Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against Page 2 of 24 humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture Page 3 of 24 built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and Page 4 of 24 employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities. Page 5 of 24 More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Page 6 of 24 In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest forPage 7 of 24 interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw Page 8 of 24 branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz Page 9 of 24 established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish

Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrillaPage 10 of 24 warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in Page 11 of 24 existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17,Page 12 of 24 Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation Page 13 of 24 from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while herPage 14 of 24 brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Page 15 of 24 Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late Page 16 of 24 November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Page 17 of 24 Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the

20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, thePage 18 of 24 museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews,

Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision ofPage 19 of 24 clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the Page 20 of 24 now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies Page 21 of 24 and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, Page 22 of 24 when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

COPYRIGHT 2021 ABC­CLIO, LLC https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Page 23 of 24 Jewish Resistance Activity

In this activity, you will learn about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and create a collage timeline of one resister, describing their experiences and life using a variety of resources.

Vocabulary Jewish partisans: Jewish individuals who conducted a variety of guerrilla and paramilitary operations in enemy­held territory during World War II. Warsaw Ghetto: site in Poland of a May–June 1943 uprising in which Jewish resistance beat back and held off German forces in an attempt to prevent the forced removal of Jews to concentration camps. Zionism: a political movement that began in the 19th century to seek the formation of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Background Information The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. The Jews who stood up against them displayed remarkable acts of courage, putting their lives at extreme risk. Resistance to the Germans took many forms, from the passive courage of keeping customs and traditions alive during unimaginable times to more active forms. One group, known as partisans, engaged in such activities as sabotage (e.g., blowing up bridges, derailing trains, damaging factories), plotting uprisings, facilitating escapes, and assassinating collaborators.

Apply

1. Read the reference article "Jewish Resistance" and consider the following questions:

What were the different ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust? What are some examples of passive and active resistance? What were some difficulties and limitations Jews faced in trying to resist their captors?

2. Under Sources, skim through the biographies of Jewish individuals who in different ways resisted their circumstances during World War II. Select one person to highlight. Create a timeline of the person's life, including birth and death dates and notable events in their life. If the person participated in an event (i.e., the Warsaw Uprising), also include facts about that event.

Questions to Consider: As you create your timeline, consider the following questions while researching your person:

What type of resistance did the person engage in? How did the person resist the circumstances Jews were forced into during World War II? What were the results of some of these efforts?

To illustrate the person's life story, print out photos, quotes, facts, and anything else you would like to use, and add them to your timeline.

3. Find someone in class who chose a different person and describe your chosen person's life to each other.

Reference

Jewish Resistance

The Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. Those who claim that Jews went as meekly as sheep to the slaughter ignore the many instances of remarkable courage in the face of this staggering crime against humanity. In reality, Jewish resistance took many forms. That it often proved futile reflects the great vulnerability of Jews rather than any lack of bravery or courage.

Types of Resistance

Resistance may be divided into the two general categories of passive and active. Passive resistance took the form of cultural and spiritual endurance and assertiveness. Jews confined to ghettos such as Warsaw continued to practice their culture and religion despite prohibitions. They organized symphonies, drama clubs, schools, and other voluntary and educational associations. They also risked their lives by trading across ghetto walls, despite threats of torture and execution.

Passive resistance drew on a long and esteemed Jewish tradition of outlasting the persecutor. Initially believing that the Nazis and their various European sympathizers wanted to put Jews in their place, not in their graves, Jewish leaders sought to endure discriminatory laws, pogroms, and deportations, hoping for an eventual relaxation of anti­ Semitic policies or perhaps even a defeat on the battlefield.

Thus, Jewish resistance remained largely nonviolent until 1943, in part because the Germans succeeded in deceiving the Jews. They were helped in this by the fact that the German soldiers of World War I had generally behaved decently, treating Jewish noncombatants humanely. Jews in Poland and the east initially expected similar behavior from the Nazi invaders. Even after it became apparent that Nazi soldiers and especially police were intent on human butchery on a scale previously unimaginable, Jewish cultures that embraced the sanctity and sheer joy of life found it difficult to comprehend a culture built on hate and murderous brutality. Many Jews put their faith in God—hoping for the best, preparing for the worst, yet not daring at first to think the unthinkable.

When Jewish communities and individuals recognized the unthinkable—that the Nazis and their various European allies wanted to exterminate systematically all Jews in Europe— active and armed resistance increased. Active resistance included acts of industrial sabotage in munitions factories and isolated bombings of known Nazi gathering spots. One must recognize, however, the near utter futility of such efforts, given the impossibility of Jews "winning" pitched battles against their killers. The Nazis had machine guns, dogs, and usually superior numbers, and they could call on tanks, artillery, and similar weapons of industrialized modern warfare. The Jewish resisters were often unarmed. At best, some might have pistols or rifles with limited ammunition, perhaps supplemented by a few hand grenades. Such unequal odds often made the final result tragically predictable, yet many Jews decided it was better to die fighting than to face extermination in a death camp.

Acts of Resistance

When it became apparent that they were being deported to Treblinka to be gassed, the Jews of Warsaw at first refused to assemble and then led a ghetto uprising in April 1943, the ferocity of which surprised the Germans. More than 2,000 German soldiers, supported by armored cars, machine guns, flame throwers, and unlimited ammunition, faced approximately 750 Jews with little or no military training. The Schutzstaffel (SS) general in command, Jurgen Stroop, estimated he would need two days to suppress the uprising. In fact, he needed a full month, as Jews, armed mainly with pistols, homemade grenades, and Molotov cocktails, fought frantically and ferociously from street to street. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was only the most famous example of nearly 60 other armed uprisings in Jewish ghettos.

Resistance was less common in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, mainly because there was not sufficient time for resistance networks to form. Resistance requires leaders, organization, and weapons. These elements cannot be improvised and employed in a few hours or even days: months of planning and training are required. Despite major difficulties, however, Jews did revolt at all three of these death camps, as well as at Auschwitz­Birkenau and 18 forced­labor camps. One of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish resistance took place at Treblinka. On August 2, 1943, one year after the inauguration of the camp, a group of Jewish prisoners rose up, killed their guards, burned the camp, and escaped. Of 600 prisoners who got away, only about 40 survived the war.

Jews also participated actively in resistance networks in Poland, the Soviet Union, France, and other countries. Their plight was difficult in the extreme, since anti­Semitism within these networks often required Jews to hide their ethnicity. In some cells of the Polish Resistance, Jews were killed outright. Many Soviet partisans distrusted and exploited Jews. Nevertheless, between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews fought as partisans in the Soviet Union against Nazi invaders. In France, Jews made up less than 1% of the population yet 15 to 20% of the French underground. In 1944, nearly 2,000 Jewish resisters in France united to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (Jewish Fighting Organization), which supported Allied military operations by attacking railway lines and German military installations and factories.

Limitations of Resistance

Impressive as it was, Jewish resistance was always limited for several reasons. In general, Jews lacked combat experience, since many countries forbade Jewish citizens from serving in the military. As with Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) taken by the Germans, many Jews, especially those confined in ghettos, were weakened by disease and deliberate starvation.

The Nazis succeeded in creating a situation in which people were so focused on surviving from hour to hour that their struggles consumed virtually all their energy and attention. Dissension within Jewish communities also inhibited resistance, with older Jews and members of the Judenrat (Jewish councils) tending to support a policy of limited cooperation with the Nazis, hoping that by contributing to the German war effort, they might thereby preserve the so­called productive elements of Jewish communities.

More controversially, Jewish resistance was hampered by weak international support. Although Western leaders often condemned Nazi actions, they took little action. Official Catholic and Protestant statements were equally tentative. Hesitant and sporadic support often unintentionally played into the hands of the Nazis as they planned for Jewish extermination.

Observant Jews were people of God's law, the Torah, who put their faith in God, with Jewish culture in general tending to disavow militant actions. Confronted by murderous killing squads possessing all the tools of industrialized mass warfare, some Jews nevertheless resisted courageously, both passively and actively. That their resistance often ended tragically does not mean that it failed. Indeed, Jewish resistance was the genesis of the Israel Defense Forces.

William J. Astore https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1691811

Biography

Hannah Senesh

Hannah Senesh (also spelled Szenes) was a Hungarian Jewish partisan who spied for the British in Hungary during World War II. She also sought to rescue Allied airmen and Jewish people from Nazi occupiers.

Early Years, Champion of Zionism

Senesh was born in Budapest on July 27, 1921. In 1939, when anti­Semitism was on the rise in Hungary, Senesh left her home and her mother in Budapest to travel to Palestine. Soon after arriving, she began to train as a radio officer and parachutist for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

In 1938, Senesh became a Zionist when she realized the force of anti­Jewish sentiment in her native country, which paralleled Adolf Hitler's increasing power in Europe. Despite her Hungarian patriotism, she came to believe that Jews needed to find safety and sanctity in Palestine because the world was not safe for them elsewhere. After her high school graduation, Senesh left Hungary for Palestine.

