Microhistories of Jewish Clandestine Performance, Self-Orientation and Survival during the Holocaust

Abstract

Following the Nazi occupation of much of Europe, millions of ordinary citizens found themselves cast in unfamiliar, sometimes wholly clandestine roles. Many of these roles came to be life- and death-defining. For Jews and other targeted minorities, going undercover became a matter of everyday resistance and survival. In what were previously spaces of co-existence, they routinely risked being attacked, blackmailed or exposed—at times by former neighbours or by people offering shelter.

For Jews in hiding or seeking to ‘pass’ openly under another identity, the breakdown of all norms turned habitual, daily acts—including of self-presentation and self-orientation—into what the sociologist Stanisław Ossowski called an ‘endless surviving’, a ‘temporary eternity’. The unbounding of past experience drove a radical reshaping of agency among people struggling to survive. According to many of their first-hand testimonies, this adaptive agency was largely defined by performance. Their recollections offer distinctive performance vernaculars that detail the covert ways of being that emerged in this world of pervasive observation and threat.

This article draws on the postwar concept of Alltagsgeschichte—‘everyday history’ or ‘microhistory’ from below—to analyse a range of sources relating to occupied Poland. It investigates accounts of performing, improvising and cultivating know-how in extreme circumstances—from Jewish children masquerading as non-Jewish adults to Jewish activists passing within the Polish underground. It examines practices of self-presentation articulated by Jews living undercover, including how they interpreted changing modalities of space and unfamiliar cultural repertoires. It traces how they adapted by means of performance not only to abrupt, catastrophic situational shifts, but to changes that unfolded over years, forcing individuals to keep improvising, keep repeating—without missteps—even as conditions deteriorated beyond recognition. Finally, it suggests the everyday histories of Jewish passers constitute a cultural remembering that is increasingly vital today, as others fleeing contemporary atrocities are compelled to perform to attain refuge.

Notes

1 I would like to thank Duncan Jamieson for invaluable conversations, suggestions and editorial help with the drafts of this article and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. Unless otherwise stated in the list of references, all translations (and any errors therein) from Polish-language sources are my own. Translations of some excerpts from Żywulska (2011) are slightly modified from the published English-language version.

2 Sonia Landau ultimately kept the name of this wartime alias, under which she also published her memoir of the Warsaw ghetto Empty Water (2011) in Polish in 1963.

3 Krystyna’s interactions with the guards further highlight her alertness to contingency and close reading of behaviour. Using deceptive techniques similar to those deployed in her interrogation, she seizes on a moment of neglect to gain access to Zosia’s cell. When confronted, she judges (correctly) that the flustered official will not relay to his superiors how she was left unobserved by one guard and duped the other. While Krystyna’s encounter with Zosia was uncommonly fortunate and most prisoners had no such opportunity to secure their fates, the capacity to exploit rare, chance events by means of performance will also be a recurring theme in other first-hand accounts that follow.

4 Chances to escape diminished with successive Nazi decrees. In Poland, home to the largest Jewish population in pre-war Europe—some 3.5 million people, approximately 10 per cent of the total population— the odds of survival for Jews who did not initially flee to the Soviet Union are estimated at just 1.5 to 2 per cent (see Grabowski in Zalc and Bruttmann 2017: 133).

5 For example, ‘cooperation’ might involve joining the Jewish Ghetto Police or what the Germans called the Judenräte (Jewish councils) to avoid initial deportation to the camps. ‘Coping’ might involve finding employment in German-run workshops, selling personal possessions and participating in the black market. The majority of responses fell between coping and evasion. However, once the liquidations began, usually the sole recourse was some form of self-concealment. This meant either going into hiding or disguising one’s origins by passing as ‘Aryan’ according to the Nazis’ racial classification system. In reality, each survivor’s trajectory usually involved different strategies and modalities of social visibility, depending on immediate personal circumstances and attachments, material resources and variations in local enforcement measures.

6 According to the 1931 Polish census, 79 per cent of Polish Jews spoke Yiddish as a primary language, 12 per cent Polish and 9 per cent Hebrew (GUS 1938: tab. 10).

7 Everyday racial or queer passing long pre-dated World War Two, including among European Jews who, to mitigate antisemitic discrimination, had sought to develop a ‘dual legibility’—for instance, passing as non-Jewish within the majority culture and as Jewish within ‘one’s own’ culture (see Wallach 2017). However, under Nazi occupation, this capacity to regulate ethnic and religious modes of self-presentation became a vital survival tool.

