The actions and attitudes of the councils influenced the Jewish definition of the situation and diminished resistance. How much did such cooperation contribute to the fate of the Jews? In all places, the Germans attempted to isolate and concentrate Jews. According to Fein, when Jews were segregated, more of them were destroyed; segregation accounted for both Jewish vulnerability and the existence and cooperation of Jewish councils. “In most cases, such councils were imposed in states in which the Jews had already been isolated by the native population, shunned, and/or singled out as targets of attack.”28 As noted, a past history of anti-Semitism and highly developed anti-Semitic movements were associated with cooperation by the state, national leaders, churches, and populations with Nazi aims. Jewish councils were more accommodating when Jews were isolated and abandoned, surrounded by enemies.
Jewish actions
Not only Arendt but also other scholars regard Jewish passivity as a contributor to German success in killing six million Jews. Bettelheim suggests that the response of the German people might have been quite different if it had been necessary to drag each victim down the street or shoot every Jew on the spot; others wonder whether it all might have been different if the Jews of Stetten, the first German Jews to be deported in 1941 to the east, had been unwilling to move, so that they would have had to be bodily dragged from their houses, shouting and screaming.29 This focus on the victims’ passivity may partly be a result of just-world thinking: the victims brought their fate on themselves, not by deserving it but by not fighting back.d
First, we might wonder how different it all might have been if the German population or the rest of the world had shown a strong response – boycotts and other retaliation and threat of punitive action – or had simply expressed outrage in the course of the Jews’ increasing mistreatment. Second, our judgment of the victims’ behavior will very much depend on our perspective. We can focus on their passivity: “allowing” themselves to be gathered, murdered, or worked to death as slaves. We can focus on their attempts to evade and at times resist the killers and to maintain human dignity in the camps. And we can attempt to understand their psychological experience.
Jews frequently acted when an effective response to the threat was possible. Psychological coping mechanisms, like denial, might have slowed their leaving Germany, but over 60 percent of Jews who lived in Germany in 1933 had left by October 1941, when immigration was forbidden. The same proportion of Austrian Jews fled between the German takeover of Austria in 1938 and October 1941, “exploiting all means – legal and illegal – available. A study of those remaining in Worms in October 1941 indicated that the overwhelming majority had emigration plans and had applied for visas; almost all applied to the United States, which rigidly restricted immigrants.”30 They had nowhere to go.
About three-fourths of Estonian Jews, the only group of Baltic Jews that had an extended period of time between threat to their nation and full occupation, fled to the interior of the Soviet Union in 1941. Dutch Jews did not passively wait to be rounded up. According to a German report of August 3, 1941, only one of five Jews reported when called up, and the rest left their homes and went into hiding.31 I described some of the actions of the Belgian Jews. Jews extensively participated in resistance movements in occupied territories, often under assumed names so that they would not endanger their families. In many countries, they participated in resistance more than the native population, especially the Zionists, socialists, and communists among them. In some places, strong anti-Semitism made it difficult for Jews to join the resistance. For a Jew to join the Polish underground, he had to lie and pretend to be a non-Jew.32
In the Warsaw ghetto, nearly unimaginable suffering due to hunger, disease, isolation, and the slow death of an immense number of people crowded into a small area was followed by the deportation to the death camps of 320,000 Jews between July and September 1942. Left behind were younger people, some of them former Zionists, used for slave labor. Their families had been deported and were therefore not subject to retaliation. Doubts about Nazi intentions were gone. It is under these conditions that the Warsaw uprising began. It was delayed by the refusal of Polish resistance organizations to aid the revolt. The revolt began on April 19,1943. After four weeks of fighting, the Germans penetrated the bunker of the central command. To destroy the remaining Jews without further losses of their own, they burnt down the ghetto.
In the camps, although there were different modes of adaptation, many prisoners actively engaged with their environment rather than passively succumbing to it. Escape or resistance was made extremely difficult by hunger, brutalization, diminished life drives, extremely low probability of success, and examples of terrible punishment. While relatively rare, there were escapes and uprisings at Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Sobibor. According to many accounts, the prisoners who survived learned to dissemble – for example, to save their strength by not working but appearing to do so. Inmates continued to care for themselves, to try to keep clean.33 While it varied in the camps how much prisoners competed with each other for scarce resources or maintained solidarity, under conditions that clearly favored the former, bonding and solidarity were frequent.34
The psychology of victims
Many influences affected the victims’ experience and state of mind. The perception of reality is a construction from “objective” elements, the reality “out-there,” and past experience, personality (and the nature of one’s group), and current needs. Intense threat or danger can lead to psychological maneuvers, usually automatic, that enter into the construction of reality, their purpose to reduce the experience of threat and anxiety.
Freud proposed the idea of defense mechanisms, the screening or altering of our perception of events in the world and our own thoughts and feelings in order to reduce
