The standard postwar question, why did the Jews not resist, was the wrong question. The Jews resisted constantly. The resistance took forms that the question, framed as it usually was around armed uprisings, did not recognise. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April and May 1943 is the most famous of the cases, but it was one episode in a continent-wide pattern that ran from 1939 through 1945 and that included armed uprisings in fifteen ghettos and at four death camps, partisan warfare in the forests, escape networks, the smuggling of food and weapons, the production and distribution of underground newspapers, the maintenance of religious life and education in defiance of Nazi prohibitions, and the act of bearing witness in journals, archives and oral testimony.
Armed uprisings happened in the ghettos at Warsaw in April 1943, Treblinka in August 1943, Będzin in August 1943, Białystok in August 1943, Vilna in September 1943, Sobibor in October 1943 and Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando in October 1944. The Warsaw uprising lasted twenty seven days and was the largest single Jewish armed action against the Germans of the war. Mordechai Anielewicz, twenty three, commanded the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, the Jewish Combat Organisation, with around five hundred fighters and a few dozen weapons. The Germans threw the Waffen-SS into the ghetto. The fighters held them off for nearly a month, longer than several European armies had held them off in 1940. Anielewicz died on 8 May 1943 in the ZOB command bunker at Miła 18. The bunker had been the German army’s general staff bunker until late 1942 and is now a memorial.
The Treblinka uprising on 2 August 1943 was led by the camp’s prisoner work details. Around three hundred prisoners broke out under fire. About sixty survived the war. The Sobibor uprising on 14 October 1943, led by the Soviet Jewish prisoner of war Alexander Pechersky, killed eleven SS men and was the only successful armed escape from a German death camp. Around sixty prisoners survived the breakout and the war. Both camps were closed by the SS within weeks of the uprisings. Both had been on schedule to be closed in any case as the Aktion Reinhard killing programme wound down, but the uprisings accelerated the closures and saved the lives of the prisoners who would otherwise have been killed when the camps were dismantled. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando uprising of 7 October 1944 destroyed Crematorium IV. The four women who smuggled the gunpowder, the only Jewish women known to have been executed at Auschwitz for active resistance, are the subject of a separate page on this site.
Partisan warfare in the forests, the second main armed form, involved between twenty thousand and thirty thousand Jewish fighters across eastern Europe between 1942 and 1945. The Bielski brothers in the Naliboki forest in Belorussia ran a Jewish family camp that protected over twelve hundred non-combatants while their armed unit fought the Germans. Tuvia Bielski’s principle was to save Jews above all, even at the cost of military effectiveness. The unit’s record of survivors was the largest of any single Jewish partisan operation in eastern Europe. Other groups, the Lithuanian Jewish FPO, the United Partisan Organisation, in Vilna; the partisan companies under Soviet command in Belorussia, Ukraine and Lithuania; the Jewish units in the Yugoslav partisan army and the Italian, French and Slovak resistance, fought across the continent.
Unarmed resistance was the larger story. The Oneg Shabbat archive in the Warsaw ghetto, organised by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, gathered systematic documentation of the catastrophe as it happened: testimonies, photographs, German posters, ration cards, letters, even the wrappings of food parcels, all buried in milk cans and metal containers under the ghetto buildings. Two of the three Oneg Shabbat caches were recovered after the war. They are now the most important single source on Jewish life under the Nazi occupation in Poland. Ringelblum was murdered with his family in the ruins of Warsaw in March 1944.
The maintenance of religious life and education in the ghettos was itself an act of resistance under regulations that prohibited it. Underground schools ran in every ghetto. Underground synagogues, with services held in private apartments and basements, ran throughout the occupation. The yeshivot of Lithuania reconstituted themselves in the ghettos. Some of the rabbis and yeshiva heads of pre-war Poland died refusing food on the death marches because they would not eat non-kosher rations from the SS. The Jewish historians of the postwar period, Bauer in particular, have argued that the religious life of the ghettos, in defiance of the Nazi project to destroy not just Jews but Jewishness, was the largest and most consequential form of Jewish resistance of the period.
The reasons more Jews did not take up arms were the same reasons that more Russian and Polish and Yugoslav civilians did not take up arms. There were no weapons. There was no civilian military training. There was nowhere to go. Hostile populations surrounded the ghettos in eastern Europe. The Germans applied collective punishment, ten or a hundred for each German killed. The deportations until late 1942 were widely believed to be to labour camps, and resistance to a labour transport could mean condemning the rest of the family. By the time the truth was clear, in late 1942 and 1943, the people in the ghettos who could have fought were the survivors of communities that had already been three quarters murdered. They fought anyway. The men and women of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, of Treblinka and Sobibor, of the Naliboki forest and the Lithuanian forests and the Greek mountains, were not victims who had failed to act. They were the last survivors of communities that had already been murdered, and they fought on terms that gave them almost no chance of winning. They fought because, in the words attributed to Anielewicz in his last letter to Yitzhak Zuckerman on 23 April 1943, the dream of his life had come true: Jewish armed resistance and revenge had become a fact.
See also
- The Sonderkommando
- The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943
- The Bielski Partisans
- The Judenrat
- The Kapos
- Jewish Resistance and Rebellion
- Jewish Partisans Across Occupied Europe
Sources
- Yehuda Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness, University of Toronto Press, 1979
- Yitzhak Arad, The Partisan: From the Valley of Death to Mount Zion, Holocaust Library, 1979
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
- Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Houghton Mifflin, 1994
- Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Indiana University Press, 2007
- Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Oxford University Press, 1993