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$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter XI: The Uprisings}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Various}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{ghetto
uprising
warsaw
jewish
camp
resistance
death
few
time
treblinka}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter XI: The Uprisings

Moderator:  Dr. Irving Greenberg (USA):  Rabbi; author and Holocaust scholar;
director, National Jewish Resource Center, New York City; member, U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council.

Vladka Meed (USA):  Courier in Warsaw Ghetto uprising; author of On Both Sides
of the Wall.

Richard Glazer (Switzerland):  Survivor of Treblinka.

Esther Raab (USA):  Survivor of Sobibor.

Dr. Leon Wells (USA): Survivor of "Death Brigade," a group of prisoners forced
by the SS to erase evidence of Nazi mass executions in Janowska.

Alexander Donat (USA):  Author of The Holocaust Kingdom and other works on the
Holocaust; survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto (now deceased).

Irving Greenberg

     This panel offers a glimpse into an incredible phenomenon within the
Holocaust, that despite conditions of total oppression and overwhelming
tyrannical power, human beings found the strength and the capacity to resist
and to fight back.

     We will focus on one aspect of the general resistance - those who were
able to organize actual armed revolt within the framework of their oppression.
This, of course, constitutes part of a much broader universe of moral
resistance, an affirmation of dignity, but this group had the additional
difficulties of organizing, obtaining weapons, and rising up.

     If the numbers of survivors in each case are so pitifully small because
they are one of a hundred or one of a thousand, the figures we have with us
this morning are even a smaller remnant because so few of those who
participated either survived the fighting or survived to this day. Therefore,
it is a special privilege for them to share their testimony with us.

Vladka Meed

     The Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the symbol of Jewish resistance to the Nazis,
was not an isolated event, but rather the culmination of many forms of Jewish
resistance throughout the world.  During the first years of the Ghetto, the
nature of resistance had been to preserve our Jewish way of life against the
barbaric onslaught of the Nazis.  Survival, to outwit the enemy and to live
and to witness the destruction - that was our goal.

     It was only after July 1942, when the deportations began from the Warsaw
Ghetto, that the realization slowly dawned on us that, despite the German
assurances of "only resettlement" to other towns, the Final Solution meant
death.

     How could our people, who for generations had cherished human values,
imagine the utter madness of an enemy who planned their total annihilation?
How could we even conceive of the death camps perfected by German science and
industry?

     It took time until the ghetto Jew learned to believe the truth of the gas
chambers, but finally, as the realization grew that the Nazis would spare no
one, the idea of armed struggle took hold of those left in the ghettos.

     In October 1942, the coordinated Jewish Fighters Organization of Warsaw -
ZOB - came into being and I, a member of the Jewish underground, was sent out
of the Ghetto on a mission among the Poles a Jewish girl, but I had Polish
features and I was fluent in the Polish language.  I was trusted to try and
obtain arms for the Fighters' Organization.

     The core of our Fighters' Organization consisted of illegal youth
organizations - Zionists, Socialists, Bundists and Communists - who were
remnants of the prewar political youth movements.  Over 500 fighters were
organized into 22 units.  Though most of the fighters were in their teens or
early twenties, they were imbued with a spirit of idealism and heroism.  In
the beginning, the armaments in the possession of the Jewish Fighters'
Organization were one revolver.

     Those who say that organized Jewish armed resistance came too late in the
Ghetto would do well to remember that it came earlier than that of any other
oppressed people in Europe.  Every other underground movement waited with its
own revolt until the Allied armies were practically at the gate of the cities,
so as to assure their success.  This was true of the French in Paris and later
on of the Poles in Warsaw, but the Jews - the most persecuted and the ones in
the most hopeless position - were the first to revolt.

     It was 18 months earlier, on January 18, 1943, as soon as we got hold of
a few revolvers, that the first German soldiers fell in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The surprise attack induced the Germans to halt the deportation. January 18
marked the turning point for the Ghetto, for on that day the Ghetto had dared
to strike back in an organized fashion by setting fire to German factories and
carrying out death sentences against informers and collaborators.  The
Fighters' Organization won the support of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews.

     Through bulletins placed on the walls of Ghetto buildings, the Jews were
informed of the aims and works of the underground.  A tax was put on the
wealthy and on the remaining Ghetto institutions.  Money and jewelry were
collected.  Bakers and merchants secretly supplied bread and food to the
fighting units.  Those who still had possessions of value had to contribute
for armaments.

     "Resist!  Don't let yourself be taken away," was the call.

     "I no longer have any authority in the Ghetto," Mark Lichtenbaum, the
head of the then-appointed Jewish Council, admitted to the Nazis when he was
ordered to supervise further deportations.  The Fighters' Organization
expressed the will and the feeling of the remaining 60,000 Warsaw Ghetto Jews.

     But our biggest problem was to obtain arms.  We sent out desperate pleas
to the outside world begging for guns, but these pleas fell on deaf ears.
Pitiful was the response from the Polish underground.  Instead, the Jewish
resistance organization had to find its own way.

     I will never forget when Michael Klepfish, our armaments engineer, and I
together tested our first homemade bomb outside the Ghetto walls, and it
worked!

     With mounting excitement, armaments were smuggled into the Ghetto.
Primitive factories were set up in basements and attics to manufacture Molotov
cocktails and grenades.  By then we had learned of the German plans to make
Warsaw completely Judenrein, free of Jews.  The end was drawing near.
Feverishly we worked preparing ourselves to face the enemy by building secret
hiding places and bunkers, storing food, and practicing with small arms.

     None of us expected to survive an attack on the Nazis nor did we even
expect to influence in the smallest way the war.  But nevertheless, a profound
conviction that our cause was just drove us on.

     On Passover - April 19, 1943 - at two o'clock in the morning, the guards
of the resistance organization noticed movements of new German troops near the
Ghetto wail.  The whole Ghetto was immediately alerted.  Fighting groups took
up their positions.  Others were ordered to the prepared bunkers and hiding
places, and when the first German soldiers marched into the Ghetto in the
morning, they found the streets empty.

     Suddenly, at certain intersections, they came under fire.  From
buildings, from windows, from rooftops of houses, Jews were shooting.  The
Germans withdrew.  They set up artillery around the Ghetto walls and from
there they systematically bombarded our Ghetto positions.

     The Ghetto did not yield.  A Jewish unit under the command of Hersh
Berlinsky waited for the Germans at the entrance to the brush-making factory,
where one of our few Ghetto land mines was planted.  The first German ranks
entered the factory; a silent signal a moment later; a loud explosion, and
German corpses laid strewn on the ground amidst their own wrecked weapons.
Unfortunately, it was the only one of our four mines to go off.

     Such were the arms with which we fought.  We were so poorly equipped. We
had only a handful of grenades and revolvers against the combined might of the
Wehrmacht.

     Day after day, week after week passed in fighting.  In the first days,
the Jewish fighters tried to hold on to their positions.  Then, they shifted
to partisan methods.  Groups would emerge from the bunkers to seek out the
enemy.  In these encounters, whoever saw the other first and was quickest with
his weapon was the victor of the moment.  Inexperienced, untrained civilians
fought against a well-drilled army - a primitive Molotov cocktail against a
tank, a gun against a flame thrower, a revolver against a machine gun.

     One side of the street against the other.  One house against the next.
Block after block, street after street, the Germans set on fire.  The fire
that swept the Ghetto turned night into day.  The flames, the heat, and the
suffocating smoke drove the Jews from their houses and bunkers.  Men, women,
and children jumped out of the windows and ran through the burning winds
looking for places where they could breathe.  But where could they go when
everything was burning?

     I can still see the towers of flame.  I can still smell the stench of
burning houses and hear the agonizing screams for help.

