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A Yom HaShoah Commemoration Focusing on the Theme of Resistance

By Rabbi Devora Bartnoff, z"l

This program is designed for a synagogue supplementary school, involving the Aleph through Hei classes. It serves as the culmination of a mini-course where each class explores the different forms of resistance Jews embraced during the Holocaust and then focuses on one theme in particular.

The course is based on the assumption that an effective way to convey the enormity of the Holocaust to children is through the overall theme of resistance. Through a school-wide exploration of the different forms of resistance, children can leam cognitive material as well as begin to explore some of their own emotional responses to the Holocaust.

The different types of resistance include the following, with some complex overlapping:

armed/underground resistance
resistance of the spirit
cultural/educational resistance
psychological resistance
resistance of faith/religious observance

School-Wide Preparation and Presentation:

For one month before Yom HaShoah, each class prepares for its presentation. Aleph and Bet readings include poetry from I Never Saw Another Butterfly and then the children write their own poems in response. Classes Gimel through Hei read autobiographical accounts and diaries, learn music of the partisans, ghettos and camps and respond through book reports, original poetry, and developing an original play script. The Hei class also reads first-person oral testimonies. Excerpts of original student material are included in the commemorative program, in addition to selected readings from other sources. [Teachers should select age-appropriate materials for their classes to study and present. Some of the more complex readings within each theme should be read by an older student or teacher. Eds.]

The commemoration ritual takes place in the synagogue sanctuary, which is kept dimmed and silent except for a tape recording of "Ani Ma 'amin". Each class is led into the room by a student holding a candle. After everyone is seated, the candles are blown out, the tape is turned off and the audience sings "Ani Ma'amin". During the program, each class presents their aspect of resistance, through song, story, prayer, etc. At the conclusion of each presentation, one representative from that class is invited to come up and light a candle. The sixth candle could be lit by a Holocaust survivor or family member.

SPEAKER I: It is impossible for us to grasp the enormity of the Holocaust and its implications for the Jewish people. There are many different aspects of the Holocaust we could focus on: the brutality of the Nazis, the silent complicity of most of the world, the destruction of European Jewish life which is irreplaceable, and the anguish of the survivors, including all of us, in facing the unfathomable depths of anti-Semitism.

SPEAKER II: One aspect of the Holocaust which is not often addressed has to do with the strength and courage of those who endured the Nazis. This brings up a difficult question: "Why didn't the victims fight back?" It is very important to assert that the Jews did in fact fight back. At times they used weapons. At other times, the Jews used less obvious forms of resistance. Let us explore some of these together.

Theme I: Armed/Underground Resistance

Reading I: Let us now remember the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the proudest examples of Jewish resistance to the Nazis:

"I don't know what to tell you. Something has happened that is beyond our most daring dream. The Germans have been driven out of the Ghetto twice.... For three days the Germans have been trapped in the flames. Tonight we are changing to guerilla warfare.... I can't describe our present conditions— only a few will survive, everybody else will perish sooner or later. Our fate is sealed. In all the bunkers you can't light a candle for lack of air.... Goodbye, dear friend. The last wish of my life has been fulfilled. I have been privileged to see Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory." [From the last letter of Mordechai Anielewicz, detailed in Highlights (Spring 1993), p. 5]

Reading II: "Song of the Partisans" [see Highlights (Spring 1993), p. 7]

Reading III: In the concentration camps themselves, Jews rose up. Brutalized and beaten, witnesses of the death of entire families and communities found the strength to rise up against the Nazi machine.

On October 7,1944, a tremendous explosion shook the barracks of Auschwitz as one of the four crematoriums dissolved in flames. The sonderkommando - Jews responsible for disposing of the dead bodies - had blown it up. Their dynamite had been smuggled out of the munitions factory. Rosa Robota, a 23 year old Polish Jew who had seen her entire family taken to the gas chamber two years before, had organized the smuggling activities of 20 women who worked on the assembly line. Tiny pieces of dynamite passed from hand to hand until they reached a Russian prisoner who knew how to make bombs. The blowing up of the crematorium was to have set off a general uprising, but the sonderkommando found out they were about to be liquidated and could not wait. They blew up Crematorium III, tossed a sadistic German overseer into the oven, killed four SS men and wounded a number of others. Then they cut the barbed wire fence and about 600 escaped, pursued by the SS. [Detailed in "Rosa Robota - Heroine of the Auschwitz Underground" by Yuri Suhl in They Fought Back, Yuri Suhl, ed.l

[Editors' suggestions for additional readings related to the Warsaw Ghetto, see Highlights (Spring 1993):

"Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto Underground," oral testimony of Jack Price, p. 13
"Profile in Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" by Nora Levin, selected excerpts.]

