So the idea there wasn’t resistance is false,” she added. But in these incredibly extreme circumstances there are just so many examples of resistance, even in the most desperate situations. “Sometimes the view that people have is that the Jews didn’t really resist, and people have commented on why wasn’t there more resistance. It isn’t taught that much,” said Warnock.Ī group of Jewish partisan fighters in Soviet territory in about 1942-44. “Research by the Centre for Holocaust Education at UCL shows that schools and students in this country aren’t very aware of Jewish resistance. On 28 October 1944, he and his wife were sent to Auschwitz, on one of the last transports to leave Theresienstadt, where they were murdered. His final notebook breaks off mid-sentence. Manes was key to the cultural life in the ghetto, documenting his experiences in great detail. The extensive diaries of Philipp Manes, who was incarcerated with his wife Gertrud in the Theresienstadt ghetto, in German-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, also features, and contain poems, letters, and drawings from other prisoners, providing a vivid contemporaneous account of the efforts to keep their culture – and humanity – alive in such extreme circumstances. She was quite young, and managed to obtain papers indicating she was just Polish rather than Jewish Polish, allowing her to move around occupied Poland,” said Dr Barbara Warnock, the senior curator. And she was typical of a lot of the resisters in camps and ghettos. A map showing battles during the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943.

As If It Were Life by Philipp Manes