Sayeret
03-05-2005, 12:29 AM
During World War II, the world largely ignored the plight of European Jews. Even the progressive United States refused to come to their aid. When Jewish leaders requested bombing raids on Auschwitz, and the railroad tracks by which millions were transported like cattle to the slaughterhouse, the United States refused. The official justification was transparent and unconvincing: the military claimed that it could not spare planes, bombs, or time for Auschwitz bombings, though Allied planes flew directly over the camps often. The U.S. claimed that it was helping the concentration camp prisoners by fighting the war, towards the end goal of freeing them, though it was apparent that most of them had not the time to wait for a military victory. Though every Allied country denounced the Nazi injustices, none opened its doors for refugees from the German killing machine. Boats full of refugees were turned away and deported back to Nazi territory, where their occupants were slain. The Jews had little outside assistance.
Though few photographs of Jewish resistance have survived the Holocaust, documents and testimony show that resistance was not as uncommon as is evident. The reason for the lack of photographic evidence is straightforward: most pictures of the Holocaust were taken by Germans, and Nazi photographers did not want proof of Jewish uprising, nor wouldd they have time to photograph them in the midst of battle.
Spiritual Resistance
But the Jews did resist. In the ghettos, in the forests, and in the death camps, and in their hearts, they resisted. Their lives had been stolen from them, but the Nazis could not steal their hope. Everything they knew was gone, and they were left, as a survivor put it, "to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, and wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket, and trousers, and in one's body nothing but weakness, hunger, and knowledge of the end drawing near." Hope was surely instrumental in survival, as another survivor noted: "Religious Jews, Zionists, and Communists often seemed to survive better than assimilated Jews. The individual who possessed a religious or political ideology often resisted Nazi horror." A poet in the Vilna ghetto, Hirsh Glik, wrote:
Never say this is the final road for you,
Though darkening skies may hide the days of blue.
The hour that we longed for is so near,
Our step beats out the message--we are here!
From lands green with palms to lands all white with snow,
We shall be coming with our anguish and our woe,
And where a drop of our blood fell on the earth,
There our courage and our spirit have rebirth.
The early morning sun makes bright our day,
And yesterdays with our foe will fade away.
But if the sun delays and in the east remains-
This song as slogan, generations must maintain.
This song written with our blood; not with lead,
It's not a little tune that birds sing overhead,
This song a people sang amid collapsing walls,
With grenades in hand they heeded to the call.
So never say the road now ends for you,
Though darkening skies may hide the days of blue.
The hour that we longed for is so near-
Our step beats out the message--we are here!
In the ghettos and the camps, Jews plotted escape, forged passports and papers, and passed news through underground newspapers. Few escaped, partly for fear that the Nazis would execute entire barracks if one Jew was found missing. Most importantly, the Jews remained Jewish. They studied with rabbis and teachers in secret, and sacrificed bits of fat they otherwise could have eaten for use as candles to commemorate Jewish holidays. The Nazis could take their lives, but they could not take their faith.
Military Resistance
On some occasions, Jews were able to mount armed resistance to the Nazi onslaught. A survivor recalls one such occasion, during which Jews were able to smuggle, piece by piece, a machine gun into the Nieswiez ghetto. When the Germans came to select Jews for deportation,
"The members of the underground and the mass of Jews standing at the gate replied resolutely, "No! There will be no selection! If some are to live, then all must; if not, we shall defend ourselves!" ...The Germans opened fire. The fighting unit in the synagogue answered with a surprise volley of machine-gun fire. The Germans crashed through the ghetto gate. The Jews drew their knives and iron bars. They reached for their piles of stones....A battle began between Jews with steel weapons and Germans and police with guns....Soon the ghetto was filled with dead and dying. Throughout the streets, bodies lay like discarded puppets....Small groups of Jews like ours burst forth from the ghetto. Once outside, some were beaten by zealous peasants. Others were killed in flight. Small groups succeeded in reaching the forst."
These armed revolts were usually led by young radicals: Socialists, Communists, and Zionists. Armed revolts took place in Krakow, Warsaw, Vilna, and Bialystok. Most rebels were killed during the fighting or executed after. A few managed to escape the ghettos, and joined partisan fighting groups in the forests.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Without a doubt the most famous ghetto uprising was the one which occurred in Warsaw. The Jews had planned and stockpiled extensively in preparation for the revolt. They fought with smuggled guns and bottles of gasoline stuffed with a rag wick (these incendiary bombs are now known as Molotov cocktails). A minor revolt aroused the suspicion of the Nazis, and Heinrich Himmler himself came to assess the situation. He ordered the immediate liquidation of the ghetto--the inhabitants would be transported to death camps, and the ghetto would be burned to the ground. When the troops arrived with their tanks and their guns, there was not a Jew to be seen. They were hidden underground, and in buildings. Only the Jewish rebels were on alert above ground. 1,000 Jewish fighters with 3 machine guns, 80 rifles, 300 pistols, hand grenades and gasoline bombs attacked the German troops, fully outfitted and with tank support. The first bombs destroyed the leading Nazi tanks, blocking the ghetto entrance and forcing German retreat.
