Jewish armed resistance to the Holocaust occurred across occupied Europe. It has sometimes been obscured by the myth that Jews went passively to their deaths, a myth that is both factually false and morally harmful: it implies that the victims bore some responsibility for their fate. The reality is that resistance under the conditions the Nazis imposed was extraordinarily difficult, and the forms it took were extraordinarily varied.
Why resistance was so difficult
The conditions that faced Jews in occupied Europe were designed to make resistance impossible. Jews were systematically disarmed by German authorities within weeks of occupation. They were confined to ghettos, separated from potential non-Jewish allies and denied access to weapons. They were deliberately kept at starvation level, which reduced physical capacity for sustained resistance. Collective reprisals were applied with savage consistency: one act of resistance in a ghetto or camp typically led to the execution of many others. And the Nazis maintained systematic deception about the ultimate fate of deportees, telling people that they were being resettled for labour in the east. Most people boarding the trains to Treblinka and Auschwitz did not know they were going to be killed.
The political and social conditions were equally constraining. Jews had no army, no government, no territory, no supply lines. Underground organisations had to be built from scratch in conditions of extreme surveillance. The decision to resist also meant accepting that reprisals would fall on those who had not chosen to fight. The Jewish underground in Warsaw understood that the uprising of April 1943 would lead to the destruction of the ghetto and the death of most of its inhabitants. It proceeded anyway, because the alternative was deportation and death without resistance.
Armed uprisings
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, beginning on 19 April 1943 and lasting until mid-May, is the most celebrated single act of Jewish armed resistance. Around 750 fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation and the Jewish Military Union, armed with pistols, rifles, a small number of automatic weapons, and homemade Molotov cocktails, held off SS units under General Jürgen Stroop for nearly a month. Stroop’s report to his superiors, preserved as a Nuremberg document, records the scale of the German operation required to suppress the uprising and the difficulty his forces encountered. The ghetto was eventually destroyed systematically, building by building. Most of the fighters died in the fighting or in the ruins. The symbolic importance of the uprising, the demonstration that Jews would die fighting rather than submit, was recognised by Jewish communities and resistance organisations across Europe.
Uprisings also occurred at Białystok in August 1943 and Vilna in September 1943, at Sobibor in October 1943, at Treblinka in August 1943, and at Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944, where the Sonderkommando destroyed one of the crematoria. In each case the uprisings were suppressed and most of the participants killed. The significance of these actions was not military: they could not have defeated the German forces arrayed against them. Their significance was the act of resistance itself.
Partisan resistance
Tens of thousands of Jews escaped from ghettos and camps to fight as partisans in the forests of Belorussia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and France. The Bielski partisans in the Naliboki forest in Belorussia protected a community of over 1,200 Jews, combining armed resistance with the rescue of Jewish refugees from surrounding ghettos. The Vilna partisan commander Abba Kovner escaped after the destruction of the Vilna ghetto and led a partisan unit in the forests. Jewish partisans also fought within the broader Soviet and Polish underground partisan movements.
Non-armed resistance
Armed resistance was only one form. Emmanuel Ringelblum organised the Oyneg Shabes archive in the Warsaw Ghetto, collecting testimony, documents, and diaries that were buried in metal containers and milk cans for recovery after the war. The archive is the most important single collection of Holocaust testimony from inside the ghetto. Its preservation, under conditions of extreme danger, was itself an act of resistance: a deliberate effort to ensure that the truth of what was happening would survive even if those recording it did not. Schools, theatres, and religious observance were maintained in ghettos across occupied Europe under conditions designed to destroy them. Cultural resistance and the maintenance of human dignity were forms of defiance that should not be diminished by comparison with armed revolt.
See also
- The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943
- Jewish Partisans Across Occupied Europe
- The Bielski Partisans
- Jews Went Passively to Their Deaths
Sources
- Yisrael Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Houghton Mifflin, 1994
- Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Oxford University Press, 1993
- Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Indiana University Press, 2007
- Jürgen Stroop, The Stroop Report, Nuremberg Document PS-1061, 1943
- Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, Paul Elek, 1974