Non-Violent Jewish Resistance in the Warsaw and Vilna Ghettos in the Holocaust

(Thesis originally written May 2018)

Introduction

Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum resisted the Holocaust by establishing an astonishingly brave organization in the Warsaw Ghetto. This organization, the Oyneg Shabes Archive, recorded and preserved the testimony of thousands of Jews in the ghetto.[1] They never fired weapons, they never carried out sabotage, and they never used any form of violence to resist Nazi Germany’s goal of destroying their persons, history, and culture. Instead they utilized an incredibly effective form of civil resistance that had, and still has, a remarkable impact on the survival of Jewish culture.

Resistance is often misunderstood as only being done physically, as only a violent act. This misunderstanding suggests that in order to resist, one must do it by force and by force alone. Resistance is thus often romanticized in media as a violent struggle of the oppressed versus their oppressors. This conception can create the false idea that if an oppressed person does not resist their oppressor by force of arms, that they are being cowardly or senseless. This conception is not only false, but it is harmful.

Resistance can be non-violent and still be effective and far-reaching in its effect. During the Holocaust, many European Jews, such as Dr. Ringelblum, bravely resisted the genocide of the Nazi regime and its allies. The distinctly Jewish resistance movements were sometimes violent, as many militant Jewish partisans courageously fought against the Nazi apparatus for their right to live. However, this resistance could also be non-violent or even passive. Jews resisted spiritually by building and providing for communities. Jews resisted in an academic sense by preserving and recording history. Jews also resisted by remembering and memorializing their experiences in the Holocaust. All of these methods are linked, and by participating in or by creating acts of resistance, Jews acted heroically in the Holocaust.

Understanding Jewish Resistance

Jewish resistance to the Holocaust was astonishingly brave, those who did not resist were not cowards. The Jews that were subjected to the horrors of the Holocaust struggled to survive every day. Fostering any form of resistance would be extraordinarily difficult. There were many tremendously heroic acts of resistance, yet is important to not romanticize this resistance and exaggerate it. Yehuda Bauer, an internationally-recognized Israeli Holocaust historian, writes that in the Holocaust “that life was hell, that people were starving to death, and that when survivors tell us that inmates of the Lodz or Warsaw ghetto made attempts to educate their children, for instance, these attempts were heroic, but they did not encompass all or even most of the children, and they were part of a constant struggle against impossible odds.”[2] Thus resistance was heroic and courageous, but not engaging in resistance was not unheroic or cowardly. The Jews that did not participate in acts of resistance cannot be negatively judged for it, as all victims of the Holocaust were constantly in a daily battle for survival.

The Ghettos in the Holocaust

In the Holocaust, the invading and occupying Germans set up hundreds of ghettos. This was according to Reinhard Heydrich’s decree on 21 September, 1939, that all Jews in urban areas were to be confined to urban ghettos.[3] The ghettos varied by their internal regime, their economy, their culture, and their relationship with the occupying authority.[4] Oftentimes corruption was widespread and resources were always scarce.[5] In each ghetto, there was an established Jewish government termed the Judenrat, and each one was different in how they enforced or established social and legal rules.[6] Essentially, the ghettos were predominantly autonomous enclaves.[7] In the ghettos, several forms of Jewish resistance developed, much of it being non-violent in nature. The Vilna Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto both had large resistance efforts that created incredible acts of heroic resistance.

The Vilna Ghetto

The Vilna Ghetto was established around September of 1941, after the Germans had conquered the Baltic regions from the Soviet Union. [8] The population of the Vilna Ghetto was about 20,000 Jews.[9] The total Jewish population of Lithuania was about 220,000 people before the Nazi invasion, with most of them concentrated in Vilna, known as the “Jerusalem of the North.”[10] However, during the first few months of occupation, 175,000 out of the 220,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis and local non-Jewish Lithuanians.[11] Despite the horror that the Jews experienced in Lithuania and in Vilna specifically, a resistance to the Holocaust formed in the Vilna Ghetto.

Vilna Ghetto Library

Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto largely centered on and around the Vilna Ghetto Library.[12] Herman Kruk, the creator and head of the ghetto library, was commissioned by the local Nazi leadership to collect Jewish artifacts and take them to the library.[13] The work brigade that the Nazis commissioned for this task, the Einstazstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg brigade, was meant to collect these artifacts to establish a Nazi museum dedicated to the future “extinct Jewish race.”[14] The work brigade in Vilna was made up of Jewish intellectuals, as well as some workers, who were to travel outside of the ghetto walls to the YIVO building and collect Jewish cultural artifacts such as literature, art, religious symbols, and anything else determined to be significant.[15] Despite the work brigade being a creation of the Nazis, and despite that they were being made to work towards a Nazi goal, Kruk and others were able to turn the ERR’s work to their own advantage. The group that began salvaging these particular artifacts for themselves called themselves the Paper Brigade.[16]

In the library, Kruk and his staff were tasked by the ERR leadership with re-cataloging all of the written materials that they collected from the YIVO building.[17] In the library where they did this work, Kruk allowed “throngs” of people to find refuge in the building.[18] By September 15, 1941, Kruk and the library staff decided to begin lending out select literature in the case that the people in the ghetto. As Kruk wrote, many ghetto inmates “pounced on the books like thirsty lambs,” and that “even the horrible events they experienced could not stop them,” and that they “couldn’t resign from the printed word.”[19] This became the beginning of the Jewish library’s resistance in the Vilna Ghetto.

