Resistance: They Fought Back (2025)

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Man: You know, years,

years I've been in the classroom...

and there is never a more poignant question

that a student asked me about the Holocaust than...

"Why didn't the Jews resist the Nazis?"

And there's a moment where you just want

to leave it alone...

and then there's a moment where you can't let it go.

[Train whistle blowing]

[Slow clattering]

[Bugle blowing]

♪

[expl*si*n]

[g*nf*re]

[Soldiers shouting]

♪

Man: After a journey of days, we arrived at Auschwitz

on April to a crematorium.

♪

Freund: Marcel Nadjari--

this is a guy who was shipped off from Greece in

all the way to Auschwitz.

♪

[Loud bang]

♪

Man: The Sonderkommando prisoners were sl*ves,

compelled to do anything their masters,

the Germans in Auschwitz, tell them to do.

[Shovels clattering]

Man as Nadjari: Our unit is called the Special Unit.

I will explain for you the work

that the Almighty wanted me to do.

♪

It starts by the people entering naked.

[Water spraying]

Greif: The humiliation is a very central factor

in the German crime.

He has to be undressed, and he has to be humiliated.

♪

Man as Nadjari: After the room is filled with people,

it is locked...

[Clang]

and they are gassed.

♪

[Gas hissing]

Greif: And I have to emphasize , times

the k*lling always was made by the Germans.

♪

Freund: We're at Crematorium III,

which was destroyed by the Nazis as they were leaving in .

What really is the secret of Crematorium III is this is

where they discovered Nadjari's letter.

♪

He described in meticulous detail

what his daily schedule was,

so his letter gives us a perspective

on what it is that happened here.

♪

Man: In this horrible world, finding even a pen

and a piece of paper without being exposed

what they're doing is an incredible bravery,

and they probably didn't see hope

for their own survival.

They wanted the world to know.

Freund: People have this myth stuck in their heads that

the Jews went to their deaths like sheep

to the slaughter,

but this is where the real story begins.

♪

Man as Nadjari: How could I do this,

burn the bodies of my brothers in faith,

and why didn't I join them and put an end to it?

But every time, the thirst for revenge stopped me.

[Thump]

[Gas hissing]

Man: Each prisoner in every squad knew exactly what

he was supposed to do and prepared for it.

Different man: May those who made an ocean of blood

of my people drown in an ocean of blood.

Woman: Suddenly, the sirens began to wail.

What happened? A revolution?

An uprising at the crematorium?

♪

Freund: This is where the story begins.

Jews did not go to their death

as sheep to the slaughter.

They fought back.

♪

♪

♪

[Sobbing]

♪

♪

Woman as Peltel: Father was calming us,

saying, "Don't be scared.

"Even when the Germans come, they are not so bad.

"I remember them from the First World w*r,

and they are quite human, you will see."

For him, it was a shock.

[People shouting]

Man: What her father had said was

"I know these people. I know the Germans.

"We fought in the First World w*r together,

and they're basically decent people,"

and then within the first couple of days,

he was pretty badly beaten,

and he was so devastated that he was unable

after that to leave the house to go out on the street.

♪

Man: We were immediately singled out.

We knew something was coming.

♪

♪

Man: So this is one of the original walls that confined

the Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto,

and on Yom Kippur, the holiest day

of the Jewish year, in ,

the Jewish population finds out that it's going to be

confined into a ghetto.

Half a million Jews almost forced into this tiny area.

Man: A few hundred people crowd every large,

unheated room of a synagogue,

every hall of a deserted factory.

A whole family often receives sleeping space for one.

The walls and barbed wire surrounding the ghetto

completely cut off the Jews from the outside world.

♪

Patt: These are starvation rations.

There's no way that people can live on this.

♪

Man as Edelman: Children begged everywhere.

-year-old boys crawled through the walls

and barbed wire to obtain food on the other side.

♪

Patt: This was all part of a plan which was

going to degrade the Jews, dehumanize them,

force them to live in horrible, horrible conditions

where you have disease.

[Rats squeaking]

The creation of the ghetto was exactly

to facilitate the spread of epidemics.

They would bring in film crews into the ghetto

as part of their propaganda effort to show

this is how Jews live,

this is how Jews carry disease

and how Jews will ultimately die.

♪

[Digging]

♪

So people often want to know why the Jewish population

didn't fight back immediately.

Half a million Jews crowded into the ghetto.

Why didn't they take up arms and fight back

against the Germans?

-Collective punishment. -Collective punishment.

The Jews knew that

you can start some resistance.

You can aim a p*stol and sh**t one person,

two people, whatever it is,

but the Germans would then arrest ,.

♪

Patt: But the truth is, from the very beginning, right,

once there crowded into the ghetto,

they did resist in the ways that they knew best to do,

resistance that was a type of spiritual resistance,

resistance that was a way of standing up

against the German oppressors.

