Disinformation in Ukraine features the poppycock that a Jew cannot be the head of a state comprising neo-Nazis. Meanwhile, the Zionist Betar movement has ignored a melancholy chapter of its history that occurred in the Vilna ghetto during the Holocaust: the execution by Jews of other Jews who collaborated with the Nazis
Lotek Salzwasser, left, with the Betar commissioner in Poland. “If Salzwasser had been from Hashomer Hatzair he would have survived,” said Kremmerman, a former partisan, in his testimony.Credit: Jabotinsky Center Archives
Ofer Aderet. Haaretz
(November 14, 2020) When Lotek Salzwasser joined the partisans in the forests of Lithuania in the fall of 1943, he thought he had escaped certain death at the hands of the Nazis. He could never have imagined that death would come at the hands of other Jews, his comrades in the underground. Yet that is what happened. Abba Kovner, the commander of the underground in the Vilna ghetto, sealed Salzwasser’s fate after hearing testimonies that he had collaborated with the Nazis.
“Salzwasser reached the forest and some time later he was shot by order of the partisans’ command. They took him along on a supposed operation – and shot him,” says Miri Yahalom, an archivist at the Jabotinsky Institute who is doing research on the activities of the Revisionist Zionist movement and its youth wing, Betar, in the Vilna ghetto.
Salzwasser was not the only Jew who was suspected of colluding with the Germans and was killed by other Jews during the Holocaust. But his story caught Yahalom’s eye because he was a well-known Betar activist in Warsaw on the eve of the war – but after his execution, he was excised from the history books of that right-wing movement. Recently, Yahalom located a number of photographs from the period of Salzwasser’s activity in the movement, in the collection of the late partisan and historian Haim Lazar, himself a Betar man, who devoted himself to commemorating members of the movement in the Holocaust.
It wasn’t by chance, apparently, that the photos gathered dust in the archive for decades. They document a forgotten chapter, sensitive and bleak, in the annals of right-wing Jews in Vilna ghetto.
“Here, he has a face and he’s even photographed with the Betar commissioner in Poland,” Yahalom says emotionally, and adds, “Probably the members of his movement were ashamed of his deeds and decided to ostracize him.”
How did this come about?
When the war broke out, Salzwasser arrived in Vilna with the wave of refugees from Poland, hoping for a better fate under Soviet rule. In September 1941, following the German conquest of the region, he was confined to the city’s ghetto together with the rest of the Jewish population. There, he joined the Jewish Police, who were loathed by the residents and accused of abetting the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews.
In her research, Yahalom discovered that Revisionists filled a number of high positions in Vilna’s Jewish Police, among them its commander, Jacob Gens, and his deputy, Josef Glazman. As part of Salzwasser’s duties in the force, she notes, “he was compelled to take part in the Aktions [Nazi selection of the Jews for murder] and to expose Jews’ hiding places.”
Lotek Salzwasser with members of the Betar movement in Poland, before WWI.Credit: Jabotinsky Center Archives[
“I move around the ghetto and I see Lotek Salzwasser in the company of policemen,” Vitka Kempner, a partisan and the girlfriend, later wife, of Abba Kovner – who commanded the Jewish camp in the Rudniki forest – testified after the war, as others also did. “He opens malinas [hiding places] with weeping children and mothers who are shouting, and drags men… I grab him by the hand and shout: ‘Lotek, what are you doing, for God’s sake, you are out of your mind!’ He was once a friend of my brother and a member of the underground! And he betrayed us and left us.”
The brother she mentions, Yisrael Kempner, was a member of Betar and also served in the Jewish police.
Lotek’s lessons
However, as Yahalom notes, “Reality was not black or white.” Salzwasser was also active on behalf of the United Partisan Organization, or FPO, the Jewish underground group in Vilna, and to that end, she says, he exploited his position in the Jewish police. Upon the ghetto’s liquidation, in September 1943, Salzwasser managed to escape and subsequently joined the underground, where he asked to join Kovner’s group, which was about to enter the forests.
“He didn’t know they were waiting for him there with a noose,” Yahalom says. His comrades decided to settle accounts with Salzwasser for his activity in the Jewish police.
“After we went into the woods,” Kempner continued in her account, “I went back and took him with me so he would be executed. And I’m proud I did so.”
Salzwasser was a well-known Betar activist in Warsaw on the eve of the war – but after his execution, he was excised from the history books of that right-wing movement.
A different version arises from the testimony of another partisan, Yehezkel Kremmerman.
