Holocaust

WARBURG IN ROME by James Carroll

szfreiberger Fiction/Literary, Holocaust, Mystery/Thrillers Leave a comment

(Vatican City, Italy)

As a person who has enjoyed James Carroll’s work over the years whether he was presenting his history of the Church and Jews in CONSTANTINE’S SWORD; the difficulties of a father and son relationship during the Vietnam War in AN AMERICAN REQUIEM; or an exploration of the Pentagon and the expansion of American power in HOUSE OF WAR, I have grown to expect an absorbing read each time I pick up one of his books.  Carroll, who is an ordained Catholic priest who left the priesthood to become a writer, is also a novelist and his newest book, WARBURG IN ROME did not disappoint.  Carroll’s historical research and clerical background allowed him to explore numerous plots in his latest effort as he struggled with the role of the Catholic Church and its bureaucracy during and after World War II.   The story centers on David Warburg, a Yale University trained lawyer who worked in the Treasury Department and is assigned to head the War Refugee Board (WRB) in Rome in 1943.  We learn that the reason Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Morgenthau, Jr. appointed him was that he believed he was part of the Jewish Warburg banking family which would solve a number of political problems for the Roosevelt administration.  The fact is Warburg is from Burlington, VT which came as a surprise to many politicians and bureaucrats.  Since the appointment could not be withdrawn, the New England as opposed to the New York Warburg headed off to Rome to facilitate the removal of Jews from Nazi extermination camps.

The title WARBURG IN ROME is a misnomer as there are a number of characters who are as important to Carroll’s story as the new head of the WRB.  The story traces Warburg’s own personal voyage of faith and rediscovering his Jewish roots.  Driven by the world’s insensitivity to the plight of thousands of Jews who remained in European deportation camps following the war; with Palestine closed by the British, the United States closed by the State Department, Warburg’s journey progresses from casting his father’s tallit to opening his heart to a new found Judaism.  Warburg resigns from the WRB and begins working illicitly with the Jewish Defense Committee to break the “ratline” that Himmler had set up to assist Nazi higher ups attempted to flee Europe and reach Argentina.  Marguerite d’Erasmo in 1943 was the head of the Women’s and Children’s Committee for Italy.  After the Nazis seized Rome after Mussolini fell she worked in Red Cross refugee camps and hid records of Jews the remainder of the war to save them from extermination.  D’Erasmo personal voyage is as important as Warburg’s.  Her journey begins as a devout Catholic in Rome, morphing into a partisan fighter in Yugoslavia.  After witnessing the horrors of Croatian anti-Semitism and murder, she goes on to try and save women and children in a Nazi detention camp.  Failing to free these people from the grip of the Nazis she moves to Palestine and converts to Judaism.  Upon her return to Rome she gather’s intelligence to block Himmler’s escape route from Vienna, through Rome, on to Argentina using the Vatican as its conduit.  Other characters emerge that are part of the novel’s core; Father Kevin Deane, sent by Archbishop Spellman of New York to Rome to oversee aid to refugees.  Giacomo Lionni, a partisan fighter in the Balkans nicknamed, “Jocko” devotes his life to saving Jews. General Peter Masters, at the outset a friend of Warburg, works at cross purposes with the WRB as he represents American intelligence agencies that are cooperating with the Vatican, Nazis, and Croats against the Soviet Union as relations with Stalin continued to deteriorate.  There are a number of characters who are part of the Vatican bureaucracy, Monsignor Tardini, the Director of the Pontifical Relief Committee, Cardinal Maglione, the pro-Nazi Secretary of State for the Vatican, and of course, Pope Pius XII who hated communism and did not want a victory against Hitler to be turned into a defeat by Stalin.

 

Carroll’s novel spends a great deal of time exploring the role of the Vatican after World War II.  The church did hide and assist many Jews, but it also hid many Nazis and facilitated their escape from allied hands.  The church was vehemently anti-communist and was involved in trying to over turn the allied policy of “unconditional surrender,” and make a separate peace with Germany in order to restore a Catholic Danubian Federation under the Hapsburgs as a bulwark against communism.  After the federation failed, the church worked to restore members of the Ustashe, the Croat Nazis to power in a new Catholic Croatian state that would be anti-Tito.  What stands out in Carroll’s narrative and dialogue between characters is that the reader is witnessing history and in a sense what the author has created is a history of the refugee crisis, the flight of the Nazis, and Vatican machinations to create an anti-communist coalition during and after World War II wrapped up in a novel.  Carroll’s book is sound historically and reflects tremendous research and through his characters presents the dilemmas facing allied policymakers after World War II in coping with the remnants of the Holocaust and how to deal with an emerging world power in the Soviet Union.

