VIDEO EXTRAS
An important form of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust was medical resistance -- courageous acts by doctors and nurses to treat patients, perform research, deal with epidemics, and continue to educate young medical and nursing students. It must be noted that many of the doctors who remained in the Warsaw Ghetto were eminent in their fields and were given the opportunity to escape to the Aryan side but declined and remained with their patients in the Ghetto.
The life of the Warsaw Ghetto was meticulously documented in an effort codenamed “Oyneg Shabbes” or “Sabbath Delight” and led by Emanuel Ringelblum. The goal was to ensure the truth would survive, even if the people did not. The writers who worked on the project placed all kinds of documents and objects, evidence of Jewish resistance as well as German war crimes, in metal boxes and milk cans, and buried them. After World War II, two precious treasure troves were found, but is there a third still under the ground somewhere in Warsaw?
With harsh limitations placed on Jewish worship, spiritual observance was an important form of Jewish resistance. There are multiple examples of this in ghettos and camps throughout Eastern Europe. One has been memorialized in a children’s book written by Tami Lehman-Wilzig. She tells the story of a Bar Mitzvah which took place in Bergen-Belsen and of a promise made by a young boy named Joachim Joseph to his teacher, the elderlyRabbi Simon Dasberg, to keep the story alive.
As a Jewish courier, Vladka Meed was always in danger of being caught and killed by the Germans. But her most dangerous mission is when she is assigned to live outside the ghetto, posing as an Aryan, to procure weapons for the resistance. But getting out was the first challenge. Here’s Vladka’s story...
What happened to the brave resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?Some diedat Mila 18 as a final act of resistance. Others managedto escape through the sewersto fight as partisans in the forests, while a few were tragically left behind.
Hadas reads one of her grandfather’s poems at the historic Lele Theatre in the Vilna Ghetto.
In Vilna, for centuries the center of Jewish religionand culture, known as “the Jerusalem of the North,” stood the Great Synagogue. Jon Seligman of the Israel Antiquities Authority is in charge of the multi-year effort to excavate its treasures.
The Sobibor Uprising took place on October 14, 1943. Under the leadership of a rabbi’s son and a Russian Jewish POW, Jewish prisoners found ways to kill 11 members of the camp’s SS and break through the barbed wire to escape through the camp’s front gate. There, Germanguardsshot at them and the fleeing prisoners risked their lives in the minefields surrounding the camp. Only some 50survived this onslaught and lived to see the end of the war but where are the remains of the hundreds that fell?
Despite the limits placed on them by the Polish camp bureaucracy, in the summer of 2021, the late Professor Richard Freund and his team of geo-archeologists were able to do some preliminary work to answer that question, as shown in the next two links.
As conditions worsened in the Warsaw Ghetto, Germans began killing children at the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital. Doctors and nurses made the devastating decision to take matters into their own hands to lessen the suffering.
In a public park in Warsaw, the archeologists are looking for the third trove of the Ringelblum Archive, which is rumored to exist but has never been found. In the fall of 2022, they are given permission to dig a small experimental test site. What will they discover?
July 24, 2021. It is Tisha B’Av, when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in biblical times. But 80 years ago, almost to the day, the Germans begin to deport people from the Warsaw Ghetto to the newly built death camp Treblinka, giving special meaning to the observance.
Krystina Budnickais one of a handful of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which began on April 19, 1943. She was 7 years old at the timeand recalls what happened to her 5 older brothers.
About 700 young Jewish men and women fought in combat with German soldiers during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But thousands of men, women and children participated in the Uprising, hiding in their bunkers, refusing to surrender. Among them was 7-year-old Krystina Budnickaand her family.
Hadas Kalderon describes the Paper Brigade and the role of her grandfather Avrom Sutzkever in it. Sutzkever came to be known as agreat Yiddish poet and later won the Israel Prize for his literature, the first Yiddish writer to win that prestigious award. The New York Times wrote that Sutzkever was the “greatest poet of the Holocaust.”
When the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated, in 1943 Avrom Sutzkever and his wife Freydke escaped to the forest along with his fellow Yiddish poet and musician Shmerke Kaczerginski to fight as partisans. However, when Sutzkever’s poem Kol Nidrereached the Jewish Anti-Facist Committee in Moscow, members implored the Kremlin to rescue Sutzkever and Freydke. The first rescue plane crashed, and a suitcase was made from its wing for Sutzkever to carry treasured Jewish works saved bythe Paper Brigade to safety, as described by his granddaughter Hadas Kalderon. The next plane landed safely and carried Sutzkever and his wife to Moscow where their daughter was born. A baby son and Sutzkever’s mother had been murdered by the Nazis.
