Simcha Rotem (Rathajzer) known as Kazik, the last of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising fighters, died on Saturday evening in Jerusalem. Symbolically, Rotem died on December 22, the 76th anniversary of the Tsignaria action – the armed guerilla attach by the Jewish underground in Krakow on the German army. Rotem (94) left two sons, five grandchildren and a sister.
Rotem, a member of the pioneering Akiva movement, was an emissary of the Jewish Combat Organization (JCO) in the Warsaw Ghetto and one of its most impressive fighters. He managed to lead some members of the JCO out of the Ghetto through sewers and to lead the survivors to temporary place of sanctuary. After the Uprising he was the communicator for the Organization in Warsaw and participated in the daily efforts to save Jews who were living in hiding.
Rotem’s death has brought the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the most impressive displays of heroism in the history of the Jewish people, back into the headlines. But seventy five years after the events, once again historians face the challenge of preserving them for future generations: there is hardly any authentic visual record of what happened. In a special Davar Rishon project, we are publishing for the first time the few seconds that were documented, together with the creative ways that film directors and other artists have found to overcome the absence of material.
Of all the documentaries dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto and the Uprising, so far no filmed record of the Uprising has been established. Davar Rishon found that a match between a familiar film clip and a picture from the collection of the German General Jurgen Stroop, who was in charge of crushing the Uprising, indicates that it was shot during the Uprising. Although there are numerous written eye witness accounts of the subject, visual material has unique documentary value, and attracts considerable public attention due to its ease of accessibility. “Seeing is believing” is a well-known saying, and anyone who has the visual material, or is able to create visual images, can have enormous influence on how events are remembered.
The city that was attacked 4 times
The first Nazi attack on Warsaw came when war broke out in 1939. In the Jewish revolt that began in April 1943, the Ghetto area was destroyed to an unprecedented degree. Following the Polish revolt in August 1944, the Germans demolished some 80% of the buildings in the city, and the Russians also bombed Warsaw, in the attempt to drive out the Germans. The Museum of the Polish Revolt produced a computer simulation for use with 3D spectacles, called MIASTO RUIN (City of Ruins), to document the destruction of the city at the end of the war, and this eventually became the city’s restoration project, considered one of the largest in history.
In terms of collective memory, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is the focus of enormous public interest, but the photographic evidence is extremely meager. Most filmed accounts of the Uprising in fact use photographs and film of other events, usually the Polish Revolt in Warsaw. A study of the archives of the Holocaust Museum in Washington found 53 copies of film clips dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto (mostly from one source – a Nazi documentary about the Ghetto filmed in May 1942. Yael Hersonsky tried to decipher the riddles it poses in her film “Silence of the Archive”). The only reliable images from the Uprising are German photographs showing how it was suppressed, and there are two parts – the Stroop Report, submitted by the Nazi Commander Jurgen Stroop after the Uprising was crushed, and other pictures found in his personal possessions and not included in the report. Only one clip out of the 53, lasting only 72 seconds, can be dated to the days of the Uprising, by its match to stills in the Stroop Report.
He who controls the camera, controls memory
As part of their victory plans, the Nazis used to document their actions in words and pictures, while depriving their victims of the possibility of documentation. The Nazis extended the saying that “history is written by the winners” to cover photographs and film. Official Nazi film units accompanied the fighting and occupying forces, and documented Nazi control and its victims. One picture from the Stroop collection, that was not included in the Report and has no certain date, shows German soldiers facing two Jews emerging from the ruins.
The video clip that matches the photograph confirms that it is a genuine record from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and not taken from another period and “recruited” to help create the Uprising image.
The stills from this video, apparently taken by Stroop’s own team, have been combined with other documentary material, including Chapter 13 from the Pillar of Fire series, and other clips on the internet. It can be seen at min 3:00 in the movie below:
To renew a story, new pictures must be created
Over the years, various attempts have been made to retell the story of the Uprising. Because of the lack of visual material, more and more documentary makers are using the tools of cinema features to tell the story in their own way. In fact, the use of simulations and animations to compensate for the absence of graphic material could actually fragment memory even more, into competing memories, each with their own different visual images.
In 2006, Ronen Zaretsky and Yael Kipper-Zaretsky made the film “The Last Fighters”, which accompanied some of the Jewish Combat Organization fighters who were still alive. The film was based on later evidence, some close to the actual Uprising sites, including the sewers, and on relatively simple computer animation, based on what the witnesses remembered, to illustrate the tension in the moments before the Uprising began and its first moves. The tone of the film is sad, and seeks to portray the personal experiences of participants rather than discuss the aims and significance of the Uprising. The tendency in the film was to argue that Poland was honoring the Uprising fighters, while the State of Israel had forgotten them.