British Spy, Arrest and Execution

The British SOE organized teams of native speakers from central European countries. In Palestine, Senesh volunteered to train as a radio operator and a parachutist. She intended to return to Hungary with a unit of volunteers. In Egypt, she was trained in sabotage and espionage. With her unit, Senesh was to aid captured and hiding Allied flyers and Jews to escape to safety.

In 1944, Senesh met with five male colleagues in Italy. From there, they parachuted into Hungary to join underground resisters. Senesh and her unit members were arrested, however, after they landed. The residents of the Hungarian village where she was hiding gave in to police intimidation and turned Senesh over to the authorities. After her arrest by the Hungarian police, German soldiers discovered her radio and took her to Budapest for interrogation.

In custody, Senesh withstood particularly severe torture but did not reveal any information except her name. The police arrested Senesh's mother to question her about her daughter's work. But they soon realized that the mother did not even know that Senesh had been in Hungary. Once this was discovered, her mother's presence was used in an attempt to manipulate Senesh. Nevertheless, she still refused to give her captors information about the radio transmitter or her mission. On November 7, 1944, Senesh was executed in Budapest at the age of 23. The following words were found in her cell after her execution: "I could have been 23 next July. I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost." https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1797492

Biography

Mordechai Anielewicz

Mordechai Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacked Nazi soldiers in January 1943 to avoid imminent deportation to the Treblinka death camp. Although the Nazis defeated the uprising in May, it served as a rallying point for further Jewish rebellions against the Nazis during World War II, and Anielewicz became a symbol of Jewish resistance.

Early Years and Initial Resistance Efforts

Anielewicz was born into a Jewish working­class family in Wyszkow, Poland, in 1919. He attended a Hebrew high school in Warsaw and was briefly a member of Betar, a Zionist youth organization that advocated self­defense for Jews. At the time of the Polish invasion by Germany on September 1, 1939, Anielewicz was a leading member of the Warsaw branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a communist Zionist youth organization.

On September 7, 1939, Anielewicz fled Warsaw with some fellow members of Hashomer Hatzair and headed east to stay ahead of the German advance. He attempted to escape to Palestine in order to establish an escape route for other Zionist youths. However, he was caught by the Soviet Army at the Romanian border and put in a Soviet jail. After release, he went to Vilnius, Lithuania, which was part of the Soviet Union. Vilnius was a refuge for many Zionist youth groups and Jewish refugees.

By the time Anielewicz returned to Warsaw with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, in January 1940, the Nazis had sealed off the ghettos and appointed a 24­member Jewish Council known as the Judenrat to administer the communities. Many Jews began to die of starvation and disease, as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Anielewicz became active in the underground movement in Warsaw and set out to organize a resistance movement. He requested that other Hashomer Hatzair members return to Warsaw to continue their activities. Anielewicz established Neged Hazerem (Against the Stream), an underground newspaper. He also organized a kibbutz and cells and started to transform Hashomer Hatzair into an armed resistance group. In addition, he studied Hebrew, sociology, economics, and history and began to write and give lectures to other Zionist groups.

By October 1940, the Schutzstaffel was deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anielewicz stepped up his efforts against the Nazi occupiers. He established contact with the Polish government­in­exile in London. The exiled government ordered him to ally with Polish forces outside of the ghetto, but he was unable to carry out the orders. During the spring of 1942, Anielewicz helped establish a short­lived antifascist group, which was dispersed by the arrest of its communist members.

On July 22, 1942, the Nazis began mass deportation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camps in Treblinka, 50 miles northeast of Warsaw. The Nazis deported more than 5,000 Jews each day until September. During that time, Anielewicz had escaped to southwest Poland on an underground mission to organize other branches of his movement. Anielewicz returned to Warsaw to try to organize an armed resistance and found the ghetto devastated by the deportation of approximately 265,000 of the ghetto's 330,000 Jews.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Most of the Jewish elders disapproved of armed resistance out of fear of provoking a devastating German retaliation. However, Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman established the Jewish Fighting Organization. There were also some other small, unarmed resistance groups. Anielewicz garnered support for an armed resistance to block deportation, and he reorganized his group. The members elected him chief commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization that November. The group was able to contact the Polish government in London and procure weapons in Warsaw.

