A Profile in Courage

Joseph Greenblatt had vengeance in his heart and arsenic in his pocket when he fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. He intended to kill as many Germans as he could and not be taken alive to be gassed in a death camp.

That was more than half a century ago. Now at age 84, Greenblatt is one of the few surviving fighters of the ghetto uprising, and he is using his painful yet proud memories to bring authenticity to “The Stroop Report,” a play about the defense of the Jewish ghetto.

Greenblatt still shows signs of the determined fighter as he sits at his dining-room table in Anaheim and demonstrates his special method of concocting and detonating a Molotov cocktail. He jokes readily about his past--but the anguish is not so easily erased.

The Passover Seder scene near the play’s end moves Greenblatt to tears. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” goes the refrain of a song--reenacted on stage--that Jewish children have chanted for centuries during the ritual holiday meal.

Hearing it reminds Greenblatt why the first night of Passover, 1943, was different for him. On that day the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had begun, and on that night, at that Seder, Greenblatt saw his doomed parents and older brother for the last time.

The play, which runs through Feb. 6 at the Chance Theater, a 54-seat house in an office-industrial block in Anaheim Hills, is the creation of an ethnic tossed salad, a living negation of Adolf Hitler’s dream of racial purity through genocide.

The author is Robert Preston Jones, a Gentile novice playwright who lives in Dallas and studied history at a small Methodist college in Arkansas. The director is 26-year-old Oanh Nguyen, who was 2 when his family fled South Vietnam by boat on the day Saigon fell. The company member who pushed first and hardest to stage the play was actress Jennifer K. Majdali, the daughter of a Palestinian Arab.

The special advisor to the production--in some ways, says Nguyen, almost the co-director--is Joseph Greenblatt.

Nguyen had worried that some people might question the validity of a Vietnamese director staging a play about the Holocaust written by a non-Jew. He phoned synagogues and Jewish organizations seeking expert advice on how to keep it authentic.

In Greenblatt, he got an opinionated, unpaid consultant willing to attend numerous rehearsals and not afraid to interrupt with his objections.

“He was funny,” Nguyen said. “He was very high-spirited, and he was very ornery.”

Greenblatt has been a battler for 70 years.

At 14, he joined Betar, the most militant Zionist youth group in Poland. Members trained in soldiering and martial arts, preparing for the day when they would carry out an armed Jewish exodus from Europe to British-ruled Palestine, which the Jews would claim as their homeland, Israel.

Among Greenblatt’s friends in Betar was Menachem Begin, future prime minister of Israel but before that the leader of the Irgun, an underground faction that used terrorist tactics during the 1940s struggle to expel the British from Palestine.

In his late teens, Greenblatt furthered his military training by joining the Polish Army reserves--a rarity for a Jew. He was mocked for his religion, he says, but always defended himself. Superior officers saw that he was a good soldier and stood behind him.

Greenblatt was in the front line, a lieutenant in a heavy machine gun unit, when the Polish Army crumbled under the German blitz in 1939. He fled to Warsaw, where some of his old comrades from Betar recruited him. They had an ample stock of weapons and ammunition, collected in the streets after fleeing Polish soldiers flung them down. They figured the Allies would soon win the war and they would send the guns to forces fighting for a Jewish state.

But the Germans had other plans. They created the walled-in ghetto and penned some 400,000 Jews in it.

“It was a hell,” Greenblatt recalled over the dining table in his Anaheim apartment. People starved in the streets. One child grabbed a paper bag from Greenblatt’s sister-in-law and bit into it without looking. It contained shoes.

Families would lay out the bodies of typhoid victims in front of their houses. Greenblatt and others in his resistance unit, the Jewish Military Union, would collect them in covered carts and take them to a cemetery outside the ghetto. On the way back, the carts hid munitions bought from smugglers and profiteers.

In 1942, 300,000 Jews from the ghetto were either killed in the streets or deported to the death camps. By 1943, the young Jews who were left were ready to die fighting.

While preparing to fight, Greenblatt fell in love. He and his wife, Irene, were married on Jan. 10, 1943. They spent their wedding night on a mattress stuffed with ammunition and hand grenades.

“It wasn’t pleasant,” he said with a twinkle. “I don’t advise you to try it.” Shortly after, Greenblatt gave up his wedding ring so it could be melted into gold to buy arms.

