MMW Podcast

The exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library on Jewish resistance to the Holocaust was insightful. It highlighted the often overlooked Jewish resistance and uprisings in the ghettos. The exhibition lacked some detail and didn't mention the collaborators who assisted in the killings. It showcased both violent and non-violent forms of resistance, including theaters and libraries in the ghettos. The exhibition also touched on the Partisans, a group of armed resistance fighters, and their efforts to sabotage the Nazis. It mentioned the importance of humanizing the Jews and showed pictures of those who resisted. The exhibition highlighted the harsh conditions in the ghettos, the demand for resistance, and the uprisings in Bialystok and Warsaw. Overall, it provided valuable insights into Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. This exhibition that the Wiener Holocaust Library put on about Jewish resistance to the Holocaust was very interesting and insightful. I did A-level history and learnt about the Holocaust and resistance, for example, the Red Orchestra, White Rose, but never specifically Jewish resistance. So I found this very interesting, like Tosia Altman, and also the uprisings in the ghettos. Because I think, especially when learning about the Holocaust, it sort of ignored the Jewish resistance and the Jews get rounded up and killed and they did nothing about it and they were like lambs going to slaughter. But by reading and understanding and doing a bit more of my own research about Jewish resistance, I found that wasn't the case. Lots of Jews stood up to the horrific things that the Nazis and others did to them during the Holocaust. This exhibition was very insightful. However, I think it's perfect for someone who's interested in the Holocaust but doesn't know much about the Jewish resistance. If they wanted a lot of detail, I don't think this is a good arm because it did lack detail in some places. As well, you need to have a base understanding of Final Solution, why the Nazis were doing it, because they never said why the Nazis were targeting the Jews. As well as age, over probably the age of 14, I would recommend to be reading this because it is very upsetting and you need to be able to fully understand it and respect it. The exhibition starts with Operation Barbarossa, talking about how when Germany invaded Russia, more Jews came under their control when they invaded Russia. However, this did lack a little bit of detail. The reason Hitler wanted to invade Eastern Europe was to expand his empire. He wanted Lebensraum, which is living space, and he wanted specific people in his Lebensraum to achieve Volkermanschau. He didn't think communists, Jews, gypsies, undesirables, alcoholics fitted in, which led to the Final Solution, because they wanted to systematically kill the Jews and other people they thought were subhuman and didn't belong in their German empire. There were huge genocidal attacks in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. However, it didn't show the exact numbers that were killed, which I think would give a little bit more information and a better understanding of the extent of the massacre. The Eisengruppen went behind the front lines and they just killed them. 33,771 Jews were massacred over two days in September 1941 outside Kiev, which just shows the extent of the killings, and 2% of the Jews from Belarus and Ukraine survived the Holocaust. It didn't say this in the exhibition, but Eastern European Jews were treated so much worse than Polish and German Jews. None of the Jews were treated humanely, but Eastern European Jews had a lower chance of survival. However, despite the Nazis achieving an efficient and effective way of mass murdering the Jews, many Jews were not deterred by this and they fought the scene through the amount of resistance. Resistance varied and I think the exhibition did this very well. They showed the violent resistance and non-violent and even simple things like having a library in a ghetto is a form of resistance. The exhibition started by talking about the Partisans, which were an armed group of resistance fighters and they were based in dense forests, which shows how much the Nazis had a stronghold of cities and towns and that the Gestapo was everywhere and the Gestapo infiltrated a lot of resistance groups. So a lot of them were based in dense forests where the Nazis didn't really understand the terrain. There's lots of subgroups of the Partisans and a lot of them were very violent. For example, a large group hid in Vilna and killed 3,000 German soldiers and they were able to deter a train. They were angry. The Partisans understood that they couldn't directly fight the Nazis because they did not have the amount of soldiers, they didn't have the weapons, they didn't have the strength, but attacking them in small groups and they used guerrilla attacks, they sabotaged machines. This would lower the German morale. So as I was saying, there's lots of subgroups of Partisans and the front page showed the Avengers, which were a group of Partisans, and I think it was very good to see a picture of them because I feel like when you're talking about the Holocaust, the Jews don't really seem like humans. And seeing photos throughout this exhibition and talking about these heroic people that helped the resistance humanise this and makes the readers realise, you know, they were ordinary humans and they were treated so disgustingly just based on their religion. And they fought back. The Avengers, a lot of them escaped from ghettos like the Vilnius Ghetto in Lithuania. They were devoted to resisting the Nazis. These guerrilla attacks, as I was saying, sabotaged missions. Lots of the Partisans were linked together to help each other with weapons, with networks, with information. The Avengers were affiliated with the Soviet Partisan movement and one of their leaders, Kovner, founded an underground network to help the Jews escape from Eastern Europe. As the Nazis were getting closer and closer into Stalingrad in Russia, as the Nazis were getting closer to Stalingrad, so many more Jews were under Nazi control. 