Jewish Resistance & Rescue

Why this Chapter exists

The record of resistance and rescue.

Most accounts of the Holocaust center on persecution and mass murder. The historical record also holds thousands of acts of resistance, rescue, documentation, religious perseverance, and mutual aid. They were carried out under conditions the regime built to make them nearly impossible.

A caricature took hold after the war: Jewish populations going passively to their deaths. Some early postwar literature repeated it. From the 1960s onward, Yehuda Bauer, Yisrael Gutman, Saul Friedländer, and the broader generation of Holocaust historians challenged it. The documentary record, they showed, does not support it. It shows armed resistance under conditions that made it extraordinarily difficult, and unarmed resistance that kept dignity and community alive.

What counts as resistance

Resistance was more than armed revolt.

What counts as “resistance” has broadened since the first postwar years. Raul Hilberg’s foundational The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) centered on the German machinery, treated Jewish response as largely compliant, and stressed how limited resistance was against the scale of the catastrophe. Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman answered that reading. Bauer’s work from the 1960s onward set out a broader category that distinguished:

• Armed resistance: organized military action against the Nazi regime and its collaborators, including the ghetto uprisings, the killing-center revolts, partisan combat, and underground sabotage.
• Unarmed resistance: keeping religious, cultural, educational, and welfare institutions alive in the ghettos under conditions designed to destroy them. It includes the drive to document (most prominently the Oneg Shabbat archive), and the preservation of dignity, family, and community.
• Rescue: the work of those, Jewish and non-Jewish, who hid, moved, or otherwise saved Jewish lives. Some rescue overlapped with armed resistance, like the Bielski partisan unit that sheltered a refugee community. Much of it was civilian.
• Spiritual resistance: the work of holding onto a moral world in the ghettos and camps. It includes the underground religious life of the ghettos, prayer kept alive in the camps, and the writing produced by Jews under Nazi rule, most famously Anne Frank’s diary, alongside a large body of writing from the time.

Bauer gathered these forms under the Hebrew term amidah, literally ‘standing firm’. In that framing, unarmed and spiritual acts count as resistance alongside armed revolt.

The ghetto uprisings

Armed resistance inside the Nazi ghettos.

Armed resistance organizations formed in many of the major Nazi ghettos, and the pattern looked much the same from site to site. Secret youth groups (from across the Jewish political movements: Zionist, Bundist, Communist, and unaffiliated) formed the first cells in 1941–42. Organizing sped up once the deportations began and residents understood that deportation meant death. Coordinated armed action came last, taken up by fighters who mostly knew they would not survive.

The major documented ghetto resistance organizations:

• Warsaw: The Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB, Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa), founded July 28, 1942, and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW, Żydowski Związek Wojskowy), founded earlier in 1942 from Revisionist Zionist networks. Treated in its own section below.
• Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania): The United Partisan Organization (FPO, Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye), founded January 21, 1942 under the leadership of Yitzhak Wittenberg, Abba Kovner, and others. The Vilna uprising of September 1, 1943 was far smaller than the Warsaw uprising. Kovner’s manifesto, calling Jews not to be “led like sheep to the slaughter,” became one of the founding documents of the resistance.
• Białystok (Poland): Armed uprising August 16–20, 1943, led by Mordechai Tenenbaum and Daniel Moszkowicz. About 300 fighters against German forces. The uprising was crushed. Both leaders died: Moszkowicz in action, Tenenbaum likely by suicide.
• Częstochowa (Poland): Armed resistance in connection with the June 1943 deportations.
• Sosnowiec, Będzin, Tarnów, Kraków: Smaller documented resistance organizations and isolated armed actions.

The barriers to armed resistance in the ghettos were enormous. Most ghetto populations lacked weapons, military training, and outside support. The Nazi regime held absolute military superiority. Civilians beyond the walls, including parts of the Polish underground, were unwilling or unable to arm Jewish fighters. The German practice of collective reprisal meant any armed action would bring killing down on the very civilians the fighters were trying to protect. The fighters at Warsaw, Vilna, and the other ghettos understood these odds. They knew organized resistance would not save the ghetto population, but it would leave a record of a Jewish armed response to the genocide.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

April 19 – May 16, 1943.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is the largest single armed Jewish uprising of the Holocaust. It was also the largest revolt by any group in German-occupied Poland before the Polish Uprising of August 1944. The context: the ghetto’s registered population had peaked at about 445,000 in the spring of 1941. The Great Deportation of July 22 to September 21, 1942 had sent roughly 265,000 to the Treblinka killing center. By spring 1943 about 55,000 to 60,000 remained.

