The Story of an Underground: Resistance of the Jews of Kovno in the Second World War by Dov Levin and Zvie A. Brown (review)

The great historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg famously argued that, in the face of their destruction, the Jews offered almost no resistance. “On a European-wide scale,” he wrote, “the Jews had no resistance organization, no blueprint for armed action.” The perpetrators consequently lost no more than a few hundred men during the course of their murder of millions.¹ Hilberg attributed Jewish behavior during the Shoah to the established Jewish tradition of petitioning local authorities for relief in difficult situations. Although it would be impossible to deny Hilberg’s numbers, his explanation of Jewish behavior is questionable. It is fair to say that most historians of the topic would not agree with Hilberg’s early formulation. Jewish behavior at the time of the great atrocity cannot be explained by centuries of Jewish history and tradition, especially when we consider that other groups in similar circumstances under the Nazis reacted in the same way. To the undeniable fact that Jews succeeded in harming the Nazi murder machine only to a very small extent, the answer must be that the opportunities were not there. Jews could have done no more than what in fact they did. They were no less courageous than any other group placed in comparable circumstances.

The book under review gives us an opportunity to see the achievements, limits, and difficulties of Jewish resistance. Kovno, the capital of Lithuania during the inter-war years, was home to some 40,000 Jews in 1939. When the ghetto was set up in 1941, approximately 30,000 Jews became inmates. Nazi murderers systematically reduced the size of the population of the ghetto. This book makes it painfully clear that, from the moment the Germans occupied the city just two days after they began their offensive, Lithuanians demonstrated murderous antisemitic tendencies. The first act of the local “partisans” was to carry out pogroms. It took little effort for German propagandists to convince the local population that the Jews were Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks were Jews. Lithuanians took “revenge” on the Jews for a year of Soviet rule; this was an undertaking much easier than confronting the Red Army itself. The pages of the book devoted to the spontaneous murder of Jews and the looting of their property by their fellow citizens of Kovno are the most difficult to read. Jews could count on little help from their fellow Lithuanians. The hatred that Lithuanians, among others, exhibited toward their fellow citizens, and the consequences of that hatred, are some of the most dismaying aspects of the history of the Holocaust.

The Kovno ghetto was in many ways similar to other ghettos the circumstances and the difficulties of engaging in actions to hinder the German war machine were similar everywhere. Here, as elsewhere, the Germans formed a Jewish council, although the members of Kovno Council behaved more heroically than their counterparts in most other ghettos. The Germans began their murderous anti-Jewish actions almost immediately after occupying the city, and survivors were reduced to slave laborers. The Jews attempted to maintain a semblance of normal life, setting up schools, maintaining archives, and, to the extent possible, fostering intellectual life. The Kovno ghetto had some distinguishing features, however; it was enclosed by barbed wire rather than by a wall, which made it somewhat easier for Jews to maintain contacts with the outside world. In fall 1943, the Germans transformed the ghetto into a concentration camp. In concrete terms, this meant that the remaining autonomy of the Jewish leadership was taken away.

In Kovno as elsewhere, Jewish activists were aware of a fundamental moral dilemma: by taking action, they would endanger not only themselves but also their fellow ghetto inmates. Only when it became evident that there remained little chance of survival was this dilemma resolved. As in other ghettos—Warsaw, for...