Books and other literature offered a spiritual resistance by nourishing the souls of the Jews confined to the Vilna Ghetto. Many Jews found a brief refuge in books that distracted them from the horrors of life in the ghetto.[20] Demand for books continued to grow. In October 1941, the ghetto’s bloodiest month, the number of readers registered with the library rose from 1,492 to 1,739.[21] In this month, the library lent out an average of 325 books a day.[22] During the bloodiest month that the ghetto witnessed, the library still managed to create an average of 325 acts of resistance a day. Each book offered some sort of respite for the Jewish reader, and a respite from the suffering of the Vilna Ghetto was resistance to the goal of the ghetto. On most days in the ghetto, “life was a grim struggle for survival, for dignity and hope, by a traumatized, frightened and malnourished inmate population.”[23] The people of the ghetto needed any sort of spiritual comfort they could attain, and the library became a central resistance to the suffering.

After a year of being operated, the library continued to expand its resistance through its loaning of books. In October 1942, Kruk developed a statistical analysis of the readership of the library. He found that of the books borrowed from the library almost 80 percent were fiction and about 17 percent were children’s books.[24] Kruk wrote that the reason that fiction was the majority choice was that the reader’s wanted to escape their suffering, and reading fiction carried them “over the ghetto walls to the wide world” and returned to them a sense of freedom.[25] In this way, Jews resisted the Nazis by escaping their horrid reality, which would install in them a sense of hope. What made fiction so incredibly important for the library’s resistance was that the readers would identify with the fictional heroes, and it helped them stay “psychologically alert and emotionally alive.”[26] Thus reading was an act of resistance because it helped the ghetto inhabitants survive and so thwart the Nazi attempt at destroying the Jewish people in the ghetto. Jews resisted themselves by reading the libraries books because they “calmed one’s strained nerves and served as a psychological safety valve that prevented mental and physical breakdown.”[27]

Through the seemingly simple act of reading a book, any Jew in the ghetto was resisting the German Reich’s genocide. By reading books, one would be resisting the attempt to dehumanize and spiritually destroy them. Thus reading became a massively important part of Jewish resistance in the Vilna Ghetto. Herman Kruk heroically provided the ability for these individual acts of resistance by establishing the resistant library itself. While reading was enormously important for the individual’s survival and thus resistance in the ghetto, the library also provided and created other acts of resistance.

Another way that the ERR’s work was made into resistance was through the Paper Brigade’s job of cataloging Jewish treasures and literature. The process of cataloging itself became an act of resistance. Even though the Nazis tasked the ERR with cataloging, many of the Jewish intellectuals found a different meaning in it. Much of the work that the ghetto’s intelligentsia did was inspiring, and the ghetto library “became a symbol of hope that Jewish culture would outlive this dark time, even if most inmates would not.”[28] To supplement the catalog-collection even further, Kruk courageously smuggled himself out of the ghetto to retrieve Jewish religious artifacts from the old synagogue outside the walls.[29] The cultural treasures he brought back not only saved most of them from likely destruction by the Nazis, but they also created more feelings of pride and hope among the Jewish intelligentsia.[30] The creation of hope was resistance in itself, as well as creating the availability of the survival of the Jewish culture.

In the library building, Kruk expanded its available space to create more options for spiritual resistance. One of the expansions he created was a reading room, a place where people could go to experience a spiritual uplifting and resist the oppression of the ghetto.[31] To furnish the reading room, Kruk had furniture smuggled in on garbage trucks.[32] In addition, he filled the room with “a reference collection of two thousand volumes that was divided into fifteen sections: encyclopedias, dictionaries, textbooks, and several subject areas such as philosophy and economics,” and he also filled the room with Jewish artifacts such as “scrolls, Torah crowns, and other pieces of ritual art.”[33] In creating such a reading room, Kruk created a space that “emitted an atmosphere of normalcy, under conditions that were far from normal.”[34] Kruk created a room that was in itself a piece of resistance. To create a space that produced a feeling of normality was to create a room that gave people a relief. By giving people the ability to feel something was normal was a courageous way to resist the Nazis’ oppression.

The Vilna Ghetto Library also served as a cultural center upon which other acts of resistance rallied around. Many cultural and social activities formed in the ghetto, such as a youth club, associations of musicians and writers, and musical concerts, all of these activities used the library as an invaluable resource.[35] This rallying point provided a platform of artistic resistance for two of the greatest Jewish cultural minds of the era, Shmerke Kaczerginski and Abraham Sutzkever. Sutzkever was already a part of the ERR brigade, but Shmerke smuggled himself into the ghetto and found work with the brigade later.[36] Sutzkever was the ghetto’s “poet laureate,” and Shmerke “became its bard.”[37] These two men became a massive spiritual inspiration to the ghetto, and they would often raise spirits by performing poems to music at both concerts and at the ghetto theatre.[38] The crowd would sing these poems along with the poets.[39] Raising the spirits of the ghetto inhabitants in such a tremendous way was an incredible form of resistance. Singing and keeping spirits high resisted the Nazi oppression, and it even countered in that they made beautiful art in the face of the Nazi brutality. This sort of resistance was tremendously powerful and meaningful, and these two poets would continue to resist the Nazi regime, even after the horrific liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto in late 1943.