(Heinrich Himmler, the mentor for Father Ricardo Lehmann)

Carroll does a splendid job exploring the contradictions and diverse viewpoints following the war.  For example, Warburg and Mates clash over the probable Irgun bombing of the British embassy in Rome following Prime Minister Atlee’s expansion of refugee camps for Jews on Cyprus, as Jews were denied entrance into Palestine.  Warburg is incensed that the WRB is shut down because of Mates’ OSS (precursor of the CIA) accused him of only working for Jews.  Mates offers the usual anti-Semitic rationale that Jews were most likely to be communist and a security risk as refugees, so they should not be allowed into the United States or Palestine.  Understanding Carroll’s storyline is like peeling an onion as layer after layer of the plot and the background of each character is laid bare.  We see Father Ricardo Lehmann, a German priest assigned to the Vatican whose mentor was Heinrich Himmler.  Following Himmler’s suicide Lehmann works to maintain the “road out” using Vatican documents that allowed Nazi war criminals to travel from Vienna to Buenos Aires, with an assist from the Croatian Catholic network of Franciscan monks.

(Father Maglione, Vatican Secretary of State who assisted Nazis fleeing Europe after World War II)

The story itself presents numerous moral decisions that characters must make, decisions that in real life have been explored by historians for decades to try and ascertain the true motivation of historical figures during and after the Holocaust.  Carroll makes a valiant attempt at doing so through his own characters as he has done in previous works of non-fiction.  As the story draws to a close, Father Deane realizes that because of Vatican machinations many church officials were “in bed with Nazis.”  Deane tries to deal with what he has witnessed and cries out, “ Pavelic, Lehmann, Strangl the Treblinka commandant, for the love of God!  Living in our religious houses.  Nazis in monasteries and convents.  Vichy collaborators protected.  The protectors promoted.  Gestapo killers with Vatican passports.  The church welcoming them in Argentina.” (353)  He prepares a report of Vatican culpability, and he knows it will go nowhere as he must submit it to Vatican authorities, raising moral questions he cannot deal with and comes to the conclusion that the church itself is not guilty, but church officials are.  The book provokes a great deal of thought on many levels and I wondered what Vatican policy might have been during this time period, if the current head of the Papacy, Pope Francis had been in office.  WARBURG IN ROME is an exceptional read.

THE MAN WHO BROKE INTO AUSCHWITZ by Denis Avey with Rob Broomby

szfreiberger Biography, Holocaust, World War II 1 Comment

Picture of the sign at the entrance of Auschwitz that reads Arbeit Macht Frei.

(The entrance to Auschwitz)

THE MAN WHO BROKE INTO AUSCHWITZ by Denis Avey with Rob Broomby is not an easy book to review.  It is a memoir of a former British soldier who decided after his capture and incarceration in a German POW camp, located next to the outskirts of Auschwitz, to switch clothing and identity with a Jewish inmate, so he could witness what went on inside the death camps.  These actions take place about halfway through the memoir and from that point on the reader is riveted to Denis Avey’s story.  The first third of the book recounts his early years in England and his boredom that led him to join the British army in 1939.  We are taken through his training and finally his experiences fighting first against the Italians in North Africa and then once the Italians lost Tobruk the Germans led by Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corp.  It is during the battle against the Germans at Sidi  Rezegh that he is captured and the essence of what he would experience is recounted.

Evaluating this type of memoir places the reviewer in a quandary.  You can comment on style and language and the demeanor of the author, but based on what he has survived and overcome, is that fair?  For me, Avey’s story is an emotional journey that takes him through the savagery of warfare in the Libyan dessert as a driver of a carrier vehicle with a mounted Bren gun on top.  He sees his friends blown to bits by Italian and German artillery and bombers.  He himself is wounded and contracts malaria and in the end winds up in a German field hospital where he miraculously recovers.  The first question that must be asked is why Avey, who did not have to enlist, join the army.  Avey states that “I hadn’t joined up for King and country but youthful adventure,” but what began as somewhat of a lark morphed into “a moral conflict for me at the very time I could do little about it.” (128)  Avey matured as a person because of his experiences and for him morality dominated his mindset.

Avey’s survival can be explained through luck, but also a state of mind.  Throughout the memoir he describes the abhorrent conditions he experienced but as he states, “my body was in a shocking state, but in my head, I wasn’t a prisoner at all.  The enemy had done many things to me but they hadn’t captured my mind.” (98)  After being captured in North Africa he attempted to escape a number of times and he was labeled as a “habitual troublemaker” which led to his transfer to a POW labor camp in the Polish town of Oswiecim where he noticed people who looked starved with shaved heads wearing “ill fitting striped shirts and trousers that were more like pyjamas.” (105)  Avey worked on a massive factory that was being built by I.G. Farben to manufacture “buna,” or synthetic rubber.  Avey realized earlier that “everywhere, in the nooks and crannies of this industrial nightmare, were poor creatures in their filthy zebra uniforms, many too weak to stand, led alone shift and carry.  I knew by now this was no ordinary labour camp.  They were deliberately worked to death.” (107)  For Avey, the knowledge that as a British POW he was not going to be worked to death allowed him to contemplate how he could assist these Jewish inmates.  He was able to get a letter out to the sister of a Jew named Ernst that allowed a package to be returned to him that assisted Ernst’s survival of what is referred to as Auschwitz III, the Nazi death camp.

