Original subtitles

(birds chirping)

- You know, 40 years...

Forty years I've been in a classroom.

And there is never a more poignant question

that a student asks me about the Holocaust

than...

"Why didn't the Jews resist the Nazis?"

And there's a moment where you just want to leave it alone...

And then there's a moment where you can't let it go.

(sombre music)

(birdsong)

(haunting music)

(continues)

(explosions and gunfire)

(shouting)

(explosions continue)

(sinister beat)

(creaking)

(commotion)

MARCEL: After a journey of ten days, we arrived at Auschwitz on April 11

to a crematorium.

- Marcel Nadjari...

This is a guy who, uh, was shipped off from Greece in 1944

all the way to Auschwitz.

(dark music)

(shot reverberates)

- Sonderkommando prisoners were slaves...

..compelled to do anything their masters,

the Germans in Auschwitz, tell them to do.

MARCEL: Our unit is called The Special Unit.

I will explain for you the work that the Almighty wanted me to do.

It starts by the people entering naked.

(hissing)

- Humiliation is a VERY central factor in the German crime.

He has to be undressed and he has to be humiliated.

MARCEL: After the room is filled with people,

it is locked and they are gassed.

(hissing)

- And I have to emphasise 1,000 times,

the killing always was made by the Germans!

- We're at crematorium three,

which was destroyed by the Nazis as they were leaving in 1945.

What really is the secret of crematorium three

is this is where they discovered Nadjari's letter.

He described in meticulous detail what his daily schedule was.

So, his letter gives us a perspective

on what it is that happened here.

- In this horrible world,

finding even a pen and a piece of paper

without being exposed what they were doing

is an incredible bravery!

And they probably didn't see hope for their own survival.

They wanted the world to know.

- People have this myth stuck in their heads

that the Jews went to their deaths

like sheep to the slaughter.

But this is where the real story begins...

(music continues)

MARCEL: How could I do this?

Burn the bodies of my brothers in faith?

And why didn't I join them and put an end to it?

But every time, the thirst for revenge stopped me!

LEON: Each prisoner in every squad

knew exactly what he was supposed to do

and prepared for it.

ZALMON: May those who made an ocean of blood of my people

drown in an ocean of blood!

(gunfire)

(explosion)

WOMAN: Suddenly, the sirens began to wail...

What happened?!

A revolution, an uprising at the crematorium?

- This is where the story begins...

Jews did not go their death as sheep to the slaughter.

They fought back.

(music continues)

(fades)

(solemn music)

(explosion)

(wailing)

FEIGE: Father was calming us, saying, "Don't be scared!

Even when the Germans come, they are not so bad!

I remember them from the First World War

and they are quite human,

you will see."

For him, it was a shock...

- What her father had said was, "I know these people.

I know the Germans.

We fought in the First World War together

and they're basically decent people!"

And then, within the first couple days,

he was pretty badly beaten.

And he was so devastated

that he was unable, after that, to leave the house

to go out on the street.

BENJAMIN: We were immediately singled out.

We knew something was coming.

- So, this is one of the original walls

that confined the Jews into the Warsaw ghetto.

And on Yom Kippur,

the holiest day of the Jewish year in 1940,

the Jewish population finds out

that it's going to be confined into a ghetto.

Half a million Jews, almost, forced into this tiny area.

MAREK: A few hundred people crowd every large, unheated room

of a synagogue,

every hall of a deserted factory.

A whole family often receives sleeping space for one.

The walls and barbed wire surrounding the ghetto

completely cut off the Jews from the outside world.

AVINOAM: These are starvation rations.

There's no way that people can live on this.

MAREK: Children begged everywhere.

Six-year-old boys crawled through the walls

and barbed wire

to obtain food on the other side.

They supported entire families in this manner.

- This was all part of a plan which was going to degrade the Jews,

dehumanise them,

force them to live in horrible, horrible conditions

where you have disease...

The creation of the ghetto

was EXACTLY to facilitate the spread of epidemics.

They would bring in film crews into the ghetto

as part of their propaganda effort to show this how Jews live,

this is how Jews carry disease

and how Jews will ultimately die.

(crow cawing)

(birds chirping)

So, people often want to know

why the Jewish population didn't fight back immediately.

Half a million Jews crowded into the ghetto,

why didn't they take up arms and fight back against the Germans?

- Collective punishment. - Collective punishment.

The Jews knew that you can start some resistance.

You can aim a pistol and shoot one person, two people,

whatever it is,

but the Germans would then arrest 2,000.

- But the truth is, from the very beginning,

right, once they're crowded into the ghetto,

they did resist in the ways that they knew best to do.

Resistance that was a type of spiritual resistance.

Resistance that was a way of standing up

against the German oppressors.

Feeding the hungry,

clothing the poor, taking care of orphans,

these were strategies that Jews had used for centuries

and which they fell back upon.

- The unarmed resistance is called in Hebrew Amidah.

