VIDEO EXTRAS

An important form of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust was medical resistance -- courageous acts by doctors and nurses to treat patients, perform research, deal with epidemics, and continue to educate young medical and nursing students. It must be noted that many of the doctors who remained in the Warsaw Ghetto were eminent in their fields and were given the opportunity to escape to the Aryan side but declined and remained with their patients in the Ghetto.

The life of the Warsaw Ghetto was meticulously documented in an effort codenamed “Oyneg Shabbes” or “Sabbath Delight” and led by Emanuel Ringelblum. The goal was to ensure the truth would survive, even if the people did not. The writers who worked on the project placed all kinds of documents and objects, evidence of Jewish resistance as well as German war crimes, in metal boxes and milk cans, and buried them. After World War II, two precious treasure troves were found, but is there a third still under the ground somewhere in Warsaw?

With harsh limitations placed on Jewish worship, spiritual observance was an important form of Jewish resistance. There are multiple examples of this in ghettos and camps throughout Eastern Europe. One has been memorialized in a children’s book written by Tami Lehman-Wilzig. She tells the story of a Bar Mitzvah which took place in Bergen-Belsen and of a promise made by a young boy named Joachim Joseph to his teacher, the elderly Rabbi Simon Dasberg, to keep the story alive.

As a Jewish courier, Vladka Meed was always in danger of being caught and killed by the Germans. But her most dangerous mission is when she is assigned to live outside the ghetto, posing as an Aryan, to procure weapons for the resistance. But getting out was the first challenge. Here’s Vladka’s story...

What happened to the brave resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? Some diedat Mila 18 as a final act of resistance. Others managedto escape through the sewersto fight as partisans in the forests, while a few were tragically left behind.

Hadas reads one of her grandfather’s poems at the historic Lele Theatre in the Vilna Ghetto.

In Vilna, for centuries the center of Jewish religionand culture, known as “the Jerusalem of the North,” stood the Great Synagogue. Jon Seligman of the Israel Antiquities Authority is in charge of the multi-year effort to excavate its treasures.

The Sobibor Uprising took place on October 14, 1943. Under the leadership of a rabbi’s son and a Russian Jewish POW, Jewish prisoners found ways to kill 11 members of the camp’s SS and break through the barbed wire to escape through the camp’s front gate. There, Germanguardsshot at them and the fleeing prisoners risked their lives in the minefields surrounding the camp. Only some 50 survived this onslaught and lived to see the end of the war but where are the remains of the hundreds that fell?

Despite the limits placed on them by the Polish camp bureaucracy, in the summer of 2021, the late Professor Richard Freund and his team of geo-archeologists were able to do some preliminary work to answer that question, as shown in the next two links.

As conditions worsened in the Warsaw Ghetto, Germans began killing children at the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital. Doctors and nurses made the devastating decision to take matters into their own hands to lessen the suffering.

In a public park in Warsaw, the archeologists are looking for the third trove of the Ringelblum Archive, which is rumored to exist but has never been found. In the fall of 2022, they are given permission to dig a small experimental test site. What will they discover?

July 24, 2021. It is Tisha B’Av, when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in biblical times. But 80 years ago, almost to the day, the Germans begin to deport people from the Warsaw Ghetto to the newly built death camp Treblinka, giving special meaning to the observance.

Krystina Budnickais one of a handful of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which began on April 19, 1943. She was 7 years old at the time and recalls what happened to her 5 older brothers.

About 700 young Jewish men and women fought in combat with German soldiers during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But thousands of men, women and children participated in the Uprising, hiding in their bunkers, refusing to surrender. Among them was 7-year-old Krystina Budnickaand her family.

Hadas Kalderon describes the Paper Brigade and the role of her grandfather Avrom Sutzkever in it. Sutzkever came to be known as agreat Yiddish poet and later won the Israel Prize for his literature, the first Yiddish writer to win that prestigious award. The New York Times wrote that Sutzkever was the “greatest poet of the Holocaust.”

