“I am a father”: Experiences of Fatherhood in Diaries of Fathers from the Warsaw Ghetto

Abstract

Introduction

If Josima Feldschuh had survived the Holocaust, her name would undoubtedly be well known today. Even in her youth, she showed signs of a promising future as a virtuoso pianist, as she had already composed several pieces, and, during the early years of the Warsaw ghetto, gave concerts to much acclaim. Even those who did not know her personally recognized that she was a talented child, as evidenced by announcements published in the ghetto inviting residents to attend her concert performance.¹ Most of our knowledge about Josima’s talent, however, comes from a completely unobjective man who loved her deeply—her father, Dr. Reuven Feldschuh (pen name Reuven Ben-Shem), who wrote extensively about his daughter in his diary. Feldschuh’s diary is one of the most detailed surviving accounts of life in the Warsaw ghetto. It describes the creation, operation, and destruction of the largest Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust. He started documenting his experiences right after the Germans invaded, and finished when the Russian army captured Lublin on July 30, 1944.

Feldschuh (1900–1980) was a leader in the Zionist Revisionist movement, a teacher, writer, rabbi, and journalist in the Warsaw ghetto. Alongside his many public actions, his diary clearly shows that, above all, he was Josima’s father. This aspect of his existence was neither marginal nor negligible, but rather the central and sometimes only motive for many actions he took during the war, as can be seen in this paragraph from his diary:

My daughter exhibits talents of a genius, she amazes all her listeners. Experts say they have not heard such playing for many years, and that a bright future awaits her abroad. Just escape with her, and fast. And now my heart beats twice as fast, to save myself, my wife, and most of all her, this lovely pearl, this beautiful jewel, this divine light.²

Reuven Feldschuh was not unique. The Holocaust presented an unimaginable ordeal and challenge, especially for parents, who did everything in their power to protect their children; however, in many cases, they could not prevent the deaths of their offspring. The loss of a child symbolized the loss of the future and hope, as also expressed in the poem of Itzhak Katzenelson, “Song of the Massacred Jewish People,” a lament that begins with his description of the pain over the loss of his wife and two children:

In the Warsaw ghetto, many people, including women, teenagers, and men who were not fathers, kept diaries to record their experiences. Some fathers also wrote diaries. This article examines this latter group to explore the issue of fathers and fatherhood during the Holocaust through their diaries.⁴ It analyzes nine fathers’ diaries written in Yiddish, Polish, or Hebrew to examine how fathers themselves understood fatherhood.

Some fathers dealt broadly with the topic, while others did not extensively reference their children in their writings. For example, the educator Chaim Aharon Kaplan rarely wrote about his daughter and son in his diary. One likely reason for this absence is that his adult children lived in a Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel (Mandatory Palestine), and therefore they were safe from the Nazi threat. Nevertheless, at the beginning of his diary, he briefly addresses the gap between the personal and the public, noting that the idea of being a father was always present in his thoughts:

Within the general troubles, everyone has his own special corner with his own unique individual troubles. Even within a general androloimosso [chaotic situation], everyone lives his own life. Being busy in the general upheaval that has radically changed our lives and turned my world upside down, I never for a moment forgot those closest to me, even though they were several thousand parasangs [ancient Persian unit of distance] away from me. These faraway-close ones, which are my son and daughter in the Land of Israel. I understand their spirit and their state of mind during the terrible events of the war when the wings of death hovered over our heads.⁵

Kaplan’s words also echo the sentiments of other fathers, whose identities were grounded in fatherhood even if they did not explicitly and extensively write about their children in their diaries. For instance, Emanuel Ringelblum, who wrote very little about his son, chose to stay with him in prison during his final days. He refused an escape opportunity and was executed in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto along with his wife and son.⁶

Jewish masculinity in the Warsaw ghetto

When looking at the diaries from a gender perspective, particularly through the lens of fatherhood, some questions arise. For example, what role did fatherhood play in their considerations? How did fatherhood shape their perceptions and actions in the ghetto? To address these questions, it is necessary first to discuss the rupture that Jewish masculinity suffered during the Holocaust. The Nazi occupation led to a profound breakdown in the status of men within the Jewish family. It created a disrupted space, in which social and normative conventions disintegrated. For example, instead of the normal ratio of men and women, the Jewish-Polish space had a significant female majority, a phenomenon referred to in Maria Ferenc Piotrowska’s work as the “feminization of the ghettos.”⁷

The dramatic decline in the number of men in the Jewish population had several causes. In Poland, for example, many men left their families immediately after the German occupation because they believed that during wartime, men face greater dangers than women and children. Moreover, many Polish-Jewish men were soldiers in the Polish army and consequently were in danger, not necessarily as Jews, but because they were enemy combatants, as Chaim Kaplan described in his diary.⁸ By October 1939, men constituted 46 percent of Warsaw’s Jewish population; however, since the onset of the Nazi persecution of Jews, Jewish men had been forced into labor and sent to work camps and were murdered in higher numbers than women. By January 1942, due to various factors, the number of men in the Jewish population was approximately 42 percent of the population. This percentage was even lower in the working-age group of sixteen to fifty-nine years, where for every one-hundred men, there were almost one-hundred and fifty women. While Nazi murders of Jews directly affected the mortality of Jewish men, researchers also point to other possible explanations for the drop in the male population. One possibility is that Jewish men exhibited less psychological resilience than women when faced with the harsh reality of Nazi occupation and persecution; the former therefore succumbed to depression and apathy. Another explanation is that while Jewish men were forced to undertake strenuous physical labor, the living conditions in the ghetto did not allow them to maintain the caloric intake required for this work. As a result, men became weaker and more susceptible to disease and death.⁹

