I’m watching Schindler’s list, and one of the names on the famous list surprised me. That was Goldberg, the Jew who worked for the Nazis as a pseudo-SS officer, snitching on anyone and everyone, keeping the Germans informed about what was going on, and taking bribes from Schindler to get specific people assigned to his factory.
2 questions, really
Why would Schindler want to save Goldberg, who in my estimation was the biggest piece of shit during this period of history. His people are getting obliterated, and he is benefiting from this by accepting bribes to help himself when he can. I honestly don’t know how anyone could work for the Germans knowing they were going to be killed in the end. And most of these people met this fate. If I were a Jew, I would take a bullet to the head before taking orders from the Germans to herd my fellow Jews into gas chambers, or pick up bodies to dump into furnaces. Goldberg represents the worst of the Jews (or anyone else) in the movie. Why save him?
How did the Jewish community treat the Goldberg’s of the time after the war? If I knew Goldberg, I’d have beat him to within an inch of his life. Or maybe just beat him to death. I would not have wanted to save him, and I would make sure his name was left off any list created.
Did the Jews forgive and forget people like Goldberg?
There’s a difference between those Jews who were forced to work in menial tasks like burning the bodies or maintaining the camps, and Kapos like Goldberg, who actively assisted the Nazis in oppressing the Jews. With the former, it was understood that you had to do certain things to survive; you have to remember that most death camp inmates who survived the war managed to do so by working at the camps - everyone else was killed upon arrival.
The latter, though - the ones who actually hurt other Jews and received favors from the Germans in return - they were not forgiven that easily. I don’t think many were actually tried or punished, but they were universally shunned by society, and to this day calling someone a Kapo is the worst insult a Jew can tell another. That said, it’s not as if most of them are willing to stand up and admit what they did. After the war they tended to run as far away from their past as they could, blending in among other survivors and refugees. Occasionally one would be identified by a fellow inmate, but otherwise, they’d go on with their lives like any other Holocaust survivor.
Also, remember that as the death camps were being shut down, the Nazis killed all the Kapo’s too – they didn’t want to leave any survivors who might be witnesses.
In fact, even before that, the Nazis didn’t keep their promises to the workers in the camps (big surprise!) – with the work they were doing and the starvation rations, most only lasted a few months before they were no longer fit for work – and then the guards sent them on to gas chambers in turn.
This answer makes sense, and I was not aware of it. I couldn’t understand why Schindler and Stern would have put him on the list. If Goldberg (that piece of shit) was typing the list, the answer has to be that he simply put his name on the list to save his own ass. Not surprising behavior by Goldberg, given his character.
I’m torn by this. I understand some Jews survived the camps because of “good” work assignments, but I don’t think I could do it. If I were given the choice of tossing the dead into a furnace, or becoming one of the dead in the furnace, I think I would have taken a bullet and become one of the dead in the furnace. I don’t think I could live with myself if I were lucky enough to survive the war. I think the only thing that would motivate me to stay alive is the prospect of being about to take out the Goldbergs of my particular world.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to make that choice, and I hope no one has to make that choice again.
I know this is stepping into IMHO terrority, but I’ll post it anyway. My mother and I were once talking about slavery and whether or not we would have been a runaway, rebellious slave or a docile, “yessuh!” slave. My mother, always being the ardent revolutionary, said that there would have been NO WAY that she could have been the latter. She imagined herself as Harriet Tubman or a female version of Nat Turner. Or even more extreme, one of the people who committed suicide during the Middle Passage.
Well, of course she did. Who in their right minds would want to see themselves as a meek, spineless, stereotype-perpetrating slave?
I told her that not only could I see myself as a docile slave, but that I could also see myself being one of the slaves that snitched when rebellions were being hatched (not saying I would have wanted to be a snitch, just that I could see myself being so scared about the whole thing going awry that I might do something to sabotoge the plan.) I’m a survivor. I’ll do anything to just make it through the day, short of killing someone that I love.
But I can just as easily see myself being Harriet Tubman too.
I figure that while the Harriet Tubmans, the Nat Turners, and the Denmark Veseys of the slavery era are heroic, the folks who simply survived doing what they were forced to do also deserve respect. Because the folks I just named above? I’m not sure they were very fecund. But the other slaves were, and they represent the folks I’m descended from. Without them subjecting themselves to the oppressive machinery, there would be no me. Just like the Holocaust victims who were forced to burn bodies, they were doing what they had to do to survive. They (and their children) should feel no guilt or shame about it at all.
If I recall the movie right, Schindler simply put down every name he could get a hold of. If he knows a man’s name, he may as well save him.
I’d save someone else before saving Goldberg, but if I could save both of them, I’d save both. Put in a horrible situation, that someone made a bad choice is pretty forgivable really.
Goldberg decided who was on the list based on bribes. You were able to pay him, he put you on there.
When you read the book, the rescuer you feel sorry for is Raimund Tisch, because he never really got any sort of credit. After word got out after the war about how he had saved Jews and provided them with black market food, he got threatened and spat on on the streets of Vienna as a “dirty Jew lover”. He had a bunch of film negatives of Plaszow, but kept them hidden because he was afraid of ODESSA, and they didn’t come out until one of the survivors bought them from him, just before his death when he was broke.
This is sort of the point I wanted to make. My father is a Holocaust survivor (so is my mother, actually). He has once in a while told me stories of his experiences. One thing he always said was: The important thing was to survive, by any means possible.
Generally, the Sonderkommando weren’t volunteers — they were picked out of the arriving transportees and put to work hauling corpses, probably unaware that their predecessors were among their first “clients.” I doubt that they had much choice in the matter.
And in due course, they would arrive for work one day and be herded into the gas chambers themselves (although this recycling was practiced less often as time went by).
Generally, and this is mostly speculation, I think it likely that anyone with half a brain arriving in the camp, whether Jew, Roma or homosexual, knew full well what his or her ultimate fate would be. Life, for those not gassed right off the bat, would be a matter of hanging on day to day until death or liberation. Some did indeed try to revolt; but the Nazis’ charming habit of wiping out a random sampling of the general population as well as the rebels tended to keep such incidents far and few between.
It’s interesting, albeit depressing to look at the various ghetto Judenrate, and the different ways the leaders dealt with their positions, from Rumkowski on the one hand to Czerniaków on the other.