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366 Dalia Ofer 16 “Three Lines in History?” Modes of Jewish Resistance in Eastern European Ghettos My aim is to present resistance as it was conceived by the inmates of the ghettos , by survivors, and by historians. My hypothesis is that the ideas articulated by historiography on Jewish resistance were already expressed by the Jews under Nazi occupation. Under the yoke of Nazism a rather sophisticated understanding of Jewish reality was shared by people of all walks of life, which is evident in the contemporaneous documentation of different genres. Thus, the issue of Jewish responses to the Nazi genocidal policy was expressed and even deliberated by intellectuals and functionaries in the ghettos. Activism and passivity, armed resistance and passive resistance were the terms used to describe the responses of individual Jews and groups to Nazi persecution and mass murder. Responsibility and conduct of leaders and institutions were all discussed and deliberated in the sources. We read the sources today after gaining historical perspective and with the ability to integrate the findings of the vast research on the Holocaust, the Nazis, and World War II. I wish to allow the authentic voices of the victims and survivors to be heard on the issue of resistance in the ghettos while incorporating various approaches of historical research “Three lines in history” is taken from testimonies of activists in the underground movement in Cracow quoting from a talk by Dolek Liebeskind, one of its central protagonists. It expressed his feelings following a successful retaliation attack in the wake of the deportation of Jews from the Cracow ghetto. The 367 Resistance in Eastern European Ghettos Jewish underground attacked the SS officers club Cyganeria on December 22, 1942, an attack in which a considerable number of Germans were killed and wounded.1 Jewish underground fighters felt that they were fulfilling a national mission and redeeming Jewish honor. A mixture of pain, anger, and bewilderment characterized Jewish fighters against Nazism and many Jews who struggled with the Occupation in different ways. The disturbing question of how it was possible to eradicate whole communities with almost no resistance troubled various groups in the Jewish communities. The image of the Jews being led “like sheep to the slaughter” was coined by youth movement leaders, writers, diarists, and others. This biblical metaphor described the ultimate helplessness of Jews when confronting their enemies. The use of the expression in ghettos and camps was either a painful description of Jewish fate and lamentation, a condemnation of the Jewish response to the deportations, or a call to resist and obstruct the killings.2 To quote Liebeskind again: “We achieved our goal, we took up arms, unable to allow the idea that thousand of Jews—men, women, and children—were killed so wildly. We did not want to be led like sheep to the slaughter.... History would have claimed that the Jews of Poland died a pitiful death with not even one act of resistance.”3 Like the members of the Jewish underground, others in the ghettos shared the pain of what was considered to be Jewish passivity vis-à-vis the occupier. For example, after the mass deportation from the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942, Yehoshua Perle, a well-known Yiddish writer, wrote The Destruction of Warsaw, a text of mourning and pain, a text of horrors. The author declared that no pen, no words could even attempt to 1. For a comprehensive description of the underground in Cracow, see Yael Peled (Margolin), Jewish Cracow: Resistance, Undergound, Struggle (Hebrew) (Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1993); see also, Leni Yahil, The Holocuast: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 473. 2. The origin of the expression is in Isaiah 53:6–7; Psalm 44:23. The image of the Jews being led as sheep to the slaughter was mentioned independently in a number of ghettos and in a number of personal diaries. The best known is the call of Abba Kovner on December 31, 1941, in the Vilna Ghetto, in an effort to establish an underground movement. For further discussion see Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 68–71. For a challenging approach to the interpretation of this expression, see Yael Feldman and Stephen Bauman, “We Shall Not Die as Sheep Led to Slaughter” (Hebrew), Ha’aretz 15 (December 2007). 3. Hehalutz halohem 30 (August 20, 1943), in Hehalutz halohem (Fighting Pioneer...

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