The following are two speeches developed by Martin Goldman while working as Director of Survivor at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that respond to the erroneous belief that the Jews went like sheep to the slaughter.  They are early versions, of an idea that has been expanded upon and improved over the last couple of years, so more information is available if desired.   (To go directly to second later speech, click here.)

Jewish Resistance And Rescue
Denver Colorado
November 8, 2001

A story is told about two Jews that are about to be shot by the Nazis. As they are lined up against the wall, the Nazi officer asks them if they would like to have blindfolds.  The first one screams, "No" you'll see the hate in my eyes when you shoot me.  The other Jew says "Sshh, don't make trouble."  That's one way people thought the Jews reacted to the Holocaust.

On the other hand, when Abba Kovner, leader of the resistence movement in the Vilna ghetto urged the ghetto inhabitants to resist the Nazis he yelled at them "We will not be led like sheep to slaughter.  True we are weak and helpless but the only response to the murderer is revolt!  Brothers!  It is better to die fighting like free men than to live at the mercy of the murderers.  Arise!  Arise with your last breath!

Those are two images of the Jews during the Holocaust.  Which one is the real one, or are they both real?  As I hope you will see, as much as any other group, and more so than most, Jews did fight back in many ways.

At the time of Krystallnacht the Jewish people were the Jews that I depicted in the joke I opened this presentation with, because at the beginning of the Nazi onslaught, this was primarily the way the Jews reacted.  Remember that until the moment that the Jews started to fight back in the ghettos and the camps and the forests, it had been close to two thousand years since the Jews had fought as Jews to save Jews.  What I mean is that the Jews had been persecuted and expelled and forcibly coverted for centuries, but because they were never a majority, or even a big minority wherever they were, they had developed a defense mechanism of getting out of the way until the crises passed.  Although there are examples of Jews fighting back these were very much the exception rather than the rule.  

Except this time the crises wasn't going to pass.  This time, the enemy wanted them all dead.  This time, they couldn't convert themselves out of the situation, this time, they couldn't flee because no one would have them and for the few that made it to other countries in Europe, because the Nazis would follow them wherever they went.  Persecution in this case meant death, not exile, slavery or poverty.

What I will be talking about is the Abba Kovner Jew, about Jewish resistance and rescue.  I want to tell you about what the Jews did do during the war to rescue themselves and others, and to battle against the Nazis and their collaborators.

I hate to give away my punch line so early in my presentation, but to dispell the theory that the Jews went like sheep to the slaughter, let me summarize some information about Jewish armed resistance.

In the western part of poland there were three armed rebellions, at Warsaw, Czestochowa, and Tarnow.  There were four attempted revolts, at Kielce, Opatow, Pilica and Lubelski.  Many armed Jewish groups left the ghettos and went into the forests to form resistence groups.

There were rebellions in seven concentration camps, including Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.  These rebellions were with one exception the only rebellions that ever took place in any Nazi camp.  There were also numerous Jewish partisan detachments, and others where Jews accounted for over a third of the fighters.  Understand that these Jews that were in combined partisan units were only in the ones that the Soviet Union sponsored and supported.  The other partisan units, made up of Poles independent of the Soviet Union, would not accept any Jews, and if they found one, would turn them over to the Nazis.

I should say something about the conditions that the Jews faced in resisting.  

First, and this is really important, in Eastern Europe there is a long tradition of anti-semitism that transcends everything else.  While the Poles were fighting the Nazis they were also turning the Jews over to the Nazis, killing the Jews themselves, refusing to provide any help to the Jews when the Jews did resist.  The Poles provided no help to the Jews fighting in the Warsaw ghetto.  In fact, they helped capture the Jews that escaped from Warsaw and turned them over to the Nazis.  Do you know what they received for turning in a Jew?  A bit of sugar, or some bread, or a bottle of vodka.

Then there is collective punishment.  When a Jew escaped from the ghetto, or shot a Nazi, or did any other act to antagonize them, the Nazis would kill their family or arbitrarily select a number of people from the area to kill.  When the time came for Abba Kovner and the others to leave the vilna ghetto his mother came and asked him what she should do.  He told her that he didn't know what to say.  He wrote later that from that point on in his life he wasn't really certain if he was a great partisan fighter or a faithless son.