Amidah is standing, standing up,

or in Yiddish I would say...

(speaking yiddish)

"I'm not yielding to the situation!"

Whatever you do that is against the situation

IS resistance!

- Whether you sit or lie or crawl or swim or stand up

makes absolutely no difference.

It's Amidah.

VLADKA: Life in the ghetto was a chain of resistance.

There were illegal schools, there were illegal libraries,

choirs, even theatres...

It was an illegal LIFE!

- The Germans wanted to destroy any kind of Jewish existence,

also cultural existence and so on.

So, when you educated children in ghettos,

if they survived for them to develop after the war

this was against the German idea, eh?

BENJAMIN: I organised a school in my building

and I became the teacher of that school.

I had never prepared for being a teacher

but there were no schools.

All schools were illegal.

- And if you always keep in mind

that part of what the Germans wanted to do was to kill the body

but also to kill the soul,

to undermine humanity,

the humanity of the individual...

And therefore, if you never lost your humanity,

then in a very real sense

you're helping to defeat the Germans.

VLADKA: Although you see today how the pictures,

mostly from Germans,

pictures of Jews who were beggars and pitiful,

and this is taken

because the Germans would like us only to be seen this way...

This was only one part of the ghetto.

It was true, there were beggars,

but there was another kind of life full of activities

and spiritual resistance.

(heartwarming music)

EMANUEL: With a little peace,

we may succeed in making sure that not a single fact

about Jewish life at this time and place

will be kept from the world.

- They were documenting

the entire life of the Warsaw ghetto.

And then they buried it.

And they buried it 'cause they wanted to make sure it survived.

It's the equivalent of seeing for the first time

the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The difference is, this is so close to our own era.

And to know that Jews had been documenting

and preserved it like a message in a bottle

for future generations...

"What we couldn't scream out to the world

we buried in the ground.

I would like to live to see the moment

when it will be possible to unearth this great treasure

and shout out the truth.

May this treasure fall into good hands,

may it survive until better times,

may it alarm the world

to what happened in the 20th century.

Now we can die in peace.

Our mission has been accomplished.

Let history bear witness to that."

- So, Warsaw is occupied

and the goal for Jews is to survive,

to live to see another day,

to live until the war is gonna be over.

They have no idea that the end point of Germans' occupation

is extermination.

(birds chirping)

- This is one of the main recreation spots in Kaunas.

It sits up on a hill.

It's windy. It's breezy.

People come here for picnics, to walk their dog.

I've seen wedding ceremonies here...

But what people don't know is, underneath where we're standing,

this is where 50,000 Jews were buried in 14 trenches.

- This is where the Jews' plant is going to be

and even if they were to try to memorialise this

they don't know where the trenches are...

They thought they were going to a labour camp,

they were gonna be doing work

and that's what the artefacts tell us.

Passports, watches, personal items,

every type of button

because everyone thought they were coming to go to work!

- Everyone is very smart today...

How didn't they realise? How didn't they know?

But you never believe!

I mean, you can believe that you will be mistreated and beaten

and humiliated

but you cannot imagine you will be simply taken,

led to the forest and killed there!

- When we take a look at sites like this,

and we're looking at many Holocaust sites...

And what's important is that survivors have told their story

and we believe their stories.

What we're trying to do is bring scientific methodology

and scientific tools to verify those stories.

(inaudible chatter)

- We really are hoping,

and I'm not naive...

We're really hoping that we can diminish genocide

when perpetrators know they can never get away with their crime.

(children crying)

- The most horrific statistic I think of

is that only 11% of European Jewish children

who were alive in 1939

were still alive in 1945.

- My name is Dana Pomeranz Mazurkevich.

I'm originally from Lithuania.

I was born in Kovno ghetto.

My father was a very famous violinist.

My mother and father decided that somehow, by miracle,

somehow they have to smuggle me out of ghetto.

My mother got in touch with Yelena Zhelinka-Pechaika,

who was a very beautiful drama theatre artist

who had her own three children.

My mother, she said,

"I have girl who have beautiful blonde hair

and have blue eyes.

She's Jewish child, could you save her?"

And that Lithuanian woman,

having her own children,

she said, "Bring that child. I will take her."

They gave me a big amount of sleeping pills

and put me in a sack of potato.

And it was one Lithuanian guy,

he took me in some kind of carriage

and then we passed the border

and German soldier was staying there.

Somehow,

I probably didn't have enough air,

and I started to make that noise...

(yelping)

And that German ask, "Vas is das?"

What is this?

And that Lithuanian guy, he said,

"This is kleine schweine, little piglet."

Somehow, they let us pass.

It required an unbelievable courage,

unbelievable,

that they could give me away

and not knowing if they will survive

and not knowing if I will survive.

I think it was a big, big act of resistance

because I will not let to take my child...

And my mother had to...

Had to give me away!

It... It took so much courage for her to do that!

I have a beautiful daughter, Milana.

Sometimes I think would I be able to do?

I don't know...