Feeding the hungry clothing the poor,

taking care of orphans.

These were strategies that Jews had used for centuries

and which they fell back upon.

♪

Woman: The unarmed resistance is called in Hebrew Amidah.

Amidah is standing, standing up,

or in Yiddish, I would say...

[Speaks Yiddish]

I'm not yielding to the situation.

Whatever you do that is against the situation

is resistance.

Whether you sit or lie or crawl or swim or stand up

makes absolutely no difference.

It's something done.

Woman as Vladka: Life in the ghetto

was a chain of resistance.

There were ill*gal schools.

there were ill*gal libraries, choirs,

even theaters.

It was an ill*gal life.

♪

Bauer: The Germans wanted to destroy any kind

of Jewish existence, also cultural existence,

and so on, so when you educated children

in ghettos, if they survived,

for them to develop after the w*r,

this was against the German idea, yeah?

Man as Benjamin: I organized a school in my building,

and I became the teacher of that school.

I had never prepared for being a teacher,

but there were no schools.

All schools were ill*gal.

Man: And if you always keep in mind that part

of what the Germans wanted to do was to k*ll the body

but also to k*ll the soul, to undermine humanity,

the humanity of the individual,

and therefore, if you never lost your humanity,

then in a very real sense you're helping

to defeat the Germans.

♪

Woman as Vladka: Although you see today how the pictures,

mostly from Germans,

pictures of Jews who were beggars and pitiful,

and this is taken because the Germans would like us

only to be seen this way.

This was only one part of the ghetto.

It was true there were beggars,

but there was another kind of life full of activities

and spiritual resistance.

♪

Man as Ringelblum: With a little peace,

we may succeed in making sure

that not a single fact about Jewish life at this time

and place will be kept from the world.

♪

Freund: They were documenting the entire life

of the Warsaw Ghetto,

and then they buried it, and they buried it

because they wanted to make sure it survived.

♪

♪

It's the equivalent of seeing for the first time

the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The difference is this is so close to our own era,

and to know that Jews have been documenting

and preserved it like a message in a bottle

for future generations.

♪

"What we couldn't scream out to the world

"we buried in the ground.

"I would like to live to see the moment

"when it will be possible to unearth this great treasure

"and shout out the truth.

"May this treasure fall into good hands.

"May it survive until better times.

"May it alarm the world to what happened

"in the th century.

"Now we can die in peace.

"Our mission has been accomplished.

Let history bear witness to that."

♪

Patt: So Warsaw is occupied,

and the goal for the Jews is to survive,

to live to see another day,

to live until the w*r is gonna be over.

They have no idea that the endpoint

of the Germans' occupation is extermination.

♪

♪

♪

Man: This is one of the main recreation spots in Kaunas.

It sits up on a hill. It's windy, it's breezy.

People come here for picnics, to walk their dog.

I've seen wedding ceremonies here,

but what people don't know is underneath

where we're standing, this is where , Jews

were buried in trenches.

♪

Woman: That -.

Bauman: This is where the GeoSLAM is going to be.

And--and even if they were to try to memorialize this,

they don't know where the trenches are,

and that's what...

♪

♪

Freund: They thought they were going to a labor camp,

they were gonna be doing work,

and that's what the artifacts tell us.

Passports, watches, personal items,

every type of button because everyone thought

they were coming to go to work.

Man: Everyone is very smart today.

How didn't they realize? How didn't they know?

But you never believe.

I mean, you can't believe that you

will be mistreated and beaten and humiliated.

You cannot imagine that you will be simply taken...

[g*nshots]

led to the forest, and k*lled there.

♪

When we take a look at sites like this--

and we're looking at many Holocaust sites--

and what's important is that survivors have told their story

and we believe their stories.

What we're trying to do is bring scientific methodology

and scientific tools to verify those stories.

[Ping, ping]

♪

Freund, voice-over: We really are hoping--

and I'm not naive-- we're really hoping

that we can diminish genocide

when perpetrators know they can never get away

with their crime.

♪

[Baby crying]

♪

Man: The most horrific statistic I think of

is that only % of European Jewish children

who were alive in were still alive in .

♪

My name is Dana Pomerants- Mazurkevich--Mazurkevich.

I'm originally from Lithuania.

I was born in Kovno Ghetto.

My father was a very famous violinist.

My mother and father decided that somehow,

by a miracle, somehow they have to smuggle me

out of ghetto.

My mother got in touch with Elena Zalinkevicaite.

Was a very beautiful drama theater artist,

who had her own children.

My mother, she said, "I have girl who have

"beautiful blond hair and has blue eyes.

She's Jewish child. Could you save her?"

And that Lithuanian woman, having her own children,

she said, "Bring that child. I will take her."

They gave me a big amount of sleeping pills

and put me in a sack of potato,

and it was one Lithuanian guy.

