Resistance: They Fought Back

When the Nazi war against the Jews began, few Jewish people understood that the German’s ultimate goal was the extermination of all the Jews of Europe. One of the first to understand that was the young resistance fighter (later poet laureate of Israel) Abba Kovner. At the beginning of 1942, Kovner wrote a Manifesto, the first published call for Jews to fight back.

Many groups of Jews escaped the ghettos to fight in the forests, denying these territories to Germans and preserving them for Jews to escape and hide. One of those was the Bielski Brigade, which saved 1200 Jewish lives.

People have a myth stuck in their heads that during the Holocaust, Jews went to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter.” But this is where the real story begins. Jews did not go as sheep to the slaughter. They fought back.

Because men could so easily be identified as Jews, women played an outsized role in the Jewish resistance, risking their lives daily to procure arms and rescue other Jews. One of those female resistance fighters was Bela Hazan.

Even in Nazi death camps, Jews rebelled. None of these uprisings succeeded, but many saved lives either by destroying the ovens or because Germans shut down the camps for fear that word of the uprisings would spread.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, as in the more than 1200 ghettos into which the Germans forced the Jewish population during World War II, few Jews had access to weapons. But they resisted nonetheless, in ways that helped defeat the Nazis.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first armed battle against the Germans, though far from the only one. Some type of armed resistance was found in most ghettos, and, as was the case in Warsaw, many people participated.

Children were among the most tragic victims in the Holocaust. Professor Michael Berenbaum of American Jewish University speaks zof Janusz Korczak, a physician who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and died with the children when they were transported to Treblinka. Do we say he went to his death as sheep to the slaughter?