front cover of From the Ashes of Sobibor
From the Ashes of Sobibor
A Story of Survival
Thomas Toivi Blatt, Foreward by Christopher R. Browning
Northwestern University Press, 1997
From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival is an invaluable, firsthand account of a child's survival in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland during World War II. When the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Thomas Toivi Blatt was twelve years old. He and his family lived in the largely Jewish town of Izbica in the Lublin district of Poland—the district that was to become the site of three major Nazi extermination camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Majdanek. Blatt tells of the chilling events that led to his deportation to Sobibor, and of the six months he spent there before taking part in the now-famous uprising and mass breakout. Blatt's tale of escape, and of the five harrowing years spent eluding both the Nazis and anti-Semitic Polish nationalists, is gripping account of resilience and survival.

This edition also includes the author's interview with Karl Frenzel, a former Nazi commandant at Sobibor.
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In the Shadow of the Swastika
Hermann Wygoda
University of Illinois Press, 1998
He was known first as a Warsaw ghetto smuggler, then as Comandante Enrico. He traveled under false identity papers and worked at a German border patrol station. Throughout the years of the Holocaust, Hermann Wygoda lived a life of narrow escapes, daring masquerades, and battles that almost defy reason.
 
Unique among Holocaust memoirs, In the Shadow of the Swastika, now in paperback, celebrates the memory of a man who received decorations from three Western powers and who, years later, was honored posthumously by the Italian city he helped to liberate.
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Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis
Patrick Henry
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
This volume puts to rest the myth that the Jews went passively to the slaughter like sheep. Indeed Jews resisted in every Nazi-occupied country - in the forests, the ghettos, and the concentration camps.The essays presented here consider Jewish resistance to be resistance by Jewish persons in specifically Jewish groups, or by Jewish persons working within non-Jewish organizations. Resistance could be armed revolt; flight; the rescue of targeted individuals by concealment in non-Jewish homes, farms, and institutions; or by the smuggling of Jews into countries where Jews were not objects of Nazi persecution. Other forms of resistance include every act that Jewish people carried out to fight against the dehumanizing agenda of the Nazis - acts such as smuggling food, clothing, and medicine into the ghettos, putting on plays, reading poetry, organizing orchestras and art exhibits, forming schools, leaving diaries, and praying. These attempts to remain physically, intellectually, culturally, morally, and theologically alive constituted resistance to Nazi oppression, which was designed to demolish individuals, destroy their soul, and obliterate their desire to live.
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Justyna's Narrative
Gusta Davidson Draenger
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996
Written during World War II, Justyna's Narrative is a compelling account of the Krakow Jewish resistance. From February through April 1943, Gusta Davidson Draenger (aka "Justyna"?) composed the narrative on scraps of paper smuggled into her prison cell. Between sessions of torture and interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo, she recorded the activities and spiritual aspirations of the clandestine group of young Jewish idealists who forged documents, acquired weapons, and committed acts of defiance against the Nazis.
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Living with Antisemitism
Modern Jewish Responses
Jehuda Reinharz
Brandeis University Press, 1988
A collection of 22 essays by distinguished scholars on the Jewish response to antisemitism worldwide over the past 200 years.
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Martin Monath
A Jewish Resistance Fighter Amongst Nazi Soldiers
Nathaniel Flakin
Pluto Press, 2019
A dramatisation of Martin Monath's short life (1913-1944) would need little artistic embellishment; his identity shrouded in mystery, and executed by the Gestapo - twice - the historical record reads like a detective novel. Pieced together for the first time by Wladek Flakin, this biography tells the story of the Jewish socialist and editor of Arbeiter und Soldat ('Worker and Soldier'), and his efforts to turn German rank-and-file soldiers against their Nazi officers in occupied France. Born in Berlin in 1913, Martin Monath was a child of war and revolution. In the 1930s he became a leader of the socialist Zionist youth organisation Hashomer Hatzair in Germany. Fleeing from Berlin to Brussels in 1939, he joined the underground Trotskyist party led by Abraham Leon, and soon became a leading member of the Fourth International in Europe. His relocation to Paris in 1943 saw the birth of Arbeiter und Soldat and his work organising illegal cells of German soldiers for a revolutionary struggle against the Nazis. Drawing on extensive archival research, Flakin uses letters, testimonies and unpublished documents to bring Monath's story to life - weaving a tale rich with conviction and betrayal, ideology and espionage.
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Mothers, Sisters, Resisters
Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust
Brana Gurewitsch
University of Alabama Press, 1999
Provides an important historical record of women’s experiences during the Holocaust
 