The uprising was led by the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) under Mordechai Anielewicz, age 24. The smaller Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) under Paweł Frenkel fought in parallel, under its own command, after unification talks failed. The combined force was some 700 armed fighters. Their weapons were few: pistols, rifles, hand grenades, and improvised explosives. Most were obtained at heavy cost from the Polish Home Army (AK) and the Communist People’s Guard (GL) on the “Aryan side” of the wall, the non-Jewish part of the city outside the ghetto. The fighters faced roughly 2,000 German troops under SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, eventually reinforced to far larger numbers.

The uprising began on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, when German forces entered the ghetto for what was intended as the final deportation. The fighters opened fire from prepared positions. The Germans withdrew. The next day they returned in larger force and were again driven back. Stroop responded with a systematic burning of the ghetto, building by building, to force the fighters and the hidden civilian population out. The uprising continued for about four weeks, with sporadic resistance even after Stroop declared the operation completed on May 16, 1943.

Anielewicz died at the ŻOB command bunker at Miła 18 on or around May 8, 1943, when German forces seized it. The last surviving fighters escaped through the sewers under the city on May 10, an earlier group having gone out on April 29. Among them was Marek Edelman, who became one of the uprising’s principal witnesses. The Germans killed at least 7,000 Jews in the fighting and in the bunkers. About 7,000 of those captured were deported to Treblinka and murdered there, and some 42,000 more to Majdanek and to forced-labor camps such as Trawniki and Poniatowa. Stroop’s final report, Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr (“The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More”), records the operation in the perpetrators’ own words and photographs. Copies are held at the U.S. National Archives and the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Warsaw.

Anielewicz’s last letter, written on April 23, 1943, is among the most quoted documents of the uprising. In it he wrote (translation from the Yad Vashem edition): “[W]hat happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto. One of our companies held out for 40 minutes and another for more than 6 hours. […] The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts.”

Revolts in the killing centers

Treblinka, Sobibór, Auschwitz.

Three of the six dedicated killing centers, the camps built for mass murder on arrival, saw planned armed prisoner revolts: Treblinka, Sobibór, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. At a fourth, Chełmno, some of the last prisoners fought back during the final massacre of January 1945. The revolts were planned by prisoners kept alive to serve the killing process. At Treblinka and Sobibór, these were small work units: cooks, tailors, mechanics, and the prisoners who sorted the victims’ belongings. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the revolt came from the Sonderkommando, the prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria. These work units were periodically killed and replaced. Any uprising had to be planned and carried out by prisoners who knew they faced near-certain death.

• Treblinka, August 2, 1943. The revolt at Treblinka was organized over several months by an underground committee including Berek Lajcher, Marceli Galewski, and Zelo Bloch. The prisoners planned to seize the camp armory but were discovered first, and hundreds rushed the main gate under machine-gun fire. More than 300 prisoners escaped during the revolt. Most were hunted down and killed in the surrounding forests by German forces and local collaborators. Some 70 are known to have survived the war and given postwar testimony. Treblinka kept killing for weeks after the revolt, into September 1943. It was largely dismantled in November 1943, as the killings of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi program to murder the Jews of German-occupied Poland, ended.
• Sobibór, October 14, 1943. The Sobibór revolt had two leaders. Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky was a Soviet Jewish prisoner of war, transferred to Sobibór that September. Leon Feldhendler was a Polish Jewish prisoner who had organized the camp’s underground. The plan: kill individual SS officers in their workshops at the same time, then break out together through the gates and over the perimeter. About 600 prisoners were in the camp that day. They killed eleven members of the German staff and several guards. About 300 prisoners escaped. About 100 were caught in the manhunt that followed, and some 50 survived the war. The SS shot the prisoners who had not escaped and closed Sobibór in November 1943. Pechersky survived. He returned to the Soviet Union after the war and lived in Rostov-on-Don until his death in 1990. Feldhendler survived the war but was murdered in Lublin in April 1945 in circumstances historians still debate.
• Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando revolt, October 7, 1944. By fall 1944 the killing operations were slowing, and the Sonderkommando knew they would soon be killed and replaced. Over several months, working with the camp’s wider underground, they organized a revolt. On October 7, 1944, they destroyed Crematorium IV at Birkenau. The gunpowder had been smuggled into the camp by four Jewish women working at the Union munitions factory: Roza Robota, Ala Gertner, Estusia Wajcblum, and Regina Safirsztajn. About 450 members of the Sonderkommando were killed in the fighting or shot afterward. Some members of the squad survived the war, and their testimony underlies much of what is known about the crematoria. The four women who had smuggled the gunpowder were arrested, tortured, and publicly hanged at Auschwitz in early January 1945, three weeks before the camp was liberated. Crematorium IV never operated again. The Sonderkommando also left a written record: the “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” buried near the crematoria. Some of it was recovered between 1945 and 1980, in fragments, much of it damaged. It is among the most important documentary sources on the killing operation.

