Resistance can be defined by, “refusal to accept something new or different; an effort made to stop or to fight against someone or something” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Using that definition, resistance can basically be anything that isn’t conforming, but many people still think that resistance can only mean physical combat. Despite all of the possible definitions, resistance can only truly be defined by the person performing the resistance. If that person thinks that what they are doing is going against something that is being forced upon them, no one can contradict that. In the case of Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust, most people believe that the Jews were being passive, or did not resist at all until the armed resistance …show more content…
When the Jewish people were forced out of their houses and taken away from what they called home, they were put into an isolated place cut off from the surrounding world. The only things they received were the items the Nazis gave them, which did not amount to anything. One of the Nazis intent for the Ghetto was to kill the people by starvation, before deporting the survivors to other death camps. The Ghetto was starved, over crowded, and filled with rapidly spreading disease. The main concern on the people’s minds was survival, mainly how and where they could get some. (Battrick, 202) Leyb Goldin wrote, “It’s ninety percent your stomach and a little bit you.” (Goldin, 1) The Warsaw Ghetto Jews had no way of knowing where the Nazi’s plan was heading. If they did have any idea, they mostly thought that their plan was to starve the Jewish population to death. (Battrick, 204) Instead of succumbing into this force, the Jews fought back by smuggling food and other rations into the heavily guarded area. It became an essential part of survival for thousands of people. There were two different main types of smuggling; organized smuggling and smuggling through …show more content…
It consisted not only of Jews, but also of Poles and German citizens and police officers. Each act of smuggling had to be carefully planned and executed exactly to be successful. To keep from being detected, the Smugglers had to be creative and find new ways to transport things into the Ghetto. Some of those transportations included hearses, building and street passageways, and street cars. (Battrick, 207) The hearses were used to bring whole horses and cows into the Ghetto. The Catholic cemetery was right next to the Jewish cemetery so it made for an inconspicuous trade. The diarist and archivist, Emanuel Ringelblum, reported that as many as 26 cows were brought into the Ghetto this way in one night. If there was a loose stone in the wall of a building on the Aryan side, food would be passed through to the Ghetto side; most commonly where Aryan and Jewish houses were connected. A lot of bribing occurred in this form of smuggling because it was more noticeable and police were always trying to fix the gap. Carol Battrick wrote, “Every time the gap was blocked up by the Germans, Jewish and Polish Police were bribed, and before the lime had even had a chance to dry, the wall was broken down again to allow the smuggling to proceed once more.” (Battrick 208) And if this many people were being bribed for just one wall gap, it is unimaginable how many people had to be bribed for the entire
A Ghetto is a section of a city were members of a racial group are
While obtaining food seemed to be the entire purpose of life for the people imprisoned in the camps, it often killed more people than it saved. Though focusing on food seemed like a logical thing to do when you are being starved, it was not always very effective in helping people survive. There are many situations in the book illustrating how living for the sole purpose of acquiring food—under any condition—could turn out to be lethal.
Another method of dehumanizing the Jews was to make sure they turned on one another. Once the Jews began turning on each other, it kept them in their place and allowed them to mistrust one another even though the Germans were the real culprits. Since goods were scarce, it did not take long for the ghettos to descend into chaos. Stealing became a common practice amongst those who could not afford to buy illegally on the black market. Another way to make sure Jews constantly mistrusted one another was to make sure Jews were the ones who kept the ghettos running. Within the ghettos, a Jewish police force called Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst was created to keep Jews from escaping the ghettos. They wore armbands with an identifying marker and a badge. They were not permitted to use guns but were allowed to carry batons. The Jewish police reported any mishaps to the German police who were assigned to check perimeters outside the ghettos. They were recruited from two groups: lawyers and criminals. The criminal group was larger and soon became the dominating force behind the police and life inside the ghettos. In the Warsaw ghetto, a special group called Group 13 was created for the purpose of combatting the black market that thrived during this time. The group was also known as the Jewish Gestapo and had orders to report back to the German Gestapo. While officially the group’s job was to fight off the black market, unofficially the group extorted and blackmailed Polish sympathizers. They also were very skilled in tracking down Jews who had managed to not be sent to the ghettos. The Jewish Police were also in charge of a prison that allowed them to continue their illegal operations
Resistance: it takes many forms, from the simplest denial to an armed revolt. The Jews exhibited almost every form of resistance against the
resisted by refusing to comply” “Jewish Resistance”. This is an example of unarmed resistance because these young Jewish people did not fight with guns like the Nazis, they instead peacefully fought by escaping the ghettos before any more harm would be done to them. By doing this, they could be physically free from the abuse and humiliation from the Nazis. Along with unarmed resistance, Jewish people also took a stand with armed forces in order to fight against the Nazis.
During the Holocaust there were many varying forms of resistance these include refusal to follow German orders, the formation of the ZOB, continuing Jewish culture, education, religious practices, and keeping archives of historical events. These acts of Jewish resistance all required great courage and bravery as severe consequences were in place for those who did not follow German
Genocide is the deliberate killing of people who belong to a particular racial, political, or cultural group (Merriam-Webster). This is what Hitler did to the six million Jews during the Holocaust, which led to many Jews fighting back. This paper will talk about how the Holocaust victims fought back against Hitler and his army. The Holocaust was a mass killing of Jews and non-Jews who were viewed as unneeded within the world by Adolf Hitler. Hitler became leader of Germany and tortured and killed many people. With Nazi Germany killing and torturing millions of Jews and non-Jews, victims decided to fight back with armed and spiritual resistance.
