Politics for the European Jews by 1938–39 was not the conventional struggle for power: they had next to none. Nor was it a competition for spoils of office: positions were few and pickings were meager. Rather it was an agitated search for some form of collective self-defense against the omnipresent threat to Jews’ economic survival and increasingly to their very existence. Jewish politics was also a quest for self-respect in a world where the word Jew was, in the eyes of most people, an insult and degradation.
A sense of desolation pervaded the Polish Jewish population, especially its youth, in the last year of peace. This was a generation, wrote a journalist in the Literarishe bleter in January 1939, that was “naked and barefoot, a generation of fed up, poor little menshelekh, with no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow.”1 One of the youthful contestants in YIVO’s autobiography contest for 1939 wrote: “Poland raised me to be a Pole but brands me a Jew who must be chased out. I want to be a Pole, but you won’t let me. I want to be a Jew, but I can’t; I’ve moved away from Jewishness. I don’t like myself as a Jew. … Unless Poland’s leaders change—as well as most Poles— then this sad process, which produces culturally disoriented souls, will not change for the better.”2
Since 1935 Jewish participation in the Polish parliament had been greatly reduced. The main reason was a new constitution and an electoral law that limited the ability of minorities, including Jews, to win seats in the Sejm. In protest, several Jewish parties, including the Bund, Folkists, and General Zionists (except for those in Galicia), joined other opposition groups in boycotting national elections in 1935.
As the mirage of early establishment of a Jewish state faded, the stock of the Zionists fell and that of their rivals rose. The Bund achieved its most impressive electoral results in the late 1930s. It gained ground in spite of a “declaration of principles” adopted at a party congress in 1935, in which it reaffirmed its opposition to “any klal yisroel [Jewish unity] politics” and vigorously attacked the Jewish bourgeoisie, whom it accused of “directly support[ing] the fascist regime” and of trying to stupefy the Jewish masses with “dreams of Palestine or with religious fanaticism.”3
The growth of anti-Semitism led the Bund to modify its isolationist policies somewhat. It decided to participate in elections to kehillot in 1936, attracting support for its role after the Przytyk pogrom in mobilizing a one-day national Jewish protest strike and community-wide defense against anti-Semitism. An Agudist newspaper at the time noted disapprovingly: “The whole truth is that the Bund received very many votes from the simple masses of the people, from the Jewish poor who still keep the Sabbath, still eat kosher, go to pray on the Sabbath, and put on tefillin every day.”4
In late 1938 the Zionists called for a united electoral front of all Jewish parties but this was rejected by the Bund. In its electoral campaigns in 1938–39 it directed the main thrust of its campaigning less against the Polish anti-Semitic right, from whom, after all, it could hardly hope to win votes, than against its most immediate competitors, other Jewish parties. “The gentlemen of the ‘General Jewish Bloc,’ the merchants and the Zionists, present themselves now to the Jewish population in the name of ‘national unity,’” declared a Bundist election leaflet in Vilna, “but how can there be unity between the rich and well-fed, who have never tasted hardship, and the poor horepashnikn [toilers]?”5 Instead, it called on Jewish voters, in districts where Jewish candidates had no hope of winning, to vote for its ally, the Polish Socialist Party.6 In the parliamentary elections of November 1938, which the Bund and other opposition parties again boycotted, Jewish parties secured just five members in the Sejm (two Agudists and three Zionists) and two (appointed) senators.
In municipal elections in December 1938 and January 1939, however, the Bund won striking successes: together with leftist allies it won 17 out of 20 seats held by Jewish parties in Warsaw and 11 out of 17 in Łódź. In partnership with the Polish Socialist Party, it formed governing coalitions in several municipalities. Although its support was much weaker outside the big cities, this was still an impressive advance. In the country as a whole, the Bund received 38 percent of the votes cast for Jewish parties in these elections, beating both the Zionists, who obtained 36 percent, and the Agudists and other religious elements, trailing with 23 percent. At the same time, membership of the Bundist labor unions increased: in January 1939 they claimed 36,567 members in Warsaw, a majority of the organized Jewish workforce.