In early January 1943, Heinrich Himmler visited the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered another deportation. The deportation began unannounced on January 18. In response, the Jewish Fighting Organization and several other small fighting groups began uncoordinated guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. Anielewicz developed a plan in which his fighters obeyed the deportation orders until they reached a certain part of town, where they received a signal to attack. Despite the death of all of the Hashomer Hatzair fighters except Anielewicz, many Jews escaped. The Nazis stopped the deportation four days later, after they had lost about 50 soldiers. Anielewicz and his fellow resisters thought this was a victory.

With the deception of peace, the Nazis then tried to coax the remaining Jews to board boxcars to Treblinka. Anielewicz continued to command underground operations, as the groups planned and prepared for further combat by procuring arms and building bunkers. In April, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto cleared of all Jews before Adolf Hitler's birthday on April 20. On April 19, the first day of Passover, more than 2,000 Nazi soldiers and Polish police began the final deportation. Approximately 1,500 Jews armed with 2 machine guns, 15 rifles, 500 handguns, hand grenades, and Molotov cocktails (homemade bombs) began to attack the force. The resistance achieved a remarkable victory on the first day, forcing the Nazis to retreat. The Nazis suffered heavy losses and left behind weapons.

The second day, the Nazis returned to drive the Jewish fighters from their hideouts by using gas, smoke bombs, and flame throwers. On the third day of battle, the Nazis used small patrols for street­to­street fighting. The Jewish resistance was outnumbered and outgunned. The Jewish fighters refused to surrender and often hid in sewers. The Nazis began to burn every house in the ghetto and flood the sewers in order to force them out. After the first few days of battle, Anielewicz moved from the streets to the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization.

Uprising Crushed

After a four­week battle in which the Nazis shelled and bombed the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews, the Nazis captured and gassed the Jewish Fighting Organization's headquarters at 18 Mila Street on May 8. There, they found Anielewicz and a number of other resisters dead. Many had committed suicide to avoid capture. On May 16, 1943, General Jurgen Stroop, the Nazi commander, reported that "the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw [was] no longer in existence." The Nazis executed and deported the remaining Jews. Only about 100 survived. However, the uprising rallied other Jews to resist Nazi occupation.

Anielewicz's last communication was a letter to Zuckerman, who was stationed outside the ghetto. He wrote: "The main thing is that the dream of my life has come true. I have had the fortune to set my eyes upon Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness." In Israel, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was named after him, and a monument was built there in his honor. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1692270

Biography

Zivia Lubetkin

Zivia Lubetkin was a leader of the Jewish underground in Poland and one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB) in Warsaw.

Early Life

Zivia Lubetkin was born in Beten (Byten), Poland, on November 9, 1914, to Ya'akov­Yizhak and Hayyah Zilberman Lubetkin. She attended a Polish government school. From early childhood she was a member of the Zionist­Socialist youth movement Freiheit (Freedom), which gave her a solid grounding in Jewish communal life and a sense of duty. Lubetkin also joined and worked with the Hechalutz youth movement in Warsaw as a coordinator.

Underground Leader

In 1938, Freiheit joined Hechalutz to form one movement, Dror, and Lubetkin became a member of its executive council. In 1939, she traveled to Geneva for the 21st Zionist Congress, returning to Poland just before the outbreak of war. After Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Dror decided to send its leadership cohort east, away from the fighting. Then, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, Lubetkin went to Lvov to help organize Dror underground activities. During the winter of 1939 she and other members left the Soviet zone and returned to German­occupied territory to continue their resistance work. In January 1940 they reached Warsaw. As the Warsaw Ghetto was forming, Lubetkin's tasks included organizing the movement and facilitating communications with those outside the ghetto. During this period she also met and fell in love with another underground leader, Yitzhak Zuckerman.

By the fall of 1941 there could be little doubt that the Jews were being exterminated, though the precise means were still unknown. Lubetkin, realizing that the Jews had little hope if they sat by passively, decided to resist. On July 28, 1942, during the first mass deportation from Warsaw, she was among the founders of the ZOB as well as a member of the ZOB's political arm, the Jewish National Committee (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy, or ZKN).

