EVENTS JANUARY 26, 1943. ENTRY DITTO. N.L. It was not properly my business to make any comment, since I had been invited to attend the trial simply as recorder, yet a protest burst almost involuntarily from my lips. The trial seemed to have no order or form; it had no presiding officer, and he who was most insistent or vehement held the floor; above all, it followed no laws save those of hate, requital, and slander. About twenty men, most of them influential in the various parties of the ghetto, and all delegated by units of the Z.O.B., sat around Zilberzweig’s living room, which has become a frequent meeting place for the National Committee and the Co-ordinating Committee. The meeting had been going along for more than half an hour when I first let my impatience be heard.
N.L.: —— But this is a trial by prosecutors, not by judges!
Kurtz, the Communist leader, who had been the most vituperative voice up to this point, turning to me with an expectant and polite expression: —— Then let us hear from the attorney for the defense.
[NOTE. N.L. The Communists have recently emerged more actively among us. The news we have heard of the fighting at Stalingrad has given them great character. One must say, at the very least, that they are tireless men.]
N.L.: —— I am not afraid to speak up for Dr. Zadkin. (I was in fact rather agitated, and I have the impression that my upper lip quivered, as when a mouse works his whisker-muscles.)
Kurtz: —— I suppose you know him well. Let’s see, you have been a loyal worker in the Judenrat for some years, haven’t you, Levinson?
N.L.: —— I know him. I have worked in the Judenrat. I am not quite clear what you are trying to impute to me.
Kurtz: —— Nothing. Nothing. Just keeping the record straight.
N.L., with what I hope was a trace of humor: —— Fraind Kurtz, I would remind you that I am making the record of this session—or rather, trying to.
—— Ah, yes….Then, on Zadkin?
—— Dr. Zadkin is in the Supply Department, with which my archive has had little contact. I speak of Dr. Zadkin’s distinguished career. I don’t think we have a right to condemn a man to death on the basis of suspicions and insubstantial evidence. I think we have to judge the whole man. I ask you to consider Dr. Zadkin’s life. He is one of the most astonishingly versatile men we have, and he has contributed to the good name of Jewish culture in many fields. He has been a constant scholar. He is a Doctor of Philosophy and a Doctor of Laws. He has written distinguished commentaries on the Torah, not to speak of several secular novels and plays of great merit. The Peripatetic Mountain was produced with success in Vienna in 1924, I think it was. He has composed excellent orchestral and chamber music. His paintings hang—or used to hang—in museums in Krakow, Katowice, and Lwow, that I know about. He is one of those men who acquire a smattering of everything—only, his smatterings are phenomenal. He played a distinguished part in the Jewish nationalist movement in Silesia. More than any of us, he is a complete man, really a remarkable man.
—— I only point out that he has been versatile also in politics: assimilationist, Polish nationalist, Socialist, Zionist—and who knows what else?
—— Is it wrong for a man to grow and change his mind?
—— When the changes are frequent and violent, a man almost invariably settles down as a Fascist.
—— What is a Fascist, Fraind Kurtz?
—— Anyone who does not know the definition of a Fascist by now is himself fledging as a Fascist.
At this point I turned away from my uneasy argument with this iron-minded man:
—— I submit to the gentlemen of this so-called court that the evidence against Dr. Zadkin which we have heard is not enough to justify his execution. We have heard that he has taken money to divert supplies from the ghetto and that he has made tremendous profits from his position, but we have heard no first-hand witnesses on these allegations. We have heard that he has been seen coming out of Gestapo headquarters on Aleja Szucha—but we have not been privileged to hear from anyone who actually saw him. We have heard that he has written reports for Dr. Merta in the Gestapo, but we have not seen any such reports or heard them described in detail….