“The Last Fighters”, Ronen Zaretsky and Yael Kipper-Zaretsky, 2006
Last year the New Jewish Museum in Warsaw uploaded onto the internet a film about the Uprising called “There was no hope”, which includes animation based on the recollections of fighters who took part in the Uprising, including Marek Edelman, Simcha Rotem, Zvia Lubetkin and Mordechai Anilewitz. In addition to testimony, the film also expresses the animators’ interpretation of a text written by scriptwriters. Such a production already blurs the distinction between a documentary and a feature film, and includes fictional dramatized episodes which never happened but which give the story a vividness that is apparently impossible to achieve without the use of such techniques.
Like the films that preceded it, this film also deals mainly with the lives of people in the Jewish Combat Organization (JCO), and does not mention the existence of the Jewish Military Union (JMU), and also ignores the presence of tens of thousands of Jews who lived in the Ghetto, and without whom the Uprising would not have occurred. Bearing out the film’s title, the animation does indeed show faces without hope, but reading the testimony of the fighters suggests that the name is misleading. The fighters of the Jewish underground, from all the organizations, felt both great despair and great hope at the same time. They took on enormous responsibility and recognized the value of their actions, although they also understood that they could not win, and that nearly all of them would die, which was indeed what happened.
“Without hope. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943”; Museum of the Jews of Poland, 2016
2 fighting organizations were active in the Uprising
Last Thursday, at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, Yuval Haimowitz Zusser and Simon Shechter screened their film, “And will we remember them all?”, a film intended to commemorate the heroism of the Jewish Military Union (JMU). The main claim in the film is that their story and their heroism have been suppressed and erased from history because their leaders were members of Betar Revisionist Zionist Movement (the fighters also included religious Jews, communists and Jews with no declared political affiliation). The Tel-Aviv Cinematheque hall was full, and at the end the audience cheered and applauded wildly.
Unlike the JCO, less than 8 fighters from the JMU survived, and none of them of commander rank. We do not even have a photograph of the JMU Commander Pavel Frankel, only a composite image built from the memories of field communicator Pella Finkelstein. Due to the dearth of testimony about the JMU in general, and the meager knowledge of the surviving members about the Union’s leadership, what we know relies on what others said about it – the historian Ringelblum who visited the JMU headquarters, and members of the JCO such as Zvia Lubetkin and Yitzhak Zuckerman, who mentioned it in their memoirs. Both described the contacts that led to agreement on uniting the organizations, and the frictions that emerged and prevented them from actually uniting. As they saw it, the friction was not due to political differences, since there were ideological differences that were just as severe and complex within the JCO itself, among the various constituent movements that existed in the Ghetto. Arguments centered on every other matter – who would lead the organization, how would they raise money, how would weapons be distributed, should they carry weapons openly, who could join and how.
The main evidence of the actions of the JMU is the record of the battle in Muranow Square, in the report of Stroop himself, which describes the stubborn resistance of the organization’s fighters. The Zusser and Shechter film also uses a range of cinematic techniques to “create a picture” of the JMU story, such as dramatization of Stroop’s descriptions using actors, including the Muranow Square battle, in which the JMU people hung the Polish flag alongside the blue and white Jewish flag. Production of the film took several years, during which time the film-makers accompanied Jutta Hartman, one of the JMU fighters who survived, and documented the hurt and offense she felt at the long neglect of her comrades’ story and her part in it. For her, the invitation she received towards the end of her life to light a torch at the closing ceremony of Holocaust Day at the Ghetto Fighters House could not make up for the years of rejection and even contempt.
Holocaust researchers such as Dr. Havi Dreyfus, Israel Guttman, Dariush Livionka and others, have warned that the attempt to correct the wrong done to the memory of JMU fighters is creating a new injustice. Because of the lack of reliable sources, parts of the story are also based on doubtful Polish sources, who have fabricated events in order to glorify their own alleged role in helping to establish the Union back in 1939.
At the end of the screening, the directors explained that they wanted to refrain from political calculations regarding the commemoration of the Holocaust and the Uprising, and to create an inclusive, non-divisive memory. In fact, a significant part of the film does not deal with the story of the JMU itself, but with allegations of forgetfulness and suppression. Some are certainly justified, but it is not certain that a film which more than anything represents a long and detailed indictment of the JMU’s partners in the struggle against the Nazis can indeed pave the way to shared, non-factional memory.
That same evening, Hili Gross, representing her father Natan Gross who died two months ago, showed the films that her grandfather Natan Gross made in Poland, in a digitally restored version. One of the clips showed an astounding sight: against the background of the Ghetto ruins, survivors of the underground and remnants of Polish Jewry gathered to mark 5 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They unveiled a statue made by Natan Rappoport and the monument that still exists.