Avey who became obsessed with the immorality of the Holocaust decided to change places with Ernst.  This was accomplished on two separate occasions where Avey experienced the barracks, the smell from the crematoria, the beatings, and the total inhumanity that was the “Final Solution.”  For Avey he wanted to bear witness to the plight of the Jews.  He wanted to tell the world of their suffering and the savagery of Auschwitz I, II, and III.  Throughout his experiences Avey was careful not to establish close relations with anyone, except for Hans a Dutch Jew he assisted, and Ernst, because you never knew how quickly you would be chosen for a detail to bury them.  As the Russians moved in from the east, Avey and thousands of others were forced to March westward in the middle of a frozen winter.  Avey broke away and miraculously made his way through Silesia, Czechoslovakia, and Germany.  Finally after passing through Nuremburg he came across the American army where he was taken to an officer whose description sounded like George S. Patton.

(Head to Head with Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street on January 22, 2010.  In March 2010 Avey was presented with a medal as one of 27 British heroes of the Holocaust.  All but two received the award posthumously)

From this point Avey describes his post war struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at a time when no one knew what it was and people were interested in talking about victory not the calamity facing soldiers who fought in the war and who were victims that people did not recognize.  Avey describes his battles with nightmares, jumpiness, his inability to speak about his experiences, his violent temper, stomach pains, and loss of memory.  These symptoms as well as the loss of vision in one I that grew cancerous from a beating during his incarceration plagued him for years after the war.  Eventually he would overcome them and lead a very successful life, as Avery says during the day, but at night it was a different story.  The most heartwarming and emotionally wrenching part of the book is the last third as he describes how a reporter Rob Broomby traced Avey’s experiences for a news story and he located Ernst’s sister, leading to a reunion with Avey.  Further they uncovered a DVD of Ernst’s life in the United States after the war.  Avey never knew what happened to him and this emotional catharsis allowed him to open up and went a long way in his own recovery.  The book is sad in parts, uplifting at the same time, but it serves as another voice, a witness to man’s inhumanity to man, and as Avey points out by recounting his experiences hopefully people will gain an understanding of genocide and will not allow it to take place again.

OPERATION PAPERCLIP by Annie Jacobsen

szfreiberger Cold War, Holocaust, Nazi Germany Leave a comment

At the conclusion of her new book, OPERATION PAPERCLIP: THE SECRET INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM THAT NAZI SCIENTISTS BROUGHT TO AMERICA, Annie Jacobsen discusses her battles with American military and intelligence authorities in trying to obtain documents relating to the employ of Nazi scientists by the United States Army and other government agencies following World War II.  In her discussion a common theme reaches fruition in 2012 as the Department of Defense finally declassified a 1945 list of Nazi doctors who were sought for “mercy killings and medical murder cases.”  On that list were seven Nazi doctors who were employed by the U.S. government even though “U.S. Army intelligence knew all along that these doctors were implicated in murder yet chose to classify the list and hire the doctors.” (437)  These doctors were hired as part of Operation Paperclip a postwar program designed to use the technological and medical knowledge of Nazi scientists for the benefit of American policy as the Cold War was burgeoning.  This raises a number of moral questions, the most important of which is when does a government draw the line in working with individuals who are guilty of directly or indirectly causing the death of tens of thousands of concentration camp victims, slave laborers, or innocent civilians.  In the case of the United States following World War II that line was invisible no matter what evidence existed that the individuals that the government was interested in had either engaged directly or indirectly in genocide.  For American officials following the war it was easy to dismiss evidence because in their eyes American national security interests trumped any documents that might interfere with their goal of using Nazi technological and medical advances to further the American agenda against the Soviet Union.

