. The opposition of the Judenrat and the Jewish ghetto population, among other internal obstacles, also effectively squelched planned revolts in Pińsk, Prużana and Święciany, even though weapons and ammunition had been gathered for this purpose. See respectively: Wolf Zeev Rabinowitsch, ed., Pinsk—Historical Volume: The Story of the Jews of Pinsk 1506–1942 (Tel Aviv: The Association of the Jews of Pinsk in Israel, 1977), 118–20; Joseph Friedlaender, ed., Pinkas Pruz’any and its Vicinity (Bereze, Malch, Shershev, Seltz and Lineve) (Tel Aviv: The United Pruziner and Vicinity Relief Committee in New York and Philadelphia and the Pruz’ana Landshaft Association in Israel, 1983), 100–102; and Arad, The Partisan, 68–78. Although the United Partisan Organization in Wilno managed to organize and obtain arms (with the assistance of Polish Dominican nuns from nearby Kolonia Wileńska), they eventually made a deal with the Judenrat not to stage a revolt in exchange for safe passage for its members out of the ghetto together with the arms that had been smuggled in. Chaim Lazar comments bitterly: “In this way the commander [Abba Kovner] ‘fulfilled’ Paragraph 22 of the Organization’s constitution, which said: ‘we shall go to the forest only as a result of battle …’.” See Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 16–17; Lazar, Destruction and Resistance, 51–111. For the organization’s documents see Betti Ajzensztajn, ed., Ruch podziemny w ghettach i obozach: Materiały i dokumenty (Warsaw, Łódź and Kraków: Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1946), 133. No revolt took place in Baranowicze where the underground amassed 70 rifles, two machine guns, 40 handguns, 15,000 bullets, 500 hand grenades, and a few sticks of dynamite. Two members of the Judenrat threatened to hand the members of the underground to the Germans, and a squad of policemen was sent to arrest them. Other underground members stormed the Judenrat building and threatened to kill its members if the detainees were handed over to the Gestapo. The local rabbi, in the company of an entourage, cautioned the underground against revolt: “‘Do you realise what a bad and dangerous path you are following? I am the spiritual leader of our community and responsible for its fate. You and a few youngsters are jeopardising us all by attempting to take up arms against the Germans. And what use are a few rifles against their infernal war-machines? Worst of all, you seem to have forgotten that we are a nation of the book, not the sword. How do you think we have survived 2000 years of pogroms and persecution? Not by fighting, not by killing, but by our unshakable belief in God. … We are in a desperate situation now but there is a God in heaven and the miracle will happen.’ I looked at the Rabbi in shock and dismay; this was religious zeal carried beyond all sense.” Many ghetto residents were also opposed to insurrection and even wanted to apprehend a Jewish arms smuggler and hand him over to the Germans. See Yehuda Bauer, “Jewish Baranowicze in the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 31 (2003): 132–36; Berk, Destined to Live, 77–78.
A similar combination of opposition on the part of Jewish leaders and widespread apathy and despair prevailed in most of the ghettos in the Generalgouvernement and in the Eastern Territories. When a young Jew arrived in Stepań, Volhynia, “with the purpose of organizing the Jews to flee or to rebel. He brought news of the organization and joining of young men from the ghettos of different towns to the partisans. He told us of the acts of killing of Jews in the Volyn ghettos. The fellow’s activity in the Stapan ghetto did not last too long as in a few days he was arrested by the Jewish police by order of the Judenrat and he disappeared.” See Account of J. Peri, in Yitzhak Ganuz, ed., Ayaratenu Stepan (Tel Aviv: Stepan Society, 1977), 213 ff., Our Town Stepan, Internet: . The situation in the Jewish villages of Trochenbrot-Ignatovka (Ignatówka Trościańska), Volhynia, is described thus: “I suggested … that we should take young people into the forest and form big groups … I must admit that the local Jewish population was strongly against us. They said, ‘First of all, the Germans are not killing. And what would the Germans want with us?’ … Many times we would quietly gather the young people. But the community leaders found out and came after us with sticks, remonstrating, ‘Because of you we will suffer. You have nothing to lose—you’re homeless, you’re refugees, you’re displaced persons—but we have our houses, our fields, our property. We have a lot to lose!’ So I didn’t accomplish very much with these clandestine gatherings.” See Nahum Kohn and Howard Roiter, A Voice from the Forest: Memoirs of a Jewish Partisan (New York: Holocaust Library, 1980), 29. As noted earlier, the opposition of the local Jewish leaders was often supported by the community at large. For the typical ghetto resident, the answer to the question “Why didn’t they resist the Nazis?” was readily apparent without recourse to the cruel ruse that the Poles were somehow to blame: “Anybody showing the slightest resistance endangered not only himself but also his family and the whole community. In addition, right up to the last moment, people refused to believe in the wholesale extermination of the Jewish population. In view of this, nobody dared to do anything which might bring down disaster on the heads of his family and his community.” See Miriam Berger’s testimony, “The War,” in Yosef Kariv, ed., Horchiv Memorial Book (Tel Aviv: Horchiv Committee in Israel, 1966), 44. Why should Poles be held up to a higher standard of heroism? Writing about the situation in Eastern Poland, where he adjudged conditions for resistance and guerrilla movements to be favourable, historian Shmuel Spector concluded: “Because of German threats of collective punishment … the Judenräte did not sympathise with the resistance activities. … Most of the Judenräte did not want to take part in the resistance and sometimes even opposed or disturbed activities. … Only in places where the Juderäte approved of the resistance, or where leaders of the underground were eager to resist, could organisation of resistance be planned.” See Spector, “Jewish Resistance in Small Towns of Eastern Poland,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46, 140–41. On the other hand, there are historians such as Yitzhak Arad who, contrary to the preponderance of the evidence, maintain just the opposite: “most of the Judenräte did not in principle oppose the existence of an armed underground inside the ghetto. … Neither did the councils assist the Nazis in combating the underground movements.” See Yitzhak Arad, “The Armed Jewish Resistance in Eastern Europe: Its Unique Conditions and Its Relations with the Jewish Councils (Judenräte) in the Ghettos,” in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 596, 599.
