Lesson video

Hello again, Year Nine.

And welcome back to Oak history lessons.

I'm Mr. Mastin, and this is our second lesson of four lessons, looking at the question, how did Jewish people resist during the Holocaust? A historian that we were looking at last lesson, Yehuda Bauer, Yehuda Bauer gives all sorts of examples of resistance that Jewish people showed, both before the Holocaust and during the Holocaust.

And we're going to be looking today at the examples of non-violent resistance that took place in specific locations when the Holocaust began.

And in particular, locations called ghettos.

Now, if you already have looked at the lessons on the Holocaust, you will know about the Nazi extermination of six million Jews during the period of 1941 to 1945.

Jewish people resisted all the way up to 1941, and you would expect to see resistance when the Holocaust began.

Well, let's pause there for a moment.

You will need a pen this lesson.

You'll need something to write on, a piece of paper, and you'll need to make sure that you're in a quiet place, free from distractions, phone turned off, and when you've done all of those things, if you come back to the lesson.

See you in a moment.

Welcome back, Year Nine.

Do you remember from our first lesson, the Jewish historian Yehuda Bauer? Yehuda Bauer says that often examples of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust are forgotten or they're pushed to one side because the study of the Holocaust focused too much on the perpetrators, the people who did, the people who organised the Holocaust.

And often when the Jews are looked at in the Holocaust, they were only seen as weak or helpless or victims. Well, in a moment, I'm going to introduce a task where I want you to give examples of what the historian Yehuda Bauer calls amidah, what he sees as Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

First, let's look at his description of amidah.

What does he mean when he thinks of Jewish resistance of standing up against, which is literally what amidah means, a Jewish word meaning stand up against.

Well, the historian Bauer says, "It includes smuggling food into ghettos, mutual self-sacrifice within the family to avoid starvation or worse, cultural, educational, religious, and political activities taken to strengthen morale, the work of doctors, nurses, and educators to consciously maintain health and moral fibre to enable individual and group survival, and of course, armed rebellion or the use of force." You might not understand everything that the historian Bauer is saying, so maybe focus on the things that you can explain, the things that you do understand.

Let me just highlight three things.

Right at the end, he talks about armed rebellion or the use of force.

But it's interesting that he lists that as the last one.

Look at two others that he lists as examples of amidah, examples of standing up against, examples of resistance.

He talks about what's happening in places called ghettos.

Smuggling food into the ghettos, or within a family where people are sacrificing things for each other.

They're giving up things, they're going without things for the sake of their family.

And then he lumps a group of things together.

He calls them different types of activities to strengthen morale, to make people feel stronger, to feel that they can go on.

And he lists those activities, cultural activities, educational activities, religious, and then political activities.

We'll go back to Bauer's description of amidah.

And can you make a spider diagram on your page of examples of amidah, examples of what he means by resistance, that you find Jews performing during the Holocaust? So if you pause the video and then come back to it when you've made a list of some examples on your spider diagram.

Take your time, go through his description slowly, and stick to the ones that you think you can explain.

Well, Professor Bauer keeps talking about ghettos, and that's the example of resistance that we're going to look at in this lesson.

Any city in Europe that the Nazis took over that had a population of more than 40,000 had a ghetto.

The Nazis built ghettos in these cities.

A ghetto was a walled off area of the city where all of the Jewish people in that city would be forced to live.

Now, Jewish people were spread out all over cities.

Take, for example, the city of Warsaw in Poland.

The largest of the ghettos in any of these cities was in Warsaw, where the Nazis took a section of the city and built a very high wall around it.

And then Jews from all over the city of Warsaw packed their belongings and moved inside the ghetto walls.

That was now where they would live.

Often in very cramped conditions, where the sanitation, the fresh water, the ability to wash and to go to the toilet was very limited.

Disease was widespread in the ghettos, as was a lack of food.

The number of calories that the average man needs to survive is 2,500 a day.

The average woman needs 2,000 calories a day.

But inside the ghettos, the Nazis reduced the amount of calories to the hundreds.

So it was a way of making life incredibly difficult, of forcing starvation.

And so Jewish men and women found ways to resist inside the ghettos.

You'll notice that the title says, keeping ghetto life normal.

Well, what does it mean to keep life inside the ghetto normal? Well, if you'll imagine that a ghetto was a place where Jewish people thought that they were now going to live.

Jewish people did not expect to be murdered in camps.

They expected that however hard life was going to be inside the ghettos, that eventually this experience, this terrible experience of life in the ghettos would eventually come to an end.

And so they tried to keep ghetto life normal.

Here's one example.

Because Jewish men and women from all over the cities were put inside these city ghettos, you ended up with some very intelligent people inside the ghettos.

Top doctors and top professors and top lawyers inside the ghettos if they were Jewish.

So the example of Professor Hirszfeld, who was a lecturer for medical students, he was one of the top scientists in Europe, and he ended up inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

And so, he did what many Jewish people did inside the ghettos to try and keep life normal.

He continued his work.

He set up lectures for medical students, Jewish medical students who had obviously been taken out of their universities when the Nazis came to power.

And then when they were forced to live inside the ghettos, continued to be medical students, continued their medical training to be doctors.

Life carried on as normally as it possibly could.

But not only that, what would you expect to find in a city if life was seen as normal? Well, you would expect to find schools for children, cafes and restaurants, theatres where people would go to be entertained.

Well, all of those things that I've just listed, Jewish men and women built inside the ghettos.

You can see the city of Warsaw, and if you look at the red outline, that is the ghetto.

The ghetto had cafes, it had schools, it had theatres.

Jewish people built these places and made sure that the schools had teachers.

Jewish actors acted in the theatres and charged people money to come and see their plays.

There was even a postal service.

Jewish people were making sure that life carried on as normal.

