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Downloaded from Pubfactory at 09/26/2021 03:57:07AM Via Free Access War-Time Hiding Places of Jews Can Be Systemized According to Various Crite- Ria 1 An attempted typology of the hiding places All Jews who were hiding could tell their story of vagrancy and homelessness by describing the places where they were waiting for an improvement of their situation, the end of the war, the salvation. Each of those stories could be com- pletely different, just as different and incomparable as the destinies of individu- als are. Their hideouts are a whole spectrum of places clawed away from space. They were often absolutely unbelievable (e.g. a toilet in a yard of a town house described by Ignacy Bierzyński-Burnett or a well in which families of Koppel Holzmann and Wilhelm Dichter were hiding) and often quite ordinary, like a basement, a room behind a cabinet, a shed or a barn. However, to identify the phenomenon of a Jewish hiding place during the Second World War, we need to create at least a partial systematic categorization, as we are unable to examine and analyze each story individually. Being aware of how difficult it is to create such taxonomy and of how open- ended and imprecise the proposed categories might turn out to be, I have still de- cided to create a typology of hiding places. I have abandoned a commonly used category: “ghetto – Aryan side”. This division is used when analyzing all aspects of the experiences of Polish Jews during the Shoah. However, I believe that when depicting hiding places understood as places of hiding, dwelling, this category is not important from epistemic point of view. The following analysis will indicate that nearly all kinds of hiding places could have been equally common both on the “Aryan side” and within the ghettos. It also seems that this historical and political category falls within a different order than the categories I propose. The latter are strictly practical and apply to time, space and involvement of groups and individuals. While depicting given categories and listing specific examples, I indicate where the hiding place in question was located, as this often influences which category this case falls into, yet I do not incorporate “ghetto – Aryan side” category to my system. I spend more time deliberating some types of hiding places and approach other types quite briefly. It is not a resultant of a statistic frequency of one hiding place or another. To some extent it was influenced by number of available texts where descriptions of given hideouts were presented. Some types are simply more present in the discourse on the Shoah, as e.g. hid- ing places in the Warsaw Ghetto or in ghettos in other big cities. Other – such as hiding places in the countryside or on “no-man’s-land” – are yet to be saved from the oblivion or ignorance. 53 Marta Cobel-Tokarska - 9783653068818 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/26/2021 03:57:07AM via free access War-time hiding places of Jews can be systemized according to various crite- ria. I propose the following categories of division: – Depending on planed and/or real time spent in a given place: temporary and long-term; – Depending on presence or lack of outside help: independent and assisted; – Depending on a location: in the city (small and big cities), in the country or in a forest; – Depending on number of people hiding therein: solitary and collective. I have also introduced a separate category “wandering – looking for a hiding place”. I believe it is essential to compliment the picture emerging on the basis of characteristics of particular categories of hideouts. For one should realize how fragile and unstable was the reality of the people in hiding, even in long-term hideouts. At any time, a hiding place could have lost its virtues – it could have been uncovered, destroyed, lose its status due to a decision of its host or an own- er of a given place. Numerous “moves”, difficult times of living outside a hiding places and looking for an adequate space are an important, “dynamic” phase of the process of hiding – as important as the “static” periods of staying in relatively secure hiding places. The categories I have listed to describe hiding places are not disjoint; in nu- merous cases, they intersect and overlap. Therefore, one and the same hiding place could have undergone transformation. The above approach is not to serve a rigid categorization, but is only to organize a set of characteristics helpful while describing a phenomenon of a hiding place. When familiar with such a typology we gain a tool allowing us to look into testimonies of the people in hiding from a different angle. While citing those testimonies I was trying to choose examples illustrating each category. It was not my ambition to classify all testimonies I know to a given category. I was rather hoping to map the scope of the study and to present the described phenomenon in all its diversity before attempting a so- ciological and anthropological analysis of a space of a hiding place. Temporary and long-term hiding places This category was created based on the criterion of planned time to be spent in a hiding place. First, we need to look closely at this criterion. By its own definition and due to external circumstances a hiding place could never be treated differ- ently than as a temporary place of residence. “Temporary” means, for example, until the end of the war, i.e. a moment when hiding will no longer be a necessity. Nobody assumed they would spend their whole lives in hiding. 54 Marta Cobel-Tokarska - 9783653068818 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/26/2021 03:57:07AM via free access However, the scope of this temporary nature is important. I have assumed that for the purposes of typology the following distinction will prove practical: a hiding place can be deemed temporary if it was used to hide in until an im- minent threat passed and if it was chosen in the heat of the moment. They were not searched for in particular – they can be also referred to as improvised or co- incidental, as it was often a coincidence that led people to given hideouts. Those hiding places were most often found intuitively. Word “momentary” can be used as a synonym of “temporary”. Time spent in a temporary hiding place, waiting for it to be safe to come out could, of course, extend to over 24 hours, but my definition assumes that nobody planned an overnight stay in such a hideout. The stay is such hiding places lasted for hours rather than days. In contrast, long-term hiding places, as I describe them, are places where people planned to stay for longer and spend a night. Time spent there could extend to months and even years. A plan of staying in a long-term hiding place was normally connected with setting rules, gathering supplies and adapting the premises. Temporary hiding places Examples of temporary hiding places primarily include the ones used during displacement actions in ghettos. A highest sample of them can be found in ac- counts and memories from the Warsaw Ghetto; those include descriptions of improvised hiding places during Gross-Action Warsaw. The mass extermination of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto started on 22nd July 1942. The architecture of Warsaw tenements made this task easy for the Germans: it was simple to cover the exits from the house, check the floors and drag out resisting people from the apartments. Instinct pushed people to hide even if their hiding places of choice would not prove durable. Often nothing was changed in the rooms, people tried to make the most of that scrap of space where they found shelter against the blockade. At the sound of footsteps on the stairs a person who wished to escape death had no time to devise a strategy. First glance at a well-known space hinted at a way to save oneself. It was easy for the Ger- mans to guess where people would hide from being forced away. However, some- times a house would turn out to be a mysterious labyrinth and the space twisted, turned, shrank and led to previously unknown nooks and crannies: places in which nobody would be able to hide in different circumstances. Thus, the funda- mental characteristic of nearly all of improvised hideouts is the “impossibility”, which is supported by numerous examples. 55 Marta Cobel-Tokarska - 9783653068818 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/26/2021 03:57:07AM via free access Such an incredible story is told e.g. by Ita Dimant, who was a twenty-some- thing-year-old girl during the war: “Saturday, August 1st […] Loads of policemen in the yard. Whistles and cries: ‘out!’. Everybody down. You could already hear shots. I dash up the stairs to cover, to hide somewhere. […] There is an attic, but there is no place to hide. Some hole in the wall. I go through that hole. A parcel slips out of my hands. I’m now at an identical attic. God, I don’t have my leather bag with documents and money. Now I’m done. I jump through that same hole again. I look for the bag – it’s not there. But wait, this is not where I was before, this is a different attic. Another hole in the wall, I go through and there’s an iden- tical attic again. Have I gone mad? I look around with wild eyes, I keep jumping through some hole and it would seem that I am still at the same attic. I get to some staircase thinking that it might lead to some other yard – I hear police whistles downstairs, their feet stomping on the stairs and them banging on closed doors.
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