Jewish partisans in the street—Vilna, Lithuania

Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust
Sixty Years Since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The Central Theme for Holocaust Remembrance Day 2003

by Professor Israel Gutman

Generation after generation, Jews and non-Jews alike confront the greatest crime ever perpetrated against humanity—the Holocaust. Individuals and nations try to comprehend how the largest and most vibrant Jewish settlement that thrived in Europe for a millennium was eradicated in a matter of years.

Just as Jewish fate differed from that of other nations under Nazi rule, so too did the nature of Jewish opposition to the Nazis. Driven by the sheer will to survive, millions of persecuted Jews in Nazi Third Reich territory and the occupied countries resisted the oppressor. On the eastern and western fronts, hundreds of thousands of Jews fought and died in Allied armies.

“Operation Barbarossa”—the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941—marked the beginning of the mass murder of Jews in eastern occupied areas. Upon hearing of the mass shooting of Jews in Ponary and other sites, Zionist youth movement activists in Vilna were first to comprehend the Nazi intent: to completely annihilate the Jews.

Two members of the underground in the Kovno ghetto—Lithuania

The warning cry issued from Vilna spurred initial thoughts of ghetto revolts for thousands of young Jews, particularly members of the clandestine Zionist-pioneer youth movements. In ghettos such as Bialystok, Krakow, Bendin, Czestochowa, and Tarnow, rebellions and confrontations broke out during the final deportations. These desperate acts of resistance testified to the triumph of the Jewish and human spirit and constituted both a cry for life and a banner of hope for future generations.

On the eve of Passover 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising was launched—one of the most symbolic battles of WWII and the first popular uprising in a Nazi-occupied city (see article Self-Defense and Struggle ). Through active resistance, Jewish fighters managed to delay the Nazis’ final liquidation of the ghetto for nearly a month.

In addition to opposition inside the ghettos, underground movements were established for the purpose of rescue in Western European countries such as France and Holland, as well as Hungary. In occupied countries including Belarus, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece, tens of thousands of Jews fled to the forests and mountains to join partisan ranks. Jews formed their own units, or—when permitted entry—joined existing non-Jewish corps in order to engage in guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. They attacked small enemy factions and sabotaged their means of communication and transportation. Pursuits and sieges by the German army were quelled by the partisans’ dynamic and evasive guerilla tactics, which undermined the enemy’s confidence on the home front. The partisans’ fight was also a fight for survival. In Eastern Europe, thousands of Jews banded together in family camps or groups that hid in the forests and defended themselves with weapons in the face of enemy persecution.

Underground fighter preparing a bomb on train tracks—France

Jews also rebelled from within the labor, concentration, and extermination camps surrounded by electrified fences and heavily guarded by the SS and their collaborators. In August and October 1943 respectively, prisoners in the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps rebelled. Their intent after eradicating the camps’ military force was to escape to the forests. Their missions, however, were only partially successful: While Nazi guards suffered a number of casualties, hundreds of Jews perished and only dozens survived. In October 1944, Jews of the Sonderkommando staged an organized rebellion in the extermination area of the Birkenau camp, killing several SS men and destroying one gas chamber. All the rebels died, however they left behind diaries providing authentic documentation of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz.

In the final analysis, the call to arms and acts of Jewish resistance could not save the Jewish masses since their annihilation was one of the predominant aims of the Nazi war machine. The scope and success of the resistance movements required support, assistance, arms provisions, and training from the outside. These factors were almost always absent in the occupied countries, and local underground forces rarely answered the Jewish cry for help. Throughout the dark years of the Holocaust, Jewish defiance and survival became a struggle of tortured souls left to their fate.

The author is an Academic Advisor at the International Institute for Holocaust Research