Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Holocaust, the possibility of exit was foreclosed almost immediately after the German occupation.
    The difficulty of exit for young Jews who wanted to fight cannot be overemphasized. As Simon describes it: ‘There was no escape on the outside; on the outside we faced the Lithuanians and the Germans; all wanted to kill us.’ The Judenrat (Jewish Council set up by the German occupiers) in most ghettos gave little assistance to those wanting to leave. The Germans sealed off the ghettos and made it clear that anyone trying to leave would be killed and the ghetto would be subject to mass reprisals and the murder of family and friends. The Judenrat were rightly terrified of mass reprisals and with few exceptions would have little to do with the underground units or partisans. Simon: ‘We were fenced in like cattle in the Chicago stockyards. The Judenrat of course wanted us to stay because of the policy of mass reprisals. Germans if they caught par tisans would kill their relatives, anyone they could get their hands on. But I believed that every honest man’s place is to go into the woods.’ But, he cautioned, that was ‘easier said than done.’ Simon was fortunate; he made it out with his brother: ‘I was lucky.’
    Contingency played an enormously important role in surviving. Although it would be wrong to attribute survival to chance alone, resistance fighters needed plenty of luck to survive the unexpected. Simon tells a story about an incident that occurred a few nights after he left the Vilna ghetto. He and a friend went to sleep; but Simon kept his boots on because they were serving as a pillow for his comrade and he didn’t want to wake him. Suddenly, he awoke to gunshots. Immediately, he leapt to his feet and ran as fast as he could to cover. His friend, who slept with his boots off, never made cover because those who took the time to pull on their boots were killed. Simon escaped to the swamps with the help of Markov Brigade partisans.
    Frank’s and Simon’s recollections convey extraordinary accounts of endurance and strength. But it was the look in their eyes that seemed to convey a memory that was absent from their words. Perhaps it was their sadness in knowing how important this history was to them, what a critical part of their lives it had been, and wanting it to be heard. Perhaps it was their unstated but very real sentiment that soon they would not be able to recount these experi ences. Or perhaps they felt no one would understand fully what they had been through, what they had created and what they had endured to survive. Yet these same men seemed at home in their Manhattan world, content and satisfied with lives well lived. But maybe that contentment concealed a terrible pain, because always in their eyes lay that other home, the one that had vanished, the one that spoke of death and tragedy.
    Simon remembers his mother, her bravery in trying to protect her family.
    ‘We knew as early as the winter of 1941 what the Germans were up to; I was only seventeen years old when we found ourselves relocated to the Vilna ghetto. My mother at the time was only
    39. When she could, she left the ghetto to find food; she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders to hide her Jewish star. She wit nessed beating, executions by the roadside; everywhere she went she saw Jews being killed. No one was in the dark regarding German intentions.’
    I listened to stories of victory, transcendence, violence and loss; but another story lay underneath these narratives, the truncated feel ings of children losing parents, sisters, brothers, grandparents, and the security of a childhood thrown into chaos. It is that story that never leaves the eyes, even as Frank looks at me, silently for a minute or two, while I wait for the elevator. It is a silent communication – of fury and of immense sadness at a part of his life he knows was lost forever in those forests. One imagines that by the time we reach old age, certain compromises have