Irving Altus - June 2, 1982
Lack of Leadership
The Germans said that.
Yes! I was there. Uh, rabbis and cantors and some people from the Jewish community, they say that we are born here, we're want to die here. This was their answer. And I was there. This was by the synagogue, you know, on, on, on, in the backyard.
Was this just after the war, after the Germans took over?
Right at the beginning, yes. Maybe it was the thing, but a lot of, a lot of little cities, they did let go.
And as far as you know, that actually happened?
When they were asking...
They actually...
I think it did happen in a--two places.
They actually took them to the Russian border and...
Yes, yeah. And uh, this was a big mistake. Either they were afraid or whatever. I cannot tell you. I cannot tell you what happened. But sometime we talk about this. This was the first big mistake. But uh, as I see now, I'm older and all the thing you know, from experience, we did not had any leaders. Like for instance, we could go to, to, to the woods. We could fight. No reason why not. A lot of young people, I was nineteen. And uh, we could do a lot of things. We could kill Germans. All right, so then they would kill us, but we could do better than what we did. We did not have any leadership. This is what I think now.
Would you blame it on the lack of leadership...
Yeah, oh sure.
...as opposed to making...
I mean, which, which we could do, of course. I mean, not to blame them, because, of the leaders, the Germans didn't win the war you know, not because of the Jewish leaders or the thing. Of course, the, the Polacks were not organized to fight ei...same thing. You know, it was their country, thirty-three million people.
Wife: Nobody probably realized that...
But, uh...
Wife: ...that you have to, you know, that it's coming to such a thing, that you have to fight back. That it's a matter of life and death.
That you couldn't imagine...
But why I say this now is because of Israel. You see, what, not only Israel, here, every country. If they--if it's a minority or some becomes, that you just not sitting still. You have to fight for your fellow man, for your life, for what you believe. I think now that this was the biggest mistake. I realize that uh, I don't think this could happen again, that we would do the same thing.
But I--maybe no one could imagine that it was possible.
Well, it's true too.
That was...
I am not saying, you know, I'm not preaching now, "why did it so, why did it," no. Because I can say my parents or my uncles, my brothers, they weren't even any smarter to think about. But whoever went to the partisans or whatever--a lot of Jews and Polack--maybe they were smarter. They knew better. But very little, very little.
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