When the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated, in 1943 Avrom Sutzkever and his wife Freydke escaped to the forest along with his fellow Yiddish poet and musician Shmerke Kaczerginski to fight as partisans. However, when Sutzkever’s poem Kol Nidrereached the Jewish Anti-Facist Committee in Moscow, members implored the Kremlin to rescue Sutzkever and Freydke. The first rescue plane crashed, and a suitcase was made from its wing for Sutzkever to carry treasured Jewish works saved bythe Paper Brigade to safety, as described by his granddaughter Hadas Kalderon. The next plane landed safely and carried Sutzkever and his wife to Moscow where their daughter was born. A baby son and Sutzkever’s mother had been murdered by the Nazis.

Brave Jewish courier Lonka Korzybrodska, friend of Bela Hazan, dies in Auschwitz.

One of the most poignant questions of the Holocaust is why the Allies did nothing to destroy or damage the horrendous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. One of the answers often given is ignorance; they just didn’t know what was happeningthere. Here, the escape of fourJewish prisoners, in April and May, 1944--authors of what is known as the Auschwitz Protocols--reveal that is a lie. Their efforts saved the lives of untold numbers of Hungarian Jews.

Recognizing Jewish Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust

By Patrick Henry – October 09, 2020

Memorial institutions are finally working to redress an imbalance in the numbers of Jews versus non-Jews hailed for their heroism in defense of victims of the Shoah

Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), the Jewish children’s welfare organization, was founded in Russia in 1912 by a group of young doctors committed to offering sanitary protection and health benefits to poor Jews. The organization moved in 1917 to Berlin where Albert Einstein was its honorary president. In 1933, it moved to Paris, and in 1940, once again to escape the Nazis, it moved to Montpellier in the non-occupied south of France. With its 280 official employees, OSE became the principal Jewish organization concerned with the welfare of foreign Jews in French internment camps. In November 1941, there were more than 28,000 internees in these camps, roughly 5,000 of whom were children under the age of 18. The camps were entirely run and staffed by the French. With help from non-Jewish organizations, such as the Quakers and the Red Cross, OSE social workers fed, clothed, and raised the morale of these detainees, 3,000 of whom would die of malnutrition and disease over the course of the war. As of August 1942, when children were being deported even from the non-occupied zone, the primary goal of OSE became to illegally evacuate the children from the camps and, with the help of their Christian allies, to place them in non-Jewish homes, farms, and institutions, or smuggle them out of the country. To accomplish this work, a 33-year-old engineer named Georges Garel (né Grigori Garfinkel) left his role in the Resistance to form the Garel Network, the first entirely clandestine network for rescuing Jewish children in the still-unoccupied zone. With headquarters in Lyon, over the next 12 months, thanks to about three dozen workers—most of whom were Jewish women employed by the OSE—the Garel Network would hide over 1,600 Jewish children in various parts of France. What happened in France took place in every occupied country. Thousands of Jews, many of them very young, labored individually and in Jewish and non-Jewish organizations to save their endangered brethren. Many could have fled but chose to remain in order to rescue others. With great heroism, they employed subterfuge, forgery of documents, smuggling, concealment, and escape into foreign countries such as Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and Turkey. Together with their non-Jewish companions, these courageous persons rescued between 150,000 and 300,000 persons who might otherwise have perished.

Yet only the non-Jews who did these things have been formally acknowledged as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem. Since 1963, 27,362 non-Jewish rescuers from 51 different countries have been recognized. They remain beacons of hope 75 years later. Their Jewish counterparts, who often worked alongside them in rescue efforts, deserve the same public recognition. Doing so would give significant emphasis to rescue as a legitimate and successful form of resistance that would serve to discredit further the continuing myth that Jews went to the slaughter like sheep. It would also underscore the basic moral teaching that “righteousness” should be conferred on people for having done something, not for being or not being a member of a specific religion. One OSE fieldworker named Madeleine Dreyfus brought Jewish children to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Born Madeleine Kahn in 1909, the future Madeleine Dreyfus received her baccalaureate degree in Paris in 1927. She married Raymond Dreyfus in March 1933 on the day Hitler came to power. Her sons, Michel and Jacques, were born in 1934 and 1937, respectively, during the period when she began studying psychology intensely with Sophie Lazarfeld, a student and disciple of Alfred Adler. In October 1941, when her husband lost his job in Paris because of the recently invoked anti-Semitic laws, the family passed into the unoccupied zone and settled in Lyon. Madeleine began working for OSE as a psychologist in late 1941, giving educational and psychological consultations to troubled Parisian students whose families had taken refuge in Lyon. As of August 1942, under the constant menace of the enthusiastically collaborationist Vichy police force, and, especially after November 1942, when the Germans officially occupied all of France, Madeleine assumed responsibility for the Lyon/Le Chambon-sur-Lignon area link in the Garel Network and sought places of refuge in this mostly Protestant countryside for Jewish children.