The Nazis were killing thousands of Jews on a daily basis and for many of the Jewish people death seemed inevitable, but for some of the Jewish population they were not going to go down without a fight as Jewish resistance began to occur. However, the Jewish resistance came in many different forms such as staying alive, clean and observing Jewish religious traditions under the absolute horrendous conditions imposed by the Nazis were just some examples of resistance used by the Jews. Other forms of resistance involved escape attempts from the ghettos and camps. Many of the Jews who did succeed in escaping the ghettos lived in the forests and mountains in family camps and in fighting partisan units. Once free, though, the Jews had to contend with local resident and partisan groups who often openly hostile. Jews also staged armed revolts in the ghettos of Vilna, Bia...
“Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
In particular, the Germans began ghettos like this one, in order to gather and contain Jews until the “Final Solution” could be further implemented. In particular, after the Germans invaded Poland, they knew that it would be necessary to get rid of the Polish Jews, knowing that with 30% Jews, Warsaw had the 2nd greatest Jewish population. An area was needed to contain the Jews as the concentration camps would take time to build and had limited human capacity. As a result, they chose to create a closed ghetto, as it was easier for the Nazis to block off a part of a city than to build more housing for the Jews. The Germans saw the ghettos as a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options for the removal of the Jewish population. In essence, the Warsaw ghetto was a step from capturing and identifying the Jewish to deporting them to another location. So how exactly was the ghetto
He declared the Ghetto as an area of the city in which the Jewish population was required to relocate to. There were high walls that surrounded it which segregated any activity between the Jews and the rest of the people who lived in Warsaw. Thus, approximately 350,000 individuals were designated to reside in one area which only took up approximately one square mile of the entire city. Quality of life was poor, morale was low, and people who were living there were left with minimal choices to make on their own; their independence had been completely stripped away from them. Nazi officials systematically manipulated the ghetto by increasing population numbers, decreasing food supply, and deflating the labor market, making almost 60% of the Jewish population unemployed. These events caused exhaustion, panic, fear, and, anger of the Jews who were forced to live in such poor conditions. Two years after the Ghetto was up and running, in the summer of 1942, the Jewish Fighting Organization, or Z.O.B., formed to devise a plan to rebel against the Nazi party, an unheard of movement of any Jew during the
The ghetto residents frequently would go in so called “illegal activities,’” such as sneaking food, medicine and weapons across the ghetto walls often without the Jewish council knowing. Some of the Jewish councils and individual council members allowed it or even encouraged it, because the goods were necessities to keep the Jews in to ghetto alive. In some ghettos members of Jewish resistance movements staged armed uprisings which didn’t end well.
Forces pushed the Jewish population by the thousands into segregated areas of a city. These areas, known as ghettos, were small. The large ghetto in Sighet that Elie Wiesel describes in Night consisted of only four streets and originally housed around ten thousand Jews. The families that were required to relocate were only allowed to bring what they could carry, leaving the majority of their belongings and life behind. Forced into the designated districted, “fifteen to twenty-four people occupied a single room” (Fischthal). Living conditions were overcrowded and food was scarce. In the Dąbrowa Górnicza ghetto, lining up for bread rations was the morning routine, but “for Jews and dogs there is no bread available” (qtd. in Fischthal). Cut off from the rest of civilization, Jews relied on the Nazis f...
They resisted in spiritual ways by going to the synagogues, by practicing religious beliefs even when they were not allowed and by not allowing the Germans to get into their heads. The Jews rebelled by starting underground groups, taking down SS soldiers and stealing their weapons. Another way the Jews rebelled was by escaping the ghettos and Nazi camps and joining the Partisans. The Partisans would plain attacks against the Germans, sabotage them, and would join with other countries to make themselves bigger so they could take down the Germans. Being put into the Jew’s position would be exhausting and would take so much strength just to survive. The brave Jews that chose to try and stand up to the Germans even though they already knew that their attempts would be useless they still to this day are considered heroes. It took great courage to try to escape a ghetto or Nazi camp and it would cause 10 to 25 other
Food is essential to basic life. It provides people with the energy to think, speak, walk, talk, and breathe. In preparation for the Jews deportation from the ghettos of Transylvania, “the (Jewish) women were busy cooking eggs, roasting meat, and baking cakes”(Wiesel, 13). The Jewish families realized how crucial food was to their lives even before they were faced with the daily condition of famine and death in the concentration camps. The need for food was increased dramatically with the introduction of the famine-like conditions of the camps. Wiesel admitted that, although he was incredibly hungry, he had refused to eat the plate of thick soup they served to the prisoners on the first day of camp because of his nature of being a “spoiled child”. But his attitude changed rapidly as he began to realize that his life span was going to be cut short if he continued to refuse to eat the food they served him. “By the third day, I (Elie Wiesel) was eating any kind of soup hungrily” (Wiesel, 40). His desire to live superseded his social characteristic of being “pampered”. Remarque also uses his characters to show to how a balanced diet promotes a person’s good health. Paul Bäumer uses food to encourage Franz Kemmerich, his sick friend, “eat decently and you’ll soon be well again…Eating is the main thing” (Remarque, 30). Paul Bäumer feels that good food can heal all afflictions. The bread supply of the soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front was severely threatened when the rats became more and more numerous.