Partisan units in the forests

Armed Jewish resistance outside the ghettos and camps.

Jewish armed resistance also operated well outside the ghettos and camps. Most of it took the form of partisan units in the forests of Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine, and eastern Poland. The setting was the German occupation of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941. The occupied Soviet lands held deep forests that could hide and feed partisan operations. The Soviet government also backed partisan warfare: Stalin’s directive of July 3, 1941 ordered the creation of partisan units in occupied territory. Jewish partisans operated within that broader framework.

The major documented Jewish partisan formations:

• The Bielski partisans: Belarus / Naliboki Forest, 1942–44. The Bielski brothers, Tuvia the commander, Asael, Zus, and Aron, escaped the German massacre of their family in the village of Stankiewicze. In mid-1942 they set up a partisan unit in the Naliboki Forest. The Bielski unit was different: it was a fighting force and a refugee community at once. Tuvia Bielski’s rule was that the unit would take in every Jew who reached the forest, including the elderly, women, and children whom most partisan units turned away. At its peak in summer 1944, the Bielski otriad (partisan detachment) numbered 1,236 people, about 70 percent civilians, some 30 percent armed fighters. The unit fought German forces and local collaborators. It also ran a working community with workshops, a hospital, a synagogue, and a school. The Bielski group is the largest documented armed Jewish unit that doubled as a refugee community. Roughly 1,200 of its members survived the war. The story is documented in Nechama Tec’s Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford University Press, 1993) and was adapted as the 2008 film Defiance.
• The Vilna partisans: Lithuania, 1943–44. After the September 1943 destruction of the Vilna Ghetto, the surviving members of the FPO escaped to the Rudniki Forest and established Jewish partisan units. Abba Kovner commanded the principal unit. The group fought the German occupation until the Soviets took the area in July 1944.
• Soviet-allied units in Ukraine and Belarus. Many Jewish refugees joined Soviet-organized partisan units across the occupied territories. The record here is extensive but uneven. Soviet records often did not identify Jewish partisans as Jewish, and much of what is known was reconstructed later by historians. Central to that work was Yitzhak Arad, himself a former Lithuanian Jewish partisan and later the chairman of Yad Vashem from 1972 to 1993.
• The French Maquis and the Jewish Army (Armée Juive). France’s Jewish fighters served in the broader French Resistance and in an organization of their own, the Armée Juive, founded in Toulouse in January 1942. It fought the German occupation and the Vichy regime, ran escape routes across the Pyrenees to Spain, and took part in the liberation of southern France in summer 1944.

Unarmed resistance

The resistance that used no weapons.

The great majority of resistance during the Holocaust was unarmed. The Nazi regime set out to systematically destroy Jewish religious institutions, schools, cultural organizations, welfare networks, and economic life. Against that campaign, keeping those institutions alive was itself resistance. It was done in secret, with improvised means. The major documented categories:

• Clandestine religious life. Keeping synagogue services, Torah study, daily prayer, and the religious calendar alive in the ghettos and, where possible, in the camps. Diaries and testimony record fasts, holiday prayers, and Sabbath observance kept up in the ghettos despite the catastrophic conditions. The daily minyan, the quorum of ten required for Jewish communal prayer, operated in many ghettos and in some camp barracks. The smuggling of religious texts into the ghettos is documented in survivor testimony.
• Clandestine education. Running secular and religious schools, under prohibition, across the ghettos. The orphanage of Janusz Korczak, a Polish Jewish doctor, educator, and children’s author, was the best-documented example in the Warsaw Ghetto. It operated until Korczak and the orphans were deported together to Treblinka on August 5–6, 1942. Secret classes for children ran across the ghetto.
• Cultural life. Theater, music, lectures, literary readings, and the broader cultural life of the ghettos. The Warsaw Ghetto had five working theaters as late as 1942. The Łódź Ghetto had a dense cultural network, including a symphony orchestra. The cultural life of Theresienstadt, the ghetto-camp near Prague, including the children’s opera Brundibár performed under Nazi supervision, is well documented. When the Nazis permitted it, they used it as propaganda.
• Welfare institutions. Keeping soup kitchens, orphanages, and medical clinics running under imposed starvation. The Warsaw Ghetto’s soup kitchens, funded by the Joint Distribution Committee, served some 100,000 meals a day at their peak. The welfare network kept many people alive, though it could not stop the starvation.
• Documentation. The impulse to record the events being lived, which is treated in its own section below.

What unarmed resistance achieved is still debated. Some historians have argued that keeping cultural and religious life alive under Nazi rule was itself resistance, because erasing that life was exactly what the regime set out to do. Others have argued that a focus on unarmed resistance can risk softening the sheer brutality of the conditions.

The Oneg Shabbat archive

The Warsaw Ghetto’s clandestine documentation project.

The Oneg Shabbat archive was the documentation effort organized in the Warsaw Ghetto by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944). The name is Hebrew for “Sabbath delight,” the cover name for the project’s meetings. Ringelblum was a historian with a University of Warsaw doctorate on medieval Polish Jewish history. He had kept a chronicle since October 1939 and turned it into an organized project in November 1940, the month the ghetto was sealed.

Ringelblum recruited roughly sixty contributors: historians, writers, journalists, teachers, religious figures, and ordinary ghetto residents. Together they collected documentation, systematically, on the life of the ghetto and on the wider German campaign of murder against the Jews of Poland. The collection included:

• Diaries and memoirs by ghetto residents
• Reports on ghetto conditions: food, housing, deaths, forced labor, cultural and religious life
• Testimonies from refugees who reached Warsaw from elsewhere, including accounts of the killing operations at Chełmno, the first dedicated killing center. With these, Ringelblum and his collaborators were among the first to document the Nazi killings as a program of genocide
• Photographs, posters, official Nazi documents, and the ephemera of ghetto life
• Studies of specific communities and aspects of ghetto life by individual contributors

When the deportations to Treblinka began in July 1942, Ringelblum and his collaborators understood what was coming. The archive had to survive even if the ghetto did not. The archive was buried in three caches, packed into metal milk cans and tin boxes, in the cellars of various buildings in the ghetto. The first cache was buried in August 1942, during the Great Deportation. The second followed in February 1943, and the third on April 18, 1943, the day before the uprising began.

Ringelblum, his wife Yehudit, and their son Uri escaped the ghetto in March 1943 and went into hiding on the Aryan side under the protection of the Polish gardener Mieczysław Wolski. Ringelblum went back into the ghetto during the uprising, was deported to the Trawniki labor camp, and escaped to rejoin them. The hiding place was betrayed in March 1944. Ringelblum, his family, the Wolski family, and the other 35 Jews hidden at the site were arrested by the Gestapo and shot on or shortly after March 7, 1944.

Two of the three caches were recovered after the war. The first, ten metal boxes, was dug up on September 18, 1946. The second, two milk cans, followed on December 1, 1950. The third, buried at 34 Świętojerska Street, has never been found despite repeated searches. The recovered material, tens of thousands of pages, is held at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH). The archive was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 1999.

The Oneg Shabbat archive is among the largest single documentary collections produced by victims of the Holocaust during the events themselves. What they recorded, the conditions of the ghetto, the deportations, Nazi rule, and the community’s response, became a foundation of postwar Holocaust scholarship. Ringelblum’s purpose was that the documentation would survive a destruction the documenters did not expect to survive themselves.

Theresienstadt, 1942–1944

The classrooms and drawings of Theresienstadt.

In the Theresienstadt ghetto, children were housed separately, in youth homes overseen by the ghetto’s own welfare department, and adults built lessons and art classes around them. The art classes were organized by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944), a Bauhaus-trained painter and designer, who taught drawing as a way for children to understand, communicate, and steady themselves. Before her deportation to Auschwitz she packed about 4,500 of the children’s drawings into two suitcases and hid them in one of the ghetto’s children’s dormitories. The suitcases were recovered after the war.