The battle was far from over, however. The next day, the Germans took revenge by breaking into a Jewish hospital and shooting every patient, doctor, and nurse. They then burned the hospital to the ground, killing those few who had thus far eluded them. The same day, according to a survivor,
"A group of 300 SS men approached the gate of the brushworks area. They stopped long enough for our fighters to explode an electrically-operated mine under the SS men's feet. The Germans fled, leaving 80-100 dead and wounded. Two hours later they returned....Thirty Germans entered, but only two got out....Only then did the Germans call in their artillery....This was the second total victory for the fighters....The Germans started setting fire to the ghetto on the second day of the action....In response, the fighters set fire to all of the warehouses and shop stores, worth several tens of millions of zlotys."
For two weeks, the Germans searched building after building for hidden Jews, but were always met by fighters. They used weapons taken from dead German soldiers to fight off the German army, which utilized flame throwers, artillery, and aerial bombing. The fighters were running low on ammunition, as building after building was reduced to rubble. Before long, the Germans attacked the central command post of the ghetto fighters. The Germans threw gas bombs into the bunker to kill the last remaining rebels. A survivor recalls that the fighters discussed their options:
"Aryeh Wilner was the first to cry out: "come, let us destroy ourselves. Let's not fall into their hands alive." The suicides began. Pistols jammed and the owners begged their friends to kill them. But no one dared to take the life of a comrade....Then someone discovered a hidden exit, but only a few succeeded in getting out this way. The others slowly suffocated in the gas."
It would take four months before the last Jews hiding under the wreckage of the Warsaw ghetto would be found. The Germans blew up the synagogue, then burned down every building in the ghetto. The commander reported to Himmler that the ghetto "is no longer in existence."
Partisans
The few who escaped from ghettos, from trains, and from camps fled away from civilization, to the forests. There they joined underground groups--partisan fighters. Some partisan groups accepted Jews, but others were nearly as Antisemitic as the Nazis. In some cases, Jews formed their own partisan groups. These groups were made almost entirely of teenagers. They procured weapons in any way possible, and attacked the Germans at every opportunity. They would strike out and then escape back into the cover of the forest.
The partisans faced not only the Germans, but domestic threats. One freedom fighter remembered:
"From time to time the Germans, with the aid of the Ukranian police, raided the forest....In the winter of 1943 when it already became apparent to the Ukrainians that Hitler was losing the war they did everything possible to exterminate the armed Jewish groups [because they] were the living witnesses of what had happened and they would tell the Allies how eagerly the Ukrainians collaborated with the Germans in the annihilation of the Jews."
Resistance in Concentration and Death Camps
Even in the camps, where the Jews were completely isolated from society, they organized revolts. A worker in Treblinka who witnessed one such insurrection wrote:
"We were able to get one of our comrades into the [ammunition] building....[We] cut a pane out of a window opposite the door....A cart driven by a member of our group drove up to the building [pretending to remove garbage]. Under it twenty hand grenades, twenty rifles, and several revolvers with cartridges were loaded to be divided among the combat units. We had gotten some gasoline from trucks and tanks in the garage through one of our comrades, a mechanic....On the day of the revolt, the gasoline was sprinkled....
At 3:45 PM we heard the signal--a rifle shot near the gates of the Jewish barracks. This was followed by the detonations of hand grenades hurled at the gasoline. An enormous fire broke out in the whole camp. The arsenal exploded and everything was burned....
The victim of the first shot was...the chief of the guards....Of the 700 Jewish workers on the camp grounds, only 150 to 200 succeeded in escaping, the others perished in the camp as well as more than 20 Germans. Of the 150 to 200 who managed to escape, only 12 are still alive; the others were later murdered by the German hangmen."
Armed resistance in the camps was paramount to suicide, but many sacrificed their lives to weaken the Nazis. One Jewish woman, Mala Zimetbaum, stole an SS uniform and secret documents telling of the Nazi slaughter, then escaped from Auschwitz. She was recaptured and sent back to the camp, where she was paraded in front of the prisoners. In front of the whole camp, she suddenly began to slash her wrists with a razor. "Don't be afraid, girls," she screamed, "their end is near. I am certain of this, I know. I was free." The Nazis beat her, then burned her alive. Her courage inspired further revolt, such as an uprising in which Jewish women blew up the crematorium furnace at Birkenau. For this triumph, the rebels paid with their lives.