In addition, Jewish men suffered greater harassment and assault from the Germans, including imprisonment, public humiliation, and beatings. Among other actions, Nazi perpetrators ridiculed traditional Jewish masculine symbols, such as the beard and payot (sidelocks), and these outward signs of Jewishness endangered men who continued to wear them. That reality led to a new dependence by men on women, as described by Reuven Feldschuh:

In an interesting turn of history, last year when the German abductors started up and instilled fear in all of us … all the men tried to accompany a woman. The soldiers who captured them were attentive to the women and treated the fair sex almost as if they were human beings, and the man was usually saved by her. Even when a soldier approached and demanded that the man go with him, the woman pleaded and reminded him that this man was her husband, her brother, her father, the man chaperoning her to the doctor, and son, and she saved the poor man.¹⁰

Fatherhood in the ghetto

Many Jewish women, however, were also affected, whether by being subjected to forced deportations, starving to death, dying from diseases, or other forms of abuse. This situation left many men as the sole parent in this new reality. Fathers had no choice but to take on household chores and childcare. Even when both parents survived, family structures were dramatically altered. The transition to the ghetto, the loss of livelihood, and the menacing reality led to a reevaluation and shift in parent-child and spousal relationships. Behaviors and responsibilities traditionally associated with one gender were adopted by the other. In many instances, fathers demonstrated their ability to modify and adjust their role as fathers in response to changing circumstances.¹¹

Dienhart and Johnson have shown that fatherhood is an essential element in defining male identity, and the modern era is characterized by a more significant presence and participation of fathers in their children’s lives.¹² Raewyn Connell’s theory of masculinity argues that it is a sociologically dynamic category that changes according to culture and circumstances.¹³ Accordingly, fatherhood is also a dynamic category that responds to cultural changes by altering its modes of action and expression; however, fundamentally the father maintains the drive to protect his child.¹⁴ Researchers such as Giddens posit that family structure has changed in the modern era, and that the Western nuclear family unit, with its clear historical and organizational characteristics, has become a space more focused on the individual and individual agency rather than the family as a whole.¹⁵ Thus, fatherhood during the Holocaust can encompass a wide range of behaviors beyond the traditional roles—primarily providing food, housing, and protection.

Examining the attributes of fatherhood during the Holocaust, it seems that many fathers were significantly involved in the lives of their children, physically as well as emotionally. Was this the case before the war? This question is difficult to answer, as not all the diaries used in this study describe the prewar period. Feldschuh’s descriptions of other Jewish fathers, however, indicate a shift, and fathers who had not previously been involved in household chores, childcare, and concern for their children’s safety found themselves taking on these responsibilities. Did the physical and sociological upheaval that Jewish men experienced in Warsaw also affect their self-perception? Did this dramatic change impact their perceptions of masculinity—specifically, their perceptions of fatherhood and the paternal self?

Scholars have not thoroughly studied fatherhood during the Holocaust, in contrast to the relatively large interest in studies on Jewish women, femininity, and motherhood.¹⁶ Various sources including women’s diaries, letters, third-party witnesses, and later testimonies by children about their mothers documented women’s heroic attempts to save their children. Although women were expected to care for their children, many sources indicate that many women did so more vigorously than expected. Some women even engaged in activities that were not traditionally considered gender-appropriate for their social level and era, such as trading household items, working outside the home, and bargaining with officials.¹⁷ In contrast, fewer sources mention fathers’ actions to save their children. The lack of attention to fathers’ actions is due to the culturally ingrained assumption and expectation that fathers should protect their families, as dictated by traditional gender roles. Thus, witnesses did not always consider a father who fulfilled his “gender obligations” exceptional or noteworthy.

Another possible reason for the relative dearth of documentation is the separation that often exists in men’s writing between the personal and the public. Thus, even public leaders who were known to have been fathers left records of their public actions, while the personal side of their lives, in which they struggled to save their children, remained muted or absent.¹⁸ Nonetheless, fathers assumed a significant role within the family structure during the Holocaust, and many tried to do everything in their power to save their family members, provide for them, and protect them in the midst of the chaotic reality they faced.¹⁹

My sources for this article are ego documents written by fathers under Nazi occupation, in which they refer to their own parenting experiences or the experiences of others around them. Each diary contains different descriptions and reflections on the varying events of the Holocaust as they unfolded. The age of the children played a significant role in parenting experiences, as fathers with young and dependent children encountered different challenges than fathers whose children were grown and independent. Worldviews and belief systems also gave rise to differences—a religious father devoted more attention and interest to the issue of observing the mitzvot (Jewish commandments) and to the weakening of religion among his children. In contrast, these same issues would not likely have concerned a secular father. There is, however, one common denominator among all the diarists—they all experienced constant threats to their own lives and those of their children; they felt involved, in one way or another, in the children’s lives; and they were constantly vigilant about, what they understood to be, the best interests of their children.

