RESPONSE AND RESISTANCE –

THE JEWISH POINT OF VIEW

Douglas Wadley, Regional Education CorpsBradley-Bourbonnais Community High SchoolBradley, Illinois

resistance: any individual or group action consciously taken in opposition to known or surmised laws, actions, or intentions directed against the Jews by the Germans and their supporters.

When the Nazis came to power – 520,000 German Jews (.078% of the population)• 1914: pop. had been 600,000

Jews•Approximately 1/6 of Germany’s

Jews served her in WWI (100,000 casualties)

German Jewry:The first to suffer

• 1932: of 37 Cabinet positions, only 3 were Jews and another 4 could claim Jewish descent• Jews controlled no major companies,

industries, and not one of Germany’s wealthiest families were Jewish•High intermarriage rate in 1920’s (maybe

40%)• 500 conversions a year to Christianity

Prewar Jewish school, Czechoslovakia

Jewish shtetl (village)

•Many Jewish organizations operated to strengthen Jewish culture and resolve through education and social functions

• Some wanted to prepare young Jews to emigrate •Zionists proposed the creation of Israel

as a homeland for Jews

The majority (325,000) of German Jews survived

Reasons for staying –“How long can Hitler last?”“Nazism is just traditional antisemitism.”“How can I protect my business?”“How can I learn a new language and culture?”“How can I leave my relatives behind?”

•At the time of 1938, Shanghai was the only place in the world that required no visa

•Took in more Jews (25,000) than Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa combined

•May, 1939: British closed the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration except for 15,000 per year (max. of 5 years = 75,000)

•October, 1941: another 150,000 Jews fled Germany

Life in the ghetto –

Nazis reinstituted slavery, barbarism, and the ghetto• Several hundred ghettos• 1st was in Nov. 1939 in Piatrkow, Poland•Lasted to summer, 1944 (became known

as the Lodz ghetto)

Scene in the Lodz ghetto marketplace

Basic characteristics:• Form of concentration camp•Conditions of maximum deprivation•Slum parts of a city• Inadequate housing, food supply, hygiene•Some were open; most became closed•Governed by Judenrat (Jewish Council)

Scenes from the Warsaw Ghetto

Negatives of the ghettos –

Mortality rate• 20% died of natural causes (typhus,

hunger, etc.)• January ’41-May ’42: more than

66,000 perished in Warsaw ghetto

Judenrat, smugglers, profiteers

Judenrat workers, skilled workers, shopkeepers

“Floating” population: those living hand-to-mouth; odd jobs, smugglers

Refugees – continually dumped in; didn’t know how to survive…

Beggars, prostitutes, orphans

Society in the ghetto

Positives of the ghettos –• Smuggling•Underground newspapers, schools for

Hebrew•Diaries, journals that made it through the

war•Underground Zionist meetings•Graffiti, artwork that survived• Intellectual and spiritual life was never

fully stifled

Obstacles to resistance:• Ignorance•Unimaginability• Family solidarity•Religious faith

•Deceit, deception by Nazis – constant•How could the very young or very old

resist?•Collective responsibility• Isolation from outside world in ghettos

and camps•To escape – what would one escape to?

Resistance in the camps• Just surviving was an act of resistance•Escape•Est. 600 attempts to escape from

Auschwitz (400 successful)•Record everything•Sonderkommando: Jews who worked in the crematoria wrote diaries and buried them in the ashes around the crematoria

Sonderkommando engage in open pit burning of bodies

Physical, armed resistance•Treblinka (8/43)• Sobibor (10/43)•Auschwitz (10/44)•Crematorium IV put out of commission • Polish-led underground in Auschwitz,

while helpful, never really affected the uprising•Gunpowder supplied by 4 young

Jewish women who worked in the factories

organized by Sonderkommando

Resistance in the forests: • Partisan movements• 20,000-40,000 Jewish partisans in the

forests around Eastern Europe•Although Jews made up only 1% of

French population, they comprised 15-20% of French Resistance•Many Jews resisted as part of

nationalist movements

A group of partisans from various fighting units including the Bielski group and escapees from the Mir Ghetto on guard duty at an airstrip in the Naliboki Forest.. [Photograph #46677]

Jewish servicemen (-women)•Americans: ½ million fought (11,000 died)• Soviets: ½ million fought (120,000 died)• Sept. 1939: 150,000 Polish Jews fought in

Polish army; 33,000 were killed in battle• Jewish parachutists from Israel organized

resistance in the Balkans•Worked with the British RAF

Photos of Hannah Szenes

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TIMOTHY HURSLEY