There was the overwhelming firepower of the Nazi army.  Poland fell in a few weeks, much of western Europe almost without a fight.  In France it took about a month and a half.  As an aside, the men and women of the Warsaw ghetto stood up to the Nazis longer than most European countries.   What can we expect of the unarmed Jews who, in most cases, the most notable exception being denmark, didn't have any support from the rest of the country.

And the Nazis also segregated the Jews from the rest of the population into ghettos and camps, so that even if they wanted to blend in with the rest of the populace they could not because they were forced to live apart.   Even if there were a gentile willing to help, and there were many that would, the segregation kept them from doing much.

But perhaps the most insidious of all the things the Nazis did to keep the Jews in line was the lying about what was happening to the people who were being transported.  Everyone was told that they were going to the east to work or to farm and theat the rest of their family would be joining them.  The early deportees were given postcards to send back to their relatives to say that they were safe, secure and happy.  And then they were taken to the ovens.  Even when reports started coming back about what was really happening to the deportees, the Jews wanted to believe that no one could be that bad and do the evil things that were being reported.

There was a lot to prevent the Jews from fighting back.  But they did fight back.  They fought back and they did resist.

As you know, Yad Vashem recognizes more than 18,000 non Jews that resisted the Nazis to save Jews.  These were wonderful people who risked not only their own life, but also the lives of their family to save Jews.  If only more non Jews had been willing to take that risk.  Yad Vashem nor any other institution have similarly officially recognized the many more thousands of Jews, one at a time or as a group that resisted the Nazis and rescued other Jews by taking care of them and/or smuggling them out of the country.   But that is about to change, I hope.  Recently in Israel an organization has formed called the action committee for recognition of Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.  I don't know what the acronym is in hebrew, but I call them Jewish Holocaust heroes.  Representatives and supporters from Jewish Holocaust heroes are organizing to properly recognize these incredible people.  We are hoping that at some point, in some place, the Jewish heroes of the Holocaust will be officially recognized and their names enshrined.

But who were they and how did they resist?  They resisted in many different ways.  If people didn't know before, as of last weekend they know about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, about the handful of young Jewish men and women that held the Nazis off for over a month.  But did you know that other forms of resistance occurred in the Warsaw ghetto.  Take education as an example.  Education of any kind was forbidden in the Warsaw ghetto.   But it took place anyway when all over the ghetto small groups of pupils would meet at the homes of their teachers or at the soup kitchen.  This happened in other ghettos as well.  

What about prayer?  According to Emanuel Ringleblum, the historian of the Warsaw ghetto, in Warsaw alone there were over 600 illegal groups of Jews that prayed every day, three times a day.  And they also came together each day to study.  Within the cellars of the Warsaw ghetto, down the alley way, through house after house, Jews would meet every day to study the Talmud and discuss crucial issues of Jewish law.  They knew the reality, but for the hours they were studying the Nazis didn't exist.  Was this not a form of resistance, a spiritual resistance?  What about the archives created and stored in Warsaw, in Kovno and in other ghettos? Archives that recorded what was happening daily in the ghettos.  These archives were buried and many were retrieved after the Holocaust.

And the underground newspapers and illegal radios that were used to inform the poplulace as to what was going on.  And the mostly youngsters that had to smuggle themselves out of the ghetto to find food and occaisionally arms to bring back to the ghetto.  Young children like my friend Erika who was living in one of the ghettos in Romania.  Her job was to sneak out of the ghetto and bring back food.  Because she was blonde with blue eyes, once she got through a hole in the wall around the ghetto, she was able to pass as gentile.  Once, on the way back she caught the attention of a Nazi who decided to walk her home.  If she took the Nazi to the ghetto her family and others would be killed.  Erika took the Nazi to a very large and well known house, owned by a woman who was a famous opera singer but had never before laid eyes on Erika.  The Nazi rang the bell and when the woman came to the door, asked her "is this your daughter?"  The woman never replied, but grabbed Erika and began shaking her and smacking her and screaming "Where have you been.  You were only supposed to be away for a short while.  What a miserable girl you are," etc.  The Nazi left Erika there and the opera singer sent her on her way with a bag filled with food.  What Erika did was also resistance.

