Stories of resistance during the Holocaust

TALI NATES

Coining the phrase “Choiceless Choices”, Professor of English and Holocaust Studies Lawrence Langer, explained that the Jews faced choices that were often between “bad and worse”. In many cases, it was only a choice of how to die and not how to live.

Abba Kovner, the leader of the Jewish Vilna resistance movement, tells a story about the last time he saw his ageing mother in the Vilna ghetto. He was about to leave to fight in the forests and came to say goodbye to her. She begged him not to leave her as she was alone and afraid. But he did.

To the end of his life he felt the guilt of his choice. He said: “Am I the hero of the resistance, or the coward who abandoned his old mother in the most difficult time of her life?”

Kovner was one of the many to choose resistance – whether it was armed or non-violent – to do what they could to stop Nazis destroying Jews throughout Europe.

It was seldom a strategy for survival, but rather an act of courage and honour. The constant fear and desperate conditions in the ghettos made resistance extremely difficult and dangerous. Despite this, Jewish men, women and children, found varied ways to resist the Nazi terror. Between 1941 and 1943, underground resistance movements were active in about 100 ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, Byelorussia and the Ukraine.

Even in the shadow of death, Jews resisted. In 1943, there were revolts at Treblinka and Sobibor killing centres in occupied Poland. On October 14, Jewish prisoners in Sobibor organised an uprising and mass escape from the camp during which 11 SS guards were killed and 300 prisoners escaped. All but approximately 50 were caught and killed.

On August 2, 1943, prisoners of Treblinka started their revolt, seized weapons from the SS storeroom, attacked the German and Ukrainian guards, and set a number of buildings on fire. Some 300 prisoners escaped and about 100 survived the ensuing Nazi manhunt.

On October 7, 1944, members of the Sonderkommando (Jewish prisoners forced to work in the crematoria) started the uprising in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Crematorium IV was set on fire and SS guards were attacked. The Sonderkommando of Crematorium II killed a Kapo and several SS men. Several hundred prisoners escaped, but all were caught and killed.

Some 20 000 Jews fled into the forests of Eastern Europe to form their own fighting units or to join other partisans in resistance against the Nazis. Their life was harsh and uncertain.

Forced to move from place to place, find food and endure freezing winter conditions, they also had to evade betrayal by local populations. Large numbers of Jews fought in resistance organisations in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union.

During the Holocaust, Jews resisted by attempting to maintain their humanity and dignity under profoundly dehumanising circumstances. They defied the Nazis in ghettos, camps and in hiding, through documenting the catastrophe, cultural activities, clandestine religious observances and school lessons, despite the prevailing conditions.

Women played a significant role in resisting the Nazis. They were part of underground movements in the ghettos and camps, they were part of smuggling operations with better chance not to be recognised as Jews if caught. They were key players in the Auschwitz resistance – four women, Roza Robota, Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztajn and Ester Wajsblum smuggled gunpowder to the men of the Sonderkommando of Birkenau, paving the way for the revolt of October 7, 1944. They were hanged in the last hanging in Birkenau on January 6, 1945. In their final moments, they cried out for vengeance and sang “Hatikvah”. 

Humour was also a form of resistance. It served as a defence mechanism and many saw it as a tool for mental perseverance. This in return helped the will to live.

One of the survivors told how humour was at times directed back to oneself to keep the morale. It made it easier to laugh at yourself as you coped with the most horrible of situations. This survivor told about her reaction to the shaving of hair in Auschwitz and how she made light of it and laughed so as to deal with the pain of it all.

A group of undernourished and starving women in Theresienstadt (in German-occupied Czechoslovakia) wrote recipes of beloved dishes. Sometimes steps or ingredients were missing, the gaps a painful illustration of the condition and situation in which the authors lived.

They created a hand-sewn cookery books. By doing so, they defied the Nazis by preserving their heritage and a part of themselves. This was proof that the Nazis could not break the spirit of those women.

The cookbook was a manifestation of defiance, of a spiritual revolt against the harshness of the conditions they had to endure. It allowed them, in imagination only, to go back to a time in their life when food was available, when women had homes and kitchens and could cook a meal for their families.

The fantasy must have been painful for those courageous women. Remembering those recipes was an act of discipline that required them to suppress their current hunger and to think of the ordinary world before the camps – and to dare to dream of a world after the camps.

Mina Pachter, one of the primary authors of the cookbook, died of hunger sickness on Yom Kippur 1944. The book “In Memory’s Kitchen, A Legacy from the Women of Terezin”, was published in 1996.

Much like the Maccabees in the time of Chanukah, Jewish men and women will be remembered for their acts of resistance and courage during the Holocaust.