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Resistance: They Fought Back is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
About the Show
We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.”
Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., "Resistance: They Fought Back" provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.
Today, many stories of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust have all but vanished. In some cases, no historical records exist, and no one survived to tell the tale. The Germans documented many aspects of their war against the Jews, but they were allergic to any mention of Jewish resistance, leading many to think it never happened.
The feature documentary "Resistance: They Fought Back" is a passionate refutation of that way of thinking. Told by survivors, their children, and expert witnesses from the U.S. Israel, and Europe, it is a revelation based on extensive research of how the Jews of Europe fought back. It uncovers evidence of non-violent methods which served as crucial tools of resistance and evolved into Jewish armed revolts in ghettos, forests and death camps, even as the odds of success were vanishingly small.
Today, almost eighty years after the Holocaust, this story remains largely unknown to the general public. Without it, our understanding of this genocide, which wiped out two-thirds of European Jewry, remains incomplete, giving rise to renewed antisemitism, hatred, and denial of the Holocaust itself.
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