Svenja Bethke's book examines law, crime, and punishment in the Warsaw, Vilna, and Lodz ghettos during World War II, providing the first book-length study of these issues. It offers a complex account that focuses on ambivalences; it challenges postwar assumptions about Jewish resistance, heroism, and community solidarity. The book, a translation and revision of the original German edition (2015), also complicates the postwar narrative of unilateral Jewish criticism of the Jewish Councils and the Jewish Police in the ghettos and demonstrates important shifts in definitions of crime from 1940 till 1943.
The book is organized into six thematic chapters on the following topics: Nazi policy and Jewish Council perspectives, Jewish Council definitions of criminal activity, the Jewish Police, the ghetto courts, the penal system, and ordinary ghetto residents’ relationships with various authorities. Each of these chapters uses examples from a wealth of wartime sources such as diaries, court documents, official chronicles, reports, and newspapers, as well as postwar memoirs and testimonies, to explain Jewish Council, Police, and ordinary ghetto inhabitants’ activities surrounding the issue of crime in the ghettos. It convincingly demonstrates changing perceptions and definitions of crime over time in the three ghettos, suggesting that as mass murder ramped up, attention to so-called “classic” crimes like theft and rape diminished, while a focus on newly-defined “crimes” that threatened the existence of the ghetto increased. It also points to changes in ordinary ghetto inhabitants’ attitudes toward the Jewish Councils and Police—while these were initially seen as inhabiting typical prewar roles such as maintaining peace and order within the community, they came to engender mistrust, especially after their participation in the mass deportations of 1942. These changes over time echo similar arguments made by scholars like Alexandra Garbarini in her 2006 monograph, Numbered Days.
Bethke's deep investigation into contemporary sources provides a corrective to history written too much from postwar perspectives, “which are often distorted by expectations and wishful thinking” (172). Indeed, the central goals of the book are to complicate historical narratives that define all attempts at survival as “resistance” (as popularized by Yehuda Bauer) and to counter the claim that Jews in the ghettos lived at an exalted moral level in response to the pressures of ghetto life (as articulated by Samuel Gringauz). The sources Bethke analyzes portray an alternative reality in which some attempts at survival were deemed criminal and some took place because of decidedly non-resistance motivations, such as smuggling for the thrill of it. Furthermore, the argument that there was little crime in the ghettos does not hold up under the scrutiny of evidence from massive legal institutions in each of these ghettos, which continuously worked at upholding internal laws and external German orders.
However, some of the analytical aims of this book do not quite come to fruition. Bethke states in the introduction, “This is a book about how people create notions of right and wrong and how such notions lead to definitions of crime and thence to prosecution and punishment. . . . It explores how, under these [ghetto] circumstances, people tried to make sense of everyday lives that had been turned upside down, bringing with them pre-war notions of justice and morality, and it considers the extent to which this rupture led to new judgements of human behaviour” (4). This suggests that the book will offer a robust examination of how people assessed questions of morality and the relationship between morality and law in the ghettos. For example, Bethke explains the changing attitude toward smugglers and radio listeners over the course of the war—at the beginning, they were seen as endangering the ghetto and therefore as criminals (morally corrupt), but as time went on, they were heroized as resisters helping the ghetto (morally superior). With these and other examples, the author points toward this aim without ever fully integrating it into the text. The book describes much more successfully the various mechanisms of the legal systems in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos and their relationships with Nazi expectations, orders, definitions, and interventions.
The final conclusions are straightforward; Bethke argues that the Jewish Councils’ legal activities reflected first and foremost the aim of ensuring the survival of the Jewish communities they served, acting both autonomously and under the constraints of German overseers. She also claims that people living in the ghettos approached legal authorities primarily with an eye to their own survival. These conclusions suggest that, in fact, the only moral value that remained unchanged throughout the entirety of the existence of the ghettos was that of attempting to save Jewish lives.
To expert readers, this book provides an important contribution to the examination of ghetto life by adding a well-researched study on legal institutions in the ghettos; however, it rests on assumptions about postwar scholarship that have, in many cases, already been addressed. Isaiah Trunk in his book Judenrat (1972), in which he presented an enormous range of responses to and activities of a large number of Jewish Councils, already has complicated the narrative about animosity toward Jewish Councils. Furthermore, the argument that “‘a heightened Jewish morality’ prevented ‘criminal behaviour’” in the ghettos (166), which Bethke claims to debunk, is a marginal one in the scholarly community. While the information in this book is new, the conclusions are familiar. To non-expert readers, however, this book will be eye-opening as it plunges them into the messy, uncomfortable “choiceless choices” that made up everyday life in the ghettos. However, the book's detail, constantly switching examples from the three ghettos, and historical rather than narrative approach, may pose an obstacle to some readers.
Overall, this book demonstrates the importance and fruitfulness of continuing to examine contemporary ghetto sources with an eye to new questions such as “crime and punishment.” The miraculous amount of material that survived means that historians can and will continue to examine novel and interesting aspects of that period, to better understand the experiences of the people who lived then.
