Exhibition Review: Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust at Wiener Holocaust Library
The newest exhibition at Wiener Holocaust Library is incredibly insightful, highlighting the diversity of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
Philipp Manes’ diaries contain contributions by other incarcerated prisoners such as poems, letters, and drawings. Including this portrait of Manes in 1944 drawn by fellow prisoner Arthur Goldschmidt. Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
Editor’s Note, September 29, 2020: Wiener Library has extended the exhibition until January 2021.
The Wiener Holocaust Library was formed in 1933 and is the world’s oldest Holocaust memorial institution. It is home to a unique collection of over one million items related to the Holocaust, and many of these materials are on display in the Library’s current exhibition “Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust”. Available to visit until November 2020, the exhibition draws upon the Library’s archival collections to tell the stories of brave groups and individuals who risked their lives by resisting the oppressive rule of the Nazis and their allies.
Dr Barbara Warnock, the exhibition’s senior curator, expressed her intention to “challenge any notion of Jewish passivity” through this exhibition. Stories of Jewish resistance are scarcely told and would have been obscured by the Nazis. Therefore, Dr Warnock believes it is “extremely important” to display the preserved evidence of Jewish resistance “to keep alive what happened” and emphasise “the agency of Jews during the Holocaust”.
The perpetuated myth of Jewish passivity is immediately challenged in the exhibition section titled “Partisans in the Soviet States”. This section details how, as the German army advanced on Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, some Jews fled to join armed groups fighting covertly against the Nazi invaders and their collaborators. Information on The Bielski Group, brothers who initially fled the Belarusian forests before forming a partisan group of 30 to shelter Jews, is particularly fascinating. It explains that “The Bielski group took all Jews, from children to the elderly”, as opposed to solely those strong enough to fight. In total, up to 30,000 Jews served in partisan groups in Nazi-occupied Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic states, and the exhibition successfully depicts a range of their insightful stories.
The exhibition is organised by location; it is divided into clear sections such as resistance in camps, urban resistance, and hidden spaces. This arrangement makes the exhibition easy to navigate, and emphasises the geographical spread and scale of resistance undertaken by Jews during the Holocaust.
When talking to Dr Warnock, I asked her whether any story or individual stood out to her during the curation process, and she led me to information on the Minsk ghetto.
The Minsk ghetto was established in July 1941 with over 100,000 inhabitants. Up to 10,000 people successfully escaped from the ghetto as, during its existence, a communist underground inside and outside united to sabotage German factories and smuggle Jews out. Death certificates were cleverly forged by the Jewish hospital in the ghetto for those who escaped.
Dr Warnock expressed that it was “amazing to read about the stories of what happened there.” This orchestrated rescue stood out to her as she was in awe of “the way that different parts of the ghetto organisation and different parts of resistance inside and outside the ghetto cooperated in order to save people in a systematic way.” She was amazed that collaborative resistance stories like that in the Minsk ghetto are “hardly known”, despite the fact that they saved lives and assisted anti-Nazi fighters.
Group of Jewish partisan fighters in Soviet territories c.1942-1944. Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
Whilst exploring the exhibition, I was personally drawn to the section depicting resistance in “hidden spaces”, such as attics, cellars and sewers. This section challenges one to revise and reconsider notions of resistance itself. Through depicting cases of individual resistance, such as the keeping of private diaries, this part of the exhibition highlights that “resistance” is not solely armed combat, but encompasses a range of actions. In such severe and strange circumstances, the act of writing was one of defiance. It was a way to record personal experiences, to resist dehumanisation and preserve life.
Resistance fighter Tosia Altman, who organised armed resistance in ghettos in German-occupied Poland. Altman died in 1943 from injuries sustained on the run. Courtesy of Moreshet Archive.
Dr Warnock emphasised that the diversity of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust surpassed the “sheer range and scale of resistance across the continent” and the types of resistance, “from complex resistance networks and armed uprisings that took a lot of planning, to spiritual resistance, cultural resistance and individual acts.” The fascinating stories told in the exhibition also highlight the remarkable variety of figures involved; women and youth had played an important role. For example, Tosia Altman was instrumental in organising the Warsaw ghetto uprising. She acted as a courier to pass on information and raise awareness, and smuggled weapons into the Warsaw ghetto in preparation for the uprising. She also established a fighting force inside the Krakow ghetto.
Dr Barbara Warnock communicates stories of Jewish resistance as powerfully and succinctly as in the Library’s last exhibition, “Forgotten Victims”. The current exhibition is equally as gripping and thought-provoking. It balances informative text and eye-witness accounts with visually exciting photographs and artefacts, including an anti-Nazi opera libretto “Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Oder der Tod Dankt Ab” (“The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Abdicates,” 1943), which was composed in Theresienstadt ghetto.
Located at 29 Russell Square, the Wiener Holocaust Library is extremely close to UCL Bloomsbury campus and certainly worth visiting to explore incredible stories of compassion, endurance and courage in such dangerous circumstances.
Philipp Manes, a German Jew and prolific writer, was deported to Theresienstadt in July 1942. Manes was key to the cultural life in the ghetto and he documented his experiences in great detail. Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
Esther Pauline Lloyd camp diaries. Esther, a Jewish woman from Jersey, was deported from the Channel Islands to camps in France and Germany in February 1943. Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.