Anne Jacobsen has written a detailed and deeply researched study that raises numerous moral and philosophical questions as she explores the origin, implementation, and eventual downfall of Operation Paperclip.  She leaves no stone unturned as she ferrets out the stories and experiences relating to Wernher von Braun, the director of the German Army’s V2 rocket program and headed the Mittelbau-Dora Planning Office that oversaw experiments that resulted in the death of 30,000 out of 60,000 slave laborers he “hired” from the SS.  Other subjects include, Dr. Walter Schreiber, the Surgeon General of the Third Reich who carried out medical experiments on concentration camp victims for gas and bacterial warfare; Georg Rickhey, the General manager of the Mittlewerk slave labor facility; Otto Ambros, chemist and co discoverer of sarin gas and manager of IG Farben’s slave labor factory at Auschwitz; Dr. Kurt Blome, Deputy Surgeon General of the Reich; Major General Walter Dornberger who was in charge of V-weapons development and the technical officer in the Nordhausen slave labor tunnels; and Dr. Hubertus Strughold the wartime director for aviation research for the Reich.  These are just a few of the individuals that Jacobsen’s narrative exposes.  All are war criminals, and all participated in Operation Paperclip and developed important programs that the US military came to rely on during the Cold War, for example, Kurt Debus, an ardent Nazi and V-weapons flight test director who later became the first director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Jacobsen follows Operation Paperclip from its inception in 1945 as American authorities had to decide what to do with Hitler’s former scientists and engineers.  Proponents of Operation Paperclip decided to use Nazi scientists to assist in the war against Japan.  However, once the Japanese threat ended in August, 1945 and relations with the Soviet Union began to deteriorate the race to acquire as many scientists and technological experts before the Soviet Union could capture them gained momentum.  Jacobsen does an excellent job describing certain Nazi scientists and why their particular specialty was so important to the United States.  US policy for hiring German scientists was supposed to be based on the condition that “provided they were not known or alleged war criminals,” however this caveat was easily overlooked.  I found the mini-biographies that Jacobsen provides to be fascinating.  The author discusses many individuals that people with knowledge of World War II will easily recognize, i.e.; Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, and Heinrich Himmler, but the character studies of those not easily recognizable are the most fascinating.  Dr. Leopold Alexander, a Boston psychiatrist and German Jew left Germany in 1933 for a fellowship in China and never returned to his homeland.  He ended up working in a mental hospital outside Boston in 1934 and returned to Germany after the war to try and determine which of his former colleagues and students were guilty.  Alexander was shocked by the deviance of Nazi science and noted they did not practice science, but a “really depraved pseudoscientific criminality.”  Dr. Alexander also investigated crimes committed in the name of neuropsychiatry and neuropathology and in this capacity he came face to face with the odious Nazi belief of “untermenschen” that was the core of Hitler’s ideological framework and those individuals who implemented the murder thousands under the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring carried out by Dr. Karl Kleist, a former neurology professor of Alexander.  We also meet Americans such as John J. McCloy who was in charge of setting up war crimes programs, but also coordinated policy regarding the transfer of Nazi scientists to the United States which he supported at the end of the war and later when he became High Commissioner for the American occupation zone replacing General Lucius Clay in 1949.  Not all Americans that Jacobsen integrates into the narrative were guilty of facilitating Operation Paperclip.  There were people like John Dolibois, a G2 Army intelligence officer who was sent to Dachau after its liberation to interrogate Nazi suspects and to investigate whether any important Nazis were hiding among the general prison population.  Dolibois was shocked by the reaction of the men he interrogated as they could not believe they were being prosecuted and they used the excuse that they “were only following orders.”  To their credit many State Department functionaries argued repeatedly to keep Nazi scientists who were proven criminals out of the United States, but the military establishment was difficult to defeat.

Jacobsen’s discussion of IG Farben and their development of sarin and tabun gases are eye opening especially when the same scientists are the ones who helped develop it for the United States.  Farben’s research reflects the depravity of the Nazi scientists, the same men whose expertise the US would use, rather than having these men face the prosecution and punishment they deserved.  It was not just chemists the US was interested in.  When the Washington Post uncovered “freezing experiments” conducted at Dachau were by men would be tortured, then frozen for a period of time, then Nazi doctors would try and revive them.   The fact that the Nazi biologists involved were already working for the US was kept from the public.  Throughout Operation Paperclip officials had to work just as hard recruiting scientists as they did keeping information away from Congress and the American public.  This led to covert programs to smuggle scientists into the United States or the American zone in what became West Germany on many occasions.

Perhaps the most interesting and disturbing chapter was entitled, “Science at Any Price,” which explained how the military was able to maneuver the State Department out of the business of approving visa for the Nazi scientists that they opposed admitting to the United States.  From that point on the Joint Intelligence Objective Agency (JIOA) that had been created by the War Department was in charge of Operation Paperclip and the policy became; any scientist the Russians were interested in would be of interest to the US.  By October, 1946 there were 233 German scientists in US military custody.  At the same time the New York Times made the public aware of Operation Paperclip, the army had to go on a charm offensive by bringing out the most “wholesome looking German scientists they had working for them.” (250)