(bells toll as music sways)

- Vilna was called the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

Vilna was probably the most Jewish city in the world.

We consider New York to be very Jewish

and New York's got...

Fifteen percent of the population's Jewish.

But Vilna, at its peak, had...

Forty percent of the population was Jewish!

- As a child in Vilna,

I lived with a sense of, um, living in paradise.

SAMUEL: It was a great centre of Jewish learning.

It was a city of the spirit

and that's why it got the name Jerusalem.

- But when the Germans arrived it began very quickly,

the troubles for the Jewish population.

One day, two Lithuanian policemen came and just, uh,

kicked us out from the house.

And it was raining, it was a terrible rain

and I was carrying this pillow

and this pillow became more and more wet,

more and more heavy,

I couldn't carry it at a certain point

so I threw it away into the water on the road

and I saw a lot of people walking over it

and it became, for me, a little symbol of losing home!

- The Germans attacked Vilna on June 22nd 1941.

That's almost two years later than when they attacked Warsaw.

So, the Germans came late but they acted fast

and the Germans started looting Jewish cultural treasures in Vilna.

In July 1941,

they realised that there were just too many Jewish books and papers

and documents and treasures in this city.

They couldn't handle it

and that's why they established this slave labour brigade of Jews

that would sort the material

called The Paper Brigade.

- The Germans had this idea

to build a museum to the Jewish people

in a world where there are no Jewish people!

In order to show the world

what a good job the Germans have done

in saving the world from this people, OK?

So, this is the background, this was the idea.

My grandfather, Avrom Sutzkever,

he was one of those people

who were chosen to select the materials

and those people like my grandfather

had decided to rescue whatever they can

and bring it back to the ghetto.

- Right here, right behind me

is where the gate to the Vilna ghetto stood.

The members of The Paper Brigade had to pass through this gate daily.

They had books packed underneath their clothing,

under their shirts, under their pants,

in their shoes

and they had to pass through body searches of ghetto guards.

If they were found to be carrying books on them,

it didn't matter if you were carrying books or food or anything,

the penalty was the same.

Death.

And many of those books,

once they were smuggled into the ghetto successfully,

they brought here

to the building that was probably

the central address in the Vilna ghetto,

the Vilna ghetto library.

Reading was a kind of moral,

cultural, spiritual resistance.

You're not gonna break my humanity.

I'm a human being and reading books is integral to being a human being

and I'm gonna do that!

- It was...

Absolutely, it was a resistance.

And it was as indispensable as bread,

I would say!

(laughs)

As they say in Hebrew,

not only on bread can man live,

he needs also something for the spirit.

In the ghetto,

where art and writing and poetry were created,

where people could express themselves,

there was a sense of...

Of dignity.

And I think this was a very important factor

that kept the psyche of the people more or less alive.

- My name is Michael Kovner.

My parents were Abba Kovner and Vitka Kovner,

Kempner-Kovner.

My father wanted to be a painter

and he accepted to the Vilna Academic of Painting.

He was accepted to this but he couldn't...

You know, the war come, so he couldn't fulfil this dream.

But I think he always was kind of a poet.

My mother, she...

She walk on the pavement,

which Jewish in Poland after Nazi occupation

weren't allowed to walk on the pavement...

And she went on the pavement

and then the officer or soldier,

the Nazi came to her and he asked her, "You are Jewish?"

And she said, "Yes."

"So, why you are going on the pavement?"

She said, "Why not?"

And he said, "You are not allowed!"

And she gave him splash on his face and continued to walk.

So, that's her type!

- The youth movement played a role in the life of the youngsters

at the time.

They felt belonging.

It wasn't just a place

to which you go to be entertained once or twice a week.

You lived your life with the members,

you lived through them.

It's a collective identity of being Jewish

and this explains to you the way they handle themselves

during the war.

ABBA: We had formed our group starting from a precise ideology.

Our fight was not for self-preservation,

it was not to save myself, to save you,

to save a neighbour...

It was to fight the Germans.

- In half a year,

the Jewish population of Vilna

went down from 70,000 to 20,000 Jews.

More than two-thirds of the Jews of Vilna were killed

in half a year.

And that's in 1941,

well before there were deportations to the death camps

from Warsaw and other cities in Poland.

ABBA: One day, I was called and told to go to the hospital of the ghetto,

that there was a young girl injured who wanted to talk to me

and only to me.

From her, I got the first direct evidence about what was happening.

There were 119 women.

(shot)

They were told to line up.

Behind them, there were ditches.

(shots)

The Lithuanians started firing on the whole line of women...

(gunfire)

And all the women fell into the ditch.

(shots)

Dead.

- This is the burial pit.

It was a burial pit in 1941.

And in this forest,

both Nazis and their collaborators from Lithuania

systemically shot about 100,000 people in these pits.

ABBA: One thing is clear to me...

Vilna is not just Vilna.

Ponari is not just an episode.

There is a system

whose inner workings are for the meantime hidden from us.

