The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt by Avinoam J. Patt

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt by Avinoam J. Patt Maria Ferenc Avinoam J. Patt. The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. xvi + 542 pp. Already in October 1943, when hardly any details on the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto were known, and the remaining fighters were still struggling to survive in German-occupied Poland, NBC radio broadcasted a play by Morton Wishengrad entitled The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, the first dramatic representation of the revolt. Wishengrad’s play was the first element in the long chain of memorial events and cultural productions relating to the most famous example of Jewish self-defense against Nazis during the Holocaust. In his newest book, The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw, Avinoam Patt takes his readers on a fascinating journey through the interpretations of one of the most well-known events in the history of the Holocaust and proves how vital it was as a point of reference for postwar Jewish identity. The heroic acts of Warsaw Jews, later dubbed “the revolt of the doomed,” have received attention from all generations of Holocaust researchers, and the subject is far from being closed. In his book, Patt has pointed to yet another subject that has long deserved thorough research: how the revolt had been remembered, commemorated, and what it meant for Jewish communities in United States, Israel, and (although this subject is not tackled consistently) in other countries. Patt’s book succeeds in presenting the fascinating history of the early reception of the famous historical event. One of his most essential conclusions seems to be that the reception of the uprising belongs to the history of the postwar period and, on some level, even defines it. The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw is a real tour de force: Patt controls all narrative lines. (Though, it has to be noted that the book is long, and sometimes detailed background may distract the reader’s attention.) In the first chapter, Patt aptly describes selected aspects of the history of the Warsaw Ghetto to inform his readers on the events leading up to the revolt and introduce the people behind it (some of whom would later become important actors in its commemorations). He discusses [End Page 207] the uprising based mainly on recent work by the Israeli historian Havi Dreifuss, author of the vital book Geto Varshah: Ha-sof (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018). In chapter 2, Patt looks at what (and when) was known in the United States and Israel about the Holocaust as it was happening. Early news about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was immediately available abroad—though devoid of any details, which left much space for filling the outline of the information with meaning, and said more about the societies that produced that meaning than about the event itself. Chapter 3 discusses how the surviving fighters’ acts of writing the history of the uprising intertwined and merged with the making of the event’s mythology (that on some level antedated the revolt itself). Chapter 4 is devoted solely to the celebrations of the first anniversary of the uprising in 1944, still during the war. In chapter 5, Patt analyzes how the Zionist interpretation of the revolt has been shaped—he demonstrates that the uprising immediately became an important token of the popular imagination and that control over the narrative could translate into political, social, and cultural gains for various parties. The Zionist narrative provided answers that diminished the anxiety emerging from questions regarding Jews’ allegedly “passive” behavior during the Holocaust. Chapter 6 discusses the meaning of the revolt for the surviving Jews in Europe. Patt convincingly argues that the uprising was politicized from the very beginning and that various political movements stressed their role in it. “Only Hehalutz fought,” wrote Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization (278–79). In chapter 7, Patt tells the story of the surviving fighters of the ghetto revolt and asks how they positioned themselves toward their biographical legacy in the first postwar testimonies, which, at the same time, built the legend of the event and documented it. Since the meaning of...