WARSAW GHETTO HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS/RESISTANCE FIGHTERS AND THEIR CHILDREN 

Vladka Meed, Z“L
“Although you see today how the pictures, mostly from Germans, pictures of Jews who were beggars and pitiful and this is taken because the Germans would like us only to be seen this way…. This was only one part of ghetto. It was true. There were beggars… but there was another kind of life, full of activities and spiritual resistance.”

Benjamin Meed, Z“L
“I organized a school in my building, and I became the teacher of that school. I was...I had never had a preparation of being a teacher, but there were no schools… all schools were illegal.”

Steven Meed, M.D. and Rita Meed, Ph.D. | Son & Daughter-in-Law of Vladka & Benjamin Meed
“Collective punishment. The Jews knew that you can start some resistance, you can aim a pistol and shoot one person, two people, whatever it is, but the Germans would then arrest 2000.”

Marek Edelman, Z”L
“At the end of December, 1942 we received our first transport of weapons from the Polish Home Army. It was not much--there were only ten pistols in the whole transport--but it enabled us to prepare for our first major action.”

Emanuel Ringelblum, Z"L I Leader, Oyneg Shabes Archive
“With a little peace, we may succeed in making sure that not a single fact about Jewish life at this time and place will be kept from the world…”

David Graber, Z”L | Oyneg Shabes Archive
“What we couldn't scream out to the world, we buried in the ground. I would like to live to see the moment when it will be possible to unearth this great treasure and shout out the truth. May this treasure fall into good hands may it survive until better times. May it alarm the world to what happened in the 20th century. Now we can die in peace. Our mission has been accomplished. Let history bear witness to that.”

Krystina Budnika | Warsaw Ghetto Survivor
“The bunker we were in did not collapse. But the soil it was covered with was red-hot. And the fire went on for a while until the storage room collapsed. It was the place where our supplies were. And we were left without anything.”

Mordecai Anielewicz, Z”L | Commnder, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
“The dream of my life has become a reality. I have lived to see Jewish self-defense in the Ghetto in all of its greatness and splendor.”

KOVNO (KAUNAS, LITHUANIA) GHETTO

Dana Mazurkevich | Violinist, Boston University
“I was born in Kovno Ghetto. My mother and father decided that somehow, by miracle, they have to smuggle me out of ghetto. It required an unbelievable courage. Unbelievable. That they could give me away. And not knowing if they, they will survive and not knowing if I will survive. I think it was a big, big act of resistance because I will not let to take my child. I will not.”

VILNA GHETTO

Samuel Bak, Internationally Known Artist
“It was, absolutely, it was a resistance. And it was as indispensable as bread, I would say. As they say in Hebrew, not only on bread can man live, he needs also something for the spirit”.

Hadas Kalderon | Granddaughter of Avrum Sutzkever, Yiddish Poet
“The Germans had this idea to build a museum to the Jewish people in a world where there are no Jewish people, in order to show the world what a good job the Germans have done in saving the world from this people.”

Abba Kovner | Z”L Resistance Fighters, Vilna Ghetto
“We had ...formed our group starting from a precise ideology, our fight was not for self-preservation. It was not a question to...save myself, to save you, to save ... a neighbor. It was to fight the Germans.”

Vitka Kempner Kovner, Z”L Resistance Fighters, Vilna Ghetto
“One-thirty at night (the night of July 8, 1942), we put the bomb. We take the bomb and we put it under the rail tracks. We escaped very quickly. When the train goes [over it] at two, it explodes, and from far away we heard the explosion.”

Michael Kovner | Son of Abba Kovner & Vitka Kempner
“My father, he said, ‘Nobody can escape. Maybe here and there somebody can escape, but the Jewish people cannot escape from this. What the Jewish people can do, they can fight for their honor. That's it. To fight for their honor.’" 

Yonat Rotbaine | Daughter of Ruzka Korchak
“I think the idea of Abba Kovner ‘that we will not go like sheep to the slaughter’ … was one of the most significant things in my mother’s life. She says that the resistance suddenly gave meaning to life. That is to say, even if we die, we will die as free people.

RIGA GHETTO

Dr. Margers Vestermanis | Historian and Resistance Fighter
“The idea of resistance practically started with the formation of the ghetto. As we used to say in the ghetto back then, there were two options. You would be undressed…and wait for the bullet. Or you would resist, and you would be shot anyway. You would die anyway, but that would be a different death. A meaningful death, defending the honor of your people.”

GRODNO GHETTO/AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

Bela Hazan, Z“L | Jewish Courier
“Each one of us preferred to fall in combat than be led as sheep to the slaughter. The movement’s leadership, sought out girls with a “gentile” appearance who would serve as liaison-couriers between the different locations. This role was unsuitable for boys – who already from the age of eight days had their Jewishness marked on their flesh. I volunteered for the role, as I’d already gained experience and self-confidence impersonating a gentile and going outside the ghetto.”

Professor Yoel Yaari | Son of Bela Hazan
“They smuggled weapons, guns and grenades and so on and Molotov cocktails and bombs. This was a very dangerous mission. Then they also smuggled people out of the ghetto to put them in hiding places.”

BIELSKI BRIGADE, BELARUS

Michael Kagan | Son of Survivor Jack Kagan, Z”L
“My father wrote in his book that when he got to the forest, how did he feel? And he said, and here I quote, ‘I had come from a camp where thousands of Jewish people were being killed by the Germans and now they were all these fighters with guns. I felt very, very proud. There was great camaraderie at the camp. We were unhappy because so many members of our families had been massacred but we were happy because we were free and we were fighting back.’"

Betty (Batya) Cohen | Daughter of Survivor Fania Dunetz, Z“L
“Tuvia Bielski was responsible for saving 1200 people's lives. He accepted everybody: small children, old men and women, solitary women who couldn't fight, like my mother, everybody. [And] Tuvia said he would rather save one Jew than kill a hundred Germans...” 

SOBIBOR CONCENTRATION CAMP

Chaim Melcer, Z”L, Sobibor Survivor
“Two of the boys, neighbors, Mendel and Moishe, two brothers, they jumped out the trains, and I jumped after them. My father, my mother, all together, next to the little opening, to the window. The cattle trains, they're little windows. They lift off the wires, and they jumped out, while the train was going. And I jumped out, just before Sobibor, after them.”

Esther Raab, Z”L, Sobibor Escapee & Survivor
“I came to the camp with a pair of brown leather boots, which, not everybody had, and I said to the group that we slept together, ‘With these boots, I'm going to escape from Sobibór. Don't ask me why. Don't ask me how. And maybe it's not, doesn't even make sense, but I'm going to escape with these boots.”

BUDAPEST

David Gur | Budapest Resistance Fighter
“They took out of the province half a million Jews and only the Jews of Budapest remained in Hungary and then one had to think how to save the Jews of Budapest.”

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

Marcel Nadjari, Z”L, Auschwitz Sonderkommando Resistance Survivor
“How could I do this? burn the bodies of my brothers in faith? And why didn’t I join them and put an end to it? But every time, the thirst for revenge stopped me”

Leon Cohen, Z”L, Auschwitz Sonderkommando Resistance Survivor

Eliezer Eisenschmidt, Z”l, Auschwitz Sonderkommando Resistance Survivor

Ronnen Harran, Son Of Ada Neufeld, Gunpowder Smuggler