- My father said, "Nobody can escape!

The Jewish people cannot escape from this!

So, what the Jewish people can do, they can fight for their honour!

That's it, to fight for their honour!"

ABBA: They shall not take us like sheep to the slaughter!

All those who were taken away from the ghetto never came back!

- It is a call to the population that was left

not to foster illusions!

Those who went out of the gates of the ghetto

will not come back!

ABBA: All the roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponari

and Ponari is death...

- He said Hitler has a plot...

He's planning to murder all the Jews of Europe!

If everyone out of the ghetto was killed...

..and if there is a plan to kill the rest as well...

..then there is no other choice left but to resist!

ABBA: It is true we are weak and defenceless

but resistance is the ONLY reply!

Brothers, it is better to fall as free fighters

than to live by the grace of the murderers!

Resist to the last breath!

- Nobody wanted to resist

because they said if you try to resist

they will kill everyone.

And the youth movement said,

"They're going to kill everyone anyway

and we must resist!"

RUZKA: The soul was enlightened.

The ghetto nightmare dissipated...

Martyrdom, helplessness and slavery are over!

And now the one goal before us is rebellion!

VITKA: We were not soldiers. We'd never shot a gun before.

We took a pipe and another boy got the dynamite.

It was very primitive.

- My mother, she went with two other guys

for three days outside the ghetto

because they have to go very far from the ghetto

that the German won't know that the Jewish people did it.

That was most important thing.

So, she found the best place,

the patrol of the German is not there

when the train is there, da, da, da,

she found the best place.

VITKA: At 1:30 in the morning, we planted the bomb.

We took it and we put it under the rail tracks.

We escaped very quickly.

When the train passed over it at 2:00,

it exploded...

(booming)

..and from far away we heard the explosion!

- She was the hero of all the story!

Like, she was the first one who went outside the ghetto

and bombed a German train!

- One should never believe that Warsaw and Vilna

were the only ghettos that rose.

Ghettos, large and small, rose in resistance.

- If we discuss how the Nazis reacted to resistance,

they thought of Jews being so inferior to them

that they're unable to resist,

that will actually go as the cattle to the slaughter.

So, we have to understand that

when we use this phrase 'cattle to the slaughter'

we use the Nazi lens.

We look at Jews through Nazi eyes.

- When my mother became a courier,

the first, uh, task was to move into Grodno.

In Grodno,

she was supposed to see what's going on

with the Jewish community 'cause there were no connections.

You have to understand, there was no telephones,

all telephones were cut.

There was no mail service, there was no internet.

BELA: Each one of us preferred to fall in combat

than to be led as sheep to the slaughter.

The movement's leadership

sought out girls with a gentile appearance

who would serve as liaison-couriers between the different locations.

This role was unsuitable for boys,

who already, from the age of eight days,

had their Jewishness marked on their flesh.

I volunteered for the role

as I'd already gained experience and self-confidence

impersonating a gentile and going outside the ghetto.

- They smuggled weapons,

guns and grenades and so on.

This was a very dangerous mission.

They also smuggled people out of the ghetto

to put them in hiding places.

EMANUEL: These heroic girls

are a theme that calls for the pen of a great writer.

Boldly, they travel back and forth

through the cities and towns of Poland.

They accept and carry out the most dangerous missions.

Nothing stands in their way.

- My mother, she was sent to Grodno.

I must remind you again that she was 19 years old.

She bought a golden cross and a prayer book

and she pretended to be a Catholic,

which meant that every Sunday she went to church

and she prayed

and she all the time looked what to do

because she had no idea.

One must remember that these couriers

who were actually CIA agents, if you want,

or Mossad agents,

they had no training.

They had to improvise all the time

and they did many mistakes also,

which cost some of them their lives.

BELA: I went to the labour bureau in town.

The clerk asked me whether I knew German

and I answered him in poor Yiddish.

For vus, I said vas and so on...

After a few sentences from me he declared,

"You speak German very well.

You can take a position with us as an interpreter at the Gestapo."

- So, when she worked in that office,

she managed to steal from the desk all kinds of papers and stamps

and she brought them to Vilna

and they were used to make false identities

for other people,

travelling documents and so on.

She was several months, almost half a year in Grodno.

Her two friends who were also couriers,

Tina Schneiderman and Lonka Korzybrodska,

came to her room.

This was Christmas Eve

and my mother was invited by the Gestapo.

There was one officer who, I think, was in love with her

and he invited her

to the Christmas party of the Gestapo.

And she said, "I'm sorry...

I cannot come because I have two girlfriends."

And he said, "Bring them also with you."

He came to pick her up

and the three of them,

they dressed in the best clothes that they had.

They went on Christmas Eve December 1941

to this Christmas party

and this Gestapo officer took a picture of the three of them.

(snaps)

- So, this is original photo.

Quite amazing how things from the Holocaust,

original like that,

this is an original photo,

found a way to our archive during the years.