     And in the midst of this flaming hell, the resistance went on until the
entire Ghetto was a charred rubble.  General Stroop, who destroyed the Warsaw
Ghetto, stated in an official report that the Jewish uprising came to an end
on May 16 after four weeks of struggle.

     We know, of course, that after that date the Ghetto was unable to
continue organized resistance since the majority of our military organization
had been killed.  Mordecai Anilewicz, the leader of the uprising, and his
entire staff at Mila 18 were gassed.  Many others were burned to death, but
for long weeks afterward, other Jews remained hidden in the still-smoldering
ruins and bunkers and would not give up themselves.

     For weeks shots were still heard in the Ghetto.  The same General Stroop
in another report informed his superiors that he blew up or gassed 631 Jewish
bunkers.  This means 631 Jewish points of resistance.  No one knows exactly
the number of Jews who perished in the bunkers.  No one can tell about their
last hours or their deaths.

     Those final days united them all - those who had fallen with arms in
hand, those who were gassed, those who suffocated in the smoking ruins, and
those who were burned to their death.  They were all united in one great chain
of resistance against their enemy.

     During the days of the uprising, the Jewish underground sent radio
information to the world, to our representatives in the Polish government-
in-exile in England.  We pleaded for ammunition, for help, but the world sat
silently by.  Our people were entirely alone, abandoned.  Those of us who
survived can never forget the feeling of desertion we experienced.  We shall
never be able to find justification for having been forsaken in our last hours
of struggle.

     One year later, I was in the uprising of the city of Warsaw, and I
remember at that time the planes flying over the city, throwing down arms and
medical supplies for the fighters.

     But when our Warsaw Jews were fighting, the skies over the Ghetto were
empty.

     In the months afterwards, we learned of other Jewish uprisings in
ghettos, towns, and death camps.  Later, as the Allies came closer, the other
civilian uprisings took place.  But the Warsaw Ghetto uprising doomed from the
start yet inspired by the highest ideals of humanity and human dignity -
became the symbol of heroism and resistance for all people - and for all time.

Richard Glazer

     I am a survivor of the Treblinka camp and witnessed the uprising in the
camp on August 2, 1943.

     Let me first tell you something about the general character of the camp
because it is important for the uprising.  Treblinka was a very small camp.
It had very small dimensions, some 300 by 500 meters, and a tremendous
capacity - as many as 18,000 people a day were killed there. Except for the
bottleneck on the railroads, Treblinka could have had all the six million Jews
killed in the Second World War.

     You must understand that these people had been persecuted for a long time
even before they were deported, so they kept their last bit of property up to
the last moment in the form of gold, precious metals, jewels, money, and so on
which were easily transportable.  Just imagine 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 people a
day - a fantastic richness piled in Treblinka into a huge - what I call
"mammon" and this "mammon" corrupted all the German SS, the Ukrainian guards
as well the inhabitants of the whole region.  The inhabitants of the whole
region were very, very poor farmers with a very low level of education.  They
were understandably eager to enrich themselves, even though they had fear of
the Nazis who would torture to the death anyone who was caught hiding a Jew,
along with the Jew.

     So, these were the general conditions which we had to keep in mind when
preparing the uprising.  It meant for us no help outside Treblinka at all.
Last but not least, we shouldn't forget the traditional anti-Semitism in
Poland at that time.  We couldn't count on any help from the outside, and we
knew that our chances for survival even in the event of a miracle that we
succeeded in getting out were practically nil.

     As for the preparation and organization of the uprising, we found out
that out of the 450 inmates who survived after typhus and all the illnesses in
the camp, during a time when the transport didn't come due to difficulties the
Germans were having with the railroads, only some 40 had some military
training, less than ten percent.  I myself was at that time very young and had
no proper military training.

