May 16 marks the 70th anniversary of the bloody suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The uprising broke out on April 19, 1943 in response to the deportations of the ghetto inhabitants to extermination camps, started by the Nazis a year earlier. The insurrection led by the left-wing Jewish Combat Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB) was brutally suppressed by the SS, Wehrmacht and Orpo with the support of the Trawnikis (anti-Soviet collaborators among the Red Army prisoners of war) and the so called Blue Police (the last remnant of the pre-war Sanacja regime).
The heroic deed of the insurgents is incorporated in the so-called „historical policy” of the Polish government. This is related to the „defalsifing” of history, i.e. negating the leading role of ŻOB and exaggerating the significance of the Revisionist-Zionist (i.e. far right) Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, ŻZW) – an organization of former officers of the Polish Military. Nothing shows the bizarre nature of this „defalsification” more than naming one of Warsaw garden squares after Mieczysław Apfelbaum – an alleged member of the ŻZW, who, according to the latest historical research, never existed.
The official “defalsifiers” assume that “communist propaganda” exaggerated the importance of ŻOB – a united-front coalition of Bundists, left-wing Zionists and communists. This assumption is unjustified. Before the war, three quarters of Polish Jews were small craftsmen and shopkeepers (the rest were mainly workers in the textile and food processing industries). As a result of the Great Depression, the economic situation of Jewish craftsmen deteriorated significantly, which resulted in an increase in left-wing sentiment among the Jewish masses.i At the same time, the favorable attitude of the Zionists towards the anti-Semitic military junta (e.g. running in the parliamentary elections of 1935 and 1938, boycotted by all opposition parties, or the Zionist-Revisionist support for the government’s proposals for expulsion of Jews from the country) undermined support for this movement. The progressing radicalization of both the ruling Sanacja and the Endecja (right-wing ethnic nationalists, one of the main opposition forces) aroused anti-fascist sentiments among the Jewish masses. All this resulted in a leftward shift of the political sympathies of the Jewish population. In the last pre-war elections to the Warsaw gmina (1936), the anti-Zionist social democrats from the Bund got the most votes. In the local government elections of 1938, the Bund (running in coalition with the Polish Socialist Party) won 17 seats in the Warsaw city council, other Jewish parties – 3 seats.
The war made the situation of the Jewish working masses even worse. The occupier herded the Jews into ghettos, where the conditions were calculated for their slow extermination. The ghetto misery was deepened by the attitude of the Jewish property classes. It was from among them that the members of the Judenrat, the administration and the Jewish police came from. Members of the latter, in particular, brutally exploited their position (the policemen didn’t receive a wage, which motivated them to rob the terrorized residents and engage in black market activities). Since food rations were below the biological minimum, the inhabitants of the ghetto had to rely on smuggling and the black market. A layer of wealthy black marketeers selling contraband goods at usurious prices quickly grew. Their networks often included the ghetto apparatus, especially the organs of repression. The population also became subject to hyperexploitation by German capital – the largest plants in the ghetto belonged to German concerns producing uniforms for the Wehrmacht, residents were also deported for forced labor.
The relations of exploitation were directly guarded – apart from the SS and the Wehrmacht, of course – by the Judenrat and the Jewish security forces recruited from and allied with the Jewish bourgeoisie. The struggle against the genocidal occupier had to objectively mean an armed fight against the Jewish-bourgeois collaboration (liquidation of the policemen, robberies and contributions collected from the ghetto bourgeoisie, etc.). Considering the situation of the Polish Jewish masses before the war and their situation in the Warsaw Ghetto, is it any wonder that the working-class, socialist parties played the main role in the Uprising? No, that is why the role of ŻOB does not need to be „exaggerated”. The leading role of ŻOB in the uprising can be denied only by those who deny its class character: because the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a proletarian uprising.
And this is how the Uprising should be remembered, as a struggle for national and social liberation, as a moment of the global proletarian struggle against capitalism in general and against fascism in particular. Especially since the memory of the Uprising is falsified not only by the reactionary-nationalist government of Poland, but also by Zionism, which cynically instrumentalizes the memory of the Nazi genocide in the service of the colonial oppression of Palestine.
In this context, the following article published in March 1941 by Polish Trotskyists in their (edited in the Warsaw Ghetto) press organ „Czerwony Sztandar” („Red Banner”) is interesting. It is a penetrating critique of the politics of the ruling classes of the Jewish community. Its starting point is the characteristics of the gminaii institutions. Gminy were forms of self-government for Jewish religious communities. They were to maintain the rabbinate, synagogues, mikvehs, cemeteries, watch over the religious education of Jewish youth, provide believers with kosher meat, and help the poor through institutions established for this purpose. Due to their religious character, they were dominated by the most conservative elements among the Jewish community. During the Nazi occupation, gminy became the backbone of the Judenrat apparatus.