Voroshilov Brigade

In September 1943, the ERR’s work at YIVO was nearing its end. There was little left that the Nazis wanted to plunder. Since the brigade’s work was nearing its end, the FPO feared that the Germans would soon liquidate the Vilna Ghetto and deport its inhabitants to be killed.[40] To escape this fate, the FPO decided to smuggle several fighting groups out of the ghetto and into the nearby Narocz forest.[41] Shmerke and Sutzkever escaped from the ghetto with one of these bands of Jewish warriors. In the forest, these fighters formed themselves into the “Voroshilov Brigade.”[42]

Shmerke and Sutzkever helped build a culture within the partisan camp. Even though the partisans fought against the Nazis by force of arms, Shmerke and Sutzkever formed an integral part of the resistance in a non-violent way. While they did serve as combatants, their main skills clearly lied in the arts, which the partisans were in dire need of.[43] The poets created a vibrant culture within the camp, which Shmerke described as a “shtetl in the forest.”[44] To lift the spirits of the partisan group, Shmerke would often lead a group gathered around the campfire in communal singing.[45] Sutzkever would recite his newest poems at these gatherings, oftentimes accompanied by background music made up of by simple instruments.[46] The cultural life that they created and helmed, was an integral part of the partisan’s resistance. While the partisan group itself was a violent and armed group, Shmerke and Sutzkever’s endeavors prove that non-violence could exist within partisan bands.

Shmerke and Sutzkever operated a Jewish spiritual resistance in this way, by singing songs as well as writing and reciting poems. These practices kept the Jewish arts alive within their group, as well as alive within the broader context of the Holocaust.

In addition to operating a spiritual resistance within the group, Shmerke and Sutzkever also served as historians. The partisan leadership determined that since they were not particularly useful fighters, and since they could not work as tailors, that they would be most useful serving as historians.[47] The cultural leaders were thusly moved to the brigade’s headquarters deeper in the forest, where they were paired with a translator and an artist.[48] The translator’s job was to translate the duo’s Yiddish writings into Russian, and the artist was charged with being their photographer.[49] This grouping of individuals proved to be a formidable team in recording the history and happenings within the Jewish partisan’s camp. They interviewed hundreds of fighters and Shmerke primarily wrote down the fighters’ personal histories.[50] Shmerke had a particularly fascination with the Jewish fighters, especially so because they were “living refutations of the canard that Jews were cowards.”[51]

The assembled team of historians immortalized the Jewish fighters, and by doing so they resisted the Nazi’s goals within the Holocaust. It is especially poignant that they recorded the history of a group who resisted violently, proving that Jews were not cowards. However, the acts of spiritual resistance and resistance through recording history that Shmerke and Sutzkever created were also brave. It was brave to commit themselves to the cause of creating and furthering Jewish culture through writing poetry and songs. It was also brave that they resisted the Nazi’s by recording the history of the Holocaust and the war, something the Nazis had proven before that they did not want remembered. While it is true that Shmerke was recording the lives of courageous Jews who disproved the myth of Jewish cowardice, Shmerke and Sutzkever themselves were also contradicting that claim. By creating these acts of resistance, whether through history writing or poetry, they both were also actively disproving the myth, exactly like the fighters were.

The Warsaw Ghetto

The Warsaw Ghetto was officially established by the occupying Nazis in May 1940.[52] The city of Warsaw had a very large Jewish population of about 350,000 people, roughly thirty percent of the city’s total population.[53] The ghetto suffered about 100,000 deaths from starvation and disease from 1940-1942.[54] In the Warsaw Ghetto, much of the relief effort came from those who tried to remain outside the Judenrat control, such as the local resistance efforts.[55] Most of the Jews in Warsaw were murdered at the Nazi death camp Treblinka, but many were also killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943.[56] However, in the two and a half years that the ghetto existed, many Jews participated in brave acts of resistance or in resistance movements.

Wiktoria’s Experience

Polish historian Wiktoria Sliwowska was one of many Jewish children living in the Warsaw Ghetto. At nine years old, her family found themselves living in the ghetto, as their small apartment was already located within the “small ghetto” and so they were not forced to move.[57] Before being forcibly moved into the ghetto, her parents were both people who worked in the academic field, her mother being an assistant professor and her father operating a business selling antique books.[58] Her family lived in this apartment for two years during the occupation, and much of her extended family came to stay with her. She recalls the struggles of life in the ghetto: swollen feet, frostbite, and sores and boils forming on her legs and feet.[59] Despite the overwhelming hardships of living in the Warsaw Ghetto, Wiktoria’s family, and her mother in particular, began to operate a spiritual resistance against the German Reich’s genocidal efforts.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, Wiktoria remembers three generalizations of how people lived. She recalls many that lived with “terrible hunger and the nightmare of death,” a few officials that lived luxuriously as well as those that bribed those same officials in order to prolong their lives and comfort, and finally those who did everything in their power to “live with dignity in times of contempt, to avoid the worst and survive, providing a handful of children with real spiritual comfort and the maximum nourishment for the body as was possible to earn with their own hard work.”[60] Wiktoria’s family fit into the third generalization.