Several times a month, accompanied by a small group of children (aged anywhere from 18 months to 16 years), Madeleine would take the train from Lyon to Saint-Etienne, where she would transfer to the local steam engine to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Sometimes these children had been given to her by their parents. Just as often, they had managed to escape or hide at the time of their parents’ arrest and were then rescued by the network. These trips to the countryside were extremely dangerous ventures in which Madeleine continuously risked her life. Although in almost all cases the children had false Aryan identity papers, Madeleine, who carried the most readily identifiable Jewish last name in France, did not. Madeline Dreyfus had to take control of these mostly foreign children to get them through police inspections in the train stations and on the trains. She had to keep them from speaking Polish, German, or Yiddish, and make sure that they called their friends by their French names. From September or October 1942 to November 1943, Madeleine made these trips, finding shelter for well over one hundred Jewish children. She would return often to visit the children she had placed, to bring them clothing, medicine, food tickets, and whenever possible, letters from their parents—who, for safety reasons, never knew where their children were hidden. As of November 1942, Madeleine was already pregnant with her third child, Annette. Being pregnant may have slowed her down, but it didn’t stop her. Annette was born in Lyon on Aug. 29, 1943. “Very shortly thereafter,” writes Raymond, “my wife resumed her trips back and forth between Lyon and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.” Only a few weeks later, after his sister-in-law and two of her children were arrested and deported, Raymond begged Madeleine to stop her illegal work, “now that she was responsible for three small children, two months, six, and nine years of age, all without false papers.” Madeleine asked Raymond to wait a bit longer, since there was no one to replace her. On Nov. 23, Madeleine received a phone call from the father of a child she had hidden at the School for Deaf-Mutes at Villeurbanne, who was distraught because he had heard there was going to be a Gestapo raid at the institute. Madeleine called there and the woman on the other end of the line encouraged her to come to the school right away. It was impossible for Madeleine to know that her respondent was being held at gunpoint and was being instructed to answer in that manner by her Gestapo captors. Despite walking into a trap, Madeline managed to immediately warn both her family and the OSE. She was sent to Fort Monluc in Lyon where she spent over two months in the Jewish women’s dormitory, from whose window she witnessed the execution of many resisters, Jews and Christians alike. At the end of January 1944, she was transferred to Drancy. In May, she was deported to Bergen-Belsen in northwest Germany, where about 40,000 inmates would die of starvation and disease. Even in Bergen-Belsen where she would spend 11 months, Madeleine was concerned with the well-being of others. She constantly tried to raise the morale of her companions and organized daily delousing sessions to help stem the typhus in the camp. She and her companions received between 600 and 700 calories a day. Survival was contingent, she reported later, upon selective camaraderie. Small groups of three or four women would stay together and help one another maintain morale and reestablish their humanity: sharing food, assuming social roles, making an effort to speak about art and literature, and reassuring one another that they were still human beings. After 18 months of incarceration in prison and Nazi concentration camps, Madeleine was liberated and repatriated on May 18, 1945. She continued her practice as an Adlerian psychologist and was particularly gifted with children, teaching, and family situations, until her death in 1987.