2.4 million Jews lived in Ukraine. One of the limitations, I think, of this exhibition was they said the Nazis and the Eisengruppen and collaborators mass-murdered Eastern European Jews, but they never said who the collaborators were. So I do my own research and in areas like Lithuania and Western Ukraine, local nationalist groups assisted with or carried out the shootings of Jewish people. This is because there was widespread anti-Semitism. People tend to think that anti-Semitism was only in Germany with the Nazis, but unfortunately it was a global thing. It was more extreme in areas like Germany, but unfortunately it was something that was across the world. Widespread anti-Semitism in the areas, which was even heightened by propaganda, which caused the people to blame Jewish communities for the Soviet occupation, which Germany so-called liberated them from, so the Ukrainian and local nationalists helped the Nazis kill the Jews. Nearly 200,000 Jews in Lithuania were killed by mobile killing squads by the end of 1941. And I think that's very useful information, which the exhibition missed out. But the exhibition also did something very well. They talked a lot about armed resistance, but they also mentioned about non-armed resistance, like legal schools, theatres, soup kitchens. In the Vilna ghetto, there was a theatre, which was established by the Judenstrat, which was Jewish councils, and they performed 111 times, with a music school as well as an orchestra being set up. These things were prohibited by the Nazis, so they were a form of resistance. And in the ghettos then, all they wanted to do was simple things like watch the theatre production, listen to music, learn. Libraries were also set up, hospitals. Jews just wanted human things that we now take for granted, and they were squashed in these awful ghettos. For example, the Lodz ghetto was the second largest ghetto behind Warsaw, with 210,000 Jews in 1940. So it was a huge industrial centre to help the war effort. They were working so hard, they were hardly eating, disease was rife and it was spread. So there was a lot of anger, there was demand for resistance, to fight back. And especially in Lodz ghetto, there wasn't just violent resistance, there was also political, spiritual and cultural resistance against the Nazis. And the exhibition did well in showing a photo of the musical event in Lodz, which, despite the life the Nazis had created for them, which is so awful, they just wanted a night to have fun and listen to music. The Minsk ghetto also had a large inhabitants number with 100,000 Jews. Because there were so many Jews there, there was lots of resistance. There was a communist underground operation which was united outside the ghetto to help smuggle Jews out and plan sabotage missions. Members of the Judenstrat, which was the Jewish council, sorry for my pronunciation, often forged death certificates of the Jews that had escaped. And up to 10,000 Jews successfully escaped from Minsk ghetto, which is a large number, considering the Nazis had such a stronghold and unfortunately very efficient way of keeping the Jews in the ghettos, very organised and it was very hard to escape. And it was so risky, but often Jews felt that they had no choice but to escape. The Jews being crammed in these ghettos also meant there was lots of uprisings. And the two major uprisings was the Bialystok ghetto, I'm sorry for my pronunciation, and the Warsaw ghetto. So the Bialystok was on the 16th of August 1943 in Poland and it was triggered by large-scale deportation. The exhibition didn't declare the numbers and I think that if the readers really understood the amount of Jews that were leaving this ghetto, which caused the uprising, I think they would have a better understanding. So I did my own research. 10,000 Jews were deported from Bialystok to Treblinka in February 1943, which in a month, 10,000 just leaving, which is a huge number. Although the uprising was soon defeated and those who took part tried to escape, but if the Nazis did find them, they were killed or they did commit suicide, which shows the power and fear the Nazis had. So the uprising that wasn't very successful, but it shows that there was an appetite for resistance. The Warsaw ghetto was arguably the most successful and largest ghetto uprising in the Holocaust. It happened from April to May 1943, again in response to the deportations of inhabitants. They stole weapons and initially the SS forces retreated and it took them over a month in resistance, which was a lot longer than any other ghetto resistance. The Jews were hiding in bunkers and it was successful for a month, but as the Nazis were a lot stronger, they had more weapons and more men, it soon collapsed and those who took part were either killed, committed suicide or deported to death camps. A key person that was involved in this uprising was Tosia Altman and she was a member of the socialist Zionist youth movement and she was very key in organising the Warsaw ghetto uprising. She took huge risks by working as a courier on false papers in and out of various ghettos, which is very risky because she could either be killed, be trapped in a ghetto or sent to a death camp. So it just shows that no matter the risk, people were willing to fight, willing to resist the Nazis' regime. The death camps, hardly anyone survived them. The survival rate, people who escaped, hardly any of them survived the war. In autumn 1941, Chelmno and Belzec were adapted to become death camps and in 1942, Sobier and Treblinka were built. 2.5 million Jews were deported across Europe to death camps. They had no time to respond or resist before they got put into these death chambers they were lied to, saying they were having a shower and they had no chance to resist. On 14 October 1943, 365 prisoners in the Sobier camp were bailed, but only 47 survived the war, with lots being captured and killed. October 1943, 750,000 people were killed in Treblinka, which is 44,717 a month, which is just horrific numbers and it puts into perspective the scale of the mass killings at the death camps. Only 70 prisoners from Treblinka survived the war. Those who survived the war were likely to work in the death camps, like Werber. She worked as a Sonderkommando, so she worked in gas chambers and the crematoria in Auschwitz, but she collected evidence of the Nazis' atrocities in the camp and April 1944 she managed to escape. She was one of 144 prisoners to be able to successfully escape Auschwitz. She escaped to Slovakia and published