     Only very few had access to the 55 barracks and to the ammunition stores.
These were very young boys, and one of their tasks was to put a small metal
chip into the lock of the ammunition stores.  The Germans could open the door
so they called people from the locksmithy.  The locksmiths were Jews so a key
was made for the munitions store.  The first grenades and the guns could have
been smuggled out only with the help of these young boys, around 13 and 14
years old.  It happened that on the day when we decided to start the uprising,
the grenades that had been smuggled out were without fuses so the whole thing
had to be postponed and the grenades smuggled back again.

     At last, on August 2, the uprising started.  We counted on some help. One
kilometer from Treblinka was another camp, a slave labor camp.  Probably the
Nazis used this camp to hide the existence of the extermination camp. We were
counting eventually on the help of the slave labor from this camp because the
Germans brought those people to work outside of the camp, but that didn't
happen.

     The whole thing was supposed to start then at four o'clock in the
afternoon with the blasting of the first grenade.  But some ten minutes
before, we saw that one of the traitors - there were, of course, traitors,
very few, but there were traitors in Treblinka - was speaking to one of the
SS, so the whole thing had to start before.  We succeeded in setting Treblinka
on fire and it was burned down.  However, we did not succeed in attacking the
watch towers or in cutting the connection to the military garrison in
Malkinia.

     The whole uprising was half a success and half a failure.  It was an act
of despair in a time when we in Treblinka felt simply abandoned by the whole
world.  It was an act to let the world know, and not be slaves of the Nazis,
and not have to burn our own people.

Esther Raab

     I have the distinction of being one of the 14 Sobibor survivors today in
the world.

I hasten to say that in spite of the fact that Sobibor is seldom mentioned, I
want to say that Sobibor was exclusively an extermination center.  Those who
were there, like myself, were selected for sorting the clothing and valuables
of the murdered, and others served in domestic chores for the SS.

     The commandant of our camp was Gustav Wagner and his associate was Karl
Frenzel Those two bloodthirsty hounds were only satisfied when transports for
death arrived.  Once there was a slowdown in the arrivals, and Wagner came
into the camp, took out some young men and, before killing them, he tortured
them by skinning their fingers.  Frenzel was in charge of the arrivals.  Once
- I witnessed it - he spotted an infant among the arrivals. He grabbed it by
its little feet and smashed the skull against the wall of the freight car.

     Just for the record, there was a tragic competition between Sobibor and
Belzec, at our expense, as to which death camp exceeded in its murderous
accomplishment.  On one of his spot inspections to the camp, Himmler was shown
how 700 women were brought in from Majdanek.  They had to undress, and their
heads were shaved before they were gassed.

     The uprising in Sobibor came in October of 1943.  The plans were made
before, but the opportunity availed itself when a transport of Russian war
prisoners came for extermination and a small group was selected for labor.
Among them was the war prisoner Sasha Piechorski with whom the in-group began
to finalize the uprising.  One hour before the uprising, Sasha stood up and
told us that we were all doomed to die.  He did not believe that any of us
would survive.  However, if any one of us should make it and survive, he
wanted him or her to swear to tell the story of hell as long as he or she
might live.

     I am fortunate to tell the story in their name.

Leon Wells

     As I'm asked here to give testimony about the uprising, I would like to
emphasize that uprising or fighting in general in no way elevates my stature
as a survivor or diminishes the Nazi atrocities perpetrated on the victims
whom they killed because they did not fight. This statement is important to me
because of the introduction of a most offensive philosophy which is called the
"sheep theory," which is especially emphasized by some Jewish leaders.

     In the middle of June 1943, I was the last one of my family of seven
brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents.  I was taken into the Death
Brigade which the Germans named Sonderkommando 1005.  The purpose of this
Death Brigade was to erase all traces of Nazi atrocities so that no witnessing
of the atrocities could take place after the war.  I think it may have started
in 1943 when the Nazis saw that their armies were retreating.

     We dug up the graves of people that had been killed, burned their bodies,
ground their bones, and took out the gold teeth or any gold we found in these
ashes.  We normally went through about two thousand bodies a day.

