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Last update - 18:25 11/06/2008 Biography What we knew, and yet didn't know By Yechiam Weitz Tags: Yisrael Gutman, Warsaw Ghetto  Ada Pagis's splendid writing opens a window into the very private life of renowned scholar and Holocaust survivor Yisrael Gutman Yemei Afela, Rig'ei Hesed Prakim Mekhayeh Yisrael Gutman ("Days of Darkness, Moments of Grace: Yisrael Gutman -- A Life"), by Ada Pagis, Hakibbutz Hameuchad & Yad Vashem (Hebrew), 248 pages, NIS 84 Advertisement Yisrael Gutman is my mentor and teacher. He published my first academic article, and he guided me in the writing of my master's thesis and later my doctorate, at the Hebrew University. In 1977, the year of the great political upheaval here, Gutman was teaching a graduate course on Zionist policy and displaced persons in the Holocaust. Every time he meant to say "Bevin" [Ernest Bevin, Britain's anti-Zionist foreign secretary before and at the time of independence], it came out "Begin," drawing peals of laughter from the students at the insight this provided into his political views. All his students knew, of course, that he was a Holocaust survivor. We had read the chilling testimony he provided at the Eichmann trial in 1961, whole sentences of which had remained etched in our minds. "I walked the streets of Warsaw for the last time, I saw it as it lay in ruins," he says in Haim Gouri's film "The 81st Blow." So we knew, and yet we didn't know. Gutman, a very private person, was not eager to share his life story. Only now he has told all, to Ada Pagis, who wrote it down as he spoke. In her first book, "Lev Pitomi" ("A Sudden Heart"), published in 1995, Pagis described the fascinating but sad life of her husband, the poet Dan Pagis, who died in his prime in 1986. With courage and complete honesty, Pagis laid it all out, both the good and the bad. There is a basic similarity between the protagonists of her books: Both hailed from "there," and both became prominent spokesmen on the subject of the Holocaust -- Pagis through his poetry and Gutman through his historic research. Nonetheless, there are significant character differences between them. Pagis describes her husband as anxiety-ridden and prone to depression. Gutman is a different type entirely, cruelly taunted by fate, time after time, but tough as a rock, garnering all his emotional resources to stand up to the blows. So it was during the Holocaust, and later, also, in Israel. Inheriting timidity Yisrael Gutman was born in 1923 in Warsaw. His father was introverted and sensitive, and later, as the son pondered his own shyness, he concluded he had "inherited" it. At the age of 13, during the Spanish Civil War, he joined the secular Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, and this influenced his life in two ways: He was introduced to the dynamic enterprise of the Jews in the Land of Israel, where pioneers were "conquering the soil with the sweat of their brow," and he developed an awareness of socialist ideology. These became the guiding principles of his life, remaining with him long after the Warsaw youth club and those who belonged to it were reduced to smoke and ashes. The outbreak of war in 1939 was predictable, as the German-Polish conflict escalated. Only the defeat of the Polish army and its swift surrender came as a surprise. In the days of German occupation that followed the September invasion, the Gutman family was left penniless, and young Yisrael looked for jobs to help make ends meet. One day the following June, while working at a German air force base, he was sent home early, after being presented with a gift worth its weight in gold -- a loaf of bread. It turned out the reason for this unusual generosity was the fall of Paris. Gutman took the news badly: "He dropped the loaf of bread and was so overcome with grief and despair, he blacked out for several minutes. That was his escape from the horror of it all." But poverty was not the worst to come. His family shrank within a matter of months. In the spring of 1940, his sick father grew steadily weaker and one day closed his eyes for good. A sister who was born with serious kidney problems died soon after. His mother, who had been the family's pillar of strength, died a few months later. Gutman remained alone in the world, with only a young sister to care for. With great effort, he managed to get her into the Warsaw orphanage run by Janusz Korczak, an institution whose good reputation he believed would help keep the children safe. When that illusion was dashed one day, and the orphans, among them Genya Gutman, dressed in their holiday best, marched in an orderly line to their deaths, the pain and grief felt by her brother knew no consolation. It was "a wound that has never healed." As a natural continuation of his membership in Hashomer Hatzair, Gutman took part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (April 1943), which, according to Pagis, the Jews saw "as the one ray of light in a period of utter darkness." Mordecai Anielewicz had been Yisrael's counselor in the movement, but their relationship was complicated. Gutman worshipped the older boy, but Anielewicz behaved coolly toward him. When gas penetrated the bunker where he was hiding, Gutman was forced out into the street. Exhausted and suffering