Talk by David Rosenberg at National/Waltham Forest Stand Up To Racism event for Holocaust Memorial Day 2024
left to right: Sabby Dhalu, SUTR, David Rosenberg, JSG, Vicky Grandon, chair, Rabbi Lev Taylor
Thank you for inviting me to this event in the week when we celebrate the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in January 1945. Auschwitz was established in spring 1940, initially as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners – communists, socialists, trade unionists, gays, and enemies of Nazism, including Jehova’s Witnesses. We remember the brutality they experienced at Auschwitz 1; and mourn the victims of mass extermination at a separate site, Auschwitz-Birkenau, constructed in Autumn 1941 – 2 miles from Auschwitz 1 – as a killing centre with hundreds of wooden barracks and four gas chambers.
Gas chambers were principally reserved for two categories of the Nazis’ diverse victims, – Jews and Roma Gypsies. More than 900,000 Jews and 21,000 Roma, were gassed to death at Auschwitz Birkenau mainly between 1942-44. Several thousand Soviet Prisoners of War were gassed too.
Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe arrived in cattle trucks on trainlines leading directly into Birkenau. Most of the youngest and oldest were immediately exterminated. Those from late teens to late-30s, were assessed for slave labour, which operated in a network of workshops and factories at Monowitz – a few miles from Auschwitz 1
Birkenau was one of six isolated sites the Nazis built within Poland to perpetrate industrial mass murder in gas chambers designed by skilled architects and engineers. The process was overseen by educated administrators. Companies supplying poison gas made handsome profits. Zygmunt Baumann and Hannah Arendt have shown: this was a meticulously planned, and recorded extermination, in conditions of capitalist modernity. That is fundamental to understanding it.
The brick barracks of Auschwitz 1 now house a remarkable museum which describes how the Nazis first experimented with mass killing methods in Germany in 1939 using disabled people, deemed “life not worthy of life”. At Auschwitz, the obsession with eugenics led to selected Jewish and Roma children undergoing gruesome medical experiments.
Around 2.7 million of the 6 million murdered Jews, were killed in factories of death. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest, and operated the longest. A similar number of Jewish civilians were murdered in mass shootings of Jewish civilians in Nazi-occupied areas, especially in the Soviet Union, by Einsatzgruppen units, that incorporated willing collaborators from local non-Jewish populations where antisemitism was strong. Another method: cramming Jews into buildings that were then set on fire.
Other Jews starved to death or succumbed to rampant diseases in the terrible ghetto conditions in which the Nazis occupiers incarcerated them, or met an early death as over-worked, underfed slave labourers. Ghettos isolated Jews from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities. There were hundreds of ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone.
In 1995 I visited Auschwitz for the first time through the Anti Nazi League who led educational trips for trade unionists and anti-racist students. Our guide, then, was a remarkable 84 year old Auschwitz survivor, Leon Greenman, who died in London in 2008.
From 2016 -2019 I returned to Auschwitz annually as a member of the UAF educational team leading the trip. We were based in Krakow for 4-days which included 1 day in Auschwitz where guides led us around the prison camp museum, and the vast bleak space of Birkenau – mostly left as it was.
One museum display that shocks me – every time – is a map that shows the extraordinary lengths the Nazis went to, literally, to deport Jews to death camps in Poland. One of the longest lines runs from Oslo in Norway to Auschwitz. A few hundred Jews were captured and deported from there, initially on ships, then loaded on trains. I later discovered that 46 of these Jews were on the Monte Rosa, a ship captured by the British in 1945 and repurposed. In June 1948 that same ship docked in Tilbury as the “Empire Windrush”.
When Holocaust Memorial Day was inaugurated here in Britain in 2001 – I worried, with some justification, that if it became too formal, too official, this might conflict with more organic and meaningful grassroots commemorations; that the stamp of official approval might affect the content. What about other genocides before the Holocaust and since? Will they be represented? And if it became adopted into the British national diary, would there be room to ask awkward questions about the role of the British state then, or might an official Holocaust Memorial Day depoliticise it? I still worry about that. The questions that still need to be asked – and answered – are:
•What did the British state and British establishment do in the 1930s in the face of rising fascism?
•What did it fail to do, before, during and immediately after the Holocaust? And why?
• Why were so many asylum applications received from those living under Nazism simply ignored?
• Why were credible reports of the Nazis mass murder in Poland, and requests for extraordinary actions by the allies, dismissed?
• Why, compared with other western countries, were so few Holocaust survivors admitted to Britain after WW2?
On the educational trips to Auschwitz and Krakow, I have contributed something I felt was very important but missing: the story of Jewish life in Poland in the decades, indeed centuries, before their mass murder. It was not people alone being destroyed – it was a culture, a language, a civilisation, that included radical progressive movements at its heart, struggling for a better world, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Jews have a 1,000 year history in Poland. In the 1930s, they were more than 10% of Poland’s population. They formed around a third of the population in many large cities including the capital, Warsaw. 90% of Polish Jews then were wiped out.
Auschwitz alone doesn’t tell us this. It’s an end point of a process. What could have been done to interrupt it, to stop it? When? How? What patterns were there to fascism as it emerged? Have we seen these signs elsewhere? Are we indeed seeing them now?
For me, the more poignant, more significant, date is 19th April 1943. That was when the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began, an incredible act of organised resistance by several hundred starved and brutalised fighters aged 13-43 years old, which lasted nearly a month and inspired uprisings in other ghettoes, even in concentration camps and death camps.
What led me to think this way, were the first grassroots Holocaust commemorations I attended, in the early 1980s, 20 years before HMD was created. These took place in
the East End, in Yiddish – the mother tongue of most Jews in 1930s Poland. They were organised by a group – the Friends of Yiddish – who met every Saturday to share Yiddish literature and song. They included refugees who survived Nazi occupation, ghettoization and the camps. They held a special event on April 19th each year, where they shared experiences and cultural treasures from their earlier lives, remembered how Jews resisted, and always honoured the Roma who in the words of the chair, Majer Bogdanski, died in exactly the same way and for the same reasons as the Jews.
These events humanised their former lives and those of the 6 million. Paradoxically, in Poland itself, despite the very right wing authoritarian government that ruled since 2015 until recently, depleted Jewish communities are growing again in around 15 cities, and anti-racists and anti-fascists there organise powerful grassroots alternative events especially in Warsaw to commemorate the ghetto struggles. The Jewish Socialists Group sent delegations to Warsaw in April 2019 and 2023 to participate in these events.
I want to end with this thought, prompted especially by our last visit. We need to look at resistance in broader, more subtle ways. We know the headlines about courageous physical resistance against the odds. But those participants in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had already survived nearly 2.5 years incarcerated in the ghetto before that last physical action. How? They were sustained by an incredible underground system of mutual aid and personal support, especially around welfare, culture and education among people treated by their occupiers as sub-human.
Everyday quiet acts of concealed heroism and passive resistance, that kept people alive, instilled a collective spirit of refusing to submit. They kept a flicker of hope and dignity alive. We have so much to learn from that, for our struggles against all racism, fascism and oppression today!
A rose left in one of the barracks at Birkenau, 2018
rebel notes 