Jewish resistance during the Holocaust

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The Holocaust
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Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933 to 1939

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"Final Solution": Wannsee · Aktion Reinhard

Death camps: Auschwitz · Belzec · Chełmno · Majdanek · Treblinka · Sobibór · Jasenovac  · Warsaw

Resistance: Jewish partisans
Ghetto uprisings (Warsaw)

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The Destruction of the European Jews
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The Jewish resistance during the Holocaust was the resistance of the Jewish people against Nazi Germany leading up to and through World War II. Due to the careful organization and overwhelming military might of the Nazi German State and its supporters, many Jews were unable to resist the killings. There were, however, many cases of attempts at resistance in one form or another, and over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings.

Contents

[edit] Uprisings

[edit] In ghettos

Main article: Ghetto uprising

The largest instance of organized Jewish resistance was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, from April to May of 1943, as the final deportation from the ghetto to the death camps was about to commence. The ŻOB and ŻZW fighters held out against the Nazis for 27 days, before most were killed and the uprising suppressed. There were also other ghetto uprisings, though none were successful against the German military.

[edit] In concentration camps

There were also major resistance efforts in three of the extermination camps.

  • In August 1943, an uprising took place at the Treblinka extermination camp. Many buildings were burnt to the ground, and 70 inmates escaped to freedom, but 1,500 were killed. Gassing operations were interrupted for a month.
  • In October 1943, another uprising took place at Sobibór extermination camp. This uprising was more successful; 11 German SS commanding officers, including deputy commander, were killed, and roughly 300 of the 700 inmates in the camp escaped, with about 50 surviving the war. The escape forced the Nazis to close the camp.
  • On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos (those inmates kept separate from the main camp and put to work in the gas chambers and crematoria) at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female inmates had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. At this stage they were joined by the Birkenau One Kommando, which also overpowered their guards and broke out of the compound. The inmates then attempted a mass escape, but almost all of 250 were killed soon after. (There were also international plans for a general uprising in Auschwitz, coordinated with an Allied air raid and a Polish resistance attack from the outside.)

[edit] Partisan groups

Main article: Jewish partisans

There were a number of Jewish partisan groups operating in many countries. Jewish partisans were most numerous in Eastern Europe. See Eugenio Calò for the story of a Jewish Italian partisan. Jewish volunteers from Mandate Palestine, most famously Hannah Szenes, parachuted into Europe in an attempt to organize resistance.

[edit] Types of resistance

In his book The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, Martin Gilbert describes the types of resistance:

"In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair.

Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit."[1]

This view is supported by Yehuda Bauer who wrote that resistance to the Nazis comprised not only physical opposition, but any activity that gave the Jewish people dignity and humanity in the most humiliating and inhumane conditions. Bauer disputes the popular view that most Jews went to their deaths passively. He argues that, given the conditions in which the Jews of Eastern Europe had to live under and endure, what is surprising is not how little resistance there was, but rather how much.

[edit] Organizations

[edit] Jewish resistance fighters

Belorussia, 1943. A Jewish partisan group of the brigade named after Chkalov. ([1])
Enlarge
Belorussia, 1943. A Jewish partisan group of the brigade named after Chkalov. ([1])

[edit] Uprisings

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy. London: St Edmundsbury Press 1986
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