Wiktoria’s mother did everything she possibly could in order to improve her family’s life and well-being. As well as improving her own family’s well-being, her mother also extended her effort to many of the neighborhood children. Her mother wanted to maintain a sense of normalcy and a feeling that they were still humans with spiritual needs, despite the overwhelming loss of hope due to the Nazi occupation.[61] To resist the Nazi aim of dehumanizing the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Wiktoria’s mother sought to build a soul-nourishing life for her family and particularly for the local children, and so went about creating a strong spiritual resistance.

To achieve her goal, her mother formed a school for the neighborhood children. Wiktoria remembers that “in our house, very quickly, a real school was formed, groups of pupils in several shifts, and, in addition, individual lessons given by my mother. This school … formed the basis of our life during the occupation. It also provided a precise rhythm in our everyday life. Other activities were subordinated to it.”[62] When they were not in school, such as during the summer, her mother kept the children busy with arts-and-crafts activities, gardening, putting on puppet shows, attending class, and celebrating birthdays.[63] Wiktoria’s mother put forth an incredible determination to make a real and functioning schooling system for the children, thus providing a true spiritual comfort and sense of normalcy. The school not operating during the summer truly shows that her mother went so far to emulate a normal, functioning school system that she adhered to the concept of the school year. Even further, she still kept the children occupied with activities when school was out, by providing for the children an availability to create art and expression.

Aside from the schooling system and activities organized for the children, Wiktoria’s mother also sought to maintain normalcy in other ways. She did her best to always keep everything clean and in good order, as well as making sure everyone was always busy doing some sort of work, learning, or other activity.[64] When someone told Wiktoria’s mother that she was wasting her time and energy, Wiktoria remembers her responding that “so long as the pots were shining, so long as we were eating on china and a freshly pressed tablecloth, they [the Nazi regime] had not managed to oppress and demean us.”[65] In these responses she would give, it is extraordinarily apparent that Wiktoria’s mother was truly operating in resistance to the Nazi’s.

Wiktoria’s mother went through a great amount of effort to establish a system which maintained normalcy for the children, something that let them know that despite all of the violence and hardship that they were enduring, they still were children who had the right to be happy and to grow. It was not Wiktoria’s mother’s responsibility to build something so incredible for the children, but she did it anyway. She decided to put her energy into resisting the German regime by creating a real spiritual resistance. Her resistance made an incredible impact on the children, as at the time they “did not ourselves realize how much effort it took. We felt only that we were living in a normal household.”[66] Wiktoria’s mother was aware that her endeavors were a noble resistance to the German effort of oppressing and dehumanizing her Jewish family in the ghetto.

It is particularly interesting how acutely aware Wiktoria’s mother was in relation to her acts of resistance. In Wiktoria’s testimony, she is clearly aware that even an act such as maintaining a clean house was an act of resistance. By establishing a school and activities for children, she provided for them a reminder that they were still children, despite the horrors that existed in the ghetto. Providing a sense of normalcy was incredibly powerful, not least because of the great labors it took to provide it. The Nazi regime espoused rhetoric dehumanizing Jews, and attempted to dehumanize Jews in the ghetto by making them live in extreme poverty. Wiktoria recalls how the protection of her home ended as soon as she exited the front door, where then she was immediately exposed to the horrific conditions that existed in the ghetto. Her mother built something of a bulwark protecting her children from the horrors of the Holocaust for as long as she could. Wiktoria writes in her memoir that “when I recall all of this today, I am conscious of how much wisdom and fortitude were needed to organize domestic life in the heart of the Nazi occupation.[67] Her mother bravely built a protective home for her children as well as others, and by doing so she boldly resisted the Nazis.

It is important to note that while many Jews and Jewish families did not construct such powerful resistances such as Wiktoria’s mother, these people were not cowardly or weak. Wiktoria clearly states that her house was special, and her family had special circumstances that allowed for her mother to create such a brave resistance as the one she did.[68] Most homes and Jews within the Warsaw Ghetto suffered immensely, and very few would have had the resources and strength to create acts of resistance.

Dr. Ringelblum and Aleynhilf

Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum was an integral and essential part of the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jewish resistance. He was a secular, Yiddish, Jewish historian in Poland before the war.[69] After the Nazi invasion, he found himself imprisoned within the Warsaw Ghetto.[70] He had a dedication to history for the people, and not the rich and elite.[71] This compassion for the poor and for Jewish people led him to try and alleviate the suffering of the Jews in the ghetto, to do so he joined Aleynhilf.[72] Aleynhilf, otherwise known as the Jewish Self-Help Society, was an organization dedicated to the welfare of the ghetto Jews.[73] Within the organization, Ringelblum became a lead community organizer, essentially in charge of teaching and providing the means for Jews to spiritually resist their imprisonment in the ghetto, primarily in a spiritual way.[74] Aleynhilf became the springboard for resistance activities throughout the ghetto.

