Jewish Resistance against the Nazis

Abstract

Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis, by Patrick Henry, ed., Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press of America, 2014,630 pp.Reviewed by ALEXANDER J. GROTHPatrick Henry, Cushing Eells Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Literature and Foreign Languages at Whitman College, has assembled a collection of variously informative and generally well-written essays on a subject of major importance in the field of Holocaust studies. The articles in Henrys anthology confront a pernicious myth of longstanding: that the Jews who perished in the Shoah "were led like sheep to the slaughter." As Henry notes in his introduction, this idea transfers the blame for the monstrous crime to the victims partly because, in the distorted Nazi psyche, those who would not defend themselves had "no right to live." Such an accusation also helps exonerate the passive by-standers because "if the Jews did nothing to save themselves, why should others have risked their lives to help them?" (XIII).Major Jewish scholars, such as Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt, notoriously took up the theme ofan alleged Jewish passivity during the Holocaust. In Eichmann in Jerusalem ( 1963), Arendt went so far as to label the role of Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people as "undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story." The motives for this grossly unjustified interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe may never be known completely. Professor Henrys book challenges these mistaken conclusions. His selection of essays, however, is somewhat odd.The Henry collection classifies Jewish resistance in four different ways: type of resistance; geographic distribution of resistance; chronology of resistance; and the role and contribution of Jews to national resistance movements in Nazi-occupied countries. A major form of resistance described here involves what Professor Yehuda Bauer called amidah, a concept that includes cultural, educational, religious, and political activities, and indeed, all actions intended to strengthen health and morale among Jews, not only armed rebellion or the use of force. This theme is explored further by Dalia Ofer, "Modes of Jewish Resistance in Eastern European Ghettos," (366-392). Similarly, Joanna B. Michlic, "Jewish Children and Youth in German-Occupied Poland" deals with rescue activities through efforts that did not involve violent confrontations with the killers. Nick Strimples "Music as Resistance," (319-338) also comes in this category. In "Jewish Resistance in Nazi Germany and Austria, 1933-1946," Dieter Kunz describes the activities of physicians and nurses in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin who opposed the prevailing Nazi policies and went to extraordinary lengths in order to save the lives of Jewish patients. And, Deborah Dwork writes about "Childrens Resistance both through Diary Writing and Song" (279-299).This volume also contains articles on armed resistance by Jews, such as the struggle led by the Bielski brothers in the forests of Belarus and Jewish resistance in the Ukraine, often in conjunction with and, occasionally together with Soviet partisans, as described by Yehuda Bauer (483-503). The lesser known, albeit important Jewish resistance in Slovakia appears in the article by Hana Kubatova (504-518) and Jewish resistance in Hungary in the articles by Gabor Kadar, Schmidt van de Zandan and Zollan Vagi (519-546). The latter conclude that "Jews were by far the most actively resisting victim group in the Nazi concentration camp universe... besides typhus, it was onlyjews who killed SS men in Auschwitz until the arrival of the Red Army" (546). In "Resistance in the Camps" (547-593), Robert Van Pelt emphasizes the appalling conditions under which Jews lived in the camps and their inability to change the horrendous odds against them. However, he also mentions the revolts of the Sonderkommando in Treblinka, on August 2, 1943; in Sobibor, October 14, 1943 and in Auschwitz-Birkenau, October 7, 1944. …