Abstract
The Schutzstaffel coerced and enlisted detainees into the administration of the labor and death camps. These detainees were called Kapos. The Kapos constitute a particularly contested element of Holocaust remembrance. Some Kapos deployed their situational authority to ease the conditions of other prisoners, while others acted cruelly and committed abuses. This chapter explores one treatment of the Kapo, this being on stage: Kapo Be’Yerushalaim (Kapo in Jerusalem) (play, 2014 Motti Lerner; Hebrew, translated into English by Roy Isacowitz, derivative of a film of the same title). This chapter considers how this play speaks of victims who victimize others and narrates the pain that results. Recounting the story that this play tells—a very powerful one, forcefully voiced, of law, judgment, suicide, shame, and the deployment of violence to supposedly protect others—serves as a collected ‘picture book’ of the potential and limits of international law.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (New York: Penguin, 1987), 129 (describing the Kapo: ‘The Nazis … empowered camp elders, clerks, block leaders, and so forth to supervise the inmates and assume primary responsibility for the routines of daily life’).
- 2.
Adam Brown, Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation and the “Grey Zone” (Oxford: Berghahn, 2015), 12: ‘Kapos were subject to punishment by Nazi guards for any problems arising from the prisoners they were responsible for […]’.
- 3.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Michael Joseph, 1st ed. 1988), 31.
- 4.
The full text of the play is available for open and free public access at the Israeli Dramatists Website, ‘Kapo in Jerusalem’, Drama Israel, visited: January 15, 2019, http://dramaisrael.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Kapo-in-Jerusalem-September-2014.pdf (noting specifically copyright of the author and that ‘All dramatic rights in this play are fully protected by copyright and no public or private performance—professional or amateur—and no public readings for profit may be given without the written permission of the author and the payment of royalty. Communications should be addressed to the Author’s representative: Susan Schulman A Literary Agency, 454 West 44th St. New York, New York 10036 T: (212) 713–1633 F: (212) 581–8830’). Scholarly discussion of this play within this chapter falls outside of these protected grounds and, furthermore, we maintain it is subject to the fair dealing doctrine.
- 5.
Galia Glasner-Heled and Dan Bar-On, ‘Displaced: The Memoir of Eliezer Gruenbaum, Kapo at Birkenau—Translation and Commentary’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 1–23 at 2.
- 6.
Id. at 1.
- 7.
Mark A. Drumbl, ‘The Kapo on Film: Tragic Perpetrators and Imperfect Victims’, Griffith Journal of Law & Human Dignity, 27 no. 2 (2018): 229–271.
- 8.
Mark A. Drumbl, ‘Histories of the Jewish “Collaborator”: Exile, Not Guilt’, in The New Histories of International Criminal Law, eds. Immi Tallgren and Thomas Skouteris (Oxford: OUP, 2019), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3009231.
- 9.
Mark A. Drumbl, ‘Victims who Victimise’, London Review of International Law, 4 no. 2 (2016): 217–246.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Hanna Yablonka, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Israel: The Nuremberg, Kapos, Kastner, and Eichmann Trials’, Israel Studies 8 no. 3 (Fall 2003): 1, 9.
- 12.
This is the approach taken in Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950), in which four witnesses provide alternative versions of the same criminal incidents (the rape and murder of a couple). Heralded as a film of extraordinary quality, Rashomon underscores the subjectivity of truth and the vagaries of factual accuracy including in contexts of eye-witnessing; it has also been allegorically read as reflecting Japan’s defeat in World War II.
- 13.
Kapo in Jerusalem, Holocaust Studies in Haifa, The Weiss-Livnat International MA Program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa Blog (January 25, 2016) (accessed May 27, 2016, on file with the author).
- 14.
Id. It is not only Bruno who brings this forward, but also Sarah. At one point, she mutters: ‘I stole bread from an aunt of mine with dysentery, knowing that in the morning she would die of hunger … She didn’t die. She stole bread from a woman who was weaker than her … I met her again after the war … She saw me … and turned away’ (29).
- 15.
Id.
- 16.
Id.
- 17.
For further discussion of Eliezer Gruenbaum, see Tuvia Friling, A Story of a Kapo in Auschwitz: History, Memory and Politics (New Hampshire: University of New England Press, 2014).
- 18.
Glasner-Heled and Bar-On, supra note 5, at 1.
- 19.
He arrived at Auschwitz in June 1942 and was sent a few days later to Birkenau. These two camps are adjacent to each other, though they form a whole that sprawls across the Polish countryside.
- 20.
Glasner-Heled and Bar-On, supra note 5, at 3.
- 21.
Id. (noting also that ‘[i]n the last days prior to the camp’s [Buchenwald’s] liberation [he] took part in self-defense actions directed against the SS’).
- 22.
Or Muselmänner, ‘literally, Muslim. A term used by prisoners of concentration camps for the prisoners suffering from extreme stages of starvation who were almost unable to move and spent much of their time cringing in a position similar to the one adopted by Muslims during prayer’. Glasner-Heled and Bar-On, supra note 5, at 5.
- 23.
Here Bruno echoes Gruenbaum, who also memorializes his own use of beatings in the name of safeguarding health, for example to thwart detainees from wearing the clothes of the dead at the risk of infecting the living. Id. at 16.
- 24.
Brown, ‘No one will ever know’, supra note 2, at 99 (noting that ‘Kapos were subject to punishment by Nazi guards for any problems arising from their charges and Jewish Kapos were arguably under more pressure to keep their positions through violence’).
- 25.
Orna Ben-Naftali and Yogev Tuval, ‘Punishing International Crimes Committed by the Persecuted: The Kapo Trials in Israel (1950s-1960s)’, Journal of International Criminal Justice 4 (2006): 129 at 141, 144, 147 (noting that ‘the Law had as its primary target Jewish collaborators, who were themselves persecuted persons’ and that it was ‘primarily designed to realize, indeed, to constitute a community of “pure victims”’ and to ‘cleans[e] the Jewish community in Israel of Jewish traitors’).
- 26.
Demjanjuk ultimately was acquitted in Israel on charges of having been a guard at Treblinka. In 2011 he was tried and convicted in Germany as an accessory to mass murder as a guard at Sobibór. He appealed but died during the appeal process. Hence, his conviction was never validated. The legal theories deployed to try Demjanjuk in Germany have nonetheless inspired other subsequent prosecutions of former concentration camp guards and officials. For his part, Demjanjuk argued that he was like a Jewish Kapo—that he should be seen as a victim injured by the Nazis.
- 27.
Michael Bazyler and Julia Scheppach, ‘The Strange and Curious History of the Law Used to Prosecute Adolf Eichmann’, Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review, 34 (2012): 417 at 418, 461 (‘Though it remains officially on the books, the law is a dead letter’).
- 28.
Statement of Pinhas Rosen, cited in Yablonka, supra note 11 at 11.
- 29.
Ben-Naftali and Tuval supra note 25 at 153.
- 30.
Id. 136.
- 31.
Itamar Levin, Kapo on Allenby Street (Yad Ben Tzvi & Moreshet Publications, 2015).
- 32.
[1884] 14 Q.B.D. 273 (Eng.); see generally A.W. Brian Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law (1984).
- 33.
Glasner-Heled and Bar-On, supra note 5, at 21.
- 34.
Maggie Astor, ‘Holocaust is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds’, New York Times (April 12, 2018).
- 35.
Id.
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Drumbl, M. (2020). Staging International Law’s Stories: Kapo in Jerusalem. In: Stolk, S., Vos, R. (eds) International Law's Collected Stories. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58835-9_3
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