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Liberation, Resistance & Rescuers

Resistance

Jews responded to the ghetto restrictions with a variety of resistance efforts. Ghetto residents frequently engaged in so-called illegal activities, such as smuggling food, medicine, weapons or intelligence across the ghetto walls, often without the knowledge or approval of the Jewish councils.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The most well-known attempt by Jews to resist the Nazi regime took place in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943 and lasted for almost a month.

This was organised by the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa – Z.O.B (Jewish Fighting Organisation), and headed by 23 year old Mordecai Anielewicz with the aim of encouraging Jewish inhabitants to resist being rounded up into rail cars which would take them to the concentration camps.

In January 1943 shots had been fired during one such deportation by the Z.O.B using the small number of arms that had been smuggled into the Ghetto. After a few days of the attack, Nazi troops retreated. This success inspired further revolt.

On 19 April 1943 the Nazis entered the Warsaw Ghetto to carry out its liquidation approximately 750 Z.O.B fighters fought the well-armed and trained soldiers. The revolt lasted for just over a month until, on 16 May they were finally defeated. More than 56,000 Jews were taken from the Warsaw Ghetto during the liquidation with 7000 being shot upon capture and the remaining 49,000 deported to concentration camps.

There were also violent revolts in Vilna, Bialystok, Czestochowa, and several smaller ghettos.

Jehovah’s Witnesses

Many Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned and murdered for their refusal to swear allegiance to the Nazi regime or to participate in fighting. Jehovah’s Witnesses were unique in that they could secure their own release by renouncing their faith. Most resisted and faced continued imprisonment or execution.

Rescuers

Many people and organisations rescued victims of the Nazi regime. Some non-Jewish rescuers have been recognised by Yad Vashem as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ for their actions during the Holocaust. Those regarded as rescuers may have hidden someone for a few hours, overnight or two or three years. Some may have saved one life, others saved thousands. Whatever the scale each deed was as significant as each other. Both the Talmud and the Koran remind us: ‘Whoever saves a life, it is as if he saved the world entire.’

During the Nazi period everyone had to make moral choices. Some people became perpetrators, others were bystanders. A small minority chose to help the persecuted – these are the rescuers and helpers. This was an extraordinary selfless choice. It meant risking not only their own lives but the lives of their own family and children. Many paid with their lives. None succeeded in halting the Holocaust but many people were enabled to survive as a result of their efforts. Each chose to defy the power of the Nazis and their collaborators – mostly single-handedly. That choice made a huge difference to many individual lives. More importantly they showed the power of the individual and provided hope in otherwise hopeless circumstances by demonstrating the importance of moral courage in action.

During the Nazi period the vast majority of people were not perpetrators, but bystanders. We know that fear was a major contributing factor to the success of Nazi policy generally and the genocide of Jews, and the persecution of Roma and Sinti, Black, disabled and Lesbian and Gay people specifically.

But there were courageous people who stood out from time to time. They were found in every Nazi-occupied country and from all walks of life. What is clear is that most of these people were very ordinary people, making individual choices of conscience. Their actions demonstrated that true heroes are often just ordinary people acting on their convictions. Many were surprised that what they had done was deemed to be exceptional.

The Nazis were brutal in their reprisals against anyone caught trying to assist. Bystanders therefore had good reason to be concerned for their personal safety. This in turn makes the actions of those who did resist the more remarkable. Their actions were selfless, but no less calculated. They knew the potential risk, but took the risk anyway.

Liberation

When Allied troops began a number of offensive strikes in Nazi-occupied Europe, they began to uncover the concentration camps throughout. After the first liberation – the camp of Majdanek in Poland in summer 1944, Nazi forces began to burn down the crematoria and the mass graves. Prisoners were forced to walk into the interior of Germany, already suffering from starvation and ill-treatment, many died on the enforced ‘death march’.

In late 1944, Soviet troops also overran the sites Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka, which had been disused by the Nazis from 1943.
Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27 January 1945. They found several thousand emaciated survivors, and the smouldering remains of the gas chambers and crematoria – the Nazi attempt to destroy evidence of their crimes against humanity. In the following months, the Soviets liberated Stutthof, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck.

US troops liberated Buchenwald in April 1945, followed by Flossenburg, Dachau and Mauthausen.

British Troops liberated Bergen Belsen on 15 April 1945. Liberator Iolo Lewis recalls the sight that met the liberators:

I was absolutely horrified to find out what had happened where I stood and the inhumanity of man against man. I have never been the same since, mentally. How could people do this sort of thing to other people?... The people were not lively. They were treated like animals. They had lost reason. When the medics came in they tried to save a lot of people.

We cannot begin to imagine the scenes which confronted the liberators. Disease such as typhoid was rife, and an ever present danger to the malnourished survivors. Many camps had to be burnt to the ground in order to ensure the containment of diseases. The liberation of the camps exposed the full extent of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ to the rest of the world.