Despite great risks and challenges, many Jews attempted armed resistance across German-occupied Europe. Jews engaged in resistance at both the individual and group levels. Among their efforts were uprisings in killing centers and ghettos.
Olga was born to a large Jewish family living in the Bessarabia province when it was still part of the Russian Empire. In 1918 the province was annexed by Romania. When Olga was 12 years old, she was arrested for the first time for having participated in a strike at the mattress factory where she worked. Despite her youth, she was put in prison and beaten.
1933-39: Olga was an active and vocal member of the local workers' organization. She had been arrested and imprisoned so often that she simply considered it an occupational hazard. In 1938 she travelled to France where she worked with French leftists, helping to ferry arms to the Spanish Republicans in their fight against fascism. Just before the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, she gave birth to a little girl, Dolores.
1940-44: France fell to the German army in 1940. Olga found a French family to keep her daughter safe, and joined the armed resistance group, Franc-Tireurs et Partisans, to fight the Germans. She assembled bombs and helped transport explosives used to derail German troop and supply trains. On November 6, 1943, she was arrested during a Gestapo roundup. She was tortured but revealed no information. Even after she was condemned to death, they continued to interrogate and torture her.
Olga was transferred to a prison in Stuttgart where she was re-tried and again condemned to death. On May 10, 1944, her 32nd birthday, Olga was beheaded.
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Boria was born to a Jewish family living in the Bessarabian province when it was still a part of the Russian Empire. Following Romania's 1918 annexation of the province, life for Bessarabia's 200,000 Jews worsened. Subject to more widespread antisemitic laws and pogroms than while under Tsarist Russian rule, many Bessarabian Jews emigrated overseas or sought refuge back in Soviet villages.
1933-39: Boria became active in a local revolutionary communist group and was arrested and jailed many times. After moving to Paris in late 1938, he joined the International Brigade to fight alongside the Spanish Republicans in their war against fascism. After their war ended in March 1939, he enlisted in the French army to fight against the Nazis. But, due to an illness, he was unable to serve and was discharged.
1940-44: Shortly after France fell to the Germans in May 1940, Boria was deported to the Rivesaltes detention camp in southern France. He escaped in 1941 and went to Paris. There, he headed a unit of the Jewish resistance. They planted explosives in German-occupied buildings throughout the city. Boria oversaw the assembly of bombs and established a workshop and explosives depot in the Latin Quarter. He was arrested during a police roundup on June 26, 1943. He was tortured, but divulged no information.
Boria was condemned to death on September 20, 1943. He was executed by firing squad on Tuesday, October 1, the Jewish New Year. Boria was 28 years old.
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When Wolf was a young boy, his family moved to France to escape Poland's economic instability and growing antisemitism. Soon after they settled in Paris, his father found work in construction, and Wolf started elementary school.
1933-39: Paris was home to Wolf, but he loved to listen to his parents reminisce about autumns in Krasnik and journeys to Lublin. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. The Wajsbrots learned of the death camps and mass deportations of Jews. Wolf's parents no longer spoke of the past. Wolf received his school certificate, and at age 14 he began an apprenticeship to a mechanic.
1940-44: The Germans crossed into France in early 1940, and by June they occupied Paris. The Wajsbrots escaped many of the early roundups of Jews, but on July 16, 1942, Wolf's parents were arrested and deported. At 17 he joined the armed resistance group, Franc-Tireurs et Partisans, to fight against the German occupation. He helped to set two bombs on a Paris street that killed many German officers and soldiers. In the autumn of 1943 he was arrested.
Wolf was tried by the German authorities in February 1944. Convicted and sentenced to die by firing squad, Wolf was executed on February 21, 1944. He was 19 years old.
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Samuel's parents immigrated to Palestine when he was very young. They lived in Rishon le Zion, the first settlement in Palestine founded by Jews from outside of Palestine. After graduating from high school, Samuel became active in a movement challenging the British mandate in Palestine.
1933-39: Samuel was expelled from Palestine in 1936 because of his outspoken criticism of the British mandate. He went to France and then to Spain just after the civil war began. Samuel fought for three years with the Spanish Republicans against the fascists. The Republicans were defeated, and Samuel returned to France, where he was interned by the French at the Gurs detention camp for foreigners. He escaped and headed for Paris.
1940-44: In 1940 Samuel joined the armed resistance group, Franc-Tireurs et Partisans. He smuggled explosives into Paris to use in sabotage against the German army. In July 1942 he arrived at the East Paris train station with two suitcases full of explosives. Two policemen grabbed him. He ran, but was shot in the legs and arrested. After two months his wounds healed. Then, on crutches, he was led daily to the prison basement to be questioned and tortured.
