Home > Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity > Resistance

Resistance is one of the most controversial and emotional issues associated with the Holocaust and other genocides. The overwhelming scope of the Holocaust raised the question, How could so many people be murdered? Initially, writers proposed that it could only happen if the victims allowed it to happen through their own powerlessness. The phrase, "Jews went like sheep to the slaughter," as described most famously in the writings of Hannah Arendt, and later adopted by Raul Hilberg, summed up the early opinion that Jews offered little or no resistance. Later research, however, demonstrated that the issue was perhaps not the lack of resistance but how resistance was defined and, equally important, not why there was so little but how there was so much resistance that actually occurred.

Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust

The overwhelming might of the Nazi machine, together with local collaborators, made large-scale armed resistance impossible. Jews were isolated, with little arms or training, often disoriented by the progressive stages of the Final Solution and physically beaten down and systematically starved. Furthermore, most were primarily burdened by communal or familial responsibility and feared to act in the face of brutal Nazi reprisals. This limited the options of the more settled and older members of the community. Thus, in the ghettos, younger Jews—often those who had been members of the prewar Zionist youth movements—usually carried out armed resistance. The most famous resistance was the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, where a small number of Jews held out for almost a month. Other ghettos where Jews fought back included Vilna and Kovno in Lithuania and Bialystok, Kracow, and Czestochowa in Poland. According to some estimates, there were more than sixty ghettos in the Baltic areas that had underground resistance groups.

Jewish resistance was eventually found in the midst of the death camps, under the worst possible conditions. In camps such as Sobibor (August 1943) and Treblinka (October 1943) armed revolts caused both camps to stop functioning (Sobibor immediately and Treblinka after a few months). In Auschwitz-Birkenau another revolt (October 1944) resulted in the destruction of at least one gas chamber. This revolt was carried out by the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria and who were supplied with gunpowder smuggled by women inmates from their slave labor in munitions factories.

Outside of the camps and ghettos Jewish resistance appeared as a form of partisan or resistance movements. However, in many cases, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Jewish units were not only forced to operate separately but also hunted and targeted by local resistance units, such as the Armia Krajowa in Poland. These Jewish units were often denied arms by both the national underground movements and the Allies, and they often had to protect themselves from these national units as well as the Nazis. Nonetheless, there was resistance, which usually took two forms. The first was offensive and consisted of attacks against Nazi forces and installations, or against places that could harm the Nazi war effort (such as trains, bridges, and telephone wires). The second was defensive and consisted especially in the formation of "family camps"; Jews who had succeeded in escaping the Nazis and had fled into the dense woods of Eastern Europe could find refuge in these camps, which were run and defended by Jews. The most famous of these camps was the Bielski otriad, which saved more than 1,100 Jews in Belorussia. An estimate of the number of these partisans in the East puts the figure at about 30,000.

In Western Europe, such as in France and Belgium, some separate Jewish groups did operate, but many of the Jews who were active in the resistance contributed in the context of the national underground. This was also the pattern with other lands, such as Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Greece.

Whether resistance only involves fighting and violence is another question. While some scholars dismiss all forms of nonviolent or spiritual resistance, others such as Tzvetan Todorov have pointed out that nonviolence does not mean nonresistance to evil. In contrast to Hilberg and his followers, they advance the idea that as Yehuda Bauer put it, "one resists without using force" (2001, p. 120). Scholars are still exploring the precise definition of the term resistance, but various actions that fit into the definition might include smuggling food in opposition to Nazi decrees, establishing medical efforts to provide for the community, and continuing religious, educational, and cultural activities. Forms of these activities all took place in the ghettos and camps, and all were based on the idea of working to attempt to survive until liberation, thus depriving the Nazis of their goal of creating a Europe that was Judenrein ("free of Jews"). These actions also defied the Nazi attempt to define Jews as Untermenschen ("subhuman"), by affirming Jewish self-definition. In religious terms, in a reversal of the traditional term Kiddush Ha-Shem (literally "Sanctification of the Name" in Hebrew, referring to the obligation to accept martyrdom in certain conditions), a rabbi in the Warsaw ghetto put forward the commandment of Kiddush Ha-Hayyim, the "Sanctification of Life," as a religious obligation.

Resistance during Other Genocides

While resistance during the Holocaust is the best documented and most discussed example of resistance to genocide, it is not the only example. And as each example of genocide in history has its own unique features, so too do the other examples of resistance. But the lack of specific studies and detailed documentation hampers the discussion of other examples of resistance. For example, Soviet archives have only become accessible since the end of the cold war. Their availability gives historians the opportunity to compare Joseph Stalin's gulags to the Nazi concentration camp system, but significant differences do exist. While even in the midst of the gulag, at the height of Stalin's terror (and immediately after his death in 1953), there existed a network of anti-Stalinist and anti-Soviet activities that included strikes, protests, underground newspapers, and, ultimately, armed revolts in 1942, 1953, and 1954 that involved thousands of inmates. Resistance by refusal to work would have been futile in a Nazi system that existed to provide death, not products.

Also, while the myth of the impossibility of escape from the Gulag was one that was popularized by many, including survivors such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, others, such as the scholar Anne Applebaum, have pointed out that thousands did escape, especially in the early years of the Gulag. For example, Applebaum cites official Soviet statistics: in one year alone (1947), 10,440 prisoners escaped and only 2,894 were recaptured.

While there is not a specific account of Tutsi resistance to the Hutu genocide, reports of resistance have surfaced. Philip Gourevitch described Bisesero as being "the only place in Rwanda where thousands of Tutsi civilians mounted a defense against the Hutus who were trying to kill them" (1998), and he also described non-violent rescues by individuals. As the war crimes tribunals continue their prosecutions in 2004, more evidence of both resistance and rescue are being documented.

Ultimately, resistance to genocide on a large scale can only succeed with assistance either from significant segments of the local populations or with international assistance. Failing that, resistance can save some, but its more lasting value might exist in giving the threatened group a sense of pride and self-determination, even in the sense of choosing the time, place, and method of their death, and in leaving a lasting legacy both to the survivors and to those who will come later. And, it is this sense of self-determination that can be a basis for rebuilding the family and community with a sense of group self-worth and shared humanity, both of which are necessary for the ability to not forget and to stand as equals among others.

SEE ALSO Bystanders; Perpetrators; Rescuers, Holocaust

Mark Weitzman