Resisting

As the Nazis took control of Germany in 1933, Jewish citizens lost their civil rights. This photo, taken by the family of Ellen Rawson from the balcony of their flat in Königsberg, documents the gathering threat. In the years that followed, resistance could take many forms.

In 1932, Rachel Posner, the wife of a rabbi, photographed the family's Chanukiah in the window, facing a Nazi flag across the street. On the back of the photo, she wrote: "Death to Judah, the flag says. Judah will live forever, the light answers."  

After the Nazi annexation of Austria, even secular Jewish families found strength in their ancestral religion. Max Schnabl from Vienna said: "Now is the time to celebrate our Judaism". He created an improvised Chanukiah  for his daughter Hedi, who recorded the story later. 

Bernard's school was attacked and destroyed by the Nazis. Although strictly prohibited, students used the camera to record the destruction, and their efforts to repair the damage.

In the Łódź Ghetto, Henryk Ross used his camera secretly to record the suffering that the perpetrators wanted to hide. Ross buried the films for safekeeping. He survived, and excavated the material after liberation, creating a unique archive.

Weapons were hard to come by. In the Warsaw Ghetto, hand grenades were forged from Sidol bottles, a metal cleaner. As the ghetto was being liquidated, German troops were astounded by the intensity of the resistance they encountered.

Asserting one's voice against the narrative of the perpetrators was an act of resistance in itself. Julius Feldman was only 17 when he was forced into a labour camp. His diary miraculously survived, hidden in a gap in a brick wall. Julius was murdered. But his diary speaks to us across time.

Between 1943 and 1945, Victoria Ancona-Vincent, a young Jewish Italian, was deported from one concentration camp to another, across Europe. But she held on to her own sense of time and place, meticulously memorizing  every significant date and recording it after the end of her ordeal on a tiny note.

After 1945, many Jewish survivors kept the spirit of resistance alive: they bore witness, through writing, public speaking, and art. Roman Halter's watercolours depict haunting memories  — here, of a mass execution. Find out more in our story "Being a Witness" on this platform.