How did some Europeans show their resistance to Nazi persecution of the jews?
1 Answer
Opposition to the Nazis was usually very dangerous and acts of resistance were swiftly punished. The "Righteous Among the Nations" who worked to save Jews were some of the bravest people in the war.
Explanation:
The Nazi persecution of the Jews developed slowly and gradually. Even in 1939-40 in Occupied Poland, the casual shooting of Jews was out-paced by the deliberate murder of Polish intelligentsia and leaders. These last (also in danger from the Soviets) were killed more often than Jews were until the invasion of the USSR in June 1941.
The mass shootings of hundreds of thousands of Jews by Germans (and Romanians) , often with local help who conflated Soviet ideology and the Jewish identity. was the real start of the Holocaust. Deaths by starvation in Polish ghettos started in that same year. After the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the mass murder started in earnest with the establishment of six operating death camps.
"The Righteous Among the Nations" were very few... often because being caught helping the Jews could result in a hasty execution if caught. Still there were some truely heroic people who helped to smuggle in food into Ghettos, who smuggled people out (particularly children), and hid Jews in the woods, remote farms, sewers and attics. Others produced false IDs, and some resistance movements also killed anyone who betrayed Jews to the Germans.
It wasn't until 1943 that the full measure of the Holocaust was widely understood (thanks to Polish Home Army resistance movement)-- but by that time most of the murder was done. Still, there were populations of Jews in Bulgaria, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and Greece who were hidden or smuggled to safety, while Romania reversed its earlier persecution.
A sampling of some of the Righteous Among the Nations can be found by googling the likes of Ona Šimaitė, a Lithuanian librarian; Feldwebel Anton Schmid of the Wehrmacht; Yvonne Nevejean, a Belgian aid worker; Henryk Iwański and Irena Sendler of Warsaw; Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou of Athens; and the Podgórski sisters Stefania and Helena who were 16 and 6 when they started to hide 14 Jews in the attic of their family home.
