While “No to Fear” often reads like a Wikipedia entry with no hyperlinks, “Mordechai Anielewicz: No to Despair,” by Rachel Hausfater (“The Little Boy Star: An Allegory of the Holocaust”), also translated by Alison L. Strayer, is a thrilling biography with the immediacy and emotional impact of a novel.
“No to Despair” begins on the eve of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943. The previous summer, the Nazis had deported 300,000 of the ghetto’s Jews and murdered most of them in the Treblinka concentration camp. In January 1943, they had arrested and attempted to deport more Jews but had been thwarted by 10 resistance soldiers, including the 24-year-old Anielewicz.
So in April he rallies those who are left in the ghetto to fight back, even if it’s a lost cause. Their goal is not to win, Anielewicz tells them, but to fight to the death. A chosen death, not the one that will otherwise surely be forced upon them.
How we got here — the German invasion of Poland, the creation of the Jewish ghettos, the Aktions that rounded up prisoners, the camps where they were killed — is explained clearly and chillingly, with barely any footnotes. Well-placed flashbacks show how Anielewicz formed a gang as a boy to protect his Warsaw neighborhood from antisemitic attacks and how he was kicked out of a paramilitary camp for retaliating against persecution.
Like “No to Fear,” this story is told from the point of view of an observer, but here it’s someone in the same age group as the series’ intended readers: the 13-year-old Feigele, “a little messenger girl, a former smuggler,” who lost her entire family in an Aktion. Rescued by Anielewicz on the way back from a foray outside the ghetto, she becomes his devoted follower and constant companion.
In Feigele’s eyes, Anielewicz is “an angel,” his thinking “brilliant,” their quest “sacred.” He is “pure of heart, heartbreakingly gentle, incredibly brave” and, of course, “a mensch.” At times Feigele’s adoration comes across more like an embarrassing teenage crush, but it’s a good example of how Anielewicz was able to inspire hundreds of young people in the ghetto to join him in a hopeless cause.
Source: NY Times