It is important to note that this study, which seeks to amplify the voices of Jewish fathers during the Holocaust, does not attempt to compare the suffering of fathers with that of mothers. The premise of this research is that while the loss of a child is equally painful and horrifying for both parents, and while both parents sought to act for the good of their children, the ways they acted may have differed due to various gender biases and influences.²⁰ Thus, this study does not place men and women against each other on opposite sides of a scale. During the Holocaust, fathers and mothers likely followed similar patterns to care for and protect their children.

While there is scant research on fatherhood during the Holocaust, one generally accepted claim by Nechama Tec posits that while Jewish mothers adapted relatively quickly to the changes imposed during the Holocaust, Jewish fathers struggled to adapt to the new reality.²¹ Many sank into depression and despair and ultimately perished. According to this argument, the reason for the relative success of Jewish mothers and the maladjustments of Jewish fathers is that, although everyday reality and circumstances dramatically changed during the Holocaust, the essential gender roles of motherhood did not change.²²

In contrast to this argument, Maddy Carey has shown that not only was the institution of fatherhood during the Holocaust not dramatically damaged, but it was even more recognized and appreciated by children than motherhood. Carey argues that paternal identity is one of the normative representations of masculinity, one that Jewish fathers clung to throughout the Holocaust. Their role as fathers was to provide shelter and food—but no less importantly, to guide and instruct their children and to support them emotionally.²³ Carey’s work has helped us expand our understanding of Jewish fathers’ roles during the Holocaust beyond how they were presented in previous studies.

Most researchers, however, who rely primarily on testimonies from child survivors given years after the Holocaust, find that these testimonies may suffer from various memory biases, while the passage of so much time could have added insights and perspectives that were not necessarily present at the time the events occurred.²⁴ This article aims to explore Jewish fatherhood during the Holocaust through the fathers’ own words written contemporaneously with the genocide, to give them a voice and paint a more complete picture of parenthood during the Holocaust.

Diary writing as a paternal duty

The practice of keeping diaries during the Holocaust was not an unusual practice given the profound oppression that the community experienced. Amos Goldberg’s, Alexandra Garbarini’s, and Dalia Ofer’s close readings of personal texts written during the war reveal that it is possible to trace the psychological changes and mental processes that Jews underwent under Nazi occupation. In his research on diaries written during the Holocaust, Goldberg shows how their language changed over time, even within the same diary. Traumatic events found their way into the diarists’ writing through their languages’ structure, forms of expression, and imagery,²⁵ and, they express their trauma both through their style and content. Many Jews viewed keeping a diary as an act of resistance to combat the Nazis’ goal of erasing all memory of Jewish existence. For those Jewish fathers who wrote diaries, their writing actively expressed their attachment to their paternal role, as Sewek Okonowski explains in his diary:

I, a young and hotblooded Jew, a direct scion of a Hasidic family from both my father’s and mother’s side, and a lover of the new spirit of Palestine, today understand the harsh truth: only the elimination of the national character can save our future generations from the bitter fate that awaits the Jewish people.… We have no right, Dasenka, to knowingly condemn our children to the same fate that our fathers unknowingly condemned us, and these pages will help me in this because human memory is weak.²⁶

Okonowski was not a father. He wrote his diary in the form of a love letter to his beloved wife, Hadassah (known as Dasenka), who had been separated from him. Yet his role as Dasenka’s husband, and his dream of bringing children into the world with her led him to contemplate his role as a father and motivated him to write a diary.

The poet Yitzhak Katzenelson kept a diary in the Vittel camp in France to which he was deported with his eldest son after the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943. He begins his diary by mentioning the loss of his children and wife, who were taken away during the mass deportation. This is followed by his monumental poem, “The Song of the Massacred Jewish People.” He wrote to remember and commemorate the Jewish tragedy, and he did so by grieving the loss of his wife and children and documenting his experiences in the ghetto and beyond. In other words, the loss of his children was the main inspiration for him to write and record the events of that time.

Feldschuh’s diary, too, was shaped according to his perception of his role as a father. He wrote his diary on small scraps of paper that he managed to save and smuggle with him during the war. In March 1943, after escaping from the ghetto, he began to transfer his diary entries to notebooks. At this stage, it seems that he did an initial edit of his manuscript, and then continued writing in notebooks until the end of the war. He wrote in dense, almost illegible script, and parts of the pages were soaked and erased. The diary entries are quite lengthy and usually lack specific dates, instead indicating only the month or holiday when they were written. Nevertheless, Feldschuh wanted his diary to be published, and therefore, in addition to publishing short excerpts in the press, he worked on making the text more readable. Following his arrival in Mandatory Palestine in October 1945, he initially transcribed the central part of his diary into notebooks in clear handwriting, and later, he had the text typed into a nearly eight hundred-page manuscript for publication.²⁷

As noted, Feldschuh did not copy and print all of his diaries. The typed section begins in November 1940, at the time of the ghetto’s closure, and ends on April 4, 1943, when Josima’s parents paid their last farewell to their daughter—after they managed to escape the ghetto and a few weeks before Josima succumbed to tuberculosis. Why, despite the fact that he continued to write in his diary for one and a half more years, did Feldschuh later decide to only publish the sections before Josima’s death? This question leads us to one of the diary’s most significant and meaningful topics—the question of fatherhood within the Warsaw ghetto. Feldschuh’s decision to end the published version of his diary just before Josima’s death and to conclude it by focusing on the image of his daughter sheds new light on the entire document and why he wrote it. It situates fatherhood as perhaps the most significant element in his life. Though fatherhood was likely not his only reason for keeping a diary, one cannot ignore his daughter’s influence on his writings.