These victories did not lead the Bund to abandon its opposition to klal yisroel politics. On the contrary, insisting that the elections proved that it alone “represented the Jewish masses of Poland and that the other Jewish political bodies had practically no influence or representative capacity and would either gradually wane or die out completely,” the Bund refused, for instance, to participate with other Jewish organizations in a general committee of Polish Jews to cooperate with the Joint Distribution Committee, even though many of its institutions, such as the Medem sanatorium, depended in part on the Joint’s financial support. A Bund representative pointed out “that they could not jeopardize their position with the non-Jewish elements of labor groups by sitting with people known as representing capitalist groups.” Their relationship with socialist brethren was “much more important to them than any assistance granted them by the JDC through the Central Polish Committee and they would rather maintain their principles even at the risk of sacrificing such assistance.” Such high-minded expression of class solidarity did not, however, prevent the party from presenting importunate demands to the Joint for assistance for various Bund-associated projects and institutions.7
Too much should not be made of the Bund’s electoral victories at this time. Although for the moment the largest Jewish party, it still represented only a minority of Polish Jewry, who remained divided along traditional lines into three main parts: orthodox, Zionist, and the left (including the formally nonexistent, electorally invisible but, among Jews, still significant Communists). The Bund’s rejection of klal yisroel politics prevented it from breaking out far beyond its proletarian base. One indication of its limited appeal emerges from membership figures for the Bundist youth organization, Tsukunft, which recruited youngsters aged fifteen to eighteen: in the whole of Poland in March 1939 it could muster just 2,235 members.8
As their political support ebbed, Zionists of all stripes exploited the mood of public desperation to try to outshine their rivals in extremist rhetoric. In early 1938, at a conference of his organization in Prague, Jabotinsky had offered the unfortunate prediction: “Great Britain will no more let you, the Czechs, down than us. Her word is a rock and she will keep it, she will not let down the smaller nations.”9 After Munich, as Britain tightened restriction of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Jabotinsky’s proposals seemed all the more utopian. Yet his ideas secured the support of the anti-Semitic Polish right and friendly interest from the Polish government. In response to the Kristallnacht, Jabotinsky arrived at apocalyptic conclusions. Foreseeing “elemental floods” that would engulf east European Jewry, he propounded, in place of his ten-year, 1.5 million Jews emigration policy, a new “evacuation” plan, whereby one million people would be transferred to Palestine within a single year.10
Once the British backtracked from the idea of partition of Palestine, as they did in the course of 1938, the mainstream Zionists had little to offer, by way of competition with the Revisionists, save rhetoric. If Jabotinsky proposed unfeasible policies, they could present little more than ineffectual protests. In February 1939 the chairman of the Jewish parliamentary club in the Sejm, Emil Sommerstein, a General Zionist, denounced “the extermination policy of the present Government and system.”11 When the Sejm passed a bill calling for a complete prohibition of shechitah in Poland, the Jewish community observed a “meatless fortnight” in protest. The gesture had little impact, save on kosher butchers and restaurants, which suffered a foretaste of the bill’s likely consequences if it were to be approved by the senate. The Bund, in a further characteristic exercise in ideological posturing, disdained to participate “since the religious motives of the Jewish bourgeois parties were foreign to its views,” while at the same time it did not oppose the protest since the ban “was obviously a means of oppressing the Jewish minority.”12
A Zionist leader wrote from Poland in March 1939 that the Revisionist “danger” was increasing “day by day, hour by hour. They always raise their heads when times are difficult for us.” Their massive propaganda efforts were aided, he suggested, by the widespread demoralization—“and they indeed are the biggest factor in this demoralization.” They were attracting, in particular, the assimilated intelligentsia. Using the propaganda methods of Italy and the USSR, he wrote, there were “no lies too good for them.” Weizmann was portrayed as a British agent. Jabotinsky’s “evacuationism” found a ready audience.13
The mainstream Zionists continued to favor a policy of selective immigration to Palestine of indoctrinated cadres, though Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the former leader of the Polish Zionists, by then resident in Palestine, had occasionally spoken in larger terms: “We must depart. The hour of the exodus has struck for the broad masses of Jewry,” he had declared in 1936.14 That, however, was not intended as a serious policy proposal. Apolinary Hartglas, president of the Zionist Organization of central and eastern Poland, rejected Jabotinsky’s plan vehemently: “To other than ideologically motivated emigration to Palestine, we say no, never!”15 His outspoken hostility to the Revisionists earned him a death threat.
