Survival Strategies during the Holocaust and Why They Matter

Abstract

Survival Strategies during the Holocaust and Why They Matter Jeffrey Kopstein (bio) Based on a thorough study of the three ghettos—Minsk, Białystok, and Kraków—Evgeny Finkel paints a highly differentiated, fascinating, and necessarily grim picture of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust. In many ways it is a post-Arendtian picture in that the categories of collaboration, compliance, and resistance are readjusted and reconceptualized to provide a much richer and empirically more grounded account of Jewish behavior in the ghettos. Whether Jews cooperated and collaborated, coped and stayed put, evaded their persecutors through escape, or engaged in organized and violent resistance depended upon the skills they had obtained in the years running up to the Nazi occupation and, crucially, on the broader political environment of the particular community. So, for example, Jews who had previous experience in Zionist or Communist politics were more likely to resist, and these resistance organizations were likely to be most robust where they faced a modicum of repression before the war (too much repression and they ceased to function). At the same time, those who had experience in Jewish politics were also more likely to be useful within the Judenrats (which, contra Arendt, were not only collaborationist but also frequently worked closely with resistance organizations). In cities, such as Białystok, which in interwar Poland had a record of strong antisemitism and little Jewish acculturation not only within the municipality but in the surrounding communities, Jews had little hope of receiving assistance from local Poles and therefore escape was not rational; reliance on the strong local network of Jewish organizations—that is, coping and staying put—made more sense. In Kraków, by contrast, with its moderate politics and high rate of Jewish acculturation in the interwar Polish republic, evasion was possible. Meanwhile, in Minsk, which had been part of the Soviet Union since 1922, making one’s way to the forests and the partisans was the [End Page 227] best route to survival, but whether one could do so depended upon preexisting connections to these groups. In short, what Evgeny Finkel has done is remind us that the Holocaust unfolded in specific communities and each of these communities had a specific history. This history, he maintains, shaped not only the chances of Jewish survival but also specific Jewish survival strategies. Resistance may have been “heroic” but this heroism was not randomly distributed. It was easier to be heroic in some places than in others. So much of Holocaust historiography and accounts of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust focuses on individual character traits of resisters, villains, and bystanders; it is, however, worth recalling that all of this human behavior in extremis occurred in contexts. Finkel’s book, by concentrating neither at the macro level (“Germany,” the “Soviet Union,” “Poland”) nor at the micro level (heroes or cowards) but at what he terms the “meso” (the community) level, is able to draw us back to the histories of where the Holocaust occurred and tell us why they mattered. That Białystok had been part of the Russian empire before becoming part of interwar Poland; that Kraków came to Poland out of Habsburg Galicia; that Minsk had been incorporated into the Soviet Union; and that in all three of these cities the relations between Jews and their neighbors were different—all of this shaped Jewish responses to ghettoization and their impending destruction. This on its own is a huge contribution and I believe it will be a lasting one. Political scientists have largely ignored the Holocaust. Finkel himself took part in the first panel on the Holocaust in the history of the American Political Science Association meetings in 2011 (!). Of course, other individual political scientists have made important individual contributions, but the problem has been—and this is almost hard to believe—to tell political scientists why this “index case” of violence in the modern world should be integrated into the general corpus of social scientific knowledge. Finkel’s book does this by directly engaging with other accounts of victim behavior in the social scientific literature from other instance of mass violence. His book follows Charles King’s in breaking down the Holocaust itself...