Resistance: They Fought Back

[birds chirping] PATT: So, people often want to know why the Jewish population didn't fight back immediately.

Half a million Jews crowded into the ghetto, why didn't they take up arms and fight back against the Germans?

- Collective punishment.

- Collective punishment.

STEVE: The Jews knew that you can start some resistance.

You can aim a pistol and shoot one person, two people, whatever it is, but the Germans would then arrest 2,000.

[tense music playing] [wings fluttering] PATT: But the truth is, from the very beginning, right, once they're crowded into the ghetto, they did resist in the ways that they knew best to do, resistance that was a type of spiritual resistance, resistance that was a way of standing up against the German oppressors.

Feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, taking care of orphans, these were strategies that Jews had used for centuries and which they fell back upon.

DINA PORAT: The unarmed resistance is called in Hebrew Amidah.

Amidah is standing, standing up.

Or in Yiddish, I would say... [speaking Yiddish] I'm not yielding to the situation.

Whatever you do that is against the situation is resistance.

Whether you sit or lie or crawl or swim or stand up makes absolutely no difference.

It's Amidah.

"Life in the ghetto was a chain of resistance.

"There were illegal schools.

"There were illegal libraries, "choirs, even theaters.

It was an illegal life."

The Germans wanted to destroy any kind of Jewish existence, also cultural existence, and so on.

So when you educated children in ghettos, if they survived for them to develop after the war, this was against the German idea, yeah?

"I organized a school in my building, "and I became the teacher of that school.

"I had never prepared for being a teacher, "but there were no schools.

All schools were illegal."

And if you always keep in mind that part of what the Germans wanted to do was to kill the body, but also to kill the soul, to undermine humanity, the humanity of the individual.

And therefore, if you never lost your humanity, then, in a very real sense, you're helping to defeat the Germans.

"Although you see today how the pictures, "mostly from Germans, pictures of Jews "who were beggars and pitiful.

"A-And this is taken because the Germans "would like us only to be seen this way.

"This was only one part of the ghetto.

It was true.

There were beggars."

"But there was another kind of life full of activities and spiritual resistance."

[poignant music playing] <end subtitles>