He took me in some kind of carriage,

and then we passed that border,

and German soldier was staying there.

Somehow, I probably didn't have enough air,

and I started to make that noise.

[Grunting]

And that German asked, "What is that? What is this?"

And that Lithuanian guy, he said,

"This is kleine Schweine," little piglet.

Somehow, they let us pass.

It required unbelievable courage,

unbelievable, that they could give me away

and not knowing if they will survive

and not knowing if I will survive.

[Man shouting]

I think it was a big, big act of resistance

because I will not let to take my child,

and my mother had to--oy-- had to give me away.

This is--it--it took so much courage for her to do that.

♪

I have a beautiful daughter Milana.

Sometimes, I think would I be able to do?

I don't know.

♪

[Bells tolling]

♪

♪

Man: Vilna was called the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

Vilna was probably the most Jewish city in the world.

We consider New York to be very Jewish.

New York's got--% of the population's Jewish,

but Vilna at its peak had % of the population was Jewish.

♪

Man: As a child in Vilna, I lived with a sense

of living in paradise.

Fishman: It was a great center of Jewish learning.

It was a city of the spirit,

and that's why it got the name Jerusalem.

♪

The Germans attacked Vilna on June , .

That's almost two years later than when they attacked Warsaw,

so the Germans came late, but they acted fast,

and the Germans started looting

Jewish cultural treasures in Vilna.

In July , they realized that there were just

too many Jewish books and papers

and documents and treasures in this city.

They couldn't handle it,

and that's why they established this sl*ve labor brigade of Jews

that would sort the material called the Paper Brigade.

♪

Right here, right behind me, is where the gate

to the Vilna Ghetto stood.

The members of the Paper Brigade had to pass

through this gate daily.

They had books packed underneath their clothing,

under their shirts, under their pants,

under their--in their shoes,

and they had to pass through body searches

of ghetto guards.

If they were found to be carrying books on them--

it didn't matter if you were carrying

books or food or anything.

The penalty was the same, death...

♪

and many of those books, once they were smuggled

into the ghetto successfully,

they brought here to the building

that was probably the central address

in the Vilna Ghetto, the Vilna Ghetto Library.

Reading was a kind of moral, cultural,

spiritual resistance.

"You're not gonna break my humanity.

"I'm a human being, and reading books is

"integral to being a human being,

and I'm gonna do that."

Bak: It was--absolutely it was a resistance,

and it was as indispensable as bread,

I would say.

As they say in Hebrew,

"Not only on bread can man live."

He needs also something for the spirit.

♪

In the ghetto, where art and writing and poetry

were created, where people could express themselves,

there was a sense of dignity,

and I think this was a very important factor

that kept the psyche of the people more or less alive.

♪

♪

My name is Michael Kovner.

My parents were Abba Kovner and Vitka Kovner--

Kempner-Kovner.

My father wanted to be a painter,

and he accepted to the Vilna Academic of Painting.

He was accepted to this, but he couldn't, you know--

the w*r would come, so he couldn't

fulfill this dream,

but I think he always was kind of a poet, you know.

My mother, she--she walked on the pavement,

which Jewish in Poland after n*zi occupation

weren't allowed to walk on the pavement...

[Whistle blowing]

and she went to the pavement,

and then the officer or soldiers, n*zi,

came to her, and she--

and he asked her, "You are Jewish?"

And she said yes.

"So why you are going on the pavement?"

She said, "Why not?"

He said, "You are not allowed,"

and she gave him splash on his face

and continued to walk.

So that's her type.

♪

Porat: The youth movement played a role in the life

of the youngsters at the time.

They felt belonging.

It wasn't just a place to which you go to be

entertained once or twice a week.

You lived your life with the members,

you lived through them.

It's a collective identity of being Jewish,

and this explains to you the way they handled

themselves during the w*r.

Man as Abba: We had formed our group,

starting from a precise ideology.

Our fight was not for self-preservation.

It was not to save myself, to save you,

to save a neighbor.

It was to fight the Germans.

♪

Fishman: In half a year, the Jewish population of Vilna

went down from , to , Jews.

More than / of the Jews of Vilna

were k*lled in half a year,

and that's in , well before there were deportations

to the death camps from Warsaw and other cities in Poland.

♪

Man as Abba: One day I was called and told to go

to the hospital of the ghetto,

that there was a young girl injured

who wanted to talk to me and only to me.

From her, I got the first direct evidence

about what was happening.

♪

There were women.

They were told to line up.

[Metal clatters]

Behind them there were ditches.

♪

The Lithuanians started firing on the whole line of women...

[g*nshots]

and all the women fell into the ditch...

[g*nsh*t]

dead.

♪

This is the burial pit.

It was a burial pit in ,

and in this forest,

both Nazis and their collaborators from Lithuania

systematically shot

about , people in these pits.

