In Search Of A Lost People; The Old And The New Poland

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Text originally published in 1948 under the same title.

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IN SEARCH OF A LOST PEOPLE: THE OLD AND THE NEW POLAND

BY

JOSEPH TENENBAUM

IN COLLABORATION WITH SHEILA TENENBAUM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 5

PART ONE 7

I—MY COMPANION JUSTINE 7

II—TWO EPOCHS-ONE PROBLEM 13

III—WARSAW 19

IV—THE WARSAW GHETTO 25

THE GERMANS IN WARSAW 26

ACTION IN WARSAW 29

ORGANIZED DEFENSE 32

PART TWO 39

V—THE GHETTO UPRISING 39

VI—THE RUBBLE FIGHTERS 54

VII—THE LAST CHAPTER 63

VIII—ECHO OF THE GHETTO UPRISING 67

IX—THE LIQUIDATION OF THE BIALYSTOK GHETTO 73

X—THE CITY OF LODZ 81

THE LODZ OF TODAY 85

XI—MY CITY LEMBERG 88

THE GHETTO 91

THE JULAG 93

THE EXTERMINATION CAMP ON JANOWSKA STREET 94

THE DEATH BRIGADE 95

XII—CRACOW, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 101

XIII—ON THE ROAD TO OSWIECIM 108

PART THREE 115

XIV—A THOUSAND YEARS OF JEWISH HISTORY 115

JEWS IN WARSAW 117

WITH FIRE AND SWORD 119

JEWISH AUTONOMY 120

THE DECLINE OF THE POLISH STATE 121

JEWS UNDER PRUSSIAN RIGORISM 123

THE DUCHY OF WARSAW 124

THE POLISH KINGDOM 124

AFTER THE INSURRECTION 127

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 129

PRUSSIAN AND AUSTRIAN POLAND 131

XV—POLONIA RESTITUTA 133

THE NEW GOVERNMENT IN POLAND 135

AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENT 141

XVI—THE GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE 146

THE POLISH SOVIET CONFLICT 148

AFTER THE DEATH OF SIKORSKI 151

THE TWO FRONTS 153

XVII—THE UNDERGROUND ARMIES 156

THE BAND BRIGADE 157

XVIII—THE NEW POLAND 162

XIX—THE LEADERS OF THE NEW POLAND 170

XX—THE CHURCH IN POLAND 177

CARDINAL HLOND 179

AN APPEAL TO THE VATICAN 184

XXI—SILESIA 186

POLISH CLAIMS TO SILESIA 189

THE JEWS IN SILESIA 191

PART FOUR 199

XXII—THE NAZI TIMETABLE 199

XXIII—SLAUGHTER IN THE EAST 204

THE UKRAINIAN HAIDAMAKI (HAIDAMACKS) 206

THE DISTRICT OF GALICIA 208

XXIV—THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS 211

CHELMNO 211

BELZEC 212

TREBLINKA 213

MAJDANEK 215

SOBIBOR 216

XXV—THE OVENS OF BIRKENAU 218

THE BATHS 218

THE ROUTINE OF BIRKENAU 220

HUMAN RABBITS 221

A GRIM CONFESSION 223

UNDERGROUND AND REVOLT 224

XXVI—DEATH OF A CIVILIZATION 226

BIBLIOGRAPHY 233

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 236

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

MY ORIGINAL PURPOSE IN GOING TO POLAND WAS BEST EXPRESSED IN an address delivered by me at a farewell dinner in New York, on March 31, 1946, a few days before my scheduled trip. With certain minor changes that address is as relevant today as it was then. The historical facts it embraced are still a source of anxiety and despair. These were my words:

Within a few days, I shall leave these familiar shores on a flight to Poland, the country of my birth, education and youth. Who is left in Poland? My people there have perished, an entire people of six million men, women and children have been massacred by the German barbarians, amidst indescribable horrors of seizure and slaughter. Of the three and a half million Jews in pre-war Poland, a mere fraction has survived. These pitiful remnants are haunted by the memories of a ghastly past and troubled by an uncertain future. Some or most of them are in hiding. They have become marranos," frightened lest their faith be discovered and’ they suffer disastrous consequences. And all of them, the fifty or seventy thousand surviving Jews, are living in a state of utter insecurity or panicky flight.

