Resistance in the Camps
There was resistance in the camps, even in the extermination camps. At the most basic level, there were defiant actions such as stealing food from the kitchens, sharing meagre rations with others even more desperate, covering up for a sick person at rollcall and doing ‘work’ duties in their place. Survival mechanisms were often quite bizarre, but most often they involved simply offering psychological and practical support; urging others to go on, and not to give up hope. It has been said that the traditional closeness of Jewish family ties played an important part in this type of resistance.

Plaque at the site of the Sobibor
camp commemorating the revolt

For religious prisoners, a powerful form of resistance was their continued commitment to God and the attempt to maintain even a basic level of observance. Some Jews in the camps even continued to observe the holy Day of Atonement with its traditional fast, even though this meant further depriving their already-starved bodies of the miniscule daily food rations. Many Jewish women, at great risk, blessed electic light bulbs on the Sabbath or made Sabbath candles out of hollowed potato peelings filled with margarine. Jews participated in clandestine prayer services inside barracks while other inmates stood guard outside. Non-Jewish camp inmates including Catholic priests and Jehovah’s Witnesses also maintained their religious practices to the extent they could hide them from the Nazis.

In some camps there were more daring schemes involving escape routes and so on; there were also actual physical revolts, often late in the war when it became clear that there was to be a total camp “liquidation” . These were at Treblinka (August 2 1943), Sobibor (October 14 1943), Ponary/Janowska (May 19 1944), Auschwitz (October 7 1944) and Chelmno (January 17 1945). Although the inmates of these camps faced hopeless odds and were mostly caught and murdered, escape offered them the chance of revenge and a purposeful and dignified death.

Finally, survival itself - by almost any means - was a form of resistance. It meant defiance of the Nazi aim to eliminate the Jews from Europe. And the chance to give testimony, so that the Nazi crime would be revealed to the world in all its enormity.