I'm writing to you because last night I saw the film Hanna Arendt and I obviously thought of you. It focusses on the whole chapter of the Einchmann trial and Arendt's subsequent book Einchmann in Jerusalem. Of her two main points, on the one hand the idea of the banality of evil, and on the other the complicity of the Judenrat, I'm most interested in the second. If you remember, my trip to Poland last year took me to Lodz, a city which held the second biggest Guetto in all occupied territories (after Warsaw). The city is still today a tough place, with most buildings in a state of calamity and a generally depressing mood. There I came about the figure of Chaim Rumkowski, head of Lodz Judenrat, and I wrote about it. it's in Spanish though.
Rumkowski is one of the most striking characters of Lodz guetto's History because he became a totalitarian dictator drunk with power in his own cage, with the power to decide on the overall live of the guetto and the lives of it's dwellers. He also committed abuses personally against women and kids. But probably because his story is so extreme it is a good one to examine the conflict that Arendt posed: how can we judge the complicity of the Jews who collaborated with the enemy. Those who defend Rumkowski's role do it on the grounds that he prolongued the life of the guetto for two years and saved some thousands of lives.
The head of the Judenrat in Warsaw killed himself when he was ordered to deport people to the concentration camps. Rumkowski on the other hand, asked the families of the guetto to give up their children and sent them to the gas chambers reasoning that 'limbs had to be cut off so that the body (the rest of guetto) could live on'.
In her book Harendt put her finger on this issue, not only on Ramkowski but all Judenrats. And that did not go down well with the Jewish community who felt she was criminalizing the Jews more than their murderers, the nazis.
Towards the end of the movie there is a scene where we see the philosopher having to defend her theories in front of a difficult audience, her students -the majority of whom support her- and the rest of her fellow scholars and friends who are furious about her ideas. In this grand finale kind of scene she makes an challenging remark: had the Elders of the Judenrat not collaborated with their assassins, millions of live could have been saved. She opens for discussion the possibility of an intermediate solution that could have been morally sound, and would have lied somewhere between resisting -which was not a possibility- and collaborating which is morally dubious.
I'm most interested in this idea. Rumkowski and the rest were like those tragic heroes who must face an impossible riddle from which they can only leave defeated. They could only do it wrong, life and beauty was not a possibility. That is tragedy in a dramatic sense, a situation where a hero can only choose between bad and worse. My first impulse is to align with the decision taken by the chief of the Judenrat in Warsaw who saw no point in surviving in such miserable conditions. His solid moral principles prevented him from becoming an instrument of brutality and sending people to certain death. Rumkowski's choice is difficult to understand and come to terms with and probably that's why it is more interesting. What made him accept collaborating in such henious acts against his own people? Was it his instinct of survive at all costs or did he really do it because once he accepted resisting was not a possibility, he decided to embark on a journey through hell for the purpose of prolonging life in the guetto (and his life) and giving a chance to live at least to some? In this process he became a monster, that was the price he had to pay to live a little longer (he died in Auschwizt) and help others survive.
Arendt's questions however remains: what else could he have done?
