Jews against the Nazis

Press, 27 January 1979, Page 17

Jews against the Nazis

-ws Against Hitler. By Lucien Steinberg. Gordon and Cremonesi. 358 pp. $9.50. (Reviewed by Michael Pugh)

It was a commonly acknowledged right in the Mauthausen concentration camp that if you could no longer withstand the regime you were entitled to make your way to the top of the stone quarry and throw yourself down the steep cliff. The guards would jeer. One day a young French Jew took this course. He stopped and chatted with two SS men, shook hands ■with them, and then jumped. He pulled them over with him. Acts like this did not win the war, and in many cases the German reprisals were disastrous. But even a futile resistance had a great symbolic significance, no more so than for Jews.

Lucien Steinberg shows that Jews did resist Nazism if only because some of them learned that they were doomed to certain death anyway. He acknowledges that in occupied countries where assimilation into the local culture had proceeded fully then a specifically Jewish resistance did not emerge. In France, it was more

patriotism than Jewishness which made Jews resist. On the other hand where a large, socially cohesive Jewish community existed, as in Poland, revolt was sustained by Jewish organisations.

There are points on which one would like clarification. What exactly was Nazi policv towards the .lews' At one stage Steinberg leaves the impression that they were all to be killed outright. But the word “annihilation" in Hitler’s terminology covered a multitude of bestialities from herding into ghettos to gassing. Perhaps the Nazi programme was more ad hoc and less highly programmed than Steinberg implies. The book covers a wide field, dealing with Jewish resistance in each of the fascist States, the Western countries, the death camps and the ghettos, though the section on Russia is less than adequate. At times the work has the character of a collection of testaments rather than a thesis with manifold perceptive insights. But it is a formidable dossier of evidence which should nail once and for all the myth that the Jews submitted tamely to their tormentors.