Dr. Paul R. Bartrop, professor of history and director of FGCU’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, recently published a book that tells the inspiring stories — many never before made public — of heroic individuals who fought against the Nazi oppression and annihilation of Jews in Europe.
The College of Arts and Sciences will hold a reception at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 9 in Sugden Hall Room 114 to mark the launch of “Resisting the Holocaust: Upstanders, Partisans, and Survivors” (ABC-CLIO; 2016). Seating is limited, and guests should register via email with Amy Vitiello. [email protected]
In advance of the book launch, FGCU360 asked the author a few questions about his work.
How would you describe your book? Is it more scholarly or more inspirational?
This is a book about people who said no to the Nazis in their attempt to destroy the Jews of Europe. They resisted this attempt in a wide variety of ways, from physical confrontation through to the very act of survival — and thus outlasting the regime that sought their very destruction – and everything in between. It tells the stories of 161 remarkable human beings, from all walks of life. As such, this is a book that tells an intensely human story, and is accessible to a very wide readership.
What do you think your book brings to the subject that has not been explored before?
A number of authors have explored the issue of resistance to the Nazis, but never before with the same breadth as this volume embraces. Several previous studies have, for example, considered those brave and selfless non-Jews who put themselves and their families at risk (and often lost their lives in the process) by saving Jews in the face of the Nazi horror. Rightly recognized as Righteous among the Nations by Israel’s Holocaust Authority Yad Vashem, such people have been often been featured in individual volumes or compilations. This book takes the story further, including Jews who saved other Jews, as well as men and women from countries outside of Nazi-occupied Europe who worked to find ways to save lives threatened by the Holocaust.
How did you discover some of resistors or survivors who had not been brought to attention before?
In some cases, names were referred to me by direct contact with survivors whose lives had been saved by certain individuals; in others, I learned of resistance activities from people here in SWFL who “had heard” about this or that person; even some of my FGCU students suggested names of people they had encountered in their studies, but of whom they had been unable to find any details. All too often, it was a case of sheer accident, or serendipity, which enabled me to find names for inclusion in the book.
Talk about how you researched the stories. Were you able to get information firsthand from some of the survivors?
Sometimes I was able to obtain information from survivors, but in a great many cases it was the skills required of me as a historian-turned-detective that enabled me to compile notes on the people I was investigating. Often, in chasing down a specific fact, insight, or piece of corroborating data, I might have to consult 25 or 30 different sources before I could add to the profile I was developing. On other occasions, the sort of precise information I was seeking was simply not available, and I was obliged to speculate on the balance of probabilities that a conclusion I was drawing was in fact the case. This is what historians are often obliged to do, but in this case it was made all the more difficult given than many of the actions I have highlighted in the book were clandestine to begin with.
Was there a range in terms of the kinds of people the upstanders and resistors were, or in their reasons for fighting against the Nazis?
Resistance meant that there were people who said no to the attempt by National Socialist Germany, between 1933 and 1945, to disenfranchise, dehumanize, and, ultimately, destroy Europe’s Jews. They said no in a wide variety of ways, and for a plethora of reasons. These were people who sought simply to maintain dignity and a sense of what it meant to be human. Resistance also embraced those who sought to save life, through rescue, concealment, or other forms of denying the Nazis the chance to realize their murderous goals.
Taken collectively, resistance was an active, ongoing process of opposition to all aspects of life as intended by the Nazis. It could take many forms, and arise over any issue. It was as much an attitude as a physical process, and sought to negate the commands, rules, intentions, actions, statements, and deprivations imposed by the SS. Its numerous forms enabled men and women to take some measure of control over their fate in an environment in which survival and success were in no sense guaranteed. Every act of helping, encouragement, and cooperation that took place disproved the claim that an attitude of self-reliance could not be maintained, and individuals, groups, and resistance movements all sought to establish and maintain this attitude.