Madeleine Dreyfus was only one of dozens of Jewish OSE workers who risked their lives to save other Jews in France. In Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, André Chouraqui, the future assistant mayor of Jerusalem, immediately replaced Madeleine at OSE in Lyon and in the Garel Network. Jews not affiliated with OSE, such as Oskar Rosowsky, risked their lives by fabricating false papers for Jews hiding in the area. Nor were they alone during the occupation years. Jews were involved in the rescue of other Jews all over France. Moussa Abadi and his partner, Odette Rosenstock, working with the bishop of Nice, Paul Rémond (who would later deservedly be named “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem), managed to save 527 Jewish children; Odette, like Madeleine, survived Bergen-Belsen. On the Swiss border, three Jewish groups—OSE, EIF (Eclaireurs israélites de France, or French Jewish Scouts), and MJS (Mouvement de la jeunesse sioniste, or Youth Zionist Movement)—worked together to smuggle hundreds of Jewish children into Switzerland.Let us remember in particular two young Jewish heroines who gave their lives in these endeavors: Mila Racine, who was caught smuggling Jewish children into Switzerland in October 1943, was deported to Mauthausen, and died during an Allied bombing mission at the age of 23. She was replaced by Marianne Cohn, who was arrested for smuggling Jewish children across the border in May 1944, then beaten, tortured, and murdered by the Gestapo in July 1944. She was 21 years old when she died. During the occupation of France, OSE saved the lives of roughly 6,000 Jewish children in France; yet 32 OSE staff members lost their lives and 90 OSE children did not survive. Among the 76,000 Jews deported from France were 11,600 children whom the Nazis never asked for. Prudence dictated that Christians and Jews lie low, out of risk’s path. Nor was there any shortage of active collaborators with the Nazi edicts from the highest levels of French government and society to the lowest. All those who chose to rise up against this evil deserve recognition. To celebrate Jews and non-Jews, who risked their lives together to rescue persecuted people, would offer a superb example of human solidarity in a world of rapidly increasing anti-Semitism and group hatreds. Finally, to insist on the differences between Christian and Jewish rescuers violates the spirit of the overwhelming majority of Jews and Christians alike who did not think in terms of religious affiliations or differences when they put their own lives at risk to save others. In Lisa Gossel’s award-winning documentary The Children of Chabannes, Félix Chevrier, the gentile leader of a rescue mission that sheltered 400 Jewish children, is described as having been anguished throughout the entire rescue period “because he didn’t want to save the children because they were Jewish. He wanted to save them because they were children.” The great Jewish humanitarian, pediatrician, teacher, and radio personality Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage in Warsaw and later inside the Warsaw Ghetto did his work in a similar spirit. When asked what he would do after the war were he to survive, he responded: “Take care of German orphans.” We defile the memory of these rescuers when we confine them to categories that their magnanimous souls obviously transcended. In the absence of a program at Yad Vashem that recognizes “Jewish Holocaust Rescuers,” a group of Holocaust survivors from Holland, France, Germany, and other countries, who were themselves saved by the efforts of Jews, came together in 2000 with a number of Jewish rescuers and representatives of international Jewish organizations and founded the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust (JRJ). Focusing on the ideas of “self-rescue” and “rescue as resistance,” this group has been engaged in numerous initiatives aimed at bringing this neglected chapter of Holocaust history to public attention. The goals of the JRJ are to collect testimonies, set up a database for research, and incorporate their findings into the curriculum of Holocaust studies in Israel and throughout the world.

“Righteousness’ should be conferred on people for having done something, not for being or not being a member of a specific religion.”

Haim Roet, the founder and chair of the JRJ, was 11 years old in 1943 when he was rescued and hidden in the village of Nieuwlande, one of only two “places,” along with Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, to be declared “righteous” by Yad Vashem. Three rescuers led this operation, which saved 200 children: Johannes Post, Arnold Douwes, and Max “Nico” Leons. Jan Post was caught by the Germans and executed; Arnold Douwes lived into old age. Max Leons died in 2019 at the age of 97. Post and Douwes were both named “Righteous Among the Nations.” In 2011, the Jewish Rescuers Citation was created. It is a joint project of the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust (JRJ) and the B’nai B’rith World Center-Jerusalem. So many people participated in the rescue mission in Nieuwlande that a monument was constructed at Yad Vashem to honor the entire village. It contains more than 100 names of rescuers chiseled in stone. Max “Nico” Leon’s name is not on the stone for the same reason he was never cited by Yad Vashem as a rescuer of Jews: He was Jewish. In Amsterdam on Nov. 24, 2011, at his surprise 90th birthday party, Roet presented Leon with the Jewish Rescuers Citation, a well-deserved honor intended to redress what increasingly appears, with the benefit of hindsight, to be a historical and moral injustice that only perpetuates the kinds of divisions between human beings that rescuers of all faiths heroically refused to recognize.

Article from: Recognizing Jewish Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust - Tablet. used with permission.

