$Unique_ID{bob01143}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter IX: The Resistance - Part I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Various}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{resistance
jews
war
fight
like
danish
first
camps
dutch
jewish}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter IX: The Resistance - Part I

Moderator:  Frank R. Lautenberg (USA):  Businessman; member, U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council. (Elected to U.S. Senate 1982.)

Louis de Jong (Netherlands):  Historian; former director of the Netherlands
State Institute for War Documentation.

Renee Aubry (France):  Chief of Cabinet in Ministry of Veterans; widow of
resistance fighter.

Frode Jakobsen (Denmark):  Former resistance fighter; member of first post-
occupation cabinet; member of the Danish parliament.

Branko Lakic (Yugoslavia):  Counsel General in Washington; partisan fighter.

Samuel Gruber (USA):  Survivor of Majdanek; partisan fighter.

Benjamin Meed (USA):  Businessman; president, Warsaw Ghetto Resistance
Organization; member, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

Institutional identifications are those at the time of the Conference.

Louis De Jong

     First of all, as to my personal involvement, I am Jewish, and this was
one of the factors which made me decide in May 1940, when the German army
attacked the Netherlands, to try and escape to Britain.  I was one of the very
few people who succeeded in doing so.

     In Britain, I worked for five years broadcasting in Dutch to the people
of occupied Holland, and after the war in 1945, I was given the task of
organizing and directing a state institute of war documentation.  I did so
until 1979 when I retired.  The main part of my work over the past 20 years,
has been to prepare an overall history of the Netherlands in World War II in
which inevitably much attention is paid both to Jewish persecution and to the
resistance.

     You might like to know that these books attract tremendous notice in my
country, testifying to the strong interest among the Dutch people for what
happened in World War II.  We generally start with the first printing of
100,000 copies, which would mean a million-and-a-half when it would come to
the size of the United States.  They are usually very quickly sold out.

     You will understand also that given the fact that my books - at least the
ones that have been published so far - total some 10,000 pages, it is fairly
difficult to compress them into 10 minutes.

     I would like to stress first of all the country is as flat as a pancake.
It was and is very densely populated and has an area the size of about 12,000
to 13,000 square miles or 30,000 square kilometers.  It is inhabited by nine
million people.  There are no impenetrable swamps.  There are no mountains.
There are no deep forests.

     So, forms of resistance that were possible elsewhere in Europe,
particularly in Eastern Europe, Poland, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Greece,
and some parts of Italy and France, were out of the question in a country like
Holland with its excellent road and communication system.  If you had to carry
out resistance and save people, you could only hide them, so to speak, within
the folds of society as it was, and this is what happened.

     It is not so easy to give a proper definition of what resistance is. In
my opinion, one should ask first of all what were, with regard to Holland, the
aims which the Nazi occupier had in mind?

     I would be able to indicate four of these aims.

     First of all, he intended to Nazify Holland, that is to change the
existing Dutch institutions into Nazi institutions, and this was completely
unsuccessful.

     Most people - I would say 95 to 98 percent - said no to the German
occupation right from the start, and I would like to remind you that Holland
is perhaps the only country in world history where an impressive and
tremendous strike movement took place to protest against what was happening to
the Dutch Jews.  I am referring to the strike movement in February of 1941 in
Amsterdam - a strike which lasted for two days, which one might say had no
material effect, but which clearly proved to the German occupier that his
political aim, the attempt to Nazify the Netherlands, was not to be attained.

     A second aim was the economic exploitation of Holland, and in this the
occupier largely succeeded.  That is to say that Dutch industry was forced to
work as part of the German war machine, and some hundreds of thousands of
Dutch workers were forced to work in Germany.

     A third aim - I will be coming back to that - was the deportation of
virtually all Jews and of another group which should not be forgotten - the
Gypsies.

     A fourth aim was to counteract all forms of resistance.  He wanted a
passive nation, but this passive nation he never got.