The acrimonious Zionist debate over Jabotinsky’s evacuation proposal proved to be purely academic. Its implementation was predicated on somehow inducing the British to comply. But neither by diplomacy nor by the organization of illegal immigration did the Zionists prove equal to that task. Their failure became manifest in May 1939 with the publication by the British government of its White Paper on Palestine. This spelled out what were to be the guiding principles of British policy for the foreseeable future. Jewish immigration was to be limited to a maximum of seventy-five thousand over the next five years. Jewish land purchase was to be altogether prohibited or severely restricted in large areas of Palestine. And for the first time the British government declared that its ultimate aim in Palestine was the creation of a state that would be neither wholly Jewish, nor wholly Arab. The White Paper marked the end of the more than two-decade-old Anglo-Zionist alliance and represented an attempt by the British to freeze the Jewish National Home within its existing demographic and geographical limits.
Regarded by the Zionists as a betrayal in their darkest hour, the White Paper was enforced rigorously by the British authorities in Palestine. Naval patrols sought to interdict ramshackle steamers carrying illegal Jewish immigrants. Every possible pressure was exerted against countries that allowed Jews to leave or cross their territory and against states in whose ships refugees traveled. Illegal immigrants were threatened with return to their countries of origin, though hardly any such deportations could take place as refugees lacking immigration certificates threw away their passports before reaching Palestine.
Most Jewish opinion condemned the White Paper. But in France the Union Patriotique des Israélites Français opposed protest demonstrations and expressed the view that “for foreigners admitted to reside on our soil, it behooves them to abstain from agitation of any kind, most particularly when it is directed against the actions of the government of a power allied to France.”16 In Warsaw the Poalei Zion organized a protest strike but the Bundist unions refused to participate.
Palestine, in any case, did not seem so attractive to some potential immigrants. In the summer of 1939 a family of orthodox Jews in Palestine wrote to their old parents in a shtetl in Romania, urging them to immigrate to the Holy Land. The father, a desperately poor shochet, replied: “How beautiful and how pleasant it would surely be to be with you face to face and to fulfil the commandment to settle in the Land of Israel. But what shall I say? Given the number of bad rumours that we hear from the Land in the newspapers, we certainly cannot think of this now.”17
An index of the desperation with which many Jews viewed their situation by this stage was the readiness even of respectable organizations to resort to extralegal actions. In early 1939 the Amsterdam Refugees Committee agreed to cooperate with the Haganah (the Zionist underground militia in Palestine) in a plan to send a ship carrying illegal immigrants, many of them from the training farm at Wieringen, to Palestine. The Joint, on which the committee was heavily dependent, insisted that its funds must not be used directly for the purpose of aliya bet (illegal immigration to Palestine).18 But much of the necessary money was provided sub rosa by Saly Mayer, a wealthy Swiss Jew who worked in close cooperation with the Joint. Gideon Rufer, a Jewish Agency representative from Palestine, arrived to coordinate the arrangements.
The Dora, a rickety little forty-year-old Panamian-registered coal freighter, with a Greek captain, left Amsterdam semisecretly on the night of July 15–16, 1939, supposedly for Siam. Crowded aboard were over three hundred passengers, mainly German Jews, among them about fifty from the Wieringen farm school and some from the Hellevoetsluis internment camp. More boarded at Antwerp. Officially the Dutch government knew nothing about the ship’s departure; in fact, senior ministers and officials colluded in the enterprise.19
I had great doubts [Gertrude van Tijn wrote later] whether it was justifiable to send the refugees on that rotten little boat with the added risk of interception before they reached their destination. But I reasoned that I would have sent my own son had he been in a similar situation. … For four weeks I lay awake at night, worrying about the ship. Then we heard that she had reached Palestine safely, had not been intercepted by the English coastguard and that all the boys and girls—who had, according to instructions, thrown their identification papers into the sea—had been distributed among the old Palestine colonies and were now unrecognizable as newcomers.20
The Dora reached Palestine on August 11–12, 1939. She was one boat among many. That summer twenty “phantom vessels” carrying refugees from Nazism were wandering the oceans in search of a friendly port.