What about resistance to being dehumanized?  Kosow is a small town in Eastern Galicia and like most ghettos had a self government appointed by the Nazis, known as a judenrat.  On Passover 1942, the Gestapo announced it would come into the ghetto.  The judenrat believed that this was the signal for the liquidation of the ghetto and told all the Jews to run away or hide.  Of the twenty four judenrat members four decided to meet the Nazis and offer themselves as sacrificial victims to deflect the wrath of the enemy.  With the ghetto empty and silent, the four men sat and waited for their executioners.  While they waited, one of them had second thoughts.   The others told him to go and hide.  The three men of Kosow prepared to meet the Nazis on Passover of 1942.  Was their act of defiance any less important than firing a gun?

What about Tuvia Bielski?  In western Belorussia, in summer of 1942, a Jewish partisan group known as the Bielski partisans was established.   Prior to that, in december of 1941 the Nazis murdered thousands of Jews in western Belorussia, including four members of the Bielski family; his mother, father and two brothers.  Four brothers survived and they, along with 13 other Jews fled into the forest.  Tuvia the leader sent a note to their ghetto inviting as many people as possible to join him.  Only eight showed up.  But over the next two years the group grew to over 1,000 as more Jews fled to the forests rather than report for deportation.  Tuvia never turned away any Jew, whether armed or unarmed, young or old, healthy or in need of medical assistance.  Not only did the Bielski partisans take in all Jews that reached them, they also sent special messengers into as many ghettos as they could to rescue Jews and bring them to the forest.  This was dangerous because the group couldn't move fast with so many people, especially the large number of those that were unarmed, weak or sick, but Tuvia insisted that resistance and rescue must go hand in hand, so that when the war ended in Belorussia in the summer of 1944 over 1,200 men, women and children emerged from the forest.  

And rescue?  Let me tell you about an organization called the Oeuvre des Secours Aux Enfants, or the Ose.  Ose, a Jewish organization was founded in 1912 in Tsarist Russia to provide medical care to destitute Jews.  By the 1930's it had moved first to Berlin and, with the rise of Hitler, to France.  In France, in the late 1930's, the Ose found themselves dealing increasingly with the social problems of Jewish children.  When refugees began to arrive from countries coming under Nazi domination the Ose bought or leased large houses around Paris in which to shelter some of the newly arrived children.  They established group homes supervised by adults and they raised the money to recruit social workers, educators, cooks and other personnel to provide as normal a life for the children as was possible.

When the war began and France collapsed, Ose quickly moved the children's homes out of the Nazi occupied part of France into southern unoccupied France, the so called Vichy France.  Large homes for children were opened by their by the Ose.  The Ose didn't just take care of the children that were part of their homes.  The Ose went out looking for additional Jewish children to help.  They were able to gain entry to the French detention camps that were jammed with deportees from Germany and foreignors arrested by the Nazis.  The Ose people persuaded the authorities to release the children, but the biggest job for the social workers was to persuade the parents that it was safe to hand over their children to these total strangers.   As you can well imagine, this was a difficult job.  A survivor friend of mine, Sylvia, remembers being a small child in a French detention camp and being rescued by the Ose.  Sylvia tells of seeing the French police on one side saying to her mother, "bring her along, you are only being resettled in a better place" and on the other side the Ose worker telling her mother that they will take good care of Sylvia and her sister.  The trucks were being filled and at the very last moment her mother decided to give Sylvia to the Ose.  Sylvia said she screamed for her mother for hours and cried for days.  For a very long time Sylvia hated her mother, even though she knows what her fate would have been had she accompanied her mother.  All of those that were left in the detention camps were turned over to the Nazis for transport and very few survived, especially the children.  The Ose saved over 7,000 children.  Very few of the children under the Ose's care were lost.  

But the greatest test to Ose happened in november 1942 when, in response to the allied landings in north Africa, Vichy France was overrun by the Nazis.  

The Ose responded to this danger by closing the homes and dispersing the children into safe locations.  The older and foreign born children, those speaking French badly or possessing pronounced Jewish features were hidden first because they were the most vulnerable.  The Ose networks made use of whatever assistance they could get from those few French authorities that were sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish children and willing to take a risk.  The Catholic and Protestant churches and the French resistance were also enlisted whenever possible.  Many of the girls found homes in the convents and other children were placed with farmers or hidden with families or boarding schools in inconspicuous places.  An Ose network smuggled hundreds of children into neutral countries, particularly switzerland.  

