While this key topic has been widely researched and taught in a range of programs and activities held by Yad Vashem over the years, this time, the focus was on efforts by Jews to save their fellow Jews in the territories of the USSR, where they faced immediate and total annihilation.
In her introduction, Yad Vashem Director General Dorit Novak reminded the hundreds of participants watching from around the globe of the importance of documenting both the physical and spiritual resistance of Jews to their Nazi persecutors and their accomplices – as well as the wide variety of efforts made by Jews to assist their persecuted brethren in a range of places, times and situations. Despite being victims themselves, Novak explained, they helped people they knew and didn't know, and were sometimes in turn aided by diplomats, members of the Christian clergy and other non-Jews who were courageous enough to take this kind of action against such a formidable enemy.
"It is clear that responsibility, solidarity and mutual help are basic tenets of the Jewish people… even in a time of existential danger."
Sadly, most of these stories left no witnesses to tell them, but with the opening of national and local archives in Eastern Europe, Yad Vashem has copied "a huge amount of material that was previously unreachable, which shed light on many more acts of rescue... Therefore, we are making enormous efforts to gather testimonies and documentation in a race against the clock, which is reducing the number of people who can tell these stories."
Adv. Aryeh Barnea, who chairs the Israeli Commission for Recognizing the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust, gave a fascinating presentation of the topic, which he claims is, above all, a moral commitment, just as recognizing Righteous Among the Nations. "Any Jew who survived was because someone helped them." Bringing some individual examples of rescue by Jews, including those who attempted to negotiate with their captors, who assassinated informers or smuggled information out of death camps in order to warn others, he also recalled the unique actions taken by individuals and groups of Jews in Eastern Europe who saved others either mutually or, most often, altruistically.
"The main goal of publicizing this topic is that young Jews, here in Israel and abroad, will know and absorb this tradition, and will see the moral behavior of Jewish rescuers during the Shoah as a source of inspiration for them as they are faced with ethical decisions in the future."
Giving a background of the Holocaust in the territories of the Soviet Union, Shlomit Shulchani of the International Institute of Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem pointed out that some 97% of the close to three million Jews living in the region were murdered under German occupation. "Murdering Jews was not just a 'byproduct' of the war," she explained. "Jews were hunted down and murdered in cold blood from the first day of the German occupation until their liberation." In addition, unlike in the West there was no "development of persecution" – disenfranchisement, ghettoization, deportation, forced labor, death camps – in the area. Nevertheless, being used to a high level of involvement in all areas of life in communist Russia, Jews joined the Red Army and created or joined partisan units wherever possible, as their contribution to fighting the Nazi enemy.
This thread was taken up by Masha Pollak-Rozenberg, Director of the Educational Guiding Department at Yad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies. Most Jews remaining in German-occupied Soviet territories, she explained, had no chance of joining the partisans and thus surviving the war. This was due to the fear of collective punishment and the widespread lack of local support, but above all, because most were murdered before the Soviet partisan movement was established. Additionally, the partisan units did not generally take in women or children, but only young men who could fight.
Into this vacuum stepped the unprecedented phenomenon of so-called "family camps." Pollak-Rozenberg brought the examples of the Zorin and Bielski family camps, both of which were led by dynamic and experienced commanders who placed the lives of fellow Jews over the deaths of their enemy. Both Shalom Zorin and Tuvia Bielski managed to get support from the Soviet leadership as well as aid from other partisan units, and their bravery and actions ended up saving the lives of thousands of Jewish men, women and children.
Orit Margaliot, who heads the Professional Development and Curricula Section in the International School's Educational Guiding Department, focused her presentation on rescue efforts in the Minsk ghetto. She discussed how hundreds of Jewish children aged 11-15 became contacts between the ghetto and the forest, helping many to escape to Zorin's family camp. She told the tragic story of Leonid Okon, who failed to ensure his family's survival due to a mix up regarding the name of a doctor he was supposed to smuggle out to the camp.
The final speaker was Naama Galil, Project Manager in Yad Vashem's Commemoration and Community Relations Division, who succinctly illustrated the topic with the stories of three individuals – Oskar Glick in Vilna, Oswald Rufeisen in Mir and Fania Rosenfeld in Wołyń, who was rescued by non-Jews and then went on to help others – who could have saved themselves but instead “did the unexpected” and put their lives at risk (and in Glick’s case even paid with his life) to save hundreds of fellow Jews.
Dr. Yohai Cohen, Director of the Guiding Department in the Commemoration and Community Relations Division who moderated the event:
"Where one victim saved another, this is where we see there was no place where Jewish solidarity wasn't necessary, and no situation in which it was not possible – a lesson for us, and our children forever..As we light Chanukah candles to publicize the heroism of the Maccabees and other Jewish martyrs and fighters, we can add the Jewish rescuers during the Shoah who saved others against all the odds. We will remember our past, for the sake of the future and to try to increase the light in the world."
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 94.