The drawings are held today by the Jewish Museum in Prague. They form the largest collection of children’s drawings from the period of the Shoah in the world, and the collection is inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Most of the children who drew them were deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Only a few survived. The ghetto’s young writers left a record too. Pavel Friedmann, a twenty-one-year-old deported from Prague, wrote a poem on a sheet of thin copy paper on June 4, 1942, about the last butterfly he had seen: butterflies, the poem says, do not live in the ghetto. He was murdered at Auschwitz on September 29, 1944. The poem was recovered after the war and gave its name to the best-known anthology of the ghetto children’s writing, I Never Saw Another Butterfly.

What the world knew, 1942–1945

The news reached London and Washington.

In August 1942, Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress’s representative in Switzerland, warned the American and British consulates in Geneva that Nazi Germany planned to murder millions of Jews. The U.S. State Department at first chose not to pass his telegram to Rabbi Stephen Wise, the Congress’s president. Officials confirmed the report three months later, and on November 25 American newspapers carried the news. On December 17, 1942, the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and other Allied governments issued a joint declaration. It condemned “this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” and promised that those responsible would be punished. It made no promise of rescue.

Late in 1942, Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish government-in-exile in London, was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and the transit ghetto of Izbica. At Izbica, disguised as a guard, he watched Jews being crammed into freight cars. He reported what he had seen to British officials, among them Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and on July 28, 1943, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House.

In April 1943, American and British delegates met in Bermuda to plan aid for Jews, under instructions that left little room for rescue on a large scale. They proposed moving refugees in Spain to a haven in North Africa. They also revived the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, set up at the Évian Conference of 1938. The proceedings were kept confidential, and the committee began no relief or rescue projects in 1943.

On January 22, 1944, after Treasury Department officials documented State Department delays, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9417. It created the War Refugee Board to rescue “the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death.” The Board helped relief agencies send money into enemy territory, pressed neutral countries to admit refugees, and worked with Sweden to send Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest. The Board’s final report estimated that it had saved tens of thousands of lives. Its first director, John Pehle, later called it “little and late.”

In the summer and fall of 1944 the Board and the World Jewish Congress asked the War Department to bomb Auschwitz-Birkenau. On August 14, 1944, John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, turned down the World Jewish Congress’s request. The operation, he wrote, “could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support” and “would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources.” Within a week, American bombers struck the IG Farben synthetic-rubber works at Monowitz, less than five miles from the Birkenau gas chambers. Whether an attack on the gas chambers or on the rail lines could have slowed the killing has been argued ever since. The arguments on both sides are gathered in The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (2000).

The Righteous Among the Nations

Yad Vashem’s designation for non-Jewish rescuers.

The Righteous Among the Nations (Chasidei Umot HaOlam) is the designation Yad Vashem confers on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi genocide. Yad Vashem itself, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, was established under the Yad Vashem Law of 1953. A commission within Yad Vashem grants the designation, and only on solid documentary evidence. The standard requires that the rescuer acted at serious personal risk and without payment.

As of January 1, 2024, Yad Vashem had recognized 28,707 Righteous Among the Nations from about 50 countries. The largest national groups are Poland (7,318), the Netherlands (6,137), France (4,303), Ukraine (2,713), and Belgium (1,819). Yad Vashem notes that the totals reflect the cases brought to it, not the full extent of rescue. Many survivors died before they could apply. Others, living behind the Iron Curtain during the Communist years, could not. The commission requires documentary evidence and survivor testimony, so the count runs conservative.

Designated Righteous receive recognition at Yad Vashem: a tree planted on the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem complex in Jerusalem, where space permits, and afterward a name on the Wall of Honor. They receive honorary citizenship of the State of Israel (or commemorative citizenship for deceased rescuers).

Rescue crossed lines of faith. In Albania, a Muslim-majority country, the population refused the German occupiers’ orders in 1943 to hand over lists of Jews, and officials gave Jewish families false papers. Yad Vashem traces this rescue to besa, an Albanian code of honor meaning “to keep the promise.” Almost all Jews in Albania under German occupation survived, refugees included, except the members of a single family. Yad Vashem notes that more Jews lived in Albania at the end of the war than before it. It has recognized 75 Albanians as Righteous.

