The Historiography of the Holocaust

344 Robert Rozett
in the anthologies, as opposed to later scholarly monographs. In the essay by
Mendel Mann, which appears in Suhl’s book, the basic facts of the uprising are
the following. Three thousand Jews were living in the Tuczyn Ghetto when, on
23 September 1942, the Gestapo ordered them to congregate in the synagogue.
A Jew jumped onto the Bimah (raised platform) and made a spontaneous plea,
calling out: ‘Resist! Do not go voluntarily like sheep!’ That night, barrels of
kerosene were somehow found and the Jews set fire to the main street. Fleeing
to the nearby forest, about 2,000 ghetto residents reached safety. The Nazis and
their collaborators captured many Jews who had made it to the forest; others
were lured to return or returned on their own initiative. All those who returned
were killed. But a large number stayed in the forest. On 17 January 1944, the
Red Army liberated Tuczyn and a handful of surviving Jews were transferred to
Rovno, where other Jewish survivors from the region of Volhynia had congregated.
Mann writes: ‘The flames of the Tuczyn Ghetto revolt illuminated not
only the towns of Volhynia; they were also a bright moment in the martyrdom
of East European Jews.’ 11
Reflecting more thorough scholarship, and a greater and more sober historical
perspective, Spector’s account differs from Mann’s on some major points. He
explains that the uprising was not spontaneous, but had been planned by the
Jewish leaders of the community. When the main street was set ablaze and
Jews fled, Spector does not stress that 2,000 reached the forest, but that 1,000
died in the initial rush. He too tells of the returning Jews who were murdered,
but unlike Mann, he writes of the terrible suffering of the Jews who remained
in the forest. Most of them fell victim to its vicissitudes, and only twenty Tuczyn
Jews were found in the region at liberation. Unlike Mann, Spector refrains from
ending his narrative with an uplifting statement. 12
Not all the anthologies are as sanguine as Suhl’s. Lucien Steinberg and Ruben
Ainsztein produced compendia of Jewish armed resistance, written in more
scholarly tones and well referenced with source notes. 13 The slant of Steinberg’s
book is clear from its title: Not as a Lamb: The Jews against Hitler. Harking back
to the debates of the 1950s and 1960s, he uses a very narrow definition of
Jewish resistance:
Nor will we, simply because it concerns Jews, broaden the meaning of
‘resistance’ to include those perfectly commendable, admirable, praiseworthy
phenomena which have no real place within the concept of resistance: for
example, to organize soup kitchens; to keep the synagogues open even in
the most dangerous times; to set up strictly Jewish children’s homes and
orphanages so that even during the worse periods the children might have
the sort of education that would encourage them to become worthy Jews;
and many of those who devoted themselves to the success of these enterprises
were arrested by the Gestapo or by its local representatives, deported,