♪

Man as Abba: One thing is clear to me.

Vilna is not just Vilna.

Ponari is not just an episode.

There is a system, whose inner workings are,

for the meantime, hidden from us.

♪

Kovner: My father said, "Nobody can escape.

"The Jewish people cannot escape from this,

"so what the Jewish people can do,

they can fight for their honor."

That's it. To fight for the honor.

♪

Man as Abba: They shall not take us

like sheep to the slaughter.

All those who were taken away from the ghetto

never came back.

♪

Porat: It is a call to the population that was left

not to foster illusions.

"Those who went out of the gates of the ghetto

will not come back."

Man as Abba: All the roads of the Gestapo lead

to Ponari, and Ponari is death.

♪

Porat: He said, "Hitler has a plot.

"He's planning to m*rder all the Jews of Europe.

If everyone out of the ghetto was k*lled"...

♪

"and if there is a plan to k*ll the rest, as well"...

♪

"then there is no other choice left but to resist."

Man as Abba: It is true we are weak and defenseless,

but resistance is the only reply.

Brothers, it is better to fall as free fighters

than to live by the grace of the murderers.

Resist to the last breath.

♪

♪

Bauer: Nobody wanted to resist because they said,

"If we try to resist, they will k*ll everyone,"

and the youth movement said,

"They're going to k*ll everyone anyway,"

and we must resist.

Woman as Korchak: The soul was enlightened.

The ghetto nightmare dissipated.

Martyrdom, helplessness, and sl*very are over,

and now the one goal before us is rebellion.

♪

[Speaking Lithuanian]

Woman as Vitka: We were not soldiers.

We'd never shot a g*n before.

We took a pipe, and another boy

got the dynamite.

It was very primitive.

Kovner: My mother, she went with other guys for days

outside the ghetto because they have to go very far

from the ghetto that the Germans won't know

that the Jewish people did it.

That was the most important thing,

so she found the best place.

The patrol of the Germans is not there

when the train is there at that hour.

She found the best place.

Woman as Vitka: : in the morning,

we planted the b*mb.

We took it, and we put it under the rail tracks.

We escaped very quickly.

When the train passed over it at :, it exploded...

[Boom]

and from far away, we heard the expl*si*n.

♪

Kovner: Heh. She was the hero of the oldest story.

Like, she was the first one who went outside the ghetto

and bombed a German train.

♪

♪

♪

Man: One should never believe that Warsaw and Vilna were

the only ghettos that rose.

Ghettos large and small rose in resistance.

♪

[Speaking Latvian]

[Singing in Yiddish]

[Speaking Latvian]

♪

Lensky: If we discuss how the Nazis reacted to resistance,

they thought of Jews being so inferior to them

that they are unable to resist,

that will actually go

as the cattle to the slaughter,

So we have to understand that when we use

this phrase "cattle to the slaughter,"

we use the n*zi lens.

We look at you through n*zi eyes.

♪

Man: When my mother became a courier,

the first task was to move into Grodno.

♪

In Grodno, she was supposed to see what's going on

with the Jewish community

because there were no connections.

You have to understand there was no telephones.

All telephones were cut.

There was no mail service, there was no Internet.

Woman as Hazan: Each one of us preferred to fall

in combat than to be led

as sheep to the slaughter.

The movement's leadership sought out girls

with a Gentile appearance, who would serve

as liaison couriers between the different locations.

This role was unsuitable for boys, who already

from the age of days had their Jewishness marked

on their flesh.

I volunteered for the role because I'd already gained

experience and self-confidence in impersonating

a Gentile and going outside the ghetto.

♪

Yaari: They smuggled weapons,

g*ns and grenades and so on.

This was a very dangerous mission.

They also smuggled people out of the ghetto

to put them in hiding places.

My mother, she was sent to Grodno.

I must remind you again that she was years old.

Woman as Hazan: I went to the labor bureau in town.

The clerk asked me whether I knew German,

and I answered him in poor Yiddish.

For "vos," I said, "was," and so on.

After a few sentences from me, he declared,

"You speak German very well.

"You can take a position with us as an interpreter

at the Gestapo."

[Telephone rings]

Yaari: So when she worked in that office,

she managed to steal from the desk all kinds

of papers and stamps, and she brought them to Vilna,

and they were used to make false identities

for--for--for other people,

traveling documents and so on.

She was several months, almost half a year, in Grodno.

Her two friends, who were also couriers,

Tema Sznajderman, and Lonka Korzybrodska,

came to her room.

This was Christmas Eve,

and my mother was invited by the Gestapo.

There was one officer who was--I think was

in love with her,

and he invited her to the Christmas party

of the Gestapo,

and she said, "I'm sorry, I cannot come

because I have two girlfriends,"

and he said, "Bring them also with you."

