It is impossible to put into words what we have been through.
I feel that great things are happening and what we dared do is of great, enormous importance.
The dream of my life has come true.
Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality.
I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men in battle.
A common question when we’re studying about the Holocaust is, “Why didn’t the Jews resist?”
But they did.
The real question must be “How was it possible for them to resist?”
Where did the Jews – starved and beaten down – find the strength and the courage,
both physical and spiritual, to resist?
As educators, we always ask how we can make the Holocaust more relevant to our students.
The story of resistance is a very human story, and that is its relevance.
Resistance empowers students by showing them the heights that human beings can reach even
in the depths of despair.
Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.
The Germans immediately subjected two million Polish Jews to violence, humiliation and arbitrary
kidnappings for forced labor.
The Nazis concentrated the Jews into larger cities.
What followed was the establishment of ghettos.
Jews were trapped inside and kept under guard.
They were usually forced into areas that were much too small, causing catastrophic overcrowding.
They were systematically starved.
Disease was rife.
Poverty was crushing.
The unbearable living conditions were intended to dehumanize the Jews and break their spirit.
Escalating chaos caused many to sink into hopelessness.
In this daily battle to survive, we might expect that people would worry only about themselves.
Yet, some were able to rise above their circumstances and assist others.
They drew on prewar social, religious and communal traditions by establishing hospitals,
soup kitchens and orphanages.
Against Nazi prohibitions, they created schools.
My younger sister was very young, and I knew that she needed education.
So I established a clandestine school.
And the girls would come, and I would conduct classes with them, and I would spill out of
my head whatever I remembered having learned in my school, and the most incongruous subject matters.
When the girls came and they were so solemn and they were so sorrowful and they would
say, "Please, please, tell us a story!"
I would say, "OK, today I am going to take you to an altogether different world."
And I took them away to a southern plantation in Georgia, and I was talking to them about
Tara and about Melanie and about Scarlett and Rhett Butler, and their eyes would open
and they would dream about it.
It took a great deal of strength to preserve their previous way of life and identity, but
Jews in many ghettos even managed to organize cultural, religious and educational activities.
This sometimes raised moral dilemmas: amidst so much death was there room for culture?
Was it frivolous, or was it a much-needed escape, if not physical, then spiritual?
Not everyone in the ghettos was able to resist, but those who tried, even in some small way,
maintained their humanity in the face of unprecedented inhumanity.
Resistance does not have to be with a gun and a bullet.
As a matter of fact, sometimes the easiest resistance is with a gun and a bullet.
Resistance when the mother gave a piece of bread to the child so that he would survive,
it is resistance.
Resistance was in the Lodz ghetto, that we had a symphony orchestra, and this orchestra
played and it was cold, but by playing in ghetto they gave the people the will to live
another day and another day and another day.
Yes, it was maybe not legal, but it was resistance.
What is spiritual resistance?
It’s not just the struggle against, it’s also the struggle for dignity, for humanity
and for moral values.
When the German army invaded the Soviet Union and the Nazis began to systematically murder
the Jews, youth movement couriers risked their lives to reach the isolated ghettos with this information.
Most Jews did not believe the rumors; it was difficult to imagine such brutality.
Yet, the leader of one of the youth groups in Vilna, Abba Kovner, instinctively understood
that the Nazis intended to ruthlessly murder all the Jews of Europe.
He called on the youth to take responsibility.
Jewish youth, do not trust those who are trying to deceive you.
In front of our very eyes, they tore our parents, our brothers, our sisters from us.
Hitler is plotting to annihilate all the Jews of Europe.
Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter!
The only response to the enemy is resistance!
Brothers!
It is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of murderers.
Resist!
To our last breath.
Why did Kovner turn specifically to the youth?
The young men and women in the youth movements were teenagers.
Like all teenagers, they believed that they could change the world.
Before the war, they saw themselves as educators and leaders, taking responsibility for the
future.
In the ghettos this idealism continued.
They organized meetings, keeping up morale despite the grim reality of ghetto life.
They assisted the community by caring for the children and creating soup kitchens.
They also organized illegal activities, such as educational seminars
and importantly, underground newspapers
They believed in mankind.
They still believed they could fight the Germans and shape the future through education,
morality and spiritual weapons.
Now, faced with mass murder that made the future an illusion, they understood that they
would need more than spiritual weapons to fight the Germans.
