Holocaust Museum (3 of 3)- RESCUES

THE COURAGE TO RESCUE- Most non-Jews in German-occupied Europe neither aided or hindered the ongoing Nazi genocide. Relatively few people that were motivated by their personal opposition to Nazi ideology, by compassion, or by religious or moral principles, actually helped Jews to escape death in the Holocaust.

Entire communities as well as individuals took big risks helped to shield Jews from the Nazis. In many places, including parts of occupied Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, providing shelter to Jews was a crime punishable by death. In western Europe, rescuers faced possible arrest and imprisonment in concentration camps.

Factors such as the intensity of German occupation policies, local antisemitism, and proximity to a safe refuge often influenced the success of rescue efforts. As the museum indicated, ,"In Denmark, 9 out of 10 Jews were saved; in Norway and Belgium about 1 out of 2; in the Netherlands, 1 out of 4; and in Lithuania and Poland, fewer than 2 in 10 survived. When ordinary citizens became rescuers, Jews had a chance of survival."

American efforts were increased in late 1942, when the U.S. government, the press, and Jewish organizations had received confirmed reports of the Nazi mass murder of Europe's Jews. On December 17, 1942, the United States, Great Britain, and nine other Allied nations publicly condemned the Nazi policy of "cold-blooded extermination" and threatened those responsible for such crimes with punishment. The U.S. government, however, undertook no practical measures aimed at rescue!!! Throughout 1943, U.S. Congressmen and Jewish organizations began openly criticizing the State Department for its inaction an on January 13, 1944, senior officials in the Department of the Treasury submitted the scathing report "On the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews", which established the War Refugee Board (WRB) to evacuate Jews from German-controlled territory to safe havens and provide relief (around 200,000 were saved).

“What we did was little enough. It was late. Late and little I would say" 1944 Wallenberg. The most extensive rescue effort during the Holocaust was led by Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat based in Budapest, Hungary, helped protect tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Until 1944, Hungarian Jews had escaped the Nazi genocide, but after Germany occupied Hungary deportations to Auschwitz began. Wallenberg distributed forged Swedish protective passports, established hospitals, nurseries, soup kitchens, and safe houses for Jews. 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported, most died in the gas chambers. Only the 200,000 Jews in Budapest remained.

Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian businessman posing as a Spanish diplomat, provided forged Spanish visas and established safe houses for children. Zionist youth organizations took an active part in the rescue efforts. When the Soviet army liberated Budapest in January and February 1945, more than 100,000 of the city's Jews were still alive. The majority owed their survival to Wallenberg and his colleagues. Although Soviet authorities denied that Wallenberg was in their custody after liberation, after Stalin died they admitted that he had been arrested in Budapest, and that he had died of a heart attack in a Soviet prison in 1947.

RIGHTEOUS PEOPLE RECOGNIZED- In 1953 the Israeli parliament directed the Yad Vashem Remembrance Authority to establish a memorial to the "Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to save Jews" during the Holocaust. A public committee was formed to identify and honor individuals who at personal risk and without remuneration had rescued Jews (a wall here is inscribed with the names of more than 10,000 persons honored by Yad Vashem through 1991).

HEREOS- From the beginning of World War Il, the Jewish community in Palestine sought ways to combat Hitler and to rescue victims of his genocidal policies. About 30,000 Palestinian Jews volunteered for the British army; 6,000 of them served in its special Jewish Brigade. The Jewish Agency for Palestine, a Zionist organization, pressured the British government to parachute Palestinian Jewish volunteers behind German lines. There, they could carry out intelligence operations and organize resistance and rescue efforts. Between 1943 and 1945, 32 Jewish parachutists from Palestine were dropped into German-occupied Europe, and 5 more infiltrated by other means. Two of the parachutists, Zvi Ben-Yaakov and Haviva Reik, helped organize an uprising in now known as Slovakia in October 1944. Both were captured and executed. Enzo Sereni and 5 other volunteers operated in northern Italy.

In June, 3 parachutists entered Hungary, including a young poet, Hannah Senesh. Soon captured and put in prison, she refused to reveal information to the Germans, despite torture. At her trial, she was condemned to death.
Her last poem contained these lines:
I could have been twenty-three next July;
I gambled on what mattered most, The dice were cast. I lost.
Hannah Senesh was executed on November 7, 1944.

Of the groups in Germany that opposed Hitler's dictatorship, only one, code-named "White Rose," openly protested the Nazi genocide against Jews. The White Rose was formed in 1942 by university students in Munich who were outraged by the capitulation of educated Germans to Nazism. Its members used anti-Nazi leaflets and wall slogans to urge the German public to resist. The group's leaflet charged: "Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized people as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct." Many people were executed in connection with working in the White Rose.

Resistance- Despite enormous obstacles, many Jews throughout Europe attempted armed resistance against Nazi Germany. Jewish partisans fought Germans in the forests and ghettos of eastern Europe. In France, Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece, Jews joined resistance movements.
Even in the death camps, Jewish prisoners carried out acts of resistance. Jewish partisans found little support outside the ghettos and camps, since antisemitism was widespread among the surrounding population. Nevertheless, Jews rose in arms against the Germans. In the death camps of Auschwitz, Sobibór, and Treblinka, Jewish prisoners rebelled. The Jews of Warsaw carried out an armed uprising when they were faced with SS plans to liquidate the ghetto. Although they knew defeat was certain, Jewish combatants fought to defend Jewish honor and to avenge the killing of family and friends. On January 1, 1942, leaders of the Vilna ghetto underground issued this call to arms to their death.