The actual stuff of novels, a film, and boundless human anguish was the saga, enacted on the high seas, of the 937 refugees who left Hamburg on May 13, 1939, on the Hamburg-Amerika company liner St. Louis. Anti-Semitic demonstrations greeted news of the ship’s impending arrival at Havana. Although armed with Cuban entry visas, the passengers were refused permission to land. The director general of the Cuban immigration authority, who had squeezed at least half a million dollars in bribes from refugees, was forced to resign when his peculations became public. A few passengers were admitted but 908 were refused landing permission. The president of Cuba offered to allow them to enter, provided the Joint Distribution Committee posted a $453,500 bond. Its representative tried to negotiate about the price but in the meantime the ship was ordered to leave harbor and sailed toward Miami. The U.S. authorities rejected pleas for their admission there and on June 6 the ship turned back toward Europe. Eventually it docked at Antwerp, and the Belgian, British, French, and Dutch governments agreed to take in the passengers. In announcing its decision, the British government warned that it could not “be regarded as a precedent for the reception in future of refugees who may leave Germany before definite arrangements have been made for their reception elsewhere.”21 The 181 passengers who were admitted to the Netherlands were initially deposited in the quarantine camp at Heyplaat in Rotterdam, which by this time had become, in effect, a prison camp surrounded by barbed wire with guard dogs.
The distraught flight of these world wanderers was a direct result of the deteriorating position of Jews under Nazi rule. In January 1939 all “non-Aryans” still in the Reich were humiliatingly obliged to add Israel (for males) or Sarah (for females) to their names, if their current forenames did not appear on an officially issued list of supposedly characteristic Jewish forenames. In the same month the Gestapo established a Central Authority for Jewish Emigration in the main Jewish community center on Oranienburgerstrasse in Berlin. Nazi policy was by now directed to making continued existence for Jews in Germany unviable and seeking every possible means to expedite the emigration of remaining Jews.
All Jews in the Reich were ordered to give up their gold, silver, and jewelry to pawnbrokers for a fraction of its value, the only permitted exceptions being one silver watch, one wedding ring, and two four-piece sets of cutlery per person. Debts owed to Jews by private persons, businesses, or insurance companies were no longer paid and recourse to the courts was fruitless. An increased emigration tax and yet other measures ensured that those who left were stripped of most of their property.
Over the next eight months a further 62,000 Jews left the country. A census in May 1939 recorded 214,000 Jews “by religion” living in Germany (not including areas annexed since the Anschluss). There were 331,000 “non-Aryans” in the Third Reich as a whole plus at least another 100,000 so-called Mischlinge. The emigrants were disproportionately young, male, and able-bodied. Those left behind, conversely, were more often old, female (including many widows), and infirm. Nearly all were destitute. Only 16 percent were gainfully employed. Most of the remainder fit for work (and some not) were already reduced to semi-slavery as conscripted laborers. In the final months of the peace, thousands more scrambled to at least temporary safety. By September 1939 the number of Jews “by religion” in the Altreich had fallen to 185,000. Only 1,480 of the 1,610 religious communities that had existed in 1933 remained. Two-thirds of other Jewish institutions had disappeared. The once proud and seemingly secure edifice of German Jewry had been reduced to pathetic dependence on a state that was far advanced on the road toward mass murder.
On July 4 a decree law was issued whereby the Reichsvertretung was formally replaced by a body to be known as the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Union of Jews in Germany). The new body, established after lengthy internal discussions among the remaining Jewish leadership in Germany, united all existing Jewish communities (which no longer retained legal existence) and institutions. The change of name was intended to drive home the Jews’ humiliation. No longer were they to be treated as if they had a right to represent their own interests. The new body, headed, like the old, by Baeck, was responsible for all Jews (racially defined). The government regarded the union’s main task as facilitating their exodus from the country. Although it operated under Nazi supervision, the Reichsvereinigung initially managed to preserve a limited sphere of Jewish autonomy and self-help, raising funds from overseas, organizing educational, health, and welfare activities, supporting the Kulturbund, and seeking, albeit with little success, to mitigate the harsh implementation of the government’s anti-Jewish decrees.22 But the realization soon dawned that the representative body of German Jews had been transformed into a hapless instrument of Nazi policy.
Kurt Goldmann, head of the Zionists’ “Palestine Office” in Berlin until March 1939, wrote scornfully in a letter shortly after he left Germany, that those who remained there were “an altogether decadent, demoralized Jewry, worn down by internal contradictions. … You see Jews in cafés, degenerate types behaving in revolting ways, living out their mindless, empty lives, and you become aware of the downfall of German Jewry from a cultured, liberal, sophisticated community into a conglomeration of repulsive, egoistical people.”23 This was the voice of a young fanatic but his view exemplified the arrogant self-confidence with which many Zionists, like adherents of other ideologies at the time, were convinced that they alone were in possession of the Ariadne’s thread that would lead to salvation.