Jacobsen artfully describes army cover-up tactics when one of their “new” employees had their Nazi past catch up to them, i.e., Georg Rickhey who oversaw production and the hanging of prisoners at Nordhausen, a rocket factory housed in a salt mine.  When Rickhey was arrested he was acquitted in the Dora-Nordhausen trial as the judges were military and the future of the American missile program took precedence.  Jacobsen weaves her narrative nicely with the use of trial transcripts and documents to support her thesis and reflects American angst that the Soviet Union was ahead in the “chemical warfare race.”  In fact Karl Krauck, IG Farben’s head chemist and Goering’s main advisor on chemicals was being recruited by the US at the same time he was on trial.  America’s rational was simple, “when working with ardent Nazis American handlers appear to have developed the ability to look the other way.  Others…..looked straight at the man and saw only the scientist, not the Nazi.” (300)

The Berlin Crisis that began on June 24, 1948 gave Operation Paperclip further momentum as the newly created CIA joined forces with the JIOA and led to the employ of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, the former head of  Nazi intelligence operations against the Soviet Union.  The US made a deal with the devil and put Gehlen’s organization at the forefront of the Cold War and made the Major General head of the entire American anti-communist intelligence operation.  Jacobsen also zeroes in on the cases of Otto Ambros, Dr. Walter Schreiber, and Dr. Kurt Blome exploring their Nazi past, their involvement in war crimes, and how they came to work for the United States.  Jacobsen follows that discussion with that of John J. McCloy’s commutation of Ambros’ and others sentences when he became High Commissioner, in part because of pressure from West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and the outbreak of the Korean War.  A new shift in US policy evolved as it was now more important to be anti-communist as opposed to anti-Nazi.

The saga of Dr. Walter Schreiber as described by Jacobsen is emblematic of the American governments experience with former Nazi scientists after the war.  Schreiber was involved with medical experiments at Ravensbruck among his other crimes, but yet he was never prosecuted at Nuremberg.  In fact he became a Russian witness against his former colleagues at the trial.  His journey to the United States and his final eviction in 1952 is a twisted voyage that brings to the surface the role of the Air Force, CIA and other agencies that did everything they could bureaucratically to allow him to remain in the United States so that we could employ his knowledge of Nazi and Soviet chemical experiments.  In 1952 when his presence in Texas reached the Boston press and went national, the fear of scandal that could reach the highest levels of the Truman administration finally saw the government force him to emigrate to Argentina with his family.  What is evident is that being an anti-communist trumped being a Nazi war criminal.   If you could assist in the Cold War battle any past crimes could be glossed over and explained away in the name of national security.

Jacobsen completes her study by discussing the case of Arthur Rudolph, a man who oversaw slave labor at the Dora-Nordhausen complex where he was involved in working prisoners to death and a number of public hangings.  Rudolph had worked for the US military and NASA for thirty-eight years when he was finally expelled, but even as his role in the Third Reich became known in 1983 there were elements in NASA who claimed the Justice Department was engaged in a witch hunt.   Jacobsen’s magnificent study concludes by asking “What does last?  The desire to seek the truth? Or, in the words of Jean Michel, the ability to take a stand against the monstrous distortion of history when it gives birth to false, foul and suspect myths?”  This for me is the epitaph of Operation Paperclip, one of the most disturbing policies that the United States government has ever pursued.

ISAAC’S ARMY by Matthew Brzezinski

szfreiberger Holocaust, World War II Leave a comment

 

Ten years ago my wife and I visited Poland. Since I had studied the Holocaust for many years I thought I knew what to expect, but after visiting the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau I was wrong. Since many of my relatives were murdered in Auschwitz and part of my journey was to find my father’s village outside of Krakow I had a very sobering and emotional reaction to what I saw. I have read countless books on the Holocaust, but few measure up to Matthew Brzezinski’s ISAAC’s ARMY. The book is not a comprehensive history of the plight of Polish Jews during the Holocaust, but after reading it I had the feeling that it was. What is presented is an eye opening account of Polish Jewry before, during, and after World War II. The author’s main focus is the city of Warsaw which was depopulated and destroyed by the Nazis between 1940 and 1944. By focusing on a select number of Jews who lived, died, and survived the trauma that befell Eastern European Jews the reader is exposed to fresh insights and is taken on a journey like no other.
The author begins by describing the difficulty of imagining Warsaw from the platform of 2012. Today Warsaw is thriving with a modern capitalist economy, but as Brzezinski points out the office buildings, financial centers, hotels and other modern edifices are built on the “holy ground” that was the Warsaw Ghetto. The first chapter provides an insight to the Polish mindset as the German invasion takes place on September 1, 1939. The masses retained the firm belief that this was another Hitler land grab and once he seized Danzig (Gdansk) and some Silesian land he would be satiated and things would return to normal. Though their neighbors seemed confident there was a “collective nervousness” in the Jewish community. Within a few days reality hit home as the Germans entered Warsaw on September 8th.

