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The Holocaust
Early elements
Racial policy · Nazi eugenics · Nuremberg Laws · Euthanasia · Concentration camps (list)
Jews
Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933 to 1939
Pogroms: Kristallnacht · Bucharest · Dorohoi · Iaşi · Jedwabne · Lwów
Ghettos: Warsaw · Łódź · Lwów · Kraków · Theresienstadt · Kovno
Einsatzgruppen: Babi Yar · Rumbula · Ponary · Odessa
"Final Solution": Wannsee · Aktion Reinhard
Death camps: Auschwitz · Belzec · Chełmno · Majdanek · Treblinka · Sobibór · Jasenovac  · Warsaw
Resistance: Jewish partisans Ghetto uprisings (Warsaw)
End of World War II: Death marches · Berihah · Displaced persons
Other victims
East Slavs · Poles · Serbs · Roma · Homosexuals · Jehovah's Witnesses
Responsible parties
Nazi Germany: Hitler · Eichmann · Heydrich · Himmler · SS · Gestapo · SA Collaborators Aftermath: Nuremberg Trials · Denazification
Lists
Survivors · Victims · Rescuers
Resources
The Destruction of the European Jews Phases of the Holocaust Functionalism vs. intentionalism
v • d • e

The Jewish resistance during the Holocaust was the resistance of the Jewish people against Nazi Germany leading up to and through World War II. Due to the careful organization and overwhelming military might of the Nazi German State and its supporters, many Jews were unable to resist the killings. There were, however, many cases of attempts at resistance in one form or another, and over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings.

Contents 1 In concentration camps 2 Partisan groups 3 Types of resistance 4 Organizations 5 Jewish resistance fighters 6 Uprisings 7 See also 8 External links 9 Notes and references

There were also major resistance efforts in three of the extermination camps.

• In August 1943, an uprising took place at the Treblinka extermination camp. Many buildings were burnt to the ground, and 70 inmates escaped to freedom, but 1,500 were killed. Gassing operations were interrupted for a month.

• In October 1943, another uprising took place at Sobibór extermination camp. This uprising was more successful; 11 German SS commanding officers, including deputy commander, were killed, and roughly 300 of the 700 inmates in the camp escaped, with about 50 surviving the war. The escape forced the Nazis to close the camp.

• On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos (those inmates kept separate from the main camp and put to work in the gas chambers and crematoria) at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female inmates had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. At this stage they were joined by the Birkenau One Kommando, which also overpowered their guards and broke out of the compound. The inmates then attempted a mass escape, but almost all of 250 were killed soon after. (There were also international plans for a general uprising in Auschwitz, coordinated with an Allied air raid and a Polish resistance attack from the outside.)

Main article: Jewish partisans

There were a number of Jewish partisan groups operating in many countries. Jewish partisans were most numerous in Eastern Europe. See Eugenio Calò for the story of a Jewish Italian partisan. Jewish volunteers from Mandate Palestine, most famously Hannah Szenes, parachuted into Europe in an attempt to organize resistance.

In his book The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, Martin Gilbert describes the types of resistance:

"In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair.

Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit."^[1]

This view is supported by Yehuda Bauer who wrote that resistance to the Nazis comprised not only physical opposition, but any activity that gave the Jewish people dignity and humanity in the most humiliating and inhumane conditions. Bauer disputes the popular view that most Jews went to their deaths passively. He argues that, given the conditions in which the Jews of Eastern Europe had to live under and endure, what is surprising is not how little resistance there was, but rather how much.

• American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
• Antyfaszystowska Organizacja Bojowa
• Betar
• Fareinigte Partizaner Organizacje
• HaShomer HaTzair
• Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
• Zionist youth movement
• Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa
• Zydowski Zwiazek Walki

• Mordechaj Anielewicz
• Yitzhak Arad
• Bielski partisans
• Masha Bruskina
• Eugenio Calò
• Franco Cesana
• Icchak Cukierman
• Szymon Datner
• Marek Edelman
• Abba Kovner
• Zivia Lubetkin
• Dov Lopatyn
• Moše Pijade
• Haviva Reik
• Hannah Szenes
• Simcha Zorin

• Będzin Ghetto Uprising
• Białystok Ghetto Uprising
• Częstochowa Ghetto Uprising
• Kraków Ghetto Uprising
• Łachwa Ghetto Uprising
• Łódź Ghetto Uprising
• Lwów Ghetto Uprising
• Marcinkance Ghetto Uprising
• Mińsk Mazowiecki Ghetto Uprising
• Pińsk Ghetto Uprising
• Sosnowiec Ghetto Uprising
• Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
• Wilno Ghetto Uprising

• Anti-fascism
• History of the Jews during World War II
• Jewish Brigade
• Resistance during World War II
• Rosenstrasse protest
• Special Interrogation Group (SIG)

• Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust from Holocaust Remembrance Network
• About the Holocaust
• Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation
• Jewish Partisan Group Near Vilna
• Kurzbiographien
• Partisan Rachel Rudnitzky After Liberation
• Partisans in Vilna
• Partisans of Vilna
• Rozka Korczak & Abba Kovner with members of the United Partisan Organization (FPO)
• Vilna Partisans
• Interviews from the Underground: Eyewitness accounts of Russia's Jewish resistance during World War IIdocumentary film and website