Arguably fatherhood was a significant and essential aspect of the daily lives of Jewish men, and as conditions in the ghetto deteriorated, these unfolding events directly and markedly influenced these diarists. To illustrate this point, I will present three stages in the history of the Warsaw ghetto, examine what Jewish fathers recorded in their diaries about their children, and follow the approach of historian Lucien Febvre, who wrote in 1941 about the need to account for emotions and their influence when writing history.²⁸

The fathers’ diaries extensively reference the various emotions that overwhelmed both them and their children. Feelings of fear, frustration, love, and pride appear in many fathers’ personal writings, and their trauma shows in full force in their writing. The choice of what to write and what to omit, the use of a specific term, or even the very act of writing all bear witness to these men’s experiences, both those that they chose to explicitly record and those implicitly woven into the text.²⁹

From the occupation of Warsaw to April 18, 1942

In September 1939, the German army invaded Poland and quickly subdued the Polish army. The Nazis implemented their antisemitic policies against Polish Jews shortly thereafter, and one of their first actions was to confine Polish Jews in ghettos.³⁰ In Warsaw, the city with the largest Jewish population, the ghetto was closed to the outside world from November 16, 1940, until May 15, 1943. On this latter date, the Germans, under the command of Jürgen Stroop, bombed the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, with Stroop declaring that “there is no longer a Jewish quarter in Warsaw.”³¹

According to various testimonies—and as evidenced by a document found in the Ringelblum Archive (Oyneg Shabes Archive), which documented life in the Warsaw ghetto, in the initial stage of the German occupation and their entry into Warsaw—it was the women who took active measures to prepare shelters, fight fires, and care for refugees.³² Over time, however, despite the women’s desire to contribute and participate in public affairs, the Jewish community began to discourage their involvement, and after the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto, men led most public activities.³³

Between the ghetto’s establishment and the sealing of its borders, many of Warsaw’s Jews were forced to leave their homes and gather in an area that encompassed roughly 2.4 percent of the city (or 1.56 square miles). In addition, Jewish refugees, who had also been uprooted from their homes in other regions of Poland, began to arrive in Warsaw. The ghetto’s boundaries changed over the years, and even though large spaces were removed, more Jews were brought in from the surrounding cities and towns.³⁴ From the ghetto’s establishment until April 18, 1942, ³⁵ the Jewish population established mutual aid workshops, some educational systems, and occasional cultural and leisure events. The ghetto’s local governing systems, led by the Judenrat, were still running, and life at this stage maintained a semblance of normalcy.³⁶ Still, even at this stage, the living conditions for Jews gradually but steadily deteriorated. Overcrowding began to take its toll, and the loss of many residents’ livelihood coupled with the erosion of community structures led to the disintegration of existing social frameworks. As famine began to grip the ghetto, working and lower-middle-class Jews struggled to survive. The overcrowding, lack of food, scarcity of heating materials, and poor sanitation led to the spread of diseases and epidemics, resulting in a dramatic increase in mortality.³⁷ Demographic changes at the macrolevel and various changes at the microlevel resulted in a shift in accepted gender roles in many ghetto families.³⁸ As mentioned earlier, during the ghetto’s early years, women were in the majority, and their situation was relatively better, if only because they faced a slightly lower threat of physical assault and harassment than men. This situation allowed women to extend their protection to men and provide assistance to them where possible.³⁹ According to Ofer, at this stage, the family unit operated in a united way, with each member fulfilling a role; the role of the men was to find housing and provide a livelihood.⁴⁰

It is difficult to gauge how most fathers coped with the sealing of the ghetto in November 1940, given the fact that most fathers left little written evidence of this period. Some, however, did document their lives and struggles. It seems that during the ghetto’s early days, fathers’ primary concern was to help their children maintain some semblance of normality. As mentioned previously, Feldschuh was a known figure in the Warsaw ghetto. In 1928, he married musicologist Perla Richter (1900–1944), and the couple resided with their ten-year-old daughter Josima at 66 Leszno Street in Warsaw when the war broke out. He was determined to save Josima from the deteriorating conditions in the ghetto, and his efforts left him sleep-deprived. While Josima entertained children at Janusz Korczak’s orphanage with her music, her father worked tirelessly to get the family out of Poland. Eventually, they managed to escape from the ghetto and went into hiding, but unfortunately, Josima passed away in April 1943 at the age of fourteen. After losing her daughter, Perla also lost her will to live and passed away about a year later, on July 25, 1944.⁴¹