All of this was not as easy as it sounds.  False documents had to be secured, ration cards were needed, records had to be kept and hidden that would record which child was placed where because it was vital for the Ose to remember the true identities of the young children being held under assumed names.  These documents were encrypted and then smuggled to switzerland and out of the reach of the Nazis so that after the war the parents that came back could be reunited with their children.  

Rescue work such as this went on all over Europe.  William Perl, a Jewish lawyer in Vienna began a rescue operation in 1937 with a sailboat and continued saving Jews for five years.  He reportedly sent thousands of refugees in boats to Palestine.  A story that can be seen as apocraphyl, exists about a meeting between Perl and Adolf Eichman.  Eichmann accused perl of harboring Jews and perl's response was that he was doing Hitler's will of ridding Europe of all it's Jews.  He was allowed to continue and was even given special authority to exchange currency.  Perl said that the most painful part of his work was selecting which potential evacuee was the fittest and therefore the best to take.

In Spain Moses Amzalak obtained permission for refugees to go to Portugal.  Until 1942 he was able to save thousands of Jews by smuggling them out of the country.  

In Lithuania Malka Fugatzki, a Jewish woman with no previous history of resistance, rescued children from the Kovno ghetto.  Her method was to give the child a sleeping pill and then to tie the child to her body.  The Jewish guard at the gate allowed her to leave and she went to the director of a Lithuanian orphan home that took in the children.  She was able to rescue 17 children that way.

In Romania in 1940 Ehud Avriel smuggled himself into Vienna and smuggled out 600 Jews to Romania and then to Palestine.

In Belgium there were 20,000 Jews that survived due to Solidarite, a Jewish organization that found hiding places and got documents for them.

During the war in Bulgaria, hundreds if not thousands of Jews were smuggled out of the country by Jewish groups and sent to Palestine.

Even in Greece, where the Jewish population was decimated, there were acts of resistance.  For instance the Chief Rabbi of Greece, Israel Barzilai was ordered by the Nazis to supply them with a list of all the Jews in Athens.  He asked for three days to compile the list but instead used that time to destroy the records, leave the city and join the underground.

Did the Jews go like sheep to the slaughter or did they fight back at least as well as the non Jews?  I'll leave it to you to decide.  When you are deciding think about the women that smuggled gunpowder into Birkenau and enabled the cremetoria to be blown up; and the residents of the Niewiec ghetto in eastern Poland that resisted deportation with knives, axes, clubs, and a handful of firearms; and the residents of Lachva Belorussia that fought back against the Nazis when they tried to slaughter them.  Seven hundred Jews were killed, but so were scores of better armed Nazis; or the Jews in Tuczyn in the Ukraine that set fire to ghetto buildings rather than reporting for deportation.  About 2,000 of them escaped to the forests.

Did the Jews go to the slaughter like sheep?  You decide.

Phillidelphia Scholars Conference 3/6/05
Martin Goldman, Director, Survivor Affairs

As a part of his narrative paradigm, renowned rhetorician Walter Fisher famously posited that all humans are essentially storytellers and all human communications is a set of stories.  He argued that people do not make their decisions on the basis of arguments (as previously supposed) but on the basis of "good reasons", which are determined by history, biography, culture, and individual character.  In fact, Fisher claimed, the world itself is a set of stories from which we choose and re-choose to constantly re-create and structure our lives and reality.  

Into this world of stories, we must locate the master narrative by which society understands the Jewish response to the Holocaust.  Consider the following two stories that exist on the topic:

One story is told about two Jews that are about to be shot by the Nazis.   As they are lined up against the wall, the Nazi officer asks them if they would like to have their blindfolds removed.  The first one screams, "No.   You'll see the hate in my eyes when you shoot me".  The other one says, "Sshh, don't make trouble." This is one way people thought that Jews reacted to the Holocaust.

The second story is the story of Abba Kovner.  By contrast to the first story, when Abba Kovner, leader of the resistance movement in the Vilna ghetto, urged the ghetto inhabitants to resist the Nazis, he yelled at them, "We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter.  True, we are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murderer is revolt! Brothers!  It is better to die fighting like free men than to live at the mercy of the murderers.  Arise!  Arise with your last breath!"

