Singing Their Way Home

Last night I and other girls from the children's home—Sima, Beyle, Basha, Vera, Chanele Lin (my sister Sorele's friend)—began to sing Yiddish songs: revolutionary songs, folk songs, children's songs. It gave me great pleasure: we were carried back to our world, to our own culture.

Diary of Lena Jedwab, 23 January 1942

The subject of spiritual resistance during the Holocaust, and especially the role of songs and singing, has received a good deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Nonetheless, it remains emotionally charged and unresolved. This chapter offers a comparative perspective on this vexed question, focusing on the experiences of Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to the Soviet Union. Before looking at their first-hand testimonies, however, it will be necessary to introduce both the contours of the controversy and the broad outlines of what these Polish Jews went through during the war years.

Resistance to spiritual resistance

As has been well chronicled elsewhere, in the decades after the Second World War many Jews, especially in the emerging State of Israel, felt a need to compensate for the perceived passivity of Holocaust victims by emphasizing the heroism of armed resistance. Events like the Warsaw ghetto uprising took on disproportionate importance. The official title of the Holocaust commemoration day in Israel is Yom Hashoah Vehagevurah (Holocaust and Heroism Day). This bias was reflected not only in popular sentiment but also in scholarship.¹ The amount of research on the partisans and ghetto fighters far outweighs their significance, let alone their percentage of the Jewish population in Europe.

By the 1980s a number of scholars had begun to challenge the hegemony of armed resistance with a new paradigm.² They introduced the idea of 'spiritual resistance', which encompassed explicitly religious and other actions that raised the human spirit in the face of the Nazi effort to destroy it. Spiritual resistance was an idea whose time had come, and it quickly spread beyond the academy and into survivor memoirs and testimonies and commemorative events. Orthodox Jews in particular, but many others as well, found great resonance in the recognition of the bravery and heroism inherent in observing Jewish rituals that were not only outlawed but made seemingly impossible by the prevailing circumstances.³

Spiritual resistance soon came to be used to describe many phenomena, among them singing. Singing seemed to be the ideal illustration of an act that could have no possible effect on the war and yet allowed its victims to find the strength to continue living.⁴ Many Holocaust memoirs describe transcendent moments of being lifted out of the hopeless present through the power of song. This potential has since been embraced by the planners of commemorative events, who make sure to feature not only songs but also stories of their transformative effects.⁵ While spiritual resistance did not replace armed resistance in either the public or the scholarly agenda, it certainly became widely applied and accepted, and expanded the conversation about Jewish life during the Holocaust.

The very ubiquity and breadth of the concept led to some important reconceptualizations. Yehuda Bauer, one of the most prolific and respected scholars of the Holocaust, devoted a chapter of his 2001 work Rethinking the Holocaust to grappling with how to categorize and describe various kinds of resistance, including revisiting his own writing on the topic. While recognizing the importance of expanding definitions of resistance, Bauer expressed concern that it could go too far. 'A reader might get the impression that while there was suffering, the majority of Jews were busy educating, learning, putting on plays or making music or painting, giving or listening to lectures, publishing illegal newspapers, and so on.'6 Bauer thus sought to contextualize resistance within the reality of the Holocaust but also to encompass its diverse manifestations.

Towards this end he employed the Hebrew term amidah, literally 'standing' but in this context meaning 'standing in opposition' or 'steadfastness'. The concept had originally been developed by the survivor and historian Mark Dworzecki. Boaz Cohen shows how Dworzecki criticized the emphasis on armed resistance beginning in 1946 and...