Of all the diaries written in the Warsaw ghetto, Feldschuh’s is one of the longest and most detailed.⁴² Among the myriad topics that Feldschuh writes about, his relentless attempt to save his daughter stands out prominently. For him, this is the purpose of his existence, and he felt he must do everything in his power to protect his family:

I am a father, the head of a family entrusted to my care. I have to take care of its existence and health…. More than once, my heart shrank when I heard the tale and at the sight of the beautiful, yearning eyes whose ambitions were not fulfilled. I decided to cause an uproar, to destroy graves, to turn the world upside down, to grab every rich Jew by his beard and threaten him.⁴³

In addition to writing about his experiences as a father in the ghetto, Feldschuh dedicates many diary pages to describing some of the other fathers, who are also living there. Some of these fathers found it hard to cope with their new circumstances and the change in their social status,⁴⁴ while others were driven by concern for their families until these feelings overwhelmed them.⁴⁵ In his detailed accounts of ghetto life, Feldschuh compiled a list of various beggars who filled the streets. He counted roughly seventy types of beggars and described one group, who chose to beg for the sake of their children’s survival. For these beggars, fatherhood was the driving force behind their actions. For example, he describes the “Carters”:

The father sticks his family in a cart to show off his handiwork…. [When he encounters] any suitable person, he suddenly starts scolding in a loud voice: “Halt!” and then quick as a flash, “Oh, sorry, sir! I didn’t see, my kids are screaming for bread.” Even this has some success, mainly with men.⁴⁶

As is clear from several of the fathers’ diaries, they cared about their children beyond ensuring their physical well-being. Emanuel Ringelblum, for example, hardly mentioned his son Uri in his diary. The main focus of his writing was his public work, and he barely addressed his personal life. Nevertheless, in one of the few instances when he did write about his son, he expressed great joy that he was learning German and improving his knowledge of the language.⁴⁷ Calel (Calek) Perechodnik, in his diary, written after the Grossaktion (“Great Action”—the mass deportation and murder of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto that began in summer 1942) and the loss of his wife and daughter, describes his memories of the ghetto’s early days when he was with his young daughter:

[W]e passed the summer and winter of 1941 in comparative peace, taking care of and raising our little Atushka. Although my wife and I denied ourselves many things, there was nothing too dear for my daughter’s diet. She was treated royally, we never left her alone in the house, and she therefore blossomed for us, developed and augured for us the best hope for the future.⁴⁸

Feldschuh also dedicated substantial time and effort to encouraging and developing Josima’s talents. For example, at the end of a concert that Josima held to raise funds for the public schools in the ghetto, he wrote in his diary:

Now it suddenly dawned on me that right here in my home, a musical genius was growing. I was blessed with such a treasure twice over. My heart shrank at the thought that we might have to waste our time here without proper attention and education, and who knows what else awaits us and what will become of us if we don’t get out. I determined within my heart to devote all my time, my energy, my honor even, to thinking only about migration, day and night, to create an opportunity for escape, to run away with her, and to bring her to the window of the world so that it will open up and delight in her.⁴⁹

Feldschuh was very passionate about his daughter and wanted to help her develop her talents and improve her education. This desire was just as important to him as caring for her physical well-being. The diaries show that fathers not only worried about the immediate dangers that the ghetto’s harsh conditions posed. They were also concerned about securing their children’s future and ensuring their growth and development. Feldschuh was not only anxious about preserving the life and soul of his daughter, but also worked to establish educational institutions and frameworks for children in the ghetto.

Kopel Piźyc was involved in similar humanitarian and educational work for the children of the Warsaw ghetto. The father of Miriam and Ruth (nineteen years old and nine years, respectively, in 1940), Piźyc helped feed children, primarily refugees deported to the ghetto. Later, he expanded his activities to include educational work and established several children’s choirs.⁵⁰ His words align with the records of Hillel Seidman on the education system in the Warsaw ghetto. Seidman noted the tremendous efforts that were being invested in establishing an education system for the ghetto children—at first clandestinely and from January 2, 1942, legally and with German approval.⁵¹ Piźyc wrote his diaries while in hiding after he escaped the ghetto with his daughter Miriam during the mass deportation. His diaries are divided into personal journals, which record events concerning his family up until the end of November 1943. His entries deal with his educational work in the ghetto, where he was a central figure in cultural life, as well as a man of status and wealth. Though I cannot conclude that his fatherhood motivated his work for the ghetto children, his actions align with those fathers who also expanded their range of activities beyond the narrow family sphere because of their identity as fathers. The author Yosef Kirman is one example, as emerges from the ghetto diaries of Rachel Auerbach:

Y. (Yosef) really loved children. He sent his two children and his young wife to her hometown to protect them from typhus and from endless hunger. His yearning for them knew no bounds. These yearnings consumed his thoughts to such an extent that he wanders around the city, grief-stricken and sad for the children. He passed on his love for his own children to all children. To all these hungry children, stretching out their hands, singing in thin voices and crying, filling the entire space of the ghetto. He wanders down the crowded Leszno street on the way to his home, distributing the last pennies from his wallet to the little beggars, and they, the children, recognize him from afar, run after him, and position themselves ahead of him. All his conversations revolve around a single focus point—the children.⁵²

In the early stages of the ghetto, when life still had a certain degree of normalcy and routine, and despite the growing difficulties and intensifying struggle for survival, fathers who could do so tried to build as normal a life as possible for their children. Their struggles not only focused on meeting their children’s physical needs by ensuring their access to food and medicine, but also, to a large extent, involved a commitment to continuing their education and fostering their talents.