After his introductory material Brzezinski shifts his attention to Warsaw and the ghetto that the Germans created. His narrative is presented through the eyes of a number of people. By focusing his attention on Isaac Zuckerman, Simha Ratheiser, Mark Edelman, Boruch Spiegel, Zivia Lubetkin, the Osnos and Mortkowicz families, and a number of other important individuals the reader is drawn into their world and their co-religionists struggle for survival. By mid-September the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east making it very difficult to escape. As the narrative develops Brzezinski describes the inability of the Jews in Warsaw to develop a unified response to events. The Nazis created the Judenrat, designed to rule the ghetto and carry out their policy. Within the Jewish community a Zionist faction emerged whose goal was to get as many Jews as possible to immigrate to Palestine, opposing them was the Bund who felt allegiance to Poland and wanted to build up the Jewish community as nationalistic Poles and remain in Poland. A Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) was created and both the Zionists and Bund members could not unify against the Nazis. In addition the Polish gentiles created a Home Army supported by the British.

By October Poland as an independent nation ceased to exist. The Nazis worked ceaselessly to rekindle Polish anti-Semitism that had plagued Polish Jews for centuries but had declined in the early 20th century. Soon a Jewish underground developed to cope with the deteriorating conditions and oppose the Nuremberg Blood Laws which defined the Nazi version of Jewishness, the looting, roundups for slave labor and outright murder carried out by the German command. Through the eyes of Brzezinski’s characters the reader gets a glimpse of Jewish life and culture in pre-war Poland that the Nazis destroyed as they seized Jewish businesses ranging from banks to publishing and industry.
The author weaves the story of the escape of the Osnos family from Poland to Romania by way of Germany to highlight the immigration barriers set up by western countries especially the United States and the machinations of Breckenridge Long, an assistant Secretary of State who created numerous roadblocks to prevent Jews from entering America (see David Wyman’s two volume history of American immigration policy before and during the war towards Jews). The Osnos family escaped Warsaw before the Nazis walled in the ghetto in the fall of 1940 resulting in almost 500,000 people squeezed into 732 acres. (100)

Once the ghetto was created Brzezinski describes the underground smuggling operation that would feed the ghetto for the next three years. The author integrates the important role that children played in the process as families relied on their offspring for survival. Many Jews were rounded up and along with Gentile Poles were sent to perform slave labor in Germany and areas they occupied in the East. Isaac Zuckerman was one of the 1.6 million people who suffered the fate of being a forced laborer and through his eyes we experience what it was like. Overall the Jews in the ghetto suffered from an ethical dilemma, how much should they cooperate with the Nazis. Under the Judenrat, headed by Adam Czerniakow a Jewish Police Force was created to assist in rounding up and policing Jews. Czerniakow’s diary (THE WARSAW DIARY OF ADAM CZERNIAKOW edited by Raul Hilberg) describes his mental state as he presided over the ghetto under the Nazis and the day to day issues that Polish Jews faced. Finally on July 23, 1942, Czerniakow could no longer deal with the situation and committed suicide.

Though Brzezinski concentrates on the Warsaw Ghetto he also describes the pogroms in Vilna and Kovno following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941. As numerous historians have pointed out Hitler did not plan in advance as to how the Jews would be dealt with once Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Decisions and killings would be made on an ad hoc basis until the Final Solution was decided upon at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. Special killing squads were employed by the Nazis in the East and experimental methods were instituted to maximize death until finally the concentration camps were refined to maximize the killing.

On July 22, 1942 the Nazis ordered the Gross Aktion (Great Deportation) to empty the Warsaw Ghetto and settle people in the East. Mark Edelman emerged as a leading figure in the underground and as a hospital orderly he helped smuggle Jews out of the Ghetto. Preference was given to underground members and as Edelman described years later he felt like he was playing God as he chose who he could assist. Soon after this Edelman and his cohorts learned that Jews were not being resettled but were being taken to a new concentration camp, Treblinka. By September 21, 1942 the deportations had ended as over 300,000 Jews had perished at Treblinka.

Throughout the book Brzezinski provides details of the negotiations between the different factions among the Jewish community as to how to deal with Nazi depopulation policy. In addition, the author provides insights concerning discussions with the Polish Home Army to acquire weapons. What emerges are the many obstacles that the Jews faced as they tried to fight the Nazis and just survive. The latent anti-Semitism of the Home Army, the ideological predilections of the different factions, and the many “greasers” (the term used to describe Ukrainian and other ethnic groups that the Nazis used to harass, rob, and murder Jews) all contributed to the inability of thousands of Jews to save themselves. By January, 1943 the Germans began to round up the remaining 50,000 Jews that had escaped the Gross Aktion.