     It seems that the Germans had been keeping an exact list of how many
people had been shot and where they were buried since they had come into east
Poland in 1941.  In 1942, while at the Janowska camp, I got sick with typhus,
and after three days I was taken to the "sands" in the back of the Janowska
camp in Lvov to be shot.  I dug my own grave, but at the last minute, after my
name was called and crossed off the list, I was able to escape.  However, I
was presumed by the SS to be dead.

     A year later in 1943, as a member of the Death Brigade, I was digging up
these same graves to burn the bodies, and we could only find 182 of the 183
bodies on the list.  I was the 183rd person.  For three days we looked for the
missing body so as not to leave any traces of these Nazi murders, but after
three days we gave up.

     We had been in this Death Brigade since June 15, 1943.  There must have
been quite a few groups before us because after two weeks these groups were
shot and a new group was brought in.  We started with 40 and ended up, on
November 19, 1943, with 123 Jewish prisoners of war.  According to some German
documents I found, there were 23 such brigades, of which only three were
composed of Russian prisoners of war.

     During this time, we also dug up the graves of the Polish leadership that
disagreed when Germany wanted to set up a Polish government.  Poland was one
of the few countries under Nazi occupation that did not set up their own
government.  Other countries, including Denmark, Holland, Hungary, Bulgaria,
and Italy had cooperation governments.

     When these 38 people were taken and given the order to set up a
government and they refused, they were all shot.  It was Yom Kippur Eve, 1943.
We dug up these 38 bodies, and I was one of the few witnesses left to note how
these people were shot and how they were buried.  They were elegantly dressed,
with suits and ties, as apparently they were coming to an official dinner.
This is how we found them in the graves, and we burned the bodies on Yom
Kippur 1943.

     In November 1943 - after all the Jews were already eliminated from
Lemberg and from Galicia - we decided to make an uprising.  Why? It was a
matter of survival among survival, but mostly we were tired.  It was finished
now.  We were not afraid anymore that they would shoot some other people
because of us.

     Here is a classical example of what my predecessor said.  There was a man
in our group by the name of Goldberg.  Goldberg was a man in his early
forties, a former employee of a Polish school, an ex-fighter, and member of
the Polish legionnaires.

     We came to him as he was getting undressed, and we said to him,
"Goldberg, don't you know we are going to attempt an escape tonight?" His
answer was "What for?  I lost my wife and seven children.  I don't care.  Good
luck to you.  Maybe you will survive, but for me, what does life matter any
more?" He laid down to sleep, and he was shot within a few minutes later.
Maybe it's because I was just 18 that my drive was a little bit different.

     I couldn't have survived, probably, because only a few of us survived
from this uprising, if not for a Polish family, whom I had not known before
the war, who took me in with another escapee and other Jews and hid us in
their basement until the liberation of 1944 when the Russians came in.

     These people did not get paid.  They did this on their own, sacrificing
their whole family.  Their name was Kalwinski - Mrs. Kalwinski died just a few
months ago.  Without these people, I don't believe I would have survived.
Your own desire was simply not enough; some outside help was needed.

     This is a short story allowed in the ten minutes about the uprising in
the Death Brigade.

Alexander Donat

     After the presentations of my predecessors, there is little I have to
add, although there are just a few footnotes I would like to add.  I was one
of the people hidden in the 631 bunkers, as we called them, or hideouts that
Vladka Meed mentioned in her account.  At the moment of the uprising on April
19, the majority of the Warsaw Jews were hidden in bunkers.

     Before the resistance and the revolt of January 18 and April 19, we all
knew that the end was coming soon and that the final liquidation of the Warsaw
Ghetto was just a matter of time.  Anyone who was in a position to escape from
the Ghetto did so.

