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Cadmus A
Reviews of Books
TUVIA FRILING. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz: History,
Memory, and the Politics of Survival. (The Schusterman
Series in Israel Studies.) Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis
University Press, published with the support of the Israel Science Foundation, 2014. Pp. xiii, 325. Cloth
$85.00, paper $40.00, e-book $39.99.
Tuvia Friling’s gripping and disturbing book, A Jewish
Kapo in Auschwitz: History, Memory, and the Politics of
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Survival, is an account of the tragic fate of one of the victims of European politics in the twentieth century. Eliezer Gruenbaum was the second son of Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the leader of one of two Zionist groups that dominated Jewish parliamentary life in Poland in the 1920s.
Unlike Leon Reich’s Galician Zionists—who believed
that the Jews in Poland should seek to persuade the authorities to recognize the rights they were granted under
the 1921 constitution and the Minority Treaty imposed
on Poland at Versailles—Gruenbaum supported the position that the Jews’ situation would improve only when
Poland was transformed from a national state into a
“state of nationalities.” This led him to support largescale autonomy for the Jews (and other national minorities) and to work for the creation of a National Minorities
Bloc (Blok Mniejszości Narodowych) in the parliamentary elections of November 1922. Yitzhak’s intransigent
strategy proved self-defeating, and in the second half of
the 1920s his influence waned as that of the more conciliatory Reich and his colleagues grew, particularly after
Józef Piłsudski’s coup in May 1926. In 1932, Yitzhak
moved first to France and then to Palestine, where he
played an important role in the politics of the Yishuv and
the Jewish Agency. He became permanent vice chairman
of the agency’s executive branch and, during the war, a
member of the Polish-Jewish community’s “Committee
of Four” and chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue
Committee. When the State of Israel was established,
Yitzhak was its first Minister of the Interior. After his defeat in the presidential election of 1952, he withdrew
from politics and engaged in historical research until his
death in 1970.
Eliezer Gruenbaum was born in 1908, became a communist at the age of sixteen, and was sentenced to four
years in jail in 1929 for underground communist activity
(the Communist Party was illegal in Poland). He was released after two-and-a-half years as a result of the intervention of his parents and moved to Paris, where he remained active in the communist movement. He fought in
Spain and then, after the outbreak of the Second World
War, went against party policy by attempting unsuccessfully to join the French Army and subsequently enlisting
in the Polish Army in France. After the French defeat,
Eliezer remained active in the French Communist Party
but also expressed doubts as to whether the Soviet Union
would be able to withstand the Nazi onslaught. He was
imprisoned as a communist and deported to Auschwitz,
where he became a kapo, or prisoner functionary, under
the brutal block leader Ludwig Konczal. At the end of
1943 Eliezer was sent from Auschwitz to work in the coal
mines in Yevishovitz and was subsequently sent to Buchenwald where he spent the remainder of the war. After
the liberation of the camp, the communist party accused
Eliezer of beating and murdering prisoners while in
Auschwitz and conducted an investigation into these
charges from both Warsaw and Paris.
One of the great strengths of this extremely wellresearched book is that it provides an extensive account of this investigation based on the records in the
Polish Archiwum Akt Nowych. According to one of his
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repeatedly had to prove their masculinity in their interactions with prisoners. This sometimes proved to be particularly difficult with a number of working-class inmates,
whose physical ideal of powerful, muscular proletarians
carried significant weight in their own notions of masculinity. A militaristic drill program launched by communist
prisoners as a recreational activity was banned by Eicke
because the prisoners were to be robbed of all pride in
their masculinity. In the final chapter, Dillon examines
the relationships between the SS and the population of
the small town of Dachau. He refers here primarily to
analyses by German historian Sybille Steinbacher, which
are not yet available in English, and complements these
with a number of disciplinary incidents that he discovered
in the personnel files of SS men relating to disputes between Dachau residents and individual members of the
SS. The book ends with an epilogue that traces the careers
of a number of SS men after the outbreak of the war. This
is ultimately disappointing because it merely rehashes material that is sufficiently well known in the literature and
foregoes a deeper analysis that ties together the author’s
results here.
In short, it should be noted that Dillon’s comprehensive screening of the personnel files of Dachau SS men
represents the book’s major contribution to the research
conducted to date. Dillon demonstrates here that he is a
splendid narrator who has selected from the files many
captivating stories that go beyond individual cases, and
has interpreted them in a skillful and thoughtful manner.
Unfortunately, however, Dillon refrains from forming an
overarching analysis of these individual cases. Comparisons with other camps emerge only very sporadically and
are not subject to a systematic review anywhere in the
book. In the end, this leaves unanswered what I view as
the key research questions in this field. Issues that need
addressing here include the specific nature of the “Dachau school” run by the SS and to what extent the Dachau SS units actually differed significantly from the SS
units in the other early concentration camps.
In conclusion, Dillon has produced a highly readable
history of the Dachau SS units during the prewar years
that offers a great deal of new information and is recommended reading for everyone who is interested in the
connection between violence and masculinity under National Socialism. It remains, however, in many respects a
patchwork of histories and ideas that leaves future researchers with the task of conducting a conclusive analysis of these new results.