They were ready to die fighting for their ideals.
Kovner’s pronouncement reached the Warsaw ghetto, hundreds of miles to the east.
Warsaw was the largest ghetto in Europe: at its height over 450,000 Jews were trapped
inside, desperately struggling to survive.
Youth movements there hesitated at first, but as reports of extermination filtered in
they began to realize that it was only a matter of time before mass murder reached Warsaw.
And then, on July 22, 1942, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto were ordered to report for
“resettlement in the east”, a disguise for deportation and slaughter.
The Germans blockaded houses, brutally hunting the Jews down in the ghetto streets.
Within weeks, about 265,000 Jews were deported and murdered in gas chambers in Treblinka,
while thousands were killed in the bloody violence of the deportations.
Afterwards, only some 60,000 Jews remained.
Many were broken.
They had lost families and friends.
The deportations were a turning point.
Those who had managed to survive them had experienced a shattering trauma.
Most gradually understood that no one was safe.
Two underground organizations were formed to fight the Germans.
Ultimately, they fought side by side.
Then I met this guy in the street.
I say, "Fiefke, what is it all about, this…?"
He says, "We have an underground and we’re gonna fight the Germans.
I know we’re not gonna win, but we’re not gonna go anymore.”
He said, “Would you like to join?”
I say, “If you’ll explain to me, I will join.”
But he said, “Don’t tell your sisters.
This has to be a secret.
Because if people know, you know what’s gonna happen.”
There were those in the ghetto who feared that having fighters among them would bring
on collective punishment.
Did the youth movements have the right to decide their fates?
It was not easy for youth who saw themselves as educators to become fighters.
Their choiceless choice was between death and death – to be murdered at the hands
of the Nazis or to die fighting them, with their human dignity intact.
But how?
Most of them were in terrible physical condition and they had no weapons.
They were forced to train with sticks and imaginary arms.
In time, they managed to smuggle a small amount of weapons into the ghetto.
But their arsenal consisted in great part of primitive, homemade Molotov cocktails.
When the Germans returned to the ghetto on January 18, 1943 to capture more Jews for
deportation, a small group fought back.
The Germans retreated, but many fighters were lost in the short street battle.
Yet, for the first time in Warsaw, Germans had been killed!
The battle ignited morale.
Now the fighters won broad support.
In the wake of the battle, the Jews in the ghetto worked feverishly to build underground
bunkers to resist German commands to surrender and to force the Germans to find them.
On April 19, 1943, the Jewish holiday of Passover, thousands of German armed forces penetrated
the ghetto with tanks, light cannons and armored vehicles.
Confronting them were a few hundred youths with mainly improvised weapons.
Most of the commanders were in their teens and early twenties, with no military training.
They understood very well that they could not defeat the German army.
Yet, they fought for their honor as human beings.
The Jewish boys knew that every bullet has to kill!
I had a girl, Tzipora Szepszyk.
She was sitting on the rooftop and was throwing one grenade, one Molotov bottle.
That girl was fantastic!
Pitched battles occurred throughout the ghetto.
A group of fighters managed to hoist the Polish flag as well as the blue-and-white flag of
the Jews at the top of a high building where they could be seen from outside the ghetto walls.
The Germans understood the tremendous impact these flags would have, and they became
a primary target.
They waved over the ghetto until the Germans brought them down.
Ultimately, the Germans went from house to house with flamethrowers, setting fire to
the ghetto and turning it into a sea of flames.
Jews hiding in underground bunkers were forced to surrender for lack of air.
People were burned alive.
On May 16, 1943 the Germans destroyed the Great Synagogue of Warsaw,
declaring the end of the uprising.
Hundreds of years of Jewish life in Warsaw had come to an end.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the very first civilian uprising in occupied Europe,
and the largest act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
There were attempts at armed resistance in at least 100 other ghettos, and among Jewish
partisans, who engaged in sabotage and guerilla warfare.
The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto inspired other Jewish and civilian revolts,
even in the extermination camps.
Its echoes were heard throughout the world.
As educators, why is it important to discuss both spiritual and armed resistance
when we teach this subject?
The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto has become a symbol of heroism.
But it could never have happened without the human dignity, the strength of spirit
and the readiness to take responsibility that laid the groundwork.
This was a war of less than a thousand people against a mighty army and no one doubted how
it was likely to turn out.
This isn't a subject for study in a military school.
If there's a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject.