by Yorgos Mitralias
‘The second story relates to the Wilna ghetto. Until its extermination, some of the men were taken out of the ghetto to work in an arms factory. The director of the factory was a young SS officer (his name can be found in Kovner’s book) who took a good look at the men who came to work every morning. Having realised that Kovner was their leader, he arranged to see him face to face and asked him point-blank: ‘Boys, do you need any weapons?’ Kovner was flabbergasted. He feared he was being provoked, but the other man handed him a revolver, and has done so every day since. When the convoy left, he repeated this operation, which was extremely dangerous for both of them. Many years later, during Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Kovner, who was a witness for the prosecution, told the court the story of this officer. Eichmann, in his glass cage, listening with a tense expression, suddenly burst out: ‘I know this traitor, we couldn’t destroy him’. It’s possible. But unfortunately there’s no one to ask if he’s still alive. (1)
This incredible story of the SS officer who supplies weapons to Jewish prisoners destined for death, so that they can free themselves from their Nazi executioners, is taken from the fascinating autobiographical book “Les sentiers du passé” (Ed. Syllepse) by the great USSR historian Moshe Lewin. And it came to mind when we read the latest news about the – ever-growing – movement of Israeli reservists who refuse to serve in Gaza, and whose slogan is the eloquent ‘An eye for an eye and we all go blind’…
Of course, it’s no coincidence that both Eichmann and Netanyahu use the same word, ‘traitor’, to describe their compatriots who disobey their orders and refuse to take part in their wars. Moreover, both Eichmann and Netanyahu also used the same word, ‘terrorists’, to make their ‘enemies’ unpresentable – Jews then in the case of one, Palestinians now in the case of the other!
However, beyond their analogies, if not their similarities, it has to be said that there is at least one major difference between these two cases of refusal to obey orders from superiors. In the current Israeli case, as noted by the Israeli media +972’, “which spoke to several associations for the defence of “refusniks”, most of the reservists who have defied enlistment orders in recent months have no “real ideological objection to the war”. Rather, they are ‘demoralised, weary or exasperated by its interminable duration’.
The SS officer who armed the young Jewish prisoners – and partisans – in Vilnius had a very different motivation. He did something qualitatively very different: he was not content either to refuse the war out of pure pacifism, or to show compassion for the Jewish ‘slave’ workers in his armaments factory, or even to hide them and help them survive, as Wehrmacht officer Wilhelm Hosenfeld did for the Jewish pianist from the Warsaw ghetto Władysław Szpilman (2), which would already be enormous. He went much further, joining in, quite consciously, with these Jews, offering them weapons, day after day, without them asking him for them (!), so that they would fight against his Nazi Germany and his army, of which he himself was an officer! In short, this SS officer is the perfect ‘traitor’ because he changed sides, going from the camp of the executioners to that of their victims, in order to fight with them – with arms in hand – against genocidal barbarity!
Having said that, the great problem facing the Jewish population of Israel, and consequently the whole of the Middle East, is that, with a few (heroic) exceptions, there is a cruel lack of such ‘traitors’. Admirable ‘traitors’ to their racist and genocidal state, who would save the honor not only of their Jewish nation but of all humanity by deciding to change sides and fight with the victims of their own country, expropriated, humiliated, oppressed, massacred, deported, ethnically cleansed and exterminated in what is the VERY definition of genocide!
However, what is becoming increasingly clear is that the urgent need for these ‘traitors’ is now being felt far beyond Israel and the Middle East, practically everywhere on our planet. And that’s because, at a time when the brown plague is resurfacing, these ‘traitors’ and their exemplary practical internationalism are more than vitally needed as an antidote to the nationalist demons of the inter-war years, which seem more threatening than ever. We need people who push their anti-fascist or anti-colonialist logic to the limit, like the Frenchman Georges Boudarel did when he decided to join the Viet Minh maquis fighting French imperialism in the early 1950s. Or like the young French Trotskyists who dared the unthinkable by publishing and distributing in 1943-1944, the mimeographed newspaper ‘Arbeiter und Soldat’ (Worker and Soldier) among the German soldiers at the Brest submarine base. Needless to say, all of them paid dearly for their internationalist initiative: Boudarel found himself in the sights of impenitent French colonialists who wanted revenge, for the rest of his life, while the thirty or so French internationalists and German soldiers in the Brest group were either executed or sent to the Eastern Front or to concentration camps. As for the leader of this group, the young Berlin Jewish revolutionary Martin Monath alias Widelin, after miraculously surviving an initial execution by the Gestapo (two bullets to the head and next to the heart), he was recaptured and hanged.
Just a few days before the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World Slaughter, and at a time when the specter of Hitler and his brown plague is once again hovering over our old continent, it is more than useful to remember these heroic internationalists and to realize that their exemplary battles are even more relevant today…
Notes
- Abba Kovner: Jew, fighter, poet, left-wing Zionist. After trying to organize an uprising in the Wilna (Vilnius) ghetto, he fled through the sewers with his comrades to the forests, where he became a legend for his fighting exploits at the head of a thousand Jewish boys and girls, in conjunction with Soviet partisans. After the war, seeking revenge, he tried, fortunately unsuccessfully, to poison the water in major German cities. Once in Israel, he was active in the Zionist Left and justified the massacres of Palestinians.
- See Roman Polanski’s beautiful film ‘The Pianist’ about the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and the story of the Jew Szpilman and his savior, a Wehrmacht officer.