Lesson video

Hello, year nine, and welcome to our final lesson.

Looking at the question, how did Jewish people resist during the Holocaust? My name is Mr. Mastin and in our final lesson, we're going to be looking at a very particular example in a place called Vilna in the far east of Europe, where there was both non-violent resistance and also a special type of violent resistance, organised by a group of people that we're going to call partisans.

So before you learn, what partisans are, can I ask you to make sure that you have the usual things that you'll need for this lesson? You will need a piece of paper and something to write with.

You'll need to make sure you're in a quiet place that doesn't have any distractions.

Hopefully your phone turned off as well.

And when you've done all of those things, we'll start our lesson.

Welcome year nine.

Do you remember the Jewish historian, Yehuda Bauer? When he spoke about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, Bauer described it using a Jewish word, amidah.

Amidah means standing up against, and we've looked at some examples of non-violent amidah in the Warsaw Ghetto, and we've looked at armed and violent examples of amidah, also in the Warsaw Ghetto, as well as in the Sobibor uprising.

Well, today I want to take you to another Jewish ghetto, a ghetto, where we'll see amidah in all its forms, both smuggling food into the ghettos, self-sacrifice, educational, religious, political activities, all of those non-violent examples of amidah as well as armed rebellion and the use of force.

This image that you're looking at now is not a typical image of Jews during the Holocaust.

And that's exactly what Yehuda Bauer is saying to us, by using the word amidah.

He's saying that the typical image of Jews in the Holocaust is of helpless passive victims, of weak people that seem to be beyond any capability of doing anything for themselves, of being led to their deaths and of not fighting back.

And yet this image here is a very different suggestion of Jews.

Can you see, there are both men and women, they're armed, they're well-dressed, but also they're very young.

These are people we call partisans.

I'll explain in a moment what partisans are, but let's take another image of the same types of Jews in the ghetto.

But this time, the typical image, the image that the historian Bauer wants to challenge.

These Jews are also in a ghetto, but you can see them there behind the Nazi officer, looking helpless, waiting to be told what to do next.

And these two contrasting images come from the same ghetto.

If I take you back to the first one of young, well-dressed men and women, all armed.

The second image, unarmed, helpless, apparently weak and passive Jews in a ghetto.

The ghetto is in Vilna.

Before I show you where Vilna is in relation to Warsaw, it's in the northeast of Europe, it's in a country today that we call Lithuania.

You already know that the largest ghetto in Europe was in Warsaw.

Vilna also had a large Jewish population.

And as you know, any city that had a Jewish population of more than 40,000 had a ghetto.

Vilna also had a very large ghetto.

Now, in exactly the same way that we looked at Warsaw Jews trying to keep life normal inside the ghetto, the same thing happened in Vilna.

You'll remember that Professor Bauer says that this is an example of amidah.

This is an example of standing up against.

When the ghettos were first built and Jews were moved into them, they did not expect to be murdered in what we now call the Holocaust.

They expected to be housed in these ghettos and as terrible as the conditions were, they didn't expect ghetto life to be forever.

And so they set up universities and doctors surgeries, they set up schools and cafes and theatres, all examples of what Professor Bauer calls, amidah.

The same thing happened in Vilna.

In Vilna there was a library with 45,000 books that the Jewish men and women built and used, there were cafes and theatres.

There was a synagogue for Jews to worship in.

The original synagogue in Vilna, before the ghetto was built, had been destroyed by the Nazis.

And so Jewish men and women in the Vilna Ghetto resisted in lots of non-violent ways, just as we'd seen in Warsaw, but then some Jewish men and women in the ghetto resisted in other ways.

Well, before we look at the other ways in which they resisted, can I ask you to complete the short task? On your piece of paper, can you draw a circle and divide the circle in half.

On the left-hand side, as you can see here, can you write non-violent resistance, and on the right-hand side, violent, armed resistance.

In Vilna, we see both.

To begin with, can you complete the left-hand side? So make it into something like a spider diagram, as you can see that I've started.

And can you write some examples of how the Jews in the Vilna Ghetto resisted in non-violent ways.

You might want to go back to the previous slide to do that.

So if you pause the lesson now and when you're ready, if you come back to it So year nine, how did you get on? I hope you listed examples like cafes, theatres, a synagogue was built, and even that library with 45,000 books.

So they're all examples of non-violent resistance, that amidah, the standing up against the Nazis that Professor Bauer talks about.

But the Jewish ghetto in Vilna is interesting because it has both those non-violent examples and also armed examples.

Let me take you to one Jewish boy who moved to the ghetto when he was 18.

By the time Hirsh Glick, whose photograph you can see here, was 20 years old, he was now living in the ghetto.

He was going to the cafes and the theatres.

He used to sit in the library and read.

Life in the ghetto, they were trying to make as normal as possible, 20 year old Hirsh Glick wrote resistance poetry and songs.

I'll give you an example of that later on in the lesson, but Hirsh Glick, as well as resisting in these non-violent ways, by using the cafes and the library, by writing resistance songs and poetry, he also joined a group inside the ghetto, a secret group.

We call them partisans.

I'll explain in a moment what I mean by that? You can also see on this slide, that Hirsh Glick eventually escapes from the ghetto two years later when he was 22.

And I'll tell you more about his story in a moment.

These partisans were an armed resistance group who wanted to use self defence.

They didn't simply want to use cafes and theatres.

They wanted to fight back using armed force.

These partisans that Hirsh Glick joined had a motto and their motto was.

"We will not go like sheep to the slaughter.

"We will not go like sheep to the slaughter." There were resistance groups in other ghettos, as we saw last lesson, organised by Jewish leaders, often, of the ghettos, but the Vilna Ghetto was different.

These partisans that Hirsh Glick joined in Vilna, like him, where young Jewish men and women.

Not the older leaders of the ghetto, but young men and women.

Now their organisation of partisans was secret.

They had particular aims. Their first couple of aims were to organise self-defense in the ghetto for if the Jewish men, women, and children, were ever attacked, but they had a second aim and that was to sabotage the German industrial production.

Sabotage means to make life difficult for the Germans to fight the war.

Jewish people inside the ghetto often were sent to work in factories, making weapons and machines, things that the Germans could use to fight their war.

And of course, one way of sabotaging the German industrial production was to make the weapons and to make the bullets and the shells and the artillery in a slightly shoddy so that it would make life difficult for the Germans to fight the war.

But these partisans had a much bigger aim.

As well as organising self-defense and sabotaging the German industrial production in the factories, their ultimate aim was to join other partisan groups.

But of course, how do you communicate between one ghetto, where there are partisans and another ghetto, where there are partisans.

This is very dangerous.

Ultimately, they wanted to go further and join the army of the Soviet Union who were fighting against the German Army to fight with them against the German Army.

Well, Jews were sent to work everyday in the factories, making these artillery shells and other weapons.

And the partisans used that as a way to sabotage the Germans' weapons, but also a way to get messages out because often other Jews would come in to work in the factories and messages could be smuggled out.

Well, if you look at this map, you can see that Vilna isn't too far away from Warsaw.

News arrived in Vilna of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto that we looked at last lesson, and this inspired the Jewish partisans, like the 20-year-old Hirsh Glick, to write more poetry and more songs about resistance, but really they needed weapons.

Collecting weapons was incredibly difficult and very dangerous, but slowly buying weapons or bribing people to give them weapons, stealing weapons, risking their lives every day for carrying or hiding weapons.

These partisans in Vilna were able to collect a very small stash.

Eventually, weapons were hidden all over the ghetto in Vilna, under beds, under floorboards, in the walls, in the roof.

The partisans were preparing to fight when they eventually knew that their ghetto would be emptied by the Germans.

