In her deeply flawed book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the philosopher Hannah Arendt asserted that had Jews—and Jewish leaders in particular—refused to cooperate with the Nazis, the Final Solution would not have been nearly so effective as it was. She points to those Jews who served on Jewish councils (Judenräte), in ghetto police forces, and most notoriously as Kapos (supervisors of other prisoners) in the death camps. Following World War II, many in Israel came to similar conclusions, and there were numerous instances of vigilante violence directed at such Jews by their fellow survivors. In the 1950s, accused collaborators began to be put on trial by the Jewish state. This is the subject of a new book called Bitter Reckoning. David Mikics writes in his review:
The hellish reality that the Nazis created for the Jews of Europe was hard to parse using the ideas of good and evil that prevail in peacetime civilian life. During the Shoah, handing over others to death might be the only way to save yourself, or your friends, or your parents, or your children. This was routinely the case for Jewish policemen in the ghettos who were spared because they rounded up other people’s families—and even their own families.
Were such actions laudable? Surely not. They are reprehensible. But they were also common enough to make any morally and historically sensitive person hesitate before passing judgement. The death sentence that targeted the Jews of Europe for extermination was handed down and carried out by the Nazis, not by the people they murdered and tortured.
The 1962 trial of Hirsch Barenblat, the head of the Jewish police in the Bedzin ghetto—who participated in bringing Jews to the slaughter but later helped rescue others—was one such example that, at the time, attracted attention in the Israeli press:
To many Israelis, Barenblat’s actions were appalling. The journalist and politician Uri Avnery considered the Barenblat trial even more important than the Eichmann proceedings. . . . Avnery and Arendt, and others like them, wanted the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to embody a higher sacrificial morality based on historical foreknowledge. The Jews of Europe, they implied, should have sacrificed their own lives instead of assisting, even in small ways, the executioners of their people. But establishing a standard that bears little connection to the historical circumstances or to the lived experience of actual survivors is not a higher form of morality; it is a form of egocentric fantasy, which victimizes the victims while celebrating those who criticize them for living.
Similarly, the fantasy that armed Jewish defiance would have stopped the genocide dishonors the victims of the Shoah, who overwhelmingly saw no such possibility. Were they wrong? In fact, history confirms their skepticism and should temper our wish to see images of heroic Jews triumphing over the Nazis. While the brave partisans and ghetto fighters will and should live forever in Jewish memory, . . . holding them up as a moral standard imposes another unbearable burden for millions of other innocent victims of a genocide.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/294059/kapos