Understanding the History of the Holocaust II
Jewish Resistance, Miracles & Righteous Gentiles
In the first Morasha shiur on the Holocaust, we developed a rudimentary understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust and its irrevocable impact on the Jewish people. We will now turn our attention to some of the glimmers of hope that appeared during those dark days.
It is important to dispel the myth that Jews went to their deaths passively, “like lambs to the slaughter.” For reasons that will be mentioned below, Jewish resistance was often spiritual rather than physical; the manner in which they retained their human spirit, and even their Jewish spirit, demonstrates strength of character that we can barely imagine. Most of the stories of Jewish courage were lost with their heroes. Some have been passed on to us. It is our duty to remember these stories, and internalize their messages.
Furthermore, while the Holocaust was a time of unimaginable suffering and darkness for the Jewish people, many of those who survived (and even those who ultimately did not) experienced moments of salvation that were nothing short of miraculous. Stretched beyond the limits of physical endurance and facing the merciless, overwhelming brutality of the Nazis, many Jews found that their lives were saved in the most improbable ways. The history of the Holocaust is replete with such miracles, evidence that God was still with us even during that time of suffering.
Finally, it is important to mention some of the non-Jewish heroes who risked their own lives to save Jews from certain death. Even at a time in history when the entire world seemed to have turned against the Jewish people, there were still isolated individuals who demonstrated both mercy and courage by extending themselves to save Jews.
In this class, we will discuss the following:
- Did Jews really go to their death “like lambs to the slaughter”?
- How did Jews resist the Nazis?
- What signs of Divine intervention and assistance were present during the Holocaust?
- How was heroism manifested during the Holocaust?
- How did righteous gentiles risk their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust?
Class Outline:
Section I. Jewish Resistance
Part A. Obstacles to Physical Resistance
Part B. Spiritual Resistance
Part C. Resistance in Continued Observance
Part D. The Courage to Rebuild
Section II. Miracles of the Holocaust
Section III. Righteous Gentiles
Section I. Jewish Resistance
Part A. Obstacles to Physical Resistance
One of the questions commonly asked about the Holocaust is how it was possible for the Nazis to murder six million victims and imprison and torture many others. Why didn’t the Jews fight back? First of all, it must be noted that there were incidences of physical resistance to the Nazi killing machine, which are generally well-documented. These include the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Jewish partisans, the escape from Sobibor, the attempted escape from Treblinka, and the rebellion of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. These resistance efforts were undertaken in the face of tremendous obstacles. The Germans possessed a massive, powerful army, while the Jews were defenseless civilians. The Germans also enjoyed overwhelming support from the local populations of the countries they invaded, while the rest of the world turned a blind eye to their acts of vicious persecution (as discussed in the previous Morasha class on the Holocaust events). In addition, the Germans employed many other tactics to prevent resistance movements from developing. The following quote discusses some of the main obstacles to any form of resistance.
1. Resistance During the Holocaust, pamphlet from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – A variety of obstacles prevented resistance movements from forming.
Many factors made resistance to the Nazis both difficult and dangerous. The form and timing of resistance were generally shaped by various and often formidable obstacles. Obstacles to resistance included:Superior, armed power of the Germans. The superior, armed power of the Nazi regime posed a major obstacle to the resistance of mostly unarmed civilians from the very beginning of the Nazi takeover of Germany. This was particularly true of the German army during World War II. It is important to remember that at the outbreak of war in September 1939, Poland was overrun in a few weeks. France, attacked by Germany on May 10, 1940, fell only six weeks later. Clearly, if two powerful nations with standing armies could not resist the onslaught of the Germans, the possibilities of success were narrow for mostly unarmed civilians who had limited access to weapons.
German tactic of “collective responsibility.” This retaliation tactic held entire families and communities responsible for individual acts of armed and unarmed resistance. In Dolhyhnov, near the old Lithuanian capital of Vilna, the entire ghetto population was killed after two young boys escaped and refused to return. In the ghetto of Bialystok, Poland, the Germans shot 120 Jews on the street after Abraham Melamed shot a German policeman. The Germans then threatened to destroy the whole ghetto if Melamed did not surrender. Three days later, he turned himself in to avoid retaliation in the ghetto. At the Treblinka killing center in occupied Poland, camp guards shot 26 Jews after four prisoners slipped through the barbed wire in winter 1942. After Meir Berliner, a Jewish prisoner at Treblinka, killed Max Bialas, a high ranking Nazi officer, guards executed more than 160 Jews in retaliation …
Isolation of Jews and lack of weapons. Jewish victims of Nazism faced an additional, specific obstacle to resistance. Jews were isolated and unarmed. Even if individuals had the physical strength, the will, and the opportunity to escape from imprisonment in a Nazi ghetto or camp, they faced great difficulties in finding hiding places on the outside, food, and a sympathetic local population willing to risk safety in favor of assistance. Most Jews could not blend easily into non-Jewish communities because of various differences of accent or language, religious customs, and physical appearance, including the circumcision of male Jews. In many occupied regions of eastern Europe, local populations, including many peasants in forest areas where Jews often had the best chances of hiding, were either hostile to Jews or indifferent to their fate. Local populations themselves were living under harsh conditions of occupation, subject to food rationing and many forms of German terror including murder, roundups for forced labor, and deportation to concentration camps. Civilians who did help Jewish escapees did so under penalty of death.
