The threads that connect the horror and heroism of the Holocaust to our own time frayed last week with the death in Jerusalem of Simcha Rotem, age 94. Mr. Rotem, a Polish Jew born Szymon Rathajzer, was the last known surviving Jewish combatant from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
The memory of that ill-fated revolt is indelible in the history of resistance to the Nazis and is emblematic of the will to survive which sustains the Jews and, in particular, the state of Israel where Rotem spent the bulk of his life. But Rotem, by his life and lifelong testimony, bore witness to a drama, to cruelty and sacrifice, to squalor and bravery, that are now a fading memory.
How that memory endures is the primary question raised by his death. Is the Holocaust an abstraction or a specific and vivid lesson for humanity?
At the least, in Rotem’s own memory, it is always useful to recall details of the German occupation of Poland after 1939. Almost immediately, the country’s Jewish population of three million was concentrated into a series of medieval-style ghettos in major cities, the largest of which was in Warsaw, where approximately 400,000 Jews were imprisoned within a square mile walled off from the rest of the capital and patrolled by SS troops.
The inhabitants of the ghetto sought to maintain some semblance of normality in their nightmare-lives. There were schools, including clandestine religious schools, refugee centers, soup kitchens, even a symphony orchestra. But these gestures toward humanity were doomed from the start. The ghetto was officially quarantined from “Aryan” Warsaw, its few available goods manufactured and traded in secret, and since inhabitants were restricted to starvation rations, the only means of survival involved bartering or smuggling, punishable by death. Disease was rampant.
In the summer of 1942, by which time some 100,000 Jews in Warsaw had already died of malnutrition or disease, deportations in the guise of “resettlement” commenced to the nearby death camp at Treblinka, where a quarter-million or more were killed in the following months. It was at this time that Rotem joined one of the two main resistance bands, the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa or Jewish Fighting Organization, and acquired a Polish nom de guerre (“Kazik”) to conceal his Jewish identity.
As the deportations accelerated, and SS troops routinely invaded the ghetto to arrest and round up inhabitants, the ZOB made contact with the underground Polish Home Army, sabotaged German communications and operations, and beginning in March 1943, mounted, along with other resistance fighters, the armed insurrection which, echoing earlier revolts in Jewish history, was a gesture of oblation to inspire future victories.
It was in these desperate circumstances that the 19-year-old Kazik emerged as a shrewd and resourceful warrior, a courier-fighter with a gift for audacity and deadly stealth. It is difficult to overstate the futility of his cause. The few hundred remaining Jews of the ghetto were surrounded by SS troops determined to liquidate them. They were largely bereft of the means to defend themselves and almost entirely isolated from the outside world. When the Germans, unable and unwilling to engage the rebels directly, chose to destroy the ghetto by artillery and aerial bombardment, Kazik undertook to rescue his surviving comrades by maneuvering them underground through the Warsaw sewers.
Having spent weeks and months moving back and forth among bunkers and hideouts, saving lives, thwarting the SS, bearing witness to slaughter, this was a tactical masterstroke. In his brief, laconic Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter, Rotem revealed not only a cool calculation in the midst of catastrophe but also a soldierly poise, even humor, that must have come at considerable cost.
Warsaw’s central sewer, he reported, “is two meters high and the sewage streams in a mighty flow … It was sometimes necessary to crawl on our bellies to get through them.” Yet, whatever terror and discomfort he felt underground was subsumed, in the ferrying of comrades in the shadow of fire and death, by a measurable calm: “It was no pleasure,” he wrote, “to flounder in excrement, to smell the stench, but we had no choice.”
In the taciturn prose of his memoir, Rotem replays the swift, brutal transformation of an ordinary adolescent in a typical Old Europe neighborhood into a Jewish man-at-arms driven by fear as much as moral imperative. The brutal German conquest of Poland had killed members of his family outright and destroyed their home, but the special peril of Jews under Nazi ideology is conveyed in the shifting loyalties, and lethal disloyalties, among the conquered, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and the mercies and cruelties survival required.
In the end, Rotem escaped from Warsaw, spent the balance of the war in the Polish resistance and, in 1946, emigrated to Palestine where he fought for Israel’s independence. In his later years, he came to personify the spirit of Jewish resistance and of reconciliation among nations. He also served as a witness to remind the world of the ambiguities and uncomfortable truths, the hidden legacies of shame and betrayal, in the history of the Holocaust.
This was expressed, with particular emphasis, earlier this year when he reminded the Polish president that while he recognized the “suffering of the Polish nation after Poland was seized by Nazi Germany … the methodical genocide of my brothers and sisters, Poland’s Jewish citizens, by the Nazi-German extermination machine … had many Polish accomplices. Only once Polish society truly faces this bitter historical truth, revealing its scope and severity, will there be a chance that those horrors will not be repeated.”
In his long life, Simcha Rotem reminded his fellow Jews, and admirers worldwide, of the price of survival and the power of sacrifice. He also showed that the lessons of history may be found anywhere, even in sewers.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
