An unknown monument on the road to Jerusalem.
It is dedicated to the Jewish victims, insurgents, and fighters against Nazism
in the communities, ghettos, and camps of Zaglembie, the region of Eastern Upper Silesia.
The center of the fighting was the two neighboring towns of Bedzin and Sosnowiec.
After the invasion of Poland, they were annexed by the Germans in September 1939.
Resistance? Did it exist?
The Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote,
Under the conditions of terror, most people will comply
but some people will not.
300,000 Jews lived in Eastern Upper Silesia,
but only a few hundred survived.
Through resistance.
A reflection of the fate of European Jewry.
Six million exterminated,
only a few hundred thousand saved.
Saved by a few resisters.
What made them strong was their shared belief that despite mass extermination, the Jewish people would survive.
Before the war, Bedzin was a lively, bustling city.
Life was dominated by a large Jewish population that essentially formed the city's middle class.
This is not to say that there was no poverty in Bedzin.
Of course, this was the constant social class throughout Poland.
But there were also wealthy people who were extremely interested in the welfare of the city and its population.
There was a very influential family in our city, the industrial Furstenberg family,
who not only donated a school but also subsidized it.
And thanks to this school, Benshin became a real cultural center.
Pupils from near and far came to our town by train every day.
And we could safely say that this school educated the intellectual elite of the city.
This has also led to the young intelligentsia segmenting itself into several political parties.
I myself was also a member of a youth organization and thanks to this youth organization, I survived.
Then Semitism in Poland was quite prevalent.
We as Jews, as students, as children, hardly ever dared to go out on the streets in the evening.
The worst was over the weekend, especially on Friday.
The average worker who received their weekly wage on Friday
consumed the entire amount in vodka and for this reason, there was hardly a weekend without stabbings.
In the last days before the outbreak of war, there was sharp anti-German propaganda in the Polish media.
Many Jewish families left Benschen for fear of reprisals.
My parents did not leave Bedzin, which is why I experienced the German invasion myself.
I remember standing in front of our house and they came from the direction of Sosnowiec.
They were tall guys, with a machine gun in one hand and a metal box full of cartridges in the other.
At first we didn't know what to do with this picture.
They behaved decently, there were no shootings and we were impressed by the strength, the ...
discipline.
and the order with which they occupied the city.
After the first days of relative calm, we thought
that it can't get any worse than this,
that the propaganda has exaggerated.
And the German Wehrmacht took over the entire Jewish quarter
and set fire to the synagogue.
The surrounding houses were cleared and the people were driven into the burning synagogue.
Hundreds of people died.
Scenes have taken place that cannot be understood with normal reason,
cannot be described with normal words.
For us, the biggest shock was that it was not the SS or the SA,
instead, it was the soldiers I saw marching past our house just a few days prior,
disciplined, well-built, well-dressed, a muscular army,
and that this army was capable of these atrocities.
They were the same Wehrmacht soldiers in the blue-green uniforms,
whom I admired just a few days ago, who just did this.
From the very beginning, the entire social life of the city was halted.
When I speak of the city, I mean the Jewish part,
the Jewish population in Bedzin.
We weren't allowed to go to school, all schools were closed.
We weren't allowed to listen to the radio and there were no newspapers.
We were excluded from all social facilities in the city.
We weren't allowed to visit a park, we weren't allowed to sit on a bench,
we weren't allowed to enter the main streets of the city.
Any resistance or transgression was practically punishable by death.
After a few months, we resumed our school lessons.
Our teachers before the war were also Jews and they were in the same situation as us.
We were only allowed to meet in small groups and hold school lessons.
I was in a group with three other students.
We put our schoolbooks in our pants,
because we were so thin back then, it wasn't noticed.
We wore a sweater or jacket over them
and we practically had to smuggle the schoolbooks to school.
At that time we had lessons with Professor Meimann from our school
and a high school student who graduated from our school, Mr. Bozsikowski,
My classmates were Oleg Gutmann, Lolek Blass, Idje Gold, and me.
The larger classes were too risky.
