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Though most Western depictions of World War II focus on soldiers rescuing helpless victims from German oppression, the truth is very different. The human species doesn’t take kindly to genocide or oppression, and the Jews are no exception.
.On August 2, 1943, the prisoners fought back. About half of the 1,500 inmates allowed to live in the camp invaded the camp armory after three Jews walked up to the two guards at the rear door and stabbed them with their own knives before they could sound an alarm, whereupon the Jews stole small arms from the armory and opened fire on the SS guards throughout Camp II. The prisoners seized kerosene stores and set fire to every building while the guards and watchtowers began shooting back. The Jews broke into Camp I and armed some of its inmates, and then about 600 men and women broke through the outer perimeter and ran for their lives into the woods. All but about 40 of these were recaptured within a week and executed. Those 40 survived the war
There were a few thousand Jews in the ghetto until August 14, 1942, when the SS entered and murdered almost every single human being, including infants. Thirty people were spared to work in the ghetto as tailors and woodwrights, and they were guarded by an SS garrison of 100, plus 30 Aryan Belarusian policemen who also hated the Jews.
On 12 September 1942, the town was assaulted from the northeast by about 150 partisan soldiers, including the famous Bielski brothers, who killed thirty SS officers, soldiers, and police. They then broke through the wall, evacuated the 30 Jews remaining, and burned the ghetto to the ground before retreating into the surrounding woodland.
Alter Dvoretsky, a local lawyer, organized a resistance group of about 60 people, who acquired guns and ammunition, and prepared to arm the ghetto residents in the event that it would be liquidated. These Partisan rebels cooperated with the Soviet Red Army in ambushing German patrols and stealing all weapon and food supplies from two dozen supply depots.
The SS decided that this activity was a result of ghetto residents escaping: They liquidated the ghetto on April 30, 1942, and again on August 6. In the first incident, 1,200 of the most able-bodied Jews were marched out of the city and shot, then thrown into mass graves. The second incident resulted in 2,000 to 3,000 being shot, but the Partisans were able to fight on and remain hidden in the forests for the rest of the war.
In late 1942, Emmanuel Ringelblum, the well-educated author of a diary about life in the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote
Whomever you talk to, you hear the same cry: The resettlement never should have been permitted. We should have run into the street, set fire to everything in sight, have torn down the walls, and escaped to the Other Side. The Germans would have taken their revenge. It would have cost tens of thousands of lives, but not 300,000. Now we are ashamed of ourselves, disgraced in our own eyes, and in the eyes of the world, where our docility has earned us nothing. This must not be repeated now. We must put up a resistance, defend ourselves against the enemy, man and child.
On Jan. 18, 1943, the Germans rounded up 7,000 Jews and sent them to the extermination camp at Treblinka; they killed 600 more right in Warsaw. But on that day, an uprising began. In the beginning, the Jewish Fighting Organization had about 600 volunteers; the Jewish Military Association had about 400, and there were thousands more in spontaneous small groups. The Jews had only 10 handguns, but the Germans did not realize how under-armed the Jewish fighters were.
After four days of fighting, the Germans on January 21 pulled back from the ghetto, to organize better. A diary written in the Warsaw ghetto exulted, “In the four days of fighting we had made up for the shame of Jewish passivity in the first extermination action of July, 1942.” [Ber Mark, “The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” in “They Fought Back" ed., Yuri Suhl (N.Y.: Paperback Library, 1968; 1st pub. 1967), pp. 104-06].
Not only the Germans were shocked by the unexpected resistance, but also the Jews were astonished. They could not imagine until then that the beaten, exhausted victims could rise against a mighty enemy who had conquered Europe. Many Jews who were in the streets of Warsaw during the fighting refused to believe that on Zamenhof and Mila streets Jewish boys and girls had attacked Germans. The large-scale fighting which followed convinced all that it was possible.
In February 1943, the Polish Home Army transferred 50 revolvers (many of them defective), 50 hand grenades, and four pounds of explosives to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. The Warsaw Jews also manufactured their own explosives, including Molotov cocktails. But, wrote Ringelblum, as in Biblical days, “their most potent weapon was their deep sense of national pride and responsibility.”
On Feb. 16, 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered that the Warsaw ghetto be exterminated on April 19. The plan was to give Hitler a Judenrein Warsaw as a present for his April 20 birthday.
On that night of April 19, the Warsaw Jews partook of their Passover Seder. Since September 1939, they had eaten the bitter herbs of slavery. Now, they were drinking the wine of freedom.
The Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary, “the joke cannot last much longer, but it shows what the Jews are capable of when they have arms in their hands.” [Yuri Suhl, introduction to “They Fought Back," p. 15.]