Theme 2: Resistance of the Spirit

Reading I: Armed resistance and spiritual resistance often went hand-in-hand. Oftentimes the decision to take up arms was very difficult. Here is such an account:

"In my heart I was still convinced that the only refuge for us was to join the partisans in the forest. 'I've got to go/, I told Papa, who I knew deep down shared my view. 'Okay,' he finally said. 'We'll leave Radun. Then if there is no other way, we'll go to the forest.' We went to tell Mother. I believe she had always known it would one day come to this. But we were not prepared for her answer. 'No,' she said, 'You'll have to go without me. Grandmother could never make the journey. I must stay here to look after her.' We begged her to change her mind, but she remained adamant. 'You go and save yourselves,' she said. ‘This is my decision. You are not responsible. You must go and live. But please understand— Grandmother has no one but me. My obligation is to stay with her.' For four days we argued but we could not sway her. She wanted to come but nothing could deter her from the obligation she felt.

"Our parting will remain forever on my mind and conscience. We hugged and kissed goodbye again and again; then at the door I turned to look back, to take one last mental picture of my dear mother. I can still see her, her dark wavy hair now prematurely gray, but her beautiful strong features unchanged. I was torn between my fear of dying and my conviction that I was betraying her, letting her down when she needed me. A hundred times I told myself to stay, a hundred times my terror forced me to leave my adored mother, the one to whom I had turned with my troubles every since I was a tiny child, and who, with a single kiss, made me whole again. To this day I still wonder if we had insisted more, or begged just a little longer, maybe she would have relented. My only comfort is the prayer that in those last moments before she and Grandmother [died], she found consolation in the thought that her husband and children were still alive—alive to carry on the tradition and commitment for which she gave her life."*

Theme 3: Cultural/Educational Resistance

Reading I: The deep determination to continue to partake of cultural and intellectual activitities helped Jews maintain their sense of humanity while they were surrounded by inhumanity.

Though forbidden by the Nazis, all forms of learning and culture flourished in the ghetto. In Warsaw there was a network of schools, a people's university and a library. For these activities, as much as for taking up a gun, the punishment was death. Yet each day classes were held on every imaginable subject. Newspapers in Yiddish and Polish were printed. There were five regular theaters. An outdoor orchestra performed in the courtyards and a puppet theater provided a little amusement for the Ghetto's children.

Reading II: (For this reading one class gave a small presentation of Leo Baeck and how his teaching late at night in the Terezin Concentration Camp inspired hundreds of prisoners to cling to life.)

Reading III: Some of the most well-known examples of creativity which persisted during the Holocaust come from the children. (Reading of "The Butterfly" by Pavel Friedmann, from ... I Never Saw Another Butterfly...Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942-1944. New York: Shocken Books, 1978.)

[Editors' suggestion for additional reading related to the Warsaw Ghetto, see Highlights (Spring 1993): "Education in the Warsaw Ghetto" by Edith Millman, p. 12]

Theme 4: Psychological Resistance

Our brothers and sisters stayed alive through the resilient mechanisms of their subconscious minds, their memories of their loved ones and of their past, and their hopes for the future. Hear the dream of a woman that sustained her through a critical point in her life:

"[This is what helped me survive] the first three months. I was almost unconscious after I lost my sister, and I came from work and I said, that's it.... I closed my eyes, and my grandmother came to me in a dream, and she brought me the most wonderful food... whatever they ate at home—kishke, cholent, tsimmes, bread, challah, fish, and I was chewing.... In the morning I got up [and] I wasn't hungry.... I could go to work like a giant.... The next day, I said, let me do the same trick. I can go to sleep and maybe she'll come to me again. P. S.—she came. And for two months I kept my portion bread [which I got at night when] I came [at] twelve o'clock, [after] walking ten miles, coming [from work].... Then to stay in line to get a portion of bread, then to be strong enough to put the portion bread in my shirt and to close my eyes and wait for my grandmother. And I had this same meal every night for two months, and I was the richest one, because in the morning I [still] had my portion bread.... "*

Theme 5: Resistance of Faith/Religious Observance

Many Jews preserved their religious tradition in the ghettos and in the camps despite the threat of punishment and death.

Reading I: [Editors' suggestions for readings related to the Warsaw Ghetto, see Highlights (Spring 1993):

Religious Resistance in a Concentration Camp", oral testimony of Rachela Frydman, p. 12
Excerpt from The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, p. 3
Excerpt from The Jews of Warsaw by Yisrael Gutman, p. 15]

Reading II: Religious resistance also involved a living faith in God which was deep and rich and amazingly pure. This was a song of faith during the Holocaust. ("Ani Ma'amin," see Highlights (Spring 1993) p. 17)

Reading III: How would a pious Jew of Eastern Europe talk to God at the time of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto? In this spirit, the following words were written. (Excerpt from "Yossel Rakover's Appeal to God" by Zvi Kolitz in Albert H. Friedlander, ed. Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature. New York: Union of American Congregations, 1968, pp. 398-9, beginning "Death can wait no longer.. ."[For older children—Eds.])

SPEAKER: The will to live, to maintain one's Jewishness, to fight back against the oppressor and to hold onto one's humanity was real and strong. Our Jewish brothers and sisters possessed a level of courage and perseverance that we must view with both awe and envy. Their will to hope and to believe in the midst of their degradation is beautifully captured in just three lines of an inscription found on the walls of a cellar in Cologne, Germany, where Jews had hidden from the Nazis: