Ben Kamm was 18-years-old when the Germans invaded. Life had been good to him until that point. He lived in a comfortable apartment with his parents and four younger brothers. His grandfather owned the building, which also housed his extended family.
Ben’s father ran a thriving family meat business but faced constant antisemitism. He and his fellow Jews were taunted constantly. As he put it, “We were abused every single day—they called me ‘dirty Jew, lousy Jew’—and every day we had to fight.” This experience made Ben better prepared than many to fight as a partisan.
On September 1, 1939, German tanks and army units poured across the Polish border, while German bombers took to the skies to pound Poland’s cities (Video). Four weeks later Poland surrendered, bowing to vastly superior forces.
After their victory, the Germans launched their war on the Jews. Businesses were confiscated. No Jews were allowed on the streets between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. and were not allowed to use public transportation. They were forced to wear armbands with a Star of David and performed forced labor. But the worst was still to come.
Into the Ghetto
A year after the German invasion, Polish Jews were forced into ghettos. Warsaw, Poland’s capital, was divided into ‘Jewish’ and ‘Aryan’ (non-Jewish) sectors, separated by an eleven-foot wall capped by broken glass and barbed wire. Within weeks, almost a half million Jews had been uprooted and squashed into apartments lining the 73 streets of the ghetto. The Kamms packed a few bags of clothes and a handful of mementos for their relocation. They said goodbye to their spacious apartment and moved into a single room with seven other people in the ghetto.
The ghetto itself was quickly overrun by hunger, disease and death. Smuggling food or goods into the ghetto was punishable by death and any Jew who was caught leaving the ghetto without permission would be executed, smuggler or not. As Ben explains, “They kill you if they find you, but you have to do it to survive.” Ben wanted not only to survive, but to help feed his family. Flouting Nazi orders, Ben began smuggling. As the war intensified and conditions worsened, starvation and disease stalked the ghetto. The future looked bleak.
Ben’s appearance helped; with blond hair, blue eyes, and perfect command of Polish, he easily moved among Christian Poles. Moreover, Ben’s aunt lived in the ‘Aryan’ section of town, was married to a Polish officer and lived for years as a Christian. She was willing to risk her own safety to help her Jewish family. Her a son owned a print shop and began printing false identity papers. Ben was “conscripted” to deliver the forgeries. In return, his aunt provided meat and marmalade for his family. While it was dangerous work, Ben enjoyed defying the enemy and hungered to contribute more to hasten its defeat.
The Call of the Partisans
In Spring 1941, Ben learned that partisans were fighting the Germans near Lublin, about 100 miles from Warsaw. “I didn’t know what a partisan was,” Ben recalls, “I just wanted to fight the Germans because of what they did to the Jews.” (Video) He convinced nine of his friends to escape the ghetto and join the fighters. Barely twenty, Ben was never away from his family for long, but nobody expected a long separation. “We thought the war would be over in a couple of months. Russia and England and France are in the war, they’re gonna crush Hitler. So, we didn’t expect this war to last.”
The men set out for Lublin without a single gun. In the town of Krasnik, they found partisan commander Grzezor Korczynski, an experienced former Polish officer. He could have easily rejected them, given their lack of arms. As Ben explains, “If you don’t have a gun, no way you can survive.” Because Korczynski’s group was small, “with [only] maybe 5 to 8 people,” they were accepted, and their first job was to procure arms. Guns were necessary for killing Germans and Polish bandits, who also wanted to kill Jews. Guns could also be used to persuade farmers to give up food and provide shelter.
Obtaining a gun was not that difficult—once you already had one. “So, we decided to ambush the Polish police. They used to ride on bicycles. We used to go in the forest. When the policemen passed by, we grab them, take away their guns.”
Life on the Run
The transition from city-dweller to partisan was difficult. “Everyone slept in a barn,” he recalled. “During the day we talked about ambushing Germans, how to get food and get rid of the lice. Everybody had lice. Do you know that for three years I never took a shower or bath? I didn’t know what a bath was.”
Worse than lice were dangers from one’s fellow humans. One day, while eating in a barn, the Polish police, “came and shot five of the partisans.” The barn’s owner had betrayed them. (Video) The incident prompted three of Ben’s men to quit and return to Warsaw; only Ben stayed with Korczynski.
Despite wanting to fight, Ben soon headed back to Warsaw. He received a letter from mother, via an intricate system of couriers, telling him they were starving. Ben sewed pockets into his pants and shirts and filled them “with beans and all kinds of other packages.” Using familiar smuggling routes, he snuck back into the ghetto. What he saw filled him with horror. “People—dead people—laying in the streets. Children and people begging. Horrible.” Thousands of Jews had already been deported. Ben’s family was in dire straits, living in a single room with three other families and little food. (Video)
Ben spent only two days in the ghetto, and never saw his family again. Looking back, he regrets not taking his younger brothers with him. At the time, he felt it would be safer for them to stay behind, believing his family would survive. As Ben put it: “I think that the human mind cannot comprehend what happened. That they were going to take people and gas them and kill them by the millions, it didn’t even come into my mind.” (Video)
Back to the Woods
Ben rejoined Korczynski and volunteered for dangerous missions, especially the liberation of a forced labor camp. The Janow Lubelski camp was in a meadow close to a forest. Inside were approximately 1,000 Jews working on a vast irrigation project. The partisans surveyed the camp and planned their attack. “We stayed in the ravine until the sun went down,” Ben remembers, and, “when it got dark we crawled up to the camp.” They waited patiently for the signal to attack. When it came, they rushed in and killed the guards. The mission was a success. (Video)
With the camp liberated, the Jews were free to leave, but at great peril. “We couldn’t take them with us,” explained Ben. “We didn’t have the guns or food.” Some ran off to the forest, while others remained in the camp. “They were scared and didn’t know what to do, where to go. Next day Germans came in, took them someplace else.” While it might seem that escape was the best option, the local population was hostile, the terrain difficult, and provisions scarce. In the camp, the prisoners at least knew what to expect. Germany was at war and workers were in short supply. The irrigation system they were building was nowhere near complete. Most importantly, the Jews at the camp could not have known that the Germans intended to leave no Jew alive.
The number of people fighting with the partisans varied each week. One day, sixteen men found their way to the camp. “They were Polish Jews from a prisoner of war camp in Lublin. They escaped and found us; they were so happy,” Ben recalls.
