CONTENTS
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Betar in the eyes of a Holocaust survivorThis is an excerpt from an interview with Henry Galler who was born in Poland in 1921. The interview was conducted by Plater Robinson of the Southern Institute at Tulane University. The full interview can be read at: http://www.tulane.edu/~so-inst/henry.html The police were on their side, yes. And the anti-Semitism at that time was getting bigger and bigger. It was the time of the Nazis, you understand, I just kept my mouth shut, and took it. That's all. We just took it. We just, we were not trained, really, to fight. We were not fighters. We were people of the book. We were studying people. We were learners, and our leaders never taught us how to fight. They never taught us how to fight and that it will be necessary to fight, which was very wrong. because we were never, later on we realized that we, actually, I remember when I survived and I returned to my city, the first question I asked, after I met my wife, that was a year after the war. I asked my wife, where were all those young men who marched in May 3, it's a big holiday in Poland, and I remember 1939, on May 3... ...there was an organization in my city called Betar. Betar is a Zionist organization. They got permit from the government to carry guns, weapons, to dress up like soldiers, and march together with the Polish army. Demonstate in the street. That was in 1939. A group of Jewish boys from Betar, I would say maybe twenty, twenty-five, I don't remember exactly, those boys were my friends and I remember them because I always looked at them with envy. They were stronger than me. They were trained to fight, and Betar teached them a little how to fight, not to fight in Poland but in Israel. Teaching them when they come to Israel... So the Polish government permitted them to walk in the streets with their guns. And it was a beautiful scenery to see that, Jewish boys with guns, walking, for the first time in my life I ever saw that... ...and when I returned after the war, I asked my wife, where were the boys? Why didn't they up some kind of resistance? Why didn't they fight? So my wife who was over there 'til the end, and you know the story of my wife, said, Henry, they couldn't. It was impossible to fight to Nazis. It was impossible to fight. We were reduced from people to roaches. Everybody stepped on us, everybody hated us. And everybody tried to fight us. So we couldn't fight them. It was imposssible. Don't blame anybody for not fighting, we couldn't do that. She was in the ghetto 'til the last minute. And I believed her."
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