The his­to­ri­an and for­mer resis­tance fight­er in the Vil­na Ghet­to, Meir Dworzec­ki, demand­ed that when we exam­ine the ques­tion of resis­tance dur­ing the Holo­caust we do so only by seek­ing truth. “Do not depict the Jews of the ghet­tos and the camps as bet­ter than they were”, he said. “Do not engage in apolo­get­ics. But do not por­tray them as less­er than they were.” So let us con­sid­er this ques­tion of resis­tance in this spir­it.

In his book The Destruc­tion of the Euro­pean Jews, Raul Hilberg gives what is per­haps the most sober­ing, con­fronting assess­ment of how the Jews react­ed to their immac­u­late­ly chore­o­graphed exter­mi­na­tion. He explains that the 2,000 years of Jew­ish exile and dis­per­sal, and the expe­ri­ence of liv­ing in almost con­stant dan­ger, had giv­en rise to a pre­cise, for­mu­la­ic and deeply inter­nalised reac­tion to dan­ger.

The Jews had come to believe that in order to sur­vive they had to refrain from resis­tance. When faced with a per­se­cu­tor, they would try to appease or pla­cate them. They could try to ran­som them­selves, make appeals to peo­ple in high places or to pub­lic opin­ion — fail­ing that, they accept­ed their fate. As the del­uge would set in, they wait­ed for it to pass over them and then sub­side. They could not rea­son with the Cru­saders or the Cos­sack horse­men, but they could out­last them; they col­lec­tive­ly out­lived them all. The Jews had come to believe that, because of the nature of God or man, they could not be anni­hi­lat­ed. This too shall pass. Am Yis­rael Chai.

They did not com­pre­hend that Nazism was unique. Where­as Rome or Spain or Tsarist Rus­sia were sat­is­fied to exploit and bru­talise or expel the Jews in their midst, Nazism would not rest until it hunt­ed and destroyed every sin­gle liv­ing Jew. As Hilberg con­cludes, the Jews could not make the switch. A 2,000-year les­son could not be unlearned. And so, they were help­less.

In the Nazi inferno

The Ger­mans, for their part, exhib­it­ed a chill­ing genius in their under­stand­ing of human nature, of how peo­ple can be bro­ken so absolute­ly as to com­ply in their own destruc­tion. In the ghet­tos, the Ger­mans appoint­ed for­mer Jew­ish com­mu­nal lead­ers to form Jew­ish Coun­cils with which they would liaise. This appealed to van­i­ty and cre­at­ed the illu­sion that these Coun­cils had some agency, some abil­i­ty to influ­ence what was unfold­ing.

They undoubt­ed­ly believed they were act­ing in the best inter­ests of their peo­ple, doing all they could to obtain infor­ma­tion, nego­ti­ate con­ces­sions, addi­tion­al med­ical sup­plies or hygien­ic prod­ucts, main­tain some sem­blance of rou­tine for the con­demned Jews by over­see­ing edu­ca­tion, cul­tur­al per­for­mances and sup­port ser­vices. We now know they should have been con­sumed with escape or rebel­lion and noth­ing else. Instead, they bus­ied them­selves edu­cat­ing chil­dren who would nev­er become adults.

Armed resis­tance was strict­ly dis­cour­aged. It would only aggra­vate the Ger­mans more and lead to even greater suf­fer­ing. It seemed things could always get worse. Instead, these Coun­cil lead­ers believed their pow­er­ful intel­lects could tame the beasts. They appealed to the Ger­mans, wrote let­ters to them, each word care­ful­ly weighed by men of esteem, believ­ing their fine rhetoric, wit and log­ic must sure­ly have some effect. In real­i­ty, they were help­ing to main­tain the order and achieve the paci­fi­ca­tion of the enslaved peo­ple that made their exter­mi­na­tion con­sid­er­ably eas­i­er.

The Nazis also extin­guished the capac­i­ty for resis­tance among those they enslaved by employ­ing every psy­cho­log­i­cal device used by the cap­tor and the tor­tur­er. They engaged in decep­tion, assur­ing the Jews that depor­ta­tion to death camps meant reset­tle­ment, gas cham­bers meant show­ers, and forced march­es to pre­dug graves meant report­ing for work assign­ments. Jew­ish lead­ers were for­ev­er try­ing to find out from the Nazis what was going to hap­pen next. The answers were always vague, dis­mis­sive or dis­hon­est. The truth that their anni­hi­la­tion was immi­nent was always kept from them.

The Nazis used the ele­ment of sur­prise, con­duct­ing pre-dawn raids of ghet­tos using bay­ing dogs and live fire to shock the ghet­to pop­u­la­tion into sub­mis­sion. They degrad­ed the Jews so com­plete­ly as to crush any indi­vid­u­al­is­tic spir­it. They used star­tling, unspeak­able bru­tal­i­ty to both shock and desen­si­tise the Jews to suf­fer­ing, and they could insert the occa­sion­al moment of respite, even a word of reas­sur­ance, to nur­ture docile com­pli­ance.

All of which is to say they kept the Jews off bal­ance at all times. Noth­ing stayed the same for very long. There were con­stant trans­ports, new labour assign­ments to fac­to­ries, move­ments from ghet­to to camp, camp to camp.

Alexan­der Pech­er­sky, a cap­tured Jew­ish sol­dier of the Red Army, spoke of this process as like the cir­cles of hell in Dante’s Infer­no. You con­stant­ly won­dered what was next and when it would all end. In this uncer­tain­ty, doing noth­ing seemed a bet­ter option than step­ping out of line and fac­ing the sadism of the guards and the cer­tain­ty of an imme­di­ate and vio­lent death. By the time death became an inescapable fact, it was much too late and the Jews usu­al­ly fell into a paral­y­sis and drift­ed to their graves.

In addi­tion to their ver­tig­i­nous cru­el­ty, the speed and effi­cien­cy of the Nazis’ destruc­tion meant that the Jews had no time, no space, no means, and no phys­i­cal capac­i­ty to resist in any mean­ing­ful or organ­ised way. We com­mon­ly speak of the grad­ual process of destruc­tion, begin­ning with the rise of Nazism and the Nurem­berg laws and end­ing in the camps a decade lat­er. But the actu­al process of mass-killing, still a quan­tum leap from the intense per­se­cu­tion that pre­ced­ed it, occurred not grad­u­al­ly but as a blitzkrieg.

In March 1942, almost 80 per cent of the even­tu­al vic­tims of the Holo­caust were still alive. By Feb­ru­ary 1943, just 11 months lat­er, that num­ber was reversed. 80 per cent of the 6 mil­lion were already dead. When the Final Solu­tion became pol­i­cy, mur­der became indus­tri­alised — and not a moment or a life was spared.

Acts of Jewish resistance

There were Jews who did man­age to escape. Who some­how slipped away when being led to the killing-field or made their get­away when being marched from their slave labour back to the camp. There was almost nev­er a hap­py end­ing to their sto­ries.

In the Lublin area of Poland, police bat­tal­ions were giv­en the task of comb­ing the forests to find any last hid­ing Jews. The bat­tal­ions called this the “Jew hunt”. Squads of three or four would ride out eager­ly each morn­ing to dis­cov­er the under­ground bunkers in which starv­ing, pet­ri­fied indi­vid­u­als or some­times whole fam­i­lies hid, fin­ish­ing them off with hand grenades or pis­tols, often sub­ject­ing them to tor­ture first. The only real choice the Jews had was to com­ply with an anony­mous death among the hun­dreds and thou­sands or hid­ing in the soil of a for­est wait­ing for death to find you.

But acts of resis­tance great and small, organ­ised and indi­vid­ual, can be found in every aspect and in every phase of the Holo­caust. Jews being deport­ed to the camps, trav­el­ling in cat­tle cars for days with no food or water, would rip planks off the car­riages with their bare hands, jump­ing from mov­ing trains in the hope of mak­ing their escape.

In the Pol­ish ghet­tos, clan­des­tine pub­li­ca­tions were cre­at­ed and smug­gled out beyond the ghet­to walls to alert the out­side world to the fate of the deport­ed Jews. Tens of thou­sands of Jews were saved by Jew­ish resis­tance organ­i­sa­tions which obtained false iden­ti­ty papers, estab­lished smug­gling routes and shel­tered hid­ing Jews.