“Lotek gave us lessons with a rifle,” he related after the war. “Dismantling, cleaning and assembling, and also how to use it. That was very useful to us in the operations. After a short time we learned that he had been taken outside the camp with another fellow and that they were murdered, without an interrogation or a trial.” Kremmerman added: “His sin was that he was from Betar. If he had been from [the left-wing youth movement] Hashomer Hatzair, he would have survived. There were a lot of policemen from the ghetto in the forest. There were a lot of traitors.” They weren’t killed.
Is it actually possible that Salzwasser’s execution was politically motivated, because of his affiliation with Betar? Yahalom refuses to consider that possibility. She says that among the Jews who were killed by other Jews for collaborating with the Nazis were some who did not belong to Betar or to the Revisionist movement.
“Politics came into play after the war,” once the survivors had arrived in Palestine, where “the battle began for a place in the pantheon of heroism,” she notes. “At that time, members of Hashomer Hatzair and the members of Betar wrote their respective histories of their movements during the Holocaust.” The former alleged that most of the Revisionists had been traitors and collaborators. The Betar group, for their part, ignored their comrades in the movement who were accused of collaboration and commemorated only the good people, the members of the underground and the partisans associated with their movement.
The best known example is that of Pawel Frenkel, one of the commanders of the Jewish Military Union resistance organization, who was active in the Warsaw ghetto, where there was not a unified Jewish resistance, and most of whose friends were from Betar and the Revisionist movement. The right wing in Israel maintains to this day that the fact that Frenkel’s name is virtually unknown whereas Mordechai Anielewicz – a member of Hashomer Hatzair and leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – became a legend, attests to the politicization of commemoration, even of everything related to the Holocaust.
Yahalom: “The Jabotinsky movement preferred to focus on ‘heroes’ like Frenkel, whose role in the movement before the war, if any, still isn’t clear to us, over those whose activity in the Revisionist movement is a proven fact but who were alleged to have betrayed their people in the Holocaust.” She adds, “There were many fighters and partisans among the members of the movement and in Betar, but it’s also important to talk about those in the movement who were in the ‘gray zone.’”
Open gallery view
Isaac Auerbach. Assassinated while on his way to a meeting with Gestapo men. Credit: Courtesy of the family
Informer ambush
In the course of doing research for her master’s thesis, which Yahalom is writing at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Havi Dreifuss, she located additional examples of Betar members with a “dark past” like Salzwasser’s, who were active in the Vilna ghetto. At the same time, she is quick to note that it is not up to us to judge them from a distance of years. In fact, she emphasizes, some of them contributed to the struggle against the Germans and to the rescue of Jews.
Isaac Auerbach, too, was a member of Betar in the city, a Jewish Police officer and an activist in the underground. However, when he was caught by the Gestapo, he became a double agent. In the last days of the ghetto, he and his wife fled with the commander of the Jewish Police to a prearranged hiding place. Following their discovery by the Germans, they were forced to work in their service. Auerbach informed on Polish members of the underground, “but there were allegations that he also informed against members of the Jewish underground,” Yahalom says.
Some time before Vilna’s liberation, Auerbach was assassinated in the street by a squad of the communist underground with the aid of a member of Hashomer Hatzair, Zelda Treger. “They knew that Auerbach was going to meet with Gestapo personnel, and laid an ambush for him,” Yahalom says. Auerbach was seriously wounded and taken to a hospital. It’s possible he was murdered there by the Germans.
Yahalom relates that after the Holocaust, Auerbach’s sister, Bossia, wanted to clear his name, but historian Lazar refused to touch the case, and advised her not to go ahead with the idea. Former Vilna residents pointed to Bossia on the street in Israel, to denounce her for her brother’s deeds. Yahalom also located photographs of him, which had not been deposited in the archive but were in the family’s possession.
Another member of Betar who was assassinated under similar circumstances was Wobek Selzestein. Yahalom has yet to find material about him. And what about women? A Betar member named Esther Yaffe was accused of being a traitor by the FPO and was sentenced to death. However, the death sentence was later revoked – perhaps because it was impossible to prove the allegations against her – and she disappeared without a trace.
There was also another activist, Mira Gonyundsky, a beautiful young woman who was both a secretary for the Jewish Police and a faithful member of the underground. In one case, the underground had her spy on the chief of the police. Her life ended when she was sent – deliberately – by the headquarters of the Lithuanian partisan brigade in the Narocz forest on an assignment from which she did not return.
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