The remaining Jews in Germany concentrated in the big cities, hoping to find a greater measure of security there. By mid-1939, 36 percent of what was left of German Jewry lived in Berlin, the highest proportion ever. In some small towns, every single Jew had left and the last reminders of their presence were being eliminated. At Creglingen in Württemberg, for example, all the seventy Jewish residents were gone, though not all had managed to escape Germany: some had found refuge, as they thought, in Stuttgart. The synagogue had been burned down on Kristallnacht. The municipal council offered the Jewish bathhouse (mikveh) for sale—to be demolished for its salvage value, since, as the council announced, “the small building spoilt the view of the town and also the style of the building is quite reminiscent of the bygone Jewish times.”24
The small city of Offenburg, near the Black Forest in the province of Baden, was one of many towns near the Rhine where Jews had lived since medieval times. The synagogue, like most throughout Germany, had been destroyed in November 1938, and the three hundred or so Jews terrorized. By the summer of 1939 Jews here, as elsewhere, were being shunned by surrounding society and were desperate to escape. Among them was Eduard Cohn, a businessman in the town who had served in the army in the First World War. During the Kristallnacht pogrom he was arrested, tortured, and sent to Dachau. After six weeks he was released on condition that he arrange to leave Germany. He managed to get to England in May 1939, hoping to proceed from there to Palestine. He was compelled, however, to leave his wife, Silvia, and their three children, behind in Offenburg. In the summer of 1939 they were still waiting anxiously for visas to enter Britain. In the meantime they tried to dispose of their remaining assets, mainly household goods. In 1937, when a relative of Anne Frank left Dortmund for Peru, she had been compelled to sell her furniture for just a quarter of its value. Now such goods were almost completely worthless. In a letter to her sister in late June, Silvia Cohn wrote: “You know that we are not permitted to advertise and old furniture is being offered for sale all over the place but people aren’t interested in buying anything anymore and will pay next to nothing for it, since there’s an excess of old furniture being offered for sale by emigrants.”25
The situation was similar in Austria, where the remaining Jews concentrated in Vienna. In the summer of 1939 two provinces, Styria and Carinthia, ordered the expulsion of all Jewish residents. Altogether 109,000 Jews emigrated from Austria between March 1938 and the outbreak of the war. Here too the Jews who remained were mainly the old. The refugees were preponderantly children and those of working age: two-thirds of all Jewish children between the ages of one and fifteen had been taken abroad by September 1939.26
On March 14, 1939, Wilhelmine Floeck, a blind, seventy-two-year-old widow in Vienna, formerly married to an “Aryan,” appealed to Josef Bürckel, Reich commissioner for the reunification of Austria with the German Reich, for permission to retain her small pension.27 The Nazi official’s response (if any) is not recorded.
A decree law that took effect on April 30 removed all legal protection from Jewish tenants throughout the Reich. Many were evicted from their homes and forced to share apartments or rooms with other Jews. In Vienna the housing department of the Jewish community reported in mid-May that it was overwhelmed every day by crowds of despairing, weeping people to whom it could offer no help.28
As the world’s attention turned toward Danzig, seemingly the next object of Hitler’s rapacity, that city’s Jewish community engaged in enforced self-liquidation. Danzig and the territory around it, which had a largely German population, had been a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations since 1920. In May 1933 local Nazis won control of the city council and reduced the authority of the League’s representative to a cipher. The mainly German-speaking Jews of Danzig had always supported German as against Polish interests there. But that availed them nothing after 1933. Over the next six years they were subjected to an ever-growing reign of terror. Signs indicating “Jews not desired” began to appear in shop windows. Arbitrary violence and police-sponsored intimidation of Jews became the order of the day. Jewish-owned businesses were ordered to close. A day or two after the Kristallnacht, the synagogues in the suburb of Langfuhr and the nearby seaside resort of Zoppot were destroyed. Fifteen hundred Jews fled over the Polish border.
In December 1938 all Jews were ordered to leave the territory. Only old people and a few “protected Jews” would be allowed to stay. In order to camouflage the forcible nature of the expulsion, the Nazis invited the Jews themselves to prepare an evacuation plan to be approved by the city authorities. Their departure would then be presented to the world as a generous response to a request by the Jews themselves.