a report about the conditions in Auschwitz, including the layout of the gas chambers, the number of Jews being held in Auschwitz and transportation. This report was crucial to tell the Allies and other countries the horrific things that were happening to the Jews and the report increased pressure on the Hungarian head of state, who eventually decided to halt deportations to Auschwitz. This led to 250,000 Jews living in Hungary surviving the war, partly due to the report. Again, it shows the impact of key individuals like Werber. Maxime Van Praag was also a very key individual. He was a Belgian lawyer of Jewish origin. He joined the underground intelligence network Zero and became its head in 1943. Zero passed information to Britain and it was one of 37 underground intelligence networks that operated in Belgium. Lots of Jews immigrated to Belgium with 94% of the 60,000 Jewish population were immigrants coming from the Russian Empire or Poland. Van Praag was captured in 1944 and was tortured. He was sent to concentration camps and tried to escape because on his prison card it read, You should probably tell him my German is awful, which means he tried to escape. Unfortunately, he died in German captivity on the 7th of April 1945. There were many committees and resistance groups in Belgium, including the Committee to Defence Jewish, which organised efforts to hide Jewish children, which led to 2,400 children being saved. And the cooperation between resistance groups, they all cooperated and were interlinked to increase the effectiveness of Jewish resistance in Belgium. Another key individual, Hans Seigelboom, was a Polish-Jewish politician and refugee living in London. He wrote Stop Them Now about Nazi's atrocities in September 1942. Unfortunately, I think the exhibition, it didn't go into a lot of detail about him. I found him very interesting, so I did my own research. He was a member of the Bund, which is the most important Jewish socialist labour organisation, and secretary to the Central Council of the Jewish Trade Union. So he was very openly Jewish and proud to be a key individual. When World War II broke out, he was captured in Warsaw, released and fled to Belgium in December 1939. Soon he went to France and then New York. May 1942, he released a report about the murder of Polish Jews, and it was one of the first sources documenting the genocide of the Jews, containing lists of towns and villages where roundups occurred, and it was called the Bund Report. This was extremely useful for the Allies and other organisations to fully grasp the extent of the genocide. 2nd June 1942, he used a broadcast by BBC to state that Jewish Poles were being singled out and killed on a mass scale. 11th May 1943, he killed himself because he found out his wife and son had been killed following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He wrote a suicide note, which read, although the Nazis were responsible for the mass murder of the Jews, all of humanity was responsible for allowing the murders to happen. I think this was essential to put in, and it's very formative, because although we link the Holocaust to the Nazis, it was everyone at the time that allowed the Holocaust to happen. Including this exhibition about Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, I think it's giving a summative picture of the Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. It talks about individuals which really helped humanise the Holocaust and the Jewish resistance, because as I said earlier, I think the Holocaust is seen as something in the past that happened, and people didn't fully comprehend that these were ordinary human beings, that they were just discriminated for their religion. He did a range of different resistance groups, as well as numbers and maps. There was a map about the ghettos, and how when the Nazis spread east and west, the amount of ghettos increased because the amount of Jews that came under Nazi control increased. And that the ghettos were just created in such a hurry, because 2.4 million Jews lived in Ukraine, which is a huge amount, especially in Poland. The Nazis gained because they gained control of the area, and they didn't know what to do with them, which ultimately led to the final solution, because they needed an effective way to mass murder them. However, some sources, although I think it's very useful to put in primary sources, were in different language, and I don't speak German or Polish, and I think it removed the value of the source, and even underneath the source, a summary or translation into English to help the reader fully understand this primary source, so I think that was a limitation to the exhibition. In some areas, like the Eisengruppen and collaborators, it lacked detail and key figures to get a more informative understanding of the topic, and they didn't point out why the Nazis wanted to kill the Jews in the first place. I think one page of just summarising why the Nazis started the war, what was happening, why they wanted to kill the Jews, to just make sure the reader is fully informative on that area. Although I did say earlier, I think, before reading this, the reader does need an understanding of the World War II and the Holocaust and the final solution. As well, it didn't really talk about state oppression shaping the resistance, and forcing people underground about the Gestapo at all, and the resistance groups were forced into forests, like the Marquis in southern France were forced into the southern mountains. They didn't say why, and I think that's missing out on a lot. So, although it provided a wide range of information that was very informative and I learned a lot, it missed key information. As well, I think the last slide should be about now and how there's new antisemitism, for example. There's new Nazi groups, like the ones who marched in Charlottesville in 2017. There was antisemitic attacks in the US especially, and this all amounted from the Gospel describing the Jews as complicit in the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. So, over a thousand years, Jews in Christian Europe were subject to systematic oppression. And I think the slide at the end, to summarise the Holocaust and the resistance, talk about the now and how 50 million Jews around the world are still facing antisemitic acts and discrimination.