From 1985-2019, I served as executive producer of the PBS science series NOVA. In 2016, I was on location in Lithuania when an archaeological team lead by Professor Richard Freund discovered a tunnel in the Ponary killing site in Lithuania, where Nazis and their Lithuanians collaborators murdered 100,000 people including 70,000 Jews. The Germans, fearing their war crimes would be known, brought in 80 remaining Jews to exhume and burn the bodies of those they had murdered. Those Jews, knowing they would be the next victims, decided to try to escape by digging a tunnel. Of the 80 Jewish prisoners that dug the tunnel, 12 succeeded in making it into the forest where Jewish partisans were waiting. I had not previously known anything about this heroic tunnel escape or other examples of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, so I embarked on a quest to uncover what are, to most of us, lost chapters of history. This evolved into the feature documentary Resistance – They Fought Back.

Today, many stories of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust have all but vanished. In some cases, no historical records exist, and no one survived to tell the tale. The Germans documented many aspects of their war against the Jews, but they were allergic to any mention of Jewish resistance, leading many to think it never happened and to believe that “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” 

This film is a passionate refutation of that way of thinking. Told by survivors, their children, and expert witnesses from the U.S. Israel, and Europe, it is a revelation based on extensive research of how the Jews of Europe fought back. It uncovers evidence of non-violent methods which served as crucial tools of resistance and evolved into Jewish armed revolts in ghettos, forests and death camps, even as the odds of success were vanishingly small.  Today, almost eighty years after the Holocaust, this story remains largely unknown to the general public. Without it, our understanding of this genocide, which wiped out two-thirds of European Jews, remains incomplete, giving rise to renewed antisemitism, hatred, and denial of the Holocaust itself. 

I hope you find this film meaningful and important.