Aleynhilf, and Ringelblum within it, conducted a large spiritual resistance in the ghetto. In the organization, Ringelblum headed the “Public Sector” department and oversaw the activities of the “house committees.”[75] These committees were the “vital microcosms of ghetto society” and were intimate groups that committed themselves to resisting the suffering within the ghetto.[76] Ringelblum sought to recruit and protect the Jewish intelligentsia in the ghetto, and so he led a distinctive effort to bring them into the Aleynhilf and find them work in it.[77] One of these work assignments was having talented writers create propaganda and leaflets made to draw more people into the resistant house committees.[78] The house committees waged their resistance through organizing people into common causes in the ghetto, but they were also brave in distributing literature that was resistant by nature. The house committees gave numerous Jews a real community, creating a serious spiritual resistance.

Another work assignment for Jewish intellectuals was to work in soup kitchens.[79] The Aleynhilf’s soup kitchens became the major framework from which the resistance was operated. The kitchens fed as many Jewish inmates as possible, however it was incredibly difficult due to the extraordinarily small caloric rations that were allowed for the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto.[80] Nonetheless, the soup kitchens were a brave resistance effort set up to not only physically nourish Jewish people, but to also spiritually nourish them by providing a community.

Aleynhilf’s organization of soup kitchens grew, and so too did the importance of the kitchens themselves. As more Jewish intellectuals came to the Aleynhilf for work, the Aleynhilf began training them to be managers of the kitchens.[81] Besides providing free meals to the poor, the kitchens were also used as a meeting place for Left-wing parties.[82] These parties would host activities in the soup kitchens such as distributing the literature of the underground press.[83] Through these efforts, the soup kitchens became a strong connection between the Aleynhilf and the underground political movements.[84]

Through Ringelblum’s connections with the Aleynhilf, he helped establish more resistance organizations. One of these organizations was the Yiddish Cultural Organization, otherwise known as the acronym IKOR.[85] IKOR’s main focus was fighting for a Jewish national revitalization and distributing any relief they could to the Jews in the ghetto.[86] The IKOR wanted Jews to feel proud about their identity as a people, and adopted a pseudo-Zionist attitude that was particular to Eastern European Jewry.[87] IKOR advocated for a Yiddish Jewish national consciousness, a nationalism that was distinctly Yiddish in character. To this end, IKOR began teaching language classes on Yiddish, as well as creating Yiddish events.[88] The organization expanded from this to create events that celebrated great Yiddish writers, put on art performances, and organize Yiddish activities for children.[89]

The decidedly Yiddish acts of resistance created a collective conscious, among those who participated, that the Yiddish Jews should be proud of their culture. Pride was a powerful form of resistance against the Nazis, as well as the educational efforts that the organization provided. The pride kept the resistance alive because it gave many Jews a reason to believe that they should resist the Holocaust because they were a strong people.[90] The Yiddish national identity formation was a great act of resistance in itself because it created an ideological bulwark to protect themselves from the hateful oppression wrought on them by the Nazi regime. The education also kept Yiddish culture and academics alive while the Nazis were trying to kill it. Thus IKOR created incredibly powerful forms of non-violent resistance.

By June 1942, the situation in the ghetto became increasing severe, and more people were dying than Aleynhilf, IKOR, or Ringelblum could save.[91] Ringelblum realized that his Jewish “self-help and relief efforts were making less and less of an impact.”[92] He decided that if he couldn’t save the ghetto inhabitants from death, he could at least remember them.[93] To do so, he determined to finish the Oyneg Shabes archives, a venture he had started in 1940 when the Nazis first invaded and established the ghetto.[94]

The Oyneg Shabes Archive

Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum first developed the Oyneg Shabes Archive in 1940 after the Nazi invasion and establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto. The archive developed out of the Jewish intelligentsia parts of Aleynhilf.[95] To create the staff of the Oyneg Shabes, approximately fifty to sixty people were brought together, all of varying backgrounds.[96] The majority of the group wrote and contributed essays, reports, and diaries that were commissioned by the executive leadership of the archive.[97] The people that worked in the archive did so from its creation in 1940 until the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943.[98] The archive’s work was preserved in tin boxes and milk cans and they buried them in three parts, however many of the documents within the containers did not survive their burial.[99] While many documents were destroyed by water damage, many thousands survived the war and Holocaust. The Oyneg Shabes Archive was a massive act of resistance and it recorded the lives of a massive amount of Jews, memorializing and immortalizing them.

One of the main projects that the archive curated was the “Two and a Half Years” project. The project was a massive study of Jewish life under the Nazi occupation.[100] However not long after the study began in fall of 1941, the ghetto began receiving information about Nazi massacres of Jews.[101] The Oyneg Shabes took the news very seriously, and began to race to complete the project.[102] To collect articles and information the archive had to do it clandestinely, and so one of the ways they would use to gather information was by hosting public writing contests, in which many people would submit their own writing based on their life in the ghetto.[103] The archive would also gather information by working in the Aleynhilf soup kitchens. Here the archive would interview and record the kitchen patrons.[104] The soup kitchens served as a great source of information for the archive since people gathered there for food and community on their own volition, therefore making the interviews much more secretive. In this way, they operated as part of the underground resistance in the ghetto as well.