He came to pick her up, and the of them,

they dressed in the best clothes that they had.

They went on Christmas Eve, December ,

to this Christmas party,

and this Gestapo officer took a picture

of the of them.

[Camera flash pops]

♪

June , Lonka Korzybrodska was sent to Warsaw.

She was sent on a mission.

She had to deliver two g*ns to the underground

and information, and she was on the train

in the middle between Bialystok and Warsaw,

and her luck didn't hold,

and she was captured by the Gestapo.

[Steam hissing]

So when Lonka did not come back to Bialystok,

my mother volunteered to follow her steps

and to look for her,

so she went on the train from Bialystok to Warsaw,

and when the train got to Malkinia,

the gendarmes who were on the train told her

"We are waiting for you.

Come, come with us."

And why were they waiting for her?

Because Lonka, she was very courageous

and very self-assured.

She carried with her the picture of the couriers,

and this fell into the hands of the Gestapo.

Woman as Hazan: People in the station looked at me

with pitying expressions.

Soldiers asked me, "Little girl, what did you do

that they're taking you like this?"

I tried my best to hold my head up so that no one

could know what was going on in my heart.

I knew that my chances were gone,

that at any moment the Germans were likely to k*ll me.

♪

Yaari: And after days of severe tortures, broken bones,

and a tooth was broken, and after days, they threw

her into an isolation cell.

For weeks, she was in darkness all alone...

♪

but she kept her Polish identity.

The Gestapo did not suspect that she's a Jew.

♪

[Clang]

[Clatter]

♪

[Dogs barking]

♪

Patt: The Germans were masters of deceit.

They told the Jews they were being sent to work camps

in the East, where conditions would be better,

but here at the Umschlagplatz,

the Jews were loaded onto trains,

deported to the death camp of Treblinka.

Man as Edelman: They promised and actually gave kilograms

of bread and kilogram of marmalade to everyone

who voluntarily registered for deportation.

Do you have any idea what bread meant

at that time in the ghetto?

Because if you don't, you will never understand

how thousands of people would voluntarily come

for the bread and go on to camp at Treblinka.

Woman: There is this diary that someone is meeting a father

who is walking toward the Umschlagplatz

with his children, and he's asking,

"Why are you doing that?

Why are you obeying the Germans' orders?"

And the man says, "Well, they took my wife already.

"I have nothing to give the kids to eat.

"They will starve to death here in the ghetto.

"What can I do?

"I prefer going there and hoping I'll be able to work

and provide my children.

So it's really choiceless choices.

♪

[Train whistle blowing]

♪

Steven: The Nazis were single-minded about k*lling off

children with as much cruelty as possible

as early as possible.

Berenbaum: Janusz Korczak, the leader of an orphanage

who went with his orphans to Treblinka.

He was offered the opportunity to survive.

Korczak was the equivalent of Mr. Rogers.

Non-Jews flocked to hear his radio broadcast.

Are we gonna say that he went like

sheep to the slaughter?

Gonna say the teachers that stayed with their students,

the doctors that stayed with their patients,

the mothers that stayed with their children

and didn't abandon them--

did they go like sheep to the slaughter,

or did they take care of those they were responsible to

unto their last breath?

[Children chattering]

Dreifuss: Those children didn't have anybody else

to take care of them.

The Jewish children during the Holocaust

were maybe the most miserable victims

if one can even class within this horrible victimhood,

and the fact that somebody is walking with them

until the end, even when it's a bitter end,

this is something that has its importance.

♪

[Children chattering]

♪

Steven: When it started to go bad,

it was moving incredibly fast.

The deportations were so overwhelming

that of those , people

who had been in the ghetto,

only , were left.

♪

♪

Patt: The ghetto is sealed.

Anyone caught leaving or entering is shot on sight.

The walls are porous, and the underground finds

ways to sneak fighters in and out to obtain weapons

one or two at a time.

♪

Vladka is one of those sent across to the Aryan side

to try to find weapons.

Rita: I think she would have said

if you asked her directly

that she was afraid all the time,

but it didn't make a difference.

She always did what was needed to be done.

♪

Woman as Vladka: It was a great event for me

when I managed to procure my first revolver,

bought from our landlord's nephew for , zlotys.

Man as Edelman: At the end of December ,

we received our first transport of weapons

from the Polish Home Army.

It was not much.

There were only pistols in the whole transport,

but it enabled us to prepare for our first major action.

[g*nf*re]

♪

[Indistinct chatter]

♪

Rita: It was the eve of Passover.

That's one of the things I remember her talking about

is standing by the window that saw into the ghetto.

She spoke of watching and of wanting to be in there

and of feeling like she had been ordered not to.

♪

[g*nsh*t]

Woman as Vladka: Sporadic g*nf*re erupted in the ghetto.

Powerful detonations made the earth tremble.

