Resistance - They Fought Back! That’s the title of a new documentary on the Jewish resistance to Nazi-led pogroms during World War II.
Executive Producer Paula Apsell says the film corrects a myth - the myth of Jewish passivity during the war.
This Thursday she will be at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, Long Island for a screening of her film.
WSHU's All Things Considered Host Bill Buckner spoke with Paula Apsell about the documentary and what it reveals.
Bill Buchner: Resistance they fought back. That's the title of a new documentary on the Jewish resistance to Nazi-led pogroms during World War II. Executive producer Paula Apsell says the film corrects a myth, the myth of Jewish passivity during the war. Paula Apsell is a senior executive producer emerita of PBS is Nova and Nova Science now, an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow and CEO of Leading Edge Productions. This Thursday, she will be at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington, Long Island for a screening of her film. Right now. Paula Apsell joins us on the phone. Paula, welcome.
Paula Apsell: Thank you so much, Bill. It's so great to be here.
BB: There are many films, histories, books about the Holocaust. What makes this documentary different? What secrets do you unveil?
PA: Many of the films, I would say most of the films, focus on Jewish victimhood, and that, of course, two-thirds of European Jewry was wiped out during the Holocaust. So Jews as victims of Nazi oppression is a very valid topic. However, a myth has grown up for various reasons that Jews went to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter and didn't fight back. And my research yielded the fact that that is completely untrue, that there was resistance in ghettos in the forest and in death camps. And for that reason, this film is actually quite different because it just simply takes a different angle on the Holocaust, and shows the many ways with weapons and without weapons that Jews fought back.
BB: When you say resistance, what did that look like?
PA: Well, it took many forms at the very beginning, starting, for example, in Warsaw in 1939 and 1940 when the Nazis imprisoned, hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, and then eventually, there were 1200 ghettos throughout Europe, the Jews had no idea that the Nazis ultimate goal was the extermination of European Jewry. They had absolutely no idea. And so their resistance was the kind of resistance that Jewish communities have always used in their history when under attack. They had open schools for children, they educated children, they took care of the needy, and they kept very careful and meticulous records of German war crimes, but it was unarmed resistance.
It has a word in Hebrew Amida, which means standing up against. But eventually, when the Jews came to realize, around 1942 what the Germans were really up to, what their ultimate goal was to eliminate all of Judaism in Europe, then, especially young people in the ghettos began to arm themselves. An armed resistance began, which eventually spread to the forest and actually went to the death camps themselves. There were seven uprisings in concentration camps, six were led by Jews. That's a fact that very few people know I certainly did not know it when I began this film.
BB: And what was the impact of this resistance on the plight of the Jewish people?
PA: Well, of course, the impact was very minor. Sadly, tragically, because how could a small number of unarmed Jews in ghettos or in the forest or in death camps, how could they defeat the Germans, a powerful army. The most powerful army in Europe that we ourselves and all the allies, took years for us to defeat them. So it was an impossibility. But it brought pride and honor to the Jewish people. And of course, eventually, it set up the war of independence for the State of Israel. A million of the victims of Nazi oppression went to Israel after the war, and they fought for the independence of Israel. So I think that it was really not a fight to win. Very few people believed that they would actually survive. But it was a fight for Jewish honor. It is a tragedy that somehow that fight has gotten buried.
BB: That's what I was going to ask you. We've been led to believe for so long, most of us that there was no resistance. Why is it that that remained buried?
PA: Well, it actually started with the Germans kind of ironically. The Germans kept meticulous records of their work against the Jews. But they said nothing about resistance. They did not believe that the Jewish people were capable of resistance. So there was nothing in the records. So when the historians, after the war, came to try to write about and understand exactly what had happened, they saw nothing of resistance. So they didn't write about it. So people thought that it didn't happen.
Now, eventually, as there have been more and more scholars, and as they came to understand that talking to people, the people who were involved in the Holocaust, the people who were involved in resistance was a legitimate form of history that changed. And now we actually know a great deal about Jewish resistance. Although the truth is, sadly, there were many types of resistance, many battles for survival, where no one survived to tell the tale. And we will never know about that, which is tragic.
But now there is a great deal of scholarly research on Jewish resistance. The sad thing is that it has not reached the general public. And it is not formed enough of the backbone of Holocaust education to really affect future generations. And that's one thing that this film tries to redress.
BB: It's my understanding that the film highlights the importance of women in this resistance. Can you explain that?
PA: Absolutely. Because Jewish men are circumcised, they can be very easily identified as Jews. So they could not go outside of the ghetto, they would be caught by the Germans forced to take down their trousers, and they would be killed immediately. So women had to do the main share of the work. They were called couriers, and they did the main share of the work of going outside the ghettos, going from ghetto to ghetto to spread news, collecting weapons, and buying weapons.
We tell the story of a woman named Vladka Meed She was a youngster really barely out of adolescence, who lived and as a Christian, even though she was Jewish herself, outside of the Warsaw Ghetto, on the Aryan side of the ghetto, to procure weapons for the resistance, and then had to bring the weapons into the ghetto. Very dangerous, she could have been caught and killed at any time. Babies had to be smuggled because women were not allowed to give birth. If they didn't do so in secret, their babies would be killed right away. So babies were smuggled from ghetto to ghetto. We tell the story of another woman named Bella Hazan, who was both in the ghettos and then when she was eventually caught and sent to Auschwitz, in Auschwitz, and HERSA itself saved innumerable lives. She was also a courier, and did many, many courageous things.
And both of these women actually survived the war. So we know the story. And they have given written books and given their testimonies, so we actually know what they did. And their, stories are fascinating. And of course, there are many more, some who did not survive men who gave their lives these women had no training. They were like the CIA or the Mossad. And they had no training and they made mistakes, and many of them gave their lives but they did an enormous amount for Jewish resistance.
BB: How did you learn about these stories? These acts of resistance.
PA: Well, I learned about them in a very roundabout way. I served as senior executive producer of the PBS Nova science series for almost 35 years. A film that I worked on in 2016 was made in Lithuania, and it was with a group of archaeologists who used high-tech equipment to understand what happened in a place called Ponary where the Germans near Lithuanian collaborators killed 100,000 Jews and others.
And there’d always been rumored to be an escape tunnel there. These ad Jews were conscripted by the Germans to come in. They were very worried that war was sort of Epping, they were worried they wanted to get rid of the evidence of their war crimes. So they made these Jews exhume and burn their bodies. And at night, when they finished their horrible tasks during the day, they dug a tunnel. They all tried to escape on the last night of Passover, which was the darkest night of the month, the rabbi who was among them, told them, and 12 succeeded in escaping, and 11 survived the war.
And I worked on this film called Holocaust Escape Tunnel. And I began to really wonder, why don't I know about this historic and fantastic adventure and accomplishment of this tunnel dug in the midst of a killing field? And really, why don't I know of any examples of Jewish resistance, with the exception of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? So when I retired from Nova in 2019, I just began to do some research in it, and it became clear to me that there were so many example that it would make fantastic and really interesting film of material that really was not widely known. And that, of course, is what every filmmaker wants to do. You want a story that everybody doesn't know. And a story that really fits together and that gives you a whole new perspective on an event in history. So it was really from this film, Holocaust Escape Tunnel, that we made for NOVA, which was very successful and very popular, which we showed in 2017 on Holocaust Memorial Day, that I got the idea from this film.
Once I had the idea, you know, when you know, you have a good story, and when you know, you have a really important story, I just felt that I had to do it, I needed to raise the money, which was not that easy, but it was possible, then make the film with my colleagues from Lone Wolf Media, and my co-director, Kirk Wolfinger. The film was finished right before October 7, actually. And now it's in distribution. I’m so glad that the Cinema Art Center in Huntington is running it. That's really an honor to me and an honor to the film.
BB: And on Thursday, July 25, you will be at the Cinema Arts Center on Long Island in Huntington. What do you hope the audience takes away from this film that night?
PA: Well, I hope that the audience comes to understand through watching the film, that the story of the Holocaust that we've all heard and that we know is incomplete, unless we include in it the brave acts of Jewish resistance that took place. I hope it will augment what they know about the Holocaust and change their perception of that terrible, terrible event. Just a bit so that they understand that that the Jews did indeed fight back.