Describing the collaborationist oppression of the Judenrat, the authors of the article point to the ideological face of this collaboration: „Zionism is the official and occupier-sanctioned ideology of the ghetto.” They state that „the ideas of Zionism and the ‚ideas’ of the fascist occupation have become so closely intertwined (…), that it is impossible to separate them from each other.” They reveal the common purpose that underlay the fascist-Zionist collaboration: „does not fascism fight, and most effectively at that, the ‚plague’ of assimilation, does it not ruthlessly and under coercion carry out the return of prodigal sons to the bosom of Israel, does it not collect the scattered and dispersed ‚chosen people’ not only from the backwater of the governorate, but also from almost all Europe and does it not gather them in ghetto concentrations? After all, isn’t the ghetto itself a substitute for the Jewish state?”
These words may seem harsh, but they are confirmed by the Zionists themselves. Chaim Rumkowski, the chairman of the Łódź Judenrat and pre-war Zionist activist, boasted that his ghetto “is a Jewish state with 400 policemen and 3 prisons. [It] has a foreign ministry and all other ministries.” Also, the Zionist underground complained that the ghetto gadzinówki mimicked its rhetoric; the Zionist-Gordonist „Słowo Młodych” („Word of the Youth”) wrote: „The Germans are masters in the field of pejorativization of lofty slogans of human ideals; and what Hitler did with the concept of nationalism and socialism after taking power, he has now done with Zionism”. This convergence of Zionist and collaborationist slogans results from the very essence of Zionist ideology and practice: the need to create a Jewish state was justified by the acceptance of anti-Semitic arguments about the impossibility of assimilation, which resulted in giving up the struggle for equal rights and conservative acceptance of the existing socio-economic and political relations, even if they were anti-Semitic. To this day the Zionist regime is allied with the most reactionary governments and movements.
(An objection may be raised that Zionists were part of ŻOB. However, this organization was joined by members of the far-left wing of Labor Zionism whose ideology was an eclectic melange of Zionism and Marxism, for example: global proletarian revolution as a precondition for creating the Jewish state. It accepted postulates that were unusual for the Zionist movement (national-cultural autonomy, embrace of Yiddish), which it took over from the Bundists and Communists with which it cooperated, often in conditions of illegality. The schizophrenic ideological profile of the extreme Zionist left is well illustrated by the fact that both leader of the ŻOB, Mordechaj Anielewicz and the head of so called „Jewish Gestapo”, Abraham Gancwajch belonged to Labour-Zionist organization before the war.)
It is necessary to oppose the falsification of history and the erasure of the memory of the revolutionary struggles of the working masses. It is necessary to acquaint the proletariat with its own history. It is necessary to show to the working class the inability of the bourgeoisie to fight against existential threats if they bring short-term benefits to it. Finally, it is necessary to continue the struggle against reaction, imperialism and militarism, the struggle against capitalism, the struggle for social liberation.
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Article translated from the Polish original.
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“Czerwony Sztandar” (“Red Banner”): Jewish gmina
In the wartime and fascist martyrology of peoples the suffering of the Jewish population occupies a special place. The „Jewish”, or more precisely anti-Jewish, ordinances of the occupiers are characterized by such unprecedented, such inhuman and simply incomprehensible barbarism, that it would seem that they are devoid of any pretense of purposefulness, and are only a symptom of pathological beastliness, which will not overlook any opportunity to make their victims’ lives more difficult and disgusting, to not only declass them and destroy them economically – but to exterminate them physically.
The atrocities directed against Jews, however, have a deeper meaning. This immensity of publicly demonstrated, cynical sadism is to be merely the test and proof of the validity of the fascist-anti-Semitic demagogy, that proclaimed to the world, ideological „raison d’être” of the „liberatory” partitions of German imperialism.
For the Jewish masses, seeking help and aid in this desperate and tragic situation, the occupier left only one address – the Jewish gminy. By appealing to consciences and calling for solidarity and self-help, gminy could easily create the belief that they themselves are the expression and organ of this self-help, an evidence of social or national solidarity. They have therefore become centers of harmful illusions and false hopes, and worse, a source of new misfortunes. In our struggle for the liberation and socialist brotherhood of peoples, we must therefore devote some attention to the activities of these false „friends” of the Jewish masses.