MARC BUGGELN
Humboldt University of Berlin
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Cadmus A
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
BERNARD WASSERSTEIN. The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 334.
$29.95.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of
the Dutch Jews, based on extensive international research,
is the first biography of Gertrude van Tijn—a hitherto little-known board member of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. Among the sources used are Van Tijn’s private
correspondence and her unpublished autobiography. As
a former board member of the Jewish Council, Van Tijn
gained a negative postwar reputation in the Dutch Jewish
community as a collaborator with the Nazis and profiteer
during the deportation years. Bernard Wasserstein arrives at a much more benevolent conclusion: he regards
Van Tijn as a courageous and admirable woman who
tried to save as many Jewish lives as possible.
Van Tijn (1891–1974) was born in Braunschweig to an
assimilated Jewish merchant family. After the early death
of her mother, Gertrude and her two brothers were first
sent to foster parents, and later to Berlin. There she completed a course in social work under Alice Salomon. An
independent character, she moved to London, started
working, and became involved in women’s groups and
the suffragette movement. During the First World War,
the English regarded Germans as enemy aliens, and in
1915 she had to leave the country. Van Tijn came to Amsterdam, where she worked in banks as well as in Zionist
and Jewish social aid organizations. She also met her husband Jacques van Tijn there, and had a marriage of seventeen years full of international travel. By 1932 she had
become very active in aid work for Jewish refugees.
Fundraising became her expertise and she became the
Netherlands representative of the American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee in New York. She established
work and training projects for young Jewish refugees,
and soon became the driving force in the Jewish Refugees Committee in Amsterdam. After the Netherlands
was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940, the work of this
Committee became very difficult. The Nazis ordered the
establishment of a Jewish Council in February 1941; David Cohen and Abraham Asscher became its infamous directors, while Van Tijn became director of the emigration department, and later the “Aid to the Departing”
(Hulp aan Vertrekkenden) department. Working for the
Jewish Council meant exemption from deportation, and
thus the board members were powerful people.
Wallerstein presents convincing descriptions of Van
Tijn’s persistent efforts to facilitate the emigration of
German Jews; her risky decisions to remain in or return
to the Netherlands during the war; and the opportunities
and dangers she faced as the only woman in the inner circle of the Jewish Council. In my view, Wallerstein does
not recognize the extent of Van Tijn’s exceptional and
privileged position. He stresses that she was not a full
member of the Jewish Council, but it is clear that she was
quite powerful and that she was regarded as such even by
the Nazis. Her personal documents, dated November
1941 in Amsterdam and December 1943 in Westerbork
concentration camp, record her position as “bestuurslid,”
board member of the Jewish Council.
Van Tijn was also the only German Jew on the Jewish
Council—this, is in my view, of vital significance. The tensions between Dutch and German Jews were substantial;
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accusers, the French communist Jacques Furmanski, Eliezer “was convinced that no one would come out of the
camp [alive], that there would be no judges, that he
would never have to explain his actions” (110). Eliezer
claimed in his defense that the accusations against him
were the result of the thankless position that he had assumed, a position that had made him “part of the German machine.” He admitted that on occasion he might
have “gone too far,” but that ultimately he had always
acted to protect party members and prisoners in general.
Eliezer also claimed that the accusations could be attributed to his family name: “People were more hurt by my
actions than they would have been if they had been performed by a person with an unfamiliar name” (106). Nevertheless, the party commission determined that he had
given a “defeatist” (30) lecture while in the camp, and
that he had been guilty of administering beatings that in
some cases resulted in the deaths of prisoners. It concluded that Eliezer had “placed himself outside the party
framework, and can never return to it” (110).
Eliezer therefore did not return to Poland cleared of
all charges, as he had originally intended, but remained
in Paris instead. He was arrested there by the French authorities on the basis of accusations against him by his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz. The trial, in which Yitzhak
Gruenbaum intervened in hopes of securing the exoneration of his son, ended inconclusively when the court held
that it had no jurisdiction because neither the accused
nor the accusers were French citizens. Eliezer’s position
in France was now increasingly uncomfortable as he was
both stateless and shunned by his former communist
party comrades. He decided to emigrate to Israel, but
there too he was subjected to vicious attacks by rightwing and religious groups eager, among other things, to
discredit his father. He decided to redeem himself by
fighting in the Israeli armed forces, which he was able to
join by means of his father’s intercession with David BenGurion, and was killed in battle near Ramat Rachel on
May 22, 1948, barely a week after the establishment of
the state. There were unsubstantiated rumors that he was
killed by one of his fellow soldiers. His death did not end
the attacks on him. In Yehiel De-Nur’s novel They Called
Him Piepl (1961), which was widely praised in the Orthodox and revisionist press, Eliezer is depicted (under a fictional name) as a vicious kapo. A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz does not resolve how much truth there is in the accusations against him and concludes with a series of
questions: “Was Eliezer Gruenbaum a Shakespearean
hero? Macbeth, perhaps? Both evil and tragic? A hero
and a villain? . . . Was he also defeated by the horrifying
pressure he was under at the camps—was he a victim?”
(261) We shall never know.
ANTONY POLONSKY
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw
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