Resistance and rescue during the Holocaust
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
Why resistance was so hard
People in the ghettos were starved, unarmed, and watched all the time. Collective punishment meant one act of resistance could get dozens of other people killed too. Families were deliberately kept together, as hostages for each other's good behaviour. Judging the lack of armed revolt as mere passivity ignores just how hard any resistance was, under these exact conditions.
Armed resistance
In April 1943, fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto took up smuggled pistols and homemade bombs. They held off German forces for almost a month before the ghetto was destroyed. It was the largest single act of Jewish armed resistance in the war. In October 1943, prisoners at the Sobibor death camp killed several SS guards and broke out. Around three hundred escaped, though most were later caught or killed. Both actions had almost no chance of military success. Both happened anyway.
Unarmed resistance
Resistance also meant smuggling food into the ghettos. It meant forging identity papers. It meant running secret schools and secret worship, both of which were banned. It meant hidden archives too — Oneg Shabbat, in the Warsaw Ghetto, buried milk churns full of documents, diaries and testimony. The aim was simple: make sure evidence of what was happening survived, even if the people who wrote it did not. Some of those buried records were dug up after the war. Historians still use them as direct evidence today.
Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance body, has formally named over twenty-eight thousand non-Jewish people as "Righteous Among the Nations". Each one risked their own life to save Jewish people. That number is likely just a fraction of those who truly helped, since formal recognition needs solid proof. Oskar Schindler protected over a thousand workers in his factories. Irena Sendler smuggled an estimated 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Britain's Kindertransport brought roughly ten thousand children, mostly Jewish, out of Nazi territory in 1938 and 1939 — usually without their parents, who mostly did not survive. Rescue, like resistance, took many forms. Each one carried a real risk of death for the rescuer.