8 The importance of certain of these factors in Jewish passing has been discussed at length. See, for example, Engelking (2001), Paulsson (2002) and Melchior (2004).

9 The fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust, like that of elderly Jews and disabled people, was particularly stark. The Nazi plan to prioritize the extraction of forced labour dictated that those deemed ‘unfit’ for work be sent directly for extermination. According to Michlic (2017: xvii), only 6 to 11 per cent of Europe’s pre-war population of Jewish children survived, compared with about 33 per cent of adults. In Poland, children formed a high proportion of the Jewish population, with nearly 30 per cent of Polish Jews registered in the 1931 census aged 14 or under (GUS 1938: tab. 13).

10 Exploitation of chance might require complete breaks from established routine. Nechama Tec (1990: 59) recounts how Oswald Rufeisen, passing as a Polish-German Christian, had to cover his momentary hesitation at wearing a gifted medallion of Mary and Jesus Christ to avoid causing offence and being detected.

11 Child inhabitants like Głowiński, who often grew up entirely within the ghettos or else were scarcely old enough to remember pre-war landscapes and social arrangements, experienced these new, harsh environments in unique ways. They frequently had to rely on scraps of memory and selected details or directions brought to their attention by adults. Rachel Auerbach’s diary recalls a conversation between two girls of 11 and 5 breaking down because the younger girl could not conceive of the lake and swans described by the other (see Eisen 1990: 75). Beyond the ghetto walls, chance gaps in knowledge could be hazardous. Many young passers sought to form ‘ad hoc, family-like structures’ that provided mutual support and vital ways of sharing information, such as where to find food and shelter and how to speak to local adults (see Michlic 2017: ix).

12 Żywulska (2011), who experienced long-term starvation in the ghetto before escaping, described her inner frustration when encountering a Jewish passer who entered to source a fur for his Polish girlfriend: ‘My stomach is dry; my face is swollen; my eyelids are blue. I’m steeped in suffering, filled with despair. I have been silent for months, with my teeth clenched, my forehead glowing and emptiness in my brain … . I am young like you, and the only thing I want is to eat. I do not wish for you to be hungry. I want you to understand that hunger is painful; hunger will overpower you or knock you down, and it triggers contempt, hatred and meanness.’

13 Głowiński adds that at moments of extreme peril, a person may become ‘conscious of having no influence over [their] fate’, ‘coming in some sense to resemble an object’ (2005: 95).

14 Rufeisen recalls: ‘I came to feel that if anyone [left here] had a right to these Jewish goods it was I … . Besides, I needed the clothes very much. It also occurred to me that by asking for Jewish things I would add to my legitimacy as a Pole. No one who asked for such things would be suspected of being a Jew. No Jew would have the guts to do that. At that point I was already sliding into my new role. This was part of the game’ (see Tec 1990: 62–3).

15 On the widespread perception that childhood recollections of passing are unreliable—due to factors like disjointed narratives and occasional involuntary errors— Grynberg counters that ‘children rarely have ideological, political, or other reasons to manipulate information’ (in Michlic 2017: 249). Fellow child survivor and novelist Aharon Appelfeld asserts: ‘Child survivors cannot recollect the Holocaust the way adult survivors do. Their contribution is bound to their experience. But their limited experience is a profound one’ (cited in Michlic 2017: xi).

16 Joanna Sliwa argues that, due to the particular vulnerability of children during the Holocaust, young people and caregivers alike ‘realized that deception, evasion, and disobedience comprised tactics necessary for, but not guaranteeing, children’s existence’ (in Michlic 2017: 27). Play had a crucial role in building behavioural repertoires out of imaginative engagement with their surroundings and taught children to cope with adult interactions when needed. Generally, enactments were cast along gendered lines—with boys playing men being searched on returning from labour and girls imitating disputes in rationing queues (Eisen 1990: 77). However, some used intermittent role-reversals as a mechanism to explore pursuing unexpected opportunities outside the ghetto, as well as taking turns to care and provide for dependants.

17 Such interventions seemed partly intended to render events more comforting and easily comprehensible for readers, in the face of unprecedented atrocity. This ‘overwriting’, as Rita Horváth termed it, particularly affected children’s testimonies and experiences, which Joanna Sliwa asserts have been repeatedly overlooked by scholars, even though children formed about a third of the Jewish population and were often compelled to act independently throughout the occupation (in Michlic 2017: 27).