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Conclusion

One of the most fruitful trends in recent Holocaust research has been the plethora of regional and local histories that have allowed in-depth studies of the variegated, complex, multiethnic environment in which the Holocaust occurred in different places in Eastern Europe. It is increasingly clear that the history of the Holocaust cannot be written solely as either perpetrator history or history from above. It is also increasingly clear that the Holocaust in Eastern Europe cannot be framed simply as a German assault upon Jews, with the rest of the population considered to be bystanders. The microhistorical approach offers one way to explore the history of the Holocaust from below, as experienced by the victims and involving multiple actors.

This microhistory of the Starachowice factory slave-labor camps is, of course, based primarily on one kind of source—namely, survivor testimonies. Such a source base does not permit equal treatment of all participants and perspectives. It reveals events primarily through the experiences and memories of the victims, but the richness and number of testimonies do permit the historian to pierce through broad generalizations and examine relations between Jews and other ethnic groups and the kaleidoscope of differences within ethnic groups.

Most broadly, Jewish survivors portrayed themselves as a relatively homogeneous victim group faced by three implacable enemies who carried out their persecution of the Jews through a convenient division of labor. Ukrainians guarded the labor camps and mercilessly beat the Jewish workers at every opportunity, especially during the daily march from the camps to the factories and back. The Germans exploited the prisoners and, having murdered most of their families and neighbors already, stood poised to murder them as well. And the Poles despised and reviled the Jews before the war, took their property and informed on them during the war, and threatened to kill those few who survived and dared to return to their homes after the war. There is certainly more than a kernel of truth in each of these stereotypical perceptions and accusations, and there is no shortage of evidence to support each of them. But there is also evidence for a kaleidoscope of nuances and differences that lies beneath these stereotypes and presents a far more complex picture of multiethnic relations in Nazi-occupied Central and Eastern Europe that can be uncovered through the microhistorical study of a single town and its complex of camps.

The Jewish slave-labor society was not homogeneous but rather composed of many layers. The original Wierzbnik Jewish community comprised mostly orthodox, Yiddish-speaking provincial Jews who lived modestly as craftsmen and tradesmen, but there was also a small, more secular, assimilated, and affluent Jewish upper class. They were joined by a wave of more urban and sophisticated Jewish expellees from Łód and Płock in 1940–41 and a second wave of refugees from nearby towns who fled to Starachowice in 1942 in search of lifesaving work cards and factory jobs. Finally, a third wave of “outside” Jews came in the form of transferees from other camps, including the resentful and angry Lubliners.

All of these Jews were targeted by the same anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi regime. They faced a common fate. But the differences among them significantly impacted the internal dynamics of the prisoner community and affected their chances for survival. First, women were clearly disadvantaged in comparison to men in obtaining work cards for factory labor as well as in surviving subsequent selections within the Starachowice camps. Second, well-off Jews were better able to buy work cards for themselves and often for many of their family members as well, while Jews without means could not. The very old and very young were uniformly excluded from obtaining factory work cards. Thus, wealth, gender, and age clearly shaped the initial makeup of the prisoner community that survived the liquidation of the ghetto and entered the camps.

Within the camps, key political and economic divisions emerged. As throughout the Nazi camp system, the Germans created an insidious mechanism of manipulation through divide-and-rule by empowering a small group of privileged prisoners to control the internal affairs of the camp community. This coterie of privileged prisoners exercised its dominance through the camp council, camp police, barracks supervisors, kitchen staff, and assignment of jobs. They also set the tone for a camp culture of inequality and corruption, in which everything from extra food to job assignments had a price. This culture of inequality based on political privilege was intensified even further by the systemic economic inequality that resulted from the extra advantage local Jews had in being able to access property that they had left with Poles they knew. In short, inequality in camp society was linked to reinforcing differences in geographical origin, date of arrival, class, gender, and age, as well as structures of political privilege and systemic economic advantage.

Despite the generalized picture of sadistic Ukrainian guards who mercilessly beat their Jewish prisoners, individual stories also tell of a few “nice” Ukrainian guards who did not report sick Jews or became fond of illegal children in the camp. More important, Ukrainian guards routinely made arrangements concerning smuggling into the camp, and some either turned their backs when prisoners left camp to conduct business or on occasion accompanied them into town for safety in return for a cut. The Ukrainians formed an extremely porous perimeter guard riddled by laxness and corruption, and this was an essential condition for the viability of the underground camp economy.

Given the centrality of the Germans to the history of the Holocaust, it is somewhat surprising how little they appear in survivor testimonies, many of which do not mention a single German by name and focus instead on the fate of family and loved ones. It was my good fortune as a historian that 125 of my Starachowice testimonies originated as German judicial interviews undertaken in preparation for postwar trials. Because German law stipulated very specific criteria for first-degree murder—such as a base motive (racial hatred), maliciousness, or cruelty—and all lesser crimes such as manslaughter were beyond the statute of limitations, investigators had to seek very specific evidence about what motivated German perpetrators, not just what they did. Under such targeted questioning, survivors provided much detailed information about individual Germans in Starachowice that they rarely included when they constructed their own accounts.