     First of all, I would like to inform you that out of a total population
of about nine million, the number of Jews living in Holland was 140,000,
20,000 of them being Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria.

     Resistance started right from the beginning in the form of the
publication of underground papers of which some 2,000 were produced during the
occupation.  I mean 2,000 separate titles.  The most important underground
papers were printed every week or every two weeks in editions of 60,000 to
100,000 copies.

     Secondly, there was an important element of sabotage of war factories and
the like.

     In the third place, help was given to people who wanted to go into hiding
- not only Jews, but also members of resistance groups.

     And in the fourth place, there were intelligence groups which were active
in collecting military intelligence which was passed on either to London or to
Moscow.

     An important fact which I would like to bring to your notice is that
proportionally the number of Jews taking part in the Dutch resistance was
higher, albeit only slightly higher, than the proportion of non-Jews.

     With regard to the reactions of the Jews themselves, I would submit that
those Jews who decided to go into hiding committed an act of resistance.  The
Germans wanted to deport them, and the German intention of destroying them
after deportation was completely unknown to virtually all people concerned.
Therefore, going into hiding was, as I see it, an act of resistance, but I
would like to underline that there were many, perhaps even tens of thousands,
among the Dutch Jews who were given the opportunity to go into hiding but who
refused to do so for various reasons.

     One reason is that they had no idea whatsoever what was in store for them
in the extermination camps in eastern Europe.

     The second is that they wanted to carry the burden of their fate
themselves and not impose certain risks on non-Jewish Dutchmen who were
willing to help them.

     In order to go into hiding, you needed an address, people who were
willing to give you shelter.  In many cases, you needed money.  If you had
found that address where people were willing to give you shelter, you had to
get your weekly or monthly food coupons.  So, an entire operation was needed
to keep a Jewish family, or members of a Jewish family who were sheltered at a
certain address, alive.

     There were many members of what one might call the resistance movement
who specialized in organizing help for Jews who wanted to go into hiding.  I
estimate the number of people whose resistance work wholly or mainly consisted
of organizing help for Jews who wanted to go into hiding at between 1,000 and
2,000.

     Earlier I told you that the number of Jews living in Holland and who were
intended to be deported was about 140,000.  Of these 140,000, 25,000 were able
to find shelter in the Netherlands, among them between 6,000 and 7,000
children who were usually separated from their parents.  In addition to these
25,000 Jews who accepted the risk of going into hiding, there were about 4,000
Jews who managed to escape, usually with the help of non-Jewish Dutchmen, to
countries like Spain, Switzerland, and some of them to Sweden.

     It is hard to estimate how many families were in a position where they
accepted Jews as people whom they would like to save.  I know of many cases of
Jews who, when they went into hiding in 1942, were still living at the same
hiding address in 1944 or in 1945 when liberation came.  I say 1944 because,
as you probably know, the southern part of the Netherlands was liberated in
the autumn of 1944 and the remainder of the Netherlands not until April and
May 1945.

     I know of many other cases where Jews had to change their address time
and time again, so that they perhaps found shelter with 10 or 20 different
families, often living in different towns and villages.  The total number of
foster families, as I call them, may also be estimated at 25,000.  On the
other hand, of these 25,000 Jews, some 8,000 were detected while they were
being cared for by Dutch families and were, unfortunately, also deported.

     I have done my best to give some of the main facts, both on the Dutch
resistance and on the part of Jews in the Dutch resistance and the help that
was given to them by people.

     I am sure that all of you have read Anne Frank's diary.  This merely
gives you the story of one single girl.  I think that if you remember that
there were 25,000 people who were in the same position as Anne with regard to
the help they received from the Dutch nation, this will give you some idea of
the risks many Dutchmen took in order to protect their Jewish co-citizens.

Renee Aubry

     The goal of our conference was primarily to get to know better the entire
subject of concentration camps.  It was, of course, difficult to speak about
concentration camps without speaking about the resistance movements.  We are
grateful that you included this subject on your agenda.