The new German effort to deport Jews to Treblinka led to the ZOB merging with the Bund and a more unified Jewish command. The ZOB took over leadership from the Judenrat and Brzezinski explores how they developed their strategy, bomb making capacity, and acquisition of weapons. Though they did not acquire a great deal from the Home Army they were able to manufacture their own “version” of weaponry. On April 20, 1943 the SS stormed the Ghetto to liquidate it. They were met by roughly 500-750 armed Jews. Receiving little help from the 380,000 member Polish Home Army they shocked the Germans who expected to be met by a few revolvers not bombs. Heinrich Himmler fearing another Stalingrad type situation in Warsaw appointed Jurgen von Stroop his counter insurgency expert to deal with the situation. Von Stroop applied massive artillery to flush out the insurgents as building after building was destroyed. Brzezinski goes into great detail as to how the Jewish defenders survived the onslaught. The remaining Jews were able to escape their harrowing situation by entering the sewer system to reach the Aryan side of the city and seek a path to safety.
On May 16, 1943 von Stroop declared the Ghetto liquidated, but 28,000 Jews remained hiding in the city. The biggest threat were the “greasers” who continued to extort and murder Jews. These “greasers” numbered between 5-10,000 Poles and were on a fee basis from the Gestapo. Brzezinski correctly points out that little research has been done concerning this problem, but he sheds more light on the precarious situation Jewish survivors of the liquidation faced. It is interesting that so much work has been done concerning the role of Righteous Christians, but so little with “greasers.” (See Jan Grabowski’s new book, HUNT FOR JEWS: BETRAYAL AND MURDER IN GERMAN OCCUPIED POLAND)

On August 1, 1944 Warsaw erupted once again as the Home Army led a revolt against the Nazis. The Poles wanted to liberate themselves before the red Army arrived. Brzezinski explores the diplomacy among Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin concerning the future of Poland and it becomes clear by the Tehran and Yalta Conferences that Britain and the United States despite protestations realized that Poland would fall into the Soviet sphere. During the Warsaw uprising Stalin kept 800,000 troops from entering Warsaw and refused the use of Soviet airspace to the British and the United States who sought to assist the Home Army. From Stalin’s perspective the more Poles the Nazis killed the better. The man who was responsible for the Katyn Forest Massacre earlier in the war was just finishing a project to decimate the Polish leadership, politically and militarily as soon as possible. On October 2, 1944 Warsaw capitulated with 200,000 casualties in 63 days. (362) “From a pre war population of 1.35 million, only an estimated five thousand remained hidden in the rubble of October 1944.” (369)

Once Poland was liberated by the Soviet Union and the war was brought to an end the full horror of the Holocaust was brought front and center for the world to witness. For the remaining Jews who survived the war they trickled back to Poland, but their ordeal was not at an end. Over 300,000 Jews returned to Poland and most did not want to remain as most Poles were not happy that so many Jews survived the war. Isaac Zuckerman worked ceaselessly to assist as many as possible to immigrate to Palestine, but the British, now a declining empire refused their admittance for fear of angering the Arabs. For those Jews who wanted to remain in Poland prewar anti-Semitism quickly resurfaced. As Jews tried to regain their homes, businesses, and other property from the prewar years many Poles either owned or occupied them and refused to go back to their prewar status and return them to their rightful owners. Beatings of Jews and robberies and other types of harassment were common in postwar Poland, but none reached the level of the pogrom at Kielce in July, 1946, which resulted in the death of 40 Jews and many more injured. The massacre was carried out by “ordinary Poles; bakers and seamstresses, white collar workers and carpenters, God-fearing Catholics who went to church on Sundays. How, after the tragedy of the Holocaust, something like this could occur in a supposedly civilized society, Isaac could not understand.” (401) For a full description of the events in Kielce and the role of the Polish government consult Jan Gross’ account in his book, FEAR: ANTI-SEMITISM IN POLAND AFTER AUSCHWITZ. The Polish government would then, after asking permission from the Soviet Union, facilitated the immigration of 115,000 Jews to Palestine. (403)

Brzezinski closes his narrative by reintroducing characters that he had interviewed for the book . Some of these survivors lived in Israel and had to deal with the remnants of their experiences. Issues such as post traumatic stress disorder were apparent in most survivors and for Isaac and Zivia death would come at a fairly young age. Mark Edelman returned to Lodz after the war and became one of the Poland’s leading heart surgeons. Many settled in Krakow, while others went to Toronto and New York. As time moves further and the continued building of skyscrapers all physical evidence of the Holocaust in Poland will be extinguished except for a few yards of the ghetto wall which stood as of my visit in 2003. At that time the wall was tended to by an older gentleman. I wondered as I closed Brzezinski’s book if that gentleman was still alive, and if not had someone else taken over the mission of caring for some of the last evidence of the Nazi destruction of such a beautiful city. ISAAC’S ARMY is superb book that reads like fiction, but the trouble for humanity is that it is all based on fact.