Just as had happened in Warsaw.

So these resistance fighters, these partisans, were preparing to fight during the final closing, the final emptying of the ghetto.

No one knew when that was going to happen.

It could be in days, it could be in weeks, maybe even months.

And so every day the members of the Vilna partisans practised for self-defense.

And then one day, some Jews in the ghetto heard about the partisans.

They were worried.

They thought that if the Nazis discovered it, that all Jews in the ghetto would be punished and to save the other partisans and to save the other Jews in the ghetto, to avoid them being punished because of the partisans' plot, the leader of the partisans chose to give himself up to the Nazis, as if he was organising it by himself.

Well, eventually the day came.

In September, 1943, when the Nazis surrounded the ghetto to clear it of all of the Jews, either killing them there and then, or transporting them to be murdered in the death camps.

The partisans very reluctantly decided not to begin a fight to the death because they feared that the older Jewish men and women living in the ghetto might be killed in the fighting.

The only way out of the ghetto and into the forest was through the underground sewers.

Climbing their way through tunnels of human excrement.

The way to the forest was full of danger, not just through the sewers, but from the ghetto, those underground members were taken to cemeteries.

They hid in the cemeteries until it was safe to continue moving.

And from there, they marched from the cemeteries into the forests.

They walked only at night, just with the light of the moon.

One of the partisans describes their journey and I'm going to quote literally from his account of their journey.

He says, "During the day, we hid among the trees "and the shrubs, avoiding any unnecessary movement, "so we wouldn't encounter people "that were passing through the forests.

"If ordinary people had discovered us, "they might have called the Germans "or they might've let us go, "but we couldn't take the risk.

"We had to eat and we only had one way to get food, "steal it.

"We were armed and so when food supplies were low, "a partisan would take a team to a farmer's house, "knock on the door and inform the farmer "that this was a burglary "and that it was best for them to give us the food "so that we would not need to use our weapons.

"More than once, "I threatened non-Jewish farmers with my weapons.

"And I took eggs and vegetables and bread, "anything that we could take to live.

"I hated doing it, but it was the only way to survive." The partisans, these resistance fighters, performed many acts of sabotage.

They destroyed power supplies for the German army, water supplies, they freed groups of prisoners from a prison camp.

They even blew up some German trains carrying soldiers.

And although they were very brave, the efforts of these partisans did not prevent the Vilna Ghetto's destruction.

By the end of 1943, the ghetto was gone, with thousands of women and children moved to death camps to be murdered.

It was at this point that Hirsh Glick wrote a song about Jewish resistance, about Jews standing up for themselves.

What Professor Bauer calls amidah and this is the poem that he wrote.

It was turned into a song.

It's quite a famous song that's still sung today about Jewish resistance.

And these are the words.

"Never say that you're going your last way.

"Although the sky is filled with lead cover blue days, "our promised hour will soon come.

"Our marching steps ring out.

"We survived.

"This song is written with blood and not with lead.

"It's not a tunes on by birds in the wild.

"This song was sung by people amidst collapsing walls, "but sung with rifles in their hands." If you have some time, year nine, you might like to go online and type in Hirsh Glick's song, find the words, and you'll even find it sung.

Usually not in English, but you can see the translation here, but it's still today a famous Jewish song.

Let's go back to that task.

On the right-hand side, can you look at examples of violent, armed resistance and try and break it down, year nine, don't just go for the big obvious things.

Go for small things as well.

I'll give you an example.

What about where the partisan described having to go to farmers houses and to steal food because they had weapons? That's an example of armed resistance.

What other things were the partisans doing that we could describe as violent or we could describe as armed? So if you pause the lesson and, when you're ready, if you come back to it, Welcome back, year nine.

So I hope that you managed to find some examples of how the partisans in the Vilna Ghetto were using violent armed resistance.

This today is a memorial in Israel to Hirsh Glick, or more accurately, the memorial shows Hirsh Glick, portraying him as an armed partisan, but the memorial is bigger than that.