Three months later, when the Germans moved to liquidate the ghetto, they met a force of ill-equipped young urban guerrillas.

Greenblatt says he commanded about 80 fighters--men and women--in a four-block area that included factories owned by Germans. The factories used Jewish slave labor to repair uniforms and make boots for German troops.

There is scant historical documentation of Greenblatt’s actions. The most authoritative source is “And We Are Not Saved,” a 1963 memoir by David Wdowinski, a leader of the Jewish Military Union who was captured by the Germans and survived the concentration camps. “After [another officer] was arrested, his command was taken over by Joseph Greenblatt who made a valiant stand,” Wdowinski wrote.

But the Jews’ ultimate defeat was foreordained, and they knew it. Greenblatt and his fighters held out for 43 days as the ghetto was bombed into rubble around them.

When they could hold out no longer, Greenblatt led the remnant through the sewers and out of the ghetto. Many died as the Germans pumped toxic gas underground; only a handful came out alive.

Irene Greenblatt survived the war hiding in Warsaw.

Under the assumed Christian name Jan Bednarcik, Joseph Greenblatt became a guerrilla fighter again with the underground Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army. Greenblatt’s sister survived Treblinka and Auschwitz, he said. His parents and brother perished in the death camps, along with some 50 others in his family.

After the war the Greenblatts lived in Belgium, where their only child, Jenny, was born, then moved to New York City in 1950. There Greenblatt ran a travel agency and was executive director of the American office of the Irgun’s political heirs, the Herut and Likud parties.

Two years ago, the Greenblatts moved to Anaheim to be close to Jenny, her husband and their two teenage grandchildren.

Greenblatt considers it a duty to tell the truth of the Holocaust to anyone who will listen--hence his periodic speaking engagements at synagogues, Jewish community centers, colleges, high schools and junior highs. Now he has his first theatrical credit.

Director Nguyen and others at the Chance Theater saw the universal message in the story of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Majdali, 28, the first company member to read the script, said she had no idea that any Jews had resisted during the Holocaust.

“It’s not necessarily about Jews or Germans. It’s about hatred in any society in the world,” she said. “History can easily be repeated. That’s why I thought this story needed to be told.”

Nguyen’s anxiety that he might botch details and give offense vanished with Greenblatt’s arrival. “I had my hand held through my first historic piece,” he said. “I was incredibly lucky.”

Greenblatt was no rubber-stamp. He hated, but has learned to tolerate, the play’s sympathetic portrayal of Adam Czerniakow, head of Warsaw’s Nazi-established Jewish Council or Judenrat.

Holocaust historian Israel Gutman, among others, depicts Czerniakow as a well-intentioned man damned by impossible circumstances. Greenblatt, like most Warsaw Ghetto Jews, reviles him as a puppet who, albeit unwittingly, helped feed victims to the ovens.

Still, many details in “The Stroop Report” bear Greenblatt’s imprint, from small ones such as how the Jews’ mandatory armbands looked and how they were worn to major elements of the staging. Greenblatt disdains most fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust except “Schindler’s List” and the production at hand.

“Generally speaking, the play is good,” he said. “Especially for people who did not live in those days, that show is a real eye-opener. It is close to the real thing.”

Life grants no parole from hardship. Nowadays, Greenblatt goes twice a day to the Anaheim nursing home where his wife has lived since last summer. Alzheimer’s disease has erased her ability to speak English and much more, he says. She speaks only in Polish.

“For me, it’s heartbreaking,” Greenblatt said.

On opening night, moments after “The Stroop Report” had ended, the old fighter walked the few paces from his front-row seat to the stage.

He is barely 5 feet tall but erect and solid, casting a presence. On the lapel of his brown suit jacket was a silver Irgun pin; on his right hand the large gold ring he wore in the Warsaw Ghetto to identify himself at resistance checkpoints. Behind him was the stage set’s replica of the red brick ghetto wall topped with barbed wire. Flanking him were the cast members. Fronting him, the audience.

“We fight like Samson in the temple of the Philistines. ‘If I have to die, let me take as many of my enemies with me.’ And we did it,” Greenblatt said in clipped cadences.

“Am Yisrael Chai!” he concluded in a husky near-shout, then translated: “The nation of Jews will live forever.”