In Poland and the for­mer Sovi­et republics, tens of thou­sands of Jews who man­aged to evade iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and cap­ture, par­tic­i­pat­ed in armed resis­tance. As many as 25,000 Jews fled the ghet­tos of west­ern and cen­tral Poland to join par­ti­san groups. Some 10,000 Jew­ish men and women from Lithua­nia did like­wise. A Jew­ish com­man­do suc­ceed­ed in blow­ing up a con­voy bound for Auschwitz, allow­ing 231 Jews to flee.

The most incred­i­ble instances of organ­ised resis­tance occurred at the Sobi­bor death camp and in the War­saw Ghet­to. Sobi­bor was a pur­pose-built exter­mi­na­tion camp. Where­as at Auschwitz, pris­on­ers and new arrivals were select­ed for the gas cham­bers if they could not be worked to death, at Sobi­bor this process was reversed. Every­one was imme­di­ate­ly gassed unless they were of the tiny minor­i­ty select­ed for some form of work detail. As a result, almost no one sur­vived Sobi­bor.

By Octo­ber 1943, trans­ports to the camp were becom­ing less fre­quent because there were so few Jews left to kill, and rumours began to cir­cu­late that the camp would soon be dis­man­tled. When the near­by Belzec death camp was dis­man­tled, the last remain­ing pris­on­ers were assured that, after they com­plet­ed the work of exhum­ing and burn­ing bod­ies and con­ceal­ing the evi­dence of geno­cide, they would be trans­ferred to a camp in Ger­many. Instead, they were sent to Sobi­bor to die.

One of the men from Belzec man­aged to sew a note into his cloth­ing to the last inmates of Sobi­bor, which was dis­cov­ered by a pris­on­er assigned to sort the cloth­ing of Jews killed in the gas cham­bers. The note said: “Be aware that you will be killed also! Avenge us!”

The upris­ing was insti­gat­ed by a Pol­ish Jew, Leon Feld­hendler. He knew the last pris­on­ers in the camp were too bro­ken to resist. But the arrival of Jew­ish Red Army pris­on­ers of war gave Feld­hendler hope. Among the new arrivals select­ed for work, he noticed a man named Alexan­der Pech­er­sky.

When Pech­er­sky saw a senior SS offi­cer mer­ci­less­ly beat­ing a Jew who had col­lapsed while chop­ping wood, Pech­er­sky leaned on his axe and stopped work­ing him­self. Intrigued by this defi­ance, the SS man pro­posed a chal­lenge for his own sadis­tic plea­sure. If Pech­er­sky could split a tree stump in under five min­utes, he would give him a pack of cig­a­rettes. If he failed, he would be lashed twen­ty-five times. Pech­er­sky com­plet­ed the task in four-and-a-half min­utes. To demon­strate he was a man of his word, the SS man offered up the cig­a­rettes. Pech­er­sky declined, say­ing that he didn’t smoke. The SS man sug­gest­ed some addi­tion­al rations instead. The starv­ing Pech­er­sky replied that he found the stan­dard camp pro­vi­sions to be ade­quate.

Feld­hendler recog­nised in Pech­er­sky, a rare cool­ness and steel, and knew he was the only man who could lead the upris­ing. Togeth­er, these men coor­di­nat­ed the simul­ta­ne­ous killings of sev­er­al of the camp guards. They killed the act­ing com­man­dant of the camp with an axe while the camp tai­lor was fit­ting him for a jack­et that had belonged to a mur­dered Jew. The resis­tors then killed ten more SS guards before rush­ing the perime­ter fence.

Only 58 Jews of the 300,000 who were sent to Sobi­bor sur­vived. The major­i­ty of those who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the upris­ing were either shot, blown up by land mines sur­round­ing the camp, or mopped up by Ger­man patrols or Pol­ish nation­al­ists in the forests. Feld­hendler him­self sur­vived, only to be mur­dered by Pol­ish anti­semites in his apart­ment in Lublin in 1945. Pech­er­sky, the mag­net­ic leader of the upris­ing sur­vived in the for­est, joined the par­ti­sans, returned to Sovi­et ter­ri­to­ry, sur­vived Stal­in­ism and died in old age in the Sovi­et Union.

Resistance in Warsaw

The War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing — whose eight­i­eth anniver­sary we mark on this day — is one of the most sig­nif­i­cant events in Jew­ish his­to­ry.

In Novem­ber 1940, the Ger­mans estab­lished the War­saw Ghet­to, the largest ghet­to in Europe. Around 450,000 Jews had been tak­en from War­saw and its envi­rons and crammed into an area of just over a square mile. By April 1942, 75 per cent of those Jews were dead. Most had been deport­ed to Tre­blin­ka and gassed, oth­ers were shot in the ghet­to, or suc­cumbed to dis­ease and star­va­tion.

A force of 700 Jews led by Zion­ist and Com­mu­nist groups led the upris­ing. It uni­fied Jew­ish nation­al­ists and inter­na­tion­al­ists, hith­er­to bit­ter polit­i­cal foes. They cre­at­ed a net­work of dugouts linked to the sewage sys­tem. They smug­gled in small arms, fash­ioned molo­tov cock­tails, and took down col­lab­o­ra­tors, inform­ers, and police­men inside the ghet­to before engag­ing in com­bat with the SS.

They held the fac­to­ries for as long as they could — jump­ing from col­laps­ing build­ings or escap­ing through the sew­ers when the SS bat­tal­ions began the sys­tem­at­ic destruc­tion of the ghet­to, scorch­ing or top­pling build­ings and all inside them, to end the upris­ing. For all their val­our and deter­mi­na­tion, the Jew­ish fight­ers killed no more than 16 of their tor­men­tors. The upris­ing was crushed. The remain­ing Jews of the ghet­to were either shot on site or deport­ed to the death camps.

But the 2,000 year pat­tern of help­less­ness in the face of tor­ment that Raul Hilberg had observed had been for­ev­er bro­ken. Emanuel Ringel­blum, who man­aged to escape the ghet­to before being betrayed in hid­ing and exe­cut­ed along with the Pol­ish fam­i­ly that hid him, wrote in lamen­ta­tion:

Why didn’t we resist when they began to reset­tle 300,000 Jews from War­saw to the camps? Why did we allow our­selves to be led like sheep to the slaugh­ter? Why did every­thing come so easy to the ene­my? Why didn’t the hang­men suf­fer a sin­gle casu­al­ty? Why could 50 SS men and 200 Ukrain­ian guards car­ry out the oper­a­tion so smooth­ly?

No one among us can judge the actions of those placed in that purest ren­der­ing of hell that was the Holo­caust. No one can say how they would have con­duct­ed them­selves if faced with their cir­cum­stances.

Dignity, memory, hope

Per­haps the great­est dif­fer­ence between those who could resist and those who could not was their con­cep­tion of hope. The resis­tors did not engage in self-delu­sion or false hope. They did not kid them­selves that the killing process would just exhaust itself. Or that any­one was com­ing to lib­er­ate them. They knew they would die. Their hope was that by rebelling they could briefly cre­ate a new real­i­ty — a dawn they knew they would nev­er see.

They resist­ed to restore their dig­ni­ty and that of their peo­ple, to assert their hon­our, to restore some indi­vid­u­al­ism, wrest back some scrap of free­dom after every­thing good in this world had been burned and choked off. This, to me, is the height of brav­ery and nobil­i­ty.

They also sought to inspire oth­ers, and in this they suc­ceed­ed. As Yehu­da Bauer notes, “armed groups resist­ed the Nazis in 110 ghet­tos and camps. There were 63 armed under­ground groups.” In addi­tion to the upris­ing at Sobi­bor, Jews rose up in Tre­blin­ka and Birke­nau. The Jew­ish resis­tance in War­saw sparked major ghet­to upris­ings in Min­sk and Bia­ly­stock.

In the dying words of the resis­tors, we see anoth­er com­mon theme. Amid it all was a crush­ing lone­li­ness, a sense that they exist­ed and were being erased as if on an island, unseen, unknown, cut off from all the world that was indif­fer­ent and obliv­i­ous to their tor­tured fate. That no one would know they ever lived and died.

But the resis­tors speak to us now. They tell us that they lived, did not suc­cumb, they did not go qui­et­ly, they did not give up. They teach us what it means to have courage, to be strong even when faced with an unstop­pable force. To see a world and a des­tiny beyond our own lives. And we, even here, so far in space and time from the scenes of the crimes, hon­our them, remem­ber them — we speak their names and we mar­vel at their great­ness.