(Jewish Group) Kapos: A book review
In early 1946 in Tel Aviv, Asher Berlin got attacked in an alleyway. A gang of men with knives slashed his stomach and face. While Berlin’s blood poured out on the ground, his attackers warned passersby not to help him: “Don’t interfere. He informed on Jews to the Gestapo.” In spite of the thugs’ threats, he was taken to the hospital and survived, his face and body covered with scars.
Asher Berlin never turned in Jews to the Gestapo. He had not set foot in Europe since coming to Tel Aviv in 1924. Mistaken for someone else, he was caught up by the mob justice meted out in the streets of Palestine in the years after the German surrender. Jews rumored to have collaborated with the Nazis were set upon by angry survivors of the camps, beaten viciously and in some cases, like Berlin’s, nearly killed. The editors of the Tel Aviv newspaper Iton Meyuhad warned, “The anarchy that is raging in our public places has gone beyond all bounds.”
A few years later, criminal courts replaced the lynch mobs. In 1950, the new state of Israel passed the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law. Under the law, Jewish kapos and members of the ghetto Judenräte (Jewish Councils) were put on trial for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. The largely forgotten history of these trials has pivotal importance for our changing sense of what it meant to be a Jew during the Holocaust, as Dan Porat makes clear in his insightful, eloquently written new book, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators.
Most surprising to readers will be Porat’s account of the charges against the Jewish defendants. Many survivors regarded Jewish kapos, policemen and Judenrat members as equivalent to Nazis themselves. Elsa Trenk, a kapo who had beaten female inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was charged in 1950 with being guilty of genocide. The policeman who arrested her claimed she had “an intention to annihilate the Jewish people,” and the prosecutor at her trial argued that she “identified with her German superiors.”
Trenk was convicted of mistreating inmates, and she received a two-year sentence. Like all the other Jewish defendants in the trials, she was cleared of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Trenk had been traumatized by her experience of Auschwitz in the years 1942-43, the court concluded, and this explained her cruelty. She did not identify with the Nazis, nor did she wish to exterminate the Jewish people.
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For the record, I have not read this book, but found the review interesting. It is something we see pop up time and time again from some anytime Jews and The Holocaust are mentioned.