Clearly, these stories paint very different images of the Jewish response to the Holocaust.  Sadly, it is likely that even among the educated the latter story is, at the very least, surprising.  It is unexpected, and there may even be a tendency to dismiss it as an exception, as a historical fluke.

Society already has an established master narrative through which it understands the Jewish response to the Holocaust.  That narrative is akin to the first story I told.  The story we use to understand the Jewish response is a story of passivity and a story of victimhood.  In this narrative, society makes Jews pathetic and views them metaphorically-as Kovner accurately captured-"like sheep going to the slaughter".  Several cultural assumptions and stereotypes about the Jewish people are implicit in this narrative even if they are not consciously recognized.  The narrative relies upon a diminished sense of agency for Jews.  Jews are weak.  Jews are willing to accept their own destruction.  These assumptions are culturally affirmed by society's willingness to privledge the narrative contained in the first story as the master narrative concerning the Jewish response to the Holocaust.

Yet, Abba Kovner's story is an equally valid narrative.  Moreover, it is not an isolated incident.  There were hundreds of Jewish rescuers and thousands of acts of self-rescue by Jews during the Holocaust, but because we privledge the first narrative, these stories have been slighted and go untold.  Through my work to recognize Jews who rescued other Jews during the Holocaust, I seek to challenge the historical assumptions that underpin the victim narrative.  Essentially, I intend to deconstruct the predominant cultural narrative concerning the Jewish response to the Holocaust by examining the concept of Jewish rescue.  In doing so, the structure of this speech is bifurcated into two distinct sections: (1) we will explore the concept of "Jewish rescue" including its historical contextualization and the social factors that stood to inhibit it, and (2) we will analyze the movement to acknowledge Jews who rescued other Jews including how it came about, where things stand now, and the future implications of the movement.

An insidious assumption within much conversation about the Holocaust is that the Jews did not fight back, and that any other social or ethnic group placed in the position of the Jews during the Holocaust would have fought viciously to preserve the livelihood of their race.  While thousands of speculations about what other ethnic groups would have done are possible, it is necessary to consider the complexity of the Jewish reaction to the Shoah within its greater historical context as well as the social conditions in the late 1930's and early 40's that may have influenced the form of Jewish response.

To begin, it is imperative to be able to situate the Shoah within a larger history of Jewish flight and diaspora.  Tragically, anti-Semitism has been a consistent feature in world history, and the Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years.  Historically, the Jewish response to this persecution has been acquiescence rather than resistance.  Never really constituting a majority in any country, Jews were more likely to flee than to fight.   As a result, Jews had developed a habit of simply "getting out of the way" and avoiding their persecutors.  However, this paradigm and defense mechanism quickly became infeasible during the rise of Nazi Germany.   Avoidance would not work, and the Nazi's left them little or no opportunity to flee as the Holocaust progressed.  In this situation, "flight" was not an option.  The choice became resist or die.

Several immediate social conditions existed both in Germany and other European nations during the Holocaust, which stood to make Jewish rescue unlikely or, at the least, exceedingly difficult.  First, there was the virulent anti-Semitism that I alluded to earlier.  This long tradition transcended all else.  Consider for example that while the Poles were fighting the Nazis they were also turning the Jews over to the Nazis, killing the Jews themselves, and refusing the help the Jews when the Jews finally did revolt.  In fact, the Poles were even rewarded for working against the Jews.  For turning in a Jew, an individual could be rewarded with a bit of sugar, some bread, or a bottle of vodka.

Secondly, the Jews were aware that they faced the prospect of collective punishment for any kind of digression.  When a Jew escaped from the ghetto or shot a Nazi, the Nazis would kill their family or arbitrarily select a number of people from the area to kill in retribution.  Thirdly, the German military strength was well known to the Jews.  Poland fell in a few weeks, France in a month and a half.  Much of western Europe fell to Nazi control almost without a fight.  The Jews were aware of the strength of their enemy.  Fourthly, segregation inhibited the ability of Jews to both work with other Jews and to collaborate with gentiles in any kind of rescue endeavors.  Finally, it must not be forgotten that the Jews were intentionally deluded and misled about their fate.  The Germans diligently worked to perpetuate the myth of "deportation to the east".   Early deportees were often given postcards to send back to their relatives to say that there were safe, secure, and happy-right before they were sent to the ovens.  This myth rhetorically functioned to stymie the urge to rebel and rescue that would have been natural in situations when a group realizes their future is in peril.  Each of these five factors worked against the inclination toward self-rescue and collectively created an atmosphere were wide spread Jewish rescue was nearly impossible.