Samuel refused to divulge information. He died under torture at the age of 34.
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Naftali was the youngest of nine children born to devout Hasidic Jewish parents living in Kolbuszowa. In the Hasidic tradition, he wore a long black coat and shoulder-length earlocks. He first faced antisemitism in the second grade when his teacher cut one earlock off each Jewish boy. Naftali escaped the teacher's shears, and his father, a respected merchant, had the teacher suspended.
1933-39: On September 9, 1939, the German army invaded Naftali's town and decisively defeated a small contingent of poorly equipped Polish cavalry soldiers. The Jews were rounded up; they watched as the Germans burned and looted their homes. Over the next two weeks, Naftali helped to bury dead horses and clean up the debris and unspent shells from town. The Germans hung two Jews in the town square as a reminder to them all not to resist their demands.
1940-44: Two shots rang and Naftali heard his father scream, "Revenge, take revenge!" Five more shots, then silence. Families of the 22 men the Gestapo killed that day came to the Jewish cemetery outside the ghetto and wrapped the bodies in shrouds and prayer shawls, according to Jewish custom. Naftali and his brother Liebush buried their father next to his father, who died 23 years before nearly to the day. At home, Naftali took the candle his father had made from scraps of wax to light to commemorate his own father's death, and lit it for both.
Naftali lived in the woods as a partisan before liberation by Soviet troops in mid-1944. He joined the Polish army, helping to liberate Cracow. He immigrated to the United States in 1947.
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Tomasz was born to a Jewish family in Izbica, a Polish town whose largely religious Jewish community comprised more than 90 percent of the population. Tomasz's father owned a liquor store.
1933-39: In September 1939, a drum sounded in the marketplace, calling the town to assemble for a news report. Germany had invaded Poland. More news arrived shortly; the Soviet Union was invading from the east. Tomasz and his family didn't know what to do. Some people said to run to the Soviet side; many, including his parents, decided to stay in Izbica. His father explained his decision by saying, "The Germans are antisemites but they're still people."
1940-43: By 1943 Tomasz had been deported to the Sobibor killing center, and was in the uprising there that year. During the revolt prisoners streamed to one of the holes cut in the barbed-wire fence. They weren't about to wait in line; there were machine guns shooting at them. They climbed on the fence and just as Tomasz was half way through, it collapsed, trapping him underneath. This saved him. The first ones through hit mines. When most were through, Tomasz slid out of his coat, which was hooked on the fence, and ran till he reached the forest.
Tomasz went into hiding, and then worked as a courier in the Polish underground. After the war, he remained in Poland, and then moved to the United States in 1959.
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Moise's family were Romaniot Jews, a group that had lived in Greek cities and the Balkans for 1,100 years. In the early 1920s Moise's family moved to Italy, where his father tried to find work. Moise attended school, and when his family returned to Greece after two years, he remained in Italy to complete school. When Moise returned to Preveza at age 17, he had forgotten Greek.
1933-39: Moise worked as a bookkeeper and administrator at the local electric company in Preveza, and he lived with his parents. Moise liked to picnic with his friends at the shore of the Ionian Sea. Sometimes he invited his younger brothers and sisters to come along.
1940-44: The Germans invaded Greece in 1941, and took over the region where Preveza was located in the fall of 1943. In March 1944 the Jews of Preveza were deported to Auschwitz. There Moise was assigned to Birkenau as part of the Sonderkommando, a work unit that took corpses to the crematoria. On October 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando in crematorium IV revolted, killing an overseer, disarming SS guards and blowing up the crematorium. Soon, others in the Sonderkommando, including Moise, joined in the uprising.
Moise was killed in Birkenau in October 1944. He was 31 years old.
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Zofia was raised in a well-to-do, prominent Hasidic Jewish family in Warsaw. Uneasy with the constant tension between the Polish people and the Jewish minority, Zofia joined the communist student club Spartacus when she was a teenager. Spartacus actively campaigned against the growing fascist movement in Europe.
1933-39: When Warsaw surrendered to the Germans on September 28, 1939, Zofia was 14 years old. She stopped going to school. Though the Nazis banned Spartacus, she secretly helped to revive the club, which printed antifascist posters and leaflets and distributed them throughout Warsaw. The work was dangerous--German troops were all over the city.
