Jewish history, religion, and tradition. The central purpose of Nitzotz during the Dachau-Kaufering period was to awaken in its authors and readers a sense of hope for the future—and that hope was fully focused on the establishment of a Jewish state. Underlying the authors’ Zionist agenda was a fundamental demand for unity. Ultimately, the authors abandoned partisan debate in favor of a unified Zionist front. By publishing Nitzotz, they asserted the cohesiveness of the Jewish community in the camp.

The conclusion returns to the authors’ central goal of providing a vision for the future and a path for recovery. They prescribed a transition from writing and resistance in Dachau-Kaufering to action and labor in the Jewish state.

…

I have lived with this project for most of my adult life, and I am deeply indebted to the many people who have urged me to return to it time and again and have made it richer with every iteration. My earliest work on Nitzotz began in 1998, as my senior thesis in literature at Harvard College. My thesis adviser, Beatrice Hanssen, helped me to understand my grandfather’s legacy as a literary artifact susceptible to theoretical analysis, and her comments on my many early drafts were always extensive and insightful. I returned to the project as a student at Harvard Law School, under the discerning direction of Martha Minow. With Minow’s keen and enthusiastic guidance, I came to regard Nitzotz not as an abstract and disembodied text but rather as the mediated product of concrete, and overwhelmingly painful, conflict. The manuscript took its final form under the expert supervision of Jan Gross in the Princeton Department of History. With Gross’s assistance, I approached Nitzotz in its broader social and political context and recognized it as a primary document of utmost historical importance. I am immensely grateful to all three mentors for their wisdom, counsel, and encouragement.

Many other people have read drafts, made suggestions, and provided advice over the long course of preparing this volume. Among them are Svetlana Boym, Marguerite Feitlowitz, James Kugel, Judith Ryan, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Roman Szporluk, Oren Weinrib, Ruth Wisse, James Young, and finally Hendrik Hartog, my dissertation adviser, who has indulged my lengthy digression into a realm far outside my principal area of study and has generously nurtured my development as a scholar in every respect.

Although there were more surviving veterans of Irgun Brith Zion (IBZ) when I began work on Nitzotz than there are today, a combination of violence and time had, unfortunately, already diminished their numbers. My heartfelt thanks to Azriel Levi, Chaim Rosenberg, and the late David Wolpe for providing interviews and reviewing materials. Thanks also to Alex Gringauz, Dror Melamed, Yael Lichtenstein, and Neil Alexander for contributing their memories and mementos of their parents.

Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum were invaluable repositories of documents and information. The Yad Vashem staff, especially Leah Teichthal and Elana Weiser, graciously assisted in processing and reproducing the archival sources.

This is a project that begins and ends with family. My grandmother Mina Shafir has shared with me her remarkable recollections of her participation in Irgun Brith Zion in Kovno ghetto and of her dangerous postwar return to Kovno to retrieve IBZ materials and smuggle them to the West. She has helped me to appreciate the human dimensions of resistance and has enriched my analysis accordingly. My mother, Estee Shafir Weinrib, has been indispensable to this undertaking from the outset, when she agreed to devote a summer to deciphering and translating the faded scrawl of the original Hebrew text. She has worked tirelessly with me to enhance and improve the translation at every stage. Of equal importance, she and my father, Richard Weinrib, have been an endless source of emotional support as I have grappled with difficult and often tragic material. My spouse and partner, David Wolraich, has endured my involvement with Nitzotz as long as I have. Together with our son, Simon Dolev, he has lovingly and patiently nourished me during this long and very personal endeavor.

And finally, I am profoundly indebted to my grandfather Shlomo Shafir, who daily risked his life to edit and circulate the issues of Nitzotz in Dachau-Kaufering concentration camp and whose spirit, courage, and love of learning have been an unparalleled inspiration to me. Without him, this book would never have been possible.

