Jews Fight Back (Part I)

I’ve noticed a substantial movement of blatantly anti-Semitic propaganda on Facebook.   Mostly these cowards tend to whine that they’re “simply against Israel and not Jews” but then post the same big-nosed caricatures we recognize from Nazi propaganda.   This brings me to my topic for this week.

Fighting Back, by Harold Werner.  My colleague Mr. Campbell got me this book for Christmas last year and I finally finished reading it.  It chronicles the struggle to survive in the forests of Poland from 1939 to 1944, wherein a Jewish partisan group had to arm itself and fight back to avoid being wiped out.  Fortunately the author survived to tell the story, but many of his friends, family and comrades did not.

Defiance.  This movie covers almost the same territory even if the characters are different (though also true), taking place in Byelorussia as opposed to Poland.  But the same issues arise:  to survive, young Jewish badasses have to get weapons, extract friends, family and loved ones from local villages and larger ghettoes, somehow find food, avoid anti-Semitic locals eager to sell them out to the Nazis, and of course, fight back against the German Police and SS units sent into the forest, heavily armed, to wipe them out.  The main fighters are played by Daniel “007” Craig and Liev Shreiber (Ray Donovan and other roles).  [No famous people on the German side here.]

Since that book and this movie tend to reinforce and complement each other, I’ll combine the analysis of the two.

Themes:   Hostile locals.  When an entire nation defended its Jews against the Nazis – as the Danes and Bulgarians did – the Holocaust was stopped dead in its tracks.  The Final Solution was impossible without substantial cooperation and assistance by locals.  However, Werner noted an interesting dynamic.  If the Germans were armed and violent, but the Jews were not, the locals would cooperate fully with the Nazis.  However, if the Jews showed up with weapons and the inclination to use them, that now put the locals in a spot.  Faced with two sides willing to kill them, they generally picked the Jews to side with.  This was pushed further in the Jews’ favor after Stalingrad (February 1943) and Kursk (July 1943) when it became more apparent that the Nazis weren’t going to win the war.  Showing up with guns, the Jews turned the locals’ contempt into fear and respect, though whichever locals had pre-existing anti-Semitic tendencies tended to remain pro-Nazi longer than the others.  When the Red Army came close by, even the nastiest bastards began thinking twice about supporting the Fritzes. 

Useless mouths.  Unfortunately, most of the Jewish refugees were women, children, elderly, disabled, etc.  Many of the men were urban intellectuals with limited combat skills or outdoors knowhow.  Only a minority were young, able-bodied men capable of fighting.  In rare but valuable occasions the fighters had Polish Army experience.  Most of the fighting had to be done by the small fraction of willing and able men – with a few women scattered here and there.  

Russians.  While not particularly enamored of Jews, and fairly brutal thanks to Comrade Stalin, the Russians are mainly good guys in this story.   Once the Jews convinced the Soviets that they were willing, able, and competent fighters, that they were willing to fight alongside the Russians and risk their own lives defending themselves, the Soviets began supplying them with weapons, ammunition, supplies, and even a few advisors.  As the front moved westwards, so did much larger Russian partisan forces.  These forces were so large, well-equipped, and well-organized as to qualify as armies in their own right. 

Two Polish Armies.  Werner describes not one but TWO Polish resistance armies (actually he mentions others, but these are the main two): The Army Ludowa and the Army Krajowa.  The latter is the larger, more famous Home Army which shows up in the 1944 Warsaw uprising.  According to Werner, the Ludowa group was Communist and allied closely with the Soviets, and almost always highly favorable to the Jews.  On the other hand, the Army Krajowa, while not explicitly anti-Semitic, was no better than neutral and did betray them to the Nazis on multiple occasions. 

After the war, the Jews faced reprisals from Army Krajowa forces – who even killed many Jewish partisans who had managed to survive the war.  The author had to flee Poland and found his way to the USA. 

My father once spoke with a genuine French resistance fighter.  He said that during the war, the Resistance never mustered more than a few hundred men and women at tops.  However, after the war, somehow that number expanded exponentially, after the fact: thousands of people emerged from the woodwork claiming to have helped out the Resistance in various ways.  The truth is that most of these people might not have been outright collaborators or Milice, but they certainly weren’t Resistance.  Probably they were minding their own business, just trying to stay alive. 

Likewise it seems that the Polish resistance armies – particularly the Army Krajowa – claimed to have supported the Jews and opposed the Nazis.   I believe in some cases this is probably true – but clearly not all.  As for resolving discrepancies between what surviving Jews claim vs. what the Polish resistance armies claim, I’m more inclined to believe the former.  While there is little reason for Jews to attribute collaboration or hostility to Poles who weren’t actually so, there is ample incentive for embarrassed anti-Semites, after the fact, to claim to have been more supportive of the Jews than they actually were.    

Uprising.  This is a recent film with an all-star cast.  NOTE: there were TWO Warsaw uprisings.  The 1943 “Ghetto” uprising was the Jewish uprising.   The later 1944 uprising was the Polish Home Army uprising.  This movie focuses on the former.

            This story has an all-star cast: Hank Azaria (best known from the Simpsons and as Gargamel in the live action Smurfs movies), David Schwimmer (Ross Geller on “Friends”), Leelee Sobieski, Donald Sutherland (a hero here, not the vile President Snow), and even the German side has some star power:  Jon Voigt as Jurgen Stroop, the SS commander who put down the uprising, and Carey Elwes as the Nazis’ chief propagandist.  Instead of forests, the locale is the Warsaw Ghetto, i.e. street fighting which eventually led to many Jews escaping through the sewers.  Here again, you have Jews fighting back and trying to stay alive, but it’s in a demolished city and its sewer complex rather than the wild forests. 

Both “Defiance” and “Uprising” are long movies, but they complement each other.  Naturally, however, “Schindler’s List” remains the definitive Holocaust movie to date.