"There are new terrors, there are new deaths. Hitler is dead, but the heritage of Hitlerism remains. Armed bandit battalions spread death and disaster. They are aiming at driving the last Jew from the European continent.

"What is to become of the Jews? What can I bring to Poland by way of solace, or brotherly advice? I cannot mouth empty, optimistic slogans. It is no use advising them to leave the inhospitable soil of Europe as long as other lands are not ready to receive them. Thousands of broken, disorganized and despairing Jews, after their miraculous escapes from the gas chambers of Hitler, are still kept in the concentration camps. Long after the German armistice they are still further from the goal of liberation than ever before. How terribly low we as a people have sunk in prestige and power, that we still countenance such conditions!

"I am going to Poland to identify myself with the sufferings and toil of my brethren, or those who are left of them. I go there to help them, to live with them and learn their innermost thoughts and desires, so that I may be able to interpret to America the epic of a great people who have been largely destroyed, and recount the trials of the few who have remained in their struggle to preserve the great heritage of Polish Jewry.

I go to Poland as an American Jew of Polish descent, on a mission to the heroic survivors of Polish Jewry in the new, liberated Poland.

This was a simply worded declaration of intent. I can only report fragments of what I saw and heard or read during my two and a half months abroad. But these fragments seem to me to be not only of moment to Jews. Despite all the investigating commissions and international committees on behalf of Jewry, the world knows little enough of the depths of human degradation or the great surges of spirit and individual flashes of heroic greatness that have been revealed.

There is a clash of two worlds, a clash that has not ceased with the death of Hitler in the gasoline flames in the cellars of the German chancellery. The sparks from the body-burning stakes at the Janowska camp in Lwow, of the ovens at Majdanek, Treblinka and Belzec, and the flames of the chimneys at Birkenau, Sobibor, Oranienburg and Mauthausen, have seared the human soul and scarred the human conscience. We cannot avoid facing the truth simply by ignoring it or driving it underground. The sanity of man, his very soul, requires a thorough catharsis which can come only through frank discussion, through revealing the naked evil in all its deformity and horror. We must think through all the implications, past and present, and realize their full dimensions. Only thus can sanity and moral strength be preserved for future generations.

In short, while this book aims at giving a frank presentation of facts and conditions, it is hoped that it may offer a modest educational contribution towards a better world.

PART ONE

I—MY COMPANION JUSTINE

ON APRIL 5TH, 1946, I BOARDED A PLANE FOR DIRECT FLIGHT TO STOCKHOLM, Sweden. I was not the only passenger, but I was the only one on a mission to Poland. As I reclined in the comfortable chair above the clouds at dusk, and began to finger in my briefcase for the usual travel literature to while away the time, I found a rare book, a book which completely absorbed my mind and heart for the rest of the trip. It was a little book, The Memoirs of Justine, which I had received from Poland before my journey. I found it not only fascinating reading matter, but also the best prologue to the Jewish tragedy in Poland. But who was Justine?

Her proper name was Gustawa Draenger, born Dawidsohn. She was a woman of twenty-five, physically slight, with dreamy eyes and sensitive mouth. The frontispiece photograph was expressive not merely of beauty but of delicacy and refinement. Her writing matched her personality, expressive and beautiful. Her book was a veritable symphony of verbal tunes, composed on the tragic episodes of her life. She called it a diary. It had been written on scraps of paper in the prison of Cracow at Helcle Street, between January and April of 1943. She had left the manuscript in a tin box hidden in the stove. Her friend had smuggled out the loose sheets and preserved them, or what was left of them.

The diary of Justine, as published, is a moving story of youth and its revolt against the might of Hitler and his machine. It is a revelation of the conspiratorial work under the noses of the Gestapo, a panorama of dreams, disappointments, joy and distress such as only Jewish youth, fired by the highest ideals, could conceive and dare. It recounts the story of one Dolek Liebeskind (Jan Ropa), general secretary of Akiba Zionist Youth, the organizer and head of the conspiracy movement; of Szymszon Draenger (Symek), the editor of Diwrei Akiba (The Sayings of Akiba); Gusta (Justine) his wife; of Romek Laban (Abraham Leibowicz), one of the leaders of the Zionist-Socialist organization Dror; and the youngest of the group, Maniek Eisenstein. These people composed the Council. There were others who played their parts loyally, including Gola Mirer, a liaison officer who had made contact with the Polish Underground and was admitted to the Council.