HITLER’S HANGMAN: THE LIFE OF HEYDRICH by Robert Gerwath

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Until 1942, the year of his assassination Reinhard Heydrich was the chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service and the Gestapo. He played a significant role in the planning of the “Final Solution” and was responsible for many of the atrocities implemented by the Nazi hierarchy until his death. In this new biography, HITLER’S HANGMAN: THE LIFE OF HEYDRICH by Robert Gerwath, the Director of the Center for War Studies at the University College Dublin,the reader is presented with the most complete study of this perpetrator of evil that has been written to date. Heydrich was the “complete” ideological Nazi. One who grew up in a privileged middle class family and the narrative and analysis follows his career progression to the point of becoming one of Hitler’s most trusted policy makers. Gerwath presents the inner workings of the Gestapo and other Nazi police organs. The reader witnesses the complexities of the Nazi secret police, the personal conflicts and power struggles and the resulting affects on its victims. It is a study that explores the personal and public character of its subject and leaves no doubt that the Holocaust was greatly facilitated by the former overlord of Bohemia and Moravia. His assassination (the topic of a fascinating new novel, HHH by Laurent Binet) by a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service in 1942 did the world a service by ending the cruelty of the “butcher of Prague.” The book is designed for the general reader as well as an academic audience and is very well written and well worth the time if one is interested in this type of subject matter.

HHhH by Laurent Binet

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Recently I read Robert Gerwath’s HITLER’S HANGMAN: THE LIFE OF HEYDRICH. It was an amazing biography of a person described as “Himmler’s Brain.” Reinhard Heydrich was the Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service and the Gestapo, also the ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia during World War II. In addition he was the leading organizer of the “Final Solution” until May 27, 1942 as well as the “host” for the Wannsee Conference that many believe set up the infrastructure for the Holocaust, quite a resume! Heydrich was one of the most important figures in the Nazi hierarchy and quite possibly would have worked his way up to be Hitler’s successor had he not been assassinated by a Czech and a Slovak as part of a British secret service plot in May, 1942. Since Heydrich was such an important historical figure I was fascinated by Laurent Binet’s remarkable book, HHhH translated from French into English by Sam Taylor and published last year. Binet’s work is a combination of historical fiction and historical narrative, a process he describes as an “infranovel.”

This book is an unusual combination of impeccable historical research and prose. The author seems to meditate over his material as he presents it in the form of a conversation with himself. His application of subtle sarcasm exists throughout and his descriptions of his characters are hauntingly accurate. The first half of the book presents the background in the form of a bio-fiction of Heydrich’s life and then the author moves on to discuss his main concern the assassination of the “Butcher of Prague.” The reader is provided an interesting portrayal of Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis the British trained assassins, who are parachuted into the Prague area in May, 1942. The reader is taken for a chilling ride with these partisans as they carry out their mission, the Nazi reprisals resulting in the massacre of the Czech town of Lidice, their own deaths and the eventual extermination of all individuals who are linked to the plot by the Germans. Binet is irreverent in his descriptions, be it social situations or ideological debates to the point that some of the scenes seem farcical. The author’s blend of historical accuracy and fictional musings draw the reader in with his commentary, i.e.; in dealing with Anglo-French sellout of Czechoslovakia in September, 1938 he states, “at this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art.” The book is truly an accurate portrayal of history presented in the form of a novel. As a historian I wish he could have provided footnotes and a bibliography!

FDR AND THE JEWS by Richard Breitman

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One of the most contentious debates pertaining to World War II deals with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s role in trying to mitigate the horrors of the Holocaust. Many argue that Roosevelt was a political animal who based his position on the plight of world Jewry on political calculation and did little to offset Nazi terror; others argue that FDR did as much as possible based on conditions domestically and abroad. In the new book, FDR AND THE JEWS, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman address all aspects of FDR’s policies during the Holocaust synthesizing most if not all the relevant secondary and primary sources with a layer of new material. The authors reach the conclusion that FDR’s views were consistent throughout the war and he was “politically and emotionally stingy when it came to the plight of the Jews-even given that he had no easy remedies for a specific Jewish tragedy in Europe.” (210) The authors argue that “FDR avoided positions that might put at risk his broader goals of mobilizing anti-Nazi opposition and gaining freedom to act in foreign affairs,” (151) for example dealing with the refugee crisis, the issue of Palestine, immigration, and organizing the defeat of Nazi Germany. The authors describe in detail the fear of domestic anti-Semitism, especially in the State Department; the inability of American Jews to present a united front; the role of the War Department; and presidential politics. Overall, the reader is presented a picture of a president who had a great deal on his plate during the war and did as much as he could given the political and military situation in Europe in trying to bring to an end the horrors that beset the Jews during the Second World War. Overall, the book is an exceptionally detailed work that is worthy of an academic as well as a general audience as it centers in on the important issue that remains with us today; what is the “appropriate response of an American president to humanitarian crises abroad?” (327)