Kurtz: —— Perhaps you will subside long enough, Levinson, to let us finish presenting the evidence. I quite agree, this trial should be based upon concrete evidence, and not upon sentiment—not upon one’s appreciation of a sonata our defendant may or may not have written in 1921. (And then, looking serene and patient, Kurtz took from his pocket and unfolded what appeared to be a carbon copy of a typewritten letter several pages long.) Gentlemen, let me read a few excerpts from this report. It is dated January 24, two days ago. It was acquired from Zadkin’s personal file by one of our people. It is, as you have doubtless guessed, addressed to Merta. I quote at random: Since the end of hostilities, the commanders of the Z.O.B. have been discussing their mistakes in these skirmishes. They feel that their greatest weakness was in communications, that one “Group” did not know what another was doing or planned to do, that consequently all action was opportunistic rather than according to set plan. As a consequence all fighters are being given certain addresses for listening posts in case of communications breakdowns in future actions. I have been unable to get many of these addresses yet, but among them are Gensia 23, Wolynska 41, Zamenhofa 12. Another weakness, the leaders feel, was in technique. They feel their groups were trying to fight “battles” rather than conduct simple street raids of a strike-and-run type. We can look for skirmishes of this more evanescent nature in case of further fighting, I believe. Personally, I feel that the Z.O.B. leaders do not recognize themselves one of their greatest weaknesses: I refer to internal political divisions and suspicions. The Socialist Groups do not trust (and therefore withhold proper liaison from) Communist Groups; even within the Zionist persuasion, Hashomer deals rather trickily with Dror, and so on…. (Kurtz looked up from his paper.) I ask you, gentlemen, to consider whether this information jibes with the facts as you know them—and whether this knowledge in German heads will harm us or not….Here, Levinson, I understand you are a Hashomer man; this will interest you: The Hashomer Groups are particularly strong. This is at least partly a matter of personalities. Zilberzweig, while still active from a policy point of view, seems to have less influence in the military. Here the leaders are Y. Katz, whom I have previously mentioned as being over-all commander of the Z.O.B., J. Montefiore, A. Weiss, and R. Apt (this last a woman). (Kurtz turned to the last page of the report.) Here is Zadkin’s conclusion: The Fighter Organization is determined. Its discipline is good. Y. Katz is insistent upon a rigid system of personal responsibility and demands utmost loyalty himself. The units are increasingly well provided with small arms. While these fighters cannot possibly prevent you from carrying out any plans you may have, they can make your work painful, expensive, and slow. I therefore recommend: that if further evacuations are contemplated, they be carried out by guile, persuasion, cunning, and trickery, and not by force; by marmalade rather than the hand-grenade. You Germans have shown yourselves skillful in the employment of your power, but perhaps you do not sufficiently understand that we Jews are a sweet-natured and gentle people. Weep before us, and we will go to the Umschlagplatz in droves. Shout and shoot, and we will retire to our bunkers. (Addresses of bunkers will follow in next report.) Respectfully submitted, M. Zadkin, Ph.D., LL.D. (Kurtz looked up. He handed the papers to me.) You asked for evidence.
I examined the papers. I shook my head.
N.L.: —— I cannot say that this report was not handed to Merta, or that it has not done us great harm. I only say that in a court of law this would be inadmissible as evidence. It is typewritten. There is not a word written in any handwriting, which might be identifiable as Dr. Zadkin’s. Fraind Kurtz, you might have written this report.
Kurtz: —— You are humorous, Levinson, but I cannot laugh.
N.L.: —— I am obliged to wonder why you withheld this piece of “evidence” from us for so long. Why did you vilify Zadkin’s character for half an hour before giving us anything like proof?
Kurtz: —— I thought proof would be unnecessary. I thought that intelligent men like yourselves would understand that the purpose of such a trial as this is not the weighing of any one man but simply the provision of an example before the world. Justice, you see, should be used as a prophylactic. It is preventive, not curative.
[NOTE. N.L. With this, I saw that my entire argument had been absurdly futile. The question, in this light, was not the actual guilt or innocence of Zadkin at all; it was whether his death would provide a good enough, or fearful enough, example for all other Jews. Therefore I suppose my praise of Zadkin’s versatility was in fact an argument in support of his execution: the bigger the man, the more spectacular the example.]
N.L.: —— Forgive me. Gentlemen, forgive me. I am only the stenographer here. I have no right to take the floor. I will remain silent.
Thus ended the exchange between Kurtz and N.L. The trial continued. The questions I had raised weighed heavily with some of the discussants, I could see, but even a man with a double cataract could see that Kurtz’s definition of justice had somewhat frightened a few of our brave men, and in the end, by a vote of fourteen to nine, Dr. Zadkin was sentenced to death as an informer and traitor. The trial and the sentence were to be announced by placard. The last paragraph of my minutes ended thus: Avigdor Kurtz volunteered to have these placards drawn up, printed, and posted in prominent places.