Lubetkin became the only woman on the ZOB's high command, and her first name in Polish, "Cywia," became the code word for "Poland" among resistance groups on both sides of the ghetto wall during World War II. In January 1943, the Germans launched a new wave of deportations, and the ZOB's resistance network decided to act. Fighting a limited action against the Nazis, the ZOB turned the Germans onto the defensive, and the deportations were brought to a temporary halt. Lubetkin was among the fighters in this initial resistance operation.

Resistance Fighter

In April 1943, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began, Lubetkin was instantly involved in the combat that followed. While the first few days of fighting seemed to offer some measure of success, it was inevitable that the Nazis' overwhelming firepower would tell in the long term. As the resistance began to falter, Lubetkin, while keeping her combat command role, also acted in a liaison capacity with the various groups of fighters and maintained contact between them. On May 8, the ZOB command in the bunker at Mila 18 sent her to find a way out through the sewers leading to the Aryan side. She was successful, and on May 10 she navigated the sewer system with the last of the fighters. The remaining fighters in the bunker—Mordecai Anielewicz, Mira Fuchrer, Rachel Zilberberg, and nearly 50 others—were either killed or took their own lives to avoid capture.

Until the end of the war Lubetkin remained on the Aryan side, continuing to serve in the underground. She fought with the remaining ZOB units during the Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and then, together with the last of the fighters, she surfaced during November 1944. Lubetkin was one of only 34 Jewish fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto to survive the war. After the liberation of the city by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, she once more met up with Zuckerman.

Both of Lubetkin's parents and four of her sisters perished in the Holocaust, while her brother Shelomo and sister Ahuvah managed to survive by migrating to Palestine.

Post­War Life

After the war, Lubetkin was active in organizing Bricha (Flight), an organization helping Jewish survivors migrate to Palestine. She herself wished to go as quickly as possible, and on March 1, 1945—even before the war was over—she attempted to do so by going to Romania with another resistance fighter, the partisan Abba Kovner, and members of his group. Unable to proceed beyond Bucharest, however, she returned to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, together with Zuckerman and a survivor of the Bialystok ghetto, Chaika Grossman, Lubetkin created an infrastructure to enable survivors from the Soviet Union to migrate to Israel. She and Zuckerman finally left for Palestine in May 1946 and were married in 1947. That same year they met with other ghetto fighters and partisans to start the process that would lead, by April 19, 1949, to the establishment of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. A museum focusing on Jewish resistance, Ghetto Fighters' House, was created on its grounds. The Zuckermans built their home and raised their two children at the kibbutz.

In 1961, Lubetkin was among the principal witnesses at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where she provided important evidence relating to the Nazis' crimes against Polish Jews. Lubetkin lived for the remainder of her life at the Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, where she died on July 11, 1978.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2262860

Biography

Itzhak Katzenelson

Itzhak Katzenelson was a Hebrew and Yiddish poet and dramatist in Poland, who was active in cultural resistance to the Holocaust.

Born to Hinda and Jacob Benjamin Katzenelson on July 21, 1886, in Karelichy (Korelichi), a small town near Minsk, he received his early education from his father. He was a descendant of a long line of rabbinical and Talmudic sages and scholars.

Early Writing

Katzenelson was raised in Lodz, where the family moved soon after he was born. He was considered a literary prodigy, and by the age of 12 had already written his first play, Dreyfus un Esterhazy. As a young adult before World War I he opened a secular Hebrew school and created a network of such schools in Lodz from kindergarten to high school, which functioned until 1939. He also became known for his Hebrew textbooks and books for children, which were the first of their kind.

In addition, Katzenelson wrote Yiddish comedies (translated into Hebrew), and in 1912 he founded the theatre Habima Halvrit (The Hebrew Stage), which toured Poland and Lithuania. Several of his Yiddish plays were performed in Lodz before World War I. His first volume of poetry, Dimdumim (Twilight), appeared in 1910.

Beginning in 1930, Katzenelson belonged to the Dror Zionist movement in Lodz and also to Hechalutz—which, with emigration to Palestine as its goal, operated a training commune, Kibbutz Hakhsharah.

Cultural Resistance

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and eight days later Lodz was occupied. Katzenelson's school was immediately closed down, later serving as the city's Gestapo headquarters. Urged on by his family, Katzenelson fled to Warsaw in late November 1939. Once settled, his wife, Hanna, and their three children followed. She and their two younger sons, Benjamin and Ben Zion, would be deported to their deaths in Treblinka on August 14, 1942.