     The resistance movement we are discussing this afternoon is a very
special kind of awareness that came about in a lot of countries - to strive
towards liberation, first of all, and to take up the defense of those who were
threatened.

     It would take a lot of time to discuss this resistance which began
nationally and became international, and I believe that no country was immune.
No country failed to rise against the dictatorship of National Socialism.  It
was a worldwide movement that invaded populations still waiting for the help
of major nations, waiting impatiently to be saved because they were being
decimated.  They undertook to maintain and to free themselves, when they
could.

     I believe that we must pay tribute to Great Britain, to the United
States, and to the Soviet Union because these are the countries which
permitted the resistance movements to fight strenuously and to work in
cooperation, particularly with London, as far as the French were concerned.

     There was another phenomenon that we must stress in this kind of
struggle.  Up to now, wars were the monopoly of men, but in France many women
went in the underground and played an important role either as liaison agents
or as parachute drop assistants, and sometimes in the underground-proper they
held a rifle together with their comrades.  They were also war correspondents.
I was thinking of my many friends who were in Bergen-Belsen, in particular at
Majdanek, who took pictures which were stirring in the horror they depicted.

     The importance of the resistance must be stressed in particular because
if it had not been useful, there would have been no point.  As far as France
is concerned, you asked me how resistance was structured in France.  Well, we
had the underground units which were members of networks of different
movements, and then there were the individuals acting alone who received
parachute drops.  Our friends who are here today know that these were
experiences that we shared in all nations.

     But I would like to say that this resistance, since we are talking
directly about what happened in the camps, permitted us to speed up the
process of liberation.  I remember that I was waiting for my husband who had
been deported to a camp little mentioned, Lerbeck.  When the British troops
arrived, the camp had been evacuated, but evacuated under tragic
circumstances.  Little is said about that particular camp which was liberated
late, and when the Allied troops arrived, no one was left in the camp.

     What matters is that the resistance from within - and we felt this deeply
in France - which was designed to harass the enemy, forced the Nazi troops to
resort to tactics which were an impediment to them.

     As we know, there were landings in France, such as the landing at Toulon
and the landing in Normandy.  You should have seen what the landing in
Normandy entailed to understand the bravery and the daring of the underground
fighters.  The French from London landed as did the Americans, and we do not
forget when we are on our own shores how much we owe to them.

     The time we have is very limited, and I am trying to be effective.  For
us, this conference has an extraordinary significance.  We would like that
this should not just end today.  We hope that we have established contact with
all the other countries, that each of us knows what everybody else was doing.
Each of us did the utmost of what he or she could do, and there is great hope
for us to think that people who were in such small numbers, who were so
limited in their means of waging war, in the final analysis are those who won
because they were on the side of freedom and on the side of hope.

     Today we spoke.  I listened very carefully to a subject which is very
dear to me since I am the president of the International Association of
Survivors of Neuengamme.  Neuengamme and its satellites were the camps of the
Final Solution.  They were the camps for underground fighters Jewish or non
Jewish - because they had stood up and they were treated differently.

     There were also underground fighters within the camps.  Resistance within
the camps was not useless.  We are studying that particular subject very
closely, and I believe that all countries gathered here today will help us
study deeper and know better what was going on within the camps in terms of
resistance.

     What we must do is to bear witness while we are still alive.  At the same
time, we must give the younger generation an opportunity to project back to us
what their perception of us is rather than projecting our own perceptions upon
them.

     That is how we shall win them over to our side.  Along those lines, in
France and within the framework of the Department of Veterans Affairs, we have
set up a special section - we call it a special commission - which will study
the history of wars, and, through the knowledge thus acquired, it will help
promote peace.  All men of good will want peace, and if I dare, I would like
to ask that all women join them more firmly, more steadfastly to ensure that
their children will never be killed.

     There is no time to speak of the children.  There is no time to speak
really of what resistance was in France - the parachute drops, missions of
information, hiding those that were sent to us from London or elsewhere, the
reception organized for those American flyers we loved so much because they
were the symbol of the liberation.