The project was a huge part of the archive’s covert resistance. Ringelblum believed that the archive's project would be of great historical significance by describing the daily life of Jewish society in the ghetto, and it also allowed “people to unburden themselves.”[105] Therefore the project was not only an act of resistance by recording the intricacies of ghetto life, but also by giving numerous people a spiritual comfort by providing a platform from which they could articulate their thoughts. In addition, the archive gave many Jews the feeling that they would be remembered after they died, which provided a sort of comfort to the subjects and interviewees.[106] Thus the project provided a tremendous spiritual comfort as well as being an incredible preservation of Jewish life and history, making it an extraordinary act of resistance by the archive.

Rachel Auerbach was one of the members of Oyneg Shabes and was an important part of the resistance effort. Auerbach was a journalist before she was confined to the ghetto and used her skills to greatly contribute to the archive.[107] She managed a soup kitchen and used the space to record the lives of as many as she could.[108] Auerbach sought to write what made each person in the kitchen their own unique person, and to do so she managed to “record the voices of the victims, both as individuals and a members of a community.”[109] She also caught the phrases and habits that made the roughly 2,000 “customers” memorable, as well as those of her staff.[110] She wanted to remember everyone as the people they were with their own personal idiosyncrasies.[111] Auerbach articulated that her purpose in doing so was so that “the victims would be remembered for who they were, not just how they died.”[112] Her efforts resisting the Nazis because she gave a human face to as many people as she could when the German regime was attempting to dehumanize and erase them. This way when the Nazi regime murdered them by starvation or otherwise, they would also be remembered as people, and not solely as numbers. Auerbach was able to immortalize so many people by recording what they were like and what set them apart from others. Every detail she recorded was a brave act of resistance that made sure some aspect of each person would survive the Holocaust.

The Oyneg Shabes Archive was a driving force of resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the motivating factors for the comprehensive documentation was to provide evidence that would indict the Nazis in post-war justice.[113] To this effect, the archive essentially became the center for civil resistance in the ghetto.[114] The archive became the information center of the Jewish underground in the ghetto, and it gather and disseminate reports on the Holocaust’s mass murder.[115] Aside from acting as a center of civil resistance in cooperation with the underground, many writers for the archive also articulated that they wrote in the hope for justice for the Nazis after the war. One of these such writers, Menakhem Mendel Kon, wrote that one of the main reasons he felt that he had to write down everything about his experiences was so that Jews could be able to enact retribution and justice on the Nazis.[116] He also felt that every Jewish person in the ghetto should do the same, so all of the experiences of the horror of the Holocaust could act together to damn the Nazis.[117]

The Oyneg Shabes Archive was an astonishingly large and powerful movement of civil resistance. The purpose of the archive was to immortalize the daily life of Jews in the ghetto, everything from: escalating mortality from hunger and disease, the simple intricacies of a person’s personality, complaints about the Judenrat and police corruption, the terrible issues surrounding children and refugees, and even ghetto folklore and street humor.[118] However the ultimate purpose of the archive was envisioned by Ringelblum as helping to change post-war Jewish society.[119] He and the Oyneg Shabes believed that Jews would survive the Holocaust as a people, and the archive would be necessary for Jews, and the world, to build an aware society.[120] To create something that would achieve this goal, the Oyneg Shabes “underscored the quiet heroism of the thousands of ordinary Jews who helped their neighbors and struggled to hang onto their personal and national dignity.”[121] The archive not only acted in resistance, but they recorded how everyday people resisted. They recorded how people resisted by uplifting others, either spiritually or physically. They recorded how ordinary Jews resisted by providing for others, creating communities, and generally resisting the Nazi attempt to dehumanize them as individuals and as a people. The archive was able to immortalize the resistance and the acts of resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, and by doing so they memorialized the Jewish people of the ghetto.

Memorialization

Memorialization was a very important aspect of the Jewish resistance in the Holocaust. Jewish memorialization was primarily accomplished through memorial books, though could also be done by remembrance of individuals who didn’t survive the Holocaust. Memorial books became a massive phenomenon in Jewish communities after the war. Memorial books were a very important part of postwar Jewish society, and when “the survivors of Eastern European communities regrouped in new locations, they wanted the publications to commemorate those who were murdered, as well as to re-capture a vanished way of life.”[122] Memorialization was a way for Jews to remember the horror that they experienced during the Holocaust, as well as to memorialize those that didn’t survive.

One way of memorializing the Holocaust was to publish journals. Simha Rotem was a fighter in a Jewish partisan group who published such a journal. Rotem recalls the struggles that he went through as a fighter, however he also recalls the quiet moments. Rotem remembers how couples would form in the partisan camp.[123] He recalls his own relationship, writing that they both “talked a lot, exchanged feelings, dreamed.”[124] After the war he writes that he would “scream horribly in my sleep” and that the Holocaust “is an inseparable part of me to this day, an axis my little world revolves around” and that “the experience is still happening, still going on.”[125] Rotem’s memorialization contrasts the quiet moments he had during the war with the horror that constantly plagued him afterwards. In publishing his memorial, he was able to resist the Holocaust by writing the terrible pain it causes him as an individual, as well as by writing and remembering the very human relationship he had during it.

Another method of memorialization was through art and poetry. In the Vilna Ghetto, Abraham Sutzkever’s infant son was murdered by poisoning by the Nazis.[126] He wrote a heart-wrenching poem to his murdered baby:

I wanted to swallow you, child, when I felt your tiny body

Cool in my fingers.