Nearly impossible, but not totally impossible; for several incidences of Jewish rescue did occur.  On one level, we can look at organized response and the work of Jewish rescue organizations.  In Bulgaria, there was the solidarite.  Thousand Jews survived due to solidarite, a Jewish organization that found hiding places and got documents for them.  During the war in Bulgaria thousands of Jews were smuggled out of the country by Jewish groups and sent to Palestine.  In France, there was the oeuvre des secours aux enfants or the Ose.  The Ose was a Jewish organization, founded in 1912, that, during the 1930's, began to deal increasingly with the social problems of Jewish children.  As the state of affairs for Jews in Europe worsened, the Ose bought or leased large houses around Paris to shelter newly arrived refugee children.  Throughout the course of the war, the Ose saved over 7,000 children, loosing very few under their care.  In Holland, there was the Jewish council in Enschede.  The leaders of the Jewish council in Enschede, against the advice of the Jewish council in Amsterdam, began urging members of their community to blatantly resist the orders of the Germans to go to "deportation in the east" and instead go into hiding.  Because they had financial and other resources to aid their community members, at the end of the war, Enschede lost fewer of their members than the general Jewish population in the netherlands.  Five hundred Jews were saved.

On a second level, there were individual rescuers.  Their stories are many and varied.  There are stories like Malka Fugtazki of Lithuania.  Malka, a Jewish woman with no previous history of resistance, rescued children from the Kovno ghetto.  She would give a child a sleeping pill and then tie the child to her body.  The Jewish guard at the gate would allow her to leave, and she would go to the director of a Lithuanian orphan home that took in the children.  Malka was able to rescue seventeen children that way.  

There are stories like William Perl.  Perl, a Jewish lawyer in the Vienna, began a rescue operation in 1937 with a sailboat and continued saving Jews for five years.  He reportedly sent thousands of refugees in boats to Palestine.  A story that can be seen as apocryphal exists about a meeting between Perl and Adolf Eichman.  Eichman accused Perl of smuggling Jews out of Austria.  Perl responded by saying that he was doing Hitler's will of ridding Europe of all its Jews.  He was allowed to continue and was even given special authority to exchange currency.  Perl said that the most painful part of his work was selecting which potential evacuee was the fittest and therefore the best to take.

There are the stories of Mussa Abadi and Odette Rosenstock.  Mussa and Odette began their rescue efforts in France by picking up Jewish children whose parents had already been deported.  With help from the bishop of Nice, they would look for safe hiding places for the children, obtaining false identification cards and forged baptismal certificates for some.   Through these actions, the "marcel" network-as they came to be called-was able to save the lives of more than 500 children.  These few stories concerning the rescue of work of individual Jews and Jewish organizations are only a sampling of the diverse array of stories of Jewish self-rescue; each standing in contrast to the dominant narrative of the Jewish victim.

As knowledge of these stories and stories like them begin to circulate, there has been a growing movement to seek recognition for these Jewish rescuers and promulgate alternative narratives of Jewish response.  Traditionally, it has only been the gentiles who have been recognized for their rescue work during the Holocaust.  Yad Vashem currently recognizes more than 19,000 non-Jews for their endeavors to save Jews from the hands of the Nazis.   It is indisputable that these people are wonderful, courageous, humane individuals, who no doubt understood what they risked and yet proceeded to place their lives-and the lives and well-being of their families-at risk for the sake of another.   For their efforts, history will forever remember their names.  

Yet, for years, Jewish stories have been omitted from acknowledged rescue narratives, and acts of Jewish rescue go unrecognized.  In "the famous kindertransport, Gertude Wijsmuller took more than 10,000 Jewish children from Germany and Austria to England where they survived the war." Gertude Wijsmuller was honored for her brave work and was conferred upon the title of "righteous gentile" by Yad Vashem, but her Jewish counterparts were never recognized.  Similarly, 300 Jews were rescued from Nieuwlande, Holland by three brave Netherlanders, but only Johannes Post and Arnold Douwes are recognized as righteous gentiles.  The third, a Jew named Max Nico Leons, was not.  Max's name is not enshrined on the same stone has Johannes's or Arnold's despite the fact that he risked his life for years, just as did the others.  This tradition in Holocaust scholarship has rendered the Jews metaphorically invisible.  

