Why didn't the Jews fight back?  

Elie Wiesel once stated that, "...the question is not why all the Jews did NOT fight, but how so many of them DID.  Tormented, beaten, starved, where did they find the strength—spiritual and physical—to resist?"

Since 1945, there has been a steady and growing accumulation of documentary evidence regarding what occurred during the Holocaust.  The genocidal atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators against the Jews are well known and becoming better understood.   Research by Holocaust scholars has also deepened our understanding of the efforts made to rescue and protect Jews.  Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression, however, has received much less attention.

One of the first questions students invariably ask me when they visit our Center or when they participate in workshops I give is "Why didn't the Jews fight back?"  A myth still persists that the Jews went passively to their deaths and did little to stand up to their oppressors.   It is of utmost importance that this misperception be corrected. 

Jewish Resistance to Nazi Oppression

Contrary to the popularly-held belief, organized, armed resistance activities by Jews during the Holocaust were numerous as well as significant.  They occurred in the majority of the ghettos, they occurred in many Nazi concentration camps, and they even occurred in three of the most notorious killing centers where Jews were gassed.

Resistance in Ghettos

In approximately 100 ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and the Ukraine underground organizations were created whose primary purpose was to wage armed struggle against the Nazis.  The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that began on April 19, 1943 was the first major civilian revolt against the German forces in all of Nazi-occupied Europe.  It lasted three and one-half weeks and inflicted numerous casualties on the Nazis. Uprisings also occurred in other ghettos including Bialystock, Kletsk, Kremenetz, Nesvizh, Marcinkonis, Mir, and Tuchin.

In some of the ghettos such as that of Czestochowa, Kovno, Krakow, Vilna, and Minsk it was too  difficult to stage a revolt against the Nazis from within the ghettos themselves.  However, Jewish resistance fighters were organized there and they found other ways of resisting. In some places, the resistance fighters attacked and killed Nazis outside the ghettos.  They also linked with and eventually joined partisan units who operated outside the ghettos. 

Organized uprisings did take place in many of the smaller ghettos, often on the spur of the moment.  These uprisings all took place under conditions in which organized, armed resistance was almost a virtual impossibility.  The resistance fighters faced extremely difficult problems including smuggling arms into the ghettos, training the fighters while living under austere ghetto conditions, establishing a way of keeping the fighters on alert, and maintaining the secrecy of their clandestine operations.

Resistance in Concentration Camps

In the concentration camps it was much more difficult for resistance fighters to organize themselves and engage in armed resistance activities.  Because they were completely exposed to the camp administration, the guards, and unofficial collaborators among the concentration camp inmates, resistance fighters were much more vulnerable. Any prisoner could be subjected to brutal torture and murder for the slightest offense or even without committing any kind of offense at all.  Chronic starvation robbed concentration camp inmates of their physical strength.  The Nazis also used the principle of "collective responsibility" against the concentration camp inmates, punishing groups of inmates for the acts of one or a few individuals in a group.  Despite these difficulties, uprisings occurred in a number of concentration camps.  In several camps, resistance fighters helped organize escapes and many of the escapees joined partisan units outside the camp.

Uprisings even occurred at three of the most notorious killing centers, to which Jews were transported to be gassed—Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz/Birkenau.  Two of these uprisings, at Treblinka and at Sobibor, resulted in the closure of the killing center operation and, thus, the termination of gassing of Jewish inmates there. The third, which occurred at Auschwitz/Birkenau on October 7, 1944, resulted in one of four crematoria being blown up as well as the deaths of many Nazis.   Only a handful of people survived the uprising at Treblinka. In Sobibor, approximately 400 inmates succeeded in breaking out of the camp but about half of them were killed as a result of land mines blowing up or because of the pursuit by Nazi soldiers and Polish collaborators.  The total number of survivors of this revolt was also very small but the uprising resulted in the closing of Sobibor and the termination of its killing center activities.  At Auschwitz/Birkenau all of those who participated in the uprising were caught and executed by the Nazis and the gassing of Jews went on until Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945.

Organized armed resistance also included the activities of Jewish partisan groups, who engaged in acts of sabotage and guerilla warfare against the Nazis.

All the many organized armed resistance efforts by Jews were acts of tremendous courage and defiance.  Although they were, at best, only stop-gap measures that inflicted some casualties and losses on the Nazis, they were a part of the overall war effort by American, British, and Soviet armies.  Much more importantly, the organized armed resistance efforts by Jews enabled the resistors to maintain their dignity and, if necessary, go to their deaths proudly and with their dignity and humanity intact.  They were a source of tremendous inspiration to Jews and others living under Nazi occupation.

