The Historiography of the Holocaust

Rescue as resistance
Jewish Resistance 353
In 1945, while events were still fresh in his mind, Rafi Benshalom (Friedel),
a leader of the Shomer Hatzair youth movement in Hungary during the war,
wrote his memoirs. In his account, Benshalom describes the underground
activities of the members of his organization. They distributed myriads of false
papers to Jews, stating they were under the protection of various international
agencies and foreign governments. They obtained food and medicines on the
black market. To safeguard children from the Germans and Hungarian fascists,
who were determined to murder them, they manned special houses for children,
which enjoyed international protection and extraterritorial status. They even
impersonated Hungarian fascist military personnel in order to intercept columns
of Jews who were being brought to the banks of the Danube to be shot, and
they brought them back to the relative safety of the Budapest Ghetto. Owing to
the popular mood in the new state of Israel – to which he emigrated after the
war – where armed resistance was glorified and other acts of resistance and rescue
hardly mentioned, if not maligned outright, Benshalom held back publication
of his book. It was finally published in 1977, by which time the idea of
Amidah had begun to infiltrate the popular imagination and one could openly
discuss rescue, which occurred in lieu of armed resistance. 48
On the heels of Benshalom’s memoir came the first scholarly studies of the
Zionist youth underground in Budapest, one by Asher Cohen and the other by
the author of this essay in the 1980s. Cohen published an article about the
rescue in 1982 in Yad Vashem Studies, and his book appeared in 1984 in Hebrew
and 1986 in English. 49 Based on my doctoral research, I published a number of
articles about the Zionist youth movement in Hungary and rescue in Budapest. 50
These were followed by research about the rescue in Hungary by Avihu Ronen,
Haim Gnizi and Arieh Ben-tov, each looking at a specific youth movement or
organization. 51
These studies make two central points. First and foremost, large-scale rescue
activity carried out by Jews is a form of resistance. Second, such resistance requires
outside help to succeed, which means one cannot study this aspect of Jewish
resistance only from the point of view of Jewish activity. In the case of Hungary,
the help primarily came from foreign diplomats, among them Friedrich Born of
the International Red Cross, Charles Lutz the Swiss Consul in Budapest, Angelo
Rotta the Papal Nuncio in Budapest, and Raoul Wallenberg, a member of the
Swedish legation in Budapest; all these men and the bodies that backed them
need to be explored to understand mass rescue in Budapest. 52
In counterpoint to the cooperative rescue effort in Budapest, Gila Fatran,
among others, portrays the virtually solitary efforts of the semi-underground
Slovak Jewish leadership, the Working Group, to effect mass rescue. Trying
every tactic from intercession with the Slovak authorities to negotiations with