Partisans: The Role Of Resistance In The Ghetto

The author Elie Wiesel said, “There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win”. People often wonder how there was barely any resistance to the Nazis without realizing that the resistance was hidden just under the Germans nose’s. One such resistance group was called the Jewish Fighting Organization. The group was otherwise known as the ZOB. The Jewish Fighting Organization aimed to gain control of the Warsaw Ghetto because they could no longer stand by and watch their family and friends be deported to concentration camps.

Zegota, or the Council to Aid the Jews, was a Polish resistance group that’s primarily goal was to help Jews in hiding with social welfare means such as, providing clothes, housing, food and through other resistance movements, false

Throughout the Holocaust, Jews organized resistance movements in ghettos, concentration, and extermination camps. Although they had virtually no weapons and faced one of the largest arsenals in the world, the Jewish people fought for their honor and freedom. Without any hope victory and in the face of death, resistance fighters found the courage to take on evil in its purest form. Their efforts must not go in vein; to them we must accord our respect. This is a brief testimony of their fight against the Nazi regime.

Firstly, the Jews in Europe organized a Jewish military league to resist the Nazi brutality. In Vilna, the first organized Jewish armed resistance arose from the youth movements. After the invasion of the Soviet Union is 1941, two-thirds of the Jewish population of Vilna were deported by the Nazis (“Jewish Combat Organization.”). Those who survived warned the other Jews of the ordeal awaiting them, which paved the way for the “First Manifesto”. This document called out for Jewish resistance and was written by Abba Kovner, a future leader of the ghetto fighters in Vilna. The manifesto was directed at the Jews of Vilna and the youth movements, and explained the fate of the ghetto deportees (that they were all killed), Hitler’s plot to “destroy all the Jews of Europe”, and called for Jewish resistance. This manifesto was significant, as it was the first call for the Jews to arm themselves and resist the Nazis. Not soon after,

All ghettos had an appointed Jewish Council called the Judenrat. The council was hardly democratic and power was held by one person. This one person represented German power to the Jewish people and to the Germans they represented Jewish needs which were seldom met ("Ghettos: History & Overview" jewishvirtuallibary.org). In Warsaw the head role was held by Adam Czerniaków. He worked with Nazi’s rather than revolting. Czerniaków eventually received an order he could not carry out, deport the orphans of the Warsaw Ghetto. In the ghettos deportation meant death. His attempt to plea with the Nazi’s failed and he killed himself. His suicide note read, “"I can no longer bear all this. My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do." ("Adam Czerniakow" jewishvirtuallibary.org)

A basic timeline of Partisan activities follows something close to the following. The first known Jewish resistance was in Belgium in 1939 with the Jewish Solidarity. These Jews joined the Belgium Army of Partisans in 1940 when Germany first started occupying Belgium. The resistance movement grew even larger when French and Greek Jews joined resistance movements in 1940 and ’41, respectively. The Eastern partisan groups sprang up beginning in June of ’41 after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. The partisans continued to fight right up to the end of the war in ’45.

for food, daily necessities, etc. This benefited the soldiers while at war for a living, but what

In the next few paragraphs I'm going to tell you about the different types of liberation and the many liberators who were and were not successful in many different camps. I will also be telling you about the resistors of the Holocaust and the final thing I'll be discussing the allied troops rescues of a few camps and subcamps. The first liberation was at Majdanek in July 1944. The Soviet forces were the first to arrive and capture

There were many different resistance efforts throughout the Holocaust. On 12 September 1942, the town was assaulted by about 150 partisan soldiers who killed thirty SS officers, soldiers, and police. They broke through the wall, evacuated the 30 Jews remaining and burned the ghetto to the ground before retreating into the surrounding woodland.

One partisan unit in Vilina derailed hundreds of supply trains, killing over three thousand Germans in the process and making it more difficult for the Germans to fight in the war (USHMM). The partisans often attacked military outposts and other strategic locations, such as power plants and factories, to make it harder to make supplies for the war effort, but they never attacked civilians (JPEF). In most cases, the partisans had the upper hand. They attacked at night when the Nazis were least expecting an attack and the least amount of people would be hurt, and they knew the lay of the land better than the, in many cases, foreign Germans (JPEF). Additionally, when the partisans could get information inside of the Nazi labor camps, Jews on the inside would purposely sabotage weapons that they were building for the Germans (JPEF). With these small attacks, partisan units were able to limit the participation of the Nazis in the war, and decrease the damage that they were doing to the Jewish

After the opening of the Ninth Fort Museum, many Lithuanian Jewish partisans published their memoirs from the Kaunas ghetto and retold the crimes committed in the fort. Their books were illustrated with photographs captured by the Lithuanian Jewish photographer from the Kaunas ghetto George Kadish and in some of their publications even the identification of Jewish victims managed to surpass the Soviet censorship. Of course, as it will be discussed in this paper, first and foremost, their memories were located within the heroic narrative of the Soviet resistance against the Nazi regime and often had to follow the Soviet guidelines of the war memorialization. Nonetheless, it might be argued that antifascist ideology, which was instrumentalized

The Judenrat led the resistance by assisting the rebels to escape from the ghettos. As a result to these resistances Nazi officers would just send attack dogs or perform search parties and eventually led to death.

Despite the Nazis best attempt to destroy their lives and strip away all their humanity, the Jews still found a way to resist the oppression and fight back. Their were often uprisings in the ghettos and camps, where the Jews would use all they could and fight the Nazi soldiers for their freedom. Today I will be talking about the Auschwitz Birkenau Uprising.

Throughout the summer of 1942, nearly 300,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka death camp. During this summer, a resistance organization known as the Z.O.B. was formed. It was headed by the 23 year old Mordecai Anielewicz, and was comprised primarily of young men. The deportations halted in September, and the Z.O.B. began collecting whatever weapons they could manage to smuggle into the

Their main goals were to organize uprisings, break out of the ghettos, and join partisan units in the fight against the Germans.The Jews knew that uprisings would not stop the Germans and that only a handful of fighters would succeed in escaping to join the partisans. Still, some Jews made the decision to resist. Weapons were smuggled into ghettos. Inhabitants in the ghettos of Vilna, Mir, Lachva , Kremenets, Częstochowa, Nesvizh, Sosnowiec, and Tarnow, among others, resisted with force when the Germans began to deport ghetto populations. In Bialystok, the underground staged an uprising just before the final destruction of the ghetto in September 1943. Most of the ghetto fighters, primarily young men and women, died during the fighting.The Warsaw ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943 was the largest single revolt by Jews. Hundreds of Jews fought the Germans and their auxiliaries in the streets of the ghetto. Thousands of Jews refused to obey German orders to report to an assembly point for deportation. In the end the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground to force the Jews out. Although they knew defeat was certain, Jews in the ghetto fought desperately and