The Confrontation - Germans Jews in occupied Poland

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In 1942 the Nazis started to resettle German Jews in ghettos in occupied Poland, including in this one, the worst of them all, the Litzmannstadt (Łódź) ghetto.
The author, a Jewish doctor who went through hell and much more, writes for psychological reasons in the third person.

The German Jews formed a completely unique society in Europe, both with regard to the role they had played in the economic and cultural life of Germany until the Nazis came to power, and with regard to the completely unique mentality they developed over the last hundred years.
This mentality had many elements, but above all, it was the conviction of their own separateness and exceptionalism.
His father, like the majority of Polish Jews, did not like the German Jews and told him a little about them. He learned a lot more about them during his studies in France, at the time when Hitler came to power.
Many German Jews succeeded in finding refuge on French soil, a refuge they saw as temporary, thinking that the whole Hitler adventure was bound to pass soon.

For a time, he was involved with a girl whose father had been a typical representative of that specific society. He ranked highly in the German social democratic movement and had even been the owner of a newspaper that derived its name and pedigree from a newspaper established in his day by Marx.

Even in emigration, even in conditions of exile. Not even once had he gained the honour of being invited to his girlfriend's parents' home. Indeed! He knew that even his family name was anathema in her home.

Now fate had decreed that the remnants of that society found themselves behind the barbed wires of the Lódź ghetto.
Face to face with those from whom they had always set themselves apart, with whom they never wanted to have anything in common. Face to face with the gloomy, hopeless reality of the ghetto. Here they had to live and, as they were assured, to work.
With a Yellow Star and a Red Cross by Arnold Mostowicz

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What linked those two worlds? Formally - religion, but it too was differently perceived in regard to philosophy and ritual.
Historically - common roots in the distant past and for many centuries the same fate.
Race? This was already a pseudo-scientific argument.

What divided them? Two centuries of European development. Two centuries of emancipation which had only barely touched the life of the Jews in the east of Europe, but had fundamentally transformed the life of the Jews in the west, in the first place the life of the German Jews.

The East European Jews, in their majority Orthodox-Hasidic, had cut themselves off from any external influences.
They remained faithful to the mysticism and religious philosophy of the Baalshemtov.
A minority succumbed to the ideas of Medem and Borochov, which while modern still had set Jews apart from the society surrounding them.
The German Jews, on the other hand, had ever so rapidly, though it proved only superficially, integrated themselves with the German nation and, consistently following the views of Moses Mendelssohn, had stubbornly assimilated themselves.
...
[T]he majority of Polish Jews considered any form of assimilation to be an apostasy.
[T]he German Jews not only viewed the adherence to the Hasidic mysticism or the setting themselves apart from the surrounding society as obscurantism and backwardness, but also showed a plainly racial dislike of every Jew of East European descent.
With a Yellow Star and a Red Cross by Arnold Mostowicz

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Like other European Jews, the Germans [i.e., the German Jews] immigrated en masse following the political upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century.
But unlike their East European counterparts, the Germans clung to their original national identity, and were economically more established. Moreover, many German Jews believed they were so-called Hojjuden, or courtly Jews, and that coreligionists from Poland and Russia were "uncivilized" and embarrassing.
The bias was best summarized in a June I894 German-American Jewish newspaper, the Hebrew Standard, which declared that the totally acclimated American Jew is closer to "Christian sentiment around him than to the Judaism of these miserable darkened Hebrews."
The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Zionist Rescue of Jews from the Third Reich to Jewish Palestine by Black Edwin

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When the modest provisions that the deportees had brought with them were about to end, and they understood that the ghetto food rations were not sufficient to keep them alive, the time for barter and exchange had arrived. All the more so because the transition from a relatively normal nutrition to the ghetto starvation had happened suddenly. The newcomers bought up any amount of bread, potatoes, and turnips - all that could always be obtained illegally and usually at exorbitant prices.

[T]he locals were richer, richer in the experience of life behind the barbed-wire fence, while the newcomers did not have enough imagination at once to fully realize their defeat. As a result, then, the deportees had to deal with the mercy and hostility of those who had the unusual luck of having been put behind the barbed wires earlier.
This was a commercial victory of the locals over the newcomers. But this commercial victory took on at the same time the character of a triumph of one brand of Jewishness over another. And on top of it, of the one that had been the despised one over the proud and boastful one. So, it had been a peculiar triumph and a peculiar revenge.

And here came the clash of those two worlds. Not in the form of a discussion or exchange of ideas, but in the form of furious bargaining, in the form of an exchange of goods on the plank-beds of the camp of deportees in the Lodz ghetto. The exchange of sweaters for turnips, of shoes for onions, of pots and bed linen for bread had allowed those despised Polish Jews to pay back.

For the humiliation that the Germans had inflicted on them, they took revenge on the newcomers, and by some twisted reasoning made them responsible for their own fate.
They got even not only for the pride of the others, for their showing off their Zweigs, Einsteins, Reinhardts, but also for their own miserable existence, for their stagnation in the little towns shrunk on the edge of history ...
Those who came here had not yet realized the full extent of their defeat. Those who received them did not want to realize that the defeat was mutual. Thus the exploitation of the newcomers t acquired lofty reasons and, if this was not sufficient, the newcomers were burdened with the guilt of having caused reduced food rations, even greater crowding and increased suffering.

The locals, having had the experience of two winters in the ghetto, were buying up that clothing. The halls and the rooms of the building on Franciszkańska Street resounded with the noisy hubbub of market bargaining.
He stopped near one of the beds and listened in on the concluding stages of a transaction. Its outcome was that a beautiful blue sweater became the property of a buyer for the sum of a few dozen ghetto marks, a sum for which it was even difficult to buy a kilogram loaf of bread.
The buyer spoke in Yiddish, the seller in German. They understood each other perfectly and covered up their mutual dislike perfectly.
For a moment, he intended to intervene in the bargaining and inform the newcomer that one could no more survive the ghetto without a sweater than without bread ... He gave up this intention.
With a Yellow Star and a Red Cross by Arnold Mostowicz

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After two or three weeks, the deportees from the west were allocated lodgings. It was, however difficult to use this term in relation to the places they received. Even if the ghetto authorities had the best intentions - and in that case, they certainly had not - it was impossible to allocate rooms or apartments that would permit a normal life to all those who were resettled to the ghetto.
Even before the arrival of the German Jews, the housing conditions had been horrible.

Besides, the people who represented the ghetto authorities thought along the same lines as the majority of the local population. For them, the deportees were not only intruders from the outside. They were Jews who had been punished for having rejected their Jewishness. Everything resulted from that punishment.

Later on, the newcomers from the West began to die out en masse ...
From TB, from dysentery, from typhus, and most often simply from hunger. Then, on every occasion when the Germans demanded a number of Jews for deportation, the newcomers were close at hand.
It was an open secret that, in most cases, the deportees were sent to their deaths. It was also an open secret that the Germans intended the same fate for all the Jews. The ghetto people constantly deluded themselves with the hope that the Germans would not have sufficient time. They tried to convince each other that it would not be worth liquidating the ghetto, given the revenue the ghetto generated for them.
They, therefore, also accepted, with thinly hidden relief, the news that, for the time being, only the strangers, who in addition had not been working, were being removed from the ghetto. This created the hope that if there were fewer mouths to feed, the ghetto would last.
With a Yellow Star and a Red Cross by Arnold Mostowicz