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.