27: Fighting Back

Survivors are often asked, "Why didn't you resist?" Their answer: How can civilians resist soldiers? How can unarmed and starving people resist? Why should people resist when they are told they are being deported to somewhere where they will have work and food? How can people resist who know that as a result of taking up arms they will provoke reprisals of the most savage sort: the killing of hundreds of defenseless people? Why should people resist whose hope is to survive in hiding?

There is also another set of answers to the question, "Why didn't you resist?": Did you know that there were revolts in many ghettos, not just the Warsaw ghetto? Did you know that tens of thousands of Jews escaped from the ghettos to the forests, to protect the Jews in hiding, and to fight the Germans? Did you know the Jews were active in the partisan movements of every conquered country? Did you know that there were even revolts in the death camps, including Auschwitz?

The will to resist was everywhere stronger than the ability to prevent the slaughter. The fighting appeals that were pasted up in the ghettos offered no real chance of survival through resistance, but advocated putting up a fight to show that the instinct of self defense was not dead, even if there was no possibility of "victory." The appeal posted up inside the Bialystok ghetto by the Jewish Self Defense Organization included the phrase: "Fight for life to the last breath."

Traditionally, Jews have always defended themselves when they had arms to do so. But the strength of the German occupation forces could crush resistance before it acquired strength of its own.

On December 22, 1942, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Cracow, led by Adolf Liebskind, attacked a cafe used by the SS and Gestapo. Yitzhak Zuckerman, who had come from the Warsaw ghetto, took part in the attack. Zuckerman managed to return to Warsaw, but the other members of the Organization were tracked down by the Germans. One of them, Judah Tenenbaum, snatching a pistol from a German, killed one soldier before he was shot by bursts of machine-gun fire. Liebeskind was also killed. A few weeks before his death he had remarked: "We are fighting for three lines in the history books."

A few of Liebeskind's group survived, intending, as his wife Rivka later recalled, "to set up hide-outs, to work in forest, and to enable Jews to hide" because they hoped they would be able "to save at least someone to relate our story."

The story of Czestochowa illustrates the near impossibility of making a stand, and the terrible consequences that could ensue. In the Czestochowa ghetto, on January 4, 1943, several young men and women, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization, were caught up in a "selection" for deportation. They possessed only a single pistol and one knife. Their leader, Mendel Fiszlewicz, used the pistol to attack and wound the German commander of the "action."

After the first shot, Fiszlewicz's pistol jammed, and he was killed by one of the guards. As a reprisal, the Germans took twenty-five men out of the line-up for deportation, and shot them on the spot. As a further reprisal, 300 women and children were sent to nearby Radomsko, where the deportation to Treblinka was actually taking place; all 300 were gassed upon arrival at Treblinka.

In every country under German rule, there were Jews who formed entirely Jewish resistance groups. Many fought in the forests, to which they had escaped from the ghettos and deportation round-ups.

In 1942, the Jewish resistance groups in German-occupied France united to form the Armee Juive (the Jewish Army). Its members attacked German military trucks and trains, and sabotaged factories making war equipment. In 1944 an enlarged Jewish resistance group, *Organisation Juive de Combat *(Jewish Fighting Organization), took part in the liberation of two French towns, Castres and Mazamet.

In Belgium, a Jewish defense organization, the Comite de defense des Juifs (CDJ -- Jewish Defense Committee) was set up in September 1942. Communists and Zionists worked together, making contact with the Belgian resistance, initiating rescue and resistance operations, and working closely with the Belgian Catholic Church to find hiding places for Jewish children. The committee's most dramatic success was on the night of April 19-20, 1943, when a deportation train on the way to Auschwitz was derailed while still on Belgian soil, and many deportees escaped.

Members of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB, the Jewish Figthing Organization) were active throughout German-occupied Poland, despite having to confront the military strength of the German army. Their actions inspired other Jews to feel it was possible to make a stand.

Jewish soldiers, sailors and airmen fought in all the Allied armies. Jewish doctors and nurses carried out their healing duties in every war zone. Polish Jews fought from the first day of the war in defense of Poland. French, Dutch and Belgian Jews fought alongside their fellow-defenders when German troops attacked westward in May 1940. Yugoslav and Greek Jews were in action against the Germans in April 1941. British Jews served in all the branches of the armed forces, in Britain and overseas. Canadian, South African and American Jews fought in North Africa, Italy and Western Europe.

Among the Jews who fought in the Soviet Army was General Semyon Moiseyvich Krivosheyn. At the time of the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, his forces held up German tanks near Gomel for a whole month. In 1943 he commanded a mechanized corps in the decisive Battle of Kursk, which halted the last German offensive. In 1945 he commanded a mechanized corps that broke through the German defenses east of Berlin. For his courage in battle he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest Soviet award for bravery. He was one of 133 Soviet Jews to receive this honor.

Among the Jews who had emigrated to Palestine before the war, several thousand volunteered to fight, and were in action against the Germans in Greece, Crete, North Africa and Italy: 734 were killed in action. Thirty-two of these volunteers were parachuted behind enemy lines. Seven of them were caught by the Germans and executed, including two women, Haviva Reich and Hannah Senesh.

A Jewish Brigade was established as part of the British Army in 1944. It fought in Italy and was identified by its Star of David insignia; 83 of its members were killed in action or died of their wounds. Later its members worked to smuggle Jewish refugees to Palestine.

Jewish soldiers fought on all the fronts, from the first day of the war to the last. They were also among the liberators of the concentration camps in the last months of the war.