1940-43: A year later, Zofia and her parents were among nearly half a million Jews "resettled" in a small section of Warsaw. The ghetto was sealed in November 1940. Through Spartacus, Zofia trained with a pistol smuggled in by communist partisans. Zofia wanted to join them, but escaping meant endangering her parents' lives. When they were deported in July 1942, Zofia escaped and joined the Lion partisans near Radom. Some 300 Nazis attacked her group of 50 on February 9, 1943. Zofia and two Poles offered to cover their unit's retreat.
Zofia, 18, armed with a machine gun, let the Germans come within eight feet before she fired. Her position was overtaken, and she was killed. Her unit managed to retreat.
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Rubin was the second of four children born to a Jewish family in the northeastern Polish town of Ivenets, approximately 60 miles west of Minsk. His father was a butcher. Rubin attended Ivenets' public elementary school until the age of 10, when he transferred to the Mirar Yeshiva to study Jewish law.
1933-39: In 1936, after completing yeshiva, Rubin made his living as a house painter. In Ivenets people would stand in front of Jewish stores and drive customers away, telling them not to buy from Jews. In September 1939 Germany invaded Poland; several weeks later the Soviet army invaded from the east. The Soviets nationalized all businesses but Rubin's daily life didn't change much. He managed to continue working as a painter.
1940-44: In 1941 Germany invaded the USSR. Rubin was deported to Novogrudok in 1942 but escaped to join the Soviet partisans. That winter, his patrol entered a village to retaliate against pro-German collaborators. They crossed a river to get there, killed the sympathizers and burned part of the town. As they left, a comrade approached a man to get his boots; he was a German soldier! They ran to the river, sure they wouldn't make it and they'd shoot them before they reached the other side. Luckily, the river had frozen overnight and they fled.
Rubin fought with the partisans until liberated by the Red Army in July 1944. After the war he lived in Austria and Italy, before immigrating to the United States in 1949.
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Aron and his three sisters were raised in a traditional Jewish family in the town of Slonim. Most of Slonim's inhabitants were Jewish, and the town had a long tradition of Hasidic scholarship. Aron's father, Chaim, owned a yard-goods and clothing store.
1933-39: Aron attended a Hebrew-language middle school and was active in the Zionist youth movement, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa'ir. He had been accepted to study in an agricultural school in Palestine when war broke out in September 1939 and Slonim fell under Soviet rule. Unable to leave for Palestine, Aron attended a Soviet technical school.
1940-45: By 1941, Aron was in the Slonim ghetto. When it was being destroyed in 1942, Aron and his girlfriend, Lisa, escaped to the Grodno ghetto. They were about to be deported from Grodno when a Pole named Tadek helped smuggle them to the train station. They planned to ride on the top of a train to Vilna. Aron jumped onto a moving car, climbed to the roof and found Tadek—but not Lisa! Tadek ran the full length of the train and found her, hanging on the side of a car. Aron held Tadek's legs and lowered him down. He grabbed Lisa's hand and pulled her onto the roof.
Aron and Lisa reached Vilna and fought with the partisans in the Naroch Forest until Soviet troops reached the area in 1944. After the war, the couple married and emigrated to the United States.
Item ViewLisa was one of three children born to a religious Jewish family. Following the German occupation of her hometown in 1939, Lisa and her family moved first to Augustow and then to Slonim (in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland). German troops captured Slonim in June 1941, during the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Slonim, the Germans established a ghetto which existed from 1941 to 1942. Lisa eventually escaped from Slonim, and went first to Grodno and then to Vilna, where she joined the resistance movement. She joined a partisan group, fighting the Germans from bases in the Naroch Forest. Soviet forces liberated the area in 1944. As part of the Brihah ("flight," "escape") movement of 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors from eastern Europe, Lisa and her husband Aron sought to leave Europe. Unable to enter Palestine, they eventually settled in the United States.
Item ViewLisa was one of three children born to a religious Jewish family. Following the German occupation of her hometown in 1939, Lisa and her family moved first to Augustow and then to Slonim (in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland). German troops captured Slonim in June 1941, during the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Slonim, the Germans established a ghetto which existed from 1941 to 1942. Lisa eventually escaped from Slonim, and went first to Grodno and then to Vilna, where she joined the resistance movement. She joined a partisan group, fighting the Germans from bases in the Naroch Forest. Soviet forces liberated the area in 1944. As part of the Brihah ("flight," "escape") movement of 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors from eastern Europe, Lisa and her husband Aron sought to leave Europe. Unable to enter Palestine, they eventually settled in the United States.
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