508 Summary
Less interested in purely political discussion “Dror” published rich collection of literary texts and was particularly attentive to the artistic forms of expression. It searched for the new ways of articulation that would make it possible to speak out the unspeakable, to comprehend the incomprehensible. The pivotal figure of this quest was undoubtedly Yitzhak Katzenelson who published in “Dror” his poetry as well as translation of Bialik’s “On the Slaughter” and essays on Bialik and Mendele (the latter on the 105 anniversary of Mendele which had been celebrated by many clandestine journals) where he attempted to re-read the great classical literature and confront it with the new dreadful experience.
In the autumn 1941 the information of mass murders in Białystok, Vilnius and Słonim reached the Warsaw ghetto. At the beginning of 1942 a report from the extermination camp in Chełmno (Kulmhof) was received. The character of the underground press changed. Yitzhak Zuckerman decided to stop publishing “Dror” and to start second series of “Yedies” instead. “What was the difference between Dror and Yedies? We started getting involved in everyday reality. No longer an educational newspaper, not ideas, but the naked Jewish reality, as reflected in the information in the paper.” (Y. Zuckerman, Surplus of Memory, p. 159).
“Yedies” published the earliest information about the extermination camps in Sobibór and Treblinka. The first facts concerning Sobibór were delivered by two emissaries of Dror, who visited the region of Hrubieszów (and Dror’s hachshara farm) when the mass deportations began there.
In 1942 the accounts of the mass murders were also reported in “Słowo Młodych”, among them the relation from the extermination camp in Chełmno, received by the Ringelblum Archive group. In the same paper the information about the armed Jewish resistance in Nowogródek appeared (its accuracy is uncertain or even doubtful). This information, which has also been published in “Yedies” and other clandestine journals, seems to have been the first expression of a new idea – that of an armed resistance.
On July 22, 1942 the mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the extermination camp in Treblinka began. Confronted with the extermination of hundreds of thousands of people, the youth organizations decided to stop their publishing activity. New forms of resistance were needed. Zuckerman engaged in creating the Jewish Fighting Organisation. Geller joined it few months later, after some period of activity outside Warsaw. Both fought in the April Uprising of 1943. Płotnicka co-organized the insurrection in the Będzin ghetto, and Tenenbaum became a leader of the Jewish Fighting Organisation in the Białystok ghetto.