Brave Jewish courier Lonka Korzybrodska, friend of Bela Hazan, dies in Auschwitz.
One of the most poignant questions of the Holocaust is why the Allies did nothing to destroy or damage the horrendous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. One of the answers often given is ignorance; they just didn’t know what was happeningthere. Here, the escape of fourJewish prisoners, in April and May, 1944--authors of what is known as the Auschwitz Protocols--reveal that is a lie. Their efforts saved the lives of untold numbers of Hungarian Jews.
HOW MEDICINE BECAME RESISTANCE
By: Paula S. Apsell, Director, Writer, and Executive Producer
November 21, 2023
An important form of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust was medical resistance -- courageous acts by doctors and nurses to treat patients, perform research, deal with epidemics, and continue to educate young medical and nursing students. It must be noted that many of the doctors who remained in the Warsaw Ghetto were eminent in their fields and were given the opportunity to escape to the Aryan side but declined and remained with their patients in the Ghetto.
As conditions worsened in the Warsaw Ghetto, Germans began killing children at the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital. Doctors and nurses made the devastating decision to take matters into their own hands to lessen the suffering.
More information on medical resistance can be found in Miriam Offer's book White Coats in the Ghetto: Jewish Medicine in Poland during the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, 2020.
HOW DID THE ‘SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER’ MYTH EVOLVE?
By: Paula S. Apsell, Director, Writer, and Executive Producer
September 25, 2023
The “sheep to the slaughter” allusion can be traced back to the Bible where it is used to praise martyrs who die to sanctify the name of the Almighty. But for reasons both political and historical, it has been turned into a pejorative in describing the behavior of European Jews facing Nazi threats of extinction.
Historian Patrick Henry in his masterful volume Jewish Resistance against the Nazis examines this question, emphasizing that while the myth of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust has been discredited by scholars, it continues in popular culture. There are many reasons for this. Early Holocaust scholarship, including that by the eminent historian Raul Hilberg as well as other Jewish intellectuals, was based largely on the extensive German documentation of their war crimes against the Jews. Allergic to any mention of Jewish resistance, the Germans excluded any descriptions of resistance activities, including death camp uprisings, with which they were intimately familiar, leading people to the erroneous belief that if resistance were not included in German documents, it must not have happened.
Patrick Henry tells us that it is important to understand the role that Nazis played in the dissemination of the myth that Jews did nothing to help themselves. “In the twisted Nazi psyche,” he says, “this blaming of the victim somehow exculpates the killers from the crimes.” It also justifies the bystanders. After all, why would you risk your life to help people who did nothing to help themselves? Even in Israel, this myth was adopted by Zionists wanting to draw a distinction between weak and passive European Jews and hale and hardy Israeli settlers working the land with their hands. After World War II, in Israel, those Jews who survived the Holocaust were often regarded with suspicion, as if they had been complicit with the Germans or somehow harmed other Jews in order to save their own lives. Survivors were taunted with the name “soaps,” referring to the myth that Nazis had manufactured soap out human bodies. It’s important to say that this situation has since changed in Israel where survivors are now honored and their brave acts of resistance more widely recognized.
Today, in the United States, Europe and Israel itself, perhaps as a holdover of these historic insults and for other reasons, the idea still persists that “Jews went to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter.” Even though scholars long ago discredited it and volumes have been written about it, somehow the reality of Jewish resistance has not penetrated popular culture. Hopefully, the feature documentary Resistance – They Fought Back will help to convince people of the truth.
RECOGNIZING JEWISH HEROS FROM THE HOLOCAUST
By: Alan Schneider, Director B’nai B’rith World Center Jerusalem
September 25, 2023
The Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust (“the Committee”) was established in Israel in 2000 at the initiative of the late Haim Roet (1932-2023), a Dutch Jew who survived the Holocaust as a child, hidden from the Nazis at great risk by both Christians and Jews. Founding committee members included rescuers, survivors, researchers, and myself. The Committee’s aim is to raise public awareness in Israel and around the world to the fact that many Jews endangered themselves to rescue fellow Jews during the Holocaust. The Committee presents these courageous acts as a source of Jewish national pride and as an example of the highest humanist conduct.
Holocaust historiography has tended to present Jews only as victims. This trend began to change some two decades ago when studies began to examine the daily lives of Jews during the Holocaust and the measures they took to survive in the fast deteriorating reality they faced.
From its early days the State of Israel showed appreciation for Jews who engaged in active combat against the Nazis and extended the title of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ to members of other religions who endangered their lives to rescue Jews. Jews who risked their own lives to rescue others received little attention in academic research and no formal recognition.
