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film, The Pianist , the epidemics that ravaged the ghettos claiming thousands of lives; the absence of food and sanitation, and the pro cessions of death wagons daily, hauled often by children, through the ghetto streets: to read these diary accounts is to witness a physical universe in the process of disintegration.
    The 50,000 left in Warsaw each suffered personally, if not the loss of a child, then the murder of a father, mother or grandparent. No one remained who had not been emotionally devastated by the effects of the transports. When the Germans attacked the ghetto in March 1943, in the final phase of their plan to kill every Jew remaining in Warsaw, the community had little or no resources to support the few hundred fighters. These people could barely survive themselves, and the killing by the Germans that accompanied the uprising decimated the remaining 50,000.
    But underground resistance occurred in a physical and psycholog ical universe where Jews fought back. Lerman: ‘Many understood the power of starvation and many who starved fought back.’ Even in Vilna, Warsaw, Kovno and Bialystok, 9 where the under ground distributed thousands of leaflets and posters describing the Germans’ intent, the recruitment of fighters faced tremendous obstacles, not the least of which was the fear of the breakup of the family. The attack on family bonds, the war on children, inequality within the ghettos, hierarchies based on proximity to the German command, the possession of labor cards as opposed to their absence, access to food coupons as opposed to little or no access, all were significant factors contributing to German efforts to immobilize the possibility of resistance. Yet, even with the terrible moral choices the resistance had to make, survival hinged on conscious ness liberating itself from ghetto mentality and from traditional moral understandings. Lerman again:
    ‘When any of our women had babies, it was an unspoken law the baby would be strangled and killed at the moment of birth. It would have been impossible to have had a baby in those cir cumstances; they could not be allowed to live. No one talked about it, but it was painful. Perhaps we shouldn’t have killed them; but who knows: even one cry could have given away our positions.
    We were in the forests from 1942 until June 1944 when we were liberated by the Russian army. Perhaps 70–80 percent of our unit survived; if our group hadn’t been in the forest, 90 percent would have perished. Were we lucky? Of course; there was good luck and bad luck; we had good luck. But being partisans we were more likely to have good luck; we could fight, unlike those in the ghetto who all perished. But I could have been one who died; the Germans would burn buildings, round up people randomly and kill them. We all shared the same bitterness, and I have no apologies for my hatred.’
    Morality in the forests had to be drastically revised; survival depended on discarding old moral beliefs. Liberation of self meant, as well, creating military vengeance and rewriting the laws of community.
    What, then, I want to do in the following chapters is to describe and interpret significant moral and ethical positions guiding this effort at resistance. But I will look at the dilemmas and conflicts in resistance as they affected both violent and spiritual resistance. Neither path was an easy one to take; each involved significant moral demands and faith in choices which ultimately meant the dif ference between life and death and the choice about how one died. The violent resistor had to literally relearn moral positions, creating an ethics adaptive to the demands of survival; the spiritual resistor fought against the ever-present reality of madness and the sinking into apathy. For both, resistance preserved sanity and protected the self’s integrity from the implosive power of genocidal action.

Collective Trauma: Th e Disintegration of Ethic s
    In Budapest 1944, during the massive German