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547 Robert Jan van Pelt 23 Resistance in the Camps In Memory of Rudi Vrba (1924–2006) Primo Levi once compared the core reality of the death camps to a Gorgon, the mythological being that turned all men who approached it into stone.1 When I began to think about the topic of “Jewish resistance in the camps,” I felt paralyzed . Should I take a narrow definition, which limits resistance to open revolts such as those undertaken by the Jews in Treblinka and Sobibor, the Sonderkommando of crematorium 4 in Auschwitz, or the group of Warsaw Jews who resisted in the undressing room of crematorium 2 in Auschwitz, killing one SS man and wounding a second? It would be a topic that might just be covered in the nine thousand words available to me. Or should I take a wide definition, and include all acts that countered the camp’s purpose to break the inmates morally and destroy them physically? In that case, I ought consider the whole gamut of defiance as it arches from open revolt to small acts like sharing a piece of bread with a comrade, or the act of keeping oneself clean and one’s head high—and struggle with tricky questions such as whether a voluntary death in order not to be separated from friends or family, or survival at any cost, or suicide may also count as acts of resistance, as Holocaust-survivor Meir Dworzecki suggested in a paper given at the Yad Vashem Conference on Manifestations of Jewish Resistance held in Jerusalem in 1968.2 Or should I adopt a Goldilocks strategy by opting for 1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 83f. 2. Meir Dworzecki, “Day-to-day Stand of the Jews,” in Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust: 548 Robert Jan van Pelt a middle ground, and follow Auschwitz-survivor Hermann Langbein, who in his book-length study on resistance in the camps defined resistance as “actions, or preparations for actions, that were undertaken in order to thwart or mitigate management campaigns directed against all inmates or a group of them.”3 What about “the camps”? Between 1933 and 1945, Jews suffered, died, and possibly resisted in so many different kinds of camps: Arbeitslager (labor camps), Auffangslager (absorption camps), Durchgangslager (transit camps), Firmenlager (company camps), Judenarbeitslager (labor camps for Jews), Judenlager (Jews’ camps), Judenumsiedlungslager (Jewish resettlement camps), Konzentrationslager (concentration camps), Polizeihaftlager (police detention camps), Sammellager (assembly camps), Sonderlager (special camps), “Vernichtungslager” (“extermination camps”—set in quotation marks because the category did not officially exist), Zwangarbeitslager (forced labor camps), and so on. What about the non-German camps where Jews were imprisoned? What about the camps d’accueil (reception camps), camps d’internement (internment camps), camps de séjour (sojourn camps) and camps de transit (transit camps) in France, or the camps in Hungary, Romania, and other countries that persecuted Jews? Should I try to cover all of these camps? Should the topic limit itself to life in the camps, or does it also include the situation of those who, like almost all who arrived in Treblinka , Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, never were properly admitted to those camps as inmates, but who were upon arrival immediately murdered? Having observed over many years the way men make buildings and the way men run organizations, I have been able to reconstruct the making of Auschwitz as a physical environment, and the operation of Auschwitz as an organization. But I have never observed a domain of degradation that begins to approximate the condition of life in a German death camp. Like almost all academics, I am one of those whom Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi addressed in his poem “Shemà,” written in 1946—one of those who live secure in warm houses and “who return at evening to find / hot food and friendly faces,” and therefore never will be able to understand the being “Who fights for a crust of bread / Who dies at a yes or no.”4 One year before Auschwitz became one of Proceedings of the Conference on Manifestations of Jewish Resistance, ed. Meir Grubsztein, trans. Varda Esther Bar-On a.o. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1971), 152–81. 3. Hermann Langbein, Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1938–1945, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Constable, 1994), 52. 4. Primo Levi, “Shemà,” in Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swan (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 9. [3.17.181.21...

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