By Melinda Mandelbaum Stein

As a child of Holocaust survivors and as a frequent lecturer on the topic of the Holocaust, I’ve fielded every question imaginable about the Nazi war against the Jews. People want to understand how, for example, “mere dislike” led to gas chambers, or “why God did not move a divine muscle to rescue his supposedly chosen people.” But there’s one query that never fails to shatter my heart like Kristallnacht glass: “Why were the Jews so passive, never fighting back, going like sheep to the slaughter?”

Besides being a quintessential case of blaming the victim rather than the perpetrator, this question is an old antisemitic canard used ubiquitously under the Nazi regime. Since the war’s end until today, this false concept continues to be retold in infinite variations. Comments such as “Every Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe should have just refused to board the trains,” “The Jews should have emulated their ancestors the brave Maccabean fighters,” and the phrase “Jews fighting is an oxymoron” have been circulating for decades. First, it should be obvious that, for those taken from their homes and forced to board cattle cars at gunpoint, any struggle would be instantaneous suicide. Second, the Maccabees never faced such weapons as loaded revolvers. And to disparage the Jewish people as too cowardly to fight is to show ignorance of everything from biblical battles to the German Jewish soldiers who were decorated in World War I.

One way to combat a Big Lie is with a Bigger Truth, and an example of that is a work called Anthology on Jewish Armed Resistance, 1939–1945. This four-volume compilation by Isaac Kowalski, published in 1986, details innumerable acts of confrontation and resistance by Jews against the Germans and their collaborators in at least 10 countries of Europe. The documents, maps, photographs, and first-person accounts in the anthology verify the overwhelming extent to which thousands of individuals and groups fought against the perpetrators of the Holocaust in cities, rural towns, ghettoes, and concentration and death camps.

In addition, many books and movies have been produced describing events such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the revolt at Sobibor death camp, the blowing up of a crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Treblinka rebellion, and the Bielski brothers’ partisan forest warfare. Given the profound dangers and risks involved, these examples of resistance are remarkable. During the Holocaust, when they could obtain weapons, the Jews fought with courage. When they could not get arms, they strove to survive, if possible, with dignity.

The Third Reich engaged in a huge disinformation campaign. Many of the millions deported to concentration and slave labor camps were told that they only needed to work hard and follow orders, and all would be well. The infamous sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, as well several other camps, Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free), reinforced that deception. In the Treblinka death camp, there was a fake train station, complete with a ticket counter and clock, to further mislead the prisoners into believing that they were arriving at a normal place. Even the gas chambers in Birkenau, the extermination center of Auschwitz, were tiled in bright colors, maintaining the fiction that the prisoners were only going to be showered with cleansing water.

The Nazis regularly conducted a Selektion (Selection) process when they rounded up the Jews and other undesirables. The masses approached a seated officer who made instant decisions as to which of two lines the individual would join. One line, consisting of seemingly useful individuals, would be sent to the slave labor camps spread all over Europe, usually via sealed railway cattle cars. The other line, consisting of the elderly, young children, pregnant women, the ill, the mentally or physically challenged, and any others deemed useless, were sent directly to the killing centers. How can these populations possibly be accused of spinelessness and cowardice for succumbing to their armed, trained murderers, or to poisoning by Zyklon B gas?

Although the Jews were the primary target of Hitler’s regime, among the deportees to the camps were also large numbers of non-Jews. Among these were the Roma and Sinti peoples, Seventh Day Adventists, political dissidents, Catholic clergy, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Records show that the behavior of these groups regarding resistance in the camps was in no way different from that of their Jewish fellow prisoners.

For further context, consider the Armenian genocide during World War I, during which approximately 1.5 million men, women, and children were put to death by means of shooting and death marches. This from the website of the Armenian National Institute: “Resistance to the deportations was infrequent. The survival of the Armenians is credited not to acts of resistance, but to the humanitarian intervention led by American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau.”

When a weaponless minority is targeted for mass butchery by the fully armed military forces of a powerful nation, the conclusion is foregone, and this has been the case in the innumerable annihilations with which world history is peppered.

Another aim of the German regime in the thousands of camps was to degrade, dehumanize, and drive the Jews into hopeless despair. To spite their captors, resistant Jews organized classes for children to keep up their learning; they fostered music, art, and poetry; they attempted to organize prayer services and holiday celebrations; and they gave aid to those who needed it. Some of their activities were secret, held at the initiative of underground organizations, and included literary evenings, gatherings to mark the anniversary of a Jewish artist, and concerts. Jewish authors, directors, and poets produced works in the ghettos. Hans Krása, a Czech composer, wrote a children’s opera that was performed by the youngsters in the Terezin ghetto/camp more than 55 times.

Many of the inmates believed, with justification, that an unarmed attempt to attack the armed guards would lead only to instant death. The preferable choice was to endure the situation until, someday, the war’s end. The return to a normal world and life, and the creation of new families to replace those slaughtered, would be their ultimate triumph, their “dancing on Hitler’s grave.” Within the environment of bare icy barracks, rampant disease, starvation, and torture, individuals to a remarkable extent refused to let themselves slide into uncivilized behavior or hopeless apathy and the virtual death of the soul. It was an insurrection of resilient spirit, resistance by determined existence.

My mother had been taken from the Lodz, Poland, ghetto to a slave labor camp in Skarzysko-Kamienna. Put to work on an assembly line for the manufacture of bullets, she endured for over a year, and then came to a decision: she could no longer live with indirectly abetting the killings of Allied soldiers, Jews and others, via the ammunition she helped produce. Her solution? She began sabotaging the bullets. I’m consistently astounded when I think of her bravery, knowing that at any moment she could have been instantly shot. When her sabotage was discovered, her punishment was not death, but a vicious, sadistic flogging in front of the entire camp at roll call. And she was reassigned to work at the picric acid facility with material so highly carcinogenic that it was rare to survive three months there. Fortunately, the war ended before that point.

Who were the real sheep of World War II? Watch the documentary film footage of Third Reich parades and rallies. See the faces mirroring abject submission, blind adoration, and the jettisoning of the independent mind, in thrall to the genocidal rantings and demented pronouncements of a charismatic dictator. Observe how, robot-like, the individuals proceed in lockstep and goosestep down the roads toward committing unfathomable butchery. Beneath the sound of the hordes relentlessly chanting, “Sieg Heil! Heil Hitler!” you may hear another, more subtle sound: “Baa! Baa! Baa!”

The Big Lie of Jewish cowardice must finally die, as must the all the calumnies that accompany antisemitism, because it is Truth, and not Arbeit, that sets us free.