EVENTS JANUARY 27, 1943. ENTRY DITTO. N.L. The Chairman of the Judenrat sat at his customary seat at one end of the conference table in the council room. As always, he had before him a ruled memorandum pad and four or five freshly sharpened pencils. Chairman Grossmann is an undistinguished-looking man; underneath his nervous austerity—he looks like a hungry bird of prey—he tries to hide the personality of one most anxious to please. His hair, his skin, his eyes, his clothes, and his voice are all grey; only the tones and textures differ. In chairs around the conference table, and standing against the walls of the room, were the chiefs and subheads of Judenrat departments.
Engineer Grossmann: —— So far as it concerns me, you may all make your individual beds and lie in them. I speak, you realize, merely as your friend—I hope I am your friend—I have no authorization, no orders. (He paused.) Each man should make up his own mind. Some of you may feel that you will be safest for the time being if you remain under the aegis of this Council: you have your work cards. Others may wish to go into hiding or to join the Fighter Organization. I have been told that some of you have already done this last, though I find it hard to believe. (The Chairman picked up one of the pencils and began to draw on his pad little arrows and staircases.) I only wish to say that after my conversation this morning with Commissioner Haensch, I no longer consider the Judenrat a stable or permanent body.
Fostel of the Taxation and Revenue Department, an officious man who always has to be heard: —— Do you base this conviction on anything explicit that Herr Haensch said to you?
The Chairman: —— No, I base it, Pan Fostel, upon what I said to him. My friends, I ask you to believe me, that what I said to Commissioner Haensch was not spoken in an undisciplined moment of despair; I had thought about it very carefully. He came to me this morning to order us to levy a tax of one million zlotys to pay, he said, for damage done to railroad rolling stock by Jews while being resettled. (The Chairman slapped his pencil down hard on the pad, and looked up.) What would you have said, Pan Fostel? You are an expert on levying moneys. What would you have answered?
Fostel of Taxation and Revenue, clearing his throat: —— Collections have become difficult. The population has diminished. Their resources…
Grossmann, interrupting: —— I said that the Judenrat is no longer the authority in the ghetto. I said that we have no more real power. We command but we are not obeyed. (Engineer Grossmann waited to let this sink in.) But what about your Jewish police? the Commissioner asked me. I laughed in his face. This was the first time I have ever abandoned myself so far with the Commissioner. (Engineer Grossmann looked around with an almost pathetic expectation of approval and applause. But the faces around him were silent and grim.) The Commissioner asked me to tell him what is the authority in the ghetto, if not the Judenrat. I told him that if there is any authority at all, at present, it lies with the Jewish Fighter Organization. So he asked me to call a meeting of the Jewish Fighter Organization.
At this unanimous guffawing broke out in the council room.
—— Yes, my friends, I laughed for the second time in the Commissioner’s face. I pointed out to him that in the eyes of the Z.O.B. it is not considered healthy to exist as a functionary of the Judenrat, and I asked him to consider the posters put up this morning. (The Chairman looked sharply around.) Where, by the way, is Dr. Zadkin?
Kohn of Sanitation: —— Do you expect him to be walking about this morning? He was always rather discreet.
Lanker, sub-chief of Vital Statistics: —— I don’t like the past tense of that verb.
Kohn: —— One can guess that he is in hiding. One can hope that the present tense is justified.
The Chairman: —— The Commissioner had not seen the posters, so I had one brought in. When he read it, he understood my idea. I told him that we would continue to try to carry out his directives to the best of our abilities, but that he should henceforth not expect results as satisfying as those in the past. I told him that if we failed to carry out some order, he could execute us all, and yet that would not serve to get the order executed. He agreed and seemed most sympathetic and said that we should go ahead and collect the million zlotys for the damaged railroad boxcars. Pan Fostel, that is your problem.
Fostel of Taxation and Revenue: —— It’s outrageous!
The Chairman, commiseratively: —— I know, Collections have become difficult. The population…
Fostel: —— No! I don’t mean that! Damn the collections! What I mean is, after all we have tried to do for our fellow men, we have now to choose: either hide from the Germans, who want to kill us, or hide from the Jews, who also want to kill us; and probably be killed in both cases; either be Murin [NOTE. N.L. Murin of Auditing was deported on January 18, SEE ENTRY JANUARY 24.] or be Zadkin. What a choice!
