Spiritual and Cultural Resistance

Spiritual and cultural resistance was the form of Jewish response to the Holocaust that did not require weapons. The historiography that emerged from the Eichmann trial onwards substantially expanded the definition of resistance to include the documented practices through which Jewish communities and individuals maintained the integrity of their inner life under conditions designed to destroy it. The practices were varied: religious observance under prohibition, the secret continuation of education in the ghettos, the writing of diaries in conditions where being caught with a diary could be lethal, the underground cultural performances, the documentary projects like the Oneg Shabbat archive that recorded the destruction as it was happening. The pages on the partisans and the armed uprisings (in the What Happened section of this site) address the armed resistance. This page addresses the resistance that was not armed.

Religious resistance

The continuation of Jewish religious observance in the ghettos and the camps was conducted under conditions where the relevant practices had been formally prohibited. The Warsaw ghetto historians’ team led by Emanuel Ringelblum documented sustained underground prayer services, the secret training of rabbis, the continuation of the religious calendar including the keeping of Shabbat where work schedules permitted, and the substantial body of religious responsa produced by Hasidic and misnagdic rabbis on the new questions the conditions of the ghetto had raised (whether one could eat non-kosher food to survive, whether the dead could be buried in unconsecrated ground, whether the recitation of Kaddish could be omitted when the days of mourning could not be observed). Rabbi Ephraim Oshry of the Kovno ghetto compiled the most substantial single body of these responsa, published after the war as Mi-Maamakim (From the Depths), running to five volumes.

The continuation of Hasidic religious observance was particularly documented for the Piaseczno Rebbe Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, who continued to give Shabbat sermons in the Warsaw ghetto from 1940 to 1942 to the small remnant of his community that had survived the deportations. The sermons were buried in the ghetto in tin cans and were recovered after the war; they were published as Esh Kodesh (Holy Fire) in 1960 and are one of the central documents of Hasidic religious thought from the Holocaust period.

Educational resistance

The continuation of Jewish education in the ghettos was a substantial documented enterprise. The Warsaw ghetto Judenrat operated a secret school system that by 1942 was teaching around 9,000 children in clandestine classrooms scattered across the ghetto, despite the formal German prohibition on Jewish schooling above the elementary level. Similar systems operated in the Łódź ghetto, in Vilna and in the other major Polish ghettos. The Vilna ghetto library, run by Herman Kruk, lent around 100,000 books between September 1941 and September 1942 to a population that had been formally denied access to the world outside the ghetto walls.

The substantial educational and cultural infrastructure of the Warsaw ghetto, including the underground universities, the lecture series, the chamber music concerts, the YIVO Institute remnant operations and the substantial network of social-self-help organisations, was documented in the Oneg Shabbat archive established by Emanuel Ringelblum from 1940 onwards. The archive recorded the daily life of the ghetto on the principle that the documentation should survive even if those producing it did not. Most of the archive was buried in milk cans before the ghetto’s destruction in 1943; substantial portions were recovered after the war and now constitute one of the central documentary collections of the Holocaust.

Diary-keeping

The keeping of diaries was a substantial form of resistance for which the consequences of being caught were severe. The diaries that survived include the diary of Anne Frank in Amsterdam (the most-known but by no means the most extensive), the diary of Adam Czerniaków the Warsaw Judenrat chairman who killed himself rather than carry out the deportation order in July 1942, the diary of Calel Perechodnik a Polish Jewish ghetto policeman in Otwock who recorded his own complicity in the deportations, the diary of Mary Berg the teenager from the Warsaw ghetto who escaped to the United States in 1944, the diary of Helga Weiss the Czech child who survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, and many others. The substantial body of surviving Holocaust diaries is one of the principal sources for the historiography of victim experience.

Cultural performance

The continuation of cultural performance under conditions of starvation and threat was substantial in the major ghettos. The Warsaw ghetto had three full operating theatres in 1941 and 1942, performing classical and modern repertoire in Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew. The Łódź ghetto chamber orchestra performed regularly through 1941 to 1944. The Theresienstadt camp, run by the Germans as a propaganda showcase, hosted substantial musical and theatrical activity in 1942 to 1944, including the children’s opera Brundibár by the imprisoned Czech composer Hans Krása, which was performed 55 times before the deportation of most of the cast to Auschwitz in 1944.

What the historiography has made of it

The Eichmann trial of 1961 and the subsequent shift in Holocaust historiography towards victim experience produced the conceptual frame within which spiritual and cultural resistance is now understood. The earlier post-war view that armed resistance was the only meaningful Jewish response to the regime, with its corollary that the substantial majority of Jewish victims who did not bear arms had failed in some way to resist their fate, was substantially abandoned in favour of the wider definition that the practices documented above represent. Yehuda Bauer and Lucy Dawidowicz both wrote substantially on this expansion of the definition of resistance. The position that emerged is that the maintenance of Jewish inner life under the conditions the regime had created was itself a documented act of resistance, and that the documentary record of those acts is part of what the killing did not destroy.

See also

Sources

  • Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001
  • Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, Indiana University Press, 1989
  • Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Indiana University Press, 2007
  • Ephraim Oshry, Responsa from the Holocaust, Judaica Press, 1983
  • Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939-1942, Jason Aronson, 2000
  • Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps 1939-1944, Yale University Press, 2002
  • Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975
  • Joseph Kermish (ed), To Live with Honor and Die with Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (Oneg Shabbat), Yad Vashem, 1986