In the ghetto, Katzenelson entered his most creative period, writing poems and articles in the underground Zionist press, as well as approximately 50 plays. He wrote poems reflecting the contemporary suffering of the ghetto, masked through Biblical or historical themes. His descriptions were his responses to the wretched conditions in which the Jews of Warsaw found themselves, and through his plays he hoped to improve ghetto morale. His Yiddish play Iyov (Job) was published on June 22, 1941, possibly the only Jewish book published in the ghetto during the German occupation.

On July 20, 1942, just before the Nazis began their mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, Mordechaj Tenenbaum, one of the leading members of Dror and a founder of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), concealed some of Katzenelson's writings in an underground hiding place. Some of these survived the war. In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began a revolt that would last for the next 27 days. The day after the start of the revolt, to save his life, friends smuggled Katzenelson and his surviving son Zvi into the Aryan part of the city.

They went to the Polski Hotel, from where they obtained documents from Katzenelson's friend David Guzik of the Joint Distribution Committee, certifying that they were citizens of Honduras. In possession of his new passport, they were transferred in May 1943 to the French internment camp at Vittel, where the Nazis held Allied citizens and nationals of neutral countries for possible later prisoner exchange. It was here, on October 3, 1943, that he wrote possibly his greatest Yiddish work, Dos Lid funem Oysgehargen Yidishn Folk (The Song of the Murdered Jewish People). He completed this epic, a poem in 15 chapters describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on January 18, 1944. Its lines include:

And it continued. Ten a day, ten thousand Jews a day. That did not last very long. Soon they took fifteen thousand. Warsaw, the City of Jews—the fenced­in, walled­in city, Dwindled, expired, melted like snow before my eyes. Warsaw, packed with Jews like a synagogue on Yom Kippur, like a busy marketplace Jews trading and worshiping, both happy and sad Seeking their bread, praying to their God. They crowded the walled­in, locked­in city. You are deserted now, Warsaw, like a gloomy wasteland. You are a cemetery now, more desolate than a graveyard. Your streets are empty—not even a corpse can be found there.

The poem ended with the words "Woe unto me, woe."

Katzenenlson made two copies of the poem, one of which he gave to Ruth Adler, a German Jew from Dresden who had a British Palestinian passport. In the spring of 1944 she received permission to leave the country in a prisoner exchange and smuggled out one of the copies, taking it to Palestine. Katzenelson buried the other copy in bottles under a tree at Vittel with the help of a fellow prisoner, Miriam Novitch, who retrieved it after liberation. The poem was first published in May 1945. Extracts have since been published in numerous languages, and a stand­alone volume has also appeared.

In the early spring of 1944 the Jews interned at Vittel were declared stateless, and on April 18, 1944, those of Polish origin were transported in three railroad cars to the Drancy transit camp near Paris. In late April 1944, Itzhak and Zvi Katzenelson were sent on a transport to Auschwitz, where they died on May 1, 1944.

Legacy

In Israel, the Ghetto Fighters' House has been named in Katzenelson's honor as the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, former ghetto fighters, and veterans of partisan units. Its aim is to serve as a place of testimony relating the story of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and in particular during World War II. As a further lasting monument, the museum has made extensive efforts to collect as many of Katzenelson's manuscripts as can be located, and to translate his works into English and other languages.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 2260777

Biography

Irena Sendler

Irena Sendler was a Polish social worker who, as head of children's section of the underground resistance movement Zegota, was instrumental in saving thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis.

Early Years and Aid to Polish Jews

Born Irena Krzyzanowska on February 15, 1910, her father was Dr. Stanislaw Krzyzanowski, a physician and one of the earliest members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, or PPS). He had a profound influence on the formation of many of her ideas regarding social justice. Irena was born, like her father, in Otwock, a short distance from Warsaw. When he died in 1917, Jewish community leaders, out of gratitude for her father's efforts to reduce medical costs among poor Jews, offered to help pay for her education. She then attended the University of Warsaw, where she studied Polish literature. As a young woman she married her first husband, Mieczyslaw Sendler. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1947, but she retained this married name for the rest of her life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the 29­year­old Irena Sendler was a senior administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor, and the destitute throughout the city. With the onset of war, and in view of the Nazi treatment of the Jews, Sendler began aiding Jews as well. Through her office she arranged for the provision of clothing, medicine, and financial aid. Jews receiving assistance were registered under fictitious Christian names. More than 3,000 false documents were forged in order to help Jewish families in need. Once the ghetto into which the Jews had been forced was sealed in November 1940, however, the options for continuing this kind of aid were rendered effectively impossible.

