H8: Jewish Resistance

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Introduction

Every Jew is conscious of the Holocaust. More than fifty years after the event we are still reeling from its terrible impact - over a third of world Jewry was destroyed. The Holocaust is a huge and immensely complex subject. In this chapter we concentrate only on one element of this tragedy - the response of the victims to the terrible events that unfolded around them.

The image of the European Jews as passive victims is found in a number of highly regarded works on the Holocaust. According to these books, all but a tiny majority of the Jews met the prospect of murder with compliance. They had learned this response, it is claimed, over a period of many centuries. In the past they could normally save more lives by enduring the hardships imposed on them than by resisting outright. When the crisis of the Holocaust came, Jews, it is theorised, followed this accustomed pattern, without realising that it no longer applied.

It is important to recognise that the suggestion that the Jews of Europe went to their death like 'lambs to the slaughter' is untrue and unfair - there was a Jewish response. In the camps, the ghettos, and behind the enemy's lines they fought back. In the face of the depravity of human relationships that the Holocaust represents there was resistance. Resistance is a word with many connotations - it took many forms, occurred in many places, and more strikingly was often led by very unlikely heroes...

Resistance can be broadly divided into two main categories:

Passive Resistance

There was an absence of armed revolt during the early war years, but this does not mean that the Jews everywhere unquestioningly accepted the fate decreed for them by the Nazis. It means that until the truth about the death camps leaked out in 1942, resistance was non-violent, designed to conserve lives and make them as meaningful as possible.

The phrase 'passive resistance' might seem like a contradiction in terms. A Warsaw Rabbi, Isaac Nissenbaum, tried to explain what it involved. "This is a time for 'Kiddush HaChayim', the holiness of life, and not 'Kiddush HaShem', the holiness of martyrdom. Previously the Jew's enemy sought his soul, and the Jew sacrificed his body in martyrdom; now the oppressor demands the Jew's body and the Jew is obliged therefore to defend it, to preserve his life".

Thus, when Rabbis and other leaders in those days counselled against taking up arms, they did not advocate giving in to the forces of evil - they meant that the struggle should be carried on as long as possible by other life-affirming means. It was a strategy that seemed well-suited to the circumstances in 1940 and 1941, when no one could know how totally different Nazi persecution would be from any sufferings experienced before.

Active Resistance

When the truth about the Nazi death camps began to leak out in the summer of 1942, many Jews decided to take up arms and, if they had to die, to take as many of their oppressors with them as possible.

Documents so far uncovered tell us that at least forty ghettos in Eastern Europe had armed underground units, some organised for fighting near home, some for escape and partisan fighting in the woods. Other documents tell us of the exploits of Jews in the resistance movement of Western Europe. Many of these incidents were unknown until recently, for often not a single Jewish fighter survived to tell the tale, and written records are only now becoming available.

Revolts also took place in the actual death camps, as well as several attempts at escape by groups from the 'transports' on the way to the camps - some were successful. In time the Nazis strengthened their security arrangements which made escape very difficult and every escape attempt was met with harsh punishment.

There are a number of leaders and events that stand out in the history of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

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