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40 Nechama Tec 3 Jewish Resistance Facts, Omissions, and Distortions There are many more questions than answers concerning Jewish resistance during World War II. Most discussions of the subject evince myriad forms of the same queries: Why did the Jews go like sheep to their slaughter? Why did they not stand up to the Germans? Why did they refuse to fight? Behind each of these questions are unexamined assumptions. Each claims that European Jews went to their death passively, without a struggle. Each alleges that conditions necessary for resisting existed but that the Jews failed to take advantage of these conditions. This sort of reasoning may easily lead to some predictable conclusions: If opportunities existed to thwart Nazi aims but the Jews chose not to rely on them, they must bear some responsibility for what happened to them. These arguments amount to blaming the victims. Blaming the victims, in turn, relieves the perpetrators of some responsibility for their crimes. Such questions and their implications can be settled only by a careful examination of historical facts. Even a cursory glance at available evidence shows that the assumptions upon which these arguments are based are false. First, favorable conditions for Jewish resistance under the German occupation were virtually nonexistent. Research for and writing of this article were supported by a Senior Research Fellowship from the Miles Lerman Center for The Study of Jewish Resistance, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. I am most grateful to the Miles Lerman Center for giving me the opportunity to engage in this study. I am indebted to my friends and colleagues Professor Pat Cramer, Dr. Jürgen Matthäus, and Professor Daniel Weiss for their careful readings of and valuable comments about this study. 41 Facts, Omissions, and Distortions Second, despite the absence of such conditions, there was a significant amount of Jewish resistance during that period. For example, in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, Jewish underground organizations were set up in seven major ghettos (Bialystok, Cracow, Czestochowa, Kovno, Minsk, Vilna, and Warsaw ) and in forty-five minor ghettos. Jewish armed uprisings took place in five concentration camps and in eighteen forced-labor camps.1 An understanding of Jewish resistance will be enhanced if examined within the context of nonJewish resistance. Before this is done, however, the meaning of resistance in general and Jewish resistance in particular calls for some preliminary clarification . Henri Michel, an authority on European resistance movements during World War II, notes that resistance started with gestures of malicious humor and moved on to more explicit refusals to submit. With time, these refusals became organized and sometimes eventually led to actual battles. While every resistance movement developed in stages, each underground group had its special characteristics. These characteristics varied with the attitudes of the occupying forces to a particular country or group, with the physical and cultural attributes of a country or group, and with the kind of assistance received from the Allies. An offer of assistance, in turn, depended on whether the Allies saw a country or a group as important.2 The literature about resistance to the German occupation usually refers to collective, organized forms, which are further differentiated in terms of passive or active, armed or unarmed, spiritual or nonspiritual, as well as with many other characterizations.3 By their very nature, all underground activities are 1. Yehuda Bauer, “Forms of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust,” in The Nazi Holocaust, ed. Michael R. Marrus (Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1989), 34–48, states that in at least sixty of the ghettos there were armed rebellions or attempts at rebellion. Similarly, he cites six concentration camps in which there were Jewish uprisings. Both the places and the number of uprisings differ somewhat from those presented by Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews during World War II (New York: Holocaust Library, 1986), 106. 2. Henri Michel, The Shadow War: European Resistance 1939–1945 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 13. 3. While most students deal with collective resistance, they disagree on several aspects when defining resistance in general. For example, Roger S. Gottlieb, “The Concept of Resistance: Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust,” Social Theory and Social Practice 9:1 (Spring 1983): 31–49, thinks that the effectiveness of resistance should not be a part of a definition. In contrast, Raul Hilberg’s formulation relies heavily on this idea. This is clear when he says that “measured in German casualties Jewish armed opposition shrinks into insignificance...

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