This group of heroic souls had begun their activities in December 1941, as an agricultural retraining project in a village near Bochnia. It soon became the focus of organized resistance. Szymszon Draenger was manager of the farm. Dolek Liebeskind, a member of the presidium of Jewish Self-Help, took over the agricultural retraining project, and thus gained an opportunity to contact and organize militant groups over the General Government. After liquidation of the project, the group operated between Cracow and Bochnia. Liebeskind was the leader of the conspiratorial activities. He also took upon himself the task of supplying arms and money. Symek, the husband of Gusta, was an amateur compositor and draftsman who used his abilities to organize a technical bureau for the forging of false identification papers, the blanks of which were supplied by Juda Tenenbaum, who stole them from the Gestapo office. Laban was in charge of replenishing the treasury.

Before long there arose a crisis in which grave decisions had to be made by this heroic little band. The small towns had been liquidated. Jews were fleeing for safety to Cracow, the capital of the Government General. Terrible news had reached the group. They heard of Treblinka and Chelmno, of the massacres in Tarnow, Rzeszow, and even Cracow itself. They felt that their place was in Cracow. Accordingly, they set up their headquarters in the Cracow Ghetto. The emotion and atmosphere of these moments is caught by Gusta in her reminiscences.

They sat, the four of them, Antek, Dolek, Marek and Justine. Words fell from their lips; an oath that they would dedicate themselves to a life of self-sacrifice; that it was too late to hold back the time clock, the thing that ends without a comeback; that it was useless to hold on to the past when life ends today and there is no more a tomorrow....Yet, as long as there is a today it was necessary to create. Ah, God! Create? To destroy, destroy, destroy to the last drop of our strength. Everything else is ephemeral. Only what we destroy will last....

These people were aware of their fate. Their idealism did not hide from them the grim realities of their situation. They took stock of their difficulties. At this point Justine gives a most moving and vivid description of some of those difficulties and responsibilities.

"What shall we do? It is so easy to warn the people of the wickedness of the Germans and to exhort them to run away from deportation. But how were they to go through barbed wire and the armed blockade? Anyone leaving the walls of the ghetto was liable to execution and anyone found without the white-blue armband on the right arm courted immediate death. And even if out of the ghetto, how was one to take the first step on the pavement of freedom?

They see the armband on your arms and immediately a bullet is fired through your skull. Discard the band? If your Polish neighbors notice the white symbolic armband being removed, you are sure to land with the police. Should you manage to succeed in hiding in the darkest alley behind the iron gate and there change your decoration," someone is bound to see you entering with, or leaving without the band. You could disguise yourself a thousand times but you would always remain the same. One was simply a Jew either with or without an armband. One betrayed one’s Jewishness with every tormented gesture, with every anxious step, with the hunch of the shoulders, on which lay the yoke of servitude, with the look of a hunted animal, in short, with the entire physical appearance on which the ghetto had etched its indelible stamp. For them one was simply a Jew, not only by the color of eyes, hair, complexion, the shape of the nose or through race. One was such a one by the lack of a bold stride, lack of poise and self-assurance, through the accent of speech, the way one expresses oneself, through a difference in behavior, and God knows what else. You were that most of all because everybody wanted to see in you just that.

"Those neighbors, at every step they lurked, peered shamelessly into the eyes, stared with suspicion and challenge till the poor creature got bewildered and self-conscious; the face became flushed, the eyes dropped and thus the Jew betrayed himself. Hence, before the unfortunate fugitive reached the first railroad station he had already behind him a whole series of battles lost, a series of speechless combats with a lurking enemy in every passer-by. Not infrequently the victim encountered blackmailers who milked him almost dry, leaving him barely enough money to buy a ticket to the nearest village.

"And then, were the Jew finally to reach the desired station, he found himself under the scrutiny of questioning eyes, boring eyes, eyes of the police in uniform, of many kinds of police auxiliaries who were sent out for the sole purpose of tracking down disguised Jews; secret service men, Germans, Ukrainians and other hirelings of fascism. How much coolness and self-possession were required to pass the station vestibule with head erect, repulse sharply the challenging stare of secret agents and with a swagger enter the waiting railroad car!