Rescue was sometimes organized. In German-occupied Poland, where sheltering a Jew was punishable by death, the Polish underground founded the Council to Aid Jews, known by its code name Żegota, in December 1942. Backed by the Polish government-in-exile and staffed by both Polish and Jewish members, it forged identity papers, placed Jewish children with families and convents, and moved funds to people in hiding. One of its workers, the Warsaw social worker Irena Sendler, directed its department for the care of Jewish children from September 1943. The network is often credited with smuggling some 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, but Yad Vashem states that the exact number of children saved is unknown. It was the only rescue organization of its kind sponsored by an underground state in occupied Europe.

The diplomatic rescuers

The diplomats who saved tens of thousands.

A small number of diplomats produced rescue work on a very large scale. They operated under their national institutions, and frequently against those institutions’ explicit instructions. The major documented cases:

National rescue · Denmark, Bulgaria, Italy

Where national institutions intervened.

Three national cases produced large-scale rescue operations beyond the individual diplomatic figures documented above:

• Denmark, October 1943. On September 28, 1943, a German diplomat in Copenhagen, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, warned Danish political and Jewish leaders of what was coming. The occupation authorities planned to deport the Danish Jewish community on the night of October 1–2, at the close of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The Danish response reached across civil society: the resistance, the royal family, the fishing community, much of the public. It became one of the largest rescue operations of the Holocaust. Over some three weeks, roughly 7,200 of about 7,800 Danish Jews were carried by fishing boat across the Øresund strait to Sweden. About 470 Danish Jews were captured and deported to Theresienstadt. Danish officials kept pressing the German authorities about them, including through Red Cross inspections, and most of them survived. Fifty-one died there. Some 99 percent of Danish Jews survived the Holocaust. The Danish rescue is the clearest documented case in which most of a national Jewish community was saved by coordinated civil action. The Danish resistance saw the rescue as a collective act and asked Yad Vashem not to recognize its members individually. A tree on Yad Vashem’s Mount of Remembrance commemorates the Danish resistance instead.
• Bulgaria. The Bulgarian government, allied with Nazi Germany, deported 11,343 Jews to Treblinka in March 1943 from Macedonia and Thrace, territories Bulgaria had occupied in 1941. Almost none survived. But the Jewish community of pre-war Bulgaria itself, some 48,000 people, was not deported. The reasons begin with the Bulgarian Orthodox Church: Metropolitan Stefan of Sofia and Metropolitan Kiril of Plovdiv publicly opposed the deportations. They continue with Dimitar Peshev, Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly. His intervention of March 9, 1943 helped stop the round-ups in Bulgaria proper. On March 19 he put a resolution before parliament demanding a halt to the deportations, and he was forced to resign later that month. They also include broad civil-society resistance to the orders. Bulgaria’s own Jews did not go unharmed. In May 1943 the government expelled 20,000 Jews from Sofia to the provinces, sent the men to forced-labor camps, and confiscated most of their property. King Boris III’s role has been sharply contested in the postwar literature. The pre-war Bulgarian Jewish community survived the Holocaust. How to weigh that survival against the deportations from Macedonia and Thrace is still debated by historians.
• Italy. Italy’s Jewish community numbered about 50,000 in 1933. After the Italian regime collapsed in September 1943 and Germany occupied the north and center of the country, the deportations began. The best-documented single action came on October 16, 1943, when 1,259 Jews were seized in Rome, and 1,023 of them were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sixteen came back. The Germans deported 8,564 Jews from Italy, Italian-occupied France, and the islands of Rhodes and Kos, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and 1,009 returned. More than 40,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in Italy. They were helped by Italian civil society: Catholic clergy and institutions, individual rescue networks, the Resistance. Geography helped too, as southern Italy came under Allied control from late 1943, and so did Italian non-cooperation with the deportation orders, even inside the occupied zone. The record of Italian rescue, including the role of the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII, has been sharply contested since the war. The debate over Pius XII and the Vatican is noted in the Nostra Aetate Chapter.

The Kindertransport

Children sent to safety, without their parents.

After Kristallnacht, the nationwide Nazi attack on synagogues, Jewish businesses, and homes of November 9–10, 1938, the danger to Jewish children inside the Reich was no longer deniable. Jewish families across Germany, Austria, and the annexed Czech lands looked for any route out. The Kindertransport, German for “children’s transport,” was the rescue operation that answered that search for nearly ten thousand of them.

