Sixty-four: Resist and Survive

Patrick Henry, the 2013-14 Ida E. King Distinguished Fellow, gave a very interesting presentation for the 10^th Annual Kristallnacht Lecture yesterday (October 29th). Dr. Henry is the author of We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (Catholic University of America Press, 2007), and he gave his reflections on the occasion of the 75^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when the Nazis engineered a pogrom in which 1500 synagogues and thousands of Jewish business were destroyed and scores of Jews were killed throughout Germany. Sponsored as it was by the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center, the Sam Azeez Museum of Woodbine Heritage, the Holocaust and Genocide undergraduate minor (director, Carol Rittner, below) the Masters Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (director, Michael Hayse, below), along with the Student Senate, the turnout for the lecture was excellent and the Campus Center was filled with a fittingly solemn audience. All present would agree, I think, that the lecture was terrific, both informative and nicely argued. It will make a fine addition to our published collection of Kristallnacht lectures given by the Ida E. King Fellows.

Dr. Henry’s lecture was entitled, “Jewish Resistance against the Nazis,” and in it he endeavored to lay to rest that old canard about Jewish passivity during the Holocaust. Pat provided the audience with a brief historiography on the notion of Jewish passivity, asserting that the Nazis themselves had recorded the events in such a way as to build an archive that would suggest that there was little Jewish resistance. This was a simple case of blaming the victim, either suggesting to the rest of the Europe and the world that there was no problem and that the Jews were going along with many of the things being done to them (e.g., being moved to ghettos), or asserting that the Jews were less than men and deserved this fate. Other nations also bought into this notion of passivity as it calmed their consciences regarding their failure to act in opposition to the crimes. Perhaps surprisingly, the idea remained uncontested after the war; Jewish intellectuals themselves frequently suggested that Jews had been passive during the Holocaust, in part to promote the notion that in future any such intimation of a threat to the Jewish people would be met with a strong and immediate response.

History, truth, and our understanding of what Jews were doing throughout Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s clearly suffered in the construction of this unflattering archive. While other historians have now done much to refute most of the claims of this school of thinking about the Holocaust, Pat was pleased to inform us, the key elements of the critique have yet to gain wide currency, and the myth of Jewish passivity still has many adherents. So Pat set about dismantling the myth at all levels.

Pat took us through the elements of violent resistance occurring in many of the ghettos, like the one in Warsaw where Jews managing to hold off the Nazis for several months, in spite of being armed with very primitive weapons compared to the might of Nazi Germany. He informed us of other violent resistance occurring in several of the death camps, and the many partisan units throughout eastern Europe, and he then provided information about the participation of Jewish soldiers in the various armies opposing Hitler (including half a million in the US army). Clearly violent resistance was formidable.

Where I was most intrigued, though, was in the detailing of all the forms of non-violent resistance. These were many and varied, covering all kinds of activity from helping Jews to escape and survive, to vigorously resisting the attempt to annihilate the humanity of Jews, which was so clearly a part of the Nazi approach to setting the stage for their liquidation as a European people. In many situations violent resistance was futile and so Jews maneuvered through a lot of different approaches to promote or secure their survival, which in the end was the ultimate form of resistance, as Primo Levi frequently asserted.

I was struck by the similarity in the discussion of the Holocaust victims’ passivity to that of the slaves of the Old South. Slavery propagandists had claimed that slaves were happy under slavery and it was their natural condition, and in most instances Northerners and those from other nations who benefitted from the slave-produced commodities were happy to agree. Even after the Civil War (which it has to be noted was largely won by the actions of the slaves themselves, carrying out what W.E.B. Du Bois described as a General Strike, and bolstering the Union army at a time when it was facing huge difficulties in securing willing recruits from the white population, who had no interest in fighting a war to eradicate slavery), the myth survived and became the basis for specious claims that African Americans weren’t "ready" for equality and citizenship.

But, the scholarship about resistance has also shifted. There used to be an assumption that only “manly” and violent resistance should count, as in the movie “Glory,” where one is led to believe that the soldiers earned their right to freedom by proving that they were real men, when the right was theirs even without these actions. There is now more of an understanding of the gendered nature of resistance, and the fact that survival itself can be a form of resistance – though in a system of labor extraction, where the slave is considered property – suicide might be a form of resistance also.

Anyway, as with all good lectures, Pat’s got the gray matter churning. As he spoke, one immediately wanted to make connections, to look for similar themes elsewhere, and connect up the dots in this tragic tapestry of death and destruction, speckled though it is with serious endeavors to promote happiness and the well-being of others, that we call human history.

Rob