Henry, Patrick. 2104. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America. Name and Subject Index.
Even before the end of the Second World War the pernicious notion that Jewish victims had gone like “sheep to the slaughter” was widespread. To the shame of us all, it persists today as a shadowy aspect of the public’s misunderstanding of the response of European Jewry to the Nazi onslaught. Accordingly, this edited collection of 23 original essays is a major corrective, one that belongs on every relevant public and private bookshelf. No one who considers himself or herself knowledgeable about the Holocaust can afford to miss reading this myth-shattering material, and it merits a place of honor in every school curriculum and memorialization project dedicated to telling the truth about the attitudes, behavior, culture, and values of European Jewry from 1933 through 1945.
Thirty-seven academics explain how the “sheep” slander serves to exculpate killers from their crime and justify bystanders who preferred to believe Jewish victims had capitulated, as this relieved them of any responsibility to possibly aid them. While for a wide range of reasons (including fatalism, protection of loved ones, etc.) some passive Jews forfeited the right to resist, most fought back in militant and/or non-militant ways, knowing the odds of success were insuperable in almost all cases. Indeed, proportionately more Jews than Germans fought back against Nazism inside Germany, proportionately more French Jews fought than their non-Jewish counterparts in France, and Jews participated in disproportionately high numbers in Italy.
Jargon-free and brow-arching essays delve into Jewish resistance in Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Scandinavia, Slovakia, and the Ukraine. Attention also goes to such specific matters as children’s resistance through diary writing and song, music as resistance, modes of resistance in the ghettos, legal tools as weapons, and resistance in the camps. Controversial topics are fairly dealt with, including the strengths and weaknesses of the Judenrat (Nazi-chosen ghetto leadership councils), the strengths and weaknesses of Palestinian Jewish responses to the plight of fellow Jews under the Nazi heel, the murderous anti-Semitism of certain gentile partisan underground units, and the worth and faults of non-Jewish Europeans to whom Jews turned at times for assistance or even rescue.
Especially valuable is attention paid to less well-known forms of non-violent resistance, as when Jewish doctors denied hospital privileges under a German occupation took to making outlawed home visits to the ill at night despite curfew limits. Similarly, Jewish schoolteachers barred from employment provided outlawed instruction in their ghetto apartments to children willing to take the risk of detection and immediate transport to a Death Camp. Later, after the ghettos were closed, Jewish prisoners imprisoned in close to about 40,000 camps found scattered across 24 occupied countries resisted by daring to violate strict SS rules against helping one another. For example, at risk of life and limb, they secretly advised new arrivals to claim they had practiced a useful trade, and were between 16 and 40 years of age, regardless of the truth of the matter, as these claims could keep them from being “selected” for the Gas Chamber lineup. Detection of such forbidden advise-sharing ran a risk of a severe beating at the very least, or summary execution.
Strong in scope, depth, and compassion this outstanding volume can help society move beyond “blaming the victim” stereotypes, and add to its memory of the Holocaust overdue appreciation for the stealth altruism of Jewish victims whose non-violent resistance took the form of secretly trying to help care for one another.