Jewish gminy in Poland have always been the domain of reaction, a reserve of ignorance and fanaticism, a grange of the most sordid part of the Jewish bourgeoisie. By their very essence, which consisted in „satisfying religious needs”, they had to be the seat and hotbed of nationalism and clericalism. The revolutionary workers’ movement has always had a negative attitude towards them, it has exposed them and fought against them. That was why they ran a consumptive life, ignored and hated by the Jewish community.
This situation was radically changed by the occupier. The real „renaissance” began, a new era of unprecedented flourishing of Jewish gminy.
On the order and appointment of the occupier authorities, Jewish councils were established in all Jewish communities in the general governorate [sic! – translator], recruited from among the most reactionary „social activists” and activists of the former gminy, along with scum and dregs. Their task, according to the ordinance of the Governor General of November 28, 1939, is „to execute the orders of the German authorities”. They are a recognized and official intermediary between the occupier and the Jewish population, an extended arm of the occupation. Everywhere, even in occupied countries, fascism is trying to create local agents, extract helpers and perpetrators of its crimes out of the area, and subdue peoples with their own hands.
This did not prevent suspending of the sign „Jewish self-government” over the present gminy. Compared to the former gminy, the competences of these institutions were expanded so enormously, that they became the sole, monopolistic organization covering all areas of Jewish life.
Jewish gminy are now a special form of symbiosis between the most reactionary and rotten part of the Jewish bourgeoisie and the occupier. It is a relationship, that has not been formed by the warmth of love, that is not accompanied by even a hint of sympathy. On the one hand – German contempt, and on the other, mayufesiii servility bordering on self-denial. Nevertheless, this relationship is a fact.
Jewish gminy act as agents of the occupier’s terror. But as in chain trade, intermediation by becoming a source of new profits weighs heavily on the consumer, so has German repression increased in its path through the gmina apparatus by the burden of Jewish bribery, naked plunder, shameless robbery and parasitism. Amidst this terror, Jewish protection, nepotism and sinecure built a quiet nest for themselves. Money and „connections” with the gmina apparatus serve to a certain extent as a letter of safe conduct, as a protection against the occupier’s sharp blows. The more severe it is against those who cannot demonstrate this letter of safe conduct – the Jewish masses. For by distributing, directing the blows of the occupier, it protects and secures above all himself and its „families” – blood from blood, bone from the bones of the Jewish middle classes and the bourgeoisie.
For its services rendered for the occupier the gmina bureaucracy charges the masses a stiff, sumptuous fee. In this area it shows amazing vitality and a truly „Jewish” ingenuity. In a jobless and starving ghetto, it has created an outright total system of fees, benefits, burdens and tributes, a network so dense that nothing can squeeze through it. There is no area of life in which its unique, outright crazy institutional initiative does not manifest itself. At most, with this money the ghetto walls are erected, but it will not be enough to run the usually closed soup kitchens, to supply hospitals and orphanages with the most necessary medicines, food and fuel, to help exiles, to pay salaries to employees of public institutions (the back-pay reaches up to 6 months).
The peace and social order of the ghetto’s propertied classes, and above all the order of occupation, are protected by the Jewish militiaiv „without pay and honorably”, in exchange only for the right to plunder the masses with impunity and for the protection from camps. How symbolic and telling is the fact that, apart from shady individuals, it consists mainly of elements from the middle classes and the bourgeoisie. The Jewish office for combating usury and profiteeringv, working closely with the Gestapo, is the partner and intermediary of the most foul and dark interests.
Almost all gmina agencies and institutions are dominated by people with morality of hyenas and jackals, but the most audacious, insolent and cynical is the trade in human life performed by the department of forced labor and camps. The lack of a sufficient ransom is a sentence condemning to the hard camp labor with all its most tragic consequences.
Therefore, despite the good will and noble motives of perhaps many people around the gmina, this institution, thanks to the logic of functions bestowed upon it, had to become the center of the worst demoralization and debauchery, a breeding ground for Gestapo agents. Thus, the war and the occupation pushed even deeper into the depths of shame and humiliation what was rotten and wormy in Jewish society.
One of the arguments of ghetto chauvinism and class solidarism is the lie about universal poverty, which supposedly leveled down everyone. In spite of the colossal increase in extreme poverty, despite a situation that confronts the majority with the real specter of hunger and starvation, and not in some indefinite future, and that has already caused a catastrophic increase in mortality, the ghetto society has not ceased to be differentiated. The abundance and wealth of those who still do good business today and carelessly fill numerous entertainment venues and confectioneries of the ghetto are clearly cut off from the abyss of ghetto despair. Cruel and monstrous vultures of profiteering and coarse smuggling circulate over the battlefield of general misery.