Apart from the police they faced the danger of the mob, which was eager to ferret out a Jew and surrender the victim to the police. The few who would not go that far were willing to annoy the Jew, or blackmail and threaten him, so that death would appear a blessing under these circumstances.

Whoever made one such journey and came out alive could relate a whole Odyssey. Gusta had many such perilous journeys to make, as a go-between and courier of important orders. But there were others who were constantly on missions. One such indefatigable traveler whose poise and appearance of pertness made her a fortress of self-confidence, was Hela Schipper. She was the best contact woman of them all. With a sway of her hips and a twinkle of her eyes she disarmed all suspicion. Once she brought from Warsaw five pistols and the joy of the little group of conspirators was indescribable. They had arms, and their dream of taking to the woods was nearer realization.

The first quintet (they were organized in cells of fives) was dispatched to the woods to join the underground. The group included Zygmunt Mahler (Zyga), Weksner Baruch (Benek), Salo Kanal (Adas), Edwin Weiss and Samuel Gotlieb (Milek). All of them had lost their dearest, went through the hell of degradation and blockade and were eager to do something. They dreamed and lived for that hour with the impatience of youth. This was the incarnation of all they had prayed for. Despite all preliminary negotiations with representatives of the Socialist Underground, they were abandoned by their guide and betrayed by the peasants, who spread rumors of an underground of three hundred men instead of the tiny band with only two pistols. Only Zygmunt Mahler returned alive.

The second attempt was even more tragic. Benek killed two gendarmes when surrounded in a hut. Ignas had no pistol. One pistol more would have made all the difference.

It became clear that the dream of the forest was but a dream.

They had learned their lesson the hard way. They had proof of how little they could rely on others. They must act by themselves, unaided, alone. More arms, more precautions were required. They started to prepare new equipment, set out to build shacks and shelters in the woods. But after further trials a heart-breaking decision was made. They decided that instead of manning the forest, they were to concentrate on Cracow, to sabotage the Nazi war machine; or as much of it as could be reached. A glimpse of the mood of the group can be gleaned from Justine’s remarks:

When I think, says Gusta (now back in Cracow) talking to Dolek, that there will disappear from the surface of the earth all the settlements of our people, that not a trace will remain of all that is dearest to us, then God be my witness, that all I desire is death. I do not cherish the role of gravedigger. I do not want to live in the ruins of our people’s life. I do not want....

Meanwhile Symek (Gusta’s husband) continued to forge documents and papers for all occasions. For in paper lay security, even if it were no more than paper security. Starting from a pocket-sized bureau—all the counterfeit paraphernalia were carried in his pocket—it soon grew to briefcase size, then to two briefcases full, later to the occupation of a corner in an empty or temporarily unoccupied alcove, and finally the business grew so much in volume that the couple moved to nearby Rabka. Here they lived the comparatively idyllic life of a gentile couple, the husband journeying every morning to work and working nights, with Gusta’s help, on the main business of counterfeiting documents.

Then suddenly there arose one of those periodic onslaughts on the ghetto that made all resistance plans topple like a pack of cards by the very suddenness of the move. Thousands were deported. Thousands were slain. It was clear that all the painstaking preparations for the uprising were without practical value. The only thing that remained was the hitting back with all one had, and not waiting for a strategic mass-revolt. Counteraction became the slogan, and counteraction began in earnest.

First their own traitors, Jewish policemen, too efficient for their own health, were finished off with pistol and club. Then new posts were opened for action, principally on the Cracow-Lwow line. Tracks were torn up, trains derailed and Germans were killed. The center of activities was transferred to Jozefinska Street 13, in the home of Szymon Lustgarten, where the central headquarters of ZOB (Jewish Self-defense) in the ghetto was located. Number 13 became the center not only of the defense activities but of all social and communal life. Here these young, hunted people, the last of the Polish Jewish dreamers, sought to salvage some happiness and even mirth. In the evening, armed parties streamed out to kill Germans as well as the few Jewish traitors. Some of these groups never returned, others came back wounded and lame. Through all these trials there grew bonds of mutual respect and a deep pride of belonging among these splinters of a people that did not belong.

