100 Books Like They Fought Back

When people hear that I'm a child of Holocaust survivors, they ask what concentration camp or ghetto I or my parents were in. When I tell them that they were partisans, fighting the Nazis in the forest with guns, they don't believe me. They think Jews went to their deaths like sheep to slaughter passively. But Jews fought back like my parents did in the Kruk-Max otryad, Soviet fighting force. 

Peter Duffy's book is an easy read, not an academic tome. I hope people will read about the heroism of Jews fighting back against fascism and evil.

This is the first comprehensive and comparative look at Jewish involvement in the military and their attitudes toward war from the 1600s to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Penslar is a professor of Jewish history and Zionism at Harvard University and a colleague of mine there.

We are both proud and progressive Zionists, yet critical of certain policies when we have to be. It’s a densely written book; one needs to read it slowly and carefully. Very few Jews are pacifists; the image of the Jew as the shy, bookish scholar or tailor (stereotyped by the images of popular culture like Fiddler on the Roof) is wrong and misleading.

If Jews did not want to fight in certain wars, it was for self-preservation or due to anti-Semitism—they were not allowed to be farmers, own land, hunt, fish, use a gun, even join the army, or were… show more.

Ainsztein’s book heavily influenced me but also honored my parents’ otryad, the Kruk-Max Group, by describing their fighting force (pp. 353-360). He should be more well-known, and his book should be reprinted in paperback to make it more available to a wider audience.

While his opening chapter is a historical survey of the Jews as fighters and soldiers in the Diaspora, most of the book details the rise of partisans and soldiers in the Polish and Soviet armed forces during the Holocaust 1941-1944.

It is extensive and comprehensive, at nearly 980 pages. But that should not deter the reader, especially the lover of military history—Ainsztein writes beautifully. Like Penslar, he addresses the myth of Jewish pacifism and reluctance to fight militarily. 

I have chosen this book despite the author being a somewhat obscure academic, a professor of history at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and the publisher, a somewhat little-known publisher (University Press of Kansas), because it gives a different picture of the Jewish resistance.

The other books are from the point of view of Jews and by mostly Jewish authors. This book is written by a Ukrainian-American and gives a fresh insight from the Ukrainian and Soviet perspectives. Writing about World War II is akin to interpreting Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which tells the tale of murder and rape from several perspectives.

World War II history is also like Rashomon; each country will tell its history from a different perspective. It is refreshing to hear from a Ukrainian point of view when most of my books are written from a Jewish perspective. 

Historian Mark Roseman interviewed Marianne Ellenbogen née Strauss in a suburban house near Liverpool. After she passed away, her son shared with him the diaries and letters he found in the attic. In the summer of 1943 Marianne escaped deportation and hid in various places across Germany, supported by a little-known network of unorthodox socialists. Her life under Nazism was horrible—yet strangely liberating. She flourished away from her strict parents but was still traumatized at leaving them behind. The fate of someone who repeatedly changed her German, Jewish, political, and indeed personal identity will move you emotionally as well as stimulate you intellectually. All along, Marianne struggled to maintain control over her own story—which makes A Past in Hiding a brilliant title for an outstanding book.   

Elsa Thon recounts her war experiences in a cinematic tale with the eye of an artist. A teenager in Poland who had apprenticed in photo retouching, she was recruited by the Jewish underground. She left her family behind in the Warsaw Ghetto, ending up in Krakow with false papers. This was difficult for her, a deeply honest person. She writes, “I lied all the time.” She takes the reader with her on her dangerous journey, the degradation of a labour camp, and a forced march. Elsa was also a student in my seniors writing class and I found her to be generous and good-humoured, despite her painful past. She lost her whole family in the Holocaust but she writes that it was her “destiny” to survive. 

Based on a true story, this dual timeline book takes us from Eva’s present-day life back to 1942,  when she used her talent for forgery to help hundreds of children escape the Nazis.

Not wanting their true identities to be lost forever, she writes their real names in code in a book. Heart-wrenching at times, this book will ultimately leave you with a smile on your face.

This moving story awakened new empathy in me for my extended Canadian family as they waited for news of us for so many years. It gave me a new understanding of the effects of war on families, even at such great distances. 

A daughter and granddaughter tells the story of her family’s escape from the holocaust in 1939. Safely in Canada, the country we left for Germany, in the same year, they fear for their family in Lithuania as telegrams of desperation arrive and news of events in Germany become known. 

I found this book fascinating for its fresh take on WWII: the experiences of a senior Greek police official amidst a web of spies leading to the Nazi occupation. I was enthralled; the characters and historical detail were exquisite. The struggle of a man against overwhelming evil while risking everything was inspiring.

This book stood out as my favorite from Furst’s Night Soldiers series because of its emotional impact. I was inspired to further research this theater of the war.

The author, a daughter of an uncommon ‘mixed marriage’ between a Lithuanian-Jewish Holocaust survivor and a Lithuanian-Christian immigrant family. Both sides of her families were kept separate, except for rare special occasions. As a child, she was told wonderful stories about how her Lithuanian grandfather helped save Jews. As an adult and as an historian, she began to investigate the true activities of her grandfather, during those dark days in Lithuania. Like, Silvia Foti, she was emotionally fractured when she learned the truth. 

There were very few Jewish survivors from Lithuania, and Gabis’ book helps me understand why.