The Germans in general were the oppressive rulers threatening Polish Jews with total extinction. Within the confines of the Wierzbnik ghetto and the Starachowice camps, however, survival depended in part upon knowing the differences among the local Germans with whom Jews had to deal. The very language that survivors frequently employed in describing individual Germans suggests that, for the practical purposes of navigating survival, they had roughly divided the Germans into three categories: the “feared” and “dangerous,” the “corruptible,” and the “decent.”

The “feared” and “dangerous” Germans killed often and enthusiastically. The most notorious example, of course, was Willi Althoff. The most prominent “corruptible” Germans were Leopold Rudolf Schwertner during the ghetto period and Kurt Otto Baumgarten during the camp period. The small number of Germans in Starachowice categorized as “decent” Germans included Willi Frania and Bruno Pappe, but especially Fiedler and Piatek at Tartak. These categories were not fixed, and several key Germans behaved unpredictably. Willi Schroth received bribes but also exhibited outbursts of lethal violence. And the Jews who had initially categorized Walther Becker among the corrupt were dismayed by his zeal and violence on the marketplace during the Aktion that liquidated the Wierzbnik ghetto.

Even more complex and contested than survivor perceptions and memories of Ukrainians and Germans are their perceptions and memories of Poles and Polish-Jewish relations. While survivors differed on the intensity of Polish anti-Semitism in Wierzbnik before the war, a negative portrayal of Polish-Jewish relations after 1939 is a matter of consensus. Four specific accusations of misbehavior occur frequently in the postwar testimony. The first is that Poles openly displayed their joy at the suffering and humiliation of the Jews. The second is that Poles made no attempt to help Jews, even when such help could have been provided at no risk and little costs. The third frequent accusation is that in the beginning Poles identified and pointed out Jews to the Germans—who otherwise would not have been able to distinguish between Poles and Jews—and later informed on or turned in Jews attempting to escape or hide. Many Jews would have been far more willing to risk fleeing to the forest, going into hiding, or trying to live on false papers if that did not mean living under the constant threat of denunciation from Polish informers. And finally, a handful of survivors—having endured all the horrors of the Holocaust and returned to Wierzbnik in search of other family members—were grotesquely murdered by Poles.

Even as many survivors made sweeping accusations of Polish misbehavior, however, they could not tell their stories without at the same time including the mention of individual benefactors. Most important in these accounts were the Polish friends, neighbors, and business associates with whom the families of survivors had left property for safekeeping. And in most accounts, Poles with whom property had been left proved “decent” and “honorable” in this regard. Access to hidden property was one key to survival.

Polish friends and acquaintances were individuals and could be identified as such. In contrast, the Polish population at large was anonymous and faceless, and beleaguered Jews could not distinguish who among them was a potential informer or predator. As a composite, they represented a grave and unknown danger to any Jew risking hiding, escape, or even brief business transactions outside the camp. Thus, Jews who could speak of individual Polish friends and acquaintances with whom they left property and from whom they received help could simultaneously speak of “the Poles” or even “the Polacks” as anti-Semites and collaborators in German persecution. Individual Polish friends and helpers on the one hand and “the Poles” as a source of hostility and danger on the other were simply experienced, remembered, and spoken about in a compartmentalized manner.

For the historian to have testimonies, some multiple, from 292 Jewish survivors from a single, relatively small complex of Nazi camps is highly unusual. Many such camps had only a handful of survivors at most. Given that Wierzbnik at its peak, just before ghetto liquidation, had at least 5,400 Jews, the survival of perhaps 600 to 700—of whom nearly half gave testimonies—can be no cause for celebration. But it does call for explanation. In my opinion, a conjuncture of factors must be taken into account. First, Jewish leadership made a conscious decision to use bribery to maximize the number of Jewish workers in the Starachowice factories, and individual Jewish families consciously invested in the purchase of work cards to fill these positions. Thus, more than 25 percent of the Jews in the Wierzbnik ghetto were spared deportation and immediate death in Treblinka. The average rate of Jews in this region initially exempted for labor was a mere 5 to 10 percent. Second, a large percentage of the Starachowice prisoners were incarcerated in their hometown. Unlike outsiders, they could avail themselves of property left with friends, which enabled them to create an underground camp economy of great complexity, supplement their inadequate nutrition, and bribe susceptible Germans and Ukrainians. Third, unlike in regions farther east, where Himmler’s maniacal campaign to liquidate Jewish slave labor in 1943 was horrifyingly successful, the Radom district factory camps lay just beyond this destructive swath and were spared. By the fall of 1943, the munitions production of the Radom factories was too vital to the German war effort for even the ideological fervor of Himmler to overcome. Fourth, unlike the other labor camps spared destruction, such as those in Silesia, the Radom camps were not incorporated into the SS concentration-camp system but remained under the control of pragmatic and corruptible factory managers. Fifth, though Majówka and Tartak were family camps in some aspects, the Starachowice evacuation transport entered Birkenau as a transfer of workers without a systematic selection on the ramp. Precisely those who were most vulnerable—namely, women and young children—were sent to the women’s camp, where, in contrast to the men’s camp, the regimen was relatively lax and most survived. Finally, the Starachowice prisoners who arrived in Birkenau were not as malnourished as the newly arriving Łód Jews and were far more experienced in camp life than the uninitiated Hungarian Jews. They were, in short, better positioned to survive Birkenau than others among their fellow incoming prisoners.