- June 1942.

Lonka Korzybrodska was sent to Warsaw.

She was sent on a mission.

She had to deliver two guns to the underground

and information.

And she was on the train

in the middle between Bialystok and Warsaw

and her luck didn't hold

and she was captured by the Gestapo.

(hissing)

So, when Lonka did not come back to Bialystok,

my mother volunteered to follow her steps and to...

To look for her.

So, she went on the train from Bialystok to Warsaw

and when the train got to Malkinia

the Gendarmes who were on the train told her,

"We are waiting for you, come...

Come with us."

And why were they waiting for her?

Because Lonka,

she was very courageous and very self-assured.

She carried with her the picture of the three couriers

and this fell into the hands of the Gestapo.

BELA: People in the station

looked at me with pitying expressions.

Soldiers asked me,

"Little girl, what did you do that they're taking you like this?"

I tried my best to hold my head up

so that no one could know what was going on in my heart.

I knew that my chances were gone,

that at any moment the Germans were likely to kill me.

- And after three days of severe tortures,

broken bones and a tooth was broken,

and after three days

they threw her into an isolation cell.

For six weeks, she was in darkness all alone.

But she kept her Polish identity.

The Gestapo did not suspect that she's a Jew.

(clinking and clanging)

(trundling)

(hissing)

(dark beat as dog barks in distance)

- The Germans were masters of deceit.

They told the Jews they were being sent to work camps

in the east

where conditions would be better.

But here at the Umschlagplatz,

the Jews were loaded onto trains,

deported to the death camp of Treblinka.

MAREK: They promised

and actually gave three kilograms of bread

and one kilogram of marmalade

to everyone who voluntarily registered for deportation.

Do you have any idea what bread meant at that time

in the ghetto?

Because if you don't, you will never understand

how thousands of people could voluntarily come for the bread

and go on to the camp at Treblinka.

(slams)

- There is this diary

that someone is meeting a father

who is walking towards the Umschlagplatz with his children.

And he's asking, "Why are you doing that?

Why are you obeying the Germans' orders?"

And the man says, "Well, they took my wife already...

I have nothing to give the kids to eat!

They will starve to death here in the ghetto!

What can I do?

I prefer going there

and hoping I'll be able to work and provide my children!"

So, it's really choiceless choices!

(horn blows)

- The Nazis were single-minded about killing off children

with as much cruelty as possible as early as possible.

- Janusz Korczak, the leader of an orphanage

who went with his orphans to Treblinka,

he was offered the opportunity to survive.

Korczak was the equivalent of Mr Rogers.

Non-Jews flocked to hear his radio broadcast.

Are we gonna say that he went like sheep to the slaughter?

Are we gonna say the teachers that stayed with their students,

the doctors that stayed with their patients,

the mothers that stayed with their children

and didn't abandon them,

did they go like sheep to the slaughter?

Or did they take care of those they were responsible to

unto their last breath?

(children shouting in distance)

- Those children didn't have anybody else

to take care of them.

The Jewish children during the Holocaust

were maybe the most miserable victims,

if one can even class within this horrible victimhood.

And the fact that somebody is walking with them until the end,

even when it's a bitter end,

this is something that has its importance.

(distant shouting)

- When it started to go bad,

it was moving incredibly fast.

The deportations were so overwhelming

that, of those 330,000 people who had been in the ghetto,

only 60,000 were left.

- The ghetto is sealed.

Anyone caught leaving or entering is shot on sight

but the walls are porous

and the underground finds ways to sneak fighters in and out

to obtain weapons one or two at a time.

Vladka is one of those sent across to the Aryan side

to try to find weapons.

- I think she would have said, if you asked her directly,

that she was afraid all the time but it didn't make a difference.

She always did what was needed to be done.

VLADKA: It was a great event for me

when I managed to procure my first revolver,

bought from our landlord's nephew for 2,000 zlotys.

MAREK: At the end of December 1942,

we received our first transport of weapons

from the Polish Home Army.

It was not much.

There were only ten pistols in the whole transport

but it enabled us to prepare for our first major action.

- This is unique...

This is a pistol which connect with Jewish fighters

in 1943.

It's hard to excavate

but we are sure there are weapons still in these places.

It's a symbol of Jewish resistance

and a symbol of uprising in 1943.

(gunfire)

- They knew that the day of the uprising

was going to be soon

but the actual minute and day that it happened

caught them by surprise.

They had gotten no message from inside the ghetto

that THIS is the moment

that we are going to start the resistance!

VLADKA: My heart tears at me.

I do so yearn to still be on the other side,

back in the ghetto together with my old friends

and comrades.

I wonder if I will ever see any of them again.

- It was the eve of Passover.

That's one of the things I remember her talking about,

is standing by the window that saw into the ghetto.

She spoke of watching and of wanting to be in there

and of feeling like she had been ordered not to.

VLADKA: Sporadic gunfire erupted in the ghetto!

Powerful detonations made the earth tremble!

The battle had begun...

- The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was the first day of Passover.

Think about it...

They went to fight the Germans

with the taste of matzo still in their mouths

and there was matzo made in the ghetto!

MAREK: Battle groups barricaded at the four corners of the street,

opened concentric fire on them.

German dead soon littered the street.

The glorious SS, therefore, called tanks into action.

The first was burned out by one of our incendiary bottles.

The rest did not approach our positions.

Not a single German left this area alive.

MORDECAI: Something has happened beyond our wildest dreams!

The Germans had to flee from the ghetto twice!

The dream of my life has become a reality!

I have lived to see Jewish self-defence in the ghetto

in all of its greatness and splendour!

VLADKA: Couriers crisscrossed the ghetto to warn the Jews,

"Do not allow yourselves to be taken!

Everyone is to hide in their bunkers!

We must all resist!"

- The vast majority of the population

had no access to arms

but they identified with the resisters

and they refused

to hand themselves over to the Germans.

It was not a passive resistance,

it was an active unarmed resistance!

And that is, after all,

a matter of some 55,000, 60,000 people.

- The Jews are hiding.

The Jews are hiding

and the Germans don't succeed in finding Jews.

It's actually unbelievable...

They're entering house after house,

there are houses in which hundreds of Jews are living there

and they cannot find even one!

VLADKA: I reflect...

There are SO many forms of resistance!

The courageous ghetto fighters firing their pistols,

the mother trying to save her baby,

the father refusing to allow his son to be separated,

the family remaining in hiding under the bed.

These too are part of the uprising.

These too are forms of resistance.

- Very soon,

the Germans understand that the major problem they have

is of those Jews who are staying in the houses and bunkers

despite everything.

And this is when the Germans decide to fight the Jews

with the weapon of fire

and they start to set the ghetto on fire.

- The Warsaw ghetto held out longer than the armies of France

and Belgium and Netherlands.

What an achievement.

On the other hand, as an action,

it was the end, it was the last stand,

but as an act of moral resistance to it all

it's a matter of screaming, shouting, fighting,

deciding that I will take the enemy down with me...

..and not go quietly into the dark night.

(water splashing)

(trickling)

(birdsong)

- This stone, taken from the rubble at Mila 18,

marks the final resting place of the brave fighters who died here

and it reads,

"Here they rest,

buried where they fell,

to remind us that the whole earth is their grave."

ABBA: The Germans' tactics changed on September 23rd.

At 1:00pm, the ghetto was suddenly surrounded.

They knew we were there.

We had every reason to believe they'd take out the remaining Jews

and then shell with artillery.

We decided to make our way out.

The only way out was through the sewers.

(trickling)

- So, that's the end of it!

Now, the sewage canals,

well, this is a place for no one.

But certainly not for elderly mothers with illnesses

and wounds and whatever...

So, they did not take any parents

or young brothers and sisters,

just them,

and his mother came running and said,

"OK, what about me? What about me?!"

ABBA: One of the most terrible moments I had,

my mother made her way there.

She asked me, "What should I do?"

I couldn't let her in because of the other mothers.

I didn't have an answer.

It's easier to talk about a fight or a revolt in abstract terms

but when your mother asks you, "What should I do?"

And the commander has no answer...

- And they left her.

And they left her...

And his mother appears in most of his poems and dreams,

et cetera,

always dreaming the door would open and she will be there.

And she was not.

ABBA: She went to a hiding place.

She went to a hiding place

that was later captured by the Germans.

- They went out to the forest with nothing,

just their shirt on the back, that's it.

What do they do?

The forest is rain and snow and wild animals and nothing to eat

and it's a horrible place to...

To live in!

VITKA: It was a forest.

A forest without Nazis.

We lived there under the sky for two months.

It was raining and it was cold

but it is what we had in the beginning.

- Abba Kovner,

his avengers worked and lived exactly here in this forest.

Today, we can show you,

we're lucky to show you the remains of these bunkers that we have here.

VITKA: In the Rudniki Forest,

there were 600, maybe a thousand,

I think 30%, 40% were women

and the boys did not want to go with the women.

They'd say, "No, you are a woman!

You are not prepared! You can't do it!

You get upset, you are weak!

You cannot go!"

In our group, Abba was the commander.

If not for Abba, no woman would be a fighter.

It was he who demanded that, in every action,

there has to be one woman.

- One of them told me ever again,

"We were not born partisans,

we were children from good homes!

I studied French and piano and Latin!

I didn't study how to live in a forest!

I did not see a fork,

a fork to eat with for ten months!"

- It was a tough life.

It was very cold and there was not a lot of food

but they were free people,

they have honour.

(gunshots)

(horn blows)

(birds chirping)

- Around April 1943,

a decision was made to escape.

The decision in the end was a tunnel.

(shovelling)

They would take turns.

People who finished their work would come dig.

Some people would pretend to be sick so they could dig all day

and there was a group of diggers, tough people.