The servility of the Jewish reaction to the occupier produced no less glaring, and perhaps even more poisoned, fruit in the ideological domain. The legal fruit of this dishonorable relationship is „Gazeta Żydowska” [„The Jewish Paper”], the semi-official organ of the Jewish gminy.
No one would be surprised by another reptile paper [gadzinówka]vi – this time for the Jewish masses – and everything would be in order, if this organ did not serve the propaganda of the ideas and slogans of Jewish nationalism, Zionism and clericalism. The glorification of the most hideous decrees of fascism was seasoned with the ideas of national revival, the cult of the Hebrew language and culture, and the slogans of returning to the „land of the fathers”. It promotes „transvaluation”, the real expression of which is to be the joyful creativity in German labor camps, it promotes the cult of universal and self-sufficient Robinsons-bunglers. For the masses trapped in the walls of the ghetto it paints mirages of distant lands. In the name of divine laws and national ideals, it enjoins one to come to terms with the ghetto reality.
The ideas of Zionism and the „ideas” of the fascist occupation have become so closely intertwined in this newspaper, that it is impossible to separate them from each other. Besides, does not fascism fight, and most effectively at that, the „plague” of assimilation, does it not ruthlessly and under coercion carry out the return of prodigal sons to the bosom of Israel, does it not collect the scattered and dispersed „chosen people” not only from the backwater of the governorate, but also from almost all Europe and does it not gather them in ghetto concentrations? After all, isn’t the ghetto itself a substitute for the Jewish state?
Zionism is the official and occupier-sanctioned ideology of the ghetto, and the representatives of its most reactionary and fascist part – the Revisionists – are a living ark of the „ideological” covenant with the occupier.
The Jewish quarters were separated by the occupier with all possible walls from the outside world, but he also wanted to separate them from it with a [unintelligible text] ghetto of the spirit, over which he has set up Jewish nationalism as its gendarme. „Gazeta Żydowska” – this tube of Goeb[b]elsian-Zionist propaganda – as an interesting example of social and political exoticism, can help in deciphering the Janusian, or rather class, face of all nationalism.
Not only conscious workers, but also the progressive elements of the middle classes, separate themselves with loathing and repugnance from the Jewish gminy, surrounding them with a blockade of contempt and hatred. This blockade is broken by Jewish reformists, as always so sensitive to the „concrete, immediate and present” interests of the masses, that they obscure to them the main interests and essential matters. This time, they argue for their participation and cooperation in some gmina departments by pointing at the necessity of alleviating the masses’ lot by infiltrating an organization that, against our will, concentrates all management and power in the Jewish community. In this way they hope to blunt the sting of the inevitable evil and to provide the masses with the maximum of help which can be provided at the moment. This is an old tactic of reformism, known for its deplorable consequences. But this reformist tactic is taking on a specific flavor these days. It is cooperation with the occupier’s institution, completely independent of the best intentions and objectives. It is sowing dangerous illusions, obscuring consciousness, leading the energy of the masses astray.
The war and the ghetto conditions once again underscored the absurdity, showed the falsehood and the negligence of all half-measures and ad hoc actions. The only hope, the only liberation and the truest help – is the crushing of fascism. The relentless fight with the occupier or the ghetto death. There is no other road for the Jewish masses. And it leads through common struggle with the Polish people to overthrow not only the occupier’s ghetto, but also capitalist misery.
Notes:
i Meyer A., „Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in History”, Verso 2012, p. 75.
ii Gmina (pl. gminy) is also known under Hebrew name ‘kehilla’ (pl. kehillot).
iii In feudal Poland, the Sabbath song „Ma Yofis” was sung with a special melody, and the Polish nobles that the Jews worked for would often request performing it for their entertainment; hence ‚to sing ma yofis’ to a gentile came to mean to serve him obsequiously or slavishly, while ‘mayofis’ or ‘mayufes’ came to describe Jews guilty of it.
iv Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst (Jewish Security Service), colloquially known as ‘the Jewish police’.
v The article incorrectly names the organization ‘Żydowski urząd do walki z lichwą i paskarstwem’ (The Jewish office for combating usury and profiteering). The full correct name is ‘Urząd do Walki z Lichwą i Spekulacją w Dzielnicy Żydowskiej w Warszawie’ (Office for Combating Usury and Speculation in the Jewish Quarter in Warsaw). It was also known as ‘Trzynastka’ (‘13’, after its headquarters’ address – 13 Leszno St.) or ‘the Jewish Gestapo’.
vi Nazi propaganda press published in Polish.
VOLLHANDFRÜHLING 
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