Of course, we discontinued subjects such as Latin or geography, nobody wanted them,
But we learned other subjects like German, mathematics, subjects that could play a role in the future.
At that time, the Germans only knew one punishment, and that was the death penalty.
It goes without saying that our teachers, Mr. Maimin and Mr. Boschikowski, also risked their lives.
We didn't just teach the four of us, there were several groups like this.
And in my opinion, that was the first step toward resistance for me in particular.
The Jewish resistance was recruited from the world Zionist organization Hechalutz, which means “pioneer” in English.
The world headquarters of Hechalutz was in Geneva.
He organized over a quarter of a million young Zionists across Europe.
With the outbreak of war, its organizational structure became a network of Jewish resistance.
Nathan Schwalb-Dror had been the head of the Geneva office since the end of 1939.
He sent couriers with information and money in all directions.
Reporting was done via code in six European languages.
The codes had to be changed every two months.
Three men for Germany. Straw or hay for weapons.
Albus for Auschwitz. Helios for ghetto. Impossible for extermination camps.
Underground channels were formed after the beginning of ghettoization in Poland and Upper Silesia in the winter of 1940-41.
Their leaders were Mordechai Anielewitsch in Warsaw, Mordechai Tenenbaum, alias Tamarow, in Bialystok, and Golda Miere in Krakow.
Israel Diamant and Israel Korsuch in the twin town of Benzin-Sosnowiec.
The ghettos were in constant contact via couriers, but the routes of the couriers, mostly
Aryan-looking young girls, but their courier routes did not only led through occupied Poland.
The Jewish underground was also networked with two other rescue committees abroad,
in Bratislava and Budapest.
At the end of 1941, the extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz began with so-called test gassings.
By the end of the war, over two million people were murdered there.
Auschwitz is located 40 kilometers south of Benshin.
The trains ran right through the city with their miserable cargo.
Sometimes the trains were shunted in Bedzin.
Then you could hear the Jewish prayer for death from the cattle wagons.
Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.
Hear, O Israel, our God is the only God.
The underground in Bedzin learned very quickly about the truth in Auschwitz,
which the Nazis tried to hide behind a so-called Reich secret.
It was the railway workers who told the Jewish underground about the crematoria and gas chambers.
The young Jews quickly understood what this meant.
They joined together to form underground groups and formed a central leadership.
Sitting next to Israel Korsuch and Israel Diamant there was
Frumka Plotnitska,
Herschel Springer,
Heike Klinger,
Zvi Brandes and Leon Blatt, the only survivor from the channel.
The most important problem for us was how we could save the youth of Europe, of Nazi Europe,
because that was the only thing that could assure the future of the Jewish people.
The moment we learned that there was a possibility to ally through to Palestine from Slovakia,
we took all the steps to find an escape route from Warsaw to the Slovakian border
so that people can also come to Slovakia from Warsaw.
In February 1941, the leadership of the Chalutz underground movement decided
that we should try to find our way to Slovakia.
Then I was told to try to leave the ghetto and go to Slovakia.
At the beginning of March, I left the ghetto with false papers that I had obtained
and took the train to Krakow and then to Tarnow by car,
and from Tarnow to Nobisonsch by wagon and horse.
I stayed there for a few days until we found a way for me to cross the border.
Crossing the border was organized by Laban.
He was a comrade from Krakow, who was also from the Chalutz underground movement.
Since he lived near the border and had acquaintances on the border,
his assignment was also to find the smugglers who would help us cross the border.
I went from Nobisonsch with a smuggler who took me to Slovakia.
We crossed the border at the High Tatras, where it was safer,
although the path was much harder than passing through the normal Carpathians.
The first place I went was near Poprad in Slovakia.
I immediately wrote a letter explaining to my neighbors in Warsaw
how to make the journey and how to cross the border.
And from Poprad, I also travel to Bratislava on the same day.
That's why I went to Slovakia.
I shared with Warsaw how it was possible to drive from Warsaw to the border
and who would meet them from the Slovakian side at the border.
There was a man in Bardejov whose assignment was that if someone came from Poland,
he should pick them up and continue from Bardejov.