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the Germans for these leadership positions could not be expected to transcend their view of survival and the lies continually fed them by the Germans. Spiritual and political leaders that might have gener ated resistance had been executed soon after the Germans occupied Jewish villages and towns. Many radical political leaders escaped to the Soviet Union after the German invasion of Poland; some returned to participate in and organize armed resistance. Leaders of stature in the traditional communities were quickly murdered, including many rabbis, long before the German authority appointed the Judenrate . It is also the case that the instinct for survival, although understood as collusion, molded Judenrat policy.
    Many joined Judenrat administration and the Jewish police to assure their own survival and that of their families. Many believed that to be a member of a Jewish police unit would be a shield against German roundups, or that work in a Judenrat office would make it less likely that they would be placed on a selection list. The human self when faced with terror reacts with terror. The Judenrate operated in an environment of terror, and those that worked for the Judenrate acted in ways they believed would save them and the remnant. One can fault their tactics, but given the realities of human nature, could they have been expected to act in any other way? While their policy of collaboration failed miserably, it pos sessed both a strategic and a moral logic.
    To violently resist the Germans, to take an active stance against Judenrat policy, meant the resistor self had to transcend its own terror, fear and uncertainty, to see the possibility in alternative forms of political and social organization. To their credit, the Judenrate in most ghettos, with the cooperation of social service groups, sponsored and supported hundreds of soup kitchens and fed thousands of homeless children and refugees, the sick and elderly. 3 In an environment where hopelessness defined everyday life for hundreds of thousands, the establishment of the soup kitchens, at least in the short term, inhibited the German policy of mass star vation. By the time, however, that individual Judenrat members realized the full extent of German policy, it was too late; in Warsaw in the summer of 1942, hundreds of thousands of Jews were mur dered in the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, in addition to the tens of thousands dying between 1939 and 1942 from disease and starvation. 4
    But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the Judenrate were headed by resistance leaders; that each ghetto Judenrat had been the center of underground activity. Would the outcome have been any different? Probably not, and for one very good reason. Family, in addition to religious practice and its organization, had been central to the cultural and public life of the Jewish commu nities in Europe. The Germans understood that. A centerpiece of their policy lay in an assault on the family – in particular through the killing of children – and on rabbis and Jewish sacred objects. Demoralization of family life, the desecration of religious artifacts and the despair provoked by the selection and killing of children are critical to understanding why so many Jews were murdered. With some exceptions – for example, the Jews of Budapest, who were transported directly from Budapest to Auschwitz in 1944 – most East European Jews had been driven from their villages and home towns into ghettos, if they had not already been slaughtered in the process.
    The route to the death camps for Jews from France, Belgium and the Netherlands was equally defined by rapid confusion. Jews in the Netherlands, for example, had to endure Westerbork, a massive holding camp, before being transported to Auschwitz. 5 The sudden ness of the German assault on the primarily middle-class West European Jewish community meant that families had to face the Auschwitz journey alone, confused, hungry, sick, without