It is difficult to give a coherent summary of this fragmentary diary with missing half-sentences, unfinished paragraphs and abrupt endings. But one scene, for all its fragmentariness, has the strength and fullness of a dramatic episode. It is the description of the last Sabbath-Eve, something so grand in its simplicity that for this scene alone Justine will live forever in the hearts of her people. I shall quote in direct translation wherever possible:

"The last Saturday!

"They all knew it was the last. They felt danger coming nearer. Preparations for the feast were made two days ahead. All waited tensely. The feast of the Sabbath had to start on Friday at dusk and end at dawn, the following day. For years they kept up in the movement (Zionist Youth) the holy tradition. In the course of a day’s drab experience one was suddenly hoisted into the holiday spirit. In devotional concentration, one waited for that moment when suddenly the candles flare up in the festively decorated room. Girls in white blouses, boys in white shirts with widely flowing collars, sat down, thrilled, at the set table. First there was a moment of silence. And then from all the breasts burst forth a strong, welcome song. The eyes gleamed in the glare of the candles. The fervent stirring of the soul was mirrored in these wide open pupils. Another kind of soul entered man—cleaner, nobler.

"Thus it has been always, for years, in the quiet village as well as in the noisy city, high in the mountains or midst factory chimneys, always with the same song on their lips, with the same sentiments in their hearts, they set out to meet Princess Sabbath. And today they welcomed Her in this group for the last time.

"While the cup of happiness was filled to the brim, there fell as from nowhere the words: ‘The Last Supper.’ And now Dolek, the leader, the strongest and the hardiest of them all could hold back these words no longer. ‘There is no return from our road,’ He spoke with all the solemnity of the occasion. ‘We travel the road of death; remember well! Whoever seeks life, let him not look for it among us. We are at the very end. Only that our end is not the end of all things. Our end is a kind of death, sought after by the strong. I feel that it is the last of our Sabbath festivities. We will have to clear out from this district. There is too much suspicion around us. This week we shall begin to liquidate our center at number 13. Another milestone of our life will close. We are not permitted to be sorry for ourselves. So be it!’

The gray dawn filtered through the window panes as this ‘Last Supper’ neared its conclusion.

The memoirs of Gusta conclude on a note of caution. She could not write all that she knew, in order not to endanger the lives of those who survived her. Nor could she risk the future of the movement. She herself did not finish the memoirs. But we know the fate of some of the heroes that appear in the book. Some of the survivors, notably Jozef Wulf, the distinguished writer, who together with the young dramatist Israel Szreibtafel (Wladyslaw) was enlisted for the cause by Gusta, has supplied the epilogue to this epic of horror and heroism. Here are some of the known details.

On December 23, 1942, the group organized a bombing attack on the cafe Cyganeria frequented by Germans. During the bombing a score of Germans were killed and many wounded. Other groups of the same outfit scattered leaflets and posted proclamations against the Nazi occupation. It was no coincidence that, almost on the same night, hand grenades were hurled at the Central Railroad station in Warsaw, and a Wehrmacht cafe in Kielce and a movie house in Radom were bombed. The Gestapo, forewarned by traitors and informers, bore down with full force and made many arrests. The group hiding in the ruins of the hospital at Skawinska Street were trapped in the Gestapo net. Among them were Laban and Alexander Goldberg (Alek).

On December 24, 1942, Juda Tenenbaum was captured. The Germans fell upon Dolek Liebeskind at Zulawski Street. He killed two and wounded two more before his bullet-ridden body fell lifeless. None of those captured and tortured betrayed their comrades. Unfortunately, among the membership there crept in two informers, who made it easy for the Gestapo to trail the others. Thus Symek was arrested on March 13, 1943. On April 29, 1943, the Germans gathered six prisoners from the Montelupich jail and led them away for execution. Symek Draenger, who was one of them, escaped, on the way. Laban whose flight was frustrated threw himself on the troopers who brought him to the Jewish cemetery for execution and with bare hands mangled one of his executioners. It took nine bullets to put an end to his struggles.

