The Historiography of the Holocaust

354 Robert Rozett
the Nazis, the fostering of flight to Hungary and the support of armed cells
within Slovakia, they failed in their attempts to achieve large-scale rescue. Ultimately,
their futile exertions provide one of the most cogent examples from the
Holocaust about the underlying concept of Jewish powerlessness. Jews, when
bereft of significant allies, could do little if anything to escape their fate. 53
In his impressive monograph on Jewish rescue in France, Lucien Lazare discusses
the theoretical underpinning for his title and main thesis: Rescue as Resistance:
How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France. Lazare surveys the development
of attitudes to Jewish resistance in France, beginning with the nascent
understanding of Henri Michel in the 1960s that after all there might have
been something specific about Jewish resistance. He continues through Georges
Wellers in the 1980s, who differentiates more clearly between ‘National Resistance’
and ‘what was done to save the Jewish community from the collective
death that was already set in action’. 54 Without using the term Amidah, Lazare
invokes different definitions of it, such as Hillel Kieval’s, mentioned earlier,
and Jacques Adler’s, who says only clandestine activities can be considered as
resistance. 55
Lazare himself offers a very broad definition of Jewish resistance in France,
similar to that of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. He writes:
The history of Jewish resistance [in France] is that of Jewish groups active
between 1940 and 1944 organized to sustain the morale of the Jewish
population on the religious, spiritual, cultural and political levels, and to
ensure their physical survival by distributing means of subsistence, often
clandestinely, by rescuing Jews from internment and deportation, and,
finally, by carrying out military operations. Hundreds of the resisters in these
networks, mainly young men and women, were subjected to torture, execution,
and deportation. 56
Lazare illustrates the evolution among many Jewish organizations from legal
relief work to rescue. The importance of spiritual resistance, especially among
the Zionist youth, he notes, took place alongside their rescue activities. No
less important, he points out that the hub of their activities, and all French
Jewish rescuers, was the rescue of children as soon as they were threatened by
deportations. 57
Lazare seeks to provide a balanced view of the activities of Jewish leadership
groups, especially the official French Jewish leadership, the UGIF. In so doing,
he refers to the early canard that all Jewish leaders were collaborators, as well as
to the discussion at the Yad Vashem conference on Amidah in 1968:
Just as it would be incomplete and excessive to view every Jewish charity or
cultural project as a resistance movement, so too it would be outrageous and