Luke’s Reviews > Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund > Status Update

Two SS men with white rags limped forward to request a fifteen-minute truce to collect their wounded. The [Warsaw ghetto] fighters answered them with bullets. Criminals, [obergruppenführer Jurgen] Stroop sniffed. This was against the rules.

Erlich was so stupefied by boredom he snuck out just to wait on breadlines.

These activities won the Bund so much love that when a group of communists tried to jump Bernard [Goldstein] on Smocza Street, nearby housewives threw themselves on top of the attackers, using their brooms as bludgeons, and would have murdered them if the communists hadn't managed to escape.

For the Bolsheviks, stopping pogroms was a matter of self-interest as well as ethics. They had long known that the conflation of Jew and revolutionary would redound against them, and Trotsky's role as leader of the Red Army brought these slanders to a fever pitch. [...] Levin himself made a gramophone recording to convince soldiers that antisemitism was a tool of the bourgeoisie.

Just like lynchings in the American South, pogroms were family affairs. Blood-smeared Russian mothers loaded their pushcarts with the spoils from looted Jewish houses, then had their kids torch the homes behind them as they left.