Publicola

Ian McCollum writes an interesting piece entitlted An Inquiry into the General Lack of Violent Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust

"Where these revolts occurred, German activity was slowed or halted. The Warsaw ghetto was the scene of active fighting for more than six weeks, and sporadic resistance continued, unbelievably, until mid-June of 1944 ­ 15 months after the outbreak of the revolt!(12) If such violence had engulfed German executioners wherever they had attempted to harm Jews, the Holocaust would have been stillborn. To quote Emmanuel Ringelblum, archivist of the Warsaw ghetto, (13)
…if everybody had attacked the Germans with knives, clubs, shovels, choppers; if we had received the Germans, Ukrainians, Latvians, and the Jewish ghetto police with acid, molten pitch, boiling water, and so on ­ to put it in a nutshell, if men, women, and children, the young and the old, had risen in a single people’s levy, there would not have been 350,000 murdered at Treblinka, but only the 50,000 shot dead in the streets of Warsaw.
A final, and oft overlooked outcome of the revolts was the reclamation of simple human dignity by the fighters. The individuals incarcerated in the camps of the German extermination system died deliberately starved, beaten, helpless and dehumanized. They were subjected to the most brutal of tortures and the most degrading of conditions. No human being deserves to die in such a state. To fight back gave them the opportunity to have a hand in their fate; it gave them back the dignity that is the essence of being human."


Thanks to End the War on Freedom where I found the article.