This rhetorical invisibility and gap in acknowledgement can be seen as created by a variety of forces in scholarship and academia.  The first is that the concept of Jewish rescue is incompatible with the dominant social narrative concerning Jewish response.  The first story I opened the speech with is easier to accept because it fits with our social predisposition to see the Jewish response to the Holocaust as passive acquiescence or hostility.  The Abba Kovner story can been seen as jarring or surprising because it is difficult to incorporate into the dominant social narrative.   The stories of Malka Fugtazki.   William Perl and Moussa Abadi and Oddette Rosenstock conflict with what many have already learned about the Jewish reaction to the Holocaust.  The deep entrenchment of the victim narrative complicates the ability to accept stories of Jewish self rescue.

The second reason for invisibility is simply a failure of the imagination on behalf of scholars and historians.  Renowned Holocaust historian, Nechama Tec once remarked, "while there were Jews who selflessly rescued others, as a subject of systemic study, they have remained unnoticed.   Why had I overlooked the rescue of Jews by Jews?   Did I think that self-preservation, a basic drive would take precedence over everything else?   Historically, Jews have been viewed as victims and not as rescuers, not as heroes.  Had I unconsciously assimilated these perceptions?   Had I assumed that victim and rescuer were incompatible role[s]?  " Scholars and historians replicated the problems of the incompatibility of the narratives by failing to envision Jewish self-rescue as a respectable category or area of study.

Currently, we stand a juncture of history in which these trends in scholarship are finally being reversed.  There has been an emerging effort within Holocaust scholarship and the academic community at large to recognize these unsung Jewish heroes.  Our goal and mission is to publish the names of these individuals, and to attempt to achieve for them the acknowledgement and recognition that they deserve for their bravery and effort.  In Israel, an organization, of which I am a part, has formed called "the committee for recognizing the heroism of Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust".  The committee consists of volunteers-many of who are Holocaust survivors and rescuers.   Yad Vashem has also decided to get involved in revealing the work of Jewish rescuers.  

In my office, for years now, I have had a series of individuals working part time on this subject.  They have been reading books searching for new names, translating documents that might be able to elucidate unknown aspects of a rescuer's story, and organizing and assessing holes in the existing scholarship on Jews who rescue Jews.  Thus far, all of this has culminated in the discovery of hundreds of individuals that can be designated as Jews who rescued Jews.  Additionally, through their research, we have generated a list of more than six hundred additional names of potential rescuers.  We have come a long way, but there is still work to do.

As the Holocaust recedes in our cultural memory with the passage of time, we must make new strides in the near future to spread the names and stories of these Jewish rescuers and cement their legacies within public consciousness.   The next steps are clear.  In our office, we plan to trace the names that we have, note the appearance of these individuals in the stories of others, and attempt to piece together the details of their experience in order to discover and appropriately recognize additional Jews who have rescued other Jews during the Holocaust.  Though we have recovered many names, we will not settle for a partial or incomplete recollection of Jews who have rescued other Jews.  We plan to devote our attention to what else can be done to remedy the conspicuous absences in our study of the Jewish response to Holocaust.  

On a more global scale, the next clear goal is to push for a more comprehensive Holocaust education program that includes the topic of Jewish rescue and does not mirror the traditional invisibility of this subject within scholarship.   We are gradually passing from what many term the age of witness into the age of memory.  Without any survivors, the way in which we transmit the cultural legacy of the Shoah through Holocaust education becomes of utmost importance.  We must ensure that Holocaust education includes attention to Jewish rescue and resistance.  It is for this reason that I am particularly proud to be at events like this one.  It is through speaking engagements and written papers that the alternative narrative of the Jewish response-the story of Jewish self-rescue-is propagated.  Having heard these stories now, it is my hope that each of you will help in the deconstruction of the social myth that tells society the only response of the Jewish people to the Holocaust was acceptance of their own destruction.