Like a glass

Of warm tea. . . .

I wanted to swallow you, child to taste the future waiting for me.

Maybe you will blossom again in my veins.

I am not worthy of you, though.

I can’t be your grave.

I leave you

To the summoning snow.

This first respite.

You’ll descend now like a splinter of dusk

Into the stillness

Bringing greetings from me

To the slim shoots

Under the cold.[127]

The journalist Rachel Auerbach memorialized many people in her diary that was preserved in the Oyneg Shabes Archive. One of the people she memorializes is a sixteen-year old girl named Henie.[128] Auerbach remembers her as always smiling and flirting with the boys at the soup kitchen.[129] After the war, Auerbach wrote about her more. She wrote “I miss her . . . it was she I thought about when I wrote on the Aryan side about the Jewish girls who were like rye bread and like shirts of rough canvas on the body of the Jewish people; they were like the happy laughter of the waving rows of grain that we Jews would walk through when we lived on the Slavic earth.”[130] Auerbach memorializes Henie in her writing, and insures that an aspect of her survived the Holocaust.

Issues with Memorialization

Memorialization is not something that came easy to surviving Jews after the Holocaust. Many Jews did not want to talk or write about it at all. Jews could not want to participate in memorialization because of survivor’s guilt or because the pain that came with remembering the Holocaust was too severe to bear. Oftentimes, Jews would not want to participate in remembering because “the task of memorializing a destroyed people, its history, and its physical and social communities could be overwhelming.”[131]

In many cases, Jewish people would refuse to talk about their Holocaust experiences at all. Simha Rotem remembers “people in Eretz Israel” constantly asking “’how did you survive?’”[132] He had the feeling that he was guilty for surviving and so he “’preferred not to tell about myself and where I had spent the war years.”[133]

After the war, Victor Seidler’s Jewish parents moved to England where they raised him. His parents had moved from Poland, and they refused to speak about their experiences in the Holocaust.[134] He attests that after the war “many Jews found it difficult to develop a positive sense of Jewish identity because they unconsciously associated being Jewish with being killed.”[135]

Memorialization was, and is, a powerful method of resisting the Holocaust by memorializing it. However, if a Jewish person or community refuses to speak about it or memorialize it, they are not refusing some fort of duty. Jews are not obligated to share their testimony of the Holocaust. Jews are not obligated to re-experience the extreme pain and suffering of the Holocaust. Therefore it is important to keep in mind that Jews who do not memorialize the Holocaust are not cowardly, but they are individuals with their own emotions and reasons for what they do or do not do regarding the Holocaust.

Conclusion

Many Jewish people bravely resisted the Holocaust. The efforts of Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes, Wiktoria’s mother, Kruk and the Vilna Ghetto Library, the poets Shmerke and Sutzkever, and every memorial book a Jewish survivor has shared, all created important acts of resistance. The Nazi regime attempted to brutally murder and crush the Jewish people and culture, but these individuals and organizations, among many others, heroically resisted. Due to these resistance efforts, historians, as well as ordinary people, are able to remember and learn about the horrific acts that the Nazis enacted, as well as the courageous efforts many Jews took part in to resist. The Eastern European Jewish culture and tradition was largely able to survive this horrific event because of these incredibly brave people and their incredibly brave actions. The resistance they took part in had far-reaching ramifications, and as Dr. Ringelblum wrote “’I do not see our work as a separate project, as something that includes only Jews, that is only about Jews, and that will interest only Jews . . . Jewish suffering and Jewish liberation are part and parcel of the general calamity and the universal drive to throw off the hated [Nazi] yoke . . . we have to regard ourselves as participants in a universal attempt to construct a solid structure of objective documentation that will work for the good of mankind.”[136] The Jewish civil resistance as a whole had far reaching implications, and allowed for the survival of Jewish-ness as well as justice against those who tried to destroy it.

“Vey dir” (Woe to you) by Yitzhak Katzenelson.[137]

We will stand on all the roads.

Quiet. quiet like the grass.

Quietly stand and quietly ask,

Why did you kill us, why?

Bloody and filthy you will scurry

Engulfed in wild terror;

But we the dead will block all your roads

Wherever you run, you will see us.

We the murdered will look at you silently

In our agony we will mutely stare;

And looking at you we will silently devour you

And gnaw at your bones

Bibliography

Bauer, Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Cimet, Adina. “To Hold Our Own Against Silence.” In Memorial Books of Eastern European Jewry: Essays on the History and Meanings of Yizker Volumes, edited by Rosemary Horowitz, 122-142. London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2011.

Corni, Gustavo. Hitler’s Ghettos: Voices from a Beleaguered Society 1939-1944. London: Arnold Publishers, 2002.

Field, Rachel, Shmerke Kaczerginski. “Escaping from the Vilna Ghetto: An Authentic Memoir.” Jewish Currents. 2017. Accessed May 9th, 2018. https://jewishcurrents.org/writings-grid/escaping-from-the-vilna-ghetto-an-authentic-memoir/

Fishman, David. The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2017.

Kassow, Samuel. Who Will Write Our History? Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007.

Rotem, Simha. Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.

Seidler, Victor. Shadows of the Shoah: Jewish Identity and Belonging. New York, NY: Berg, 2000.