It is important to note that the fathers who wrote diaries during the period of the Warsaw ghetto were likely not representative of all fathers. These diaries primarily represented the experiences of fathers with a tolerable economic situation. Others in more precarious financial situations often had to have their children earn a living. These fathers had almost no time for education and nurturing talent, let alone writing diaries.

April 18, 1942, to September 21, 1942

The second phase of the short and brutal existence of the Warsaw ghetto started on the “Night of Blood” (or “Bartholomew’s Night”) on April 18, 1942, and lasted until the end of the mass deportation on September 21, 1942. On the night of April 17/18, the Germans’ brutal treatment of the Jews intensified, and widespread slaughter began on the ghetto streets. Later, the mass deportation began on the evening of Tisha B’Av (July 22, 1942) and continued through Yom Kippur (September 21, 1942). During these few weeks, more than a quarter of a million Jews—more than 85 percent of the ghetto’s population—were sent to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp.⁵³ The mass deportation significantly altered the social and community fabric of the ghetto. Now, women and children were under greater threat. Accordingly, the sense of responsibility and concern for their fate felt by their husbands and fathers—who had to use all their resourcefulness to try to save them—also increased. Kopel Piźyc testified that being a father and the responsibility this placed on his shoulders changed his outlook.⁵⁴

To protect the lives of their children and family, ghetto fathers often relied on their personal connections and social networks. For example, Piźyc describes how, during the mass deportation, he tried to find a hiding place for himself and his daughter Miriam, after he succeeded in smuggling his wife and younger daughter out of the ghetto:

I am crying, asking him if he knows of a place to hide. He advises me to go to house number 50 immediately, the baker’s house in Lejman, where I might get a place in a Bunker. I ran there with Miriam. I met a few acquaintances there, and crying and begging I crept into the Bunker, which was closed to everyone.⁵⁵

The constant concern for saving the lives of their children—both physically and psychologically—naturally intensified the fathers’ own emotions, one of the most significant of which was their sense of guilt. While fathers tried to maintain a show of confidence before their children and shield them from the horrific realities, they expressed their actual feelings in their personal diaries. The guilt that some fathers experienced related to actions they did or did not take, which they believed could have somehow changed the course of events. A striking and painful example appears in the diary of Celek Perechodnik, a member of the Jewish Ghetto Police, who personally took his wife and daughter to the deportation square, erroneously believing he could save them later. Perechodnik was not the only father who failed to save his daughter. Many other children of many other fathers were deported to Treblinka. Perechodnik writes about the death of his wife and children at the beginning of his diary:

Only my wife could—although she shouldn’t—absolve me. However, she is no longer among the living. She was killed as a result of German barbarity, and, to a considerable extent, on account of my recklessness.… That’s why I ask the whole democratic world—Englishmen, Americans, Russians, Jews of Palestine—to avenge our women and children burned alive in Treblinka. We Jewish men are not worthy of being avenged! We were killed through our fault and not on a field of glory.⁵⁶

Shmuel Winter belonged to the Oyneg Shabes Archive’s inner circle and he kept a diary during his time in the ghetto. When his wife and young son were taken to Treblinka during the Grossaktion in Summer 1942, he experienced terrible guilt. In his diary, he wrote about an acquaintance who managed to move his daughter to the Aryan side: “Such a simple Jew did everything he could to save his loved ones, and I failed.”⁵⁷ According to Rachel Auerbach’s testimony, Winter became a broken man at that moment.⁵⁸ The poet Yitzhak Katzenelson was deeply troubled by the problem of saving his children; however, in August 1942, his wife Chana and their two youngest children, Benzion and Benjamin, were captured in the Grossaktion and sent to Treblinka. He was left alone with his son Tzvi. Shortly after his family’s deportation, Katzenelson wrote his poem “Der tog fun mayn groysn umglik” (Yiddish: “The Day of My Great Tragedy”).⁵⁹

Katzenelson managed to escape from the ghetto and was sent to the Vittel camp in France, where he wrote his “Vittel Diary,” which describes Polish Jewry and the Warsaw ghetto. This work, written as a monograph, includes a deeply emotional account of his final days in the ghetto, from the start of the great deportation until his escape. In one of the many passages in “Vittel Diary,” he describes his children, and writes about how, to a certain extent, his son’s death was also his own death, as his son Benjamin had inherited his father’s hair and smile. After the father lost his hair due to the ravages of time, this feature lived on in his son. The loss of Benjamin, therefore, was also a physical loss of a part of himself.⁶⁰