On December 17 the head of the Jewish community, Dr. Curt Itzig, addressed two thousand people crowded into the main synagogue and announced the expulsion order. “When Jews came together in this holy place in former times,” he said, “we came to pray to God. In good times we thanked God for the good he bestowed upon us. … To-day we are gathered together here because we are all fearful for our fate and, what is even more important, for the fate and future of our children.” He urged his hearers to grant him and his colleagues full authority to conduct an orderly dissolution of the community in accordance with the orders of the Nazi authorities. His hearers approved the proposal unanimously. Afterward they wept.29
The synagogue itself was ordered to be torn down in May 1939 and the ground on which it stood was to be sold to help finance the Jews’ emigration. Signs were erected on the building announcing, “The synagogue will be demolished” and “Hasten, dear May and render us free of the Jews.” The Joint Distribution Committee negotiated an arrangement whereby the ritual treasures of the community—a total of 342 items, including 52 Torah scrolls, 11 Torah crowns, 9 mezuzot (amulets), 8 Torah mantles, and 4 ram’s horns, as well as a memorial plaque for the 56 Danzig Jews who had died “for the fatherland” between 1914 and 1918—were exported to the United States for safekeeping. The Nazi police chief authorized their removal “on condition that the proceeds are applied to funding the emigration of the Jewish community.”30
Like Jews elsewhere, those of Danzig found it almost impossible to secure immigration visas to any destination. The British consul general in the city, Gerald Shepherd, helped to arrange the departure of 122 children and a small number of working-age adult males to England as well as of some elderly persons to Palestine. But he warned community leaders to have nothing to do with illegal immigration to Palestine. They ignored the warning. In concert with Revisionist Zionist operatives, they organized a transport of refugees to Palestine. The Nazi president of the Danzig Senate complained to the League of Nations high commissioner that Shepherd was doing his utmost to “torpedo” their departure.31
In early March a group of 423 Jews left the city, heading for Palestine. They traveled overland by bus, truck, and train to the port of Reni in Romania, where they boarded a Greek-owned cargo-ship, the eight-hundred-ton SS Astir. Conditions on the ship were unsanitary, food was inadequate, and the vessel was dangerously overcrowded. When the Danzig refugees, who were now accompanied by 280 others from Romania and Hungary, arrived in Haifa, they were refused permission to land. The ship wandered around the Mediterranean for several weeks, finally returning to Palestine in late June. The passengers, by this time in poor physical and mental condition, were transferred to small, Arab-manned sailing-boats off the coast of Gaza and landed on the beach. The few British officers present were unable to prevent the theft of the greater part of the refugees’ belongings by the Arab boatmen. On landing, the immigrants were transferred to an internment camp, where they were able to recuperate from their ordeal.32
Some Danzig Jews managed to obtain visas for Bolivia. Fifty took refuge in Shanghai. A group of 135 found shelter at the nearby Polish port of Gdynia. But rising tensions between Poland and Germany led the Polish government to decree that no Jew could live within fifty miles of the border. They were therefore ordered to move on. By the end of August 1939, no more than 1,400 Jews remained out of the 10,000 who had lived in Danzig in 1933.
In July 1939, the association of French Jewish veterans of the First World War held their usual annual pilgrimage to Verdun and recited kaddish at the Jewish memorial at the ossuary of Douaumont. Throughout France that month, Jewish communities celebrated the 150th anniversary of the revolution that had brought them, for the first time in Europe, civil equality with Christians. One such ceremony took place in the spa town of Vichy, recently the scene of anti-Semitic incidents. A rabbi delivered an eloquent address, lauding Abbé Grégoire, whose efforts in the National Assembly had led to the emancipation. At a celebratory dinner of Jewish ex-servicemen in the restaurant “Max,” the mayor of Vichy declared his sympathy for refugees, victims, he said, of ignoble racist theories.33
In Vilna, the calendar of events at the Yiddish theater for the spring and summer seasons offered a lively program of both high- and lowbrow shows:
Outside the theater, however, it was dangerous for Jews to hang around in the streets too long after dark. Every day in the city Jews were being attacked in seemingly pointless onslaughts, explicable only as outbursts of anti-Semitism.