     So, to be here today is extremely important for all of us.  It is deeply
moving, but it is not enough to be moved.  You must also be useful.  I believe
that that's what we are going to be able to do all together.

Frode Jakobsen

     May I first say that it is a good feeling for me to be here among people
whom, in most cases, I have never met before, but with whom I was united, in
those days so long ago, in a great cause which perhaps meant the survival or
the downfall of civilization.

     Denmark's contribution to the downfall of Nazism was not big, but it was
our contribution, and therefore, right or wrong, we can never forget it.  For
how was the situation in Denmark until the Danish people really stood up to
fight?  Before that, we had felt the anguish in our hearts, not only the
anxiety that all that we believed in was about to perish, but also the fear
that our people, the Danish people, should fail in what we felt was our duty.

     You must understand what a shocking experience it was to awake in the
morning and to be informed that during the night your country had been
occupied by the Nazis.  This capitulation, however, was never the main
criticism of the Danish resistance.  Denmark had been told beforehand, even by
Churchill, that nobody could come to our rescue.

     We were told by our political leaders that now we were in the cage with
the tiger and that we were like prisoners of war; therefore nobody could
expect anything from us.  We had to leave all the fighting to those who were
still free, but this fight was also a fight for our freedom.

     So the Danish resistance grew up as a fight on two fronts:  directly
against the German occupation and indirectly against an official policy which
we held to be wrong, but of which we knew had only one object - the saving of
the Danish people from the horrors of war.  Therefore, in Denmark it is not so
difficult to tell what resistance is.

     For some of us, the resistance was not wanting to be spared; we did not
want to be the canary bird of Hitler.  We had to stand up and fight, fight
with fear in our hearts, fear that we would be too weak, and that something
dreadful was about to conquer the world.  We could not help it.  We had to
fight no matter what our government told us.  It is a mockery to speak about a
democratic government which you have to obey in a country occupied by the
enemy.

     The final break between official Denmark and the Germans came.  It came
when the Germans demanded that death sentences against saboteurs from then on
be carried out not by the Germans, but by Danish authorities.  No Danish
politician could ever accept that and still hope to be a Danish politician
after the war.

     From then on, there was no Danish government, and soon there was no
Danish police either.  That meant no suffrage, but we were happier.  Our
political freedom we won later.  Our moral freedom we won on that day.  Now we
could concentrate all our energies directly against the enemy.

     I have chosen not to speak about details but about what I would call the
spirit of resistance.  What is that spirit?  To keep the sense of human
dignity unimpaired was still more important than military effects.

     I am not a young man any longer.  You may be able to see that.  I
remember the resistance we were so sure of in 1932 and 1933 - the German
Social Democrats and Communists who would overthrow Hitler after a short
period.  I have seen how that collapsed like a soap bubble.

     There we stood dejected.  Was the revolt of the human spirit against
degradation only a naive illusion after all?

     One year later, however, they fought in Vienna.  An unequal fight, a
foolish fight - artillery against the workers' buildings.  It was another
defeat, but before that, a heroic battle.  It was a defeat, but a defeat which
raised our courage again - we who had despaired in 1933.

     About 10 years later there was a fight in Warsaw.  That fight was also
doomed to defeat, but if I were a Jew, I would be proud that my people rose in
the last desperate, uncalculating defiance.

     As for Danish resistance, it was sabotage and the organizing of an
underground army of 55,000 people armed with weapons dropped down by the
British.  The sabotage was mainly against factories working for the Germans.
How could we contribute war materials to kill those who were fighting for the
cause which was also ours?

     It was also sabotage against railways carrying German troops through
Denmark, which became important after the invasion in Normandy.  The Nazis had
to move badly needed troops through Denmark to the front in France.  We could
delay them sometimes for a week in Jutland.