Secrecy and deception of deportations. The speed, secrecy, and deception that the Germans and their collaborators used to carry out deportations and killings were intended to impede resistance. Millions of victims, rounded up either prior to mass shootings in occupied Soviet territory or for deportation to Nazi killing centers where they were gassed, often did not know where they were being sent. Rumors of death camps were widespread, but Nazi deception and the human tendency to deny bad news in the face of possible harm or death took over as most Jews could not believe the stories. There was no precedence for such a monstrous action as the planned annihilation of a whole people as official government policy. The German or collaborating police forces generally ordered their victims to pack some of their belongings, thus reinforcing the belief among victims that they were being “resettled” in labor camps. When, as late as summer 1944, almost one-half million Jews were deported to Auschwitz from German-occupied Hungary, many had not even heard of the camp. To further the deception for those Jews left behind after the first wave of deportations, many deportees at Auschwitz were forced to write postcards to friends and relatives just before they were gassed: “Arrived safely. I am well.”
Part B. Spiritual Resistance
While it was exceedingly difficult for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to organize any sort of physical rebellion against the Nazis, there are countless examples, great and small, of their resistance to the Nazis’ efforts to break their spirits. The attack of Nazi Germany against the Jews was not limited to their bodies. It was just as much an attack against their souls. The Jews were dehumanized, degraded to a degree that we cannot begin to imagine, and were denied every right a human being can claim. In fact, the Nazis deliberately set out on a campaign to destroy the spirits of the Jews, in addition to destroying their bodies. The Nazis’ agenda was to ruin their victims on every level: physical, emotional, and spiritual. Yet, in many cases, the Jews’ spirits were not broken. While the cases of physical resistance to the Nazi machine are few, the cases of spiritual resistance cannot be quantified, even known. This resistance was often silent; it was the resistance of a Jew intent on keeping his dignity; it was the sanctification of life, and the sanctification of God’s Name in death.
In this section we will quote a number of stories of such spiritual resistance. The stories below are few, a glimpse of the great Jewish spirit that was not quelled; yet it is possible that thousands, tens of thousands, millions of innocent victims who did not survive had the same courage, the same boundless faith, and the same will to live. We will never know what incredible tales they have taken with them.
The following story is quoted in numerous publications, including Rabbi Ezriel Tauber, From Darkness to Light [Hebrew], Path Through the Ashes (Artscroll/Mesorah), and others. The version below is taken from Yaffa Eliach, The Holocaust and New Hasidic Tales, published in Tradition 20(3), 1982, p. 228. It is the story of how a great Jew did not allow his suffering at the hands of the Nazis to diminish his pride at being a member of the Chosen People.
1. The Holocaust Haggadah, Targum Press, Inc – The Chosen People.
The Passover Haggadah says: “Asher bachar banu mikol am” – Who chose us out of all peoples.The Klausenberger Rebbe was taken as part of a slave-labor group from Auschwitz to Warsaw to dismantle the bombed-out buildings. The work was done at a furious pace and consisted of carrying heavy boulders and beams. Many people died of exhaustion.
One day, while the rebbe and his fellow prisoners were working on top of a building, a tremendous torrent of rain came down on them. Nevertheless, the Nazis drove them mercilessly to continue their work. One of the poor, exhausted, and completely drenched victims exclaimed in pain to the rebbe, “Are you going to continue to say ‘You [God] have chosen us’ – and rejoice that we are the chosen nation?”
The Klausenberger Rebbe answered, “Until this day I did not say ‘You have chosen us’ with the proper devotion. But from today, when I say, ‘You have chosen us from among the nations,’ I will say it with much more fervor. I’ll be infinitely ecstatic.”
When the rebbe saw the astonished look on the man’s face, he explained to him, “If it weren’t for the fact that God has chosen us, then I would also be like the Nazis. It’s better for me to be in my situation than to be one of them, God forbid. Happy is my lot!”
The Klausenberger Rebbe related further, “In Warsaw there was a Jew from Lithuania with us whose situation was much better than ours because he was an expert in metalworking, which made him very important to the SS. He was allowed to go around freely, and was given extra food.