In Minsk the seventy-one thousand Jews, now reduced to under a third of the population, were no longer the showpiece of Soviet Yiddish secularism that they had been for two decades. The previous July the Byelorussian Supreme Soviet had terminated the status of Yiddish as an official language of the republic. This was more an anti-minority than an anti-Jewish decision: Polish was similarly demoted. But it spelled the end of Soviet promotion of a secular Yiddish culture. Yiddish writers and scholars in the city were arrested. Nearly all remaining Jewish institutions, apart from the Yiddish theater, were closed.35 The practice of Jewish religion in the city had by this time been driven almost completely underground. An illicit manufacturer of matzot found himself in a labor camp in 1939 with a five-year sentence.36
Many of the Soviet Jews who had embraced Communism with such burning faith were by now bitterly disillusioned. Moshe Zalcman had been separated from his Yiddish-speaking friends and moved to another camp of the Gulag system. Gershon Shapiro, after his second narrow scrape with denunciation, was keeping his head low. In both cases selfless commitment to the cause had given way to a dull determination to survive.
In Salonica Jewish life was in a sorry state: “Jewish schools were empty; Jewish youth associations no longer attracted many members. … The Zionist Federation was almost non-existent.”37 The annual meeting of the Grand Cercle Sioniste, the main Zionist society, had to be postponed owing to the absence of a quorum.38 The Jews, within living memory the largest population group in the city, now numbered 52,000 out of a total population of 240,000, the great majority of whom were Greeks.
Declining religious observance in Salonica was reflected in a story published in Acción in which a character criticizes mothers who bring parcels of food to the synagogue for their children on Yom Kippur.39 Another story appeared in Mesajero in which a father fails to persuade his son to observe the fast of the tenth of Tevet, while the son’s wife seems more concerned with buying a silk umbrella than with fasting.40 There were just twenty rabbis left in the city, most of them elderly, ten shochtim, four mohalim, and four sofrim (scribes qualified to write Torah scrolls).
Nearly all the Jewish charitable bodies reporting to the Salonica community council in May 1939 lamented crippling deficits in their budgets.41 The Asilo de Locos (mental asylum), for example, stated “El estado general de mouestra ovra à pounto de vista financario es de los mas criticos.” (“The general state of our work, from the financial point of view, is in the utmost degree critical.”)42 Traditionally the community had depended financially on various internal taxes and fees, notably the pecha, a tax on purchasers of kosher meat, with exemption for the poor. The growing impoverishment of the community and a declining observance of kashrut led to a drop in the number of pecheros to fewer than 1,200 by 1939, producing an income barely a quarter that of two decades earlier. The prevalent feeling among Jews in the city was one of communal decay and personal foreboding.
In Amsterdam the number of new refugees had at last begun to decline: whereas 601 had arrived in the Netherlands in January, only 253 gained entry in August. Of these 187 held onward transit visas and tickets. These numbers reflected the stringent application of Dutch immigration policy. Indeed, in August more refugees left than arrived. The most common destination for these emigrants was Australia (77 cases), followed by the United States (55), Britain (49), and various South American countries; only eight were able to move to Palestine. The number of refugees in camps in Holland was also declining, from 1,556 on March 31 to 1,278 on August 31; as a result, three of the camps closed in August.43
On August 30 the Joint organized a meeting in Paris of experts dealing with the refugee problem. Gertrude van Tijn was among those attending. She returned to Holland with one of the German-Jewish leaders, Fritz Seligsohn, whose wife and children had taken refuge there the previous November. Seligsohn’s wife and Gertrude begged him not to return to Germany but he felt it was his duty to go back to help the left-behind Jews, mainly old and infirm, for whom he felt a responsibility.
In Warsaw the atmosphere was a strange mixture of fear and patriotic elation. As the likelihood of war grew, Jews joined in the military and civil mobilization and were relieved to note that, at least in this supreme crisis, they could find a degree of acceptance as fellow citizens. Some facets of the mood of the time are conveyed by headlines in the Vus hert zikh in varshe? local news section of Haynt on August 25: “Another emigrant swindled” (two Jewish crooks took advantage of a woman from a shtetl who had come to Warsaw to seek a U.S. visa); “A special room for Polish advocates in the District Court” (Jewish lawyers were not to be admitted); “Festive reception for Shaul Tchernikhovsky in Writers’ Club” (the Hebrew poet, visiting from Palestine, received a warm welcome).
