The Historiography of the Holocaust

342 Robert Rozett
to their deaths ‘like sheep to the slaughter’. This became a common view in
Israel of the behaviour of most Jews during the Holocaust.
In many publications this viewpoint led to the exaltation of Jewish armed
resistance. Veneration for Jewish fighting is evident in some of the statements
contained in the published proceedings of the first international scholarly
conference at Yad Vashem, in 1968, which focused on the subject of Jewish
resistance. Glorification can be heard in the words of Edward E. Gelber, a representative
of the Yad Vashem directorate, who addressed the conference: ‘Were
they [the Jews in the Holocaust], indeed, like sheep to the slaughter, or did
they perhaps display resistance and courage to a degree almost inconceivable
in the conditions of that dreadful time?’ 2 Such a tone is even more pronounced
in the statement made by Arieh Tartakower of the World Jewish Congress:
Among the numerous facets which merit our attention there is one which
has such overpowering significance that it casts all others in the shade,
regardless of their own intrinsic importance. I refer to the Jewish resistance
to the Nazi oppressor and his collaborators, which reached its supreme
expression in the ghetto revolts and the warfare of the partisans, though it
flourished in many other forms as well. The fact is that at the very height of
the Hitler period the principal victim rose up against it armed only with his
bare hands – since almost no assistance from the outside was forthcoming –
and this victimized people accomplished what no other nation under similar
circumstances ever did. 3
In particular, by making barehanded resistance seem like the rule and not the
exception it was, Tartakower appears less concerned with historical accuracy
than with rhetorical flourish.
The exaltation of Jewish armed resistance did not occur only in Israel in the
first decades after the Holocaust; nor was it always regarded as symbolic of
a new kind of Jew. The American-based Jewish historian Phillip Friedman,
author of an early history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, deems the Uprising
a significant milestone in the long legacy of combating tyranny. Writing in 1954,
when the Cold War was at freezing point, he claims that the Warsaw Uprising
has the moral impact of the Spartans’ battle against the Persians at Thermopylae,
and stands as a reminder of the murderous possibilities inherent in totalitarian
regimes. Given the time when he was writing, it is clear that Friedman is talking
about the danger he considered inherent in the Communist Bloc. 4 In France,
too, until the late 1960s, Jewish resistance, if it was mentioned at all, was seen
as part of the splendid tradition of the Maquisards – underground armed combat
for the sake of the ‘real’ France. 5
If Jewish resistance was perceived as glorious, the six million victims of the
Holocaust were often seen as anything but. Around the time of Adolf Eichmann’s