The battle had begun.

♪

Schudrich: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

was the first day of Passover.

Think about it.

They went to fight the Germans

with a taste of matzah still in their mouths,

and there was matzah made in the ghetto.

Man as Edelman: Battle groups barricaded at the corners

of the street opened concentric fire on them.

German dead soon littered the street.

The glorious SS therefore called tanks into action.

The first was burned out by one of our incendiary bottles.

The rest did not approach our positions.

Not a single German left this area alive.

Man: Something has happened beyond our wildest dreams.

The Germans had to flee from the ghetto twice.

The dream of my life has become a reality.

I have lived to see Jewish self-defense in the ghetto

in all of its greatness and splendor.

Woman as Vladka: Couriers crisscrossed the ghetto

to warn the Jews "Do not allow yourselves to be taken.

"Everyone is to hide in their bunkers.

We must all resist!"

♪

Bauer: The vast majority of the population

had no access to arms.

but they identified with the resistance,

and they refused to hand themselves over to the Germans.

It was not a passive resistance.

It was an active, unarmed resistance,

and that is, after all, a matter of some , or , people.

The Jews are hiding. The Jews are hiding,

and the Germans don't succeed in finding Jews.

It's actually unbelievable.

They are entering a house after house.

There are those houses in which hundreds of Jews

are living there, and they cannot find even one.

♪

Woman as Vladka: I reflect.

There are so many forms of resistance--

the courageous ghetto fighters firing their pistols,

the mother trying to save her baby,

the father refusing to allow his son to be separated,

the family remaining in hiding under the ghetto.

These, too, are part of the uprising.

These, too, are forms of resistance.

♪

Very soon, the Germans understand that

the major problem that they have is of those Jews

who are staying in their houses and bunkers

despite everything,

and this is when the Germans decide to fight

the Jews with the weapon of fire,

and they start to set the ghetto on fire.

[Fire roaring]

♪

[Speaking Polish]

[Wood splintering]

♪

Berenbaum: The Warsaw Ghetto held out longer than the armies

of France and Belgium and Netherlands.

What an achievement.

On the other hand, as an action, it was the end.

It was the last act,

but as an act of moral resistance to it all,

it's a matter of...

screaming, shouting, fighting,

deciding that I will take the enemy down with me...

and not go quietly into the dark night.

♪

[Splashing]

♪

Patt: This stone, taken from the rubble at Mila ,

marks the final resting place of the brave fighters

who died here, and it reads,

"Here they rest, buried where they fell,

to remind us that the whole Earth is their grave."

♪

♪

[Bells tolling]

♪

[Vehicle driving]

♪

Man as Abba: The Germans' Tactics changed

on September rd.

At p.m., the ghetto was suddenly surrounded.

They knew we were there.

We had every reason to believe that they'd take out

the remaining Jews and then shell with a*tillery.

We decided to make our way out.

The only way out was through the sewers.

[Splashing]

Porat: So that's the end of it.

♪

They went out to the forest with nothing,

just the shirt on their back.

That's it. What do they do?

The forest is rain and snow

and wild animals and nothing to eat,

and it's a horrible place to live in.

[Rain falling]

Woman as Vitka: It was a forest,

a forest without Nazis.

We lived there under the sky for two months.

It was raining, and it was cold,

but it is what we had in the beginning.

Kovner: It was tough life.

It's very cold, and there was not a lot of food,

but they were free people.

They have honor.

♪

[g*nf*re]

[Train whistle blowing]

♪

Man: Around April ,

a decision was made to escape.

The decision in the end was a tunnel.

They would take turns.

People who finished their work would come dig.

Some people would pretend to be sick

so they could dig all day,

and there was a group of diggers, tough people.

[g*nf*re]

♪

[People shouting]

Man as Jack: When I came out from the tunnel, it was dark.

There was sh**ting, which I could see

lots of flashes of fire.

I could see people being k*lled.

Woman: This took place on September .

It's already cold. There were drenched.

Pitch black. Didn't know where to go.

[Thunder]

[People shouting]

♪

Kagan: My father-- I remember him telling me

that when he first arrived in the camp

in the middle of the forest

and there was this man

on a big white horse with a g*n on his shoulder.

My father's like, "Who is that?" Ha ha ha!

And that was Tuvia Bielski.

Like, just as in the film, right?

In the film, he has a g*n slung over his shoulder,

and he's a warrior.

My father wrote in his book that when he got

to the forests how did he feel,

and he said, and here I quote,

"I'd come from a camp where thousands of Jewish people

"were being k*lled by the Germans,

"and now there were all these fighters with g*ns.

"I felt very, very proud.

"There was great camaraderie at the camp.

"We were unhappy because so many members

"of our families had been massacred,

"but we were happy because we were free

and we were fighting back."

♪

Cohen: Tuvia Bielski was responsible

for saving , people's lives.

