by Bennett Muraskin
Discussed in this essay:
Stealth Altruism: Forbidden Care as Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust,
by Arthur B. Shostak.
Transaction Publishers, 2017. 319 pages.
Published in Jewish Currents // Spring 2018
Library shelves bulge with books on the Holocaust; colleges and universities offer many courses on the subject; Holocaust education in public schools is mandated in various countries; Holocaust museums and exhibits abound. Is there any significant aspect of the period yet to be explored? Arthur Shostak makes a convincing case that there is: the history of mutual aid in the slave labor, concentration, and death camps. Shostak believes that the acknowledgment of what he calls “stealth altruism” is a necessary corrective to the impression of the Holocaust as a series of unremitting horrors featuring Jews as helpless victims—a narrative that even well-known books by Primo Levi, Terence Des Pres, and other writers have failed to overcome.
Mutual aid in the ghettos established by the Nazis was well-documented by Warsaw’s Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum and other contemporary observer-victims. Concentration camps, however, have typically been perceived only as a jungle where the strong preyed on the weak, while the Nazi authorities and their helpers, determined to starve, overwork, torment, degrade, and humiliate Jewish inmates, severely punished those who tried to help one another.
Shostak does not deny that there were Jewish predators—kapos, informers, criminals, Jews who just looked out for themselves and Jews so far gone that they could only linger until they died—but he contends that there were also numerous “carers,” inspired by both religious and secular humanist ideals, who evaded the rules and risked punishment to keep their fellow Jews alive, physically and spiritually.
What is his evidence? Shostak has read 195 memoirs written by 178 survivors. These make up less than 4% of all survivor memoirs, he notes, and were written mainly by Western or Central European Jews, who, in fact, made up a small minority of Jewish victims. There is no reason to believe, however, that these women and men were more altruistic than the mass of Eastern European Jews in the camps; if anything, it is arguable that the latter, who were less assimilated, may have displayed a greater degree of Jewish social solidarity.
A trained sociologist, Shostak identifies two character traits key to altruistic behavior among camp inmates: empathy and optimism. Resourcefulness and resiliency were also essential. Not giving up hope was just as important as compassion, he notes, and it appears that two types of people embodied these values: the devoutly religious and the devoutly leftist. They had strong ethical belief systems to sustain them, and they were willing to reach out to their fellow inmates to build a support network. Oddly, however, Shostak, without explaining himself, places “anarchists,” “homosexuals,” and “those opposed to being an employee” in the opposite category, along with “alcoholics, drug users . . . prostitutes and vagabonds.” While it’s true that the Nazis often used criminals within the imprisoned population to enforce their will and to serve as spies and informers, Shostak’s assumptions about the character of particular “types” are unexplained and dubious. Anarchists in particular had a long history of defying unjust authority and were active anti-fascists.
Shostak provides numerous examples of “stealth altruism”: smuggling food and medicine; taking over work details for the weak and sick; huddling together during roll calls for warmth or to prop up faltering inmates so they would not be sent to the gas chambers; “adopting” and protecting orphaned children; intimidating a kapo into kinder behavior. He observes that those Jewish inmates who worked in close proximity to the prison authorities were often in the best position to help. They could coach Jews stumbling out of the cattle cars to say they were the right age to be selected for labor rather than extermination or that they were skilled laborers. They could falsify death records to increase rations, steal food or clothing, or provide inside information about German plans or breaches in security.
To maintain a sense of community under the most savage conditions, Jewish “carers” secretly prayed and celebrated Jewish holidays, set up makeshift schools for children, organized discussions and group singing, told each other stories, shared news of German military defeats, and gave each other “gifts” on special occasions. Merely reminding fellow inmates to think about pre-war life and their hopes for the future could keep them from falling into the despondency that could lead to death.
Although Shostak would like to avoid horror stories because he believes they dominate Holocaust remembrance, he cannot help relating them if he is to document how Jews resisted. One scene that I cannot forget is that of Jewish female inmates rolling away hundreds of baby carriages, emptied of their dead Jewish infants, to be used by German mothers.
His profiles of exemplary Jews include a doctor, Hadassah Rosencraft, and nurse, Luba Tryszyska, who set up a model infirmary in Bergen-Belsen with minimal supplies that saved the lives of many Jewish children. Often the Germans killed Jews who went to the infirmary because they were unfit for work, but in this case, the Germans actually showed off the infirmary to the International Red Cross to prove they were caring for sick Jews. After the camp was liberated by the British Army, Rosencraft and Tryszyska were honored for their work and stayed on to care for people in the DP camps before immigrating to the US.
Shostak does not neglect righteous gentiles. He provides many examples of French and Italian prisoners-of-war who shared food, news, and good cheer to keep Jewish inmates alive. Communists receive special recognition for extending a helping hand to Jews in distress. Even an SS commandant and a few SS guards acted humanely toward Jews, although in many cases they only became humanitarians with the approach of Germany’s defeat.
That Shostak is not a professional historian sometimes shows in his book. He blames rivalry between the German Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party for the collapse of Weimar Germany, to the exclusion of other factors. He argues that Germans were incurable antisemites and that the Nazi government planned the Final Solution from the minute they came to power. He claims that Jews who lived in Polish cities were assimilated, and he ignores the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class organized by the Bund. He mistakenly identifies Bertolt Brecht as a Jew. He also betrays an incomplete grasp of Jewish texts, at one point confusing Jonah with Abraham.
His book suffers from a good deal of repetition and would have benefited from the guiding hand of a good editor. Nevertheless, Shostak accomplishes his mission: he has created “a redemptive Holocaust narrative that includes altruism along with anguish, care along with cruelty and valor along with victimization.”
In the course of his research, Shostak traveled to dozens of Holocaust museums and memorials. The only one he credits with acknowledging “stealth altruism” is Yad Vashem in Israel. I contacted the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and confirmed that Shostak is correct: there are many exhibits on Jewish armed resistance or sabotage, but none on nonviolent resistance in the camps.
Stealth Altruism vastly enriches our understanding of the nature of Jewish resistance to the Nazis in the most desperate and gruesome circumstances.