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Audio Resistance: Benjamin Bedzow

Slideshow Resistance

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  • Resistance

    There were four types of resistance under German occupation, symbolic resistance, polemical resistance, self-help and only then armed resistance. Jews were traditionally adept at the first three forms of resistance and had to learn to resist by force.

    A hiding place in the floor of a bunker prepared for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 1943 / USHMM

  • Jews rose in armed resistance in ghettos and forests--even in the death camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka. They fought alongside other national resistance groups in France, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, but often had to fight alone because there was deep antisemitism within some resistance groups.

    Leaders of the Anti-Fascist partisan group in the Kovno Ghetto, 1941-43 / USHMM

  • Armed resistance was usually not seen as a way to prevail or to live, but a choice of how to die while inflicting damage on the enemy.

    Abba Kovner, leader of the Jewish partisans group in Vilna, 1944 / USHMM