Though the task is a worthy one, there are several factors that stand to complicate this agenda.  One is the fragmentation of the current approach.   No institution has yet taken on the role of being the central source for the collection of information or study of Jews who rescue Jews in the way that Yad Vashem has done for the righteous among nations.  Until then, our work will continue to be sporadic and uncoordinated.  Secondly, there are definitional problems which problematize the advancement of our study.   As simply surviving each day of the Holocaust can be seen as miraculous, it is often difficult to classify what kinds of activities constitute "rescue" or "resistance".  Does rescue necessarily mean helping someone escape from a camp?   Or can it mean giving food to someone who is on the verge of dying from starvation?   Does resistance mean staging a rebellion or can it mean engaging in activities like prayer or education that were forbidden by the Nazis?   Without clear answers to these questions, we cannot engage in a shared dialogue on this topic.   Finally, on a pragmatic level, we must consider funding.  Most institutions cannot continue to pursue this endeavor without the financial resources to sustain their efforts.  For these studies to continue, there needs to some sort of fiscal support.  Otherwise, these three problems may stymie our efforts to obtain for these Jewish rescuers the recognition and honor they deserve.

Yet, we must not be deterred as the social implications and impact of our work testify to the worthiness of this movement.  Aside from merely seeking acknowledgement for individuals, this effort has larger ramifications in the fights against cultural stereotyping.  As I explained earlier, the dominant social narrative regarding the Jewish response to the Holocaust contains within it implicit stereotypes and assumptions about the nature of the Jewish people.  Accepting this narrative as the unchallenged master narrative of the Jewish response is equavilent to confirming the stereotypes contained within it.  The myth of passivity contained in the dominant narrative is just another myth about the Jewish people which we seek to dispel.   By propagating an alternative narrative, we seek to combat this process of stereotyping and encourage people to critically assess the assumptions that structure dominant historical narratives.  

Secondly, this project is revolutionary as it challenges our traditional belief about who gets to write history.  One of the common tropes in academia is that history is written by "winners"; history is written by the powerful.  The Jews were hardly the "winners" in World War II, but in this capacity we get to tell our story beyond stories of being victims, stories of suffering, stories of despondency.  This is history rewritten to include the diversity of Jewish experiences.  This is history which includes the simultaneous possibility of the victim-resister, the victim-rescuer, the victim-hero.  There is a sense of empowerment here that is unmistakable.  It is the empowerment given to people to exercise some control over the record of their past, and the stories that are told about them in the future.

Finally, the project benefits academia as a whole as it results in a diversification of stories that compose general category of "world history".  The current situation in Holocaust education is tantamount to the scholastic imperialism of the "Jewish victim" narrative as it is often the only narrative taught as the Jewish response.  This one-sidedness is incredibility destructive within the academic climate.   It fosters a dangerous scholastic atmosphere in which one story is so dominant that it runs the risk of being conflated with the "objective truth".  Clearly, a diversification of narratives is called for in this situation.  Each of these reasons co-exist among thousands of others that lend support to the process of deconstructing the master narrative of passivity.

The Jewish response to the Holocaust was more than acceptance of death or resignation that the dominant social narrative would prescribe.  The topic of the Jewish response includes stories of resistance and stories of rescue; stories of feats large and small.  Despite a history of flight or accommodation, the Holocaust provided the historical impetus to act, and action was taken.  From organized group operations to the work of individuals rescuers, the stories of Jews who rescued Jews are both numerous and diverse.   Now, we have embarked on a mission to recognize these individuals for their heroism.  With tribute already paid to the righteous gentiles, we want to obtain that same acclaim for these Jewish unsung heroes.  We have made great strides in this effort so far, and we must continue to try to obtain acclaim for these individuals equal to that of the righteous gentiles.  Our mission is clear, and our path evident.  Despite the problems that may hinder our progress, we will overcome these challenges and tell their stories to the world.  The master narrative of the Holocaust will be deconstructed through our efforts to promulgate stories of Jewish response.   These efforts are not merely an act of choice.  It is an obligation we owe as members of the human race to those who acted so selflessly to help sustain it.  As Walter Fischer contended we can restructure our reality by the choices we make in the narratives we accept, we each have the power to promote the narrative of Jewish self-rescue.