Even Feldschuh, who did not lose his family during the Grossaktion, was tormented by thoughts about saving his daughter, and his role in the circumstances that had caused her to be in the ghetto at that time. His constant worry about his daughter’s physical and emotional well-being, and his desperate, unsuccessful attempts to secure decent living conditions for her, created dissonance within his self-perception as a father. Consequently, his mix of emotions and internal psychological struggles burdened him. For example, alongside feelings of responsibility and commitment to saving his daughter, he experienced feelings of disappointment, failure, and guilt. In front of his daughter, he attempted to show confidence and minimize her worries; however, in his diary, he confessed his own anxieties, fears, and disappointments. The ongoing war and his failure to save his family also determined how he saw himself, including his helplessness, which in his eyes was a failure of masculinity, as he wrote on January 20, 1943: “And I, a man, am powerless to save my dear one.”⁶¹ Throughout his time in the ghetto, however, his deterioration would not be linear. Even after writing the above statement, when recounting another event on the same day, where Feldschuh had to fight for his wife and daughter to go into hiding, he describes doing this because of his role as a father and the head of the family: “Then the powers of my ancient ancestors entered me.”⁶²

The immense hardship and loss of family members led to despair and a willingness to resort to extreme measures, or at least to consider them. For example, the educator Avraham Levin wrote in his diary on August 24, 1942, during the height of the mass deportation from Warsaw, twelve days after his wife was taken and he was left alone with his fifteen-year-old daughter, Ora:

Ora is sick again. Her fever reached forty degrees. I was forced to leave her with Natsia [Levin’s sister], even though she was in great danger. For the first time in her life, her mother isn’t by her side when she’s sick. Can such a situation be described? This question of the mother also causes me great pain. What to do with her? I gave my consent to let her sleep the eternal sleep rather than hand her over to the murderers. But Y. refused to actually do it. Even the devil could not have imagined such a situation.⁶³

In these brief words, Levin expresses the difficulty he experienced when trying to care for his sick daughter while he was alone, and even “gives his consent” to actively hasten her death. Scholars studying life in the ghetto rarely address the matter of actively killing children, or at least the willingness to conceive of such an act.⁶⁴ Here, however, this issue should also be examined through the lens of paternal concern. As Carey shows, even behaviors considered harmful or morally reprehensible stemmed from a paternal obligation distorted by the dehumanizing and horrific conditions in the ghetto.⁶⁵ Levin’s desire to shield Ora from greater harm, depravation, or suffering by peacefully ending his daughter’s life was a reaction to his despair over no longer being able to protect her. To be clear, Levin never acted on these thoughts. For many fathers in the ghetto like Levin, contemplating the fate of their families, and how they had failed to save them made the lives unbearable.

Mid-September 1942 to the Warsaw ghetto uprising

The third phase of the Warsaw ghetto began after the Grossaktion. At this stage, approximately fifty-five thousand Jews remained in the ghetto, of which thirty-six thousand were officially registered. About twenty thousand had managed to evade the mass deportation and remain in the ghetto without permits. The latter group faced greater danger than those who were registered.⁶⁶ This stage involved preparing for a pending second deportation, and dealing with the actual deportation in January 1943.

The majority of the deported were women, children, and the elderly. Given that deportation meant death, the need to hide became extremely urgent. Therefore, by April 1943, the ghetto residents began creating hiding places—that became known colloquially as “malinas”—and bunkers. Prior to the Grossaktion, the main struggle of the ghetto Jews had been to try and maintain some semblance of normal life. When the mass deportation began in summer 1942, it marked the end of “normal” life in the ghetto, and rescue and escape now became the most critical issues for those who remained.

By October 1942, the ghetto had received more reliable reports about what was happening in Treblinka, and on November 10, a survivor from Treblinka managed to reach the ghetto. He detailed the horrific events in the extermination camp. Rumors had now become substantiated facts that shook Feldschuh to the core. He increasingly realized that death was the expected future for him and his family. Alongside his feelings of terror and helplessness, he felt a deep anger about his family’s future. This led him to act, as he wrote in December 1942:

We are digging. We dig at night, our own hands prepare the ground for us, for our wives and our children. We want to save them, to get them out from the jaws of the panther, and who knows if we are not handing them over to terrible beasts, to tuberculosis bacteria, to the bacteria of insanity and derangement, to the bacteria of skin diseases, to terrible intestinal and stomach diseases, to longings and sufferings, which they, our beloved ones, will endure as we look on, in our presence. And we will be powerless to save them, and we won’t have the strength to kill them, to suffocate them with our bare hands.⁶⁷

The impetus behind his actions was not necessarily aimed at saving children, as it was clear to any rational person that the chances of doing so were minimal. Rather, Feldschuh acted to prove to himself that, as a father, he had done everything in his power to resist the cruel fate the Nazis were attempting to impose on him and his family. This determination would enable him to honestly say that he had fulfilled his duty and done what was expected of him as a husband and father. As he continues:

[O]nce I hid myself or hid my wife and child, I understood that I had fulfilled my duty, and now an SS officer or Ukrainian could discover the hiding place and shoot me or my family. I saved my own soul. Not my life, but my soul.