In fact, while the Germans and their collaborators attempted to methodically annihilate European Jewry, many Jews resisted the grim fate that awaited them. Half a million fought in the Allied armies and in the ranks of the partisans, revolted in the ghettos and led uprisings in extermination camps.
Another form of active resistance by Jews was the rescue of fellow Jews while exposing themselves to great danger. Renowned Holocaust historians have noted: that Jewish self-rescue is “an additional aspect of the study of the Jewish response during the Holocaust which is not sufficiently well-known”, that “Jews played an active and significant role throughout occupied Europe in the rescue of other Jews” and that “Non-Jews were not the only ones who saved Jews; Jews also saved Jews, and non-Jews were sometimes saved by Jews.” The ability of Jews to act was much more restricted than that of non-Jews, who were not persecuted by the Nazis, and reflects the highest form of Jewish and human solidarity. These acts of rescue are a supreme expression of the ancient Jewish principles “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor” and “All Jews are responsible for one another.” These activities do not reflect a collection of coincidental events but, in many cases, a phenomenon of methodical, carefully planned rescue operations that took place across Europe and North Africa, carried out both by individuals and groups. Rescue operations were carried out from the rise of the Nazis to power until after the end of WWII. Despite the difficult conditions which varied from place to place and evolved as the war progressed, many who could have fled chose to exhibit exemplary solidarity and remain behind to rescue others; some paid for it with their lives. With great heroism, Jews in Germany, and every country in occupied Europe exploited loopholes in Nazi bureaucracy and employed subterfuge, document replication, smuggling, concealment, and other methods to help Jews survive the Holocaust or assist them in escaping to safe haven. In doing so they foiled the Nazi goal of total annihilation of the Jews. Since many rescue operations were not documented, there is no clear estimate of the scope of this phenomenon, and it is likely that records of many cases have been lost forever. Many Jewish rescuers were awarded national decorations by foreign countries while the State of Israel and its institutions have made no similar gesture event to this day.
The Committee strives to close the gap of eighty years during which these heroes were left largely unknown and unrecognized by the Jewish people. To achieve this, it promotes public activities in Israel and abroad, cooperating where possible with governmental bodies, academia, educational institutions, Jewish communities and organizations for Holocaust commemoration. These include: an annual ceremony held by the B’nai B’rith World Center and the Jewish National Fund on Yom Hashoah v’Hagvura (Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day) at the B’nai B’rith Martyrs Forest dedicated since 2002 to the legacy of Jewish rescuers; the Jews Saving Jews Forum (established in 2018) at Bar-Ilan University's Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research; and The Jewish Rescuers Citation (established in 2011 with the B'nai B'rith World Center) which has been presented to 624 Jewish rescuers--in person or posthumously--who operated across Europe and North Africa.
Since 2020, the Committee has been chaired by Aryeh Barnea, a second generation educator and Holocaust researcher, who initiated, among other things, the soon-to-open Jewish Rescuers Center, located at the Wilfrid Israel Museum in HaZore’a, Israel.
For further reading: Jewish Rescuers Citation - B'nai B'rith International (bnaibrith.org)
FROM LITERATURE TO HISTORY
By: Professor Patrick Henry, Whitman College, Emeritus
October 24, 2022 | Walla Walla, WA
It was probably in the spring of 1988 when I first contacted Philip Hallie. I was beginning to think about editing a collection of essays on Montaigne. Hallie was one of my favorite commentators on Montaigne’s Essays and I wanted him to write an essay for the volume I was planning. He had published The Scar of Montaigne (Wesleyan University Press, 1966), an insightful and important study of the essayist’s irresolution, of his skepticism, and of the importance of experience in the Essays. More crucial still, for me, were Hallie’s groundbreaking studies of Montaigne’s ethics that depicted an ethical revolution that moved ethics away from concentration on the self in “egocentric” ethics toward the value of the deed itself and its consequences.
Hallie was much more than cordial on the phone. He seemed flattered to have been asked and genuinely happy to learn that someone he didn’t know three thousand miles away was interested not only in his work but much more importantly in the ethics of the Essays. Regarding the article for my collection, however, Hallie was not interested. Montaigne clearly remained his favorite philosopher, he said, but he had moved on to other things.
“What other things?” I asked, not wanting to end the conversation abruptly simply because he had turned me down. He said that he had published a book a decade earlier, entitled Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and How Goodness Happened There (Harper & Row, 1979), and had become tremendously interested in the rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust. He suggested that if I read the book and was interested in the ethical questions it raised, I should call Bill Moyers and ask him for a copy of the 1987 PBS video, Facing Evil, in which Hallie appears and reflects upon the village eight years after publishing his study about the importance of what happened there.