He accepted everybody--

small children, old men and women,

solitary women who couldn't fight like my mother, everybody,

and Tuvia said he would rather save one Jew

than k*ll Germans.

♪

Kagan: Bielski did something completely different,

a completely different philosophy

of "We're all Jews. We need to survive.

That's our resistance."

♪

♪

Berenbaum: Treblinka had approximately somewhere

in the neighborhood of , Jews being k*lled.

Some people revolted in Treblinka and escaped.

♪

♪

In the end, there were less than survivors,

but unless they had tried to escape,

there would not have been survivors,

and then we would have never known anything

about Treblinka or at least not from the perspective

of the victims.

We would only know the statistics

from the perspective of the perpetrators.

Henry: There were rebellions in the death camps.

of them were led by Jews, by the Russians,

so actually, even if you only consider

violent resistance, the Jews look pretty good.

♪

♪

♪

[Speaking polish]

[Footsteps]

♪

Freund: You can imagine that everyone who came

up this way, maybe , people,

thought they were going to showers.

Where they went is the gas chambers.

♪

♪

[Wind blowing]

♪

♪

Woman as Raab: And all that built up in me

such anger and the feeling of revenge.

I came to the camp with a pair of brown leather boots,

which not everybody had, and I said to the group--

we slept together-- "With these boots,

"I'm going to escape from Sobibor.

"Don't ask me why. Don't ask me how,

"and maybe it's not-- doesn't even make sense,

but I'm going to escape with these boots."

♪

Berenbaum: Alexander Pechersky came with a military background.

He joined with a Jewish prisoner from Poland,

who in a very real sense was his liaison

with the other prisoners, who didn't quite trust a Soviet POW

even if he was Jewish,

and they formed a formidable team

to plan for how to conquer, how to escape.

♪

Woman as Raab: And that evening, we cried.

We cried very, very much,

and everybody said goodbye because we figured

in our wildest dreams we didn't think one of us

is going to survive,

and as I cried myself to sleep, I dozed off,

and I saw my mother coming in through the camp,

through the main gate, the way I left her.

That's how she looked,

and I said, "Mom, you know that we're

going to escape tomorrow,"

and she said, "Yes. That's why I came."

[Wind blowing]

♪

Berenbaum: They lured n*zi commanders and n*zi officials

who were working in the camp into a place

where they could be slaughtered one by one.

Woman as Raab: The plan was at :.

The electric wire was cut,

the telephone wire was cut.

Everybody has to k*ll his SS man and his guard

at his place of work...

[Man screaming]

and it started working.

Berenbaum: They then stormed the gates,

and then they went into the woods.

[Siren wailing, g*ns firing]

Woman as Raab: This was before decided--

in case anything goes wrong, everybody on his own.

[People shouting]

Maybe one will survive

and will be able to tell the world.

[g*nf*re continues]

♪

[Train clattering]

♪

[Marching footsteps]

♪

Woman as Hazan: When I would go out to the threshold

of the block, I could see the smoke

rising from the chimneys.

It clouded the skies and choked the air

of the entire camp.

I cast glances toward the smoke-shrouded heavens,

where it seemed I could see the souls of Jewish children,

their mouths gaping to scream.

Yaari: The stories that she told are quite difficult

to tell because she faced such atrocities.

Like...I would start crying if I tell this, so...

♪

I cannot tell that really.

♪

[g*nf*re]

[Explosions]

♪

♪

[Speaking Hebrew]

Berenbaum: Why were the Germans so intent on k*lling

the Jews at that point?

Let's put it very clearly.

The Germans fought two wars,

the World w*r...

and the w*r against the Jews.

When push came to shove, they wanted to succeed

in the w*r against the Jews, even if it took

resources away from the World w*r.

Sawicki: Despite the n*zi regime knows that it

is coming to an end,

the one group that is supposed to pay

the ultimate price will be the Jews.

They're losing,

but "What can we do before we lose?

We will k*ll more Jews."

♪

Berenbaum: When you go to Birkenau, you see that there are

railroad tracks that go into the innermost nature

of the camp.

Those tracks were built in anticipation

of the m*rder of Hungarian Jews.

Hungarian Jews constituted about % of the number

of people who were k*lled in Auschwitz.

That occurred not over years but over months.

♪

There was an entire underground that

distributed these passes, that created these passes.

♪

How important was forging?

It was the difference between life and death.

♪

[Steam hisses]

[Indistinct chatter]

[Train chugging]

Yaari: During the transports of Hungarian Jews,

which came thousands every day.

Every day, , people were sent to the gas chambers,

and the camp of the women bordered with the train ramp,

and when the people from the train were sent

to Crematorium Number II,

which was meters away from the women's camp.

So all these years that she was in Auschwitz,

she was just meters away from of the crematoria

in Birkenau.

