THE VALUE OF TESTIMONIES
Sara Dina Minuchin Itzigsohn
and José Alberto Itzigsohn
Translated by Menahem Frenkel (Haifa)
The testimonies on the fate of the Jewish residents of the small town of Serock, Poland, during World War II, are a significant contribution to the history and the understanding of the Holocaust. They were written in Yiddish, the language of the protagonists, thus making them unaccessible to Spanish readers.
Therefore the initiative and the efforts of Dr.Silvio Gutkowski, Argentinian psychiatrist who lives and works in Israel are so important ; some of his family members, like many others, emigrated to Argentina before World War II, but many more of his family remained behind and perished in that great historical catastrophe.
The survivors' stories are an important part of the literature on the Holocaust. As we are presented with individual events or with stories of small groups, it is much easier to grasp that overwhelming numbers of millions of people mercilessly persecuted and finally murdered. The horrific and exorbitant size of the Holocaust (Shoa) prevents us from grasping its true dimension. It is always easier to identify ourselves with the tragedy of just one singular human person.
Moreover, what is important is that each narrator (reporter) is the representative of a series of stories which allows the reader
-17-
to identify through a specific experience with the millions of people who lived under the same horrible circumstances.
Serock is only one of hundreds of Polish small towns with a high percentage of Jewish inhabitants, located north of Warsaw, on the Narew River, on the way to Danzig. Serock presented favorable conditions for the economic performance of the Jews- which was always necessary for the life of Poland, along centuries-despite antisemites' opinions and propaganda.
Jewish people there installed a relatively stable life for generations, with the typical components of each village (shtetl): merchants, craftsmen, teachers and rabbis and marginal (on the fringe of society) groups, whose violence was used, paradoxically, to protect them from a hostile environment. Their way of life was affected by external and internal factors. As external factors, we mark the fall of most of Poland under Czarist Russian, with the result that the Jews suffering mayor discrimination. As internal factors: Heavy unrest due to the internal Jewish conflicts between Hasidim=the pious, and Misnagdim= the traditional Orthodox, and also by the penetration of ideas of the non-Jewish world, as the Enlightenment, the general Polish culture, Zionism and socialism in its various forms.
The First World War accelerated this process of imbalance, beset by the growing anti-Semitism of the new Poland, which had become independent of Russia. Many youths sought new economic and intellectual horizons in cities, particularly in Warsaw. Luckily, many families decided to emigrate, especially to Argentina, where there was already a Jewish community
-18-
willing to receive the new immigrants. They emigrated also to other parts of the world, including the British Mandate in Palestine.
Those who remained in Europe endured a life of difficulties and great ideological and political turmoil that accompanied the changes in living conditions.
As we know, the Polish government before the war was pro-fascist, but that did not stop the Nazis from attacking and defeating Poland in the course of a month. Thus, the small Jewish communities were exposed to the violence of the local anti-Semitic groups, encouraged by the german army. The first step was pogroms, intended for terrorizing and dispersing them, thus organized resistance was avoided.
The stories that Gutkowski transmit to us show human groups seeking refuge here and there while hounded like wild animals. The dramatic nature of the testimonies highlights the Nazi methodology to subdue Jewish populations to a total disorientation. They were carried from one place to another in long uncertain journeys, creating a Jewish population unable to plan for the future, thus contributing to their helplessness. Jews could find a temporary hiding at a Polish family and then had to keep escaping. This point that is repeated in several narrations, shows that there was a certain degree of interaction between Jews and Poles that the Nazis tried to prevent at all costs.
Many reached the area of Poland occupied by the Soviet army, but there they were suspected as secret Nazi agents. This mistrust motivated
-19-
some people to return to the German zone, where they came face to face with death that was still not foreseen. Others were evacuated by the Soviets to labor camps in the forests of northern Russia or Central Asia. Their fate was hard, but most of them survived and we will find them giving testimonies for this book.
Those who remained or returned to Poland suffered the various stages of the genocidal policy of the Germans: First, forced concentration in the ghettos of the big cities and Second, as from 1942, the systematic extermination, This was the destiny doomed the by the Nazis for all Jews in the occupied territories. Very few survived in situ, especially Jewish women whose condition could be more easily concealed.
The epilogue of these heartbreaking stories is the return to Poland, of a young man who emigrated to Palestine before the war and volunteered in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. There he meets survivors returning from the Soviet Union; his chronicle (narration) shows a group of people, the Jews of Serock, terribly beaten but not destroyed. The image evokes the stanza of the Vilna Ghetto Resistance: "Mir seinen do," (in Yiddish) "we are here," our life persists despite everything, but certainly not in Poland.
The hostility of paramilitary ultranationalists groups (after the war) and the anti-Semitic policy of the communist government of Gomulka in the '50's ended up with the migration of the last survivors. Only a few hundred Jews remained obstinate in Krakow, Warsaw and elsewhere. Centuries of Jewish existence erased in a very short time. A historical lesson to learn and contemplate, reinforced by the stories of survivors of Serock, to which we refer, and that move us each time we read it again.
-20-
After the war, a group of writers, liberated from Auschwitz, met to think how they should transmit (bequest) this trip to hell they have endured to those who have not been there.
We believe that the narrators of The Book of Serock had more than succeeded in achieving this goal. We expect the Spanish readers might become part of some of those frightening experiences of the Jews under Nazi regime during the years of the Shoah.
-21-
Copyright©Howard Orenstein, 2021.