That day, a poster appeared in Warsaw in which the Jewish Fighting Organization assured the Christian Polish resistance that the Jews would never surrender. The poster promised, “You have seen and will see that every doorstop in the ghetto is and will continue to be a fortress. We may all perish in the struggle but we shall not surrender….Long live the brotherhood of weapons and the blood of fighting Poland! Long live Freedom! Death to the murderous and criminal occupants.” [Ber Mark, “The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising," in “They Fought Back," pp. 120-21.]
Sobibor was the greatest revolt, but not the only one. Jews rose up at four other extermination camps and eighteen forced labor camps or death camps. [Nechama Tec, “Jewish Resistance: Facts, Omissions, Distortions" (DC: US Holocaust Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, 1997), p. 1; Yehuda Bauer, “The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness" (Toronto: Univ. of Tor. Pr., 1979), p. 31.] Of these, the August 2, 1943, revolt of 700 inmates at Treblinka was the most successful. The prisoners used improvised explosives to set fires, improvised knives to kill guards, and had already stolen some firearms before revolt began. The huge fire disabled much of Treblinka. Between 150 and 200 prisoners escaped, and of them, a dozen survived until the end of the war. [Samuel Rajzman, “Uprising in Treblinka,” in Yuri Suhl ed., “They Fought Back” (NY: Paperback Library, 1968), pp. 146-47. The Germans forced the remaining prisoners to demolish Treblinka, then gassed many of them , and shut the camp down forever on August 21, 1943. After the remaining Jewish prisoners had finished the job of completely burying the camp, they were shipped to Sobibor in October 1943, to bury the remnants of that extermination camp. Once that was done, they were all murdered.
Of all the German concentration and extermination camps, it was almost exclusively the Jewish camps where there were revolts
Violence never solves anything” is a platitude which American schoolchildren are taught. Sobibor and Treblinka show the platitude is a deadly falsehood. Violence solved Sobibor and Treblinka. The solution to Hitler’s Final Solution was violence — the violent destruction of the Nazi regime. The Jews at Sobibor and Treblinka did their part. By shutting down two extermination camps, those fighting Jews may have saved more lives per capita than did other anti-Nazi combat unit, ever. Even the revolts that did not have such spectacular success helped defeat the Nazis. Every revolt delayed and impeded for at least some time the machinery of extermination. Every extra guard that was assigned to a camp because Nazi fear of revolts was one less soldier on the front lines against the Allies.
Some people claim that firearms did not make, and could not have made, any difference in the Holocaust. Sobibor and Treblinka show the opposite. Once the formerly-unarmed Jews got their hands on firearms, the extermination camps were on their way out of business.
Despite minimal support and even antisemitic hostility from the surrounding population, thousands of Jews battled the Germans in eastern Europe. Resistance units emerged in over 100 ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. Jews resisted when the Germans attempted to establish ghettos in a number of small towns in eastern Poland in 1942. Revolts took place in Starodubsk, Kletsk, Lachva, Mir, Tuchin, and several other towns. As the Germans liquidated the major ghettos in 1943, they met with armed Jewish resistance in Krakow (Cracow), Bialystok, Czestochowa, Bedzin, Sosnowiec, and Tarnow, as well as a major uprising in Warsaw. Thousands of Jews escaped from the ghettos and joined partisan units in nearby forests. Jews from Minsk, for example, established seven partisan fighting units. Jews from Vilna, Riga, and Kovno also formed resistance units.
In western Belorussia, the western Ukraine, and eastern Poland, family camps were established in which Jewish civilians repaired weapons, made clothing, cooked for the fighters, and assisted Soviet partisan operations. As many as 10,000 Jews survived the war by taking refuge with Jewish partisan units. The camp established by Tuvia Bielski in the Naliboki Forest in 1942, for example, gave refuge to more than 1,200 Jews.
After World War Two he worked to document what happened at Sobibor, one of three secret death camps built by the Nazis in occupied eastern Poland. About 250,000 people, mainly Jews, were murdered there from 1942-43. More than 34,000 were from the Netherlands. Jules Schelvis lost most of his family in the war and survived six more camps until he was finally freed in 1945. He was a co-plaintiff in the trial of Sobibor guard John Demjanjuk, who was found guilty in 2011 of being an accessory to the murder of 28,000 Jews.
The Nazis tried to cover up the existence of Sobibor and little was known about it as so few people had survived. Schelvis was one of only 18 Dutch people to come back from Sobibor. He died at his home in Amstelveen, near Amsterdam. Schelvis began writing about the camp in the 1980s when he retired and set up the Sobibor Foundation. He was transported to Sobibor aged 22 from the Dutch concentration camp of Westerbork in June 1943, along with his wife and in-laws who were murdered within hours.
Schelvis himself was later sent to a labour camp after speaking to an SS officer using German he had learned at school. Initially he believed he was the only Dutch survivor but eventually found another 17 people who had returned home. Asked why he had devoted years of his life to documenting the horrors of Sobibor, he once said: "I did it for everyone who was murdered there. First of all for my wife and the family and everyone else."