Many of these factors can be attributed at least in part to coincidence, fate, or “luck,” which is what most survivors invoke to account for their survival. But clearly Jewish agency played a significant role. In the first decades after the Holocaust, too much discussion concerning Jewish response revolved around the false dichotomy of resistance and passivity. In the debate over resistance or the lack thereof, the term was subsequently expanded beyond its initial understanding as “armed resistance” to encompass many forms of Jewish agency, self-assertion, and opposition, which were characterized by the Hebrew term amidah or “standing up against.”¹ In the words of Yehuda Bauer, amidah included “trying to preserve their dignity as long as possible, trying to obtain food, trying to preserve health, protect the children and the infirm, support cultural activities and other morale-building projects….”² Much of this occurred within the Wierzbnik ghetto and the Starachowice factory slave-labor camps, but the main strategies for survival involved putting money in German pockets and bullets in German rifles. In order to survive, Starachowice Jews bought their way into slavery, produced for the German war effort, and enriched their oppressors. In doing so, some of them thereby ultimately thwarted the intention of the Nazi regime that none of them should survive. This certainly was not a course of passivity but neither can it usefully be termed resistance or amidah. We need a different vocabulary to describe their struggle for survival, and I would suggest words such as ingenuity, resourcefulness, adaptability, perseverance, and endurance as the most appropriate and accurate.

In analyzing the struggle for survival of Jewish individuals, families, and communities during the Holocaust, we should avoid false heroics and sanitizing censorship. One of the saddest “lessons” of the Holocaust is confirmation that terrible persecution does not ennoble victims. A few magnificent exceptions notwithstanding, persecution, enslavement, starvation, and mass murder do not turn ordinary people into saints and martyrs. The suffering of the victims—both those who survived and those who did not—is the overwhelming reality. We must be grateful for the testimonies of those who survived and are willing to speak, but we have no right to expect from them tales of edification and redemption. As one survivor put it, the story of Jeremiah Wilczek and his fate is also a part of history.

We also have no right to make facile moral judgments. In the camps, the normal moral world was totally inverted, in that the basic axiom “Do no harm” was often rendered meaningless. Nazi power placed Jews in a “less than zero-sum game” in which they had some agency or choice, but all choices caused harm to many and no choice guaranteed saving the life of anyone. As one Starachowice survivor put it succinctly, if you helped one person, it was usually at the expense of another.³ Lawrence Langer coined the classic phrase “choiceless choices” to capture this impossible situation. One possible reaction to such an impossible situation was to adopt what Primo Levi called “the law of the Lager,” to live by the Social Darwinian laws of struggle for survival and survival of the fittest through uninhibited assertion of self-interest.

In my study of the factory slave-labor camps of Starachowice, I do not find that unrestrained self-assertion was the typical response of the prisoners, however. Rather than entirely abandoning any notion of moral obligation, the prisoners in effect created a moral system more appropriate to their situation of agency combined with powerlessness. This system was based on a hierarchy of moral obligation rather than either an impossible universality or a total annulment of moral obligation. What they expected and accepted of one another was first of all loyalty to one’s own remaining family members. Second, one had obligations to one’s friends and neighbors, third to one’s townspeople, and fourth to Jews vis-à-vis other non-Jewish prisoners. I remember my initial discomfort when interviewing a Starachowice survivor who was telling me how his little sister had been taken away in a selection. To this day, he would not forgive another survivor, a Jewish camp policeman who had lived on the same street and had been his childhood playmate. The camp policeman, he said, could and should have saved his sister because “there was [sic] plenty of people from out of town there that he could have sent.”⁴ Only gradually did I realize that this unguarded statement reflected precisely the hierarchy of moral obligation within the prisoner community, in which a camp policeman with limited agency was expected to rescue the little sister of a neighborhood playmate, even at the expense of someone else in a more distant circle of moral obligation.

In the unusual circumstance in which much of the prisoner community was composed of partial families, almost every prisoner had suffered grievous loss but still had loved ones alive. The searing experience of family loss did not lead to the total rupture of all bonds but rather to a total commitment to those family members who were still there. Family ties became the key associational and bonding factor of prisoner society in Starachowice and in the end also helped to account for the unusually high survival rate. It is no mere coincidence that I know of no fewer than twelve families in which three or more siblings survived Starachowice and the subsequent camps and marches together. The “choiceless choices” they had made turned out in this rare instance to be not so “choiceless” after all, and the camp morality they created helped to alleviate camp mortality and save remaining family members as well. And, like the story of Wilczek, this too should be a part of history.