Jewish Resistance Fighters in WWII

* The story of Holocaust survivors (“What if History Suffers Amnesia?” Sept. 29) was an important and moving piece.

As a scholar who is studying resistance, I have interviewed and am interviewing former Jewish resistance fighters. Their stories were not so welcome. Their stories are still often not welcome today. In fact, most Jewish and Gentile Americans are completely unaware of the degree of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust.

As many as 60,000 Jews joined partisan units (including wholly Jewish units) to fight the Nazis. There were also Jewish underground activities and ghetto fighting organizations. Sobibor and Treblinka were shut down by Jewish rebellions, and revolts occurred in at least three other death camps and a dozen concentration camps. There were underground movements and revolts in at least 20 ghettos.

A few of the more well-known heroes of Jewish resistance include: Vitka Kempner, who engaged in the first act of armed resistance to occur in Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania), in May 1942; Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky, who was a Red Army officer captured by the Germans. He and other Soviet Jewish soldiers were transferred to the death camp of Sobibor in September 1943, where he helped plan and lead the escape that took place that October; 24-year-old Niuta Teitelboim assassinated an important Gestapo officer in Warsaw, among other acts of resistance; and Tuvia Bielski, who led a Jewish partisan unit of 1,200 people, including women, children and the elderly, in the forests of Belorussia. The Bielski partisans engaged in rescue and military operations throughout the war, while maintaining weapons and clothing workshops hidden in the forest.

They represent the many thousands of Jews who saved Jews and fought Nazis up to the end. Our lack of awareness of such activity is the result of many factors, including postwar politics and the psychological difficulties of absorbing the horror, guilt and shame that images of the Holocaust continue to produce today.

MARTIN COHEN

Los Angeles

* I am sure you are aware of the program initiated by Steven Spielberg called “Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.”

The intent of this program is to interview as many survivors of the Holocaust as possible on film so that this terrible period in our history will never be forgotten.

I personally was interviewed and encouraged to tell as many survivors as possible of the existence of this program, which intends to create archives of this tragedy for future generations.

The address is P.O. Box 3168, Los Angeles, 90078-3168.

RICHARD LOWE

West Hills