Station #2: Obstacles to Resistance and What Motivated Rescuers?

1. Station #2: Obstacles to Resistance and What Motivated Rescuers?

2. Obstacles to Resistance • Superior armed power of the Germans. • German tactic of “collective responsibility.” • Secrecy and deception of deportations. • Family ties and responsibilities. • Absence of a non-Jewish population willing to help.

3. Jewish Resistance To smuggle a loaf of bread – was to resist. To teach in secret – was to resist. To cry out in warning and shatter illusions – was to resist. To rescue a Torah Scroll – was to resist. To forge documents – was to resist. To smuggle people across borders – was to resist. To chronicle events and conceal the records – was to resist. To hold out a helping hand to the needy – was to resist. To contact those under siege and smuggle weapons – was to resist. To fight with weapons in streets, mountains, and forests – was to resist. To rebel in death camps – was to resist. To rise up in ghettos, among the crumbling walls, in the most desperate revolt – was to resist. Taken from a wall on resistance at the Ghetto Fighters House.

4. Bystanders (85%) Victims Rescuers (< 0.5%) Perpetrators (< 10%)

5. What Motivated Rescuers? • Some sympathized with the Jews. • Some were actually antisemitic, but could not sanction murder or genocide. • Some were bound to those they saved by ties of friendship and personal loyalty, while some went out of their way to help total strangers. • Some were motivated by their political beliefs or religious values. • Some felt ethically that life must be preserved in the face of death. • For some there was no choice, what they did was natural and instinctive. • Many rescuers felt they were simply acting out of elemental human decency. They later insisted that they were not heroes, that they never thought of themselves as doing anything special or extraordinary.

6. Methods of Rescue • Hiding a Jew in one’s house or on one’s property. • Supplying forged ID’s or ration cards. • Finding employment. • Smuggling people from one place to another. • Providing food or clothing.

7. Individuals Who Rescued Irena Sendler Miep Gies Oskar Schindler with some of those he rescued. 1946. Betsie, Corrie, Nollie and Willem Ten Boom American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) Andre Trocmé and his wife Magda

8. Governments that Rescued Bulgaria Denmark Finland Hungary Italy Vatican United States Danish fishermen ferry Jews to safety in neutral Sweden during the German occupation of Denmark. 1943.

9. Antisemitism (hatred of Jews) in the U.S. November 1938 After Kristallnacht, an overwhelming majority of the American public was shocked by Nazi actions, but according to polling data, 85% of the public still opposed any change in our restrictive immigration quotas. 1939 Roper Poll 39% Jews should be treated like everyone else 53% Jews are different & should be restricted 10% Jews should be deported Emergency Rescue Committee: May 1940 Varian Fry, on assignment for the Emergency Rescue Committee, briefs rescuees on escape routes.

10. Jewish Losses TOTAL :5,596,029 * *These are minimum losses as reported by Yehuda Bauer and Robert Rozett, "Estimated Jewish Losses in the Holocaust," in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990), p.1799. The estimated number of Jewish fatalities during the Holocaust is usually given between 5.1 and 6 million victims. Despite the availability of numerous scholarly works and archival sources on the subject, Holocaust related figures may never be definitely known.