The Warsaw Ghetto

"...Now that Warsaw has witnessed the last act of bestial German action, we cannot simply pass over the change in attitude of the victims who, being unable to change their fate, decided to fall with arms in their hands.  This stand of theirs, understood by every Pole, changes the picture significantly.  From a people without hope, a herd slaughtered by German murderers, the Jews rose to the heights of a fighting people.  And if it could not fight for its existence—a thing made impossible by the overwhelming advantage in numbers of the enemy—it did demonstrate its right to life as a nation...  The Polish public looks upon this happening with great respect, gives its moral support and hopes that its resistance will continue for as long as possible..."
From the Polish Underground newspaper Mysl Panstowa ("State Thought") written on April 30, 1943 in the aftermath of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Organized, armed resistance was not the only form of Jewish resistance activity.  Resistance needs to be understood in much broader terms.  The foundation of Jewish resistance, especially in the ghettos and concentration camps, was survival, both physically and spiritually.  The smuggling and sharing of food, clothing, medicine, and other necessities was a significant factor of ghetto life.  Because these items were severely rationed by the Nazis or non-existent, smuggling helped many Jews stay alive.  Smuggling was an act of daring and defiance.  Sharing the things that were smuggled was an act of compassion and caring and was as commonplace in the ghettos as smuggling and black marketing.

Spiritual survival was as important as physical survival.  Besides the constant need to find food, clothing, shelter, and protection from disease or from being shot, the victims of Nazi persecution had to constantly struggle against feelings of hopelessness and despair.  Death was everywhere and people trying to survive in the ghettos, the concentration camps, and even in hiding witnessed people being tortured, murdered, and deported to unknown destinations.  What did the Jews do mentally and spiritually to cope with the burden of day-to-day survival?  In the ghettos, they operated schools, infirmaries, prayer services, and libraries, as well as cultural and recreational activities.  They organized concerts and theater performances.  Jewish youth maintained cultural, religious, and political organizations like the Zionist youth groups.  They created underground newspapers that sometimes imparted information received from illegal sources such as short wave radios or through networks of contacts with people outside the ghettos and concentration camps.  Sometimes the information contained in the underground publications was untrue, created to inspire hope among the victims and protect them from feelings of despair that sometimes led to suicide; sometimes these activities were clandestine rather than done openly because they were forbidden by the Nazi overseers.

Documentation

Documentation was another significant part of Jewish resistance activity.  In some ghettos, such as Warsaw, Kovno, and Lodz, Jews created day-by-day chronicles that established a written record of the conditions in the ghetto (i.e. rationing of food, starvation, homelessness, and disease), selections and deportations, and other atrocities perpetrated against ghetto inhabitants.  Some Jews also kept personal diaries for the purpose of documentation.  A handful, like Mendel Grossman in Lodz, had cameras and took secret photographs that recorded the conditions of the ghetto.  A few Jews also drew, painted, and sculpted works of art that were documentary evidence of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews.  In Theresienstadt particularly, where artists were permitted by the Nazis to draw and paint and where the Nazis actually commissioned works, a group of Jewish artists secretly painted the atrocities that were occurring daily in the ghetto and smuggled the paintings and drawings outside the ghetto with the help of contacts in the Czech underground.  A large amount of documentary material survived the Holocaust even though those who did the documentation were murdered.

The obtaining and smuggling of information was another type of Jewish resistance activity.  Many women especially played important roles as couriers, smuggling letters and information between ghettos and concentration camps.  Some of the material assisted Jewish resistance fighters in their efforts to strike against Nazi targets; some passed between friends and family members, letting them know that their loved ones were still alive.

Keeping up hope, talking others out of feelings of hopelessness, developing mantras, prayers, songs, and visualizations to recite during roll calls, slave labor work, and torture were all ways in which individuals helped themselves and helped others to survive.  Having a strong will, refusing to be beaten down, refusing to commit suicide—all of these things were significant acts of Jewish resistance.

Many Jews took personal risk to observe their religious traditions— Passover seders that were only recitations by memory of passages of the Passover Haggadah, praying daily (with or without prayer shawls), manufacturing candles and lighting them secretly on Hanukkah, refusing food rations on Yom Kippur despite the fact that one was starving—all of these were acts of defiance as well as inspiration to the many Jews who did them.

Rescue of Victims by other Jewish Victims

Rescue of victims by other Jewish victims is another amazing example of resistance by Jews.  The story of the Bielski brothers, who were leaders of the largest Jewish partisan group in occupied Europe.  They created an entire town to house their 1,500 member unit in a forest in Belarus.  They brought in and rescued hundreds of Jews who were physically too old, too young, or too ill to actually fight as partisans.  Rescuing and sheltering their brothers and sisters who could do nothing except hide was a part of their effort as partisans. 

A Living Memorial: Holocaust Survivor Families

Local Families Rescue Victims

There are two stories of rescue of Jews by other Jews in "A Living Memorial", the part of the permanent exhibit at the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center devoted to families with Holocaust history who settled in the Greater Springfield area.  One story is about the Terkeltaub (Torrey) family of Lodz who, in response to a request by Jews they knew, took a girl out of an orphanage in the ghetto just prior to the day when all of the children in the ghetto were being deported to Auschwitz.  They hid this girl in their home and kept her with them when they were sent to Nazi concentration camps in Germany after the ghetto was liquidated.  The Terkeltaub (Torrey) family all survived the Holocaust and the girl they sheltered survived together with them.

The complete dramatic story of Jewish resistance to Nazism is still unfolding and the need to tell it is now more important than ever.  Every story of Jewish resistance is a testimony not only to the courage of the survivors themselves, but to the triumph of the human spirit.