HOW MEDICINE BECAME RESISTANCE

By: Paula S. Apsell, Director, Writer, and Executive Producer
November 21, 2023

More information on medical resistance can be found in Miriam Offer's book White Coats in the Ghetto: Jewish Medicine in Poland during the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, 2020.

Blog by Mark Werner

On the brave acts of his father, Harold Werner

I was very happy to see this movie because it serves to dispel the myth of Jewish passivity during the

Holocaust. There are many stories about Jewish resistance, not all of which could be mentioned in this

movie.

One of the most prominent stories of large-scale and successful Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is

chronicled in my father Harold Werner’s book “Fighting Back: A Memoir of Jewish Resistance in World War

II”. Harold Werner’s Jewish fighting unit operated in the forests of eastern Poland. It had two goals: (1) to

save as many Jews as possible; and (2) to do as much damage as possible to the German military. They

achieved both goals.

Regarding the first goal, the unit conducted sweeps through the forest to save many Jews who were hiding in

those woods. For example, one-third of all of the Jews who survived the mass revolt at the Sobibor death

camp were saved by my father’s unit as they combed through the forest for survivors. They also secretly

extracted many Jews from the ghettos set up by the Germans in the towns in their area.

Regarding the second goal, one-by-one my father’s unit attacked and wiped out all of the German garrisons

in the villages and towns in their area of operations. By the time the Russian army swept through their area,

this Jewish fighting unit had already liberated it of occupying German soldiers. And my father’s unit

destroyed 25 German troop trains headed for the Russian front, killing all of their occupants. My father’s unit

occasionally combined with Russian partisan units in their area to fight pitched battles against German

forces, forcing the latter to retreat. My father’s unit was heavily armed and so was able to destroy German

tanks and shoot down attacking German planes. Overall, my father’s unit killed in excess of 12,000 German

soldiers, causing significant damage to the German military machine.

By the time the Russians swept through their area, my father’s unit consisted of 400 fighters (both men and

women) protecting a group of another 400 non-combatant Jewish children and elderly.

After my father’s book was published in English in 1992, Yad Vashem issued a Hebrew edition of it in order to

dispel among the Israeli populace the myth of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust. The book has also been

published in German and Dutch.

In 2005, to commemorate the 60 th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, Israel chose to issue a postage

stamp to highlight the contribution to that defeat made by Jewish partisans in eastern Europe. Israel chose

the cover of my father’s book as the stamp.

In 2006, shortly before his fatal stroke, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon commissioned a souvenir

leaflet to be given to all then-surviving members of the Jewish partisans. He included in this leaflet a copy of

this stamp.

DIRECTOR KIRK WOLFINGER ON THE MAKING OF RESISTANCE – THEY FOUGHT BACK

Because the Holocaust was an epic event in human history, spanning several countries, multiple cultures and

nearly incalculable number of people, making a film about the Resistance movement that grew out of these

tragic events, would also need to be epic in scale. While a small core team, led by Paula S. Apsell, conceived

and strategized the filmmaking, the effort would quickly grow to more than 24 collaborators in all phases of

filmmaking from production planning, writing, filming, editing and post-production elements of musical

composition, color correction and sound mixing.

We began filming in the Spring of 2021 and in the in middle of the Covid pandemic. Using as much caution as

possible we attacked the project aggressively deploying our crew to 3 countries across eastern Europe –

Latvia, Poland, Lithuania as well as Israel and the U.S. -- landing in 59 locations interviewing and filming

scenes with over 60 witnesses, survivors, authors and scholars. Over 47 production days, some 150,000 air

miles for the many crew members and talent, and 3500 miles of cross-country driving, we shot 172 hours of

original footage. When you add 155 hours of accumulated archival footage it is no wonder it took 170 days of

editing to end up with this 97-minutes of finished film.

I’ve laid the nuts and bolts of the process out, just as the film attempts to lay out and decipher for the

audience how much went on under the surface of this movement known as the Resistance. What goes on

behind the scenes of making a film is largely unseen and unrecognized by the casual viewer. Just as

Resistance took many forms, much unseen and unrecognized even to many historians, I feel the analogy is

appropriate.

As for the artistry and success of that process, it’s not for me to articulate how we did what we did or if we

were successful. That is for you, the viewer, to judge.

But this effort, whatever it took, grew from one man’s relentless passion to see this story told. Ironically,

Richard Freund would not live to see the final version of the film. Yet, his spirit pervades every frame,

zichrono livrakha.

HOW DID THE ‘SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER’ MYTH EVOLVE?

By: Paula S. Apsell, Director, Writer, and Executive Producer
September 25, 2023

The “sheep to the slaughter” allusion can be traced back to the Bible where it is used to praise martyrs who die to sanctify the name of the Almighty. But for reasons both political and historical, it has been turned into a pejorative in describing the behavior of European Jews facing Nazi threats of extinction.

Historian Patrick Henry in his masterful volume Jewish Resistance against the Nazis examines this question, emphasizing that while the myth of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust has been discredited by scholars, it continues in popular culture. There are many reasons for this. Early Holocaust scholarship, including that by the eminent historian Raul Hilberg as well as other Jewish intellectuals, was based largely on the extensive German documentation of their war crimes against the Jews. Allergic to any mention of Jewish resistance, the Germans excluded any descriptions of resistance activities, including death camp uprisings, with which they were intimately familiar, leading people to the erroneous belief that if resistance were not included in German documents, it must not have happened.

Patrick Henry tells us that it is important to understand the role that Nazis played in the dissemination of the myth that Jews did nothing to help themselves. “In the twisted Nazi psyche,” he says, “this blaming of the victim somehow exculpates the killers from the crimes.” It also justifies the bystanders. After all, why would you risk your life to help people who did nothing to help themselves? Even in Israel, this myth was adopted by Zionists wanting to draw a distinction between weak and passive European Jews and hale and hardy Israeli settlers working the land with their hands. After World War II, in Israel, those Jews who survived the Holocaust were often regarded with suspicion, as if they had been complicit with the Germans or somehow harmed other Jews in order to save their own lives. Survivors were taunted with the name “soaps,” referring to the myth that Nazis had manufactured soap out human bodies. It’s important to say that this situation has since changed in Israel where survivors are now honored and their brave acts of resistance more widely recognized.

Today, in the United States, Europe and Israel itself, perhaps as a holdover of these historic insults and for other reasons, the idea still persists that “Jews went to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter.” Even though scholars long ago discredited it and volumes have been written about it, somehow the reality of Jewish resistance has not penetrated popular culture. Hopefully, the feature documentary Resistance – They Fought Back will help to convince people of the truth.

RECOGNIZING JEWISH HEROS FROM THE HOLOCAUST

By: Alan Schneider, Director B’nai B’rith World Center Jerusalem
September 25, 2023

The Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust (“the Committee”) was established in Israel in 2000 at the initiative of the late Haim Roet (1932-2023), a Dutch Jew who survived the Holocaust as a child, hidden from the Nazis at great risk by both Christians and Jews. Founding committee members included rescuers, survivors, researchers, and myself. The Committee’s aim is to raise public awareness in Israel and around the world to the fact that many Jews endangered themselves to rescue fellow Jews during the Holocaust. The Committee presents these courageous acts as a source of Jewish national pride and as an example of the highest humanist conduct.

Holocaust historiography has tended to present Jews only as victims. This trend began to change some two decades ago when studies began to examine the daily lives of Jews during the Holocaust and the measures they took to survive in the fast deteriorating reality they faced.

From its early days the State of Israel showed appreciation for Jews who engaged in active combat against the Nazis and extended the title of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ to members of other religions who endangered their lives to rescue Jews. Jews who risked their own lives to rescue others received little attention in academic research and no formal recognition.

In fact, while the Germans and their collaborators attempted to methodically annihilate European Jewry, many Jews resisted the grim fate that awaited them. Half a million fought in the Allied armies and in the ranks of the partisans, revolted in the ghettos and led uprisings in extermination camps.

Another form of active resistance by Jews was the rescue of fellow Jews while exposing themselves to great danger. Renowned Holocaust historians have noted: that Jewish self-rescue is “an additional aspect of the study of the Jewish response during the Holocaust which is not sufficiently well-known”, that “Jews played an active and significant role throughout occupied Europe in the rescue of other Jews” and that “Non-Jews were not the only ones who saved Jews; Jews also saved Jews, and non-Jews were sometimes saved by Jews.” The ability of Jews to act was much more restricted than that of non-Jews, who were not persecuted by the Nazis, and reflects the highest form of Jewish and human solidarity. These acts of rescue are a supreme expression of the ancient Jewish principles “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor” and “All Jews are responsible for one another.” These activities do not reflect a collection of coincidental events but, in many cases, a phenomenon of methodical, carefully planned rescue operations that took place across Europe and North Africa, carried out both by individuals and groups. Rescue operations were carried out from the rise of the Nazis to power until after the end of WWII. Despite the difficult conditions which varied from place to place and evolved as the war progressed, many who could have fled chose to exhibit exemplary solidarity and remain behind to rescue others; some paid for it with their lives. With great heroism, Jews in Germany, and every country in occupied Europe exploited loopholes in Nazi bureaucracy and employed subterfuge, document replication, smuggling, concealment, and other methods to help Jews survive the Holocaust or assist them in escaping to safe haven. In doing so they foiled the Nazi goal of total annihilation of the Jews. Since many rescue operations were not documented, there is no clear estimate of the scope of this phenomenon, and it is likely that records of many cases have been lost forever. Many Jewish rescuers were awarded national decorations by foreign countries while the State of Israel and its institutions have made no similar gesture event to this day.

The Committee strives to close the gap of eighty years during which these heroes were left largely unknown and unrecognized by the Jewish people. To achieve this, it promotes public activities in Israel and abroad, cooperating where possible with governmental bodies, academia, educational institutions, Jewish communities and organizations for Holocaust commemoration. These include: an annual ceremony held by the B’nai B’rith World Center and the Jewish National Fund on Yom Hashoah v’Hagvura (Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day) at the B’nai B’rith Martyrs Forest dedicated since 2002 to the legacy of Jewish rescuers; the Jews Saving Jews Forum (established in 2018) at Bar-Ilan University's Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research; and The Jewish Rescuers Citation (established in 2011 with the B'nai B'rith World Center) which has been presented to 624 Jewish rescuers--in person or posthumously--who operated across Europe and North Africa.

Since 2020, the Committee has been chaired by Aryeh Barnea, a second generation educator and Holocaust researcher, who initiated, among other things, the soon-to-open Jewish Rescuers Center, located at the Wilfrid Israel Museum in HaZore’a, Israel.

For further reading: Jewish Rescuers Citation - B'nai B'rith International (bnaibrith.org)

FROM LITERATURE TO HISTORY

By: Professor Patrick Henry, Whitman College, Emeritus
October 24, 2022 | Walla Walla, WA

It was probably in the spring of 1988 when I first contacted Philip Hallie. I was beginning to think about editing a collection of essays on Montaigne. Hallie was one of my favorite commentators on Montaigne’s Essays and I wanted him to write an essay for the volume I was planning. He had published The Scar of Montaigne (Wesleyan University Press, 1966), an insightful and important study of the essayist’s irresolution, of his skepticism, and of the importance of experience in the Essays. More crucial still, for me, were Hallie’s groundbreaking studies of Montaigne’s ethics that depicted an ethical revolution that moved ethics away from concentration on the self in “egocentric” ethics toward the value of the deed itself and its consequences.

Hallie was much more than cordial on the phone. He seemed flattered to have been asked and genuinely happy to learn that someone he didn’t know three thousand miles away was interested not only in his work but much more importantly in the ethics of the Essays. Regarding the article for my collection, however, Hallie was not interested. Montaigne clearly remained his favorite philosopher, he said, but he had moved on to other things.

“What other things?” I asked, not wanting to end the conversation abruptly simply because he had turned me down. He said that he had published a book a decade earlier, entitled Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and How Goodness Happened There (Harper & Row, 1979), and had become tremendously interested in the rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust. He suggested that if I read the book and was interested in the ethical questions it raised, I should call Bill Moyers and ask him for a copy of the 1987 PBS video, Facing Evil, in which Hallie appears and reflects upon the village eight years after publishing his study about the importance of what happened there.

I read Hallie’s book, watched the PBS video and, while I continued to teach my courses on French Literature of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, began spending time each semester looking into the phenomenon of rescue in France during the Holocaust in the same area that Hallie had studied.

