The Historiography of the Holocaust

Jewish Resistance 349
the enemy under any circumstance; and rescue by escape to the forest to
save Jewish lives. But the emphasis on these aims varied from ghetto to ghetto, or
within different groups of a given underground, and, as a result, there were often
acrimonious debates about priorities. Nevertheless, the ideas of Überleben –
surviving to see the end of the war – and armed resistance coexisted. 31
Lastly, Levin discusses Jews among the partisan units. He explores the emergence
of Jewish partisans and the so-called family camps in Lithuania, as well
as the integration of Jews into Belorussian and Lithuanian partisan units. He
highlights the problems of discrimination against Jewish partisans in these
units and sets that discrimination in a wider context. Besides overt antisemitism,
there was a certain rationale for some of the anti-Jewish attitudes, he notes. Since
the peasants hated Jews, having too many Jews in the unit made all contact
with them, which was essential, more complicated. The emphasis on fighting
was detrimental to Jewish non-combatants and led to callousness towards
them on the part of partisan commanders, including Genrikas Ziman (Jurgis),
who was himself a Jew from Kovno. 32
How far Levin has moved away from the tendency to glorify Jewish armed
resistance, and his attempt to offer objective analysis, is clear from the following:
‘the urge to fight was more emotional than logical; the preferred course of action
was the honorable one, even when it was not necessarily the most practical or
productive for the rescue of large numbers of Jews.’ 33
Shmuel Krakowski carried out his doctoral research in Israel in the 1970s,
and his book on Jewish armed resistance in Poland is based on his thesis. Like
Levin, Krakowski recognizes that armed resistance is only one form of Jewish
resistance to the Nazis. Like Levin, who sought out fundamental details, the
focus of Krakowski’s study is ‘to determine the basic facts and clarify the extent
of the Jewish armed resistance movement in the General Government and to
analyze its character, its uniqueness and its results’. 34 Krakowski also explores
the motivations and goals of Jews who offered armed resistance to the Nazis. He
shows that the ghetto undergrounds, the camp undergrounds and the Jewish
partisans in Poland each had different goals:
The major objective of resistance efforts in the ghettos – and especially in
the Warsaw Ghetto – was the expression of armed protest against the German
murderers’ actions, a protest under conditions which absolutely precluded
any hope of saving the trapped ghetto inhabitants, with the exception of
the rare miracle of an individual escape or rescue.... The objective of armed
resistance operations in the extermination camps was the destruction of the
mass murder installations [gas chambers] and the creation of the opportunities
to rescue prisoners by breaking out of the camps and escaping to the
partisans...Jewish fighting groups in the forest were made up of fugitives
from the ghettos and camps, who had not had the opportunity of preparing