Hope and Honor: Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust

“Why did Jews resist Nazi oppression?” is the central question that sociologist Rachel L. Einwohner explores in her book, Hope and Honor: Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust. In this way, Einwohner flips the usual questions assuming Jews’ passivity during the Holocaust (“did Jews resist?” and “why didn't Jews resist?”) to that of affirming Jewish activity (“why did Jews fight back?”). The focus of the book is on three ghettos located in areas that had been Poland before World War II: Warsaw, Łódź, and Vilnius (Wilno). Einwohner zooms in on the circumstances that shaped Jews’ decisions to plan and stage or not engage in armed resistance against Nazi authorities. Resistance, Einwohner claims, happened when and where Jews correctly assessed the dangers of genocide. This interdisciplinary comparative study belongs to fresh approaches to reexamining key Holocaust-related issues and questions. Yet the aim of this study extends beyond addressing Jewish responses to persecution. Einwohner draws from Holocaust history and sociological theories to contribute to the larger themes of social movements and collective protest.The book is composed of six chapters. In chapter 1, Einwohner explains her focus on the three cities by considering the role of geography, time, and place. She seeks to understand why sustained armed resistance occurred in the Warsaw ghetto, why it failed to materialize in Vilnius (although it was planned there), and why it never happened in Łódź. Einwohner points out the similarities and differences among the three ghettos. The location and size of a ghetto, its population, but also a different Nazi administration of the region where the ghetto was located, combined with the timing of creating the ghetto and the German actions against Jews, elicited various survival strategies and decisions regarding armed resistance. Yet the definition of a Nazi ghetto for Jews as a physically circumscribed area contradicts, for example, the findings of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that Einwohner refers to in order to show the extent of ghettoization. In fact, the enclosure (walls, fences, wires, and gates) of Jews is another factor that allows for a comparison of the three ghettos.Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for resistance, mainly when and why social movements happen. Collective protest and social movements in ghettos consisted of more than armed resistance. Einwohner highlights examples throughout the text, such as the clandestine Oneg Shabbat Archive in the Warsaw ghetto, smuggling, sabotage, and social welfare. What shaped the pursuit of armed resistance or lack thereof, Einwohner claims, are what she calls “critical conclusions” (the ways in which Jews assessed opportunities and threats) and “resonant responses” (the reactions to opportunities and threats). Einwohner outlines how the titular “hope” (or hopelessness) and “honor” explain the motivations for armed resistance.Following are three chapters that focus on the ghettos in Warsaw, Vilnius (Vilna), and Łódź. Einwohner contextualizes the Jews’ situation in each ghetto by providing key information about a city's history before World War II and the German occupation, as well as how Jews’ lives changed with the onset of Nazi oppression. If Jews in the Warsaw ghetto held onto the hope for survival, the Great Deportation that began in July 1942 marked a turning point for Jewish armed resistance. Jews resisted, Einwohner concludes, precisely because they lacked opportunities and resources for survival. Their hopelessness emboldened them to fight the Germans. In Vilnius, the realization of the Nazi threat had occurred after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. However, as Einwohner explains, that conclusion was insufficient to spark armed resistance because the idea for it did not resonate with the general ghetto population. The hope for survival, after the initial mass killing sprees, combined with the credibility of the head of the Jewish Council and the compliance that he demanded, contributed to a shift in the resistance mode—from fight to flight (and hiding). Escaping the Vilnius ghetto to join the partisans in the forest was facilitated by geography and landscape. On the other hand, those factors inhibited the emergence of Jewish armed resistance in the Łódź ghetto, which was the most isolated of the three discussed in the book. The leadership style of the Elder of the Jews in the Łódź ghetto, combined with the notion of “work to live” amplified the hope that Jews held for survival. Thus, armed struggle did not happen. Timing played a role, too, as Łódź had the longest-lasting ghetto in all of German-controlled Poland, providing additional, albeit false, belief that Nazi ideology mattered less than Nazi utilitarianism vis-à-vis Jewish laborers.The last, sixth, chapter offers remarks about what can be learned from studying Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Einwohner claims that a discussion of historical cases of armed resistance illuminates how threat and the way it is assessed and understood compels people to act. The three cases emphasize the evolving nature of threats, and thus the changing responses to them. Decisions whether to resist depend on access to information and on what people know. In the case of the Warsaw ghetto, there is a wealth of scholarship on this topic, much of it in Polish. Those materials would have been important to understand from where Jews sourced their information, how they interpreted it, and the ways in which that guided their actions regarding resistance. As Einwohner emphasizes, the fact that armed resistance happened shows the limits of repression, even under extreme circumstances. Hope, something that relies more on the irrational than reality, may inspire action, limit, or thwart it. As the book shows, hopelessness, too, can animate striking back. In this way, Einwohner underscores the exceptional character of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.Hope and Honor, with its comparative lens, offers a valuable analysis of how various factors shaped Jews’ assessments of their situation and their ensuing responses concerning armed struggle. One's age, gender, prewar membership in Jewish youth movements, and wartime participation in such groups affected involvement in collective resistance during the Holocaust. A discussion whether and if youth ideology played a role could provide additional insights. More immediate factors played a role in attempting and in engaging in armed struggle. Here Einwohner's scrutiny of the Łódź ghetto is especially illuminating. The misery of life, she observes, took precedence over efforts to resist with weapons, as did the separation of the ghetto from the rest of the city. Despite that, as Einwohner explains, Jews made efforts to engage in “everyday resistance.” This point speaks to the range of defiance methods, especially when fighting with guns and explosives was not a viable option. To make the latter a possibility, Jews in each of the three ghettos had to establish and maintain connections to non-Jews. Therefore, this book also engages with Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust, and, indirectly, in the role of Poles in the emergence, or lack thereof, of Jewish armed resistance.This study is grounded in a wealth of first-person testimonies, of Jews who survived and those who did not. Excerpts from oral histories and written accounts provide a human dimension to the complex topic of resistance and are a great strength of this book. Through these voices, the reader learns about the challenges, dilemmas, choices, decisions, and actions of Jews confined in the ghettos in Warsaw, Vilnius, and Łódź. The memories and assessments contextualize Jews’ responses to Nazi persecution.Hope and Honor is an original contribution to the research on the Holocaust in Poland and to Holocaust scholarship more broadly. Einwohner's use of a sociological approach to the study of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust yields a thought-provoking inquiry into a topic that continues to arouse interest particularly because of how striking it was for Jews to even consider staging a fight against their German oppressors, and to actually engage in armed resistance. In addition to scholars of the Holocaust and historians of Poland, this book will be of interest to educators who will benefit from the comparative study that includes historical background, references from primary sources, and a compelling analysis. With an emphasis on Jewish agency during the Holocaust, this book is bound to interest readers who want to know about how and why Jews fought back. In fact, Hope and Honor enters into dialogue with some of the recent publications that put Jewish resistance during the Holocaust front and center, thereby further shattering the myth of Jewish passivity and reinforcing the reality of the many ways in which Jews tried to defy destruction.