(Jewish Group) The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust

During World War II, Jewish resistance fighters launched attacks, created underground networks, led rescue missions and documented their experiences at great personal risk. But though historians have ample evidence of such acts of defiance, the idea that Europe’s Jews didn’t fight back against the Nazis persists. Now, a new exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London seeks to honor these individuals’ largely unheralded contributions.

“Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust” draws on documents, artifacts and survivor testimonies, many of which were gathered by library researchers during the 1950s. The show tells the stories of Jewish partisans in the Soviet Union, organized resistance in concentration camps and ghettos, and individual instances of bravery, among other topics.

“Sometimes the view that people have is that the Jews didn’t really resist, and people have commented on ‘why wasn’t there more resistance?’” senior curator Barbara Warnock tells the Guardian’s Caroline Davies. “But in these incredibly extreme circumstances there are just so many examples of resistance, even in the most desperate situations.”

One of the individuals featured in the exhibition is Tosia Altman, a young woman who used fake “Aryanized” papers to smuggle herself into Poland’s ghettos. As a member of the social Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair, Altman invaded ghettos, organized resistance groups, spread information and moved weapons, reports Michelle Desmet for Dutch newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws. At just 24 years old, she participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but was captured and died of her injuries shortly thereafter.

“Her story is quite amazing,” says Warnock to the Guardian. “And she was typical of a lot of the resisters in camps and ghettos. She was quite young, and managed to obtain papers indicating she was just Polish rather than Jewish Polish, allowing her to move around occupied Poland.”

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