After his escape, Symek Draenger returned to Bochnia to join the others who were left after the debacle. At the same time Justine escaped from prison to join her husband at Bochnia. There with Hilel Wlodzislawski, Jozef Wulf and others, they renewed their conspiratorial activities, organized new combat groups and edited a conspiratorial paper Hechalutz Halochem, (the Fighting Pioneer). In November, 1943, both Symek and Gusta disappeared. There were no witnesses of their capture or execution. But there is little doubt of their fate. When the Germans managed to get them within their grasp it was the clasp of death.

Gusta’s words to her Gestapo tormentors in prison before her ultimate escape, were proud and defiant: Sure, we have organized Jewish guerrilla groups, and I can assure you that if we should succeed in escaping from your talons we shall continue organizing even stronger combat units. She kept her word, but so did the Gestapo.

Before the war, Gusta was editor of the youth publication Zeirim, the official organ of the Akiba Youth Movement. Her life was a shining example of the best that was in Jewish womanhood. Her death left a challenge to youth everywhere and laid a great moral obligation on her people.

II—TWO EPOCHS-ONE PROBLEM

THE AIRPLANE IS A GOOD PLACE IN WHICH TO REFLECT UPON THE PAST. Absolved from the earthly pull, high above the clouds, liberated from the commonplace fetters, the mind is free. There are no signposts to arrest the eye, no landscape to rivet your attention. Save for an unobtrusive fellow-passenger in the adjoining seat, you are on your own. It comes to my mind that perhaps this symbolizes the tragedy of modern civilization. High aloft and isolated. The realities of earth are left behind, the earth where rivers, mountains and jungle wilderness have been spanned, bridged or hacked out, and vehicles hurl themselves with fantastic speeds. Now the very sky itself has been made unsafe. Seemingly, even the abode of God has been made insecure.

Where is God? That is what the heroic youths in Justine’s diary must have asked themselves a thousand times. Yet they did not abandon faith. On that last Sabbath Eve, they sang with unutterable tenderness the age-old song: "Lecha dodee—Come, my beloved, to meet the Sabbath bride." A stubborn people, the Jews! A stubborn youth! They have not abandoned the God of Israel even though the God of Israel seems to have abandoned them...

And my mind wanders back to my own youth. Another generation, another war, in the very same country. It was in the year 1918, when the writer, an Austrian officer during the war, returned from four years field duty to his beloved home town Lemberg (Lwow), capital of Galicia, where he had spent most of his formative years. World War I was nearing its end; the proud Austrian Empire had collapsed like an air bubble. Peoples and nationalities held together in a makeshift empire for centuries became free, free to hate and to make war on each other.

A bloody conflict between Ukrainians and Poles broke out for the possession of the unhappy land, Eastern Galicia, inhabited by 3,293,023 Ukrainians, who hated the Poles, a minority of 1,349,626 Poles who in turn despised the Ukrainians, and 658,722 Jews thrust between them. For the Jews there was but one choice; the strictest neutrality in this gory business of neighbor fighting neighbor, with all the bitterness and brutality of long suppressed enmities. This was the dictate of common sense, of fairness as well as of statesmanship. But what is a virtue with everyone else is a crime when practiced by the Jews.

The Ukrainians resented Jewish neutrality in so just a cause, and made no bones about the consequences of such a course, and the reactionary Polish nationalists under the Austrian regime, had considered the Jews their chattels too long not to resent this newest betrayal by the Jews.

The writer was one of the leaders of the Jewish Council, one of the organizers of the Jewish self-defense, and the head of the commissary which fed Jews and the beleaguered Poles as well during the Polish-Ukrainian war. He took part in every move to propitiate, conciliate and explain the difficult position of the Jewish population, especially in Lwow where districts, streets and blocks changed hand almost hourly between Ukrainian and Polish combat forces. Jews were appealed to by both sides, and they rendered valuable Samaritan services to both combatant forces with equal zeal and equal impartiality. This state of affairs lasted for nearly a month. And then disaster suddenly struck the Jews.

