Lesson video

Hello again year nine.

Welcome to our third lesson, looking at resistance from Jewish people during the Holocaust.

In our third lesson, we're going to be looking at violent and armed examples of resistance.

As usual, you'll need something to write with, you'll need a piece of paper to write on, and you'll need to make sure that you're in a quiet place that doesn't have any distractions.

So when you have found all of those things and you're ready to start, then let me know.

Welcome back year nine.

So if you remember the Jewish historian, Yehuda Bauer, we're looking in detail at what he means by Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

He calls it amidah.

And amidah is any example of standing up against the Nazi state.

Well, we were looking last lesson at non-violent examples of amidah.

Smuggling food into ghettos, setting up schools and cafes, and life continuing as normal in the ghettos.

But I want to look this lesson, at armed rebellion, the use of force.

We could describe it as violent resistance during the Holocaust.

Now you might want to think for a moment about why some Jews would choose to resist violently instead of non-violently.

Because all of the examples we've looked at so far, and there are lots of them, have been of non-violent amidah.

Non-violent resistance.

But then the other side of that is a different question.

Why would some Jews choose to resist non-violently instead of violently? You might want to take some time to think about that.

Before we go any further, I'll let you know that the piece of paper that you have, I'd like you to divide into three columns.

I'd like the three columns to go from the very top of the page, all the way down to the bottom.

So we're using the whole of the page.

So we don't want three little boxes.

We want three columns from the top to the bottom, because we're going to be using as much of those columns as we can, this lesson.

So if I give you a moment to divide the page into three, roughly three equal columns, but it doesn't matter too much.

And if you can give the column on the left and the column on the right, these headings.

Because the two examples of violent resistance that we're going to look at this lesson, are called the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, that's in the first column, and in the third column, the Sobibor Uprising.

The Sobibor Uprising.

So when you're ready, if you pause, and then resume.

You already know that wherever there was a Jewish population of 40,000 or more in a city, the Nazis built a ghetto in that city.

Now this map has a lot of detail on it, but let's focus just on two details.

If you look at the place that I've circled in green, this is where the Warsaw ghetto was that we were looking at in our first lesson and in our second lesson.

And in the Warsaw Ghetto, there was an uprising that we're going to study today.

An uprising in 1943 during the second world war.

During the part of the second world war when the Holocaust happened.

And then further West from Warsaw was a camp called Sobibor.

Sobibor was a death camp, an extermination camp, that was built to murder Jews.

Remember that a ghetto is a walled off area of a city.

An extermination camp was built specifically with the purpose in mind of murdering Jewish men, women, and children.

When the Warsaw Ghetto was created, more than 400,000 people were imprisoned inside the walls of the ghetto.

And as you know, because food was difficult to get inside the ghetto, there were tens of thousands of people who died of disease, and of starvation.

Well in 1942, in the space of a few months, over the summer, 235,000 people, almost all children and old people, were deported from the ghetto.

They were taken from the ghetto to a death camp called Treblinka.

And in the death camp, these children and old people were murdered.

By the next year, 1943, only 60,000 people remained inside the ghetto.

And when the ghetto was about to be cleared, once and for all, in April 1943, Jewish resistance groups launched their uprising.

You can see this man here in an underground tunnel that have been built throughout the ghetto.

Well, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as it came to be known, was the first major civilian uprising anywhere in Europe.

Civilians are ordinary men and women.

Civilians are people who are not in the army or the Navy, or the air force.

They don't wear uniforms. They're just ordinary people like you and me.

Well, these civilians became very well known.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

These Jewish resistance fighters, ordinary civilians, faced many obstacles.

The obvious one being, how do you get weapons? They also face the danger of being discovered.

And of their plan being thwarted, being stopped by the Nazis who controlled the ghetto.

Well despite all of this, the desire to resist the Nazis grew after that mass deportation of all the children and the old people.

That's because it became clearer what the Nazis were intending to do.

You'll remember that up until this point, life in the ghettos was appearing to be as normal as possible because Jewish people were resisting by not starving, by not going along simply with what the Nazis wanted them to do, which was to die.

They were building schools and cafes and theatres.

They were keeping life going.

They expected to be in the ghettos for the rest of the time that the Nazis were in control.

But then eventually they thought the Nazis would be defeated, and so the ghettos would be no more.

But it became very clear when all of the children and the old people were taken from the ghettos, that the Nazis were planning to kill them.

It was at this point that most of the people in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, most of the people who resisted violently, were physically very healthy, and mostly quite young.

They didn't have strong family ties which helped them to fight all the harder.

Very few of these resistance fighters expected to survive.

They didn't expect that the Nazis would lose because the Nazis were very well armed.

They had tanks, they had guns.

They had the control of the ghetto.

But what the freedom fighters, the resistance fighters, hoped to do was to make a statement about Jewish pride.

They were going to defend themselves.

Well, despite the lack of weapons, these Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, fought the German forces for four weeks.

So can I ask you, in that first column, to make some notes.

Here are four questions to think about when you make your notes.