On November 21, 1938, the British government agreed to admit unaccompanied Jewish children under the age of seventeen on temporary visas. Each child required a fifty-pound guarantee to fund an eventual re-emigration, and the children had to travel without their parents. The operation was run by the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, a coalition of Jewish, Quaker, and other volunteers. The first transport reached the English port of Harwich on December 2, 1938. The last transport from Germany left on September 1, 1939, the day the war began. The children came from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig, and the majority were Jewish.

They traveled by train across the Reich and by ferry across the North Sea, each child wearing a numbered tag and carrying a single small case. Parents said their goodbyes on station platforms, in most cases for the last time. The transports out of Prague, which brought 669 children out of Czechoslovakia, were organized largely by a young London stockbroker, Nicholas Winton, whose part in the rescue became widely known only decades later.

The visas placed the children in Britain, but homes had to be found for them one at a time. Until foster families, hostels, and farms could take them in, many of the new arrivals were housed together in reception camps of their own. Among them were the Dovercourt Bay holiday camp near Harwich and the camp at Pakefield near Lowestoft, seaside summer camps pressed into winter use. There the children waited, often in the cold, to be placed.

The visas covered children only. Most of their parents could not get out, and many were later deported and murdered. Most of the rescued children never saw their parents again. For what children faced where the rescue did not reach, see the Camp System Chapter.

Contested elements in the resistance record

What historians still debate.

The scholarship on Holocaust resistance argues over hard questions. The main ones:

• The scale question. The armed resistance during the Holocaust involved far smaller numbers than the Jewish population under Nazi rule. Historians have asked what that limited scale reflects: the near-impossible conditions the regime imposed, or a limited Jewish response. The consensus, set out above all by Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman, is that the conditions made armed resistance extraordinarily difficult, and that the resistance that did occur shows what was possible under them.
• The “lambs to the slaughter” question. Early postwar writing, including much early Israeli political debate, used the phrase “lambs to the slaughter” (Hebrew: ka-tzon la-tevach) for Jewish behavior under Nazi rule. The phrase draws on biblical language (Psalm 44:23 and Isaiah 53:7). Abba Kovner used it in his 1942 Vilna manifesto as a call to resistance. After the war it was widely turned into a criticism of Jewish passivity. That framing has been deeply revised since the 1960s. Today’s scholarship largely rejects it as inadequate to the record. How the phrase shaped later Holocaust memory is its own field of study.
• The Judenrat question. The Jewish Councils (Judenräte), the Jewish leadership bodies that the Nazi regime imposed on each ghetto, operated under coercion. Did the councils, in practice, ease the deportations by cooperating? Or did cooperation under coercion buy rescue that would otherwise have been impossible? The argument has run for decades, including the famous Hannah Arendt controversy treated in the Hannah Arendt Chapter. The consensus, set out above all in Isaiah Trunk’s Judenrat (1972), is that the record varied widely from council to council. Some Judenrat leaders refused German demands, and some councils quietly aided the underground, the secret resistance groups. The best-known refusal is Adam Czerniaków’s in Warsaw: he took his own life on July 23, 1942 rather than sign the deportation orders.
• The rescue scale question. The rescue documented in this Chapter, the diplomats, the national operations, the roughly 28,000 Righteous, stands against a hard reality: the great majority of Jews under Nazi rule were not rescued. How to weigh that record against the wider world’s failure to rescue more has been argued ever since. The questions include the Allied decision not to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, the U.S. refusal to loosen immigration limits, and the British restrictions on refugee immigration to Palestine.

Key takeaways

• Holocaust resistance took armed, unarmed, spiritual, and documentary forms. In Yehuda Bauer’s scholarship these fall under the Hebrew term amidah, “standing firm.”
• The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19 – May 16, 1943) was the largest single armed Jewish revolt of the Holocaust, fought by roughly 700 fighters of the ŻOB and ŻZW.
• Armed revolts broke out at three killing centers: Treblinka (August 1943), Sobibór (October 1943), and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando (October 1944).
• Jewish partisan units operated in the forests of Eastern Europe. The Bielski group in Belarus combined armed action with a forest refuge that sheltered about 1,200 people.
• Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbat group buried the Warsaw Ghetto’s records in milk cans and tin boxes. Two of the three caches were recovered after the war.
• Yad Vashem has recognized more than 28,000 non-Jewish rescuers as Righteous Among the Nations. Rescue ranged from individual diplomats to the near-total national rescue of Danish Jewry in October 1943, yet it reached a minority of the Jews under Nazi rule.
• The Kindertransport brought nearly 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children to Britain in 1938–39. Most never saw their parents again. One of them, Frank Meisler, later placed memorials along the children’s route.