During the Holocaust upstanding was not a soft option, and, all too frequently, it was fraught with emotional, moral, and physical dilemmas. It wasn’t easy being an upstander. To stand out from the crowd, to refuse to acquiesce, to not compromise one’s own values in order to guarantee personal safety at the expense of that of others – these were grueling issues for people to confront during this most extreme period in history.
What are some of the common threads among their stories?
Common threads are difficult to find, owing to the wide variations in motivation that characterized each person’s experience. That said, it is obvious to me that all were committed to the elevation of life in the face of the forces that would destroy life; to combatting hatred; to overcoming indifference; and to defeating the anti-human ideologies that were totalitarianism (generally) and Nazism (specifically).
One further thread runs through the stories of those who sought to shield life from destruction; a simple (and frequently unstated) assumption that saving life was a given – that these people saw there was nothing special in doing what they did, and that undertaking to “do the right thing” for their fellow human beings was both normal and expected.
Are there one or two that you found especially remarkable or unforgettable?
Resistance in the ghettos was frequent, and the example most people recall was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April-May, 1943. On April 19 the Nazis attempted to destroy the ghetto and its inhabitants as a birthday present to Adolf Hitler. Resistance here focused on the efforts of the Jewish Combat Organization, led by Mordecai Anielewicz, Yitzhak Zuckerman, Marek Edelman, Tosia Altman, and others. It lasted until May 16 – longer than the defense of Poland in September 1939. While it did not materially affect either the outcome of the war itself or the continued annihilation of the Jews, it remains to this day the symbol of Jewish resistance to Nazi tyranny.
Beyond the ghettos and camps, partisan groups comprised of guerrilla fighters risked their lives through fighting Nazis, particularly in the forests of eastern Poland, Ukraine, and Belorussia (Belarus). They attacked railroads, bridges, and military installations, but sometimes also cared for non-military combatants – women and children, or those too young, too old, or too sick to fight. Among the most notable of the partisan groups was that associated with the Bielski brothers, but there were also a large number of other Jewish operational commanders in other theaters, as well.
But upstanding did not have to take place on a grand scale in order to be effective. In a myriad small ways, the worst excesses of the Holocaust could be resisted. People such as August Landmesser, Giovanni Borromeo, Max Schmeling, Torgny Segerstedt, Johannes Bogaard, Charlotte Israel, and Sture Linnér all played their part in resisting the Nazis by refusing to acquiesce, or turn a blind eye, or desist from their commitment to the sanctity of human life.
All of these people, and many, many others, are featured in the book.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book in terms of knowledge or understanding of the Holocaust, and how might this perspective influence their view of the world today?
Saving lives during the Holocaust was sometimes next to impossible. It was a time when living space, food, sanitation facilities, and medicine were at a premium, and those who helped Jews risked their own lives as well as those of their families. Given the enormous risks involved in undertaking rescue efforts, it is remarkable that any of these initiatives took place at all. When we ask, therefore, why there were so few examples of upstanding during the Holocaust, the question could more readily be, in view of everything people faced, how come there were so many?
In a situation where both armed resistance and upstanding were impossible options, the mere act of survival was a form of resistance. For Jews this meant defeating death as much as it meant defeating the Nazis; indeed, the two were essentially the same. Every day in which a person stayed alive meant successfully resisting the Nazis’ genocidal ambition. Retaining one’s dignity, and sense of what it was to be human, signified a person’s defiance. For many, survival did not have to have any deeper meaning beyond this. Quite simply, anyone Jewish in continental Europe who outlived Hitler overcame the fate he and his regime intended for them, and through that very act they demonstrated an act of resistance stronger than any other – and, ultimately, a commitment to the one thing the Nazis sought to destroy … life.
This has got to be the most important value I would seek for people to take out of a reading of this book; the ongoing commitment to life, to an understanding that, when all is said and done, we all need each other, and that every life in both sacred and worth defending when confronted by hatred, bigotry, and racism.