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Opinion

Remembering those who fought back

The JC Essay

April 18, 2013 14:23
‘Warsaw Erev Pesach 1943’. The photograph, from a rare collection taken by a German photographer, is one of several on display at the London Jewish Cultural Centre until April 25
6 min read

The landscape of Holocaust remembrance is punctuated by anniversaries, but few dates are as resonant as April 19, which marked the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Its enduring symbolism is attested to by the fact that it is the national Holocaust Remembrance Day in Poland, the country from which more than half of the victims of the Shoah came. This year, the 70th anniversary, represents one of the last landmark commemorations in which survivors and witnesses will be able to participate.

In Warsaw, memorial events will continue until May 16, the date commonly accepted as the end of the revolt. This in itself shows why the uprising occupies such a central place in both Jewish and Polish narratives of the Holocaust: a group of poorly armed, inexperienced guerrilla fighters resisted German forces for almost a month in what was the first major civilian revolt in occupied Europe. It is thus hardly surprising that it has become the supreme symbol of Jewish resistance.

Despite this, Jewish resistance is often marginalised in accounts of the Shoah. Even some of those who have celebrated the uprising have used it to reproach other European Jews for alleged passivity. During the war itself, many critics - Jewish and non-Jewish - claimed that the victims had allowed themselves, in an oft-used phrase, to be "led like sheep to the slaughter". But such arguments simply do not stand up to serious scrutiny.

It should first be acknowledged just how difficult resistance was - for all communities living under Nazi rule but especially for Jews. Not only were they confronted by an opponent with overwhelming force; the starvation and exhaustion that characterised life in the ghettos limited the ability to resist. Moreover, Jews did not know Nazi intentions in advance. As the historian Yehuda Bauer explains, "the decision to murder [the Jews] was not taken until… 1941. If the Germans did not know, the Jews cannot be expected to have known either." The main aim of most European Jews was therefore to hold out until the expected and longed for Nazi defeat. It is understandable that many people believed active resistance would make the situation worse by provoking reprisals. Even after the killings began, it proved hard to properly absorb their implications. Emmanuel Ringelblum, a Polish-Jewish historian in the Warsaw ghetto, put it thus: "It was difficult for normal, thinking people to accept the idea that on this globe it was possible for a government calling itself European to murder millions of innocent people."