To resist was to risk death, but to submit was to lose all that was life. The young, the religious, the righteous, and the courageous kept faith through the Holocaust, and struck out in any way possible against Nazi injustice. Their faith kept them, their people, and their story, alive.
http://library.thinkquest.org/12307/resistance.html
Though few photographs of Jewish resistance have survived the Holocaust, documents and testimony show that resistance was not as uncommon as is evident. The reason for the lack of photographic evidence is straightforward: most pictures of the Holocaust were taken by Germans, and Nazi photographers did not want proof of Jewish uprising, nor wouldd they have time to photograph them in the midst of battle.
Spiritual Resistance
But the Jews did resist. In the ghettos, in the forests, and in the death camps, and in their hearts, they resisted. Their lives had been stolen from them, but the Nazis could not steal their hope. Everything they knew was gone, and they were left, as a survivor put it, "to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, and wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket, and trousers, and in one's body nothing but weakness, hunger, and knowledge of the end drawing near." Hope was surely instrumental in survival, as another survivor noted: "Religious Jews, Zionists, and Communists often seemed to survive better than assimilated Jews. The individual who possessed a religious or political ideology often resisted Nazi horror." A poet in the Vilna ghetto, Hirsh Glik, wrote:
Never say this is the final road for you,
Though darkening skies may hide the days of blue.
The hour that we longed for is so near,
Our step beats out the message--we are here!
From lands green with palms to lands all white with snow,
We shall be coming with our anguish and our woe,
And where a drop of our blood fell on the earth,
There our courage and our spirit have rebirth.
The early morning sun makes bright our day,
And yesterdays with our foe will fade away.
But if the sun delays and in the east remains-
This song as slogan, generations must maintain.
This song written with our blood; not with lead,
It's not a little tune that birds sing overhead,
This song a people sang amid collapsing walls,
With grenades in hand they heeded to the call.
So never say the road now ends for you,
Though darkening skies may hide the days of blue.
The hour that we longed for is so near-
Our step beats out the message--we are here!
In the ghettos and the camps, Jews plotted escape, forged passports and papers, and passed news through underground newspapers. Few escaped, partly for fear that the Nazis would execute entire barracks if one Jew was found missing. Most importantly, the Jews remained Jewish. They studied with rabbis and teachers in secret, and sacrificed bits of fat they otherwise could have eaten for use as candles to commemorate Jewish holidays. The Nazis could take their lives, but they could not take their faith.
Military Resistance
On some occasions, Jews were able to mount armed resistance to the Nazi onslaught. A survivor recalls one such occasion, during which Jews were able to smuggle, piece by piece, a machine gun into the Nieswiez ghetto. When the Germans came to select Jews for deportation,
"The members of the underground and the mass of Jews standing at the gate replied resolutely, "No! There will be no selection! If some are to live, then all must; if not, we shall defend ourselves!" ...The Germans opened fire. The fighting unit in the synagogue answered with a surprise volley of machine-gun fire. The Germans crashed through the ghetto gate. The Jews drew their knives and iron bars. They reached for their piles of stones....A battle began between Jews with steel weapons and Germans and police with guns....Soon the ghetto was filled with dead and dying. Throughout the streets, bodies lay like discarded puppets....Small groups of Jews like ours burst forth from the ghetto. Once outside, some were beaten by zealous peasants. Others were killed in flight. Small groups succeeded in reaching the forst."
These armed revolts were usually led by young radicals: Socialists, Communists, and Zionists. Armed revolts took place in Krakow, Warsaw, Vilna, and Bialystok. Most rebels were killed during the fighting or executed after. A few managed to escape the ghettos, and joined partisan fighting groups in the forests.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Without a doubt the most famous ghetto uprising was the one which occurred in Warsaw. The Jews had planned and stockpiled extensively in preparation for the revolt. They fought with smuggled guns and bottles of gasoline stuffed with a rag wick (these incendiary bombs are now known as Molotov cocktails). A minor revolt aroused the suspicion of the Nazis, and Heinrich Himmler himself came to assess the situation. He ordered the immediate liquidation of the ghetto--the inhabitants would be transported to death camps, and the ghetto would be burned to the ground. When the troops arrived with their tanks and their guns, there was not a Jew to be seen. They were hidden underground, and in buildings. Only the Jewish rebels were on alert above ground. 1,000 Jewish fighters with 3 machine guns, 80 rifles, 300 pistols, hand grenades and gasoline bombs attacked the German troops, fully outfitted and with tank support. The first bombs destroyed the leading Nazi tanks, blocking the ghetto entrance and forcing German retreat.