Revolt in ghettos- Between 1941 and 1943, underground resistance movements formed in about 100 Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. Most were led by members of Zionist or Communist youth groups. In some ghettos, the resistance was unified; in others, it became fragmented into political factions. Most Orthodox Jews did not participate. Resistance movements were often opposed by the Jewish Councils, especially those that hoped to save ghetto residents by meeting the Nazis' economic needs. But in some ghettos, the Jewish Councils joined forces with the underground.

Most commonly, rebellion arose in response to the threat of deportation and certain death. The small Ukrainian ghettos of Starodubsk, Tatarsk, Kletsk, Mir, Lachva, Kremenets, and Lutsk rebelled just prior to deportations. This also happened in the Polish ghettos of Czestochowa, Kamionka, Sosnowiec, and Tarnów. In Biatystok, the Antifascist Fighting Bloc arose on August 16, 1943, one month before the ghetto was finally liquidated. Most of the ghetto combatants, who were primarily young men and women, died during the fighting.

Under the most difficult conditions, Jewish prisoners succeeded in rebelling even in Nazi concentration camps and killing centers. After the final transport to Treblinka was gassed in May 1943, about 1,000 Jewish prisoners remained in the camp. Aware that they were soon to be killed, the prisoners prepared to revolt. On August 2, equipped with shovels, picks, and a few weapons taken from the SS armory, they set fire to part of the camp and broke through its barbed-wire fence. About 200 prisoners managed to escape; only half survived the search that followed.

In the summer of 1943, the Sobibór death camp had almost completed its genocidal task, and the Jewish work force was soon to be killed. The prisoners Aleksandr (Sasha) Pechersky and Leon Feldhendler planned an audacious uprising. On October 14, prisoners killed 11 SS guards and set the camp on fire. About 300 prisoners escaped, but most were killed during the subsequent manhunt. Fifty were alive at the war's end.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, prisoners of the Sonderkommando (special squad), whose task it was to operate the crematoria, learned of SS plans to liquidate them. On October 7, the Sonderkommando of Crematorium IV rebelled, killing three guards and blowing up the crematorium. Several hundred prisoners escaped, of whom most were surrounded near the camp and killed. During or immediately after the revolt, two-thirds of the remaining Sonderkommando prisoners were executed.

Throughout occupied Europe, Jews formed or joined partisan groups to fight Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Jewish partisan units operated in France, Belgium, the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Poland. Large numbers of Jews also fought in non-Jewish French, Italian, Yugoslav, and Soviet resistance organizations. In southern France, the Armée Juive (Jewish Army) assassinated Nazi collaborators and smuggled refugees to safety in Spain. A partisan group of Jews and non-Jews assassinated the collaborationist general Hendrik Seyffardt in the Netherlands. In Belgium, the Jewish and Belgian partisan group Solidarité derailed a deportation train on April 19, 1943.

The success or failure of Jewish partisan operations usually depended on cooperation with non-Jewish partisans. In Poland, the nationalist Armia Krajowa (Home Army) was often hostile to Jews. Many Soviet partisan units initially rebuffed Jewish partisans but eventually accepted them, and Jewish fighters had their greatest success in the Soviet Union. Jewish and Soviet partisans helped several thousand Jews escape from the Minsk ghetto to the relative safety of nearby forests. Jewish partisans also aided about 350 people to escape from the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania.

Death marches-As Allied and Soviet armies advanced on Nazi Germany during the winter of 1944-1945, the SS began to evacuate concentration camps near the front and to remove the prisoners to camps inside Germany. The Nazi regime wanted to erase evidence of its atrocities and to continue exploiting inmate labor. At first, prisoners were transferred by train, and even by boat. Evacuations by foot, which became known as death marches, began in the final stages of Germany's military collapse. Prisoners were forced to march, often hundreds of miles and in bitter cold, with little or no food, water, or rest. Any prisoner unable to keep up with the others was shot.

The first major death march was launched in July 1944, when more than 4,000 inmates of a camp set up on the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto were moved to Kutno, a distance of 81 miles. About one-fourth of them were killed on the way. The largest death marches took place in the winter of 1944-1945, when the Soviet army was liberating Poland. On January 18, 1945, about 60,000 prisoners were removed from Auschwitz, 15,000 died during the march.

Mass killings of prisoners often occurred before, during, or after marches, In one evacuation, 6,000 prisoners from several satellite camps in East Prussia were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, where they were shot. During Germany's military collapse, the converging armies of the Allies and the Soviets liberated the concentration camps that lay in their path. The liberations were not a primary objective: they were a by-product of the goal, which was to defeat Germany and its allies.

The first liberation took place in July 1944, when four Soviet divisions entered the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, Poland. The following autumn and winter, Soviet forces liberated more camps, in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Auschwitz was freed on January 27, 1945.

Also in 1945, British, Canadian, American, and Free French units liberated concentration camps in Germany. As they advanced from the west, American divisions freed Dora-Mittelbau, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen. In northern Germany, British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme. A few weeks before Germany surrendered, Soviet divisions liberated Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück.

Although the Germans had attempted to evacuate the camps, they still housed thousands of starved and diseased prisoners. The combat-hardened Allied and Soviet troops were unprepared for what they encountered: heaps of rotting human corpses, and barracks filled with dead and dying prisoners with the stench of death was everywhere.

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