I read Hallie’s book, watched the PBS video and, while I continued to teach my courses on French Literature of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, began spending time each semester looking into the phenomenon of rescue in France during the Holocaust in the same area that Hallie had studied.
Although I would never meet Philip Hallie, we talked often on the phone from 1988 until his death in 1994. His enthusiasm was as inextinguishable as it was contagious. Ethical principles were vital to him; he wore his on his sleeve. I invited him to speak at Whitman College, but he fell ill just before this engagement and was unable to make the trip. Although he never set foot on our campus, Hallie did make it to Whitman College: every graduating senior for one two-year period read Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed in our Senior Colloquium.
Just about twenty years after that first phone call to Hallie, I published my own book on the same area Hallie had studied, We Only Know Men. The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (Catholic University Press of America, 2007). What struck me more than anything else in my research was to discover so many Jewish people involved in the rescue process in that area: Madeleine Dreyfus brought roughly one hundred Jewish children to the area to be hidden in homes and farms. After she was arrested and deported, she was replaced in the Garel Network by a Jewish man, André Chouraqui. Oscar Rosowsky, a Polish Jew in hiding, made 5,000 false papers that were distributed to Jewish people hiding in the area or just passing through and Pierre Fayol, a French Jew, was the head of the French Resistance in the area.
I then investigated every area where large numbers of Jews were rescued in France: Marseille, Chabannes, Nice, and on the Swiss and Spanish borders. Everywhere Jews were part of the rescue of other Jews.
Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Queens in New York City, we had always been told that “the Jews went to the slaughter like sheep.” I continued to do research on the different ways Jewish people resisted the Nazis: flight, rescue, armed conflict in ghettoes, forests, and camps, for example. I decided to put a book of essays together written by specialists working in Holocaust research in specific countries. This five-year research project resulted in the publication of a huge 600-page collection of essays, Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis (Catholic University Press, 2014). Written by two dozen scholars from Israel, Europe, Canada, and the United States, the essays examine the different violent and nonviolent ways Jews resisted the Nazis in every occupied country and in the ghettos and camps.
Over time, this work became more and more personal for me. I had the impression that I was working my way back home to my neighborhood in Flushing, to my friends I grew up with: the Golds, the Solomons, the Schwartzes, the Schweibels, the Ganzes, the Engelbarts, the Friedmans, and especially my next-door neighbor, Irena Rutenberg, who was a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw (see my tribute to her here). I wish we could all get together now and talk about growing up together in the 1940s and 50s when, even as people sometimes appeared in the street with Auschwitz tattoos, the Holocaust was the elephant in the neighborhood.
THE STORY BEHIND ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE
By: Lisa Goodfellow
Archival Producer, RESISTANCE — THEY FOUGHT BACK
March 27, 2024
Long before I entered the world of documentary filmmaking the seeds for my role as the archival producer for Resistance – They Fought Back had been planted. It was 1993, I along with my mother and 3-month-old son Max were visiting the home of Eva K., a friend my mother met through work. After visiting for a while, I asked if there was a quiet place that I could lay Max down for a nap. Eva led me to her bedroom and as I quieted my son on her bed she pointed to the photos on her nightstand and shared that these images were her family. She explained that when it became clear that life in Poland was unsafe for Jewish people, her parents scraped together enough money to send one person to Holland, a place they assumed she would be safe until they could reunite. She took these photos as she said goodbye at the boat dock. Eva survived the Holocaust, her family did not. As I laid with the beautiful new life next to me, I stared at the photos that met Eva as she started and ended each day. Eva's pain and the power of those images stayed with me, highlighting the profound impact a photograph can have in preserving memories and stories.
The sources for the archival footage we used in Resistance – They Fought Back vary. You will see photographs shared by family members, photos and footage safely held in museums as well as footage taken by the Nazis. While the footage captured by the Nazis was intended as propaganda to dehumanize the Jewish population, we repurpose them to reveal the brutality of the Nazi regime and to showcase acts of resistance within the community.
We recognize that behind every photograph of an individual whose life was tragically cut short lies a story of a person with hopes and dreams, a loving family, and aspirations for a future that would never take place The decision to include images of those who were murdered was not made lightly. We hope that by acknowledging them, even though we may never know their names, we are doing our part to ensure that their stories are not forgotten. They resisted; and we must resist the urge to not look away, not forget.
Eva passed away a few years after our encounter, and the fate of her family photos remains unknown. I imagine they may reside in the archives of a historical society, waiting to be discovered by future generations. My hope is that those who view these images will see beyond victimhood to recognize the loving, resilient individuals they depict, deserving of our admiration and respect.