Although I would never meet Philip Hallie, we talked often on the phone from 1988 until his death in 1994. His enthusiasm was as inextinguishable as it was contagious. Ethical principles were vital to him; he wore his on his sleeve. I invited him to speak at Whitman College, but he fell ill just before this engagement and was unable to make the trip. Although he never set foot on our campus, Hallie did make it to Whitman College: every graduating senior for one two-year period read Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed in our Senior Colloquium.

Just about twenty years after that first phone call to Hallie, I published my own book on the same area Hallie had studied, We Only Know Men. The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (Catholic University Press of America, 2007). What struck me more than anything else in my research was to discover so many Jewish people involved in the rescue process in that area: Madeleine Dreyfus brought roughly one hundred Jewish children to the area to be hidden in homes and farms. After she was arrested and deported, she was replaced in the Garel Network by a Jewish man, André Chouraqui. Oscar Rosowsky, a Polish Jew in hiding, made 5,000 false papers that were distributed to Jewish people hiding in the area or just passing through and Pierre Fayol, a French Jew, was the head of the French Resistance in the area.

I then investigated every area where large numbers of Jews were rescued in France: Marseille, Chabannes, Nice, and on the Swiss and Spanish borders. Everywhere Jews were part of the rescue of other Jews.

Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Queens in New York City, we had always been told that “the Jews went to the slaughter like sheep.” I continued to do research on the different ways Jewish people resisted the Nazis: flight, rescue, armed conflict in ghettoes, forests, and camps, for example. I decided to put a book of essays together written by specialists working in Holocaust research in specific countries. This five-year research project resulted in the publication of a huge 600-page collection of essays, Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis (Catholic University Press, 2014). Written by two dozen scholars from Israel, Europe, Canada, and the United States, the essays examine the different violent and nonviolent ways Jews resisted the Nazis in every occupied country and in the ghettos and camps.

Over time, this work became more and more personal for me. I had the impression that I was working my way back home to my neighborhood in Flushing, to my friends I grew up with: the Golds, the Solomons, the Schwartzes, the Schweibels, the Ganzes, the Engelbarts, the Friedmans, and especially my next-door neighbor, Irena Rutenberg, who was a Holocaust survivor from Warsaw (see my tribute to her here). I wish we could all get together now and talk about growing up together in the 1940s and 50s when, even as people sometimes appeared in the street with Auschwitz tattoos, the Holocaust was the elephant in the neighborhood.

THE STORY BEHIND ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE

By: Lisa Goodfellow
Archival Producer, RESISTANCE — THEY FOUGHT BACK
March 27, 2024

Long before I entered the world of documentary filmmaking the seeds for my role as the archival producer for Resistance – They Fought Back had been planted. It was 1993, I along with my mother and 3-month-old son Max were visiting the home of Eva K., a friend my mother met through work. After visiting for a while, I asked if there was a quiet place that I could lay Max down for a nap. Eva led me to her bedroom and as I quieted my son on her bed she pointed to the photos on her nightstand and shared that these images were her family. She explained that when it became clear that life in Poland was unsafe for Jewish people, her parents scraped together enough money to send one person to Holland, a place they assumed she would be safe until they could reunite. She took these photos as she said goodbye at the boat dock. Eva survived the Holocaust, her family did not. As I laid with the beautiful new life next to me, I stared at the photos that met Eva as she started and ended each day. Eva's pain and the power of those images stayed with me, highlighting the profound impact a photograph can have in preserving memories and stories.

The sources for the archival footage we used in Resistance – They Fought Back vary. You will see photographs shared by family members, photos and footage safely held in museums as well as footage taken by the Nazis. While the footage captured by the Nazis was intended as propaganda to dehumanize the Jewish population, we repurpose them to reveal the brutality of the Nazi regime and to showcase acts of resistance within the community.

We recognize that behind every photograph of an individual whose life was tragically cut short lies a story of a person with hopes and dreams, a loving family, and aspirations for a future that would never take place The decision to include images of those who were murdered was not made lightly. We hope that by acknowledging them, even though we may never know their names, we are doing our part to ensure that their stories are not forgotten. They resisted; and we must resist the urge to not look away, not forget.

Eva passed away a few years after our encounter, and the fate of her family photos remains unknown. I imagine they may reside in the archives of a historical society, waiting to be discovered by future generations. My hope is that those who view these images will see beyond victimhood to recognize the loving, resilient individuals they depict, deserving of our admiration and respect.