Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany

by Wolf Gruner

Overview

A highly original and compelling account of individual Jews who resisted Nazi persecution, challenging the traditional portrayal of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust
 
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust category
 
“These are the stories that longtime readers of Holocaust literature have been waiting to read: evidence of small, covert acts of resistance (often by individuals working on their own initiative) against a fanatically coordinated genocidal force.”—Library Journal (starred review)
 
Drawing on twelve years of research in dozens of archives in Austria, Germany, Israel, and the United States, this book tells the story of five Jewish people—a merchant, a homemaker, a real estate broker, and two teenagers—who bravely resisted persecution and defended themselves in Nazi Germany. These stories have not been told until now, and each case is one of many, as Gruner shows by resurfacing similar accounts of Jewish refusal to accept persecution and violence in Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1943, upending the notion of passive Jews and expanding the concept of resistance.
 
Each individual described here represents a category of resistance: written opposition, oral protest, contesting Nazi propaganda, defiance of anti-Jewish laws and measures, and self-defense against physical attacks. Many of these courageous acts resulted in the resisters being prosecuted and put on trial, and often receiving harsh punishments, while some led to acquittal by courts and others to changes in Nazi policies. Taken together, these accounts reframe our understanding of German Jewish attitudes during the Holocaust, while also providing an astonishing examination of the complex Nazi reactions to the many individual acts of Jewish resistance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300267198
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	08/29/2023
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	424,032
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Wolf Gruner is the Shapell Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and professor of history at the University of Southern California. He is the founding director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, and the author of ten books on the Holocaust. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Editorial Reviews

These are the stories that longtime readers of Holocaust literature have been waiting to read: evidence of small, covert acts of resistance (often by individuals working on their own initiative) against a fanatically coordinated genocidal force.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“[Gruner’s] broadened lens offers a more accurate and complex portrait of the responses of ordinary Jewish men and women living under horrific conditions.”—Linda Kantor-Swerdlow, Jewish Book Council

“It’s a narrative that both shocks and inspires.”—Jewish News of Northern California

Finalist for the 73rd National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust category, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council


“This important book shows in great detail, on the basis of numerous moving and often heartwrenching individual stories, that German and Austrian Jews often rebelled against and resisted their oppressors in a variety of ways. Gruner has given us a crucial corrective to the historiography of the Holocaust.”—Omer Bartov, author of Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past

“This deeply researched and highly original study highlights multiple forms and cases of courageous recalcitrance on the part of German Jews subjected to Nazi persecution. A welcome book as both a tribute to the tormented protagonists and a corrective to the historical record.”—Peter Hayes, author of Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Sensitized to the complexities of living as a non-conformist in a persecutory dictatorship by his own upbringing in East Germany, Gruner is ideally suited to teasing out from fragmentary evidence the historical reality behind the Nazi caricature of the ‘impudent Jew.’ He compiles impressive evidence and argumentation against the widespread assumption of Holocaust victim passivity.”—Christopher R. Browning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Wolf Gruner has developed a unique perspective in Holocaust history, uncovering countless examples of individual Jews who protested Nazi policies. While devastating, these poignant stories are also hopeful, demonstrating that even in the worst dictatorships, individuals can and do defy discriminatory and even exterminatory policies.”—Marion Kaplan, author of Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940–1945

From the Publisher

★ 07/28/2023

Gruner (Jewish studies, Univ. of Southern California; The Greater German Reich and the Jews) writes about German and Austrian Jews, many culturally rather than religiously Jewish, who were initially baffled by their government's inability to recognize Jewish national patriotism as it imposed the oppressive Nuremberg Laws. That's all while, not without a little irony, decorating the chests of Jewish soldiers who had demonstrated battlefield heroism in World War I. Some Jews disguised themselves to attend Nazi youth meetings, where they hoped to gather information about coming deportations and pogroms. Informal networks forged documents and provided avenues for escape. Ultimately, they risked their own lives by remaining in place, Gruner argues. For most resisters, whether acting alone or in concert with clandestine movements, anonymity was their best protection—but one that makes uncovering evidence of such resistance difficult. Those who have shared these stories insist, however, that it was the camp survivors who were the true heroes. VERDICT Evidence of the power of the powerless. These are the stories that longtime readers of Holocaust literature have been waiting to read: evidence of small, covert acts of resistance (often by individuals working on their own initiative) against a fanatically coordinated genocidal force.—Sandra Collins

Library Journal