The Historiography of the Holocaust

352 Robert Rozett
head of the Jewish Council, could not commit himself to armed resistance. She
neither berates him nor judges him, but tries to explain his point of view:
It is plausible that when he realized he had failed, he could not bring himself
to believe in armed struggle or in any good that could come of it. It is possible
that Barasz, who made rescue his first priority, could not distinguish between
an honorable death and death like ‘sheep to the slaughter’, and therefore did
not change his opinion even during the last hours of the ghetto’s existence. 43
This analysis of events, which is concerned with ideas like ‘sheep to the slaughter’,
is light years from the accusatory and painful tones that often dominated
discussion in Israel and abroad in the first two decades after the Holocaust.
Among the most fundamental questions concerning Jewish resistance, is: when
is an act considered Jewish resistance or resistance by Jews? Among others, Henri
Michel, Yehuda Bauer, Dov Levin and Dan Michman address this issue. Especially
concerning Jewish participation in the French communist underground, French
researchers and former members of the Resistance have also debated this issue.
For example, Georges Wellers does not consider Jews who participated in the
French communist underground as part of Jewish resistance, whereas David
Douvette and Adam Rayski do. 44 In her work on Jews in France during the
Second World War, Renée Poznanski writes from a somewhat different angle,
that of the forces that motivated Jews to join the French Resistance: ‘It was only
natural that the initial decision to resist was an individual rather than a collective
decision for French Jews.... And they joined the Resistance as French citizens...
In a sense, this was another way of refusing the enemy’s efforts to single
them out.’ 45
Dov Levin, as has been noted, suggests many reasons why Jewish men joined
the Lithuanian Division, but the bottom line is that their Jewish identity played
a significant role in their decision. Bauer concurs, but adds that when the fighters
define themselves not as Jewish fighters, but as members of the resistance who
happened to be Jews, we must respect their self-identification. 46
According to Michman, there was a fundamental difference between Jewish
armed resistance and the armed resistance carried out by other groups against
the Nazis. They had different aims and were carried out in totally different
contexts. Non-Jewish armed resisters primarily sought to ‘oust the occupier’.
Jews, as we have seen from the writing of Krakowski and Levin, among others,
had very different goals most of the time. Michman underscores that a central
reason for these different goals was that Jews fought the Nazis alone; they did
so in scattered units and therefore could not possibly have hoped to oust the
government. Moreover, the Jews who resisted were far from a homogeneous
group, and individual bodies had to expend much effort in achieving some
sort of unity. 47