Part One The Voice of Resistance

1

Introduction to Nitzotz

The problem of representation during and after the Holocaust is a mainstay of Holocaust studies. There is a widespread sentiment among Holocaust scholars that critical reflection was impossible within the concentration camps—that the victim, physically and spiritually bankrupt, had lost the capacity to speak.¹ Even if words were possible, these scholars emphasize, there was no audience to hear them. In this context, the sophisticated moral and political analysis within the pages of Nitzotz is a powerful testament to human resilience. Against all odds, the authors of Nitzotz found a voice within the camps, and they gambled everything to preserve it for posterity.

Writing in Context

Historical interest in the written attempts by Holocaust survivors to make sense of their experiences is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the decades after the war, Holocaust scholarship focused primarily on Nazi documents: SS reports, government correspondence, and office dispatches. When the official archives were exhausted and collective memory of the Nazi atrocities began to recede, personal accounts emerged as a new means of understanding everyday life in the camps. And in the 1980s and 1990s, spurred by scholarly interest and their own encroaching old age, many survivors committed their memories to writing.

Nonetheless, many scholars clung to their earlier assumptions about the kind of writing that was possible during the Holocaust. They believed that one could not digest the terrors of the Holocaust as one lived them—that reflection would be possible only years later.² According to this view, the prisoners of the concentration camps were traumatized by their experiences. Understanding what transpired would entail rupturing the silence that infected the victims, so that their voices might finally be heard.³

During recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in contemporaneous accounts and a corresponding reevaluation of the reactions and capabilities of the victims during the event. Against this backdrop, the journals and letters that survived the war are an indispensable resource. In 2002, Yale University Press released a major English translation of a journal written by Herman Kruk in the Vilna ghetto and the Estonian labor camp Klooga. Avraham Tory’s diary has been a mainspring of the historical literature on Kovno ghetto. Diaries and documents have surfaced from the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos and the Breitenau labor camp.⁴ Many of these accounts transcend their authors. Some are very much community endeavors. And many were preserved as the most crucial belongings of the survivors.⁵

Meanwhile, underground communities in a number of ghettos circulated journals and newsletters to debate ideological issues, to inform residents about developments within and outside the ghettos, and to prepare members for armed or unarmed resistance. From the Warsaw ghetto alone (the most famous repository) nearly fifty such newspapers were preserved, the majority of which were produced by the Zionist youth.⁶

Still, as a surviving document, Nitzotz remains in a category of its own. The uncovering of a wealth of underground literature produced in the ghettos has done little to dispel the conventional wisdom that ideological debate had no place within the concentration camps—that the prisoners of the camps, if not the ghettos, were consumed by the struggle for survival.⁷ In the world of Holocaust literature, the content of Nitzotz is something of an anomaly. Very little writing survived the concentration camps. The few treasures that were preserved were of a personal nature: memoirs and diaries, poetry, and letters. For many authors, newly bereft of friends and family, writing was a substitute for human companionship. Others wrote to leave a trace in a world from which the Nazis sought to erase them.

The authors of Nitzotz were motivated by a different challenge. Rather than provide a written record of a life and community that would soon be stamped out, they aspired to prepare through writing for a life and community that would someday exist.⁸ The articles in Nitzotz are predominantly political and ideological. They contain virtually no reference to everyday life in the camp. Although the journal occasionally featured memoirs and poetry that engaged the human tragedies of the camp, they too were firmly rooted in community. The articles in Nitzotz assume life, not death—for the Jewish people, if not for the authors.

Concededly, Nitzotz is something of an anomaly. The authors of Nitzotz were privileged in their ability to produce a journal. When Kovno ghetto was liquidated, some of the young activists who had participated in the journal were evacuated to the same satellite camps of Dachau, ensuring continuity in their underground work. They had fortuitous access to writing supplies, and sometimes even to radio. And though the authors suffered tremendously at hard labor, Dachau-Kaufering was a work camp, not a death camp.⁹

All told, this collaborative circulation of an underground newspaper in a concentration