While the basic facts of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising are relatively well known, few are aware of the numerous other instances of Jewish resistance against the Third Reich. Thus the myth persists that millions of Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter”—a biblical phrase famously invoked by a leader of one of those resistance movements. A new exhibit at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London aims to set the record straight, writes Robert Philpot:
[A]s the exhibition makes clear, in every European country which fell under Nazi rule, Jews resisted the Germans, their allies, and their collaborators. Sometimes that resistance was a part of wider underground organizations, while sometimes Jews established their own groups.
Warsaw and Bialystok—where several hundred Jewish fighters launched a short-lived uprising in August 1943—were but two of the seven major and 45 smaller ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union where Jewish underground groups operated. And the two cities were by no means alone in seeing Jewish armed revolts. In dozens of ghettos, including Krakow, Vilna, Kovno, Będzin, and Częstochowa, Jews took up arms against their persecutors.
The Minsk ghetto—the scene of another revolt—also saw an audacious effort to smuggle out Jews and sabotage German factories. The exhibition highlights the story of Mikhail Gebelev, who liaised between resistance groups inside and outside the ghetto and organized mass escapes in 1942. But Gebelev refused to escape himself. Aged thirty-six, he was betrayed and murdered by the Nazis in August 1942. Thanks in part to his efforts, however, up to 10,000 of the 100,000 Jews imprisoned in the Minsk ghetto successfully escaped, many of whom then joined the Soviet partisans.
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