Tales of Jewish resistance rescued from history’s amnesia By Phillip Deery
May 28, 2021 — 4.00pm The Light of Days: Women Fighters of the Jewish Resistance by Judy Batalion. HISTORY The Light of Days: Women Fighters of the Jewish Resistance Judy Batalion Virago, $32.99 X-Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos Who Helped Defeat the Nazis Leah Garrett Chatto & Windus, $35 There is a persistent myth that European Jewry meekly acquiesced in their own annihilation during World War II. That iconic photograph of a Warsaw ghetto boy surrendering with his arms raised is remembered more than the context: the heroic but doomed ghetto uprising of April-May 1943. The misconception that Jews were submissive or compliant was assisted by Zionist politicians in Israel during the early postwar years. They sought to distinguish European Jews from Israeli Jews: the former were physically weak and passive, and embodied the past; the latter, who fought for Israel’s independence, represented the strong wave of the future. The new arrivals were greeted with hostility or indifference. Some survivors were dismissed as sabnonikim (soaps), alluding to the soap Nazis allegedly made from the fat of incinerated corpses in the extermination camps. In other countries to which they emigrated, Holocaust survivors remained silent, usually self-imposed, due to survivor guilt, the suppression of painful memories or simply a desire to assimilate quietly. Tales of resistance and heroism were rarely heard. When survivors were acknowledged, their resilience rather than resistance became the dominant Holocaust narrative. Footage of skeletal concentration camp survivors became embedded in the popular consciousness. The Light of Days and X Troop rescue unknown stories of resistance from this historical amnesia. One focuses on young Jewish women in Poland who played an important role in opposing their oppressors; the other on German and Austrian Jewish refugees in England who became Britain’s secret shock troops of World War II. Both groups, fearless and courageous, were animated by a raw, defiant desire for revenge: to kill those who had extinguished their families, friends and former lives. Neither story has previously been told in such detail. Judy Batalion draws on overlooked, untranslated Yiddish memoirs, supplemented by recorded testimonies. The brutal Nazi occupation of Poland and the implementation of the Final Solution provides the overarching context to the profoundly unsettling and often riveting The Light of Days. Judy Batalion draws on overlooked, untranslated Yiddish memoirs, supplemented by recorded testimonies, to reconstruct the wartime lives and ground level exploits of a remarkable cadre of Jewish women ghetto fighters. They were all single, all young (some as young as 15) and all unsung heroines. X-Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandoes Who Helped Defeat the Nazis by Leah Garrett. Most were kashariyot, or couriers, who carried food, weapons, medicine and messages to and from the barricaded Polish ghettos in support of the armed underground resistance. All means were pursued: grenades were smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto in menstrual pads and revolvers inside teddy bears. Those with Aryan appearance and Polish accents were especially favoured for these highly dangerous missions. Armed with fake IDs, fake background stories, bleached hair and steely nerves, they disguised their Jewishness, beguiled the Gestapo and travelled to surrounding Polish towns to save other Jews, conduct sabotage or, as human radios, transmit the latest reports of Nazi atrocities. Most were blackmailed or betrayed, captured and murdered. But they embodied hope and the will to survive. They were a backbone of the resistance, playing a critical role in ghetto uprisings and death camp rebellions. And they countered the myth of Jewish passivity. None went to their deaths like sheep. Leah Garrett’s X Troop is also a compelling read. It is based on deep archival research and, unlike The Light of Days, takes far less licence with imaginative reconstructions of emotions and conversations. It is also more academic in tone and coherent in structure. But similarly, it focuses on a group of Jews who were in the frontline fight against the Nazis. Members of X Troop training on Idwal Slab. These fighters were refugees from the Third Reich. Most had arrived in England via Kindertransport in the late 1930s and were interned as “enemy aliens” in 1940. (There is an Australian connection: some were sent on the Dunera to the Hay internment camp in NSW.) Upon release, they were selected for advanced commando and counterintelligence training in a unique German-speaking unit formed in 1942, conceived by Lord Mountbatten and approved by Winston Churchill, who named it X-Troop. They were highly motivated: they knew that their families were being persecuted in the ghettos or murdered in the camps, and all 87 who were offered a place in