Chajka Grosman, one of the last survivors among the leaders of the uprising of the Białystok ghetto, was also among the initiators of the Revolt of the Warsaw ghetto. She is President of the MORESHET Institute, in Israel, charged with the preservation of the memory of the Jews of Poland. She was a MAPAM deputy in the Knesset. This text is that of her intervention at the Fiftieth-Anniversary ceremony organized in Paris by our friends of the Cercle Bernard Lazare and the Fondation Jean Jaurès. It is doubtless her last public intervention. We have just learned, indeed, that Chajka Grosman has had a serious accident (she slipped on a staircase) during a friendly visit to an Arab village near Jerusalem. She is at present in a coma. We wish her a return to health.
Out of the depths I called you, but you did not come. Out of the abyss I called you, but there again you did not come. Who could have come, but did not, on the nineteenth of April fifty years ago, at the moment when the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto broke out? Twenty-seven days and twenty-seven nights, a handful of young men and young women with a few weapons fought against the death sentence imposed upon the Jewish people and its destruction. This event symbolizes all the rebellions that broke out in the ghettos and the death camps, and the battles in the forests. These were all battles lost in advance, but their end was a sad victory.
Abba Kovner used to say and say again: “It is not enough to study what happened; we must seek out how it was possible for that to happen.” This question has given us no rest these last fifty years. I turn back toward my memory, I leaf through the yellowed pages, and sometimes it seems to me that my soul was formed by the humanist education that filled me with enthusiasm in the youth Movement when I was young. Perhaps we are really in a world of dogs? Perhaps the lost battles, the revolt from atop the rooftops and from the depths of the bunkers, were from the start the sign that no hope would spring from there? In truth, were we left on the surface of the earth solely to seek out the strength and the right to speak to the world through the mouth of a powder keg? Those who remember the feeling of hopeless waiting of our people dying before our very eyes can ask who will deliver us from our enemies if not our own power. But if that were the truth, Europe would still be under Nazi occupation and the Jewish people would not yet have a country of its own. My mind strains to see, in spite of everything, that human dignity and the spirit will triumph in the end, even if all that comes about later. Absolute evil is ephemeral; genocide and slavery have a brief duration. I am again and again preoccupied with what would have to be done so that the soul is not disappointed before consolation arrives.
I must admit it: these days come to me from the depths of my soul at the sight of the old tempest. What has man learned since the houses were burned over the heads of their occupants, what has happened since the ashes were scattered by the winds? Blind hatred of a different race, of a different tribe or ethnic group, fanatical fundamentalism still spews from the depths of that hell and draws a new strength from it. I try to convince myself that evil has but a short life, but what of the evil that grows on all sides? You want to scream — hey! you there in Bosnia, in Bombay, in Gaza, hey! — we are Jews. I know how small is the difference between a day of mourning and a day of celebration.
I do not believe that the Holocaust should be turned into an instrument of patriotic, national Jewish education. Must our people pass through this torment to be the equal of others? Even without a holocaust, do we not have the right to a sovereign country for ourselves? Every nation has the right to its own sovereignty in order to realize its own culture and its own national experience. We want to build our own country without suffering bloodbaths, neither our own nor that of another.
Faced with the revival of racism and antisemitism, I cannot simply say “Be a Zionist, leave everything and come to Israel.” It is necessary to come to Israel when there is antisemitism, and when there is none, when Jews suffer and when they live at ease. The head of racism must be cut off while it is still in the cradle. All of Europe must remember this, for it has not yet learned the lesson. There will be no more Jews killed there. For Germany itself would be destroyed. Today each person makes their own holocaust; after all, there are enough tragedies, and we must not make the Holocaust a commonplace event. It was the universal element of the destruction of the Jews in the Holocaust. Tens of millions of non-Jews, in addition to the six million Jews, were murdered by the Nazis. Yet the Jews died differently. Not because they were capitalists or communists, not because they were good or wicked, not because they fought or remained docile, but solely because they were Jews. “God on high, I speak trembling: for what and why has my people died? Where, then, have they died in vain? Not in a war and not in a battle.” Thus asked Yitzhak Katzenelson, the poet of the Warsaw ghetto. The uprising of the ghetto was the war of the Jews against the Nazis. The decision of the “final solution” was directed solely against the Jews and the Gypsies. The Holocaust was not the result of a natural disaster. People with two hands and two feet and two eyes like you and me did it. Among them there were some who loved music, and certain ones were even mad for classical music. And they did it. After fifty years it is time to understand how limited the power of power is. The destruction of the Jews was an inseparable part of the Nazi system, but nonetheless a part without precedent.
I must repeat the terrible truth: Already around the middle of the year 1941, months before the Wannsee Conference, four young people sat together and reached the conclusion that the mass murders of Jews that had already taken place in one town were only the beginning of the annihilation of all the Jews in every place the Nazis had conquered. I was with Abba Kovner, one of those young people. What should we have done with this terrible truth? Should we have hidden it from the masses of Jews? Remember that there were then nearly half a million Jews in Warsaw. We said to ourselves: let us warn our brothers. Today we all know it: this assessment of our disastrous situation was correct. The human spirit of these young people grasped the inhuman thing that was to happen. The fathers and mothers of children could not face this truth. Even if they had understood, they would have remained without help and without salvation. In any case we had nothing to offer them, for there was no place to go. The pioneering haloutz Jewish youth, together with the Communists and the Bundists, sought partners among the non-Jewish freedom fighters. When all was said and done, they remained alone.
Each of the other peoples found itself on its own land and fought with the hope that the day would come when Nazi Germany would be defeated and it would then recover its freedom. Our people did not have this chance awaiting it. Neither in Poland nor in Hungary, nor in Lithuania, nor in France. At the head of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto there was Mordechaï Anielewicz, who was twenty-four years old. Do not tell me myths about heroes, myths that fade with the passing time in the eternity of history. I did not come from a myth. I am not the salt of the earth. I come neither from the salt nor from the earth, but rather from suffering. I came to Israel from a place where the battle in the ghetto was lost in advance. I do not remember the slogans of that time. I do not remember having thought about saving the honour of the Jewish people. But did the honour of a destroyed people need to be saved? Those who stood aside, those who were quiet, those who collaborated — it is their honour that needs to be saved. The whole image of man needed to be saved. From battles lost against the technological industry of death we must save a spark of innocence, so that humanity may face the dawn.
I have lived with the trauma and the wounds of a new existence for fifty years. In Israel, the Jewish State, the only place where I could breathe — it is customary to speak of our lives from the Holocaust to the redemption as if things were clear and definitive. The truth: our lives waver between these two points, between which we have built a bridge. Daily I am on this bridge, and all my efforts are made in order to cross the time my burden accompanies me. All the yesterdays, all the richness of the spirit, of the belief in humanity, is necessary to win against hatred, disaffection, and the poverty of homeless refugees, without making war and without injustice. The image of friends long lost who are no longer among us, those who could have been parents and grandparents, remains with me wherever I go. A good friend of mine, Tosia Altman, who was a major fighter in the Warsaw ghetto and at 18 Miła Street (the HQ of the Revolt — Ed.), wrote in her last letter: my people die before my eyes, I clasp my hands and I cannot save them. I know she could have saved herself, but she chose rather to fight in the uprising for something that, it seems, was greater than her own life.
I was fortunate to survive after the uprising in the ghetto. I live in Israel with all the feelings of exaltation and all the hours of sadness. We have brought about a time of hope such that we will no longer be forced to fight in a last battle of the war without choice. The choice today in our hands is a life of peace without hatred or revenge.