(explosions)

JACK: When I came out from the tunnel it was dark.

There was shooting,

which I could see lots of flashes of fire.

I could see people being killed.

(explosions)

- This took place on September 26th.

It's already cold. They were drenched.

Pitch-black, didn't know where to go.

(explosions continue)

- My father,

I remember him telling me

that when he first arrived in the camp

in the middle of the forest

and there was this man on a big white horse

with a gun on his shoulder...

My father's like, "Who is that?!"

And that was Tuvia Bielski,

just as in the film, right?

In the film, he has a gun slung over his shoulder

and he's a warrior!

My father wrote in his book

that when he got to the forest how did he feel?

And he said, and here I quote...

"I had come from a camp

where thousands of Jewish people were being killed by the Germans

and now there were all these fighters with guns.

I felt very, very proud.

There was great camaraderie at the camp.

We were unhappy

because so many members of our families had been massacred

but we were happy because we were free

and we were fighting back."

- Tuvia Bielski was responsible for saving 1,200 people's lives.

He accepted everybody...

Small children, old men and women,

solitary women who couldn't fight, like my mother,

everybody!

And Tuvia said he would rather save one Jew than kill a hundred Germans.

- Bielski did something completely different,

a completely different philosophy of...

"We're all Jews, we need to survive. That's our resistance."

(gentle music)

(ominous turn)

(building)

(fades)

- Treblinka had approximately

somewhere in the neighbourhood of 925,000 Jews being killed.

Some 300 people revolted in Treblinka and escaped.

In the end, there were less than a hundred survivors.

But unless they had tried to escape,

there would not have been a hundred survivors

and then we would have never known anything

about Treblinka

or at least not from the perspective of the victims.

We would only know the statistics

from the perspective of the perpetrators.

- There were seven rebellions in the death camps.

Six of them were led by Jews, one by the Russians.

So, actually,

even if you only consider violent resistance,

the Jews look pretty good.

(birds chirping)

(chirping continues)

- You can imagine that everyone who came up this way,

maybe 180,000 people,

thought they were going to showers.

Where they went is the gas chambers...

ESTHER: And all that built up in me,

such anger and a feeling of revenge!

I came to the camp with a pair of brown leather boots,

which not everybody had,

and I said to the group, we slept together,

"With these boots, I'm going to escape from Sobibor!

Don't ask me why, don't ask me how

and maybe it's not...

It doesn't even make sense

but I'm going to escape with these boots!"

- Alexander Pechersky came with a military background.

He joined with a Jewish prisoner from Poland

who, in a very real sense,

was his liaison with the other prisoners

who didn't quite trust a Soviet POW even if he was Jewish

and they formed a formidable team to plan for how to conquer,

how to escape.

ESTHER: And that evening, we cried.

We cried very, very much.

And everybody said goodbye because we figured,

in our WILDEST dreams,

we didn't think one of us is going to survive...

And as I cried myself to sleep,

I dozed off

and I saw my mother coming in through the camp,

through the main gate.

The way I left her, that's how she looked.

And I said, "Mum, you know that we're going to escape tomorrow?"

And she said, "Yes, that's why I came!"

- They lured Nazi commanders and Nazi officials

who were working in the camp

into a place where they could be slaughtered one by one.

(beat strikes)

ESTHER: The plan was at 4:00 the electric wire was cut,

the telephone wire was cut.

Everybody has to kill his SS man and his guard

at his place of work...

(screaming)

..and it started working!

- They then stormed the gates and then they went into the woods.

(siren wailing)

ESTHER: This was before decided in case anything goes wrong.

Everybody on his own...

Maybe one will survive and will be able to tell the world!

(trundling)

BELA: When I would go out to the threshold of the block,

I could see the smoke rising from the chimneys.

It clouded the skies

and choked the air of the entire camp.

I cast glances toward the smoke-shrouded heavens,

where it seemed I could see the souls of Jewish children,

their mouths gaping to scream.

- The stories that she told are quite difficult to tell

because she faced such atrocities.

Like, uh...

I will start crying if I tell this...

I cannot tell that, really...

(explosion)

- Why were the Germans so intent on killing the Jews at that point?

Let's put it very clearly...

The Germans fought two wars,

the World War...

..and the war against the Jews.

When push came to shove,

they wanted to succeed in the war against the Jews

even if it took resources away from the World War.

- Despite the Nazi regime knows it is coming to an end,

the one group that is supposed to pay the ultimate price

will be the Jews.

They're losing,

so what can we do before we lose?

We will kill more Jews!

(music building)

- When you go to Birkenau,

you see that there are three railroad tracks

that go into the innermost nature of the camp.

Those three tracks were built

in anticipation of the murder of Hungarian Jews.

Hungarian Jews constituted about 45%

of the number of people who were killed at Auschwitz.

That occurred not over four years but over three months!

There was an entire underground that distributed these passes,

that created these passes.

How important was forging?

It was the difference between life and death!

