Seventy years after the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Moshe Arens’ book recalls the forgotten fighters who did not live to tell their story
Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
by Moshe Arens
Gefen, 2011, 406 pages
Moshe Arens has a glittering résumé. After a career in aeronautics and academia, he turned to politics, serving as Israel’s foreign minister and defense minister as well as ambassador to the United States. In later years he has become an eminent journalist. His Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising sets out to right the wronged heroes of this tragic chapter in Jewish history.
Seventy years after the fact, the 1943 uprising remains at the foundation of the Zionist consciousness, the antithesis of the sheepish passivity for which Israeli society long silently – and mistakenly – blamed the victims of the Holocaust. As Jews in the emptying ghetto realized that the deportations to Treblinka led not to a labor camp but to extermination, opinion gradually turned in favor of revolt, however hopeless. On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, German forces entering the ghetto to deport much of its remaining population were ambushed by Jewish fighters. During the four days of battle, two flags flew in Muranowski Square – a Polish resistance flag and a blue and white Zionist flag. Arens’ book is named for these flags.
The Jews fought with the fury of the desperate. The Nazi officer in charge of quashing the uprising reported that
“the women belonging to the battle groups were equipped the same as the men…. Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands. It happened time and time again that these women had pistols or hand grenades … concealed in their bloomers up to the last moment to use against the men of the Waffen SS, police, or Wehrmacht.”
With fewer than a thousand half-starved and poorly armed resistance fighters (including members of the Polish resistance, who may not have been as active as they claimed), the uprising was doomed from the start. Eventually, the Germans prevailed by burning down the ghetto. Some Jews hid in trenches until they were smoked or flooded out. In four days, 13,929 Jews were killed, about half in the ghetto and half sent to Treblinka. The surviving fifty thousand Jews were sent to their death, and the ghetto was razed.
History Belongs to the Survivors
Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto is Arens’ attempt to set the record straight regarding the two Jewish resistance groups in the ghetto: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ŻOB), the socialist, non-Zionist Jewish Combat Organization; and Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (ŻZW), the right-wing Zionist Jewish Military Union, whose members outside Warsaw included Menachem Begin and other eventually prominent members of the Revisionist Zionist Irgun (or Etzel) militia.
During the uprising, all the ŻZW commanders and most of their ŻOB counterparts were killed. Some ŻOB leaders committed suicide to avoid capture. However, ŻOB commander Marek Edelman escaped the ghetto and survived. His testimony, together with that of other ŻOB fighters, became the official narrative of the revolt. Not surprisingly, in their telling, the ŻOB was paramount. No one survived to tell the story from the right-wing Zionist perspective.
The ŻOB bias was apparent even during the battle itself. The Warsaw ghetto had its own historians, who worked in the shadow of death to document their surroundings. When Emanuel Ringelblum, leader of the effort, asked for a list of fighters for the ghetto archive, he received a roster of ZOB members. Who were the ŻZW fighters? he wondered. For it was the ŻZW whose flags flew in Warsaw, and whose ranks put up the stiffest resistance against the Germans, as Arens proves.
In aiming for unbiased documentation, Arens finds an unlikely ally in the Nazis, who hated all Jews equally. The author relies heavily on the testimony of SS police general Juergen Strook, whose daily operational accounts chillingly detail the battles. According to Strook, the ŻZW was “the main Jewish combat group.”
The Mantle of Leadership
Arens’ book attempts to give credit where credit is due:
It is the purpose of this book to set the story straight. It is a story of daring and courage and sacrifice that should be known as accurately as we can reconstitute it after all these years – out of respect for and in homage to the fighters who rose against the German attempt to liquidate what remained of the Warsaw ghetto, and made a last-ditch fight for the honor of the Jewish people. And also, for the sake of historical truth.
Arens presents original and painstaking scholarship. Some have expressed concern that he relies too heavily on questionable oral histories, but even without them, Arens has a wealth of facts. The book is more detailed than most readers want or need, but Arens is interested less in readability than in proving his point.
Why does it matter so much? The Warsaw ghetto uprising occupies an important place in Israeli history and politics. These Jews fought back against all odds. They and their sympathizers naturally assumed the mantle of leadership in the new State of Israel. If only left-wing socialists fought in Poland, then only they could be trusted to govern and protect Israel.
This attitude of historic invincibility, that a certain sector has earned the exclusive right to leadership, is the wrong that Arens wishes to right. He succeeds, but only by underscoring a terrible reality. Even in the face of certain death, the Jews of Warsaw (unlike the partisans of Vilna, for example) could not put aside their politics in the face of a common goal. Seventy years after these Jews were murdered, the divisions that defined them remain. The fact that Arens felt the need to write his book only proves the point.
But there is hope. Arens dedicates Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto to ŻOB leader Mordechai Anielewicz and ŻZW leader Pawel Frenkel. At least In death, if not in life, they are reconciled.
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