     There were several young people who were involved in organizing the
Jewish Fighting Organization and who were involved in another military
organization as well as several hundred so-called "wild fighters," not
affiliated with any organizations, who were armed.  But the 50,000-60,000 of
the Ghetto inmates were unfled.  We were all willing and ready to fight, but,
of course, we had no weapons.  We were the army that decided to resist the
German orders to surrender.

     In a few short words, I would like to relate the history of our bunker.
Before the April revolt, bunkers and underground passages leading from one
building to another were built in practically all the buildings of the Warsaw
Ghetto.  The whole Ghetto had been converted into an underground city.  You
could cross a whole block, which was quite a distance, without ever going out
onto the street, without leaving the cellars or the attics of the buildings.
In our shelter there were about 40 people - men, women, old people and only a
few children.  Personally, I was very lucky.  Two weeks before the revolt, I
had managed to give away my only child at the time, who was five, to our
Christian friends who hid him.  He survived the war, first under their
personal care and then in a Catholic orphanage near Warsaw.

     As I said, about 60,000 people were left in the Ghetto when the uprising
started.  There were about 10,000 people who were sheltered at the Toebbens
factory and other factories who were not in a position to hide. They
surrendered immediately.  But 50,000 decided to defy the German orders and not
surrender.  This was a wonderful act of defiance.  The uprising in the Warsaw
Ghetto was not just a revolt of the 1,000-1,500 armed units, but it was an
unarmed uprising of 50,000 men, women, and children who decided it was better
to be burned in the flames of the Warsaw Ghetto than to surrender and be sent
to Treblinka.

     There were 40 of us in our bunker, as I said, and only one man had a gun.
It wasn't because we didn't want them; we just couldn't get any more. As one
of the historians of this period says, the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto were
limited only by the availability of arms.  If we had had 50,000 weapons, we
would have had 50,000 fighters.

     Eventually, this unarmed resistance forced Stroop, a combat general, to
turn into an arsonist because he couldn't force the 50,000 people to leave
their shelters.  As he writes in his account, he decided to set every building
on fire.  He didn't have to fight with us.  He was beyond the reach of our
weapons because the ones we had were very primitive, very poor, and handmade,
as Vladka pointed out - handmade Molotov cocktails, a few guns, very few
rifles, and, as far as I can remember, one machine gun.  What we needed was
rifles and machine guns, not revolvers.

     Stroop proceeded to set fire to one building after another.  Our building
was in a strategic position because it was located on the corner of Muranowska
Street and Zamenhof Street where many of the battles took place.  On the
eighth day, a fierce battle took place not far from us.  For the first and
only time in the battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, 18 Poles appeared on Muranowska
Square and participated in the actual combat.  Losses were very heavy.  All
other acts of sympathy were just of a cosmetic nature. The alleged Polish help
to the Ghetto was really of no military value and of no consequence.

     On the eighth day, our time came.  Buildings in Warsaw were built around
a courtyard.  On the far side of the courtyard were the dwelling sites.  The
Germans appeared in the courtyard yelling for everybody to come out.  Nobody
showed up.  They then put gasoline on the ground floor and the wooden
staircases and set fire to the building.  At the same time, they threw hand
grenades into the cellars where many people were hidden, and on the ground
floors.

     The attic was on the fourth floor under the roof, and after half an hour
the flames and the smoke came up to us, and we had to leave the attic in order
not to suffocate or be burned alive.  We tried to escape to the roof and get
to the neighboring building, but the adjacent building was already in flames.
We sat on the boards on the roof and wondered what to do.  We had only two
alternatives:  to commit suicide right there by jumping down from the fourth
floor or by being burned alive, or our last hope, our last resort, was to take
some cyanide which my wife, who was a pharmacist in the Warsaw Ghetto, carried
with her in a little bag.

     Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, in the scramble of jumping to the
burning stairs, the bag and our last hope were lost.  We decided it was never
too late to die, so we decided to go down through the burning staircase and
surrender.  There was a German officer standing there with a timer, and as we
appeared with our hands up, he told us we were lucky.  He had set a deadline
of two seconds later for anyone who appeared to be kept alive to have the
privilege of perishing in Treblinka.  Anyone coming out after that time was to
be shot on the spot.  At that moment, people appeared from other gates and
staircases, and they were shot on the spot.

     I will spare you the story of our anguish as we were on a death train
going to a death camp.  We were very tired and emaciated after being in the
shelter for nine days.  But we still decided that we would jump, no matter
what happened, if the train was going to Treblinka.  If the train was going to
Lublin, we would take our chances.

     Now we come to the second chapter of what is relevant to our topic -
Lublin.  In Lublin we were sent Majdanek.  By the way, I want to point out
that of the 40 people in our shelter, 20 took poison right away when the
building started burning.  Of the 20 people who left the shelter, we were the
only two to survive.  Even the man with the gun who managed to escape to the
other side was arrested, sent to Treblinka, and then sent to Lublin.  It was
very strange.  There were two selections in Treblinka where people were chosen
to be sent to other camps, to Majdanek.  He was one of them, and he perished
in Majdanek.

     I'm going to skip the story about Majdanek, but I want to point out only
one thing.  Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec were links of the same murder train
that is known as Operation Reinhard.  Reinhard Heydrich was Himmler's main
helper who was killed by [Czech] patriots in 1942, so they decided to honor
his name by giving the name Operation Reinhard to the extermination of the
Polish Jews.

     The methods of gassing and the whole procedure was uniform in all three
camps and, as the commandant of Treblinka said at his trial, there was a
special order not to let any children survive.  In other words, this was the
same organization.  There were three camps.  Majdanek and Auschwitz were
50-50 - half extermination and half concentration camps.  In other words, when
you arrived in Auschwitz as a Jew, you had a chance, a slight chance, but a
chance to survive.

     I would like to say a few words about certain conclusions concerning the
subject of operating resistance.  There is a problem that has bothered the
researchers and the survivors for 36 years now, that is, whether uprisings
saved lives or whether they just saved the honor of the Jewish people in these
areas.  I don't think there is an answer so far to this problem, and, of
course, this is beyond the scope of our discussion here.

Discussion

Irving Greenberg:  The common theme is an expectation not to survive, in the
sense that no one would help.  Yet there was a sense that you had to somehow
do this anyway.  I just wondered to what extent people said this at the time
and to what extent you felt it? What was the driving sense that you wanted to
communicate in doing this nevertheless?

Esther Raab: When they brought us in, we did not really know what was going on
in the camps.  There were rumors, but nobody believed them.  I was very young
- we were all young.  The minute that we noticed what was going on, we decided
that it was better to get shot on the barbed wire than to go to the gas
chamber.

Richard Glazer:  And may I put it the other way?  Of course, I've been asked
many times what makes one survive.  I don't believe that it's the physical
fitness primarily.  There is something which is more valuable than the
physical fitness.

     I think it's simply faith in life.  Of course, I was very very young, but
the thought that I wouldn't survive never came to me.  I never gave up. Maybe
it's only because I was so young, but in my view the primary thing was faith
in life.

Irving Greenberg:  Yet you did decide to draw that fire upon yourselves by
trying to storm the watch towers when you could have simply run into the
forest, so although there was the condition you would live, on the other hand
there was a willingness to die for making the statement.

Richard Glazer:  Right.  It's always a mixture - the fighting and, of course,
the longing to survive.

Esther Raab:  May I add something?  If the question is about organized
resistance, I guess quite an important factor was the beliefs of the young
people.  The young people belonged to certain organizational groups in the
prewar time, and this imbued them with certain beliefs in humanity and
behavior and an attitude toward life that gave them the strength to be the
leaders in the Resistance.  The role of our youth during the Nazi occupation
has not yet been recognized in our literature or history.  They were the
planners and the organizers of the revolts in the ghettos and in the camps.