Sobibor Nazi death camp survivor Schelvis dies at 95 - BBC News
strange now its armed ragheads killing Germans
strange now its armed ragheads killing Germans
And raping their women
I bet the Germans considered them terrorists and wanted to ship them off to segregated areas.Armed Jews killing Nazis is a good thing
Though most Western depictions of World War II focus on soldiers rescuing helpless victims from German oppression, the truth is very different. The human species doesn’t take kindly to genocide or oppression, and the Jews are no exception.
The Treblinka Rebellion
1943
.On August 2, 1943, the prisoners fought back. About half of the 1,500 inmates allowed to live in the camp invaded the camp armory after three Jews walked up to the two guards at the rear door and stabbed them with their own knives before they could sound an alarm, whereupon the Jews stole small arms from the armory and opened fire on the SS guards throughout Camp II. The prisoners seized kerosene stores and set fire to every building while the guards and watchtowers began shooting back. The Jews broke into Camp I and armed some of its inmates, and then about 600 men and women broke through the outer perimeter and ran for their lives into the woods. All but about 40 of these were recaptured within a week and executed. Those 40 survived the war
The Lenin Ghetto Assault
1942
There were a few thousand Jews in the ghetto until August 14, 1942, when the SS entered and murdered almost every single human being, including infants. Thirty people were spared to work in the ghetto as tailors and woodwrights, and they were guarded by an SS garrison of 100, plus 30 Aryan Belarusian policemen who also hated the Jews.
On 12 September 1942, the town was assaulted from the northeast by about 150 partisan soldiers, including the famous Bielski brothers, who killed thirty SS officers, soldiers, and police. They then broke through the wall, evacuated the 30 Jews remaining, and burned the ghetto to the ground before retreating into the surrounding woodland.
Zdzieciol Ghetto Partisans
1942-44
Alter Dvoretsky, a local lawyer, organized a resistance group of about 60 people, who acquired guns and ammunition, and prepared to arm the ghetto residents in the event that it would be liquidated. These Partisan rebels cooperated with the Soviet Red Army in ambushing German patrols and stealing all weapon and food supplies from two dozen supply depots.
The SS decided that this activity was a result of ghetto residents escaping: They liquidated the ghetto on April 30, 1942, and again on August 6. In the first incident, 1,200 of the most able-bodied Jews were marched out of the city and shot, then thrown into mass graves. The second incident resulted in 2,000 to 3,000 being shot, but the Partisans were able to fight on and remain hidden in the forests for the rest of the war.
10 Incredible Cases Of Jewish Resistance During The Holocaust - Listverse
I bet the Germans considered them terrorists and wanted to ship them off to segregated areas.Armed Jews killing Nazis is a good thing
Though most Western depictions of World War II focus on soldiers rescuing helpless victims from German oppression, the truth is very different. The human species doesn’t take kindly to genocide or oppression, and the Jews are no exception.
The Treblinka Rebellion
1943
.On August 2, 1943, the prisoners fought back. About half of the 1,500 inmates allowed to live in the camp invaded the camp armory after three Jews walked up to the two guards at the rear door and stabbed them with their own knives before they could sound an alarm, whereupon the Jews stole small arms from the armory and opened fire on the SS guards throughout Camp II. The prisoners seized kerosene stores and set fire to every building while the guards and watchtowers began shooting back. The Jews broke into Camp I and armed some of its inmates, and then about 600 men and women broke through the outer perimeter and ran for their lives into the woods. All but about 40 of these were recaptured within a week and executed. Those 40 survived the war
The Lenin Ghetto Assault
1942
There were a few thousand Jews in the ghetto until August 14, 1942, when the SS entered and murdered almost every single human being, including infants. Thirty people were spared to work in the ghetto as tailors and woodwrights, and they were guarded by an SS garrison of 100, plus 30 Aryan Belarusian policemen who also hated the Jews.
On 12 September 1942, the town was assaulted from the northeast by about 150 partisan soldiers, including the famous Bielski brothers, who killed thirty SS officers, soldiers, and police. They then broke through the wall, evacuated the 30 Jews remaining, and burned the ghetto to the ground before retreating into the surrounding woodland.
Zdzieciol Ghetto Partisans
1942-44
Alter Dvoretsky, a local lawyer, organized a resistance group of about 60 people, who acquired guns and ammunition, and prepared to arm the ghetto residents in the event that it would be liquidated. These Partisan rebels cooperated with the Soviet Red Army in ambushing German patrols and stealing all weapon and food supplies from two dozen supply depots.
The SS decided that this activity was a result of ghetto residents escaping: They liquidated the ghetto on April 30, 1942, and again on August 6. In the first incident, 1,200 of the most able-bodied Jews were marched out of the city and shot, then thrown into mass graves. The second incident resulted in 2,000 to 3,000 being shot, but the Partisans were able to fight on and remain hidden in the forests for the rest of the war.
10 Incredible Cases Of Jewish Resistance During The Holocaust - Listverse