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One particularly horrifying aspect of Hitler's Final Solution came to an apocalyptical ending. Of the 380,000 Jews crowded into the Warsaw ghetto, all but 70,000 had been deported to the killing centers in an operation devoid of resistance. By this time, however, those left behind had come to the realization that deportation meant death. With this in mind, Jewish political parties within the ghetto finally resolved their differences and banded together to resist further shipments with force. They did so to Himmler's amazement and he ordered the total dissolution of the Warsaw ghetto.

At three in the morning of April 19, 1943, more than 2,000 Waffen SS infantrymen accompanied by tanks, flame throwers and dynamite squads invaded the ghetto, expecting an easy conquest, only to be met by determined fire from 1,500 fighters armed with weapons smuggled into the ghetto over a long period. These weapons included two light machine guns, hand grenades, fifteen rifles and carbines, several hundred pistols and revolvers, and Molotov cocktails. Himmler had expected the action to take three days, but by nightfall his forces had to withdraw.

On the second day, the Germans broke into the Jewish hospital and killed all the sick and wounded as they lay in their beds. Then they set the building on fire. Those patients, doctors and nurses who managed to reach the cellars of the building, in search of safety, died in the fire.

The one-sided battle continued day after day to the bewilderment of the SS commander, General Juergen Stroop, who could not understand why "this trash and subhumanity" refused to abandon a hopeless cause. He reported that, although his men had initially captured "considerable numbers of Jews, who are cowards by nature," it was becoming more and more difficult. "Over and over again new battle groups consisting of twenty to thirty Jewish men accompanied by a corresponding number of women, kindled new resistance." The women, he noted, had the disconcerting habit of suddenly hurling grenades they had hidden in their bloomers.

On the fifth day of frustration, Himmler ordered the ghetto combed out "with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity." Stroop decided to do this by setting fire to the entire Jewish area, block by block. The Jews, he reported, remained in the burning buildings until the last possible moment before jumping from the upper stories to the street. "With their bones broken, they still tried to crawl across the street into buildings which had not yet been set on fire. . . . Despite the danger of being burned alive the Jews and bandits often preferred to return into the flames rather than risk being caught by us."

The defenders fought for weeks with reckless heroism, taking refuge, as a last resort, in the sewers. On May 8, the Germans attacked the command post of the insurgents, a fortified bunker at 18 Mila Street. When artillery fire failed to dislodge the defenders, the Germans used gas. A few fighters escaped into the sewers, but most were suffocated by the gas. Among those killed in the command post was the the commander of the uprising.

Finally, on May 15, firing from the few remaining Jewish nests of resistance became sporadic and the following day General Stroop blew up the Tlomacki Synagogue, in the "Aryan" section of Warsaw, to celebrate the end of the battle. Four exactly four weeks the little Jewish army had held off superior, well-armed forces. Of the 56,065 who were rounded up, 7,000 were shot out of hand, 22,000 were sent to Treblinka and Lublin and the remainder to labor camps. The official German casualties, obviously minimized, were 16 dead and 85 wounded. Of far more significance was the blow dealt to Hitler's concept of Jewish cowardice.

During the uprising, several thousand Jews managed to escape to the "Aryan" side of the city. There they hid, dependent for the most part on the goodwill of those Poles who were prepared to give them shelter, and were willing to take the risk of sheltering them. Some of those in hiding, among them the historian Emanual Ringelblum, his wife and son, were betrayed to the Germans and killed. Others managed to survive in hiding to the end of the war.

A few small groups of Jews survived within the ghetto area, hiding in the few underground bunkers that had not been detected. But one by one, almost all these bunkers were found, and those hiding in them killed. In September 1943, the Germans sent Polish forced laborers in to demolish whatever walls and structures were still standing. Those Jews that still remained in hiding met their deaths during these demolition activities.

Starting on November 2, 1943, and continuing for three days, some 40,000 Jews -- many of whom had been taken from the Warsaw ghetto immediately after the uprising -- were killed in labor camps at Trawniki, Poniatowa and Majdanek. The killing was part of what the SS called the "Harvest Festival."

November 2, was the date in 1917 on which the British government had issued the Balfour Declaration promising the Jewish people a "National Home" in Palestine. The Germans deliberately chose this date in for the killings, it was part of what was known as the "Goebbels calendar" -- significant dates of the Jewish religion or history.

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By the time of the Warsaw ghetto revolt, all the death camps were nearing peak efficiency. In each nightmare world, and especially at Auschwitz, killing had taken on an irreversible momentum. In spite of the increasing shortage of rolling stock, Adolf Eichmann's trains kept arriving at Auschwitz, bringing ever larger consignments of people to their deaths. Said an Auschwitz guard to some new arrivals, "You are only numbers. A shot, and the number is gone." The Jews knew that escape was impossible, but guards always told them superfluously, "Don't try to escape; the only way to get out of here is by the chimney."

At Auschwitz, the death-making machinery was taxed and overtaxed but kept on working. More and more Zyklon B was required: 7.5 tons in 1942, 12 tons in 1943, and in 1944 a single consignment filled 20 trucks. The canisters of gas-making crystals were hurried to the camp's death center, Birkenau, where the gas chambers could produce 4,000 to 5,000 corpses an hour.

Auschwitz reached peak production in the summer of 1944 as Hungary was being cleared of its Jews. Adolf Eichmann worked so effectively that his trains full of Jews piled up at the Auschwitz siding and people suffocated in boxcars before they could be unloaded. Many people were sent under guard into a nearby forest, where they were forced to wait their turn for a day or two without food or water.

To handle the influx, the SS men worked feverishly, tirelessly, around the clock, and 20,000 policemen were called in to help out. On a single day they put to death 24,000 Jews. In their haste they flung many living children onto open-pit fires. By the end of August half of Hungary's 750,000 Jews had been gassed and cremated.

The killing went on and on.