On November 22, 1918, early in the morning, Polish reinforcements arrived from the West and the Ukrainians were routed. Instantly there was a pogrom in Lemberg. For three days and three nights the fury of the Polish Soldateska was unleashed in the Jewish Ghetto. The savagery of those soldiers was unbounded. Bodies were ripped open, women raped before the eyes of their children, and their husbands slain. Men, women and children were locked in burning houses and anyone attracted by the cries for rescue was shot by the guards, who blocked the streets. Stores were looted publicly, loaded on army trucks and carted away. Synagogues were wrecked, holy scrolls torn and strewn in the gutter, and finally the buildings were set on fire. It was a blazing inferno, which raged for several days and left charred ruins of one of the oldest parts of the Jewish community.

The crop of the bloody harvest was seventy-two dead, over four hundred wounded and maimed, 25,000 made homeless and destitute. The entire community was left in utter, mute terror. Despite all our pleas with the authorities, there followed weeks and months of dreadful searches in the dead of the night, looting of homes at all hours, and abduction of Jews for forced labor. In the midst of this frightful terror Jewish youth (youth like Gusta), the youth of Hashachar (Dawn), Zirei Zion (Youth of Zion), the Akiba and the Emunah (Faith), and the Heatid (Future), were inspired to fight, work and die magnificently. Two epochs so far apart, yet spanned by the same youth, so akin to one another.

In the year 1919, a book appeared from the pen of this writer, The Pogrom of Jews in Lemberg (Der Lemberger Judenpogrom, Wien-Brunn, 1919), in which this terrifying experience has been described and documented. Let me quote but one passage:

On Thursday, November 28, was the funeral of the pogrom victims, men, women and children, and the defiled holy scrolls. A cortege of twenty thousand mourners accompanied the victims. The Chief Rabbi Dr. Guttman began the funeral services but collapsed, and only fragments of syllables were torn from his stricken voice. The whole community broke out in anguish of frenzy. Tears flowed, hot, bloody, disconsolate tears. Only this gift could they offer the dear ones on their eternal journey. After the laments, there was silence, and then as from nowhere a thousand voices, a thousand cries, a collective oath: NEVER AGAIN SHALL THIS HAPPEN TO US!

And yet, in barely two decades the Never became Ever so often, ever so cruel, ever so barbarous.

The mind goes back through decades, centuries, millenniums. Always the same story. Yet, not quite the same. Jews are being driven out, taken in, and driven out again—perpetual wanderers striking roots in the desert, drenching the barren soil with their sweat and blood. With tenacity and genius, they strike water from the rocks, making the earth bloom where never before grass had grown, bringing forth wealth and treasure for the Herrenvolk to war with, or squander away in luxury and idleness.

The mind conjures up the eternal wanderer in his woe, tricked of everything he has built up with such effort, on his weary way to seek new hosts, new landlords, new leeches. So it was in Germany, in Poland, in the Levant, and even in the Holy Land where the Jews have literally made the desert bloom. There is an unholy conspiracy to deprive the Jew of the fruits of his labors. As in Hitler’s Germany, so it had been in fifteenth century Spain. In that country there also had been propaganda for a new era. This too was to be accomplished by ridding the country of the parasite who had gathered the gold for the princes. There too they murdered or exiled a whole people, some 400,000 of them. All this was done in the name of religion!

From Asturias to Austria is a long stretch of time and space. Yet, it has all happened before. The Spanish grandees anticipated Hitler even in the racial theories of the detestable Austrian wall-paper hanger. Indeed, Hitler was not original. Even the theory of racial purity was Spanish. The theory of Limpieza, blood purity to the fourth generation, was introduced in Spain nearly four centuries and a half before Hitler.

The bully, Ferdinand of Aragon, and the bigot, Isabella of Castile, were the Hitlers of Spain. And the Jews? Well, Jews have been always Jews. Just as in Germany, Jews had been living in Spain for hundreds of years. A Jewish leader, scholar and financier, Isaac Abravanel, who had supplied the empty treasury of his sovereigns with money and the means for the many campaigns of conquest and adventure, had submitted a memorandum proving that Jews had been on Spanish soil more than a thousand years before Christ. It had availed naught.

We quote from the historian Valeriu Marcu’s book: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain:

"The exodus began. The roads to the coast formed the bed of the stream. Most of them (the refugees) went on foot, the luckier ones riding on mules or horses. Some fell from fatigue, some because they were ill. Some died, others were born by the wayside. When the columns began to move, the women sang, while children beat