The White Rose

It's Purim. Instead of dressing up and making noise, I went to play ping pong with my father. It was a lot of fun, and I felt very refreshed and ready to find any Amalek, which dares to conspire against us. Eating the hamentashen during the dinner while watching the news, I couldn't help but think about Haman. One interpretation of the story of Haman is that he's a symbol of anti-Semitism of the time, and the whole situation described in the Book of Esther can be seen as an allegory of the Jewish fight for survival through the ages.

I could definitely see that. The attempts to bring down the Jews didn't end with Haman, but continued through the middle ages with the blood libel and religious bigotry through the emergence of anti-Semitism as we know it after the Enlightenment. Yet, through it all, we managed to survive. We survived collectively, but not without a lot of help from various courageous individuals. One of the most noteworthy examples of a modern "Amalek" was, of course, Hitler. In my previous post, I wrote about different types of bullies, often mediocre individuals, many of whom manage to rise up to power. Hitler was one of them. His bullying went beyond schoolyard fights; he established a totalitarian regime and was responsible for the murder of millions of innocent people.

Fortunately, he was vanquished, as was the Nazi regime. The history of the victory of Allies over Nazi Germany is a fascinating one, of course... but what interests me much more is the story of individuals who dared to rise up against this embodiment of evil, who dared to resist despite the odds. I was in high school when I first heard of them. At the time, I was studying the Holocaust as a history/literature class, and was continuosly annoyed at the way Jews were portrayed: like sheep being led to the slaughter. This couldn't be right. Sure, we learned about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and about groups of partisans who managed to evade the concentration camps and sabotage the Nazi train routes. But there had to be more resistance than that! And of course, I read about the French Resistence. And yet... and yet some part of me remained dissatisfied with the overall demonstration of silence and subjugation that seemed to emerge out of my textbooks. I decided to go to the library and do some research.

Of all the books on Nazism, there was only one dealing with active resistance, both by Jews and Gentiles. I was amazed at the individual displays of courage that seemed to be forgotten about in history classes because of their small scale. Surely anyone who risked his or her life to rise up against tyranny in any way deserved much wider recognition and remembrance! One of the two final stories I've read struck a deep chord within me, not because it was any more tragic than any other examples I've read, and not because it was especially dramatic... but because something made me identify with it on an individual level. It would be years before I would hear about these people again. (I will write about the second group story in a future post).

The White Rose



Hans Scholl

(September 22, 1918 - February 22, 1943)



Sophie Scholl, b. Sophia Magdalena Scholl

(May 9, 1921 - February 22, 1943)



Christoph Probst

(November 6, 1919 - February 22, 1943)



Alexander Schmorell

(September 16, 1917 - July 13, 1943)



Willi Graf

(January 2, 1918 - October 12, 1943)



Karl Huber

(October 24, 1893 - July 13, 1943)

The White Rose was a nonviolent resistence organization, which consisted of five students - Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and a sister, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, and Willi Graf - and a professor, Karl Huber. The students all attended Munich University. Between June 1942 and February 1943, the group prepared six leaflets, with the professor responsible for the making of the first two. They later distributed these leaflets. Everyone but Sophie was a war veteran and witness to the atrocities done by the Nazi Regime. They rejected the fascist ideology and militarism and saw the future of Europe as a federation, founded on the principles of tolerance and justice. They used the leaflets to contact the German intellectuals, hoping that the educated people would be disgusted with what they saw in a suppressive, totalitarian regime and would reject it outright.

By January 1943, after witnessing the battle at Stalingrad, the group was fairly certain that Germany was facing defeat at the hands of the allies. Three members of the group painted anti-Hitler, pro-freedom slogans with tar on the buildings, such as the University, several times in February. On February 18, Hans and Sophie brought a case of the leafleats to the university and dropped them off in the hallways, for students to find. The remaining leaflets, Sophie dropped from the staircase into the atrium. A custodian, named Jakob Schmiedt, saw what happened and reported it to the Gestapo, which arrested the Scholls. Everyone else was arrested as well. On February 22, the Schools and Probst were brought before the court and found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. They were all beheaded the same day. The others were also killed a few months later.

Ironically, Fordham organized a discussion about the group the very next day after the Finkelstein event, which represented anything but tolerance. During the discussion two issues came up, which led some of the students present to criticize the group. The first issue was the motivation. The primary motivation of the White Rose was their opposition to Hitler's dictatorial regime. A few people took issue with that, because they felt that it wasn't as moral a motivation as the opposition to the atrocities, such as the Holocaust, per se. I, however, don't think it's possible to separate the two. As far as I see, ANY totalitarian regime always finds groups of people to blame for domestic problems, real or imaginary, and therefore always uses repression and state terror on the scapegoats. Therefore, opposition to atrocities comes in the package with opposing totalitarianism. It's not a separate issue that one could really prioritize.

The second issue was the fact that their resistance was nonviolent. Considering that totalitarian regimes only understand power, it was pretty obvious from the start that these young idealists wouldn't be able to overturn the regime by themselves. Even as they saw the intellectuals remaining inert at best, or hostile to their ideas, they nevertheless continued the same nonviolent resistence which only led to their deaths and didn't have much impact on the society on the whole. What, then, was the point of risking their lives? That was the second raised by the students. What did the White Rose die for? I think they did what they did (and yes, died for it), because they couldn't live with themselves otherwise.

As they say, it's better to die like a lion than to live like a dog. What kind of a life was it if they saw the country they loved submerged in blood and evil? What kind of a life is a life of a silent, trembling coward, a life of the sword always hanging over your head? A life of a humiliated zombie, brainwashed by a regime, which holds nothing sacred and whose only vision is absolute power? Everyone dies. You don't have a choice about that. But you do have a choice about the way you die and about the way you live. And they chose to do something, something to show that they refused to accept the reality around them.

It may have been futile in very broad terms, but for them it wasn't. They showed to themselves that they were people of integrity, they did what they thought was right - and that was enough. It is the goal of totalitarian regime to kill individualism in the society, to make everyone else think as one, to have the people be completely controlled by the government. Well, the Nazis failed to do that with the White Rose - the students and the professor - refused to be told how they should live. They were able to make A choice, in a country where no choice seemed to exist but that of the Nazis. And that's enough.

The White Rose, as well as it's Jewish variant in Berlin, have been an inspiration to me ever since I've learned about these two groups. In fact, they were two of the inspiring sources for the story I'm writing, "The Nameless". I will write about the group in Berlin shortly, as it is even less known than the White Rose to many people, and as their ends were even more tragic.

I bow my head in respect to the courage of those who dared to stand up before Evil, before Amalek - whatever their reasons.

Amazed,
Irina