Jewish
Resistance during WWII
Although
Hitler had long been publicizing his hostility towards the Jews, as he
manifested in his book Mein Kampf, the Nazis¡¯
rise to power in Germany and
the prelude to Holocaust did not seem to hint at a wholesale killing of Jews
across Europe. From 1933, the civil rights of German
Jews were gradually taken away, but outright murders did not start until the
late 1930¡¯s. Some German Jews, sensing that much worse things were in store for
them, tried to escape and did so successfully to other countries in Europe or to
America
whilst others, thinking that the prosecution will not escalate much further,
did not attempt to do so. The Jewish leaders in Germany even thought that it might
be possible to negotiate with Hitler and formed a union for that purpose in
1935.
Of
course, if the Jews in Germany
had naïve hopes, the Jews outside Germany could have never known what
was coming; I should think that not many of them read Mein Kampf and thought that Hitler seriously
intended to carry out what he wrote. However, Hitler really meant it. In 1938,
he annexed Austria; in March
1939 marched his army into Czechoslovakia;
in September that year started WWII by invading Poland
and in 1940, took France and
the Benelux countries. Also, Hitler at one
time controlled a large part of Russia
and Eastern Europe. Where he conquered, he
started preparing for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The pattern
followed what happened in Germany;
all Jews that the Nazi authorities could find were rounded up to be first
relocated to ghettos and later transported off to extermination camps.
At
first, unorganised and told that they were merely being segregated or sent to
work camps, the Jews offered little resistance - hiding was probably as
uncooperative as they got. A few managed to contact underground movements;
some, escaping to the countryside, even formed their own partisan groups; but
once segregated in ghettos, this became harder to do. However, they became
increasingly desperate and aware of Nazi intentions by the later stages of
WWII, and some Jews decided to put up a fight. The most famous incident of such
open resistance is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Less famous incidents of
relatively large scale include uprisings at Bialystok and revolts
in the Treblinka and the Sobibor extermination camps,
among several others.
The
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, not to be confused with the Warsaw Uprising which
happened about a year later, was the largest single incident of Jewish
resistance and started in January 1943. It is estimated that about 380,000 Jews
were placed in the Warsaw
ghetto when it was established in 1940; Jews living in the countryside or other
nearby towns were also brought in later. Of these, approximately 300,000 were
sent to various extermination camps and thousands of others died of starvation
and diseases, leaving some 60,000 alive by the end of 1942, when there was a
pause in the deportation of Jews to extermination camps. Meanwhile, some
residents of the ghetto formed into resistance groups, ZOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa –
Jewish Fighting Organisation), with 800 members, and ZZW (Żydowski
Związek Walki – Jewish
Fighting Union), with 400 members, being the two largest. These organisations
attempted to smuggle weapons into the ghetto, but it was very difficult; also
they could only acquire very little ammunition. The scarcity of firearms meant
that pistols, Molotov cocktails and improvised explosives were their staple
weapons, but ZZW fighters were relatively well-armed thanks to their connections
with Polish resistance groups. One Polish unit even fought alongside them
during the uprising. Still, it was ZOB that played the most active role and
became the most famous during the uprising.
In late 1942, Hitler gave the order for the remnant
of the Warsaw
ghetto to be liquidated, and on 18th January 1943, the Germans began
a new wave of deportations. However, this time, the Jews made it much more
difficult for the Germans; resistance fighters built barricades and fired upon
German soldiers rounding up the ghetto Jews. This surprised the Germans and severely
hampered their efforts; they had only managed to collect several thousand Jews,
even though their plan had been to clear out the ghetto, before withdrawing
from the ghetto, after four days. The Jews celebrated the initial victory, and
in the three months of peace that followed, they built up their arsenal and
trained more fighters. Civilians were evacuated into the hundreds of air raid
shelters already prepared.
On 19th April, the Germans under General Juergen Stroop came back. This
time, they knew that they were going to encounter stiff resistance and brought tanks
and artillery, as well as many thousands of soldiers. However, several attempts
to force entry into the ghetto were repulsed by the determined Jewish fighters.
Eventually, Stroop resorted to burning down the
ghetto, trying to force the Jews out of their cover. Even though the Jews were
resolved to fight to the end, this strategy worked. Many of the civilians
hiding in shelters were suffocated to death, but most were captured and either
shot on spot or sent to extermination camps. Meanwhile, the heavily outnumbered
and outgunned resistance fighters, growing ever smaller in number, gradually
lost ground. It took 28 days for the revolt to completely subside. Most members
of the resistance, including the ZOB commander Anielewicz,
perished in battle, but a few survived, with the help of the Polish Home Army,
and lived to fight in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Some civilians also managed
to escape from the ghetto during the turmoil or remain hidden, such as Wladislaw Szpilman, whose story
is portrayed in the move The Pianist.
The significance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,
apart from being the largest, is that the bravery and the tenacity displayed by
the Warsaw fighters served as an inspiration for other Jews around Poland. Its
news eventually reached other ghettos and extermination camps, spurring the
Jews there to form their own resistance. Similar but smaller uprisings also
occurred across ghettos in Poland,
with similar but less dramatic results; most died, some managed to escape and
fewer still survived the war. However, the purpose of these Jewish revolts was
not so much to escape or to beat the German army; they knew it was impossible. Rather,
they saw it as an honourable alternative way to die, instead of being
slaughtered like sheep at extermination camps, and wanted to take as many
German lives as they could in the process. In this respect the Jewish
resistance movement was unique from all other national resistance movements,
such as those of the French or the Koreans.
The
interesting thing to note is that all the major uprisings took place in Eastern
Europe, most notably Poland.
In France, there was a
Jewish wing of the French Resistance called Armee Juive which was involved in minor skirmishes and acts of
sabotage, but it was no big deal; in Germany, individuals joined
underground movements but they too, had little lasting impact, if any. I think
that there are several reasons for this.
First, there was a higher
concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe than in Western
Europe, as the map below shows. Poland,
with 3.3 million Jews, had more than all the other countries indicated on the
map, not including Russia,
put together. Unlike in Germany
or France,
it was necessary for the Nazis to set up ghettos, as it was impossible for them
to kill all the Jews in a brief time. In turn, these ghettos put the Jews all together,
meaning that they were able to communicate between themselves and organise
armed resistance that concentrated over a small area.
Also,
most Jews in Western Europe had assimilated
into the local population. Many of them did not even speak Hebrew or Yiddish.
On the contrary, the Jews in Eastern Europe
clung on to their Jewish inheritance in general. They lived in closely knit Jewish
communities and maintained their traditions. This affinity to their Jewish
identity enabled them act as a Jewish people.
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States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "The Holocaust" and other
articles from Holocaust
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¡°Piotrus¡±
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Jon Dale, ¡°The Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising¡±, Socialism Today, Jun 2003
http://www.socialismtoday.org/75/warsaw43.html
Author not mentioned, ¡°Holocaust: The Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising¡±, Aish.com
http://www.aish.com/holocaust/overview/he05n27.htm
Marek Edelman, The Warsaw
Ghetto: The 45th Anniversary of the Uprising, Interpress Publishers, undated.
Put up at:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/warsaw-uprising.html
Author not mentioned, ¡°Warsaw Uprising¡±, Spartacus
Educational
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWwarsawU.htm
Mary
Demoully et al, ¡°Estimated Jewish population of Europe¡± (a map), A Teacher¡¯s Guide to Holocaust
http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/gallery/jewpop.htm