the elite X-Troop accepted without hesitation. Each volunteer underwent a metamorphosis. Their European Jewish identity and all connections with the past were shed, and a new “British” identity was constructed. The peaked cap of the German schoolboy had been replaced by green beret of the British commando. Their new British names (which were retained postwar by those who survived) and their new Anglo-sounding accents minimised the chances of being shot if captured. When X-Troopers were killed behind the lines, their former identities remained hidden: they were buried under their noms de guerre with the Christian cross, not the Jewish star. Garrett’s evocation of the tension and drama of the many clandestine operations in Europe undertaken by X-Troopers is gripping. From the disaster at Dieppe to the landings on D-Day, X-Troopers were invariably in the advance party (hence their disproportionally high casualties), able to interrogate the enemy in fluent German and gather valuable intelligence. They were daring, resourceful and unflinching. The thirst for revenge by X-Troopers whose Jewish families were gassed and burnt was not quenched. Garrett tells the poignant and remarkable story of one X-Trooper who late in the war searched for his family, travelling deep in the heart of Germany and occupied Czechoslovakia. Eventually he located them, alive, in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. His father tells him, “We can never get adequate revenge for this, because we can’t be that cruel.” But the thirst for revenge by X-Troopers whose Jewish families were gassed and burnt was not quenched. A great many continued to hunt Nazis at war’s end, provided evidence at the Nuremburg trials, and assisted with the Allies’ denazification project. The history of World War II contains many dark shadows and obscure corners. Batalion and Garrett both illuminate part of that veiled history. The stories of brave Jewish ghetto girls active in the underground resistance, and Jewish refugees being transformed into elite British commandos, are important to tell because they have been forgotten or concealed in previously classified archives. Equally important, both books challenge the fallacy that Jews did not fight back, did not have agency and were partly to blame for their own destruction. The myth of passivity will be perpetuated, but not by those who read these two books. Phillip Deery is an Emeritus Professor of History at Victoria University, Melbourne. https://www.theage.com.au/culture/books/tales-of-jewish-resistance-rescued-f rom-history-s-amnesia-20210519-p57t7k.html?fbclid=IwAR3_6-WuTXxO3S6-awoHt7C4 gCuAx4i-8-g8KXLw2Sqrl2CRBCUt5bAyXY4 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ R E C O N C I L I A T I O N C O N F ER E N C E L I S T قائمة مؤتمر المصالحة since 1994 by the Jewish People’s Liberation Organization End Zionism & Judaeophobia abraham Weizfeld PhD moderator-founder <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] political declaration JPLO ( a Bundist chapter ) <https://www.academia.edu/45689019/Jewish_Peoples_Liberation_Organization_J_ PLO_Organisation_pour_la_liberation_du_Peuple_Juif_OLP_J_a_Non_Zionist_Decla ration_v4_2_3_Jewish_Bundist_Organization_?email_work_card=abstract-read-mor e> https://www.academia.edu/45689019/Jewish_Peoples_Liberation_Organization_J_P LO_Organisation_pour_la_liberation_du_Peuple_Juif_OLP_J_a_Non_Zionist_Declar ation_v4_2_3_Jewish_Bundist_Organization_?email_work_card=abstract-read-more <http://bundist-movement.org/about-us.html> http://bundist-movement.org/about-us.html the books Sabra and Shatila (1984) 2009 <http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000255066/Sabra-and-Shatila.a spx> http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000255066/Sabra-and-Shatila.as px The End of Zionism : and the liberation of the Jewish People 1989 <http://www.academia.edu/11243333/THE_END_OF_ZIONISM_and_the_liberation_of_t he_Jewish_People> http://www.academia.edu/11243333/THE_END_OF_ZIONISM_and_the_liberation_of_th e_Jewish_People Nation, Society and the State : the reconciliation of Palestinian and Jewish Nationhood <https://www.academia.edu/40349204/VOLUME_I_SECOND_EDITION_THESIS_NATION_SOC IETY_AND_THE_STATE> https://www.academia.edu/40349204/VOLUME_I_SECOND_EDITION_THESIS_NATION_SOCI ETY_AND_THE_STATE <https://www.academia.edu/40349264/VOLUME_TWO_SECOND_EDITION_THESIS_METHODOL OGY_OF_NATIONAL_IDENTITY> https://www.academia.edu/40349264/VOLUME_TWO_SECOND_EDITION_THESIS_METHODOLO GY_OF_NATIONAL_IDENTITY The Federation of Palestinian and Hebrew Nations <https://www.academia.edu/38380122/The_Federation_of_Palestinian_and_Hebrew_ Nations> https://www.academia.edu/38380122/The_Federation_of_Palestinian_and_Hebrew_N ations <https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-1313-6> https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-1313-6 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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