Who was leading the Warsaw ghetto uprising? What types of people were involved in leading this uprising? Where did the uprising take place? How did this uprising work? And what was the result of the uprising? So if you pause the video, and when you're ready, if you come back.

So you probably had something like, the uprising was led by ordinary people.

You might've used the word civilians.

It took place in a ghetto in Warsaw, in Poland.

How did it work? Well, they had to find weapons.

They didn't expect to survive but they were fighting for their pride.

And the result was that there were four weeks of fighting.

But in the end the uprising failed.

So you can see that there's a second uprising that we're going to look at, a second example of violent resistance.

The Sobibor Uprising is different from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for a simple reason.

And that is, it happened inside one of the death camps.

The Sobibor uprising was perhaps the most spectacular act of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust.

Just like the Jewish resistance fighters in Warsaw, these resistance fighters in the death camp also faced difficulties.

The biggest one being a lack of weapons.

And also, what would happen if they were discovered.

Well naturally, the situation was even more dangerous than the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising because they were inside a tightly guarded death camp.

It was difficult to communicate between prisoners because they were separated, in how they worked, and where they were housed.

They were also the extermination areas where Jewish people were killed and their bodies were burned.

But even if the Jewish prisoners managed to get out of the camp, they would face more obstacles.

Around the camp fence in Sobibor, there were land mines that had been planted.

There were swamps, and very thick, dark forests.

If prisoners did manage to get out, there would be German search groups with search lights and dogs.

And also, where would you shelter? Where would you run to? And then if anyone in the local population like a farmer or someone in a cottage, was to discover you, there was the danger of being reported and being murdered there and then, or taken back to the death camp.

And so the fact that so many Jewish people did escape Sobibor camp, might be seen as a huge success.

And it wasn't just at Sobibor.

There was another death camp called Treblinka.

It was the camp where the children and the old people from the Warsaw Ghetto were taken to.

And if you put the uprising at the Treblinka camp, and the uprising at the Sobibor camp together, around about 400 of the 1,500 prisoners of the two camps, escaped and managed to stay safe.

And of these, about a hundred of them survived to the end of the war.

Now, if you compare this with other camps, in some other camps there were no uprisings.

And very few of the prisoners survived the war.

So it makes the uprising in the Sobibor camp stand out.

Well, let's go back to our task.

That third column.

The same questions that you were thinking about in the first column.

Who led the uprising in the Sobibor camp? Where did it take place? How did it work? And what was the result of the uprising? I've given you some examples there to start you off, but can you add a little bit more detail? So when you're ready, pause the video, fill it in, in a little bit more detail, and then start the video again.

So you filled in your notes for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and your notes for the Sobibor uprising, well, in the middle column, I'd like us to compare the two uprisings.

Can you give two examples where the uprisings were similar? What things did they have in common? Now you might be able to give more than two examples.

That would be great, but two is fine.

How were they similar? And then, can you give two examples where the uprisings were different? In fact, you might want to start with where they were different.

So some Jews chose to resist violently, such as in Sobibor and in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

You might've included that in your middle column.

They were both violent uprisings.

And they were different as well, weren't they.

One was in a ghetto, one was in a death camp.

But then in ghettos and in death camps, there are more examples of Jews who chose to resist non-violently instead of violently.

The examples of violent resistance definitely stand out.

But the historian Yehuda Bauer, would say to us, don't ignore the non-violent examples of resistance because the violent examples of resistance are much, much more difficult to undertake.

Let's come to our questions.

Now it's nearly the end of the lesson.

What were the difficulties that Jewish resistance fighters faced? Question two.

Who was involved in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and what were the results of the uprising? And the third question, who was involved in the Sobibor Uprising and what were the results of it? If you want to pause the video and then come back to it when you're ready.

So question one.

Difficulties faced by Jewish resistance fighters.

Well, getting weapons was always difficult.

Where would they get them from? And also the fear that they could be discovered.

How do you plan resistance? How do you plan to attack and to escape? It's also quite difficult to communicate with each other, if you're kept separate, and if you're being watched.

So you might have listed some of those difficulties.

Question two.

Who was involved in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? Well, they were civilians.

They were ordinary men and women in the ghetto.

The results? Well, most of the people in the Warsaw Ghetto were deported to death camps but there was another result, that for four weeks, the resistance fighters in the Ghetto Uprising, for four weeks they kept the Germans fighting.

And although they failed, nevertheless, they showed that Jewish people could, and did, stand up to the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Question three.

Who was involved in the Sobibor Uprising? Well, that was also civilians.

They tended to be young people, people without family ties, but they were just ordinary men and women.

The results, well, hundreds of them escaped from the Sobibor camp, and a hundred survived until the end of the war.

Well, I do hope you share your work with me so that I can see what you've done this lesson.

Very well done year nine.

Thank you very much for your hard work today.

Look forward to seeing you in our final lesson, looking at the question, how did Jewish people resist during the Holocaust? It would be great to see some of the work that you've produced this lesson.

So as usual, you know where to go to post that work so that I could have a look at it.

Looking forward to seeing you in our final lesson.

I hope you have a good day.