Despite this, Sendler was determined to continue trying to provide aid to the Jews of the now­isolated ghetto. Therefore, when Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was established in October 1942, Sendler was among its most enthusiastic supporters. This organization existed under the auspices of the Polish government­in­exile and operated through the Polish resistance, with the express purpose of aiding the country's Jews and finding places of safety for them within occupied Poland.

Sendler and Aid to Jewish Children

Sendler saw her role as being directed towards the rescue of Jewish children. To do so, she needed to be able to enter the heavily guarded ghetto on some sort of official business, and in pursuit of this she was able to secure a pass from Warsaw's Epidemic Control Department. With this in hand, she was able to visit the ghetto on a daily basis. Doing so enabled her to reestablish earlier contacts, and in this way to arrange the rescues that were so urgently needed. Zegota played a vital role in this enterprise. Some two dozen other Zegota members participated in helping get Jewish children out, as well as helping Jews remaining in the ghetto. They worked to assist Jews in hiding, seeking hiding places, and paying for the upkeep and medical care. All in all, Zegota also helped save some 4,000 Polish Jews by providing food, medical care, and other forms of aid for those hiding on the so­called "Aryan" side of the ghetto, and in other parts of Poland.

It was mainly with regard to child rescue that Sendler developed her renown, however. In August 1943 Zegota appointed Sendler (known by her nom de guerre, Jolanta) as to head of its Department for the Care of Jewish Children. This enabled her to better organize her rescue activities, and with the help of each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department—from where she recruited at least one person to assist her—she was able to issue hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. On her own responsibility, she issued at least 400 of these.

Sendler cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. Her team then organized a smuggling operation, sneaking out babies and small children in ambulances and trams. Sometimes they were taken out in sacks or bags, or disguised as packages; others were hidden deep inside freight consignments. All and any means were taken to try to get the children out of the ghetto, and to safety.

One of the areas in which the children were hidden was with kindly Polish families, but finding homes willing to provide this avenue of refuge was never easy. It was also no small thing to ask parents to risk the life of their own children if the Nazis were to find out what they were doing. Often, then, Sendler relied on the good graces of the church to provide assistance. Various Catholic convents were successfully prevailed upon to open their doors, and the Sisters of the Family of Mary orphanage enabled Jewish children to pass through with identities changed by the provision of false papers. Sendler retained the real names of the children through adopting a code she only understood. She would then keep the only record of their identities in a set of jars buried, ironically, not far from a German military barracks. These jars, which were located later, contained the names of 2,500 children. The exact number of children saved is unknown.

Not all were rescued by Sendler alone, but her group, comprising about 30 volunteers, managed collectively to achieve these remarkable rescues. So far as it was humanly possible, Zegota did its best to ensure that the children would be returned to their Jewish families when the war was over. Unfortunately, however, all too often there were no family members left alive by 1945.

Sendler's Arrest, Torture, and Final Years

On October 20, 1943, the run of Irena Sendler, whose underground name was Jolanta, came to an abrupt end. The Nazis became aware of her activities, and she was arrested. The Gestapo sought full disclosure of all Zegota operations regarding the hidden children, particularly their secret identities and their hidden locations. Interrogation and imprisonment led to torture. She had her legs broken and her feet crushed, but refused to divulge anything that would give away the children or her co­conspirators. Sent to the notorious Pawiak prison, she was sentenced to death. Only at the last minute was her life spared, when Zegota activists managed to bribe one of the Gestapo officers. She escaped from prison, and spent the rest of the war in hiding.

She lived in hiding for the rest of the war, continuing her work for Jewish children and continuing to head the Children's Section of Zegota. With the end of the war, Sendler and her surviving helpers gathered as many of their records as could be located, and passed them on to the General Secretary of Zegota, Adolf Berman, at the Central Committee of Polish Jews.

On October 19, 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem recognized Irena Sendler as one of the Righteous among the Nations for her efforts on behalf of Jewish children, and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. She was awarded Poland's Order of White Eagle on November 10, 2003, and in 2008 she appeared on a Polish commemorative silver coin. She was declared the 2003 recipient of the Jan Karski Award for Valor and Courage, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She has said of her activities: "Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little." Irena Sendler died in Warsaw on May 12, 2008, aged 98.

Paul R. Bartrop https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/StudentActivity/2263165

Entry ID: 1957055

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