Jewish Collaboration Not All Choiceless Choices Gelissen

Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz, by Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Heather Dune Macadam. 1996

Jewish Nazi Collaborators: Not Just Choiceless Choices: Jewish Kapos Who Went Beyond the German Call of Duty

Rena was a Polish Jew who hailed from Tylicz, which is located southeast of Krakow. Perhaps without intending to, the author touched on the walls that separated Jews from Poles. Before WWII, Rena was in love with a Polish gentile, Andrzej Garbera. Eventually, Andrzej proposed marriage. He offered to let her continue her Orthodox Jewish practices, and to allow the children to be raised Jewish. If that was not enough, he offered to be circumcised and to convert to Judaism. Rena rejected him. She pointed out that, in accordance with prevailing Jewish custom and the wishes of her parents; she could only marry someone who was born Jewish. (pp. 14-15).

THE GERMAN SEXUAL PREDATORS

The Germans dismembered Czechoslovakia and conquered Poland. There are ironies to later German complaints about Russian soldiers raping German women and girls, and the Nazi German preoccupation with RASSENSCHANDE (race defilement). German soldiers were not above raping local women, including Jewish women. (p. 41). Rena herself was the object of persistent, unwanted German sexual attention, from which she successfully hid. (pp. 29-30).

AUSCHWITZ WAS NOT BUILT FOR JEWS

Rena’s work includes helpful footnotes. One of them puts Auschwitz in perspective, pointing out that, before March 26, 1942, the only inmates at Auschwitz were men, mostly Polish gentiles and Russian POWs. (p. 60).

Unlike the vast majority of Jews sent there, Rena was not gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. She was instead made into a forced laborer. Rena describes the frightful cruelties of the Germans, the tortures, deaths, and atrocious living conditions. Later, the Nazis moved her to the women’s camp at Birkenau, and she observed the mass cremations there.

JEWISH NAZI COLLABORATION: CONDUCT BEYOND CHOICELESS CHOICES

While at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rena met inmates of various nationalities. In common with other authors, the author singles out the Jewish kapos, “The girls in the SS offices are constantly complaining about the Jewish kapo, Edita. She’s always reporting them for the littlest thing and then punishing them too severely. She is a tyrant and treats them more severely than some of the German kapos.” (p. 217).

A common exculpation for the gratuitous cruelties of many Jewish kapos is the one about them trying to impress the Germans and thereby enhancing their chances of surviving. However, this exculpation is hollow, because kapos of all nationalities were “in the same boat”, that is, trying to please the Germans so that they could survive, yet many of them were not as cruel as some of the Jewish kapos. Clearly, it was a matter of personal choice, not a choiceless choice.

NON-EXTERMINATORY NAZI GERMAN PLANS FOR EUROPE’S REMAINING JEWS?

Rena had a conversation with the infamous Irma Grese sometime late in the war (1944). Interestingly, Rena quotes Grese as making the following statements, “‘All of you Jews will be sent to Madagascar…You’ll be slaves for the rest of your life. You will work in factories all day long and be sterilized so you can never have children.’” (p. 226). If accurately quoted, Grese’s statements are revealing. They indicate that Jews, diverted into forced labor, were not necessarily in a temporary respite from the gas chambers owing to wartime needs. Instead, at least some of the Jewish forced laborers were to be made into a permanent slave class [as were the Slavs]. The statement of Irma Grese also indicates that the Nazis would not have exterminated the remainder of Europe’s Jews had Germany won the war. Instead, the Nazis were still open to a “Final Solution” that included a mass expulsion of Europe’s remaining Jews.

NOT ONLY SOME JEWS DIED IN LAST-MINUTE NAZI ACTIONS: SOME POLES DID TOO

The author was part of the Auschwitz-evacuating death marches of January 1945. She saw the bodies of those who could not make it. These included not only Jews, but also Poles who had earlier fought in the Soviet-betrayed Warsaw Uprising of 1944. (p. 258).