from facial injuries, he reached the Umschlagplatz (Deportation Square), where he was arrested. Thus began his ordeal in the death camps. At his first stop, Majdanek, Gutman walked around dazed and confused, though he also recalls fleeting moments of grace, as some of the older prisoners extended a helping hand. "Even in this place, where life descended to the lowest of the low," writes Pagis, "he often sensed the prisoners' need for human contact and willingness to protect those weaker than themselves." The next stop was Auschwitz. In the transport there, he kept repeating to himself that "anything is better than Majdanek," never imagining what lay in store. At Auschwitz, he learned for the first time what loneliness was. In the ghetto he had been surrounded by comrades from the youth movement and the underground, and even in Majdanek he had a few friends. Now "he felt for the first time that he had no one in the whole world." Gutman did not excel in the battle for survival: "A combination of bashfulness and pride kept him from taking advantage of situations that would allow him to improve his own lot." But paradoxically, that is what led other prisoners to do everything they could to help him. "Instead of more soup, he got extra-large helpings of warmth and friendship, which revived his spirit time and again." In Auschwitz, as he had back in Warsaw, Gutman joined the underground. Years later, he wrote that the idea of all-out war in Auschwitz was born out of acute distress and despair, but the idea of self-defense was a "breath of life." Many prisoners in Auschwitz felt that they had regained their humanity after becoming active in the underground, which organized an escape from the camp and succeeded in destroying a gas chamber, in October 1944. 'Visions of love' At the end of 1944, as the "1000-year Reich" was drawing to an end, Gutman moved on to his next stop in life: Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. He was taken there aboard a freight train, together with other hungry, tired, freezing prisoners. During this nightmarish trip and its aftermath, two incidents occurred that remained indelible in his mind as "visions of love, precious keepsakes that he carried with him to the free world." One of them took place as the train was passing through a small town near Vienna, early one morning: Hundreds of laborers walking to work saw the train of horror, opened their lunch sacks and tossed bread, fruit and vegetables to the prisoners on board, who "shivered with cold and emotion at the hail of manna from heaven." When Gutman reached the camp, it was too full to take in more prisoners. He was sent to a sub-camp near Vienna, and eventually released. Walking on the road near the camp, he saw a company of German POWs guarded by an American soldier, who ordered them to take off their clean uniforms and don the filthy rags of prisoners who had just been freed. "Ich bin a Yid!" ("I am a Jew!"), he shouted at the top of his lungs, "illustrating, in his own way, the new order in the world." Gutman reached Palestine on the eve of the War of Independence. He wanted to settle on a kibbutz, but flatly turned down an offer to join one that was then being formed near Tel Aviv, on the grounds that it was not pioneering enough. Instead, he chose Kibbutz Lehavot Habashan, in the Upper Galilee, due to its proximity to the Hula swamp and the Syrian border. He lived on the kibbutz for 25 years, established a family there and began his research career. In 1963, he published a book about the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto, "Mered Hanetzurim" ("Revolt of the Besieged"). He left the kibbutz in the wake of a personal misfortune: His son, Nimrod, was killed in the army in tragic circumstances and Gutman felt the kibbutz was guilty of not safeguarding him sufficiently. Pagis, whose low-key writing is her strength, devotes a single sentence to it: "Yisrael felt that the system, which had given his life meaning and protected him when he was down, had taken his son from him." Gutman moved to Jerusalem, suffering from "wounds that had no cure," and devoted himself to academia. He completed his doctorate at the age of 50, and went on to become an acclaimed historian, both in Israel and abroad. His book "The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943" was translated into many languages. He served as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, and was involved in the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. Gutman has also cultivated a whole generation of Holocaust scholars and researchers. I read Pagis's book with bated breath, and not only because of my personal connection to her subject. The combination of Gutman's unique personality and Pagis's splendid writing turn it into a sensitive and compelling book. Yechiam Weitz is a professor in the Land of Israel studies department at the University of Haifa. His book "The First Step to Power: The Herut Movement, 1949-1955" was published by Yad Ben-Zvi (Hebrew) last year. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Marketing ploy Israeli satellite TV has a new star - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Through her lens Madonna's next project: documentary about the Israeli-Arab conflict.

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