The battle was far from over, however. The next day, the Germans took revenge by breaking into a Jewish hospital and shooting every patient, doctor, and nurse. They then burned the hospital to the ground, killing those few who had thus far eluded them. The same day, according to a survivor,
"A group of 300 SS men approached the gate of the brushworks area. They stopped long enough for our fighters to explode an electrically-operated mine under the SS men's feet. The Germans fled, leaving 80-100 dead and wounded. Two hours later they returned....Thirty Germans entered, but only two got out....Only then did the Germans call in their artillery....This was the second total victory for the fighters....The Germans started setting fire to the ghetto on the second day of the action....In response, the fighters set fire to all of the warehouses and shop stores, worth several tens of millions of zlotys."
For two weeks, the Germans searched building after building for hidden Jews, but were always met by fighters. They used weapons taken from dead German soldiers to fight off the German army, which utilized flame throwers, artillery, and aerial bombing. The fighters were running low on ammunition, as building after building was reduced to rubble. Before long, the Germans attacked the central command post of the ghetto fighters. The Germans threw gas bombs into the bunker to kill the last remaining rebels. A survivor recalls that the fighters discussed their options:
"Aryeh Wilner was the first to cry out: "come, let us destroy ourselves. Let's not fall into their hands alive." The suicides began. Pistols jammed and the owners begged their friends to kill them. But no one dared to take the life of a comrade....Then someone discovered a hidden exit, but only a few succeeded in getting out this way. The others slowly suffocated in the gas."
It would take four months before the last Jews hiding under the wreckage of the Warsaw ghetto would be found. The Germans blew up the synagogue, then burned down every building in the ghetto. The commander reported to Himmler that the ghetto "is no longer in existence."
Partisans
The few who escaped from ghettos, from trains, and from camps fled away from civilization, to the forests. There they joined underground groups--partisan fighters. Some partisan groups accepted Jews, but others were nearly as Antisemitic as the Nazis. In some cases, Jews formed their own partisan groups. These groups were made almost entirely of teenagers. They procured weapons in any way possible, and attacked the Germans at every opportunity. They would strike out and then escape back into the cover of the forest.
The partisans faced not only the Germans, but domestic threats. One freedom fighter remembered:
"From time to time the Germans, with the aid of the Ukranian police, raided the forest....In the winter of 1943 when it already became apparent to the Ukrainians that Hitler was losing the war they did everything possible to exterminate the armed Jewish groups [because they] were the living witnesses of what had happened and they would tell the Allies how eagerly the Ukrainians collaborated with the Germans in the annihilation of the Jews."
Resistance in Concentration and Death Camps
Even in the camps, where the Jews were completely isolated from society, they organized revolts. A worker in Treblinka who witnessed one such insurrection wrote:
"We were able to get one of our comrades into the [ammunition] building....[We] cut a pane out of a window opposite the door....A cart driven by a member of our group drove up to the building [pretending to remove garbage]. Under it twenty hand grenades, twenty rifles, and several revolvers with cartridges were loaded to be divided among the combat units. We had gotten some gasoline from trucks and tanks in the garage through one of our comrades, a mechanic....On the day of the revolt, the gasoline was sprinkled....
At 3:45 PM we heard the signal--a rifle shot near the gates of the Jewish barracks. This was followed by the detonations of hand grenades hurled at the gasoline. An enormous fire broke out in the whole camp. The arsenal exploded and everything was burned....
The victim of the first shot was...the chief of the guards....Of the 700 Jewish workers on the camp grounds, only 150 to 200 succeeded in escaping, the others perished in the camp as well as more than 20 Germans. Of the 150 to 200 who managed to escape, only 12 are still alive; the others were later murdered by the German hangmen."
Armed resistance in the camps was paramount to suicide, but many sacrificed their lives to weaken the Nazis. One Jewish woman, Mala Zimetbaum, stole an SS uniform and secret documents telling of the Nazi slaughter, then escaped from Auschwitz. She was recaptured and sent back to the camp, where she was paraded in front of the prisoners. In front of the whole camp, she suddenly began to slash her wrists with a razor. "Don't be afraid, girls," she screamed, "their end is near. I am certain of this, I know. I was free." The Nazis beat her, then burned her alive. Her courage inspired further revolt, such as an uprising in which Jewish women blew up the crematorium furnace at Birkenau. For this triumph, the rebels paid with their lives.
To resist was to risk death, but to submit was to lose all that was life. The young, the religious, the righteous, and the courageous kept faith through the Holocaust, and struck out in any way possible against Nazi injustice. Their faith kept them, their people, and their story, alive.
http://library.thinkquest.org/12307/resistance.html