In addition, he describes how, during this period, attempts to smuggle the remaining children out of the ghetto became increasingly desperate, and people used any remaining connections they had with Poles on the Aryan side of the city to find a hiding place for their children.⁶⁸ For Feldschuh, at the beginning of the war, he believed his paternal duty was to showcase Josima’s talents, but by the end of 1942 he knew he needed to conceal her, though he knew that her odds of surviving were slim. He embraced his fundamental and essential role as a father, and his obligations, and his understanding of what it meant to be a good father transformed and adapted in light of the harsh realities of the ghetto.

Even Yitzhak Katzenelson, who remained with his son Tzvi in the Vittel camp, did not forget his paternal role, despite his deep grief over losing his wife and two younger sons. Katzenelson immediately wrote of the loss of his family at the beginning of his diary, and it became a pivotal event that overshadowed the remainder of his writing and reflections. According to Katzenelson, if they were still alive, he would have the strength to mourn this destruction, but their deaths left him mute and unable to cope with the terrible catastrophe. His family were a part of him, and with their loss, a significant part of him also died.⁶⁹ Yet, Katzenelson still had a living son who was with him in Vittel. Interesting, when he writes of his deceased children he only refers to his pain and longing for them; however, when referencing his living child he discusses the difficulties and frustrations he faces parenting a teenager, particularly in such a chaotic period:

Tzvi is going crazy in his own way…. He lay down on his bed and fell asleep. I’m very sorry for Tzvi. When he was awake, he would irritate me by smoking cigarettes, by talking, and by his responses to questions about matters outside of Vittel. It also irritates me that he does not sigh in secret, that he does not express in silence his sorrow and anger about the things that have happened. But now that he has actually fallen asleep on his bed, I feel very sorry for him.⁷⁰

Through his diary entries, Katzenelson reflects on the difficulties of being a father to Tzvi, the surviving son. Though fundamentally he wanted to keep him alive, he still hoped that his son would grow up to be a well-mannered and well-educated young man. His brief remarks reflect the struggle that many fathers faced as they tried to cope with the destruction of their families and communities, their inability provide their children with educational opportunities, and their sense of powerlessness as they failed to protect their families from the chaos of the Holocaust.

Conclusion

The diaries examined in this article reveal the complex identities and dilemmas that Jewish fathers faced during the Holocaust. Violence and persecution in the ghetto strengthened their paternal identity, which became a dominant element that influenced their decisions and how they perceived reality. Traditional concepts of masculinity—in which the father is the head of the family and responsible for its well-being—drove Jewish fathers in the ghetto to focus on their roles and duties as fathers. By providing for the family, ensuring its security, and educating their children, their traditional paternal roles were reinforced; however, fathers also became more involved in domestic life, and tried to help and support their children emotionally, so the purview of their duties as caregivers and protectors expanded as well. Given the chaotic and horrific circumstances of the Holocaust, Jewish fathers understood that despite all their efforts, the chances of saving their children were extremely slim. Consequently, fathers often expressed their despair over the future and described their difficulties and disappointments in diaries, but despite this, Jewish fathers—with the exception of Abraham Levin, who contemplated killing his daughter to prevent her suffering—did not express a willingness to give up or shirk their paternal role.

Fatherhood was dynamic. While the areas of life in which Jewish fathers involved themselves changed and adapted according to their shifting circumstances, the intrinsic meaning of being a father did not change. Jewish fathers not only clung to their paternal identity, but even prioritized it when their other identities (professional, social, cultural) were lost or could not be actualized.⁷¹ Therefore, contrary to claims that parental identity disintegrated during the Holocaust, it is clear from the diaries of Jewish men in the ghetto that fatherhood remained significant to them, and became a clear and undeniable expression of their masculinity.

Another important aspect here is the adaptations that fatherhood underwent in the Warsaw ghetto in response to changing circumstances. In the initial stage, as society began to disintegrate, fathers mainly concerned themselves not just with meeting the material and physical needs of their children and family, but also—and perhaps more so—with meeting their psychological, educational, and moral needs. In the second stage, as the Nazis began to liquidate the ghetto, fathers focused their efforts on physical preservation and survival, relying on their social connections and networks. Finally, Jewish fathers mourned and lamented the loss of individual children, which to a large extent also symbolized the wider destruction of Europe’s Jews.

Between those who lament failed fatherhood and those who praise the fatherhood that managed to flourish, it seems that the story of fathers during the Holocaust has yet to be told in the way that they themselves narrated—addressing their pain, their failures, and feelings of guilt, but also their courage, dedication, and sacrifices. The image of the Jewish father that emerges from these ghetto diaries is that of a broken man who nevertheless strives to maintain his masculine, paternal identity as he grapples with an impossible and brutal reality.

Tehila Darmon Malka is the head of the History Department at Herzog Academic College and a research fellow at Bar Ilan University. She obtained her PhD from Ben-Gurion University, focusing on missing persons and the search for relatives in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Her current research is centered around fathers and fatherhood during the Holocaust, particularly as reflected in fathers’ diaries. This study has received support from EHRI and Yad Vashem.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank Professor Dalia Ofer, Dr. Maddy Carey, Dr. Ada Gebel, and many others for their generosity in sharing valuable insights and advice.

Funding statement

The author would like to thank The International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem and The Norbert and Liza Schechter Z’l Fund for sponsoring this research.

Footnotes