The Story of an Underground

The great historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg famously argued that, in the face of their destruction, the Jews offered almost no resistance. “On a European-wide scale,” he wrote, “the Jews had no resistance organization, no blueprint for armed action.” The perpetrators consequently lost no more than a few hundred men during the course of their murder of millions.1 Hilberg attributed Jewish behavior during the Shoah to the established Jewish tradition of petitioning local authorities for relief in difficult situations. Although it would be impossible to deny Hilberg's numbers, his explanation of Jewish behavior is questionable. It is fair to say that most historians of the topic would not agree with Hilberg's early formulation. Jewish behavior at the time of the great atrocity cannot be explained by centuries of Jewish history and tradition, especially when we consider that other groups in similar circumstances under the Nazis reacted in the same way. To the undeniable fact that Jews succeeded in harming the Nazi murder machine only to a very small extent, the answer must be that the opportunities were not there. Jews could have done no more than what in fact they did. They were no less courageous than any other group placed in comparable circumstances

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