Woman as Hazan: I suggested digging a trench

under the barbed wire fence during the nights

through which we would bring young Jewish women into the camp

and save them from the crematory ovens.

Now, today, when you go to Birkenau,

everything is green and nice,

but at that time it was all mud and ditches,

so they made some space under the fence.

Woman as Hazan: Our objective was to smuggle into our camp

some individuals from within this human mass.

When the girls came through, we were overcome with joy.

Yaari: And they bought in from the line

to the gas chambers into the camp

about young girls on several occasions

They brought them into the camp, and they gave them

the dressing of other women who died,

and they hid them for some time.

Woman as Hazan: We didn't succeed in bringing many souls

into our camp.

There were so few opportunities to do so.

However, the little that we did gave us

great satisfaction.

We began to feel a power rising in us,

awakening our will to live.

♪

[Crickets chirping]

♪

Man as Nadjari: Now we must disappear

from the face of the Earth

because we know so much about the unimaginable methods

of their abuses and reprisals.

The dramas my eyes have seen are indescribable.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Hungary

have passed by my eyes,

and why didn't I join them and put an end to it?

But every time, the thirst for revenge stopped me.

♪

Man: Nadjari--we don't really know what motivates

what he puts into his letter

other than he wants to tell the story,

he wants to see revenge,

and that becomes a more compelling notion

than giving up and getting out of the fight.

♪

Man: Each prisoner

in every squad knew exactly what he

was supposed to do and prepared for it.

My job was to set fire to the crematorium building,

where I worked.

Man as Eisenschmidt: The Jews had brought knives to the camp

to make kiddush.

Their original purpose was to slice the challah.

They had the words Le-shabbat kodesh,

for the Holy Sabbath, engraved on them.

They were long and had white handles.

My job was to make them into bayonets

by honing them on all sides.

We produced homemade mines and hand grenades.

We took metal cans of food,

filled them with expl*sives, and put in fuses.

♪

Greif: Between Auschwitz and Birkenau,

there was a big munition factory called Union-Metallwerke,

which many Jewish prisoners worked.

and one brave, Jewish, young prisoner Róza Robota

was years old, had many girlfriends

inside that factory, and when she was asked to

recruit some of the girls to smuggle out

on a daily basis a small amount of gunpowder,

she did not hesitate for a second.

My mother was born in Poland.

Her name was Ada, maiden name Neufeld.

She was one of the sl*ve laborers at the factory.

Smuggling itself wasn't easy because they had

the body searched on exit from the factory

and then on entry to the camp.

My mother told me that she hid it inside her shoe,

and once in camp, she would hand it over to someone else,

and they bring it to Robota.

Róza Robota would then take it and deliver it

to her friend from the Sonderkommando.

♪

Man as Leon: On October , ,

they informed us that the Germans intended to remove

the Sonderkommando men from Crematorium IV.

We knew what that meant.

They were going to m*rder them.

We figured that it was time for action.

[expl*si*n]

Woman: In the distance, we now see billows of smoke burning.

The second crematorium is burning.

Greif: The destruction of Crematoria Number IV,

this is a big achievement.

It never functioned anymore again.

Woman: The sirens began to wail, aggravating the commotion.

What happened?

A revolution? An uprising at the crematorium?

[g*nf*re]

♪

Freund: This is perhaps the single most important site

for the understanding of Jewish resistance

during the Holocaust.

In the most improbable place at Auschwitz,

the Sonderkommandos destroyed a combination

crematorium and gas chambers.

Henry: It was a defiant and wonderful act that

probably saved many thousand lives

because they did, in fact, destroy one of the crematoria.

♪

Greif: The uprising came to its tragic end

with the k*lling, murdering of young, Jewish,

courageous, brave men.

♪

Yaari: On the night of the th of January,

the camp was given the order to be evacuated.

[Footsteps]

♪

Woman as Hazan: We marched at a cadence,

practically running on winding paths.

We didn't know exactly where they were leading us.

We did understand that we were fleeing

from the Russians, heading for Germany.

After the first kilometer, women began to fall.

Whoever found it hard to walk at that quick pace

or who stood to rest was shot right away.

[g*nsh*t]

There were moments of despair when I thought

of asking those escorting us to k*ll me,

but at those same moments, I would see flashes

of rocket barrages in the sky and hear the roar of aircraft,

and these inspired me with the will to live.

[Airplane flying]

So I'm talking now about the th of April.

The Americans was in the process of capturing Leipzig.

My mother stayed behind with the sick prisoners.

The SS are on the way to k*ll them...

♪

and they decided to escape with the sick people,

who could not walk,

and then when it became dark, they actually carried

them by hand.

This was the night between th and th of April.

They saved the lives of about prisoners,

sick prisoners,

and this was my mother's liberation day.

♪

[Cheering]

♪

♪