Professor Bauer says that these are all examples of amidah, of Jewish people resisting, of Jewish people standing up against.

The most common form of resistance inside the ghettos was smuggling basic supplies, especially food, over the walls or under the walls or through the walls.

In fact, estimates by historians suggest that between 80% and 90% of the food inside the ghettos entered the ghettos through the walls, over the walls, under the walls.

Remember I said that the Nazis had severely restricted the amount of food that Jews would receive, the amount of calories that they would use to survive? And so Jewish people resisted by smuggling food in.

They also resisted with cultural and religious activities.

So theatres and musicals, that's a form of culture, of keeping life normal.

But then religious activities.

Building where Jewish people worship is called a synagogue.

And so you find in the ghettos that Jewish people built a synagogue.

That rabbis would help Jewish people with their religious and spiritual needs in the synagogues.

We'll take the example of this Jewish teacher.

Janusz Korczak was a well-known Polish Jewish teacher who had set up a place for Jewish boys and girls who didn't have parents.

It's called an orphanage.

But then suddenly, the Nazis forced all of the Jews living in Warsaw to live inside the ghetto walls.

And so what did Janusz Korczak do? He just simply moved the orphanage.

He set up the orphanage inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

And despite the terrible conditions, the lack of food, the lack of things to keep people busy, Janusz Korczak made sure that the children in his orphanage had enough food and enough activities to keep them fit and healthy and busy.

Well eventually, Korczak was offered the chance to escape the ghetto by a resistance group.

They were helping some Jews to escape, but Korczak refused.

He wanted to stay with the Jewish children in the orphanage that he had set up.

Well, eventually in 1942, the Nazis came to the orphanage in the ghetto to collect the 200 children.

Korczak insisted that he would come with them.

Well, they were all sent to a death camp where they were murdered.

Can I ask you to go back to the task that you started at the beginning of the lesson? You gave some examples of what Bauer calls amidah.

Can you add to your spider diagram specific examples of how Jewish people were resisting? So, I'll give you a way of doing it.

Maybe you listed cultural activities from Bauer's description, or religious activities.

So can you give some examples then of cultural activities? I'll start you off.

Theatres were built where plays were performed.

That's a cultural activity.

So go through your spider diagram and see if you can add some specific examples of how Jewish people were resisting inside the ghettos.

If you pause the video, and then come back to it when you're ready.

Well, let's have some questions.

If you could write down the answers to these five questions.

First question is what three examples stand out to you of how Jewish people were trying to keep their life normal in the ghetto? Consider those horrible circumstances of having to leave their homes and to travel to this walled off area of the city.

Very cramped.

Terrible conditions.

Lack of food.

But what three examples stand out to you of how Jewish people tried to keep their lives normal inside the ghetto? Second question.

How did Jewish people keep their cultural life alive? So not simply surviving with food, but their cultural life, the things that make us more human, the things that we enjoy doing, not the things we have to do, but the things that we enjoy doing culturally.

How did they try to keep their cultural life alive? Third question.

How did Jewish people keep their religious life alive in the ghetto, their religious life? Fourth question.

How did Jewish adults help Jewish children in the ghetto? Now I'm hoping you might be able to think of a couple of examples where Jewish adults helped Jewish children in the ghetto.

And the last question, the information isn't in the worksheet for this, so you'll need to think of this question by yourself from what you've learned this lesson.

How does the historian Yehuda Bauer use these examples to explain Jewish resistance? None of these examples are violent.

None of them involved armed force or using weapons.

None of them involve physically attacking the Nazis.

But Bauer would say that they're examples of resistance.

So in your own words, how would the historian use these examples to explain Jewish resistance? So if you pause the video and then come back to it when you're ready.

So, the first question.

Well, maybe your examples are different from mine.

I'll just give you one of my examples that I think stands out of how Jewish people tried to keep their life normal.

I mentioned to you the idea of a post office.

To me, that stands out.

It's just an ordinary, normal, everyday part of life.

And so Jewish people were resisting, keeping their life normal by having something as simple as a post office and a postal service of being able to mail things.

Second question.

How did they keep their cultural life alive? Well, you might have talked about theatres and musicals and schools.

You might have talked about how Jewish people continued to write things, or you might've talked about the historian who resisted by creating an archive by collecting all sorts of documents.

You might have talked about the professor who continued to lecture medical students to keep their medical training going.

Question three.

How did Jewish people keep their religious life alive in the ghetto? Well, you might've given a couple of examples for that one.

They kept their religious holidays.

They also continued to have a synagogue, a place, a building where Jewish people could worship.

They also had a rabbi, a man who would help the Jewish people with their religious and their spiritual needs.

Fourth question.

How did Jewish adults help Jewish children in the ghetto? Well, there are two big examples you could have used.

The schools that were built in order to educate Jewish children.

And also that example of Janusz Korczak, the Jewish teacher who set up the orphanage inside the ghetto and kept it going until eventually he was murdered by the Nazis.

Now, the fifth question.

The historian Bauer would use all of these examples to show that Jewish people continued to resist.

No matter what the Nazis did to them, no matter how bad the discrimination and the persecution got, even inside these terrible conditions in the ghetto, you still find Jewish people organising, standing up against what the Nazis were trying to do to them.

They were trying to keep their lives normal, despite the very challenging conditions that they faced.

Well, that's the end of our lesson today, Year Nine.

I do hope you will share with me some of your work.

That would be great to see it.

So, very well done this lesson, Year Nine.

We've been looking at examples of non-violent resistance in the ghettos from Jewish men, women, and children during the Holocaust.

I would be very interested to see the work that you did.

So as usual, if you know where to post it, using the various Oak methods of posting it, I would like to see it.

Looking forward to seeing you in our third lesson, where we look at violent and armed resistance from Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Have a good day.