The Jewish police and agents and informers of the Gestapo were particularly effective in eliminating the fledgling Jewish underground. When the People’s Guard attempted to provide arms to the ghetto in Mińsk Mazowiecki they were warned by the commander of the Jewish police to desist or face a denunciation to the Germans. See Bartoszewski and Lewinówna, eds., Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, 285. Conditions in Sosnowiec are described as follows: “Under the leadership of Zvi Dunsky, Lippa Mintz, Heller Schnitzer, and Joseph Kosak, the Sosnowiec [underground] group aimed at a genuine resistance, maintaining communications with Warsaw. They printed circulars … and posted on walls, manifestos against the regime and the Judenrat. They even plotted to kill [its president] Moshe Merin. Merin was busy too. He set up a network of spies, who infiltrated the organization and reported back to him. As soon as he had enough names, he made his move. He rounded up all the resistance people and had them transferred to camps in Germany. Thus our first attempt to organize an uprising locally was shattered in its inception. Now the Jews were too numb to care.” See Chava Kwinta, I’m Still Living (Toronto: Simon & Pierre Publishing Company, 1974), 136. In Kraków, the Jewish underground established contact with the Polish underground and was thus able to procure weapons, yet there too the possibility of revolt was thwarted. Shlomo Schein explains the obstacle they faced: “Our boys were falling into the hands of the Gestapo one by one … The Jewish policemen sniffed after us, fearing that they would be blamed for aiding the fighters.” See Arieh L. Bauminger, The Fighters of the Cracow Ghetto (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1986), 85. So, too, in Złoczów, a planned revolt was stifled by spies inside the ghetto, even though arms had been procured with the assistance of Poles: “In spite of the secrecy and precaution, there had been somebody spying on the planners who betrayed the five leaders on the eve of the enterprise. The informer was a boy from Lwow [Lwów] … The five leaders were arrested.” See I. M. Lask, ed., The City of Zloczow (Tel Aviv: Zloczower Relief Verband of America, 1967), column 133. A similar situation prevailed in Mir, where a planned escape of Jews to the forest was foiled “by a Jew from the Mir zamek ghetto named Stanislawski. … If [Oswald] Rufeisen had not been betrayed [by him] … Our ambush would have been a unique event … Perhaps the life of the Mir ghetto itself could have been prolonged by wiping out the gendarmerie stationed in the town. But instead, the traitor Stanislawski brought ruin upon himself and the entire ghetto.” See Sutin, Jack and Rochelle, 59–60. According to another source, “A Jew named Stanislavski [Stanisławski] worked with horses at the gendarmerie. The chief promised to let him live and give him special privileges if he informed him from where the Jews had gotten the guns, and who told them about the planned roundup. Stanislavski, believing he could save himself through this betrayal, agreed to the Kommandant’s conditions. He told him he heard say “Oswald” [Rufeisen] had given the guns to the Jews and had planned their dispersal with them.” See the account of B.A. in Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution, 295. See also the account of Szloma Charchas (Szlomo Charches) in Ajzensztajn, ed., Ruch podziemny w ghettach i obozach, 116, and in Michał Grynberg and Maria Kotowska, comp. and eds., Życie i zagłada Żydów polskich 1939–1945: Relacje świadków (Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2003), 514. The well-armed underground in Baranowicze ultimately failed to stage a planned revolt because of the deception of the Germans during the second Aktion. There too the Germans were aware of the existence of an underground in the ghetto and employed Jewish spies to acquire information about it. A Jewish teenager from Łódź betrayed a group of Jews who attempted to escape from the Luftwaffe base and informed the German commander about the underground group. An underground group organized in the forced labour camp in Stara Wilejka near Mołodeczno was betrayed by a Jew named Schulzinger from Szczuczyn; only a small number of Jews were able to escape, and all those left in the camp were killed. See Yehuda Bauer, “Jewish Baranowicze in the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 31 (2003): 121, 132–38. A clandestine youth group in Radzyń, composed of members of the Hashomer Hatzair and other Zionist organizations, who sought to arrange for Jews to flee to the forests and set up fighting units, gained the support of the Hasidic Rabbi Shmuel Shlomo Leiner. In June 1942, the Gestapo learned of this through informers and executed the rabbi in the square in front of the synagogue. See “Radzyn,” in Abraham Wein, ed., Pinkas Hakehillot: Polin, vol. 7 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1999), 543–47; English translation: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland, vol. VII, Internet:
