On the way to their annihilation by the Germans, Jews behaved in a way that may seem puzzling: they submitted to the Germans. The puzzle dissipates when we realize that others behaved similarly: Russian POWs, assimilated Western European Jews, and Gypsies, for example. Consider the image of a criminal convict sentenced to death who quietly accepts the right of the armed men to extinguish his life. In Primo Levi’s words, he abandons his only power—the power to refuse his consent. The Jews behaved abominably, but in a way that is all too human.
Social history imprinted on personal consciences the stereotype of government’s monopoly on power. Free peoples perished under the onslaught of conquerors; as Machiavelli noted, it is impossible to conquer people who are not used to submission—so they were exterminated. In the human world of incessant wars, submissiveness proved a beneficial evolutionary trait.
Ancient Jews were anything but submissive: they launched the devastating wars of the Maccabees, Zealots, and Bar Kochba. Josephus relates that on many occasions foreign Jews cut down enemy pagan communities when marching to Judea’s help. After the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt, the rabbis spared no effort to make Jews submissive: they roped them with myriad rules and denounced messianic expectations. Submissive but living Jews were preferred to the proud but dead.
The Germans took care to give Jews hope of survival through work or luck. Jews boarded death trains with luggage, sometimes with tickets. Gas chambers were disguised as showers. In the ghettos rumors of death camps were denied, and at the factories a small number of non-Kapo workers survived for years, thus imbuing the others with the hope of avoiding the chimneys.
The inhabitants of German work camps were physically unable to revolt even if they could have organized in small bands without being betrayed. From the first day in the camps they were starved so that they could only move slowly. They had nowhere to run; even if they broke out of the camps, Poles turned them in. The numbers tattooed on their hands made them immediately identifiable.
Hunger and abasement precluded long-term planning; people thought only of daily survival. Their horizons shrunk from life and freedom to the next handout of bread and soup. After a few days in the camp, freedom had become an otherworldly concept.
Jews in the ghettos had a choice of almost certain death in the attempt to escape or hoping for survival. The life in ghettos was hell, but Jews there did not have the terrible benefit of the knowledge that we have now. In the Warsaw ghetto, the survival rate—until the last-stage deportations and bombings—was far better than what Jews could hope for if they tried to escape. The Poles killed the refugees more efficiently than the Germans—until the Germans killed them all.
Byalik condemned Jewish acquiescence in the earlier Kishinev pogrom, but what were the Jews supposed to do? That was the first major massacre in three generations, and Jews were not prepared to fight the police who disarmed them. Fighting the mob was equally hopeless for Jewish families trapped in their homes, though perhaps it would have been the right thing to do. The few instances of resistance to Arab mobsters during the 1929 Hebron massacre did not stop the mob. With the example of the Kishinev pogrom, Jews in many other towns prepared and successfully conducted armed resistance against the police and throngs, though they failed to protect their families in most places.
In many clear-cut situations, Jews behaved inexplicably. They dug their own graves instead of charging at the small shooting squads with bare hands and at least taking some enemy lives along. They walked on corpses into the swampy pits on the orders of Germans and Ukrainians. They boarded the death trains sometimes fully aware of their fate. Such behavior is well-documented in other nations in various wars. Hardened Boers dug their own graves, and Russians were docile in the face of mass murders during their Civil War.
Here is the point: anything goes in war or a similar murderous endeavor. In wartime our cognitive framework is switched to a different plane: what causes revulsion in peacetime becomes acceptable in war. Death becomes normal. People get used to their lives being threatened, and don’t revolt. That’s why long-term insecurity is a boon to totalitarian governments. People prepared to die are submissive in mundane matters. Jews, used to the destruction of Sderot, won’t protest the division of Jerusalem.