     The rescue of the Jews to Sweden is a different category.  It was not a
special contribution of those active in the resistance but of the whole Danish
population.  After 40 years, there is a tendency to stress the unity of all
Danes during the war, and I believe that unity was greater than in most
countries.  But the truth is that we were not completely united until the
Germans started to persecute the Jews.

     Speaking of resistance, I sometimes make a distinction between two
different ways to love one's nation, or another human being, for that matter.
You may be more preoccupied with the well-being of those you love, or you may
be more concerned that those you love behave well.

     This was the difference between the political parties and the resistance,
but there were ideals neither of the two would think of compromising.  One of
these ideals was equal treatment of the Jews and the rest of Danes.  There the
resistance and what we call the "old politicians" met in a united Denmark in a
fight for humanity, for the dignity of man.

Branko Lakic

     During the war I was young, but in the second part of 1943, I left to
participate in the liberation.  I hope that many of you know that Yugoslavia
is a small country in the southeastern part of Europe.  I am going to describe
the situation in Yugoslavia during the war.

     Its contribution to the Allied forces was substantial:  1.7 million
people, or 1.2 percent of the total population, were killed in combat, in
concentration camps and in prisons.  For example, in the notorious
concentration camp at Jasenovac about 700,000 patriots of all nationalities
including Jews and Gypsies, were put to death, many of them women and
children. (Last year [1980], a new charnel house was discovered in the area of
Jasenovac, which is estimated to have been the common tomb for another
40,000.)

     Yugoslavia's uprising in 1941 caused a major delay in the Nazi invasion
of the Soviet Union which eventually changed the course of the war.  The
Yugoslav forces, though significantly outnumbered by the enemy, managed to tie
down about 30 divisions of the Axis powers at any given time during the war.
In April 1941, there were 520,000 Germans, 350,000 Italians, 100,000
Hungarians, and 30,000 Bulgarians, or a total of one million enemy troops, in
Yugoslavia.  On the other hand, there were 80,000 troops fighting in the
National Liberation Army in the autumn and winter of 1941.

     Yugoslavia was the first country to liberate a part of its territory in
1941 when the Nazis were on the offensive on every front line in Europe.

     For example, I have to use a few details.  The National Liberation Army
had 305,000 dead and 425,000 wounded.  The greatest casualties were among the
youth between the ages of 16 and 21.  There were about 100,000 women fighting
in the ranks of the National Liberation Army.

     As the Yugoslavian theater of war began to acquire glory and importance,
in 1943, Hitler decided to launch a massive offensive against the main
operative group of the Supreme Headquarters and the First Croatian and the
First Bosnian Army Corps which operated in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He deployed
over 104,000 German, Italian, and quisling' troops with air support from 150
planes in January 1943.

     As of late 1944, the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia numbered over
500,000 troops, 17 army corps, 53 divisions (two air force divisions), a navy,
a river flotilla, and a large number of smaller partisan detachments.  The
Yugoslav Army and all armed members of the national liberation struggle fought
to the death with a total of over 800,000 persons in May 1945.

     The Yugoslavians suffered terrible devastation.  The statistics are
staggering: 289,000 farms were ruined; 822,000 buildings, of which 65,000 were
town dwellings, were bombed and reduced to rubble; 137 power plants were put
out of commission; 28,000 railway cargo wagons and 3,000 passenger carriages
were destroyed.  At least one fourth of all Yugoslav citizens were left
homeless.  As a result, the Yugoslav national income was reduced by $9
billion, and war damages were estimated at $46.9 billion at 1939 prices.

     The price was high, but the prize was supreme - freedom.  One million
seven hundred thousand women, men, and children laid down their lives for
these causes.  In other words, every tenth Yugoslav was killed in the war.

     In 1943 these contributions were recognized by the Allies.  Missions of
Great Britain, the USSR, and the USA were parachuted into Yugoslavia to keep
their commands informed of the true sources of resistance.  The difficulty the
Allied Command attributed to these missions is best illustrated by the fact
that Sir Winston Churchill assigned his son Randolph to this important task.

