One of the most persistent and insidious Holocaust distortions is that Jews “went like sheep to the slaughter”. This phrase, cloaked in false pity but steeped in contempt, perpetuates the old trope of the feeble Jew. Yet its supposed opposite, the armed, defiant Israeli Jew, is equally scorned. Such is the nature of this twisted bigotry: Jews are criticised whether they suffer or fight.
The truth is both more complex and more inspiring. We must, first of all, consider that the overwhelming majority of Shoah victims were women, children (1.5 million) and the elderly. Entire families were torn from their homes at gunpoint. Genocide doesn’t tend to offer its victims a fair fight.
And yet, even against such impossible odds, the record of Jewish resistance is as stunning as it is often overlooked. Jews fought back in some 100 ghettos and concentration camps, most famously in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a battle that lasted, under the most dire circumstances, 27 days, nearly as long as the entire Polish army stood up to the Wehrmacht invasion.
But the full story of Jewish fighters in the Second World War is not just one of doomed heroism. It is also the story of Jewish soldiers in uniforms, a staggering 1.5 million of them. From Normandy to Stalingrad and the Pacific, these Jews fought in the regular Allied armies and in all theatres of the war.
Consider the raw maths as calculated by Misha Galperin, president of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. Of the 18 million Jews alive before the war, six million were murdered in the Holocaust. Of the remaining 12 million, half were men. Of those, perhaps three million were of military age. That means around 50 per cent of all eligible Jewish men were in uniform during the war. No other ethnic or religious group comes even close to this rate of military service.
Some 500,000 Jews fought in the Red Army alone. More than 120,000 were killed in combat; an additional 80,000 were murdered by the Germans after being captured. More than 160,000 received citations for valour, including over 150 as “Hero of the Soviet Union” – the Red Army’s highest honour.
Well over half a million Jews served in the US Armed Forces. Around 10,000 were killed in action; over 36,000 were decorated. A further 400,000 served in the other allied armies, 100,000 alone in the Polish military. Of these, 30,000 were killed, taken prisoner, or went missing.
About 60,000-70,000 Jews served in the British forces, including volunteers from Palestine, many of whom joined the specially formed Jewish Brigade. And then there were the partisans. In forests across eastern Europe, an estimated 100,000 Jews joined resistance groups defying the Nazis.One of the most famous Jewish soldiers of the Second World War was Chaim Herzog, who later became Israel’s sixth president. As an officer in the British Army, he took part in the Normandy landings and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.
Like other Jewish veterans, particularly those from Mandate Palestine, he would later fight in the War of Independence, helping to bring about Israel’s rebirth – a mere three years too late to save the six million. But never again would Jewish survival depend on the mercy of others.
Jewish women fought alongside men against the Nazis. Take Hannah Szenes. Born in Hungary, she emigrated to Mandatory Palestine where she was recruited by Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE). She parachuted into Yugoslavia, joined a partisan group and was captured while trying to cross into Hungary.
Tortured, she gave away nothing, and was executed aged 23. Her poem Eli, Eli [My God, my God], set to equally haunting music in 1945, remains a fixture on Israeli radio, particularly on Yom Hashoah.
These amazing facts and heroes remain curiously absent from public memory. And so, in this issue, we remember. Above, read testimonials from some of the few surviving British Jewish veterans. You’ll learn how American Jews forged unbreakable bonds with their Christian comrades. You’ll meet Soviet Jews who fought on the icy eastern front and the Jewish Brigade, which helped liberate Italy. And you’ll encounter the X Troop, a band of mostly Jewish refugees turned British commandos whose exploits would be deemed too impossible even for a Mission Impossible script.
We must remember these warriors for their own sake and because they are part of who we are as a people. Never again accept the lie that the Jews went like sheep. Wherever they could, they fought like lions.
