The Historiography of the Holocaust

Jewish Resistance 347
first popularized by Nathan Eck. 23 In his essay on Jewish responses in France,
written in 1980, Hillel Kieval makes a similar distinction. The aid that Jewish
groups proffered to children in France, he says, became resistance only when
raids on children’s homes began to take place. Until then, activities that were
conducted above board, even including moving children to more secure places,
cannot be considered resistance. 24
The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published in 1990, can be seen as one of the
first major attempts to present a comprehensive summary of our understanding
of the Holocaust and the events associated with it. The Encyclopedia provides
a broad definition of Jewish resistance, which is not all that different from
Dworzecki’s definition of Amidah. As author of the entry, I wrote that Jewish
resistance was:
planned or spontaneous opposition to the Nazis and their collaborators by
individual Jews or group of Jews. In the Nazi system, within which Jews
were faced with a process of dehumanization that ultimately culminated in
death, any act that opposed that process can be regarded as resistance. In
response to this system, Jewish resistance to the Nazis took many forms and
worked on many different levels. 25
In the more recent major encyclopedia on the Holocaust, edited by Walter
Laqueur, the subject of Jewish resistance is presented in two separate parts, one
for eastern Europe, the other for western Europe. The authors, Nechama Tec and
Eli Tzur, respectively, discuss Amidah, without ever using the term. 26 The
proceedings of another important conference on Jewish resistance, published
in 1998, also use a wide definition of the term, akin to Amidah. Ruby Rohrlich,
the editor of the volume, writes:
What constitutes resistance? The definition is far from simple; the term
embraces a variety of operations, actions and movements performed by
individuals, groups and nations. Sociologist Nechama Tec, herself a survivor,
and the author of numerous books and articles about the Holocaust, defines
acts of resistance as ‘motivated by the intention to thwart, limit or end the
exercise of power by the oppressor over the oppressed.’ For Jews during
the Holocaust, simply surviving can be considered a form of resistance to
the German goal of Jewish extermination. 27
It seems that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of Amidah,
if not the word itself, had become an almost undisputed keystone for our
understanding of Jewish resistance.