EVENTS JANUARY 27, 1943. ENTRY DITTO. N.L. Somewhere in the Judenrat building a woman screamed. I was up on the third floor talking with Mandeltort, and it sounded to us as if the scream had come from the ground floor. Felix and I looked at each other questioningly: should we go down and see what had happened, or should we be prudent and stay in Felix’s office? Without speaking a word, we decided to compromise (and so, we found, did quite a few of the workers on the third floor) : we hurried out to the head of the stairwell and peered over the edge and listened. We heard sounds of scuffling feet and exclamations, but these were not extraordinary sounds; it soon seemed safe to descend.
In the main corridor on the ground floor, a large crowd was gathered around the notice board which is customarily used for the organizational bulletins of the Judenrat, and for lost-and-found announcements. In time Felix and I were able to get close enough to see what had caused the woman to scream, and what was causing this sensation. A small cloth bag hung by a drawstring from a nail. The nail held also a piece of paper, on which was written, in a heavy crayon script:
FOUND
This bag contains the spectacles, wallet, identity card, key ring, and watch of Dr. Emil Zadkin. He tried to hide from the Z.O.B. He was found. The Z.O.B. is everywhere.
EVENTS JANUARY 30, 1943. ENTRY FEBRUARY 1, 1943. N.L. It was day before yesterday, only three days after Engineer Grossmann’s confession, when I received notice, as did about twenty others in the Judenrat (I flatter myself that the method of nomination was entirely chancy), that we were to report next morning for work in a construction battalion. One of the men in the Labor Department told me that this might mean anything from brutal foundation-digging to the lettering of draughtsmen’s renderings, but that it might just as well mean deportation. At any rate, this order shook me from the apathetic state in which I had resided ever since Engineer Grossmann’s warning that the Judenrat had lost its potency. Like everyone else, I have a tendency to refuse to believe in catastrophe until the very last and worst moment. Of course I decided, when I received the notice, to evade it and hide. After burying my most recent acquisitions in the archive, I came here to Rachel’s bunker, and she has said I may live here, though the bunker is already crowded. I have begun work on a monograph on the deportations: perhaps we can smuggle it to the outside world, as I have smuggled out directions for the discovery of my archive. It keeps me busy, anyhow. I work by day in the back room of the bakery. Since Menkes’ death, Hashomer has put the bakery in the hands of a young apprentice baker who used to be with Haleazar: it was vital to keep the bakery operating, else the bunker might be lost.
So the Judenrat crumbles. Felix is staying on, for the moment, but he is into Zionist work and hopes to join the Z.O.B., and I imagine he will have “disappeared” in a few days. The Germans are calling out more and more Judenrat workers, as they called me. Also, voluntary defections from the Judenrat are increasing; very few continue to hope that a job there will save them.
I suppose it can be said that the Judenrat is collapsing because of what the Chairman told Haensch the other day about the Judenrat’s loss of authority: neither the Germans nor its own employees any longer have faith in the organization. And I suppose it can be further argued that Engineer Grossmann was at least partly motivated, in what he told Haensch, by his own fear as a result of having seen the Zadkin poster. (God knows what he would have told Haensch had that little bag of effects been delivered to the Judenrat earlier that morning!) And so perhaps that harum-scarum tribunal, before which I made such a fuss, was the actual instrument of the Judenrat’s downfall. Is the end of the Judenrat’s authority a good thing? If so, does then a new light fall upon that “trial”? Would that make the decision on Zadkin’s fate, if not more just, at least more justifiable? I was stupid not to see that that might have been the Communists’ real purpose in instigating the “trial.” But I am unable to answer my own questions. I must leave them as questions. Personally, as I think I have noted before in this record, I find myself placing a higher and higher valuation upon each single human life, the closer I come to the end of my own. It was the destruction of Zadkin balanced against the destruction of an authority that was in any case already moribund. I don’t know. Maybe I am only trying to rationalize the position I took in the trial the other day, but I still think I may have been right. Zadkin was such a learned and various man, perhaps a genius; perhaps also a traitor. I don’t know.