|
Trending Topics
|
UK Exhibit Highlights Jewish Resistance to the Nazis
(Times of Israel) Robert Philpot - "Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust," an exhibition at London's Wiener Holocaust Library, draws on a unique collection of photographs, manuscripts, and over 1,000 eyewitness accounts. "There was Jewish resistance to the Holocaust across Europe," said Dr. Barbara Warnock, the library's senior curator. Warsaw and Bialystok were two of the seven major and 45 smaller ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union where Jewish underground groups operated. In dozens of ghettos, including Krakow, Vilna, Kovno, Bedzin and Czestochowa, Jews took up arms against their persecutors. In the Minsk ghetto, up to 10,000 Jews successfully escaped, many of whom joined the Soviet partisans. Jews led six prisoner rebellions in concentration and death camps, with at least 18 occurring in slave labor camps. In the uprising at Sobibor on October 14, 1943, coordinated by Polish Jewish resisters and Soviet Jewish prisoners of war, 300 prisoners escaped, of whom 47 survived the war. 144 prisoners escaped from Auschwitz. Up to 30,000 Jews served as armed partisan fighters in Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. The Avengers, a Jewish partisan group operating in the Lithuanian forests, is credited with killing over 200 enemy soldiers, rescuing at least 70 Jews, and destroying 180 miles of train tracks. Jews were also over-represented in the resistance movements of Germany, Austria and Western Europe. In Belgium, the Comite de defense des Juifs (CDJ) saved some 2,400 Jewish children.