Sliwowska, Wiktoria. The Last Eyewitnesses: Children of the Holocaust Speak. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. New York, NY: Tim Duggan Books, 2015.

[1] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007) 46.

[2] Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001) 128.

[3] Gustavo Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos (London: Arnold Publishers, 2002) 23.

[4] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 92.

[5] Ibid., 92.

[6] Ibid., 92.

[7] Ibid., 93.

[8] Gustavo Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos, 34.

[9] Ibid., 34.

[10] Ibid., 34.

[11] Ibis., 34.

[12] David Fishman, The Book Smugglers (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2017) 49.

[13] Ibid., 36.

[14] Ibid., 35.

[15] David Fishman, The Book Smugglers, 36.

[16] Ibid., 43.

[17] Ibid., 37.

[18] Ibid., 37.

[19] Ibid., 37.

[20] Ibid., 41.

[21] Ibid., 42.

[22] Ibid., 42.

[23] Ibid., 42.

[24] Ibid., 44.

[25] Ibid., 45.

[26] David Fishman, The Book Smugglers, 48.

[27] Ibid., 48.

[28] Ibid., 48.

[29] Ibid., 50.

[30] Ibid., 50.

[31] Ibid., 42.

[32] Ibid., 42.

[33] Ibid., 32.

[34] David Fishman, The Book Smugglers, 42.

[35] Ibid., 43.

[36] Ibid., 64.

[37] Ibid., 64.

[38] Ibid., 64.

[39] Ibid., 64.

[40] Rachel Field, Shmerke Kaczerginski, “Escaping from the Vilna Ghetto: An Authentic Memoir.” Jewish Currents. 2017. Accessed May 9th, 2018, 1.

[41] Ibid., 1.

[42] David Fishman, The Book Smugglers, 117.

[43] David Fishman, The Book Smugglers, 119.

[44] Ibid., 119.

[45] Ibid., 119.

[46] Ibid., 119.

[47] Ibid., 119.

[48] Ibid., 119.

[49] Ibid., 119.

[50] Ibid., 119.

[51] Ibid., 119.

[52] Gustavo Conri, Hitler’s Ghettos, 28.

[53] Ibid., 26.

[54] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 92.

[55] Ibid., 92.

[56]Timothy Snyder, Black Earth (New York, NY: Tim Duggan Books, 2015) 319.

[57] Wiktoria Sliwowska, The Last Eyewitnesses (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998) 131.

[58] Ibid., 131.

[59] Ibid., 132.

[60] Wiktoria Sliwowska, The Last Eyewitnesses, 137.

[61] Ibid., 134.

[62] Ibid., 132.

[63] Ibid., 134.

[64] Ibid., 133.

[65] Ibid., 133.

[66] Wiktoria Sliwowska, The Last Eyewitnesses, 133.

[67] Ibid., 134.

[68] Ibid., 131.

[69] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 73.

[70] Ibid., 87.

[71] Ibid., 70.

[72] Ibid., 91.

[73] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 91.

[74] Ibid., 91.

[75] Ibid., 91.

[76] Ibid., 91.

[77] Ibid., 116.

[78] Ibid., 125.

[79] Ibid., 116.

[80] Ibid., 115.

[81] Ibid., 118.

[82] Ibid., 118.

[83] Ibid., 118.

[84] Ibid., 118.

[85] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 116.

[86] Ibid., 117.

[87] Ibid., 117.

[88] Ibid., 117.

[89] Ibid., 118.

[90] Ibid., 117.

[91] Ibid., 143.

[92] Ibid., 143.

[93] Ibid., 143.

[94] Ibid., 147.

[95] Ibid., 145.

[96] Ibid., 147.

[97] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 147.

[98] Ibid., 147.

[99] Ibid., 215.

[100] Ibid., 215.

[101] Ibid., 215.

[102] Ibid., 215.

[103] Ibid., 220.

[104] Ibid., 220.

[105] Ibid., 233.

[106] Ibid., 233.

[107] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 136.

[108] Ibid., 137.

[109] Ibid., 137.

[110] Ibid., 137.

[111] Ibid., 137.

[112] Ibid., 137.

[113] Ibid., 213.

[114] Ibid., 214.

[115] Ibid., 214.

[116] Ibid., 155.

[117] Ibid., 155.

[118] Ibid., 124.

[119] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 230.

[120] Ibid., 230.

[121] Ibid., 387.

[122] Adina Cimet, “To Hold Our Own Against Silence.” In Memorial Books of Eastern European Jewry: Essays on the History and Meanings of Yizker Volumes, edited by Rosemary Horowitz, 122-142. (London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2011) 122.

[123] Simha Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) 27.

[124] Ibid., 27.

[125] Ibid., 153.

[126] David Fishman, The Book Smugglers, 44.

[127] Ibid., 44.

[128] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 138.

[129] Ibid., 138.

[130] Ibid., 138.

[131] Adina Cimet, “To Hold Our Own Against Silence,”123.

[132] Simha Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter, 153.

[133] Ibid., 153.

[134] Victor Seidler, Shadows of the Shoah (New York, NY: Berg, 2000) 24.

[135] Ibid., 132.

[136] Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 387.

[137] Ibid., 312.