     Of about 75,000 Jews living in Yugoslavia in 1941, only 15,000 lived to
see the dawn of May 1945.

     This extreme suffering cannot and should never be wiped from the memory
of mankind.

     As a conclusion, let me repeat a beautiful thought Senator McGovern
expressed on one of his visits to Yugoslavia in the postwar years.  Landing at
the military airport of Vis where he had landed once before during the war,
and stunned by the change, he exclaimed that he wished all the military
airports of the world were bordered by vineyards like this one was.

Samuel Gruber

     My name is Samuel Gruber.  In the wartime it was Mietek.  In September
1939 in Poland, when the war broke out, I found myself drafted into the Polish
army.  After eight days of fighting, I was wounded in my right shoulder and
taken prisoner by the Germans.  After a short stay in a hospital, I was sent
out with other Polish prisoners of war to Stalag 13A near Nuremberg, Germany.
There they selected all Jewish prisoners and put us in separate barracks and
sent us out for all kinds of manual work.

     In February 1941, the Germans decided to send all Jewish prisoners of war
back to Poland, stating, "You are no more prisoners of war.  You are plain
Jews." And as such, they sent me and about 2,000 others to a camp near Lublin.
Here, they gave us over to the SS.  Before we were under the Wehrmacht.  They
put us to work all over the town of Lublin and then to build the known
concentration camp Majdanek.  Every day there were beatings, hangings, and
shootings.  When we saw this, we started to organize.  Then we started talking
to people about what to do and how to plan to escape.

     I think I live today because I was a believer.  I believed when Hitler
said that he would kill all the Jews.  I believed when Himmler and Goebbels
and others wrote in their books and their theory that they would kill us all.
I believed it, but a lot of us did not.  When I came over to my people and
asked them to run away with me, a lot of them said, "No.  Why should we?  We
don't know what will happen there.  And here we have a place to sleep. They
give us food.  All right, they are beating some of us, they are killing some
of us, but they wouldn't kill everybody."

     But I believed that they would do it.  Realizing that the whole camp of
2,000 people couldn't escape, I organized a group of 22 Jews.  In October
1942, I ran away to the woods around Lublin.  In the beginning, we had a very
hard time adjusting to our new life.  We had no guns, no weapons to defend
ourselves, and food was also a problem.

     In a short while, we found some connections with other Jewish boys and
girls who had run away from concentration camps and The Resistance

other ghettos and also with some Polish groups.  Together we organized a
partisan unit ready to fight the Germans.  We started to sabotage the links of
communication and the railway train, stop trucks, cut telephone wires, ambush
German soldiers, and kill spies and collaborators.  After a time, our Jewish
group was singled out by the leader as the best organized fighting men in the
woods.

     I want to recall here one episode of our actions.  I recall the first
train derailment we engineered and the excitement of it.  We prepared for this
moment for three days ahead, finding out the right spot, timing, and also
where the military installation and placement of German soldiers were. The
night was dark, and we took positions on the embankment around a railroad line
going from Lublin to Warsaw.

     Our bomb expert put his bomb under the train rail, and we were all
waiting with nervous tension for the train to come.  After half an hour, we
heard a locomotive hissing.  Our explosion erupted, and the train turned on
its back.  The train carried oil, war materials, tanks, and parts for the
military machinery.  There were interruptions for two to three days in the
military communications.

     This was a very big accomplishment for us and made us very proud and gave
us the courage to fight more.

     All over Poland, Jews seeing their plight, started to organize and fight
back.  There were revolts in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, Grodno, Bialystok
and others, and in the concentration camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, but the
remnants from those fights and from the revolts came to us, to the partisan
sector.  It is estimated that 50,000 Jews fought in the partisans.

     I wrote a book about my experience.  The name is I Chose Life.  I am glad
that I was able to write that for what I and my fellow fighters went through.
Too many comrades perished in the struggle, and by writing this story in
detail I believe I fulfilled their dying last wish that their sufferings
should not be forgotten.