During the Holocaust young Jews founded clandestine groups and organized undergrounds in ghettos in order to resist the Germans. They accumulated weapons and trained for action, while debating whether to stay in the ghetto and fight within it or to escape to the surrounding forests and join units of Soviet partisans. The dilemmas they faced, and their experiences in both the ghettos and forests stands in the core of this talk. The story is constructed on various formats of survivor’s testimonies and memoirs, some of them have not been previously studied. Though embraced by the young Israeli society in the early days of the state as heroes, in time, different narratives and versions on their experience have been developed, sometimes contradictory and less heroic.
Jewish resistance in the ghettos was not void of internal political rivals, and the partisans’ challenge was often complex and ambiguous. The Jewish partisans encountered obstacles in their relations with their Soviet comrades, had to beware the local population as well as the Germans, but also faced sometimes harsh difficulties among their own people. This “Dark Side” of their experience is usually suppressed in the academic and personal literature but can be exposed in the testimonies. Despite this complexity, one might say that being partisans and resisting provided the Jews with a sense of self-esteem, feeling of revenge and pride.
The lecture aims to discuss this unique chapter in the Jewish occurrence during the Second World War.
