Jewish resistance is rarely at the forefront of Holocaust stories. The Holocaust is relayed as something Jews suffered through and it's often non-Jews, whether Oskar Schindler, memorialized in Schindler's List, or Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank and her family and is the subject of the recent TV miniseries A Small Light, or other righteous individuals who aided us, who are typically portrayed as the main heroes of this tragic episode in history.
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The French Resistance, too, has been the subject of dozens of movies, television shows, and books. The focus on these individuals and movements implies that owing to the hopelessness of our circumstances, we couldn’t save ourselves. I imagine most students would have a difficult time naming a single Jewish hero of the Holocaust.
And it’s true that many abided by the Nazis’ rules in order to try and survive because breaking the rules meant a near-certain violent and possibly torturous death. As noted by the Anti-Defamation League, the Nazis “encouraged that sense of hope in order to keep the Jews obedient and orderly,” telling them that their displacement was temporary, deceiving them up until the moment of their murder. It would have likely been inconceivable for individual Jews to understand the scope and scale of the Nazis’ eventual extermination effort.
But is the portrayal of “passive” Jews entirely accurate? In many ways, no. There were many acts of rebellion, including the most well-known instance inside the Warsaw Ghetto, but also at the extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. As explored by a 2020 exhibition, now online, at London’s Weiner Holocaust Library, Jews also joined armed resistance groups and rescue missions; they smuggled information and sabotaged machinery. They also ran from the camps, attacked and killed guards, and jumped from transport trains. Others imbued their final moments with dignity, reciting the Shema, an “affirmation of Judaism” that asserts “the Lord is One” on their way to the gas chambers. They were not without hope. They were not defeated. “In these incredibly extreme circumstances, there are just so many examples of resistance, even in the most desperate situations. “So the idea there wasn’t resistance is false,” Barbara Warnock, the exhibition’s senior curator, told the Guardian when the exhibition first opened.
One of these large-scale acts of resistance occurred 80 years ago today. On August 2, 1943, hundreds of prisoners fought back at Treblinka death camp, the second deadliest camp in Nazi-occupied Europe. Scholars argue that their actions, which resulted in destroyed camp structures and the depletion of a labor force, led to the camp’s closing. Treblinka was technically two separate camps: Treblinka I was a forced labor camp and consisted of Jewish and non-Jewish Polish prisoners. Treblinka II opened in a nearby remote area in July 1942 after the Nazis instituted Operation Reinhard — an official plan to murder nearly two million Jews in the region of German-occupied Poland referred to as the “General Government.”