JUDENRAT Collaboration Not Readily Excused Goda

Jewish Histories of the Holocaust, by Norman J W Goda (Editor). 2014

Not Instant Death for Jewish Ghetto Police Disobeying German Orders to Ship Jews to the Death Camps

The reflexive response to Hannah Arendt (EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM), on the excessive obedience of the JUDENRAETE and Jewish Ghetto Police to the Germans, is the choiceless- choice exculpation. However, it was not so simple.

This anthology includes an article by Israeli historian Sara Bender, in which she discusses a rare case of the Jewish Ghetto Police refusing to load the Jews on the death trains (thus acting like Arendt had suggested). It happened at the Bialystok ghetto. Interestingly, and contrary to what one may intuitively suppose, the Germans did not shoot the Jewish Ghetto Police for their defiance.

Citing a Hebrew-language source, Sara Bender writes, “Afterwards, the Jewish police force was placed under the exclusive control of the Judenrat presidency and, in keeping with Barash’ s efforts to maintain high moral standards in the ghetto, the Jewish police refused to round up the Jews from their homes. Although they were severely beaten and accused of sabotaging the evacuation, the Jewish police threw off their hats and left the hunt for the Jews to the Germans themselves.” (p. 82). Bravo!

In addition, Bender (pp. 81-82) acknowledges that there was a problem with the corruption of the Jewish Ghetto Police. The successful efforts of Efraim Barash, the leader of the Bialystok ghetto, to rein-in this corruption, itself contradicts the popular notion that the demoralization and desperation, faced by the doomed Jews, alone accounted for this corruption or made it inevitable.