The occupation of Brno by the Nazis in March had been followed by intensified anti-Semitic measures. The main synagogue in the city was burned down. Hugo Jellinek was still living there as a refugee. “The future is clouded with impenetrable black cloths,” he wrote to his daughter in Palestine.44 On the personal level, he was happier than ever since he had fallen in love with a local widow. But his parents, brothers, and sisters and their families, all stuck in Vienna, were desperately seeking avenues of escape. “We are at our wits’ end,” wrote one of his sisters in late June.45 His father, a former synagogue cantor, who had been used to being treated with great respect, was bellowed at and humiliated by a Nazi official when he went to lodge an application. One of Jellinek’s brothers had succeeded in leaving for the United States. Another left for Shanghai. A sister managed to get to Australia. His daughters Bertha and Anna applied for visas for the United States. Bertha also applied for admission to Britain. In August, still without visas of any kind, the girls considered following their sister Nadja on an illegal transport to Palestine. But at the end of the month they and their father were still in Brno.
In spite of the depressing trends confronting Yiddishists in most of Europe by 1939, the director of YIVO, Max Weinreich, an enthusiast but also a realist, was not altogether disheartened. Summarizing prospects for the language in a paper that he prepared for the International Congress of Linguists that convened in Brussels on August 28, 1939, he struck a hopeful note. While acknowledging that “inherent in the position of a minority language are certainly many dangers for its existence,” he set these aside as “facts of an extra-linguistic nature.” “Insofar as the linguistic level is concerned,” he concluded, “it can be stated that at no period of its history has Yiddish reached such a degree of independence, integration and expressiveness as today, and the present-day achievements, especially in the language of poetry and scientific literature, give us the certainty that the development is not to stop there.”46 Weinreich was, of course, sadly aware that the “extra-linguistic” factors might expunge everything else. They hit the language, its speakers, and Weinreich personally, almost immediately. Unable to return to Vilna at the end of August, he was compelled to seek refuge elsewhere.
In Geneva, on August 16, the Zionist Organization convened its twenty-first congress. In spite of the political setbacks that had befallen the movement, membership was at an all-time high. The total number of shekel purchasers in 1939 was a record 1.3 million. This was 25 percent higher than prior to the previous congress, in 1937, even though the shekel could no longer be sold in greater Germany or Italy. Sixteen delegates from Germany managed to attend. Elected representatives arrived from almost every other Jewish community in Europe, except the Soviet Union. Although actively organized Zionists remained a minority of world Jewry and although the Revisionists had excluded themselves from the organization, the congress could plausibly claim to be the closest the European Jews had to a parliamentary assembly.
On August 24 the delegates were shocked by news of the signature at 2 A.M. that day, of a Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. While the secret clauses, by which Stalin and Hitler agreed to partition Poland, remained as yet unknown, it was immediately understood that the treaty gave Hitler carte blanche to go to war with Poland.
Already in May the dismissal of the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, a Jew identified with the policy of “collective security” and his replacement by Vyacheslav Molotov gave an important clue to the change in Stalin’s thinking. Litvinov, whatever his loyalties, would hardly have been an appropriate interlocutor with Ribbentrop. Stalin accused Litvinov of disloyalty and instructed his new foreign minister, “Purge the ministry of Jews.”47
The Nazi-Soviet pact caused consternation among Jewish Communists. In Paris the initial reaction of the Yiddish Communist daily, Naye prese, was almost instinctively to parrot the Moscow line faithfully. But party members there and elsewhere were aghast. Ilya Ehrenburg, whose dispatches from Paris had suddenly stopped appearing in Izvestia in April, was beside himself with rage and could not eat solid food for months, losing forty pounds as a result.
In the light of the news from Moscow, the Zionist Congress closed a day earlier than planned in order to enable delegates to return to their homelands. Chaim Weizmann delivered a farewell address to the assembly in Yiddish. The mood of his hearers was one of deep depression and anxiety. He told them: “I have no prayer but this—that we shall meet again, alive.” Then, using a biblical phrase that came, toward the end of the war, to be used of Jewish survivors in Europe, he said: “She’erit hapleitah [the surviving remnant] will continue to work, to fight, to live, until better days shall come.” The official record of proceedings recorded that there was deep emotion in the hall and many of those present had tears in their eyes.48