Spiritual Resistance and Armed Resistance Among European Jews

It is widely acknowledged that extermination, concentration and labor camps were seats of spiritual resistance, generally defined as a kind of daily adherence to traditional Jewish values. This spiritual resistance was buttressed by a component of sabotage; the only form of physical resistance available to interned Jews during the Holocaust. Examples of this include the destruction of one of the four Auschwitz crematoria by Sonderkommandos, in addition to various accounts of intentionally poor workmanship on the part of laborers manufacturing German munitions. This spiritual or non-violent form of resistance has led many to consider the extent to which Holocaust-era Jews engaged in armed resistance. Scholarship has sought to explore this issue within the context of non-Jewish resistance. What emerges is that to the extent that there existed the socio-political and infrastructural conditions necessary for substantial armed resistance against the Nazi regime, as many Jews participated in such activity as did non-Jews, though these efforts were hindered by the same Anti-Semitism at the heart of the Nazi order. Ultimately, the anti-Jewish sentiment within resistance groups impeded the efforts of a Jewish armed resistance and partisan resistance, in general.

In Hitler's War Against the Jews, David Altshuler deals with the culture of interred Jews endeavoring to maintain Jewish culture, against all odds: "All forms of culture sustained life in the ghetto…Card playing was very popular, and actors, musicians, comics, singers, and dancers all entertained small groups who came together for a few hours to forget their daily terror and despair” (Altshuler). In addition, illegal schools were established in Lithuanian and Polish ghettoes, instructing in Jewish studies (Tec 7). Despite this resistance wrought of self-preservation, Jews did not enjoy the benefit of strong leadership and access to munitions of the kind necessary to stage meaningful armed resistance (Tec 16). Jewish leaders who had fled prior to the war’s onset did not maintain sufficient organizational infrastructure to effectively communicate with those left behind, to say nothing of those authority figures who had already been murdered. Generally, Jewish leadership of any magnitude did not provide overwhelming support for any Jewish Underground (Tec 17). While resistance fighters plead with Allied forces for access to arms and munitions, these calls for aid were ignored (Ibid.).

However, incidents such as the Auschwitz crematorium raid were not isolated ones and served to stem the tide of Jewish extermination. In fact, towards the war’s end, Jewish prisoners of Treblinka succeeded in outright destroying the camp and, just over two months, Sobibor inmates killed ten S.S. guards and many estimates suggest that several hundred prisoners proceeded to escape, thereafter joining Soviet partisan brigades (Tec 10-11). Indeed, the number of Jews who participated in the Soviet partisan movement is estimated at anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000 (Ibid. ). One of these Jews was a young Belourussian named Tuvia Bielski, one of the few young and relatively experienced Jewish paramilitary leaders. To be sure, Bielski and his fellows were first-and-foremost members of an armed Jewish resistance, as opposed to a spiritual one, if only because their education in Judaic spirituality was limited (Tec 12).

The Bielski Partisans numbered 1,200 at its height, accepting into its ranks any Jew able to reach them. In fact, they also advanced scouts and spies into ghettos, assisting in the escape of prisoners who would then join the Bielski Otriad, as it was known (Idid.). However, the Bielski group was unique in its Jewish identity and comprised only a small number of the Jewish fighters engaged across a wide range of partisan groups. Among these groups, anti-Semitism was as rife as it was within many concentration camps (Tec 3). It was only in 1943, when the Soviet Union Army was able to gain some broad authority over the forest-bound partisan groups that Jews fighting within them were officially immunized from anti-Semitic treatment (Ibid.).

However, the eyes of the Soviet government did not guarantee that Jewish partisan fighters would be entirely protected and, moreover, anti-Jewish measures of both the Germans and other controlling governments had already destroyed Jewish morale, making it extremely difficult to effectively forge meaningful armed resistance (Tec 17). Particularly within the Belorussian partisan community, anti-Semitism was so prevalent that it threatened to disrupt daily operations. Indeed, as an embedded partisan with the Kalinan Detachment towards the end of the war, Jewish partisans under the command of Tuvia Bielski himself were disarmed and prevented from making a crucial river crossing that threatened to cripple the unit through starvation (Smiilovitskii 44). This was shortly after non-Jewish partisans from one detachment had outright attacked the Jewish partisans of another (Smiilovitskii 39).

As early as 1941, Jewish partisans faced substantial danger wrought of either Polish partisans or the Polish Home Army itself, as Timothy Snyder recalls the Polish Prime Minister wishing the Jews of Poland a peaceful Rosh Hashanah from London via a BBC Radio transmission (Snyder). This message was met with disgust by Stefan Rowecki, commander of the Home Army in Warsaw, suggesting a deep tension between the Polish “government-in-exile” and the Polish Home Army or “Underground.” Yithak Arad, a Yad Vashem founder, details the extent of Polish anti-Semitism’s impact on effective resistance:

“In Eastern Poland, in Byelorussia, and sometimes in other areas as well, groups of Polish rightist guerillas took an active role in the killing of many Jewish families and partisans in the forest. Among their victims was also a group of Jewish fighters who had succeeded in breaking out of the Warsaw Ghetto at the time of the uprising, had reached the forests, and launched guerilla warfare against the Nazis” (Ibid.).

Ultimately, as modern scholarship has established, no infrastructure existed for European-based Jews to mount substantial resistance to Nazi forces. Requests for armaments and munitions were denied and widespread anti-Semitism precluded partisan forces from efficiently absorbing Jewish partisan fighters. Indeed, anti-Semitism outright prevented the undertaking of proper military maneuvers, as detailed above.

