Very briefly I want to say something about the Jews. Well, it was unprepared. That is in the 1939, 1941 period, the Soviet regime did not play up that the Nazis, the Germans have a particular policy toward Jews, they were allies. I mentioned that in 1939, some Jews actually moved from Soviet occupied territories to German occupied territories. Thinking of the German's afterall. [FOREIGN] Culture Nation, so at the offset was easy picking and then once it became clear as many escaped as possible moving to the East and people who were left behind were unescapable. Old people who were more difficult to move and consequently, the Germans, the Nazis, at the outset killed more women than men. The men were more likely to serve in the red army. The men were more likely to work somewhere else. And so, it was easier to kill women and old people and children than actually killing men. All right, so we are back again, this difficult question of resistance. What were the forms of resistance? It seems to me, one can talk about three different forms. One, ghetto rising. In here, we already talked briefly, about the Warsaw rising, which is very significant. Where indeed the fighting went on for a remarkably long time and as Mary mentioned, this was the first moment in April 1943 that an actual anti-German rising. Took place anywhere. And I, of course, mentioned that the Germans lost 16 people in the Warsaw of this rising. Well, I mean, this takes away nothing of the heroism of the people who took weapons, at the time, and the success of the venture seems so remote. And also the behaviour of the Jewish leadership. That the Jewish leadership nowhere took leading position in these affairs but on the contrary, they regarded this as something counterproductive and opposed it. There were also smaller scale rising for example in Belestoke where they actually took some degree of fighting. The most significant form is the Jewish participation in the partisan movement. Well, unquestionably, Jews were every bit as heroic as every other nation. The problem was that they were not well positioned. What I have in mind is that the partisan became a major and significant affair only at the time when there was a hope for success. That is 1943-1944 by which times most Jews were already dead. Second, Jews, city dwellers, be it small city or shtetel or what not, were not particularly well-trained, well-positioned to escape in the forests and which after all, which was the refuge of the partisans. And thirdly and perhaps most significantly, the surrounding populations, which really essential for even the smallest degree of success for the partisans, was not there. That is, the support from the surrounding population for jewish partisans was very iffy. Actually, it was somewhat greater, somewhat better beyond the east of the old Soviet border then in the case of Poland and the Baltic states, where the population did not support the Jews. Again, these matters were discussed at the highest level. What I have in mind is that the Polish leadership in London, the Polish government in London, and the Polish home army, namely The Polish resistance to the Nazi's. This caused to an extent they can or they should support Jews in Barcelona or anywhere else by providing them with methods and the response to this contradictory yes and no. On the one hand, resistance of Germans, of course on the other, the Polish government in exile and the leadership of the whole army foresaw that the Jews would support the Bolsheviks and the coming of the Red Army. And therefore, they were very reluctant to support. So what are we to say about the Jewish resistance? It seems to be self evident, that the Jews were every bit as heroic. And the idea that 2,000 years of behaviour in the past was really irrelevant in explaining their behaviour and motivation. But what we must remember is that the opportunities were not there, that there was nothing particular, nothing specific about the Jewish resistance or lack of it. >> I think Peter has sketched the difficulties of the situation for the Jews. And before I comment on that however, I wanna say something about the Nazi murderers. And he pointed us to the ways in which they were acting out of their ideology and they were motivated by abstractions. The abstractions of the Jews are our misfortune that they had repeated to them. >> 19th Century Treitschke. >> Right, from the 19th Century on as part of their propaganda and the Nazis revved up that propaganda. Then there was the whole thing about the notion, which as Michael Saylor was suggesting, that you defined people as having lives not worth living another of their abstractions. He quoted Himmler, and that's key because the Nazis, Himmler, does not talk about recognizing the victims. He's only talking about how important the Nazi work is and you can't talk about it. This is part of what Hannah Arendt found when she listened to Eichmann during the trial, that Eichmann's ability to think about anybody else was very limited. He could only think about himself and this was part of his we could call it sentimentality, his self-absorption. The other great attack on Russia happened as part of the French Revolution and we have brilliant materials from that. And we have in War and Peace, by Tolstoy, a great moment when the Russians and the French are fighting. And the French at one moment, have taken Russian prisoners and the standard thing you do with them is you kill them. And Tolstoy has a French officer look at and see whom he's about to kill. He looks him in the eye, and this is a key moment in acknowledging that the thing you're about to kill is not an alien or a different species, but that person is like you. So, you see a reflection of yourself you have to acknowledge, you're in the same species. Go back to Primo Levi, who says that the guy who said, let's see if any Jews no chemistry, looked at Jews as if they were in an aquarium as if they were a different species. Go to Schindler, Schindler looks at these people and he sees human beings. Other people with whom you can talk, have a cigarette, have sex, have fun, Amon Goeth, in Schindler's List, he doesn't see these as people who are of the same species, he doesn't look out at them. So what opportunities could the Jews have to resist? When they were able to go to the forest, and Michael Thaler had that experience in his youth. He doesn't talk about it much, but he will if you find him and take him aside. >> Then you cannot stop him. >> You have to understand that when they did become part of partisan units, since their leaders were not particularly interested in them, they would get sent, the Jews would get sent, on the suicide missions. They would get very little in the way of guns and weapons. Because of this, Primo Levi after the war, spent time interviewing survivors and he learned Yiddish so he could talk to them. Italian Jews don't know Yiddish. He learned Yiddish, and he wrote a novel based on those interviews called, If Not Now, When, about a major Partisan Jewish group run by Jews who fought their way through Europe, and eventually ended up in Italy as a unit. You have to remember that there were Jews from the land of Israel who had joined the allied armies and some of them managed to fight in Europe. And they also sent people ahead to make contact with these Jewish communities. But once people knew what was happening, with the murder the mass murders of the Jews. There was this huge problem and the Jews organized, and as Peter says, the Udarata, the Jewish leaders of these groups, thought that they could accommodate the German demands and some of them would survive. And we have the case Rivka Lipshitz's diary, the head of. Since he said we will make ourselves useful. We will not be lies, we're unworthy of living. We will make ourselves useful to the Nazi war effort so Woods produced the uniforms for all the Nazis. His bet was if he would give up the old people and the children and keep the abled body workers, they would survive, some of them would survive. In time to be liberated and we have to ask, was he right? Was this anything of a gain they could win or was everything stacked against them? We do know, in a great irony that the first major clothing company in the land of Israel was founded by two survivors from Woods and they called it. Still there, still makes clothing in Israel as a company and. >> Not for the German army. Not for the German army. So, all of this keeps playing out in terms of how do your respond to this zero sum game? To this worse than zero sum, to the zero possibilities. And in all of this, I keep going back to yes, Vilna, the [INAUDIBLE]. There were even some revolts in the extermination camps. >> Yes, I was >> Peter will talk about those. >> Sobibor and other places. >> Treblinka. >> Treblinka, but in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Jews of Warsaw, who were reluctantly given some weapons by the Poles smuggled in held off the Nazi army longer than the Polish army did, or the French army. Now, only 19 Nazis kill but they held them off, they held off a whole division. They had to be burned out of Warsaw. These are horrible possibilities, including the terrible possibilities, that your neighbors will take pleasure in getting rid of you. And, here too, the ways in which the war unleashed, what I call, the eroticization of violence, what Peter described in Lithuania. You know, not only do you kill them, you get applauded for killing them. Then you play the accordion, and everybody joins in singing the Lithuanian national anthem.
