Before 1942, the Jewish underground in German-occupied Eastern Europe did not view armed resistance as an option according to historian Yisrael Gutman, who was a member of the Jewish Underground in the Warsaw ghetto and participated with the Jewish resistance in Auschwitz. The Nazis were viewed as a transitory evil. Until they were defeated, Jews in the Polish ghettos had to “play for time,” in order to maintain their community and ensure minimal harm.
The possibility of mass murder had not even occurred to the Polish Jews prior to or even during the initial stages of the German occupation. “It was not possible, therefore,“ Gutman concludes, “for the Jews to prepare themselves for actual events.” The systematic mass murder of the Jews began on June 22, 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
The absence of information and a thorough understanding of the German’s ultimate objectives were not the sole reason for the Jews “passivity and confusion,” Gutman adds. Some members of the Judenräte (the Jewish Councils), established by the Germans to execute their orders, subscribed to the belief that productive work in the ghettos would protect the Jews, or at least a majority of them, from deportation and extermination. They perceived this as the only possible option available to them. Not everyone agreed that the “work will save life” approach was a viable solution.
Armed Resistance
Armed resistance would not have helped them in their immediate need to survive, opines Bauer. He asserted that attacks against the German army would not have undermined the military. Instead, they would have provoked severe mass reprisals resulting in the murder of most, if not all of the Jewish residents, and confiscation of Jewish homes by the local population.
The Germans permitted the local inhabitants, who were either unmoved by the plight of the Jews, generally hostile, or expressed open animosity, to seize Jewish possessions.
This secured Polish collaboration in the murder of the Jews, encouraged them to thwart the survivors from escaping, and guaranteed that there would not be any remaining witnesses to expose the crimes that had been committed.
Emanuel Ringelblum , who founded the Oneg Shabbat Archive in the Warsaw Ghetto, described this enmity when he asked, If it was “inevitable” that while Jews were being transported to Treblinka and other extermination camps from all over the country, their last glimpse of the outside world should be to witness [the] “indifference or even joy on the faces of their neighbors?”
He wrote in the summer of 1942, “when carts packed with captive Jewish men, women and children moved through the streets of the capital, did there really need to be laughter from the wild mobs resounding from the other side of the ghetto walls, did there really have to prevail such blank indifference in the face of the greatest tragedy of all time?”
Since resistance would result in collective punishment, Abba Kovner, a young poet and a partisan commander in the Vilna Ghetto, asked whether by procuring and smuggling weapons to ghetto fighters they were “entitled to endanger the lives of the last few thousands of Jews in case arms were discovered in our possession.”
Kovner’s response to inevitable German retaliation, especially since Jews were “exposed to all kinds of betrayal,” was unequivocal: “With full consciousness of the responsibility we were undertaking, our reply was: Yes. We can. We must.”
Bauer explains that Jewish armed resistance in Poland and elsewhere depended on two factors: the availability of arms , and the aid of the local population, who were able and willing to support the underground fighters.
Neither prerequisites existed for the Jews Bauer notes. They could not retrieve weapons hidden by the Polish army after the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. Very few Jews were officers, especially high ranking ones. Merely one general in fact. Only right wing officers knew where the arms were buried, and they did not share this information with the Jews.
Rebellions in the Generalgouvernement– Warsaw, Kraków, Radom and Lublin
As long as the Jews hoped they would survive, there were no rebellions in the ghettos Bauer said. “Only when all hope for survival was abandoned,” Gutman added, “ did armed resistance enjoy widespread support.” In other words, “Hopelessness was a prerequisite for resistance.”
In the Generalgouvernement there were about 5,000 fighters; 1,000 of whom fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on April 19, 1943; 1,000 in the Warsaw Polish insurrection which lasted from August to October 1944. In 1939, there were about 1.5 million Jews in the area, which meant a ratio of 0.33 of those who resisted—a negligible number at most.
There were three armed rebellions in the Generalgouvernement, in Warsaw, Czestochowa, and Tarnów. Attempted rebellions occurred in Kielce, Opatów, Pilica and Tomaszów Lubelski. There were 17 places where armed groups escaped to the forests.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The uprising, which began on April 19, 1943, on the eve of first night of Passover, to oppose the Nazis’ final effort to transport the remaining 55,000-60,000 Jews in the ghetto to extermination camps. By the middle of-May, 1943, the revolt had been quelled.
Most of the people remaining in the ghetto were workers and generally only one person was left from their entire family. They lived “in pain and isolation,” with no illusion that before long that they too would be deported, Gutman said. “Most of the population supports opposition…., “ Ringelblum wrote. “The public wants the enemy to pay heavily for life…. No longer will they allow themselves to be expelled by means of siege…”
The Establishment of the Jewish Fighting Organization
Faced with no alternative but to resist after major deportations had begun, Jews in the Warsaw ghetto created the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ZOB), a Jewish self-defense organization on July 28, 1942.
Before an effective organization could be established, Gutman said “deep political divisions had to be overcome, and alliances had to be forged among Jewish fighting factions torn by deep ideological rifts. Zionists of the right and left, religious non-Zionists, socialists, Bundists, and Communists were at odds with each other, divided over what tactics and strategies to employ, when to strike, whom to trust, what contacts to make. Revisionist Zionists established their own fighting unit, with only marginal contacts, with the major resistance organization.”
Ultimately, Gutman said, a degree of solidarity was achieved among various political and ideological groups who had been unable to work together during the interwar period. “Still,” he lamented, “political and religious differences prevented a wall-to-wall coalition of Jewish factions. Even when faced with a Nazi enemy who did not distinguish among them, the Jews could not come together.”
The Germans Paid a Heavy Price
The Germans paid dearly in terms of loss of prestige, resources, and casualties Gutman said. Warsaw was the first uprising in any German-occupied city in Europe. The revolt tied down a considerable number of enemy forces for a longer period of time than did many other countries under German control.
The rebellion demonstrated that even a limited number of people, with a minimal quantity of arms, could exact considerable damage to the Germans, who were forced to fight in an urban setting. They had not anticipated the Jewish resistance, which is why they were surprised by the intensity of Jewish opposition .
A rebellion of this nature does not offer any immediate relief from suffering or provide any optimism for the future. The leaders of the revolt refused every possibility for rescue and survival.
The Most Significant Rebellion —”A Desperate Cry For Future Generations”
Bauer asserts that the rebellion was unique in “that it had no pragmatic goal. The military effect of such an uprising was obviously minimal. It was basically a rebellion of people who had been condemned to die, in order to mark their presence in history. It was a matter of revenge, it was a matter of Jewish honor, it was a matter of a simple statement of opposition to the policy of the Nazis, and the only way that the world would understand. If people had not rebelled, then the whole destruction of the Jewish people would have passed by, so to speak, without any kind of reaction; the rebellion made a statement.”
