And We Are Not Saved: Including The Jewish Military Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto

By David Wdowinski

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802224865
• ISBN13: 9780802224866
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Philosophical Library
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Warsaw Ghetto, the Ghetto Uprising, and the Eichmann Trial

In tracing the development of a Jewish philosophy of militant resistance, Wdowinski is candid about the fact that the Jewish pro-Communist political orientation went far beyond the small membership of the CP and its fellow travelers: "The second, the confused political orientation, was largely due to the fact that many Jewish leaders were reared in the spirit of the Russian Revolution, and they thought they could translate the ideas of the class struggle into Zionist terms." (p. 5) When describing the Warsaw Ghetto, Wdowinski had scathing words for the Jewish Ghetto police: "A veritable army of Jewish men from all walks of life, university graduates, business people, and, of course, characters from the underworld--all of them men who looked for personal safety, a little more comfort, a little more food, and others who were degenerates and psychopaths--took advantage of the situation and joined the force which handed over to the Germans hundreds of thousands of their brothers to be sent to labor camps, to Treblinka for extermination, to prisons for torture. I am convinced that aside from total annihilation of the Ghetto by the Germans, the Jewish police was the single institution in the Ghetto that was responsible for the needless murder of thousands of Jews who would not have been found by the Germans without their help. This was one of the darkest chapters in the life of the Ghetto, and one of which the Jewish people were most ashamed." (pp. 32-33) As for Jewish Gestapo agents, Wdowinski comments: "Amongst the Jewish population there were some deluded individuals who, for the sake of personal immunity from arrest, a better labor card, or a bigger ration would gladly turn informers." (p. 42) David Wdowinski and Chaim Lazar cite several sources that describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This book emphasizes the ZZW (rather than the ZOB) and, to a lesser but still notable extent, the role of Poles in support of the Uprising. (see esp. pp. 188-191) Testifying at the Eichmann trial, Wdowinski repudiated the casualness with which the German-ness of the Holocaust had already by then been glossed over. He commented: "I am prepared myself with data and references to scientific treatises on the mystique of the German people, pointing to the fact that such a phenomenon could happen only in Germany; that for hundreds of years the German people had been psychologically prepared for Hitler and Nazism; that this was the only country in the world that had brought in a totalitarian regime through a popular election..." (p. 102). "It is curious that Jewish leaders and Jewish intellectuals should be at the forefront of the legion that is defending Germany with such ardor...They refuse to heed the voice of those who have made studies of it, that Nazism was NOT an accident in Germany; that it was the historical culmination of a process engendered by the elite of German culture for hundreds of years; that such conditioning is not eradicated by wishful thinking; an

The other wing of the Warsaw Ghetto's anti-Nazi resistance

David Wdowinski attempted to deal with the ghosts of his past by composing this short account of what the Ghetto was, how evil operated there and how its remaining community members, not yet murdered, decided it was better to die attempting to take the evil down with them than go to their deaths easily. This is at times not only disturbing as to its accounts of Nazi sadism and brutality, but how the prime victims of the genocide out of desperation or delusions worked against their own survival. He points out how people went along with the manipulative lying enemy wanting to believe they might survive, or win its favor. Additionally, Wdowinski shows how petty politics prevented pre-war rescue efforts in Europe by Zev Jabotinsky, and a United Ghetto Front of Resistance Fighters during the Nazi terror. The former may have saved many millions of people while the latter might have done more to delay the enemies destruction of the remaining Jews. Can a mixture of uncontrolled power, irrational group hatred or paranoia, greed, "social-psychological" experimentation/manipulation and doing atrocities just because we can or relish it, happen again? Is the monster virus of anti-Semitism still out there looking to paint the Jews as the villains? Is this evil attempting to further its aims by denying its capacity for malice?, Or is it out there denying or inverting history against the prime victims of the World War II genocide? The obvious answers are yes to all of these questions. And in a general sense, the events of Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur (today) prove that the world has a long way to go in dealing with genocide, so there should not be anyone who says forget the history it cannot happen again. Therefore, read this book and try to understand the inexplicable.