In Mothers, Sisters, Resisters, twenty-five survivors of the Holocaust furnish compelling and historically vital testimony that illuminates and explores Jewish women's experiences during that terrible period. In entries that preserve each voice, personality, and style, survivors describe their efforts to evade Nazi laws and subsequent dehumanization, protect their children and siblings, and maintain their Jewish identity.
 
Throughout each narrative, from Brandla Small’s description of having her child dragged from her arms at Auschwitz, to Eva Schonbrun’s remembrances of her sister who refused to leave her siblings and save herself, to Emilie Schindler’s account of rescuing Jews left abandoned on a cattle car, we become intimately involved with each woman's struggle and eventual survival. We also gain a new appreciation and understanding of the Holocaust experiences unique to women.
 
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A Promise at Sobibór
A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland
Philip “Fiszel” Bialowitz, with Joseph Bialowitz; Foreword by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
This is the true story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who in 1943 escaped the Nazi gas chambers at the Sobibór death camp. He joined with his brother and a small group of prisoners to carry out a daring and precisely planned revolt that killed SS officers and allowed roughly half of the camp’s 650 remaining Jewish prisoners to flee through minefields and machine-gun fire into the surrounding forest. Only about forty-two of them, including Fiszel, are known to have survived to the end of the war.
    Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz, now an American citizen, relates his eyewitness story in “realtime” perspective, from his childhood before the war to his life in the Izbica ghetto, his six months of internment and resistance at Sobibór, and his rescue by courageous Polish farmers. He also recounts the challenges of life following the war as a displaced teenager and his eventual efforts as a witness to the truth of the Holocaust.
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Shadows of Treblinka
Miriam Kuperhand and Saul Kuperhand
University of Illinois Press, 1998
      Unique and compelling, this husband-and-wife memoir of the Holocaust
        will move and inform generations. As we lose eyewitnesses to this ultimate
        horror, the Kuperhands present us with an elegantly restrained, yet hard-hitting,
        Kaddish to Polish Jewry.
      Miriam was the daughter of a prosperous furrier; Saul was the son of
        a poor shoemaker. Miriam was sixteen when she and her brother roamed the
        wild countryside of Poland, searching for food and shelter--and for their
        parents. Saul was only a few years older when he watched the smoke rising
        from the crematoria and knew that his parents, sister, and eight brothers
        were gone forever. Miriam lived by hiding; Saul lived by escaping from
        the camp.
      The authors emphasize the essential role that Polish Christians played
        in their survival and stress that wit, courage, faith, luck, and even
        a strong will to live were worthless without their help.
      The travail of their survival is wrenching yet comforting, tragic yet
        upbeat, cinematic yet intimate. Shadows of Treblinka will haunt
        and inspire its readers.
 
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This Cannot Happen Here
Integration and Jewish Resistance in the Netherlands, 1940-1945
Ben Braber
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
This sweeping work is the first comprehensive English-language study of Jewish resistance in the Netherlands during World War II.

Adopting a comparative approach, Ben Braber explores the situation of Jews in the Netherlands against the backdrop of their experiences in other Western European countries. Charting the occurrences of Jewish resistance, he pays particular attention to the ways in which the integration of Jews into Dutch society influenced their responses to German persecution. Braber’s incisive analyses shed new light on Dutch and Jewish history, pointing the way toward future paths of inquiry.
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