It certainly cannot be argued that Jews interned in either concentration, labor or extermination camps did less than their utmost to maintain a kind of spiritual resistance through maintaining daily Jewish rituals and traditions. Moreover, these prisoners made the most of the resources at their disposal, as indicated by above-referenced examples. The height of Jewish spiritual resistance actually took the form of violent resistance, albeit unarmed: 1,000 Warsaw Ghetto inmates, armed with no armaments whatsoever, confronted 3,000 German troops, with 7,000 in reserve and heavy artillery at their disposal. While Heinrich Himmler assured Hitler himself that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would be put down within three days, it took Nazi forces four weeks to do so (Maher 256). It seems that this Herculean show of spiritually-inspired force has caused modern historians to, essentially, question why Jewish fighters not restricted to camps were not more successful in resisting Nazi forces. Needless to say, the reason for this is rooted in the same anti-Semitism that prompted the internment of so many Jews. Scholarship does indicate that, as noted above, anti-Semitism played a crucial role in inhibiting the effectiveness of Jewish resistance efforts undertaken outside the concentration or labor camp settings.

In light of what modern scholarship has uncovered regarding anti-Semitism’s detrimental impact on the ability of Jewish partisans to effectively mount armed resistance, the image of Jews being led to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter seems all but eradicated. To the extent that it has not been, it seems that one difficulty is the lack of surviving Jewish partisans to share their tales. Indeed, it is estimated that approximately 80% of the Jewish partisans embedded in Soviet-based partisan groups did not survive the war (Krakowski 301). In this sense the debate surrounding Jewish resistance seems to have revealed the sheer extent of anti-Jewish sentiment that was widespread throughout Europe, and not restricted to Germany itself. This revelation has itself spawned a defensive posture on the part of post-Soviet and Polish non-Jews, who feel vilified by the negative attention attracted by its respective nations’ partisan politics, so to say.

As Nehama Tec points out, “the Polish underground had a special section, ‘Zegota,’ devoted to rescuing Jews” (Tec 23). As such, the revelation that Jewish resistance was often more prevalent than non-Jewish resistance has resulted in, to some degree, a lack of attention being paid to the resistance of Polish and Soviet forces. The effort to understand how anti-Semitism impacted Jewish armed resistance has thus provoked Polish citizens into a defensive posture. For example, Polish viewers were outraged by the depiction of Polish partisan groups as anti-Jewish in a recent German television drama, despite the historical accuracy of this depiction (Robson). Critics of Timothy Snyder have suggested that “he distracts from the fact that only the Holocaust aimed for the extermination of an entire people,” seeking to offset what they perceive as Snyder comparing anti-Semitic Soviets to Nazi Germans (Kuhne 136).

Accordingly, scholarship exploring the nuances of Jewish armed resistance during the Holocaust period has revealed a sensitive and largely unexplored facet of this period’s history. While Soviet and Polish Armed forces surely sought the destruction of Hitler and Nazi Germany, they just as surely did not oppose the destruction of Jewish life, by and large. While true, this revelation has in a sense deepened anti-Jewish sentiment in parts of Poland and the former Soviet Union. In turn, we have been provided with a broad-reaching answer to another question. Why was Hitler’s army so difficult to defeat, even after the United States entered the war? The answer lies in the fact that Hitler’s focus on anti-Jewish vitriol deprived many of the nations opposing him of many of their most productive citizens; namely, Jews. As for those Jews available to serve their respective nations, the Polish Home Army, for example, was largely off-limits to them, thereby preluding Jews from aiding in Poland’s primary resistance movement (Tec 2).

While Jewish resistance of a spiritual nature has been well-documented, no military or political infrastructure existed for purposes of allowing Holocaust-era Jews to mount meaningful armed rebellion or resistance against Nazi forces. To the extent that Jewish men were incorporated into partisan resistance groups, these men often suffered from the same anti-Jewish sentiments that accounted for the internment of so many of their brothers and sisters. In exploring the manner in which anti-Semitism interfered with effective administration of partisan armed resistance, post-Soviet and Polish factions have sought to excuse the conduct of their predecessors by suggesting that because it was not as malevolent as that of the Nazis, it does not deserve attention that reflects poorly on their respective nations. However, this “bad publicity” is necessary in uncovering the fact that Jewish armed resistance was just as forceful as non-Jewish armed resistance was during the period. As such, exploration of this topic, and the debunking of the myth to the contrary, has served to provide an even deeper understanding of how deeply engrained anti-Jewish sentiment was in Holocaust-era Europe. In this sense, evidence of how Jewish armed resistance was hindered provides a profound illustration of how difficult it was for Jews of the period to mount a successful spiritual resistance in the face of such pervasive hatred.

Works Cited

Altshuler, David. Hitler's War Against the Jews. Springfield, New Jersey: Behrman House Inc., 1978.

Krakowski, Shmuel. The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1984.

Kuhne, Thomas. “Great Men and Large Numbers: Undertheorising a History of Mass Killing.” Contemporary European History 21.2 (2012): 133-144.

Maher, Thomas. “Threat, Resistance, and Collective Action: The Cases of Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.” American Sociological Review 75.2 (2010): 252-272.

Robson, Steve. “Fury in Poland over German war drama which 'tries to spread blame for Holocaust.” Daily Mail. 28 Mar. 2013. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300724/Fury-Poland-German-war-drama-tries-spread-blame-Holocaust.html

Smilovitskii, L. " Antisemitism in the Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941-1944: The Case of Belorussia." Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 20.2 (2006): 207-234.

Snyder, Timothy. “Jews, Poles & Nazis: The Terrible History.” The New York Review of Books. 24 Jun. 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/24/jews-poles-nazis-terrible-history/

Tec, Nechama. “Jewish Resistance: Facts, Omissions, and Distortions.” Miles Lerman Institute for The Study of Jewish Resistance (1997).