Object Spotlight

The milk cans of Oneg Shabbat.

They are ordinary dairy cans, dented tin with clamped lids, the kind that stood outside any Warsaw shop. Into them, and into metal boxes, Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbat group sealed the archive and buried it in three caches under the ghetto’s streets.

Ten metal boxes came out of the rubble in September 1946. The two milk cans were found in December 1950, under a destroyed house on Nowolipki Street. The third cache has never been found.

The containers are preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, alongside the documents they protected.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Each question is anchored in a fact this Chapter documents. Answer from the evidence on the page.

1. Historians broadened the definition of “resistance” after the 1960s to include unarmed and spiritual acts. What is gained, and what might be lost, by defining resistance so broadly?
2. The fighters at Warsaw and Vilna knew armed revolt would not save the ghetto population. How should we weigh acts whose purpose was to leave a record rather than to win a battle?
3. Ringelblum’s group risked their lives to bury an archive. Why might documenting events be considered a form of resistance under those conditions?
4. Compare the rescue of Danish Jewry with the rescues carried out by individual diplomats. What conditions made a near-total national rescue possible in Denmark?
5. The Judenrat record is contested among historians. What makes the actions of leaders operating under coercion difficult to judge from the outside?
6. More than 28,000 people have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, while millions were not rescued. How should a study of the rescuers account for the much larger record of those who did not act?

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. Examines Jewish armed and spiritual resistance, rescue, documentation, and survival.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • compare the many forms of resistance (armed, spiritual, cultural, and rescue)
  • evaluate rescue efforts and the choices behind them
  • weigh moral agency under extreme conditions
  • analyze memoirs and underground archival evidence
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments.
• International Classroom Relevance. Supports Holocaust education, civic and character education, genocide studies, and human-rights instruction.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Grade 8 (United States History) 8.6 and NY Global History 10.5 (Unresolved Global Conflict, 1914–1945) and 10.10 (Human Rights Violations).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction by correcting misconceptions about Jewish resistance while documenting the many forms resistance took under genocidal conditions.
• Common Core, Reading in History/Social Studies (grades 6–12). Students assess purpose and point of view (RH.6–8.6, RH.9–10.6, RH.11–12.6) and integrate multiple sources (RH.6–8.9, RH.9–10.9, RH.11–12.9), working from memoirs, underground archives, photographs, diplomatic records, and survivor testimony.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 and D2.His.14 (grades 6–8 and 9–12). Students investigate context, evidence, moral choice, and interpretation.

Resources, lessons, and video

Where to teach this well.

The lessons, testimony, and primary sources below come from institutions that document resistance and rescue.

Teacher materials & lesson plans

• Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, short films, survivor interviews, and ready, standards-aligned lessons built entirely around the forest partisans.
• USHMM · Teaching Materials, lessons and the searchable Holocaust Encyclopedia entries on armed and unarmed resistance.
• Yad Vashem · International School for Holocaust Studies, resistance and rescue units by grade band, plus the searchable Righteous Among the Nations database.
• Echoes & Reflections, a full classroom curriculum with a dedicated unit on resistance, built around survivor testimony.

Primary sources & testimony

• The Jewish Historical Institute · Warsaw, the home of the recovered Oneg Shabbat (Ringelblum) archive, the records the ghetto buried before it burned.
• USC Shoah Foundation · IWitness, survivor video testimony, including partisans and rescuers, with built-in activities.
• Smithsonian Magazine · “A New Holocaust Exhibition Tells the Story of Jewish Resistance”, background reading on how museums are bringing the resistance record to the public.

Films & video

• USHMM · “Jewish Resistance”, an authoritative overview carrying short archival film and survivor-testimony clips. All grades. Strong for teacher preparation and projection.
• Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation · short films, brief, classroom-length films built around the forest partisans, each paired with a lesson. Grades 8–12.
• Defiance (2008), the story of the Bielski partisans, a dramatic feature rated R for combat violence. Preview before classroom use. Teacher discretion.

For New York–region teachers. The Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County (Glen Cove, Long Island) runs in-school programs and a Speakers Bureau on resistance and rescue, and offers a free virtual guide to its galleries.