“One day this man sneaked into my cabin and said, ‘I came to discuss with you a point in Jewish law. In my work, I have to violate Shabbat by transgressing Torah prohibitions. I think it is better to be transferred to the group that has to carry the heavy logs and boulders, which is not a Torah prohibition but a rabbinic decree.’
“When I asked him how he was going to accomplish this, he said, ‘I have already made preparations to burn my hands with scalding water so that I will be unable to continue my delicate work. Then they will have to transfer me to the other work groups.’
“One has to realize,” continued the rebbe, “that carrying the boulders meant certain death. Many were not able to hold out for more than a few days. In vain, I tried to convince him not to put himself into such danger. But he insisted that he did not want to transgress so many Torah prohibitions. With great difficulty I was able to persuade him that as a metalworker he was able to save the lives of many other Jews. Only then did he relent. Certainly seeing such a Jew strengthened in us the joy of ‘You have chosen us.’”
The Nazis often forced the Jews to undergo various brutal torments with the express intention of shaming them, degrading them, and causing them to lose their feelings of humanity. Yet often the Jewish spirit was not broken by these attempts, and the Jews retained their pride and dignity – which, under such circumstances, certainly constitutes true heroism.
2. Moshe Prager, “The Hassidic Movement During the Holocaust,” Sefer
Habesht, Y. L. Cohen Maimon, ed. Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1960, pp. 269-270.
Dignity in response to attempted acts of physical and spiritual degradation was dramatically demonstrated in Lublin towards the end of 1939. The German commander had forcibly assembled the Jews in an empty field on the outskirts of the city and ordered them in jest to sing a Hassidic melody. Hesitantly, someone began the traditional melody Lomir zich iberbeten, Avinu Shebashomayim (Let us become reconciled, Our Father in Heaven).The song, however, did not arouse much enthusiasm among the frightened masses. Immediately, Glovoznik (the commander) ordered his hooligans to attack the Jews since they refused to fully comply with his wishes.
When the angry outburst against the Jews continued, an anonymous voice broke through the turmoil with a powerful and piercing cry, Mir velen sei iberleben, Avinu Shebashomayim (We will outlive them, O Father in Heaven)! Instantly, the song took hold among the entire people, until it catapulted the people into a stormy and feverish dance. The assembled were literally swept up by the entrancing melody full of dveikut, which had now been infused with new content of faith and trust.
The intended derision was turned into a disaster for the bewildered Nazis, forcing the commander Glovoznik to order a halt to the paradoxical spectacle.
The Nazis subjected the Jews to such severe pain and privation that one might have expected the victims to use any recourse to alleviate their suffering. Yet despite their best efforts, many Jews retained their humanity and nobility, representing a true defeat of the Nazi agenda.
3. Rabbi Menachem Nissel, audio shiur – Heroism during the Holocaust did not necessarily mean physical resistance. Heroism often meant saving the life of another, even at the greatest cost.
At the former location of the Warsaw ghetto is a large sculpture known as the Rappaport memorial, dedicated to the fallen fighters of the Warsaw ghetto. It is a massive granite block. On one side are images of the heroic fighters of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, sculpted as incredibly powerful, muscular human beings. On the other side are images of weak-looking elderly men and women, along with children, being herded into the gas chambers.An elderly Holocaust survivor with a fiery disposition once explained the significance of part of the memorial to me. Part of the memorial depicts a grandmother holding a child and walking toward the gas chamber. How did a grandmother end up carrying a child toward the gas chamber? The Nazis brought entire families and communities in cattle cars to the entrances to the concentration camps, where the Jews were immediately divided into two lines. The line on the right consisted of strong, youthful individuals: those who were fit for work. The line on the left consisted of people who were weaker: children, the sick, the elderly, and pregnant women. If the people who arrived there had a chance to take stock of what was going on around them, it would have been relatively simple for them to realize that the people on the right were being spared from death and sent for slave labor, while the people on the left were being sent to their deaths.
The only type of healthy-looking person who would also be sent to the left was a mother holding a child. How did a grandmother come to be holding a child? When the cattle cars pulled up to the concentration camp after days of travel, after days of deprivation of food and water, and the grandmother stumbled out of the cattle car, she would have seen the two lines of people and understood what was taking place. She would have seen her own daughter, the child’s mother, who was clutching her child, and she would have realized that the only way to save her daughter’s life was to grab her grandchild and hold the grandchild close to herself, thereby allowing her daughter to be sent to the right, to life.
“So I ask you,” this elderly survivor concluded, “who were the real heroes of the Holocaust? Were they the people depicted on the front of the memorial, the ones with guns and knives and huge muscles? Or were they the elderly people on the back of the memorial, whose last actions were the heroic moves that they took in order to save their family members from death?”
Part C. Resistance in Continued Observance