The Historiography of the Holocaust

Jewish Resistance 357
Many aid workers tried to bend the rules in desperate attempts to save someone
from being put in the cattle wagons. They tried anything that might
work: they would fudge the age of an adolescent, make false documents that
could allow some individuals to be exempted, disguise a girl as a nurse or
a boy as a Scout in order to get them out of a camp, hide Jews slated for
departure in some corner and then in an ‘official’ vehicle, or supply some
drug that would allow someone to fake an illness. Aid workers also tried to
appeal to various officials.... And although they were not spared, the ‘baptized’
received special attention from priests and pastors. 65
‘Diving’, or going underground, became a common strategy of resistance
and survival in both France and Germany. Kaplan explains it like this:
Most Jews waited until the last moment to ‘dive’, once they were certain the
Nazis intended to kill them. Hiding may have been somewhat easier for women
than men, but it was extremely dangerous and nearly impossible for all
Jews. They lived in dread, fearful for their own safety and that of the people
who hid them. Since ‘the prospect that Europe’s Jews saw before them was
not one of simply holding out until a preordained liberation date set for
May 1945 at the latest’, they showed enormous courage in defying the fate
the Nazis had prepared for them. The Germans who hid them showed compassion
and daring, revealing the possibility of resistance to genocide. 66
Kaplan then spells out some of the mechanics of living an underground life:
the necessity of trying to camouflage ‘Jewish looks’, of finding a place to sleep,
of obtaining false papers and ration cards and food from the black market, and
the need for money. The act of ‘diving’, she stresses, usually initiated by the Jew
himself, could not succeed without the help of a Gentile, or more commonly,
many of them.
It is clear from both Kaplan and Poznanski that Amidah was an integral part
of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, even in situations as different
as Germany and France. It was not always possible, however, for Jewish leaders
to foster Amidah on a community-wide scale. In his reflections on the Holocaust,
written after devoting several decades to its study, Yehuda Bauer
applies much thought to Amidah. At one point he summarizes the necessary
factors for Amidah on the community-wide level: a very large ghetto or place
where Jews were not starving; continuity in traditional Jewish leadership or
other strong leadership; and the nature of the German regime (which allowed
Amidah to take root). 67 Similar conditions were necessary for the more particular
form of Amidah, armed resistance, which, in Bauer’s words, ‘took place
wherever there was the slightest chance that it could, which did not happen
too often’. 68