(hisses)

- During the transports of Hungarian Jews,

which came thousands every day,

every day, 10,000 people were sent to the gas chambers...

And the camp of the women bordered with the train ramp

and when the people from the train was sent to crematorium number two

which was 50 metres away from the women's camp...

So, all these years that she was in Auschwitz

she was just 50 metres away from one of the four crematorium

in Birkenau.

BELA: I suggested digging a trench

under the barbed wire fence during the nights

through which we would bring young Jewish women into the camp

and save them from the crematory ovens.

- Now, today, when you go to Birkenau,

now everything is green and nice

but at that time it was all mud and ditches,

so they made some space under the fence.

BELA: Our objective was to smuggle into our camp

some individuals from within this human mass.

When the girls came through, we were overcome with joy!

- And they brought in from the line to the gas chambers

into the camp

about 14 young girls on several occasions.

They brought them into the camp

and they gave them the dressing of other women who died

and they hid them for some time.

BELA: We didn't succeed in bringing many souls into our camp.

There were so few opportunities to do so.

However, the little that we did gave us great satisfaction.

We began to feel a power rising in us,

awakening our will to live.

(critters chittering)

MARCEL: Now, we must disappear from the face of the earth

because we know so much about the unimaginable methods

of their abuses and reprisals.

The dramas my eyes have seen are indescribable...

Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Hungary

have passed by my eyes.

And why I didn't I join them and put an end to it?

But every time, the thirst for revenge stopped me!

- Nadjari,

we don't really know what motivates what he puts into his letter

other than he wants to tell the story.

He wants to see revenge.

And that becomes a more compelling notion

than giving up and getting out of the fight.

LEON: Each prisoner in every squad

knew exactly what he was supposed to do

and prepared for it.

My job was to set fire to the crematorium building

where I worked.

ELIEZER: The Jews had brought knives to the camp to make Kiddush.

Their original purpose was to slice the challah.

They had the words L'Shabbat Kodesh,

for the Holy Sabbath,

engraved on them.

They were long and had white handles.

My job was to make them into bayonets

by honing them on all four sides.

We produced homemade mines and hand grenades.

We took metal cans of food,

filled them with explosives and put in fuses.

- Between Auschwitz and Birkenau

there was a big munition factory called Union Metallwerke,

which many Jewish prisoners worked.

And one brave Jewish young prisoner, Roza Robota,

was 19 years old,

had many girlfriends inside that factory.

And when she was asked to recruit some of the girls

to smuggle out on a daily basis a small amount of gunpowder

she did not hesitate for a second.

- My mother was born in Poland.

Her name was Ada,

maiden name, Neufeld.

She was one of the slave labourers at the factory.

Smuggling itself wasn't easy,

because they had the body searched on exit from the factory

and then on entry to the camp.

My mother told me that she hid it inside her shoe

and once in camp

she would hand it over to someone else

and then bring it to Robota.

Roza Robota would then take it

and deliver it to her friend from the Sonderkommando.

LEON: On October 7th 1944

they informed us

that the Germans intended to remove the Sonderkommando men

from Crematorium IV.

We knew what that meant. They were going to murder them.

We figured that it was time for action.

(explosion)

WOMAN: In the distance, we now see billows of smoke burning!

The second crematorium is burning!

- The destruction of crematoria number four,

this is a big achievement!

It never functioned anymore again!

WOMAN: The sirens began to wail,

aggravating the commotion!

What happened? A revolution?!

An uprising at the crematorium?

- This is perhaps the single most important site

for the understanding of Jewish resistance

during the Holocaust.

In the most improbable place,

at Auschwitz,

the Sonderkommandos destroyed a combination crematorium

and gas chambers.

- It was a defiant and wonderful act

that probably saved many thousand lives

because they did in fact destroy one of the crematoria.

(horn blowing)

- The uprising came to its tragic end

with the killing, murdering of 452 young Jewish

courageous brave men.

- On the night of the 18th of January,

the camp was given the order to be evacuated.

BELA: We marched at a cadence,

practically running on winding paths.

We didn't know exactly where they were leading us.

We did understand that we were fleeing from the Russians,

heading for Germany.

After the first kilometre, women began to fall.

Whoever found it hard to walk at that quick pace

or who stood to rest was shot right away.

(shot)

There were moments of despair

when I thought of asking those escorting us to kill me...

But at those same moments

I would see flashes of rocket barrages in the sky

and hear the roar of aircraft

and these inspired me with the will to live!

- So, I'm talking now about the 18th of April.

The Americans was in the process of capturing Leipzig.

My mother stayed behind with the sick prisoners.

The SS are on the way to kill them.

And they decided to escape with the sick people

who could not walk

and then, when it became dark,

they actually carried them by hands!

This was the night between 18th and 19th of April.

They saved the lives of about 140 prisoners,

sick prisoners

and this was my mother's liberation day!

(uplifting music)

(cheering)

(music fades)

Subtitles by Sky Access Services