It's to the Vilna Ghetto, to the partisans who fought back.

So I have some questions for you, year nine, if you write down the answers on your piece of paper.

The first question is what were the aims of the Jewish partisans in Vilna? The second question.

Why do you think that some Jews in the Vilna Ghetto did not join the armed resistance? Question three, thinking about the ghetto in Vilna, what was so difficult about organising armed resistance.

Question four.

Question four asks us to think back to where we started these lessons, with Professor Bauer's ideas of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust.

Question four, thinking of what we've studied over these lessons, why do you think stories of Jewish resistance have so often been overlooked in studying the Holocaust? And question five, you won't find the answer to question five in the worksheet, but if you followed these lessons up until now, you should be able to think about Yehuda Bauer's argument of dehumanising the Jewish people in studying the Holocaust and what he wants to do, which is re-humanizing the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

So question five.

Why do we know so much about non-Jewish rescuers, but we know so little about Jews who rescued other Jews? So here are five questions.

If you pause the lesson and when you're ready, if you come back to it, Well, year nine, we've got a big question to answer now.

We could call it an essay, but all an essay really is is saying there's more than one answer to this question.

If I could answer it in one sentence, I would, but I can't.

So our big question, how did Jewish people resist during the Holocaust? We need to do different things to answer this question.

So if you look at my six bullet points here, the first bullet point, I think you need to explain what the Holocaust is and how Jews were resisting before the Holocaust.

So Jews didn't suddenly start resisting when the Holocaust happening.

They were resisting from the moment the Nazis came to power in 1933.

So go back to the first lesson.

For the second bullet point, explain the common view of Jews during the Holocaust that historians have tried to challenge.

Think about Yehuda Bauer and how he says the image that we have of Jews during the Holocaust is about them being weak and incapable and helpless.

Think about the photographs that we usually see of the Holocaust.

So that's the second bullet point.

When you get to the third one, so really each bullet point is a paragraph.

The third one, I'd like you to explain what the historian Bauer means by resistance.

So he uses a Jewish word, amidah, but what does he mean by that? Fourth bullet point, give some examples of non-violent Jewish resistance that we've studied in our history lessons.

And then fifth bullet point, give some examples of violent or armed Jewish resistance that we've studied.

Try and be specific as well.

Were they in Warsaw? Were they in Vilna? Were they in a ghetto? Were they in a death camp? And then, as with all essays, when you come to the end of it, the sixth bullet point, we have a conclusion to write.

So how did Jewish people resist during the Holocaust? Do the examples that we've looked at of resistance, have some things in common and were the examples isolated to one location or do we find examples of resistance in various places? And we could also talk about in our conclusion why resistance was so difficult.

So although we find lots of examples of it, why is it actually difficult to resist? What was it about the way that the Nazi state worked and the way that the Holocaust was organised, that made resistance very difficult for Jewish men and women Well, that's quite a big question to answer.

So if you pause the video, complete the work and when you're ready, if you come back to me.

So, year nine, that's quite a big question to answer, and I'm sure that you have a detailed explanation for it.

It's been great working with you over these four lessons, as you're used to now, I'd love to see your work.

So if you can share it with me, I would much appreciate it.

So, year nine, you have worked very hard, not just this lesson, but also in the previous three lessons.

And I hope you see that the answer to that question, how did Jewish people resist during the Holocaust? Is not a straightforward question to answer, but it is important that we remember, as Yehuda Bauer would say that Jewish people certainly did resist, both before the Holocaust from the time the Nazis came to power, all the way through to the Holocaust and the very end.

Well, it has been a pleasure working with you over these four lessons.

I hope that you enjoy the rest of your history lessons and that you have a good day.

As usual, please share with me any work that you've done, especially that essay that you wrote.

That final question that you've written just now.

I would be most interested to see it.

Great working with you, bye-bye.