Resistance – They Fought Back got its start on a sunny June day in 2019 at the kitchen table of executive producer and co-director Paula S. Apsell, during a visit with Holocaust scholar and archeologist, the late Richard Freund, from Christopher Newport University in Virginia. Asked why so many heroic attempts at Jewish resistance were unknown to the general public, Professor Freund replied, “Because you haven’t made the film yet.”
 
That seemingly innocuous remark gave rise to a four-year effort to produce the feature documentary Resistance – They Fought Back with production partner Lone Wolf Media of Portland, Maine, headed by Kirk Wolfinger, with whom Apsell had worked on 25  documentaries while she was at the helm of the PBS science series NOVA. Challenges abounded. First, there was the little problem (familiar to most independent filmmakers) of raising a million plus dollar budget. Then there was the Covid-19 pandemic, which threatened to delay even postpone indefinitely all our shooting.
 
Thanks to Zoom, research was able to proceed, allowing the team to have extensive conversations with scholars and the families of resistance fighters. Amazingly, we were able to locate and speak with five actual survivors who played a role in the resistance of several ghettos, camps and partisan brigades. But when it came to planning our shoot in the summer of 2021, hard decisions had to be made. Covid was raging in Eastern Europe where our story unfolded. How could we justify possibly subjecting our crew to a bout of Covid in foreign countries? But the entire team was more than willing and, masked up with our Covid coordinator in tow, we headed to Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Israel in the summer and fall of 2021.
 
We felt it was crucial to go to places where resistance occurred, first of all to show it was widespread, not limited to known locations like the Warsaw Ghetto. As Professor Avi Patt explains, because the Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish uprising during the Shoah, people have come to believe it was the only Jewish uprising. To the contrary, scholar Michael Berenbaum tells us, ghettos large and small rose in resistance. In the Vilna Ghetto, Vitka Kempner derailed a German troop transport train with a homemade bomb. In Riga, Latvia we learn that resistance began almost as soon as the ghetto was set up. And out of seven death camp uprisings, six were led by Jewish prisoners. But in most places, armed resistance was difficult, even impossible, since weapons were hard to come by and national resistance movements were reluctant to part with their supply. What distinguishes our film is its emphasis on non-violent methods as crucial tools of resistance, especially in the early years of the war. This took many different forms. All over German-occupied territories, ghetto and camp residents disobeyed German edicts to care for the sick and needy, setting up soup kitchens and educating children, maintaining a spiritual life of Jewish observance as well as a cultural life of music, art and theater, hiding and escaping, and documenting German war crimes – all this in the face of starvation, beatings, humiliation, disease, poverty, and the threat of transports and death at any time.

Along the way, as our shoot proceeded, we interviewed survivors and their families, compiling  dramatic testimonies, shining a light on lost chapters of history, and bringing to life historical detail and stories of personal strength and courage. This allowed us to present the stories of a group of dynamic characters as well as interviews with their surviving children. These include Vladka Meed, a Warsaw Ghetto courier, whose son Steven Meed tells her story. Courier Bela Hazan worked in Gestapo headquarters in Grodno; her son Yoel Yaari, who is writing a book about her based on Bela’s own notebooks, describes her courageous actions in both ghettos and camps. It was amazing that we were able to locate and interview living survivors, whose numbers are dwindling as they age, including concert violinist Dana Mazurkevich, who was smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto in a truckload of potatoes; internationally known artist Samuel Bak who had his first exhibition in the Vilna Ghetto at age 9, and David Gur, whose forgeries saved thousands of Budapest’s Jews.

Our society’s understanding of the Holocaust, even after all these decades, is limited, misunderstood and frighteningly transient. Surveys indicate that two-thirds of millennials in the United States cannot identify the infamous concentration camp Auschwitz. In the U.K., surveys suggest that 1 in 20 people don’t believe the Holocaust happened, and one-third of people from seven surveyed European countries know little or nothing about it. That Jews were complicit in their own deaths has become a common meme of both antisemitic and white supremacy movements, which are steeply on the rise. Therefore, this story is one that demands to be told now with the authenticity that archeological finds, rigorous historical analysis, and eyewitness testimony describing tunnels that were dug, sewers used as escape routes, examples of sabotage against the all-powerful German army can provide.  Thus, even as survivors leave us and personal testimony fades, we are gaining a new perspective to our understanding of the Holocaust. It is this story of millions of victims whose brave acts of resistance against a barbaric and all-powerful enemy have too long remained unheralded, that we are determined to tell.