How rebel groups form in genocide: The Warsaw Ghetto fighters

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is emblematic of armed Jewish resistance to the Holocaust; it should also be emblematic of rebel organization formation and capacity building in the most extreme power asymmetry. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened because civilians who were directly experiencing a genocide formed rebel organizations that gained the capacity to hold territory. Drawing from video testimonies and memoirs of survivors, diaries of witnesses, and the work of historians, this study analyzes the formation and evolution of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB) to create and begin to validate a generalizable theory on how rebel organizations form in genocide, and how they create the capacity to hold territory from the genocidal opponent. The ŻOB evolved from a violent resistance organization to a rebel organization with a military infrastructure that could hold territory against the Nazis; further, it was this capacity to hold territory that allowed the ŻOB to win the survival of many Jews. These findings offer important insights on the possibility of rebel group mobilization against genocidal persecution, and can be used to understand contemporary genocide resisters.

Daughter of Saul, or Saul Leanya: The Gendered Place of Atrocity in László Nemes's Son of Saul

László Nemes's 2015 production, Son of Saul (Saul fia), is one of the most critically acclaimed Holocaust movies to date. The film disrupts canonical notions of visual representation of the special squads of Jewish inmates, or Sonderkommando, forced to work in the crematoria. Simultaneously, it radically re-genders an exceptional survival scene recorded as autobiographical truth by witness testimony. A young Hungarian girl's survival of a Zyklon B gassing became exceptional among other incidents of survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau due to the medical assistance offered and the resuscitation administered by the Hungarian medical doctor of the crematoria, Miklos Nyiszli. Son of Saul effectively swaps the body of this teenage girl with the body of a boy in order to re-create a foundational patrilineal story of powerful ideological impact and legitimating force. Pursuing a project of reestablishing a hegemonic male discourse over the Holocaust, the film also portrays a female inmate as one of the four women who made the 7 October 1944 Sonderkommando revolt in Auschwitz-Birkenau possible by smuggling in the explosives for the insurgents. Ella's disconcerting neediness in the film seems uniquely misplaced onto a woman tortured by the Gestapo and hanged without having betrayed her accomplices. While Son of Saul offers its own remarkably successful solutions and modes of cinematic transcendence portraying the ultimate sites of extermination, it does not convey an adequate understanding of gender relations transformed by the historical context of the Final Solution and the vital role of women in the Jewish resistance to the Nazi-orchestrated genocide.

JEWISH RESISTANCE IN AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE HOLOCAUST IN THE XX CENTURY: SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS

В статье анализируется эволюция представлений о понятии еврейского сопротивления Холокосту в американской историографии - от понятия исключительно вооружённого восстания, единственно признаваемой формы в 1960-70-е гг., до духовного сопротивления, ставшего предметом более детального изучения с начала 1980-х гг. Рассматриваются социокультурный контекст осмысления этой проблемы в США, а также позиции ключевых американских исследователей по интерпретации проблемы еврейского сопротивления, в том числе его значения. Делается вывод о специфике отражения еврейского сопротивления в американской историографии XX в., основывающейся как на личных взглядах исследователей, так и особенностях источниковой базы и развития исторической науки в США, что в конечном счёте повлияло на восприятие проблематики Холокоста в целом. The article analyzes the evolution of the concept of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust representation in American historiography - from the concept of an exclusively armed uprising, the only recognized form in the 1960s and 1970s, to spiritual resistance, which has become the subject of more detailed study since the early 1980s. The socio-cultural context of understanding this problem in the United States, as well as the positions of key American researchers on the interpretation of the problem of Jewish resistance, including its meaning, are considered. A conclusion is made about the specifics of the Jewish resistance reflection in the American historiography in the 20th century, based on both personal views of the researchers, the peculiarities of the source base and development of historical science in the United States, which ultimately influenced the perception of the Holocaust issue as a whole.

Spatial movement as a resistance strategy in a holocaust novel A Blessing on the Moon

Exploring Jewish resistance in relation to the Holocaust has become one major topic widely discussed in the Holocaust novels written by the second or third generations of Holocaust survivors. The fact that these writers primarily have no direct experience with the event somewhat shows that the paramount effects of the tragedy expand generations and leave trauma that lingers. To cope with the narration of atrocities, resistance strategy is often employed by the Holocaust writers and to a certain point has a function to represent the struggle of the survivors. Joseph Skibell as the third-generation writer deploys a strategy of spatial movement as a coping mechanism and resistance against atrocities in his magical realist novel A Blessing on the Moon. Using Sara Upstone�s spatial politics perspective, this research aims to investigate the spatial movement performed by the main character and to explain how it produces the resistance strategy. In doing so, it will also further examine the scale and characteristics of various spatial locations used in the novel as a means of resistance. As it goes along, the issue of trauma and identity of the Holocaust survivors and their descendants is also explained.